If you want to be happpy, marriage, family, & friendship matter way more than money. In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, Robert Lane’s argument is that market societies induce people to spend their time and energy acquiring greater material wealth at the expense of companionship, and, as a consequence, happiness suffers.

But if companionship makes us happier than stuff, why don’t we demand more companionship and less stuff? Lane seems to hypothesize that there is a diffference in the salience of satisfaction that biases us in favor of stuff. I found this interesting:

Adaptation is the key. If people can adapt to the chronic absence of their arms and legs [ww: as opposed to their temporary or intermittent absence?]– as they do — they will also adapt to absence of friendship, and it is this adaptation that accounts for the lack of demand by the lonely for friends. But, as with the elderly, this adaptation may have a hidden cost, for “the presence of a familiar person lowers blood pressure under stress, [and] . . . people whose heart rates rise more in [certain] experiments have high blood pressure two to 15 years later, whether or not they acknowledge being under stress or feeling intense emotion

What I take Lane to be saying is that companionship adds a subtle positive tone to experience, and we report ourselves much happier when our experience is shot through with that tone. The positive tone is the correlate of an objective organic good. (Not clear the way the causation goes here.) But the quality of the experience is subtle, the source is not easily attributable, and we quickly adapt to its absence, and so are not easily motivated to seek out its cause.

The hedonic surge from material consumption, however, is intense and immediate, and its source is easily attributable. However, due to habituation to the presence of new stuff, there is little lasting satisfaction from consumption. We’d be better off cultivating our relationships. However, because the fleeting hedonic payoff of consumption is more psychologically salient, we’re more easily moved to go for a fresh consumption high. Thus, we’ll tend to make ourselves less happy, and less healthy, as we consume.

Do you find this convincing?

I have a new piece up at the American Spectator criticizing Barack Obama for smearing the ideals of the Ownership Society as “Social Darwinism.” Includes a riff on social solidarity and cooperative market order from my Cato paper.

I have a new paper out today in Cato Social Security Choice series. It’s called “Noble Lies, Liberal Purposes, and Personal Retirement Accounts.” If you’ve been following the Social Security posts on the blog, lots of the paper will seem familiar to you, but there’s a lot of new stuff in the paper that I encourage you to check out.

Here’s the executive summary:

Opponents of President Bush’s proposal to make individually owned personal retirement accounts a part of the Social Security program routinely charge that it is motivated by ideological animosity toward the values Social Security is supposed to embody, such as equality and social cohesion. However, a frank look at the Social Security status quo reveals that the program is very poorly designed to realize liberal ideals. Social Security has a barely progressive overall structure, if it is progressive at all. The huge volume of transfers inherent in the system accomplishes very little income redistribution within generational cohorts. Furthermore, it works to the disadvantage of current workers, who will receive a smaller “return” on their payroll taxes than do current retirees. The terms of the imaginary “compact between the generations” are manifestly unfair.

What is worse is that the Social Security status quo embodies a government-perpetuated deception designed to generate its own political support by misleading voters into believing that their payroll taxes entitle them to later benefits. The architects of Social Security created a structure and accompanying rhetoric that were specifically intended to encourage the false belief that the system provides a kind of insurance, similar to private insurance based in contract and property, and therefore involves a binding entitlement to benefits.

However, there is no justification for this deception on contemporary liberal grounds. The persistent intentional misrepresentation— the “noble lie” — embedded in the structure and language of the Social Security system is in fact antithetical to the ideals of transparent government, open democratic deliberation, and equality among citizens — ideals at the core of contemporary liberal thought.

A system of personal retirement accounts plus a means-tested safety net would serve the “social insurance” function better than the Social Security status quo according to liberal standards. Contrary to critics of reform, personal retirement accounts would materially enhance equality and social cohesion by more fully integrating workers into the market, providing everyone with a stake in its growth, closing the gap between the investing and noninvesting classes, and making more salient the mutuality of interests in a market society.

The paper is here.

Julian has an excellent discussion of what DeLong might mean when he says I don’t know how to speak English.

Spelling bees are awesome. (Watching now on ESPN.) I’m pulling for the spastic kid with the mustache from North Carolina. Or the chill blond girl from Jersey who jams her hands in her pockets.

The kids who “spell” the word with their fingers on the back of their name placards are a nice example that cognition isn’t just something that happens inside the head. Just a thought.

We will someday be ruled by the Asians. Another thought.

This kid is so gonna flub ‘pepysian’. Yup. Ding! I got it right! But I’m 32. The Indian kid (or one of them) nails ‘zouave’. Never in a million years. The girl from New Hamspshire is queen of etymology. Oh, here’s the chill Jersey pocket girl. Ohh, she doesn’t know. Me neither. Tension! Ding! ‘laetrile’. Who knew? The Carolina mustache spazz. Nails ’schnecke’ with his ridiculous accent. OK, enough spelling bee liveblogging. I’m embarrassing myself with my enthusiasm. Of wait? The 11 year old. Samir Patel. He’s very excited! So short! ‘cholecyst’ Score!

OK…

I just want to point out that Scanlon has posted [scroll down] in the comments of DeLong’s post conceding Weatherson’s point about Delong’s reply to one of my posts about utilitarianism.

The question of how “well being” should be understood is really several different questions. As a result, there is a tendency for people debating the question to talk past one another, and this tendency is to some extent represented in this thread.

One way that the question of well being might be understood is: what, at the most basic level, should an individual want his or her life to be like? Preference satisfaction is not a very plausible basic answer to this question, because in many (I would say most) cases people (rightly) prefer things because they believe them to have other properties, such as being pleasant, or worth doing for other reasons. They do not seek these things simply because they prefer them.

On the other hand, the question might be: How should the quality of individuals’ lives be assessed by policy makers, as a basis for governmental decisions? Here preference satisfaction is a much more plausible answer, based on the ethical principle that governments should defer to individuals’ own assessments of what is good for them.

There are lively debates about the proper answers to both of these questions. Nozick’s experience machine is a contribution to the first debate: Should individuals take the quality of their experience as the sole determinant of the quality of their lives, or should they take other factors into account, such as whether our pleasure comes from true beliefs about what we are actually doing, and whether these things are in fact worth doing? Sen’s work on capabilities is a contribution to the second debate: Given factors such as the adaptability of preferences, shouldn’t governmental policy be judged on some basis other than facts about what people happen to prefer?

I won’t argue here for my own answers to these questions. My point is just that they are different, and that this difference needs to be taken into account in order to understand what we are disagreeing about.

My view is pretty close to Scanlon’s these days, so that’s pretty cool.

Julian has nailed the upshot of Kelo:

Now that the “liberal” justices on the court have sided with the drug warriors against cancer patients, and with a plan to rob people of their homes for the benefit of wealthy developers, will some court-watchers on the left begin to question the wisdom of having let economic freedom become the red-headed stepchild of modern jurisprudence?

. . . The straightforward implication is that any taking of a private residence to hand it over to a business, or just from a poor person to a wealthy person, will be a taking in service of a public purpose: As a general rule, the rich pay more taxes than the poor, and businesses pay more taxes than households.

That is, if you have something somebody richer than you wants, watch out. Good work, egalitarians, good work.

Don Boudreaux has a strong reaction, too.

Brad DeLong takes issue with my recent attacks no utilitarianism. In reply to my claim, against Layard, that if happiness is self-evidently good, then so are lots of other things, such as freedom, DeLong writes:

The response–against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink–would be that Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise–that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise–Wilkinson is simply saying, “Baa baa buff.” He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.

I wonder if DeLong has carried on a conversation in the English language. Games of rational and moral justification sometimes but rarely terminate in reasons of happiness, much less in reasons of pleasure. He must hear “Baa baa buff” almost every time someone explains himself. Or BD just refuses to listen, uncharitably reads his philosophical theories into people’s heads, and so assumes that they are offering reasons of happiness when they are evidently not. DeLong’s argument, if I am making it out correctly, is that the following proposition deserves a little linguist’s star of semantic deviance:

(a) Happiness without freedom is not worth having.

English speakers, lend me your ears! Does (a) violate the intuitive semantic constraints of it’s constituent terms?

Well, if “worth having” in English means “conducive to pleasure” it sure does. But that’s not what “worth having” means in English. That’s what it means in Benthamese, the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger’s cases, etc.) “Worth having” in English means something like” valuable” or “good,” and there is surpassingly little evidence to be gleaned from the semantic practice of competent English speakers that “valuable” and “good” are synonymous with “pleasurable” or “happy making”. (a) is far from “Baa baa buff.” In context, it’s surely true!

My defense, then, is the truth of the claim that there are conditions under which being happy would be worse than not being happy. I take it that DeLong would agree that if a mad scientist rigged his brain such that slaughtering his own beloved children would bring him the most exalted, never-ending, guilt-free bliss, this would not be happiness worth having. Or is this, too, just “baa baa buff?”

Anyway, refusing to do violence to one’s language, or, more importantly, the complexity of moral experience, in the service of an ill-supported theory does not strike me as a project of obfuscation.

More later on Delong’s inability to understand the experience machine thought experiment.

I’ve been at the University of Virginia the last few days helping out with the IHS Social Change Workshop for Grad Students. It’s quite nice to not be running the show, and to enjoy it more from the consumer side. As usual, great people, great conversations.

Here are some illustrations of typical phases of the day, below.
(more…)

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:

In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Eugene says:

Well, if “the standard scientific theory” is that “God had no part” in the process of evolution — not just that human beings developed in a particular way, but that God didn’t guide this — then it seems to me that the theory of evolution is a challenge to many people’s deeply held religious convictions. And that’s so not just as to the young-earthers who believe the Earth was created several thousand years ago, but also to people who are willing to embrace the scientific evidence but see the guiding hand of God in the process.

What’s more, how exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me — which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

I think Quinean ontological principles can help us properly understand Shermer’s statement, and avoid what seems to me to be a confusion on Eugene’s part.

Quine says that to exist is to be the value of bound variable in the formal statement of our best explanatory theory of the world. That is, if your best theory of something requires you to posit some entity or property in order to state it, then you are ontologically committed to that entity or property; you’re saying it exists. The best explanatory theory of the emergence of life and the development of biological variety is the theory of evolution by natural selection. The statement of this theory does not require us to quantify over, or commit to, any supernatural properties. That “God had no part in the process” is straightforwardly implied by the fact that the theory does not mention God or God-properties. The “proof” that God is no part of the process is simply the statement of the theory, and the fact that the theory is the best, whatever our criteria for “best” are. You can tell that something has no part in the process by checking the list of things one is ontologically committed to by dint of accepting the theory. If it isn’t on the list, it plays no part. Surely Eugene would agree that God is not on the ontological list we would compile by scouring the formulation of the standard theory of evolution to see the kinds of things it quantifies over. But that is, I think, all Shermer is saying.

Now, the fact that the theory of evolution by natural selection doesn’t quantify over God-properties does not, by itself, “challenge” the conviction that god exists, unless that conviction is based on the explanation of biological phenomena. If no part of our OVERALL best theory (or collection of theories) of the world requires God-properties, than that is a challenge to the conviction that God exists, because commitment to God’s existence just is the belief in the claim that Godmaking properties figure in to the best overall theory of the world. If he doesn’t figure in, then he isn’t listed in the catalog of things we have reason to believe in.

It seems that Eugene almost flirts with Meinongian nonsense, where not existing is a property something can have, just like existing, so that something’s not existing requires that it exist, in a superspecial not-existing way, in order for there to be something that is doing all that not-existing. In that case, the claim that something doesn’t exist (or does) is substantive, since one is attributing a property to it, and it makes sense to ask for evidence that it does have that property. But to say that something doesn’t exist is not in fact substantive. It is simply to point out a formal absence, like the fact that there is no ‘p’ in ‘beer’. (If you’re lucky!)

I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he’s really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb.

If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he’d get a solid “B”:

Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal–or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it.

Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false. I am, in fact, willing to sacrifice some measure of happiness to ensure my autonomy, or to accomplish something of great value. I would, in fact, be willing to face suffering and death if that was required to preserve my freedom. And it’s pretty easy to point out that happiness is instrumental to other values. I want happiness because I will be motivated to accomplish great things if I am happy. I am more likely to be benevolent and kind if I am happy. I am more likely to have a meaningful, successful intimate relationship. I will live longer if I am happy, and it is good to live. Etc. If we are going to admit that it makes sense to talk about things being self-evidently good, then happiness surely is one of those things. And so are all the other goods Layard mentions. He gets nowhere.

Layard is right that a plurality of values requires balancing. But there is no way around this on a personal level, and especially not on a public level.

Individual moral intelligence involves weighing competing values and making judgments about their ordering according to standards that vary with context, relationship, social role, and more. It is hard to be a good person because it is hard to make out all the morally relevant characteristics of one’s situation, and it is hard to know how to trade values against each other, and to be modest but resolute in the face of complexity–not because it is hard to be motivated to maximize something ridiculous like net aggregate utility.

Layard’s larger problem is that he totally fails to grasp that the central problem of liberalism is how to accomodate and balance the pluralitiy of value conceptions of citizens in a cosmopolitan society. That Layard thinks he is in possession of the one true philosophy of value that allows him to rank other values is quite nice for Layard. But the very fact that I am spending my time writing a blog post disagreeing with Layard about utilitarianism demonstrates that not everyone agrees that his is the correct conception of value, or the correct standard for determining public policy. And the simple fact that we are having this disagreement, whether or not Layard is right about utilitarianism, is a reason not to accept utilitarianism as the sole arbiter of our public rules. Even if utilitarianism, or any comprehensive conception of value, is true, it cannot therefore be asserted as the legitimate basis of a just society as long as people reasonably reject it. None among us has the special authority to declare that ours is the public philosophy, and others will just have to live with it, like it or not.

Ironically, Layard accuses anyone who is not a utilitarian of paternalism, because he apparently thinks that if some value is a value, then the state ought to promote it, but that if a value doesn’t register as hedons, then you’re forcing people to act in the interest of alleged values that they don’t benefit from experientially.

However, Layard is a transparent paternalist. If you think that things other than happiness are good, then Layard will just say that you are wrong, have no moral right to act for values other than happiness, and that the state may force you to do what “science” reveals to be conducive to happiness, whether you most want happiness or not.

If one has aspirations for the totalizing rule of one’s comprehensive moral conception, it seems that one should accept a fair burden of persuasion. But Layard treats classic objections to utilitarianism as annoyances, or bad manners, and brushes them off with incompetent “argumentation.” Here’s what he says about Nozick’s famous experience machine:

If offered the chance, asks Nozick, would you plug in? Of course, many people would not, for all sorts of reasons. They would not trust the machine to deliver what it promised, so they would prefer to keep their real autonomy. Or they might have obligations to others that they could not perform if they were inert. And so on. Thus this is a weak test case, especially because it describes a situation so far from our reality that we have almost become a different animal.

That the machine perfectly delivers as promised is stipulated. Inability to entertain the counterfactual–to actually conduct the thought esperiment–is not an argument against it. And “obligations to others they could not perform”? Well, yes. This is precisely the sort of thing people might worry about because people generally think they ought to meet their obligations, regardless of the hedonic payoff. That’s part of Nozick’s point, dipshit. If Layard was honest, he would bite the bullet and say, yes, plug in. And if there was an experience machine for each of us that would maximize the hedonic quality of our experience, then we would be obligated individually and collectively to forgo a real life of actual action and actual engagement, and instead climb into our pods on the Matrix pod farm, and dream sweet virtual dreams until we die. If Layard will not deign to explain to us why, despite our deep sense of revulsion, we ought to see this scenario as the happiest of all possible circumstance, he cannot expect us to acquiesce to his Benthamite Philosopher Technocrat fantasy.

Hitchens is now testifying to the DC City Council against the proposed smoking ban, and given how, um, sobriety compromised he seems to be, he did a quite fine job of working the sainted Carol Schwartz up into a good freedom of choice lather.

Oh, now repartee with the demonic Jim Graham. Something about Iraq-Kurdistan being the smoking–or at least smoldering–section of the middle east. And this is nice, and sadly true: “You’re treating us like children; retarded children at that.”

Sigh.

Jason DeParle of the NYT discovers the Heritage dorm in this not-so-bad “conservatives in the mist” bit of political ethnography.

Hey Times, if you’re interested in exotic budding ideologues why not go out to the Falls Church Oakwood and check out the IHS Koch Fellows. They’re smarter than the Heritage kids, and twice as dangerous!

This is from a now very old Barry Schwartz column about why people are too stupid to manage their own finances, especially if their finances involve a Social Security personal retirement account, in the NYT. Old, but so bad I can’t help talking about it.

This brings me to the final defense of privatization: the payroll taxes you pay are your money, and you ought to be able to do what you like with your money. This, I suspect, is the real justification behind the move to privatize, and it is the worst reason of all. The payroll tax is not “your” money; it’s our money. Social Security was created as an insurance scheme, not a pension scheme. It was meant to provide a safety net, to protect the unlucky from immiseration in old age. The benefits we get are not payouts from accounts in which we have accumulated our own private stash. What we get is largely determined by what we earned, but we keep getting it even after we’ve taken out every penny we put in. And if we happen to die early, someone else reaps the benefits of our contributions.

That’s refreshingly frank: it’s not your money! OK. So, it’s “ours.” Let’s just skip over the fact that the entire Social Security system and the disinformation one regularly gets from the SSA is specifically designed to encourage the sense that there is some kind of property-like nexus of entitlement between the payroll tax and retirement benefits. (And that social insurance systems like ours are commonly called pensions systems around the world.) Perhaps Schwartz will forgive American voters for having the wrong idea here, and not realizing that they do not in fact have any right to their benefits.

Anyway, what is it that we’re doing with “our” money? Well, we’re sending over 90% of it back to the same income bracket from whence it came, that’s what! Now why would we be doing that if what we wanted to be doing was “protecting the unlucky against immiseration in old age”? (Not to sustain the illusion that our payroll taxes do in fact belong to us as individuals, for sure!) I mean, wouldn’t it be silly to pretend to “insure” people by taking money away from them (thereby increasing their exposure to risk!), and then simply replacing it later? That sure would be silly! Schwartz gestures toward the redistributive function of the program, but . . . there is almost no redistribution! And . . . it isn’t progressive!

An authentic government old-age insurance program might look like government disability insurance. You pay taxes into the program and then you get money back if and when you need it–sort of like the way actual insurance works!

Hey liberals! Since you insist on talking about social insurance, why not stop dissembling and plump for a system that is actually sort of like insurance? Why not not defend a disability insurance model of old-age insurance, where you get it only there is some actual threat of immiseration? We can fund it with a dedicated payroll tax and everything. It really will not function like a pension at all. It will be a safety net for people who need it funded by people who don’t. Isn’t this exactly what liberals should want? TPM Cafe? Left2Right? Somebody? Why don’t you love this idea? Really, I want to know.

See Brooke Oberwetter’s account at Ban the Ban of Jim Graham’s disgraceful faux “town meeting.”

Come next election cycle, this Ward One voter is going to do his utmost to unseat Graham, who has shown himself an enemy of the right of business owners to govern their own establishments.

This book is just a philosophical/methodological disaster.

Layard cites a study by Carol Ryff that purports to show that “purpose in life, autonomy, positive relationships, personal growth and self-acceptance” are highly correlated with self-reported SWB. OK. No suprise. What does Layard think this shows? That Mill was wrong about the existence of qualitatively “higher” pleasures.

Thus Mill was right in his intuition about the true sources of happiness, but he was wrong to argue that some times of pleasure are intrinsically better than others

Of course, it doesn’t even begin to establish this. It might simply establish that people who have more intrinsically valuable experiences tend to report that they are happier on the whole. That’s what Mill thinks, after all.

Layard goes on to say that Mill’s high/low distinction is “inherently paternalistic.” But the only reason to say that is if you, like Layard, are an irremediable paternalist, and take the existence of higher pleasures as a reason to coerce people into having more of them and less of the lower. That is, Mills distinction is paternalistic only if you think the fact that something has special value on one conception of value immediately implies that the state should do something about it. Absurd.

More:

[S]ome unhealthy enjoyments, like that of the sadist, should be avoided because they decrease the happiness of others. But no good feeling is bad in itself–it can only be bad because of its consequences.

Now, I understand that that’s just a restatement of Benthamite egalitarianism among pleasures, but it doesn’t pass the straight face test, does it? Many emotions (or any “judgment sensitive attitudes”, in Scanlon’s terms) are themselves morally evaluable. And it strikes me as exceedingly dubious to assert that the problem with taking pleasure in the rape of children, the torture of kittens, or the betrayal of those who trust you has to do with their consequences for happiness.

The reason Mill distinguishes between higher or lower pleasures is that the distinction is real, he’s a good philosopher, and so sees that it must be accomodated within his theory. The problem with Mill’s move for Mill is that it points beyond utilitarianism toward the independent value of properties, such as beauty, cognitive complexity, and truth in virtue of which higher pleasures are higher.

Sweet.

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I’ve been getting drowned in comment spam. So, until I get a better spam solution, I’ve disabled comments for unregistered folk. For the time being, you’ll need to login with TypeKey. (Go here to register, if you haven’t. It’s free). I like to keep my comments as open as possible, so sorry about this. But TypeKey is pretty easy.

Looking through the literature on happiness (those in the know say “subjective well-being,” or just SWB), it seems clear that a good number of those involved have egalitarian or welfare liberal politics. A lot of these folks profess to being utilitarians of some sort. And there seems to be a push for more redistribution, less inequality, etc. But I think I’m detecting something amiss, here.

Much of the upshot of the literature is that extra money doesn’t do much for you; that people tend become accustomed to their level of material comfort; that people have happiness set-points to which they recur after positive or negative spikes in affect. The flip side of “a lot of money doesn’t make you happy” is “not so much money doesn’t make you unhappy.” So the problem with large economic inequalities isn’t the happiness gap, because the happiness gap is small.

Now, it turns out that one’s perception of one’s place in the income distribution matters to happiness, such that people lower in the distribution are less happy in virtue of being lower in the distribution (or thinking they are). But, aside from total egalitarianism, which isn’t likely to make anyone happy, there is nothing to be done about this. There is always going to be some distribution. There is always a bottom and a top quintile. The point being, I’m a bit puzzled at this point by the attachment to utilitarianism AND SWB research AND egalitarianism.

My hunch is that these folks aren’t really utilitarians after all. They have a prior intuition about the injustice of inequality, and the justice of progressive redistribution. Then, they attempt to undermine resistance to higher tax rates on the wealthy by pointing to research that they interpret to say that this won’t make the wealthy any less happy, and so, Why worry? The trouble is, it won’t make the poor (in a country like the US where the poor are already rich) much happier either, and won’t do anything to change relative position in the distribution. So what’s the point? The point is more progressive redistribution, to which many folks are committed to prior to and independent of utilitarianism or their interest in happiness.

In a way, it turns out that dogmatic welfare liberals are just like dogmatic libertarians. I’ve run into a lot of libertarians who think that a perfect libertarian regime MUST be most conducive to happiness. Because if it wasn’t, then that would be a strong argument against the perfect libertarian regime, against which there is no strong argument. Unsurprisingly, a lot of welfare liberals think this way too. Start with your political commitments, and then argue that everything good must revolve around your fixed point. This is fun at parties, but it tends not to make for good science.

Right now, I’m looking at Richard Layard’s Happiness. He’s an unreconstructed Benthamite, and his view seems to be that evidence on the neurological reward system provides an account of objective utility. And because there’s a neurological correlate to utility, we should think of utilitarianism as the most scientifically respectable of all moral theories, and use it as a guide to social policy, in just the way Bentham intended.

This got me wondering: is the reward system unitary, with a single architecture, or is the reward system implicated in different ways by different cognitive programs or difference kinds of decision tasks. (One possibility is that pleasure/benefit is determined by different systems than pain/costs, and so it may not be that units of plan and units of pleasure trade off in any simple on-to-one sort of way.)

In this article from Nature Reviews, neuro-ethicist Bill Casebeer argues that a virtue-theoretic approach best captures what’s going on in the brain. Moral judgment and motivation is not in all (most?) cases driven by judgments of utility. For example “hot” judgments in social contexts activating theory-of-mind systems probably don’t implicate systems that would calculate either individual or collective expected utility.

This may be important for a number of reasons. The most interesting to me has to do with possible conflicts social policy that is designed to maximize expected social utility and the affective/motivational systems that actually drive behavior. Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism, in a nutshell, is that it is inconsistent with our “sense of justice” and thus utilitarian principles will not gain our willing compliance, and will therefore fail to establish a stable social order. The utilitarian can retort that motivational dispositions are a constraint that utilitarianism must take into account. But then it seems that the principles of utility basically end up mirroring the principles that underlie actual human motivation, which will be doing all the work. At which point it seems otiose to say that what we’re trying to do with policy is maximize happiness, when it would just be more accurate to say that we’re trying to come up with principles people take themselves to have a reason to endorse, where those reasons are only sometimes reasons of utility. The fact that the dopaminergic system or whatever lights up whenever we do whatever we do has nothing interesting to do with what we take to be valuable, or what we should be shooting for socially.

I guess I’m trying to say something to the effect that nothing about the brain actually helps a utilitarian like Layard justify a Benthamite approach to social policy. The reasons for rejecting utilitarianism were never that we don’t know where utility is in the brain, but that it wreaks havoc with native moral judgment and cuts against the grain of our motivational dispositions. Brain science helps us understand why this is the case. We are natural-born Aristotelians (or maybe Humean sentimentalists) unlikely to be moved by comprehensive schemes of utility maximization. Does anyone who might know think the evidence supports this argument?

Glen shows us again why he is an economist and not a poet in this post on “You’re So Vain,” inspired by Tyler’s exhumation of the perennial mystery. (This page is entertainingly un-useful for the “who is it about” question.)

On my intepretation, which is, of course, the natural and correct interpretation, “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you” is a self-indictment, expressing frustration and emotional paradox.

Carly, or whoever the implied narrator is, obviously can’t get the guy out of her dome. She wants to hate him because he was just as aware of his allure as she was, which was irresistable, which is why she fell for him and he “had her.” She was thrown when he dumped her. And she tries to console herself by pointing out how vain he is. But, it turns out, his vanity is really just a fair acknowledgement of his overwhelmingly attractive qualities, a form of confidence and self-possession that is itself attractive. And so pointing out his vanity is an implicit acknowledgement of everything she loved, and everything she grieves losing.

(By the way, people who go on and on about how great they are, like Quentin Tarantino and Phil Hellmuth, drive you crazy in a special way that only those who live up to their own ridiculous hype can.)

The fact that she’s still thinking and writing songs about him and how goddamn beautiful/perfect/irresistable/vain he was “several years” after he “had her” substantiates his vanity (like his Lear jet and his horse “naturally” winning at Saratoga), which is maddening, and throws her right back into the cycle of love/resentment. He is in fact the kind of person people write songs about and can’t forget. She wants to hate him for the fact that he knows it. But, no, that’s just why she loved him. He’s right. He’s unforgettably terrific. If she could just forget him, she wouldn’t be singing the song. But she can’t, and the reason she’s singing the song is precisely why fell so hard for him, and can’t possibly get over the fact that he “gave away the things [he] loved and one of them was me.”

Right?

I’ve got a blog post-length comment on this post by Jonathan Wilde over at Catallarchy. This is what you get today.

I’ve got all sorts of interesting things stored up to report on & ruminate about. Gruter Institute conference on the values of the free enterprise system. AEI conference on neuro-morality. Drinks with Pinker. Hannah & Martin. Perhaps tomorrow, should I have world enough, and time (but if we’re tearing our pleasures with rough strife thorough the iron gates of life, then forget it.)

I’ve helped to put together a little theatrical field trip tonight for the America’s Future Foundation’s newly recussitated AFF Underground cultural series. There’s a couple spots left for discount tickets, and you should email me if you want to come.

We’ll be going to theater J at the DC Jewish Community Center to see the award-winning new play Hannah and Martin, by Kate Fodor. Hannah and Martin explores the intellectual and intimate relationship between celebrated philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s most incisive theorists and critics of totalitarianism.

After the play, we will convene to Local 16, at the corner of 16th and U Streets for drinks and discussion of what promises to be intellectually provocative play.

Tickets are $25.00, five dollars off the regular price, and a merer $20.00 for AFF Founder’s Club members, ten dollars off the regular price. (Why not become a Founder’s Club member now?) AFF Underground has a block of only 30 seats, so act fast.

If you would like to claim a ticket, email me at willwilkinson AT gmail DOT com.

—-

Hannah and Martin
Thursday, June 2, 7:30 pm
Theater J, DC Jewish Community Center
1529 16th St NW

“Celebrated professor and philosopher Hannah Arendt is forced to confront charges that her lover and mentor, the venerable Martin Heidegger, is a Nazi sympathizer and must choose whether to indict or
forgive him. A sensual and deeply felt play of ideas that mines questions of forgiveness, academic independence, and the limits of loyalty when blinded by romantic desire.”

For more info: Theater J at the DC Jewish Community Center to see the award-winning new play Hannah and Martin, by Kate Fodor. Hannah and Martin explores the intellectual and intimate relationship between celebrated philosopher and notorious Nazi, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, one of the 20th Century’s most incisive theorists and critics of totalitarianism.

After the play, we will convene to Local 16, at the corner of 16th and U Streets for drinks and discussion of what promises to be intellectually provocative play.

Tickets are $25.00, five dollars off the regular price, and a merer $20.00 for AFF Founder’s Club members, ten dollars off the regular price. (Why not become a Founder’s Club member now?) AFF Underground has a block of only 30 seats, so act fast. Email Chris Morris at chris@americasfuture.org if you would like to claim a ticket.

Hannah and Martin
Thursday, June 2, 7:30 pm
Theater J, DC Jewish Community Center
1529 16th St NW

“Celebrated professor and philosopher Hannah Arendt is forced to confront charges that her lover and mentor, the venerable Martin Heidegger, is a Nazi sympathizer and must choose whether to indict or
forgive him. A sensual and deeply felt play of ideas that mines questions of forgiveness, academic independence, and the limits of loyalty when blinded by romantic desire.”

For more info, visit the page at Theater J.

[UPDATE: AFF's block of tickets at the discounted rate is now spoken for. However, if you're interested in coming and didn't get a discount ticket, you should still feel free to join us. Call the theater for tickets, meet us before in front of the JCC (7:15-ish), and join us for drinks and discussion afterwards at Local 16.]