Here is the fourth chunk of the argument. To return to the third chunk, click here. To advance to the fifth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.
We have arrived at a peculiar situation. For the free market to exist at all requires that people adhere to certain moral principles that constrain their pursuit of their own utility, such as respect for property rights and the principle of noncoercion. And these minimal principles aren’t sufficient for a perfectly efficient free market (one that satisfies the conditions for perfect competition), only for a modestly efficient free market. Of course, no market will exhibit perfect efficiency, but efficiency will improve the more open, honest, probative, loyal, forthcoming, fair-minded, and so forth that people are, again at the expense of their pursuit of their own utility. And this generates the apparent paradox that people must be community-spirited in order to set the stage for them to be selfish!
So, what is the message here? Are people supposed to be egoists or not? In the purely competitive market, people are supposed to follow only one principle: egoistic utility maximization. But for such a market to exist, even approximately, people have to follow certain “moral” principles—principles of good behavior distinct from egoistic utility maximization and that often conflicts with egoistic utility maximization.
To be clear: The problem is not that the free society seems to require two different sorts of moral principles. It’s that the different sorts of moral principles conflict, and no rationale is provided for resolving the conflict. We have seen that the egoistic utility maximizer has no reason to forego his own utility to promote an efficient free market (or any free market) where this can be avoided. On the flip side, it’s at least ironic to insist on “moral” rules to create an egoistic free-for-all. Why should people care about nonegoistic constraints on the pursuit of their own utility if their observance is only in the service of egoism?
That a social order should require devotion to principles that sometimes require individuals to restrain their pursuit of their own utility is hardly very surprising or problematic. It’s the mixed message that is the problem. It’s that we demand that people care about the rights of others and simultaneously embrace as their moral vision egoistic utility maximization. On the one hand, we’re supposed to care about community-spirited values; on the other hand, we’re supposed to care only about our own benefit. The problem is to reconcile these two directives.
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Suppose we start with the set of normative reasons that do not include any deontic reasons (or reasons to conform to rule that almost always trump all other non-deontic reasons at each decision point). Each agent has this set of reasons. Suppose further that these reasons (or the ends that ground them) are most efficiently pursued, for each agent, if there is enough conformity – pretty good conformity to a set of rules for treating other people nicely or respectfully, S = {R1, R2, R3}. This seems to yield non-deontic rule-following reasons that lack the relevant “trumping” feature. So what we should do, to the extent that we can, is avoid following the rules when we can and spend only as much time as we need to in taking actions that promote enough general conformity in our communities. On these suppositions, we have only instrumental and non-deontic reason to follow the rules of S. If the initial set of reasons do not include moral reasons, then our reasons to follow familiar moral rules are only non-moral.
If this picture is unacceptable (and unavoidable as it seems that you cannot get recognizably deontic reasons from something along the lines of egoistic eudaimonism), then put the deontic reasons back in! If we do, what is the problem? Where is the “contradiction”? Maybe it is unclear how we explain why and how we have these reasons. Fair enough, but to the extent that this is a puzzle not simply a request for a deeply explanatory justification that we do not yet have, isn’t it just the puzzle of how inherently puzzling deontic reasons are? Is the puzzle simply that of squaring such deontic reasons with the kind of normative reasons we are granting at the outset (common desires, market-efficient satisfaction of them)?
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