Category Archives: Uncategorized

Morals and the Free Society: 7. Frank

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Here is the seventh chunk of the argument. To return to the sixth chunk, click here. To advance to the eighth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

Robert Frank (1988) could hardly be accused of attempting to provide a moral vision for a free society, but he makes a case for one way of resolving the moral contradiction of the free society. He attempts to show how a seemingly selfless adherence to the moral principles that support the efficient operation of the free market might ultimately be justified in egoistic terms after all. The basic strategy is to reap the long term benefits of playing by free market rules by foregoing the short term gains that can be made by breaking them. Of course, this depends on finding other agents who also obey the free market rules—and enabling them to find you. Otherwise, as Frank shows, the strategy will be undercut and ultimately defeated by rule breakers.

How this strategy works can be illustrated by the case of honesty. Honest behavior is economically selfless on those occasions when one could gain by dishonesty (for example, perhaps by not paying the bill of a supplier who is about to go bankrupt or the bill of a small contractor who can’t afford to sue). Now, suppose you committed yourself to a policy of strict honesty. If others knew this, they would have reason to prefer doing business with you over others, to give you easier credit, etc. For, they could be confident that you would not rip them off; i.e., impose costs on them through dishonesty. In North’s terms, doing business with you would lower their transactions costs. Thus, by foregoing the occasional rip off, you reap the rewards of doing more business on better terms. And notice, by the way, that even if other people adopt the same honesty strategy, thereby undercutting your “market edge,” your terms of doing business will still be better. Transactions costs are still lowered, even if everybody becomes completely honest (indeed, they are lowered even more).

Of course, this works only if people know you are completely honest. Continue reading →

Bleg: Repression–Freudian and Otherwise

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I’m in the middle of a short paper (for class!) on Michael Billig’s Freudian Repression: Conversation Creating the Unconscious. Verdict on the book: essentially negative. But that’s a topic for another time. I’ve come neither to praise nor blame, but to bleg.

I’m looking for “off the cuff” answers to the four (or five) questions below the fold. The point is to get a (very unscientific) sense of how “people” think of psychological repression. Feel free to answer whether you’ve read Freud or not (Sigmund or Anna or both); whether you’re in psychology or psychiatry or not; and whether the conception of repression you have in mind is Freudian or not. If you have read Freud, and/or are professionally in psychology or psychiatry, please indicate that. And feel free to answer any or all (or I guess, none) of the questions.

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Minimum Wages and Payroll Taxes

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about the minimum wage, now that New York and California have increased it to $15 (over the next few years).

This is a literal, not a rhetorical or loaded question: what stands in the way of keeping the minimum wage where it is, but (where mathematically possible) decreasing payroll taxes on minimum wage workers by the equivalent of the proposed increase in the minimum wage? I encountered the proposal decades ago in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post by James Glassman, but have heard almost nothing about it since.

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Morals and the Free Society: 6. Hayek

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Here is the sixth chunk of the argument. To return to the fifth chunk, click here. To advance to the seventh chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here. An Addendum to the present chunk, on cultural group selection theory, is posted here.

Nozick’s is a split view. There is the morality of the side constraints, and there is the egoistic morality of the market, and they have essentially nothing to do with each other. From the perspective of either, there is no intrinsic reason to care about the other. A similar critique ultimately applies to Hayek’s otherwise very interesting take on a moral vision for a free society in The Fatal Conceit (1988).

Hayek believes human behavior is structured in three tiers. The lowest tier is instinctual and includes genetically supported behavioral patterns and impulses that evolved over the thousands of years of our hunter-gatherer prehistory. The second tier is that of culture. Cultural customs, traditions, mores, and practices are transmitted through social learning. They evolved through a blind, quasi-Darwinian process of relatively random variation and selection through the success or failure of those who adopt them. They are not the product of reason. Reason itself, which is the third tier, is a late product of this process of cultural evolution. It enables us to consciously and critically evaluate evidence, hypotheses, and proposals. It is the only self-aware capacity of the three, but it is a very weak instrument. It is almost entirely incapable of grasping the reasons or justification or purposes of our actions or of predicting their effects. Hayek believes reason across the board is highly overrated. It serves mostly as a source of post hoc rationalizations of our behavior. One should not trust reason, whether theoretical or practical, very far at all. (The hostility to reason betrayed in this book is stunning. But further discussion of this point is a topic for another time.)

The different tiers are the source of different and sometimes conflicting behavioral imperatives, particularly “moral” imperatives. Continue reading →

“Driving While Black”: Vice News Comes to Town

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No sooner do I praise my local police department, but Vice News comes to town to trash it.

Of course, this video is worth watching, as well. In the video, Bloomfield’s police chief mentions burglary, something I can speak to from first-hand experience. The question is whether the reduction in the crime rate has come at the expense of individual rights–or not.

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Morals and the Free Society: 5. Nozick

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Here is the fifth chunk of the argument. To return to the fourth chunk, click here. To advance to the sixth chunk, click here. The complete essay is posted here.

 

Resolving the Contradiction

A satisfactory moral vision for a free society cannot be a schizophrenic opposition of moral directives. Yet that’s where we’ve been led by our investigation of the moral implications of the economic theory of the free market. How can these conflicting directives—to constrain our pursuit of our own utility for the sake of the free market as a whole, but also to pursue our own utility egoistically—be reconciled into a consistent moral picture?

To investigate this problem, it will be useful to survey some attempts to provide some sort of morals for the free society.

Nozick

Nozick (1974) speaks of the moral rules that bring the free market into existence as “side constraints.” The idea is that one maximally pursues one’s own goals in a state of unconcern for the goals others, while at the same time observing a set of extraneous, more or less absolute restrictions on one’s range of action. You pursue your own goals however possible, except that you aren’t allowed to kill or maim anyone, rob people, defraud them, etc. The constraints are called “rights,” and they are conceived as prohibitions on allowed action that stand completely outside the order of ends or utilities. According to Nozick, the source of rights is that “individuals are inviolable” (1974, 31). “Why?” asks the market egoist. “Why should I care about other individuals?” Nozick: “Because Kant.”

So there are rights, which appear as a set of rules separate from the rest of life, and there’s the rest of life, which can supply no intrinsic motivation to respect rights.

This is obviously no solution. It is just a reaffirmation of the very schizophrenia we want to escape. It sets rights and market behavior in opposition, the selfless versus the selfish, with the irony that the selfless observance of rights exists to create the selfish market. It invites people to think of the market as something that does not reward and even punishes rights-respecting behavior, and to think of rights-respecting behavior as something it’s better to get others to do while avoiding for themselves. In addition, it treats rights as the only source of moral constraint on the pursuit of one’s own goals. Now, perhaps the bare observance of rights is enough to secure “liberty.” But we have seen that a perfectly efficient market, which optimizes the outcomes of all, requires the elimination of all transactions costs and therefore requires adherence to mores of behavior, such as candor and fair-mindedness and forgivingness, that go well beyond the bare observance of rights.

Work Cited

  • Nozick, Robert. 1974. <em>Anarchy, State, and Utopia</em>. Basic Books.

Derek Bowman on Adjuncting: “Why Working for Free Is Bad For Your Students”

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I’ve previously mentioned the adjunct session we’re doing at the Felician Institute conference in a few weeks, with Michelle Ciurria and Derek Bowman presenting. Derek Bowman alerts me to the fact that he’s posted a two paragraph precis of his presentation on his website, which I’ve cut and pasted below the fold. I have a complex set of agreements and disagreements with Derek’s way of putting things, but I’ll reserve comment for later, and for now, simply invite comment from others. I’m hoping to invite presenters to the conference to post their papers on the Institute’s website. More on that when I hear back from them.

PS. You might also be interested in this paper of Derek’s on philosophy and practical engagement [PDF] (which happens to mention PoT’s own Michael Young in the acknowledgements). Derek’s paper provides an interesting contrast to this one by Bas Van Der Vossen, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.

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