Evolution isn't really about survival. It is about reproduction. Utility isn't about hedonic pleasure or the maintenance of 'conatus' (i.e. inertial existence). It is about what is useful for whatever purposes a person may have. But that purpose includes 'discovery'- i.e. trying novel things- and may involve not utility maximization by regret minimization- more particularly if there is Knightian Uncertainty. Discovery is related to adaptation. Indeed, it is a two way street.
We often have reasons to compare two different states of the world. Suppose you are offered a well paid job in an Islamic country with strict laws on alcohol, adultery and so forth. Your alternative is low pay in a 'decadent' Western country. It might initially be difficult for you to adapt to a pious, teetotal, lifestyle. But maybe it would be good for you. Moreover, you could save up money and have a better standard of living if you decide to return to the West after a few years. Of course, if you are a hopeless alcoholic or a compulsive adulterer, it may not be safe to make the move. You have to decide whether you can or can't adapt.
Countries too need to decide what they can or can't adapt to. This matters because if you choose the wrong 'mimetic target' or economic plan, you may end up worse than before. Still, these are decisions which we all must make throughout our lives. At a fundamental level, they are ideographic, not nomothetic. No a priori 'norms' or calculus can be applied.
Some twenty years ago Mozaffar Qizilbash published a paper titled-
The Adaptation Problem, Evolution and Normative Economics
Abstract: Amartya Sen has advanced a number of distinct arguments against utilitarianism and ‘utility’-based views more generally.
Nobody knows what utility or capability really is. This means there can be no argument against the thing because it isn't whatever strawman you are belaboring.
One of these invokes various ways in which underdogs can ‘adapt’ and learn to live with their situations.
This is like the Income and Substitution effect of a price change. Would people pay more money not to have to 'adapt'? Measuring this involves no very severe problem. True, a 'Laspeyres' type approach may magnify the negative income effect whereas a Paasche type approach would do the reverse. Still, we could look at other evidence to see how much people would pay not to have to change their behavior- i.e. adapt.
Sen’s argument is related to Jon Elster’s discussion of ‘adaptive preferences’
which is like 'managing the news'. But this does not change the fact that some people may be paying money, or enduring inconvenience, not to have to do so. Examine that and you get an idea about what has happened to aggregate welfare. A good example is looking at entry and exit. If people are running away from the Socialist Paradise, chances are the Human Development indices the regime puts out are shit. Either that or 'class enemies' are simply too far gone in decadence to adapt to a pure and healthy way of life.
but is distinct in part because Sen cites the need for underdogs to survive.
Surviving as opposed to topping yourself requires you to stop weeping bitter tears because you didn't get selected for Julia Roberts' role in 'Pretty Woman'. I console myself that I achieved fame as Beyonce.
When read in combination with his discussion of Darwinism, Sen’s discussion of adaptation is relevant to recent work in normative economics which is influenced by evolutionary biology.
that 'work' is shit.
It poses a problem for Richard Layard’s book on happiness, particularly its policy conclusions.
Don't try to raise people's incomes. They will just spend the money on booze and thus become more and more unhappy.
It also poses a problem for Ken Binmore’s account of justice because the empathetic preferences in terms of which interpersonal comparisons are made in Binmore’s account are formed through social evolution.
Binmore hadn't noticed that highly inegalitarian societies had taken territory from egalitarian ones. Social evolution hasn't turned us all into peaceful foragers.
Introduction One of Amartya Sen’s arguments against utilitarianism, and ‘utility’-based views more generally, involves the idea that certain underdogs may ‘adapt’ to, or learn to live with, their living conditions in a variety of ways – such as by suppressing suffering, cutting back their desires or finding pleasure in small mercies.
This is also true of top-dogs. Everybody has to adapt to the fact that as they grow older it becomes difficult to pleasure more than five super-models a night.
It they do so, the calculus of ‘utility’ might be a misleading guide to a person’s quality of life or advantage in the evaluation of normative claims.
But that calculus is wholly notional. Nobody knows what will turn out to be really useful. You can have expectations and there is 'revealed preference' re. what you buy with your money. That's good enough for any practical purpose.
This argument goes by a variety of names. In earlier work (Qizilbash, 2006a, p. 83), I have referred to the difficulty it poses for some accounts of well-being as the ‘adaptation problem’.
This is lie the difficulty posed to accounts of Superman by the fact that the guy can fly faster than light and thus can go back into the past to prevent bad shit from happening.
The use of the term ‘adaptive preferences’ to refer to Sen’s claims about adaptation is misleading, because he usually makes no claim about preferences in the relevant discussions.
Sen got it into his head that very poor people in Bihar reported less morbidity than very rich people in Beverly Hills. This wasn't true. Asked the right questions, they would have reported much higher morbidity.
In this paper, I argue that one difference between Elster’s and Sen’s discussions - which has received little or no attention - is that Sen is often concerned that underdogs adapt with a view to survival.
Everyone either wants to survive or is ready to top herself. Why speak only of underdogs?
His related work on the Darwinian view of progress and evolution, helps to make more sense of some of his concerns about adaptation and survival. This paper goes on to address the following questions: is the adaptation problem relevant to recent contributions in normative economics - notably on happiness and justice?
No. Both are stupid shit.
and do these contributions have any plausible response to the adaptation problem? I take Richard Layard’s work to be an example of recent work on happiness, which has been influential at the policy level and Ken Binmore’s writings as a contemporary account of justice. Both Layard and Binmore are influenced by evolutionary biology.
In which case they should be focused on reproduction. The surprise is that greater affluence may mean much lower reproduction and thus demographic replacement one way or another.
The scope and claims of the paper are thus limited to examining whether the adaptation problem arises for these authors, rather than the work of all those working on happiness and accounts of justice which build on evolutionary biology in economics.
The adaptation problem in Econ has to do with the substitution and income effect. If there is a perfect substitute, there is no income effect and thus no impact on Welfare. The question is whether substituting consumption for having babies makes people happier. In some cases, yes. In others, no. You will be miserable in your old age unless you get busy with the booze and drugs. On the other hand, watching your kids starve to death mightn't be a barrel of laughs.
Jon Elster’s discussion of adaptive preferences dedicates considerable space to distinguishing adaptive preferences from those formed in other ways. Indeed, for Elster, adaptive preferences are closely identified with a specific phenomenon: ‘sour grapes’. The fox and grapes example highlights the way in which preferences may not be independent of the set of feasible options.
But we can find out if foxes like grapes by offering them some. There may be a market for fox-food like the market for dog-food. Add grapes to the mix and you make a lot of money.
Indeed, while Elster’s discussion is aimed primarily at utilitarianism, it is relevant more generally for preference based accounts of rational choice, including social choice ).
Which just boils down to 'peeps prefer to buy stuff they prefer. They don't prefer to buy shite they fucking hate.'
So he asks: ‘why should the choice between feasible options only take account of individual preference, if people tend to adjust their aspirations to their possibilities?’ (Elster, 1983, p. 109).
Also should people be identified as occupying specific bodies? I aspire to be both Beyonce and the Andromeda galaxy. Why are Neo-Liberal economists refusing to fulfil my aspirations? Is it coz I iz bleck?
As regards many modern forms of utilitarianism – which rank outcomes, rules or dispositions in terms of the average or sum of welfare they produce, and conceptualise welfare in terms of the satisfaction of desires or preferences – the implication is also clear.
Fuck utility. Just focus on what people would be willing to pay. Utility or ophelimity was just a way of avoiding saying 'money'. Only vulgar peeps talk about money.
As Elster puts it: ‘there would be no welfare loss if the fox were excluded from the consumption of the grapes, since he thought them sour anyway’ (Elster, 1983, p. 109).
Not if we gave the fox some grapes and it devoured them happily. If you care about foxes and observe a fox slinking away from juicy grapes, you might improve its welfare by chucking a bunch of grapes in its direction.
Put another way, if the fox preferred starving to eating the grapes, preference-based utilitarianism would have no basis for claiming that the fox was worse off starving.
Only if it was as stupid as shit.
Elster discusses a wide range of related phenomena which include: ‘counteradaptive preferences’; manipulation; ‘character planning’; addiction; and preference change through learning. By distinguishing these phenomena from that of adaptive preference formation, he hopes to explain why adaptive preferences are problematic.
They may indeed be so. That's why we have a big Advertising and Consumer Finance industry which assures us that even ordinary folk like ourselves can and should buy nice things. Educators in state schools may have to work hard to convince working class kids that they can and should enjoy classical literature or advanced calculus.
His ultimate charge against utilitarianism is that it would not distinguish between adaptive preferences and preferences formed in other ways and would thus not begin to address the problem he isolates.
But utilitarianism can distinguish 'sour grapes' expectations easily enough. Offer the fox the grapes. If it likes them, you know how to raise welfare. As a matter of fact, enterprises do spend money on finding out if their customers like a new product line.
To clarify this point, I explain these different phenomena. In his conceptual map, ‘counteradaptive preferences’ refer to the ‘opposite’ phenomenon to sour grapes, i.e. that ‘forbidden fruit is sweet’.
Adam ate an apple. That is why he and Eve were booted out of paradise.
Here, as in the case of adaptive preferences, preferences are shaped by the feasible set. However, in counteradaptive preferences, the preference is for unattainable, rather than attainable, options.
The apple was attainable. We may try things which are forbidden because we are curious. This is part of 'discovery' and is easily accommodated by Utilitarianism of a 'regret minimizing' kind.
As regards, preference formation through learning, Elster notes that choices depend on tastes, which in turn depend on past choices . Someone reared in the country may prefer a country lifestyle to an urban one while someone with experience of only an urban lifestyle might then prefer that to a country lifestyle. On the other hand, someone who has experience of both lifestyles may be better informed – and have learnt from experience. The informed person’s preferences are then not simply reversed by changing the set of feasible options, as would be the case if preferences were adaptive.
Preferences are epistemic and thus have no stable extension. Once you understand that Social Choice theory was constructed on an intensional fallacy, you can still do rough and ready Welfare econ or make smart marketing or other such decisions. The fault here is a sort of mathsy 'akreibia'- i.e. a seeking for greater precision than the subject matter can bear.
Elster also distinguishes sour grapes from the case of addiction where ‘people get hooked on certain goods, which they then consume compulsively’. He thinks that adaptive and addictive preferences have a certain amount in common because, in both, preferences are ‘induced by the choice situation rather than given independently of it’.
In both cases there is an element of impredicativity. But this always exists when it comes to Preferences. They simply don't have a well ordered extension. They aren't sets and can't give rise to mathematical functions.
However, he suggests that these phenomena differ in both the consequences of withdrawal and in the fact that in the case of addiction the object of addiction plays an important role, whereas in adaptation it is the feasible set which is crucial.
Addiction is a real thing. 'Adaptation' isn't. 'Sour grapes' is just a comic expression. It so happens that I like grapes but, like the fox, am unable to pluck them myself. Since I have money, I find that the local supermarket has taken account of my preference and so I can purchase as many as I like.
Elster crucially also distinguishes adaptive preferences from ‘character planning’. In the phenomenon of ‘sour grapes’, the process of adaptation occurs – on Elster’s account - ‘behind the back’ of the person and is not the outcome of deliberation.
Nope. The fox is generally presented as a cunning creature. It's remark was the product of deliberation.
If it were a person’s choice to alter her preferences in the light of the actual possibilities she faces, for Elster, that makes her free, in a way that she is not in the case of adaptive preferences.
A galley slave may alter his preferences. This does not make him free. Even if I 'manage the news' such that I think that every time Beyonce gets an award, it is actually me who is being lauded, this does not alter the fact that I would prefer to be a beautiful African-American woman who enjoys great wealth.
In the case of adaptive preferences, the process of preference formation is purely causal and to some degree undermines the person’s autonomy.
The fox was autonomous enough. The galley slave wasn't.
Adaptive preferences are also distinct from ‘manipulation’ on Elster’s view. In the case of manipulation, the process of preference formation is driven by the fact that it benefits people other than those whose preferences are being shaped. In the case of sour grapes, however, the process is driven by the fact that it is (apparently) good for – and presumably can be seen as improving the welfare of - those who adapt while undermining their freedom or autonomy.
Saying 'Beyonce can't dance or sing. The only reason she is famous is because she is the father of Benjamin Netanyahu' doesn't undermine shite. Anyone can say anything. The fact remains- as you can see from my TikTok videos, I think I can twerk just like Beyonce. I'd love to swap my life for hers.
Elster’s discussion of sour grapes thus focuses on the potential conflict between autonomy and welfare in evaluating the effects of adaptation. This is especially clear when he discusses the possibility of release from adaptive preferences which occurs when people raise their (previously dampened) hopes or expectations when new possibilities open up.
Market Researchers can gather evidence that a specific section of the population would be happy to try some new product.
His own further analysis of such release – which continues in his discussion of the evaluation of the effects of the Industrial Revolution – focuses on the fact that social changes which lead to such a release can involve both ‘inducement of frustration and creation of autonomous persons’ .
Getting rid of serfdom certainly helped.
This point is clearly important for the evaluation of progress or development which is a central theme in Sen’s writings.
Because he was from India and had to pretend to care about poor people.
. Sen on Adaptation, Capability and Evolution While there is a significant overlap between Sen’s discussions of adaptation and Elster’s, there are also significant differences. In Sen’s writings, claims about adaptation are put to (at least) two distinct uses. The argument is used: (1) to undermine confidence in ‘utility’ – understood as desire satisfaction, pleasure or happiness – as a reliable measure of wellbeing or the quality of life;
it is unknowable. We may have expectations regarding usefulness or pleasure derivable from a purchase and that information could be useful to Market Research companies.
and (2) to signal significant worries about any view of justice which focuses on ‘utility’ as a metric for interpersonal comparisons of advantage.
Money is a good enough proxy for utility. Courts make judgments of this sort all the time. Suppose both I and an 18 year old suffer life-altering injuries in an accident. The younger person should get more by way of compensation. I don't have that much longer to live.
Indeed, it in part motivates Sen’s own well-known views of the quality of life and justice which are in part constituted by his ‘capability approach’ which is concerned with makes what a person can do or be .
Which nobody can know. By contrast we can get good enough information about whether a particular group of people will buy a particular product at a particular price.
In more precise terms, the relevant things a person can do or be, her ‘doings’ and ‘beings’, are called ‘functionings’ and her capability refers to ‘the alternative combinations of functionings the person can achieve, and from which he or she can choose one collection’ .
Nobody can do so. Sen could have followed his father's footsteps and chosen to study something useful at University. The poor chap may have thought what mathematical Econ would be useful for India. It wasn't.
A person’s capability thus ‘reflects her freedom to lead different types of life’
No it doesn't. A highly capable person may be in prison. A useless tosser like me may be as free as a bird.
and, in this sense, the opportunities open to her. On the capability approach, the quality of life, egalitarian claims and development can be evaluated in terms of what people are able to do or be,
which affects their utility or at least what sorts of things they can buy with their income
not just in terms of what their ‘utility’ is or in terms of their income or resources.
Money is measurable. Utility is just a fancy word for money. Capabilities means potential productivity in different occupations. It is certainly worth investing in raising that both for employers and the Government because there is a virtuous circle between raised productivity and increased revenue.
In On Ethics and Economics he writes that: A person who has had a life of misfortune, with very limited opportunities, and rather little hope, may be easily reconciled to deprivations than others reared in more fortunate and affluent circumstances.
In other words, such a person is likely to spend less on seeking a way to escape. Thus, suppose you are in the business of smuggling people out of shitholes to affluent countries. Don't bother trying to sell your services to a tranquil beggar. Find a guy who was used to having a better standard of living or one who feels sure he will make a lot of money in a new country. This is the case even if you mean to kill such people once you get their money.
The metric of happiness
which does not exist. Governments spend a little money finding out about Income levels so as to set tax rates. They don't measure happiness- unless, like Bhutan, they have just ethnically cleansed a racial minority and thus are feeling very happy indeed.
may, therefore, distort the extent of deprivation, in a specific and biased way. The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless labourer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the overexhausted coolie
or the sodomized Mathematical Economist
may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continued survival, but it would be ethically deeply mistaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of this survival strategy.
Who was actually doing so? The answer, of course, is Manmohan Singh. Did you know he used to rudely force his way into the shacks of starving peasants and say 'are you happy you disgusting pieces of shit?'. The peasants would say 'Sardarji, we are very happy. God bless you.' Manmohan would then steal all their food and kick them in the balls. He was a very evil man. Sen used to point this out repeatedly.
(The related notions of adaptation with a view to survival and of a strategy undertaken in the face of adversity with a view to merely continuing to live can be found in many of Sen’s texts from his earlier, to later, statements of the capability approach .
They were premised on the notion that other economists kept going around measuring utility in the manner of Manmohan Singh.
The cases Sen cites in this particular quotation to exemplify the phenomenon of adaptation – the hopeless beggar, the precarious landless labourer etc. – are very specific and are, as we will see, both, in one sense broader, and in another narrower, than those which exemplify Elster’s notion of ‘adaptive preferences’.
Sen was Bengali. He believed that if people are poor, some rich dude- perhaps a Punjabi or Marwari- must have stolen all their money. Yet those evil Punjabi or Marwaris are constantly measuring the utility of their victims and saying 'they are very happy! Their utility is very high!' Sen, in his polite way, protested against this. Yet India has not made Sen PM whereas Mohammad Yunus, who only has Nobel Piss Prize, is now running Bangladesh! How is that fair?
On the one hand, if an affluent but rejected lover who faces many opportunities in life decides that the object of his affection is not as beautiful as he earlier thought she was, and that someone he previously thought less attractive but who is more likely to respond positively to his overtures is to be preferred, this is no doubt a case of adaptive preferences in Elster’s terms since it is a form of sour grapes (because the affluent lover’s preferences are reversed in the light of a contraction in the feasible set).
No. It is quite usual to feel more and more affection, more and more admiration, more and more love, for the person you marry.
It clearly may not, however, be the sort of phenomenon Sen has in mind. The affluent but fickle lover has a wide range of opportunities in life while the underdogs in Sen’s examples typically do not.
But the underdogs may reproduce faster than the top-dogs. That way they win the evolutionary race.
In this sense, Sen’s examples are narrower than Elster’s cases of adaptive preferences since Sen focuses on cases of significant deprivation or inequality. However, Sen’s examples are less restrictive than Elster’s in another way. Consider the case of the dominated housewife who learns to live with her situation by
shutting the fuck up not
accepting ideological claims which are put forward with a view to advancing the interests of men at the expense of women.
Why not the case of the husband whose wife keeps telling him he has a tiny todger?
In this context, Sen tells us that Simone de Beauvoir’s work illuminated for him how ‘women readily accept the pro-inequality apologia as a true description of reality’.
French women didn't get the vote till 1945. Some women in India had the vote by 1919. Ceylon got universal adult suffrage in 1931.
The case of gender inequality is one of a range of cases where Sen invokes how people might adjust to the inequitable conditions in which they find themselves.
A person who moves from a very unequal to an egalitarian society would have to make many adjustments. But people born in a particular society don't have to adapt to it though they may have suppress certain inclinations they may have- e.g. the impulse to copulate with a police horse when of strong drink taken.
While he mentions such cases primarily in questioning the use of ‘utility’-based views in the context of justice rather than well-being, they fall squarely within the category of examples he mentions in discussing adaptation, though in Elster’s terms they would not be cases of adaptive preferences if those who gain because of adaptation are men rather than women. In Elster’s terms these would rather be cases of manipulation.
Why bother manipulating those without power or money? It really isn't the case that the boss tries to brainwash you into accepting him as your superior. He just sacks you if you ride a police horse into your place of work and proceed to have sex with it.
It is worth here mentioning another phenomenon which Elster distinguishes from adaptive preferences: ‘rationalization’. Here the situation a person finds herself in shapes – indeed distorts - her perception rather than her evaluations. Elster readily accepts that this situation is often hard to disentangle from one of adaptive preferences. In the case of the spurned lover, for example, both phenomena are arguably at work. The lover both changes his beliefs about the beauty of the woman who rejects him and alters his evaluation of the merits of different women.
Unless the fellow is a professional Judge of beauty pageants, his behavior is in accordance with the evolutionary theory of how the sense of beauty came to be what it is.
By contrast, Sen’s discussion of adaptation often invokes what he terms ‘objective illusion’ (notably Sen, 1993b and 2002, pp. 473-4) – which relates, roughly speaking, to distortions in perception - and the Marxian notion of ‘false consciousness’ in relation to such illusion.
So, the thing is subjective. Big whoop. Just say preferences, utility, capability, happiness, beauty etc. are all epistemic and thus don't have a well defined extension and you are spared all this low IQ reinvention of the wheel.
In spite of these differences between Elster and Sen, there are numerous overlaps between their discussions which sometimes obscure the differences. Just as in Sen’s examples the underdog often reconciles herself to, or reduces her hopes or aspirations in the light of, her situation, so also in Elster’s writings the phenomenon of adaptive preferences is usually described in terms of resignation or adjusted aspirations .
These may be psychologically necessary but they are not required by economics. This is because there is no 'scarcity' when it comes to what you choose to believe or what illusions you choose to indulge yourself in. Thus I can believe I am Beyonce and also the Andromeda galaxy without having to pay extra for that privilege.
In both, also, people adjust to limited freedom in the range of choice open to them.
Everyone has only limited freedom. We can't choose to be immortal.
Furthermore, both clearly see adaptation as a problem for utilitarianism. Sen’s reference to a ‘survival strategy’ in the quotation from On Ethics and Economics cited above can be seen as related to what he sees as the limits of Darwinian analysis in the social sciences.
Sen never got to grips with John Maynard Smith. He didn't know what contemporary 'Darwinian analysis' was like.
Sen (2002, p. 485) has no worries about Darwinian analysis as an approach to how evolution takes place. Rather his concerns have to do with what he calls the ‘Darwinian view of progress’ – which relates to what constitutes progress and to the way in which evolution brings about progress.
He was attacking a straw man.
Sen sees the Darwinian criterion of progress as involving two steps, one of which is more direct than the other. The first judges progress directly in terms of the quality of the species produced .
That isn't Darwinian. Eugenics is a separate subject though some Darwinians were into a century ago.
Sen himself distinguishes this ‘quality-of-species’ approach from a ‘quality-of-life’ approach which focuses on individual lives rather than species
in which case it is part of Social Science. Darwin was a Natural Scientist.
and he sees his own capability approach as an instance of the latter type of approach to the evaluation of progress .
Why evaluate progress? It isn't as though progress will become depressed if you give it a 'C' grade or that it will suck you off in return for an 'A'.
The second step involves judging the excellence of the species in terms of reproductive success – ‘the power to survive and multiply and thus, collectively, to outnumber and outlive competing groups’ .
The evolutionarily stable strategy is one impermeable to invasion by mutant strains unless the fitness landscape changes.
It is in the context of this second step in the evaluation of progress that Sen returns to the notion of adaptation. He writes: We recognize many virtues and achievements that do not help survival but that we do have reason to value; and on the other side there are many correlates of successful survival that we find deeply objectionable. For example, if a species of vassals – some variant of homo sapiens – is kept in inhuman conditions by some tribe and that species adapts and evolves into being super-rapid reproducers, must we accept that development as a sign of progress? An exact analogue of this is, of course, imposed on those animals on which we feed. But such an arrangement would hardly seem acceptable for human beings, and it is not at all clear … that it should be acceptable in the case of animals either. (Sen, 2002, p. 494)
Why stop there? Why not say 'We recognize that pineapples can be tasty but should we find it acceptable for pineapples to be thrust up the rectums of disabled women in the Global South? Is this what you call 'Progress'? No doubt, if you are Manmohan Singh, you may think this increases 'utility' but what about the capability of disabled women to store other items in their rectums?
Here adaptation is explicitly linked to survival and evolution and Sen finds the inhuman conditions which lead to it objectionable even if it promotes reproductive success.
Very true. Disabled women with valuable pineapples up their rectums may be seen to have higher net worth but has their welfare really improved?
There are at least two points that are central to Sen’s argument: (1) that survival is not the only thing we have reason to value;
we have no reason to value having reasons to value. Otherwise we'd also have reasons to value having reasons to value having reasons to value and so forth.
and (2) if evolutionary pressures lead us to adapt to inhuman conditions and be ‘super-rapid’ reproducers, the ‘quality-of-species’ judged in terms of reproductive success is completely unconnected to the quality of life of individual members of the species.
Yet, those with lower 'quality of life'- e.g. agricultural communities as opposed to happy-go-lucky foragers- might end up taking over the territory and killing off the indigenous people.
The first point suggests that we should be concerned with a multiplicity of things we have reason to value – and that is entirely compatible with Sen’s capability approach which is ‘inescapably pluralist’ at a number of levels
No. It is unknowable. One may as well have a 'counting imaginary fairies' approach.
and allows for a variety of different valuable functionings of which merely surviving can be seen as the most basic.
Sadly, that is one 'functioning' everybody will lose sooner or later.
The second point underlines what Sen sees as the limitations of the quality-of-species as compared to the ‘quality-of-life’ view.
There is no relationship whatsoever between them. A genetically superior being who is being kept in solitary confinement by a Secret Agency so Evil Scientists can perform experiments upon him, has shitty 'quality of life'. A pet Vietnamese pot-bellied pig may have very high quality of life while others of his species are factory farmed.
Sen also expresses a worry that ‘the Darwinian perspective, seen as a general view of progress suggests concentration on adapting the species rather than adjusting the environment in which the species lead their lives’ .
No it doesn't. Darwin was aware that human beings had changed their environment- e.g. by building nice warm houses for themselves. But beavers were changing their environment just as well.
Adapting the species could involve either lending a ‘helping hand to nature’ through genetic improvement or ‘trusting to nature’ to weed out unfit genes.
Sen didn't understand that co-evolutionary processes, not the fitness landscapes (i.e. Nature), which do the heavy lifting.
Neither approach, Sen thinks, suggests that we should adjust or reform the environment with a view to improving the quality of life.
If so, Sen is a cretin. He doesn't think we should avoid mating with our own sisters. Also, why modify the environment by building a house? Just find a nice hole in the ground and make that your residence.
While Sen’s claims here do not distinguish between different views of the quality of life, his claim that we should not in general see adaptation of the species as a solution without seriously considering the possibility of adapting the environment to improve people’s lives and make progress is relevant to modern views, especially views of happiness.
This would be a sensible comment only if, currently, the Government was genetically modifying us so that, in winter, we would not feel the cold and thus would not need houses or central heating while reversing that modification in summer. The fact is our species hasn't changed very much over the last fifty thousand years. Our environment has- because of our efforts.
Richard Layard’s recent book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science reports on, and draws out lessons for policy, from the large recent literature on happiness across many disciplines including economics.
The lesson for policy makers was that a guy who advocates a tax based Incomes Policy should be ignored. completely.
Layard defines ‘happiness’ to mean ‘feeling good – enjoying life and wanting the feeling to continue’
That isn't happiness. You may be happy when feeling very poorly- e.g. hearing your daughter has been elected to high office though you are dying painfully of cancer.
and by ‘unhappiness’ he means ‘feeling bad – and wishing things were different’
I may feel bad because I've just undergone painful surgery. I don't wish that surgery hadn't take place because I don't want to be dead.
. He also explicitly defends utilitarianism
because Libertarianism was trying to rape it
in something like the original form that it took in Jeremy Bentham’s statement of it.
i.e. 'sum of pleasures and pains'. Sadly, they are incommensurable. Bentham was stooooopid.
On Layard’s account, it is the view that ‘the right action is the one which produces the greatest overall happiness’ .
Both 'rightness' and 'happiness' are epistemic- they change as the knowledge base changes. Thus they are intensions without well defined extensions. Furthermore, they may be impredicative. Sometimes the right thing is what makes you happy. But as your knowledge base expands, you may see that it is wrong. This makes you unhappy more particularly if it ought to make you unhappy but doesn't at all. Any way, whichever way you slice or dice it, what you have here is the 'intensional fallacy'. You can't assume Liebniz's law of identity. Neither deontic logic nor mathematics have any purchase.
The definition of adaptation which underlies the recent applied psychology literature on happiness, which Layard cites a great deal, runs as follows: ‘adaptation … refers to any action, process, or mechanism that reduces the effects (perceptual, physiological, attentional, motivational, hedonic and so on) of a constant or repeated stimulus’ while ‘[h]edonic adaptation is adaptation to stimuli that is affectively relevant’ (Frederick and Loewenstein. It should be clear that this definition of ‘adaptation’ is quite distinct from those operating in the writings of Elster and Sen.
Indeed. Psychology is different from Economics or Moral Philosophy. Still, if Psychologists come up something useful, then a price can be put to it and it becomes part of Economics. Moral Philosophy too can get involved if what the service the Psychologists are providing involves sex with miners. Mrs. Thatcher banned sex with miners. She was a very mean lady.
Nonetheless, this definition encompasses the notion of adaptation used in the well-known claim that people increase their aspirations in line with rising incomes thus dampening any extra satisfaction derived from increases in income.
Which is why HR departments come up with various perks which have the information theoretical quality of 'surprisal'. Thus, you are expecting a big raise and feel a bit blase when you get it, but then the MD takes you aside and gives you the key to the executive toilet. Shitting never felt so good. You feel lifted up into a higher sphere of life.
As people’s income repeatedly increases, any mechanism, action or process - such as an adjustment of aspirations - which reduces the effects of such increases on levels of satisfaction or happiness can be seen as ‘adaptation’.
Which is why its good to mix things up a little when it comes to incentives or tasty treats or drugs, sex and rock & roll. Psychology isn't a real high IQ discipline but surely it gets this.
Unlike Elster’s concept of adaptive preferences this notion is not restricted to ‘sour grapes’;
which is a false example of it
in contrast to Sen’s examples, it is not necessarily about the way in which underdogs adjust.
Why the fuck are these nutters getting their knickers in a twist over poor people who stop whining about being poor because they find better ways to pass the time?
As we saw earlier, one key respect in which Elster’s and Sen’s discussions are similar is that adaptation or adjustment of attitudes – desires, preferences or aspirations - occurs in response to some limit in freedom, whether it be some limit in what is feasible (in Elster’s case), or in a person’s opportunities which makes her an underdog (in Sen’s case).
Why isn't everybody utterly miserable that they didn't get to talk and write utter bollocks so as to get a Nobel Prize for being a brown monkey from a starving shithole? Don't they understand their freedoms and capabilities and functionings have been negatively impacted by their inability to savor yummy yummy dog turds the way Amartya Sen's multiple identities do?
By contrast, in the happiness literature adaptation can occur in response to expansions in what is feasible or attainable.
Who didn't know that if you win the lottery, you can happily adapt to a millionaire lifestyle?
Layard’s discussion of the fact that people ‘adapt’ to higher levels of income by raising their aspirations.
is shit. People with aspirations get higher levels of income till they start aspiring to fuck the boss's wife.
He starts from an utilitarian assumption that happiness is the only ultimate end or value. Adaptation is then a good or bad depending on whether it does, or does not, promote happiness. In the case of adaptation to higher levels of material prosperity, it dampens happiness and is bad.
Very true. If a starving beggar gets a job as a CEO, he should express surprise and delight everytime he is offered a potato chip or piece of bread. If he gets to his new affluence, then some stupid cunt named Layard would say, he has become unhappy and that is bad. He should go back to being a beggar.
Indeed, the moral that Layard draws from empirical research is that ‘income is addictive!’
Fuck you Income! Fuck you very much! Why did 'Dagenham Man' not express surprise and delight at only getting to eat a potato from time to time in return for participating in Layard's super-duper Tax based Incomes Policy?'
He goes on to add that ‘[s]ince most people do not foresee the addictive effects of income and spending, taxation has a useful role, just as it has with other forms of addiction like smoking’ .
Tobacco damages your health. It is a 'demerit' good. Money isn't. Layard truly was as thick as shit.
Layard’s conclusion is prefigured in Elster’s discussion of the addictive pursuit of material prosperity.
Why do they not discuss their own addictive pursuit of stupidity?
The relevance of Sen’s writings for Layard’s work emerges starkly when one considers the conclusions Layard draws from the empirical literature on happiness in the context of physical and mental impairments. Sen clearly sees the disabled as potentially falling under the category of underdogs who might learn to be happy with or cheerfully accept, their situation.
If you see a disabled person, you should pat it on its head and offer it a cookie. It won't beat the shit out of you. Trust me.
On this point, the psychological literature on adaptation suggests that Sen is right to be concerned and indeed there is strong evidence of ‘adaptation’ in as much as some people who have become seriously impaired (e.g. become paraplegic or quadriplegic as a result of an accident) report surprisingly high levels of happiness .
Not when seeking damages.
Sen’s key argument is that the metric of happiness
which does not exist
may provide a flawed measure of the quality of life
because it does not exist
in this sort of case and can be misleading in evaluating the quality of life and egalitarian claims.
Nope. Something which does not and can not exist can't mislead even stupid shitheads who teach nonsense.
He would suggest that we should be concerned with what people can do or be,
we don't know what we ourselves can do or be. Why be concerned with something unknowable?
and consider adapting the environment
Sen is Superman. He can use his super-breath to cool down the ambient temperature if people are feeling too hot.
or in other ways increasing the opportunities open to them.
Mohammad Yunus leant out some of his own money to poor women in his country so they could take advantage of opportunities. That's why he is now running Bangladesh.
So, in the case of the disabled, we should be concerned with the extent to which the social environment allows the disabled to do or be certain things, such as access public spaces, or find work.
No. We should be concerned that we continue to have access to such things whether or not we become disabled. It isn't the case that disabled people are very different from able-bodied people. It is in everybody's interest to show prudence and foresight in ordering public affairs, or in delegating that responsibility to particular agencies.
To see the relevance of Sen’s arguments, consider Layard’s discussion of disability and mental illness. Layard writes that: ‘we ought to be specially concerned about those misfortunes to which it is difficult to adapt. For example, persistent mental illness is impossible to adapt to’ .
It is something that can happen to anyone at any time. By ensuring that such people get decent treatment and that crazy psychiatrists aren't allowed to fuck with the mentally ill, we are acting with self-regarding prudence.
He also thinks that one reason health ‘never comes through as the top determinant of happiness’ ... ‘may be partly because people have a considerable ability to adapt to physical limitations.’
A guy who is used to raping and beating people may find it very difficult to adapt to a situation where it is he who keeps getting beaten and raped. Tough titty. There is no reason for us to worry about the 'adaptation problem'. It is enough to make prudent, self-regarding, provision for a contingency which might befall our selves and some near and dear to us.
This can be done in a rough and ready manner. If some stupid Professor wants to prolong the discussion by talking bollocks why not offer that Professor some tasty dog turds to eat? True, they may have adapted themselves to a diet less repugnant to others. Indeed, they may claim to detest dog turds and to relish only French haute cuisine. But, this is only because in their despair at remedying their lot, they have accepted an 'objective illusion' or developed a 'false consciousness' such that they refuse to eat dog turds. It is our duty to force such food down their throats till they overcome their 'adaptation'.
