Why is Sen such a cretin? One answer is that he does not know Econ. Another possibility is that he is shit at English- a language which requires a lot of 'tacit knowledge' of social and judicial and commercial contexts, in order to be correctly used. Consider the following- a random passage from 'Idea of Justice'-
There is, in fact, also a ‘signalling’ issue that makes consequentialism an oddly unsuitable name for an approach that begins with – and focuses on – the evaluation of states of affairs. To see the states of affairs as ‘consequences’ raises the immediate question: consequence of what?
Previous states of affairs. That's how the arrow of Time works. Consequences are the results of preceding actions. We evaluate such actions on the basis of their consequences. There is no 'signalling' issue here whatsoever. Thus in evaluating your choice to get drunk at the Office party, a consequentialist would say it was a bad choice coz you pooped yourself, punched the boss and got fired. On the other hand, I would evaluate your action as being totes the right thing to do, socioproctologically speaking.
So even though philosophers who see themselves as consequentialists seem inclined to start with the evaluation of states of affairs (and then proceed to the evaluation of other things such as acts or rules), the term consequentialism points in the opposite direction – to the prior relevance of something else (an action or a rule or whatever) of which a state of affairs is a consequence.
This is nonsense. Consequentialists evaluate actions at time t with reference to their consequences in subsequent periods. Sen thinks the consequences of an action are its own preceding causes. Why? Does Time move backwards for him? Does he really not understand that a cause precedes a consequence? The two words don't mean the same thing at all.
It is like, first, defining a country merely as a colony,
Nobody does that. A country is defined with respect to a geographical territory. 'Colony' is a predicate, not a definition, that could be applied to a country. Sen does not understand the meaning of the word 'definition'. He thinks it means 'predicate'.
and then striving hard to show not only that the colony is important independently of the metropolis,
for example because of its resources or strategic importance. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
but also that the metropolis itself should be assessed entirely in the light of the colony.
Again a perfectly legitimate thing to do if you are solely concerned with the colony. Sen's mistake arises from thinking that doing something legitimate- e.g. talking about the importance of this particular colony- involves having a crazy definition. Such is not the case. Colony is a predicate, not a definition, applicable to a country ruled by some other power.
What happens when you take a random snippet of Sen's shite and go through it line by line? The answer is that what, at first blush, looks 'scholarly' is just stupid ignorant shite the guy pulled out of his ass. Sen's English was poor not because Bengal couldn't teach English properly but because people who teach Economics in English need a lot of 'tacit knowledge' about the workings of the Law and of Commerce and Legislature in Anglo Saxon jurisdictions. Just reading other Economists won't enable you to understand what they write. You need common sense and some modicum of worldly wisdom. Writing high falutin' nonsense will make you stupider and more ignorant than when you started off.
Look at this heading
Inclusionary incoherence and focal group plasticity
It sounds scholarly. What does it mean? Nothing at all. Inclusion is only 'incoherent' if it simultaneously includes and excludes an element. Focal groups aren't 'plastic' unless they suddenly stop being 'focal' and turn instead into a flower pot.
The fact that the members of the focal group have a status in the contractarian exercise that non-members do not enjoy creates problems even when we confine our attention to one society – or one ‘people’ – only.
This is foolish. A focus group should be representative. If it isn't why make it 'focal'? Clearly creating a focus group takes up scarce resources. The only question is whether the benefit of so doing outweighs the cost. But this is a purely economic problem. Sen pretends it is 'philosophic'.
The size and composition of the population may alter with public policies (whether or not they are dedicated ‘population policies’)
but this will happen very slowly relative to the time scale of concern to those who pay for the focus group.
and the populations can vary even with the ‘basic structure’ of the society.
But not in a manner which makes any difference to the exercise.
Any rearrangement of economic, political or social institutions (including such rules as the ‘difference principle’) would tend to influence, as Derek Parfit has illuminatingly argued, the size and composition of the group that would be born, through changes in marriages, mating, cohabitation and other parameters of reproduction.
So what? It is easy to compensate for this if the effect is big enough to be worthy of notice.
The focal group that would be involved in the choice of the ‘basic structure’ would be influenced by that choice itself, and this makes the ‘closing’ of the group for closed impartiality a potentially incoherent exercise.
Nonsense! The fact Time has an arrow and what is past is past means that any future influence on an agent does not matter at all when it comes to an action taken in the present by that agent. Thus, the fact that I chose to get drunk and poop myself and punch the boss at the Office party was not at all influenced by future-me's remonstrations because future-me doesn't have a time-travelling De Lorean.
To illustrate this problem of group plasticity, suppose there are two institutional structures, A and B, that would yield, respectively, 5 million and 6 million people. They could, of course, be all different people, but to show how difficult the problem is even with the most favourable assumptions, let us assume that the 6 million we are talking about include all the same 5 million people and then another million more. Who, we can now ask, are included in the original position in which social decisions are made which would inter alia affect the choice between A and B and thus influence the size and composition of the respective population groups?
Either, representative agents of both populations are pretty darn similar or there is more heterogeneity in the population than any type of Social Choice mechanism can usefully deal with. Chichilnisky has a result to this effect.
To avoid this difficulty, suppose we take instead the larger group of 6 million people as the focal group who are included in the original position,
it is enough to take a representative sample. The law of large numbers applies. Sample size only needs to increase as a log function of population. That's why this sort of thing is useful.
and suppose also that it turns out that the institutional structure chosen in the corresponding original position is A, leading to an actual population of 5 million people. But then the focal group was wrongly specified.
No. It is simply the case that people decided that overpopulation obtained. They'd have been better off choosing a less pro-natalist 'basic structure'. There is nothing 'incoherent' about deciding that we'd all be better off if we could go back in time and not do stupid shit. The thing is actually quite useful. We say to ourselves 'never again should we do stupid shit of that sort.' Parliament is a 'focal group'. It is constantly deciding that it made a mistake in the past and that in the future it won't repeat that mistake. The fact that this happens doesn't mean there was some mis-specification in its constitution. Indeed, the fact that guys in the focal group can change their minds after seeing that doing stupid shit is stooooopid, is why such groups can do useful stuff.
We can also ask: how did the non-existent – indeed, never existent – extra one million people participate in the original position?
We can ask that but only if we are as stupid as shit and don't get why we can't go visit our Aunty yesterday instead of tomorrow.
If, on the other hand, the focal group is taken to be the smaller number of 5 million people, what if the institutional structure chosen in the corresponding original position is B, leading to an actual population of 6 million people?
This cretin thinks you can have a focal group from the future. They can drop in on us while visiting their Aunties in the past.
Again, the focal group would turn out to be wrongly specified. The additional one million people, then, did not participate in the original position, which would have decided the institutional structures that would extensively influence their lives (indeed not just whether they are to be born or not, but also other features of their actual lives). If the decisions taken in the original position influence the size and composition of the population, and if the population size and composition influence the nature of the original position or the decisions taken there,
in other words, if time-travel is routine
then there is no way of guaranteeing that the focal group associated with the original position is coherently characterized.
but only if time-travel is routine. But, such is not the case.
The foregoing difficulty applies even when we consider the so-called ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘global’ version of the Rawlsian ‘justice as fairness’, including all the people in the world in one large contractual exercise (as proposed, for example, by Thomas Pogge and others).
This poses no theoretical difficulty at all precisely because time-travel is not routine. But then, if it were, then all decisions would be problematic because jobless me from five years from now would be saying 'dude, don't get drunk' while schizophrenic me from ten years from now says 'do get drunk. It is only after living as a homeless person that you get to see that shape-shifting lizards from Planet X are controlling everything with mind-waves. Don't just get drunk. Make sure to poop yourself and punch the boss so hard that he breaks his jaw. Also invest in tin-foil hats.'
The population plasticity problem would apply no matter whether we consider one nation or the entire world population.
Nope. The people of one nation will choose stuff which gives their nation an advantage. The globe as a whole may choose differently.
However, when the Rawlsian system is applied to one particular ‘people’ in a larger world, there are further problems.
Migrants? Build that Wall! Actually, it would be enough to have discriminatory taxes and public goods- as they do in the Emirates or in Singapore- such that the migration problem becomes simply a 'guest worker' problem. At the margin you have to pay some migrants better while continuing to exploit the fuck out of rest.
In fact, the dependence of births and deaths on the basic social structure has some parallel also in the influence of that structure on the movements of people from one country to another.
Births and deaths can be disregarded in the short-run. Sensible policies on migration- for countries which can afford to implement them- take care of the only manner in which demographics can change in the short term.
This general concern has some similarity with one of David Hume’s grounds for scepticism about the conceptual relevance as well as the historical force of ‘the original contract’, already proposed in his own time: The face of the earth is continually changing, by the increase of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of tribes . . . Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?
It was there in the coffee shops and gentlemen's clubs of Britain and America. The fact is, the language Hume wrote in has become the language of the globe. Currently, some 500 million Chinese citizens are learning English. One type of 'mutual agreement' which has prevailed is the notion that hereditary monarchs and religious prelates ought not to have absolute power- or even very much influence.
However, the point at issue, in the present context, is not only – indeed, not primarily – that the size and composition of the population is continually changing (important though this problem is), but that these changes are not independent of the basic social structures that are meant to be arrived at, in contractual reasoning, through the original position itself.
But this is not a problem because the time frame of demographic change is different from that of policy discussion. Even if this were not the case, people in the original position could be given instruction in population dynamics so that 'Muth rationality' prevails- i.e. expected outcomes coincide with actual outcomes because the correct economic theory is applied.
We must, however, examine further whether the dependence of focal group on the basic social structure is really a problem for Rawlsian justice as fairness
It isn't. Even if the population is homogeneous, the fact is we'd just choose collective insurance not 'maximin'.
Does the focal group actually have to determine the basic social structure through the corresponding original position? The answer, of course, is straightforwardly yes, if the parties to the original position are meant to be exactly the focal group (that is, all – and only – the members of the polity or society). But sometimes Rawls speaks of ‘the original position’ as ‘simply a device of representation’.
It is a gedanken or thought experiment. But it is obviously foolish. Sen doesn't see the foolishness. Instead he introduces crazy shit of his own predicated on the ubiquity of time travel and the problem of people choosing whether or not to get drunk being interfered with by their future selves.
It might, thus, be tempting to argue that we do not have to assume that everyone in the society or polity has to be a party to the original contract,
just that they'd accept the result of the gedanken. But they won't because, as a matter of fact, they don't know their own future and thus buy insurance rather than join a commune or insist that Society lexically preference the interests of the poorest just in case they themselves get stuck in that position.
and it could be argued that, therefore, the dependence of the focal groups on the decisions taken in the original position need not be a problem. I do not think that this is an adequate rebuttal of the problem of inclusionary incoherence for at least two reasons. First, Rawls’s use of the idea of ‘representation’ does not, in fact, amount to marshalling a wholly new set of people (or phantoms) as parties to the original position, different from the actual people in that polity. Rather, it is the same people under the ‘veil of ignorance’ who are seen as ‘representing’ themselves (but from behind ‘the veil’). Rawls explains this by saying: ‘This is expressed figuratively by saying that the parties are behind a veil of ignorance. In sum, the original position is simply a device of representation’ (Collected Papers, p. 401).
The problem is, for most of us, the future really is uncertain. I don't know if my pension fund will turn out to have been run by Bernie Madoff. I certainly don't know if I will be struck down by dementia and will have to spend thirty or forty years in a County facility where overworked nursing staff have to wipe my bum. But that's why I am willing to pay insurance premiums of various types while voting for administrations which will maintain a 'social minimum' for the unfortunate.
Indeed, Rawls’s justification of the need for a contract, which invokes (as was noted earlier) ‘an undertaking people are giving’, indicates concrete participation (albeit under the veil of ignorance) of the very people involved in the original contract.
No. That's not how contracts work. A court can 'read in' a contract though I signed nothing. It is sufficient for a reasonable person to consider that a contract existed for it to be deemed to exist and for any unconscionable departure from this notional contract to become justiciable.
Second, even if the representatives were to be different people (or imagined phantoms), they would have to represent the focal group of people (for example, through the veil of ignorance of possibly being any member of the focal group).
It is enough for a 'Golidlocks condition' of not too much, not too little, preference diversity, for gedanken of this type to be useful. Rawls mistake was not to see that collective insurance beats maximin. As an economist, Sen should have pointed this out to his pal. But Sen was shite at econ.
So the variability of the focal group would now be reflected in – or transformed into – the variability of the people whom the representatives represent in the original position.
There need be no focal group. This is just a gedanken. Once you spot Rawl's error you can make the prediction that actual Societies will feature risk pooling but not a maximin rule. Moreover, Societies which say 'to each according to his needs' will soon abandon that type of stupidity. However, establishing collective insurance and a 'social minimum' makes sound fiscal sense as Society moves toward demographic transition.
This would not be much of a problem if, first, the size of the population did not make any difference to the way the basic structure of the society could be organized (complete scale invariance),
which does obtain in OECD countries. Iceland's basic structure is not so different from America's though the latter's population is almost a thousand times greater.
and second, every group of individuals was exactly like every other in terms of its priorities and values (complete value invariance).
Chichilnisky showed that not too much, not too little, variance was fine.
Neither is easy to assume without further restrictions in the structure of any substantive theory of justice.
Yet actual courts of justice have had no problem whatsoever with 'reasonable man' tests for centuries. Juries are focal groups. Some may do silly things but, speaking generally, they work out well enough.
Group plasticity, therefore, does remain a problem for the exercise of closed impartiality, applied to a given focal group of individuals.
Yet, we'd get rid of juries at our peril. Sen's stupidity mischievously imperils the foundations of Anglo Saxon jurisprudence and Democracy under the rule of Law.
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