Sen, pretending to know German, writes
In his Grundlegung zur Metapbysik de Sitten , Immanuel Kant argues for the necessity of seeing human beings as ends in themselves, rather than as means to other ends:
Kant believed that there were 'laws of freedom' just as there are 'laws of physics'. He thought both were 'synthetic a priori'. But we now know there are no such physical laws. Thus Kant's analogy fails. He was simply wrong. He didn't actually give any argument for seeing human beings as ends in themselves. He just said there was a moral law to that effect.
"So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as means only".'
But if you act in accordance with this injunction your action is a means to its fulfilment. It is unrelated to yourself or humanity's own 'ends'. Put it another way, it is one thing to do what is in your own interest while not transgressing the law and another thing to obey the law disregarding your own interest. In the former case, you are an end in yourself. In the latter case you are using yourself merely as a means to fulfil the law.
Laws of nature, to our present conception, don't depend on volitional obedience. They are descriptive or predictive simply. There may be 'economic laws' or even rules of 'natural justice' but, as Hume had already pointed out, this depends purely on utility or convenience such that some person or set of persons were 'ends in themselves' and those who were a means to their gaining a benefit were themselves recompensed in a manner satisfactory to what they were as 'ends in themselves'. Thus the meal we order is to satisfy ourselves alone. The waiter who serves us gets a good tip which he uses to advance his own ends. Utility or what Pareto called ophelimity is always about 'ends in themselves'. Obeying laws just because they are laws means making oneself a means to an end- that of some impersonal duty or deontology- rather than an end in oneself.
Obviously, one should not use people in a repugnant manner. Don't see them simply as things to defecate or micturate upon. If you do, they may kick the shit out of you. True, a disabled or unconscious person may not be able to gently insert an knife into your heart. But, others might enjoy doing so on their behalf.
This principle has importance in many contexts - even in analysing poverty, progress and planning.
No. This principle is wholly useless. Sen's own work hasn't helped us analyze poverty or progress or planning. But that was not because he was a Kantian. It was because he was stupid and ignorant and didn't really give a shit about the miserable people in the starving shithole from whence he came. By contrast, an ICS officer- Binoy Ranjan Sen- as head of FAO, materially contributed to the reduction of global hunger and to vast improvements in food security. How fucking useless does an economist have to be if even a Bengali bureaucrat can be said to have been more useful to the commonweal than himself?
Human beings are the agents, beneficiaries and adjudicators of progress, but they also happen to be - directly or indirectly - the primary means of all production.
Sen did not know that an 'agent' is employed as a 'means' of getting something done. Adjudicators too may be employed though they may not be worth the wage. Beneficiaries of production, under conditions of market exchange, provide the means by which producers are rewarded and are thus enabled to pursue their own ends using legitimately acquired means. Charity cases are a different matter. But Economics is not predicated on mendicancy.
This dual role of human beings provides a rich ground for confusion of ends and means in planning and policy making.
Only if you are as stupid as Sen. Everybody understands that producing stuff involves disutility. But if we are compensated for this adequately, then we spend our leisure hours consuming things which give us utility. We are a means to serve the ends of others at work. At home we use the means we have acquired to pursue our own ends. Consumption is different from Production. There is no fucking confusion here at all save in Sen's sententious and utterly vacuous mind.
Indeed, it can - and frequently does take the form of focusing on production and prosperity as the essence of progress,
because progress means moving in a desirable direction. Regress means moving to a worse position. Sen made progress by abandoning his own bride and running away with the wife of his best friend. This is because he desired that Italian lady more than his Indian spouse. He also moved from India to England, and then the US. This was perfectly understandable. Sen's income went up. His utility went up. He had made progress. But anybody who listened to his worthless shite regressed. That's cool. There's no law against teaching worthless shite.
treating people as the means through which that productive progress is brought about
But that's not what happens. Producers are treated as the means through which productive progress is brought about. They experience disutility or have high 'transfer earnings' which is why we have to pay them more as they become more productive. They use the means we provide them to pursue their own ends or utility.
(rather than seeing the lives of people as the ultimate concern and treating production and prosperity merely as means to those lives).
Is 'seeing the lives of people as the ultimate concern' itself the means to anything or is it an end in itself? In the former case, we would have to see whether it is a productive or unproductive means. In the latter case, it is no different from 'seeing the lives of people as the ultimate proof of God' or 'the Devil' or a confirmation that life is absurd and meaningless.
Indeed, the widely prevalent concentration on the expansion of real income and on economic growth as the characteristics of successful development can be precisely an aspect of the mistake against which Kant had warned.
Kant made a stupid mistake. He thought that if 'laws of nature' are synthetic a priori (which they aint) then there must be moral laws of a similarly a priori and indefeasible type. Thus, since we know Kant was a kretin, his warnings are as worthless as those of Nostradamus.
The plain fact is that 'real income' in Econ is defined in such a way that only its expansion can be characterized as successful development. Failure to measure real income properly is what can lead to 'unsustainable development' or 'immeserizing growth'. Partha Dasgupta has explored the former. Bhagwati expiated on the latter. Sen merely talked vacuous bollocks.
This problem is particularly pivotal in the assessment and planning of economic development.
Rubbish! Planning is about financial budgeting and O.R. It is based on mimetics- imitating what has worked- not on meretricious mathematical turnpike theorems or virtue signaling bollocks.
The problem does not, of course , lie in the fact that the pursuit of economic prosperity is typically taken to be a major goal of planning and policy-making.
Planning is about budgeting as is policy-making. Both should concentrate on taxing and spending in a manner such that there is a virtuous circle whereby tax revenue rises as Incomes rise thus permitting further Government spending of a useful kind.
This need not be, in itself, unreasonable. The problem relates to the level at which this aim should be taken as a goal.
It is at the level of Fiscal policy that a goal should be set. Tax Revenue is a function of GNP. Your plan, or budget, should ensure that you don't waste money or get into a debt trap. That's it. The thing is bleeding obvious. No fucking philosophy is involved.
Is it just an intermediate goal, the importance of which is contingent on what it ultimately contributes to human lives?
But Fiscal policy is itself intermediate. Thus its goal must be intermediate. It can't be final. No doubt, some may say the State must dedicate itself to making citizens more God fearing or more Communist in their ideology or more addicted to talking Sen-tentious bollocks. But that is a separate matter from Fiscal policy and setting a budget and having a plan for the economy.
Or is it the object of the entire exercise? It is in the acceptance - usually implicitly - of the latter view that the ends-means confusion becomes significant - indeed blatant.
There is no confusion at all. Everybody understands that Fiscal policy instruments are means not ends. Indeed, instrument is another word for 'means'. The instrument does something which is correlated with a better outcome. It is not the case that the fork and knife I use are themselves nutritious or digestible. They just make it easier for me to put tasty food into my mouth. It is food which is nutritious and digestible. Only Sen could get an instrument- like a fork- confused with the the thing it acts upon- spaghetti in this case.
The problem might have been of no great practical interest if the achievement of economic prosperity were tightly linked - in something like a one-to-one correspondence - with that of enriching the lives of the people.
But this is exactly what would happen if real income were being correctly measured. Sen confuses criticisms of National Income statistics- which may not give the full picture re. externalities, depletable resources, etc.- and the notion that real income is not linked directly, by one-to-one correspondence, with the enrichment or ophelimity of living people.
If that were the case, then the pursuit of economic prosperity as an end in itself, while wrong in principle, might have been in effect, indistinguishable from pursuing it only as a means to the end of enriching human lives.
This is meaningless sophistry. Why not simply say 'taking a shit as a means to rid yourself of shit is wrong in principle. Still, in practice, the effect of doing this wrong thing is that the end of being less full of shit is served.' ? But why stop there? Why not say 'being less full of shit is wrong because it is merely a means to the end of emptying your bowels'? As for emptying your bowels, that is merely a means to the end of experiencing some abdominal relief.' But experiencing abdominal relief is merely....
But that tight relation does not obtain.
It could do if we had a good enough measure of real income. The problem is that this is defined in terms of what can be spent without diminishing wealth which is what determines income in the first place. As Partha Dasgupta has warned, it is more than likely that many will experience a collapse in real income and wealth over the course of their lifetimes. Indeed that is what happened to much of Europe over the course of two world wars and Revolutions and counter-revolutions.
Countries with high GNP per capita can nevertheless have astonishingly low achievements in the quality of life, with the bulk of the population being subject to premature mortality, escapable morbidity, overwhelming illiteracy and so on.
If so, then simply deflate per capita Income in a suitable manner to reflect lower ophelimity. Pareto talked about stuff like this 120 years ago. The thing isn't rocket science.
Sen says-
First, economic prosperity is no more than one of the means to enriching the lives of people.
This is false unless the availability of 'free goods' changes- i.e. some things become scarce, i.e. gain an alternative use. Otherwise Economics defines real income to include anything which contributes to utility or serves as a store of value for households. Sen is too stupid to understand that this is a question for those who specialize in collecting National Income statistics. It has nothing to do with moral philosophy or Kant or Aristotle.
It is a foundational confusion to give it the status of an end.
The only confusion lies in Sen's shitty brain. Utility is an end in itself. That is its definition for Econ. True one can use the term ophelimity or felicity if you don't like Utility but that is mere semantic quibbling. Utility is simply a Tarskian primitive which is undefined. But then so is 'end'.
True, if you believe in the after-life things get more complicated. Poverty and privation is this world may mean eternal bliss in the world to come. But Sen is an atheist.
Secondly, even as a means, merely enhancing average economic opulence can be quite inefficient in the pursuit of the really valuable ends.
Only if you are measuring 'average economic opulence' incorrectly. You may need to exclude outliers and adjust for negative externalities and depletable resources etc.
In making sure that development planning and general policy-making do not suffer from costly confusions of ends and means, we have to
tell Sen to fuck off. Employ sensible people with ideographic knowledge.
face the issue of identification of ends, in terms of which the effectiveness of the means can be systematically assessed.
No we don't. If we treat others as ends in themselves we must not start identifying their ends. Otherwise they may retaliate in kind. Thus I have identified Sen's ends as involving scouring the streets for dog poo which he eagerly devours. He may deny eating dog turds. He may provide ample documentary evidence that he dines only on exquisite gastronomic delicacies provided by the finest restaurants in the world. I reject his arguments by saying he merely feeds on delicate fare as a means to build up stamina to pursue his true ends- which involve scouring the streets for dog poo.
Sen says his 'capabilities approach' is indebted to Marx. The problem here is that Marx had a theory of economic determinism whereby the very fact that Sen comes from a Turd World Shithole implies that he has shit for brains. Bengal is simply too backward for Bengalis to understand what Marx was getting at. That was why the slavish Bengali buddhijivi, having had to bid goodbye to his nice British Nanny, immediately put himself under the tutelage of the Commissars of the Kremlin, or, a little later, Mao's murderous mandarins. Sen, to his credit, escaped from India to England along with his best friend's wife who happened to be related in different ways to both Sraffa and Gramsci. Partha Dasgupta went one up on Sen by marrying James Meade's daughter. But Sen did not despair. He next married a Rothschild. The ghar-jamai tradition well suited the buddhijivi anxious to escape to the West.
On the other hand, such egress took its toll on the little grey cells. Consider the following-
an important part of Marx's programme of reformulation of the foundations of political economy is clearly related to seeing the success of human life in terms of fulfilling the needed human activities.
Sheer nonsense! Marx's big contribution was his prediction that Capitalism would dig its own grave by extracting surplus value more and more ruthlessly till a Revolution occurred.
Marx put it thus: "It will be seen how in place of the wealth and poverty of political economy come the rich human being and rich human need. The rich human being is simultaneously the human being in need of a totality of human life-activities - the man in whom his own realization exists as an inner necessity, as need.:
This is from an 1844 manuscript. Marx says Science is one and the same as Industry. Industry reveals man's true nature which is as a Socialist with no need for God or some Hegelian or Feuerbachian Geist. Industry will go on progressing. A new kind of man will inevitably emerge. 'Need' will mean what Industry wants a particular guy to do to advance industry. The new kind of man created by industry will automatically feel a fierce hunger, a burning thirst, to turn up at the office and complete the Quarterly returns before feeling an urgent need to relieve himself by doing the filing and photocopying before clocking off for the day. He won't feel the need to blow off steam coz his life sucks ass big time because man would be the creation of industry and would live to serve it so it could recreate him. Thus true recreation aint getting drunk at the pub, it involves returning to the office and re-doing the fucking Quarterly returns because Head Office has changed the format- again!
Had Marx done a day's proper proletarian or even petit bourgeois work in his life, he would not have held such absurd beliefs about the need of Socialist man to be the slave of a boring and shitty industry. True, there was a 'Mussar' element to Marx- my spiritual needs are the material needs of the other- and he did gas on about how poverty gives rise to the emotion which seeks the greatest wealth- through industry- for the benefit of the other except don't for fuck's sake give money to the poor. Give it to me so I can tell you nice fairy stories about the world to come when there will be a whole lot of industry and nobody will find their office or factory routine dull and boring because...urm... Feuerbach just aint as smart as me. Nobody is. Take my word for it. Also, after youse guys do a Revolution don't forget to call me in to run things. I just am hella smart, you know.
If life is seen as a set of "doings and beings" that are valuable,
nothing whatsoever is gained. Why not see life as a net of goings and comings or a bet on booings and cooings or a get for the Rabbi's wife who wants to divorce him and marry the butcher?
the exercise of assessing the quality of life takes the form of evaluating these functionings and the capability to function.
Very true. Sen is capable of eating dog turds. He has a shitty quality of life because he is too stupid to understand this. Sadly, Sen won't pay me any money for assessing the quality of his life. On the other hand some starving Bengali mathematical economists might get some billionaire to give them a bit of money so they can assess whether starving people in an African shithole are better off than starving people in an Asian shithole.
This valuational exercise cannot be done by focusing simply on communities or incomes that help those doings and beings, as in commodity-based accounting of the quality of life (involving a confusion of means and ends). "The life of money-making" , as Aristotle put it, "is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else."
But Aristotle charged money for teaching rich kids. He was competing with athletic coaches and sophist-lawyers and comely prostitutes. He had to pretend that what he was selling was yet more valuable. Few believed him. On the other hand, his pupil, Alexander became a God.
The task is that of evaluating the importance of the various functionings in human life, going beyond what Marx called, in a different but related context, "commodity fetishism".
But if we rule out information from markets, where are we to get the metric for evaluating functionings? There may be experts who can improve functionings in some respects and their input could be helpful. But, otherwise, we have no way to proceed. There is no objective criteria whereby Sen could refute my claim that he is deeply deprived and is malfunctioning in a horrendous manner because he is not able to eat as much dog poo as he likes.
A thoroughly deprived person, leading a very reduced life, might not appear to be badly off in terms of the mental metric of utility, if the hardship is accepted with no-grumbling resignation.
Such is Sen's case. He appears perfectly happy to have got the Nobel rather than the dog poo he craves.
In situations of long-standing deprivation,
Sen hasn't eaten his fill of dog poo for almost ninety years!
the victims do not go on weeping all the time, and very often make great efforts to take pleasure in small mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest "realistic" - proportions. The person's deprivation, then, may not at all show up in the metrics of pleasure, desire-fulfilment etc.,
which don't objectively exist any more than metrics of capabilities or functionings exist
even though he or she maybe quite unable to be adequately nourished, decently clothed, minimally educated and so on.12 This issue, apart from its foundational relevance, may have some immediate bearing on practical public policy. Smugness about continued deprivation and vulnerability is often made to look justified on grounds of lack of strong public demand and forcefully expressed desire for 'removing these impediments,
Vajpayee, who well knew that Sen craved dog poo, gave him a Bharat Ratna instead. Modi must take back that Bharat Ratna and force feed dog poo to Sen otherwise a manifest injustice, under Article 32, will remain uncorrected due to legacy of colonial era laws which are inhibiting buddhijivis from chowing down on puppy doo doo. Since Modi is too Hindutvadi to do the needful, Supreme Court must take suo moto cognizance of this glaring atrocity! Mamta Didi may kindly preside over a suitable ceremony. She was wrong to offer the fellow Bangabibhushan when what he has really wanted all these years is turds from such bow wows as foul the pavements of Ballygunge.
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