What is an epistemic methodology? Presumably, it is the method used to acquire knowledge. If such acquisition uses up scarce resources, then power over those resources is a sine qua non for its burgeoning.
To many this sounds like a cynical doctrine. Surely Knowledge is something pure and good in itself? Why drag in Money, or Power, into the discussion? In Hinduism, there are three Godesses- Sarasvati who presides over Knowledge, Laxmi who presides over Wealth, and Shakti whose name literally means Power. The learned Brahmin, living in poverty, ruefully says, 'Sarasvati and Laxmi don't get along- they won't abide together under the same roof.' However, so long as Brahmins are useful to the productive class they won't starve. This is a good enough survival strategy.
Sen- who comes from a caste associated with Medicine and other Professional expertise and scholarship- may well have absorbed the traditional Brahmin disdain for Wealth or Power at Shantiniketan- a University founded by Rabindranath Tagore.
Tagore was a Brahmin whose father was the Maharishi of the 'Brahmo Samaj'. His own poetry was vaguely Vaishnavite and in accordance with the dominant pan-Indian Hindu ethos of renunciation. The Brahmo focus on Truth as univocal Being, went hand in hand with a horror of 'tantra'- a mechanism, like a loom, which intermediates Knowledge and Power (Shakti). Tagore expanded this metaphysics of revulsion to include all organized or mechanized aspects of life.
Sadly for Tagore, in Bengal, the Shakta sect predominated though, no doubt, prior to the arrival of the British, it was under an Islamic yoke. Since then the Hindu had risen while the Muslim had fallen. But had this not strengthened the British rather than increased Hindu power?
This 'un-thought known' represented the fundamental source of tension in the mind of the Bengali 'buddhijivi',' or public intellectual, ever caught between the Scylla of a pure but ineffectual Gnosis and the Charybdis of a Knowledge increasingly useful to Power not least through utilitarian 'mechanism design'- i.e. the proper application of the Principles of Law and Economics to raise productivity and increase Wealth and Strength.
In particular, for Tagore's comprador class, there was an unbearable tension between the brittleness of the 'Babu' English education they acquired at Calcutta University and some hopefully more authentic type of Knowledge which might subsist in the countryside without any relationship to Power or, indeed, wholly in ignorance of it.
In Tagore's time one could display one's authenticity by growing out one's beard and putting on a kaftan. Sen, who came of age in independent India, was denied that choice. It was obvious that the Gandhian path led to imbecility, not Knowledge. The British were gone and India had to defend and feed itself.
Sen must have felt obliged, after completing his studies at Cambridge, to return to India to train the new leaders of the Nation. One of his fellow students- Manmohan Singh- became a two term Prime Minister. He gets much credit for the progress India has made in the last 30 years.
Singh, however, was Punjabi. Like savants from the West of India, he seems to have been little concerned with questions of 'epistemic methodology'. Indeed, in most of India, Economics- Artha Shastra- is seen as orthogonal to Philosophy- Darshan Gyan. The former deals with what is more accurately known through experiment and experience of a rough and ready kind. The latter is transcendental and features an esoteric methodology beyond the common ken.
Gandhi- though from Gujarat- did, it is true, embrace a type of 'swadeshi' authenticity which sought to make Economics and Spirituality interdependent. But he wasn't a philosopher; his method was experimental, but, sadly, the thing was a fiasco. Indeed one of Sen's first tasks on his return to India was to show that the Gandhian handloom was a waste of money. At this time, he was happy enough to get on his bicycle and go off to the village to conduct the sort of Statistical survey which the Indians led the world in conducting.
Sadly, India produced more crackpot economic schemes than its Statisticians could debunk. Sen gave up his bicycle for, in his case, a Chair, not a charpoy or hammock, in one of the new elite institutions which, mathematicizing Development Economics at a furious pace, nevertheless did much to prevent the country developing at all.
Amartya Sen stands out as a Bengali Economist who took up Philosophy, rather than deep, ideologically sound, slumber, to escape this impasse. Remarkably, this enabled him to continue to harm Indian Development long after most of his fellow Bengalis had given the thing up as hopeless because there's no point trying to reason with Punjabis or Gujjus. Those guys don't eat fish and so their brains don't have enough potassium to grasp that Indians must fuck up India otherwise the fucking Hindus will take over!
Philosophy, one may truly say, was Sen's second birth. He became more Brahminical than any Tagore. Yet, it wasn't till Manmohan left office- and the Hindus did fucking take over!- that one could truly say 'The Sen also rises'.
Arguably, as a Philosopher, Sen's influence is now greater than Tagore's. Moreover, it appears to be growing. This suggests it might be worthwhile to look at his epistemic methodology. However, in doing so, it is wise to begin with an 'emic' perspective. Sen was first and foremost a product of an indigenous Bengali paideia before he was exposed to Western thought. He himself uses Indic terminology- e.g. the distinction between Niti and Nyaya- when writing for a Western audience.
What would be the most economical approach to understanding Sen's ideas? I don't don't know- but this is my 'quick and dirty' stab at it.
I begin with a philosopher embraced by Iqbal but rejected by Tagore. Nietszche said 'To impose upon becoming the character of being—that is the supreme will to power'. A Bengali Sakta (but, perhaps, also a descendant of Kaulas, like Iqbal) would recognize the sentiment. Divine Mother, by her Will, shapes the pure Being that is Consciousness thus making possible the Super-Man. Knowledge divorced from Power is indeed a hollow reification itself imposed by the application of merely oppressive or inertial force. Liberation must be willed.
Liebniz believed Francis Bacon to have said- 'either we must put Nature on the rack- or Man'. Either Man cultivates the Will to Power or he must, himself, break his own will. There are echoes of such ideas in Vivekananda and, more particularly, Aurobindo. Netaji Bose may be said to incarnate them. The Ananda Marga, though ruthlessly suppressed, kept them alive in the Seventies and Eighties. I myself was astonished to find that a Socialist President of India admired a book by an Ananda Margi economist based in America. Meanwhile Sen was headed in an opposite direction. The truth is that the Bengali 'Superman' might look somewhat Fascist. He might accomplish great things- but, Sen believed, hadn't Mussolini started out the same way?
Like Niradh Chaudhri, Sen's family in East Bengal had suffered because of Partition. To both the mystic creed of the Bengali, buddhijivi, comprador now seemed a double edged sword. After all, it had only arisen because the British Raj nakedly revealed a fact Indic religion had occluded. Power must find ways to pay for itself. Meditators gaining Liberation all over the place through their spiritual power won't keep your people from enslavement. Power must grow the economy or else it is doomed to perish. Gandhi's moral force proved useless. It took a World War to get the Brits to pack their bags.
All useful knowledge relates to the more efficient usage of scarce resources which, by itself, reinforces the Power that knowledge deploys. Sen's ancestral Brahmoism may be seen as a Benthamite Nietszcheanism avant la lettre. There was a time it was bleeding obvious that Indian independence would mean the rule- or if not rule, then at the very least, the hegemony- of people named Bose and Sen and Chatterjee and Batterjee and Mad Hatterjee. Then Tagore noticed that if bhadralok buddhijivis exercised 'Will to Power', the first thing that would happen would be their being chased out of Burma and East Bengal. After that, they'd be the clients of Gujju Banias & Marwaris or subsist as mere intellectual coolies further West. As M.N Roy- escaping Stalin to the safety of a Raj-era prison cell- might have realized, the 'cunning of History'- incarnated in his own supremely cunning Babu class- rendered the 'buddhijivi's' Will to Power incongruent with its own existence as a hegemonic, as opposed to parasitic- or swindling- class. Still Roy was bhadralok enough to demand a 'subsidy' from the Viceroy. Sens- already in the Thirties, the one sub-caste where Male adult literacy in English exceeded every other group- indeed, a male Sen was better credentialized in English than even the Eurasians or 'country bottled' pure blooded Anglos. I can testify to this myself. Back in '71, I met Jim Cobbett's sister in the Aberdare mountains in Kenya. Mum & Dad pitilessly mocked her English accent and vocabulary and the fact that she offered to go milk a cow so the kids could have something to drink. I liked her. That's why, eight years later, Amartya Sen gave me the cold shoulder when I accosted him after a lecture. He could see immediately what my parents only reluctantly admitted as the decades went by. I am lower fucking class. Some mothers do 'ave them. Shame, but there it is.
The reason my Dad went to see Cobbett's sister is because India was opening a Nature Reserve in her brother's name. It turned out that low class 'country bottled' fella, when not speaking Hindustani or Garhwali or whatever, probably sounded like G. V Desani 'H.Hatterr'. Nevertheless, Cobbett had expert knowledge of a useful type. Those in power in India found it useful to invoke his name while creating a hard currency earning machine similar to Kenya's Nature Reserves.
(Come to think of it, Desani was only useful to us because he was born in Kenya and never actually got any sort of academic credential. Thus he spoke well and actually knew what he spoke of. Like Niradh Babu, Radio broadcasting, under Brits, put him on the path to fame. Thankfully, Indian Independence- and the reconstitution of All India Radio as the 'Voice from the Sky' of that being than whom nothing more boring can be conceived- shut off this avenue of literary advancement. Thus, both Desani & Chaudhri were Prophets without a Palestine and died, in their nineties, in the U.S & U.K respectively)
At about the time I met Corbett's sister, Sukhamoy Chakraborty- who steered Amartya from Physics to an utterly mischievous type of Econ- was appointed Head of the Planning Commission. His English, like Sen's, was impeccable- worthy of a Rothschild. But those Mad Hatters harmed India. The reason we liked Sen was that he emigrated before he could get roped into the Planning Commission's cretinism. But, Lord Desai says, he left coz of the scandal occasioned by his divorce. It wasn't his Will to Power that was lacking. It's just that his virility had accessed an inappropriate object.
Sen did well in the West, but one reason he did well was because his primary subject was known to be dead in the water, at least w.r.t his own methods- Journals were refusing Social Choice shite by the late Seventies- and, to be fair, he was doing nothing to keep it alive. Thus, he was considered a good egg. A reliable chap. A guy who gets with the program without treading on anybody's toes. He was the ideal 'affirmative action' hire- because he was actually more reactionary than any port swilling Don of aristocratic pedigree. He spent a lot of time quoting Adam Smith but was astonishingly ignorant of Marx.
Sen chose status over power. Good for him. It was a rational choice. But he never admitted that his research program was useless. It was pure Spence 'signaling' of virtue- yes- but also a bien pensant type of stupidity.
The fact is, an epistemic methodology must either concern itself with acquiring power over scarce resources- i.e. must vanquish its rivals by foul means or fair- or else acknowledge that it is concerned not with this world but the hereafter; or- for bien pensant atheists, not with what is useful and concrete, but the purely equitable and imaginary.
The Bengali comprador class- having lost its Estates and taken a more humble station as a 'buddhijivi' bildungsburgertum- realizing that the cunning of history invariably used their low, for not value adding, cunning to frustrate, with Romantic irony, their own Schopenhauerian will-to-power, sought to turn 'Knowledge' into something extraterritorial to, and without imbrication in, Power- save of a cliquish, bureaucratic type.
This required affirming a monadology without indiscernible identity- i.e which forbids Yoneda lemma type interaction in advance. In other words, the Bengali bhuddijivi, acknowledging the essentially mischievous nature of his own existence, must posit the separate and unconnected unfolding of unequal 'entelechies'- in other words, must deny the Will-to-Power of a common Kali or Universal Mother.
He is welcome to ineffectually deplore this state of affairs. But, to even methodologically posit equality between entelechies or to focus on interactions would be illicit. Why? Something useful might come of it. But, by the 'cunning of history', what is useful contributes to Power & Power is always on the verge of becoming Fascist and getting trains to run on time in a manner which disintermediates the moral suasion of this class of intellectuals.
Hence, though of Hindu origin, the Bengali buddhijivi must keep aloof from 'Hindutva'- i.e. such Hinduism as would still exist in a world without caste or gender or homophobia or any other type of injustice- indeed, must condemn it as a potentially more productive and 'value adding' entelechy which, precisely because it might get 'last mile delivery' right, is like totes Fascist dude.
The apotheosis of Sen's imbecility occurs in 'Argumentative Indian' where, after a hilariously ignorant and ultracrepidarian disquisition on Indian calendars and so forth, Sen opines that- 'an epistemic methodology that sees the pursuit of knowledge as entirely congruent with the search for power is a great deal more cunning than wise.'
Cunning is itself a pejorative word for cleverness. It may be that there is a wisdom which isn't clever at all. Its source of nourishment is plentiful and requires no great effort to access. It has no predators or parasites. It can survive despite being as stupid as shit. This may represent felicity, to some, but why call it wisdom? Nothing useful can be learned from it, though its possession may appear enviable to those whose existence is predicated on struggle.
An epistemic methodology needs to pursue power so as to command resources to further its quest for knowledge. This is likely to happen if it can convince others that knowledge enhances power. Thus invest some power in this enterprise and you will get more back. We differentiate alchemy from chemistry and astrology from astronomy because we now know that investing in chemistry and astronomy increases power and wealth. By contrast money spent on alchemy or astrology is money wasted.
What is Sen's own epistemic methodology? The answer is that it is a cunning attempt to gain power for itself by appearing congruent with what we think of as virtue and promising that knowledge to support virtue will be forthcoming somewhere down the line. The problem is that Sen's project has not delivered. Furthermore, we don't find that he is in fact virtuous at all. He is merely a bigot whose head is stuffed full of mischievous fallacies and meretricious memes. In other words, he is a typical Bengali blathershite with a veneer of European sophistication.
There is now a large and growing Human Development and Capabilities Association with more than 400 'practitioners' in 70 different countries. It has money and power. Has it done any good? Has it uncovered any actual knowledge? Sadly, the answer is no.
A paper in the Journal of Economic Methodology states- 'Sen is not a capability theorist.'
This paper aims to clarify the status of capability in Sen’s idea of justice. Sen’s name is so widely associated with the concept of capability that commentators often assume that his contribution to the study of justice amounts to a capability theory, albeit underdeveloped. We argue that such a reading is misleading. Taking Sen’s reticence about operationalization seriously, we show that his contribution is inconsistent with a capability theory. Instead, we defend the idea that the capability approach plays a heuristic role: capability is a step in his argument against alternative materials, but is not meant as a definitive end. Sen defends a critical perspective primarily to encourage public reasoning and respect for agency as regards the definition of what should count in the evaluation of social states.
The problem here is that if there is no method of specifying or aggregating capabilities then public reasoning about capability is no different from public reasoning about alchemy or astrology. It may be that such and such procedure is evil and should be reformed. But the reason it is evil is not because it is defective from the stand point of alchemy or astrology or the capabilities approach. Rather the thing is bad because it has bad consequences. There is something else which could be done which would have good consequences. By describing it, you win your case. Your alchemical or astrological or capabilities based arguments are irrelevant. This is not to say that God could not be an astrologer or an alchemist or a member of the HDCA. To a divine intelligence, lead may be easily transmuted into gold. But we possess no such Nous. We ought to exclude such arguments from our 'public reasoning'.
Suppose Sen's primary purpose was to 'encourage public reasoning'. Then he should be uncovering instances where such reasoning was better than the bureaucratic or elite sort. Sadly, the one thing he hangs his hat on- viz. that famine can't happen in a democracy- is not true at all. The transition to democracy in his native Bengal was accompanied by two separate big famines. True, there was a food availability deficit. But corrupt politicians prevented civil servants from implementing the Famine Code. The Brits had gotten rid of famine by 1902 on the basis of 'bureaucratic reason'. Mass Starvation returned once the bureaucracy was made subservient to elected politicians. It is noteworthy that soldiers did a better job, in this respect, than elected Premier both in the Forties and the Seventies.
Still, if you want to champion 'public reasoning' in a purely theoretical way, you should be trying to link 'Aumann agreement' with the 'Condorcet Jury theorem' and showing how for large enough groups 'noise' cancels out leaving a 'Muth rational' signal. This justifies Gibbard's Revelation Principle and, provided Regret Minimizing strategies are used (because of Knightian Uncertainty) you have a cheap and cheerful theory which says- public discussion on the basis of subsidiarity should guide mechanism design. Then let there be 'Tiebout sorting' and mimetic effects. Discussion gets channelized into tinkering with actual mechanisms- i.e. it concerns itself with 'Minute Particulars'- and moves on to address new problems quickly enough. This is in fact the way most of us think Liberal Democracy should actually work. Filter out the woke nutters but listen to guys who know what is happening in their own backyard. Design a mechanism which restores incentive compatibility in that locality. Let that locality compete and imitate other similar localities. Don't bother measuring things with any great accuracy. People are smart. They make these comparisons for themselves and imitate those doing better than themselves. Neither Philosophy nor abstract Mathematical Economics is any help when it comes to 'oikonomia' sensible, suave, discretionary management. Aristotle would have denounced as 'akreibia' the various interventions of the eggheads. They seek a type of precision in discourse which the subject matter can't afford. This is mischievous to the commonweal. Purely as a pedagogic exercise, this could be explained to Students at the end of their Public Econ 101 class using roughly the terminology I have outlined. All this could have been done by the time I got to the LSE in 1979. It seems unfair a stupid person like me had to work it out for myself. This is the sort of thing I should have been spoon-fed.
Sen knew much more than I did about all the things I mentioned. Yet he chose to gas on about the essential incomparability of values. He encourages increased dimensionality of the decision space though this is bound to result in 'McKelvey chaos' and a struggle for 'agenda control'.
If Sen really wanted to encourage 'respect for agency' then he should be a Hayekian or else a champion of 'subsidiarity'- decisions should be taken by those directly involved. Bureaucrats and academics should be disintermediated.
The truth is Sen is not really interested in either 'public reasoning' or 'respect for agency'. He invokes both as magical remedies. But the context in which he does so is a problematization, invented by himself, which would cause any type of reasoning or agency to become paralyzed. Thankfully, Sen's problematization is based on stupid lies. It does not represent a genuine aporia, or scandal.
In an interview, Sen said-
Consider the importance of human freedom. Freedom is the basis of both human rights and capability.
This is not true. Slaves and prisoners and minors and insane people have some human rights but may lack freedom completely. Capability has no relationship whatsoever with freedom.
Why is Sen telling an obvious lie? The answer is he wants to appear so virtuous and attached to freedom that he can't even imagine being capable of eating food if he were not free. Yet, we suspect, had the British remained in India, Sen as the subject of an alien race, would have continued to relish his repast.
Still, it may be that this Nobel Prize winner will come up with a way of ordering Society such that everybody will be free and, what's more, it will seem to them, their capabilities are organically linked to this freedom. That would be cool coz currently China is lifting hundreds and millions out of poverty into increasing affluence but at the price of strict limitations on political freedom. When John F Kennedy became President he said that it was important that Democratic India do as well as China- or else it would be the Chinese model that would prove more attractive to newly independent countries- an outcome fatal to American hegemony or 'soft power'. In 1990, India was level with China. Now it is clearly inferior. US backing for Indian mathematical economists and their mischievous Planning Commission and meretricious musings on Freedom and Development and Social Choice has backfired. India would have been better off without economists and political philosophers. It should simply have imitated other, more successful, similarly placed countries and stuck with what worked. Amartya Sen is now the senex iratus- the irritable father figure- of an availability cascade which ceaseless reproduces itself as farce. He is an alazon- an impostor- whose job, it seems, is to damage India and to disparage any progress it makes.
This is not because he hasn't worked hard or hasn't had the ability to recruit smart students. It is because his project was always orthogonal to Reality. He wanted power to push his research program but didn't want that program to have any power to change the world for the better. Thus Sen's epistemic methodology has come up with nothing but hot air. Capabilities can't be operationalized anymore than alchemy can. One could argue that alchemy is essentially a spiritual science. Its study makes you a better man. A similar claim may be made for Sen's oeuvre. But the evidence is that nothing of the sort has happened. Sen is a bigot and his acolytes are self-righteous bigots.
Consider the following- does it mean anything at all? Why does a philosopher, John Tasioulas- not ask Sen what on earth he is getting at? Is it not the task of a philosopher to clarify what is said?
Freedom has not only an opportunity aspect for which capability is a reasonably good fit, but it also has a process aspect.
The problem here is Slavery can have exactly the same opportunity and process aspect. Arguably, the Chinese were more free than the Indians because they got what they wanted- viz. to get richer and stronger- though they couldn't vote for whom they wanted. Why can't Sen's acolytes press him to, at the very least, say how Freedom is different from Slavery?
If habeas corpus is rightly invoked in one situation ― in favour of Person A ― but wrongly denied in another ― for Person B ― we could say that people are being treated unequally, and in some sense unjustly.
No. We could only say that a judicial wrong was committed in the second case. Tasioluas has taught jurisprudence in the UCL faculty of Law. He must know that the power to gain a remedy arises from being able to specify a wrong, not by expressing an inchoate sense of unfairness or injustice. Indeed, a cunning defender of the status quo would prefer that people protest against unfairness and inequality rather than focus on specific wrong doing. William Blake said that to do good one must focus on Minute Particulars. Who babbles about the General Good is up to mischief.
Person B being denied habeas corpus is being given unequal treatment.
That is irrelevant. The fact that the same judicial wrong is inflicted on all does not mean there has been equal treatment before the law provided at least one person, affected by some other law, is not mistreated. Due process is concerned with all rights. It can't pick and chose.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that Person B will end up worse off than the other.
This is irrelevant. The law is not concerned with the extra-legal consequences of its actions. It is protocol bound. That is why it is operationalizable.
It may be that habeas corpus would not have greatly helped him, or that he is otherwise so fortunate ― with much better luck than Person A in health, wealth and social respect ― that he will end up being better off despite the denial of habeas corpus to him.
This is crazy shit. Only if B is so unfortunate that he is better off in prison does Sen's argument hold. But in that case, it is clear that 'capability' can be destroyed by Freedom but enhanced by Slavery.
But still the denial of habeas corpus to Person B remains an unjust violation.
Violation of what? The Law. But that is a matter the Law can redress. It may also be a violation of our sense of fairness. But our sense of fairness can only offer sympathy, not an effective remedy. An epistemic methodology which privileges sympathy over cure may be a cunning ruse of reaction. Or it may simply be stupid and useless.
The analysis of justice may make us look well beyond the outcomes and overall advantages of the different persons.
Certainly the alchemists and astrologers claimed to look 'well beyond' all sorts of things. But the thing was either a swindle or just hot air- like Sen's idea of Justice.
There are processes involved and we cannot have an adequate concept of equity if it does not pay sufficient attention to processes in addition to the outcomes.
Either the processes have effect in which case they are captured in the outcome time series or they don't in which case they don't affect equity or anything else. Provided some agents are tasked with the proper administration of the Law, there is an outcome time series which captures procedural misconduct. In other words, so long as the Law is a profession, an adequate concept of equity can be operationalized. Why pretend otherwise? Revolutionaries may hope to gain interessement in this way. But what is the point of gaining obligatory passage point status if you are merely going to gas on about how difficult it is to get an adequate conception of this or that? This may be a cunning strategy. But it is a cunning whose apotheosis is in its own endless display of naked stupidity and impotence.
Procedures matter, not just substantive opportunities, and we have reason to look beyond capabilities.
But procedures only matter to the extent that they effect the outcome time series. It is a mistake to task an agent with oversight of useless procedures because that agent's outcome time series correlate, under scarcity, with worse outcomes for all other agents. In other word, pay for Judges by all means. Don't pay useless tossers to make judgments which are wholly useless.
There are also other inadequacies. Consider the value of the environment. The environment is, in fact, a bit of a mixed bag. Some environmental concerns link well with our capabilities.
They all do- though we may not know this because we live under Knightian uncertainty. We do know our production function. It is better to focus on what we can know than what we can't.
Our capabilities are influenced ― negatively ― by the foulness of the air we have to breathe,
We don't actually know that. All we can say is 'currently this is the case'. It may be that there is a very cheap type of filter which can increase your productivity no matter what air you breathe. What we actually are doing is something we know about. What we are capable of doing is wholly unknown.
or the nastiness of the water we have for drinking. But the environment includes other concerns as well. We may want to have the preservation of species of animals, not because they contribute to our quality of life, but because we have reason to value their continuation. We can strongly favour the survival of spotted owls without any concern about how they affect our lives. We are not self-seeking all the time. We seek what we value, and among them may be valuing the continuation of a variety of species of animals that do not enhance our own personal lives. In voting for the continuation of spotted owls, I shouldn't have to claim that my life is affected by spotted owls. In fact, I have never seen one, and I'm not sure I would diagnose one if I saw one. But I don't want the species to disappear ― indeed, I strongly don't want that ― not because of any personal advantage, nor, maybe, because of any religious faith I have, but out of a certain view of nature and its importance.
The problem here is that we don't know if 'values' aren't linked to our own biological self-interest. It may be that there is an 'extended phenotype' aspect to this. In any case, most people understand that spotted owl habitat is likely to be a 'green lung'. The alternative is yet more urban sprawl.
Instead of speaking of 'capabilities' or 'values' or 'utility' one could just adopt a 'regret-minimizing' approach grounded in Knightian uncertainty. We may oppose x and support y without any clear idea of why we do so. It is sufficient that Uncertainty is so great that we act more prudently lest we do something we might greatly regret.
But this also means that 'public discussion' won't get us very far. That's a good thing. Curb that nuisance. Disintermediate HDCA type academics and 'activists'. Defund that bunch of blathershites.
In a recent paper, Sen 'disputes the belief that reasoning about choice remains unfinished until an optimal alternative has been identified.
There is no such belief. Reasoning about choice may be indulged in for reasons wholly unconnected with what is or isn't chosen. We may want to uncover and articulate the reasons we make certain choices so as to have a better understanding of what makes us tick. Alternatively, we may be seeking better decision making strategies or heuristics. In a legal setting, we may be trying to show that a particular choice says something about mens rea or competence or diligence.
A successful closure of a reasoning may identify a maximal alternative, which is not judged to be worse than any other available option.
This is an unsuccessful closure of reasoning. I wanted to prove that your choosing Dr. Pepper over Coca Cola shows you are like totally gay, dude. However, it turns out I've been drinking Dr. Pepper not Coke, as I thought. Well, I'm definitely not gay- despite Mum constantly trying to fix me up with a nice Iyer boy- and so I decide both beverages are equally non-gay. Instead I move on to arguing that the fact that you are choosing to stroke my crotch proves you are like totally gay, dude.
A maximal alternative need not be optimal in the sense of being ‘best’ (that is, at least as good as every other alternative). Critically sound reasoning can lead us to a partial ordering yielding a maximal alternative that is not optimal. The compulsive search for an optimal alternative needlessly limits the reach of reasoning in ethics.
This is nonsense. Reasoning in ethics is about altering one's ethos so one's choice menu changes qualitatively. It may feature 'optimality'. If choice is sub-optimal it is less likely to be robust or prescriptive. Suppose I want people to take my medical advise. They may still do so if I look like a sack of shit. But by actually making myself healthy I may be even better at my job. If we see a person doing much better than every other person with a similar endowment we may well say 'his method is optimal. It is prescriptive. It is the Schelling focal solution to a coordination problem for those in a similar line. Thus, it is Muth Rational and our expectations should change accordingly.
This is how ethical progress is achieved. We may speak of a Tardean mimetic law by which people imitate those they see are their betters. Indian Religion has always upheld the advisability of following the best practice of the best people. It is by the 'field effect' generated by mimetics that Societies rise up. We started educating our daughters and, a little later, encouraging them to rise up in the professions when we saw people of superior virtue and social standing do so. Countries rise up by imitating what has worked for their more affluent and secure neighbors. That's how China started its rise from poverty. Its leaders saw how South Korea and Singapore and so forth had risen up. They imitated these 'Tigers' and soon rose up themselves.
Sen says-
I have a paper in the journal Philosophy which focuses on the distinction between the "maximal" versus the "optimal." To make a mathematical distinction, a maximal is an alternative in a set such that there is nothing better than that.
This is so if you assume the axiom of choice or Zorn's lemma or Hausdorff maximal principle- i.e. you assume that there is a maximally totally ordered subset in a poset. However, this involves some implicit assumption about 'width'. Essentially, the number of strictly incomparable elements determines how many partitions the poset can have. If this is uncertainty, or time complexity arises, there is little point constructing maximals. Even absent Uncertainty and Complexity, provided combinations of 'incomparables' nevertheless give rise to 'Income effects' or create hedging opportunities, then the
'anything goes' theorem holds.
This is not to say that the 'maximal' isn't useful in a multi-objective optimization problem. 'Chasing the Pareto Front' using algorithms- e.g U
nchainedBandits- which don't require comparability and which have limited knowledge of the poset appears worthwhile. But how can the thing be prescriptive? The thing is purely economic and ad hoc.
Data mining & A.I bred algorithms may well be better at 'carving up the world according to its joints'- i.e. finding the best way to partition a poset- for a particular purpose. But this has nothing to do with Philosophy or Epistemic Methodology. It is merely represents an arbitrage opportunity though, no doubt, it may significantly change dynamics.
An optimal is an alternative in the set which is at least as good as all the others. For a well-behaved ordering, an optimal alternative must necessarily also be maximal, but a maximal alternative is not necessarily optimal.
in which case carving up posets into totally ordered subsets is irrelevant. There may be some other way to approach the problem such that the optimal solution stands out. I may want to find the 'best student' at my old school for a valuable scholarship. I can play around with different ways of aggregating the available test results. Finally I find the 'maximal'. I tell the Head Master of my choice. He is flabbergasted. The boy I picked is stupid but good at cheating in exams. The best student does not show up in my tables because he was off sick during Test season. I should give him the scholarship. He will achieve great things.
Of course, it would be foolish to turn this into a categorical rule- e.g. 'ignore Test scores and just ask the Head Master'- because then you vest a rent in some elderly, perhaps bigoted, pedant.
On the other hand, it is better not to have rules if the activity concerns an ideographic, not nomothetic, field- i.e. use your mother wit unless the thing really is mathematically tractable.
I argued that ethical reasoning would frequently tend to take the form of maximality rather than optimality.
If it were done by the sort of cretins who fucked over Indian Development while at the Planning Commission or teaching at D.S.E or the Indian Institute of Statistics.
I shouldn't bad-mouth my own profession, but economists often don't seem to see the distinction, even though the distinction is absolutely central to the maths of set-theory and topology. We would often arrive at some maximality, but not optimality. A maximal choice may emerge from a cluster of lists, even when there is no agreed optimal choice.
But the maximal choice could be the wrong choice. Still, a bureaucracy may say 'well, we have to make a decision and this decision looks like it was arrived at after 'due deliberation' and careful consideration of all the things we are supposed to consider under the relevant rules and regulations. True, this is a terrible choice. Still, it looks good on paper. '
Let me make one further point: I do believe public reasoning is very important – indeed essential.
Sure, if we start off by telling Sen he is a worthless blathershite.
To what extent is public discussion value-creating ― Rawls may be at least partly sympathetic to that diagnosis ― or is it only value-detecting?
It is value-faking or virtue signaling.
But a theory that eschews the vital role of public reasoning altogether before coming to the fixing of lists surely must have a problem.
Fuck 'fixing lists'. Just make good decisions in a timely manner without wasting too much time and cognitive resources. All theories have a problem. They are theories. What matter are outcomes. These needn't be algorithmically arrived at. Because coevolved processes tame complexity something fierce, algorithmic methods have little to offer outside very narrow domains. Still, as a matter of 'accountability' or 'due process', algorithms feature in deontic logic. But the heavy lifting is done by coevolved agents. Thus a Judge decides the Law, but the Jury decide the facts. By the Condorcet Jury theorem, jury deliberation is irrelevant as jury size explodes. Noise will get cancelled out leaving a robust signal. There may still be 'Oracles' whose intuition is even better. But then those Oracles become public signalers so better correlated equilibria are reached. Sadly, Sen is a sort of anti-Oracle. Anything he spends time on turns out to be shit. But such is his cunning, a superficial appraisal would cause us to think his problem is not that he is as stupid as shit, but that he is too good for our world.
Tasioulas: How should we think of the relationship between capabilities and human rights? Are human rights, in effect, another name for capabilities?
Rights only exist if they are linked to effective remedies by an incentive compatible bond of law. Capabilities can rise where Rights decrease and vice versa.
Sen: No. That it isn't. I think there is a category difference. Human rights are those things we acknowledge, for reasons yet to be discussed, as being an important thing that any person by virtue of their humanity should have ― not contingently because of nationality and citizenship.
No. We think all humans should have lots of love and affection and happiness and so forth. But there can't be rights to such things because no remedies for them exist.
What, then are Human Rights? They are an entitlement to a remedy by virtue of being a human being. Such rights have always existed, even for slaves, in all known jurisdictions. However, remedies may not have been available, or those rights may have been defeasible. But this is still true today for many free citizens who are forced into sex slavery etc.
The term "human rights" indicates that these rights should be the entitlement of all appropriately placed human beings,
No. Human rights subsist even for the inappropriately placed.
as opposed to being shared only by those who are citizens of a country, or something like that. It is a general ethical claim, and it is an ethical claim that goes with some duty on the part of others to try to do something about it.
No. Human Rights are a Legal, not Ethical, matter. We may say there is an ethical obligation to all other humans. But an ethical obligation is not a Hohfeldian right.
I have tried to argue that the duties in general will very often come, in the Kantian sense, in the form of imperfect obligations.
Actually, what matters is how the duty to have duties arises. This is what partitions perfect from imperfect duties. We can easily see this if we consider what happens where a Principal performing a particular action out of a sense of obligation is artificially turned (for e.g by being 'Deputized' like in the cowboy films) into an Agent performing the same action so as to discharge a legal duty.
And those imperfect obligations are still serious obligations ― obligations, for example, to think what you can, and perhaps must, do to prevent the eviction of settled people without papers.
The answer was to create a perfect obligation for all agents employed in any such activity to have a safe and effective way of reporting any breach of the law without being victimized for it. My memory is that a number of lawyers and other good citizens spent money and time to try to secure this outcome
To give an example, if Trump were to succeed in evicting up to seven million people living in America from the country, they may not be covered by legal rights,
if lawyers and judges and legislators are asleep at the wheel. Thankfully there are organizations with office holders who have perfect obligations in this regard.
but what about their human rights? Do others have any imperfect obligation to help those who are about to be evicted after years living in American in peaceful and productive ways?
By turning an imperfect obligation into a perfect one, a strong signal is sent and coalition formation is eased. Talking worthless virtue signaling shite helps nobody.
To be sure, a lot of people ― Trump's supporters ― would be in favour of evicting them
Most 'Trump supporters' did not want mass eviction at all. They wanted good, secure, jobs and rising wages. Before Covid struck, Trump appeared to be delivering this. That's why he was expected to win.
These illegal residents clearly do not have any legal right to stay.
Why tell such a mischievous lie? There were and are plenty of lawyers fighting for the legal right to stay for all sorts of people. Even after every avenue of appeal has been exhausted and the person has been deported, it is unsafe to say they didn't have a legal right to stay. Look at Britain's Windrush deportees. Many were illegally removed or barred from re-entry. The Tory Government is having to compensate these people with a minimum pay out of 10,000 pounds.
While Sen was talking shite, good people were doing first-order work to remedy a grave injustice.
On the other hand, the question still arises, do they have any relevant human rights, having been integrated in American society for so long? An argument of relevance to this kind of prospect has been made in a powerful op-ed by Michael Bloomberg: that many parts of America ― including New York ― would be impossible to live in if the illegals were deported, because of the loss of service providers; and, given their history of being integrated in American society and the belief generated that they can stay on, evicting these precarious people would be violation of their human rights.
This is an argument for 'amnesty'. It is good as far as it goes. However, the big Human Rights questions have to do with 'due process' itself. Sen-tentious shite is harmful to the approach the ACLU is taking.
Human rights are claims that any one possesses irrespective of citizenship, and the claims could coincide with legal rights ― and, indeed, may inspire legal rights as Herbert Hart has famously argued.
The opposite approach was better. The State's rights in respect of obnoxious actions was defeasible. It is better to prune back what is repugnant rather than seek to expand the scope of what is innocent, but undefended, because the former preys upon the latter, not the other way around.
On the other hand, if not by origin legal rights, they may eventually be reflected in legal rights. But even without being reflected in legal rights, they may still be serious concerns, generating imperfect obligations for others to do something to help.
What is dangerous is perfect obligations to do repugnant things. Defeasibility is the essence of the Law and the best way of pruning back such repugnant actions.
Then the issue arises: Would the promotion of capabilities in this kind of a situation be rightly linked to human rights?
Yes. If remedies are effective and incentive compatible.
Well, to that there's a very contingent answer.
In which case, why bother with that shite?
The very important rights may have that feature. Human rights don't cover the entire ethical space. Human rights build up things in which other people have some duty.
But remedies only exist if there is a perfect obligation which it is incentive compatible to discharge. It is the existence of remedies that 'build things up'. Sen's approach is empty.
Society may be better off if I'm more fulfilled in my life.
But Society would be even better off it it was wholly unaffected by your level of 'fulfillment'
If, for example, I'm a putative poet and if my poetry was more liked and I was happier, that may be seen as an improvement. I don't have to be utilitarian to say that in some way society would be better off if I'm happier because my creation ― the poems ― were being widely appreciated. But this cannot really be seen as a human right.
Yes it can. It may be that my poems are not liked because of racism or homophobia or the fact that peeps be illiterate due to skools are shite. There may be a justiciable element to this.
I don't think society has a duty to make sure that my poetry is appreciated.
There may be organizations which have a 'perfect obligation' in this respect. If my poems are not appreciated because of a failure by an obligation holder to provide the remedy- e.g. arranging for my poems to be reviewed by those better able to appreciate my genius.
So there are a lot of ethical things that arise which are not matters of human rights at all. Human rights won't cover the whole normative space.
They may do if that normative space is properly factorized. Once again, this is a matter where actual lawyers are busy doing productive work.
Tasioulas: William Easterly has claimed that the right to health is not a very good basis for thinking about social policy because he says it represents "a claim on funds that has no natural limit since any of us could get healthier with more care."
Experience has shown that entitlement collapse occurs where remedies are not incentive compatible. Calling thing a 'right' does not magically create a remedy. However, lawyers can find ways of doing useful things with Hohfeldian rights provided incentive compatible remedies exist.
I take it your claim is there is an actual limit to rights and that is the limit constituted by the duties associated with them.
A duty may exist absent the means to discharge it. What matters is that those means arise in an incentive compatible manner. Otherwise deontics is empty.
And so the capability may be enhanced but we still have to ask the question: is there a duty on anyone else to enhance that capability? Only then can there be a right.
No. Whether a duty exists does not matter. What matters is finding an incentive compatible remedy. This means finding an economic mechanism such that enhancing productivity- Sen may say 'realized capabilities'- yields a surplus. It can more than pay for itself. This may be because Uncertainty is reduced or externalities are internalized or information asymmetry is reduced etc, etc.
And it must be a duty that exists simply being in virtue of being a human for it to be a human right. So he's totally misunderstanding the contribution human rights make to the logic of social policy.
Easterly isn't misunderstanding anything. He is just pointing out that saying x is a human right doesn't mean x appears by magic.
Sen: Totally, yes. Easterly's book I very much enjoyed reading. There are some insightful ― and often funny ― stories there from which there are lessons to be drawn. But claims of health care must relate to the importance of the benefits involved, and the affordability of the costs that have to be covered. This is surely a matter of valuation in a social context. We have discussed this question earlier. Health care is not a matter of being put on a "list," but one of valuational assessment.
Valuational assessment does not create resources out of thin air. Why is Sen pretending that there is some omniscient Benthamite planner who does everything on the basis of Cost Benefit Analysis?
There is nothing particularly odd about insisting on providing basic affordable health care to all, even if the exact contents of what is provided may have to vary between societies.
So, Sen is for 'affordable' health care, not free health care as a human right.
But, of course, Easterly is very proud of being against planning. When I reviewed the book in Foreign Affairs, I think we chose the title, "The Man Without a Plan." But I do believe a bit in planning, and in planning about what we can justifiably do; there is no particular difficulty in assessing what can be provided to all and how. The duties of others to demand this for all is important.
Sen believes that 'second order public goods'- i.e. demanding more first order public goods- is an important duty we should discharge. But Sen comes from a place where students would spend a lot of time burning buses so as to draw attention to the State's duty to make everybody rich.
Tasioulas: To Easterly's argument that rights must be limitless claims ― there's always more you can do, and therefore they don't provide much guidance ― you respond that there is a duty and that sets a limit. Now there are two problems someone might have with that response. What exactly does the right to health give us a right to? What are the duties associated with it? That is a very complex, contested process, so is there really a principled basis for figuring out what exactly the limits of that duty are? Futhermore, you put a lot of emphasis on public reason generating those limits. Now someone might argue that these so-called human rights are created: they're created by public discourse ― in particular, public discourse generated within a democratic society ― and enshrined in law. So, in a way, the only real answer to the question of where the limits are set is that we've decided to set them through law at this particular point because pure reason won't tell you where to set them.
What a crock of shite! Why does public reason and public discourse have to state the bleeding obvious- viz. 'we want what that country over there has got? It is or was a lot like us, but they have better health care at a lower per capita price. Let us imitate them and catch up.'
Obviously, there will be a discovery process once mimetics gets off the ground. Practical reason, not Kantian shite or Sen-tentious shite, is what will make things better.
Sen: I think even if something is legalised in order for it to be implemented, you need its recognition ― its continued recognition ― as a human right.
Why not just recognize that its something we want coz them guys have it and they've pulled ahead of us?
And, indeed, a very telling example came some years ago in Pakistan. The Taliban introduced very severe, very strict dress codes for women in the Swat valley when they occupied it. And they had the practice of caning or whipping young women who violated those dress codes. The Pakistan civil society was negative on that, but they actually didn't do very much about it ― even though it was strictly speaking, even in terms of existing Pakistani law, illegal to do that. You can't seize a young girl from a family and come and whip the person on the ground that she violated the dress code. Still, there was initially no public agitation on this issue, and the military was reluctant to intervene.
Wow! Does this guy really not know that speaking out against the Taliban can get you killed? Even the Army was shitting itself at the thought of having to reassert sovereignty. Thankfully, an American drone strike killed Fazlullah- but not before his people massacred 140 kids at an Army Public School.
Now, the Human Rights Commission in Pakistan works under a disadvantage: unlike in India and South Africa, where it has a legal status ― and happens to be a legally constituted body and can actually sue particular persons or organizations ― Pakistan's Human Rights Commission is merely an NGO. And yet it nevertheless has a powerful influence because of public reasoning.
Mad! Utterly mad! The Pakistani Army and US drone strikes is what made a difference. Public reasoning is again on the backfoot in Pakistan. America is leaving Afghanistan and Imran Khan may have to expel the French Ambassador and come to terms with the militants.
In the case of the Taliban dress code in the Swat valley, someone associated with the Commission risked his life by going to one of the whippings, and he could be seen apparently making a long phone call, but that was actually a video picture that he was taking. If he had been found, he would have lost his life. It was a dangerous thing to do. Happily, he wasn't found. He came away and put the video on Pakistan cable television and then the general television. The result was an explosion of outrage. So that the law which was not being executed, the army now said that they will execute it, they will carry it out. The Army had to go into the Swat valley to take control away from the Taliban.
This is nonsense. The Army had to go in because of pressure from China re. Uighur militants in the area. Zardari wanted a way to back out of the deal the Army wanted- i.e. Sharia Law in return for peace- because, obviously, keeping the Army preoccupied was good for Zardari himself. Anyway, those militants had killed his wife. Vengeance is a virile virtue.
Now, this is a case where the law existed, but it required the support of imperfect obligations linked with human rights in order to bring about the protection of the dressing rights of women.
This is silly. Some pervert could have taken the video and put it on Youtube to gloat. What mattered was that it gave Zardari and excuse to wrong-foot the Army.
There are many other cases where there may not be any law there at all. One of the reasons why I quote Mary Wollstonecraft all the time ― the main reason I quote her is because I believe she is the most under-appreciated eighteenth century thinker ― is because she discussed extensively why the realisation of rights require many non-legal activities. The right to education, for example, and the right to fair media coverage are not just matters of legal reform, but also of development of social values.
In Pakistan, the realization of rights of the sort we like involves killing militants who want very different rights. Drone strikes help achieve this. Droning on about Wollstonecraft is futile.
Tasioulas: Isn't the law then doing all the work in specifying the content if there's this moral disagreement?
Sen: I don't think so. Both the recognition of human rights and the understanding of imperfect obligations are matters of valuation.
But 'valuation' can't begin till things are well specified. Sen won't do that specifying.
We discussed earlier the critical role of public reasoning and valuation in the context of capabilities ― even in arriving at appropriate "lists." Valuations are dependent on public discussion and critical scrutiny, exploring such questions as, "What is affordable?" and "How important is this facility?" and "What must we accept as something that every person ― in a particular situation ― should have?"
But public discussion and critical scrutiny means having to engage with virtue signaling shitheads. So, it is a waste of time.
If an existing law already upholds a justifiable human right,
i.e. the thing is justiciable
the perspective of human rights reasoning should suggest grounds for supporting the implementation of the law ― through agitation, voting, organised intervention for better implementation. However, if more laws are needed than what are there, public reasoning can sensibly aim at both fresh legislation and providing social support even before legislation.
but it still has to specify justiciable rights. That's what Sen won't do. Why not simply agitate for Niceness Now!
Public awareness and discussion have, for example, changed the domain of freedom from sexual harassment in recent years in many countries including the United States ― consider the "Me Too" movement ―
which didn't prevent a 'pussy-grabber' getting to the White House
involving both legal means and ideas of social unacceptability that go well beyond the domain of illegality.
Actually, contracts in America often have morality clauses and so the thing is justiciable- i.e. within the domain of the law. In any case, tort law can be equally effective. A hefty fine may be as crippling as a jail sentence.
Valuations based on public reasoning can be very effective both through legislation and through reasoned social action.
Or, as in Sen's case, they can be vacuous bullshit.
Tasioulas: Amartya Sen, thank you very much.
For nothing. Sen's cunning is to appear to care about 'epistemic methodology'- he generally starts of by making a distinction without a difference as if he has given the matter a lot of thought- and to appear to be congruent with virtuous values, but what happens next? What is the outcome? Nothing at all. Just more and more vacuous bullshit about how the public could be very nice and it is very nice to be reasonable and so nice public reasoning can make everything as nice and nice and then you can hire some useless Bengalis to do 'valuation' and then they will say 'Niceness can be very nice' and then everybody will be so happy due to Niceness has triumphed.
