Amartya Sen, back in his Tanner lecture of '79 said-
Discussions in moral philosophy have offered us a wide menu in answer to the question: equality of what?
This can't possibly be the case. If there is a rational discussion, as opposed to just a bunch of randos shooting their mouths off, then the 'what' must already have been decided. There is no menu. There is just a discussion. True, if someone starts talking of the equality of dick sizes and waving a scalpel around, the other moral philosophers will say 'Sorry this isn't a discussion about that sort of equality. We are discussing the equality of something else entirely. Try down the hall.'
Sen is pretending there is some choice involved in a rational discussion. This is true of a chat but not of a discussion. The topic must be prespecified. True, a particular topic may be abandoned and separate one taken up. But they are separate discussions.
In this lecture I shall concentrate on three particular types of equality, viz., (i) utilitarian equality, (ii) total utility equality, and (iii) Rawlsian equality.
These are not different types of equality. They are different conceptions of what economic equality might entail. But because they ignore the fact that work has disutility- i.e. an opportunity cost, people need to be rewarded for giving up their leisure or not switching occupation- they are utterly useless.
One could stipulate for equality with respect to economic rent- i.e. surplus over and above what would be required to match disutility- as opposed to reward. But this just means raising the elasticity of supply or demand by permitting greater factor mobility or by increasing competition or regulating 'natural' monopolies and monopsonies. But, that is something we should be doing anyway to raise growth and improve allocative efficiency. It would tend to reduce equality- at least initially. But then this is what happens when each receives, as Marx recommends, according to his, not need, but contribution. Improving efficiency by eliminating rents increases the contribution of those who are productive. This may also provide more funds to help weaker sections of Society but though they benefit yet inequality has increased- a good thing for all concerned save censorious moral philosophers or 'normative' economists.
I shall argue that all three have serious limitations, and that while they fail in rather different and contrasting ways, an adequate theory cannot be constructed even on the combined grounds of the three.
The reason they have serious limitations is because they are silly. They seek to look at distribution separately from production. Yet, people only work for a reward unless coercion is used. But if coercion is used, then distribution is a function of coercive power- nothing else. Robin Hood may give to the poor. Then again, he may not. Arrows cost money. Besides 'merry men' drink lots of expensive beer to stay merry.
Towards the end I shall try to present an alternative formulation of equality which seems to me to deserve a good deal more attention than it has received, and I shall not desist from doing some propaganda on its behalf.
Why not desist from 'propaganda' and stick to accurate reasoning?
First a methodological question. When it is claimed that a certain moral principle has shortcomings, what can be the basis of such an allegation?
That it involves or condones an immoral action.
There seem to be at least two different ways of grounding such a criticism, aside from just checking its direct appeal to moral intuition.
No. It is both necessary and sufficient to show that some substantial immorality flows from or is involved in the application of that principle for one's allegation to be upheld.
One is to check the implications of the principle by taking up particular cases in which the results of employing that principle can be seen in a rather stark way, and then to examine these implications against our intuition.
There is no need to mention intuition. The context is a discussion between moral philosophers. It is enough for the thing to be reasonably proven even if the thing is felt to be counter-intuitive.
I shall call such a critique a case-implication critique.
But 'case-implication' is not critique. It is a line of reasoning which must be evaluated for plausibility at every link of the chain. Intuition is irrelevant. This is a rational discussion.
The other is to move not from the general to the particular, but from the general to the more general. One can examine the consistency of the principle with another principle that is acknowledged to be more fundamental.
No one can't. All that is impugned is that same 'acknowledgment'. But, it is not germane. Judges, it is true, may hold some principle more fundamental and then apply 'harmonious construction' or strike down what is inconsistent with the 'basic structure of the Constitution'. However, Jurisprudence is 'buck-stopped' as well as protocol bound. Moral philosophy is not. What Sen has said simply isn't true about the subject he claims to be discussing.
Such prior principles are usually formulated at a rather abstract level, and frequently take the form of congruence with some very general procedures. For example, what could be reasonably assumed to have been chosen under the 'as if' ignorance of the Rawlsian “original position,” a hypothetical primordial state in which people decide on what rules to adopt without knowing who they are going to be - as if they could end up being any one of the persons in the community.
Depending on what Econ 101 module Rawls provides his subjects with, anything at all could have been chosen. Suppose you are told that everybody must be the impoverished slave of Stalin otherwise humanity will perish, then that is what you must choose even if the odds are stacked greatly against your being Stalin. It is pointless to say 'but no reasonable Econ 101 module would prescribe this option'. The fact is, Econ has an empirical, ideographic, aspect. It is certainly possible that, because of non-convexities, concurrency problems and so forth, only if humanity becomes the slave of a Stalin will we escape the deadly plague which will be brought to earth by Halle Berry's comet in 2088.
As a matter of fact, if 'regret minimizing' Econ is taught, everybody in the original position would just tell Rawls to fuck off. Uncorrelated asymmetries should be allowed to dictate 'bourgeois strategies' and thus get incorporated into mechanism design as well as change our notions of justice and fairness through lived experience. Not to do so would be to throw away information and thus reduce our biological and other fitness on an uncertain landscape.
In real life, we know we might be hit by a bus and become a cripple. So we pay into insurance schemes and may favor compulsory insurance of an incentive compatible type. We would be mad to stipulate that Society should constantly reorder things to help the least well off. In any case, 'least well off' is a movable feast. You help x, but y is now poorest so you tell x to fuck off and help y but now x is the poorest. This is stupid shit.
Rawls is only valuable because he helps us justify slavery and Stalin and so forth in a language holier than fucking Harvard.
Or what rules would satisfy Richard Hare’s requirement of “universalizability” and be consistent with “giving equal weights to the equal interests of the occupants of all the roles.”
The problem here is that cognition is costly. Thus applying Hare's principle has some cost but we can't be sure it has any benefit. But if we waste resources applying, or even thinking about, Hare's principle, then on what basis can you deny equal time and resources to Iyer's principle which is that to apply any principle before Iyer's principle is racist? Since the observable world in fact adheres to Iyer's principle, it has a concrete model. This does not mean it is consistent with Hare's principle but rather that Hare's principle is immoral.
I shall call a critique based on such an approach a prior-principle critique.
But this critique is empty because 'principles' are 'anything goes'- i.e can always be made congruent with even the most evil outcome.
Both approaches can be used in assessing the moral claims of each type of equality, and will indeed be used here.
Neither approach is relevant. The moral claims which arise in a discussion about economic equality must only be evaluated in moral terms. The moral sense- like the sense for beauty, or elegance, or lovability- is wholly independent of any ratiocinative process. In economics, we recognize that some markets are repugnant and some contracts are unconscionable. This is an ideographic matter. It is not nomothetic or derivable from more fundamental principles nor is it linked to outcomes.
The correct economic theory Moral philosophers should rely on would have 3 components
1) Since Knightian Uncertainty characterizes our fitness landscape, only regret-minimizing strategies, not utility maximizing ones, should be used. Further aggregation should be done through multiplicative update weighting algorithms which have certain robustness qualities we might term 'evolutionarily stable'.
2) Who owns what, or controls what must depend on observable uncorrelated asymmetries or their effects- these are John Maynard Smith's 'bourgeois strategies'. Ignoring them may seem cool, or rad, or woke- but the alternative is just sophomore sophistry.
3) Cognition is costly. Don't try to plan or legislate for Society. Crack a book. Learn about Mechanism Design and incomplete contract theory- that shit is hard, but it pays for itself. Give free reign to mimetic effects and Schelling focal points which track non-computable equilibria or which give rise to co-evolved processes which tame complexity something fierce.
Obviously, this means everything which has been written under this rubric up to now is utter shit. Defund this branch of pedagogy. It is immoral to continue to teach worthless rubbish.
Of course, if the Professors who discussed this nonsense had been good at reasoning then we might still read their shite. But they were terrible at reasoning.
Consider Sen's objection to Utilitarianism-
Insofar as one is concerned with the distribution of utilities,
Sen was concerned with distributing a certain type of utility in that year. Instead of telling me, in so many words, that I was a cretin and should fuck off, he could have said something nice about the question I asked in his class. But Sen wasn't concerned with distributing utility equally. He was interested in commanding the attention of students who weren't obviously mentally retarded. Why? He wanted to advance his own research program. He wanted the best and the brightest to gravitate towards him. He didn't want to get stuck with losers.
it follows immediately that utilitarianism would in general give one little comfort.
If Sen wanted comfort, why did he not buy a teddy bear? Comfortism is about having a nice teddy bear which, when you pull a little string, says 'I wuv you! You are so special!'.
Even the minutest gain in total utility sum would be taken to outweigh distributional inequalities of the most blatant kind.
Only if that is what we wanted when we decided how to measure total utility.
This problem would be avoidable under certain assumptions,
It could only arise under one, very stupid, assumption.
notably the case in which everyone has the same utility function. In the pure distribution problem, with this assumption the utilitarian best would require absolute equality of everyone’s total uti1ities.
If we assume everybody is equal and equally enjoys more cake, then the division is equal. There is no need to calculate anything at the margin.
This is because when the marginal utilities are equated, so would be the total utilities if everyone has the same utility function. This is, however, egalitarianism by serendipity: just the accidental result of the marginal tail wagging the total dog.
No. It is how mathematics works. Suppose there are two trains, 50 miles apart, hurtling towards each other. One is travelling at 20 mph the other is travelling at 30 mph. There is a bumblebee which travels at 60 mph which zig zags between the two. At what time will the fly be squashed as the trains collide? The answer is one hour, which is when the two trains meet. You don't have to calculate the limit of the series describing the flight of the bumblebee. Only the two trains matter. The bee does not. Sen is like the stupid mathematician who calculated the limit of the series when it was blindingly obvious to everyone else that the trains will collide when their combined speed covers the distance between them.
Sen, I suppose, would say, it was just serendipity that the two trains collided at exactly the moment that the limit of the bumblebee's flight's infinite series was reached.
More importantly, the assumption would be very frequently violated, since there are obvious and well-discussed variations between human beings. John may be easy to please, but Jeremy not. If it is taken to be an acceptable prior-principle that the equality of the distribution of total utilities has some value, then the utilitarian conception of equality - marginal as it is - must stand condemned.
This is nonsense. Absent any other information, the proper way to cut up a cake is into equal slices. John may feed Jeremy while stroking his hair and whispering sweet nothings in his ear. We whisper to Jeremy that John is easy to please. Everybody else at the party is a size queen. Anyway, that's the sort of thing I imagine happened in Sen's Cambridge. At the LSE we were all difficult to please- or so we let it be known.
Human diversity gives rise to uncorrelated asymmetries which in turn give rise to eusocial 'bourgeois strategies'- i.e. differences in preference-intensity resulting in different credible threat points. We understand a guy might fight harder to protect what is his than risk injury making off with something to which he has no title. It is eusocial to have public signals in this respect. However, there could also be strategic preference falsification and bogus threats. Unless we have an informational advantage we should not impose a coercive solution. However we can arbitrage between coordination games- pooling equilibria- and discoordination games- separating equilibria. But that is economics, not moral philosophy.
Sen is doing neither when he says-
The case-implication perspective can also be used to develop a related critique, and I have tried to present such a critique elsewhere. For example, if person A as a cripple gets half the utility that the pleasure-wizard person B does from any given level of income, then in the pure distribution problem between A and B the utilitarian would end up giving the pleasure-wizard B more income than the cripple A.
Change 'cripple' to 'miser' and we approve this outcome. Clearly the problem is not with Utility, it is with our feeling of sympathy for the cripple- unless, obviously, he lost his legs escaping from a prison camp for Nazi war criminals.
Sen thinks this is 'case implicature'. It isn't. It is a blatant manipulation of our feelings by the use of emotive words like cripple and 'pleasure wizard'.
The cripple would then be doubly worse off: both since he gets less utility from the same level of income, and since he will also get less income.
This is 'double counting' which Economists are warned against. The cripple is worse off only because he is worse at turning money into utility. A good and moral person would work with the cripple so as to help him get more out of life. A smart person might figure out a way to turn the cripple into a gold winning medallist in the Paralympics. A STEM subject maven might find a way to given this guy better legs and a bigger dick and a hair transplant and so forth.
Sen, moral imbecile that he is, has wheeled in this cripple just to make his rivals look bad. But Sen fails. He has merely shown himself to be a cretin.
Utilitarianism must lead to this thanks to its single-minded concern with maximizing the utility sum.
Under existing informational constraints. Change those constraints and you could get a different result. The Nazi war-criminal cripple should get no Income at all. He should be hanged. The pleasure-wizard, whose entire family was butchered at Dachau, should get a lot more income so he can travel the world spreading his gospel of how to be happier with unchanged income.
What of Sen? He now tells an outright lie-
The pleasure-wizard’s superior efficiency in producing utility would pull income away from the less efficient cripple.
If Income has been distributed equally it must be the case that everybody's total utility had been set to the same level. The pleasure-wizard got the same Income as John or Jeremy or Adolph the cripple. Nothing 'pulled income away' from Adolph. It came to him the same as it came to John or Jeremy.
As a matter of fact, physically disabled people enjoy life and enable others to enjoy life to the max. Sen is a disgusting, 'ableist', piece of shit. However, it is certainly true that there are people who get very little extra utility from extra income. But this represents a market opportunity. We need to figure out ways to get them spending and enjoying their income. The result would be more jobs and a 'multiplier' effect for the economy.
The problems of Utilitarian theory are easily solved. I just say, if I were the Benthamite Social planner, I'd attribute more utility to this guy coz I sympathize with him and less to that guy coz I don't approve of his way of life. You may say something different and we could have a reasoned discussion. This could be part of moral philosophy or welfare economics but only if we discard Sen's 'case-implication' or 'prior principle' approach. Why? They falsely create the impression that this isn't just a story about my prejudices vs your prejudices. It has something to do with maths or econ. The truth is, a reasoned discussion in which I say 'fucking Estate Agents! Tax them at 90 per cent!' and you reply, 'actually, having a good Estate Agent saved my Aunty Mary's life. We needed money quickly for an emergency operation and luckily the guy my cousin Andy bought his flat from was able to get a cash buyer and arrange a bridging loan.' I suddenly realize there are good and bad Estate Agents just as there are good and bad Sens.
Marginal Utility, in Microeconomics, is the pleasure received from the last unit consumed. Bizarrely, Sen confuses it with 'marginal propensity to consume'- which isn't about utility except indirectly- and is a term from Macroeconomics.
First of all, while we economists often tend to treat the marginal and the total as belonging to the same plane of discourse, there is an important difference between them. Marginal is an essentially counter-factual notion: marginal utility is the additional utility that would be generated if the person had one more unit of income. It contrasts what is observed with what allegedly would be observed if something else were different: in this case if the income had been one unit greater.
A counterfactual refers to something in the past- which can't now be altered- e.g. if Hitler had won the war then such and such would have happened... But Hitler is dead. He can't win shit. However, Income could go up and consumption could go up and marginal utility could go up. Why? This is because, unlike the Past, the Future is still open.
Total is not, however, an inherently counter-factual concept; whether it is or is not would depend on the variable that is being totalled.
No. A total only depends on what it sums over. If these entities are posited, or otherwise given, there is a total which can be checked and rechecked. If nothing exists to be summed, no summation is possible.
In case of utilities, if they are taken to be observed facts, total utility will not be counter-factual.
It does not matter whether they are taken to be facts or are merely posited for some other purpose. So long as there are numbers which can be summed, there will be a total. I can say 'if Hitler had won the war and if he had continued his genocidal policies with the same virulence then, I estimate, that the total death toll would have been higher than that of Stalin plus Mao. So Hitler was more evil than either.' People could check my sums and give reasons for why I might have underestimated the death-toll. That maniac would probably have started killing such of his people as had even a remote non-Nordic ancestor.
Thus total utility equality is a matter for direct observation,
No. We can't directly observe and measure utility or beauty or truthiness or lovability. However, we are welcome to adopt a convention such that everyone has equal total utility and total cuddliness and total lovability etc.
whereas utilitarian equality is not so, since the latter requires hypotheses as to what things would have been under different postulated circumstances.
No. It merely requires an equally false convention to be adopted.
The contrast can be easily traced to the fact that utilitarian equality is essentially a consequence of sum maximization,
of what? Values imputed by convention.
which is itself a counter-factual notion,
No it isn't. Anything at all can be imputed to anything at all. I can say 'forty fairies dance upon the tip of every rose and, best beloved, in the garden of the Sultan, forty roses grow. How many fairies dance in the Sultan's garden?'
Similarly I may babble about pleasure-wizards and cripples and impute utilities to them till I am blue in the fact. But this is mere fantasy, not anything which rises to the strict and demanding standards of a truly counter-factual debate- e.g. could Spiderman beat up Dracula?
whereas total utility equality is an equality of some directly observed magnitudes.
No. It is something imputed by convention- like saying everybody is equally loveable and beautiful in the eyes of God.
Second, utilitarianism provides a complete ordering of all utility distributions
No. Some guy may make some such imputation- e.g saying I award ten utiles to peeps I like and zero utiles to cunts I dislike- and, sure, it could be a total ranking, but so what? Hitler had one and, take it from me, he was not a good guy.
- the ranking reflecting the order of the sums of individual utilities- but as specified so far, total utility equality does not do more than just point to the case of absolute equality.
By a fucking imputation you stupid cretin!
Do you not get that saying 'forty fairies dance on a rose, while only twenty dance on a dandelion' you are doing exactly the same thing as saying 'all peeps score 100 per cent in beauty and intelligence and being beloved of God' ? This is just idle talk is all- though, it must be said, Medical panels may indeed use some such scoring mechanism to decide who gets a liver transplant etc.
In dealing with two cases of non-equal distributions, something more has to be said so that they could be ranked.
No. Ranking could be purely arbitrary or done by a drunken lunatic. The algebra wouldn't change.
The ranking can be completed in many different ways.
No. It can either be completed algorithmically or non-algorithmically (i.e. by relying on the judgment of some person or committee or else by tossing a coin or consulting an oracle or using a non-deterministic type of computation).
One way to such a complete ranking is provided by the lexicographic version of the maximin rule, which is associated with the Rawlsian Difference Principle, but interpreted in terms of utilities as opposed to primary goods.
Where do the utilities come from? If they are being plugged in from outside then the resulting ranking is non-algorithmic. It has been imposed from outside.
Here the goodness of the state of affairs is judged by the level of utility of the worst-off person in that state;
but both 'level of utility' and 'worst-off person' are determined outside the system. Thus this is an imposed ranking. It is not 'intensional'. Mathematics can say nothing here.
It is easy enough to rank imaginary things. However, if you gather information to do a ranking such that Income distribution might change then everything changes. For a start, some people currently in the society will exit it. Others will invest in getting 'least well off status' while, more generally, non-economic inequality will rise as people substitute non-economic positional and other goods for earned or unearned income.
This is the reason, the quest for economic equality ran out of steam in the Seventies. Workers didn't want to be taxed to subsidize the supposedly work-shy. Even where this was not the case, Income had to compensate for the disutility of work. Thus Social Justice simply became a repugnant market for its own utterly futile supply.
Sen quotes Rawls in connection with the 'obtuseness' of welfarism. Sadly, it is its imbecility which is more to the point.
In calculating the greatest balance of satisfaction it does not matter, except indirectly, what the desires are for.
Yes it does. Consumption is itself an input for Production. People who demand things which raise their productivity will get richer. Trying to tax them will fail because they will either flee or discover ways to get greater utility from leisure than suffer disutility from work.
We are to arrange institutions
no you are not. You are too stupid.
so as to obtain the greatest sum of satisfactions; we ask no questions about their source or quality but only how their satisfaction would affect the total of well-being. . . .
but 'source' or 'quality' have 'externalities' they also directly affect the production function.
Thus if men take a certain pleasure in discriminating against one another, in subjecting others to a lesser liberty as a means of enhancing their self-respect, then the satisfaction of these desires must be weighed in our deliberations according to their intensity, or whatever, along with other desires. . . .
No. It is perfectly legitimate to get people to find pleasure in things which are good for them and for society and to wean them away from sadistic or vicious pleasures.
In justice as fairness, on the other hand, persons accept in advance a principle of equal liberty
either one has liberty or one doesn't. Accepting a principle of equal liberty won't magically create it. There has to be a more or less costly means of defending liberty which, at the margin, excludes those less able to pay for it or who lack a sufficient threat point.
and they do this without a knowledge of their more particular ends. . . .
but they do know if they are men or women, straight or gay and they have lots of other unconscious biases arising from 'uncorrelated equilibria'- e.g. skin color, size and build, sexual attractiveness etc. It is perfectly possible that there was a time when many Gay people would have agreed that a homophobic Society was 'Righteous' because of the manner in which they had been brainwashed.
Is it rational to want equal liberty for all? No. Maniacal serial killers should have none. On the other hand, Sherlock Holmes should have more liberty so that he can track down the dastardly Moriarty.
An individual who finds that he enjoys seeing others in positions of lesser liberty understands that he has no claim whatever to this enjoyment.
Nor does he have any 'claim' to any other type of enjoyment. That's why you can't go to court to force rainbows to appear and fill your heart with delight the way they used to when Trump was in the White House and all was right with the world.
The pleasure he takes in other’s deprivation is wrong in itself: it is a satisfaction which requires the violation of a principle to which he would agree in the original position.
But this is the reason he wouldn't agree to it in the first place. Why bind yourself for no immediate consideration? Which lawyer says to you, 'agree to any contract- social or otherwise- offered to you?' They would say 'don't agree to shit. Suggest that you require a douceur to even consider the proposition.'
Sen doesn't get that Utilitarianism can put a negative value on vicious pleasures while putting a multiplier on meritorious sentiments.
It is easily seen that this is an argument not merely against utilitarianism, but against the adequacy of utility information for moral judgments of states of affairs, and is, thus, an attack on welfarism in general.
No. It is merely stupid shit. Rawls thought people were queuing up round the block to sign on to a particularly stupid Social Contract which would have quickly caused the collapse of Society if implemented.
Second, it is clear that as a criticism of welfarism - and a fortiori as a critique of utilitarianism - the argument uses a principle that is unnecessarily strong. If it were the case that pleasures taken “in other’s deprivation” were not taken to be wrong in itself, but simply disregarded, even then the rejection of welfarism would stand. Furthermore, even if such pleasures were regarded as valuable, but less valuable than pleasures arising from other sources (e.g., enjoying food, work, or leisure), welfarism would still stand rejected. The issue— as John Stuart Mill had noted-is the lack of “parity” between one source of utility and another.
Which is also a reason there should be a lack of parity in liberties and entitlements
Welfarism requires the endorsement not merely of the widely shared intuition that any pleasure has some value - and one would have to be a bit of a kill-joy to dissent from this- but also the much more dubious proposition that pleasures must be relatively weighed only according to their respective intensities, irrespective of the source of the pleasure and the nature of the activity that goes with it.
No. There is a useful Structural Causal Model of 'pleasures' which can be used to change what people like so they have better lives and Society improves.
Finally, Rawls’s argument takes the form of an appeal to the prior principle of equating moral rightness with prudential acceptability in the original position.
But this could lead to bizarre outcomes like a ban on sex. I definitely don't want to be fucked by a man. If there's a 50-50 chance I could be a woman then my leximin strategy is to say no fucking way should anyone have sex. Women too may want to stipulate for this because they know the truth about whether size matters and how few men are blessed in that respect.
Even those who do not accept that prior principle could reject the welfarist no-nonsense counting of utility irrespective of all other information by reference to other prior principles, e.g., the irreducible value of liberty.
But everybody could do so because no good purpose is served by this silliness.
The relevance of non-utility information to moral judgments is the central issue involved in disputing welfarism.
But if moral judgments can have a metric then we could say this was the utility function of those engaged in that activity.
Libertarian considerations point towards a particular class of non-utility information,
information useful to Libertarians yields a utility function for them.
and I have argued elsewhere that this may require even the rejection of the so-called Pareto principle based on utility dominance.
It could require any stupid shite whatsoever.
But there are also other types of non-utility information which have been thought to be intrinsically important. Tim Scanlon has recently discussed the contrast between “urgency” and utility (or intensity of preference), He has also argued that “the criteria of well-being that we actually employ in making moral judgments are objective,” and a person’s level of well-being is taken to be “independent of that person’s tastes and interests.”
That is certainly true. But it is also true that we soon realize that it is immoral to make moral judgments unless, obviously, we are paid to do so and can't get any other job because of our issues with incontinence.
These moral judgments could thus conflict with utilitarian - and more generally (Scanlon could have argued) with welfarist - moralities, no matter whether utility is interpreted as pleasure, or - as is increasingly common recently - as desire-fulfilment.
why not just say utility is what is useful?
However, acknowledging the relevance of objective factors does not require that well-being be taken to be independent of tastes, and Scanlon’s categories are too pure.
We could easily say- 'by taste we mean some subjective bias which we would abandon if we knew it led us to make worse choices'. I recall, when first reading praise of JK Rowling's Harry Potter novel, I thought to myself 'It's bound to be some politically correct shite and thus not to my taste'. Then I saw a little kid engrossed in reading a copy of 'Philosopher's stone'. I have the same tastes as little kids. So I bought myself a copy and, though I did get so scared that I wet myself a couple of times, gained great 'well-being' from Rowling's books.
Categories in natural language are either useful or pure. Scanlon's are useful enough. Nothing could be more 'urgent' than that an addict get her next 'fix'. But heroin in this context is not utile at all. It harms well-being.
For example, a lack of “parity” between utility from self-regarding actions and that from other-regarding actions will go beyond utility as an index of well-being and will be fatal to welfarism, but the contrast is not, of course, independent of tastes and subjective features.
This is nonsense. We do get utility from the well-being of others. Of course, we may be wrong about what yields utility to them. But we may equally be wrong about what is good for us.
“Objective” considerations can count along with a person’s tastes. What is required is the denial that a person’s well-being be judged exclusively in terms of his or her utilities.
But this is not what is happening. It is enough to say, ceteris paribus, people are better off when they have more money- i.e. transferable utility. Let us move on to figuring out how to raise productivity so that this can happen sustainably.
If such judgments take into account a person’s pleasures and desire-fulfilments, but also certain objective factors, e.g., whether he or she is hungry, cold, or oppressed, the resulting calculus would still be non-welfarist.
Only in the opinion of a pedant who thinks it is important to define 'welfarism'. But nothing utile is gained by doing so.
Welfarism is an extremist position, and its denial can take many different forms - pure and mixed - so long as totally ignoring non-utility information is avoided.
We don't know that any information whatsoever is 'non-utility' information. If the thing has a use then it is utility information. Even establishing that it isn't useful, can be useful for moving forward more rapidly across a wide range of problems.
During periods of National Emergency- e.g. during a total war- the Government may have to decide what consumer goods and services should be distributed to the population. A similar calculation may have to be made for a Space Station or Rocket Ship. At that point, 'tastes' will be irrelevant. Experts will agree on what gives and what doesn't give utility and a minimum material standard of living for all will be drawn up. This may make life somewhat grey, but the dramatic nature of unfolding events more than makes up for any monotony of diet or dress.
Sen, in pushing for 'Basic Capability Equality' asks-
Can we not construct an adequate theory of equality on the combined grounds of Rawlsian equality and equality under the two welfarist conceptions, with some trade-offs among them.
No. Rawlsian equality will be rejected in favor of a collective insurance scheme. The other two conceptions will be dismissed because, absent some pressing emergency- or the possibility that we are going to be shot out into Space with some minimal life-support equipment- there is no point measuring utility because everybody thinks you are stupid. They will tell you to fuck off if you try to talk to them. Also, you actually are stupid.
I would now like to argue briefly why I believe this too may prove to be informationally short. This can, of course, easily be asserted if claims arising from considerations other than well-being were acknowledged to be legitimate. Non-exploitation, or non-discrimination, requires the use of information not fully captured either by utility or by primary goods.
No it doesn't. There is exploitation or discrimination if transferable marginal utility from the same extra hour of labor is different for a systemic reason- e.g market segmentation by a monopsonist or pervasive gender or racial or educational discrimination.
Other conceptions of entitlements can also be brought in going beyond concern with personal well-being only. But in what follows I shall not introduce these concepts. My contention is that even the concept of needs does not get adequate coverage through the information on primary goods and utility. I shall use a case-implication argument. Take the cripple again with marginal utility disadvantage.
He has no transferable marginal utility disadvantage. He is in the same boat as an old man like me who can no longer eat and drink to surfeit. But I can gain utility by treating young people to a slap up mean with plenty of wine or beer going around the table.
We saw that utilitarianism would do nothing for him; in fact it will give him less income than to the physically fit.
No. We saw he'd get the same income. Sen double counted- i.e. cheated. In a market economy, the 'cripple' may earn more because of lower disutility from work. He may gain higher transferable utility by helping other people. But his position is the same as an older man like me. Suppose I was given a pair of expensive roller-skates. I can't use them. But I do know a young person who would be delighted to receive them. I'd gain a lot of utility seeing this person zipping around on those handsome skates.
Nor would the Difference Principle help him; it will leave his physical disadvantage severely alone.
No. It would militate for disabled access to offices etc. That's a worthwhile investment. The young and able-bodied feel happy when they see that the 'cripples' are getting an equal chance to contribute. Indeed, their contribution may be proportionately much greater.
He did, however, get preferential treatment under leximin, and more generally, under criteria fostering total equality. His low level of total utility was the basis of his claim.
The disabled have never made any such claims. They want the chance to contribute. They aren't whining about their miserable life. Even old fools like me aren't complaining that we can't enjoy our food as much as we used to. It would be crazy to give lots of money to very old billionaires in the futile attempt to make life as enjoyable to them as it is for teenagers.
But now suppose that he is no worse off than others in utility terms despite his physical handicap because of certain other utility features. This could be because he has a jolly disposition. Or because he has a low aspiration level and his heart leaps up whenever he sees a rainbow in the sky. Or because he is religious and feels that he will be rewarded in after-life, or cheerfully accepts what he takes to be just penalty for misdeeds in a past incarnation. The important point is that despite his marginal utility disadvantage, he has no longer a total utility deprivation.
But he may have lower disutility of work. It makes sense to help him have better access to high productivity employment. His total transferable utility may then be greater but all can see that Society as a whole has benefited.
Now not even leximin— or any other notion of equality focussing on total utility - will do much for him. If we still think that he has needs as a cripple that should be catered to, then the basis of that claim clearly rests neither in high marginal utility, nor in low total utility, nor of course - in deprivation in terms of primary goods. It is arguable that what is missing in all this framework is some notion of “basic capabilities”: a person being able to do certain basic things. The ability to move about is the relevant one here, but one can consider others, e.g., the ability to meet one’s nutritional requirements, the wherewithal to be clothed and sheltered, the power to participate in the social life of the community.
Good people can see that providing facilities which overcome such obstacles is good for Society. It may be that the large number of people left disabled after two World Wars helped improve matters in this respect. However, it is the sterling contribution made by disabled people which has led all enterprises to see the wisdom of finding ways to gain their very valuable help.
The notion of urgency related to this is not fully captured by either utility or primary goods, or any combination of the two. Primary goods suffers from fetishist handicap in being concerned with goods,
no they don't. It is not the case that pervs are constantly wanking over them.
and even though the list of goods is specified in a broad and inclusive way, encompassing rights, liberties, opportunities, income, wealth, and the social basis of self-respect, it still is concerned with good things rather than with what these good things do to human beings.
A senseless distinction worthy only of a fetishist.
Utility, on the other hand, is concerned with what these things do to human beings, but uses a metric that focusses not on the person’s capabilities but on his mental reaction.
Nonsense! Anyway, 'mental reaction' is itself a capability.
There is something still missing in the combined list of primary goods and utilities.
It is positional goods and ontologically dysphoric hedges.
If it is argued that resources should be devoted to remove or substantially reduce the handicap of the cripple despite there being no marginal utility argument (because it is expensive), despite there being no total utility argument (because he is so contented), and despite there being no primary goods deprivation (because he has the goods that others have), the case must rest on something else.
Sen fails to see that disabled people are productive. Removing obstacles and improving accessibility yields a bigger cake- i.e. more transferable utility.
I believe what is at issue is the interpretation of needs in the form of basic capabilities. This interpretation of needs and interests is often implicit in the demand for equality. This type of equality I shall call “basic capability equality.” The focus on basic capabilities can be seen as a natural extension of Rawls’s concern with primary goods, shifting attention from goods to what goods do to human beings.
Goods gain a market by being designed to do good to human beings. Sen assumes that they exist only because of some perverse fetishism.
Rawls himself motivates judging advantage in terms of primary goods by referring to capabilities, even though his criteria end up focussing on goods as such: on income rather than on what income does, on the “social bases of self-respect” rather than on self-respect itself, and so on.
Self-respect is not an economic good. No scarcity or opportunity cost is involved. There is nothing to stop everybody self-respecting themselves and also respecting everybody else to an infinite degree.
If human beings were very like each other, this would not have mattered a great deal, but there is evidence that the conversion of goods to capabilities varies from person to person substantially, and the equality of the former may still be far from the equality of the latter.
So what? These capabilities vary over the course of the day for every person. They tend to decrease with age. It is not possible to have equal enjoyment of food or sleep or kisses at all moments in the day- or even the hour.
There are, of course, many difficulties with the notion of “basic capability equality.” In particular, the problem of indexing the basic capability bundles is a serious one.
The game is not worth the candle. That's why it hasn't been done. Still, it may be, for a Human colony on Mars, some such index may be devised.
It is, in many ways, a problem comparable with the indexing of primary good bundles in the context of Rawlsian equality. This is not the occasion to go into the technical issues involved in such an indexing, but it is clear that whatever partial ordering can be done on the basis of broad uniformity of personal preferences must be supplemented by certain established conventions of relative importance.
In other words, there has to be a 'buck-stopping' mechanism. 'Public reasoning' can't go on vomiting over the subject. Decisions have to be made. Sen has to be told to fuck off.
The ideas of relative importance are, of course, conditional on the nature of the society. The notion of the equality of basic capabilities is a very general one, but any application of it must be rather culture-dependent, especially in the weighting of different capabilities.
Societies engaged in a war or other such emergency may have to produce 'basic goods' and distribute them equitably. Israel in the Fifties and Sixties is an example as was Ireland at one time. Since then, their productivity has grown enormously and they have a much more consumerist life-style because they are 'knowledge economies'.
While Rawlsian equality has the characteristic of being both culture-dependent and fetishist, basic capability equality avoids fetishism, but remains culture-dependent. Indeed, basic capability equality can be seen as essentially an extension of the Rawlsian approach in a non-fetishist direction.
Or it can be seen as Sen's own fetishistic need to pretend he is a 'moral philosopher' rather than a crap economist.
The fact is, utility theory was only useful because work had come to be seen as 'disutility'. Owners of factors of production preferred to let them stand idle rather than take the trouble to make them as useful as possible to the nation. Was there a non-coercive way forward? Yes. One could tell stupid moralists- guys like Sen who think 'luxuries' are wicked- to fuck off and encourage the supply of all sorts of positional goods or even 'ontologically dysphoric' hedges against mortality. The burgeoning of the Arts and Sciences and various novel Spiritual and Ethical and 'Life-style' services was one result. Another was that 'transferable utility' gained orient horizons. Life became richer and more colorful. Hundreds of millions escaped the Malthusian trap of involuted agriculture. Meanwhile Sen, fetishist that he is, was jizzing all over this stupid 'Capabilities' approach bullshit. Still, he got paid for the disutility he was creating. There is a niche, but Globalized, market for virtue signaling stupidity. Cramming himself into it, Amartya has achieved immortality, not by any great feat of erudition, but simply by refusing to just fucking die already. In so choosing, Sen has turned his back on the one true agent of equality and of Justice- Yama, the god of death, who alone knows our capabilities.
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