In my previous post I asked if Sen was simply crap at English. He didn't understand that, in English Law, there is a 'reasonable person test', and, moreover, contracts can be read into a situation where it would be reasonable to do so irrespective of whether there was any agreement. Rawls, being familiar with this aspect of Anglo Saxon tradition was not saying there was an actual social contract or that his own original position referred to any such thing. Sen, hilariously, pretended otherwise. His conclusion, however, was that Adam Smith's 'impartial observer' had some supernatural power not available to those in Rawl's gedanken of the original position.
Sen wrote-
We must, however, also ask whether the Smithian approach of the impartial spectator is not similarly troubled by incongruity arising from group plasticity,
a spectator is one person. One person is not a group. How the fuck could a single person be troubled by incongruity arising from being a member of a group?
and if not, why not. It is not, in fact, similarly troubled precisely for the reason that the impartial spectator need not come from the given focal group.
Nonsense! Smith's 'impartial observer' has vast worldly wisdom arising out of experience of being part of a particular 'focal' group- viz. the set of smart, successful, people in Society who determine what is or isn't 'eudoxa' or best practice. True, the 'impartial observer' is a ghostly being similar to 'the angel of one's better nature' or that bit of you which could of gone to collidge and made good in the corporate rat race. But that impartial observer is deeply embedded in your own society. This is not a creature from Mars or an artificial intelligence from the 44th dimension.
Indeed, Smith’s ‘abstract and ideal spectator’ is a ‘spectator’ and not a ‘participant’ in any exercise like a group-based contract.
But, Smith shows that 'impartial spectator' as participating in discussion with the agent. It's a voice inside his head which says 'don't get drunk at the office party. You'll end up pooping yourself and punching the boss. Then, you'll be fired and end up homeless. '
There is no contracting group, and there is no insistence even that the evaluators must be congruent with the affected group.
But the 'impartial observer' is you- but smart and prudent and chock full of worldly wisdom.
Even though there remains the very difficult problem of how an impartial spectator would go about deciding on such issues as variable population size (an ethical issue of profound complexity),
This is easily done. Your impartial observer tells you not to have babies like crazy if a lot of those babies are gonna starve or end up sucking off dudes to get a bit of cash and protein in their diet. True, if your country is underpopulated and it is obvious that if you have ten kids then each of those ten kids is gonna end up living in a big mansion- then, sure, be pro-natalist.
the problem of incoherence and incongruity in ‘inclusionary closure’ in the contractarian exercise
does not exist.
does not have an immediate analogue in the case of the impartial spectator.
Actually, we could easily create such an analogue. We just say that the 'impartial spectator' isn't really impartial at all. He doesn't get that if you end up homeless then you will derive great benefit from sucking off strangers and developing schizophrenia with the result that you and you alone come to see that shape-shifting lizards have taken over the planet and are controlling everybody with 'mind-waves'. A more erudite way of saying the same thing is that Smith's 'impartial observer' is 'inauthentic' and represents petit bourgeois 'false consciousness'.
The fact is, Amartya Sen has made a career of reading his own cretinism into any text whatsoever. This is a talk he gave to the Scots on their own Adam Smith
One of the more subtle points of Smith that seems to have been fairly widely missed is his pointer to the impossibility of thinking of poverty without going, at the same time, into inequality.
This is nonsense. Smith, like others of his time, thought that highly egalitarian societies- like the naked Patagonians- were likely to be very poor. Indeed, the English often made comments of this sort about the Highland Scots. Smith taught that you have to increase inequality in every possible way so as to build up a Wealthy Nation. One mechanism by which this happens is that people begin to feel ashamed for not having something their neighbours have. If everybody is wearing leather shoes, you feel ashamed of your wooden clogs. Even those at the bottom of Society feel they have to work a few more hours every week so as to 'appear with credit in society' by following the prevailing fashion. Thus a country could only rise out of poverty if its people began to feel ashamed of their lack of possessions. Expenditure on 'luxuries' and 'fripperies' were a good thing because they were the spur which caused people to work harder and become more skilful and commercially minded.
For each person, the income and resources needed for achieving the same minimal functionings and for having the same capabilities continue to grow with the overall progress of an economy and the rise in other people’s incomes. For example, to be able to “appear in public without shame” may require higher standards of clothing and other visible consumption in a richer society than in a poorer one, Smith noted.
Only if people felt shame for not being able to follow the fashion. Of course, the opposite would also be the case. If the rich felt ashamed to dress well then they would get lazier and more careless with their money and so the Nation as a whole would lapse into Gandhian mendicancy.
Smith himself was not instrumentalizing shame. Perhaps it would be more just to speak of 'cognitive dissonance'. People don't want to stand out as an oddity. They want to conform. Similarly, rather than speak of 'associationalism' we might simply say that Smith's recipe for Wealth creation for the Nation is 'Tardean mimetics'. Find a superior role model and mimic it. But remember your limitations. Thus Scotland could imitate small scale stuff England and Holland were doing- e.g. setting up export industries. It could not do large scale stuff like creating its own colonies.
The corollary for independent India was it could do small-scale stuff which other poor countries were doing- e.g. focus on textiles and other labour intensive export markets. It couldn't do what the Soviets or Chinese Communists were doing through their 5 year Plans. Why? Stalin and Mao could shoot those who failed to overfulfill their output target. They could kill or deport vast classes of people. India could not do that. At best a bureaucrat could threaten an industrialist- like Rahul Bajaj- who overproduced his quota. Still, Bengal had plenty of buddhijivi 'prodigals and projectors' of that type of 'Scientific Socialism'.
Sen says
it is striking how insightful Smith was in identifying the destructive influences of those whom he called “prodigals and projectors”.
Smith was wrong. Bentham was right. Smith thought that the interest rate should not be allowed to rise because then only fraudsters would borrow. But who would lend to fraudsters? If people really are that stupid, let them get fleeced till they learn better. The sub-prime fiasco was about lending to...urm... how should I put this politely? Actually, there were 'projectors' who did well out of what was supposed to be an altruistic scheme to help....urm... urban folk. Guess who got stuck with the shitty end of the stick?
That analysis is, in fact, deeply relevant today in understanding what has just happened in the financial world. The implicit faith in the wisdom of the market economy, which was largely responsible for the removal of the established regulations in the United States, tended to assume away the activities of prodigals and projectors in a way that would have shocked the pioneering exponent of the rationale of the market economy. It is interesting in this context to note that Jeremy Bentham wrote to Smith a long letter, questioning this part of his analysis and disputing in particular Smith’s remarks about the so-called “prodigals and projectors” (Bentham 1843a). Bentham argued, among his other points, that those whom Smith called “projectors” were also the innovators and pioneers of economic progress. As it happens, Bentham did not manage to persuade Smith to change his mind on this indictment, even though Bentham kept on hoping to do just that, and on one occasion convinced himself, with little evidence, that Smith’s views on this had become the same as his. Smith knew the distinction between innovating and projecting well enough, and gave little evidence of changing his mind on this subject. Now, more than two centuries later, the distinction remains sadly relevant as we try to understand the nature and causation of the crisis that has hit the world of finance
This is bunkum. There has been plenty of innovation over the last 20 years. It isn't financed by borrowing money. IPOs are the way to go. Bentham and Smith were writing to each other before Joint Stock Companies became common.
Smith did not know the 'distinction between innovating and projecting'. No one does. Is quantum computing gonna make mega-bucks? What about cold-fusion? We'll have to wait and see.
Smith did not believe that we have an inborn notion of right and wrong. Everything has to be learnt from experience and that experience is relative to the society in which one finds oneself. He writes-
When a philosopher goes to examine why humanity is approved of, or cruelty condemned, he does not always form to himself, in a very clear and distinct manner, the conception of any one particular action either of cruelty or of humanity, but is commonly contented with the vague and indeterminate idea which the general names of those qualities suggest to him.
This is nonsense. When a kid hears the word 'humane' he thinks of a nice guy who gives him sweeties. When he hears the word 'cruel', he thinks of a nasty guy who steals his sweeties and beats him and fucks him in the ass.
But it is in particular instances only that the propriety or impropriety, the merit or demerit of actions is very obvious and discernible.
Again, this is nonsense. Smith was as stupid as shit but was getting paid to give utterly useless lectures which, however, reflected the conventional wisdom of the governing class in his country. The fact is, the more you look at 'particular instances' the more you doubt there is a bright line between propriety and impropriety.
It is only when particular examples are given that we perceive distinctly either the concord or disagreement between our own affections and those of the agent, or feel a social gratitude arise towards him in the one case, or a sympathetic resentment in the other.
But then the opposing counsel gets up and convinces us otherwise. Ultimately, we might have to come down on one side or the other- but only if we are locked up in the Jury room. Otherwise we just lose interest and go home.
When we consider virtue and vice in an abstract and general manner, the qualities by which they excite these several sentiments seem in a great measure to disappear, and the sentiments themselves become less obvious and discernible.
The same thing happens when we consider stuff which does not matter to us in the slightest.
On the contrary, the happy effects of the one and the fatal consequences of the other seem then to rise up to the view, and as it were to stand out and distinguish themselves from all the other qualities of either.
Smith just contradicted himself. He truly was the Father of modern economics- i.e. as stupid as shit.
Consider the following-
The qualities most useful to ourselves are, first of all,
those by reason of which we command resources and gain happiness in life.
superior reason and understanding,
Fuck that! If you were born frail and deaf and blind, superior reason and understanding won't make your short life any less miserable. Robust good health is the quality most useful to us.
by which we are capable of discerning the remote consequences of all our actions,
What fucking 'remote consequences' are worth discerning for a young slave being buggered silly by his master? The fellow will top himself before he is gelded and sold as a eunuch.
and of foreseeing the advantage or detriment which is likely to result from them: and secondly, self-command, by which we are enabled to abstain from present pleasure or to endure present pain, in order to obtain a greater pleasure or to avoid a greater pain in some future time.
Self-command might involve topping yourself before everybody goes to town on your ass. Fuck having 'self-command'. The most useful quality to have under those circumstances is a talent for poking out the eyes of your tormentor before taking your time killing him and his chums. Berzerker rage may be a useful quality. Self-command, not so much. Why? There is a stochastic quality to the former which means that a 'mixed strategy' is being played. Basically, this means it is riskier to tangle with the dude. A Polish sociologist who spent some time in jail discovered that there really was an advantage for being known to be an unpredictable head-case. Even a small guy was left alone if he had a 'Joker' vibe.
In the union of those two qualities consists the virtue of prudence, of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual.
No. It is the virtue most useful to a Chartered Accountant who will never make Partner. But the guy will still lose his pension when the people at the top tank the Company by giving Enron or Madoff or whatever a clean chit.
There's a good reason why the only people who read Smith were cretins like Bentham, whom nobody read. Sen writes-
Smith argues that while “prudence” is “of all the virtues that which is most useful to the individual […]
though it is unknowable save through a long period of observing its effects in different social settings after which it has become internalized and is 'second nature'- but only if you are the kind of Chartered Accountant who will never make Partner.
humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others”.
though they too are unknowable save through a long period & c. In other words, Smith isn't arguing anything at all. He is giving a description of an unfalsifiable type. Basically, peeps in a harmonious society where things are going well may be termed prudent, or cuddly or nice or humane or sweetie pies or just or bottom smackingly scrumptious or public spirited or having ambrosial jizz or whatever laudatory predicate you wish to accord them.
The canny Scot was 'prudent' in the sense that she did not waste her money. But, precisely because she wanted to benefit her own country, she was willing to take calculated risks. Indians appreciate the enterprise shown by Scottish people. Look at the Jute industry. It was created by the Scots. But the Scots did not rest on their laurels. They continued to innovate and take risks so as to retain their competitive edge. One result was that an Indian lady- Kiran Mazumdar Shaw who trained as a brew-master in Australia but whom the Indians would not employ in such lowly 'masculine work' had to go to Scotland to get a job in the field she was trained in. Why did the Scots, not the Ozzies or the English or the Americans, give Kiran a job? I suppose it was because they needed to keep their competitive edge by hiring on the basis of character, not color of skin. When the Scots saw that Kiran had what it takes to rise to the top in a highly competitive knowledge based industry, they got behind her and so she (and her Scottish husband who was highly regarded in Bangalore business circles) became billionaires. But they risked their own money. Was this prudent? Yes, as it turned out- but only because they had fine character and actually knew what they were doing. Kiran and her husband have helped India greatly. Sen gassing on about Smith has been utterly useless.
The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society: even John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate in the United States complained constantly of “the greed of Wall Street” in his campaign speeches in the summer of 2008. Indeed, much evidence has emerged powerfully in recent years in that direction, in addition to what we already knew from past studies of the failings of motivational narrowness.
McCain lived long enough to see Trump elected. Whatever the lesson of the crash, it wasn't what Sen thought it was. Americans want the Treasury to send them a nice fat check every month. They don't want their money spent on killing sand-niggers who would probably kill each other without a single tax dollar being spent. Voters don't care if the Government gives them money taken from the Bankers or money saved from not drone striking Bedouins. This 'motivational narrowness' is a good thing. It curbs the nuisance that is American foreign policy.
Smith himself was rescued from the oblivion his own garrulous imbecility should have guaranteed him by the fact that
1) he was Scottish- i.e. funny because we think of him as wearing a kilt and talking like Billy Connolly
2) motivational narrowness could be ascribed to him- i.e. we can ignore all the dreck he wrote and just concentrate on the zinger he got off re. the benevolence of the butcher.
Sen turns Smith into a Bengali blathershite who isn't funny at all coz instead of sounding like Apu on the Simpsons, the guy talks posher than the Queen's tits.
Despite Smith’s frequent discussion of the importance of motivations other than self-interest, he has somehow developed the reputation of being a champion of the unique importance of self-interest for all human beings.
Yes. Smith's name has currency because we say 'Smith championed rational self-interest' rather than 'Smith wrote boring shite about all sorts of boring shite'. But, the fact is, had Smith not been from Scotland- a country which showed you can get ahead through hard work, good character, useful education, enterprise and thrift- nobody would give a toss about him. Scotland matters because it has contributed so much to making the world a better place. Smith matters because he was a Scottish patriot who was determined that his country and his people should rise and rise in every possible way.
For example, in two well-known and forcefully argued papers, the famous Chicago economist George Stigler has presented his “self-interest theory” (including the belief that “self-interest dominates the majority of men”) as being “on Smithian lines”.
Whereas Sen thinks most people aren't interested in themselves at all. That's why they don't feed themselves- unless reminded to do so by Capability theorists- and won't wipe their own bum because they think it is job of the Government to come and do it for them.
Stigler was not being idiosyncratic in that diagnosis—this is indeed the standard view of Smith that has been powerfully promoted by many writers who constantly invoke Smith to support their view of society.
Which is why we've heard of Smith.
A great many economists were, and some still are, evidently quite enchanted by something that has come to be called “rational choice theory” in which rationality is identified with intelligently pursuing self-interest.
Rather than intelligently pursuing the project of chopping bits off the bodies of others.
Further, following that fashion in modern economics, a whole generation of rational choice political analysts and of experts in so called “law and economics” have been cheerfully practising the same narrow art.
Shame on them! Why are they not intelligently pursuing the project of chopping bits off the bodies of others while lecturing on the Capabilities approach? Why are they so narrow-minded?
And they have been citing Adam Smith in alleged support of their cramped and simplistic theory of human rationality. While some men are born small and some achieve smallness
Sen was simply short
it is clear that Adam Smith has had much smallness thrust upon him.
In the opinion of a blathershite who is now thrusting his own warmed up sick down Smith's long dead throat.
One interpretational confounding is the tendency to confuse the question of rationality and the adequacy of self-interest as a motivation with a much narrower question: what motivation is needed to explain why people seek exchange in a market economy?
This is nonsense. No 'motivation' is needed to explain any economic activity whatsoever. True, a 'method actor' playing a bar-maid might piteously cry 'what is my motivation for pulling pints?' But acting is an art form. It is not purely economic. Still, the director may say 'your motivation is not getting sacked!'- i.e. the motivation is the difference between the value of the transaction and its opportunity cost. In this case, it is the money and exposure the actress gets by playing the bar-maid as against what she could otherwise earn.
Smith, it is true, thought 'psychology' should be developed as a scientific subject and that this would be useful. However, what Smith and other Scottish individuals were actually doing was not some bogus 'psychology', they were helping build Scottish character and intellect and the patriotic motivation to lift up their country and rise by their own lights and their own efforts.
Sen thinks some question of 'rationality' arises quite separately from questions of character. This isn't the case. Economic analysis can be applied to animals, plants, robots etc. But, a patriotic and canny people can improve their national character and show the way to other nations. That is what Scotland did and we respect Smith because he was part of that process.
It does not matter what the 'discovery' process is for opportunity cost or the exact dynamics of how behavior changes when opportunity cost changes, provided there is scarcity and adaptive behavior, economics has a subject matter. But economics is only a useful subject of study for people who want to improve the character of their Nation and to enable it to rise as an example and inspiration to others. I suspect that this is what Bangladesh is doing. It is noticeable that its 'intellectuals' are less fluent in English academo-bureaucratic pi-jaw but its people are rising up faster than those of West Bengal. It was noticeable even decades ago that the 'Faraizi' Bangladesh had better character- greater piety, less alcoholism, and an aversion to either burn buses or bullshit incessantly. Also, the Bangladeshis were prepared to implement sensible economic policies. Still, a canny Scottish observer- partial or impartial- would surely note aspects of strong character and good conduct which have been assiduously cultivated in Sen's ancestral homeland.
Smith famously argued that to explain the motivation for economic exchange in the market we do not have to invoke any objective other than the pursuit of self-interest.
We don't have to invoke shit unless we are specifically paid to invoke some shit or other in which case we would be careful to invoke the stipulated for shit.
In his most famous and widely quoted passage from the Wealth of nations, Smith wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love (Smith 1976 [1789], 26-27). The butcher, the brewer, and the baker want to get our money in exchange for the meat, the beer, and the bread they make, and we—the consumers—want their meat, beer, and bread, and are ready to pay for them with our money. The exchange benefits us all, and we do not have to be raving altruists to seek such exchange. This is a fine point about motivation for trade, but it is not a claim about the adequacy of self-seeking for economic success in general.
Yes it is, if all our transactions are on open, global, markets. We would never interact with the opposite parties of our trades. Here 'self-seeking' is adequate for economic success. Nothing more is needed. True, our 'self-interest' causes us to love mummy and daddy and baby and wifey or hubby and our pals and some of our neighbors and so forth. This is because we are social animals. We might abstain from economic activity if there were no scarcity. We wouldn't abstain from social relationships.
Unfortunately, in some schools of economics the reading of Smith does not seem to go much beyond those few lines, even though that discussion by Smith is addressed only to one very specific issue, namely exchange (rather than distribution or production)
but distribution is exchange and no production process does not involve exchange of some sort
, and in particular, the motivation underlying exchange (rather than what makes normal exchanges sustainable, such as trust and confidence in each other).
This is mad! An exchange clarifies its own motivation. You like money but handed over some to buy a hot-dog. What was your motivation? Eating said hot-dog. 'Trust' and 'Confidence' can either be purchased from a third party or else burgeon through mimetic effects or the sheer force of habit. I don't really need to know the name of the guy at the Pizza parlor to be sure my pizza will be delivered to me in 30 minutes or less.
In the rest of Smith’s writings there are extensive discussions of the role of other motivations that influence human action and behaviour. For example, Smith argued: When the people of any particular country has such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.
Sen thinks our motive for putting money in our Bank account is 'trust'. That is false. We are exchanging notes and coins or checks or bank drafts for a more convenient way of holding liquid assets. We may pay a small fee in exchange or the Bank may find a way to profitably pay us a small amount. The motivation in both cases is tied to what is gained in exchange. It has nothing to do with 'trust'. Where that is lacking, the expected value of the exchange is lower than the opportunity cost. But the market could find ways to remove that impediment.
Suppose Sen were right. We put money in banks so as to show our trust in bankers. Then, the question arises, why do we insist on getting Bank statements? Why not just stuff money into the pockets of bankers while kissing them affectionately on the lips? Why not send them your nubile daughters so as to demonstrate your confidence in their sexual probity?
Smith discussed why such confidence need not always exist. Even though the champions of the baker-brewer-butcher reading of Smith, enshrined in many economic books, may be at a loss about how to understand the present economic crisis
This is foolish. Everybody understood that regulators and auditors and ratings agencies and so forth did not have enough incentive to do their job. We were trusting to benevolence rather than selfishness. That's why we got screwed.
(since people still have excellent reason to seek more trade even today—only far less opportunity), the devastating consequences of mistrust and lack of mutual confidence would not have puzzled Smith.
This is nonsense. The question was whether Governments would bail out the Banking sector and assume the downside risk so as to permit a bull market. The answer was yes- but in a way which enriched Trump, not the kind of guys we might think voted Obama. What was the consequence? Voters trusted Trump and put him in the White House. But for COVID, he might be there still.
Smith also made the point that sometimes our moral behaviour tends to take the form of simply following established conventions. While he noted that “men of reflection and speculation” can see the force of some moral arguments more easily than “the bulk of mankind” there is no suggestion in Smith’s writings that people in general systematically fail to be influenced by broader considerations—broader than sheer pursuit of self-interest—in choosing their behaviour.
But 'established conventions' are very narrow indeed. Sen may say there is no suggestion in Smith against the bee in his bonnet but I could counter that Smith nowhere denies or casts the slightest doubt upon the proposition that Amartya Sen eats dog turds.
What is important to note, however, is Smith’s recognition that even when we are moved by the implications of moral arguments, we may not see them in that explicit a form and may perceive our choices in terms of acting according to some well established practices in society.
In which case we aren't moved by 'the implications of moral arguments' at all. We are merely reminded of some well established social practice. Anyway, Smith never 'recognized' the nonsense Sen has ascribed to him.
As he put it in The theory of moral sentiments: Many men behave very decently, and through the whole of their lives avoid any considerable degree of blame, who yet, perhaps, never felt the sentiment upon the propriety of which we found our approbation of their conduct, but acted merely from a regard to what they saw were the established rules of behaviour .
So, they never felt some particular sentiment and were never swayed by the 'implications of a moral argument'. But Smith had already said that his own 'sentiments' and 'moral arguments' only came to him through long experience of Society. No doubt, he took a philosophical view of 'established rules' but that was only because he was paid to do so as a professional philosopher.
This focus on the power of “established rules of behaviour” plays a very important part in the Smithian analysis of human behaviour and its social implications.
It vitiates it utterly. What great analysis is involved in saying 'Society is created by Society and appears to have rules coz Society is like that only'? Still, Smith was a canny Scot who got quite rich- and posthumously famous- for writing something not too far from common sense.
However, neither specifically reasoned choice nor the following of established rules of behaviour takes us, in Smith’s analysis, to the invariable pursuit of self interest.
Because it is there ab ovo. Self interest causes us to cultivate prudence and ratiocination and awareness of and adherence to 'established rules' and so on and so forth.
This has huge implications for practical reason in addition to its epistemic merits.
The reverse is the case. Practical reason is merely something we acquire as part of socialization . There is no epistemic merit to the bleeding obvious.
Both individual reasoning and social convention can make a real difference to the kind of society in which we live.
No. The kind of society we live in determines individual reasoning and the social conventions it discerns. Smith really wasn't much of a thinker. Still nothing wrong with porridge and common-sense if eating the one and getting paid to write stuff not too far from the other is the best your society can do for you.
We are not imprisoned in any inflexible box of the unconditional priority of self-love.
We are free to chop off our own head and shove it up our pooper. That's true enough.
The pillaging bosses of perverse businesses (such as AIG) are not doomed to any inescapable pursuit of plunder; they choose to plunder in line with their inclinations, making little use of rational scrutiny, not to mention moral reasoning.
AIG was bailed out but the tax payer made a profit on the deal. Basically, the crash was 'market discovery'. It turned out the Government would take on downside risk and create a bull market for... perverse businesses, because that's what the Government actually is- a perverse business.
While Smith’s thoughts are of much relevance in explaining the present global crisis
Coz he knew from Gaussian copulas and CDOs- right?
and in suggesting ways and means of not only overcoming it but also of building a tolerably decent society in the world,
by getting little kids to earn money to pay their teachers- right?
there are other parts of Smith’s analyses that throw light on such grand notions as justice and impartiality, subjects of lasting importance.
to gobshites.
Since I have just completed a book on justice, called The idea of justice (Sen 2009b) which draws very substantially on Adam Smith’s ideas, I could perhaps be forgiven for spending a bit of time on the lines of analysis that I believe I get from Smith. Even though the subject of social justice has been discussed over the ages, the discipline received an especially strong boost during the European Enlightenment, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
when the Church got a drubbing and 'Social Justice' was shat upon and plutocrats rudely shouldered aside the old aristocracy
encouraged by the political climate of change and also by the social and economic transformation taking place then in Europe and America.
And Sen's natal Bengal thanks to which his people rose above their Muslim former masters. That didn't last. Sen's family was chased out of what became East Pakistan.
There are two basic, and divergent, lines of reasoning about justice among leading philosophers associated with the radical thought of the Enlightenment.
They are 'positive' vs 'natural' law. The former is a buck stopped, protocol bound, 'artificial reason'- as Coke explained to a Scottish King- while the latter has its roots in Stoic notions of oikeiosis which were related to the Church's notion of the Katechon's 'mysterious economy'. Sen doesn't know any of this because his knowledge of Western culture and civilization is shallow and self-serving. He will now write nonsense.
The distinction between the two approaches has received far less attention than, I would argue, it richly deserves. One approach, led by the work of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and followed in different ways by such outstanding leaders of thought as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, concentrated on identifying perfectly just institutional arrangements for a society.
Rubbish! These guys weren't lawyers or bureaucrats or Generals. They couldn't say how the Courts or how Government Departments or how the Army should be reformed. They couldn't even describe the ideal constitution for a limited monarchy or Republic or what have you. They simply didn't have the necessary experience and worldly knowledge.
This approach, which can be called “transcendental institutionalism”, has two distinct features. First, it concentrates its attention on what it identifies as perfect justice,
Nonsense! Locke was a doctor. Rousseau was into Music and belle lettres. Kant was a bit Sciencey. None knew anything about the legal system though Kant borrowed a notion of deduktion from what he understood to be the judicial underpinnings of the Holy Roman Emperor. But he was mistaken.
Kant uses the term 'transcendental' to mean things known a priori in Physics- e.g. that Absolute Space and Absolute Time exist (though they don't really). But nothing similar can exist in the Law or Government. We know this must be the case because we see that different countries have different political and legal arrangements which however are 'observationally equivalent'. Scotland still has a different legal system from England & Wales. This makes little practical difference. But, precisely because Social Choice is 'multiply realizable, there can be no Newton for Jurisprudence or Economics. Still, there are some principles, not institutions, which we might hold to be 'self-evident' or which represent ideals after which all right thinking people would want to strive. But, such things are 'Shelling focal' solutions to coordination games. They are not 'canonical' mathematical results.
Justice is the subject of jurisprudence. What was Kant's theory of jurisprudence? We don't know but assume it was in the 'natural' law tradition. But what would represent its actual institutionalization? Civil Law? The Napoleonic Code? We don't know. That's why positive law is all we are left with. But it can't have a perfect form. It is 'artificial reason'- i.e. ab ovo arbitrary and hysteresis ridden though, no doubt, equitable remedies might evolve and Legislative action might improve its functioning.
rather than on relative comparisons of justice and injustice,
which anybody can make. Why am I being arrested for shitting on the road when thousands of plutocrats are hovering over our heads in their fancy shmancy flying suits defecating upon our heads with vast, invisible, turds?
and it tries to identify social characteristics that cannot be transcended in terms of justice.
In other words, Sen thinks we should incessantly gas on about how everything is a 'manifest justice'. This is easily done without having any 'idea of justice'. Just say 'cats say miaow. Dogs don't. How is that fair?' The trouble is people will stop listening to you. The fact is 'comparisons are odious'. My incessantly comparing myself to Beyonce is one reason people give me a wide berth at cocktail parties.
Its focus is not on comparing feasible societies, all of which may fall short of perfection.
So, it is just talking for the sake of talking. But lots of nutters do that. Still, 'whataboutery' adds noise to signal and so if everybody is incessantly comparing apples to oranges and denouncing this manifest injustice, then actual injustice can burgeon.
The inquiry is aimed at identifying the nature of “the just”, rather than finding some criteria for one alternative being “less unjust” than another.
So, Justice will be associated with no partial ordering. Suppose a Court decides that the appropriate way to deal with the crime of rape is to kill the victim and given the offender a small sack of beans. We might well question whether, in this context, cats are saying miaow because of the manifest justice that they are not dogs. It is not the case that some other alternative- e.g. giving the victim a small sack of beans while cutting the victim's hair- is less unjust- especially to cats. How come beans get a sack but felines don't?
Second, in searching for perfection, transcendental institutionalism concentrates primarily on getting the institutions right, and it is not directly focused on the actual societies that would ultimately emerge.
This is nonsense. Society is concerned with getting 'institutions right' because Societies are directly focused on the ways in which they are changing and the better ways in which they can change. People working in the judicial system are constantly trying to make judicial institutions work better- e.g. simplifying and clarifying the law, providing more resources for areas where coverage is lacking etc, etc. There are no 'transcendental institutionalists' though there are people who draw attention to particular problems- e.g. lack of representation on the Bench or within the legal profession for specific disadvantaged groups. There may also be some nutters who say stupid shit like- 'in a just society, cats would only say miaow if no dog was denied the opportunity to say miaow.' But such nutters we shall have with us always.
The nature of the society that would result from any given set of institutions must, of course, depend also on non-institutional features, such as the actual behaviours of people and their social interactions.
Nonsense! The nature of Society is determined by what selection pressures it is having to deal with. Thus if foreigners are invading and killing members of that Society, the nature of that Society is that it is either martial, and it is fighting back, or it is abject, and it is running away or screaming loudly and shitting itself incessantly. Institutions don't matter. Actual behavior or social interaction does not matter either if people are being killed or are starving to death rather than keeping busy working every hour that God sends so as to get more money to buy cool shiny stuff.
In elaborating the likely consequences of having one set of institutions rather than another, some specific behavioural assumptions are made (of quite a demanding kind).
No. Scrapping existing institutions and importing new ones has zero effect. Ask the Afghans. What was the point of pretending they had a Parliament and Ministries and Human Rights and so forth? What about the Indians? Are they happy now they have the Institution of Lok Pal? Shit like this doesn't matter in the slightest. Economic activity matters. Armies matter. Institutions don't. Professors of shite subjects are ignored by everybody except the UN which is ignored by everybody. President Ghani was a Professor, greatly liked by UN bureaucrats coz he gave good memo, who was put into office because he had specialized in the study of failed States. Then his State failed. Sad? Not sad. Hila-fucking-arious.
With those assumptions in place, the search in the approach of transcendental institutionalism is for perfectly just institutions, rather than for the ways and means of bettering what actually happens in a society.
Which is why transcendental institutionalism doesn't exist while Sen-ile shitheads who compare cats to dogs are merely ignored. The fact is the population pays tax to the Government and wants useful services back in exchange. This is like a contract- an incomplete one- which is why politicians speak of getting voters a better deal or 're-writing the social contract' to promote inclusivity and opportunity and choice and so forth. Sen, cretin that he is, is opposed to this because he falsely believes that it involves 'transcendental institutionalism' rather than piece-meal reform. Instead, he wants to gas on incessantly about the manifest injustice of cats saying miaow while dogs are pitilessly excluded from this potentially valuable capability or functioning.
Both these features relate to the “contractarian” mode of thinking that Hobbes in particular had initiated, and which was further pursued by Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.
They died long ago. Legislators changed the laws and reformed the various institutions of Society on the basis of the practical experience of lawyers and men of business and reformers and so forth. Meanwhile some pedagogues talked stupid shite about Hobbes and Locke. But nobody paid any attention to them.
The hypothetical “social contract” that is assumed to be chosen is concerned with an ideal set of institutions as an alternative to the chaos that would otherwise characterize a society.
Just as Sen's criticism of this hypothesis assumes that some evil results from its assumption. But no such assumption has ever been made. Some stupid pedagogues talked worthless shit. So what? Nobody was listening.
The overall result was to develop theories of justice that focus on the transcendental identification of ideal institutions and rules.
It is true that the West had got a bee in its body about spreading Democracy and Human Rights and so forth. But that was only so some contractors could get rich and some pedagogues and bureaucrats could talk nonsense. Now the plug has been pulled on that type of stupidity.
In contrast with transcendental institutionalism, a number of other Enlightenment theorists, of whom Adam Smith was perhaps the principal analyst, took up a variety of comparative approaches that were concerned with social realizations (resulting from actual institutions, actual behaviour, and other actual influences), and did this from a comparative perspective.
Nope. Smith just said imitate the successful if you can. Talking bollocks, unless you are specifically paid to do so, won't help you. Be canny. Don't do stupid shit.
Different versions of such comparative thinking can be found, for example, in the works of Adam Smith, and those of the Marquis de Condorcet (the founder of the mathematical discipline of social choice theory who was much influenced by Smith’s work), Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, among a number of other leaders of innovative thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
They were all overtaken by events. On the continent Napoleon arose and promulgated the Napoleonic Code and got rid of the 'Holy Roman Empire' and so on. Meanwhile in Britain, Bentham and Mill and Marx were shouldered aside as first the middle class, and then the proletariat, gained representation in Parliament and put together their own practical agenda for thoroughgoing reform. No doubt, some stupid pedagogues got paid a little for gassing on about Smith and Bentham and so forth but nobody really cared what they said.
As it happens, they were all very familiar with Smith’s approach. Marx even chastised Mill for daring to say that he agreed with Smith: how far would a little man go, Marx wondered, in trying to place himself in the company of the great.
Says Sen who is placing himself in the company of Smith. But Smith is great only because Scotland became and continued to be great because it wanted to rival its more prosperous and populous Southern neighbor. Incidentally, Scotland has different institutions from England. But this makes scarcely any difference. Only Economics matters. The nature of the transaction, not the formal manner in which it is justiciable, determines outcomes.
Even though these authors, with their very different ideas of the demands of justice,
or very different ways of ignoring the question altogether
proposed quite distinct ways of making social comparisons,
but only in the sense that they didn't make any such proposal.
it can be said, at the risk of only a slight exaggeration, that they were all involved in comparisons of societies that exist or could emerge,
but only in the sense that this is also true of cats which saw miaow and dogs which don't.
rather than confining their analyses to transcendental searches for a perfectly just society.
Which nobody was doing. Heaven was the place to expect a perfectly just society. True, there were 'Utopian' and 'Communitarian' thinkers. But Sen is not mentioning them though some innovations described by them were indeed taken up by Legislatures or Neighborhood Associations.
Focused on realization-focused comparisons,
They weren't focused on 'comparisons' at all. Saying 'stop fucking over women, slaves, etc' does not involve comparing the position of women or slaves in different countries. There is a good reason for this. 'Comparisons are odious'. Once you start making them, people can say- 'this thing will always exist albeit under a different name. Why bang on about negro slavery when, in the coal mines of North England, colliers were effectively enslaved till 1870?' Slavery will always exist. A comparative approach makes this clear.
they were often primarily interested in the removal of manifest injustices they saw in the world, such as slavery, or policy-induced poverty, or cruel and counterproductive penal codes, or rampant exploitation, or the subjugation of women.
What 'manifest injustice' is Sen concerned with? Is it that the 'transcendental institutionalists' are worshipped while he himself is neglected? But 'transcendental institutionalists' don't exist. Sen hasn't been neglected. He just hasn't said or done anything useful.
The distance between the two approaches—transcendental institutionalism on the one hand and realization-focused comparison on the other—is quite momentous.
Neither exists in any meaningful manner.
As it happens, it is the first tradition (that of transcendental institutionalism) on which today’s mainstream political philosophy
which nobody bothers with because it is turgid shit
largely draws in its exploration of the theory of justice. The most powerful and momentous exposition of this approach to justice can be found in the works of the leading political philosopher of our time, John Rawls.
That stupid cunt didn't get that 'behind a veil of insurance' we choose 'collective insurance'. We don't stipulate that the welfare of the least well off be maximized. There is an obvious moral hazard.
Rawls came late to the party. His shite gained currency just as redistribution was taken off the table because white voters didn't want to subsidize 'welfare Queens'.
Indeed, Rawls’s “principles of justice” in his A theory of justice (1971) are intended entirely for identifying perfectly just institutions.
No. Rawls is completely silent about institutions. But, any Court or Administrative Tribunal or Enterprise of any sort could 'operationalize' his 'maximin' rule. But, it would be stupid to do so. A 'Law & Econ' approach is better.
A number of the other pre-eminent contemporary theorists of justice have also, broadly speaking, taken the transcendental institutional route. I think here of Ronald Dworkin, David Gauthier, and Robert Nozick, among others.
Dworkin was a constitutional scholar. His theory of 'law as integrity' can apply to any system of jurisprudence. India's legal and constitutional institutions are different from those of Germany or Japan or America. But Indian judges agree that they should show integrity in their decisions. This is a principle or an ideal. It is not an example of a 'transcendental institution' because nothing a priori is known about what the institution should look like. Must there be a Supreme Court? Britain did not have one till very recently. This does not mean 'law as integrity' was not a feature of its judiciary.
David Gauthier has a theory of morality- 'morals by agreement'. But agreement is not a priori at all. Prudence is what dictates an agreement to constrain individual utility maximization. There is no 'transcendental' method to institutionalize this.
Nozick had an evolutionary and voluntarist, not an a priori, theory which, in his last work, he extended to cosmology such that 'objectivity' emerged through evolution across possible worlds. This is not transcendental at all. Kant died long before Darwin.
Their theories, which have provided different—but respectively important—insights into the demands of a “just society”,
but those insights have no unique representation as institutions which we would consider just for an a priori reason.
share the common aim of identifying just rules and institutions,
Rules are not institutions. Any institution whatsoever can decide to apply a particular rule. Thus, an administrative tribunal might deliver the same outcomes as a Court of Law. Sen has created a strawman- 'transcendental institutionalism' which is indifferent to outcomes- and then says that this strawman is championed by everybody else because everybody else is very stupid and evil. Sen and Sen alone sees the truth. But why should we believe his ridiculous claim? Do the people of Bengal hail Sen as their Solon? Has he achieved anything substantive over the course of his long life? No. He has merely contributed to the stupidity and uselessness of UN type bureaucracies.
even though their identification of these arrangements come in very different forms.
But Dworkin, Gauthier, Dawkin etc. did not propose any change to the existing institutions in their country. Consider Biden's Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. Has it gotten any 'Dworkinian' or 'Dawkinian' submissions? The fact is, there is no 'a priori' way of determining whether or not a constitutional amendment is required for time limits etc.
The characterization of perfectly just institutions has become the central exercise in modern theories of justice.
In the opinion of a guy who knows absolutely nothing about the Law.
This entire tradition is very non-Smithian in approach.
Smith wasn't a lawyer. Why not say it was very non-J.K Rowlings in its approach?
Smith’s focus is on actual realizations (not just institutions and arrangements), and on comparisons rather than on transcendence.
No. His focus was on common sense and promoting the conventional wisdom of the governing class in his country at that period. He thinks free markets and rational self-interest is the way forward. But he can't be sure and mentions reasons why blind optimism in this regard might be misplaced.
The difference between the two approaches is reflected in the questions that have to be answered by a theory of justice. The primary concentration in the Smithian approach is on such questions as: “how could justice be advanced?”
But Smith did not write a single word on 'how justice could be advanced' in Scotland. He did write about what might promote economic progress and how people might make better decisions.
rather than on, as in Rawlsian theory: “how could we identify perfectly just institutions?”
Rawls does not tell us how to identify anything. He merely puts forward a wrong and foolish theory about what outcome we would find 'just'. The truth is we would stipulate for a collective insurance scheme not a 'maximin' rule focused on the least well off. Thus, when designing a building, we don't maximize convenience to blind quadriplegics though we might make some minimal provision for them so as to virtue signal. Still, we might want disabled people to receive a higher tax credit or disability payment out of the collective insurance fund. After all, we too might suddenly be struck down in like manner.
Smith’s approach has the dual effect, first, of taking the comparative rather than the transcendental route,
but there is no transcendental route save that of Religion. Karma may be perfectly just- but it would only be so over the course of many births.
and second, of focusing on actual realizations in the societies involved, rather than only on institutions and rules.
There is no point focusing on 'actual realizations' because they take time to fructify and, in any case, are opaque and costly to quantify. Common sense tells us to be content with some apopthegms of a sensible type.
Given the present balance of emphases in contemporary political philosophy,
which subject, however, everybody considers to be shit.
the Smithian approach demands a radical change in the formulation of the theory of justice.
We don't need a theory of justice- at least not one from a cretin who knows shit about the law. On the other hand, actual lawyers need to study jurisprudence.
I shall not go further into the working out of such a theory of justice here, since I have tried to do this in my most recent book on justice (2009b).
Every sentence in that book is false or foolish or both false and foolish.
However, I will separate out for discussion one particular feature of the Smithian approach, on which I have not yet commented, and which is quite central to the theory I present in my book. The issue involved concerns the domain of points of views that a theory of justice should try to accommodate.
A theory of Justice has a theory of justiciability. Only if a point of view fixes upon a justiciable issue can it be accommodated. Thus, my point of view- which is that all beings seek to be Beyonce impersonators- can't be accommodated by any theory of justice save in so far as Beyonce may be able to get a restraining order on my selling tickets to a Beyonce concert in which I alone perform. What is justiciable here relates to intellectual property.
How far should we have to go to get the impartiality that a theory of justice must demand?
The answer is that impartiality means that absent a justiciable uncorrelated asymmetry between parties to a dispute, the outcome must be the same under 'antidosis'- i.e. if the parties interchange roles. Thus Roe vs Doe should have the same outcome as Doe vs Roe provided there is no 'uncorrelated asymmetry' to distinguish them. However, if Roe owned x and Doe didn't own x, then the outcome must be different even if Roe is ugly and Doe is cute. This is because the justiciable uncorrelated asymmetry here is 'ownership' not 'cuteness'. A Beauty contest would have a different outcome to a law suit re. property title.
Adam Smith’s thought experiment on impartiality invokes the device of an “impartial spectator”
who takes the role of 'the still small voice of conscience' within our breast. But Smith was talking about how we govern our own actions. He wasn't talking about how Judges or Juries should decide court cases. All he asked for was a 'tolerable administration of justice' so people weren't constantly robbing or raping each other.
who can come from far as well as near, and this differs substantially from the admissible points of view that a social contract concentrates on, to wit the views of the people within the polity in which the contract is being made.
Sen, very stupidly, thinks that 'Justice' demands that we take the opinion of everybody on the planet, or indeed every sentient being in the Universe, before deciding anything. This is crazy shit. True, America was doing exactly this when it thought that it had a 'Right to Protect' women in Afghanistan from having to wear the hijab. But then ISIS too thought that its views on what Europeans should be allowed to do had great salience in determining what was or wasn't just. Biden, thankfully, has seen reason. Stuff happening in far away countries is none of our fucking business. As for terrorists, lets just kill them quietly rather than bang on about a 'War on Terror'.
Even though in John Rawls’s discussion of what he calls a “reflective equilibrium”,
which was shit because the information set keeps changing. Thus the agreement reached after a discussion has no 'reflective' property. It is just convenient to stick with what we have rather than go through another exhausting process of discussion and horse-trading. In other words, there is no 'meeting of minds' or 'overlapping consensus' in what is merely a historical 'Schelling focal' solution to a coordination problem.
distant perspectives can be invoked, in his structured theory of “justice as fairness” the relevant points of view are those of the people in the society in which the so-called “original position” is being contemplated (Rawls 1971).
Rawls was stupid. He thought people not party to an agreement should have a say in it. But Sen is even more stupid. He thinks people living far far away who don't even know we exist, should nevertheless have a say about agreements we make which have zero impact on them.
Smith’s device of the impartial spectator
merely means the guy inside us who, over the course of years and thanks to social intercourse with people of great worldly wisdom, is able to distinguish those of our actions which are gauche or uncool from those worthy of a refined gentleman worthy of a seat on the higher councils of State.
leans towards an “open impartiality” in contrast with what can be called the “closed impartiality” of the social contract tradition, with its confinement to the views of the parties to the social contract and therefore to fellow citizens of a sovereign state.
All contracts only feature the parties to that contract who give and receive consideration. A social contract is merely a metaphor for a Society where the people contribute resources for the provision of public goods. Sen, utter cretin that he is, thinks every sentient being in the Universe should be consulted before any contract can be made.
To be sure, both Smith and Kant had much to say about the importance of impartiality.
By 'impartial' Smith meant 'not narcissistic'. Thus, if I fart, the narcissistic side of me is thrilled by the grossness of the smell I produce. The impartial part of me takes note that other people in the room evinced great discomfort. I did not really endear myself to them. In future, they won't invite me to dinner. That's not a good outcome.
Kant, who had some sort of mental malfunction, thought we should be equally subject to any rule we might make. This was foolish. Rules should make exceptions on the basis of 'uncorrelated asymmetries'. Thus I am welcome to break a rule I have laid down for my employees because I, and I alone, own the enterprise.
Even though Smith’s exposition of this idea is less remembered among contemporary moral and political philosophers, there are substantial points of similarity between the Kantian and Smithian approaches.
C.J Kraus- a fan of Smith's (he also translated Arthur Young's Political Arithmetic)- was close to Kant. But Kant had little interest in Economics. Still he wrote enthusiastically of the 'division of labor' and had been quite enthusiastic over Smith's 'Moral Sentiments'. Sadly, philosophy is a field where specialization can lead to increased stupidity. It is better to separate out Mathematics and 'Natural Philosophy' (Physics, Biology, etc) and also Jurisprudence, Economics, etc. This leaves nothing but coprophagous shit for the Kantian project of shitting higher than one's arsehole. Still, it is true that Kant refers to a 'perfectly just civil constitution' which finds a balance between freedom and 'irresistible force'. But this is where the Germans fucked up. They thought an enlightened despot like Fredrick the Great could kick-start development and enable 'catch-up' growth. There might be some 'metaphysical' way by which the German pedant could be as Whiggish as the English while remaining a Civil Servant obedient to the will of an autocrat. This is the 'idealist' or 'phenomenological' project of pretending to be free 'internally' while Heil Hitlering your heart out like the rest of the rabble.
The truth is Scotland was behind England but ahead of Germany. The canny Scots soon made England their intellectual debtor but the Germans were too 'immature' (unmunding) to understand that Autocrats, even if smart and successful, are a bad thing because sooner or later their successor is a fucking cretin. There is no alternative to 'Civil Society' gradually taking more and more power from the Crown till the latter merely 'reigns' not rules.
German philosophy, of course, is an exercise in adolescent schwarmerei or unmundingkeit, but it is still less shite than Sen-ile, Sen-tentious, stupidity of the sort that buddhijivis cultivate so as to flee their natal shithole for more comfortably situated Campuses.
In fact, Smith’s analysis of “the impartial spectator” has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness which so engaged the world of the European Enlightenment.
Rubbish! The notion of 'antidosis' is older than Aristotle. However, it was Cicero who most influenced Hume and Smith. Smith believed he was improving on Cicero (or Hutcheson's notion of a 'sixth sense') by clarifying 'motivations'- thus sidestepping the problem of defining 'natural law'- and this is what Sen, in his ignorant manner, is trying to latch on to. But Smith doesn't actually clarify shit. He merely gives us a descriptive account of what we might call the working of cognitive dissonance or the manner in which 'Tardean mimetics' arises. But that account is ad hoc and only intelligible in an ignorant, provincial, mealy mouthed, context. A guy living in Paris might have other options- join the Church or emigrate to America or, like Talleyrand, do both- and Smithian 'motivations' couldn't explain why he might pick this course rather than that.
Smith's 'psychology' is that of a petit bourgeois pedant seeking to make a career in a hypocritical and miserly provincial city of decidedly second rank and few avenues of advancement. By contrast, Cicero is persuasive precisely because he played a great role in a great civilization whose achievements would continue to dwarf anything Scotland or Germany could show till the middle of the nineteenth century. Cicero and 'natural law' are important because Christendom could take them over. By contrast Smith was as shitty as Sen except in the sense that Smith was part of Scotland's heroic effort to lift itself up by its bootstraps and achieve pre-eminence in both the Arts and the Sciences as well as Industry and Commerce. By contrast, buddhijivis like Sen dug Bengal's grave.
In fact, Smith’s analysis of “the impartial spectator” has some claim to being the pioneering idea in the enterprise of interpreting impartiality and formulating the demands of fairness which so engaged the world of the European Enlightenment.
Everybody was trying to come up with a replacement for the Catholic notion of 'synderesis'- roughly the voice of consciousness. Luther and other Protestant thinkers needed this basis for 'practical reason' to become concerned with the person as a whole. In other words, there had to be something innate which didn't just enable you to distinguish between good and bad actions but also enable you to know that Jews and Catholics are very evil and should be killed. The German 'Enlightenment'- shitty as it was- wanted to turn the page of bloody wars of Religion which had ended in stalemate. Sadly, its Kantian trajectory was towards crazy Kaisers and a Hitler who opened the gates of Hell.
The Scots were more sensible- which is why Smith is still cool provided you don't waste any time reading his turgid shite.
Smith’s ideas were not only influential among those “enlightenment thinkers” such as Condorcet, who wrote on Smith. Immanuel Kant too was familiar with The theory of moral sentiments, as we know from his correspondence with Markus Herz in 1771 (even though, alas, Herz referred to the proud Scotsman as “the Englishman Smith”).6 This was somewhat earlier than Kant’s classic works, Groundwork, 1785, and The critique of practical reason, 1788, and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.
This is interesting. Did Smith influence Kant's 'critical turn'? I suppose one could say that 'psychology' or 'phenomenology' could put 'moral science' or 'aesthetics' etc. on an a priori basis. But we know that Physics and Maths and so forth has no a priori basis. Thus Smith's 'psychology' or Kant's 'phenomenology' was just pedants shitting higher than their arsehole. Essentially, to get away from 'natural law' or a moral 'sixth sense' so as to seem more 'sciencey', you can pretend to have invented some new 'psychology' or 'phenomenology' or 'capabilities approach' etc, etc. But the thing is mere charlatanism. On the other hand Quantum chromodynamics explains why my Beyonce impersonation is considered the best by nine out of ten walruses.
This was somewhat earlier than Kant’s classic works, Groundwork, 1785, and The critique of practical reason, 1788, and it seems quite likely that Kant was influenced by Smith.
Or that both were influenced by Hume
In the present discussion I am not so much concerned with the similarities between Smith on one side and Kant—and Rawls—on the other, but with their differences.
There are no similarities. Adam Smith stands for Scotland's rise through hard work, thrift, enterprise and sound common sense. The Scots showed the world what dignity and freedom and psychological and political 'maturity' looked like. Hume and Smith explain why Sir Walter Scott's heroes and heroines- whether they be aristocrats or ordinary people- are models of good character and personal integrity. The Scotsman- and Scottish woman- show why patriotism is noble. This is because the Scot works for the wealth and security of his country and that of those countries to which it is honorably bound.
By contrast, Kant merely illustrates the worthlessness of the pedant as a bulwark against despotism, while Rawls was simply a silly man who didn't get that the spirit of the Warren Court had been well and truly exorcised from the body politic. The poor had spoken. They didn't want equality. They wanted cool shiny stuff.
The internal discussion among the participants in the Rawlsian original position would appear to Smith to be inadequately scrutinized, since we have to look beyond the points of view of others, all in the same society, who are engaged in making the social contract.
Very true. Smith didn't say 'the Parish Council should see to all parochial affairs. The Central Government should be told to fuck off.' Instead he said, 'before the Parish Council should decide where to locate the septic tank we must consult the Patagonians and the Portuguese and the Punjabis and such aliens as might live on the surface of Pluto'.
As Smith argued: We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.
But Smith didn't say you have to go to Patagonia and get a brain transplant so as to discover the Patagonian point of view on whether or not it is just and proper to fart loudly in kirk.
But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them
Which people? Patagonians? Nope. We should be concerned only with smart people with much worldly wisdom who can help our own social and professional advancement.
Rawls’s focus is on removing biases of the kind that are related to vested interests and personal slants within a given society, and he abstains from invoking the scrutiny of (in Smith’s language) “the eyes of the rest of mankind”.
Why only mankind? What about walruses? Rawls knew that Calcutta was a shithole. That is why he restricted his theory to affluent nations like America which could spend a lot of money keeping out dusky folk from starving shitholes. Otherwise, 'maximin' would mean we'd all have to hand over our entire income while subsisting on gruel and wiping the bums of drooling imbeciles in Malthusian shitholes.
Something more than an “identity blackout” within the confines of the local focal group would be needed to address this problem.
Rawls knew that his students would tell him to fuck off if he told them that his theory of Justice required them to go off to Malthusian shitholes to wipe the bums of all the drooling imbeciles that could be found there.
In this respect the procedural device of closed impartiality in “justice as fairness” can be seen as being “parochial” in its construction.
But Smith was all about the Parish deciding stuff to do with the Parish. He was against sending tax money to the Capital so bureaucrats there could decide what to do with it. This is the doctrine of 'subsidiarity'.
We could ask: why is this a problem? Indeed, since many of the criticisms of Rawls have come from philosophers who are communitarians and cultural particularists, it could even appear that this localism of Rawls is a virtue, not a barrier to be overcome.
It is common sense. No decision will be made about where to locate the septic tank if we first have to canvass Patagonian and Portuguese and Punjabi views on the matter.
There are, in fact, two principal grounds for requiring that the form of public reasoning about justice should go beyond the boundaries of a state or a region, and these are based respectively on (1) the relevance of other people’s interests—far away from as well as near a given society—for the sake of preventing unfairness to others who are not a party to the social contract for that society,
so you should not be allowed to wipe your own bum because I happen to prefer you to be known as a smelly dude with a shitty bum.
and (2) the pertinence of other people’s perspectives in broadening our own investigation of relevant principles, for the sake of avoiding an underscrutinized parochialism of values and presumptions in the local community.
This is typical of Sen's stupidity. Why are men not women? Why are human beings not walruses? Are we not being terribly parochial and under-scrutinizing all sorts of shit when we wipe our own bums or get them wiped for us? Do walruses wipe their own bums? Oughtn't we to be more like walruses? But are walruses really so perfect? Why do they not roam around eating the leaves of tall trees like giraffes?
Still, we can see why some shitheads like Sen-tentious shite. It gives them an opportunity to demand more representation for disabled Lesbian goats on the managing committee for CERN. How is it fair that the vast majority of Quantum Physicists have qualifications in Physics? Illiterate cretins are severely underrepresented in that profession.
The first ground, related to the interdependence of interests, would have been obvious to Smith.
Sen is a fucking cretin. He doesn't get that Bengal suffered because decisions about Bengal were being made by guys who lived very far away from Bengal. True, this was the fault of the Muslim Nawabs who ruled Bengal. They in turn might speak of the mistake they made in tolerating 'bhadralok' Hindus as tax-farmers and petty bureaucrats.
For example the misdeeds of early British rule in India,
which could only arise because of the misdeeds of Indians
including the disastrous famine of 1770,
for which Bengalis were responsible. It is not the case that the Brits were saying 'don't grown enough food. Don't feed the starving.' Indeed, they weren't even saying 'don't defend yourself. Carry on doing stupid shit, you stupid shitheads till every bit of your country is colonized by a less stupid and lazy Nation.'
engaged Smith greatly, and there could not have been any notion of adequate justice based only on a social contract among the British that could do the job of assessment adequately (in terms of Smith’s analysis).
This is crazy shit. It was obvious that the Bengalis, who were very much more numerous than the English, were cowardly and stupid and greedy. That's why they were colonized. True, the Hindus preferred British to Muslim rule for very good reasons. But the fact remains that the Bengalis were an abject people. Blathershites like Sen help to show that this may have been due to stupidity not an utter and complete lack of fighting spirit.
Other parts of India, too, were colonized. But non-Bengalis (unless trained by Bengalis in shitty subjects) don't pretend that the British ever had a duty to wipe everybody's bum or to consult every cretin who came under their paramountcy.
Similar issues remain very alive today. How America tackles its economy influences not only the lives of Americans but also those in the rest of the world, and if there is one motivation that is central to the G-20 meeting recently held in London (April 2009), it is the importance of taking appropriate steps in the light of the interdependence of the global world.
America was exerting 'exorbitant privilege' to make Europe pay, in terms of austerity, for its own rapid reflation. Sen thought the Americans were wiping Greek bums and tenderly suckling starving baby giraffes in Tanzania.
Similarly, how America responded to the barbarity of 9/11 in New York has affected the lives of many hundreds of millions elsewhere in the world—not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also well beyond those direct fields of American action.
America killed lots of them sand niggers and towel heads and so forth. But this turned out to be wasteful and stupid.
Further, AIDS and other epidemics have moved from country to country, and from continent to continent, and also, on the other side, the medicines developed and produced in some parts of the world are important for the lives and freedoms of people far away.
What have we learned from COVID? The rich look after themselves first, last, and everywhere in between. The poor try to do the same but then discover they can't coz they are as poor as shit. Suddenly, listening to Sen doesn't seem such a smart move.
Many other avenues of interdependence can be identified, for example the challenge of environmental policies for the world to tackle such issues as global warming.
I suppose Sen believed- as most of the bien pensant did- that America wouldn't unilaterally withdraw from Paris type agreements. We think of the first Obama administration as a more innocent age.
The interdependences also include the impact of a sense of injustice in one country on lives and freedoms in others. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1963, in a letter from Birmingham Jail.
He was wrong. His people had little to complain about compared to Mao's starving victims. But those 'hungry ghosts' imperilled nobody.
Discontent based on injustice in one country can rapidly spread to other lands.
Unless it has the shit kicked out of it. That's all that matters. Kicking the shit out of nutters.
Our “neighbourhoods” are now effectively spread across the world.
Till, suddenly, they are not- as happened in Dacca- from which it was Hindus, not Whites, who were aggressively chased away.
Our involvement with others through trade and communication are remarkably extensive in the contemporary world, and further, our global contact involving literary, artistic and scientific connections, make it hard for us to expect that an adequate consideration of diverse interests or concerns can be plausibly confined to the citizenry of any given country, ignoring all others.
Yet, such in fact is the case. Which country offers everybody in the world a vote in its elections? None at all. Sen might not like it but Sen is as stupid as shit.
In addition to the global features of interdependent interests, there is a second ground—that of avoidance of the trap of parochialism—for accepting the necessity of taking an “open” approach to examining the demands of impartiality. If the discussion of the demands of justice is confined to a particular locality (a country or even a larger region than that) there is a possible danger of ignoring or neglecting many challenging counterarguments that might not have come up in local political debates
So, if a political debate does not feature some counterargument- e.g. 'Beyonce impersonating walruses don't give a shit about this shit! Stop this debate now!'- then it must be prorogued immediately. That's a great way of making Legislative gridlock permanent and all extensive.
or been accommodated in the discourses confined to the local culture, but which are eminently worth considering in an impartial perspective.
In which case, some smart guy would have brought it up. He'd have said 'hey guys, the Norwegians- or Nicaraguans or whatever- faced the same problem. Their solution was truly brilliant. Let us study what they did and implement something similar.'
It is this limitation of reliance on parochial reasoning, linked with national traditions and regional understandings, that Adam Smith wanted to resist by using the device of the impartial spectator,
This simply isn't true. His 'impartial spectator' came into existence only through social interaction with one's betters. It did not involve consulting naked Patagonians or Punjabis dancing the bhangra.
in the form of the thought experiment of asking what a particular practice or procedure would look like to a disinterested person—from far or near.
But one with greater worldly wisdom of an entirely local kind.
Smith was particularly keen on avoiding the grip of parochialism in jurisprudence and moral and political reasoning.
Sen, with typical fatuity, now shows that the reverse was the case.
In a chapter in The theory of moral sentiments entitled “On the influence of custom and fashion upon the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation” Smith gives various examples of how discussions confined within a given society can be incarcerated within a seriously narrow understanding: [...] the murder of new-born infants was a practice allowed of in almost all the states of Greece, even among the polite and civilized Athenians; and whenever the circumstances of the parent rendered it inconvenient to bring up the child, to abandon it to hunger, or to wild beasts, was regarded without blame or censure. [...]
Christianity censured the shite out of infanticide and sacrificing your first born to Ba'al and so forth. Smith was only repeating this bromide because of his own wholly parochial Christian upbringing.
Uninterrupted custom had by this time so thoroughly authorized the practice, that not only the loose maxims of the world tolerated this barbarous prerogative, but even the doctrine of philosophers, which ought to have been more just and accurate, was led away by the established custom, and upon this, as upon many other occasions, instead of censuring, supported the horrible abuse, by far-fetched considerations of public utility. Aristotle talks of it as of what the magistrates ought upon many occasions to encourage. The humane Plato is of the same opinion, and, with all that love of mankind which seems to animate all his writings, no where marks this practice with disapprobation
It was Revealed Religion- not 'Natural Philosophy'- which put an end to that shite. How did it do so? By making you fear you'd burn in Hell for all eternity if you so much as procured an abortion. `
Adam Smith’s insistence that we must inter alia view our sentiments from “a certain distance from us”
What could be more distant than Hell where devils are sharpening their pitchfork for sinners?
is, thus, motivated by the object of scrutinizing not only the influence of vested interests, but also by the need to question the captivating hold of entrenched traditions and customs.
But that motivation is shit. If people tell you to shut the fuck up or they will kick your head in, then it disappears completely. Still, if you get paid a little money to talk high falutin' bollocks that's exactly what you have to do.
While Smith’s example of infanticide remains sadly relevant today,
Is Sen against abortion? Cool!
though only in a few societies, some of his other examples have relevance to many other contemporary societies as well. This applies, for example, to Smith’s insistence that “the eyes of the rest of mankind” must be invoked to understand whether “a punishment appears equitable” (Smith 1982 [1762-1763], 104).
But, we tend to think, only the really smart and technologically advanced of 'the rest of mankind' bother to dart their glance in our direction. Thus, what Smith is saying cashes out as 'do what the smart guys in advanced countries tell you to do.' Obviously, this is stupid. Still there is little harm in pretending to do what rich and smart people say everybody should do.
I suppose even the practice of lynching of identified “miscreants” appeared to be perfectly just and equitable to the strong-armed enforcers of order and decency in the American south, not very long ago.
Is this guy talking about Southern trees and their 'strange fruit'? Why does the cunt speak of 'miscreants'? How fucking racist is he?
Even today, scrutiny from a “distance” may be useful for considering practices as different as the stoning of adulterous women in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, selective abortion of female fetuses in China, Korea, and parts of India, and plentiful use of capital punishment in China, or for that matter in the United States (with or without the celebratory public jubilations that are not entirely unknown in some parts of the country).
The elites, back then, thought 'Right to Protect' and a 'rules based world order' was cool and would serve their interests. Then Obama confessed that American foreign policy consisted of doing stupid shit and Trump got elected. Sen-tentious shite had caused an entire classes of shitheads to get disintermediated.
The United States is, by the way, the country with the fourth largest number of executions in the world today, behind China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and just ahead of Pakistan.
But the US is still ahead of those countries- though China is catching up. Why did Sen relocate from England, which doesn't execute people, to America, which does? Was it because American Universities pay more?
Closed impartiality lacks something of the quality of intellectual engagement that makes impartiality—and fairness—so central to the idea of justice.
Nonsense! There is nothing stopping any one from going on Google and getting 'foreign' perspectives. It is foolish to think you need the Patagonian perspective and can only get it from a Patagonian.
The relevance of distant perspectives has a clear bearing on some current debates in the United States, for example that in the Supreme Court not long ago on the appropriateness of the death sentence for crimes committed in a person’s juvenile years.
The reverse is the case. Roper v Simmons was decided on a doctrine of 'evolving standards of decency' wholly internal to the USA. Thus the fact that more and more American States were moving in this direction was crucial to the ratio. Nobody was talking about what the Patagonians or Portuguese of Punjabis thought about the matter. Still, Courts are at liberty to look at rulings from other jurisdictions if there is no stare decisis ratio within their own.
The demands of justice being seen to be done even in a country like the United States cannot entirely neglect the understanding that may be generated by asking questions about how the problem is assessed in other countries in the world, from Europe and Brazil to India and Japan.
Yes it can. The fact that executions of juveniles was rising in Pyongyang would have been deemed irrelevant.
The narrow majority judgment of the Court, as it happens, ruled against the use of the death sentence for a crime that was committed in juvenile years even though the execution occurs after the person reaches adulthood. In condemning that decision, Justice Scalia in his dissenting note complained that the majority of the Court was influenced by their tendency to “defer to likeminded foreigners”.
Not in this case but it did happen in others e.g. Lawrence v Texas. Scalia pointed to abortion as an area where the US was less restrictive than the international norm- i.e. Scalia was complaining of cherry-picking or partiality. Either you accept foreign rulings for everything or for nothing. That's what impartiality requires.
The majority of judges did refer to views from countries other than the United States, and it could be asked whether they were right to do so, rather than looking only at American points of view.
When Sen was writing this, it was not obvious that the Bench would move in Scalia and Thomas's direction.
Central to this debate is the relevance of Smith’s insistence on the need to scrutinize from “a distance” which is an integral part of the device of the impartial spectator.
Nonsense! This 'impartial spectator' must be highly partial towards the opinions and judgments of those who are demonstrably richer, more successful, more worldly wise, and held in greater esteem. This is 'Tardean' mimetics of the superior, not listening to naked imbeciles from far off shitholes.
The apparent cogency of parochial values often turns on the lack of knowledge of what has proved feasible in the experiences of other people. The inertial defence of infanticide in ancient Greece, on which Smith spoke, was clearly influenced by the lack of knowledge of other societies in which infanticide is ruled out and yet which do not crumble into chaos and crisis as a result of not permitting such killing.
Nonsense! There was explicit religious sanction for the custom. The Phoenicians were rich and successful. One reason people thought their 'word was their bond' was because they knew these guys killed their first born because their God required it. Thus a 'costly signal' had established a 'separating equilibrium' which promoted high-trust 'insider' transactions and risk-pooling.
Despite the undoubted importance of “local knowledge”, global knowledge has some value too, and can contribute to the debates on parochial values and practices.
Only if we 'cherry-pick' and show partiality towards stuff done by smart people, not drooling imbeciles living in Malthusian shitholes.
To listen to distant voices, which is part of Adam Smith’s exercise of invoking “the impartial spectator”, does not require us to be respectful of every argument that may come from abroad.
Cool. We can tell Sen to fuck off back where he came from.
Willingness to consider an argument proposed elsewhere is very far from a predisposition to accept all such proposals.
Also, wiping your own bum does not mean you want to wipe everybody's bum.
We may reject a great many of the proposed arguments—sometimes even all of them—and yet there would remain particular cases of reasoning that could make us reconsider our own understandings and views, linked with the experiences and conventions entrenched in a particular country, or culture.
More sensibly, we don't bother with arguments. We just imitate what has worked elsewhere.
Arguments that may first appear to be “outlandish” (especially when they do actually come, initially, from other lands) may help to enrich our thinking if we try to engage with the reasoning behind these locally atypical contentions.
Thinking does not matter. Imitating what smart people are doing is the way to go.
Many people in the USA or China may not be impressed by the mere fact that capital punishment is not permitted in many other countries, for example in the bulk of Europe and much of the American continents (in fact the United States is the only country in the American continents that has systematic civil executions). And yet if reasons are important, there would be, in general, a strong case for examining the justificatory arguments against capital punishment that are used elsewhere.
Reasons aren't important. The truth is a rich country can just cage up, rather than kill, felons. This could be profitable for the Prison-Industrial complex.
I must end here. We can examine Smith’s ideas for the way they are related to the world that he saw around him, but also for their relevance to the nature of human society in general and thus to our world today. I have pursued the latter inquiry in this presentation. I never cease to be impressed—indeed astonished—by the reach of Smith’s ideas across the centuries. I am sure I would be accused of being over the top when I compare, in this respect, Smith with Shakespeare.
Nor would I for comparing Beyonce with a walrus which has taken up twerking on TikTok. But I wouldn't get paid for making that comparison. Sen would. Why? Everything he writes explains why his native Bengal is so fucking poor. The answer is- its 'buddhijivi' intellectuals are as stupid as shit. Still, Bangladesh is coming up just by mimicking what other poor countries have done. It seems ethnically cleansing Sen-tentious swine, was a dynamite idea. What was foolish was tying up with West Punjabis and Pathans. Still, Bangladesh has now overtaken Pakistan economically. It may soon overtake even the more prosperous parts of India. But then its economists don't spend their time Sen-ilely shitting on Smith. No wonder Biden didn't give Bangladesh an invite to his Democracy summit. He did invite Im the Dim but Im turned out not to be too dim to see that refusing Biden's invitation was the smart play. Perhaps he will take up shitting on Smith as Pakistan continues to fall ever farther behind its former colony to the East.
No comments:
Post a Comment