Hilary Putnam on Amartya Sen

A little over a decade ago, I wrote a blogpost on this topic. It is a bit difficult to understand so let me simplify matters.

Economics is like plumbing. You pay an economist to economise just as you pay a plumber to fix the sink. There may be some complicated philosophy of plumbing or of economizing but that philosophy is neither economics nor philosophy. It is a fucking waste of time.

Like plumbing, economics has its 'terms of art'. 'Normative' or 'Value judgment' just means 'preferences' or whatever variable is being maximized or minimized.  'Positive' just means objectively quantifiable- i.e. something which lots of different people can measure and get the same answer. 

Neither of these terms has anything to do with Kantian 'analytical' or 'synthetic' judgments. They are Tarskian primitives. It is not the case that any 'definition' is involved such that a tautology (analytical statement) can be derived. This is because the thing in question- utility, preference, welfare- is 'intensional'. Its 'extension' changes as the knowledge base changes. It does not obey Liebniz's law of identity. Facts, or positive statements, in Econ too are merely provisional. They correspond to correlation, or something like 'Granger causality', rather than actual mechanistic causation. 

Hilary Putnam, who thought Amartya Sen was a great economist, didn't understand any of this. He thought 'akreibia'- i.e. a precision greater than the subject matter can bear- could clarify or contribute to the pragmatic 'economia' that is the soul of economics.

In a foolish little book titled 'the collapse of the fact/ value dichotomy' (which is just the alethic/imperative dichotomy)  he wrote- 

THE IDEA THAT “VALUE JUDGMENTS ARE SUBJECTIVE" is a piece of philosophy that has gradually come to be accepted by many people as if it were common sense.

It is a piece of common sense. Some instruments which are objects- e.g. a weighing machine- determines 'objective' values like how much a thing weighs. However aesthetic or medical judgments may made by subjects who differ from each other in their psychology and motivations and who look at non things which can't be measured by an object like a weighing machine. Thus fashion editor may think a model is overweight though a Doctor may disagree. Both may say the actual weight of the person is irrelevant. It is the aesthetic effect created by the person, or else data to do with the functioning of their different organs, which is what matters. 

In the hands of sophisticated thinkers this idea can be and has been developed in different ways. The ones I shall be concerned with hold that “statements of fact” are capable of being “objectively true” and capable, as well, of being "objectively warranted,” while value judgments, according to these thinkers, are incapable of object truth and objective warrant.

There is no need to say the thing is true. It is enough that it can be independently verified for a particular purpose.  

Value judgments, according to the most extreme proponents of a sharp “fact/ value” dichotomy; are completely outside the sphere of reason.

They can be. Crazy people may think the most delicious to eat is their own shit.  

This book tries to show that from the beginning these views rested on untenable arguments and on over-inflated dichotomies.

They don't rest on arguments or dichotomies. They rest on common experience.  

And these untenable arguments had, as we shall see, important “real world” consequences in the twentieth century

Evil economists, like Bhagwati or Manmohan Singh, are pretending Amartya Sen is a useless tosser.  

Although I have criticized the fact/value dichotomy in chapters of previous books, this is the first time I have tried to examine the history of the dichotomy from David Hume to the present day and to examine its concrete effects particularly in the science of economics' I chose economics because economics is a policy science-economists directly advise governments and non-governmental organizations-and precisely the question this book deals with, the question as to whether "ends," that is to say values, can or cannot be rationally discussed or, to put it differently whether there is a notion of rationality applicable to normative questions, has been hotly debated in economics for many decades.

Governments and NGOs decide how they want to spend their money or how to do more with the money they have to spend. They may call in an expert to advise them on their menu of choice. A guy with good quantitative skills who is helpful in this regards may be called an economist. He helps his client economize on the use of scarce resources. 

Economists and Accountants aren't supposed to tell you about what you should prefer or what  you should spend your money on. A clergyman may advise you to give your wealth to the poor. A bon viveur may recommend you spend your money on certain choice wines and viands. Depending on your predisposition, you may hire such a person to direct and motivate your expenditure. But such a person is not an economist. He is not economizing on anything.  

Another reason is that, although at one time the ruling view in economics was precisely the view this book attacks, the view that, as Lionel Robbins put it, “there is no room for argument” when values are in question, a powerful case on the other side, a case for the need for and possibility of reasoned arguments about ethical questions in welfare economics, has been made and defended for many years by one of the world’s great economists, Amartya Sen.

He is a useless tosser. India remained poor because people like him thought the cake should be fairly divided up before it was baked. The result was- no fucking cake. Manmohan and Montek Singh helped India break with its crazy Socialist policies and things have gotten a lot better for hundreds of millions of Indians. Sen, 'the Mother Theresa of Economics', made stupid or mischievous comments from time to time till everybody understood he was a vacuous, verbose, shithead.  

In our time, then, the question as to what the differences are between “factual” judgments and “value” judgments is no ivory-tower issue. Matters of-literally-life and death may well be at stake.

Very true. Suppose somebody smashes in your skull. You are taken to a hospital. The surgeon delivers a nice sermon but refuses to offer you any medical assistance. You die. Objectively, that surgeon is a useless tosser. Subjectively, he has championed the capabilities approach and is on the side of the angels. Anyway, the dichotomy between life and death has been exaggerated. The truth is they are intricately entangled. Just because you are buried six feet under ground doesn't mean you can't have an active social life.

EVERY ONE of you has heard someone ask, “Is that supposed to be a fact or a value judgment?"

You answer by offering verification, if it is a fact, or explaining why you think it is right to hold such and such a value.  

The presupposition of this “stumper” is that if it’s a “value judgment” it can’t possibly be a [statement of] “fact”;

It is a fact that you think such and such is right. The problem is that only you can testify that this is so. People may doubt your veracity. They may think you are 'virtue signalling'.  

and a further presupposition of this is that value judgments are “subjective”

Only a subject, not an object like a weighing machine, can have values.  

The view that value judgments are not factual claims and the inference that if they are not then they must be subjective have a long history In this century many social scientists accepted both, with terribly important consequences, as we shall see in detail (in connection with the case of economics in particular) in Chapter 3.

There were terrible consequences to thinking economic facts didn't matter- e.g. entrepreneurs and arbitrageurs raise factor productivity- whereas 'values' like compassion for the poor or the need to establish Social Justice could be translated into Government programs which didn't cause economic collapse. 

Similarly, in Physics, it was a mistake to dismiss certain theories on the grounds that they had been put forward by Jewish, homosexual, women whom God fucking hates.  

Before we explore the dichotomy between facts and values in more detail, it will be helpful to look at a different distinction, one that has also been inflated into a dichotomy and wielded as if it comprised an exhaustive classification of all possible judgments, namely the distinction between analytic and synthetic.

Why bother? There are no valid synthetic a priori judgements.  

Analytic” is a philosopher’s term of art that, under the pressure of developments in the history of early analytic philosophy, came to be viewed as a name for the class of truths that are “tautologies,” or “true simply in virtue of their meaning.” A favorite example of such an allegedly analytic truth is 'All bachelors are unmarried.”

This is not a tautology. It informs us about the meaning of a word in a particular context. Of course, it isn't true.  A Knight bachelor may be married. Others may be married in some jurisdictions but not others. 

(The positivists, in employing the terms “analytic” and "synthetic," were borrowing vocabulary from Kant-vocabulary that had passed through and, on the way been transformed by Frege.)‘ The logical positivists claimed that mathematics consists of analytic truths.

 A theorem is a conditional tautology. Carnap did try to defend the notion Putnam is getting at but this entailed declaring analytic statements to be provable by non-finite reasoning

“Synthetic” was Kant’s term for the non-analytic truths. His surprising claim was that mathematical truths are both synthetic and necessary (a priori).

He was wrong. Get over it.  

In the twentieth century Kant’s positivist opponents attempted to expand the notion of the “analytic” to embrace all of mathematics (which they claimed to be, in effect, a matter of our linguistic conventions as opposed to facts). Thus for the positivists both distinctions, the distinction between facts and values and the distinction between analytic and synthetic, contrast “facts” with something else: the first contrasts “facts” with “values” and the second contrasts “facts” with “tautologies” (or "analytic truths”).

If so, them guys were stoooopid. Facts can be independently verified. Tautologies may be wholly meaningless.  

It is widely recognized since Quine’s 1951 attack on this overblown form of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy that it has collapsed. (In effect, Quine argued that scientific statements cannot be neatly separated into “conventions” and “facts.”)

In which case what Quine was saying can't be neatly separated into anything at all. 'Synthetic' is a wholly useless term. Kant needed it because he thought Newton was right. But Newton was wrong. Philosophers really couldn't add value to any discourse they stuck their noses into.  

The point of view concerning the relation between “facts” and “values” that I shall be defending in this book is one that John Dewey defended throughout virtually all of his long and exemplary career.

Is that a fact or is it a value? Dewey did exist and some guys rated him. Putnam clearly places a value on his work. But what is the value to us- not to Putnam- of this defence? The answer is we are supposed to think more highly of Sen. Yet, Sen is a shithead. The 'cash value' of what Putnam is doing is shit.  

Dewey’s target was not the idea that, for certain purposes, it might help to draw a distinction (say between “facts” and “values”); rather his target was what he called the fact/ value “dualism.” It is one of a great many such philosophical dualisms that Dewey was concerned to identify diagnose, and exorcise from our thinking.

Dewey wanted his country to become richer, nicer and more secure. There was a 'cash value' to his work. Sen wants to virtue signal while pretending Manmohan is very evil. He is a fucking waste of space.  

A misunderstanding that his work always tends to provoke (as I have learned by teaching it) is the misunderstanding that when Dewey attacks what he called “dualisms” he is thereby attacking all allied philosophical distinctions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Was Dewey cool with Sen-tentious Manichaeanism such that Manmohan and Minhas and Montek and other such Punjabis who wanted Indians to eat more nice food and wear nicer clothes were all evil bastards because they didn't understand that some people have a lower capability of generating utility from food or clothes? Did Dewey think that before making up our mind on any issue, we should consult 'impartial spectators' from Patagonia or the Planet Pluto? Nope. Dewey was pragmatic. He wasn't a verbose virtue-signalling cretin.   

Although it was not one of Dewey’s favorite examples of a pernicious philosophical dualism, the case of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy illustrates the importance of respecting the distinction between a philosophical dualism and a philosophical distinction.

It is important to show extreme disrespect to meaningless or stupid shite like the above.  In philosophy there are distinctions without a difference because a particular problem remains open. Once it is closed, that branch of philosophy collapses. Dualism or dialethia or whatever is still diarrhoea. 

The logical positivists famously introduced a tripartite classification of all our putative judgments into those that are “synthetic” (and hence, according to the logical positivists, empirically verifiable or falsifiable),

verification, for some specific purpose, is all that matters 

those that are “analytic” (and hence, according to the logical positivists, “true [or false] on the basis of the [logical] rules alone”), and those-and this, notoriously included all our ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic judgments-that are “cognitively meaningless” (although they may have a practical function as disguised imperatives, ways of influencing one another’s attitudes, and so on).‘

Why not just say they are subjective or strategic?  

Although our ordinary language is confused and vague so that an ordinary-language sentence may not be clearly classifiable as analytic or synthetic (or even as cognitively meaningful or meaningless), once what the speaker is trying to say is made clear, perhaps by offering the speaker a set of precise alternative formulations in an artificially constructed language, Whichever clear formulation (or “rational reconstruction”) she may choose of what she is trying to say will be (1) true (or false) in virtue of the very rules (or conventions) of the artificially constructed language; or (2) testable by confrontation with “observation sentences”; or (3) “cognitively speaking,” just nonsense. What I said earlier about the fact/value dichotomy namely that it was conceived as an “omnipresent and all-important gulf” could also be said about the manner in which the positivists conceived the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.

Only if could also be said about the cat dog divorce court in San Diego which doesn't exist.  

To say that it was “omnipresent” is to say that this distinction was conceived of as something that could be applied to absolutely every meaningful judgment in absolutely every area. Indeed, if a judgment could not be so classified, then that would suffice to show that, at best, the supposed ‘judgment” was ambiguous, that the speaker was confused as to which of several different judgments she wanted to make, and that, at worst, there was no real judgment there at all. Such an “analytic-synthetic distinction” (or, to use Dewey’s term, such a “dualism” of the analytic and the synthetic) is a metaphysical bogey To say that the analytic-synthetic distinction appeared “all important” is to say that if one accepted that distinction (or rather dualism), then all philosophical problems would thereby appear to be solved at once! The only problems that would remain are technical problems-such as the ones the logical positivists set themselves.

So, this was an arbitrary method of achieving some particular end. But the end didn't matter and the method was silly. Why mention it now?  

The crucial transition-to which Dewey sought to alert us from an innocent distinction to a metaphysical dualism can already be seen in Kant’s way of conceiving the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. For Kant forced the question: ‘Are the truths of mathematics analytic or synthetic?"

Neither. They are either useful or useless.  

(as well as a similar question about many other hard cases, for example, the principle of causality). Kant found that the principles of mathematics are both synthetic and a priori, but that claim has proven anathema to empiricists.

Math can be useful. That's all that matters.  

The logical positivists’ reply was that the principles of mathematics are indeed necessary (as Kant thought), but not synthetic-they are analytic.; But in order to give this reply the logical positivists stretched the notion of analyticity to the breaking point.

Then people realized they were useless.  

Once Kant’s category of the synthetic a priori ceases to be available,

It was silly. There is nothing you can find out just by sitting in an armchair and thinking real hard. On the other hand, wishing on a star always works.  

it becomes important to consider-as many metaphysicians are still unwilling to consider-the possibility that the principles of mathematics are unlike both paradigm examples of analytic truths (like “all bachelors are unmarried”) and purely descriptive truths (like “robins have feathers”).

There are lots of different types of math with different principles which are useful in different ways. There are no truths. There are things we can verify well enough for a particular purpose. That is all. Philosophy is a waste of time.  

This illustrates one difference between an ordinary distinction

which are useful 

and a metaphysical dichotomy:

which are stupid and useless 

ordinary distinctions have ranges of application, and we are not surprised if they do not always apply

Unrestricted comprehension is a short cut to babbling nonsense. 

Not only did the logical positivists follow Kant in supposing that the forced question “analytic or synthetic” must make sense as applied to mathematics, but they thought it must make sense as applied to every single statement of theoretical physics. Thus not withstanding the fact that considerations of elegance (which would be classified by the logical positivists as introducing an element of “convention”), as well as the need to make our physical theories as a whole square with experiment (“fact,” in the logical positivist idiom), shape the way we develop and employ concepts in physics-they had to maintain that to ask whether, say the Principle of the Conservation of Energy is “analytic or synthetic” is not only to ask a meaningful question, but to ask one that must be answered if we are to embark upon the project of making our physics (fully) “rational.”

i.e. deductive. But the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle (and later on the problems associated with quantum decoherence) meant that QM didn't have this built in, so to speak, into its undergirding.

Quine criticized the positivists, first, for their “failure to appreciate that this legislative trait [in other words, the element of convention] is a trait of scientific hypothesis very generally” (rather than a trait possessed by certain particular scientific sentences and not others), and second, for their “failure to appreciate that it is a trait of the passing event rather than of the truth which is thereby instituted” (in other words, the fact that a sentence is initially adopted as a convention does not mean that it does not subsequently face the tribunal of experiment on a par with all the other sentences of the theory).‘ Summing all this up in a brilliant metaphor, Quine wrote, “The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale grey lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”

A Godelian might say this is because we have found no 'Absolute Proofs'. Alternatively if there is no way to distinguish pseudo-random from random or 'lawless' from 'law-like choice sequence', then 'natural proofs' are out of our grasp. Still, it appears, for any practical purpose, there generally seems a way forward. 

Quine, however, went much too far in his initial attack on the distinction in his famous essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” throwing out the baby with the bathwater by in effect, denying that there is any sense to distinguishing a class of analytic truths (for example, “all bachelors are unmarried”) from truths that are subject to observational test (“all main sequence stars are red”).°

One may say 'bachelor' is an intension whose extension is 'all men who have never undergone any ceremony of marriage nor are considered to have entered a common law, Levirate, or other such marital relationship'. This may appear to be a well defined set. But investigation may prove a lot of so called bachelors are no such thing. However, if we find a bachelor who is married (e.g. a Brahmo character in a Tagore story who discovers he was married off as a child according to Sanatan rites) we can refine our definition of 'bachelor'. In the case of 'main sequence stars' presumably finding one which isn't red won't change the definition of it. It will change the structural causal model of it. In a sense, this is a matter of protocol or convenience. Suppose we live in a strict monarchical country. There is a law that the Prince of Wales is deemed a bachelor even though he is known to be married to a Catholic lady. Professors in this country, afraid of lese majeste, may prefer to say empirical evidence has shown that not all bachelors are unmarried. The proposition is false. 

And indeed, much of Quine’s philosophy of mathematics seems to be an attempt to assimilate mathematical truth to truth in physics (which would seem to imply that mathematical sentences are “synthetic” in Kant’s sense, rather than implying that the question “analytic or synthetic” is a hopelessly unclear one).

This is the long Euclidean hangover suffered by Western philosophy. Geometry is. Thus the world must be as our Geometry says it should be. But our Geometry can be anything it likes.

Others, however, starting with myself, have argued that one can accept Quine’s insight (that there are large ranges of statements that cannot be simply classified as either analytic truths or statements of observable fact) while retaining the modest idea that there are also cases that fall on either side of the following specifiable distinction: statements of a language that are trivially true in virtue of the meanings of their words and statements that are not;° Quine himself later conceded that I was right and attempted to state that difference precisely.” I would add that recognizing a difference between such trivially true statements,

sadly 'trivially true' statements can turn out not to be any such thing as the knowledge base changes.  

however we characterize that class linguistically and other sorts of statements, does not entail that all those other sorts of statements fall into a single class of “statements about matters of fact” (Hume) or a single class of “synthetic statements” (Kant). In short, it turns out that the notion of an analytic statement can be a modest and occasionally useful notion, but so domesticated that it ceases to be a powerful philosophical weapon that can perform such marvelous functions as explaining why mathematical truths pose no problem at all for empiricism."

Just as the modest notion of the immaculate conception can explain how come God's Mum didn't bump uglies with God's Dad who was consubstantial with Himself.  

I4 | THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY

THE HISTORY OF THE FACT/VALUE DICHOTOMY

The history of the fact/ value dichotomy parallels in certain respects the history of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy

Not in Econ. There used to be a 'paradox of value'- i.e. why are diamonds more expensive than water? The solution was Demand and Supply based on Marginal Utility and Marginal Cost curves intersecting. Prices were a fact about the world discoverable on open markets. One was still welcome to say that the cake Mummy made for you with oodles of love was far more valuable that the caviare you are eating out of the pussy of a high priced hooker. Shame you had to sell Mum's house to fund your binge. 

Like the latter, it is foreshadowed by a Humean dichotomy-the one implicit in I-Iume’s famous doctrine that one cannot infer an “ought” from an “is.”"

And yet we infer, correctly, that when Mum says our room is really messy, that we ought to clean it up. Otherwise, Mummy will give us a tight slap. There are imperative or deontic logics just as there are other systems of inference. 

Putnam shows, albeit unconsciously, why Hume was wrong.

However, Hume’s criterion for “matters of fact” presupposed what might be called a "pictorial semantics.”" Concepts, in Hume’s theory of the mind, are a kind of “idea,” and “ideas” are themselves pictorial: the only way they can represent any “matter of fact” is by resembling it (not necessarily visually however-ideas can also be tactile, olfactory and so on). Ideas have, however, nonpictorial properties as well; they can involve or be associated with sentiments, in other words, emotions. Hume does not just tell us that one cannot infer an “ought” from an he claims, more broadly that there is no “matter of fact” about right and no matter of fact about virtue. “ The reason is that if there were matters of fact about virtue and vice, then it would have to be the case (if we assume “pictorial semantics”) that the property of virtue would be picturable in the way that the property of being an apple is picturable.

This is silly. Little kids see pictures of good little kiddies who are smiling and happy and neat and tidy. The bad little kiddies are depicted as slovenly and screaming their little heads off. We have a picture of goodness in our heads and seek to conform to it.  

Hume was quite correct, given his semantical views, to conclude that there are no such matters of fact.

There are in fact apples and there are in fact sober, clean, happy people who remain sober, clean and happy because they are leading what would commonly be called virtuous lives.  

Furthermore, given that “passions” or “sentiments” were the only remaining properties of “ideas, ” Hume thought he had at his disposal to explain why it so much as seems to us that there are such matters of fact, it was quite reasonable for him to conclude that the components of our “ideas” that correspond to judgments of virtue and vice are nothing more than “sentiments” aroused in us by the “contemplation” of the relevant actions owing to “the particular structure and fabric” of our minds."

We may also have sentiments towards apples- as a healthy snack- and against a bar of chocolate. 

The doctrine that “one cannot infer an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’

merely means that imperative or deontic logic is different from the sort used in the natural sciences. The Law of Gravity can't be repealed by Parliament nor can you be given a dispensation from it by the Archbishop. 

” possesses a feature that I noted in connection with the analytic synthetic dichotomy: one side of the distinction names a class with a more or less distinctive feature.

Because such a distinction was made. 

In the case of  Hume’s moral philosophy the class is the class of judgments that involve the “idea” ought.

These would be the judgments of law or canon courts or of that of the conscience itself.  Deontic logics  have different protocols and are 'buck stopped' in different ways from scientific logic. In particular, the latter can have a Heaven or Hell whereas we would look askance at an astronomer or cartographer who wasted any time in locating such places. 

So described, the class presupposes the discredited seventeenth- and eighteenth-century talk of “ideas,” but (if we wish to disinflate the dichotomy implicit in Hume’s arguments) we can repair this defect by speaking instead of the class of judgments that involve the word “ought” in one of its ethical uses.

Why not just say that ethical arguments are different from arguments about physics?  

To be sure, so described, the class is somewhat vague (since it is not clear when a use of “ought” is an “ethical” use), but just as in the case of the notion of an “analytic truth,” it would be premature to deny that there is such a class at all merely on the grounds of the vagueness of its boundaries.

But ethics does not have a vague boundary with physics.  

Moreover, guided by Hume’s own remarks in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, we can enlarge the class by considering judgments containing not only the word "ought," but also “right,” "wrong," “virtue,” “vice,” and such derivatives as “virtuous” and “vicious,” as well as “good” and “bad” in their ethical uses.” The resulting class--call it the class of paradigmatic value judgments-would contain the great majority of examples that appear in the writings of the proponents of what I am calling the fact/ value “dichotomy”

The dichotomy arises because some facts are measurable objectively or, for some particular purpose, may have an associated metric. Values are subjective though they can generate 'Schelling focal' solutions to coordination or discoordination problems.  But this is the standard view in Econ. Putnam admits there is nothing of philosophical interest in anything he said about Hume. He moves on to Kant.

 Suffice it to say that many Kantian moral philosophers have taken Kant to say-and have agreed with Kant, so interpreted--that value judgments have the character of imperatives (Kant himself speaks of “rules” and “maxims” as well as of the famous “Categorical Imperative”).

Kant thought freedom entailed forming laws to regulate your own conduct. He was a deeply silly man.  

According to them, “mur­der is wrong” is a way of saying “do not murder,” and this is not a description of any fact (this then becomes a point on which Kant so interpreted-agrees with Hume).

No. Kant thought he had provided a good argument for why rational, autonomous, beings would give themselves this law against killing. But Kant's reasoning was poor. He was simply wrong.  

But, on any sound interpretation of Kant’s View such a remark cannot be just an expression of a “sentiment” either; nor can it be simply a mixture of a judgment (that certain circumstances obtain) together with an expression of a “sentiment” (with respect to those circumstances). Here Kant strongly disagrees with Hume. All interpreters of Kant take him to hold that moral statements can be rationally justified- indeed, the whole of Kant’s moral philosophy is an account of how this can be the case.

But justification has two components- a legal and a factual one. Change the facts, or even knowledge of the facts, and the law compels what it would otherwise forbid. Interestingly, knowing the facts can forbid what would otherwise be the obligatory response.  

Judges have been distinguishing what is law and what is fact for thousands of years. Businessmen have differentiated between price- which is factual and objective- and valuation, which is subjective and may not have a metric, for even longer. Yet Putnam thinks facts and values are 'entangled'. Why? The answer is that he thinks something bad will happen if we don't hold this absurd view. 

There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between “facts” and “values”-and to draw it in such a way that “values” are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether.

Those are the same reasons why we are tempted to tell nutters to go fuck themselves if they insist we slit our throats so as to avoid the rise of Demon King Asmodeus. We seek to curb a nuisance.  

For one thing, it is much easier to say “that’s a value judgment,” meaning, “that’s just a matter of subjective preference,” than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.

Socrates was a fucking nuisance. His people killed him.  

As Michele Moody-Adams argued in an important book about cultural relativism, if we give up the very idea of a “rationally irresolvable” ethical dispute,

i.e. the nuisance created by virtue signallers 

we are not thereby committing ourselves to the prospect of actually resolving all our ethical disagreements, but we are committing ourselves to the idea that there is always the possibility of further discussion and further examination of any disputed issue, including the Socratic self-examination that I just spoke of”

Fuck that. Let those who are more ethical achieve something wonderful in which case they will be emulated. Pleading for more ethical behaviour is not itself ethical behaviour.  

The worst thing about the fact/ value dichotomy is that in practice it functions as a discussion-stopper, and not just a discussion-stopper, but a thought-stopper.

Fuck discussions. You go off and help thousands of starving peeps and Society will begin to praise you. Capable people will follow your example. Deeds matter. Discussing things endlessly is a waste of time. 

But there are less disreputable reasons for being attracted to relativism, noncognitivism, the error theory and the like, and the other contemporary versions of the dichotomy One reason, Bernard Williams’s reason, is that he does not see how to provide us with a metaphysical explanation of the possibility of ethical knowledge.

Not to mention why we love our Mummies and our Babies. It is enough that there are 'revealed preferences' in this respect.

Putnam begins his chapter on Sen with this quotation-

'The support that believers in, and advocates oil self-interested behavior have sought in Adam Smith is, in fact, hard to find on a wider and less biased reading of Smith.

Sen pretends that Smith thought darkies weren't inferior to White people.  

The professor of moral philosophy and the pioneer economist did not, in fact, lead a life of spectacular schizophrenia.

The guy was paid to teach moral philosophy but had made some money by using his knowledge of developments in France etc to write a very readable book- 'the Wealth of Nations'- which was broadly reformist and anti-mercantilist.  

'Indeed, it is precisely the narrowing of the broad Smithian view of human beings, in modern economics, that can be seen as one of the major deficiencies of modern economic theory.

The theory doesn't matter. Economics is something practiced in the world. Has there been a great economizing of scarce resources in production and consumption? Yes. True, Government departments and the Academy, etc, got a bit bloated but tax payers could and did rebel from time to time.  

'This impoverishment is closely related to the distancing of economics from ethics'

Sen was too stupid to understand that in Smith's time, slavery was cool. Clearly economies, and therefore economics, had become more, not less, ethical everywhere- save some Commie shitholes.  

IN previous chapters I criticized the arguments for the fact/value dichotomy

Putnam's criticism failed. Judges and businessmen have distinguished the two for thousands of years without any problem.  

& showed, first, that both historically and conceptually those arguments originated in an impoverished empiricist (and later an equally impoverished logical positivist) conception of fact,

Nobody gave a shit about the logical positivists. Only fools like Putnam bothered with that shite. 

and second, that if we do not see that facts and values are deeply “entangled” we shall misunderstand the nature of fact as badly as logical positivists misunderstood the nature of value. In this chapter (as I have promised) I shall relate these issues to the work of Amartya Sen, work that has transformed our understanding of what “classical economic theory” was

Sen says it was about being nice to the poor and listening patiently to Patagonian savages. The man is a cretin.  

 Vivian Walsh, who, like Amartya Sen, is both a moral philosopher and an economist,

and equally useless 

” has recently traced the development of what he calls “the revival of classical [economic] theory during the twentieth century” with special attention to Amartya Sen’s place in what Walsh sees as the emerging “second phase” of that theory’

Sen was pretending Smith was actually a Left Liberal. However, even Marx said 'to each according to his contribution' till scarcity disappears. There was some renewed interest in Ricardian, Georgist, Institutionalist and fix-price economics but it petered out. Sen wasn't involved in it at all.  

He begins his narrative by pointing out that the “habit of concentration on a few key issues of classical theory” was a prominent feature of the work of the theorists who initiated the revival of classical economics at the beginning of the twentieth century; “and their main preoccupation was naturally with Ricardo. As Walsh has noted elsewhere, Ricardo himself never lost sight of the deep moral implications of Smith’s analytical contribution.

Ricardo was a successful arbitrageur who entered Parliament to lobby for a particular fiscal arrangement advantageous to people like himself. Still, he and his rival Malthus could be said to create actual models of the economy. Smith just gassed on in a well-bred fashion.  

But Ricardo knew that he was not a trained moral philosopher, and so (as he himself tells us)‘ he “confined his attention to those passages in the writing of Adam Smith from which he sees reason to differ.” Walsh points out that this “Ricardian minimalism” was a notable characteristic of the work of Piero Sraffa,

who was useless. He didn't get that even in a one-commodity one-period economy there would still be a plethora of hedges and positional goods.  

von Neumann,

a mathematician- not an economist. I suppose Walsh is getting at 'expected utility'. But the payoff matrix can be arbitrarily specified.  

and others, but this is not a criticism of Sraifa or von Neumann or their contemporaries. As Walsh says, “In fact such a minimalism reflected the most critical need for the revival of classical theory: the most precise possible mathematical development of the structure of the theory”

Ignoring the marginal revolution was silly. Only dynamics matter.  

A similar point is made by Sen himself (note that Sen’s term for what Walsh calls “minimalism” is “the engineering approach”): “There are many issues on which economics has been able to provide better understanding and illumination precisely because of the extensive use of the engineering approach.”

Sen is thinking of Pareto on the one hand and Kantarovich, Pontyragin, etc. on the other. But this misses the point that only what happens at the margin matters. There it is mimetics- imitating what the smart operators are doing- which alters outcomes. That's why South Korea and Taiwan rose and rose while India stagnated.  

Sen characteristically adds that “these contributions have been made despite the neglect of the ethical approach, since there are important  economic logistic issues that do call for attention, and which can be tackled with efficiency up to a point, even within the limited format of a narrowly construed non-ethical view of human motivation and behavior."

You can improve logistics with O.R but what's even better is to stop doing stuff which smart peeps are giving up and try to get into the fields which those smart peeps are taking up. Rationality isn't about computation. It is about choosing a good mimetic target and trying to emulate it to the best of your ability.  

(Sen gives as an illustration the development of general equilibrium theory, which, he says, brings out “important interrelations that call for technical analysis of a high order.”)

By the early Seventies, General Equilibrium was known to be 'anything goes'. Still, Arrow-Debreu securities were useful precisely because they were also 'weapons of financial mass destruction'- i.e. had a Schumpeterian role.  

If it was important in the twentieth century to perfect the mathematical tools of the “minimalist” approach, Sen insists that something additional is needed now

Arrow-Debreu & Sen's own shite ignore Knightian Uncertainty and have frictionless futures' markets for everything. This means the price vector encodes ALL information. This means there is no need for language or communication or any actual exchange of money. The coordination and Transportation problem for the Economy would be solved by ubiquitous telepathic magic. But even a computer the size of the Universe could not compute the General Equilibrium or the Capabilities solution in one billion times the life-time of the Universe. 

“The impoverishment of welfare economics related to its distancing from ethics,” he writes, “affects both welfare economics (narrowing its reach and relevance) and predictive economics (weakening its behavioral foundations).”

Sen's solution was to tell stupid, childish, lies. He was pretending there was a real risk of a big famine under Mrs. Thatcher!  

However, if we are to understand Sen’s place in history the reintroduction of ethical concerns and concepts into economic discourse must not be thought of as an abandonment of “classical economics”; rather it is a reintroduction of something that was everywhere present in the writings of Adam Smith and that went hand-in-hand with Smith’s technical analyses. This is something that Sen himself stresses; again and again he points out that Adam Smith is being misrepresented by those who would construe him as the prophet of “economic man.” Those who see Smith in such a way are fond of quoting the following passage: “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, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."‘° Sen’s dry comment on this use of the passage is: While many admirers of Smith do not seem to have gone beyond this bit about the butcher and the brewer, a reading of even this passage would indicate that what Smith is doing here is to specify why and how normal transactions in the market are carried out, and why and how division of labour works, which is the subject of the chapter in which the quoted passage occurs. But the fact that Smith noted that mutually advantageous trades are very common does not indicate at all that he thought that self-love . . . could be adequate for a good society

Smith was Scottish. He stressed that people must possess 'force' and 'courage' as well as 'prudence', 'thrift', 'patriotism' etc. A society needs to be able to fuck over its enemies and despoil them of their colonies if those colonies increase their military strength. 

Indeed, he maintained precisely the opposite. He did not rest economic salvation on some unique motivation.” Walsh’s term “second phase classical theory” is thus the right term for the Senian program. That program involves introducing ethical concerns and concepts into economics without sacrificing the rigorous tools contributed by “first phase” theory 

A plumber has a good set of tools. But he will only fix your sink if you pay him. Instilling 'ethical concerns and concepts' in the plumber may cause him to beat you. He may point out that you are a useless tosser. 

Economics is about economizing on scarce resources- including the time of the plumber. He may listen to your lectures on morality while sipping tea if you pay him by the hour. But you have wasted time and money since he'd have fixed the sink and gone his merry way if only you'd let him get on with the job. 

Putnam may say, 'some evil logical positivists caused Economists to become unethical and so a nice brown monkey from starving Bengal came to point out the errors of their ways'. But this is not true. Sen had to leave India because he eloped with his best friend's wife. He came to England and then went to America because he was paid better there. As for genuine economists, they were making billions in the private sector- like Purnendu Chatterjee- or else were lifting up their country, like Manmohan Singh. 

In Ethics and Economics as well as in his many papers and lectures, Sen has sought to challenge standard economists’ picture of (1) what economic rationality requires;

Because of Knightian Uncertainty, it is some sort of Hannan Consistency and is linked to machine learning. Sen was too stupid to tackle that sort of thing. 

(2) what the motivations of economic actors can realistically be assumed to be;

Nothing can be assumed. You actually need econometric evidence of behaviour and 'revealed preference'. Alternatively, just mimic what smart peeps are doing and hope you get lucky.  

and (3) what criteria of economic performance and social well-being welfare economics can legitimately use.”

For Sen, the answer was to take existing indices and arbitrarily manipulate them till you could show that inequality and poverty had never risen so rapidly than under the administration of your pal Manmohan. The problem with telling stupid lies, is that sooner or later people think you are either a stupid liar or a Mother Theresa type figure disconnected from Reality.  

In addition, he has not only enriched our understanding of such tragic phenomena as famine

Sen told stupid lies about two big Bengali famines in his lifetime.

and the millions of “missing women” (that is, the shorter life-expectancies of women as compared with men in large parts of the world),

Sen came late to that party. Female infanticide was an issue taken up by British District Commissioners in the late eighteenth century in India. Less breast feeding for daughters- which also means the greater likelihood of a sibling being born- was another common explanation. The British Census had drawn attention to the phenomenon. Why were some sub-caste net importers of brides while others supplied them? 

but he has also proposed a positive approach to the evaluation of wellbeing, the “capabilities approach.”

It already existed. Governments had Ministries of Health and Education and Sports and Housing and so forth.  Different policy instruments targeted different aspects of welfare. 

I shall say something about each of these, and then close by connecting my discussion to the topics in the first two chapters. (1 ) Does One Have to Be Selfish to Be Rational? “How is rational behavior characterized in standard economic theory?

Standard theory neglected Knightian Uncertainty and focussed on Expected Utility maximization. But Utility is a Tarskian primitive. It can be 'Capabilities' or anything else you like. 

It is fair to say that there are two predominant methods of defining rationality of behavior in mainline economic theory One is to see rationality as internal consistency of choice

ceteris paribus. This just means, that tastes or preferences do not change. There are no mimetic or learning or addiction or other sources of market failure. 

and the other is to identify rationality with maximization of self interest"

But the self is welcome to have any preferences it likes.  

Amartya Sen has written extensively on questions concerning the notions of consistency of both preferences and choices (and the relation between choices and preferences).

That writing was worthless.  Choices and preferences only matter because the future is unknown. If this were not the case, we would outsource both. Economic models would be deterministic. Communist countries would have had to put up walls, not to prevent their people escaping, but to keep out people fleeing Capitalism.

“' But quite apart from the question as to just how these consistency notions are to be interpreted mathematically (and the important question as to whether the notion of purely internal consistency is itself cogent), the idea that internal consistency of choice can be a sufficient condition of rationality seems absurd, as Sen notes.”

Then why waste time on that academic availability cascade?  

Once we give up the idea-itself the product of a narrow verificationism that is a hangover of logical positivism-that one’s choices must flawlessly “reveal” one’s values,

I suppose Putnam is taking a dig at Samuelson's 'Revealed Preference'. But Companies and Government Agencies needed to estimate demand curves. Market research is one thing. Looking at what people actually buy too is important.  

it is impossible to avoid the question of the relation of a person’s choices to his or her values,

Sometimes our values affect our choices. Sometimes habit or mimetics or FOMO dictates our actions. Nothing more can be said about this.  

as well as the question of the evaluation of those values themselves.

Why not evaluate the evaluations of those evaluations? There's a reason values are Tarskian primities.  

The idea that only self-interested values are “rational” is even harder to defend.

Not if failure to act self-interestedly leads to an extinction event. It doesn't matter if we talk as though we cared about disabled Lesbians being tortured in Iran. Talk is cheap. But if we go off to Iran to protest their incarceration we won't live long enough to tell the tale. People will think we were stupid.  

In part the prestige of this idea in economics derives from the false supposition that it is what Adam Smith taught, an idea that, as we have already seen, depends on a misreading of Smith that Sen has repeatedly and consistently tried to correct.

Nobody gives a fuck about either Economic theory or Hume or Smith.

(2) The Motivations of Economic Actors Often economists defend the strategy of assuming that economic actors are “rational” as what Sen calls an “intermediary” strategy: actual behavior is identified with rational behavior, on the ground (or methodological hope) that actual behavior is close enough to rational for this “simplifying” assumption to work, and then rational behavior is assumed to be identical with self-interested behavior.

To have 'rational expectations' means to expect the outcome predicted by the correct economic theory. Every profession has its own 'terms of art'.  

Sen’s uncharacteristically savage comment is as follows: The complex procedure of equating self-interest with rationality and then identifying actual behavior with rational behavior seems to be thoroughly counterproductive if the ultimate intention is to provide a reasonable case for the assumption of self-interest maxirnization in the specification of actual behavior in economic theory

We don't make an assumption with the ultimate intention to make a case for the assumption. We make an assumption so as to simplify matters and get more quickly to a solution for a particular problem. Sen has shit for brains.  

To try to use the demands of rationality in going to battle on behalf of the standard behavioral assumption of economic theory (to wit, actual self-interest maximization) is like leading a cavalry charge on a lame donkey

Nothing wrong with that, if the enemy is riding chickens. But there is no enemy. We reason about things not so as to reason about reason but so as to end up with more and better things.  

“ The assumption that people act only on self-interested motives  was sometimes defended on the basis of the hedonist psychology of jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, which held that everyone ultimately “really” desires only a subjective psychological quantity (called “pleasure” by Bentham) and that this “quantity” was a purely subjective matter.

But nobody cared about that defence. Economics was about saving money by economizing on the use of scarce resources. No doubt, people acted in one way when discharging an economic function while acting quite differently when expressing their psychological or aesthetic or spiritual or other such proclivities or commitments.  

As john Dewey put it long ago, “When happiness is conceived of as an aggregate of states of feeling,

But we don't conceive of happiness in this way. We sometimes say 'I'm feeling really happy. I suppose its for such and such reason.' We don't say 'I'm aggregating my states of feeling so as to determine if I am happy.'  

these are regarded as homogenous in quality different from one another only in intensity and duration. Their qualitative differences are not intrinsic, but are due to the diiferent objects with which they are associated (as pleasures of hearing, or vision). Hence they disappear when the pleasure is taken by itself as an end.”" This disappearance of the qualitative differences is (as far as importance to the agent’s “happiness” is concerned), of course, just what makes it possible for the utilitarian to speak of “summing” pleasures, “maximizing” them, and so on.

No. Utilitarianism's appeal is that the existence of money means that we can work out net profit or loss. We can think of Society as working in a manner which maximizes net benefit over net social cost. This has a clear connection with calculating National Income which in turn is helpful for fiscal policy. 

But if Dewey’s alternative view is right (as I believe), and if “agreeableness is precisely the agreeableness or congruence of some objective condition with some impulse, habit, or tendency of the agent,” then “of course, pure pleasure is a myth.

Dewey isn't right.  

Any pleasure is qualitatively unique, being precisely the harmony of one set of conditions with its appropriate activity The pleasure of eating is one thing; the pleasure of hearing music, another; the pleasure of an amiable act, another; the pleasure of drunkenness or of anger is still another.”‘° Dewey continues, “Hence the possibility of absolutely different moral values attaching to pleasures, according to the type or aspect of character which they express. But if the good is only a sum of pleasures, any pleasure, so far as it goes, is as good as any other--the pleasure of malignity as good as the pleasure of kindness, simply as pleasure.”" Dewey not only anticipates the point made by Nozick with the aid of his famous thought experiment of the “experience machine” that what we want in life is not mere feelings (otherwise we would all choose to spend our lives in the experience machine) but rather the objective fulfillment of desires, capacities, and efforts, but he also anticipates Nozick’s point that “what we are is important to us.”

The 'experience machine' does not exist. If it did, we might spend money taking a vacation on Mars from time to time. What is the point of saying being a rock is important to the rock and being a stockbroker is important to the stockbroker? The rock may suddenly turn into a weapon used by one ape-man to batter in the brains of another ape-man. The stockbroker may suddenly become a jail-bird.  

As Dewey also writes, “Not only the ‘good,’ but the more vigorous and hearty of the ‘bad,’ would scorn a life in which character, selfhood, had no significance, and where the experimental discovery and testing of destiny had no place.

They would also scorn a life where the theoretical discovery and testing of sodomitical unicorns had no place. So what? 

Sen argues in a number of places that people are very often powerfully moved, not only by motives other than subjective “pleasure,” but by a great variety of non-self-interested motives-not only ethical motives, although there is no reason for refusing to recognize that these may be powerful in certain circumstances, but also loyalties of all kinds, both good and bad, both to ideas and to groups (as well as group hatreds of all kinds).

Why argue for what is obvious but also wholly irrelevant?  

Last but not least, not only are people not simply motivated by self-interest, but even more disastrously for the way the notion of “self-interest” is often used by the economists Sen criticizes, there is an enormous difference between maximizing genuine long-term self-interest (which is usually not what is understood by the term “selfinterest”) and maximizing mere short-term selfinterest.

There is also an enormous difference between talking vacuous bollocks and saying useful or sensible things. 

When this is seen, it becomes clear that the modern version of “economic man” is neither genuinely rational nor truly acting in his or her selfinterest.

So what? People stopped talking of 'economic man' long ago.  

(3) Criteria of Economic Performance and Social Well-Being During the Great Depression a rather remarkable change took place in welfare economics.

More and more people realized that they needed a Social Security safety net. An expanded role for Government could be helpful for every branch of industry and every aspect of social life.

To understand this change, we need to recall a bit of history

No. We need to recall the Great Depression which hit laissez faire Economies much worse than planned or autarkic economies.  

Some economists started using the concept of utility in the eighteenth century and by the end of the nineteenth century it had achieved a particular form, which became virtually standard. It was assumed by the “neo-classical” economists (William Stanley jevons, Alfred Marshall, and their followers) that there was something called which could be quantified. (Edgeworth’s brilliantand preposterous at least by present standards-Mathematical Psychics, published in 1881, and repeatedly republished thereafter,  assumed a unit of utility called the “Util.”) “Utility curves” were plotted, which showed how utility supposedly increased with increasing quantities of a given commodity These curves assumed a particular shape, a shape governed by what was called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility According to this “law” the marginal utility (the utility of the last amount consumed) decreases with additional consumption. (Alfred Marshall illustrated this with the charming example of a small boy eating berries.) Arthur Cecil Pigou’s enormously influential Economics of Welfare, published in 1920, derived a simple argument for at least some redistribution of wealth from these “neo-classical” premises. lf the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility is right, then the marginal utility of money should also diminish. And even if these marginal utilities vary considerably from person to person, it is still plausible that the marginal utility of, say a thousand dollars to someone at the point of going hungry or becoming a homeless beggar is much greater than the marginal utility of a thousand dollars to, say Bill Gates. Conclusion: the total utility (often identified with “the total happiness” by utilitarian writers) of the population as a whole would be increased by taking a thousand dollars away from Bill Gates in taxes and giving a thousand dollars to the destitute person; more generally other things being equal, income redistrilmtion promotes webfare. Interestingly enough, it was during the depths of the Depression that Lionel Robbins, certainly one of the most influential economists in the world, persuaded the entire economics profession that interpersonal comparisons of utility are “meaningless ".

No. Robbins was a silly fellow talking to other silly fellows in a silly branch of the academy. We make 'interpersonal comparisons of utility' all the time. I say 'look you have inherited a copy of a book written in a language you can't, but I can, read. Why don't you give it to me in return for something I have which I'm not using but which would be quite helpful to you?' You may go on Google and discover that you can sell the book for ten thousand dollars. You ask me if I will pay that sum. I say no. You tell me to fuck off. There are 'arbitrageurs' or 'market makers' who try to identify classes of assets where there is likely to be 'value discrepancy'. One such bunch of arbitrageurs compose the market for rare books.  

Although these views were not the product of logical positivism (Walsh has pointed out that at the beginning of the 1930s Robbins seems to have been influenced by jevons’s skepticism concerning the possibility of knowledge of the states of mind of other people-a skepticism that is contrary to the behaviorist doctrines of logical positivism), by 1935, Robbins was beginning to be influenced by logical positivism as well.” In particular, he held strong views to the effect that rational discussion (“argument”) is impossible in ethics, and therefore ethical questions must be kept wholly out of economics.

The fellow was a nuisance. The whole 'revealed preference' availability cascade merely complicated matters. 'In order theory, the Szpilrajn extension theorem (also called the order-extension principle), proved by Edward Szpilrajn in 1930,[1] states that every partial order is contained in a total order. Intuitively, the theorem says that any method of comparing elements that leaves some pairs incomparable can be extended in such a way that every pair becomes comparable. The theorem is one of many examples of the use of the axiom of choice in the form of Zorn's lemma to find a maximal set with certain properties.' In other words you can always get a cardinal measure from an ordinal ranking. Robbins & Co were wasting their time. Still, the definition of 'positive econ' was quite useful. It was a way of politely but firmly telling the Marxian or the Nazi or the Gandhian or the Catholic Economist to fuck the fuck off. Sen, being a chattering brown monkey from a starving shithole, protested against this because, obviously, brown monkeys want to wreck the Economy even in the affluent countries to which they have shrewdly migrated.

With one stroke, the idea that the economist could and should be concerned with the welfare of the society in an evaluative sense was rejected,

For the same reason that the idea that Physicists should be concerned with the moral character of quarks was rejected.  

and in its place was inserted the positivist idea that such a concern was “meaningless,” at least from a scientifoc point of view

Thus, if an economist is asked to calculate the Social Costs and Benefits of building a new airport, we expect her to look only at objective, measurable, effects. We don't want the economist to talk about how the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation could eliminate the need for air-ports by teaching everybody to levitate thus spreading 'peace rays'.  

A couple of quotations from Robbins will give the flavor of the idea: If we disagree about ends it is a case of thy blood or mine-or live or let live according to the importance of the difference, or the relative strength of our opponents. But if we disagree about means, then scientific analysis can often help us resolve our differences. If we disagree about the morality of the taking of interest (and we understand what we are talking about), then there is no room for argument."

Actually there is. We can have a Ninomiya type General Equilibrium where the interest rate is replaced by a vector of obligations. Something like this arises in a 'liquidity trap' where Capital Gains provide the 'reward for thrift'. But this may lead to bubbles.  

And again: “It does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition. Economics deals with ascertainable facts; ethics with valuation and obligations.”2’ After they had been persuaded to accept these views by Lionel Robbins (later Lord Lionel Robbins), economists did not simply conclude that there was no such field as “welfare economics.” Instead they looked (strange as this may sound) for a value neutral criterion of optimal economic functioning. And they found one, or so they believed, in the notion of “Pareto optimality”

Which just means two or more people can't do any more mutually beneficial swaps because all relevant information is already taken into account and no more arbitrage can be done.  

Recall that utility itself had not been declared a “meaningless” notion. Indeed, a theorem proved by von Neumann to the effect that (in the case of one single consumer) any formally consistent set of choices could be “represented” mathematically by a function assigning utilities to the various “bundles” of commodities (that is, to the possible combinations of choices) seemed to justify speaking “as if ” there were such a thing as “utility” without having to make any of the heavy philosophical assumptions that went with the use  of that notion in the nineteenth century (for example, the assumption that “utility” is a mental quality of some kind, or the assumption that it is-or isn’t-the same as “pleasure”).

It was obvious that words like utility or ophelimity just cashed out as cash- i.e. money.  

(I have criticized the assumptions needed for the proof of this theorem, however, and so have Sen and numerous others 

Whatever assumptions are made you will still have either uncomputability or lack of completeness. 

‘ What had been declared to be meaningless was not “utility” but intersubjective comparison of utilities.

But this is not meaningless. It is what we do when we offer to buy or swap for stuff which someone else owns but does not use. However, because of Knightian Uncertainty, the other person may prefer to retain it so as to 'minimize regret'.  

I pause to note that while the utilitarians’ assumptions about “utility” were in many ways absurd,

Utility is a Tarskian primitive. It may be useful to make assumptions about it.  

and while the idea that the amount of satisfaction different people get from various goods and services (and from such intangibles as opportunities) can be linearly ordered also seems absurd, the idea that there is a partial ordering here is not at all absurd.

If there is a partial order then, by Zorn's lemma, that 'absurd' total order must also exist. 

To revert to my example above (the one derived from Pigou), the idea that a thousand dollars matters almost not at all to Bill Gates and matters enormously to someone who is about to lose the roof over his or her head, is not at all absurd.

Why did Gates, and not some poorer investor, bring down my old pal Arif Naqvi? The answer is that Gates is so rich that he can afford to make an example of 'impact investing' Private Equity guys who are cutting corners rather than their costs. The very very rich can have higher not lower opportunity cost for a relatively small tax or other fiduciary liability. It is worth their while to switch jurisdiction to escape that liability while the ordinary businessman has no choice but to grin and bear it. 

Again, one does not need to suppose that welfare is simply a function of monetary income,

It is, if you add in imputed elements for things like owner occupation of housing, good health, etc.  

an assumption that Sen has repeatedly criticized, to think there is some validity to the Pigou argument for a certain amount of income redistribution. Speaking of the problem of assigning “weights” to the various factors that one might count as contributing (positively or negatively) to welfare, Sen has written: It is of course crucial to ask, in any evaluative exercise of this kind, how the weights are to be selected. This judgmental exercise can be resolved only through reasoned evaluation. For a particular person, who is making his or her own judgments, the selection of weights will require reflection, rather than any interpersonal agreement (or consensus). However, in arriving at an “agreed” range for social evaluation (for example in social studies of poverty), there has to be some kind of a reasoned “consensus” on weights, or at least on a range of weights. This is a “social choice” exercise, and it requires public discussion and a democratic understanding and acceptance."

Sadly, from the Seventies onward, leftist economists kept producing reports saying 'inequality has never been so bad! We are heading for a Bengal type famine in England's green and pleasant land! Under the current Government, ninety percent of all young people are being forced to suck off hobos just so as to get a bit of protein in their diet'.  

What the positivist views that came to dominate economic  thinking did was to proscribe the very idea of a “reasoned” consensus on any value question.

No. The Left noticed that voters had turned against 'redistribution' by the beginning of the Seventies. They also knew that Dickensian poverty no longer existed in Welfare states. Thus, instead of saying 'poverty and inequality have gone down', they arbitrarily biased existing indices so as to claim that 99 percent of the population was having to suck off hobos.  

If value questions are questions of “thy blood or mine,” the very notion of reason makes no sense: “there is no room for argument.” Pareto optimality is, however, a terribly weak criterion for evaluating socioeconomic states of affairs.

It is obvious that improving technology so information is cheaper and more ubiquitous while enabling more and more arbitrage will make everybody better off. That's the real story about Pareto. Incidentallty higher factor mobility means higher elasticity which means higher allocative efficiency and less 'rent extraction'.  

Defeating Nazi Germany in 1945 could not be called Pareto optimal, for example, because at least one agent-Adolf Hitler-was moved to a lower utility surface.”

It was a Pareto improvement for the Allies- which is why they did it.  

Moreover, if the reason for favoring Pareto optimality as a criterion is that one approves of the underlying value judgment that every agent’s right to maximize his or her utility is as important as every other’s, then it would seem that Pareto optimality isn’t a value neutral criterion of “optimality” at all.

It is factual. To say this is the Pareto frontier means no further profitable arbitrage can be done. We disprove optimality by finding a profitable arbitrage opportunity. This is useful and, on financial markets, can be very profitable. Shit Economists end up teaching shitty shite like Social Choice. Smart economists can become very very rich finding arbitrage opportunities.  

How could there be a value neutral criterion of optimality, anyway?

In the same way there can be an objective truth. Essentially, any smart person who looks at the thing comes to the same conclusion unless they are paid to tell stupid lies. The notion of 'naturality' or non-arbitrariness from Category Theory applies.  

The upshot of this little bit of history is that if there is to be such a subject as welfare economics at all,

it will be a dumping ground for senile shitheads who help budding bureaucrats to get Sheepskins in Grievance Studies 

and in particular, if welfare economics is to speak to problems of poverty and other forms of deprivation,

in the way impotent dicks speak to luscious pussies 

then welfare economics cannot avoid substantive ethical questions.

Is it ethical to teach stupid shit and charge hefty fees for doing so?  

Yet, if we cannot simply go back to nineteenth-century utilitarianism, nor (Sen has argued) accept twentieth-century versions of utilitarianism, what is the a1ternative?z° This is the question to which Sen has devoted a remarkable series of books and lectures. THE CAPABILITIES APPROACH The approach that Amartya Sen has elaborated and argued for in the works to which I just referred is called the “capabilities approach.” The “capabilities” that Sen speaks of are particularly capabilities “to achieve functionings that [a person] has reason to value, and this yields a particular way of viewing the assessment of equality and inequality”’° Sen explains, “The functionings included can vary from the most elementary ones, such as being well-nourished, avoiding escapable morbidity and premature mortality, etc., to quite complex and sophisticated achievements, such as having selfrespect, being able to take part in the life of the community, and so on.”"

We don't know our own capabilities let alone those of anybody else. Worse yet is the problem that what raises 'capabilities' today can cause them to disappear tomorrow. Some Sen-ile nutters thought Chavez's Venezuela was going down the right path.  

Since I have referred repeatedly to the work of Vivian Walsh, it is appropriate to mention that this notion of “functionings” was anticipated by Walsh in 1961 in Scarcity and Evil. Walsh's term was “achievements,” and like Sen he connected a very wide notion of achievements or functionings with a concern for the character of a human life as a whole, which goes back to Aristotle. The idea of applying this point of view to problems of development is, of course, due entirely to Sen.

Yet Development only occurred when countries ignored Aristotle or Marx or Gandhi and concentrated on imitating what the smart countries had done to achieve 'export led growth'. If you concentrate on making your country more 'liveable', there may be some benefits in the short to medium term. But fewer of your young people will be able to live there. They will have to emigrate to find work.  

In recent years, Martha Nussbaum has also used a “capabilities” approach to discuss development issues, particularly as they affect women.” Obviously I do not have the time to explain the capability approach in detail, much less to discuss the rival approaches to questions of poverty welfare, and global justice that Sen considers and rejects (for example, Rawlsian liberalism, Nozickian libertarianism, and the several versions of utilitarianism). But that is not necessary for my purpose, which is to see how welfare economics has found itself forced to recognize that its “classical” concern with economic well-being (and its opposite, economic deprivation) is essentially a moral concern and cannot be addressed responsibly as long as we are unwilling to take reasoned moral argument seriously

This is like saying plumbing is about cleanliness and hygiene. A plumber can't fix your toilet without first addressing your responsibility for shitting into that toilet a whole heck of a lot. You must be willing to take the plumber's reasoned moral argument that you are full of shit very seriously indeed.  

Precisely because Sen’s concerns as an economist are frequently, in fact characteristically international in scope, his writing often addresses problems of what is called “economic development.”

Which the Government of India was doing before he was born. 

In this area, the conventional wisdom is that the sole problem is to raise the monetary income or perhaps the gross economic output of “underdeveloped” nations.

No. The terms of trade and allocative and dynamic efficiency also matter a great deal. Raising factor productivity is about raising 'functionings' and 'capabilities'. It has nothing to do with lecturing rich kids in Cambridge or Harvard.  

One way in which Sen shows us the need for more sensitive measures of “underdevelopment,” poverty and other forms of economic deprivation is by observing how feeble a measure of economic well-being money and gross economic product are by themselves, and how seriously our “information base” is restricted when we fail to gather information about what results flow from given levels of income or production under various conditions.”

Having a big information base about a starving shithole doesn't help those starving in that shithole.  

As Sen continues: The relationship between income and capability [is] strongly affected by the age of the person (e.g. by the specific needs of the very old and the very young), by gender and social roles (e.g. through special responsibilities of maternity and also custom determined family obligations), by location (e.g. by the proneness to flooding or drought, or by insecurity and violence in some innercity living), by epidemiological atmosphere (e.g. through diseases endemic in a region), and by other variations over which a person may have no-or only limited-control.

So what? We know how problems of various sorts can be tackled.  

A striking statistic that Sen uses to illustrate this point is the following: Men in China and in Kerala decisively outlive African American men in terms of surviving to older age groups.

No they don't, if they share the same traits. Being a crack addict who enjoys drive-by shootings leads to high mortality even if you are a Chinese Keralite.  

Even African American women end up having a survival pattern for the higher ages similar to the much poorer Chinese, and decidedly lower survival rates than the even poorer Indians in Kerala.

America gave India lots of free food and free money and then new 'green revolution' technology and resources for Family Planning .  Had it not done so, Indians in Kerala would have high mortality. Incidentally, incarcerating under 'three strikes' African American men of a certain cohort improved their mortality, education level, morbidity etc. 

So it is not only the case that American blacks suffer from relative deprivation in terms of income per head vis-a-vis American whites, they are also absolutely more deprived than the low income Indians in Kerala (for both women and men), and the Chinese (in the case of men), in terms of living to ripe old ages.”

This is sheer nonsense. African Americans had less deprivation when it came to accessing drugs and guns and living a gangster lifestyle.  

As I said, I do not have time to discuss the several versions of utilitarianism, but I do want to call attention to one interesting criticism that Sen makes of a particular version of utilitarianism, the version according to which well-being can be measured simply by desire satisfaction.”

Fuck that. Real income (including 'imputed' benefits) can be measured well enough. Anyway, we can see whether there is exit or entry 'at the margin'.  

The novel point that Sen makes is that in cases of extreme and long-lasting deprivation, the satisfaction of desires can also be an impoverished information base because a frequent consequence of this sort of deprivation is the reduction in the range of desires owing to the hopelessness of the situation.

This fool got it into his head that poor people become fatalistic. He didn't notice that, at the margin, they run the fuck away from shitholes in the same manner that he himself did. 

As Sen writes: The problem is particularly acute in the context of entrenched inequalities and deprivations. A thoroughly deprived person, leading  a very reduced life, might not appear to be badly off in terms of the mental metric of desire and its fulfillment, if the hardship is accepted with non-grumbling resignation. In situations of long-standing deprivation, the victims do not go on grieving and lamenting all the time, and very often make great efforts to take pleasure in small mercies and to cut down personal desires to modest--“realistic”­ proportions .... The extent of a person’s deprivation may not at all show up in the metric of desire-fuliillment,

which does not exist 

even though he or she may be quite unable to be adequately nourished, decently clothed, minimally educated, and properly sheltered."

What matters is whether people try to exit shitholes. The answer is they do.  

"Capabilities," in Sen’s sense, are not simply valuable functionings; they are freedoms to enjoy valuable functionings, a point that is announced in the title of Sen’s recent book Development as Freedom and stressed throughout that book.

Why stop there? Why not say there are Beatitudes associated with freedoms to enjoy valuable functionings? Thus we can right a book titled 'Beatitude as Development as Freedom as Niceness as Some Stupid Shite you can get a Sheepskin in but only if you are an utter cretin and thus incapable of doing anything useful.' 

Obviously there is room for disagreement as to just which functionings are “valuable” or such that people have “reason to value them,” but this room for disagreement is something that Sen regards as valuable rather than disadvantageous.

Moreover, there is room for disagreement as to just which Beatitudes as Freedoms as Functionings are 'valuable' as opposed to incessantly sodomizing itself. 

Indeed, Sen does not even claim that the capability approach includes all the factors one might wish to include in the evaluation of welfare: “we might, for example, attach importance to rules and procedures and not just to freedoms and outcomes?"

just as we might attach beatitude to importance as freedom as development as niceness as getting an MPhil in worthless shite like Rahul Baba. 

And he asks the question, “Is this plurality an embarrassment for advocacy of the capability perspective for evaluative purposes?”

Yes. That plurality is constantly unzipping its fly and pissing on everybody.  

to which he responds with a firm negative: Quite the contrary To insist that there should be only one homogeneous magnitude that we value is to reduce drastically the range of our evaluative reasoning.

more particularly if this evaluative reasoning is done by pissing on people 

It is not, for example, to the credit of classical utilitarianism that it values only pleasure, without taking any direct interest in freedom, rights, creativity or actual living conditions.

What is definitely to its discredit was that it sucked off Traditional Utilitarianism in the belief that Romantic Beatitude would get jealous.

To insist on the mechanical comfort of having just one homogeneous “good thing” would be to deny our humanity as reasoning creatures.

No. It would be merely a case of talking vacuous bollocks.  

It is like seeking to make the life of the chef easier by finding something which-and which alone--we all like (such as smoked salmon, or perhaps even french fries), or some one quality which we must all try to maximize (such as the saltiness of the food).” 

It does make the cook's job easier if everybody agrees to order the same thing. God alone knows why Putnam wants to maximize the saltiness of food.  

Mathematically speaking, what the capabilities approach yields (even when we have agreed on a list of valuable functionings--some thing that itselii as Sen has told us, requires “public discussion and a democratic understanding and acceptance”) is not a complete ordering of situations with respect to positive welfare, but a partial ordering, and a somewhat fuzzy one at that.

It yields nothing at all. Anybody can construct an arbitrary index showing that Lesbian goats in Paraguay are better off than billionaires under Biden.  

The approach (sometimes Sen calls it a “perspective”) does not pretend to yield a “decision method” that could be programmed on a computer. What it does do is invite us to think about what functionings form part of our and other cultures’ notions of a good life and to investigate just how much freedom to achieve various of those functionings various groups of people in various situations actually have.

So, a guy writing an article comparing life in Barcelona to life in Boston might look at how easy it is for different sorts of pervert to hook up in one City compared to another. There may also be 'ease of doing business' indices which might guide choice of location for enterprises.  

Such an approach will require us to stop compartmentalizing “ethics” and “economics” and “politics” in the way we have been doing since Lionel Robbins triumphed over the Pigovian welfare economists in 1932, and come back to the kind of reasoned and humane evaluation of social wellbeing that Adam Smith saw as essential to the task of the economist.

 I studied at the LSE. Nobody gave a fuck about Robbins. Pigouvian taxes were part of the Public Finance course which also included Welfare Econ & Social Choice. 

CONCLUSION: ENTANGLEMENT AGAIN In the first chapter I began by explaining the difference between an ordinary distinction and a metaphysical dichotomy, using the analytic synthetic distinction/ dichotomy (at different times it was one or the other of these) as an illustration.

You did a shit job. A distinction without a difference is metaphysical. Economists aren't concerned with it.  

I pointed out that if the fact/ value distinction is intended as a mere distinction, it is not univocal;

Yes it is.  

we get one “partitioning” of the space of judgments

there is no such space 

if we take value judgments to be judgments in which certain relatively abstract or ethical concepts figure (for example, "good," "bad," “ought,” "should," “duty” “virtue,” “obligation,” "right," “wrong“), a somewhat different partitioning if we take value judgments to be judgments that praise or blame some person or persons, and we get still other possible interpretations of the distinction.”

You can't partition a space which does not exist. I may speak of the 'space of dog turds devoured by Sen' and partition them in all sorts of ways. But there is no such space.  

This fuzziness does not, of course, make the distinction unusable. More important, the possibility of distinguishing a class of “value judgments” in one way or another does not, by itself, have any implications at all as to whether value judgments can or can not be true or false, justified or unjustified, do or do not have any descriptive content, and so on; nor does it have any implications as to whether the complementary class of non-value judgments has any unity at all. When the distinction becomes a dichotomy-perhaps I should have used john Dewey's term, a dualism-it typically gets accompanied by a highly contentious set of metaphysical claims (even they are typically claimed to be anti-metaphysical claims).

Just say 'Dewey was a pragmatist. If a distinction is useful for a particular purpose make it by all means.' 

 Let me now make explicit the connection, which I have so far left implicit, between the topics of this chapter and the “abstract” topics of Chapters 1 and 2: the capabilities approach requires that we use the vocabulary that one inevitably uses, the vocabulary that one must use, to talk of capabilities in the sense of “capacities for valuable functions,” and that vocabulary consists almost entirely of “entangled” concepts, concepts that cannot be simply factored into a “descriptive part” and an “evaluative part.”

I say that every such concept can and has been factorized in this way by judges and business analysts and policy makers. 

just about every one of the terms that Sen and his colleagues and followers use when they talk about capabilities-“valuable functioning,” “functioning a per­son has reason to value,” “well nourished,”

this if factorized into medical data based on actuarial tables and scientific studies. Our ideas may change in this regard. We now see more meat and sugar and fat may be bad for you.  

“premature mortality”

which is actuarial.  

“self-respect,”

If people quit a type of enterprise or exit a jurisdiction citing 'self-respect', then you can quantify this. It is a different matter that you can ignore Putnam or Sen saying 'no self-respecting economist would demean themselves by doing useful stuff.'  

“able to take part in the life of the community”

again, this can be quantified for a particular purpose- e.g. the siting of a highway may cut off and isolate a subset of a particular community from  and a CBA can put a money value to this. 

-is an entangled term.

Nope. They can be fully 'factorized' for any given purpose such that only what is measurable is one side of the balance sheet. It is a different matter that a particular market may deemed repugnant in an of itself. That is a value judgment or a matter of tastes and preferences. Sometimes we may decriminalize an activity which is repugnant because the Social Costs of prohibition are too high. But we may equally do the reverse. Ban the teaching of mathematics because most mathematicians tend to have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE!                                                                                       

The standpoint that Sen shows we must take if we are to make responsible evaluations in welfare and developmental economics is not the standpoint that says (as Robbins said) that “it does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition.

In other words, being ethical means we should tell stupid lies about the way the world actually is. The problem here is people may think you are just a lazy self-publicist who is making a profit on 'virtue signalling'. Thus, when I say 'dicks cause RAPE! Ban all dicks!' I am merely seeking to ingratiate myself with the Feminists. They understand this and may say repay me by supporting the Iyer claim to an Iyerland currently ruled by a half Marathi leprechaun. 

Economics deals with ascertainable facts; ethics, with valuation and obligations.”‘" It is a standpoint that says that valuation and the “ascertaining” of facts are interdependent activities.

In which case, we are naturally suspicious of so-called 'facts' presented to us. We dismiss it as propaganda.  

It is ironic that in Europe there was another tradition in the social sciences, one coming from Max Weber, which also sharply separated factual and ethical questions, but which acknowledged a certain interdependence.

Which is why the German Historical school could turn Nazi so easily.  

For Max Weber, the decision as to what question the social scientist investigates was and had to be one that involved ethical values.

Or, who was paying for it. Investigators are paid to uncover or invent 'facts' useful to their employer.  

But once the choice was made, the ascertaining of the answer to the scientist’s question was not to be dictated by that scientist's value system.

He was simply an employee.  

With this I am sure Amartya Sen would agree. But what Max Weber failed to acknowledge was that while indeed the answers to a scientific question must never be dictated by one’s value system, the terms one uses even in description in history and in sociology and the other social sciences are invariably ethically colored;

Men have dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! We must ban the mathematical physics of the 'Phallocracy'.  

this is nowhere more true than in the case of the terms Weber used to describe his “ideal types.” Two further points emerge from Sen’s work that deserve to be emphasized here. First, once one proposes to evaluate economic well-being, one necessarily becomes involved with questions that have been discussed extensively in the literature of ethics.

Unless one's evaluations are useful in which case you can earn money by doing alethic research. Thus if you find real wages and welfare for Dentists is higher in Dubai than in Dusseldorf, then German dentists will migrate from the one place to the other. Moreover, you will get paid by magazines read by Dentists to do more such evaluations. 

That does not just mean the literature of utilitarian ethics (which for many years tended to be the one kind of ethics that economists who did not wish to exclude value judgment altogether regarded as respectable);

on the basis of Cost Benefit analysis. The rise of NIMBYism put paid to this. Private Enterprise might still go ahead with big projects based on their profit calculations. The Public Sector became wary of the rent-a-mob of activists and thus withdrew from the field. 

if it is legitimate for some economists to defend utilitarian measures of well-being,

it is if tax revenue rises by certain types of public spending or investment. The thing pays for itself. There is no 'crowding out effect' or 'Ricardian equivalence'.  

it must be legitimate to consider the arguments against the adequacy of utilitarianism, both in terms of what it allows in its “information base” and in terms of its procedures of evaluation.

Only if it is also legitimate to scream hysterically and shit yourself incessantly because dicks cause RAPE! Yet Biden isn't even having gender reassignment surgery once a week.  

Moreover, considering arguments against means also considering arguments for alternatives to utilitarianism, which is why Sen discusses in detail the work of john Rawls, Robert Nozick, and many others.

What conclusion does he come to? None at all. We should just go on debating endlessly while inviting the testimony of 'impartial spectators' from different planets. 

In short, the serious welfare economists have to have a serious acquaintance with the best of contemporary ethical discussion.

They should read Peter Singer and demand votes for walruses.  

(It is not a one-way street; in Ethics and Economics Sen argues that ethicists also have much to learn from economics.)

No one has anything to learn from Sen. His existence is an explanation for why Hindu Bengal fell relative to other parts of the sub-continent. Buddhijivis have shit for brains. 

Second, it is not only that entangled concepts necessarily figure in evaluation; to the extent that people’s motivations are significantly influenced by their ethical reasoning, we will need to take account of-and to make “descriptive” uses of-a variety of thick ethical concepts in the description of economically relevant behavior: As Sen writes, in the concluding paragraph of Ethics and Economics: I have tried to argue that welfare economics can be substantially enriched by paying more attention to ethics, and that the study of ethics can also benefit from closer contact with economics. I have also argued that even predictive and descriptive economics can be helped by making more room for welfare-economic considerations in the determination of behavior. I have not tried to argue that either of these exercises would be particularly easy They involve deep-seated ambiguities, and many of the problems are inherently complex. But the case for bringing economics closer to ethics does not rest on this being an easy thing to do. The case lies, instead, on the rewards of the exercise. I have argued that the rewards can be expected to be rather large."

What have those 'rewards' actually been? The answer is we have had a lot of woke virtue signalling while private enterprise has taken over more and more of the functions of the Welfare State. Elon Musk or Gautam Adani don't have to pretend to give a fuck about crazy feminists or animal rights activists.  

One of the reasons I discussed the fact/ value dichotomy in these chapters was not only to provide a philosophical overview of the reasons that made economists like Lionel Robbins think that the development Walsh called “second phase classical economics,” the enterprise of "bringing economics closer to ethics,” was “logically impossible”; but also, by demolishing those reasons, I wished to provide a philosophy of language that can accommodate and support this second phase.

But that 'second phase' was shit. Post-War Governments discovered there were fiscal 'virtuous circles' in tackling various 'collective action problems'. Then NIMBYism and Woke activism killed the thing off. Private Enterprise moved in because Public Servants didn't want to be incessantly attacked as 'Fascist'. Sen continually attacked his pal Manmohan. But Manmohan had no power. Then Modi got elected and suddenly only Mamta would pat Sen on the head. But the West Bengal economy continued to underperform.  

I believe but aware of my own limitations have not tried to document, that very similar issues arise in the law

The Law, as Hume pointed out, is concerned with Utility. It is merely a service industry just like econ. Either it saves people money or it gets disintermediated and becomes a nuisance activity. 

When a Doctor writes you a prescription for some illness you suffer, you have an incentive to act according to that prescription because the Doctor knows how to cure that illness. Some nutter who prescribes some crazy shit to you is not speaking 'prescriptively'. Sen & Co. were unable to prescribe anything sensible for India or any other country. So they migrated to Philosophy's La La  land. 

0NE of the earliest publications by Amartya Sen on moral philosophy is a 1967 essay “The Nature and Classes of Prescriptive judgments.”

He was only speaking of 'commendatory judgments' which aren't prescriptions at all. They may influence you to go to X rather than Y for a prescription in your particular case. 

After reading the account of the overall significance of Sen’s work in Chapter 3, one may be surprised to learn that this early essay takes the noncognitivist position of R. M. Hare as its starting-point.

Sen begins his essay by mentioning Hare. He clarifies that 'evaluation' can involve value judgments. But this depends on who ordered or paid for the evaluation. Moreover, evaluations aren't really prescriptive at all though they may motivate requesting such a prescription from a particular agent.  

Yet even at this stage, Sen was chafing at the implications of noncognitivism, and this early essay is worth examining for its valiant attempt to reconcile the noncognitivist thesis that value judgments are merely a way of expressing our endorsement of certain imperatives with the claim that it is possible to give reasons for and against ethical judgments.

There can be deontic or aesthetic or other types of logic or reasoned discourse. But Economics must focus on economizing just as plumbers must focus on fixing the fucking toilet.  

It is, I think, worthwhile to examine the distinctions (and even more the tensions) in Sen’s arguments at this stage in the evolution of his thought. Hare’s best-known statement of his position was set out in The Language of Morals.” Hare subsequently called this position “universal prescriptivism.”

Sen's critique of Hare was shit. I've posted about it here 

" He called it “universal” because, according to him, it is a logical (that is to say an analytic) truth that ethical judgments are universalizable (note how once again the analyticsynthetic dichotomy is being presupposed). If I say that “murder is wrong,” then I must agree that it is wrong for anyone to commit murder if my judgment is to be a truly ethical one.

No. You are merely saying that the word 'murder' is only properly used in the case of a certain type of wrongful killing. + 

And Hare calls it “prescriptivism” because the value component of an ethical judgment (sometimes Hare uses simply “value judgment”) is properly expressed in the imperative mode.

This is arbitrary. Saying 'wrongful killing is wrong' is not a prescription. It is merely the sort of thing you say when the other guy starts gassing on about how Hamas's terrorists are angels and all Jews and other Kaffirs are evil scum.  

Thus IHare writes, in a passage quoted by Sen: “I propose to say that the test, whether someone is using the judgment ‘I ought to do X’ as a value judgment or not is, ‘Does he or does he not recognize that if he assents to the judgment he must also assent to the command, ‘Let me do X?’

This is merely an arbitrary assertion. 'I ought to shit in your hat' can represent the value judgment that you are an evil piece of shit. But it does not mean, 'please let me take a dump in your headgear.'  

”’ Or as Sen himself put it: A value judgment is to be called “purely prescriptive” if by it the author intends to convey only an agreement to the underlying imperative and not any factual information other than that necessary to express the imperative.

This is an arbitrary and foolish assertion. A judgment is prescriptive if it creates an incentive to perform the action it recommends. Thus, if the world's best Macroeconomist says 'lower the interest rate by x amount so as to remove inflationary pressure and restore confidence in the currency' then there is a prescriptive element. If some crazy hobo says 'lower the interest rate because I am very interested in rating your asshole for sodomitical purposes', there is no prescription.  

The factual part consists here only of identifying the alternatives to which the imperative refers. For example, if I say “Capital punishment should be abolished,” and mean by it only my agreement to the imperative “Let us abolish capital punishment,” this can be taken to be a “purely prescriptive judgment.”

Not if you are a crazy hobo who goes on to say 'Capital should not be punished. It should be encouraged to tell its possessors to let me fuck them in the ass'.  

‘ It is true that Sen says at the very beginning of this essay that “we shall not enter into the debate whether all value judgments are ‘prescriptive’ or whether all of them are ‘universalizable’; we shall simply confine our attention to those which have these characteristics, without worrying about whether that leaves some types of value judgments out of consideration.”

In other words, let us confine our attention to meaningless shite.  

However, in the course of the article he regularly cites many familiar sorts of “value judgments” as examples, without giving any special argument that they are “prescriptive” in Hare’s sense.

Because he was a stupid shithead writing worthless shite.  

Evidently then, at this stage Sen thought that if there were other sorts of “value judgments” they could safely be ignored.

Ignore shite talked by shitheads- d'uh! 

In addition, the factual information/ imperative dichotomy is explicitly presupposed in the passage I just quoted.” Finally a “purely prescriptive” value judgment, that is, one with no descriptive component, conveys only an agreement (on the part of the “author” of the value judgment) to an “underlying” imperative. “Capital punishment should be abolished” is “only” a way of conveying the speaker’s agreement to the imperative, “Let us abolish capital punishment.” IHow then did Sen find a way to resist the conclusion of the logical positivist A. ]. Ayer concerning the relation between a value judgment and its “reasons”? Sen quotes Ayer: “Why people respond favourably to certain facts and unfavourably to others is [merely] a question for the sociologist.” Sen begins with the remark that “one difficulty with Hare’s analysis _ . . is that while one gets from it a very precise analysis of classes of value terms and expressions, Hare himself says relatively little on the classes of value judgments that use these terms.”'° (In fact, the “analysis of value terms” that Sen referred to here presupposed the doctrine, which I criticized in Part I, of the “factorizabi1­ ity” of value terms into a “prescriptive” and a “descriptive” component.

Yet, such factorizability of all genuinely prescriptive statements. The Doctor's case notes have a description of the malady and then a prescription directly linked to alleviating its symptoms or tackling its aetiology.  

As Sen explains," “Hare distinguishes between a ‘prescriptive term,” which has ‘prescriptive meaning,” ‘whether or not it has descriptive meaning,” and an ‘evaluative term’ which has ‘both kinds of meaning’

Only if the evaluation is being done by a smart and objective agent- not a stupid or partisan nutter. 

”" Sen’s strategy in this essay was to “suggest a system of classification of value judgments that corresponds to Hare’s general classification of value words,” and then to follow this “by introducing two other methods of classification.” This was no mere exercise in “classification”; Sen’s distinctions, and the discussion that accompanied them, undermine Hare’s noncognitivism much more than Sen himself was willing to come out and say (and perhaps more than he himself recognized in 1967).

So, even back then, Sen was either a fool or a coward or both. 

Sen first distinguished between a “purely prescriptive judgment” (I quoted his definition earlier) and an evaluative judgment,

This is a distinction without a difference. We may say that a Doctor gave a prescription or that he conducted a health evaluation. Suppose, there is no possibility for the prescription to be filled. We might then speak only of evaluation.  

which not only “implies my agreement to an imperative, but also has descriptive content”; this is very much in the spirit of Hare, obviously. His example of an “evaluative judgment,” to which I shall return, is the following: “For example, if I say ‘Capital punishment is barbarous,’

you may simply be repeating a statement you heard from your English teacher without knowing what the sentence meant. Alternatively, you might mean 'some people are barbarians. We must deal with them in a barbarous manner. That's the only language they understand.'  

I may try to convey more than my agreement with the imperative quoted earlier (or a modified imperative of a kind to be discussed [in a later section of Sen’s paper]), viz. also that capital punishment has certain features usually associated with the notion of barbarity”

Because Conan the barbarian knew all about lethal injections and electric chairs- right? 

Next Sen added an additional and very interesting distinction between what he calls “compulsive and non-compulsive judgments."

All Sen's distinctions turn out to be utterly meaningless. A judgment is either enforced or it is a dead letter. 

And finally he reviewed a distinction familiar from both ethics and decision theory; the distinction between “basic” and “non-basic” ends or values.

Which turn out to be utterly impossible to specify- save arbitrarily.  

This whole discussion lies squarely within the framework of Hare's prescriptivism.

i.e. was utterly useless 

First of all, there is the assumption that the value judgments under consideration all imply imperatives; second, there is a peculiar assumption concerning the meanings of “evaluative terms” (these correspond roughly to what I have called “thick ethical concepts”). Before I turn to Sen’s way (at this stage in his career) of finding a place for reasons in connection with value judgments, I shall now say a word about each of these. DO VALUE IUDGMENTS IMPLY IMPERATIVES?

Yes. There is a value judgment which says 'don't run off with your best friend's wife'. Sen did so and defied a moral imperative. It was hilarious that he later set himself up as a Mother Theresa type figure.  

One might wonder how value judgments are supposed to stand in logical relations, such as implication, to anything in that they have no content that is true or false.

You can have a deontic logic like that of the law or religion.  

In the case of statements p and q, which are true or false, to say that p implies q is to say that, if p is true q must be true-indeed (in the case of what is called logical implication), there is a logical inference scheme S of which the inference of q from p is an instance, such that no instance of S with a true premise has a false conclusion. But if value judgments are not true or false, then “implication” cannot be explained in this way.

This is like Jorgensen's dilemma. The solution is easy. There can be deontic logics just as there can be mathematical logics.  

Hare and Sen are aware of this problem and meet it in different  ways. Sen’s way is to employ the following test: a value judgment, say “Capital punishment should be abolished,” implies (or “entails”) an imperative, say “Let us abolish capital punishment.” just in case anyone assents to the first and denies the second, then “no sense can be made of the supposition that he did understand what he said, spoke literally and still meant what he seemed to be saying.”

Nonsense! It is obvious that an Indian who has taken citizenship in a country without Capital punishment can still say that India too should get rid of it. But he can't be part of the process which abolishes it because he can't become an Indian legislator by reason of not being a citizen. Moreover, the meaning may be 'just do extrajudicial killing. Why waste money on due process?'  

' But do value judgments “entail” imperatives (in this sense of "entai1s”)?

They may do iff a deontic logic has been set up.  

Hare’s belief that they do is derived from a belief I criticized in Chapter 3, the belief that value terms are inherently motivational, in the sense that an adjective whose semantic content is that something possesses intrinsic value (or disvalue), is such that anyone who uses it without hypocrisy or insincerity must be motivated to approve (or disapprove) of that thing.

This is nonsense because of 'multiple realizability'. Two people may say the same thing yet mean very different things. 

As Elizabeth Anderson pointed out in a passage I quoted in Chapter 3, “Boredom, weakness, apathy; self-contempt, despair and other motivational states can make a person fail to desire what she judges to be good or desire what she judges to be bad. This prevents the identification of value judgments with expressions of actual desires and preferences, as Hare insists.”

What's more, there is such a thing as virtue signalling or preference falsification.  

If we look at the capital punishment example Sen used, we can see just how implausible this doctrine that “value judgments are ways of assenting to imperatives” actually is. First of all, the imperative, “Let us abolish capital punishment,” is a deviant utterance, linguistically speaking, if one is an ordinary citizen, not giving a public speech, and not an influential politician speaking to influential people. The most that an ordinary person could normally say without linguistic oddity would be, “Let us try to get capital punishment abolished,” or something of that kind.

Nonsense! Anyone can say 'let us' if they have a vote and are speaking to other voters. If you don't have a vote, someone may remind you that you lost your right to assert such things when you slyly fucked off to greener pastures.  

But is it the case that if I say “Capital punishment should be abolished,” and do not assent to “Let us try to get capital punishment abolished,” then no sense can be made of the supposition that I understood what I said, spoke literally and still meant what I seemed to be saying? Sen himself found reasons to demur from this conclusion (though not with this example) as I shall discuss. But a simpler reason, and one closely related to Anderson’s point, is that I might reply “I know I should try to get it abolished, but I just don’t feel like engaging in politics right now”-or even, “I know I should try but I guess I am not a very good citizen.”

You may also point out that what you'd really like is the departure of the boring cunt who is chewing your ear off about something you don't give a shit about.  

The belief that everyone who agrees with the “should be” must at once go along with the imperative, “Let us,” is just another form of Hare’s unreasonable motivational requirement.

Yet, you could set up a deontic logic of this type easily enough.  

And the unreasonable motivational requirement was the very core of “prescriptivism.” “SECONDARILY EVALUATIVE TERMS" Several examples of what I called "thick ethical concepts” in Part I appear in Sen’s “The Nature and Classes of Prescriptive judgments.” Following Hare, Sen says that sometimes such “secondarily evaluative” terms are used “purely descriptively” and sometimes they are used simultaneously to convey a description and to express a “prescription” (an imperative) based upon that description: By and large it is the case that value judgments making a significant use of Hare’s “secondarily evaluative” terms or expressions are evaluative judgments], while those confining themselves to the “purely evaluative” terms or expressions can be either prescriptive or evaluative.

Anything can be anything at all by arbitrary stipulation. That's the problem here. There is no 'naturality' or method of 'carving up the world along its joints'.  

When I say “Your action last Sunday was courageous,” not only do I commend it, but I also describe it in a certain way.

Nonsense! I may be speaking ironically.  

If instead I say "Your action was right,” I almost certainly commend it, but I may  not mean to imply that it fitted in well with the normally accepted standards of “right” behavior

I may simply be trying to suck up to you. Speech can be tactical or strategic. 

“ I want to emphasize the way the “secondarily evaluative terms” are interpreted by Sen (who, at this stage, evidently did not wish to recognize the entanglement of fact and value that these terms exemplify). I list the two interpretations we have just encountered together with a third (of the adjective “nicer”), which occurs a little later in Sen’s paper.

You do so because you have nothing better to do. You wasted your fucking life.  

Barbarous = “has certain features usually associated with the notion of barbarity”

unless it doesn't at all. It is merely a pejorative term you use so as to convey your belief you are morally superior and more civilized than other people. Universities came into existence during the Dark Ages. They are barbarous- with the exception of Trump University which will give me a PhD in return for $9.99.  

Right (when used descriptively) “fitted in well with the normally accepted standards of 'right' behavior”

Unless the person using the term is fucking the corpse of his Mum as he says this.  

Niceness = “may be defined in terms of certain conventional standards, e.g., a ‘nicer’ girl being one who takes longer to yield to temptations of a certain kind”

Nice girls don't run off with married men who also happen to be their husband's best friend.  

It is clear from these three examples that the descriptive meanings of these words are supposed to be captured by what is “usually associated with the notion,” or by “normally accepted standards” (“conventiona1 standards”). This is a stupendous mistake-one which, if Sen had not wholly transcended this “prescriptivist” framework, would have made everything he is doing today with his “capabilities” approach to problems of welfare utterly impossible!

Nonsense! Anyone can talk vacuous shite no matter what stupid shit they wrote fifty years previously.  

It is a mistake in its terms because as a “linguistic analysis” of the meaning of these terms, it implies extremely implausible synonymy relations. For example, if “courageous” were synonymous with, “fits in with normally accepted standards of courageous behavior,” then it would be a contradiction for someone (Socrates?) to say that the “normally accepted standards” confuse courage with rashness.

But it is normally accepted that terms like courage are 'essentially contested'.  

Or to take Sen’s own example, if “barbarous” were synonymous with “has certain features usually associated with the notion of barbarity” then to show that capital punishment isn’t “barbarous,” it would suffice to point out that those features that capital punishment has in common with barbarity are not necessary and sufficient for barbarity as defined by what is “usually associated” with it.

This does suffice. If you are more boring and pedantic than your interlocutor he moves away in search of another victim for his own stripe of boring pedantry. The fact is, one reason affluent countries abolish the death penalty is that a life-time behind bars is a more cruel and unusual punishment than any the Dark Ages could afford. It is easy enough to torture and kill a person. The trick is to keep them alive for decades of torture. 

The problem is that this kind of “analysis” makes a reference to what most people think when they use the word a part of the very meaning of a “secondarily evaluative” term.

In other words, the thing is impredicative or begs the question. 

But it is no contradiction to say that many people fail to see that certain acts aren’t courageous, or that many people fail to see that capital punishment is barbarous, and so on. 

It may be in a particular deontic logic.

A logical positivist would say that when Socrates persuaded us that rash acts do not exemplify courage (if he did succeed in doing this), or when most people in Europe became convinced that capital punishment is barbarous, the meanings of the terms “courage” and "barbarous” simply changed.

Why not just say they were always 'essentially contested'? Greeks thought foreigners were barbarians but those foreigners may have thought the same of Greeks.  

But saying this was part of a larger strategy in the case of logical positivism, of treating every change in the “method of verification” associated with a term as a change in its meaning. This was so obviously just a persuasive redefinition of the term, "meaning," that this very consequence of logical positivism became one of the chief reasons that people gave it up.

Unless they didn't. There is legal positivism and economic positivism and so forth. 

" But if “courageous” is not synonymous with “act that is conventionally called ‘courageous,’ ” or something of that kind, and if what it takes to see that we have been misapplying the term is ethical insight, then the whole idea that when I describe an act as “courageous” without intending to “commend” it (that is, to endorse a related imperative), I am engaged in "value free description” collapses.

No. You may be an expert on battlefield conditions and thus a person called on to testify whether a particular individual deserves a particular medal for gallantry. This may be protocol bound. The Army may have a rule against giving medals for failed campaigns.  

“Courageous” may be the precisely apt description of an action without being “value free.” This is, of course, just the phenomenon of “entanglement” of fact and value.

No. If it is 'apt' then there are objective determinants- e.g. degree of hazard and number of lives saved. There is no 'entanglement'. However, some facts may not be available for a cut and dried 'factorization'. But one can rely on probabilities or the balance of the evidence and make determinations of fact while preserving juristic protocols.  

REASONS IN ETHICAL DISCUSSION Earlier in this chapter, I asked the question, “How did Sen find a way to resist the conclusion of the logical positivist A. j. Ayer concerning the relation between a value judgment and its ‘reasons’?”

He didn't. The right answer was pragmatic. For a given purpose you can do a good enough factorization.  

The conclusion was that the relation is a merely subjective matter to be studied by psychologists. The importance that Sen attached to being able to do precisely this is evident from his explicit statement of disagreement with the most influential economist of the time, Professor (now Lord) Lionel Robbins,

he was never influential. He did have some importance for the LSE but he simply wasn't a smart dude.  

who in his famous treatise on the nature and significance of economics, had written, “it does not seem logically possible to associate the two studies [ethics and economics] in any form but mere juxtaposition. Economics deals with ascertainable facts; ethics with valuation and obligations.”

Sen merely played the 'me starving brown monkey' card. He pretended that all the other Indian economists were depraved sadists who wanted to 'turn India into an economic super-power' even though all its people were gravely ill and undernourished and lacked basic entitlements to PhDs in Gramscian Grammatology from Cambridge.  

The first step in Sen’s procedure was to relax considerably the force of the “imperatives” that are supposed give the (non-descriptive) content of the various value judgments. In Hare’s version of prescriptivism, “Capital punislunent should be abolished,” is equivalent to the imperative, “Let us abolish capital punishment,” where this means: “No matter what reasons may be given against doing it, let us abolish capital punishment.” A value judgment that is equivalent to an absolutely unconditional imperative of this sort is called a “compulsive” judgment by Sen,

Because it is enforceable against any institution of the State which seeks to carry out such punishment. Sadly, this just means lots and lots of extra-judicial killing.  

and Sen’s first point is that a great many perhaps the large majority of all value judgments are noncompulsive: “There is another kind of judgment, such that a judgment of this kind in favour of X against Y implies an imperative in favour of X in a choice between the two, J one denies at the same time all conceivable value judgments giving a reason in favour of choosing Y against X.”” Sen gives the following example of a familiar kind of value judgment that is “non-compulsive”: if someone says that something is “nicer” than something else, this does not imply that they endorse the imperative, “Let us choose it.”

Yet that may indeed be the case.  

All kinds of reasons might override the greater “niceness”: it might cost too much, or it might be out of fashion, and so on.

This is also true of compulsive judgments. You can ban x but this may cause an increase in y which is a good substitute for x.  

Note that Sen has rejected Hare’s thesis that every value judgment just is a way of endorsing a particular imperative.

Though it can be taken as such. But that, like everything else in such matters, is an arbitrary proceeding.  

What I find more important, however, is Sen’s discussion of a different-and very familiar-distinction, the distinction between "basic" and “non-basic” value judgments:

Which is just a way of saying 'basically I am right. The fact that I am completely wrong is 'non-basic' not to say some sort of luxury of thought only indulged in by sybaritic parasites.'  

There is another useful method of classifying value judgments which we may now discuss. A value judgment can be called "basic" to a person if no conceivable revision of factual assumptions can make him revise the judgment.

Thus if he continues to hold certain views even after his head has been chopped off we may say these judgments were 'basic' to the person. An example is Sarmad who picked up his head after the executioner chopped it off and then went running to his Spiritual preceptor to get permission to lie down and die.  

If such revisions can take place, the judgment is “non-basic” in his value system.

Everything turns out to be non-basic. You may want to live but you may give up your life to save your child.  

[Note that “non-basic” is not the same as “non-compulsive.” Non-compulsiveness has to do with the defeasibility of the relation between the value judgment

all judgments are defeasible. Otherwise you are speaking of a Pavlovian conditioned reflex.  

and the imperative to choose the positively valued item-or not to choose the negatively valued item-while non-basicness has to do with the revisability of the value judgment itself] For example, a person may express the judgment, ‘A rise in national income measured at base year prices indicates a better economic situation.”

ceteris paribus. Otherwise there is Laspeyres bias. 

We may ask him whether he will stick to this judgment under all factual circumstances, and go on inquiring, would you say the same if the circumstances were such and such (e.g., the poor were poorer and the rich a lot richer)?” If it turns out that he will revise the judgment under certain factual circumstances, then the judgment can be taken to be non-basic in his value system.

But 'ceteris paribus' is always assumed in judgments of this type. 

If on the other hand, there is no factual situation when a certain person will regard killing a human being to be justifiable, then not killing a human being is a basic value judgment in his system.”

Till you find he has a freezer full of decapitated heads. His other personality is that of a serial killer. 

Ayer had argued that there cannot be either a “logical sense” or a “scientific sense” in which “reasons” can support a value judgment.”

Yes there can. There is some objective evidence that Norah Jones just has a better voice than me. Beyonce is more sexually appealing than I am for reasons which are purely scientific- e.g. relative size of breasts, belly, buttocks etc. There are plenty of people who make money by calculating which baseball players most increase a team's likelihood to win. This gets reflected in their remuneration. 

Sen calls Ayer’s presentation "misleading," and writes, “Someone disputing a value judgment put forward by someone else can have a scientific discussion on the validity of the value judgment by examining the scientific truth of the underlying factual premises.” And he continues: Now, if the judgment expressed happened to be a “basic” one in the value system of the person expressing it, then and only then could it be claimed that there can be no factual method of disputing the judgment.

Nope. It can still be disputed. I may believe that only those who are biologically female can be judged sexy by heterosexuals. Then I discover my favourite cabaret artist is biologically male. Indeed, my beloved wife, has a bigger dick than I do.  

That all value judgments are not basic is easy to show in practically anyone’s value system. If someone entertained only basic value judgments and no others, he would be able to answer every moral question that he can answer without knowing any of the facts; but such people seem to be, to say the least, rare. . . . Consider, for example, the value judgment, “The government should not raise the money supply more than in proportion to the national output,” based on a factual theory relating money supply and output to inflation. If this theory is disputed, which is a legitimate reason against the value judgment in question, the person may move on to a more fundamental value judgment, “The government should not do anything that leads to inflation.” If that too is based on some factual assumption, making it non-basic, the process of moving backwards, as it were, may be repeated .... In this way one might hope to reach ultimately in this person’s value system some basic value judgments.”

Like not wanting to get sacked. But this just comes down to 'self interest' and 'uncorrelated asymmetries' and bourgeois strategies which are perfectly objective and game theoretic.  

Up to this point, Sen has refuted Ayer (who writes as if all value judgments were "basic," just as Hare writes as if all value judgments were “compulsive”), but he has not said anything that a greater logical positivist than Ayer could not accept. Hans Reichenbach, for example, distinguished between imperatives and entailed imperatives, and argued in a similar way that rational discussion of the entaihnents of one’s basic imperatives is possible.”

The conclusion this militates for is the familiar Indian notion that a bunch of different 'matams' (doctrines) may be 'observationally equivalent' as 'Vigyan' (Science or Praxis). But this is 'multiple realizability' not some basic 'supervenience' relationship.  

But Sen goes much further. Without ever quite saying that the whole doctrine that there must be "basic value judgments” in any rational value system is wrong (as john Dewey did throughout his philosophical career), he in effect argues that it is unverifiable that any value judgment is basic.”

Though any system of values can have a number of deontic logics with 'basic' axioms.  

Sen’s clearest statement on this point occurs when he quarrels with Lionel Robbins. Robbins had written: If we disagree about ends it is a case of thy blood or mine-or live or let live according to the importance of the difference, or the relative strength of our opponents. But if we disagree about means, then scientific analysis can often help us resolve our differences. If we disagree about the morality of the taking of interest (and we understand what we are talking about), then there is no room for argument."

Nope. The problem of 'Ways and Means' remains. During the First World War, the question was whether ideological Liberals could remain in the Cabinet despite conscription having been introduced. The answer was, if they could make themselves useful- sure. If they were useless, get rid of them in any case.  

Sen’s comment is: The crucial difficulty with this approach is that it is not quite clearly determinable whether a certain end, or the corresponding value judgment stating the end, is basic or not.

This does not matter. You can have a whole bunch of deontic logics with different premises and still move forward on the 'Ways and Means' of various collective action problems. 

To take Robbins’ own example, how can one be so certain that a difference on the morality of taking interest must be of a basic kind, i.e., why must both parties’ judgments on the morality of taking interest be necessarily basic? The assumption that judgments on certain specific fields (e.g., the rightness of taking interest) must be basic in everyone’s value system, does not seem to be particularly realistic."

Yet we see Governments consulting with senior jurists, clergymen, and leaders of Industry and of Trade Unions so as to get consensus on 'Ways and Means' even though the different actors have different 'basic' values.  

Sen then considers the possibility of a “test of basicness.” Asking the person concerned naturally occurs as a possibility “But since no one would have had occasion to consider all conceivable alternative factual circumstances and to decide whether in any of the cases he would change the judgment or not, his answer to the question may not be conclusive.”

Provisional answers are good enough. Mahatma Gandhi endorsed Indian military action in Kashmir. Just asking the dude resolved that question.  

Another test is to ask the person to consider hypothetical and even counterfactual revisions of factual assumptions, but process never establishes basicness, though it can establish that the judgment is not non-basic in any obviously relevant way” Sen concludes, “It is interesting to note that some value judgments are demonstrably non-basic, but no value judgment is demonstrably basic.”

Yet the Pope's judgment that Christ is God is demonstrably basic. It is no good offering him a bribe to get him to say that Krishna is God.  

To show that all this is no idle logical exercise, Sen then considers utilitarianism in detail and shows that in their compulsive forms,

They have no such things. It is not the case that any utilitarian went around giving blow-jobs to hobos because this promoted the greatest good of the greatest number. This is because 'disutility' turns out to be just opportunity cost.  

the various better-known versions of utilitarianism are best construed as non-basic.” The moral is clear: when we are dealing with any important value disagreement, we assume that facts are irrelevant at our peril.

No we don't. The Pope has a value disagreement with the Ayatollah. Facts about what happened in Bethlehem 2023 years ago are irrelevant.  

No convincing logical reason can be given

because logical reasons are shit.  

for the logical irrelevance of fact to value judgments, even if we accept the positivist conception of what a “fact” is.

So don't bother with philosophy. It is a waste of time.