In this third Dewey lecture titled 'Freedom & Agency' Amartya Sen said-
In the last lecture it was argued that the well-being aspect of a person calls for dual accounting- in terms, respectively, of freedom and achievement.
Well-being calls for good health- consult a Doctor by all means. Also, a good accountant could help you with financial planning. As for 'achievements'- maybe a personal trainer or life-coach could help you there. But what you don't need is to get someone to evaluate 'freedom'. Either you have it, as do others like you, or you don't. If the enemy invades and enslaves your country, you don't need anyone to tell you that you have lost your freedom.
The significance of the distinction relates particularly to the agency aspect of a person.
Every aspect of a person is an agency aspect. Your hand is the agent by which you scratch your bum. Your bum is the agent by which you expel feces from your body.
Values other than the pursuit of well-being may figure prominently in a person's assessment of choices.
No values whatsoever may figure in this.
Not making maximal use of the freedom to pursue well-being may not reflect any failure of evaluation or action.
Nor can it not reflect this. This is because anything and everything could be an evaluation and, moreover, evaluation is itself an action and all actions could be said to be evaluative.
In judging what kind of a deal a person has in terms of the opportunity to pursue his or her own well-being,
you expose your own bigotry. Judge not lest ye be judged.
the concept of well-being freedom is, therefore, necessary,
Freedom means being able to fuck yourself up by taking lots of drugs.
and its role cannot be subsumed by the observation of actual achievements of well-being.
because the role of something wholly useless and impossible can't be subsumed by something useful and feasible.
The autonomy of the agency aspect of a person, which has the effect of making WAIF an inadequate basis for substantive moral reasoning,
because substantive moral reasoning is any old shit you pull out of your arse
also has the result that the well-being aspect of a person must be seen in terms of freedom as well as actual achievement.
Why stop there? Why not say freedom should be seen in terms of the freedom to be free to be free to value freedom as the achievement of the freedom to enjoy well-being by being free to value any old shite you pull out of your arse?
. AGENCY FREEDOM Well-being freedom is freedom of a rather particular type.
A wholly meaningless type.
It concentrates on a person's capability to have various functioning vectors and to enjoy the corresponding well-being achievements.
If so, people going in for this would be able to tell others what they are or are not capable of. This would be a very useful and marketable skill. If you can spot the guy who is capable, if made CEO, of doubling profits, then you will be paid a lot of money by big Corporations and Private Equity funds.
This concept of freedom, based on the well-being aspect of a person, has to be clearly distinguished from a broader concept of freedom, related to the agency aspect of a person. A person's "agency freedom" refers to what the person is free to do and achieve in pursuit of whatever goals or values he or she regards as important.
'Agency freedom' can only be specified by a highly qualified lawyer. This is because what we are 'free to do' is justiciable. I may think I am free to sell my old TV. I discover that this is not the case because there has been a change in the relevant rules. My TV can't be sold because it has been deemed unmerchantable.
A person's agency aspect cannot be understood without taking note of his or her aims, objectives, allegiances, obligations, and-in a broad sense-the person's conception of the good.
We already have such an understanding by the time we are about 5 years old.
Whereas well-being freedom is freedom to achieve something in particular, viz., well-being,
which a Doctor may be better placed to advise us regarding
the idea of agency freedom is more general, since it is not tied to any one type of aim.
But is tied to what is lawful. Here, lawyers, not Doctors, have salience.
Agency freedom is freedom to achieve whatever the person, as a responsible agent, decides he or she should achieve.
No. It is what a good lawyer says is legal to do.
That open conditionality makes the nature of agency freedom quite different from that of well-being freedom,
No. Both are subject to superior advisement by medical or legal professionals.
which concentrates on a particular type of objective and judges opportunities correspondingly.' This open conditionality does not imply that the person's view of his agency has no need for discipline,
it has need for advise re. what is lawful
and that anything that appeals to him must, for that reason, come into the accounting of his agency freedom.
Anything which appeals can come into the accounting. Just check with a lawyer how to do it without breaking the law.
The need for careful assessment of aims, objectives, allegiances, etc., and of the conception of the good, may be important and exacting.
Or it may be as easy as pie. Still, it might be wise to look at what successful people, who started off in the same position as you, did and are doing. Try to imitate them. This is 'Tardean mimetics'.
But despite this need for discipline, the use of one's agency is, in an important sense, a matter for oneself to judge.
Or you can 'outsource' judgment. Just imitate what smart people are doing.
When the requirement of careful assessment cannot be fulfilled (e.g., in the case of young children, or with persons mentally ill in ways that rule out such assessment), the agency aspect will be, obviously, less important.
Because agency is lacking. But 'careful assessment' is not required. Just do what smart peeps are doing. Your own assessment is likely to be shit.
This does not indicate that the demands of the agency aspect for such a person would have to be assessed by others on his or her behalf, but only that no such demands would then be made.
Nonsense! Mums and Psychiatrists want to get kids, or mental patients, to do more and more things for themselves. However, they may stop them doing certain things- e.g. running around with a knife in one's hand.
This would not, of course, in any way compromise the importance of their well-being aspect. Indeed in the absence of the relevance of their agency aspect, it is their well-being achievement that would uniquely command attention.
No. Sen had kids. He encouraged them to exercise agency wherever it was appropriate for them to do so.
The importance of the agency aspect, in general, relates to the view of persons as responsible agents.
And the importance of the view of persons as responsible agents relates to the need for useless pedants to talk meaningless bollocks.
Persons must enter the moral accounting by others
No they must not. Sen would run away when he saw me approaching him. This was because, as an auditor, I wanted to establish his moral bankruptcy. On the other hand, I did offer him a tasty treat in the shape of a dog turd which, I felt, would enhance his wellbeing freedom to value his own agency as a devourer of canine feces.
not only as people whose well-being demands concern,
Sen's well-being- which is a function of eating dog turds- demanded my concern
but also as people whose responsible agency must be recognized.
I recognized that Sen must exercise responsible agency by eating dog turds.
For responsible adults, the concept of "well-being freedom"
is useless. Only irresponsible adults, teaching worthless shite, gas on about it.
has a clear relevance in judging the opportunities a person has for pursuing his or her own advantage.
Sen was incapable of this type of judgment. That's why businessmen didn't consult him on how to become billionaires.
The supplementation of well-being by well-being freedom,
or the supplementation of well-being freedom by the freedom to value the valuing of well-being freedom as the freedom to pull yet more stupid shite out of your arse
in the case of responsible adults, involves a refinement in the assessment of the well-being aspect of a person.
I did approach Dr. Sen to show him my hemorrhoids. Sadly, he refused to refine his assessment of this vital aspect of my well-being by saying 'I'm not that kind of Doctor! Please pull your trousers back up!'
But well-being freedom is only a specific type of freedom,
like freedom freedom or freedom to value freedom freedom while pulling yet more shite out of your arse.
and it cannot reflect the person's over-all freedom as an agent;
Only the law can specify that over-all freedom.
we have to turn to the notion of agency freedom in that context. It is hard to see how any part of this plurality (involving both the well-being aspect and the agency aspect of persons) can fail to have some intrinsic importance.
It is easy to understand that meaningless gibberish has no fucking importance. If you can assess well-being, you can also improve it- the way a Doctor can. If you can't, fuck off.
This plurality would have been a matter of considerable embarrassment
if Sen had dropped his trousers and asked Dr. Rawls to examine his hemorrhoids.
if for methodological reasons we were obliged to reject any information-pluralist framework, with "monism" as the only acceptable approach.
Governments are obliged to reject pluralist frameworks which show everybody as both the most affluent and the most abject citizen of the country. Fiscal policy has to be 'monist' in the sense that only money coming in and going out of the Treasury matters.
But, as was discussed in the first lecture, there is no good reason for that monist presumption, and none for imposing monism as an a priori requirement.
The 'good reason' is 'monism' is useful. That's why the law says we have a single identity tied to our physical body. Otherwise, I could claim to the King of Norway while also being the guy who just won the lottery.
the well-being aspect and the agency aspect of persons have dissimilar roles in moral accounting. They invite attention in disparate ways. At the risk of oversimplification it can be said that the well-being aspect of a person is important in assessing a person's advantage, whereas the agency aspect is important in assessing what a person can do in line with his or her conception of the good. The ability to do more good need not be to the person's advantage.
So, what Sen is getting at is that if a person is at 'bliss point'- i.e. the marginal utility of money is zero, they can give that money away. But this isn't very interesting.
Perhaps an illustration may help to bring out the distinction a little more clearly. You are enjoying eating a sandwich on a nice spring day, sitting on the bank of the river Avon. Meanwhile, far away, a man who cannot swim is drowning. You cannot do anything to save him -he is hundreds of miles away. Consider now a counterfactual situation in which that man, instead of drowning at that lonely, distant spot, is about to drown right in front of you. How are you affected by this counterfactual change?
You lose your taste for eating when you hear cries of distress.
Your agency freedom is, in an important way, increased.
No. You lose your appetite even if you are paralyzed and have no fucking agency freedom.
You can now very likely save the man. You will, let us assume, value this opportunity highly and decide to save him, and, further, you will even succeed. You will chuck your sandwich, jump into the cold river, and haul the man out. Your agency freedom would have been well used, and the state of affairs would have been better, as you would yourself judge it.
Then you find out this is the guy who killed and ate your Mummy. This is not a story about 'freedom'. It is a story about luck and how what appears good luck may turn out to be very bad luck.
FREEDOM: POWER OR CONTROL? Within the idea of freedom itself, there tends to be an internal plurality.
Only if you are stupid. Freedom is a justiciable immunity. You have it whether or not you exercise it.
There are, in fact, two distinct elements in the idea of freedom (they may be called, respectively, "power" and "control"), and the assessment of freedom has to deal with this internal plurality as well.
Nonsense! The law has a concept of freedom. Our conception of it may diverge from that of the law, but it is to the law that we are answerable. 'Power' and 'Control' are aspects of 'obligation'. If you have them, then the law may place an obligation on you which it would not if you had no such thing. The Prime Minister has more 'power' and 'control' than we do. But he has less freedom than we do. I am welcome to say 'I have Iyengars'. They are so smart and handsome, they make Iyers look bad. If Sir Keir said this, he would be investigated by the police for a 'hate crime'. In my case, I have a defense in law because I am clearly a drunken nutter. Nobody could be influenced by my crazy utterances. The fact that I can't control my own bladder while standing in the dock, inclines the Magistrate to acquit me.
The distinction is of special relevance to particular issues of freedom, such as liberty and autonomy. A person's freedom may well be assessed in terms of the power to achieve chosen results:
No. That is irrelevant. The fact is a slave may achieve a lot and live in a Princely manner. But he is still a slave.
whether the person is free to achieve one outcome or another; whether his or her choices will be respected and the corresponding things will happen.
Sen comes from a country where the slaves of the Sultan had much more power and wealth than free people. That is why high caste people would offer the most talented of their sons for castration, enslavement, and employment around the person of the King.
Control rights, on the other hand, are part and parcel of Hohfeldian immunities- i.e. freedom. The Sultan's slave is ordered to lead a military expedition. If he refuses he will be killed. However, a free man- even if very poor- can refuse the Sultan's order. The Qadi (judge) will advise the King that he can't be compelled for fear of risking a general uprising. Sen, being a fool, takes the opposite view.
I would argue that this concentration on control tends to produce an unacceptably narrow conceptualization of liberty and freedom. To illustrate the contrast, I begin with a shortened version of an example I have used elsewhere. Your friend is injured in an accident and is unconscious. The doctor says that either treatment A or treatment B can be used and one would be just as effective as the other, but that your friend would suffer less from A because of its smaller side effects. However, you happen to know that your friend would have chosen treatment B, since treatment A is associated with some experiments on live animals of which your friend disapproves totally. He would, in fact, agree that treatment A would have been better for his well-being, but as a free agent he would have nevertheless chosen treatment B, if he were given the choice. If you now decide to ask the doctor to give your friend treatment B, you are giving your friend effective power even though he is not exercising the control himself. And your ground for choosing treatment B for him is surely not his well-being (he too agrees that A would be better for that), but his freedom (in the general form of agency freedom). It is also worth noting that your decision regarding what treatment your friend gets is dependent on what your friend would himself have chosen. It is not only that he happens to be getting what he would have chosen; he is getting it because he would have chosen it.
This example fails. Friends have no locus standi unless specifically empowered by a legal instrument. In this case, absent a 'living will', or lasting power of attorney, even next of kin have no say. The Doctor is obliged to choose treatment A. The question is whether he has breached medical confidentiality by discussing the case with some 'friend'.
The contrast between effective power and procedural control is important in practice.
No. If you have effective power- e.g. the ability to kill anyone who tries to fuck with you- procedures don't matter.
It is often not possible to organize society in such a way that people can directly exercise the levers that control all the important aspects of their personal lives.
Society organizes itself in this way- at least for those who are in control of their own lives and possessions.
To try to see freedom exclusively in terms of control is to miss out on the demands of freedom when control cannot feasibly be exercised by the persons themselves.
Nonsense! Freedom is a set of Hohfeldian immunities for which legal remedies are available. Sen may have heard of the writ of habeas corpus.
If, for example, we want the freedom not to be mugged in the streets
we carry a gun and shoot muggers. Word will get round quickly enough.
and the liberty to move about without being so treated, we are looking for effective power.
Why look? Why not buy a gun or other weapon? Remember, what deters muggers is the risk of grave bodily harm.
Precisely who exercises the control may be less important than the ability to achieve what we would have chosen. If the streets are cleared of the muggers because we would choose not to be mugged, our freedom is being well served, even though we have not been given control over the choice of whether to be mugged or not.
You could always pay a muscular dude to beat the shit out of you. It's called 'rough trade'.
To avoid possible misunderstandings, it may be useful to clarify what is being asserted here, and what is not.
Nonsense is being asserted. Sense is not.
First, it is, of course, typically the case that not being mugged also serves our well-being. But in asserting that our freedom-even agency freedom-is well served by the streets being cleared of the muggers, something more is being asserted.
Something false is being asserted. We had the freedom to walk the streets. Previously there was some risk of being mugged and also some risk of getting drenched by a sudden cloud burst. If the Government decides that rounding up all the petty criminals and putting them in 'chain-gangs', the risk of being mugged falls, but the risk of getting drenched remains. Freedom, however, has not been affected at all.
It is that we would have chosen not to be mugged, and the streets are being cleared precisely because that is what we would have chosen.
Actually, the muggers may have been sent to the chain-gang because the prison-industrial system is highly profitable.
Second, with the streets cleared of the muggers, we have, of course, the opportunity to walk as we please.
We already have that opportunity. What has changed is the risk of mugging but not the risk of being drenched.
This reflects the positive freedom, in most cases, to walk or not.
Not to mention the positive positive freedom to value walking or not walking on the basis of some shite Sen pulled out of his arse.
But in that part of the story there is no contrast between control and power.
We have no control over muggers or rainclouds. However, we may have the power to kill muggers. Also we could carry an umbrella.
We have the power to walk and also control over that decision. The contrast arises in considering the alternatives of being mugged and not being mugged.
Which is like being drenched or not being drenched. If you shoot muggers, you have power over them. But you also have the power to keep from getting drenched by carrying an umbrella.
We do not control this choice ourselves, and we do not have the option of "being mugged" once the streets are cleared.
Yes we do. We can pay a guy to do it.
But though that control is not ours, it was exercised in line with what we would have chosen and because of it.
Maybe, maybe not.
It is in this sense that we have effective power, though no procedural control.
If you have a vote, or can raise your 'Voice', you have some control over 'procedures'. This is also true if you can exit the location and this would reduce the tax base.
Third, in the example of mugging, the power is enjoyed not by each individual separately, but by the individuals taken together.
No. Some people may not know that all the muggers have been arrested.
There are other examples in which the individual on his own has effective power without control, e.g., in the example of your friend getting the treatment he would have chosen.
Only if he had a 'living will'. But even then a Court order may be required to override the Doctor's decision.
Given the interdependences of social living, many liberties are not separately exercisable,'
Some liberties are separately exercisable- e.g. the 'natural' right to kill those trying to rob and kill you. Others are social or political in nature.
and effective power may have to be seen in terms of what all, or nearly all, members of the group would have chosen, e.g., in this case not to be mugged.
That is a bad example. A better example would be the right to stand for elective office. Obviously, this depends on Society having created such offices alongside a voting procedure.
What Isaiah Berlin calls "a man's, or a people's, liberty to choose to live as they desire" has implications for effective power of individuals taken together as well as separately.
No. Effective power has implications for what people freely choose but the reverse is not the case. I freely choose to be a beautiful Bollywood star. I have no effective power to be any such thing though, no doubt, I can dress up like Aishwariya Rai and sing 'Crazy kiya re'.
Sen mentions
positional invariance, i.e., the requirement that within a given moral approach the valuation of a state must be independent of the evaluator's position vis-a-vis the state, including his agency.
in other words, we don't want 'special pleading'. The problem here is that Sen & Co are engaged in that very thing. They are saying they themselves- not Doctors or Lawyers of experienced politicians or administrators- have the highest salience when it comes to talk of freedom or well-being. But they are wrong. They are useless and incapable of reasoning.
Positional invariance raises some difficult issues.
Not for a Doctor or Lawyer or person with expert knowledge. She herself would take the course she recommends unless, of course, she wants an inferior outcome for some personal reason.
It may look superficially like a condition of elementary consistency. How can two persons, sharing exactly the same moral approach, value the same state differently?
Three different ways
1) they hold different facts to be true
2) the moral approach is 'multiply realizable'- i.e. there is no unique prescription
3) different rates of time-preference or risk-aversion. This becomes a matter of uncorrelated asymmetries. It may happen that the person with the control right in one case, exercises it differently than they would have counselled someone else to do so. Thus, I may say 'everybody should send their kids to the State School' but decide to send my own son to private school just in case he turns into a yob and tries to knife me.
The issue of consistency can be dealt with in formal terms easily enough.
No it can't because epistemic objects are involved. This creates the problem of impredicativity which in turn means that 'consistency' requires a type theory whose ramifications are themselves epistemic and impredicative. There is an infinite regress here such that only if there is a 'divine axiom' can consistency be guaranteed even for mathematics- let alone the representation of any deontic logic.
The valuation of the state may take note of such positional information as the agency of persons involved in bringing about that state, and the influence of that agency can vary parametrically depending on whether the evaluator is one of the agents involved (and if so, what has been his specific role).
Anybody at all can make an equally arbitrary evaluation. The question is 'is this particular evaluation useful?' But that may be a 'political question'.
The real issue is not formal consistency, but cogency.
Anything at all can be made cogent enough.
Why should the evaluator's own agency make a difference to the valuation made by him?
The evaluator may be afraid of retaliation if he gives the right answer rather than the one which will keep him safe.
The issue of cogency relates to the recognition (discussed in the first lecture) that action and agency are integral parts of the state,
e.g. the fact that when shitting, you discover that it is you who is doing the shitting. This is very very important.
and furthermore, that agency can be an important aspect of the person. It would be extraordinary to require that a person himself must take no more note of his own agency in evaluating a state of affairs than others should and that a morally relevant assessment of the state can be made in this oddly detached way.
Yet this is what we expect. Thus, if I am the auditor of a Company and I give an incorrect valuation because I own shares in the company, then I am guilty of a financial crime.
When the evaluator happens to be also the agent whose action helped to bring about the state in question and when the action for which the person is peculiarly responsible is an integral part of that state, it is not at all clear why the evaluator must ignore this important connection in assessing the state, for moral reasoning.
This is because egotistic 'special pleading' is immoral.
Lady Macbeth may well have got a little carried away in the state of affairs resulting from the murder she
instigated, not
committed when she asked, "Will these hands ne'er be clean?", but on the other hand we might mislead her a little if we were to inform her that, in the post-murder state, the perfumes of Arabia would sweeten her "little hand" as easily as any other hand.
The only person Lady Macbeth kills is herself. This proves she is damned according to Christian doctrine. Judas, too, killed himself.
The responsibility of agency surely extends to evaluating states including the evaluator's own role, and that responsibility cannot suddenly disappear in the morally relevant evaluation of the state.
This is like my imputing to Sen responsibility for devouring all the dog turds in the vicinity. People may be held responsible for their actions by Courts of Law. Failure to perform 'moral evaluation' is not itself punishable. Indeed, it may be a mitigating factor if the person had no such capacity.
One reason why agency invariance may appeal, is
stupidity or paranoid 'virtue signaling'. This is like Prahlad Iyengar haranguing the recruiters from Lockheed for engaging in genocide. They could have asked why he remained at MIT thought it too, according to him, was complicit in genocide and the colonial occupation of 'Turtle island'.
a tendency to confuse this type of invariance with "authorship invariance," which was discussed in the first lecture. Authorship invariance does have some claims to being a reasonable requirement of moral evaluation (and, as was argued in the first lecture, can also be seen as a requirement of objectivity of moral beliefs).
In which case, it has been failed by any philosopher or economist who has changed his mind- i.e. all of them.
This is because the authorship of a statement is a very contingent fact. A can easily consider what he should say if he were in fact in B's position rather than in his own.
He can equally consider that he has shit for brains whereas B does not.
But the positions themselves are not without significance in evaluating the states,
but such 'evaluation' has no fucking significance.
and this position relativity can be combined with authorship invariance and indeed objectivity of the corresponding type.
But this just means some stupid shithead saying something and sticking to that stupid shit.
The introduction of position relativity does have the effect of relaxing the overtight informational constraints imposed by the traditional combination of welfarism and consequentialism, and in this sense, it does make room for less blind judgments under consequentialist evaluation.
It makes room for any and every type of nonsense. In discussing the proposed increase on inheritance tax for farmers, we must consider how it would impact compulsory gender reassignment surgery for heterosexual males within the wider context of ending the colonial occupation of Europe and Turtle island by non-Neanderthals.
But it does not require either the acceptance or the rejection of consequentialism as such.
It does not require a brain.
Take Bernard Williams's famous example of Jim having to consider killing one person himself to save nine lives; the one to be killed by him would be killed anyway."
Jim should consult a lawyer. Alternatively, if no such person is available, he needs to set up a Jury of some sort whose unanimous decision he could later on rely on as having given him the required authority.
Whereas others have a straightforward reason to rejoice if Jim goes ahead, Jim has no option but to take serious note of his own responsibility in that state and his agency in killing someone himself.
Which is why he should do as I suggested. At the very least he should take an oath before witnesses mentioning why and on what authority he is going to do the dreadful deed. He may also recuse himself by mentioning some circumstance- e.g. personal enmity- why he can't discharge the duty with 'clean hands'.
Position relativity will certainly be adequate to bring in a deep asymmetry between Jim's position and those of others even in consequential evaluation.
But there are mechanisms to get rid of the asymmetry- e.g. letting everybody, except the executioner, vote on the matter. Alternatively, in a religious society, a sign from God might be sought.
Nevertheless, even with this modification, Jim's decision may be ultimately straightforward in a consequentialist framework. In the state that will result from his killing one person, nine people are saved, and the one who is killed would have been killed anyway. Jim would have to attach an extraordinary degree of importance to the position of not being a killer himself to come to the conclusion that the value difference between one person being killed by Jim rather than by someone else is enough to outweigh the gain of nine people being saved from sure death.
Jim is entitled to insist that his position, before the law, not be inferior to any of the other people who are saved by his act. There are things he can do to show that this was a collective decision.
Even with position relativity, the decision is fairly straightforward. If, in fact, Jim's decision problem is not straightforward, asWilliams argues it is not, then the difference must rest somewhere else.
It rests in law and religion. Both, from their prehistoric origins, have evolved mechanisms whereby the 'pharmakon' or 'khorban' (who is put to death so the remainder may live) is killed without blood guilt descending on the executioner.
It is possible to argue that there is a difference between an action being right and the state resulting from that action being the best feasible state, after taking note of the value or disvalue of the action itself (including agency).
Yet that is not what Humanity has done. It evolved religious or legal mechanisms such that no blood guilt attaches to the executioner in cases of this sort.
The first judgment concerns an action, and the second a state (including inter alia that action). There is no necessity that the two must correspond to each other in the rigid way that consequentialism would demand.'
Yes there is. That is why we have stopped burning witches. The fact is witches have no power to harm the harvest or to cause barnyard animals to miscarry. No bad consequence is averted by killing an innocent old woman.
Whether they should, in fact, be linked in this way or not is a matter for further moral analysis,
just as further moral analysis must be the subject of further moral analysis and so on ad infinitum.
and the need to examine this link remains even after position relativity has been incorporated in the evaluation of states of affairs.
How about the position of the guy who will be killed? Personally, I'd prefer dying alongside everybody else rather than going to my death knowing the others will get to live large.
Jim could still ask: "Can it be right for me to kill this man, just because the state of affairs resulting from that would be better (even after taking note of the disvalue of my action, judged as a part of the state of affairs)?"
He should ask a lawyer or a priest who will tell him that what is right isn't what he thinks is right. It is what the Church or the Courts of Law would uphold.
The question of consequentialism will have to be settled by other arguments, since this one leaves that issue open. It is certainly true (as can easily be shown) that agent relativity of every kind that has been proposed in the literature (by such authors as Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and Derek Parfit)
none of whom mention the salience of the law and the methods by which culpability can be reduced.
can be accommodated within a consequentialist structure, once position relativity in the evaluation of states is admitted and used.
A Jury does this. That is what is needed here. Alternatively, Jim could rely on Religious or legal advise.
But the force of the deontological considerations may not be fully captured in this way, since part of that argument rests on distinguishing between the nature of action judgments and that of state judgments, no matter how inclusively (and position-relatively) the states are judged.
This is foolish. Deon means duty. Wherever there is a duty there is an adjudicating body which says what is or isn't a duty in a particular case. This means there is a 'buck stopped' extension for every intensional term and thus no cascade of intensional fallacies. If Philosophy pretends the Law does not exist, it ends up eating its own shit.
I have discussed elsewhere" why we may have good grounds for violating someone's rights
e.g. by chopping off their penis
if that prevents even worse consequences, e.g., a worse violation of the rights of others,
e.g. that penis ending up in a vagina- which is RAPE!
arguing that this type of consideration is inescapable given the problems of interdependence that moral analysis has to face. For example, the violation of the property rights of some can prevent a developing famine and decimation.
Not in Sen's ancestral East Bengal, where the opposite happened.
Or, to take a different type of example, the violation of the rights of privacy of someone may yield the necessary information to prevent someone else from being battered, kidnapped, raped, or murdered.
Just chop off everybody's dick.
It is not at all clear why violating property rights, privacy, etc., must still remain rejectable, everything considered, in the cases specified.
Because it is obvious that things will turn to shit if lawlessness prevails. It is a different matter that any particular right may be abridged or nullified by due process of law.
This necessity of considering, as it were, "everything" makes the proposals of consequence-independent absolute rights hard to defend.
The Law accepts that all rights are defeasible. Where jurisdictions differ is on the 'doctrine of political question'.
And the considerations of well-being and agency discussed in these lectures are impossible to reconcile with any proposal of consequence independence.
Which means Sen's conception of both is not 'ergodic'. In that case it isn't part of economics. But it isn't part of philosophy either because Jurisprudence is the rubric under which such matters are studied.
The nature of the rights considered by Nozick raises two different types of question. One concerns their force, in particular, their irresistibility; and the other relates to their form, namely their focus on "control" and more specifically their concentration on the "negative" perspective-imposing constraints on what others are permitted to do.
The Americans do like pretending there are 'indefeasible rights' but this is 'mere puffery'. Rights are just as defeasible on both sides of the Atlantic.
It may be that Sen would not mind if someone else claims to have a multiple identity as both Sen and his wife and who thus gains control over his Bank accounts. However, the rest of us will feel safer if the fraudster in question is caught and put behind bars.
... minimal demands of well-being (in the form of basic functionings, e.g., not to be hungry), and of well-being freedom (in the form of minimal capabilities, e.g., having the means of avoiding hunger), can well be seen as rights that command attention and call for support.
this was the case when Brits ruled Bengal. Sadly, they ceded control to an elected government in 1937. What followed was famine and ethnic cleansing. East Bengal, as part of Pakistan, did have free elections in 1970. This was swiftly followed by genocide and, a little later, a big famine. It seems some Bengalis, but not Brits, who, by reason of their elected office have 'agency', are nevertheless insensitive to 'demands' for food from starving Bengalis.
Consider a case in which person A pushes person B, who does not swim, into the river. B in fact drowns, and A cannot justify his action, we assume, in terms of some greater good that would follow from this drowning. It is possible to distinguish between two bad things that have happened. First, B is drowned and his positive freedom to live on and not to die prematurely has been violated.
No. What was violated was B's immunity to being pushed in the river. That is what A will be prosecuted for doing. If A hoped B would drown, the charge is murder not manslaughter.
Second, A has failed rather badly as a responsible moral agent.
We don't know that. A is the Bishop of Antioch. He pushed B, his prodigal nephew, into the River Jordan hoping that his sins would be washed away. Moreover the boy had done his PhD in 'Swimming- a Capabilities approach' under Sen & Nussbaum. How was A supposed to know that this indicated that B could not swim or rather that he had forgotten how to swim because of the course of studies he had undertaken?
So something worse than B's drowning has occurred, especially as it should be viewed from the position of A. This way of seeing the problem can appear to be erroneous, involving double-counting. Everything follows, it can be argued, from the bad thing happening to B. But is such an objection really sustainable? A's failure is, of course, not unrelated to the bad thing happening to B, but there is a source of badness in A as well, in terms of his agency aspect, since he has failed so badly as an agent.
This is not necessarily the case. Speaking generally, if you push your friend into a river, he quickly swims out of it and chucks you in it. This is horseplay, nothing more. It may be that, unknown to both, the decision had been made to release water from the dam. This should have been notified. Sirens should have sounded. Sadly, there was an electrical failure and so by an unfortunate concatenation of events which none could have foreseen, an innocent life was lost.
Indeed, A's failure as a responsible agent could have taken place even without the same bad thing happening to bedraggled B.
No. What counts is the intention of the assailant. Was it horseplay? Was it an attempt to kill?
For example, A pushes B with all his might, but unexpectedly B somehow does manage to stay on land;
that could still be attempted murder
or B does fall, but is saved by the accidental presence nearby of a good swimmer.
see above
B's positive freedom is, thus, very little affected,
No. B has a Hohfeldian immunity against being pushed or punched or stabbed. True, if A and B are friends and have long engaged in horseplay of this type, then we say A waived his immunity. The Court then moves on to consider whether A acted recklessly or negligently. However, the penalty may be civil rather than criminal.
but A's agency failure remains serious, if the saving happened to be unexpected and accidental.
No. There may be no such failure. A is a three year old child. B is his father. By bad luck a playful push given by A led to B toppling into the river and drowning.
In evaluating the states and actions, agent A cannot but take note of his own agency in the attempted drowning.
He can take note of an extenuating circumstance- e.g. the decision to release water from an upstream dam without proper warning be issued.
His moral assessment must take note of both B's loss, if any, and his own failure as a moral agent (if he were to take the step of pushing B into the river). Once the agency aspect of a person is given a central place in moral accounting, there is no escape from including this type of consideration in evaluating states and actions, and what looks like doublecounting is, in fact, the union of two different, though not independent, bad things.
It is nonsense. That is why Courts establish 'Hohfeldian incidents'. A had an immunity to being pushed though he may have waived it. B may have been negligent or reckless and thus may be culpable even if immunity was waived. But the true culprit may be the upstream Dam authority which released water without adequate warning.
Moral accounting, like financial accounting, has to do 'apportionment' to avoid double-counting. One might say there are three 'cost centers' here
1) A pushing B. What is the cost this imposed? If A intended to kill B, there is a very high cost and both criminal and civil penalties will be imposed.
2) B not knowing how to swim. Suppose B had attended a school where swimming proficiency was compulsory and A relied on this information. Then the cost of B not knowing how to swim falls on the school. They may be liable in Tort law
3) other exogenous events- e.g. the sudden release of water from an upstream dam.
The state in which B drowns accidentally-not pushed by anyone-cannot be as bad, especially as it should be seen by agent A, as the state in which B drowns after being deliberately pushed by A himself into the river.
It is equally bad under (2) and (3). Psychologically, of course, A would prefer not to have been involved in any way in this tragedy. But psychology is separate from morality. You may do a moral thing which, for exogenous reasons, has a bad outcome and this affects you psychologically.
Thus, negative freedom does have some intrinsic importance of its own, in addition to its instrumental role in the pursuit of positive freedom.
Very true. When you are drowning you are pursuing positive freedom. It will be a great comfort to you to reflect that negative freedoms have an intrinsic importance quite apart from their instrumental role in your thrashing about and swallowing water and sinking slowly, but inexorably, to the river bed where the fish will nibble your decomposing corpse.
For a variant of this case, consider one in which B falls accidentally into the river, with swimming champion A standing close to the spot, doing absolutely nothing to save B.
If he does so because in his expert estimation, he too would drown if he dove into that raging torrent, then he has properly exercised 'agency'- even if he is a life-guard by profession. Indeed, he may be commended by the Court if he physically restrained others from jumping into the water hoping to rescue B.
Though A has not violated B's negative freedom, it can be argued that this is also a case of agency failure on the part of A and that the state of affairs is, in a morally relevant way, worse for agent A than it would have been had B drowned without A standing nearby, or had A tried to save B unsuccessfully (with, of course, exactly the same result, so far as B's life is concerned).
There may be a 'Good Samaritan' law in that jurisdiction. However, provided A can show that he acted as a 'reasonable man' would, there is no legal or moral opprobrium attaching to him.
Agency failure is a more general consideration
it is meaningless
than failure to respect negative freedom,
also meaningless. What matters is whether a specific Hohfeldian immunity was recklessly, negligently, or maliciously violated. I am not obliged to respect such immunities. Indeed, I can call for their abolition. But I can't steal your wallet with impunity just because I am not obliged to respect the law of private property.
Sen concludes his Dewey Lectures thus-
In these lectures I have tried to explore some of the implications of seeing persons from two different perspectives, viz., well-being and agency, neither of which can subsume the other.
Sen does not know that these 'perspectives' arise from the legal distinction between beneficial rights and control rights. The latter may be exercised by an agent in which case Hohfeldian immunities are lower in that the agent must always be able to show that control has been exerted for a purpose beneficial to the principal. Principals, speaking generally, have higher Hohfeldian immunities but they may also be held to a stricter standard of care (culpa levis in abstracto) as befitting a 'bonus paterfamilias'. However, if they are poor or stupid, the standard is lower (culpa levis in concreto).
Economics does concern itself with Agent-Principal hazard but that is a story about incentive compatibility, preference revelation, etc. It has nothing to do with saying that the agency of well-being is the freedom of the freedom to evaluate agency as the well-being freedom of the freedom freedom to evaluate some shit I just pulled out of my arse.
The substantive moral discussions drew on the examination of methodological issues in the first lecture,
But since nobody actually does Sen-tentious appraisal or evaluation, there is no extant method which can give rise to 'methodological issues'. There is only madness of a pedantic type.
using an informational approach to ethical questions, and dealing with such matters as pluralism, incompleteness, positionality, agent relativity, and objectivity.
But without having any fucking information about anything whatsoever.
The adequacy of the foundational structure that Scanlon calls "philosophical utilitarianism"
which is a type of contractualism. Since the Social Contract is 'incomplete', incomplete contract theory is its foundation.
(more descriptively renamed here as "well-being as informational foundation"-WAIF for short)
but nobody anywhere in the world has provided any such informational foundation. True a Doctor could prescribe ways of improving physical well-being, and a lawyer, a psychologist, a financial adviser, a personal trainer etc, etc- could chip in with prescriptions of their own to raise well-being, there is no way, and little point, to aggregating all this information.
was examined and rejected. But that informational foundation provided one of the two major bases of moral reasoning used in the second and the third lectures.
But that 'moral reasoning' was stupid shit involving valuing the freedom to value the well-being freedom of the agency of the valuing of some shit Sen pulled out of his arse.
While the attractiveness of well-being as a foundation accounts for a good deal of the appeal of utilitarian moral approaches, it was argued in the second lecture that the identification of well-being with utility fails for each of the three main interpretations of utility (in the form of choice, happiness, and desire fulfillment).
Utility is a Tarskian primitive. Anyone can give any interpretation to it that they like. Clearly, no one can have any utility whatsoever so long as we don't chop off all heterosexual dicks while ejecting American colonial occupiers of Turtle island and European colonial occupiers of territory which rightly belongs to the Neanderthals.
It was further argued that even if such an identification were, for the sake of argument, to be accepted, utilitarianism still could not be derived substantially from WAIF.
Because the thing does not, cannot, exist. However, any thing useful in utilitarianism can be easily derived from the assumption that money has marginal utility.
Contrary to some claims, the issue of sum ranking is not trivial nor unproblematic.
It is impossible. The relevant information is too costly to acquire.
More positively, it was argued that a more plausible view of wellbeing is provided by the accounting of functioning vectors,
i.e. saying well-being is the vector of such functionings as constitute well-being. Similarly, the anti-Higgs boson is the vector of the functionings of the anti-Higgs boson. Oh. The Higgs boson is its own anti-particle. Still, what I said should get me a Nobel prize in Physics- right?
refined by considerations of capabilities to function.
If you can tell who has the capability to function as the next Sachin Tendulkar, you could make a lot of money as a Talent Scout. Sadly, capability theorists have no such capability. They can merely talk bollocks.
This approach yields partial orderings which are typically incomplete but eminently usable.
No one has created any such thing. What is usable, must actually exist. If it doesn't exist, it is eminently unusable.
The third lecture has been largely concerned with examining the relevance of agency and the nature of freedom.
The law sheds light on both. Sen's grandfather was a Judge. Sadly, Sen studied nonsense at Uni.
Each of the two basic aspects of persons, viz., well-being and agency, leads to a particular concept of freedom.
A wholly vacuous one.
Using this dual base, I have tried to comment on a number of related issues concerning control, power, rights, consequences, agency, and positive and negative freedoms.
You have talked bollocks.
Both well-being freedom and agency freedom have important-though disparate-relevance to the assessment of states of affairs and actions.
They have none. We pay smart peeps to do assessments iff they can tell us how to improve outcomes. Stupid pedants are welcome to talk bollocks to each other and to their even stupider students.
And the informational base of the moral approach explored in these lectures cannot, in general, dispense with either agency information or well-being information, each of which has intrinsic interest-in the form of freedom as well as that of achievement.
Medical ethics could be said to take a 'moral approach'. Some want patients to have more agency- e.g. right to die- others see a great danger in this approach. Something like a rough and ready 'functionings' or 'capabilities' approach is already taken by 'Death panels' who decide which patient should get a transplant. This is utilitarianism in action. It does have its dilemmas and trade-offs but, in every case, scientific advances, can provide 'win-win' outcomes. Thus Medical ethics attracts stupid people. Smart people do Medical Research.
These lectures have been much concerned with examining these plural informational elements and their respective roles in moral valuation and judgment.
These lectures, like Amartya Sen's entire career, have been a waste of time. If you can identify and cheaply acquire new data streams which enable us to get better Structural Causal Models and thus better interventions and better outcomes, then you have done something useful. Gassing on about Utilitarianism is not useful even if you use nice words like 'Freedom' and 'Agency' and 'Well-being' and pretend you care deeply about the poor. Still, one may say Sen & Co merely eat their own shit. Coprophagy may contribute to their well-being as freedom as the agency to evaluate the taste of their own feces.
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