An open letter to Mister Fedward Hyde
Federico and I have had a back-and-forth for the past week or so over the 'Conservative Moral Duty to crush farm subsidies.' In the spirit of free inquiry, I have posted it online. Any comments, critiques, or responses would be appreciated.
Federico,
Thank you for the enlightening debate. It is always a pleasure to engage with another person so eager to engage in free discourse and to expand his beliefs; someone who, to borrow a phrase from the plaque on the facade of Bascom Hall at our hallowed alma mater, believes so thoroughly in "that sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found." I fear, however, that I have not been entirely fair to you and to your arguments about 'Conservative Moral Duties' to end Farm Subsidies. I have sent a couple of off-the cuff responses without fully fleshing out my position, so let me now express to you my concerns with your argument.
First, as fond as you are of labelling me as a firebreathing liberal, I think it need not be said that I am not in favour of agricultural subsidies, especially in the developed world. However, the tone of past emails being considered, I feel that it was necessary to make this abundantly clear from the start. My qualm with your email is not the content of your position on subsidies, but rather your assertion that there exists a "moral duty" to eliminate protection. It is my belief that there is much to critique in this statement.
Let us begin with one of your remarks in your correspondence on 16 February.
You said:
"It is a moral duty to promote good economics = morality is subservient to the need of promoting good economics."
This is a difficult statement to interpret, because it appears that you try to cover two arguments in the same space through an opaque equality. But the two phrases are substantively different. As it is phrased now, taking the latter half of the formulation, it seems to say that morality takes a backseat to promoting good economics. This is in fact a statement that you have made on numerous occasions, decrying the uselessness of 'abstract philosophizing and political nonsense' in favor of the no-nonsense rigor of economic decision-making. Notwithstanding the impossibility of understanding or implementing economic policy without regards to political situations and the methodological and epistemological influences of philosophy on economics, this assertion is frighteningly off the mark. Were we to take the Fedwardian approach to morality then there would be no constraint on what could be done in the name of economic 'necessity.' By your argument, in the purely economic world, if we found that by carpet bombing the south-west and installing miles of solar panels would have a higher discounted marginal product than leaving the people there to live their lives, there would be no moral constraint on this action. If you want a more realistic example, we could just scrap Social Security because it's badly conceived and is hugely wasteful without regard for any duty or obligation we might have to the people who paid it.
Anyway, if that is your point, there would be no real reason for you to consider crushing farm subsidies to be a 'Conservative Moral duty?' If economics preceded morality wouldn't the crushing of farm subsidies be first and foremost an economic duty, and not a moral one? Why would you even invoke such ‘subservient’ principles? As much as this argument seems amenable to your perspective, and as much as I think that you largely believe it, unless I have radically underestimated the extent of your intellectual bankruptcy I don't think that this entirely is what you are arguing.
The other half of your formulation seems to contend one of two things. The first is that good economics is good in itself (and being that we have a moral imperative to promote the good, we have a moral duty to promote economics). As I just wrote however, this cannot be the basis of morality. There are certain constraints that humans put on their actions that would prevent them from doing the aforementioned acts simply because they ‘know’ that it is wrong. This is what I meant in my last email: not that morality is the basis of any economic theory, but that it does apply an additional constraint on the implementation of an action.
Having said all this, I am led to interpret your statement to mean that the condition of morality is derived from the goodness or badness of a given economic policy. By this standard, if it is a moral imperative to promote good economics, the reason why it is ‘moral’ must lie either in the goodness of the policy (what I believe to be your position) or the act itself of making good policy, or some combination of the two. This is a more defensible position than the Fedwardian twist, but unfortunately, the two statements you have indicated, while individually workable, are incoherent when combined. If morality is necessarily linked with what is good economically, if morality is a function of economic goodness, how can it be simultaneously interconnected and overruled by economic goodness? This would create a contradiction in the second case, that is, unless you were going to defend the position that what makes implementing good economic policy truly right is the role of employing good policy, and not economic correctness per se. If this were the case, however, we need our own moral epistemology to determine what is good, and it is this epistemology that will insert something as the ‘right’ policy, be it a massively redistributive, socialist state, or the limited one lovingly extolled by PJ O’Rourke in the Hong Kong chapter of “Eat the Rich.” Considering your hardline insistence of insisting the pre-eminence of economics in everything, this seems unlikely. Through your disdain for abstract concepts of morality, you have relegated the closely-tied factor of morality to a subservient role to the detriment of your argument. Nonetheless, this has not invalidated your position, though we can throw away the Fedwardian premises once and for all.
So it seems now that the main position we have from your argument is: "being economically good is a moral necessity, as morality is being economically good." That's more of an assertion than an argument. Beyond being a bit circular, you need to show WHY morality is necessarily tied to being economically good in order for this to convince anyone. I take your argument to be the following:
Economic orthodoxy says that X is bad
Whatever is bad is immoral
So, X is immoral
You have a moral duty to eliminate the immoral
You have a moral duty to eliminate X
Well, there are many problems with this formulation. First off, what do we mean by 'bad?' Though we could quibble over the points here, I interpret 'bad' to mean suboptimal, i.e. tarifs are bad because we could be better off under free trade. A second, related point is that the claims that economics itself makes are not really moral in any sense. It takes an outside moral system to inject moral content into the discipline of economics--in this case, your own (and I find it deliciously ironic that you denigrate the ideas of moral systems when it is your own that places economic efficiency at the zenith of rightness). Though some writers like Partha Dasgupta argue that such an infusion of morality into economics is redundant because it already has its own internal moral compass, they understand the purview of this moral underpinning to be quite limited.
So it seems that your argument is : attaining optimality in economic systems is a moral necessity, because optimality in an economy is morally good. To tackle this question, I would like to better examine your adopted basis of morality. In particular, I am having difficulty identifying the grounding for your moral theory, as it seems to me to be partially consequential and partly deontological. I'm not trying to unfairly deluge you with abstract philosophical terms, so let me explain: consequentialist and deontological explanations of morality depend on the relationship between the right and the good. In the former, the right is identified with the good, but in the latter the right and the good are at least partially independent. For instance, utilitarianism is a consequentialist doctrine, which says that the only thing that is good is that which maximizes utility, while Kantian philosophy, which argues that a lie is morally wrong even if it results in a good outcome, is an example of a deontological theory.
Now I think that you would likely claim to be a "realist," which would indicate an affinity for the tenets of consequentialist moral philosophy. "What matters is what is empirically testable, not some abstract philosophizing bullshit" is something I believe you said to me in a past Messenger session. Yet, it is not going to be easy to extricate this concern for outcomes with your constant claims for "the preeminence of economic rights" which seem to presuppose some objective basis of rights not entirely determined by economic doctrine. While I believe that your position is very much consequentialist, I feel that you still would be loathe to abandon certain features of a deontological conception of morals. Of course, you could argue that your belief in such economic 'rights' stems not from a belief in fundamental objective norms of right and wrong, but from consequential motivations: you could believe in economic rights, political rights, etc, not because they are intrinsically good, but because they are means to an end--from your perspective, an economic gravy train. But is this really the case? Rights-based issues like entitlement a la Nozick and libertarian orthodoxy are right up your alley as well. You certainly seem to think that people have the right to keep whatever they earn (“excessive taxation is unjust” you have oft remarked). But such economic rights need not correlate with the maximization of economic efficiency.
Consequentialist theories seem at first to be very attractive, as they seem to line up so closely with our beliefs about what morality is and should be: what is morality if it does not aim for better consequences, the highest well-being, the most optimal allocation of resources, etc. Yet in a sense, if this is the basis of your moral vision you are impelled in every case to follow WHATEVER will lead to your chosen good. This is not the case with deontological arguments, which are more in the form of constraints with options. For instance, you do not have the right to appropriate someone’s home in the name of efficiency, but you also have the right to not give money to charity if you so choose.
What if you could create total efficiency in the market by depriving one person of his justly earned salary? Or one town? Or as many as people as possible given that the total result would be an improvement on the status quo with regards to your prescribed dimension? I have a feeling that your libertarian streak would seriously object to that. You will probably reply that these cases are farfetched, but remember, this is a question of the applicability of a moral theory, so it should be able to hold in all cases. These are necessarily debated in the abstract, to see if they do in fact adhere to our intuitions. The other tack is to ruthlessly cling to your position despite the fact that your intuitions say that you are acting impermissibly, and if you are going to do that, then I don’t think any argument could sway you. In any case, the moral permissibility of doing any of these actions is logically consistent with the consequentialist track line that you seem to be toeing: optimality is the supreme moral condition, and we must maximize it, hence it is a moral duty to eliminate/promote policy X.
I believe that if we are to apply any moral system to economics, I believe it should be a deontological one. Deontological systems are much broader in scope: they recognize that economic efficiency is a good thing and we should strive for it, but that it need not be achieved at the expense of other rights. While efficiency might be ‘good’ there is some independence of our notions of what is ‘right’ This is consistent with a number of positions, from ones that acknowledge the right to “sit on your ass and collect welfare” up to a rigorous one that aims directly at being as efficient as possible. It recognizes conditions other than economic efficiency to be valid for the basis of morality, unlike the consequentialist theory that you espouse which has no other aim.
I am likely just as upset about agricultural subsidies as you, but I believe that it is incorrect to discuss them in the realm of moral imperatives. The moral duty to eliminate them under a consequentialist theory does not even consider the fact that they might be wrong tout court. It is one thing to recognize the importance of lowering subsidies and to strive fervently towards that noble goal, but it is another thing altogether to believe that the only reason we have to do so is because it will help to maximize the pre-eminent moral category: efficiency. But the real problem, at least from your point of view, is that since a deontological theory does not readily identify the good, the ‘moral duty’ that began this entire thread does not really apply. You are constrained in your actions, and have a certain autonomy to act in whichever way you choose (for instance, lobbying for reductions in farm subsidies), but there is no imperative, conservative or otherwise, to lower agricultural protection. I don’t dispute the need to change the current system of trade protection, but unless you are willing to adhere entirely to a strict, consequentialist doctrine, it is a misnomer to use the language of rights with regard to any such change.
Shit, I hope that this has been coherent. I’m tired as hell from partying all night last night, and I don’t particularly feel like doing my work here at the library. I think this is the longest email I’ve ever written. I should go and do some of my reading and stop being pedantic.
Julius
Federico,
Thank you for the enlightening debate. It is always a pleasure to engage with another person so eager to engage in free discourse and to expand his beliefs; someone who, to borrow a phrase from the plaque on the facade of Bascom Hall at our hallowed alma mater, believes so thoroughly in "that sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found." I fear, however, that I have not been entirely fair to you and to your arguments about 'Conservative Moral Duties' to end Farm Subsidies. I have sent a couple of off-the cuff responses without fully fleshing out my position, so let me now express to you my concerns with your argument.
First, as fond as you are of labelling me as a firebreathing liberal, I think it need not be said that I am not in favour of agricultural subsidies, especially in the developed world. However, the tone of past emails being considered, I feel that it was necessary to make this abundantly clear from the start. My qualm with your email is not the content of your position on subsidies, but rather your assertion that there exists a "moral duty" to eliminate protection. It is my belief that there is much to critique in this statement.
Let us begin with one of your remarks in your correspondence on 16 February.
You said:
"It is a moral duty to promote good economics = morality is subservient to the need of promoting good economics."
This is a difficult statement to interpret, because it appears that you try to cover two arguments in the same space through an opaque equality. But the two phrases are substantively different. As it is phrased now, taking the latter half of the formulation, it seems to say that morality takes a backseat to promoting good economics. This is in fact a statement that you have made on numerous occasions, decrying the uselessness of 'abstract philosophizing and political nonsense' in favor of the no-nonsense rigor of economic decision-making. Notwithstanding the impossibility of understanding or implementing economic policy without regards to political situations and the methodological and epistemological influences of philosophy on economics, this assertion is frighteningly off the mark. Were we to take the Fedwardian approach to morality then there would be no constraint on what could be done in the name of economic 'necessity.' By your argument, in the purely economic world, if we found that by carpet bombing the south-west and installing miles of solar panels would have a higher discounted marginal product than leaving the people there to live their lives, there would be no moral constraint on this action. If you want a more realistic example, we could just scrap Social Security because it's badly conceived and is hugely wasteful without regard for any duty or obligation we might have to the people who paid it.
Anyway, if that is your point, there would be no real reason for you to consider crushing farm subsidies to be a 'Conservative Moral duty?' If economics preceded morality wouldn't the crushing of farm subsidies be first and foremost an economic duty, and not a moral one? Why would you even invoke such ‘subservient’ principles? As much as this argument seems amenable to your perspective, and as much as I think that you largely believe it, unless I have radically underestimated the extent of your intellectual bankruptcy I don't think that this entirely is what you are arguing.
The other half of your formulation seems to contend one of two things. The first is that good economics is good in itself (and being that we have a moral imperative to promote the good, we have a moral duty to promote economics). As I just wrote however, this cannot be the basis of morality. There are certain constraints that humans put on their actions that would prevent them from doing the aforementioned acts simply because they ‘know’ that it is wrong. This is what I meant in my last email: not that morality is the basis of any economic theory, but that it does apply an additional constraint on the implementation of an action.
Having said all this, I am led to interpret your statement to mean that the condition of morality is derived from the goodness or badness of a given economic policy. By this standard, if it is a moral imperative to promote good economics, the reason why it is ‘moral’ must lie either in the goodness of the policy (what I believe to be your position) or the act itself of making good policy, or some combination of the two. This is a more defensible position than the Fedwardian twist, but unfortunately, the two statements you have indicated, while individually workable, are incoherent when combined. If morality is necessarily linked with what is good economically, if morality is a function of economic goodness, how can it be simultaneously interconnected and overruled by economic goodness? This would create a contradiction in the second case, that is, unless you were going to defend the position that what makes implementing good economic policy truly right is the role of employing good policy, and not economic correctness per se. If this were the case, however, we need our own moral epistemology to determine what is good, and it is this epistemology that will insert something as the ‘right’ policy, be it a massively redistributive, socialist state, or the limited one lovingly extolled by PJ O’Rourke in the Hong Kong chapter of “Eat the Rich.” Considering your hardline insistence of insisting the pre-eminence of economics in everything, this seems unlikely. Through your disdain for abstract concepts of morality, you have relegated the closely-tied factor of morality to a subservient role to the detriment of your argument. Nonetheless, this has not invalidated your position, though we can throw away the Fedwardian premises once and for all.
So it seems now that the main position we have from your argument is: "being economically good is a moral necessity, as morality is being economically good." That's more of an assertion than an argument. Beyond being a bit circular, you need to show WHY morality is necessarily tied to being economically good in order for this to convince anyone. I take your argument to be the following:
Economic orthodoxy says that X is bad
Whatever is bad is immoral
So, X is immoral
You have a moral duty to eliminate the immoral
You have a moral duty to eliminate X
Well, there are many problems with this formulation. First off, what do we mean by 'bad?' Though we could quibble over the points here, I interpret 'bad' to mean suboptimal, i.e. tarifs are bad because we could be better off under free trade. A second, related point is that the claims that economics itself makes are not really moral in any sense. It takes an outside moral system to inject moral content into the discipline of economics--in this case, your own (and I find it deliciously ironic that you denigrate the ideas of moral systems when it is your own that places economic efficiency at the zenith of rightness). Though some writers like Partha Dasgupta argue that such an infusion of morality into economics is redundant because it already has its own internal moral compass, they understand the purview of this moral underpinning to be quite limited.
So it seems that your argument is : attaining optimality in economic systems is a moral necessity, because optimality in an economy is morally good. To tackle this question, I would like to better examine your adopted basis of morality. In particular, I am having difficulty identifying the grounding for your moral theory, as it seems to me to be partially consequential and partly deontological. I'm not trying to unfairly deluge you with abstract philosophical terms, so let me explain: consequentialist and deontological explanations of morality depend on the relationship between the right and the good. In the former, the right is identified with the good, but in the latter the right and the good are at least partially independent. For instance, utilitarianism is a consequentialist doctrine, which says that the only thing that is good is that which maximizes utility, while Kantian philosophy, which argues that a lie is morally wrong even if it results in a good outcome, is an example of a deontological theory.
Now I think that you would likely claim to be a "realist," which would indicate an affinity for the tenets of consequentialist moral philosophy. "What matters is what is empirically testable, not some abstract philosophizing bullshit" is something I believe you said to me in a past Messenger session. Yet, it is not going to be easy to extricate this concern for outcomes with your constant claims for "the preeminence of economic rights" which seem to presuppose some objective basis of rights not entirely determined by economic doctrine. While I believe that your position is very much consequentialist, I feel that you still would be loathe to abandon certain features of a deontological conception of morals. Of course, you could argue that your belief in such economic 'rights' stems not from a belief in fundamental objective norms of right and wrong, but from consequential motivations: you could believe in economic rights, political rights, etc, not because they are intrinsically good, but because they are means to an end--from your perspective, an economic gravy train. But is this really the case? Rights-based issues like entitlement a la Nozick and libertarian orthodoxy are right up your alley as well. You certainly seem to think that people have the right to keep whatever they earn (“excessive taxation is unjust” you have oft remarked). But such economic rights need not correlate with the maximization of economic efficiency.
Consequentialist theories seem at first to be very attractive, as they seem to line up so closely with our beliefs about what morality is and should be: what is morality if it does not aim for better consequences, the highest well-being, the most optimal allocation of resources, etc. Yet in a sense, if this is the basis of your moral vision you are impelled in every case to follow WHATEVER will lead to your chosen good. This is not the case with deontological arguments, which are more in the form of constraints with options. For instance, you do not have the right to appropriate someone’s home in the name of efficiency, but you also have the right to not give money to charity if you so choose.
What if you could create total efficiency in the market by depriving one person of his justly earned salary? Or one town? Or as many as people as possible given that the total result would be an improvement on the status quo with regards to your prescribed dimension? I have a feeling that your libertarian streak would seriously object to that. You will probably reply that these cases are farfetched, but remember, this is a question of the applicability of a moral theory, so it should be able to hold in all cases. These are necessarily debated in the abstract, to see if they do in fact adhere to our intuitions. The other tack is to ruthlessly cling to your position despite the fact that your intuitions say that you are acting impermissibly, and if you are going to do that, then I don’t think any argument could sway you. In any case, the moral permissibility of doing any of these actions is logically consistent with the consequentialist track line that you seem to be toeing: optimality is the supreme moral condition, and we must maximize it, hence it is a moral duty to eliminate/promote policy X.
I believe that if we are to apply any moral system to economics, I believe it should be a deontological one. Deontological systems are much broader in scope: they recognize that economic efficiency is a good thing and we should strive for it, but that it need not be achieved at the expense of other rights. While efficiency might be ‘good’ there is some independence of our notions of what is ‘right’ This is consistent with a number of positions, from ones that acknowledge the right to “sit on your ass and collect welfare” up to a rigorous one that aims directly at being as efficient as possible. It recognizes conditions other than economic efficiency to be valid for the basis of morality, unlike the consequentialist theory that you espouse which has no other aim.
I am likely just as upset about agricultural subsidies as you, but I believe that it is incorrect to discuss them in the realm of moral imperatives. The moral duty to eliminate them under a consequentialist theory does not even consider the fact that they might be wrong tout court. It is one thing to recognize the importance of lowering subsidies and to strive fervently towards that noble goal, but it is another thing altogether to believe that the only reason we have to do so is because it will help to maximize the pre-eminent moral category: efficiency. But the real problem, at least from your point of view, is that since a deontological theory does not readily identify the good, the ‘moral duty’ that began this entire thread does not really apply. You are constrained in your actions, and have a certain autonomy to act in whichever way you choose (for instance, lobbying for reductions in farm subsidies), but there is no imperative, conservative or otherwise, to lower agricultural protection. I don’t dispute the need to change the current system of trade protection, but unless you are willing to adhere entirely to a strict, consequentialist doctrine, it is a misnomer to use the language of rights with regard to any such change.
Shit, I hope that this has been coherent. I’m tired as hell from partying all night last night, and I don’t particularly feel like doing my work here at the library. I think this is the longest email I’ve ever written. I should go and do some of my reading and stop being pedantic.
Julius
posted by Det. John Kimble at 15:00
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