Abundance and Self-Realization

I'm looking at Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, starting here.

Distribution of income matters less than distributiion of "spiritual resources", he says. That means there is a tendency in the "Fourth Awakening" to refocus on the individual again, rather than material conditions in society as a whole.

I have often talked about abundance on this blog, such as here and here. Fogel also emphasizes the saturation of material goods.

Our society is so well saturated with consumer durables, in fact, that even the poorest fifth of households are well-endowed with them. Consequently, the era of the household accumulation of consumer durables, which sparked the growth of many manufacturing industries in the many decades following World War II, is largely over in the United States. p189

So where are things going? Meaning becomes more important as survival challenges recede.

Today, people are increasingly concerned with what life is all about. That was not an issue for the ordinary individual in 1880, when nearly the whole day was devoted to earning the food, clothing and shelter needed to sustain life. A half century from now, perhaps even sooner, when increases in productivity make it possible to provide goods in abundance with half today's labor, the issue of life's meaning, and other matters of self-realization, will take up the bulk of discretionary time. p 191-192

Health and leisure time will be the focus of the future economy, although, he says, it is difficult to foresee the details.

The point is that leisure-time activities (including lifelong learning) - volwork - and health care are the growth industries of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-firsty. They will spark economic expansion during our age, just as agriculture did in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth and as manufacturing, transportation and utilities didin the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. The growing demand for health-care services is due primarily, not to a distortion of the price system, but to the increasing effectiveness of medical intervention. p201

What does self-realization mean? Interestingly, Maslow is not mentioned at all, nor are the older classical ideas about virtue in any detail. Instead, Fogel develops his own list.

To those philosophers who have developed the concept, self-realization means the fullest development of the virtuous aspects of one's nature. ..Of all the maldistributed spiritual resources, sense of purpose may be the most important. p205

Others include "a vision of opportunity", "a sense of the mainstream of work and life" which means a sense of where opportunities are and how to pursue them. There must be "a sense of community", an "ability to engage with diverse groups", which entails an "ethic of benevolence". As self-realization is often achieved through an occupation, a "work ethic" and "sense of discipline" are required, as well focus and a "capacity to resist the lure of hedonism". There needs to be a "capacity for self-education", a "thirst for knowledge". an "appreciation of quality", and some "self-esteem." p205-206

To this updated list of virtues he adds a sense of balance or, as Aristotle would put it, the golden mean.

Each of the fifteen spiritual resources just outlined must be possessed in moderation. There is an optimal amount of each spiritual resource, which will vary from one individual to another. Too much of a sense of purpose turns dedication into ruthlessness. Too little sense of purpose may cause one to be uncompetitive in a given pursuit. p207

It isn't quite a virtue ethics, perhaps, as it is more a list of desirable psychological attributes, being well-adjusted rather than arete or excellence. But it comes close. It is not utilitarian, nor based on more simplistic ideas about happiness. It is certainly reconcilable with older virtues such as courage or temperance or practical wisdom. It is also reconcilable with other ideas we have looked at, such as the evolution of the economy from manufacturing to services to experiences to, finally, transformation of individuals, or the requirements for individual flourishing.

What it does not do (and no book can do everything) is explain what happens to labor markets and economic incentives when material needs are saturated. How might a post-scarcity economy work? How will people make a living?

In all, it is quite a radical book for an academic economist. It is also politically quite eclectic - egalitarian, but taking religion seriously; interested in the condition of the poor but skeptical of government intervention. It asks the right questions, even if the answers are not wholly developed.

The basic conclusion is income is no longer a suitable end-point for policy discussions. Nor are national income statistics. Like the rich sons of Athens two thousand years ago, the nature of the good life is the main question that confronts us once material needs are saturated. Even some Nobel Prizewinners in Economics can see that.

 

 

 

The Fourth Great Awakening

I read Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism over the holidays, and it is a very interesting book. Fogel is a Nobel Laureate in Economics (1993) , mostly for his earlier quantitative economic history and study of the historical economics of slavery in the US. Perhaps he felt liberated to write a much more original book, published in 2000. Yet it is based on deep knowledge of US history.

He focuses on the impact of the waves of religious revival in the US on broader growth and public policy. The main challenge for egalitarianism now is not material redistribution, he says, but the maldistribution of "spiritual resources."

The agenda for egalitarian policies that has dominated reform movements for most of the past entry - what I call the modernist egalitarian agenda - was based on material redistribution. The critical aspect of the postmodern egalitarian agenda is not the distribution of money income, or food, or shelter, or consumer durables. Although there are still glaring inadequacies in the distribution of material commodities that must be addressed, the most intractable maldistributions in rich countries such as the United States are in the realm of spiritual or immaterial assets. These are the critical assets in the struggle for self-realization. p2

Traditional measures of income inequality are inadequate. They ignore consumption of leisure and improved health, for example.

They focus on a variable - money income - that currently accounts for less than half of real consumption and that in a generation may account for less than a quarter of real consumption. Such measures shed little light on the most intractable forms of poverty (those related to the unequal distribution of spiritual resources). Nor do they bear on the capacity of individuals to overcome the social estrangement that undermines their quality of life. p3

So a politics based on income transfers is exhausted. That naturally leads to consideration of the good life.

A good place to begin a consideration of the content of a postmodern egalitarian agenda is with Socrates' question, What is the good life? That was a crucial question not only for the sons of rich Athenians but for the sons of the landed rich throughout history. Freed of the need to work to satisfy their material needs, they sought self-realization in public service, military adventures, philanthropy, the arts, theology, ethics and moral philosophy. p2

Naturally, I felt a huge sense of recognition and agreement at this point, as I believe that without some sense of the good life public action is empty. Fogel adds another twist. State action cannot redistribute such spiritual resources.

Realization of the potential of an individual is not something that can be legislated by the state, nor can it be provided to the weak by the strong. It is something which must develop within each individual on the basis of a succession of choices.

The quest for spiritual equity thus turns not so much on money as access to spiritual assets, most if which are transferred and developed privately rather than through the market. Moreover, some of the most critical spiritual assets, such as a sense of purpose, self-esteem, a sense of discipline, a vision of opportunity, and a thirst for knowledge, are transferred at very young ages. P4.

This is very much in tune with what I have been arguing on this blog. The main challenges we face are more ethical than economic now, about how people can be helped realize the good life and what kinds of behavior should be rewarded. It is surprising to see such a clear statement in this vein from an academic economist - although economic historians consistently seem more heterodox and interesting than mainstream model-builders.

We will look at more tomorrow, especially his emphasis on how ethical concerns develop over time.

 

 

 

Welfare and the Good Life

 

We're looking at Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, starting here.

Against the European Welfare model

The connection between the four basic social institutions and happiness leads Murray to argue for American exceptionalism, as against the European welfare model.

The tacit assumption of the advanced welfare state is correct when human beings face starvation or death by exposure. Then, food and shelter are all that count. But in an advanced society, the needs for food and shelter can be met in a variety of ways, and at that point human needs can no longer be disaggregated. The ways in which food and shelter are obtained affects whether the other human needs are met.

People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned—it cannot be self-respect if it’s not earned—and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.

This is of course a version of what I have talked about before, a change in needs as we rise up Maslow's hierarchy. The welfare state ramified in the 1960s as one response to abundance. Given sufficient wealth, the main political drive has been towards equal distribution rather than new flourishing and possibility.

Upper class people still generally practice these four institutional virtues, he says. They are much more likely to be married, see a job as a calling and work hard, practice religion, and believe others can be trusted. In a sense, getting ahead requires them.

The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead.

He thinks this view, nonjudgemental "niceness", is living on borrowed time, however, as science produces more results which refute it.

Here are some more examples of things I think the neuroscientists and geneticists will prove over the next few decades: Human beings enjoy themselves when they are exercising their realized capabilities at the limit of those capabilities. Challenge and responsibility for consequences is an indispensable part of human motivation to exercise their realized capabilities at the limit of those capabilities. People grouped by gender, ethnicity, age, social class, and sexual preference, left free to live their lives as they see fit, will produce group differences in outcomes, because they differ genetically in their cognitive, psychological, and physiological profiles. Regardless of whether people have free will, human flourishing requires that they live in an environment in which they are treated as if they did.

So he thinks it will become obvious that nonjudgemental welfarism will be understood to undermine the crucial institutions of society.

The institutions surrounding marriage, vocation, community, and faith will be found to be the critical resources through which human beings lead satisfying lives. It will be found that those institutions deteriorate in the advanced welfare states for reasons that are intrinsic to the nature of the welfare state. It will be found that those institutions are richest and most robust in states that allow people to work out their lives on their own and in company with the people around them.

Putting it together

So what do we make of this? As a rule I consider libertarianism a horrible mistake. But Murray is a strange kind of libertarian. He is not so much arguing for the market and voluntary Ayn Randian contractualism, as strengthened independent social institutions.

He calls for an emphasis on virtue, which I like, but it in practice he means strengthening his four core institutions rather than the Aristotelian virtues as such. It is sociology more than ethics. He does not have much of the rest of virtue ethics, such as the golden mean, or an emphasis on the multiplicity of virtues.

What he does have is a kind of sociological vision of the good life, of flourishing, which I think makes him divergent from full libertarianism. Flourishing for him means strengthening those four institutions and reducing the role of government and bureaucracy in life.

I think this is what my friend, who I mentioned at the beginning of the post, was hostile to. Murray says people have to make their own choices in life, but his view is much less sympathetic for radical innovation in lifestyles. He believes in marriage, in standard jobs, in the churches, in stability.

But there is a basic confusion here. People do not work out their lives on their own, or even just in the company of those around them. They do so in the context of an ethical vision of the good life, of what contributes to happiness. We do not start off from year zero every time we make a decision.

Government and bureaucracy cannot run our lives for us. That much is true. But we still need a conception of the common good. Traditional libertarianism does not do that. It is just about process. Murray's distaste for government means he throws much of the possibility of common culture out as well.

I've said a number of times I think the debate between government and the market is a stale 20th century debate. Instead, the real issue is what we do about abundance and what flourishing means. Murray contributes some hard statistical evidence to that question, about the value of social institutions. But it correlation, rather than explanation.

It is a good argument against welfarist government. But it does not make any case for the positive possibilities of abundance, or how institutions need to adapt. What becomes of work if the demand for medium-skilled jobs is being hollowed out, for example? How do you promote social trust?

America is about new possibilities of freedom - and what that means substantively when material necessities are met.

 

 

Virtue and the Founders

We're looking at Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, starting here.

Murray argues that mainstream America is seeing crucial social institutions erode. He gives a fascinating account of how the founders of the United States were convinced that the bedrock of the Republic was the virtue of the people. Naturally, I found this illuminating because of my continued interest in virtue ethics, like this post the other day. According to Murray,

Everyone involved in the creation of the United States knew that its success depended on virtue in its citizenry—not gentility, but virtue. “No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure,” James Madison famously observed at the Virginia ratifying convention. “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”

For Benjamin Franklin, this meant that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” On the other hand, virtue makes government easy to sustain: “The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed.”

Washington emphasized the point too:

George Washington said much the same thing in the undelivered version of his first inaugural address, asserting that “no Wall of words, no mound of parchment can be formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.” Or as he put it most simply in his Farewell Address: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” In their various ways, the founders recognized that if a society is to remain free, self-government refers first of all to individual citizens governing their own behavior.

This shows, of course, how natural and widespread and unexceptional a belief in the virtues was before the utilitarian 19th century.

Now Murray believes virtue is eroding.

The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century. America will remain exceptional only to the extent that its people embody the same qualities that made it work for the first two centuries of its existence. The founding virtues are central to that kind of citizenry.

 

Four key institutions

He spends much of the rest of the book distingushing between the mores of an upper class suburb, which he calls Belmont, and a lower class one, Fishtown. The four core institutions of society - marriage, work, religion, and social trust - have all eroded markedly in Fishtown, he says. Marriage has declined:

For the first time in human history, we now have societies in which a group consisting of a lone woman and her offspring is not considered to be sociologically incomplete—not considered to be illegitimate—and so I will adapt and call them nonmarital births.

So too has the work ethic. One interesting thing is he emphasises work as a vocation, a calling, rather than just a means to pay the bills. He thinks that even low-paying work can give meaning if it helps support others.

Yes, you can overdo it. There is more to life than work, and a life without ample space for family and friends is incomplete. But this much should not be controversial: Vocation—one’s calling in life—plays a large role in defining the meaning of that life. For some, the nurturing of children is the vocation. For some, an avocation or a cause can become an all-absorbing source of satisfaction, with the job a means of paying the bills and nothing more. But for many others, vocation takes the form of the work one does for a living.

The data shows lower-class neighnborhoods have changed much more than upper-class ones.

In 1960, 81 percent of Fishtown households had someone working at least forty hours a week, with Belmont at 90 percent. By 2008, Belmont had barely changed at all, at 87 percent, while Fishtown had dropped to 60 percent. And that was before the 2008 recession began. As of March 2010, Belmont was still at 87 percent. Fishtown was down to 53 percent.

Religious adherence - Catholicism in the case of Fishtown, which is based on an actual inner suburb in Philadelphia - has declined sharply.

The jury is still out on the metaquestion of whether secular democracies can long survive. But the last few decades have brought forth a large technical literature about the role of religion in maintaining civic life and the effects of religion on human functioning.

Social trust has also plunged.

The scariest message from the GSS [survey] does not consist of declines in specific activities that make up social capital, but this: The raw material that makes community even possible has diminished so much in Fishtown that the situation may be beyond retrieval. That raw material is social trust—not trust in a particular neighbor who happens to be your friend, but a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. As Francis Fukuyama documented in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, the existence of social trust is a core explanation of why some cultures create wealth and other cultures are mired in poverty.

Diversity, for all its positive qualities, also erodes social trust.

Another problem regarding social trust, and one that may help explain the decline, has surfaced more recently: The key ingredient of social capital, social trust, is eroded by ethnic diversity. In the years after Bowling Alone appeared, Robert Putnam’s research led him to a disturbing finding: Ethnic diversity works against social trust within a community—not only against trusting people of the other ethnicity, but against trusting even neighbors of one’s own ethnic group. In addition, Putnam’s research found that in areas of greater ethnic diversity, there was lower confidence in local government, a lower sense of political efficacy, less likelihood of working on a community project, less likelihood of giving to charity, fewer close friends, and lower perceived quality of life.

The erosion of these institutions diminishes happiness. And there is a common notion of what happiness means, says Murray.

... the core nature of human happiness is widely agreed upon in the West. It goes all the way back to Aristotle’s views about happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics. Distilling his discussion of happiness into a short definition leaves out a lot, but this captures the sense of Aristotle’s argument well enough for our purposes: Happiness consists of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole. The definition in effect says that when you decide how happy you are, you are thinking of aspects of your life that tend to define your life (not just bits and pieces of it); that you base your assessment of your happiness on deep satisfactions with the way things have gone, not passing pleasures; and that you believe in your heart of hearts that those satisfactions have been worth achieving. It is not really a controversial definition—try to imagine a definition of happiness you could apply to your own life that is much different.

There seems to be a strong connection in survey evidence between the strength of Murray's four core institutions and happiness.

At baseline—unmarried, dissatisfied with one’s work, professing no religion, and with very low social trust—the probability that a white person aged 30–49 responded “very happy” to the question about his life in general was only 10 percent. Having either a very satisfying job or a very happy marriage raised that percentage by almost equal amounts, to about 19 percent, with the effect of a very satisfying job being fractionally greater. Then came the big interaction effect: having a very satisfying job and a very happy marriage jumped the probability to 55 percent. Having high social trust pushed the percentage to 69 percent, and adding strong religious involvement raised the probability to 76 percent.

I'll conclude looking at the book tomorrow.

 

Coming Apart

I read Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 the other day. Murray, of course, is controversial. I had lunch back in late spring with a liberal friend from work who mentioned the book in passing - and spluttered in outrage. I wasn't sure why. My friend didn't give arguments, but radiated hostility to the book. So I decided I should read it at some point, although I looked at Murray before, here.

Murray repeats and extends his arguments in the book, with much more data. He argues that America is increasingly not divided by race, but by class. Hence he uses statistical evidence to demonstrate massive declines in social institutions among whites since the early 1960s (specifically, the date Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, marking the end of an era), without needing to consider any racial differences or stereotypes about an underclass.

THIS BOOK IS about an evolution in American society that has taken place since November 21, 1963, leading to the formation of classes that are different in kind and in their degree of separation from anything that the nation has ever known. I will argue that the divergence into these separate classes, if it continues, will end what has made America America. ..

It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

He has a marked libertarian view, but with a conservartive slant. Government is the enemy because it saps vitality out of the other institutions of society, the "little platoons" as Edmund Burke would have called them.

But the American project was not about maximizing national wealth nor international dominance. The American project—a phrase you will see again in the chapters to come—consists of the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, coming together voluntarily to solve their joint problems.

The most interesting thing by far is his discussion of the emergence of a new elite university-educated upper class which is heavily clustered into a few narrow districts, the "SuperZIPS". The value of brainpower started rising sharply in the postwar years, he says, as the economy developed from agriculture and manufacturing and towards more sophisticated services and technology. More people, and smarter people, went to college.

The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10 percent of the incoming class by 1960. The same thing happened throughout the college system.

And the graduates of selective colleges naturally associated with each other.

The human impulse behind the isolation of the new upper class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk. Cognitive segregation was bound to start developing as soon as unusually smart people began to have the opportunity to hang out with other unusually smart people.

The shift in the upper class was dramatic and swift, with consequences that we are still feeling today. The new upper class is very different to the past, he says. He uses alumni data from Harvard and Yale, among other sources, to show that a huge proportion of the graduating classes live in just a few upscale suburbs and cities across the continent. Unsuprisingly, there are clusters in New York, Washington, Boston, San Francisco and LA.

The new upper class is liberal, but not notably more so in most of the country. It is very much the four principal major cities which have very liberal upper classes.

They have increasingly little exposure to the mainstream of American life.They are isolated, mostly talking and interacting just with each other. (I of course live in one of those "superZIPS" in Manhattan).

That is not an argument for turning the clock back, he says.

..I have described the America of 1960 in ways that have sometimes sounded nostalgic. But if a time machine could transport me back to 1960, I would have to be dragged into it kicking and screaming. In many aspects of day-to-day life, America today is incomparably superior to the America of 1960.

The increased presence of brainpower in the upper reaches of society starting in the 1960s made a major difference in daily life:

That brings us to the timing of changes in the American standard of living. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, not much changed in the technology of daily life. ... Then things took off. Beginning around the mid-1970s—the appearance of the Apple II in 1977 is a good symbolic opening—the cascade of changes has been unending. They range from the trivial (it was still difficult to get a really good cup of coffee or loaf of bread in most parts of America in the late 1970s) to the momentous (the Information Revolution is rightly classified alongside the Industrial Revolution as an epochal event). The design, functionality, and durability of almost any consumer product today are far better than they were in 1960.

The social changes are not simply a product of wealth, however. Taxing the upper classes to achieve greater income equality would make little difference in behavior or culture.

The new-upper-class culture is not the product of great wealth. It is enabled by affluence—people with common tastes and preferences need enough money to be able to congregate—but it is not driven by affluence. It is driven by the distinctive tastes and preferences that emerge when large numbers of cognitively talented people are enabled to live together in their own communities. You can whack the top income centile back to where it was in the 1980s, and it will have no effect whatsoever on the new-upper-class culture that had already emerged by that time. Places like Marin County are not fodder for cultural caricature because they are so wealthy.

This is very interesting.

Education and cultural change

He essentially says the cultural change is a natural outcome of sorting and acculturation by higher education. As I see it, perhaps it is a shift in society in a more priestly direction - the triumph of the brahmins, as opposed to the warrior, merchant or lower classes in the traditional fourfold Indian classification , for example.

In the past, a military aristocracy has often dominated society. Now the ruling class is the one which is more skilled at symbolic manipulation and arguments and moral deliberation - traditionally the role of the priests. We have a secular religion with its own upper class factions.

We have discussed before whether the massive social changes of the 1960s came about because humanity for the first time was not impelled by immediate survival needs. The possibility of abundance caused an outbreak of aquarian utopianism, followed by backlash.

Part of it was also technological, like the new possibilities opened up by the contraceptive pill.

And part of it was the rise of a more intellectual, educated upper class.

I'm not sure that higher education is inherently liberal or egalitarian in orientation. Rather, it was in a particularly liberal and secular phase in the 1960s and since. Harvard started off as a training center for the hardline Calvinist ministry, after all. The Jesuits have been famously highly educated, and not particularly liberal. The same applies to Chinese scholar-officials educated in the classics, or many Jewish Rabbis or graduates of the old Islamic Universities like Al-Azhar.

But having an upper class that did pass disproportionately through a few key institutions means it is likely to be stamped with the ethos of those institutions at a point in time. Most of the people would never have attended those institutions had they not become meritocratic. Hence there was natural self-interest in reinforcing those values.

We'll look at more of the book tomorrow.

Kant and Universalism

We've encountered plenty of criticism of Immanuel Kant on this blog before, and some support for the "escalator of reason" in which enlightenment ethics played a major part.

Clearly he is the axial figure, the pivot around which our modern conception of ethics shifted. We can trace much of the modem preoccupation with impartiality and universal rules as the bedrock of morality straight to him.

Looking at Kantian ethics hardly guarantees much readership for a blog - quite the opposite. But I keep finding on this blog that looking at the future path of the economy requires rethinking many of our ethical concepts. If we no longer have to worry about food, shelter and basic survival as our main preoccupations in life, then issues of the common good, the good life, happiness and flourishing all come to the fore.

And that means ethical philosophy becomes much more prominent in the discussion, rather than simply utility or macroeconomics. And that means we have to look, among other things, at Kant rather than the Kardashians.

I had read the classic Stephen Korner book on Kant years ago, but I noted a major recent biography in Deirdre McCloskey's references. So I read Manfred Kuehn's Kant: A Biography the other week ( while exiled to a place in Queens by the hurricane). It is well-written, tractable, and gives a deep evocation of Kant's times and context.

Of course, it does not break new ground in examining his philosophy itself, although it very much helps to get more sense of his evolution.

What really struck me is how much of Kant's early life and education was rooted in Lutheran theology and Pietist religious doctrine. Even in the eighteenth century, theology could have major consequences. Prussia tended to allow free intellectual speculation on metaphysics, although normal life was circumscribed. The relationship between reason and faith was a major issue of the age.

The limits of reason

I will leave most of the issues in the Critique of Pure Reason aside and focus on the ethics. But before I do, it is striking that Kant's metaphysics is all about demonstrating the boundaries and limits that apply to reason and experience; his ethics is all about entrenching pure reason with little regard to experience.

The driving force is certainty, and its limits.

Kant's critical philosophy can be viewed as an attempt to answer three fundamental questions of enduring philosophical significance: "What can I know", "What ought I to do?" and "What may I hope for". He may be said to address the first of these questions in the Critique of Pure Reason, but he does not answer the question. He seems to be primarily interested not in the general question of what we can know, but in the narrower question of what can be known with absolute certainty and without any qualification. In his terminology, this question is "What can we know a priori and in complete isolation from experience?" p242

He wants to demonstrate that absolute skepticism does not make sense. Experience must presuppose some a priori categories. As Kuehn puts it,

Science allows of continuous progress. This is not so for metaphysics. It has both limits and boundaries. In fact, Kant believes that metaphysics leads us necessarily towards boundaries. p260

In a sense, his aim was to save a place for moral certainty based on a priori reason, in the face of rationalist skepticism.

Kant's ultimate concerns were moral, and perhaps even religious. Accepting the validity of the empiricist approach to science and to the growth of knowledge, Kant wanted to save morality from becoming too naturalistic and too relativistic. He wanted to show that even in the absence of knowledge of absolute reality, morality has a claim on us that is itself absolute and incontrovertible. It is this moral claim that elevates us above the beasts. p 265

He wanted to use reason to save morality from reason, in effect. It is a defense of morality against the corrosion of skepticism, on the one hand, and dogmatic Pietist religious claims on the other, but it leaves a very thin morality. Too much territory is conceded.

Kant's Groundwork

Kuehn emphasis that Kant saw a good will as the only moral thing.

Indeed, a good will is the only thing that is good without any qualification. In order to explain what he means by a good will, Kant introduces a distinction between acting from duty and acting in accordance with duty. He apparently thought that duty is what a good will would will. p284

And it is wholly distinct from self interest or specific ends.

Thus, actions have moral worth only when done from duty. But this moral worth is not to be found in the purpose or goal that they are meant to attain. They have their moral worth only in the subjective principle of volition that they express. Kant calls this practical principle of volition the "maxim". As we have seen, maxims are general principles of action. p284

So here already we have the contemporary notion that intention matters to the exclusion of anything else, and strict separation from self-interest.

A pure moral philosophy deals with a pure will, that is, a will that has motives "that are represented completely a priori by reason alone" and not with human volition, which is characterized by empirically based motives. p285

Morality is a matter of pure reason, rather than the more concrete issues that lay in the domain of anthropology.

Kant, in other words, does not intend to deal with the everyday situations of moral agents. He deals, rather with an ideal of pure reason that is entirely a priori. This ideal, which he calls the categorical imperative, is not given in experience. p285-286

This requirement of disinterestedness is also at the root of his aesthetic theory.

.."the beautiful is what pleases in the mere estimate formed of it (consequently not by the intervention of any feeling of sense in accordance with a concept of the understanding). From this it follows immediately that it must please apart from all interest. p347

Indeed, one cannot help but naturally think there are parallels between Kant's purely rational autonomous agent and our more recent conception of homo economicus in economics.

 

Residual elements

He sees there are difficulties with this notion, however:

Indeed, Kant ends his book by emphasizing that " we do not.. comprehend the practical unconditional necessity of the moral imperative." We only "comprehend its incomprehensibility"... So morality for Kant is an enigma. .. That the "mere dignity of humanity as rational nature, without any other end or advantage to be attained from it - hence respect for a mere idea - is yet to serve as an inflexible precept of the will", is , Kant openly acknowledges, a paradox. True morality is an ideal yet to be instantiated in the world, but it is the only ideal worth striving for. This is in the end what his idealism amounts to. p 286

Interestingly, immediately after the Groundwork he wrote the Idea for a Universal History, which does of course have teleological elements.

So Kant argues for a teleological view of Nature by arguing that such a view is required for the progress of humanity. .. Such a regular progression would not be due to any rational process of humanity, but would have to be ascribed to Nature itself. [.]

To this end, Kant formulates in somewhat dogmatic fashion and with little defense nine propositions. The first maintains that all natural capacities of a creature are 'destined" to be fully developed sooner or later. If nature has a plan, then the plan must be fulfilled. In the second proposition, he claims that our reason is such that it can be developed only in the species, not in an individual. Our lives are too short to allow the latter ... Fourth, nature brings about the full development of our natural faculties by an antagonism within society. In the long run, this antagonism leads to a law-governed social order. Kant calls this the "unsocial sociability." Though people may not be able to bear one another many a time, they still seek the approval and respect of others.

This is a feature of his approach in general. Kant has not abandoned completely the older ideas of purpose, or, as we shall see, virtue. But he pushes them to the periphery of his system. They are ad-hoc add-ons. And as such they soon fall from sight altogether.

Whereas much of his theoretical work was concerned with showing that reason has much less power than had been assumed by his rationalistic predecessors, Kant's moral philosophy may be seen as an attempt to show that morality is the exclusive domain of reason. p312

In a similar displacement, morality requires us to believe in the existence of God, or so Kuehn summarizes Kant's view:

Without morality and God, we would be condemned to moral despair. Moral action should lead to greater good in this world, but it usually does not. Happiness and worthiness to be happy do not usually go together in this world. If we want to establish a connection between the two, we must assume they will be made to coincide by God in the long run. In this way, the notion of "God" and "immortaility" as prerequisites for the realization of the summum bonum or the highest good, make possible the moral enterprise for Kant, and therefore we must believe in their reality. p313

But God is a consequence of morality, not the other way around.

It is our autononomy that is the basis of the moral law, not God's commands or demands on us. p313

God, like purpose, still forms part of his system, but at the periphery. The trouble is these other elements - God, a belief in progress and teleology, a belief in the paradox of inflexible striving for a pure idea - are needed, even on his arguments, to make his theory join up and make sense in practice.

Kant and Virtue

One thing I found particularly interesting was Kuehn's account of how Kant saw the virtues. He was very influenced by Cicero.

There are large areas of agreement between Kant and Cicero. They both thought that ethics is based on reason and is opposed to impulse, and they both rejected hedonism. Cicero used such phrases as "conquered by pleasure" and "broken by desires" to describe actions that fall short of virtue and moral character, while Kant argued that only actions done from duty alone were moral, while any action motivated by pleasure was nonmoral. Both Cicero and Kant offer a duty-based theory of morality.

But, says Kuehn,

Though Cicero, like Kant, considered duty and virtue to be the fundamental concepts of morality, Cicero opted for a form of eudaimonism, which held that whatever is in accordance with duty will also turn out to be ultimately more pleasant than what is in contradiction to virtue.

Kant rejected Ciceronian notions of ethos or honor or the duties particular to a role or social position, although he was very familiar with it from his father's participation in Koenigsberg guilds. "Without honor, a member of a guild was nothing."

The grounds of moral obligation, Kant thinks, must not be found

in the nature of man nor in the circumstances in which a man is placed, but must be sought a priori in the concepts of pure reason... Ciceronian ethics that remain founded on common life, expressed by such concepts of honor (honestas) , faithfulness (fides) , fellowship (societas) and seemliness (decorum) is too superficial and unphilosophical for Kant. For this reason, Kant rejected not just Cicero but all those who were trying to derive a Ciceronian ethics. Moral duties cannot be derived from honor or honorableness in any way. p281

Honor, he thought, always involves an element of self-interest. He still allowed a role for character and virtue in his system, but largely in terms of strength of will in carrying out the claims of disinterested duty.

Kuehn quotes a very late Kant work, the Doctrine of Virtue.

(objectively), there is only one virtue (as moral strength of one's maxims); but in fact (subjectively) there is a multitude of virtues.. our self-knowledge can never adequately tell us whether it is complete [in being virtuous] or deficient. p401

Kant also believed duty was a clearer principle than happiness.

The concept of duty is "simpler, clearer, more comprehensible, and more natural" than any motive drawn from happiness. Maxims drawn from happiness are notoriously difficult to formulate and act on. Yet moral education had been based on such maxims until now. Kant went on to argue that this is what impeded moral progress, and this did not prove the old saw that moral theory could not work in practice. It would work, if only it were tried. p374

Kuehn summarizes, and then quotes Kant again :

The complete system of duties that Kant finally presents to us is a doctrine of virtue; what he ultimately aims at is a virtue-based ethics, one in which character plays a central role, and not some kind of constructivist moral system. The categorical imperative is intimately bound up with virtue.

Virtue is the strength of a human being's maxims in fulfilling his duty. Strength of any kind can be recognized only by the obstacles only by the obstacles it can overcome, and in this case the obstacles are natural inclinations.. and since it is man himself who puts these obstacles in the way of his maxims, virtue is not merely self-constraint.. but also a self-constraint in accordance with a principle of inner freedom, and so through the mere representation of one's duty in accordance with the moral law. p402

So virtue and character are boiled down to determination to pursue the one true principle of adhererence to univeral maxims. The plurality of life and multiplicity of different virtues are reduced down to one demand of reason. The shadow of other doctrines is still there, but only a shadow.

I think in the end Kant's aim is to defend morality against the possibility of radical doubt, which was seeping into the European consciousness. But is this really a sensible aim? In a plural world, with competing values and situations and contexts, there will always be some grounds for doubt or exceptions to universal moral principles. That is not to justify relativism. It is to say that no moral principles can be universal. Rules must sometimes be honored in the breach. Experience and knowledge of human nature must be a major part of our moral outlook. Things should not be neater than they can be.

Perhaps it is just an inherent inclination in many people that they crave clear principles to the detriment of reality, just as quant modellers prefer their econometrics to the messy business of qualitative reality.

 

Destroying the village in order to save it

So, in the end, Kant rejected social roles and position as a foundation for morality, including the elevation of the aristocracy, which was brave for his time. He believed he had retained character and virtue as central parts of his system. But they were relegated to just supporting roles for the central actor: universal rules dictated to us by our autonomous reason. There is no role for flourishing or happiness: only duty is moral. And nature has her own purposes which may be inscrutable to us.

He defended morality by ignoring most of the content and inherent judgement that underlies it. Impartiality replaced substance.

Kant spent many years lecturing on anthropology, i.e the more concrete elements of human nature, and devoted much effort to practical reason as well as pure reason in the Critiques. But he severed morality from forms of life, and human nature.

It is a magnificent system for hedgehogs, people who believe in explaining things in terms of one principle or model. It provides more determinate principles of action, stripped from particular circumstances.

But the dictates of reason themselves may allow little room for restraint or temperance or prudence or compassion or good judgment. In releasing ourselves from the circumstances of human life, we also release ourselves from the constraints and possibilities of humanity.

 

 

 

 

Philippa Foot and Virtue Ethics

One of my increasing long term interests on this blog is virtue ethics, and at some point I will have to get around to reading Philippa Foot's essays on the issue.

It always seems the more you know about something, the more you realize how little you know. Just to thoroughly read up on contemporary ethical philosophy would be a work of years. So there are dozens of books in ethics I still have to read.

In the meantime, I read a nice obituary of her in the Guardian from two years ago:

The moral philosopher Philippa Foot, who has died aged 90, started a new trend in ethics. She challenged, in two seminal papers given in the late 1950s, the prevailing Oxbridge orthodoxy of AJ Ayer and Richard Hare; and, for the next few decades, passionate debate over her naturalism, as against Hare's prescriptivism, occupied most moral philosophers in Britain and America. She was also one of the pioneers of virtue ethics, a key development in philosophy from the 1970s onwards.

From her essay Moral Beliefs (1958) to the collection Moral Dilemmas (2002), and throughout her academic life at Oxford and universities in North America, she was always passionate that "the grounding of a moral argument is ultimately in facts about human life" and in what it is rational for humans to want.

Suppose, she famously demanded in Moral Beliefs, that morality really were (a la Ayer and Hare) just a matter of each person commending and prescribing ways of acting that they happened to approve of – then why not commend a man who clasps his hands three times a day, or prescribes that this be done? No one would, of course, unless the clasping somehow had some relation to human wellbeing or harm, which is what morality must surely be about – "unless you change the facts of human existence".

 

Aristotle: Virtue and Happiness

I'm going to conclude a series of posts about Aristotle's The Politics , which start here.


He warns again against simply doling out surplus, as in a welfare state - which apparently happened at the time, and notoriously so later in antiquity in the form of Roman bread and circuses.

On the other hand if revenues are available, one should not do what popular leaders today do - make a free distribution of the surplus. (When people get it, they want the same again: this sort of assistance to the poor is like the proverbial jug with a hole in it.) .. Every effort therefore must be made to perpetuate prosperity. And since that is to the advantage of the rich as well as the poor, all that accrues from the revenues should be collected into a single fund and distributed in block grants to those in need, if possible in lump sums large enough for the acquisition of a small piece of land, but if not, enough to start a business, or work in agriculture. p375

Independence is preferable to simply handing out revenues, he thinks. It is a timeless thought. Often we think we are the first generation to confront a problem, or we are wonderfully modern and sophisticated. But it is just as often because we don't know how often it has been confronted in the past. We forget lessons which were already manifest in 350 B.C.

 

A constitution needs a view of the most desirable life

However, he comes back to his main point. We have to know what the good life is to design political institutions to achieve it.

If we wish to investigate the best constitution appropriately, we must first decide what is the most desirable life; for if we do not know that, then the best constitution is also bound to elude us. p391

He believes that virtue is the precursor to prosperity and happiness.

Thus people suppose that it is sufficient to have a certain amount of virtue; but they set no limit to the pursuit of wealth, power , prosperty, reputation and the like. {But} it is not by means of external goods that men acquire and keep the virtues, but the other way around; and to live happily, whether men suppose it to consist in enjoyment or in virtue or in both, does in fact accrue more to those who are outstandingly well-equipped in character and intellect, and only moderately so in the possesion of externally-acquired goods. p392

Of course, one of the more difficult issues in life is that sometimes character and virtue are not rewarded, of course. Time and chance happen to everyone. But it is still probable that as a rule people who are prudent and temperate and courageous and honest will do better. Parents generally teach their children to be honest rather than lie, after all. And living happily has only a tenuous connection with wealth and material goods beyond a certain threshold, as we know from the Easterlin paradox.

So Aristotle may overstate the point when he says

Let this then be agreed upon at the start: to each man there comes just so much happiness as he has of virtue and of practical wisdom, and performs actions dependent thereon. p392

But we would like it to be true. And in the long run, on average, it probably is true - and, like Pascal's bet, it is probably better to act as if we believe it is true.

 

Defining the Good Life

So what's the good life, or the best life? Not asceticism or denial or honor/shame or material success.

For the present, let this be our fundamental basis: the life which is best for men, both separately, as individuals, and in the mass, as states, is the life which has virtue sufficiently supported by material resources to facilitate participation in the actions that virtue calls for. p393

Although this is open to all, some avenues attract the most ambitious.

Both in earlier and in modern times men most ambitious for virtue seem generally to have preferred these two kinds of life, the statesman's or the philosopher's. p395

We have to have some purpose, or target.

The well-being of all men depends on two things; one is the right choice of target, of the end to which actions should tend, the other lies in finding the actions that lead to that end. p427

Aristotle is very teleological, of course. I often complain about liberal neutrality. But there is a liberal teleological tradition as well, and a leftist one stemming from Marx and Hegel. The problem is the good life they aim at is a vague abstract equality without much substance.

I would add another element. We need a choice of target, if nothing else because the economy and society naturally evolve regardless of whether we choose to perceive it. We can and ought to at least choose the fitness and selection criteria for the kind of change we experience.

So was it worth looking in such detail at a classic work, from a world in which a trireme or a horsecart was high technology? Yes. While looking up the Easterlin reference above, I came across this previous quote from Deirdre McCloskey in this blog post:

The great economist Simon Kuznets, notes his student Richard Easterlin, believed that "the `givens' of economics- technology, tastes, and institutions- are the key actors in historical change, and hence most economic theory has, at best, only limited relevance to understanding long-term change.

The technology has changed since Aristotle's day, of course. But tastes and institutions are still the key actors which we need to understand in a much less superficial way than our own parochial view allows.

And that is why stepping far outside our own parochial view , right back to first principles at the origin of many of our conceptions about ethics and politics, can give us a fresh perspective on our current challenges.