Can Societies Value?
Jason Kuznicki on Mar 26th 2008
“I think our main problem is our unclear definition of value.”
I’d like to make a top-level reply to one of the most interesting comments we’ve gotten in weeks. Before we begin, readers should know that I’ve already laid my cards on the table in the global warming game: Several months ago I wrote that 1) global warming is apparently both real and manmade and 2) even so, the best option may still be to do nothing about it.
I argued that many people seem to become convinced on this issue — one way or the other — because they find a particular narrative appealing, even while discounting various possibilities that don’t line up neatly with the narrative they happen to like. “Scientists find a danger, stop it, and save the world” is a tremendously appealing story, even to me. “Scientists find a danger, try to stop it, spend enormous amounts of money, and we’re screwed anyway” — while not appealing — is also a possibility, and one that we should not dismiss. There’s even “Scientists find a danger, overcorrect it, and polar bears now rule the world,” which is a remote possibility, but then, the remote possibility of something horrible shouldn’t be discounted either.
The problem with seizing on a narrative is that it focuses our attention on one set of dangers and on one outcome only. This is unwise in the extreme, particularly when dealing with a system in which “we’ve warmed things up, but we don’t know how much” is the cutting edge of our knowledge. It might in fact be wisest to wait and see what new technologies — like cheap solar energy — may do to the question in the coming years.
Anyway, let’s get to Casey’s comment. I’ve interleaved my replies, so if you’d like to get the full effect of the comment before you see them, please do so now.
Casey writes,
I’ve seen arguments like this before, and I’ve always struggled to pick out exactly where they go wrong. Not to be overly harsh, but I think economics has the same effect on some economists that biology has on some biologists, like Richard Dawkins or PZ Meyers: biology describes a world that does not require a god, but it doesn’t follow that accepting biology should compel atheism.
Wait just a moment there! It’s true that biology describes a world that may include but does not require a god. But it’s also true that the Bible makes some very specific and testable claims about what the fossil record should look like. And the fossil record, as scientists can tell you, just doesn’t look the way the Bible predicts.
This is a serious blow to the credibility of the Bible as a perfect or fully complete truth. One may resolve this difficulty in a number of ways. The Catholic approach, for instance, is that Genesis teaches perfect spiritual truths while not being literal science. Yet while evolution isn’t necessarily fatal to all forms of God-belief, it does do some harm to some of the claims of some religions. The non-overlapping magisteria hypothesis is appealing, but not terribly accurate.
Worse, the apparent design of the natural world — from our harmonious internal organs to the web of life itself — has often been used as an argument in favor of a designer, God. If any believer in God held his belief on the basis of the design argument alone, then a better explanation for the appearance of design might very well compel atheism, or at least agnosticism. Thus, it is not wholly unreasonable for a biologist to also be an atheist, or for many of the most prominent atheists also to be biologists: They have very detailed knowledge of one aspect of the reasons why God does not exist, and if they can master a few metaphysical claims as well, then the game is won. (Not that Dawkins always does this very well. I’m more of a Daniel Dennett atheist myself.)
Likewise, economics is neutral between preferences, but it doesn’t follow that WE should be. After all, while economics night be neutral between the Book of Common Prayers and a good shower spray, very few people are.
I think Casey has a point here. It’s also one that Tim Sandefur has made on several occasions, and I agree with it. Economics describes how people pursue their values, either alone or in society. It describes the consequences of the pursuit, but it does not attempt to rank our choices for us.
I think it comes down to whether societies and cultures can have preferences, or whether only individuals do. I suspect the former might be true, and that changes things. Economics only has normative force when it describes the most efficient way to achieve a preference it cannot judge. So, if a society places a value on some sort of environmental activism or equity, economics should be able to describe the most efficient way to achieve it. The kind of cack-handed environmentalism described by Dr. Landsburg probably isn’t it — although I tend to agree with typical liberal priorities, most typical liberal solutions are make me gag a bit.
This is the heart of the matter. I agree that it would “change things” if societies and cultures had preferences. Certainly. So for the sake of argument let’s posit that they do, and work from there.
The first question is very simple: How are we to determine what our society’s preferences are? In the history of political thought, there have only been at most three different ways of doing it:
1. Majority vote democracy. The will of 50% of the people plus one equals the will of a society.
This raises enormous problems. The first problem concerns just how we determine the franchise — or how we set the boundaries of our “society,” which amounts to the same thing. The problem is particularly acute with regard to global warming, since the putative harm isn’t for the most part going to fall on us, but on our descendants, whom we are incapable of consulting.
The second problem with this overall approach is that, the vote having been taken, the minority certainly has not had its will carried out. And are they not members of the society as well? Do they not have wills anymore, once we’ve voted in their presence? These problems do not disappear under supermajority or other voting rules. Clearly some violence seems to be done to the definition of “will” when it references a collective, and when voting is used to determine the collective “will.”
Yet democracies function fairly well, for all that. This is because the members of most voting minorities implicitly accept another value beyond the one that they were seeking in any particular failed effort: They value continued participation in society with the majority, including the continued operation of the government, the markets, and all of the various cultural institutions that have grown up among the fragmented people. When they cease to value these things sufficiently, they go to war, but as long as they do value them, they carry on and allow the majority to have its way. But this does not in any sense convert the majority will into the authentic will of everyone.
2. The enlightened subset decides. Whenever a disputed issue arises, we ask [clan elders, the dictator, the Communist Party, the Oracle at Delphi, or any other identifiable subset of the polity]. The identity of the subset is not very important; all that matters is that their opinions are designated ex ante as being more valid than others’.
The problem here is obvious: There are few really good ways of determining who constitutes the enlightened subset. Thus, subset-ism is the ideology typically favored by the strong and by those well inclined to use force against others. When more than one faction believes itself to be enlightened, the faction with the most force — or the least compunction — usually wins.
The problem with solving global warming according to subset-ism is that even the scientifically enlightened are apt, once in power, to make themselves far too powerful, to arrogate to themselves money, prestige, and authority in ways that are dangerous here just as with any other special interest group. Which scientists do we listen to? On many issues, the worst alarmists get the most public attention, and these can convince people in the mixed-constitutional system we have to set up an “enlightened subset” decisionmaking process for a particular issue.
There are no easy ways around this problem, here or anywhere else.
3. Laissez faire. We allow every individual to do as he wishes, as long as it interferes with no one else, insofar as we can. We call the results, however messy or self-contradictory, “the will of the people.”
You can probably guess that this one is my favorite. Effective laissez faire requires known rules and procedures for property and contractual relationships. This I think is hard but not impossible to do. That’s why it’s the most promising of the three approaches, even if it doesn’t deliver what most people want when they envision the will of a society.
So… even granting the premise that societies have values or preferences worth preserving, it’s hard to say how to find them. I am inclined to think that it is not worth the trouble to look, since individual preferences are obvious and speak for themselves. It’s a little hard, thinking about it, to see how these two things — individual and “social” preferences — even fall into the same category. I don’t think they should.
But back to global warming. Laissez faire also works best when the externalities are smallest, or when the law forces market actors to internalize them. Viewed as an economic phenomenon, global warming is an externality that we are almost certainly imposing on future generations. Yet future generations are not generally speaking offered “rights” at all, and it is difficult for us to know what their preferences would be.
One thing to keep in mind is that, if past trends continue, future generations will likely be far wealthier and more technologically advanced than we are. The problems that daunt us today may be trivial to them. If competitively priced solar power arrives in the next ten years — as now seems likely — then global warming may only be a short-term problem. Even if it doesn’t, other technologies may make our descendants much better able to take care of it than we are. With their great wealth, they may marvel about how conscientious we were, even to consider that they of all people would resent the small imposition we are making upon them, by burning coal and oil. They may even thank us for preventing the ice age we would have had.
These are some of the reasons I am inclined not to take drastic action against global warming now. I’m skeptical of a carbon tax in particular because even if we could determine the properly discounted value of the amount of social harm that global warming will do to the largely unknowable preferences of our descendants, it hardly follows that paying money to our current government will make things any better. We might be able to inhibit the market preference for carbon-based fuels, sure. But does the government really deserve to be the beneficiary here? By my way of thinking, a larger government is likely to be a drain on our descendants, and not a help at all.
I’ve had this same problem with Pigovian tax systems for as long as I have known about them, and no one has ever explained to me why the other side of the Pigovian tradeoff is just. Sure, given some pretty generous assumptions about our ability to solve knowledge problems, we can inhibit negative externalities more or less efficiently with a tax. But why then should this money go to the state to do with as it wishes? Why not redistribute it to all citizens equally? Or just give it to the poor? To this libertarian’s jaundiced eye, the Pigovian tax seems to reduce one externality, pollution, at the expense of creating another, a bigger state.
I think the crucial comment is Dr. Landsburg['s] ‘right’ not to recycle. Certainly he has this right — just as he has the right not to say “please” or “thank you” or hold the elevator door open for the woman with a baby stroller. (Are those example loaded enough?) But he only has that right because he lives in a society that values rights of that kind.
No, these examples are not nearly loaded enough. I’ll give you a much better one.
You have a right to die and be buried with all of your internal organs still inside your body, even if other people badly need them for transplants. The state does not have the right to harvest them from you at your deathbed.
Your examples are matters of politeness. Mine is of life and death. Yet the principle of individual rights should apply in either case, and it would be a monstrous evil to set up a program of compulsory organ donation.
It would be a petty evil to set up a program of compulsory recycling, for all of the same reasons that mandatory organ donation would be horrible. The same reasons all apply. These petty sorts of evil are everywhere nowadays, and thus I fully expect that such a program will soon be enacted, which will be a shame. Such is the state of the world today.
Filed in The Biosphere, The Boardroom
Excellent post- i think it really helps me to see your side of this issue.
It seems like your opposition to carbon taxes is that they are paid to the government- but how would you feel about creating exchanges where the carbon tax is actually paid into a market and reinvested in those commercial areas that are working to reduce global warming gas emmissions? while the government would still be involved, it would not be to the same degree that you suggest in this post. would that reduce your concerns about that imposition?
thanks for this discussion
Jason, thank you for your thoughtful response. Had I known that I would be quoted on the main page I would have done more editing. (”are make me gag” — ack!) I’ll just add a few minor points to your analysis which — on the whole — gets things exactly right. (A proper, full response would require me to resuscitate the corpse of my dead blog!)
First, the Biology/Economics analogy was just meant as an illustration of the kinds of mistakes scientists can make when they allow methodological considerations inform personal beliefs and values, nothing more. (Personally, while I prefer Dennett to Dawkins, I’m more in the Michael Ruse camp.) Consider it a red herring.
You are right to point out the different kinds of translating the values of a society into concrete political action. We have plenty of historical and empirical evidence that the laissez-faire system generally results in more robust, more subtle and more efficient systems and should be favored in most circumstances. But it doesn’t follow that every kind of problem is amenable to the same kind of solution — it might be the case that different classes of problems require different approaches. For example, the decision to drive on the right or the left side of the road perhaps shouldn’t be left to the citizenry to sort out on their own. The cost in accidents, damage to property and loss of life (probably — history might not bear me out) outweighs the benefit of less regulatory intrusion. A solution of this kind requires people to coordinate their actions — something a laissez-faire approach is generally absolutely capable of doing. But technical considerations of the particular example (since cars are heavy, made of metal and go fast) make it unfeasible to wait until a solution emerges spontaneously.
It is possible that solving a worldwide environmental crisis is similar to choosing which side of the road to drive on — in order to be effective, the solution needs to be universal, and time considerations mean action needs to be taken before a solution can spontaneously emerge. If someone were to obstinately insist on their right to prefer to drive on the left side of the road, the benefits of almost-universal coordinated action will be undone. The fear is that if most everyone coordinates but a few don’t (*ahem* China and India *ahem*) no one will gain the benefits of action. It is that fear that motivates the global warming alarmists.
Personally, I suspect the alarmists are wrong on this point. The actions of a few can have a measurable positive impact — if a few countries reduce emissions the problem is almost solved. Emerging economies can leapfrog (more expensive) polluting energy sources and go straight to the (cheaper) clean stuff. Overall I’m bully on the global warming issue. Al Gore and his friends probably won’t solve the issue, but their caterwauling might provide the impetus to discover the technology that will make everything better. The only real issue is, I think this:
“[I]f past trends continue, future generations will likely be far wealthier and more technologically advanced than we are. The problems that daunt us today may be trivial to them.”
I think this is true, but I am scared of what lurks in that ‘if’. The choice of action or non-action is equivalent to making a bet on the content of that ‘if’ — and bets are always colored by attitudes toward risk. Personally, I’m only a moderate risk-taker.
Finally, I absolutely love your example of organ donation. I think it absolutely captures (in a more dramatic manner) what I think of other environmental actions such as recycling: the tradeoff between a small cost to oneself (recycling takes very little time, after all — and organ donation happens after I stop caring about my own organs!) to a larger benefit to fellow citizens, either those who live in a future with fewer (non-renewable) resources than we have now, or those who desperately need organs.
I think it is important to distinguish between two related issues — especially because policy-makers are so bad at making the distinction themselves. I am of course talking about the RIGHT to make a decision, and the MORALITY of the decision itself. I will never deny that someone has the right to not donate their organs, and if it ever becomes compulsory I will join you in burning my organ-donation card in the street. (I have images of jack-booted thugs, streets full of tear-gas and voices over loudspeakers: “We will have your organs — now or later!”)
But that doesn’t mean that the decisions to donate or not to donate are morally equivalent. It was an undercurrent of this kind of moral equivalence that I was objecting to in Dr. Landsburg’s piece. If someone were to opt out of organ-donation on religious grounds, while I would think their reasons foolish and based on superstition, I could accept them. But if someone were to refuse to donate their organs because they didn’t want to, or couldn’t be bothered, or because they hate being told what to do, or just to be obstinate — I would think that person is being selfish and I would say so.
Thanks again for the thoughtful response, and thank for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts on these issues.
I’m not convinced that a carbon tax is quite the same as other types of Pigovian taxes. I think of it this way: A carbon tax isn’t necessarily about inhibiting certain types of behavior, but applying a cost to a resource that is being consumed.
With cigarette taxes, the government is theoretically trying to curb that behavior because some group (the majority?) has decided that behavior is dangerous (of course, I disagree strongly with this — let people go to hell in their own way). But there is no inherent harm done to other people in society by smoking cigarettes (you can quibble here and talk about health costs, etc, but in a truly free society, no one else would bear the cost of another).
Compare this to a carbon tax: sure, some people want to curb this kind of pollution because they think it’s evil and/or dangerous. But there is a resource being consumed here — the air. We pay for any other resource used as part of the price of a commodity. Why should this shared common resource be “free”?
I agree with your inherent mistrust of the government to spend the money raised with this kind of tax, and I don’t have a good solution for that. I just wanted to point out that there is a subtle difference that makes me at least somewhat in favor of a carbon tax-type solution while still opposed to other types of Pigovian taxes.
I agree entirely that economics, properly understood, must be silent as to what our preferences are or even should be and can assist us only in sorting them out. (Friedman had a famous article about the difference between normative and positive economics which, as Coase famously pointed out, was itself an almost entirely normative essay.)
I don’t believe societies have values except as a shorthand way of saying that a majority of people in a given society over a given time have in some overt way held and expressed those values. Beyond that, attributing such values to the society itself is, in my opinion, a fallacy of composition. (For the more philosophically sophisticated Ryle fan, I’d claim it is a category mistake.)
Also, I’m not sure I could concur with the claim that a law requiring decedents organ ‘donation’ would actually be “a matter of life and death” or even a particularly significant ethical issue, the enormous psychological impact aside. Corpses, by the way, and how a society treats them, constitutes a fascinating example of the twilight zone between persons and property.
Finally, and entirely irrelevant to this discussion, since when did we start calling anyone with a Ph.D. “Dr.” I know the arguments, historical and otherwise, for and against the practice, but I personally restrict my own such usage to those whose earned degrees and licenses includes the ability to prescribe controlled substances. Otherwise, we have to start calling people with Ed.D. degrees and, worse yet!, people like me with J.D.s “Dr.”
I’m not sure that your reduction of ’societal values’ to a sum of the values of individuals is incompatible with my own. There are plenty of forces in the universe which are reducible to the actions of individuals. It’s much like saying there is no such thing as ‘gas pressure’ since any such pressure is simply the movement of individual molecules — technically true, but methodologically difficult to describe mathematically. A complete description of the actions of individual molecules cannot fully predict the behavior of the collection, simply because of the number of possible interactions. Likewise, a description of the behavior of the whole can tell us nothing about the actions of the individuals. (Insert many decades of debate over reductionism, holism and emergent properties here!)
Personally, I dropped out of grad school too early to have much personal experience of the use of “Dr.” in relation to Ph.Ds — except for one professor who INSISTED on the use of the term! (I always suspected a form of overcompensation.) I’d much prefer to use the term “Professor”, except we Americans tend to use it as a specific job title and not a general honorific.
I subscribe to the thousand(s) year old principle that a society exists solely at the pleasure of its individual citizens; that government’s function is simply to provide minimal organizational structure for the benefit of those citizens. Thus it should not be considered as having any will or value of its own. In short, governments should always have limited power. In “Rights From Wrongs” Alan Dershowitz looks at the history of Rights as man made legal systems created to prevent the re-occurence of injustices. Each of the sections in our Bill of Rights restricts government action. He distinguishes such Negative Rights from Positive rights–the former tell the government what it can’t do to restrict individual freedom. The latter have been more recently proposed by allegedly compassionate, but actually power-hungry elites, and require a continual expansion of government’s role designed to redress every conceivable societal shortcoming. When it comes to having the government apply its talents to eliminate global warming, the do nothing approach has considerable appeal. And you don’t have to be an economics PhD to know why: After all, every program of the last 60 years designed and run by the bureaucrats in Washington has, 1.) had adverse unintended consequences; 2.) failed to solve the problem that the program was supposed to alleviate; 3.) grown exponentially into a multi-headed monster with no clear goals or logic; and 3.) created a huge and rapidly expanding drain on the nation’s resources requiring increased taxation and an expanding number of governmental employees. Another test for such questions as should the government do something about global warming is : How would that help the ordinary citizen of this country? Would it not add to his burden of regulation and taxation ? I see no benefit to the average Joe from us signing on to things like the Kyoto Protocol. Such lofty abstract agendas have appeal only to misled idealistic minds and the intellectual elites who seek more power from administering new governmental programs.
In analyzing whether a society can hold a value, you have to deal with Arrow’s theorem. In a nutshell, you can’t aggregate individual values into a coherent social value without violating fundamental norms. The fact that each individual is rational, that is, has a coherent (transitive) preference order, does not mean that the social aggregate is coherent. Therefore, society cannot meaningfully be said to have values, or a will.
As to when we started calling people with PhDs “doctor,” it’s been going on far longer than I’ve been alive. It’s a well-established tradition, and medicos don’t really have a stronger historical claim to the title.
Lawyers, however, don’t have much claim at all, I’m afraid, as the juris “doctorate: isn’t really considered to be the equivalent of a PhD. It’s only 3 years of education, after all, and you don’t have to do any original research for a dissertation. It’s a professional degree, and no less respectable for that, just as an MBA is a very respectable professional degree.
Yes, Mr. (oops! Dr.) Hanley, it was a semi-rhetorical question. Actually, the major impetus for changing the L.L.B., the traditional first professional law degree, to the J.D. occurred within my lifetime because federal personnel offices were interpreting the hiring grade level regulations to give holders of, e.g., the M.Ed. degree a higher grade than attorneys. OTOH, while it is true that the J.D. degree does not require publishable research, the overwhelming majority of law school faculty hold no higher degree. Legal scholarship is not quite the same as scholarship in the liberal arts and sciences, but that’s another long discussion.
Amusingly, and proving that those who refuse to learn from history and blah, blah, blah, there is an emerging trend among — gosh! — federal employees to ‘attend’ some of the shall we say less traditional ‘degree granting institutions’ and to ‘earn Ph.D.’ degrees. These people, like the Ed.D holders I mentioned previously, have taken to wandering about insisting on being called Dr., and I have no more intention of complying than I would if the demand were made from someone with an honorary doctorate from a bible college.
Anyway, I’m not sure that Arrow’s Theorem is dispositive of the question whether societies can “meaningfully be said to have values, or a will.” In fact, I’m rather sure it isn’t if we define value or will just a little bit differently. Still, since I’m already on record denying that societies are the sorts of entities capable of that sort of attribute regardless, it hardly seems worth arguing.
[...] Jason Kuznicki has a yet another very good post up at positiveliberty.com. This time, it’s about how societies determine value. In general, I agree with the post, but I wanted to quibble about one thing (and I made a comment to this effect): I’m skeptical of a carbon tax in particular because even if we could determine the properly discounted value of the amount of social harm that global warming will do to the largely unknowable preferences of our descendants, it hardly follows that paying money to our current government will make things any better. We might be able to inhibit the market preference for carbon-based fuels, sure. But does the government really deserve to be the beneficiary here? By my way of thinking, a larger government is likely to be a drain on our descendants, and not a help at all. [...]