Madeleine Bunting is in a quiet way one of my favourite journalists writing today. She invariably tackles important questions and I often find myself grappling with them immediately and then reflecting on on months later. Her latest column, Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good, I think will fall comfortably into this category. She wants to know why we seem to know the price of everything yet the value of nothing.
My initial reaction was indeed the all too common outrage, for she was looking to the Harvard box-office philosopher, Michael Sandel for answers. I had been reading so many people, it seems almost for as long as I have been reading books, warning about the dissolution of values that dramatically accelerated in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher’s embrace of the Chicago school. Perhaps the most influential for me was The Growth Illusion by Richard Douthwaite which showed (certainly to my satisfaction) that the benefits that come from economic growth are largely illusory. (I still believe this thesis.) Then there was the introductory chapter to A Guide for the Perplexed and more recently, Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam essays, both of which I have been using in recent posts on this blog. And yet here was Madeleine Bunting pinning her hopes on the latest fad to emerge from the academy (and as Mark Vernon pointed out, Sandel is approaching omnipresence).
I left a rant in the comment section, quoting Robinson’s Facing Reality essay, concluding with a prediction that we would be reading Robinson when Sandel was long forgotten. Now this might be true but I was goaded into going back to Sandel’s Reith lectures, recorded in June, and giving them a proper consideration. Given the almost complete confusion that passes for ethics in contemporary moral philosophy I wasn’t expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised–and on further inspection, even quite impressed. This was really quite passable moral philosophy!
Sandel is an Aristotle man and shows how ethical questions come down to values, generally intimately connected with the purpose of an action. Sandel explains it all very well, and I recommend listening to the lecture or reading the transcripts.
How does this relate to how our modern propensity for putting a price on everything and using market mechanisms to arbitrate. Sandel gives the example of a school trying to discourage parents from collecting their children late by charging a fine to those parents that do. The problem was that when they introduced the fine parental offending rates increased because parents interpreted the charges as charges for a service, and they took it up. Sandel’s point was that by introducing a price mechanism the school changed the relationship between the parents and teachers, who no longer felt obliged (or at least less obliged) to collect their children on time, so turning teachers’ after-school time into a commodity.
So Sandel is concerned, for example, about the use of market mechanisms to price carbon as that could encourage people to turn the environment into a commodity. If I have understood Sandel right (and this is probably simplifying a bit), he seems to be suggesting that we shouldn’t be using prices to discourage people from, for example, taking a flight they can avoid, but persuading people to care for the environment so that they will avoid taking the flight in the first place.
I am not at all sure about this, and it smacks of sentimentalism—that we should cultivate sentiments that will guide us towards the desired behaviour. Part of my problem with this is that it just takes no account of modern realities. Traditionally people would not engage in environmentally destructive behaviour because it would immediately degrade the environment for everybody. But those activities (fly tipping, for example) would have an immediate and visible effect, and there was no question of how much fly tipping was acceptable–the activity is simply socially unacceptable.
The way we are compromising the global environment isn’t like this at all, and we have one enormous habit to tackle. To try and tackle this by herculean will power, maybe reinforced by neighbours keeping running totals of foreign holidays, car usage and so forth, generating the outrage, tut-tuting, and wagging the fingers as appropriate, would probably not work. To be sure we need a wholesale change of values, of purpose, and of motivation, one that sees ourselves as stewards not consumers of the environment, take a pride in minimising our ecological foot print, resolving to leave our children with a biosphere fit for purpose. Without such a change of values, no meaningful change is possible. Without this shared change of values the political capital won’t be there to pass the laws necessary and, even if the legislators changed the laws without anyone else’s consent then I doubt very much if they would work.
Hearts and minds need to change, but our best economists are also needed to help us devise the smartest mechanisms to quickly reach the shared objectives.
Sandel finishes by taking issue with Kenneth Arrow.
In the course of these lectures, I’ve argued for a greater role for a moral argument in public life, and for the need to keep markets in their place. I would like to conclude by anticipating one possible objection. The distinguished economist Kenneth Arrow once wrote – and I quote: Like many economists, I do not want to rely too heavily on substituting ethics for self-interest. I think it is best on the whole that the requirement of ethical behaviour be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down. We do not wish, he said, to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.
The notion that ethics, altruism and fellow-feeling are scarce resources, whose supply is fixed once and for all and depleted with use, this idea seems to me outlandish – outlandish but deeply influential. My aim in these lectures has been to call this idea into question. I’ve tried to suggest that the virtues of democratic life – community, solidarity, trust, civic friendship – these virtues are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are rather like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.
A politics of moral and civic renewal depends, it seems to me, on a more strenuous exercise of these civic virtues.
In some ways Sandel is right, that ethics, altruism and fellow-feeling are like muscles, but did he miss Arrow’s point? Supposing the government needs some more money to keep the schools open, and the government asks the citizenry to top up their taxes for a month, and if enough people do this then the schools will stay open. How many times will the government be able to do this? We have the tragedy of the commons.
Some institutions indeed rely on generosity, notably charities, where some may predominantly give and others may predominantly benefit, so it is clear that organisations can be built around altruism, and to be sure, the more we can do that in society the better. But until those habits have been established–and that takes time–care has to be taken not to tax people’s altruism too suddenly. These things can’t be forced–by external coercion, or forcing ourselves–but by reorienting ourselves to a more altruistic and compassionate way of being.
Madeleine Bunting is impatient to start, but can’t see how religion can be co-opted in secular Europe yet sees outrage as a driver for the urgent change that is needed. That is understandable with our very life-support systems starting to break down. But if we can’t get it done quickly enough the right way, we surely can’t get it done quickly enough the wrong way. Anger can quickly poison and pervert.
If a revolution in values is needed then hearts are giong to have to change. It is difficult to see how those deep changes can be compatible with an ongoing, mindless antagonism to religion. Patience will be needed all round.
The Age of Cynicism
My initial reaction was indeed the all too common outrage, for she was looking to the Harvard box-office philosopher, Michael Sandel for answers. I had been reading so many people, it seems almost for as long as I have been reading books, warning about the dissolution of values that dramatically accelerated in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher’s embrace of the Chicago school. Perhaps the most influential for me was The Growth Illusion by Richard Douthwaite which showed (certainly to my satisfaction) that the benefits that come from economic growth are largely illusory. (I still believe this thesis.) Then there was the introductory chapter to A Guide for the Perplexed and more recently, Marilynne Robinson’s Death of Adam essays, both of which I have been using in recent posts on this blog. And yet here was Madeleine Bunting pinning her hopes on the latest fad to emerge from the academy (and as Mark Vernon pointed out, Sandel is approaching omnipresence).
I left a rant in the comment section, quoting Robinson’s Facing Reality essay, concluding with a prediction that we would be reading Robinson when Sandel was long forgotten. Now this might be true but I was goaded into going back to Sandel’s Reith lectures, recorded in June, and giving them a proper consideration. Given the almost complete confusion that passes for ethics in contemporary moral philosophy I wasn’t expecting much, but I was pleasantly surprised–and on further inspection, even quite impressed. This was really quite passable moral philosophy!
Sandel is an Aristotle man and shows how ethical questions come down to values, generally intimately connected with the purpose of an action. Sandel explains it all very well, and I recommend listening to the lecture or reading the transcripts.
How does this relate to how our modern propensity for putting a price on everything and using market mechanisms to arbitrate. Sandel gives the example of a school trying to discourage parents from collecting their children late by charging a fine to those parents that do. The problem was that when they introduced the fine parental offending rates increased because parents interpreted the charges as charges for a service, and they took it up. Sandel’s point was that by introducing a price mechanism the school changed the relationship between the parents and teachers, who no longer felt obliged (or at least less obliged) to collect their children on time, so turning teachers’ after-school time into a commodity.
So Sandel is concerned, for example, about the use of market mechanisms to price carbon as that could encourage people to turn the environment into a commodity. If I have understood Sandel right (and this is probably simplifying a bit), he seems to be suggesting that we shouldn’t be using prices to discourage people from, for example, taking a flight they can avoid, but persuading people to care for the environment so that they will avoid taking the flight in the first place.
I am not at all sure about this, and it smacks of sentimentalism—that we should cultivate sentiments that will guide us towards the desired behaviour. Part of my problem with this is that it just takes no account of modern realities. Traditionally people would not engage in environmentally destructive behaviour because it would immediately degrade the environment for everybody. But those activities (fly tipping, for example) would have an immediate and visible effect, and there was no question of how much fly tipping was acceptable–the activity is simply socially unacceptable.
The way we are compromising the global environment isn’t like this at all, and we have one enormous habit to tackle. To try and tackle this by herculean will power, maybe reinforced by neighbours keeping running totals of foreign holidays, car usage and so forth, generating the outrage, tut-tuting, and wagging the fingers as appropriate, would probably not work. To be sure we need a wholesale change of values, of purpose, and of motivation, one that sees ourselves as stewards not consumers of the environment, take a pride in minimising our ecological foot print, resolving to leave our children with a biosphere fit for purpose. Without such a change of values, no meaningful change is possible. Without this shared change of values the political capital won’t be there to pass the laws necessary and, even if the legislators changed the laws without anyone else’s consent then I doubt very much if they would work.
Hearts and minds need to change, but our best economists are also needed to help us devise the smartest mechanisms to quickly reach the shared objectives.
Sandel finishes by taking issue with Kenneth Arrow.
In some ways Sandel is right, that ethics, altruism and fellow-feeling are like muscles, but did he miss Arrow’s point? Supposing the government needs some more money to keep the schools open, and the government asks the citizenry to top up their taxes for a month, and if enough people do this then the schools will stay open. How many times will the government be able to do this? We have the tragedy of the commons.
Some institutions indeed rely on generosity, notably charities, where some may predominantly give and others may predominantly benefit, so it is clear that organisations can be built around altruism, and to be sure, the more we can do that in society the better. But until those habits have been established–and that takes time–care has to be taken not to tax people’s altruism too suddenly. These things can’t be forced–by external coercion, or forcing ourselves–but by reorienting ourselves to a more altruistic and compassionate way of being.
Madeleine Bunting is impatient to start, but can’t see how religion can be co-opted in secular Europe yet sees outrage as a driver for the urgent change that is needed. That is understandable with our very life-support systems starting to break down. But if we can’t get it done quickly enough the right way, we surely can’t get it done quickly enough the wrong way. Anger can quickly poison and pervert.
If a revolution in values is needed then hearts are giong to have to change. It is difficult to see how those deep changes can be compatible with an ongoing, mindless antagonism to religion. Patience will be needed all round.