Musings on individualism and communitarianism

theObserver wonders, "if you need a Y axis with ‘Individualistic’ and ‘Communitarian’, and an X axis with moralistic and pragmatic?"

My initial suspicion is that individualism and communitarianism are not really fundamental distinctions. When I think hard about these words, their meanings and distinctions get more slippery, rather than less.

For the last three millennia (perhaps hundreds) we have lived in societies. To some extent, individuals have had to forego their personal desires for the "good of society". Few, I think, would take individualism so far as to say that an individual's desire to kill or rape should take precedence over "society's" desire to be free of murder and rape. (Ayn Rand might be an exception.) On the other hand, the "good of society" is an abstraction: there is no concrete thing as "society" which has goods or desires independently of the individuals comprising that society. Thus, there can be no real tension between the good of the individual and the good of society; there can be only tension between the good of individuals.

The first thing I want to know when I hear about some theory of political philosophy is: why that theory and not some other? What makes your theory better? Which is just a transformation of the atheists' creed: How do you know? I'm not going to say (at first) that your theory is insufficiently or excessively individualistic or communitarian.

One thing I see is that the political philosophies that I tend to find... well... icky... the theories that intuitively go thud instead of ding are strongly moralistic, whether they are traditionally labeled "individualistic" (e.g. Rand) or "communitarian" (fascism or Stalinist* communism). There is a right way for people to be — there is a right way to organize a society — that can be discerned without reference to how that society works out in practice. If 90% of the world has to freeze and starve when the lights go out in New York, well, that's the price we have to pay to get to the right way to live. (It cannot make us all happier, n'est pas?). If a million Jews have to go to the gas chambers, or a million to the gulags, again, that's just the price we have to pay. Hence I see Ayn Rand and Hitler as being politically similar, even though their philosophies seem superficially very different: they are both moralists to the core.

*At least how Stalinism is traditionally conceived. It's plausible that the worst abuses of Stalinism are the consequences of the only possible response available to early 20th century Russia in to Hitler's intent of annihilating the Slavic people.

I don't really see any tension between individualism and collectivism. The only "liberties" I have to give up under pragmatic collectivism are just those I don't want in the first place. I don't care that I have to give up the liberty to cause others to suffer; I don't want to buy happiness at that price. I don't care that I have to give up the liberty to exploit others; if I contribute an hour of hard work to the welfare of others, then I expect in return only an hour of another's hard work. If the product of my hour's work is somehow "more valuable", I am happy to take as my bonus only the public's good opinion. We have to determine what constitutes happiness and suffering and what constitutes "work" (and what constitutes hard work) to a large extent by a social process, but as long as I myself have a real say in that process, I'm willing (under most circumstances) to be satisfied with the judgment of my neighbors. I don't feel like my individuality is at all compromised by these limitations.

The philosophy of moralism and pragmatism

In part 1, I speculated that moralism vs. pragmatism is a useful axis to arrange political thought and ideology. It's useful in part because, rather than being explicit and intentional, the moralist vs. pragmatist is usually obscured and subconscious. Moralism vs. pragmatism is also a point of intersection between political and ethical philosophy. It's helpful to understand these concepts at a philosophical level to apply them to political thought.

While it's easy to simply define these terms — moralism is about the intrinsic value of actions, regardless of their consequences; pragmatism is about evaluating actions according to their outcomes — it's more difficult to identify these principles in actual thought. A moralist can justly point out that intrinsically bad actions often have bad results, and because it always (or almost always) has a bad result, a pragmatist might say determine that some action was itself bad. In the trivial case, moralism and pragmatism become identical: saying an action is intrinsically bad to some degree is to say that it has bad results to that degree. We need to apply more subtlety to discern these approaches in practice.

It's often helpful to look at edge cases. In an edge case, a moralist will condemn or praise an action even if he acknowledges it has, as best he can tell, the opposite effects. Similarly, a pragmatist will condemn or praise an action even if our moral intuition, applied directly to the action, is the opposite of our evaluation of its effects.

A case in point is Rabbi Moshe Averick's recent article, Pedophilia Is Next On the Slippery Slope. Averick (interpreted with perhaps an excess of charity) makes the argument that even if we were to find that pedophilia had positive consequences, it would still be wrong. His article is full of straw men and lousy arguments, but we can see a thread of moralism in his underlying position. In contrast, if a pragmatist were to find that sexual contact between minors and adults had an overall benefit, he would be forced to admit that his moral intuition was mistaken. I do not believe that pedophilia is actually beneficial, but it's possible that I could change my mind; for the moralist, it's impossible by definition to change his mind, because the outcome is at best only of secondary importance.

Another case in point is Andrew Mellon's position during the Great Depression (as reported by Herbert Hoover):

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate... [Panic and depression] will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.

Mellon clearly had a moralistic view: there was at least an incorrect way of living, "high living", which had to be corrected even at the cost of "liquidating" the economic livelihood of millions of people.

Today's post by Paul Krugman has a telling paragraph about moralism in economics:

I don’t fully understand [the resistance among Very Serious People to lowering unemployment]. But a large part of it, it seems obvious, is the intense desire to see economics as a morality play of sin and punishment, where the sinners are, of course, workers and governments, not the bankers. Pain is not an unfortunate consequence of policies, it’s what is supposed to happen.

An evolutionary view of social development helps explain why people adopt moralistic views. In an evolutionary view, our social development is the product of heritable random* variation of social ideas or mores and natural selection. Natural selection works against, it eliminates variations from the pool that can be inherited. Thus, we can say that people randomly develop moral attitudes towards actions themselves; some of these moral attitudes are selected against and eliminated; whatever remains forms the basis of the society's morality (and politics). Since the ideas were not generated intentionally and rationally, we tend to treat them with mystical reverence. In many societies, these ideas come directly from the gods. Moreover, we hold onto these ideas because of meta-evolution: a society cannot exist without some degree of inherent stability in the transmission (heritability) of social ideas. A society will not long survive if each new generation must reconstruct its social and moral ideas from scratch.

*i.e. their generation is uncorrelated with outcomes

Even a die-hard pragmatist such as myself must admit that moralism has some value. We cannot come anywhere close to predicting the consequences of every action; sometimes the best we can say about an action is that it seems to have worked in the past. To the moralist, moralism is an expression of knowledge: they know that some action is right or wrong independently of its outcome. In contrast, the pragmatic use of moralism is an expression of ignorance: some action seems intrinsically right or wrong because we don't know the consequences of acting differently. But we often do know the consequences, and to the pragmatist, knowledge of the consequences outweighs even the most established tradition.

It's important to understand this dimension of ethical thought to differentiate between trivial and substantive conservatism. Trivial conservatism is just the idea that "if it works, don't fix it." In contrast, a substantive conservative holds that those moral intuitions sanctioned by tradition (and, if we are cynical, justify his privilege) are inherently correct. I myself, not only a die-hard pragmatist but also a thoroughgoing radical, adhere to trivial conservatism. But I know what I mean by working and not working: if it doesn't work, we must fix it.

Comic Sans

Comic Sans fights back (some language NSFW)

I've always thought the anti-Comic Sans forces were a wee bit pretentious.

The Stupid! It Burns! (Pakistani trash edition)

I don't get a lot of Muslim sites coming up on my atheist/atheism Google search, so today is special.

Beware! “Pakistani Atheists and Agnostics” Propaganda at its peak ( Report )

Recently I came across a website full of trash named, Pakistani Athiests [sic] and Agnostics (PAA) which apparently describes itself as a ‘social organization for atheists, agnostics and freethinkers of Pakistan.” The venomous website claims to be affiliated with Atheist Alliance International (AAI), an international community that aims to misguide and confuse the masses and the world at large and induce secularism and atheism. ... [emphasis original]

All apostates are liable to death but nothing.

At least they cite their source, which is sometimes more than we get on the Christian side.

Unemployment cards from Hallmark

I shit you not: Hallmark has unveiled a line of unemployment-related sympathy cards.

(via Monday Through Friday)

The Stupid! It Burns! (Western White Scientist edition)

Why Atheists Make the Worst Scientists

What a good scientist NEVER says is, “Because I, the Great Western White Scientist, have never personally seen it, and because my cadre of like-minded Western White Scientists haven’t seen it, it must not EXIST.”

Moralism, pragmatism, and politics

"I can't stand it when someone tries to put one over on me," a friend of mine exclaimed. She was an upper-middle-class professional, probably making about $100K per year; she was talking about some of her relatives, who were living on welfare. My friend worked hard, spent wisely, avoided debt, and saved for her retirement. Her relatives were — or she painted them as — lazy, imprudent and irresponsible. Her testimony is plausible: there are those who strive to fulfill all the good middle-class virtues and yet remain poor, but there are indeed those poor who cannot or choose not to uphold these virtues. Are they because of their vices thus deserving of not only poverty but starvation? If we do not allow them to starve, are they "putting one over" on us?

To me, of course, welfare is an economic triviality. Excluding Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid (providing pensions and medical care for old people who have worked for decades is hardly welfare), we spend a tiny fraction of our Gross Domestic Product on welfare. I really don't care whether welfare recipients are "deserving"; I'm pleased that for just pennies we can at least ensure no one freezes nor starves, regardless of their virtues or vices. No one can "put one over" on me in this sense: because there's nothing I expect in return, no one can fail to deliver it.

In political science as well as popularly, political "ideology" is usually described along the axes of freedom and equality. I think these are poor axes. Both words describe concepts that are complex and operate at many layers of abstraction. Freedom, for example, sounds good, but freedom to do what? I don't want people to be free to hurt or kill me; I don't want people to walk off with the stuff I need to survive and operate effectively in the world. Do I want the freedom to eat broccoli, or the more abstract freedom to eat what I choose? More directly, do I want to have — and allow others to have — the freedom to do anything I want economically, even to economically exploiting others? Equality is a little better: we can measure certain kinds of equality (such as equality of nominal wealth or income), but no one, I think, wants (or would admit to wanting) a Harrison Bergeron model of everyone being the same. Evaluating ideology on these axes seems to shed little light on how people actually think about underlying political issues.

Based on my conversation with my friend, and many other conversations, I think there is a better axis to label political philosophy, which I'll arbitrarily term moralism vs. pragmatism. Terms in ethical and political philosophy can have widely divergent definitions, so let me be explicit about what I mean. Moralism means the notion that there is some intrinsically good way of living, or at minimum some intrinsically bad ways of living. To the moralist, the proper function of the state* is to reinforce the intrinsically correct way of living and to suppress the intrinsically incorrect ways of living. In contrast, pragmatism is not concerned with the intrinsic ways of living, but with outcomes: a way of living is good or bad only to the extent that it produces a good or bad outcome. To the pragmatist, the proper function of the state is to produce a good outcome. Both of these paradigms entail making moral judgments: the moralist must (somehow) judge which ways of living are good or bad; the pragmatist must (somehow) judge which outcomes are good or bad.

*In the canonical sense of the state as the institutions that hold and exercise a monopoly on the use of violence.

One interesting result of evaluating political ideology on this axis is the observation that most ideologies are mixed: almost all ideologies contain moralist and pragmatic elements. Even so, we can generally observe that "right" ideologies are more strongly moralistic; "left" ideologies are more strongly pragmatic. In the example at the start of this post, we can see that my friend is more strongly moralistic: she is concerned that people not "put one over" on her, regardless of the outcome. In contrast, I'm more pragmatic: I can ensure with little personal cost that a person on welfare does not starve or freeze. Pragmatism does not mean "amoral": I am still making the moral judgment that starving and freezing are bad outcomes.

Testimony of Marriner Eccles

London Banker excerpts the testimony of Marriner Eccles to the Senate Committee on the Investigation of Economic Problems in 1933 (complete transcript [pdf]). Eccles quotes an unknown economist:

It is utterly impossible, as this country has demonstrated again and again, for the rich to save as much as they have been trying to save, and save anything that is worth saving. They can save idle factories and useless railroad coaches; they can save empty office buildings and closed banks; they can save paper evidences of foreign loans; but as a class they can not save anything that is worth saving, above and beyond the amount that is made profitable by the increase of consumer buying. It is for the interests of the well to do – to protect them from the results of their own folly – that we should take from them a sufficient amount of their surplus to enable consumers to consume and business to operate at a profit. This is not “soaking the rich”; it is saving the rich. Incidentally, it is the only way to assure them the serenity and security which they do not have at the present moment.

(via Yves Smith)

Christian Used Bookstore

Yesterday, we passed the Christian Used Bookstore (real). My son commented...

Only slightly burned

Who Put the Rot in Herr Hummler’s Wurst?

Who Put the Rot in Herr Hummler’s Wurst?:

I changed the presentation I intended to make entirely in order to respond to Thursday’s famous Thursday keynote presenter, Dr. Hummler, the head of the oldest private bank in Swizerland. ... Dr. Hummler received his advanced economics training at one of the University of Chicago’s outposts, the University of Rochester. Even within the Chicago school, the UR economists have a reputation for the vigor of their antipathy for even democratic government. ... The reason his bank has customers is overwhelmingly the customers’ desire to evade taxes through means that are crimes in their home nations, but at most civil violations in Switzerland. ...

It is simple under Austrian views of the democratic state as the great danger to freedom to interpret anything, even fraud by the wealthy, that reduces the State’s tax revenues as desirable. ... Under Hummler’s view of property rights, the democratic State can function only because the non-wealthy lack the wealth and financial sophistication (or they lack the necessary immorality) to emulate the wealthy tax cheats by engaging in tax fraud with impunity. As that great Austrian school sage, Saint Leona Helmsley explained: “only little people pay taxes.” ... Re-branding the wealthiest tax cheats into freedom fighters represents a triumph of what criminologists refer to as “neutralization” of the moral restraints against fraud. Successful neutralization leads to increased crime. ...

Hummler’s keynote address contained his famous sausage metaphor. Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are made by slicing and dicing mortgages. It is easier to observe whether meat is rotten when it is whole. When it is sliced up into tiny pieces, mixed with lots of other meats, and placed in a somewhat opaque casing it is far harder to see or smell that it contains some rot. One only learns that the sausage is rotten after consuming it and getting sick. In the CDO context, Hummler says that the rot was U.S. subprime loans. ... Hummler recognizes that he has to explain why the sausage makers would put rotten meat in their sausages. His metaphor is heretical for a theoclassical economist of either the Chicago or Austrian school. He has reversed the core metaphor of the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith. Smith’s most famous metaphor was that we could safely rely on the butcher (the maker of sausages) and the baker to give us high quality goods without rot not because the butcher and baker really cared about our health, but because they were driven by self-interest. ... Hummler is desecrating sacred ground by reversing Smith’s central argument in favor of capitalism. ... If I can get away with fraud, and if self-interest is my guide, then Hummler’s logic leads to a further great desecration of Smith’s metaphor – "Mankiw morality:" .... if you can get away with committing accounting control fraud, and fail to do so, you are not a moral CEO – you are "irrational." It is “irrational” not to breach your fiduciary duties by looting the firm’s creditors and shareholders in order to make yourself wealthy. ...

Hummler does not appear to understand how destructive of theoclassical and neoclassical economics’ defining metaphor it is to argue that Adam Smith’s dependable butcher is now routinely, and deliberately adding meat that he knows is rotten and will make the consumer deathly ill into sausage because he knows that he can deceive the consumer by disguising the filth in an opaque sausage casing. Hummler’s butcher is still acting out of greed, but he has discovered that defrauding and sickening or destroying his customer pays. In Hummler’s dystopian vision, the capitalist is a psychopath, and capitalism has become severely criminogenic.

The article goes on to discuss the underlying social dynamics of the financial collapse, and how the "rot" (liar loans*) became an integral part of the "sausages" (collateralized debt obligations).

*There are some more-or-less legitimate purposes for stated income loans, but most of the liar loans involved in the sub-prime crisis that sparked the broader financial crisis did not fulfill those purposes.