Showing posts with label J S Mill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label J S Mill. Show all posts

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Is ecological justice also a mirage?

 


David Schmidtz advocates “ecological justice” in his book, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science. Although Schmidtz does not refer to Friedrich Hayek in this book, his general line of argument is similar, in many respects, to that developed by Hayek in Law, Legislation, and Liberty. From Schmidtz’s earlier writings, it clear that he is well aware of Hayek’s views.


I presume Schmidtz has good reasons for not comparing his views to those of Hayek in this book. However, since Hayek argued that ‘social justice’ is a mirage, I thought Hayek would not object to me asking whether ecological justice could also be a mirage.

In this essay, I provide a brief summary of Hayek’s reasons for viewing social justice as a mirage before considering the basis for Schmidtz’s concept of ecological justice.

Why did Hayek view social justice as a mirage?

Hayek argued that it is “a dishonest insinuation” and “intellectually disreputable” to make reference to social justice in an attempt to bolster an argument “that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no reason for it”. Hayek implies that where there are good reasons for assistance to the less fortunate, reference to social justice adds nothing to the argument. (LLL, V2, p 97. See also p 87 for Hayek’s discussion of reasons to support “protection against severe deprivation”.)

Hayek also argued that “a society of free individuals” … “lacks the fundamental precondition for the application of the concept of justice to the manner in which material benefits are shared among its members, namely that this is determined by a human will – or that the determination of rewards by human will could produce a viable market order”. (LLL, V2, pp 96-7)

Elsewhere, Hayek made the point that the size of the national cake and its distribution are not separable issues:

“We must face the truth that it is not the magnitude of a given aggregate product which allows us to decide what to do with it, but rather the other way around: that a process which tells us how to reward the several contributions to this product is also the indispensable source of information for the individuals, telling them where they can make the aggregate product as large as possible” (Conference paper published in Nishiyama and Leube, “The Essence of Hayek”, p 323).

Hayek went on to make the point that John Stuart Mill’s claim that “once the product is there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with it whatever it pleases” is really “an incredible stupidity, showing a complete unawareness of the crucial guide function of prices”.

Interestingly, David Schmidtz suggests that by pulling production and distribution apart, J. S. Mill “unwittingly pulled one question into two half questions that in fractured isolation had no proper answers and that would derail rather than facilitate our study of the human condition”. (p 6) Following Mill, questions about production were allocated to economists, while questions of distribution were the province of philosophers: “those who work on justice”. (p 5)

What is ecological about justice?  

David Schmidtz writes:

“We are social and political animals, and justice is a human adaptation to an ecological niche.” (p 220)

What does that mean? The common human characteristic of negotiating what we expect from each other is one of the reasons why humans are viewed as social and political animals. As people negotiate what to expect from each other, they create social niches in which they hope to flourish. (p 25) Schmidtz suggests that to speak of justice is to speak of what we should be able to expect from each other. (p 219)

Justice manages traffic. (p 220) People share an interest in avoiding collision, but otherwise have destinations of their own:

“The truth for political animals is that since we began to settle in large communities, being of one mind has not been an option. Being on the same page is not an option. Even our diverse ideas about how to resolve conflict are a source of conflict. And, disturbing though it may be for a theorist to admit it, theories do not help. It is a political fact that we live among people who have theories of their own, who do not find each other’s theories compelling, and who are perfectly aware that there is no reason why they should.” (p 221)

Schmidtz discusses several other features of ecological justice. For example, norms of ecological justice are an adaptive response to reality. Principles of justice are based on an understanding of which institutional frameworks are enabling people to flourish and which are not. Justice is somewhat testable: when the world tests our ideals and finds them wanting, we need to rethink.

The author ends up suggesting that the features of ecological justice that he has discussed “do not define ecological justice, and do not exhaust it, but they indicate whether a conception of justice is more or less ecological”. (p 226)

 Instead of seeking to define ecological justice, perhaps it is more helpful to ask what is the question that ecological justice seeks to answer. The title of Schmidtz’s book suggests that the question has to do with how we can live together. In his introduction, he asks:

“What if justice evolved as a real question about what people ought to be able to expect of each other?”

Since we have reasons to believe that justice evolved in that way, perhaps the relevant question is:

What rules of just conduct should influence what people ought to be able to be able to expect of each other, allowing for the possibility that individuals might flourish in different ways?  

(That question borrows words from Friedrich Hayek, and Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, as well as David Schmidtz.)

Conclusion

David Schmidtz’s concept of ecological justice is certainly not a mirage. It has to do with the nature of humans as social and political animals, and the nature of justice as a human adaptation to an ecological niche.

Rather than seeking to define ecological justice precisely, perhaps it is more helpful to ask what is the question that ecological justice seeks to answer. My suggestion is:

What rules of just conduct should influence what people ought to be able to be able to expect of each other, allowing for the possibility that individuals might flourish in different ways?  


Friday, December 9, 2022

How has the Neoplatonism of my youth influenced my current beliefs?

 


The kid in the photo believed that the material world is an illusion. Those beliefs about the nature of reality probably led him to be somewhat less materialistic than he would otherwise have been. However, an observer would have had to look closely to find any evidence that he, and his school colleagues who held similar beliefs, were behaving as though they did not believe the account of reality provided by their sense organs. They didn’t attempt to survive without food, to defy gravity by jumping off tall buildings, or to do much else to suggest that they had a different view of reality than most other teenagers living in Australia in 1960. The main difference an astute observer would have seen was their practice of treating illness as an error of thinking and viewing medical intervention as unnecessary and undesirable under most circumstances.

I am writing this article because a few people who have known me at different times of my life might be interested to know something about the process by which my beliefs have changed over the years.

Youthful preoccupations

When I was a child, I liked sitting on the gate post of a fence separating our garden from the farmyard. That was my favorite spot for observing what the horses, sheep dogs, cows, pet lambs, humans etc. were doing in the farmyard. One day when I was sitting there – I would have been about 6 years old - my father told me that everything I saw in the farmyard was an illusion. I thought at first that he was joking, but he was in the process of informing me that he had decided to attend the Christian Science church and had arranged for me to attend their Sunday school.

Over subsequent years, I gradually became immersed in the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, and her book, Science and Health (S&H). The final 3 years of my secondary education were spent as a border at Huntingtower, a school run by Christian Scientists in the Melbourne suburb of Mount Waverley. At that time, the school only accepted students who had a family background in Christian Science. Huntingtower still has a focus on the individual personal development of students and provides excellent educational opportunities. I am grateful that one of my aunts paid the fees to enable me to attend that school.

I have long been aware that there was some similarity between Mrs. Eddy’s teachings and the philosophy of Plato. I now see a closer resemblance to the Neoplatonism of Plotinus. Plotinus believed that “The One”, the absolutely simple first principle of all, was the cause of being for everything else in the universe.  Mrs. Eddy wrote: 

“Principle and its idea is one, and this one is God, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being, and His reflection is man and the universe” (S&H, 465-6).

The Neoplatonists saw life’s purpose as being “to bring back the god in us to the divine in the All”. Mrs. Eddy urged her followers:

We must form perfect models in thought and look at them continually, or we shall never carve them out in grand and noble lives. Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love — the kingdom of heaven — reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear” (S&H, 248).

Secular pursuits

I abandoned Neoplatonism at the end of my teen years. At that time, I didn’t consciously reject that belief system even though I can remember becoming increasingly frustrated at the difficulty of attempting to follow Mrs. Eddy’s injunction: “Stand porter at the door of thought” (S&H, 392). My social life and academic interests made me less inclined to spend time engaging in what I was coming to view as speculations about the nature of “ultimate reality”.  I was beginning to study economics, so my thinking focused increasingly on how human aspirations could best be met. At that time, I became interested in the writings of J S Mill on liberty and utilitarianism.

Over the years, my philosophic interests developed along with a work career focused on public policy relating to economic development, international trade, productivity growth and technological progress. That led to increasing interest in the role of liberty in economic progress, and human flourishing more generally.

As a consequence of my interest in human flourishing, I have come to view Aristotle as the greatest of the philosophers of Ancient Greece. My book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, explains the framework of my current thinking.

These days, the idea that the evidence of our senses is illusory seems as strange to me as it was when I was the child sitting on the gate post. Our senses provide the direct experience of reality that members of our species require to thrive. Since we are conscious beings, we are aware of our own use of maps, and models (both metaphorical and actual) to communicate and reason about what we experience. However, we also know that maps and models do not always correspond to reality. The search for truth is about seeking better maps and models.

The lurking questions

There were two questions lurking in the back of my mind after I had abandoned Neoplatonism. First, how could a change in thinking bring about the healing of serious illnesses which seemed to have a physical cause? Second, why did the same techniques sometimes fail to provide the lasting healings hoped for in respect of disorders that seemed to have a psychological rather than physical cause?

I do not doubt the veracity of most of the large number of testimonials that church members presented about healings that they experienced. As I remember it, most of the church members I knew either had personal experience of healings themselves or were family members of people who had obtained healings. The prevalence of healings seems to me to be the most obvious factor explaining the rapid growth of this church in the first half of the 20th century, when medical science was less advanced than it is today. Advances in medicine provide the most obvious explanation for the decline in church membership in recent decades.

I think the answer to my first question lies in the potential impact of a change of an individual’s thinking on their body’s natural defences against disease. For example, a substantial amount of evidence has accumulated about the relationship between psychological stress and the human immune system. There is a lot of advice available about the importance of stress management in maintaining good health, and about how to manage stress via physical exercise, breathing exercises, yoga, meditation, and so forth. However, I don’t think many people give enough attention to the potential for negative thinking associated with medication to influence its efficacy. Before you decide to take any medication prescribed to you, it seems to me to be wise to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of how the medication works and the impacts that most users experience. If that doesn’t provide a basis for you to expect positive outcomes, perhaps you should seek another opinion.

My answer to the question of why lasting healings didn’t always occur in respect of psychological disorders is that an appropriate change of thinking had not actually occurred. That was not necessarily attributable to insufficient vigilance as “porter at the door of thought”. In my own experience, I think the opposite was the case. Trying hard to keep fear of stuttering and blocking out of my mind resulted in greater fear of disfluency than I would otherwise have experienced.  The reason for that became clear when someone suggested that I try the “don’t think of a pink elephant” exercise. The exercise consists of trying very hard not to think about pink elephants and then observing what images come to mind. Deliberate attempts to suppress thoughts makes them more likely to occupy your mind.

The questions lurking in the back of my mind made me receptive to Neuro-Semantics – a model of how we create and embody meaning developed by Michael Hall and Bobby Bodenhamer - when I learned about it 20 years ago. For present purposes, I think the message of Neuro-Semantics can best be  illustrated by the following quote from an article by Michael Hall entitled, “The Inner Game of Frame”:   

‘The frames we set about our experiences are much, much, much more important and critical than our experiences.  In this, “there is no good or bad but thinking makes it so” as Shakespeare noted.  In this, “men are not disturbed by things, they are disturbed by their interpretation of things.”  In this, “as we think in our heart, so we are.”  In this we have the cognitive-behavioral foundation for human functioning.’

Readers of my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, will find a reference to Hall’s views on the importance of frames of meaning in the discussion of why people do not always move on to satisfying higher needs, as Abraham Maslow suggested they would, once their basic needs have been met (p 168-9).

Beyond utilitarianism

One aspect of Mrs. Eddy’s teachings that I have held on to is the idea that the identity of the individual person is a metaphysical concept. Mrs. Eddy made the point persuasively as follows:

‘If the real man is in the material body, you take away a portion of the man when you amputate a limb; the surgeon destroys manhood, and worms annihilate it. But the loss of a limb or injury to a tissue is sometimes the quickener of manliness; and the unfortunate cripple may present more nobility than the statuesque athlete, — teaching us by his very deprivations, that “a man’s a man, for a’ that.” ‘ (S&H, 172)

The Neoplatonism of my youth has also left me receptive to the idea that to fully flourish we need to be willing to transcend utilitarian preoccupations. That idea is, of course, also present in Aristotle’s view that practice of the virtues is central to individual flourishing. In Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I summarised my current view as follows:

Liberty and technological progress give us potential to obtain more of the basic goods of flourishing humans. To fully flourish, however, we need to be willing to transcend utilitarian preoccupations and to contemplate what our human nature requires of us as individuals. Perhaps it is in our nature to bring wonder into our lives by seeking the essence of truth, beauty, and goodness. If so, we may take pleasure in doing that, whilst rejecting the idea that it is appropriate to employ the metrics of pleasure and pain to assess the worth of our endeavors” (197).

Postscript

I neglected to mention my guru, Tim Gallwey. I have been a fan of Tim Gallwey's books for more than 20 years. I found "The Inner Game of Golf" particularly helpful in aspects of my life that have little to do with golf. Tim Gallwey's insights about the inner game of golf helped me to see some personal problems in perspective. (By the way, I play golf about once a year and play no better might be expected!)

Tim Gallwey describes how people tend to interfere with their performance in activities requiring muscle coordination when they respond to self-doubt by "trying harder". Trying harder often entails increasing muscle tension. Gallwey's books offer practical suggestions to circumvent self-doubt.

Tim Gallwey says: “We all have inner resources beyond what we realize”.  You discover your true identity as you draw on those resource to master the inner game.

In this video Tim Gallwey talks about the personal philosophy that motivates him.

My podcast episode entitled, "Tim Gallwey, my Inner Game guru", can be found here.


Sunday, June 26, 2022

How did a trading company come to rule India?

 


Spencer went on to suggest that trade would have been more successful in the absence of the privileges that the British government had conferred on the East India Company (EIC):

“Insane longing for empire would never have burdened the Company with the enormous debt which at present paralyzes it. The energy that has been expended in aggressive wars would have been employed in developing the resources of the country. Unenervated by monopolies, trade would have been much more successful.”  

Prior to my recent visit to India I was aware that classical liberals like Herbert Spencer were critical of the East India Company. Since my visit I have become an expert on all matters pertaining to Indian history. Just joking!

I can only claim to be able to sketch the outlines of the story of how the EIC ended up ruling India. I think the story is worth telling as a case study of the unintended consequences of government intervention in international trade.

Spencer was correct in identifying the importance of the EIC’s links to the British government as an important determinant of its behavior, but the context in which it operated also needs to be taken into account.  The most important element of context seems to me to the rivalry between European powers to obtain advantage in trade with India.

Portugal came first.

Perhaps you can recall from school history lessons that Vasco da Gama sailed to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. This was the culmination of voyages of discovery by Portuguese sailors, including the important contribution of Bartolomeu Diaz, who had rounded the Cape some years earlier.


The Portuguese government was heavily involved in this exploration, and in what followed. In his book, The Portuguese in India, M.N. Pearson relates how the king, D. Manuel, invited da Gama to command the expedition when the latter happened to wander through the council chamber where the king was reading documents.

After da Gama’s voyage, the Portuguese court debated whether they should use force to seek a monopoly in the Indian Ocean or be peaceful traders. They chose force. Their aim was to try to monopolize the supply of spices to Europe and to control and tax other Asian trade. There was, of course, a great deal of trade in the Indian Ocean prior to Portuguese intervention, much of it controlled by Muslims (from India as well as the Middle East).

The Portuguese built forts in India to protect their trading activities. Some local rulers saw advantage in giving the Portuguese permission to establish forts, but they often used force. Goa was conquered in 1510. The Portuguese obtained permission to build a fort at Diu in 1535 (and had ceded to them the islands that today form Mumbai) because the sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shar, wanted Portuguese help after being defeated by the Mughal emperor, Humayon. The Portuguese obtained Daman from the sultan in 1559 and immediately began construction of the fort at Moti Daman. Building of St Jerome fort (my photo below) commenced in 1614, but was not completed until 1672.


The Dutch eclipsed the Portuguese early in the 17th century.

The Portuguese were unable to prevent competition from the Dutch because the latter were “better financed, better armed, and more numerous”. The Dutch blockaded Goa from 1638 to 1644 and again from 1656 to 1663.

The Dutch East India Company was founded by the Dutch government in 1602, not long after the English formed the EIC. Both organisations were granted trade monopolies, and combined private investment and the powers of the state in a similar manner.

In the early 18th century there was fierce rivalry between the Dutch and English over the spice trade in Indonesia. That ended with the English quietly withdrawing from most of their interests in Indonesia to focus elsewhere, including India.

The transformation of British activities in India

In the 17th century, the EIC established trading posts in Surat, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta with permission from local authorities. The French India Company offered increasing competition during the latter half of the 17th century and into the 18th century.

The initial objectives of both the EIC and the French were commercial, but their conflicts in Europe spilled over into India. The British sought to fortify Fort William in Calcutta against potential attack from the French. In 1756, the French encouraged the nawab of Bengal to attack Fort William. After the fall of Fort William, the surviving British soldiers and Indian sepoys were imprisoned overnight in a dungeon where many died from suffocation and heat exhaustion. The prison became known as the Black Hole of Calcutta. The number of fatalities is disputed, but the incident seems to have provided impetus for the EIC to seek to wield greater political power in India to protect its commercial interests.

My photo of the Black Hole monument in the grounds of St John’s church in Kolkata.

 

EIC forces led by Robert Clive (Clive of India) retook Calcutta in 1757 and went on to defeat the nawab and his French supporters at Plassey. Clive’s victory was aided by a secret agreement with Bengal aristocrats which resulted in a large portion of the nawab's army being led away from the battlefield. The person responsible for this treachery, Mir Jafar, was rewarded by being installed as nawab. Clive rewarded himself and EIC forces from the Bengal Treasury.

A few years later, as governor of Bengal, Clive arranged for the EIC to collect land tax revenues in Bengal by appointing a deputy nawab for this purpose. The conquest of other parts of India was planned and directed from Calcutta. Amartya Sen has noted:

“The profits made by the East India Company from its economic operations in Bengal financed, to a great extent, the wars that the British waged across India in the period of their colonial expansion.”

Consequences and responses

The worst consequences of EIC rule became evident during the Bengal famine of 1770. The company was apparently more concerned to maintain land tax revenue than to relieve to the suffering of peasants.  Its policies contributed to the massive loss of life during the famine. Adam Smith presumably had that in mind when he suggested in Wealth of Nations:

“No other sovereigns ever were, or, from the nature of things, ever could be so perfectly indifferent about the happiness or misery of their subjects, the improvement or waste of their dominions, the glory or disgrace of their administration; as, from irresistible moral causes, the greater part of the proprietors of such a mercantile company are, and necessarily must be.” (V.i.e 26)

By reducing the agricultural labor available to generate taxable income, the famine caused the EIC to experience a subsequent loss of revenue. The British government provided financial relief to the company but arranged to supervise it. Regulation of the EIC was further increased in 1784, when British prime minister William Pitt the Younger, legislated for joint government of British India by the EIC and the government, with the government holding the ultimate authority.

The British government seems to have been engaged in an ongoing balancing act to placate both supporters of the EIC, including investors and former employees, and its critics, including prominent individuals like Edmund Burke and Adam Smith.  

Pitt’s India Act stated that to pursue schemes of conquest and extension of dominion in India are “measures repugnant to the wish, the honour and the policy of this nation”. Perhaps that was an honest statement of the British government’s policy objective, but it is doubtful that it had any impact on the extension of British dominion in India.

Fortune seekers

During the 18th century, India was seen as offering opportunities for young British men to obtain a fortune, become well-connected, and to marry well.

Lachlan Macquarie, who (in my opinion) ultimately become one of the best of Australia’s colonial governors, expressed views, while a young army officer serving in India, that may have been fairly typical.


In his biography of Macquarie, M. H. Ellis notes that in 1788 Pitt and his followers had cramped the style of young army officers in India by reducing their allowances. Macquarie recorded in his diary: “ … our golden dreams, and the flattering prospects we had formed to ourselves in Britain, of soon making our fortunes in the East, must now all vanish into smoke; and we must content ourselves, with merely being able to exist without running into debt” (p 18).

Macquarie’s hopes for a change in fortune rested on being called to active service. He had his wish during the third Anglo-Mysore war. The war ended after the 1792 Siege of Seringapatam led to the signing of a Treaty in which Tipu Sultan surrendered half of his kingdom to the EIC and its allies. Macquarie noted that news of the cessation of hostilities “damped the spirits of every one who wished the downfall of the Tyrant and hoped to have the satisfaction in a few days more, of storming his capital”. The storming of Tipu’s capital would presumably have offered the prospect of looting, but Governor-General Cornwallis managed to maintain the morale of his troops by announcing payment of a “handsome gratuity in lieu of prize money”.   (Ellis, p 39)

India’s civil wars

Disunity within India was another important element of the context in which the EIC ended up ruling India. British colonial expansion occurred at a time when the power of the Mughal empire was declining, with much of its territory falling under the control of the Marathas. In the south of India, the rulers of Mysore and Travancore were also powerful. The EIC sided with different rulers in different locations at different times. For example, at the time of the Third Anglo-Mysore War, referred to above, the Marathas were allies of the EIC. That war occurred because Tipu, an ally of France, had invaded the nearby state of Travancore, which was a British ally.

Why did EIC rule end?

In 1813 the EIC lost its monopoly over British trade with India. The opening of access to competing traders seems to have been partly attributable to growth of the free trade lobby in Britain.  

In 1833, the EIC was reduced to the status of a managing agency for the British government of India. The government took over the company’s debts and obligations, which were to be serviced and paid from tax revenue raised in India.

EIC rule of India finally ended following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which is now also referred to as the First War of Independence. I took this photo at an Indian airport.

 


Colonial rule was formally transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria in 1858. The British government took over the Indian possessions, administrative powers and machinery, and the armed forces of the EIC.

In my view, EIC rule ended because the company had a hopeless business model. The company was obviously successful in conducting wars in India, and some employees of the company made fortunes as a consequence. But the company’s attempts to service debts incurred by imposing taxes on the people of India were inherently problematic. Such taxes made it inevitable that the company would incur high ongoing costs to put down rebellions. The EIC’s conquest of Bengal raised expectations that colonial rule might be a profitable activity for the company, but it became incapable of surviving without government financial backing only a few years later.

Was a better option possible?

 John Stuart Mill - in his role as a spin doctor employed by the EIC rather than an eminent philosopher - opened his last ditch defence of the EIC by pointing out that at the same time as the company acquired a “magnificent empire in the East” for Britain “a succession of administrations under the control of Parliament were losing to the Crown of Great Britain another great empire on the opposite side of the Atlantic”. (Mill is quoted more fully by Richard Reeves in John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand, p 258.)

Mill was obviously attempting to present a persuasive case to British politicians at a time when most of them perceived “empire” to be a desirable objective.

These days, people who want to defend the empire-building activities of the EIC in India are more likely to suggest that the institutional legacy of British rule, including a united India (if you overlook the tragedy of partition) would otherwise not have been possible. Amartya Sen has pointed out the weakness of that argument:

“Certainly, when Clive’s East India Company defeated the nawab of Bengal in 1757, there was no single power ruling over all of India. Yet it is a great leap from the proximate story of Britain imposing a single united regime on India (as did actually occur) to the huge claim that only the British could have created a united India out of a set of disparate states.

That way of looking at Indian history would go firmly against the reality of the large domestic empires that had characterised India throughout the millennia. …”

Summing up

The East India Company came to rule India as an unintended consequence of British government intervention seeking trading advantages over other European powers. This intervention occurred against the background of previous involvement in Indian trade by Portuguese and Dutch governments, and in the context of intense rivalry with the French government’s trading company.

The East India Company’s schemes of conquest and dominion were made possible by disunity within India, which provided it with opportunistic allies. However, the company’s business model of taxing subjugated Indians was not capable of generating sufficient revenue to service debts incurred in subjugating them and maintaining order. Rather than let the company fail, the British government became increasingly involved in directing its activities, and ultimately displaced it.  

Sunday, April 23, 2017

What will government look like after the fourth revolution?

“Democracy in Australia is sinking into a self-destructive spiral. The sickness at its heart is the demise of individual responsibility and expecting more from the state when the national interest says state responsibilities should be cut, not increased. Our democratic system now works to undermine economic progress.”

That is how Paul Kelly, Australia’s most widely respected journalist, concluded an article in The Australian a few weeks ago. The article entitled “Crisis time: We can take a stand – or solve a problem” (probably gated) was published on March 29.

As far as I can see there hasn’t been much public reaction to this article. Only a small proportion of the population read articles of this kind, and most readers would still feel complacent about the Australian economy and the future of democracy in this country. It will become easier to convince people that they should be alarmed about the self-destructive spiral when the crash is imminent. The malfunction began over a decade ago and it might be another decade, or more, before crunch time.

Some other informed commentators take a more optimistic view than Paul Kelly. For example, Gary Banks, former chairman of the Productivity Commission, acknowledges that policy development is now a problem. He has suggested the a “loss of policy capability within government – Commonwealth and State - is palpable and multidimensional”. He is hopeful, nevertheless, that the problem can be ameliorated by improvements to policy-making processes:
Yet, if this diagnosis is correct, there is hope. Unlike the adverse changes evident in our parliaments and media, changes which are arguably reflective of changes in society itself, the decline in capability is not irreversible. Unless it is turned around, however, we cannot tell whether reform has truly become ‘too hard’, as many now seem to assume”.

A few years ago I was similarly optimistic. I still support efforts to improve policy capability within government. I agree with Gary that improvements to the policy-making system are an essential pre-condition for improvements in policy. However, I doubt whether much economic reform will be achievable until we see substantial changes in the rules of the political game that will provide political representatives with appropriate incentives to pursue the broader interests of the community, rather than the narrow interests that too many of them currently seek to protect. And, unfortunately, that seems unlikely to occur until a major economic crisis is upon us.

In his article, Paul Kelly drew inspiration from The Fourth Revolution: The global race to reinvent the state, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. 









The authors of this book make a case that western societies have seen three and a half revolutions in government over the last four centuries:
  • The rise of the nation state in 17th century Europe. Europe’s network of competing Leviathans threw up a system of ever-improving government.
  • The rise of the liberal state in the 18th and 19th centuries following the American and French revolutions.
  • The advent of the welfare state in the 20th century.
  • And the half revolution in the 1980s, associated with economic reforms promoting a partial return to classical liberalism in a few countries.


This history of the revolutions in government seems broadly accurate. Micklethwait and Wooldridge associate each of these revolutions with a notable contributor to ideas about government. In sequence, the four revolutionary thinkers they chose were: Thomas Hobbes, J S Mill, Beatrice Webb and Milton Friedman. It is possible to quibble about that choice, but I will refrain. I want to focus here on what the authors have to say about the fourth revolution.

The authors argue that the fourth revolution is occurring as a result of a confluence of three forces: failure, competition and opportunity.
  • The West has to change because it is going broke:“Debt and demography mean that government in the rich world has to change. … For the foreseeable future the Western state will be in the business of taking things away – far more things than most people realize”
  • Competition from the “Asian alternative” is prompting change:“Chinese-oriented Asia offers a new model of government that challenges two of the West’s most cherished values: universal suffrage and top-down generosity. This ‘Asian Alternative’ is an odd mixture of authoritarianism and small government, best symbolized by Singapore’s long-term ruler, Lee Kuan Yew”.
  • There are opportunities to “do government” better: “New technologies offer a chance to improve government dramatically, but so does asking old questions such as the most basic question of all: “What is the state for?”


So, what will government look like after the fourth revolution? The authors would like to see greater individual liberty emerging as a consequence of reforms that reduce government spending and relieve governments of some of their responsibilities. I would too, but we need to be careful not to confuse what we hope will happen with what we see as most likely to happen.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge published their book a couple of years ago, but it was apparent even then that many voters were becoming cynical about politicians representing the mainstream political parties. The European Union had become a breeding ground for populists who were speaking out against “incompetent and arrogant elites”. Even then, that cynicism was also apparent elsewhere. The authors suggested:
Such cynicism might be healthy if people wanted little from the government. But they continue to want a great deal. The result can be a toxic and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one hand and disdain for government on the other”.

Perhaps the victories that the populists appear to be winning at the moment will cause the elites to become less complacent, and less incompetent and arrogant. The political cycle may be turning, as Tyler Cowan suggested in The Complacent Class (recently discussed here). Over the longer term, the elites may come to embrace dynamism, rather than protection of their professional turf, so we might see the battle lines being drawn more clearly between dynamism and stasis. That might correspond broadly to Tyler Cowan’s depiction of the political battle as between talent (human capital) and authoritarianism, stemming from underlying fears of disruption. Since this is also a battle between talented young people and fearful old people, in my view the odds favour talent in the longer term.

It would be easier to predict what government will look like after the fourth revolution if some western democracies provided models of a successful revolution in government. Micklethwait and Wooldridge suggest that reforms in Sweden, necessitated by economic crisis, have produced “a highly successful update of the old middle way”. New Zealand provides a model of what effective government can achieve following a natural disaster. The response to crisis in Sweden and New Zealand provides better protection for citizen’s rights than would adoption of something like Lee Kuan Yew’s model of technocratic government. However, democratic government in Sweden and New Zealand might well revert, within a few years, to taking upon itself more responsibilities, until another economic crisis ensues.


It seems to me that the fourth revolution is likely to involve changes in the rules of democratic politics. This might require constitutional change in some countries, but revolutionary change might be possible in Australia and other countries similarly afflicted by voter cynicism and political fragmentation, if the major parties were to adopt a convention for accountable government. What I have in mind is that the major parties should agree that whichever party wins government has a mandate from the people to implement the tax and expenditure policies it has taken to the election. What could be more democratic than that?

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Was J S Mill correct in his observation that happiness cannot be obtained by seeking it?

John Stuart Mill is often quoted as an authority on the question of
whether happiness can be obtained by seeking it. In Autobiography he wrote:
“Those only are happy ... who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way”.

How can that view be reconciled with Mill’s conviction “that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life”? That was no problem for J.S. Mill. In Utilitarianism he proposed:
“the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent's own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator”.
Mill enlisted the support of a widely-esteemed authority in support of that proposition:
“In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality”.
Mill might not have been a reliable exponent of the teachings of Jesus, but he was certainly an artful propagandist for utilitarianism.

Coming back to the original question, it seems important to be clear about the nature of the happiness that Mill claimed could not be obtained by seeking it. In his writings he seems to accept that some of the pleasures of life can be obtained by seeking them. As noted in 
my discussion of his views on pushpin and poetry (here and here) he regarded some pleasures as being higher than others.

Mill saw the development of “noble character” as intimately linked to the higher pleasures. At one point Mill seems to suggest that development of a noble character is an avenue to happiness. In Utilitarianism he wrote:
“... if it may be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier ...”.

Mill argued that some happiness could be obtained by cultivating tranquillity:
“the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best prospect of realizing, such happiness as is attainable. For nothing except that consciousness can raise a person above the chances of life, by making him feel that, let fate and fortune do their worst, they have not power to subdue him: which, once felt, frees him from excess of anxiety concerning the evils of life, and enables him, like many a Stoic in the worst times of the Roman Empire, to cultivate in tranquility the sources of satisfaction accessible to him, without concerning himself about the uncertainty of their duration, any more than about their inevitable end”.


In saying that happiness cannot be obtained by seeking it, Mill possibly meant that tranquility of mind cannot be obtained by seeking pleasure. Mill’s personal experience is relevant here. He reports that he helped himself to regain some measure of happiness after suffering a nervous breakdown when he was a young man by reading the poetry of William Wordsworth. In Autobiography he wrote:
What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of.

Wordsworth’s poem “Imitations of immortality from recollections of earlychildhood” might provide an example of what Mill was writing about.

What should be make of Mill’s suggestion that to be happy people need to fix their minds on some object other than their own happiness? In his autobiography Mill reports that he came to that view after his nervous breakdown. It has been suggested (for example by Kieran Setiya) that Mill displayed a lack of self-knowledge because he became unhappy even though he had already met his own condition of aiming not at his own happiness, but at the happiness of others.

However, my reading of Mill’s account suggests that he saw his problem as stemming from the moment when he asked himself whether he would be happy if all his objects in life were realized. Mill implies that his mistake was to question his own happiness:
“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning”.


Under what conditions would a person who was fully absorbed in a major social or political movement be likely to be made to feel depressed merely by asking himself if he would be happy if all the objectives of that movement were realized? It seems to me that one set of circumstances in which that outcome might make sense is if the person concerned had been indoctrinated into the movement from an early age and had not previously considered the extent to which “his” objects in life were consistent with his own personal values. Those conditions may have applied in the case for JS Mill, who was educated by his father to become a propagandist for utilitarianism.

That explanation fits with Mill’s account that the first "small ray of light broke in upon [his] gloom" when he "accidentally" read the passage from Marmontel's Mémoires that relates his father's death and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt as a result of his increased responsibilities. It strikes me that Mill might at that moment have been inspired to see himself as an autonomous individual rather than a creation of his father (James Mill) and Jeremy Bentham (his godfather).  

So, after all that, was Mill correct in his observation that happiness cannot be obtained by seeking it? The answer depends on what we mean by happiness. The small amount of wisdom I have gained from my reading in this area suggests that it makes sense to pursue the things we (as autonomous individuals) value most highly in all domains of our lives. Whether or not that brings us great joy, it is likely to give us the satisfaction of knowing that our lives are meaningful.


Note: This is a revised version of an article posted on this blog in 2008. I have revised it because my views have changed.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?

The question is from the first lines of a poem by William Wordsworth, written in 1841 in protest against plans for construction of the Kendall to Windermere railway in the Lakes District of England.

Wordsworth was not impressed by the view that the railway would place the beauty of the Lakes District within easier reach of these who would not otherwise have access to it. He described such arguments as: ‘Utilitarianism, serving as a mask for cupidity and gambling speculations’. Environmentalists sometimes advance similar arguments these days, but few are as rash as Wordsworth. The famous poet suggested that an appreciation of the beauty of romantic scenery was beyond the capability of ordinary people:
‘Rocks and mountains, torrents and widespread waters, and all those features of nature which go to the composition of such scenes as this part of England is distinguished for, cannot, in their finer relations, to the human mind be comprehended, even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of culture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual’.

Our rash assault on Lake Windermere took place late in August, via the steam train from Haverthwaite to Lakeside.


It is hard to imagine that any reader of this blog would have difficulty in appreciating the beauty of Lake Windermere, but I will nevertheless add some of Wordsworth’s poetry below my photos.





Standing alone, as from a rampart’s edge,
I overlooked the bed of Windermere,
Like a vast river, stretching in the sun.
With exultation, at my feet I saw
Lake, islands, promontories, gleaming bays,
A universe of Nature’s fairest forms
Proudly revealed with instantaneous burst,
Magnificent, and beautiful, and gay.

(William Wordsworth, The Prelude Book IV)

After our cruise on Lake Windermere we visited Grasmere.







Rest in peace, William Wordsworth. I hope our visit did not disturb you too much. We were only in your beautiful Lakes District for one day. 
John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous advocates of utilitarianism, walked all over your Lakes District for the best part of a month in July-August 1831 and even spent about 4 days walking and talking with you.

After visiting Wordsworth, Mill told a good friend, John Sterling:
 ‘all my differences with him [Wordsworth], or any other philosophic Tory, would be differences of matter-of-fact or detail, while my differences with the radicals and utilitarians are differences of principle’. (See: Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill, 2007, p 74.)

The best explanation of Mill’s views at that time seems to be that he was somewhat confused after setting out to expose himself to a variety of different views opposed to radical utilitarianism - the secular religion of his youth. Mill did this following a mental crisis which he attributed to realization that even if all his (radical utilitarian) objectives were realized, he would not be filled with ‘great joy and happiness’. In addition to the views of Wordsworth, Mill became strongly influenced at that time by French secular messiahs, Saint-Simon and Auguste Compte. (Mill’s involvement in that brand of secular religion has been examined by Linda Reader in her book, John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity, 2002.)


Mill embraced the poetry of Wordsworth because it helped him to achieve a more tranquil mental state. I expect that vast numbers of people have been similarly helped by the imagery of the Lakes District conveyed by Wordsworth’s poetry. 

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Do 19th Century principles of political economy explain British policies towards the Irish during the great famine?

Front CoverThis question has arisen from my reading of ‘The Great Famine’, by Ciarán Ó Murchadha. But I have an interest in the question for two additional reasons: I have some Irish ancestors who would have been affected by the great famine; and in the course of my work as an economist I have developed a great deal of respect for 19th Century political economics.

I found Ó Muchadha’s book to be enlightening in explaining why a substantial proportion of the Irish population were heavily dependent on potatoes and highly vulnerable when crops were destroyed by a fungal disease in most of the years from 1845 to 1849. Prior to the famine, about one-third of the population was completely dependent on potatoes because no other crop could provide as much nutritional value from small plots of land. Over 600,000 households subsisted without tenure rights on small plots of land under the conacre system, which gave them access to land in exchange for their labour. A further 300, 000 cottier households had a more formal tenancy relationship which entailed working for set wages, which were offset against the rent for their plots. Many tenants on small holdings paid their rents in cash rather than by providing labour, but were also completely dependent on potatoes for subsistence. 

In the decades leading up to 1845, access to land for potato-growing was becoming more difficult, partly because of an increasing tendency for landowners to consolidate holdings for grazing purposes. In their struggle to obtain access to land it had apparently become common for poor people to offer more rent than they could possibly pay, in the hope that once possession was obtained it would be less bothersome for landlords to reduce rents than to initiate eviction proceedings. The transactions costs associated with evictions were often substantial. Tenants had a set of ‘tradition-sanctioned’ modes of proceeding under cover of darkness against people whom they believed to be perpetrators of injustice. 

Such secret society activity did not persist after 1847, however.  By that time, those who would have been likely to exact retribution for evictions were apparently ‘for the most part dead, in the workhouses, in prison or had departed overseas as emigrants or as transported felons’. The famine added impetus to the number of evictions, not just because many tenants were unable to pay rent, but also because landlords anticipated that their rates would rise dramatically to pay for relief under the Poor Law. Evictions would have substantially increased the death toll from the famine, but from a landlord’s perspective, consolidation of holdings was necessary in order to avoid bankruptcy.

The relief provided by voluntary contributions and the British government was not sufficient to prevent over a million deaths occurring during the famine period. The British Treasury spent about £8 million on famine relief in Ireland, much of which consisted of advances that were intended to be repaid. The government’s contribution was relatively small by comparison, for example, with the £69 million spent on the Crimean War of 1854-1856. The government could have done more to help the Irish without causing much hardship within Britain.

So, why didn’t the British government provide more help to the victims of the Irish famine? The explanation offered by the author is as follows:
‘Political economy … combined with ‘providentialist’ and ‘moralist’ views, provided the assumptions underlying the decision-making of the small London-based political elite whose views translated into legislation for Ireland, and none of whom ever witnessed its effects first hand’ (page 194).

However, that doesn’t line up well with what I know about the views of prominent 19th Century political economists. For example, in discussing the limits of laissez faire in his book ‘Principles of Political Economy’, published in 1948, J S Mill wrote:
‘Apart from any metaphysical considerations respecting the foundation of morals or of the social union, it will be admitted to be right that human beings should help one another; and the more so, in proportion to the urgency of the need: and none needs help so urgently as one who is starving. The claim to help, therefore, created by destitution, is one of the strongest which can exist; and there is prima facie the amplest reason for making the relief of so extreme an exigency as certain to those who require it, as by any arrangements of society it can be made.’

Ciarán Ó Murchadha implies that his view is based on research by Peter Gray, which demonstrates
 ‘that the ideological framework was part of a wider set of beliefs shared across the British political spectrum, including the conviction that the Famine had been sent by providence, and that it furnished the British state with both the opportunity and the moral authority to reform Ireland thoroughly’.

A paper by Peter Gray has explained British policies towards the Irish in terms of
‘a readiness to attribute mass famine mortality in Ireland to the wilful immorality of the Irish, and to insist on the implementation of the penal mechanism of the poor law on all social classes’.
Immediately afterwards, Gray adds:
‘This, rather than any unthinking adherence to “laissez faire” is what informed the doctrine of “natural causes” in the latter stages of the Irish famine’ (IEHC 2006 Helsinki Session 123).

It seems to me that British views relating to providence and morality might have been advanced by English people to avoid acknowledging that they did not feel much sympathy for starving people in Ireland. In his book, ‘Why Ireland Starved’ (1983) Joel Mokyr suggests:
‘It is not unreasonable to surmise that had anything like the famine occurred in England or Wales, the British government would have overcome its theoretical scruples and would have come to the rescue of the starving at a much larger scale. Ireland was not considered part of the British community. Had it been, its income per capita may not have been much higher, perhaps, but mass starvation due to a subsistence crisis would have been averted …’ (p 292).


Even though Britain and Ireland were part of a political union, there are strong historical reasons why many British and Irish people did not see each other as members of the same community. There is evidence that British political economists, including J S Mill, shared the prejudices against the Irish of many other British people. But the principles of political economy espoused by 19th Century political economists did not require the British government to allow large numbers of people to die during the Irish famine. 

Friday, April 20, 2012

Is Enlightenment humanism a coherent world view?


‘The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.’

The quote is from Steven Pinker’s book, ‘The Better Angels of our Nature: Why violence has declined’, 2011, p 180. I am only half-way through reading the book, but I am becoming bored with the chapter on ‘the long peace’, so I will comment on this aspect now.

John Gray’s response to the quoted passage is that Pinker has listed ‘highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas’.  On the face of it, Gray would appear to be correct. In his explanation following the quote Pinker makes matters worse, in my view, by equating Enlightenment humanism with classical liberalism.

Friedrich Hayek’s classification of liberals into British (classical liberal) and French (constructivist rationalist) varieties is helpful in this context. Classical liberals retained strong respect for traditions and institutions that had spontaneously evolved, including respect for individual rights. By contrast, rationalistic liberals made strong assumptions about the powers of human reason and sought to construct a utopia in which economic and social outcomes would conform to the will of the majority.

Hobbes and Descartes helped to provide the intellectual foundation for the views of Voltaire, Rousseau and Condorcet, which led to the French Revolution, the development of socialist ideology, liberal progressivism and even neoconservatism. (See Troy Camplin’s recent discussion of how neoconservatism can be linked to Continental enlightenment thinking.) There are also several other people on Pinker’s list, including Jefferson and J S Mill, who were strongly influenced by Continental rationalistic thinking.

Would A N Whitehead have agreed with Pinker that Enlightenment humanism constituted a coherent world view? I raise the question because my last post was about Whitehead’s book, ‘Adventures of Ideas’. In fact, Whitehead’s seems to be more guilty than Pinker of lumping classical liberals and rationalistic liberals together. He presented Adam Smith as ‘a typical figure of the 18th century enlightenment’ and emphasized the links between the intellectual life of Scotland and France. He also emphasized the influence of Continental enlightenment thinking on America’s founding fathers by suggesting that the ‘mentality’ of people like Jefferson and Franklin, was French. Whitehead argued that while many factors contributed to the change from a presupposition of slavery to a presupposition of freedom, the ‘chief factor’ was ‘the sceptical, humanitarian movement of the eighteenth century, of which Voltaire and Rousseau were among the chief exponents, and the French Revolution the culmination’ (p 22).

Pinker has a very different view of the French Revolution. He sees it as a catastrophe and a departure from ‘the Enlightenment script’. He suggests that the French philosophes from whom the revolutionaries drew their main inspiration were intellectual lightweights. He argues that the American Revolution was more successful because the founders were products not just of the Enlightenment but of the English civilizing process promoting self-control and cooperation. They were very conscious of the limitations of human nature and sought to devise a system of government that would counteract the temptation of leaders to abuse their power.

In considering whether there is any sense in which Pinker could be correct to view Enlightenment humanism as a coherent world view I think it is important to consider the context in which he makes that claim. He is writing about a market place of ideas, with many new books emerging and being discussed. At the same time, the rise of cosmopolitan cities helped to bring people and ideas together. He implies that when a large enough community of free agents confers on how a society should run its affairs, it is likely that some kind of consensus will emerge.

I think Pinker would be on much stronger ground in claiming the emergence of a more general consensus supporting Enlightenment humanism among leaders of political opinion, rather than the existence of a coherent philosophy shared by a group of intellectuals. While the classical liberals would probably have seen little merit in the views of the rationalistic liberals, and vice versa, many leaders of political opinion would have seen varying degrees of merit in different viewpoints and would have sought to reconcile and assimilate them in developing their own views.

Intellectual leaders can also have an important influence on public opinion. It seems to me that J S Mill was correct in his view that the civilizing process led to the growing power of public opinion which in turn would lead to democratic political reforms. (I discussed his reasons on this blog a couple of years ago.) Mill was particularly concerned about the influence of universities on public opinion and advocated reforms that would enable universities to become bastions of Enlightenment humanism.

Over time, it seems to me that the values espoused by Enlightenment humanism have developed the status of a coherent world view in the democracies that is often, but not always, supported by public opinion. The process seems to be one in which disparate political philosophies, often going back centuries, act as tributaries to the broad streams of thought that flow into the rivers of public opinion. Enlightenment humanism is one of those broad streams of thought. The colour of the water in the streams and the rivers changes over time, depending on relative contributions from the different tributaries.

Postscript:
Jim Belshaw has commented and provided further discussion of the concepts of progress and civilization on his blog. Troy Camplin has provided references below to other posts in which he has discussed the influence of different philosophies on current political beliefs.