Saturday, August 22, 2009

How could J.S. Mill have reconciled his views on liberty and indoctrination of morals?

In “John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand” Richard Reeves suggests that the question of whether Mill’s essay, “Utilitarianism”, can be reconciled with his more famous essay, “On Liberty”, is one that “will keep scholars engaged for the foreseeable future” (p. 330). That is probably correct, but I don’t think Mill would have had a huge problem in reconciling his views in the two essays if he had felt inclined to do so.

What is it that needs to be reconciled? In “On Liberty”, Mill argues that human flourishing requires the exercise of individual choice: “The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice. He gains no practice either in discerning or in desiring what is best. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used” (Ch. 3).

In “Utilitarianism”, written about the same time, Mill argues that people should be indoctrinated with a version of utilitarian morality: “To do as you would be done by, and to love your neighbour as yourself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality. As the means of making the nearest approach to this ideal, utility would enjoin, first, that laws and social arrangements should place the happiness, or (as speaking practically it may be called) the interest, of every individual, as nearly as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole; and secondly, that education and opinion, which have so vast a power over human character, should so use that power as to establish in the mind of every individual an indissoluble association between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes; so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being's sentient existence (Ch 2).

Different people have different views about the tension between Mill’s emphasis on the importance of individual choice and his proposals for indoctrination of an indissoluble association between individual happiness and the good of the whole. For example, Linda Raeder writes: “A deep immersion in Mill’s thought leaves one with the decided impression that his aspirations for human beings were not for the flowering of their unique individuality but for their conformity to his personal ideal of value and service” (“John Stuart Mill and the Religion of Humanity”, 2002). Richard Reeves adopts a more conventional view of Mill’s aspirations: “The animating idea at the heart of Mill’s life and work is individual liberty. His image of a good society was one in which every man (and, he would add, every woman) can shape the course of their own life. ... Mill wanted our lives to be free, but he also wanted them to be good ” (p. 6).

Mill’s view on the importance of diversity in education seem to me to provide an example of the way in which it would have been possible for him to reconcile his desire for us to be free with his desire for us to be good. He wrote: “All that has been said of the importance of individuality of character, and diversity in opinions and modes of conduct, involves, as of the same unspeakable importance, diversity of education. A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body. An education established and controlled by the State, should only exist, if it exist at all, as one among many competing experiments, carried on for the purpose of example and stimulus, to keep the others up to a certain standard of excellence” “On Liberty”, Ch 5.

Mill also emphasised the value of experimentation at a more general level:
“It will not be denied by anybody, that originality is a valuable element in human affairs. There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life” (“On Liberty”, Ch 3).

In his “Autobiography” Mill noted that he viewed “On Liberty” as “a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out into ever stronger relief: the importance, to man and society of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions” (Ch 7).

It seems to me that it would have been possible for Mill to reconcile his views on liberty and ethics by making the case that recognition of the right of individuals to experiment in living as seems best to themselves is of over-riding importance to society. Not only does this open the possibility of discovering new truths, it also opens the possibility that people can learn from the mistakes of others. As Friedrich Hayek wrote: “It is whenever man reaches beyond his present self, where the new emerges and assessment lies in the future, that liberty ultimately shows its value” (“Constitution of Liberty”, p. 394).

If Mill had argued more explicitly that the right of individuals to live as seems best to themselves is of over-riding importance it would have been clearer that he did not intend that his personal values should be imposed on people who do not desire them.

Postscript:
I should have noted that Hayek explicitly made the point that "the existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the more effective ones" ("Constitution of Liberty", p.63).

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

How silly were J.S. Mill's views about income distribution?

J S Mill wrote: “The laws and conditions of the Production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary in them. ... It is not so with the Distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. The things once there, mankind, individually or collectively, can do with them as they like. They can place them at the disposal of whomsoever they please, and on whatever terms” (Principles of Political Economy, 1848, II,1.1).

In 1983, Friedrich Hayek commented that this view of J S Mill “is really an incredible stupidity, showing a complete unawareness of the crucial guide function of prices ...” Hayek explains: “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). This must have been one of the most intemperate remarks that Hayek ever made about anyone.

One of the things I have learned from Richard Reeves book, “John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand” is that Karl Marx was also unimpressed by Mill’s attempt to separate the laws of production and distribution. Marx viewed this as “a shallow syncretism” (Reeves, p 210). He thought Mill was attempting to reconcile irreconcilables.

How silly were Mill’s views about distribution? In order to answer this question I think we need to understand Mill’s views about property and inheritance.

I see a lot of merit in much of what Mill wrote about property. For example: “The institution of property, when limited to its essential elements, consists in the recognition, in each person, of a right to the exclusive disposal of what he or she have produced by their own exertions, or received either by gift or by fair agreement, without force or fraud, from those who produced it” (“Principles of Political Economy”, II, 2.2).

It is when Mill writes about “landed property” that I begin to see problems: “When the "sacredness of property" is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency” (“Principles of Political Economy”, II,2.26). Given that land can be exchanged for other goods I don’t see how it is possible to argue that rights to ownership should not be recognized as the same for land as for other goods.

The problem that Mill had with “landed property” seems to be associated with the potential for a relatively small number of families to have a disproportionate amount of wealth and to exercise disproportionate political power. He was against the inheritance of “enormous fortunes which no one needs for any personal purpose but ostentation or improper power”. Richard Reeves points out that Mill was particularly concerned to distinguish between “earned” and “unearned” income. Mill viewed inheritances as “unearned” and argued that it would be socially beneficial to impose a limit on the amount any person could inherit.

Mill’s views about redistributive taxation were also influenced by his aversion to inherited wealth: “To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation. ...I conceive that inheritances and legacies, exceeding a certain amount, are highly proper subjects for taxation: and that the revenue from them should be as great as it can be made without giving rise to evasions ... such as it would be impossible adequately to check” (“Principles of Political Economy”, V, 2.14).

It seems to me that Mill’s claim that distribution of wealth should be viewed as entirely separate from production was silly – and contradicted by his own views about the adverse consequences of progressive taxation. Mill’s idea for an upper limit on the amount that anyone could inherit also seems extremely silly. I can see some wisdom in his views about taxation of inheritances, but even here it seems to me that he was fooling himself if he thought that inheritance taxes would impose no disincentives to working and saving. Despite all this silliness, however, Mill still had many sensible things to say about property rights and taxation.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Does our Nicole worsen income inequality in the United States?

In his recent paper, “Thinking clearly about economic inequality”, Will Wilkinson – a research fellow at the Cato Institute in the U.S. (and prominent blogger)- mentions some reasons why Nicole Kidman is wealthy. He states: “Nicole Kidman is fabulously wealthy because millions of individuals have chosen to see a movie with Nicole Kidman in it instead of a non-Kidman movie, or instead of going bowling”. He uses Nicole as an example to illustrate how the pattern of incomes “emerges from billions upon billions of individual choices and transactions” (p 14).

I think Wilkinson is making a good point. People often talk about income distribution as though government is actually distributing national income among the citizens - like a mother deciding how large a slice of a cake to give to each of her children. If we want the cake metaphor to reflect the real world, however, we have to accommodate the fact that mother doesn’t actually bake the cake, the children do. And distribution is the result of mutually beneficial process in which individuals earn cake by contributing to its production.

Wilkinson’s mention of Nicole Kidman is also relevant to a somewhat different point that he is making, although he doesn’t make the link specifically. Nicole Kidman has dual citizenship between the U.S. and Australia. If she is viewed as a U.S. citizen for the purposes of considering the distribution of income that makes the distribution of income in the U.S. look more unequal. If she is viewed as an Australian citizen that makes Australia’s income distribution look more unequal. Who cares?

The point is, of course, that there is something peculiar about viewing income inequality as a cause for concern at a national level, when this can change just because people move across national borders. When people talk about the effects of migration on income distribution in countries like the United States and Australia they are more likely to be thinking of the migrants who make income distribution less equal by occupying the lowest rungs of the economic ladder than those who make it less equal by occupying the highest rungs on the ladder. But the questions raised about the relevance of income distribution to well-being are the same in both cases.

Wilkinson makes the point: “If you focus only on the shifting pattern of incomes among legal residents within the statistics-keeping jurisdiction ... you can easily lose track of the real story of human welfare ...” (p 14). He comments as follows on the effects of the migration of unskilled migration on economic inequality in the U.S.: ‘If were to assume a natural and mundane moral perspective, from which all people involved are taken into account and assumed to have equal worth ... what we would see is a profound reduction in both poverty and economic inequality. If the question is “What happened to the people in this scenario?” then the answer is “The poorest people became considerably wealthier, narrowing the economic gap between them and the rest”.’ (p 15).

It seems to me that this reasoning is relevant to Australia as well as to the U.S. If we are interested in the well-being of people we should be interested in the opportunities that are available to them. When you look at it carefully the concept of income inequality doesn’t have much relevance to well-being.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

How can a conservative favour centralization of power?

One of my reasons for reading Tony Abbott’s recent book, “Battlelines”, was to remind myself why I am not a conservative. The more serious reason was to find our how a politician who proudly wears the conservative label would attempt to justify proposing an amendment to the Australian constitution that would remove current restrictions on the policy areas in which the federal government has power to make laws.

In writing this book Tony Abbott, a former minister in the Howard Government who is now on the opposition front bench in the federal parliament, seems to have taken on the role of defining where the battlelines should be drawn in the approach to the next election.

One of the things Abbott is clearly trying to do in this book is to identify enduring values that will continue to bind the Liberal Party together. In the process he does a reasonably good job of minimizing the differences between Hayekian liberals and Burkean conservatives. At one point he writes: “Following Adam Smith, Liberals tend to think that government is necessary to keep the peace but otherwise should let people make mutually beneficial arrangements with each other” (p 82). If I believed that was a statement of conservative philosophy, I would not mind being called a conservative. In other places in the book, however, Abbott displays the contempt for personal freedom that is associated with traditional conservative values. For example: “The basic problem is that most Western countries have privatised the next generation. Having children tends to be regarded as a personal choice rather than a social good” (p 97).

Having now reminded myself why I am not a conservative, let me turn to Abbott’s views on federalism. The essence of his argument is as follows:
  • When nothing else seems to solve problems, voters always expect the central government to ‘do something’.
  • After more than 50 years of increasing federal government involvement in matters that were formerly the exclusive responsibility of the states, the federation has become dysfunctional. “There are few problems in contemporary Australia that a dysfunctional federation doesn’t make worse”.
  • Current attempts to end the “blame game” between different levels of government are not going to work. Someone has to have the legal power to take responsibility.
  • The only credible way to fix the problem is to give the central government the legal power to call the shots i.e. to over-ride the states.
  • The argument that the states form a bulwark against the potential tyranny of the national government is “far-fetched”. Australia has states because this was the price of becoming a nation, not because the fathers of federation thought that an intermediate level of government was necessary to avoid tyranny.
I agree, more or less, with the first three points, but disagree with the last two. What reason do we have for thinking that a government attempting to run schools and hospitals out of Canberra would do a better job than one trying to run them from some office in a state capital? Absolutely none! And I think that Tony Abbott agrees with me. What he has in mind is that if the federal government was able to over-ride the states on health and education the most likely result would be for public hospital and school services to be “provided on a contestable basis by a range of independent and autonomous organisations as well as by state-government instrumentalities” (p 129). That sounds to me like a move in the right direction, but we can’t be sure that some control freak in charge of the central government would not attempt to intervene more directly in the management of hospitals and schools if he/she had the power to do so.

As I see it, the main problem of the federation arise from the stupidity of the central government in its choice of forms of intervention. The basic problem in both hospitals and schools prior to federal intervention was that people were unhappy with the services that state governments were providing from tax revenues. Instead of giving state governments more money to waste, the central government should have given people back some of the money they had paid in taxes so that they could purchase alternative services.

The central government does not need additional power in order to achieve contestable service provision. It just needs to stop propping up inefficient state bureaucracies and give power back to the people.

In concluding I would like to commend Tony Abbott for presenting his views in a forthright manner. It is nice to be able to disagree with quite a lot of the things he has written and yet still feel that, as politicians go, Tony Abbott is not a bad bloke.




Postscript: August 2018

Nine years on it is obvious that the defining characteristic of Tony Abbott’s policy stance hasn’t been centralism, Hayekian liberalism or Burkean conservatism. The defining characteristic has been his attitude to climate change.

It is possible to point to some differences between his current approach to climate change, the approach he adopted when prime minister and the approach adopted in Battlelines. However, I see reasonable consistency in his position on this issue. In Battlelines he wrote:

“It sounds like common sense to minimise human impact on the environment and to reduce the human contribution to increased atmospheric gas concentrations. It doesn’t make much sense, though, to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future”.

In a recent speech Abbott said:

“I have never thought that reducing emissions should be a fundamental goal of policy, just something that’s worth doing if the cost is modest.
I have never thought that climate change was, to quote Kevin Rudd, the ‘great moral challenge of our generation’.
It was an issue, that’s all, and – at least on the actual changes we’ve so far seen – not a very significant one compared to man’s inhumanity to man; maintaining and improving living standards; and even to many other environmental issues such as degraded bush and waterways, particulate pollution, water quality in the third world, deforestation, and urban overcrowding.”

In my view Tony Abbott has shown too little recognition of the risks associated with climate change. He would be on firmer ground to argue that emissions reduction targets do little to mitigate those risks.

As politicians go, Abbott seems to have been fairly consistent in his views. However, I have revised my view that he is “not a bad bloke”. His recent behaviour in destabilizing the leadership of the Liberal Party has been appalling.

In Battlelines Abbott posed the question: “How can Australians, individually and collectively come closer to being their ‘best selves’ and what can the Liberal Party do to bring this about?” Abbott should think more about his own contribution in that regard. He hasn’t even been able to avoid doing harm to the electoral prospects of the Liberal Party. If Abbott’s recent failure to be his best self assists a Labor government to come to power in the near future we are likely to see not only deeper cuts in carbon emissions and higher energy prices, but also the adoption of policies that will make citizens increasingly subject to government regulation in many aspects of their lives.