Monday, July 04, 2011

On monstrous effects

One of my personal favourite villains in political theory is the "utility monster".

In response to the utilitarian theory that we can simply sum up citizens' preferences to determine what policies should be pursued, one of the most obvious counterarguments is to ask what happens when a single person puts so much weight on his or her own happiness that it fundamentally distorts any policy calculations. Taken to extremes, the hypothetical creature forces any utilitarian calculus to produce a distribution of benefits that's quickly and easily rejected as fundamentally unfair - with all other interests being subordinate to the utility monster's whims.

Of course, the very idea is preposterous. Ludicrous. Utterly apart from reality.

With just one problem: can anybody say with confidence that our economic policy-making does anything but to encourage exactly that type of distortion?

A mere 29 finance and resource corporations are now capturing close to a majority of all of the net corporate profits in Canada. And our policies are based on shoveling ever more money into their coffers, relying on the theory that their already-massive profits make them more likely to be able to run up the score even further in the future.

And an increasing proportion of individual wealth is similarly becoming more and more concentrated - with that process again defended through the suggestion that we should want to pour money into the hands of people who have proven both their dedication and their aptitude in pursuing wealth for its own sake, since it results in a higher society-wide number (however unfairly distributed).

In other words, our policies are devoted toward the perpetual pursuit of an aggregate measure of economic outcomes - with no regard for either the harmful effects of inequality which are exacerbated by that narrow focus, or the dangers of incentivizing the creation of ever larger and greedier wealth monsters.

So if we can see why the utility monster serves as a compelling argument against pursuing pure aggregate utilitarianism as a matter of political theory, shouldn't it be obvious that it's an equally damning indictment of what's become far too widely accepted as conventional economic wisdom?

[Edit: fixed wording, added label.]

7 comments:

  1. I hope the NDP becomes fearless on this issue. I can never understand why "class warfare" always scares US Democrats, they have been practicing class warfare since the first human realized there were classes.

    ReplyDelete
  2. jurist8:31 a.m.

    The usual debate (particularly for the Dems) is whether it's best to try to rally support on the left or avoid provoking corporate backlash. But I'd agree that the right answer is to build the strongest and most sustainable countermovement possible to balance out the ever-present corporate influence, not to hope that appeasing big money in the short term can serve as a successful strategy.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Purple Library Guy1:48 p.m.

    For me the major problem with appeasing big money as a strategy is that it never works, at least not until you end up with nothing left at all.
    Every policy concession simply moves the standard of what counts as radical and foolish policy, the new target being whatever policies have not yet been conceded.  Repeat until you have no actual policies left and turn into Tony Blair . . . or (any influential US Democratic politician).
    Essentially, such concessions are a signal to the right that vilifying your policies is a winning strategy, and they will win with it again and again as long as you keep surrendering.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Let me play devil's advocate for a bit. Among the classical utilitarians, Bentham would hold that corporations aren't relevant to the utilitarian calculus; all that matters is people and their actual benefit (Mill would take a similar line). So, in the face of an individual whose actual benefits are so frighteningly huge, the classical utilitarians would ask simply: and what's so wrong with that? Why shouldn't people who would benefit greatly be given more consideration than those with less at stake? (And, similarly, for those who would be greatly harmed.) 
    Among more recent utilitarians, most hew pretty close to just that line. It amounts to denying the claim that inequality is morally or politically important. Peter Singer's an interesting case here, though, as he tries to get around how counterintuitive it is to deny the moral importance of inequality. His point is that those who have very little will benefit more from a small redistribution than those who have very much would benefit from a much larger redistribution. That is, giving a million dollars to a billionaire produces less benefit than giving a hundred dollars to someone with nothing. So, Singer or someone like him would point out that the real problem here is the crudity of the cost/benefit calculation, not aggregating as such.

    There are also those recent utilitarians who hold that utilitarianism should target rules and general principles rather than individual actions. The tendency there would be to accommodate egalitarianism within utilitarianism, by arguing that a rule or general principle which supports equality is, all things being equal, productive of greater utility than any other rule. So, they hold, it's not actually the case that utilitarianism as such leads to inegalitarian outcomes, only that unsophisticated varieties of utilitarianism have that outcome -- and so much the worse for them.

    So, rather than utilitarianism, or aggregating, isn't the real problem the simple failure to take inequality seriously?

    ReplyDelete
  5. jurist4:57 p.m.

    I'll readily agree that the problem isn't with utilitarianism as such, but rather with the aggregated form of it. But I'd see the other two problems as linked: any focus on an aggregate measure carries with it an inherent disregard for inequality as a relevant issue.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Well, all utilitarians aggregate. That's the point, really. They take some feature -- call it happiness or well being or utility -- and consider the total available within a given population. The more available, the more preferable the outcome. If you're not aggregating, you're not a utilitarian.

    Aggregation, by its nature, does imply taking certain details of the distribution less seriously than others. If what matters is increasing the aggregate amount of something within the population, then, in particular, how evenly that thing is distributed becomes less important. There's no obvious difference between distributing 50 units between two people by giving each 25 or by giving one 50, at least from the perspective of simple aggregation.

    But it doesn't follow that you can't pay any attention to (in)equality from an aggregative perspective, only that you're going to have to do it in a way that treats equality as a derivative feature of the system, not a primary one. 

    That's the point of Singer's attempt to show that inequality can be somewhat averted by noticing how much well being someone attains from a given policy depends, in part, on how well off that person is initially. Simple aggregation misses the modifier inherent in the starting position. Similarly, it's the point of the rule utilitarians' argument that rules which prohibit (severely) inegalitarian distributions are preferable to rules which permit such distributions. Simple aggregation mistakenly focuses on individual actions in isolation.

    Neither of these forms of utilitarianism has much purchase in (at least popular) economic debates. So, again, I think that's the better objection: not that aggregation is obviously incorrect, but doing aggregation badly or carelessly or crudly will lead to obviously objectionable results.

    (After all, economists are probably never going to accept equality as a guiding principle, at least in our lifetimes, but they might accept a better way of aggregating the goods that they measure.)

    ReplyDelete
  7. <span>Well, all utilitarians aggregate. That's the point, really. They take some feature -- call it happiness or well being or utility -- and consider the total available within a given population. The more available, the more preferable the outcome. If you're not aggregating, you're not a utilitarian.  
     
    Aggregation, by its nature, does imply taking certain details of the distribution less seriously than others. If what matters is increasing the aggregate amount of something within the population, then, in particular, how evenly that thing is distributed becomes less important. There's no obvious difference between distributing 50 units between two people by giving each 25 or by giving one 50, at least from the perspective of simple aggregation.  
     
    But it doesn't follow that you can't pay any attention to (in)equality from an aggregative perspective, only that you're going to have to do it in a way that treats equality as a derivative feature of the system, not a primary one.   
     
    That's the point of Singer's attempt to show that inequality can be somewhat averted by noticing how much well being someone attains from a given policy depends, in part, on how well off that person is initially. Simple aggregation misses the modifier inherent in the starting position. Similarly, it's the point of the rule utilitarians' argument that rules which prohibit (severely) inegalitarian distributions are preferable to rules which permit such distributions. Simple aggregation mistakenly focuses on individual actions in isolation.  
     
    Neither of these forms of utilitarianism has much purchase in (at least popular) economic debates. So, again, I think that's the better objection: not that aggregation is obviously incorrect, but doing aggregation badly or carelessly or crudly will lead to obviously objectionable results.  
     
    (After all, economists are probably never going to accept equality as a guiding principle, at least in our lifetimes, but they might accept a better way of aggregating the goods that they measure.)</span>

    ReplyDelete