Modern social science, and especially in economics in its Samuelsonian forms, has become expert in simple human motivations, such as Max U and his simple consequences. But meaning is missing, which is to say that language and ethics are. Economists are slowly learning what other social scientists, not to speak of poets and novelists, have long known – that people cooperate, mainly, and when they do they talk, and when they talk they inscribe the social world with meaning good and bad, sacred and profane, right and wrong. The inscriptions then make their firms and churches and governments work. We need a science of such matters, what Vernon Smith and I call (borrowing Bart Wilson’s term) “humanomics” (McCloskey 2011; Smith 2012).
Gatherings of humans are held together by language games. The games are empty, “cheap talk,” in a society of a tyrant surrounded by slaves. But in a free society we must converse. Sweet talk, which merely in the paid sector is fully a quarter of earnings, holds us to our tasks, inspires us to charity and courage, illuminates our discoveries. One can see it working (to give what Herb Gintis once demanded of me, the killer app of humanomics) in the rise of conversation in the eighteenth century in Europe, and especially in those hives of the bourgeoisie in Amsterdam and Edinburgh and Philadelphia. Free people speak their minds, we say. The image is apt. Free speaking produced conversations that yielded amazing institutional and technological innovations, and the modern world.
Proving such propositions is both easy and hard, easy because evidence for it is littered over every human civilization, hard because economists have persuaded themselves that Prudence Only is all there is to human civilization. But let me try.
So-called Samuelsonian economics is the main sort at American universities today. It says that all human behavior can be captured in a utility function characterizing that sociopathic fellow, Max U. Max treats everyone as a vending machine. His pleasure tops everything.
The only way Samuelsonian economics can acknowledge anything else, such as love, is to reduce it to food for the implicitly male and proud lover, on a par with the other “goods” he consumes, such as ice cream cones or apartment space or amusing gadgets from Brookstone. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the senior devil Screwtape is in fact suspicious of the very existence of “love,” and reinterprets it as interest. God’s “love” for human beings, “of course, is an impossibility … All his talk about Love must be a disguise for something else – He must have some real motive … What does he stand to make out of them?” ([1943] 1961, 86).
A Samuelsonian economist will say, “Oh, stop it. It’s easy to include ‘love’ in economics. Just put the beloved’s utility into the lover’s utility function, ULover(StuffLover, UtilityBeloved).” Neat. Thomas Hobbes, who seems to have had little to do in his life with love, wrote in the economistic way in 1651: “That which men desire they are also said to Love … so that desire and love are the same thing … But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth Good” (I, Ch. 6, 24). Or, the modern economists say, “goods.” But to adopt such a vocabulary is to absorb the beloved into the psyche of the lover, as so much utility-making motivation. A certain kind of Marxist economist makes the same reduction to interest, such as class interest. The grumpy but great libertarian economist Murray Rothbard was incensed when some decades ago I called him and George Stigler “Stalinists.” George, I think, got the joke: that old line Marxists and new line Chicago Schoolers and medium-line Misesians have in common a faith that Interest Rules. Every time (except of course in their own often courageous academic careers).
St. Thomas Aquinas called love-in-a-utility-function “concupiscent love” – “as when we love wine, wishing to enjoy its sweetness, or when we love some person for our own purposes of pleasure” ([c.1269–1272] 1999, section on “Hope”; cited in Pope 2002, 237).1 It can be virtuous or not, depending on its object. But it is not the highest love unless it ascends to love of the other for the sake of their own being. “Rare is the love of goods,” the theologian David Klemm remarks, “that remains true to the love of God as the final resting place of the heart’s desire” (2004, 224). You don’t need to be a Christian to see Klemm’s point.
The philosopher Michael Stocker notes that a psychological egotist of the sort commended in modern economics could get the pleasure from the thing lovers do, “have absorbing talks, make love, eat delicious meals, see interesting films, and so on, and so on,” but would not love: “For it is essential to the very concept of love to care for the beloved … To the extent that I act … towards you with the final goal of getting pleasure … I do not act for your sake … What is lacking in these theories is simply – or not so simply – the person. For love, friendship, affection, fellow feeling, and community all require that the other person be an essential part of what is valued” ([1976] 1997, 68–69, 71).
And the beloved must be a living value in himself. If you love him out of pride or mere vanity he is reduced to a thing, a mirror, no longer a person. Love is therefore not the same thing as mere absorbing altruism. You need to explain this to the economists and other utilitarians.
Your mother loves you, in one restricted sense, for the altruistic pleasure you provide to her. When you got your PhD she got utilitarian pleasure in two ways. First, she got some pleasure directly – that she is the mother of such a brilliant child. It reflected on her own brilliance, you see, or on her own excellence in mothering. It added to her utility-account some points earned, straightforward pleasure, like frequent-flyer mileage. And, second, she got some pleasure indirectly, because you did so well – for yourself, to be sure, yet as a pleasure to her. It is not for your sake. It is as though you were happy and accomplished for her. Even if no one else knew that you had your PhD, she would know, and know the material pleasure and higher satisfactions your education would give you, and would be glad for her sake. It was “on her account,” as the revealingly bourgeois expression says. That is, she absorbs your utility into hers. If you are happy, she is happy, but derivatively. It is a return on her capital investment in motherhood. It’s still a matter of points earned for her utility.
Economists think this is a complete description of your mother’s love. Hallmark could make a card for the economist to send to his mother: “Mom, I maximize your utility.” The great Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, for example, seems to think in this fashion, as do his numerous followers. “We assume that children have the same utility function as their parents,” Becker wrote in a classic paper with Nigel Tomes, “and are produced without mating, or asexually. A given family then maintains its identity indefinitely, and its fortunes can be followed over as many generations as desired. Asexual reproduction could be replaced without any effect on the analysis by perfect assortative mating: each person, in effect, then mates with his own image” (1979, 1161).
Well. So much for happy and loving families; Tolstoy be damned.
Becker is rather more careful than his followers, actually, noting in an earlier paper that “loving someone usually involves caring about what happens to him or her” ([1974] 1976, 233). He realizes that love – or as he usually styles it, with embarrassed male scare quotes, “love” – entails more than “caring” in his restricted sense: “If M cares about F, M’s utility would depend on the commodity consumption of F as well as on his own” (234). This is an attempt to acknowledge the evident truth that much of consumption and income-earning is on behalf of someone not the direct purchaser or income earner. After all, in the average American family with children, roughly 35 percent of expenditure is directed at the kids (Folbre 2001, 112). Moms are not buying all those frozen pizzas to feed themselves. How do we explain commercial engagement in the context of a community bound by such strange gifts?
But, anyway, Becker in this paper is willing to reduce a family to the husband’s – sorry, I mean “M’s” – utility, using a methodological twist characteristic of Chicago economics: “if one member of the household – the ‘head’ – cares enough about other members to transfer resources to them, this household would act as if it maximized the ‘head’s’ preference function ([1974] 1976, 236–237).” That’s nice so long as you are not worried about reinventing the common-law doctrine of feme covert in mathematical form. Believe me, as a Chicago School economist myself I attest that such a strange view has its uses for science. Really, it does. I’ve written whole books, scores of professional papers, going further, triumphantly concluding that all you need for historical explanation is “maximum utility.”
But I was wrong. The economist’s theory is not complete. For one thing, the behaviorism and positivism that often go along with utilitarianism are an unnecessary narrowing of the scientific evidence. Whitehead remarked in 1938 that “in such behavioristic doctrines, importance and expression must be banished and can never be intelligently employed.” He added cleverly: “A consistent behaviorist cannot feel it important to refute my statement. He can only behave” ([1938] 1968, 23). In 1982 Stuart Hampshire declared that our knowledge of our own minds, including ethical intentions, “deserves the title of knowledge no less than the kind of knowledge of past, present and future states of the world we derive from perception, from memory and from inductive inference” (274).
As the feminist philosopher Virginia Held notes, relationships “are not reducible to the properties of individual entities that can be observed by an outsider and mapped into a causal scientific framework” (1993, 8). She may be giving too much away: the meaning of a relationship, I repeat, is just as “scientific” as is a budget constraint. We do not have to go on forever and ever accepting the definition of “scientific” that happened to be popular among certain English and Austrian academic philosophers around 1922. Your love for your son is real and scientific and motivational, though in some circumstances a behaviorist psychologist watching you from a great height might have quite a lot of trouble “observing” it.
More important, treating others as “inputs” into a self’s utility function, as Becker and Tomes (1979) put it, is to treat the others as means, not as ends. Immanuel Kant said two centuries ago in effect that your mother, if she is truly and fully loving, loves you as an end, for your own sweet sake. You may be a rotten kid, an ax-murderer on death row. You’re not even a PhD. You give her “nothing but grief,” as we say. In all the indirect, derivative ways you are a catastrophe. And yet she goes on loving you, and stands wailing in front of the prison on the night of your execution. Economists need to understand what everyone else already understands, and what the economists themselves understood before they went to graduate school, that such love is of course commonplace. It is common in your own blessed mother, and everywhere in most mothers and fathers and children and friends.
You see it, too, in the doctor’s love for healing, in the engineer’s for building, in the soldier’s for the fatherland (or mother country), in the economic scientist’s for the advance of economic science, down in the marketplace and up in the cathedral. As the economist Andrew Yuengert puts it, “Without ultimate ends, there is no reason to be an economic researcher: economics is for ethics” (2004, 12). Frank Knight understood this eighty years ago. To be sure, there is routine form-filling in being a doctor and insincere uses of statistical significance in being an economic scientist, but without loving and transcendent ends such lives would have no point. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre makes a distinction between goods “internal to a practice,” like being a good scientist, and those that are external, such as winning the Nobel Prize, or getting rich. He notes that utilitarianism, even in so saintly a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill, cannot admit the distinction (1981, 185).
Such loves, or internal goods, defeat the economistic view that all virtues can be collapsed into utility. Utility is the measure of an ends-means logic, what I call Prudence Only. Loving an end goes beyond means. Whatever happiness of identity a painter earns may be measured by the income he gives up. But that does not make the happiness the same thing as the income (Abbing 2002). The happiness is comparable to the happiness of identity a skillful truck driver earns or a skillful tennis player, whether poorly or well paid.
Amartya Sen (1987) speaks of a “duality” in ethics between what he calls “well-being,” which is the utilitarian idea of people as pots into which pleasure is dumped, and “agency.” Agency is “the ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc.” It “can well be geared to considerations not covered – at least not fully covered – by his or her own well-being” (41). But I would call this “agency” the virtues of faith and hope and justice and, above all, love.
The philosopher David Schmidtz likewise speaks about two separate “rational” sources of altruism. (He means “economistic” when he writes “rational.”) One source he calls “concern” for others, “which is to say [that the beloved’s] welfare enters the picture through our preference function,” that is, through our tastes for pleasures. It is the Beckerian notion of “caring.” Schmidtz observes that there is quite a different altruism, too, a nobler one on its face, which he calls “respect,” by which we constrain ourselves in regard to the beloved. “We manifest concern for people when we care about how life is treating them (so to speak), whereas we manifest respect for people when we care about how we are treating them, and constrain ourselves accordingly” ([1993] 1996, 164), italics mine). An economist would say that one has preferences over bundles of goods to be consumed (“concern”), but also over the constraints to be observed (“respect”).
But to these usefully distinguished sources of caring, which fit into Samuelsonian economics, I would add a third and a glorious one – one Schmidtz would acknowledge, of course, if he were not intent in the article on showing a “selfish” rationale for love. The third is sheer love, appreciation for the beloved, the expression here below of agape/caritas/holy charity. That it is sheer does not make it unanalyzable. The political scientist Joan Tronto analyzes the ethics of care as politics, seeing in the ethical use of sheer love an attentiveness, a responsibility, a competence, and a responsiveness (1993, 127–137). Attentiveness is temperance and humility in the face of the plight of others. Competence is a species of prudence. Responsibility arises from human solidarity, keeping faith with who we are. And responsiveness is the justice of attending to others. That is, Love is not reducible to Utility, and is a virtue only when in context with other virtues: temperance, humility, prudence, justice, solidarity, faith.
Of course. Only an economist or an evolutionary psychologist would think otherwise and put embarrassed quotation marks around the very word “love,” and then reduce it to gain. The most extreme of the evolutionary psychologists claim that love itself is an evolutionary result of Prudence Only, this time of the very genes themselves. Consider Steven Pinker (1997) on the rationality of friendship: “now that you value the person, they should value you even more … because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times … This runaway process is what we call friendship” (508–509).
No, Steven, it is what we call self-absorption. The cognitive philosopher Jerry Fodor remarks of Pinker’s one-factor theory:
A concern to propagate one’s genes would rationalize one’s acting to promote one’s children’s welfare; but so too would an interest in one’s children’s welfare. Not all of one’s motives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn’t there be quite a few such things? Why shouldn’t one’s children be among them?”
(1998, 12)
He quotes Pinker on the evolutionary explanation for why we humans like stories, namely, that they provide useful tips for life, as, for example, to someone in Hamlet’s fix: “What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? Good question.” Startlingly, Pinker does not appear to be joking here. It’s unintentionally funny, this “scientific” attempt to get along without sheer love, or sheer courage, or to get along without the aesthetic pleasure of stories reflecting faith and hope.
Even the admirable philosopher the late Robert Nozick fell prey to the reductionism of socio- and psycho- and evolutionary- and brain-science-biology. But characteristically he had wise doubts. “Someone could agree that ethics originates in the function of coordinating activity to mutual benefit, yet hold that ethics now is valuable because of additional functions that it has acquired” (2001, 300). She certainly could.
In the analysis of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, sheer Love has “four main conceptually necessary features.” It must be “a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved” (2004, 79, italics supplied). That’s the main point, and is the way the utility-driven mother imagined by economists is less than perfectly loving. Her utility function reflects precisely, and only, self-interest.
Frankfurt, by the way, equivocates between “love” as love of persons and “love” also of non-persons such as The Revolution or Art or God. Thus he adds that love is “ineluctably personal” (2004, 79), which I believe would be better expressed as “ineluctably particular.” Anyway, the person [or transcendent thing] “is loved for himself or for herself as such, and not as an instance of type” (80). One loves Harriet particularly, not incidentally as a type of “woman” or “Vermonter,” however much one might admire those types. As Nozick puts it, “the love is not transferable to someone else with the same characteristics … One loves the particular person one actually encountered … Love is historical” (1974, 168).
And “the lover identifies with his beloved.” The two share so much that the line between their selves is forgotten. A friend, said Aristotle, is another self. And finally “loving entails constraints on the will. It is not simply up to us” (Frankfurt 2004, 80). Our love for our children, though involuntary and often enough unreciprocated, is glorious. But it must be a give-and-take, acknowledging the constraints imposed by the children. “No, Ma. We’d better have Thanksgiving this year at my mother-in-law’s house.” The constraining is not simply up to us, observe, though it can and should be self-disciplined, too, if it is to be a virtue rather than merely an unrestrained and animal passion.
So: disinterested, particular, identifying, and constraining. None of these four fits an epicurean, utilitarian, pleasuring definition of love. The economist’s Maximum-Utility Man, Mr. Max U, is, above all, self-interested. He couldn’t care less if the item satisfying his interest is this particular one. He has no identity himself to project onto the beloved. And he regards all constraints on utility maximization as bad. “The hedonistic conception of man,” Thorstein Veblen thundered in 1898, “is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogenous globule of happiness under the influence of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum” (389).
If the kid cries too much, declares our Max U, the isolated, self-interested man, regardless of whether he is the father, let us send him to probable death in an eighteenth-century orphanage, since this particular kid is fungible with others. A house “filled with domestic cares and the noise of children” would make a poor place for discoursing on social justice and the raising of children (Coulson and Pearcey 2001, 36). Thus on five occasions did Jean-Jacques Rousseau act, that great pre-Romantic teacher of good behavior in love and education.
Samuelsonian economics takes need-love, or more narrowly goods-and-services-concupiscence, as all love, and calls it pleasure or utility. But, as has been repeatedly discovered in experimental and observational studies, the argument fails even in its own terms. For example, suppose a Samuelsonian economist says that contribution to public goods – say, the British lifeboat service – is utility-based, in the sense that it is motivated altruistically, by a desire to make sure there are enough lifeboats. That is, the economic agent gives to the lifeboat fund not to cover the highly unlikely event that he himself might otherwise drown – pace Steven Pinker – but because many other people will. He is public spirited, altruistic.
Yet he is still a Max-U fellow: he gets utility from contemplating the ample provision of lifeboats. It’s like your mother Maxine U getting pleasure from your graduation. If she could get the graduation without spending a dime on you, all the better, right? Now such an attitude is an ethical improvement over screw-you individualism of a Steinerian or Randian or Pinkerian sort. But it seems to be empirically false. In 1993, Robert Sugden, for example, noted that a plain implication of Max-U altruism is that £1 given by Max U would be a perfect substitute for £1 given by anyone else, at least in Mr. U’s opinion. So Max U would of course free ride on other people’s contributions to lifeboats. Every time. According to Sugden’s (1993) empirical work on the lifeboat fund, however, many people in Britain do not so free ride.
Which is evident: there is such a fund, and it does very well in bequests and in coins dropped into collection jars in pubs. Evidently British people feel that free riding in such a case would be bad – which is not a sentiment that would motivate a Max U-er. Sugden and others have shown repeatedly that people do not view the contributions of others as fungible £-for-£ with their own contributions. People take the view that there is something ineluctably particular about their giving. So also in blood donations and in going over the top at the Somme. Altruistic hedonism does not look like a very good explanation of human solidarity and courage (Sugden 1993).
You could reply that the lifeboat-giver or the blood donor or the voter down at the polling place get utility from the sheer act of giving their money or time without recompense. The love for God, in the altruistic hedonist view, is no different from satisfying an itch or buying a rugby shirt. Therefore economists studying the economics of religion, even if believers themselves, sometimes stop their concerns at explaining church attendance with the same tools one would use for explaining visits to the mall. But that is merely a pointless renaming of love – or justice or faith or some other virtue of steadfastness. As C. S. Lewis remarks, “one must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates” ([1960] 1991, 120).
Lewis offers a ladder of love. The four loves human and divine are, climbing upward: affection, human sexual desiring (eros), human friendship (philia), and finally charity, that is, agape. The lowest is one’s love for non-humans, such as a dog or a thing. The highest includes, Aquinas says, a sacred version of friendship, the astonishing friendship between unequals of humans and God. Agape is God’s gift, notes Lewis, following orthodoxy since Augustine, for God “can awaken in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love” ([1960] 1991, 140). The proud blasphemy that we are loved for our evident merits dissolves into “a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need … We become ‘jolly beggars’” (131).
The other three loves for humans, and I suppose also the best love for non-humans, Lewis would group under “natural loves.” These are not to be disdained. But they need to have that touch of transcendent agape, transcendent “charity,” if love “is to be kept sweet” ([1960] 1991, 7, 116). “Whatsoever love elects to bless,” says Richard Wilbur, “Brims to a sweet excess / That can without depletion overflow” ([1971] 1988, 61). The overflow gives a point to a virtuous life, whether medieval or socialist or bourgeois.
At this juncture, the male, prudent, scientific, economistic, and materialist stoic breaks into indignant rhetorical questions: “Who cares about sweetness? ‘Sour’ tastes fine to me. Point, schmoit. What possibly could love have to do with the hard world of a commercial economy? Let’s get practical here. Can’t we do just fine in a world of bourgeois business without love? Isn’t that the, uh, point of economics? Isn’t love something for weekends and the Home?” Or as Yeats said, “The Catholic Church created a system only possible for saints … Its definition of the good was narrow, but it did not set out to make shopkeepers” ([1909] 1965, entry 51, 334).
Economics since its invention as a system of thought in the eighteenth century has tried to “economize on love,” that is, to get along without it, that is, to justify shopkeepers far removed from saintly or poetic Love. Economics has elevated Prudence, an androgynous virtue counted good in both men and women as stereotypically viewed, into the only spring of action. Tracing it back to Epicurus, Alfred North Whitehead complained that “this basis for philosophical understanding is analogous to an endeavor to elucidate the sociology of modern civilization as wholly derivative from the traffic signals on the main roads. The motions of the cars are conditioned by these signals. But the signals are not the reason for the traffic” ([1938] 1968, 31).
The way most economists do their job is to ask, Where’s the prudence? “The rudimentary hard-headedness attributed to them by modern economics,” as Sen puts it, is the only virtue in the economist’s world (1987, 2). When in the 1960s I wanted to show that Victorian Britain did not fail economically I used Prudence-Only calculations of productivity to calculate that there was no residual to be accounted for by causes other than Prudence. When in the 1970s I wanted to show that medieval English open fields were insurance in an age of terrifying uncertainty I used Prudence-Only calculations of portfolio balance to show that Prudence sufficed to explain the scattering of a peasant’s plots of land. When in the 1980s I wanted to show how to teach economics through applied examples rather than useless theorem-proving – which unfortunately has since then triumphed in advanced economic education – I used Prudence-Only arguments throughout, though I was beginning in that decade to worry that they might not suffice.
Adam Smith asserted in 1776 that “what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom” ([1776] 1981, 457). A splendidly useful principle. Hard-headed. No talk of love, or of any other virtue than prudence. Smith, however, understood well what later economists have gradually come to forget. After all, said Smith as early as 1759 (Smith [1759] 1984), we want people to have a balanced set of virtues, including even love, not merely prudence, and this for all purposes, sacred, profane, business, pleasure, the Good, the Useful, the wide world, and the home, too. All. The legal philosopher Annette Baier argues in “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” that love and obligation, which are both necessary for a society to survive, arise from “appropriate trust” (1994, 10).
One of our crowd, the economist and historian Alexander Field, has based a similar argument on biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert with bread and water you want, you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheer self-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation, and the game’s afoot. Once you and he have chatted a while and built up trust, naturally, you will refrain. But how does trust get a chance? How did it originate? Field argues that it originates from “modules inhibiting intraspecific violence,” that is, from a very long evolution of a taboo on hurting one’s own kind (2004, 300). The “failure to harm” non-kin is hardwired into animals. It evolved from selection at the level of the group, Field argues, not the individual. It’s better for you as a behavioral egoist to kill the man you meet in the desert. But of course you are inhibited in doing so, because you are not in fact such an egoist: that’s best for the human species.
I remember driving once in Amherst past a woman walking towards me on the verge, and the strange thought entering, “Suppose I run her down?” I didn’t, I am very glad to report. But there it was, the potential for intraspecific violence even in a very peaceable and law-abiding woman. André Gide’s novel of 1914, Lafcadio’s Adventures, turns on the utterly pointless murder of a stranger, pushing him off a speeding train, just to see it done. It happens.
But Field’s observation is that usually it does not happen. Considering the opportunities to harm, the inhibitions to doing so must be powerful indeed. For my purposes it doesn’t matter whether the inhibitions come from socialization or from biology. Anyway – and perfectly obviously – we are equipped with desires for both the sacred and the profane, mutually reinforcing and completing. One of the sacred computer chips in our brains or one of the sacred virtues in our characters is “being nice and trusting.”
Adam Smith was not, it seems, a particularly religious man. But he was in his only regular academic job, at Glasgow University ages 28 to 41, a professor of moral philosophy, and he took his assignment seriously. After his death, however, his followers came to believe that a profane Prudence, called “Utility,” rules. Jeremy Bentham and his followers, and especially his twentieth-century descendants Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker, are to blame. These are good men, great scientists, beloved teachers and friends of mine. But their confused advocacy of Prudence Only has been a catastrophe for the science that Adam Smith inaugurated. No need, declare the economists of the late twentieth century, for the non-Prudent virtues – well, maybe a little Justice and Temperance on the side to keep the Prudence on track, but certainly not any need for the sacred, transcendent virtues, such as spiritual love. As Field writes, “To build a discipline on the proposition that [behavioral egoisms] exhaust the range of essential human predispositions is to lead to the unsustainable conclusion that there are no cartels, no racial discrimination, no voting, no voluntary contributions to public goods, and no restraint on first strike (defect) in single play Prisoner’s Dilemmas” (2003, 313). And no nationalism, no honor, no love, no courtesy between strangers.
In our time the Prudence-Only ethic has become “Maximize stockholder wealth, and by the way make sure that you as the CEO or CFO have a good chunk of it, and a little inside knowledge about its present value.” You will find some ethicists in business schools arguing that the reason to be just or loving or temperate is precisely that it is prudent. Your stock options will be worth more if you do not sexually abuse your employees and cheat your customers. Virtue makes more money, doing well by doing good.
This is to miss the point of being virtuous. The point of a life exercising the virtue of love, for example, is its transcendence, not the stock options conferred on one who successfully lies about his commitment to the transcendent. In a famous article, Milton Friedman argued, as the title supplied by a New York Times editor put it, that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits” (1970, 32). Milton argued that a society with more wealth can better pursue its transcendent goals, and more wealth is produced by maximizing profits. That’s right, and is one crucial argument for capitalism. He further argued that a hired manager for Boeing who improves his social standing in Chicago by getting the corporation to give to the Lyric Opera is stealing money from the stockholders. That’s right, too, though there is a contrary economic argument, namely, that the ability to play the noble lord with the stockholders’ money is part of executive compensation. The stockholders would have to pay the manager more in cash than they do if they insisted that he not be allowed to give away the corporation’s money to worthy causes. But most people who have expressed shock or pleasure at Milton’s article have not noticed that he adds a side constraint to the manager’s fiduciary duty to the stockholders: “make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom” (1970, 33, italics added).
The opposite argument is that being honest makes money. As it was expressed in a book on managerial economics, “unethical behavior is neither consistent with value maximization nor employee self-interest” (Arce M. 2004, 265). Wouldn’t that be nice if it were true? The journalist Bennett Daviss wrote in 1999 in the magazine The Futurist an article entitled “Profit from Principle,” with the headline, “Corporations are finding that social responsibility pays off.” “In the new century,” Mr. Daviss believes, “companies will grow their profits only by embracing their new role as the engine of positive social change” (2003, 203, 209). Image ads spread the Good News.
It’s a tough-minded, American idea. A study in 1999 by the Conference Board found that 64 percent of American codes of ethics in businesses are dominated by profits. By contrast, 60 percent of the European codes are dominated by “values” (Donaldson [2000] 2003, 100). When many years ago the Harvard Business School was given more than $20,000,000 to study ethics it initiated courses that collapsed the virtues into the one good of Prudence, the utility of “stakeholders.” Harvard has since then taught thoroughly all the virtue that money can buy.
The point is that Smith got it right and the later economists and calculators have got it wrong. You can’t run on prudence and profit alone a family or a church or a community or even – and this is the surprising point – a capitalist economy. In far-away Japan some decades before Smith, one Miyake Shunro (also known as Miyake Sekian), the director of a newly formed academy for 90 bourgeois students in the merchant city of Osaka, gave his inaugural address on the theme. Tetsuo Najita explains that in Miyake’s discussion a profit is
nothing other than an extension of human reason … Indeed, merchants should not even think of their occupation as being profit seeking but as the ethical acting out of the moral principle of “righteousness” [gi]. When righteousness is acted out in the objective world, Miyake went on, “profit” emerges effortlessly and “of its own accord” without passionate disturbances.
(1987, 91)
In 1726 Japan, as only a little less urgently in Europe at the time, the task was to elevate the status of merchants, the lowest of the four classes of the Tokugawa regime. The elevation entailed leveling.
In Europe the priesthood of all believers cast doubt on God-given hierarchy in general, and yielded the radical egalitarianism of, say, Smith or Kant, with precursors a century before in the literal Levelers. One’s position in the great chain of being came to be seen as a matter of nurture, not of Nature. Thus Smith in that egalitarian year of 1776:
The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of … The difference between … a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education … [F]or the first six or eight years of their existence … neither their parents nor their playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference … [T]hey come to be employed in very different occupations … till at last the vanity of philosophers acknowledge scarce any resemblance … By nature a philosopher is not in genius as disposition half so different from a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound.
(I. ii. 28–30; compare to Peart and Levy 2005)
Similarly in Japan, Conrad Totman notes, the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century witnessed a nascent if minority “belief in universal human potential” and a “defense of callings other than rulership.” The merchant’s son, Ito¯ Jinsai (1627–1705), declared in 1683 that “all men are equally men.” Another scholarly merchant’s son, Nishikawa Joken (1648–1724), wrote even more startlingly, “when all is said and done, there is no ultimate principle that establishes superior and inferior among human beings: the distinctions result from upbringing” (Totman 1993, 181, 359). Obvious, yes? Not to the men of the seventeenth century, in Europe or Japan.
As also for Smith and the other pro-bourgeois intellectuals of the Enlightenment, the philosophical elevation of the bourgeoisie in Japan was achieved by showing business to be consistent with ethical behavior. As in Europe, it took two centuries or so to become widely accepted. From small beginnings in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Japanese gradually reversed the ancient Confucian contempt for merchants, as the Europeans at about the same time reversed their own classical and Christian anti-commercial prejudices.
At length in the new East and in the new West you did not need to be a Chinese general or a Confucian bureaucrat, a Buddhist priest or a samurai, a Christian monk or a duke, to be honorable. Najita explains that gi (recall Benedict on gi-ri: social obligation) meant in Western terms “justice,” but with a prudent emphasis on its calculative side, “the mental capacity to be accurate and hence fair, principled, and thus non-arbitrary, … the human capacity to know external things, evaluate them, and make intellectual judgments as to what was, or was not, just” (1987, 88). A few decades after Miyake Shunro had lectured on bourgeois virtues to the school in Osaka, its new leader declared that “human beings are endowed by heaven at birth with a virtuous essence consisting of compassion, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom” (Nakai Chikuzan [around 1760] as quoted in Totman 1993, 359). It was a Confucian-based egalitarianism, from which Miyake deduced – as Confucius himself, hostile to merchants, did not – “like the stipend of the samurai and the produce of the farmers, the profit of merchants is to be seen as a virtue” (359).
Adam Smith, had he known of these contemporary developments in Japanese thought – though it was, I repeat, a minority movement there – would certainly have agreed, as his latter-day followers in the business-ethics movement do, Robert Solomon, for example. Business needs, Solomon declares, “both ethics and excellence,” a motto that would serve for Japanese and American business nowadays on its sweetest behavior (1992, 21). No greed. No crony capitalism. “Less money, fewer clients,” as Tom Cruise says in Jerry McGuire. No avarice.
A hardened Chicago economist, or just a Chicagoan, might reply, “So? Call me ‘greedy’ or ‘avaricious’ if it makes you feel better, but I like my SUV and my mink, and if screwing other people gets me such toys, fine. What do I care about my so-called ‘soul’?” To which Zeno the Stoic replied, as Gilbert Murray put it, “Would you yourself really like to be rich and corrupted? To have abundance of pleasure and be a worse man? Apparently, when Zeno’s eyes were upon you, it was difficult to say you would” (1915, 30). Zeno’s Roman-Greek follower Epictetus said, “No man would change [honorable poverty] for disreputable wealth” ([c.AD 130] 1920, 286).
It seems so, by the Deathbed Test: what would you wish to remember on your deathbed, more diamond rings consumed or more good deeds done in the world? Drek or mitzvoth? Aristotle wrote that things good by nature are those that “can belong to a person when dead more than alive” (1991, 1367a, 81). “Although therefore riches be a thing which every man wisheth,” wrote Hooker in 1593, “yet no man of judgment can esteem it better to be rich, than wise, virtuous, and religious” (Book One, Chap. 2, X. 2. 189). Unto death.
Leave off, if you wish, the religious part or the death talk. “The virtuous person’s reward is … an entire life of satisfying actions,” writes Daryl Koehn, “while the vicious person’s punishment is a life of actions that produce both unexpected and unintended consequences for himself and others” (2005, 536). Even in consequentialist terms, in other words, an instrumental and materialist view of love is a scientific mistake. A loveless economy would not work. And it would be hell. The secular meaning of the Christian word “hell” is personal corruption, which in truth makes ruling in such a figurative place worse, not better, than serving in heaven. “We must picture Hell,” writes C. S. Lewis, “as a state in which everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, … where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment” ([1943] 1961, ix).
David Schmidtz sees again into the core here. He notes a mental experiment imagined by another philosopher that we could “pull a lever” to decide whether or not to have scruples. “Many of us would pull a lever that would strengthen our disposition to be honest” (1993, 169). But as we actually are after Eden we are weak. If you profess an Abrahamic religion you can call the weakness “original sin.” Or you can argue as Schmidtz does that natural selection has made people, alas, “built to worry about things that can draw blood, not about the decay of their characters” (170).
In The Invisible Heart (2001), a finely crafted “economic romance” (sic), Russell Roberts makes a similar point about the limits of instrumentalism. He improves upon a famous mental experiment of Nozick’s in which you are asked whether you would like to be hitched up to an “experience machine.”
“Superduper neuropsychologists,” Nozick had posited, in a tradition going back through Huxley’s Brave New World and Descartes’ thought experiments to Plato’s cave, “would stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain … Would you plug in?” (1974, 42–44).2 In other words, “what else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” Apparently there’s something more than instrumental feeling, more than what our good friend Max U cares about. As Nozick remarks in another book, “We are not empty containers or buckets to be stuffed with good things” (1989, 102).
Or imagine a “transformation machine,” which would take us at the flick of a switch into the lives and characters of Albert Einstein or Queen Elizabeth I, “really.” If you were starving on the streets of Calcutta you would instantly agree. But among you, you comfortably bourgeois readers, any takers? Roberts sharpens the questions by making clear, in his economist’s way, the opportunity cost. His character Sam Gordon is discussing the matter with his class of high school seniors:
But there’s one detail that I neglected to mention. This imaginary life that you get to experience while on the Dream Machine must replace your actual life. You will never wake up. You enter the room today as the teenager you are. You win the Masters, the Nobel Peace Prize, surpass the popularity of The Beatles, then you grow old and die. It can be a painless death, preceded by [the dreamt experience of] a glorious old age … But after they unhook the last electrode, … they put you into the ground … They cart you away and bring on the next?
(Roberts 2001, 138)
“Still interested?” Sam asks his kids. Of course not. Max U would leap at such a chance to achieve – well, at least to “experience” – utility. But you as your actual self would not do so, because you intend to go on being you. “While a cat will be satisfied leading an animal’s life of sensation and appetite,” remarks Daryl Koehn, “a human being needs something more” (2005, 535).
The difficulty of life, within limits, is its charm. Sen makes the point with the use of his somewhat veiled term “agency” (1987, 43).3 He speaks of an “agency achievement” that is not reducible to “enhancement of well-being” in a utilitarian sense. His way of putting it sounds like David McClelland’s old idea of “need for achievement,” that is to say, the need for an identity that strives. No striving, no identity. You would agree to a magic spell to stop a cancer, surely. If you could repeat your life you might do so, especially if this time you had a chance to get it right. In stories in books and on TV you temporarily enter into imagined lives, perhaps not temporarily enough for your own good.
But scarcity in your own life seems essential for a real human life. Imagine you were an Olympian god. Being immortal, you would have no need for the virtues of hope, faith, courage, temperance, or prudence. These make no sense if you, like the Devil, cannot die. Othello stabs Iago, who replies in defiance, “I am cut but do not die.” Though then he does. Most virtues are useless to someone who really cannot die. Even on Olympus, admittedly, the virtues of love and justice might have political rewards. But what gives human love its special poignancy, and gives human justice its special dignity, is the limit to life. You love a man who will die. You help a woman who is a mere mortal. Not being either a cat or an Olympian god you want a real life with real hazards and rewards, not an experience machine. You wish to retain an identity, a Faith and Hope, as you might put it, named You.
You might as well give in and call it a soul.4
The late eighteenth-century impulse and especially the utilitarian impulse was to force ethics into a behaviorist and naively scientistic mode, reducing it to some “immensely simple” formula, as one of the virtue ethicists put it. For example, many utilitarians and some Kantians do not want to acknowledge the force of words and free will and inner light. I myself acknowledged these un-behaviorist motivations late, finally realizing that the meaning of a human action, not merely its external appearance, is important for its scientific description.
Virginia Held argues that in ethics “we should pay far more attention … to relationships among people, relationships that we cannot see but can be experienced nonetheless” (1993, 8). We would not call a mother “virtuous” who felt no emotion in carrying out her duties towards her children. Nor would we call a good Samaritan “good” who saved the drowning victim in order to achieve fame.5 Or call a business person “ethical” who followed the law out of fear of jail time. Virtue is not merely a matter of observable action. It is dispositional – feeling, for example, love and regret and anguish and joy for our acts of will.
That is, it is a matter of character, ethos, exercising one’s will to do good, to be good. It is a matter of one’s soul.
Notes
1 Quoted in Cessario, “Hope,” 2002, in Pope, Ethics of Aquinas, p. 237. See the similar analysis in Aquinas, Summa theologiae, c.[1270] 1920, Ia IIae, q. 26, art. 4, objection 3, “On the contrary.”
2 William James posed a similar question in Pragmatism ([1907] 1949).
3 “Self-interested behavior can scarcely suffice when agency is important on its own” (Sen 1987, 55).
4 As Nozick asks, “For ethics, might the content of the attribute of having a soul simply be that the being strives, or is capable of striving, to give meaning to its life?” (1974, 50).
5 Compare White, “Kantian Critique” (2006, 239). The example is Kantian.
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