Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

“I'm not sure why you say that Landsburg has only shown things about "current" preferences; the math seems more general than that.” That was sloppy language on my part. What I meant was that from an evolutionary perspective moral preferences evolved to help us obtain resources; they are means to the end of increased resources. If that is true, why should we want the social planner to allocate resources to include moral preferences in the objective function? It’s almost like observing that someone works 80 hours a week, and so including a preference for work along with a preference for money in inferring their utility function. (The difference is that a person can tell you that they don’t like work, and they really just want the money. But economists don’t like to take what people say at face value anyway.) Ultimately this line of thought leads us to ask why we should want a social planner to maximize preferences anyway. One answer is that this is what utilitarian philosophy tells us. But once Landsburg starts to question the bases of the tradition, he invites more fundamental questioning. I think this is was a couple of earlier commentators were getting at in suggesting that he had too narrow a view of morality.

Expand full comment
Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

"I expect the conditions can be considerably weakened, but that it will take a lot more math work to prove that fact." Maybe, but Landsburg says "It is clear that something like Hypothesis 2 is necessary to generate a uniqueness theorem," and the intuition behind the accompanying example (Remark 1, p.8) seems quite general. I suspect the same is true of hypothesis 1. If hypothesis 1 is not true, the topography of the objective function changes as the allocation of goods changes and in general uniqueness fails because the maximum shifts as the topography changes. I suppose it might be possible to find some condition that ensures that the maximum is stationary even though the topography otherwise changes, but I'd surprised if such a condition weren't restrictive.

I should emphasize that I find hypothesis 1 & 2 normatively very attractive. Hypothesis 1 says in effect that your view as to the just distribution of goods should not change as the actual distribution of goods changes, and I think Landsburg is right in saying that this formalizes this requirement "that preferences have genuine ethical content." Hypothesis 2 says that your ethics have to be more than pure self-interest. (Hypothesis 2 does not say that your philosophical preferences must oppose your self-interest. Landsburg's point is that at the allocation that maximizes the objective function, you will believe that you are getting more than you think you deserve, not that you must believe that you don't deserve anything.)

I think it is an attractive normative position to say that if your preferences don't satisfy hypotheses 1 & 2 then we are justified in refusing to consider them in constructing the social planner’s objective function. If we were normatively willing to impose that restriction then it would seem to follow from Landsburg's paper that there would be a unique self-justifying welfare function. Landsburg hints that hypothesis 2 formalizes the basic notion behind Kantian moral philosophy. I don’t know enough about Kantian moral philosophy to know whether he is right about this, but if he is, his paper might amount to a reconciliation of the utilitarian and Kantian traditions. If that is so, it would be a major philosophical contribution.

My concern is that Landsburg’s opening claim is that he will show that the objective function arises endogenously, without the introduction of values from outside the economic model. For this claim to be supported his hypotheses 1 & 2 would have to be descriptively true. No doubt that is why he calls them hypotheses, rather than conditions. But if they are interpreted as conditions imposed for normative reasons, those reasons come from outside of economics. His paper may well be a major contribution to moral philosophy, but I don’t think it succeeds in divorcing economics from moral philosophy.

Expand full comment
25 more comments...

No posts