The book discusses Buchanan's own individualism as well as a broadside attack upon individualism by Roberto Mangabeira Unger of the Critical Legal Studies movement. It then expounds Bunge's metaphysics in lay terms and applies it to Friedrich Hayek's dismissal of social justice as a mirage, to Ayn Rand's concept of natural rights, and to the evolutionary federalism of the social psychologist Raymond Cattell. It concludes by arguing for a plurality of contracts.
CHAPTER 1: JAMES McGILL BUCHANAN AND INDIVIDUALISM
1.1. The Work of Buchanan
1.2. Buchanan's Individualism
1.3. A First Move away from Strict Methodological
Individualism
1.4. New Contractarian Man
1.5. The Methodological Meaning of the Unanimity Rule
1.6. Additional Requirements for New Contractarian Man
1.7. Potential Abuses of the Unanimity Criterion
1.8. Duties to Obey the Laws?
1.9. Contractarianism and Natural Rights
1.10. Conclusion
CHAPTER 2: ROBERTO MANGABEIRA UNGER AND COLLECTIVISM
2.1. Unger's Characterization of Individualism
2.2. Buchanan's Implicit Agreement with Unger
2.3. Unger's Criticisms of the Individualist World View
2.4. The Factual Basis for the Separation of Theory and Fact
2.5. Unger on the Separation of Reason and Desire in
Individualism
2.6. Response to Unger
2.7. Unger on the Separation of Public Rules and Private
Values
2.8. Response to Unger
2.9. Unger's Evolutionism
2.10. Conclusion
CHAPTER 3: MARIO AUGUSTO BUNGE AND SCIENTIFIC METAPHYSICS
3.1. The Aim of Bunge's Philosophy
3.2. Bunge's Furniture
3.3. Bunge's Systemism
3.4. Bunge on Mind
3.5. Bunge's Systemic Conception of Society
3.6. Conclusion
CHAPTER 4: FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK AND THE MIRAGE OF SOCIAL
JUSTICE
4.1. Hayek's Own Argument against Social Justice
4.2. The Metaphysical Issues in Hayek's Argument
4.3. Progressive Taxes Not Necessarily a Mirage
4.4. Multi-Generational Social Contracts
4.5. Elitism
CHAPTER 5: AYN RAND AND NATURAL RIGHTS
5.1. Similarities and Differences with Contractarianism
5.2. The Arguments for Natural Rights
5.3. The Advantages of Contractarianism over Natural Rights
5.4. Value and Fact Again
CHAPTER 6: RAYMOND BERNARD CATTELL AND EVOLUTIONARY
FEDERALISM
6.1. The Self of Self-Interest
6.2. Teleology
6.3. Cattell's Morality from Science
6.4. Criticism of Cattell
6.5. The Ontology of Federalism
6.6. Problems for Contractarianism in the Composition of
Countries
6.7. Evolutionary Morality
6.8. Conclusion
ENDNOTES
APPENDICES
No. 1. Egalitarianism as a Morality Racket
No. 2. Review of Robert H. Frank, _Choosing the Right Pond_
No. 3. Review of David Gauthier, _Morals by Agreement_
No. 4. Contracting for Natural Rights
Bibliography
About the Author
Name Index
Glossary
Subject Index
Man as a Part of Nature Subindex
Divine Subindex
0.1. Philosophy suffers from an excess of convoluted introspection. One result is that concepts multiply unchecked. That some events have observable causes gets reified into a First Cause or, in a more secular age, to the thesis that every event is fatalistically determined. Another drawback of convoluted introspection is that tiny but crucial assumptions slip in, often unawares, with the result that densely argued counter-tomes are written in reply and no progress is made toward any kind of consensus. At bottom, subjectivity reigns.
0.2. I exaggerate. Toward the other pole of the subjectivity- objectivity continuum, consensus among scientists is in fact always at a good healthy distance from compulsive unanimity. New theories replace old, and at any one time the evidence can usually be interpreted two ways. Indeed, it is possible to pile epicycle upon epicycle in the Ptolemaic system of the heavens and approximate the ellipses planets travel in the Copernican system. What cinched the case for Copernicus was not simplicity--after all alchemy is simpler than chemisty. Nor was it experiment--there were no moon shots back then. Rather it was Newton's foundations. He established a physics for the earth and the heavens alike. Earthly physics we can verify, and it does not jell with the Ptolemaic system.
0.3. Indeed, striving to make subtheories jell with one another is a major aim of scientific research. Think of relativity and quantum mechanics in physics, or of micro- and macro-economics. Think also of why most scientists reject parapsychology as quickly as they do. By the 1890s, the sciences had advanced to the point that the great Charles Peirce called for a grounding of their underlying assumptions in a scientific metaphysics.
0.4. Eighty years later, Mario Bunge was the first scientist to carry out Peirce's program. I shall expound his results in non-mathematical detail in Chapter 3, but for now only a few remarks. First, Bunge treats metaphysics as a science and therefore controllable by the results of other sciences. Bunge's scheme is the *first* such carrying out of Peirce's program, not the last. Second, Bunge strives to keep his metaphysics quite general. For example, his chapter on change comes before the one on space and time. This way, should relativity theory get modified, Bunge may not have to revise his concepts and results on change. He may have to anyhow, which only goes to show that his whole enterprise is open to revision. Third, science, including scientific metaphysics, is bound to conflict with naive, however convoluted intuitions. One resists changing one's intuitions, but this is what learning is all about.
0.5. This book is about liberty, and my basic aim is to set it well within Bunge's metaphysics. Here are several of his theses I shall be adopting:
0.5.1. *Emergentism*. The world is layered in systems: physical, chemical, biological, social, and (parallel with social) human artifactual. A chemical system is made up of atoms and molecules, but it has properties, such as a boiling point and availability to participate in chemical reactions, that are peculiar to it and not to its constituents. A living organism has properties (metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis) that cannot be attributed to its constituent molecules. And a society is more than a heap of people: It has a legal system and an economic system, things no individual person has. At the same time, a system is not a holistic entity transcending its parts: There is no Society apart from its members.
0.5.2. *Reductionism*. While we cannot eviscerate emergent properties by bulldozing them down to their parts, science strives to explain emergence by means of lawful interaction among the parts. In other words, epistemological reductionism, si; ontological reductionism, no.
0.5.3. *Causality*. Each scientific law statement separates the set of all conceivable things and events into two subsets, the possible and the impossible. But there is no reason to suppose that the intersection of the sets of possible things and events corresponding to each law yields a single, fatalistic outcome. Self-determination and chance, as well as causes, remain as determiners of events.
0.5.4. *Free will*. Neurologists, unlike mind-body dualists, are busy studying volition. The answers are not in yet, but given Bunge's views on causality and self-determination, there is no ontological compulsion to hold that choice is at best an illusion. A fuller solution to the problem of free will will make heavy use of the structure of manifold feedback loops in animal brains and of their consequent extreme instability as far as action goes. Human brains are even more cross-wired than those of other animals. and this makes for our apparently unique ability to be self-conscious, or conscious of our own consciousness. We can direct our learning, too, and (as Bunge points out) reason about values as well as evaluate reasons. It is wonderful to know that the first scientific metaphysics not only allows for the emergent property called free will but also for its explanation.
0.5.5. *Values*. Animals and only animals evaluate. (Humans can evaluate values and, to a fair extent, train them, e.g., by taking music appreciation courses.) It is at best metaphorical and at worst mystical and holistic to speak of Society valuing. This is not to deny that individuals can share similar values or that socialization can reduce conflict. It does imply that social and political institutions must be systemically rooted in individuals though not ontologically reducible to them. Champions of "methodological individualism" are never clear whether they are ontological reductionists who consequently reject systemic metaphysics. A major purpose of this book is to bring these issues to the surface.
0.6. These, then, are five main theses I have taken over from Mario Bunge. My aim is to extend the discussion upward to the subject of human liberty in a way that is consistent with his system. This way, political philosophy will not have to float above the other areas of philosophy. I take as my starting point the contractarianism of James M. Buchanan, an economist and one of the Founding Fathers of the extension of economics to political behavior that has become known as public choice theory. Philosophers of the social contract too often *tell* the alleged contractors what they have agreed to. An economist far more habitually reckons in terms of agreement, bargaining, compromise. The economist's approach is the more metaphysically sound, since only individuals value. That individuals individually value, that is value differently and hence need to strike bargains, is an inescapable part of the human condition.
0.7. In the course of discussing Buchanan, in Chapter 1, I argue that his individualism needs to be tempered in order to make a social order viable, and in Chapter 2, I analyze a broadside attack on the underlying assumptions of modern individualism by Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Chapter 3 expounds Bunge's metaphysics, and the last three chapters apply it. Chapter 4 examines Friedrich Hayek's thesis that social justice is a mirage and concludes that certain moderate kinds of it need not be dismissed as resting on bad metaphysics. Chapter 5 examines Ayn Rand on natural rights and concludes that her arguments, while too weak to compel wholesale adoption, nevertheless might generally be utilized by social contractors in their deliberations. Chapter 6 examines what I call the evolutionary federalism of the social psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell, and discusses a plurality of social contracts both extending over space and enduring over generations. Above all, it is up to the contractors themselves, not to philosophers or economists, to establish their own political institutions by way of ideally unanimous agreement. (That the social contract is, of course, a historical fiction, will be discussed repeatedly.)
0.8. To the extent that my general approach and specific arguments are sound, I shall have laid out a framework for what could, very dangerously, be called scientific political philosophy. The danger is that "scientific" much too often connotes socialism, rule by experts, or just one big scheme for all mankind. This sounds orderly, especially to those yet to learn that order regularly emerges by processes of spontaneous self-assembly at all levels of systems, from chemical and biological on up. (Economics may well be the oldest science of spontaneous order.) But what looks orderly can mean just being ordered about. Truly rational planning (meta-planning) should consist of knowing when not to plan (object-plan), that is when to call off the bureaucrats.
0.9. It's okay to consult experts and even to trust them a little bit. It's okay, too, to put a little faith in tradition, to wait until a serious probing of a specific tradition's uses has been undertaken before throwing it to the winds. Indeed, some people have come to love their traditions and even want a large hunk of their lives so governed. That's okay, too, and in a finely enough partitioned federalism, each can seek out his preferred tradition-experiment balance. It would be most unscientific to ignore the central fact of both individual and group differences in this regard, and in all other regards.
0.10. It would be no less unscientific to ignore what ever-corrigible results have come down from the various social sciences, some of which apply to all men and groups alike. My aim here is not to beat a drum for any specific economic or social theory or even to claim a single economic law is true, not even that minimum wage laws cause unemployment or that rent controls cause housing shortages. I know plenty of people who will argue both economic laws tirelessly and for free. I could also argue on either public choice theory or natural rights grounds that education and money are too important to be left in the hands of the government. And I could warn against theocracies of all kinds, whether they be any of the hundreds of possible kinds of egalitarianism or interpretations of the Bible.
0.11. It is altogether too easy to denounce those who disagree with me as being unscientific. The plain fact is that people vary in their willingness to get at the truth, and it is they, not I, who will establish their own polities. I must not get carried away with my own arrogance. My plea is that others not get carried away with their own *metaphysical* arrogance and reify entities like Society and The Good that are detached from the ontological chain. There are not very many open advocates of such holism and collectivism anymore, but there are far too many who assume such things implicitly. It is more muddled than openly bad metaphysics that is the enemy of liberty.
0.12. I hope this book will clear up some of the mud.
0.13. As it happens, I wrote a short article for _Vera Lex_, called "Contracting for Natural Rights," that summarizes many of my ideas beyond the metaphysical base in Bunge. This article could continue this preface, but since it can stand alone, I reprint it in an appendix.
1.1.5 _Calculus_, while making a fundamental breakthrough into objectivity and a fundamental distinction between alternative constitutions and their operations, left a number of questions (some of which indeed were first raised in the book) unanswered. How might agreement upon a constitution come about in the first place? What about the breakdown of constitutional order? What about government itself violating the constitution? What are the prospects for reform? Buchanan was then led, from public finance to public goods, to public choice, beyond to what might be called public philosophy, to deal with these questions. Deal with them he did in 1975 in _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_,^ a new look at the idea of a social contract, and it is this book, which has easy claims for being his magnum opus, that will form the basic backdrop for this book.
1.2.3. Buchanan also denies the collectivist thesis that there are values apart from (and therefore in conflict with) those held by individuals. It is difficult to imagine what those values could be, however, and to turn up an example of a collectivist who holds to such values and has arguments for them would also be difficult. Perhaps what is meant is the specification of an overriding social objective (such as democracy, equality in one of its many forms, _ad majorem dei gloriam_, economic growth, or someone's personal list of natural rights), a specification *against* the wishes of the citizens. Politics involves compromise, to be sure, but compromise applies to the making of laws under a constitution, and not to the making of the constitution itself, which can emerge only by agreement.
1.2.4. Again, Buchanan sees a collectivist as one who judges the constitutions made by others as a presumptuous outsider and not as an insider, not as one of the initial contractors whose consent is needed. Perhaps he means by a collectivist an avowed irrationalist like Hegel. Buchanan is unclear on this point, and necessarily so, for those who might plausibly be placed in the collectivist camp are far from clear about what they do mean. Are they arguing for "some transcendental common bliss," which may turn out to be only a reification of some set of aims individuals might share separately? Are they denying the distinction [p. 5:] between constitution and laws made thereunder, or are they failing to make the distinction in the first place? If the last, clarification is needed, for there may be fundamental disagreement. Until clarification is made we may be sure that each will invent straw men for adversaries.
1.2.5. Buchanan's (methodological) individualism is not reducible to direct advocacy of individual liberties in the usual sense meant by free-market economists, whether argued on efficiency or natural rights grounds. (I shall be examining the case for natural rights in detail in Chapter 5 ["Ayn Rand and Natural Rights"]. Ordinarily economic liberties are implicitly taken to cover only bilateral agreements (contracts and exchanges) between two persons, actual persons or "legal persons" such as corporations. Buchanan explicitly treats multilateral agreements by all members of society, called social contracts. While it is automatically understood that a two-person agreement is necessarily mutual, that is to say unanimous, confusion may arise if unanimity is not required for multilateral agreement. Buchanan's treatment recognizes public goods and a constitution specifying the procedures to supply them from the outset, whereas those who begin with only individual liberties usually wind up compromising on their principles on the grounds that protecting of rights and supplying externality internalizing public goods necessitate some restrictions on individual freedom. Theirs is a "natural rights, but..." position, which can be construed as modestly collectivist. By explicitly allowing omnilateral (to coin a neologism) contracts, Buchanan is a more thoroughgoing *methodological* individualist, in that there is no need to go beyond the individual's own values to deal with the public goods problem.
1.2.6. _The Limits of Liberty_ applies this basic methodological approach to the questions of liberty and social contracts by beginning with the most abstract special case of a two-person, one-good society and becoming progressively more general. The book discusses the assignment and enforcement of rights, the limits of collective power, the public goods aspects of law itself, the capital investment aspects of adherence to rules, and the question of the control of the government itself. I shall trace his discussion and try to discern where certain assumptions beyond strict methodological individualism are implied or warranted.
1.2.7. The second chapter of _Limits_, "The Bases for Freedom in Society," treats the emergence of law out of anarchy. It deals with the most elementary setting, that of two persons and one good. Before the pair come to any agreement, each will exert efforts to produce his own quantities of the single good, efforts to seize the other's output, and [p. 6:] further efforts to prevent such seizure of his own holdings. An equilibrium will emerge among production, predation, and protection, but no more needs to be specified about abilities, desires, or selfishness along these dimensions. It is from this starting point, which Buchanan aptly terms the "anarchist equilibrium," that the two parties may begin to negotiate some mutually beneficial pact to reduce their predation and protection so as better to turn their efforts to production. Among possible peace pacts, any one might be chosen, if both parties see themselves as benefiting. The elementary case becomes only slightly more complicated when more than one good may be produced, for post-constitutional (post-peace-pact) exchange becomes possible.
1.2.8. An assumption is implicit even in this elementary situation, namely that making the pact itself is not (or at least is not expected to be) an empty exercise. It need not be claimed that the signing of the pact is embellished with sacred rituals, though it may have some kind of nonrational binding force, but there must be some mutual hope that the amounts of predation will not continue as before, even if there will be some cheating. Buchanan is definitely not assuming that anarchists will become "moral" by the mere act of signing a pact, and he is agnostic on the question whether human nature is such as to make people want to abide by their agreements. This has, of course, been argued both ways, but people can and almost always do set up enforcement mechanisms, particularly if the population is at all large. As Buchanan notes (LL 188), "The necessity for including enforcement provisions in the initial agreement distinguishes the social contract from other contracts which are made within the framework of a legal order."
1.2.9. It is worth stating again that Buchanan says nothing to judge any particular contract as fair or unfair. Indeed, he briefly mentions the possibility that one person enslaving another by contract could leave the latter better off than in an al~-out belligerent anarchy. (Whether there are individuals who would, truly knowingly, sell themselves into slavery is another matter.) An external observer with pretensions to knowledge of absolute values may judge the position of the second person here as unfair both before and after the peace pact, but Buchanan's concern is with the dynamic processes of mutual improvement, not judgments of any static present. This may offend our moral sense, at least certain people's moral senses in certain cases, and Buchanan can be and has been charged with worshipping the status quo and naively failing to realize that the current wielders of power are going to get the long end of the stick in any [p. 7:] bargaining over the social contract. Buchanan never quite adequately handles this problem, but it can be *mitigated* (though not solved in the abstract) with one small, optimistic, but plausible assumption (assuming also that we recognize the problem as real in the first place), namely that unfair advantage dampens over time. We all know the saying, "riches to rags in three generations," and there is suggestive empirical evidence for this in the work of Herbert Simon in "A Model of Business Firm Growth" (1967)^. He asked the question: How do U.S. firms that have over-average growth rates in one four-year period fare during the next? He expected a certain regression toward the mean, since above average growth can be a matter of chance, but not perfect regression, since it can also be a matter of superior ability. The result of his study was that the ratio of the growth rate of a given firm to that of the average firm in one four-year period would shrink to about its cube root in the next. Thus, a firm with twice the average growth rate in one decade would have 26% over the average the next. (Actually, it was 28%.) This shrinkage should follow a geometric progression, and a firm with an "unfair advantage" whose initial growth rate was double the average initially would hold only a l.0 percent advantage a century later (1.28 exp 4/100 = 1.010).
1.2.11. The whole issue of fairness is problematic. Those who felt that they got the short end of the stick in the original contract may very well maintain later that their consent was not genuine and attempt to renege on the agreement. Buchanan discusses calculations of prospective revolutionaries plunging society back into anarchy in hopes of securing a new and better contract in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, "Continuing Contract and the Status Quo." This topic will be discussed further below, and I shall [p. 8:] be examining Hayek on social justice in detail in Chapter 4.
1.3.3. This move is a necessary one, however, if the chance of reaching unanimous agreement is not to become practically zero in all but small numbers cases. When we treat Roberto Mangabeira Unger's _Knowledge and Politics_ (1975)^ in the next chapter, we shall see that the assumption that desires are arbitrarily diverse among persons is a key principle of post-medieval Western thought. What Buchanan has assumed is that we can identify holdouts, although at times quite imperfectly. This assumption strips the analysis of generality, but it does allow us to discuss agreements. Something more is implied however: The assumption suggests that there is a certain core essence of humanity that we have access to, or rather that there is a certain similarity among men. It is not a large step from this to saying that some values are held in common and are, in a sense, objective.
1.3.5. This is not a fatal objection to Buchanan's ideas, however, but it does embody a warning not to take them to ridiculous extremes. Probably every social philosophy contains such loopholes. The reason why most ideas can be carried to ridiculous extremes is that the world is more complex than our limited vocabularies. Science is the method for clarifying our concepts as we go along by checking them against reality. When we speed merrily ahead, piling up deduction upon deduction without checking against the facts, our ideas will stray away at a geometric rate from what we are trying to describe.
1.4.2. Even if we ignore the problems of knowing when these conditions exist and ignore the problems associated with opportunity costs (both discussed above), a merely conceptual contract will not have the binding force an actual one would. It is an imperfect substitute for the real thing. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the charge will be made that *reality*, not the theory, is imperfect. It often does seem that utility theorists berate men for not living up to their axioms of rationality (a different set of axioms for each theorist), and utopians of all stripes excuse the failures of their schemes for never having really been tried. Communism *will* produce Lenin's New Socialist Man, given enough time. And so forth.
1.4.3. I shall call Buchanan's conception of a contractor *New Contractarian Man*. Indeed, I shall suggest that the broad sweep of human history may be towards increasingly contractual thinking, and thus Buchanan's contractarianism may become ever more realistic and less and less wishful. On the other hand and 71 years on, New Socialist Man seems no closer to being realized today than in 1917.
1.4.4. Rationalizations become desperate when reality stubbornly refuses to move into line with the ideal. On the other hand, if reality and ideal seem not very far apart, and to be moving closer together, then the theory only fails in the sense that all abstractions must. Buchanan's unanimity concept could be regarded as either/or, whence in all strict logic it fails, or it could be taken as an abstraction, whence a 99% unanimity is very different from a 1% unanimity, which would have been good enough for Lenin. When the Bolsheviks took over from all the leftist forces remaining, he explained, "The people wanted the Constituent Assembly summoned, and we summoned it. But they sensed immediately what this famous Constituent Assembly really wanted. And now we have carried out the will of the people, which is All Power to the Soviets." (Shub 1950:152)^
1.5.2. The voters, all of whom have read _Calculus_, know all this and opt for the 5/6 rule rather than a simple majority. We, the omniscient outside observers, will then judge legislation that could have been passed under the 5/6 rule as good in a Pareto-efficiency sense and regard laws that could not have been so passed as coercive. This contract never took place in our history, but we think or pretend that everyone would have agreed to the 5/6 rule. It is plain that many laws currently on the books could never have mustered a 5/6 majority, all the more so since all three branches of our government have repeatedly exceeded even the powers it seized in 1789. "The Threat of Leviathan," (Chapter 9 of _Limits_), then, is hardly Buchanan's parading his own values; rather it is his considered judgment of how far government has exceeded any authority it could possibly have gained under any unanimous social contract whatever. Anyone who thinks that our government is of optimal size, in any Pareto sense and not just in his personal opinion, had better be prepared to roll out powerful arguments in support of his position.
1.5.3. This, then, is the common sense thrust of Buchanan's idea of a conceptual contract. It is when we get picky about the logic (and therefore when we lose sight of the common sense thrust) that numerous nasty problems arise. In the first place, men are, to some extent, innately disagreeable. In any group of a hundred, the chances are near 100% that at least one person will refuse to sign the contract, and unanimity minus one is not unanimity. (Adding in minors, the retarded, the insane, and the just plain ornery makes agreement even less likely.) Second, as Buchanan himself notes in Chapter 8 of _Limits_, people are inclined to regard the social contract itself as a public good and are therefore disinclined to become informed and make adequate judgments. Third, Karen Vaughn argues in "Can There Be a Constitutional Political Economy?" (1983)^ that not only is very little known about the consequences [p. 14:] of political constitutions, there is nowhere nearly the extensive self-correcting feedback characteristic of frequent and numerous exchanges in economic markets. Any convergence to an optimum will be exasperatingly slow, and equilibrium may never be reached. Buchanan, however, freely admits that a given constitution need not be Pareto optimal, and so Vaughn's objection is a matter of degree.
1.5.5. A fourth problem with the unanimity ideal is that circumstances change, as Vaughn says later in her paper. This need not necessarily be a problem, especially under omniscience and immortality, for the contractors can theoretically draw up a contract lengthy enough to handle all future contingencies, or at least do the best job they can. But the best job might not be a very good one, and in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, Buchanan discusses the possibility that changes in technology or other underlying conditions have changed the perceived anarchist equilibrium out of which the social contract arose in the first place, meaning that a quite different contract might be drawn up now. Some will prefer that things stay put, but they may also fear that changes may be imposed upon the constitution without their consent and offer some compromises. Perhaps we are getting sidetracked here, for we are now without the world of unanimity, but recall that the signing of a contract may have some nonrational binding force and assume this force decays over time. Then the problem is a real one, and is usually handled by amendment procedures requiring less than unanimity but more than that required for the normal passage of laws. In the United States, the rules of procedure each house of Congress establishes for itself enjoy a variable degree of respect intermediate between normal lawmaking and constitutional amendment. These [p. 15:] safeguards are often informal, and public choice theorists could examine whether these informal arrangements might be replaced with more formal ones.
1.5.6. Buchanan does not adduce any historical examples of changing circumstances leading to changes in the (perceived) underlying anarchist equilibrium, and it is not always an easy matter to conceive what they might be. For some, of course, it is very easy indeed, and conservatives and communists join hands in detesting capitalism and its unjustified power. Constitution-making is a serious business--the unanimity requirement will make it one!--and considerable effort will be made to distill the wisdom of the ages into a form of some permanence. Not all of the Founding Fathers foresaw the coming of industrialism, true, but they had reason to hope their attempts to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" would suffice, whatever the future might bring.
1.5.7 The future brought an erosion of liberty, even as it brought industrialization, and Buchanan rightly notes that the Fathers concerned themselves with the concentration of power to the neglect of the extent of power. But this shows, it seems, a failure of design. Vaughn thinks changed values are more important, and perhaps she is right. Let us save space by not offering any theoretical or historical arguments for the best candidate yet for an absolute truth, namely that power will accumulate unless fought every inch of the way. Now if values change so that people are less willing to pay the price of liberty, which is eternal vigilance, [3] freedom will decay. This is so regardless of any written constitutional safeguards, as it is a reasonable observation that mere words, while not without their nonrational binding effects, are rarely in themselves so powerful as to override the tendency of power to accumulate.
1.6.2. It may be countered that these claims of so-called common sense are spurious, that unfreedom is the world and historical norm, that men are hardly ever so sweetly reasonable. Still, the notion of a conceptual contract is not without its uses as a litmus test. There remains a major difference between what ideally reasonable men might conceivably agree upon and what they never could. Observers will, of course, dispute specific cases, and part of the dispute will be over what an ideal man should be taken to he. We must grant him a degree of wisdom and a degree of thoroughness in his deliberations not much less than that of our hypothetical outside observer. We grant him maturity not to whine or seek to undermine a constitutional order that did not meet up to his expectations. We expect of him a similar patience should his values change as time passes on. And we expect of him an impartiality or magnaminity such that he will not exploit the unanimity rule to bargain on his own behalf.
1.6.3. Of such wise and noble men, then, are Buchanan's conceptual contractors made up. To these splendid qualities, perhaps two more should be added. One is that those who are violating the current constitution with impunity not regard their violations as part of the _de facto_ status quo and hold out for their "rights" to future predation. Buchanan's treatment of this problem is ambiguous (LL 96-98), but it is hard to specify what predation is when it has gone on for so long that it melds [p. 17:] into accepted custom and tradition. Furthermore, while predation or just plain inefficiencies are a net (Paretian) loss, would-be predators compete among themselves to get into privileged positions and eventually drain away all profits to predation. There come to be no winners, only losers (most of us) and those who stay even. Theoretically, there are Pareto optimal ways out, but they can be far from easy to implement. *Who* is to be compensated? The current rent holders? The ones who invested in but failed to get predatory positions? The rent holders, most of them long since departed, who made a net profit from their rent-seeking? It would seem unfair to take away without compensation a taxi medallion from an owner who paid the market price for one of the 11,772 allowed in New York City. It would also be unfair to tax the citizens the market price and hand it over to the medallion owner, when most taxpayers do not use taxis and it is hard to identify those who do. (In theory, one could set taxi rates between the market and currently regulated prices and pay the difference between the new and market prices to the current medallion owners, but this raises other problems, especially statistical ones.)
1.6.4. To get out of this bind and barring immanent resolution of the problems of economic theory and data collection, we must either presume again that our contractors are impartial or that the reforms will be so broad-based that practically everyone will be better off in the net, that is, after his particular racket is taken away from him. This would be what Buchanan calls a "constitutional revolution," as it is far more encompassing than piecemeal reform. It seems reasonable, however, that Buchanan was momentarily forgetful about just how myopic people are when he wrote "Beyond Pragmatism: Prospects for Constitutional Revolution," the last chapter of _The Limits of Liberty_, particularly when it comes to their own protected turf. Either that, or they are extremely risk-averse. Not without reason, for reforms have a habit of getting bogged down, and few want only their own privileges taken away.
1.6.5. The other requirement that might be attributed to New Contractarian Man is a lack of petty emotions, such as envy and resentment. These emotions, which can be quite strong, practically characterized democracy for H.L. Mencken (1928 and a sizable fraction of his other works)^ and brought forth one of Ayn Rand's most splendidly polemical essays, "The Age of Envy" (1971)^^. Buchanan is perhaps equivocal here, for while he evidently does not favor envy, he might be taken as implying that not only might the rich be wise to save their necks by compromising with the howling mob (especially if the perceived underlying anarchist equilibrium [p. 18:] has changed) but possibly there is a certain merit to the mob's complaints. (LL 80-81, esp.) His argument shifts from the operation to the violation of the constitutional order and back, sometimes so quickly that it is difficult to say whether he is speaking ideally or really.
1.6.7. Envy and resentment are different and imply an income redistribution beyond what is rational in terms of the last paragraph. A man quite free of both envy and resentment now might realize he could become full of them under changed conditions and not want to arbitrarily block off in advance their political expression. Officially, economists of the value-free persuasion would note that the petty emotions are just as real as the more exalted ones and that they would be imposing their own values to approve of some and disapprove of others. What value-free economists *can* make is a factual claim that contractors who are both wise and impartial would realize that giving free reign to pettiness would undermine the constitutional order itself. In the final chapter, I shall discuss the work of the social psychologist Raymond Cattell and consider how findings in his field, as well as those from economics, might be utilized by the contractors.
1.6.8. In all this, we are not asking, we are *telling* Buchanan what his contractors must be like and thus moving further away from a methodological individualism that takes individuals as they actually come with all their innate quarrelsomeness and other objectionable features. In some respects we must do this: Men as they in fact are will not come to [p. 19:] unanimous agreement about anything except in very small groups. Some restrictions on what the contractors must be like must be made; otherwise, the use of the idea of a conceptual contract to look at legislation has zero content from the very start. It is vacuous to say that what counts is the fact of agreement, not the content, if agreements are never possible. But as soon as restrictions are imposed upon the values and characteristics of the contractors, possible contents are restricted too and therefore do begin to matter. The question is how far we may go adding these restrictions without approaching scholasticism and talmudic deductivism.
1.6.9. Happily, the question may be regarded as an empirical one, and this amounts to asking what it takes, for a given population, for a viable constitutional order to come about, that is, one that will be immune from violent revolution or the less openly violent but steady usurpation of power. No constitution can be expected to last forever, but we suspect that the Founding Fathers, had they had today's hindsight, might have better prevented the slow usurpation of power. We will get different answers about what it takes, and the problem is a matter of degree anyhow (and also a matter of values, since people differ in how sure they want to be that the constitution will last). Buchanan might find that a rather minimal set of restrictions on the characteristics of the agreers will suffice and that our more expanded set demands persons somewhere between Parson Weems' characterization of George Washington and that given of Mr. Jefferson each year on Graduation Day at the University of Virginia. One will simply have to listen to the various arguments and decide what sorts of rules are needed, at a minimum, for a viable constitutional order. Then, one may form an opinion as to whether a given law could conceivably be the product of one or another viable constitutional order.
1.6.10. Again, all this imposing of psychological restrictions upon the social contractors is moving away from strict methodological individualism. In fact, Buchanan's own ruling out of strategic bargaining at the constitutional stage could be read as supposing that social contractors, rather than somehow pre-agreeing (a social contract to make a social~ contract?!) to set them aside, have little propensity to engage in such bargaining in the first place.
1.6.11. In this connection, it is instructive to note that, whereas Buchanan devoted only a small space to John Rawls' _A Theory of Justice_ (1971)^ in the closing pages of _Limits_, he was later to write several articles about Rawls' work. In a recent summing up of his life work, "Better than [p. 20:] Plowing" (1986b)^^, Buchanan remarked that his own constitutionalism (as opposed to just enacting all laws in one fell swoop) implies an uncertainty of the future which puts individuals in a state of ignorance not unlike that under Rawls' veil of ignorance. I will argue in Chapter 4 that this uncertainty is such a broad feature of the human condition as to be not implausibly called a metaphysical fact.
1.7.2. In the limit, these fine, upstanding men will come to agree with--me! Therefore, any law I don't happen to approve of--I do pretend to be impartial, however--is necessarily one that could never conceivably have arisen out of *any* social contract. This is an easy trap to fall into and one Buchanan might be said to be not entirely immune from, as it comes out [p. 21:] quite clearly that he holds that the present situation in America could not have come about by procedures unanimously consented to and therefore had to have resulted from the usurpation of power. I think I exaggerate and am being too rough, but it is remarkable that Buchanan holds out constitutional revolution (that is, unanimously-consented change) as plausible and not just possible. It is safe to say that he would not so hold out, had not his learning in economics and public choice theory given him a good idea in what directions such a constitutional revolution might go and that they *would* go somewhere in the direction his learning suggests. In other words, Buchanan more than hopes that contractors would not set up a socialist state.
1.7.3. Can Buchanan now stand accused of reversing the very first sentence on page one of _Limits_: "Those who seek specific descriptions of the 'good society' will not find them here"? It is hard to claim that he reverses himself any more than the inherent difficulties with strict methodological individualism require. Buchanan's hopes are not germane unless they color his views of what restrictions will have to be placed on the personalities of the contractors (such as being agreeable, wise, and impartial) and of what values are not legitimate (bargaining considerations, perhaps envy). But place certain restrictions he must, in the only reality we have. Buchanan's treatment of possible contracts is very broad and there is no attempt on his part to link any restrictions on the contractors to his view that constitutional revolution is feasible. It is here, in these pages, not in _The Limits of Liberty_ that the need for restrictions is argued. Perhaps the restrictions we have suggested as necessary in order to get a workable constitutional order may be acceptable to Buchanan or to others, and they may entail a sort of contract natural rights holders and/or certain free-market economists would enjoy. In fact, Buchanan has been regularly roasted for declining to favor particular schemes (Buchanan and Samuels 1980), and he is hardly unique in claiming widespread dissatisfaction with the present mess nor for thinking that there is something better that virtually everyone should be able to agree upon. What does set him aside is an awareness that the only reform that could command nigh universal assent would have to be sweeping and that piecemeal proposals would surely be resisted by someone, if not a substantial minority.
1.7.4. What is of more concern here than trying to fix the restrictions on social contractors and contracts is to consider the implications for methodological individualism, strictly construed. As said above, it is [p. 22:] difficult to get a fix on just what methodological individualism is. If it entails that values can be known only in the context of an agreement, this entails a certain degree of objectivity of values, for (so we have argued) only a proper subset of all possible agreements can be viable. This runs head against the doctrine of (absolute) subjectivity of values that is part and parcel of both methodological individualism and orthodox economic theory. We also run into the ban against interpersonal comparisons of utility if we are to exclude pettiness and even strategic bargaining from having a legitimate place in constitution formation.
1.8.2. It is not clear whether this is a problem for Buchanan, since he never makes the normative claim that men *ought* to live up to their agreements. In fact, he repeatedly deals with the prospect of men violating their agreements. Yet in Chapter 5 of _Limits_, he states that if the government can arbitrarily change rights, "there is no requirement that its actions be 'honored' with ethical sanctions." (LL 83-84) The converse statement--that when the government cannot arbitrarily change rights, its actions ought to be honored--does not strictly follow, but we do not think Buchanan is making an empty statement, which would be the case if he never held that ethical sanctions are appropriate, which in turn would mean that he has no normative judgments at all to offer.
1.8.3. To imply, however, that there are duties of the citizen to the state, in *this* world where there are no actual social contracts, is collectivist at least in some sense, or else the notion involves stretching the idea of a conceptual contract beyond its methodological value. In the wrong [p. 23:] hands, such duties could be stretched and rationalized to cover practically any law, and we had better believe that said stretcher is going to use *his* veto power under the unanimity rule to block any constitutional reform that strips him of his "right" to engage in such justifications of his own power.
1.8.4. Any tool can be misused, however, and effort must go again to find the common sense of the matter, which is to find some individualist basis for saying there is an obligation to obey the laws. We cannot do so, strictly, but just as we have had to modify methodological individualism in order to come up with a conceptual contract, we might do so also for obligations to obey the laws enacted thereunder, provided, of course, that we do not get carried away. When we do get carried away, we arrive at whole-hog collectivism, or something barely distinguishable from it. One problem is that there is a range of conceptual contracts and for each contract various trajectories, each leading to a different set of laws enacted. There are, then, sets of sets of sets of possible laws under possible trajectories of possible conceptual contracts. It is a different thing to assert that an actual given law in question belongs to a set of sets of sets than to say it was at all likely to have been passed. Laws against murder? Very likely indeed. Special interest legislation? A certain amount of it, but wise contractors would try to minimize it. Prohibition? Hard to say, and remember the issue is not whether that specific law could ever have gotten unanimous consent but whether it could have been enacted under a unanimous constitution. The Equal Rights Amendment? If women belong to the polity, out of which a contract arises, it is hard to imagine an anarchist equilibrium that could lead to a social contract that incorporated blatant sexual discrimination. In *this* trajectory under the Constitution of 1789, however, the ERA has failed to go through for fear of judicial activism. And Prohibition might not have gone through had American history taken a different turn. (Recall that amendments and ordinary laws both are regarded here as enactments under a constitution.)
1.8.5. Assume we hold that Prohibition might (but by no means would) have arisen under at least one conceptual contract. We would then have shown that it was not a "bad" law, but this is far from saying it is a "good" law, or one that people are obliged to obey, as unambiguously as one ought to obey laws forbidding murder. If we actually had a social contract, Prohibition would be binding. We don't; we live under the illegal Constitution of 1789, which has been violated repeatedly; and so some sort [p. 24:] of judgment will have to be made whether Prohibition was railroaded through or whether it had nearly unanimous consent. We maintain the following principle: Without a social contract, or reasonable facsimile thereof, in actual operation, a much stiffer test has to be met before one can speak of a duty to obey a law than would be the case if the law in question were duly passed in accordance with one. I maintain that Prohibition, resisted by a huge minority, did not pass the stiffer test. [4]
1.8.7. In discussing the capital goods aspects of a stock of observed laws, Buchanan holds that its "benefits are yielded, in enhanced stability of interpersonal relationships, at an increasing rate over many periods of time. That is to say, the benefits from law increase in rate as the investment matures. It is as if, in the numerical example [of the previous paragraph], investment would yield the full 10 percent return only if the asset is maintained for, say, ten years, and that this rate might, say, increase to 20 percent if the asset should be maintained for twenty years." (LL 125) He adds that it is entirely possible that, once the public capital embodied in the legal-constitutional structure has been destroyed, it may be restorable "only over a period that exceeds personal planning horizons....For all practical purposes, public or social capital may be permanently lost once it is destroyed. It may be impossible to secure its replacement at least on the basis of rational decisions made by individuals." (LL 125-126) If so, "then a recognition of the capital or investment aspects of the genuine 'public goods' that are being destroyed makes corrective action much more urgent than any application of a consumption-goods paradigm might suggest." (LL 126)
1.8.8. Buchanan, evidently seeing this as a deteriorating era, is looking more at the erosion of public capital than at its enhancement, but one can take the opportunity to build upon his distinction between a capital stock that is characterized by an increasing rate of return over time versus stocks that are not so characterized, i.e., the ones public goods theorists usually, if implicitly, talk about. Buchanan seems on the verge [p. 25:] of converting this economic distinction into a moral one, which could read:
**It is optional whether a society provides for itself ordinary public goods, but its members OUGHT to provide for themselves public goods whose rates of return increase over time.**
1.8.9. I hasten to add that, as there may be several such public goods, the dividing line will not necessarily be between these and ordinary public goods but between increasing time-yield public goods and more increasing ones. It sounds difficult to avoid interpersonal comparisons of utility, but perhaps the constitution can be drawn up with the more increasing public goods at a higher level, just as amendments to the constitution rank higher than ordinary laws. It could be readily argued that freedom of discussion is very nearly at the highest level, that free speech is a public good that increases in its return to the capital stock of good constitutional order as fast or nearly as fast as any other. Besides, discussion is of the very essence of constitutionalism and cannot be inhibited if we are to pretend to be having any sort of (continuing) constitutional order in the first place. If we may speak of a natural right to participate in the social contract under the unanimity rule, we may (almost) equally speak of a natural right to free speech. Buchanan rejects natural rights, apparently, if an extended list is implied (especially if imposed from the outside), but he should accept at least two, continuing participation and discussion.
1.9.3. Yeager complains that contractarianism is all procedure and no content: "Rather than suppose that proper procedure exhausts the content of the good society, it would be more reasonable to emphasize proper procedure as an important part of that conception." Furthermore contractarianism is too value-neutral: "The very conception of a liberal society calls for distinguishing among the particular tastes and values of individuals, according more to some and less to others, regarding some as more and others as less worthy of being dignified by basing public policy on them."
1.9.4. Yeager's own view is that the aim of collective institutions is to encourage what he so well calls *social cooperation*, the market being the premier example of such an institution. He says that his own position is not so relativistic as Buchanan's, but neither does he wish an authoritarian regime run by people who think they have all the answers. Yeager calls his own position "fallibilism" and holds that certain moral truths may come to be known but that free and open discussion is needed for their pursuit. Contractarians really wish the same things he does, but his own position is free of their drawbacks.
1.9.5. I have voiced several of Yeager's objections earlier, and my resolution of the dilemmas has been to construe contractarianism as an ideal to be approached and also as a tool to be used in judging legislation. It does not seem that Yeager would prohibit any law that genuinely had completely universal approval, even if he thought the citizens would come to grief. This situation is, of course, hypothetical, but we have construed Buchanan's notion of a conceptual contract as a basis for judging that a given law *might* have been made under a constitution established by somewhat idealized men. Laws against murder are very different from the whims of a dictator or even special interest legislation, the merits of which are at best ambiguous. Some such legislation is inevitable, but it can be kept to tolerable levels. We have justified Buchanan's use of the word conceptual so that the set of [p. 27:] good laws (in the sense that the machinery for their establishment is approved) is not the empty set. Certainly the word can be so distorted as to rationalize everything, but so can every other word.
1.9.6. The charge that Buchanan's contractarianism glorifies the status quo involves a more subtle difficulty. It is one thing to contemplate idealized contractors in a state of nature cogitating upon a social order; it is something quite else to think about getting unanimous agreement to reform the present mess, especially as those on the take are far from idealistic and can be expected to block reform. It would seem that we are stuck with the present, unless we are willing to coerce some groups for the benefit of others. This need not be the case if the reforms are broad (Buchanan's "constitutional revolution"), however, as it can be argued that few if any are really ahead in the net with gains from a few privileges outweighing many losses elsewhere.(Getting people to realize this is another matter, but one of the jobs of *Professor* Buchanan is to educate!) Another way out is to hold that certain values are not to be included as appropriate for public policy, which is exactly what Yeager advocates. As already seen, Buchanan does seem willing to make strategic bargaining illegitimate, and other factors (e.g., envy) may well have to be excluded, on this Earth, to allow either a viable constitutional order or viable constitutional reform or revolution.
1.9.7. Buchanan seeks a high degree of generality and thus a correspondingly relatively relativist position on specific values. Yeager thinks moral truths, while not given to us by revelation, can be learned approximately and better and better as time goes on, much as scientific knowledge is gained in the non-moral realm. (Chapter 6 will discuss knowledge in social psychology, Chapter 5 the possibility of knowledge of natural rights.) Buchanan may think my own speculations about which social contracts will not work are premature, and more so Yeager's. At the same time, Buchanan would seem to be more enthusiastic than Yeager about different peoples experimenting with different social arrangements. A nation made up of those who are rugged individualists by temperament may very well be so jealous of their individual liberties as drastically to chain the constitution to disallow not only those public goods provided under another nation's constitution, but also those which, on their own preferences, they should appear to want. On the other hand, Yeager might protest a nation setting up a state that is "too large." (Federalism will be discussed in Chapter 6. I am not implying, incidentally, that either Buchanan or Yeager advocates forced imposition of his own conclusions upon [p. 28:] other peoples. The question of when one nation might liberate the oppressed peoples living under a far-from-unanimous dictatorial regime is a separate, and difficult, problem. I have no hints to offer here, and neither do Buchanan or Yeager.)
1.9.8. The difference between Buchanan and Yeager is not that one is all procedure, the other all content, but that each has a difference of emphasis, there being a greater agnosticism and recognition of differing regards for individual liberties over different nations on Buchanan's part. Both, it is fair to say, see free and open discussion as near essential to a free political order, and certainly neither is happy about the present. (Who is?) And both are quite aware of the compulsory nature of all past and existing states.
1.10.2. At each point in the discussion, we have noted inadequacies of strict [p. 29:] methodological individualism. Buchanan himself modifies his individualism by ruling out strategic bargaining at the constitutional level. Even in making this slight modification, he could be taken as making interpersonal comparisons of utility, since bargaining opportunities that are foregone are, strictly speaking, subjective opportunity costs. But I have gone further and claimed that in order to get any contract at all, a fictional New Contractarian Man has to be invoked and, it seems in places, endowed with virtues so splendid that few actually possess them. This could be a weakness as great as that of Lenin's New Socialist Man, and it remains to be explored whether there has been an evolution toward New Contractarian Man in actual human history. One also has to ask whether contractarianism is mandated by, or at least is tolerably consistent with, human nature. Both involve difficult questions.
1.10.3. A grave defect of this discussion of Buchanan's methodological individualism is that the concept is not clear. My arguments that methodological individualism needs to be modified may or may not apply to the precise claims and statements made in _The Limits of Liberty_, to Buchanan's own conception, or to the (varying) conceptions held by others. To quote _Limits_, page one again: "My approach is profoundly *individualistic*, in an ontological-methodological sense, although consistent adherence to this norm is almost as difficult as it is different." Buchanan is here contrasting his approach to the normative one that infuses political science, where an author *tells* (and not infrequently attempts to intimidate) the reader about what the political order should be like. Such arrogance Buchanan will not abide; for him it is up to the people themselves to come to their own agreements on what the political order should be. Perhaps Buchanan is too reticent when he says, again on page one of *Limits*: "I claim no rights to impose [my] preferences on others, even within the limits of persuasion," but the contrast he makes with the way political scientists usually operate is emphatic.
1.10.4. What is not so clear is whether those who parade their values openly reject methodological individualism, partially or totally, and in what respects. Buchanan is indeed different in the degree to which he strives to be objective, but perhaps many of his underlying premises are not so greatly at odds with those of conventional political scientists as they may appear. A man's biases are not impossible to fathom, though this has not been an easy nor an unquestionably successful task with respect to Limits, and men from the same culture, at odds with each other as they [p. 30:] often are, may share more in common than they disagree over. From a larger perspective, "there ain't a dime's worth of difference between 'em."
1.10.5. Let us, then, look for a larger perspective. We modern Westerners may all be methodological individualists, contractarians, constitutionalists, upholders of reason and science, to varying degrees and even (perhaps especially even) when in ostensible revolt. Searching for a larger perspective, I shall examine a book by a member of the Harvard Law School faculty, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, _Knowledge and Politics_,^ which was published in 1975, the same year as _The Limits of Liberty_. We might imagine we would want a book totally at odds with _Limits_, but that would be Zen Buddhist puzzles, shrieking, or silence (all about the same thing). Rather, Unger's book dissects the paradoxes of post-medieval thinking in the West, but the probably inevitable result is that his ultimate conclusions, after much fanfare and promise to go beyond modern thought, lie very safely within it. No matter, for one should learn what one can from books, and it is to _Knowledge and Politics_^ that we next turn.
2.1.4. The rejection of intelligible essences has implications for the psychology of the individual person. The individual is no longer seen as a particular representative of an essentialist human nature; rather, he is seen as a bundle of desires. If there were rhyme or reason to these desires being what they are, then reason could dictate which desires a person ought to have. But then we are back in the normative world of intelligible essences, with its judgmental comparisons of the actual with the essential. Desires, if we follow this line of reasoning, are purely arbitrary and should some men share similar desires, it is purely by coincidence. Reason, says the essentialist, can lead a man to his true desires; to the nominalist (or individualist in the sense used here), the role of reason is the purely instrumental or practical one of showing what it takes to satisfy these desires. But the laws of nature are the same for everyone, and so there is only one reason. Hence reason and desire are separate, just as separate as universal and particular. Men are individuals, with nothing else in common except an ability to reason about the means to ends and never about the ends themselves.
2.1.5. The line of reasoning in the above paragraph is somewhat specious, and it smacks more than a little of medieval scholasticism, as arguments using more than a few abstract nouns are prone to. Nor is this a good empirical argument based on the facts; in fact, men share far more values than random chance alone would imply. We primates share a number of biological and sociobiological needs, and most of us are conformists.
2.1.6. Unger draws a second analogy, that between the split of reason from desire in individualist psychology and a split between rules and values in individualist politics. Recall page one of _The Limits of Liberty_: "We live together because social organization provides the efficient means of achieving our individual objectives and not because society offers us a means of arriving at some transcendental common bliss." In other words, our individual objectives (particular values) can be anything at all, but we use rules, universally applied to all, to provide the minimally required social order for each to pursue his own objectives. Rules vs. values is the political counterpart of the metaphysical separation of universal and particular.
2.2.2. Buchanan thus assumes unawares, and in spite of the thrust of his other arguments, the radical separation of universal rules and particular values and thus agrees with Unger's characterization of individualism. (He also assumes that nations are territorial, and of course the entire book is atheistic.) It is hardly surprising that Buchanan should make generalizations from his own culture, and if it were pointed out that transcendental beings play a central role in Mohammedan law (Coulson 1968)^ or that that law covers only those who submit (which is what "Islam" means in English) and not those who dwell on a specific piece of real estate, Buchanan would not be moved to rewrite his book and at best would add a footnote. However, when he speaks of the necessity that laws be uniform, he is showing that he is an individualist in Unger's sense as well as one of the methodological variety. The three radical separations of individualism given by Unger (theory vs. fact, reason vs. desire, rules vs. values) do indeed hang together in some kind of analogizing reasoning, and we produce James M. Buchanan as Exhibit A in evidence. If these separations hang together for a careful thinker, trying hard to make distinctions, they must be tightly fused in the rest of us.
2.2.3. It is this hanging together that Unger calls the unity of individualist thought. In the last chapter we examined Buchanan's methodological individualism from its own standpoint and concluded that it was more applicable in a world inhabited by New Contractarian Man than in the world of today, but nevertheless the notion of a conceptual contract is highly useful--though also subject to abuse--in distinguishing a law that might have been passed under a constitution agreed upon by somewhat but not ridiculously exemplary men from a law that could only have been imposed coercively. We also argued that these exemplary contractors would most likely wind up discovering that a large measure of individualism in the natural rights sense was desirable, that it happens that men will best pursue their ends in a society where men are largely individually free. Here we tackle the problem of individualism as a world view in Unger's sense. (Note that a world view is held together neither by strict logic nor by empirical laws--Unger's order of ideas and order of events--but by analogous reasoning.) Buchanan is most clearly an individualist in the methodological sense, a good measure of an individualist in the sense of personal liberties, and also a post-medieval individualist in Unger's sense. I hoped I vindicated whatever personal libertarian sentiments Buchanan may have, though both I and Buchanan refrain from nailing down what the optimal amount of individual freedom is.
2.3.2. Practically any doctrine can be pushed to absurdity, and the reason is that the human brain is not very big. Our concepts never quite dovetail with reality and as we pile up deduction upon deduction, no matter how exact our arguments, we get carried away from reality at a geometric rate. Men are far better than other animals at making concepts, but they are also far more able to reify. The uniqueness of the West consists of a willingness by many, and an insistence by some, to put the deductions to the test and go back and refine the concepts. No other society, save the Classical, came even close, although today the rest of the world is rapidly imitating what has proven manifestly successful. The world might have droned on until the Sun died, with man being only a populous primate that managed to make a desert out of a huge part of the Earth's land surface.
2.3.3. It is meet to push the individualist world view to absurdity, for doing so brings to light mistaken directions which we willy-nilly follow. Unger entitled his book _Knowledge and Politics_ to emphasize that theory and practice go hand in hand as part of a world view held together by analogies and that neither theory nor practice can be changed alone. Let us follow Unger along his path, ask ourselves which of his conundrums we really want to get out of, crying out from time to time that no one ever meant for individualism to be taken that seriously (i.e., that absurdly), and learning what we can. Later, I shall present and criticize Unger's own proposed resolution of the paradoxes of individualism and his plan for the future. By way of anticipation, Unger does not revive intelligible essences, at least directly, and sees human nature as evolving and emerging over time. (As we shall see in Chapter 5, Ayn Rand subscribes to an essentialism, oœ an epistemological sort.) This hardly conforms to the desire to define things exactly, but in a world of change this is not always possible. Alfred Marshall had a different idea of what economics was about than did Adam Smith, and Marshall's work itself changed the definition. On today's understanding, economics is decidedly less a moral enterprise than it was to either Marshall or Smith, but the economic approach has been extended to cover parts of politics and even sociobiology.
2.3.4. Unger also holds that the domination of some men over others inhibits the full expression of human nature. Buchanan, as we have seen, is professedly agnostic about human nature (LL 63) and its evolution, but we have argued that Buchanan implicitly holds a contractarian ideal and something of a hope that man is evolving toward it. Buchanan's value-free stance does not enable him directly to decry domination, which for him would be non-unanimous putative "contracts," but it is safe to say that he regards the coming together of men to make an agreement as something more than a theoretical tool of analysis. Men express their potential more fully when they act agreeably than when they resort to force.
2.3.5. Unger criticizes individualist doctrine on grounds of the untenability of the radical separations of universal and particular made in each of its three aspects: theory vs. fact, reason vs. desire, and rules vs. values. With respect to the first, if things lack intelligible essences, our words are at bottom names of arbitrary groupings of things. Our theories stand upon these arbitrary groupings and are therefore arbitrary themselves. If we take arbitrary not to mean provisional but randomly chaotic, then theory is completely separate from fact. This is in plain opposition to our merry optimism that science is progressive. In practice, we sneak intelligible essences in by the back door, and "it is not surprising, then, that language should become an obsession of the [individualist] thinker, for he worships it as the demiurge of the world." (KP 80) Moreover, he who has the power of making definitions has real power indeed (as Hobbes noted in _Leviathan_), as was also (we add) noted in a certain book that has had an appeal across a far wider spectrum of readers than Hobbes: [6]
2.3.6. The rejoinder to Unger's criticisms is that no one, or at least certainly no one today, espouses such an extreme nominalism. (But recall Unger's own strategy of pushing individualist ideas out to absurdity (KP 8)). In the realm of set theory we may speak of arbitrary sets with complete generality, [7] but when we deal with the factual sciences our concepts are partly if not largely controlled by the fact that they should be useful. Our theories in general, and their concepts in particular, are provisional and revisable, and both do get revised, in ever closer approximation to the facts. (The doctrine that concepts are true to the extent that they are useful as parts of true theories is the *pragmatism* of the great Charles Peirce.) [8] Thus, universal and particular are intertwined. Nevertheless, they are separate in accordance with pre-Peirce individualist doctrine and remain partly separate still, since one hopes it is the theories that get adjusted to the facts and not vice versa. (However, facts do not stand completely by themselves and are in fact interpreted and understood in the light of some theory or other. This intertwines theory and fact all the more. Examples come readily to mind: Interpretation of tracks in Wilson cloud chambers uses a great deal of physical theory, as the empirical investigation of the effects of minimum wage laws uses economic and statistical theory.)
2.4.2. Now, it could be argued that the number of general concepts needed to describe the world is infinite, but it is hard to see what sort of evidence (very indirect, as Bunge said to me in a letter) could support this view, and, infinite or not, science does succeed in reducing all the possible things to more manageable combinations of things. That the things of the world are clustered and not chaotic does not seem to be just an artifact of the human brain, though its limited size will mean a failure to make all the distinctions and refinements necessary, which fact we are reminded of every time science advances. Our brains, it might also be claimed, have a bureaucrat's preference for ordering reality into a hierarchy: In cosmology, it is planets, solar systems, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and so forth. But: There are arguments as to whether there are superclusters of clusters of galaxies (pretty much accepted) and super-duperclusters of superclusters (hotly debated). What is of extreme importance here is that such arguments today do not proceed by a priori reasoning but rather upon modern probability theory coupled with elaborate catalogs of observed galaxies. (The Greeks knew of a _galaxias kyklos_, "circle of milk," as early as the sixth century, B.C., but that this was a galaxy of stars, our Milky Way, was not established until Sir William Herschel mapped it with a telescope in 1785). [9]
2.4.3. Whatever reality is like, the individualism Unger describes asserts that theory and fact are entirely separate. Those living in individualist society make such a separation, Unger claims, because philosophy and life are intertwined. If our psychology and politics accord with individualist premises (i.e., reason and desire are separated as are rules and values), our views of theory and fact will also come to share this same radical separation. Unger may well be correct here, though we think the correlation is not 100%, but what is missing is a good, solid materialist explanation. (My reasons for adopting Bunge's materialist metaphysics, i.e., its compatibility with science, will be discussed in the next chapter.) It is not enough just to analogize one mode of separation with another.
2.4.4. Let us hazard an explanation in the way the brain is divided, being mindful that such an explanation is almost certainly only partly true but nevertheless illustrates that human behavior need not be mysterious. We begin by borrowing from Stuart J. Dimond's 1979 anthology chapter, "Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Vertebrate Brain."^ Dimond observes that animals tend to be symmetric along one of the two axes perpendicular to their line of motion. This is true also of the brain, but there are certain asymmetries, such as the heart being on one side, as well. In vertebrates with two eyes, the brain integrates the information from both eyes to form a three-dimensional picture. Dimond also argues that such animals' brain halves duplicate functions to a large extent and he observes that this excess capacity can be useful in case of accident. What he does not show is that this excess capacity is worth its cost in calories. In any case, there is a certain division of labor as well as duplication. Among other things, the integration of information from the eyes takes place on one side of the brain and not the other.
2.4.5. When we come to humans, we know from the work of Julian Jaynes (1976)^ and others that the left hemisphere of the cortex (in right-handed persons) is more concerned with fact and the right with patterns or theories. According to Jaynes, modern schizophrenics and pre-self-conscious men before the Greeks heard voices from the right side, which were often felt to be messages from the gods. With the coming of consciousness, men heard these voices less, but with a nostalgia remaining for the good old days when men did not have to think. Thought requires effort (free will!) to stimulate the feedback between the fact and theory sides.
2.4.6. On this view, the bifurcation of the cerebral cortex is (perhaps) the material basis for the bifurcation of our thoughts into theory and fact and, correspondingly, the splits between reason and desire and rules and values. Once one bifurcation gets going, so do the others, though we hardly understand the details. Why did these splits really get going--nay, get exaggerated--only after the Middle Ages? On the contrary, if Jaynes is correct that consciousness means the integration of the hemispheres, then these artificial (brain-artifactual) distinctions should be eroding.
2.4.7. In fact, the bifurcations made in the post-medieval West are less rigid than those made by earlier men with less integrated hemispheres. In the Middle Ages, the overwhelming bifurcation was between God and man. God was wholly transcendent, except for Jesus, and this was an important exception. In "heretical" Christianity, that is, the losing side (losing because it was too radically separatist for the emerging Western mentality), Jesus was wholly God and nowhere material (Jesus only pretended to suffer on the cross). Some of these Levantine throwbacks went so far as to claim Jehovah was but the demiurge, or sub-god, who created the foul material things of the Earth, while the true god sent his son to redeem the chosen of mankind to participate in the wholly separate realm of the spirit. (Pagels 1979)^
2.4.8. Individualism represents a big step forward, a secularization of transcendence in Unger's term (KP 161), though with lingering, even large, bifurcations still present. The Darwinian revolution, which is at bottom materialist and should do in the mind-body distinction, is still running its course. Even in our enlightened age we still have an America that is at least 80% Christian and more than enough spiritualists as well as mystics and irrationalists, even among physicists.
2.4.9. What is remarkable--and deserves careful neurological study, much of which will have to be speculative--is that Indo-European religions have always tended to be trinitarian rather than dualistic. (Dumézil 1959^) Furthermore, it is in the modern West that fiction (the novel) was added to truth and lies, the stranger to friend and enemy (Cuddihy 1976^^), not guilty to innocent and guilty (Scottish law), nonrational to rational and irrational (Pareto). As we shall see, Unger proposes his own thirds in between the bifurcations he discusses. Let us remark now that there is a basis in reality for some of the many bifurcations men have invented down through the ages. Some will collapse into unities (e.g., spiritual into material, mind into body, i.e., brain), and others will split into trinities and (more rarely) foursomes. So far, *formal* logic is two-valued, true vs. false.
2.5.2. The upshot is that, too often, reason is confined to public life, desire to private life. The bifurcation of reason and desire destroys a unified self and shared commitment to universal ends that gives moral significance to community life. "Schizophrenia brings to light the hidden moral truth of the moral condition [individualist] psychology describes." (KP 58) Cognitive incoherence, personal distrust, social competitiveness, and natural disharmony all follow from this separation of reason and desire.
2.5.3. Economists will see themselves here, for it is true that economic theory is designed to be so general that wants could be completely arbitrary. And we also see in the economist's use of Pareto optimality an unwillingness to compare one man's utility with another's. It is further true that reason is regarded by economists as purely instrumental, that rational action is geared to the satisfaction of (arbitrarily) given ends. But the economist also has his morality of reason, the non-coercion principles of the market, which can be conditioned by public goods arguments, but still within the bounds of Paretian criteria. Buchanan does not advocate non-coercion in bilateral economic exchanges (laissez-faire) but he does keep the non-coercion criterion in his unanimity principle for a multilateral social contract.
2.6.2. This only implies that lines of permitted and prohibited will have to be drawn somewhat arbitrarily, and from some perspectives, very arbitrarily. The use of a morality of reason, such as Kant's maxim of universality, or the familiar dictum, "your freedom ends where my *nose* begins," suffers from the problem that those "long chains of deductive reasoning" Alfred Marshall grew to detest are not sufficient when it comes to giving exact specifics. The best we can hope for is to learn from experience what kinds of social arrangements help keep the social order viable and progressive. It would be nice if there could be universal agreement about the lessons of history, but, as I have argued, such unanimity is only something to be approximated.
2.6.3. Concerning Unger's charge that individualism leads the individual to an atomistic life, the terms are loaded. One could draw the choices the other way: proud and sovereign independence vs. cowering and coerced conformity. Let it simply be noted that a free society does not prohibit cooperation, only the spurious cooperation that is not for mutual benefit. It would not be fair, however, to set up Unger as an example of someone who favors conformity for its own sake; rather he sees the doctrine of individualism as leading to too much competition and too little cooperation, certainly from his own standpoint and *possibly* from that of the people concerned, if they could see themselves truly. Perhaps the hypothetical wise and impartial contractors in the remote and future world of New Contractarian Man could arrange a political constitution so that the predicted outcome is an optimal blend of competition and cooperation, but who is this Roberto Mangabeira Unger to have a ready-made answer in the present? I maintain that it is presumptuous to tell apparently happy people that they are miserable and would place the burden of proof squarely upon such claimants. Nevertheless, there are plenty of people who claim that they themselves are alienated (as well as claiming alienation for others but rarely on any other basis than loose observation). Buchanan himself sees the taxpayers as feeling remote from a monstrous and bureaucratic government. (LL 91-92) This has come about, Buchanan says, precisely because the government has usurped power.
2.6.4. Unger's charge can be phrased empirically, using Buchanan's contractarianism as a controlling ideal: Will cooperation, provided under a constitution, induce further efforts to increase it when new laws are contemplated or the constitution itself renegotiated? Contrariwise, will people living under a regime of rugged individualism be inclined to extend individualism further? Or will a balance be struck, a convergence to an equilibrium? And how far will this balance vary with time and peoples? Unfortunately, both Unger and Buchanan make only occasional noises about a federal structure of governments and societies, a topic which will absorb us in Chapter 6. Any optimum would be such a structure, one which, however, could not and should not be planned from the ground up, but one whose evolution could be (weakly) directed.
2.6.5. Freedom comes at a price, for some a very heavy price, since men living in a free society cannot easily get away with blaming their failures on others. Resentment just does not wash. On the other hand, one man or group's resentment is another's legitimate grievance. The grievers will claim the rules of the game, i.e., the social contract they did *not* sign, are stacked against them. Such claims, of course, can be hypocritical posturing and often call for redistribution of wealth and income instead of modification of the rules of the game. (LL 81) This is the usual procedure of egalitarians. On the other hand, libertarians and near libertarians will note the great amount of protectionist legislation, but will not try to get their group protected, instead urging deprotection of the protected, which will amount to calling for Buchanan's constitutional revolution. [10] Egalitarians want to increase radically the role of the state, and some go so far as wanting to abolish the family and even, if they only could, nonrandom mating in the population. It can be safely said that the chance of such drastic reforms achieving anything like unanimous consent is microscopic. Again, Unger may think he has found the truth, but his job remains to persuade the rest of us.
2.7.2. It might also be held that every society will pass laws against exploitation. This is problematic: First, very few societies have anything like a social contract, whose main iob is to limit the greatest exploiter of all, government, and no society has been very successful here for any sustained period. Second, the definition of non-coercive exploitation is either so broad that it includes almost every intelligent use of opportunity or so personal that no consensus on its meaning can be achieved. Third, we have an intuitive idea of exploitation as occurring even under voluntary agreement for mutual benefit when one party almost always gets the long end of the stick or rather most of the total gains from trade. Such cases are very hard to prove and may very well result from existing regulation or other rigidities rather than from a deficit of government involvement in the economy. Fourth, if prices are free to fluctuate, most of the effects of biases in the laws will be counteracted, though deadweight welfare losses may remain.
2.7.3. Nevertheless, most (if not all) industrial nations have laws against "exploitation," such as anti-monopoly, labor union, and workingman's compensation laws. How far the exploited benefit from these laws in the net (i.e., after prices and wages have adjusted) is a moot point, and their prevalence is worth pondering. No state is wholly legitimate, there being no actual unanimous social contract anywhere, but no state that lets its members leave is wholly illegitimate either. It is therefore problematic whether Buchanan's "conceptual contract" should be extended to include such anti-exploitation laws. If the conceptual contractors all had to be as steeped in the public choice literature of the past two decades as Buchanan himself, such legislation might very well not have been permitted under the constitution. This is asking entirely too much of the conceptual contractors--who knows how poor today's cutting edge in economic understanding will look several decades down the road!--and such things as exploitation are often far more subjective than objective anyhow. (In the final chapter, we shall examine the work of Raymond Cattell and consider how much knowledge of his field of social psychology our contractors might utilize.)
2.7.4. Under strict methodological individualism, all values are subjective, and Buchanan wishes his treatment of constitutionalism to be so broad and general as to allow for any possible social contract, so long as it be agreed upon unanimously. As we have seen, however, Buchanan himself winds up placing restrictions on full generality, and we have added others, which in our judgment are necessary if the constitutional order is to be viable. Here is the dilemma: If we can judge that certain anti-exploitation laws have passed the Buchanan litmus test (i.e., could have been passed under some conceptual contract), what is to prevent the state from invoking anti-exploitation each step along the path of the politics of resentment to Leviathan? On the other hand, could the state come to be viewed as a tool of the exploiters and thus illegitimate if it failed to pass anti-exploitation laws demanded by the voters, illiterate in economics though they be? The constitutional order may not be viable then, either. The spread of economic literacy will help resolve the dilemma, and our hidden assumption is that New Contractarian Man is versed in this discipline. Until this golden age arrives, the already existing understanding of the role of flexible prices in greatly nullifying exploitation can be used as a debating tactic to shift the burden of proof onto those who claim (non-government) exploitation is important.
2.7.5. For Buchanan, one of the great merits of individualism is precisely that of its generality, though we have argued that this generality must be tempered in the interest of a viable social contract. On the other hand, Unger sees this generality as implying that individualist politics is contentless, that no conclusions can be drawn from it about what the laws ought to be. As we have seen, Unger holds that, just as under individualist psychology a man is the sum of his particular desires (with reason being instrumental to the achievement of these desires and also as being universal over all men), under individualist politics, society is the sum of individual men (with universal rules being instrumental to the achievement of particular values of individual men). Individualism thus posits an extreme dichotomy between general public rules and particular private desires. The political order, then, must be made up of rules that are neutral with respect to individuals. Unger's claim is that this is not possible, that laws will unavoidably benefit "the purposes of some individuals more than those of their fellows." (KP 66-67) More generally, not even just enforcement of the laws is possible, for once a judge goes beyond the strict letter of the law to its purpose, as he surely on occasion will, he becomes capricious or else starts imposing his own view of the good society in his decisions, and this means that he ceases to be neutral about the merits of particular men's values. The ultimate upshot of individualist politics is that we nevertheless pretend to an unbreachable split between public and private and this destroys a feeling of unity in the individual.
2.8.2. More to the point as telling against Unger's criticisms of individualism generally is his own admission: "There is no one thinker who accepts the [individualist] theory, in the form in which I present it, as a whole, or whose doctrines are completely defined by its tenets." (KP 8) In other words, reality puts a brake upon an ever present tendency to reify, more so in the scientific age (so we have argued) than in the past.
2.8.3. Moreover, Unger's three divisions of universal and particular (theory and fact, reason and desire, rules and values) have a great measure of truth in reality. Furthermore, as evolution proceeds, the harmony between reality and our world views grows, although there have been awakenings of interest in the "Wisdom of the East," apparently more than once a generation since at least the Age of Discovery began in 1492. The neurological explanation is simple: Thinking takes work! There has been a spate of books in the last decade declaring that subatomic particle physicists have just been rediscovering what the East knew a long time ago, to wit, reality is an ineffably, interconnected One, conveniently forgetting that Newton's law of gravitation had things connected up over three centuries ago, and, as Lawrence R. Brown states in _The Might of the West_ (1963)^, only Westerners conceived that the same laws could apply to terrestrial and celestial things alike.
2.8.4. Unger would be quite correct to say that our (roughly) quart-size brains do not describe reality very well, individualism being just the latest example. One wonders about Australopithecines' pint-sized ideologies, but even Buchanan's three-pint contractarianism has problems if carried out literally. Such criticisms are often far from useless, but the critic is at his most useful best when he hints at things to come. Unger does so, and let us examine his suggestions.
2.9.2. If man cannot be fully known, we will have to define human nature as something evolving, which Unger does. He then proceeds to define the good as that which hurries this evolution on. This definition is dangerously circular, for how can one recognize whether *change* is actually evolution unless one has an idea of the good to check the change against in the first place? If one does not fall into this trap, there is another: We conclude, rightly or wrongly, that human evolution, as represented by man at his best (a third trap), is headed in a specific direction. The trap is arbitrarily to approve of this direction or to equate the good with the inevitable (if one sees these changes as inevitable, which Unger, by the way, does not).
2.9.3. I may have fallen into this trap myself, when speaking of the evolution toward New Contractarian Man. Recall that majoritarian democracy was once (and by many still is) regarded as the ideal of responsive government; what we got was rampant pressure groupism, a decidedly negative sum game with mostly losers and precious few (net) winners. A similar impasse may be reached with New Contractarian Man, and it is just as lame to blame the failings of contractarianism on the populace as it is to blame the failures of communism on the failures of empirical man to become New Socialist Man. There is a point to both excuses, but not a very large one. One should never become so enamored of one's pet theory as to push it out of harm's way into the zone of the non-falsifiable.
2.9.4. Unger has an idea, rather vague, of what the future of human evolution will bring, and he couches it in terms of a harmonization, though not a full resolution, of the radical splits of universal and particular he sees in the individualist world view. Under individualism, "Man stands before nature and society as the grand manipulator." (KP 153) Unger would replace this separation with an ideal of a natural harmony between the two and sees such a harmony already existing in love, art, religion, and work, with the last being (ideally) a harmonious blending of a self and the things found in nature rather than a mere domination over them. Second, rather than individual ends being arbitrarily diverse, Unger envisions an ideal of sympathy and a sharing of ends, or individuals complementing rather than competing with each other. (See the section of Chapter 6, "The Self of Self-Interest.") His third ideal, that of concrete universality, will be approached when people see themselves as specific instances of human nature and as helping that nature evolve (just as each paper in _Public Choice_ helps direct what the discipline of public choice is and is becoming).
2.9.5. These ideals of harmony seem hardly objectionable when the alternative is extreme belligerency. In fact, we are partly along this road, even under the rule of individualism. We do, partly, live in harmony with nature ("Nature to be commanded must be obeyed"), and, learning some of the laws of nature and society, we are backing off from the extreme enthusiasm for social planning that was embraced before it got put into practice. (But some will never learn.) We do share some ends, else civil society would nowhere exist, not even one ruled by Hobbes's omnipotent sovereign. And most of us, whether Christians or Darwinians, see ourselves as part of an ongoing process.
2.9.6. The question is, when does this evolution stop? Unger himself says these ideas are never to be fully realized in history. If so, what is the optimum, and is it not close to what would come about under individualism, under "the Enlightenment dream of free relations among free men," (LL, closing page) or under Buchanan's contractarian ideal? Unger is richly unclear here but he obviously thinks there is much room for improvement, as he holds that human nature will not become fully expressed so long as some men dominate others. So what is domination? Unger is not at all helpful when he says, "Domination is defined simply as unjustified power (KP 167), but he gives a hint when he derides "domination" resulting from genetic advantage: "The lucky ones can then cash in on the favors of nature like prostitutes whose price depends on whether they are fat or thin." (KP 173) [11]
2.9.7. Unger gives another hint of what the elimination of domination might be (KP 183): "One can imagine a condition under which the distribution of power within the bureaucracy would not involve personal dependence and domination. It might be called the condition of democracy. The exercise of power based on merit must be subordinated to the democratically established common purposes of those working in the institution. For this subordination to be effective, a number of requirements have to be satisfied. The chief of these is the availability of an independent mechanism through which all members of the institution participate equally in the formulation of common ends [other than profitability, one presumes!]. An ever broader scope is given to these common ends in determining the aims and the internal structure of the institution. For the purposes of participation, the distribution of talents is disregarded."
2.9.8. This fits in with Unger's ideals of sympathy. But: Unger professes not to wipe out individuality altogether; indeed, individuality is all the more brought out when individuals complement each other rather than coexist in a state of mutual antagonism barely contained by the police.
2.9.9. The question now boils down to which ends people will come to share, presuming Unger wishes this sharing to be genuine and not forced. Buchanan, the orthodox economist, may not have an answer here, for economists have blown up the word taste, a common word in their lexicon which no longer refers to idiosyncratic expressions of individuality, into an all-purpose term for preference, including a "taste" for committing murder and mayhem. But Buchanan, the constitutionalist, does have an answer: The shared ends are whatever are agreed upon in the signing of the social contract.
2.9.10. Unger can reply, of course, that the social contract is a fiction, but so are Unger's own ideals. To be fair, we must either push them both out to their limits or hold both to the realm of common sense. If the ends to be shared are not to be forced, we are squarely in Buchanan's world of unanimity. Unger speaks darkly of "the implacable stratagems by which one mind becomes the master of another," and warns that "the classical arguments in favor of slavery show that even the harshest forms of oppression may appear justified." (KP 244) Buchanan would not entirely reject this argument, for he deals with the question of people treating the social contract itself as a public good and therefore making insufficient investigation before submitting to its terms. (LL 145) We may feign, if we wish, that this will not be a problem for New Contractarian Man or that, if it is, any initial unfairness will have largely been eroded within a few generations, but we could also feign something similar as we approach Unger's ideal world.
2.9.11. Unger approacheth Buchanan, in so far as both see human nature evolving, but is the converse true? Buchanan is emphatically not an egalitarian in the usual sense of being willing to impose an external norm. A social contract may look quite lopsided to someone outside, but for Buchanan the fact of agreement alone is what counts. But in another sense, Buchanan is just as much an egalitarian as Unger is, i.e., perfectly. Unger, from the third paragraph above: "For the purposes of participation, the distribution of talents is disregarded." Now Buchanan on page two [12] of _The Limits of Liberty_: "Each man counts for one, and that is that.
2.9.12. Thus Buchanan approacheth Unger with respect to the fundamental equality of men (even if not exactly in the same senses), if only Buchanan could be sure Unger would adopt the placing of ends to be shared in and only in the social contract itself. But there is another sense in which Buchanan approaches Unger's egalitarianism: the historical. Now, _Limits_ is not very obviously a historical book. There are fleeting references to history, but Buchanan's treatment is mostly abstract. It can be considered downright provincial, concentrating not merely on modern Westerners but quietly assuming that most people are sharp enough to get tenure in a university economics department. (Unger's men are near geniuses, too. It is a common presumption.) Unger's treatment, while also very abstract, is more oriented to history: He speaks of the idea of intelligible essences held by ancient and medieval philosophers, the individualism held in the modern age, and the philosophy to come in the next age. Nevertheless, the two authors may be joined, for one of the broad changes in history (of man at his best!) is that of increasing participation in the affairs of government. Majority rule may not be unanimity, but neither is it monarchy or aristocracy, and Buchanan is no more a champion of the latter two than Unger. As unanimity has been approached historically, the progressively less powerful have come into the polity and have made it more egalitarian, in the sense of more universal: "Each man counts for one, and that is that" used to be *some* men count as one. Indeed, one kind of domination or power, the only kind for Buchanan, is that of operating the political machinery without the consent of the less powerful. But if the formerly powerless (i.e., the excluded) can then run the political machinery so as to take power from the incumbents, then the incumbents are the dominated. Unger may try to play Robin Hood but not when pretending to reduce domination at the same time.
2.9.13. Through this thicket of tortured reasoning, then, do Buchanan and Unger approach each other, in the sense that both want participation by all. To the extent either has come to his abstract theories as a way of grounding previously held values, and to the extent either finds our reasoning dubious, he will not see any such convergence. But perhaps the road to convergence is rendered a bit more easy, considering that both Buchanan and Unger have remarkably little to say when it comes down to specifics. For Buchanan, this silence is wholly deliberate, and it is the present writer who has had to make recommendation *for* Buchanan, with the aim of achieving some minimal level of viability in the social contract. Unger's approach is very much different. He does reject the ancient and medieval notion of objective values, but his depiction of the good as reducing domination, and thus letting human nature express itself more fully, has an insistence about it not entirely unlike the insistence made by those who think they have truly found objective values. Unger describes the method for muddling through as "practical reason," and he confesses: "I have no worked-out account of [practical reason] to offer, not because I believe such an account impossible or unimportant, but simply because I have not found one." (KP 258) This is hardly a statement Buchanan would make.
2.9.14. We have added content to Buchanan, to ensure that we will in fact get out of anarchy in the first place. We now need to add content to Unger, for the opposite reason of chaining Leviathan. This is a problem Unger (and, as we shall see in the final chapter, Cattell) scarcely recognizes, though Leviathan is on the march almost everywhere. How can Unger see to it that the government is restricted to do just what he wants it to do? In our country what began as efforts to redistribute income from the rich to the poor (or from the productive to the unproductive) has ended up today with very little of this kind of redistributive activity taking place, in comparison with redistribution to members of organized pressure groups whose sole merit consists in being organized. (Tullock 1983)^ Moreover, what net redistribution by income class does take place is managed with incredible waste. And whatever unjust power was held in the bad old days of monarchy and aristocracy has been replaced with the far larger power of Leviathan. Lastly, if Unger had his way, envy would become the master principle of politics, despite any wishes on his part to have only the grievances he himself thinks are legitimate given a voice in politics.
2.10.2 *The real danger to liberty is not from collectivists (who are hard to find) but from muddled metaphysics.* It takes clear thinking as well as eternal vigilance to keep Leviathan at bay. Unger's unclear vision of the future will be no more successful at maintaining liberty than the great Canute was at stopping the tide. Extreme individualism, as I have argued, is not the answer, and it is useless to answer leftists' insistence on objective values (to which they alone possess the key) by denying them entirely. I shall argue, when discussing Hayek in Chapter 4, that the notion of social justice, which some consider to be entirely objective, should be reconstrued so that the only just societies are those with the (ideally unanimous) consent of the governed. And in the final chapter, I shall argue that certain values and/or laws take on the character of objectivity to the extent that they turn out, in fact, to be required for the maintenance of the social, what Cattell calls maintenance values as opposed to experimental values. The *test*, however, should remain agreement, with what are persuasive arguments and not just authority.
2.10.3. Collectivists, then, are not so much those who hold to a Platonic metaphysics about Society, but rather those whose policies would lead to Leviathan. The best way to put them on the run is to demand empirical evidence and clarification of their background assumptions, not to try to make them vanish by an a priori ruling out of court of the issue of objectivity altogether or by some sort of semantic trickery. The point is to root everyone's values out, no matter their persuasion, question the bases for the values (which so often are just personal whims), and try to see which are true (or true for some men at some time). But we need a language to discuss these issues and hence first a long discussion of the ontology of Mario Bunge.
3.1.2 The honors for the idea of developing a philosophy consistent with science go to the great Charles Peirce and his program for a "scientific metaphysics" (the title of the sixth volume of his posthumously collected works), but the sciences were nowhere as advanced then as they are today. Even more decisively, the language of mathematics, set theory, and symbolic logic did not yet allow for the kind of precision needed to do the task. Bunge's work represents the first carrying out of Peirce's vision, and this first effort should never be construed as claiming to be the last effort or the final word on any of its subjects.
3.1.3. Mario Bunge's magnum opus is his Treatise on Basic Philosophy, published by D. Reidel in Dordrecht, Holland. Seven of its eight volumes had appeared by 1988. To place the ontology volumes, which are the ones most important to the present discussion, in the context of his work, as well as to beat a drum for them by way of advertisement, the volumes run as follows:
Volumes 1 and 2
(Semantics I and II):
Sense and Reference (1974, 180 pp.)
Interpretation and Truth (1974, 210 pp.) [p. 56:]
Volumes 3 and 4
(Ontology I and II)
The Furniture of the World (1977, 352 pp.)
HEREINAFTER always "FW."
A World of Systems (1979, 314 pp.)
HEREINAFTER always "WS."
Volumes 5, 6, and 7
(Epistemology and Methodology I, II, and III)
Exploring the World (1983, 404 pp.)
Understanding the World (1983, 296 pp.)
Philosophy of Science and Technology (1985)
Part 1: Formal and Physical Science, 263 pp.
Part 2: Life Science, Social Science and Technology, 341 pp.
Volume 8
(Ethics)
The Good and the Right (too long in forthcoming!)
3.1.4 Bunge conceives of ontology (or metaphysics) as the most general of the sciences and of particular sciences as special ontologies. While Peirce coined the term "scientific metaphysics," Bunge was the first to build a system describing the way reality is structured in a manner fully informed by contemporary science. Doing so will bring philosophy up to date with the separate sciences and put the latter on firmer foundations. As such, the general science of ontology is no more completed and infallible than any of the particular sciences: "It is hoped that this system will not be ridiculously at variance with reason and experience." (FW xiii)
3.1.5. Bunge's system is exact in the sense that much of it is expressed in the symbols and terminology of modern logic and mathematics. While none of his proofs of theorems are particularly difficult in themselves, his Treatise will be inaccessible to those without the mathematical prerequisites. Plato's Academy allegedly bore a sign over the entrance forbidding those ignorant of geometry to enter; Bunge's academy would replace geometry with topology. Bunge's works have a rigor and exactness that engender an aesthetic pleasure and a sense of rightness that is paralleled in the great masterpieces of classical music. His works are free of (substantial) mathematical errors that bulk irksomely in the [p. 57:] writings of other philosophers, who belong to what C.P. Snow called the First (i.e., "humanistic") Culture. It is hard however, to convey the pleasure of reading Bunge, much as no book devoted to Beethoven's string quartets could substitute for hearing them. Instead, I shall sneak past the sign about topology and try to sketch his central arguments in nontechnical language and offer justifications for them.
3.1.6. Bunge argues that all thinkers with any pretense to being scientific and exact have at least an implicit metaphysics or a broad background view of the objects of their study. His purpose is to bring out these implicit views, clarify them, and try to improve them. It is certainly the case in economics that the background assumptions are hidden, for economists rarely define, for example, what choice is or argue against determinism. From one of Buchanan's essays (1969b)^: "In a wholly determinist universe, choice is purely illusory, as is discussion about choice. I do not treat this age-old issue, and I prefer to think that the subject discussed as well as the discussion itself is not illusory." As we shall see, Bunge will define and defend the reality of choice and free will, resolving it to the satisfaction of economists perhaps, though not necessarily of all philosophers.
3.1.7. In _The Limits of Liberty_, it *seems* that Buchanan holds the view that society is the sum of its individuals, but he does not treat the matter at length. That he is not altogether satisfied with extreme methodological individualism is clear enough, but his fear seems to be for the opposite of extreme collectivism. Those he calls positivists, who equate values with whatever the powers that be propound these values to be (LL 51)^, are bad enough, let alone outright collectivist mystics like Hegel, whom Buchanan does not even bother to dismiss. As we shall see, Bunge's notion of a system, and in particular of a social system, is a way out of extreme individualism that does not embrace collectivism.
3.1.8. Regarding the scientific status of his own system, Bunge states that "there will never be any metaphysical laboratories" and that "metaphysics can be checked solely by its coherence with science." (FW 15-16) So while his metaphysics is not directly an experimental science, it is designed to be compatible with all the ones that are experimental. It is this feature, plus its revisability, that qualifies (so far only Bunge's) ontology as a science. Though economics is not as full-fledged a science as physics, Buchanan also argued that compatibility with other branches of science is a virtue in one of his most inspired and inspiring essays, "Economics and its Scientific Neighbors" (1966)^. I shall adopt Bunge's [p. 58:] metaphysics, then, but as always with all sciences, until further notice. My aim here is not nearly so much to defend Bunge against all comers as to exploit Bunge's results for the purpose of developing a metaphysics of liberty and discussing its implications for the problems of social justice, natural rights, and federalism (Chapters 4-6).
3.2.2. Chapter 1 of Furniture, "Substance," lays down in precise language the notion of bare existents (also called substantial individuals), as yet to be decked out with any attributes. Bunge elucidates how one object is part of another, how two things may be placed side to side, and how they might be mixed. He also discusses how an object may be (conceptually) decomposed to certain levels: a social system to people, at the living level, and to all the atoms of the people at the atomic level. This concept of level will come into play throughout, but the first chapter is mainly of technical and aesthetic value (substantially so) rather than of value for the prime concerns here.
3.2.3. "Form" is the title of Chapter 2 and fleshes out bare existents with properties. Here Bunge takes pains to distinguish the properties of substantial individuals, composite or not, taken singly or multiply, from our statements about them. Properties are always properties of something: "There is no substantial property apart from entities, let alone prior to them and dwelling in a separate Realm of Forms." (FW 64) We can make negative statements about properties, but the properties themselves are always positive. Thus, the statement that neutrons are electrically charged happens to be false, but this does not mean that neutrons have the property of not-being-charged, let alone of being anti-charged. Some properties are frame-dependent (as in relativity theory), and some are even observer-dependent, but only in psychology and definitely not in the most general science, ontology. "A scientific metaphysics must be just as [p. 59] objectivistic as science itself, i.e. thoroughly." (FW 67)
3.2.4. Bunge postulates the existence of only a finite number of very general properties (like mass and charge) but an (uncountably) infinite number of particular properties of special cases (e.g., properties of a specific atom at a specific time, there being a continuum of instants of time). This is a critical assumption, and here is his justification (FW 72-73):
3.2.6. Compare now Unger's second statement of the doctrine of intelligible essences: "The theory of intelligible essences states there are a limited number of classes of things in the world, that each thing has characteristics that determine the class to which it belongs, and that these characteristics can be known directly by the mind." (KP 79)^ In Bunge's view, much of our knowledge is indirect, mediated by scientific theories, rather than being directly perceptible, and so his notion is not quite the same as that held by ancient and medieval philosophers. Bunge's definition of a natural kind, to be discussed shortly, is also connected to the idea that there are only a finite number of general properties. Bunge defines the scope of a property as the set of individuals for which the property holds and postulates a principle of lawfulness, which states that the scope of any property either contains or is contained in the [p. 60] scope of some other property. In other words, there are no stray properties unrelated to everything else in the universe.
3.2.7. Bunge then gives the important definition of an emerRent property as one that is true of the whole but of none of its parts. Equilibrium is an excellent example of an emergent property economists are familiar with. Bunge postulates that all composite things have some emergent properties but that these properties are epistemologically analyzable with reference to the parts. This latter contradicts holism and its discussion of wholes apart from their parts. Bunge allows for the explanation of ontological novelty and warns that "a mountain is not explained away when explained as composed of atoms." (FW 98)
3.2.8. In other words, epistemological reductionism, si; ontological reductionism, no. It is the lawfulness of the world, of things being and becoming and of processes, that makes epistemological reduction possible at least in many cases. (Bunge does not claim that we will someday understand everything.) Later Bunge will view the world as made up of layers--physical, chemical, biological, and social--and protest the "ontological bulldozing of reality" to a single level.
3.2.9. Stated in such a summary fashion as we have done, it may seem that Bunge's development of his system is arbitrary, full of unnecessary technicalities, and bound to do nothing but add to the bulk of pointless argumentation that is philosophy. Philosophy hitherto has never been conclusive, as the quote from Mencken at the beginning made clear, but Bunge's program is to make philosophy consistent with science, and this is perhaps the only way any consensus can be reached. Consensus may never become unanimous, however: "We cannot prove the existence of concrete things any more than we can prove the existence of deities or of disembodied minds. What can be proved is that, unless there were things, other items--such as acting on them and investigating them--would be impossible." (FW 112) Bunge frequently intersplices the formal mathematical exposition of his system with discussions of previously advanced solutions, what (in part) about them, and how they might be modified so as better to conform with science and the way scientists operate. He is uniquely qualified for this task, for he was a practicing scientist (physics), and his Foundations of Physics (1967b)^ is still the only book to lay down the implicit background assumptions of physicists in an exact way. Bunge has also written extensively on the philosophy of science, and his Treatise might be viewed as an extension of Foundations of Physics. [p. 61:]
3.2.10. Chapter 3 of _The Furniture of the World_ is entitled "Thing," which is defined as an individual (simple or composite) together with all its properties, known or unknown. Bunge distinguishes real things from our concepts and ideas of them: "The failure to distinguish the thing represented from its model is not just a form of mental derangement: it is also at the root of black magic and subjectivism." (FW 121) Part of modeling something is to characterize the states it can be in from one of many alternative viewpoints. Scientific laws restrict the possible states a thing can be in.
3.2.11. Several definitions: A class of things is not an arbitrary set of things but a set that is the scope of some property. (Recall that the number of properties is finite.) Several properties taken conjointly (e.g., human = rational and animal) determine a kind, and a set of properties, each of which is also a law, determines a natural kind. All of this, however, is just a framework: "We shall not list the kinds of constituents of the world but shall leave that task to the special sciences. For no sooner does the metaphysician pronounce the world to be 'made of' such and such kinds, than the scientist discovers that some of the alleged species are empty or that others are missing from the metaphysician's list." (p. 153)
3.2.12. "Possibility" is the title of Chapter 4 of Furniture. Bunge conceives of reality as the union of the actual with the really possible. A conceptual possibility could be any characterization (what Bunge calls a state function) of some thing, but real possibility must also conform with scientific laws. What actually happens depends on possibility and also upon circumstances. Laws plus circumstances may force a unique fact or they may not. Bunge's world is not a rigidly deterministic one and he allows for chance propensities. Looking at it mathematically, each law divides all conceptual possibilities into two subsets: the possible and the impossible. All the laws (known and unknown) reduce the domain of the possible to the intersection of a number of subsets. Rigid determinism would assert that this intersection has one and only one member: that there is but a unique outcome. However, there is no a priori reason to suppose this in advance, and so Bunge leaves open real possibility. The ideas in this chapter will become useful when discussing choice and free will later.
3.2.13. Chapter 5 is called "Change," and it is a thing of beauty to behold the way Bunge can define change without introducing time. This chapter paves the way for the final one of The Furniture of the World, [p. 62:] "Spacetime," and he is able to conceive of time with sufficient abstraction as to be compatible with relativity theory. These last two chapters are bound to be controversial among both philosophers and physicists--or if we agree with him, he sets things right at last. Of interest here is Bunge's simple and elegant definition of causality: One event in a given thing causes a (later) event in some other thing if the difference the first thing has on the (otherwise free) trajectory of the second thing includes the later event. But there is no necessity in postulating that every event has a prior cause, as this would arbitrarily rule out spontaneity or self-causation, and thus free will.
3.3.2. Chapter 1 of _A World of Systems" and begins with noting that all the sciences study systems of one sort or another. There is even a field called "general systems theory," which purports to study features in common to all systems, the principle of least effort being a good and familiar example. Systems theory and ontology have a great deal in common, both being very general disciplines, but the two differ in that ontologists do not take for granted such notions as possibility, change, and time, which systems theorists do. The latter tend to focus on input-output models that are largely at the mercy of their environment while ontologists can also study free systems. And ontologists study stochastic systems as well.
3.3.3. Bunge distinguishes conceptual (e.g., mathematical) systems from concrete (material) systems and further distinguishes an aggregate (or random heap) from a system (WS 4):
3.3.4. Concrete systems are made up of at least two different connected things and are described by a triple consisting of the system's *composition* (the list of its parts), its *environment* (the list of all other things that act upon or are acted upon by the parts of the given system), and its *structure* (the set of relations among the system's parts and among them and the things in the environment). Bunge postulates that all systems (not just living ones) are subjected to selection by the environment. Systems can be made up of subsystems, but the more stable the subsystems, the less stable the system itself.
3.3.5. The general discussion of systems is wrapped up with a discussion of how the author differs from holists, at one end, and from the atomists, at the other, while recognizing the partial merits of both. Holism is overly vague when not downright mystical. Bunge characterizes some of the doctrines of the holists, one of which follows (WS 40):
3.3.6. Atomism, by contrast, ignores wholes altogether, or rather engages in *ontological* reductionism, which is the doing away with emergent properties. Our job is to explain, as best we can, these emergent properties, not to explain them away. Bunge is a moderate *epistemological* reductionist: Some such explanations are forthcoming, but not necessarily guaranteed. Bunge's position in a nutshell: "The world is material but not just a lump of physical entities: it is composed of systems of a number of qualitatively different kinds." (WS 44)
3.3.7. "Chemism," the title of the second chapter, is the first of four to deal with the special sciences going up the levels of reality. Not many things here concern us, but it is worth noting that a body of water has properties (such as a boiling point) that individual H2O molecules do not have and that a water molecule is a system, differing from one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms separately. It may be interesting to know that we can now predict the boiling points of (bodies of) small chemical compounds on the basis of the physical structures of the atoms making them up, not very accurately yet, but within a factor of two or so, measured in absolute degrees there is no deep theory to base the predictions on, just a growing body of experiments and measurements. Science often begins with some odd data (and how odd it is that hydrogen and oxygen are both gases with very low boiling points, while water boils at 373 degrees K.) that eventually fall into some sort of pattern. Theories may eventually be advanced to explain the patterns and then be tested on new compounds. Depending on how successful the theories are, epistemological reductionism will have been achieved, but not ontological. [13]
3.3.8. Bunge gives us a warning (WS 48): "In ontology we take such [chemical] bonds for granted and let chemists inquire into their nature. (Remember the fate of Hegel's alleged refutation of Berzelius' brilliant hypothesis that chemical bonds are electrical.) The metaphysician accepts gratefully what the chemist is willing to teach him about the spontaneous formation (self-assembly) of molecules out of atoms, or of other molecules, as well as about the breakdown or dissociation of such systems as a result of their interaction with the environment (in particular thermal motion). The philosopher's task is not to compete with the chemist but to try and discover the structure and peculiarities of chemical properties of chemical processes vis a vis other kinds of process. If in the course of his work he comes up with results helping to clarify the foundations of chemistry, so much the better."
3.3.9. One more point of considerable interest is a simple remark: "But of course not all conceivable [chemical] compounds are really possible, i.e. lawful." (WS 49) Bunge limits the diversity of things (recall Unger's intelligible essences) in two ways, by admitting of only finitely many general properties and by distinguishing conceivable from lawful things. He notes that "there are about 4 million known species of chemicals" (WS 48), a huge number, to be sure, but still finite if not manageable. Presumably, even the ones chemists do not know about would still be finite in number: Well before a molecule got to be as big as the Sun, it would collapse.
3.3.10. Chapter 3 of _A World of Systems_, "Life," gets us closer to our concerns with economics and the foundation of a state that provides collective economic goods. Bunge states his approach well toward the end of the chapter: "Biosystemism recognizes the bios as an emergent level rooted to the chemical one." (WS 119) He details the origins of life, built up subsystem by subsystem, and remarks (WS 77): "Nowadays we know that chemical and biochemical systems cannot help but self-assemble under the actions of bonds of various kinds. Moreover we know that such self-assembly processes are more likely to occur in stages than at one stroke. In particular, the formation of primitive proteins may have proceeded in two stages: amino acid synthesis followed by polymerization. Therefore the first biochemical systems, and even the first organisms, may have formed on our planet and elsewhere as soon as the requisite conditions were met. This explains the short time span between the origin of rocks and the appearance of the first bacteria and blue-green algae."
3.3.11. Bunge goes on to draw careful definitions and make numerous distinctions (WS 83):
3.4.2. Learning consists of "the formation of new neural systems, i.e. in establishing permanent connections among neurons or facilitating ephemeral (but repeatable) neuron interconnections." (WS 132) Bunge defines mental activity as brain activity of plastic neural systems and distinguishes this from the activities of pre-wired systems. "Every fact experienced introspectively as mental is identical with some brain activity; this, in a nutshell, is the neurobiological or materialist hypothesis of the mind." (WS 138) He later notes: "Mind and brain are not identical: there is no more brain-mind identity than there is lung-respiration identity," (WS 141) though, of course, he will equate the two as a manner of speech.
3.4.3. Bunge has a witty discussion of various dualist objections to materialism, two of which are worth mentioning here. One is that pain is indeed perceived in a limb that has been amputated (phantom limb), but only in adults who from childhood have formed a comparatively unalterable map of the body. Dualists cannot explain both this and the lack of experiencing phantom limb in young children. The other is best given by a quotation (WS 148): "Another, related objection to the identity thesis, and one commended as definitive by Popper (Popper and Eccles, 1977 [The Self and its Brain]), is as follows (Kripke, 1971 ["Identity and Necessity," in Milton K. Munitz, ed., Identity and Individuation]). If the identity is to be taken just as seriously as "Heat is the motion of molecules", then it must be a necessary identity, in the sense that it must hold in all possible worlds-whatever these may be. However, this cannot be, because "it seems clearly possible" (to Kripke) that M (e.g. pain) could exist without the corresponding brain state N, or that the latter could exist without being felt as pain--whence the identity is contingent and therefore flimsy. Rejoinder: (a) scientists and science oriented philosophers do not waste their time speculating about (logically) possible worlds: they want to explore the real world (Bunge, 1977a [Furniture]); (b) the difference between necessary (or strict) identity and contingent identity does not occur in ordinary logic or in science. In sum, the sophistic objection to materialism holds no water."
3.4.4. More pertinent than either of these objections to dualism is the general position that scientific models of reality ought to be capable of explaining things. The chief difficulty with a separate realm for the mind, to say nothing of Popper's "World 3" of the disembodied "products of human thought and artistic endeavors, is that there is no theory about these separate realms and hardly any hope for discovering any scientific laws about either their own operations or the interactions between these realms and the material world. It is not wholly unreasonable that men would have conceived of a separate realm for the "mind," and it is often convenient even today to feign such a realm: Ideas remain brain processes, but when we are considering these ideas largely if not wholly apart from who thought them up (i.e., when we are not resorting to ad hominem or its more sophisticated variety disguised as the "sociology of knowledge"), we abstract and pretend that the ideas are "ideas in themselves."
3.4.5. A Carbon Chauvinist Pig (my term for someone who generalizes from life on Earth to all possible life in the universe) could argue that certain concepts, such as numbers, have universal validity (i.e., for the entire universe) and hence are independent of any particular kind of mind. This is just supposition, thought not bad supposition, but another problem is that in the past century or so, several definitions of numbers have been proposed and it is by no means certain that the set theoretician's definition of, say, 3, as "the set consisting of the empty set, the set consisting of the empty set, and the set consisting of the empty set and the set consisting of the empty set," [14, for this book's only equation!] will be the standard one in the future. Besides, there are many different rival logics and set theories, when it comes to the more technical axioms, with no particular version winning anything like a consensus. None of these foundational disputes has much bearing on the way scientists operate (yet),lear what it would take to make us adopt a different logic, whether different beings could or would use different ones, or whether we (i.e., men) have to assume some particular background logic before investigating the world. In any case, not even logic provides a clear-cut case for brain-mind dualism. If it did, the problem of making any lawful statements about the mind would remain. (Bunge 1981: Ch. 8, "Popper's Unworldly World 3")
3.4.6. Bunge goes on, in his chapter on mind, to build up concepts from perception to the self. His treatment is, like all of science, preliminary and revisable, and we detail his definitions for the purpose of showing how at least the outlines of a materialist and emergentist conception of mind are possible. Economists might feel uncomfortable with many of his distinctions, such as between value, choice, and decision. If so, here is hoping that Bunge's efforts will stimulate improvements.
3.4.7. Bunge begins with the old problem of sensation and perception and gives some definitions. "A system *detects* things or events of a certain kind (or is a *detector* of them) if and only if it reacts to them only." "A detector is a *neurosensor* (or *neuroreceptor*) iff it is a neural system or is directly coupled to a neural system." "A *sensory system* of an animal is a subsystem of the nervous system of it, composed of neurosensors and of neural systems coupled to these." "A *sensation* (or *sensory process*, or *feeling*) is a specific state of activity (or function or process) of a sensory system." (WS 151-51)
3.4.8. The brain processes this incoming data through these sensory systems in a chain. In the primary stage not much processing takes place, and the processor tends to become rigid as the animal grows older. Not so with later stages called perception. These perceptual sensory systems remain plastic, combine with one another (e.g., sight and sound), and can intersect both with the body's motor units and with ideational units. The integration of what becomes a whole system of maps of the external world requires both physical development and learning.
3.4.9. Behavior is defined: "The set of motor outputs of an animal, whether global as in locomotion or partial as in grasping or grinning, moving the eyeballs or excreting, is called its behavior." (WS 156) This behavioral repertoire is made up of inherited and learned components. A drive consists of the detection of an imbalance, and Bunge postulates that for each drive, there is a corresponding type of behavior that reduces such drive. Such behavior need not be explained by resort to teleology, however, nor is it necessarily the case that the behavior resulting from an evaluation coming from a drive is the right one to further the life of an organism. Much less is it the case "that all animals are conscious of such evaluations and can make value judgments. Only a few higher mammals can form value judgments: in all others, and even in man most of the time, valuations are automatic. What distinguishes man from the other animals, with regard to evaluation, is that he can reason about values as well as evaluate reasons." (WS 159, my emphases)
3.4.10. Bunge next defines an animal as having a value system over a set of items provided the animal can detect and distinguish among the items and, of any pair of items, prefers one to the other, or values them equally. Postulate: "All animals are equipped with a value system, and those capable of learning can modify their value systems." (WS 160) An animal chooses an option out of a set of alternatives provided that it is possible (recalling that in Bunge's ontology real possibilities exist) to select any alternatives in the set, that it prefers the given options to any of the others in the set, and that it actually picks that option. Then follows (WS 161): "Note the difference between preference and choice: the former underlies and motivates the latter. Choice is valuation in action, or overt valuation--hence an indicator of valuation not a definition of the latter. And note also that not every choice implements a decision. Decisions are deliberate or reasoned (if not always rational), and reasoning is the privilege of only a few animal species. Most choices, even in daily human life, are not preceded by any decision-making process."
3.4.11. It is clear that Bunge's concepts are not those of the revealed preference school in orthodox economics. But, then, the orthodox position is more a series of slogans than a worked out metaphysical position. Hence Bunge's ideas, which are informed by a study of the neurobiology of animal brains, do not necessarily clash irreconcilably with the orthodoxy either. Once more, let us hope that work in the sciences and metaphysics (the most general science) will help clarify the foundations of economics.
3.4.12. We must proceed further before we get to man, the ostensible subject of our inquiries. Bunge distinguishes memory, which magnets can have, from learning, which as we have seen involves modification of a plastic neural system in an animal. If an animal can learn, and all vertebrates seem to be able to, it can develop expectations about the future. Such animals are "said to behave in a goal seeking or purposive way." (WS 164) His definition and comments (WS 164, my emphasis):
3.4.13. Bunge next turns to thinking and deals with two basic types of "thought processes, namely concept attainment and proposition formation. We shall conceive of the former as the process of forming kinds, such as the class of cats or that of triangles. And we shall conjecture that forming a concept of the 'concrete' kind--i.e. a class of real things or events--consists in responding uniformly to any and only members of the given class." (WS 165) He postulates that there are animals equipped with plastic neural systems (psychons) to do just this job of recognition. Recalling that Bunge uses the word class in a specialized way--a class is not a random collection of things, but one that can be characterized by obeying one or more scientific laws--Bunge's statement here is more or less equivalent to saying that Unger's intelligible essences are intelligible (i.e., knowable by the human mind). Bunge's formulation is not quite equivalent to Unger's, for ancient and medieval philosophers, especially the Christian ones, thought there were a great many essences besides those corresponding to material things!
3.4.14. The operation involved in *forming propositions* is that of psycho pairing, and Bunge postulates that "thinking up a proposition is (identical with) the sequential activation of the psychons whose activities are the concepts occurring in the proposition in the given order." (WS 165) (This postulate is not as much a summation of the present state of neurology as are his other postulates, for Bunge notes that how propositions are formed is far from understood. Nevertheless, we will maintain that this postulate is good enough for the purpose of illustrating generally a materialist conception of mind.)
3.4.15. A *decision* to choose is different from just choosing, as discussed above, in that in deciding the animal has knowledge or cognition of the alternatives as well as merely being presented with them. Some more comments from Bunge (WS 167):
3.4.16. (Economists, especially, will object that adequacy comes in degrees and at a price. But we should be concerned more with the concepts that Bunge is offering here than with adjusting them. Ditto for the word compulsion two paragraphs below.)
3.4.17. Bunge distinguishes awareness, consciousness, and self-consciousness. An animal is aware of a stimulus (internal or external) if it feels or perceives it. Consciousness is awareness specifically of a brain process (by another part of the brain), and not all animals are capable of it. Another postulate, or rather finding of animal psychologists, is widely known: "In the course of the life of an animal capable of learning, learned behavior, if initially conscious, becomes gradually unconscious." (WS 172) And we know the (alleged!) story of the centipede, attributed to one Mrs. Craster, who died in 1874: [15]:
The Centipede was happy quite,
Until the Toad in fun
Said "Pray which leg goes after which?"
And worked her mind to such a pitch,
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run.
3.4.18. Two more definitions from Bunge: "An animal act is voluntary (or intentional) iff it is a conscious purposeful" act and "An animal acts of its own free will iff (i) its action is voluntary and (ii) it has free choice of its goal(s)--i.e. is under no programmed or external compulsion to attain the chosen goal." (WS 172-73) For Bunge, "all animals capable of being in conscious states are able to perform free voluntary acts. If consciousness is not exclusively human, neither is free will. And both are subjects of scientific research." (WS 173) And a last definition (WS 175): "An animal (i) has (or is in a state of) self-awareness iff it is aware of itself (i.e. of events occurring in itself) as different from all other entities; (ii) has (or is in a state of) self-consciousness iff it is conscious of some of its own past conscious states; (iii) has a self at a given time iff it is self-aware or self-conscious at that time."
3.4.19. He adds: "Possibly animals other than humans have self-awareness but, so far as we know, only humans have self-consciousness, at least when normal and past their infancy." (WS 175)
3.4.20. I have dwelt on Bunge's chapter on mind at length because the philosophical issues are important and hope to have shown that Buchanan's worries that choice and free will might be illusory may now at last be dropped. To repeat myself, and Bunge's many remarks to this effect, his treatment of general ontology in his furniture book and applied ontology (systems) in the companion volume are sketches and not pretensions to being the final answer. I have also dwelt on the subject of mind at length in order to exhibit the evidence that a materialist philosophy is not "ridiculously at variance with reason and experience." (FW xiii)
3.5.2. An interesting anthology chapter by David 0. Oakley, "Cerebral Cortex and Adaptive Behaviour" (1979)^, discusses the apparent excess of intelligence in primates, in defiance of the usually conservative processes of evolution, and explains it as due to the rather greater demands imposed by social interaction as opposed to the physical environment. "The computing capacity required to handle social interactions with even a limited number of self-regulating individuals of the same species is likely on a number of grounds to be greater than that needed for interaction with the physical environment." Carleton S. Coon, in The Origin of Races (1962)^^, held that this process of "evolution by social adaptation" as opposed to "evolution by environmental adaptation" (the terms he uses) has gone particularly far in man, whose brain consumes one-eighth of the body's calories but represents only two percent of its mass. The brain is a very expensive organ, and it is the job of evolutionists to figure out how the benefits equal the costs. Too bad the brain rots and we can't find out from fossils the details of its structure, especially with regard to free-will feedback loops.
3.5.3. Bunge's chapter on society is chock full of the symbols of set theory, and the purpose of all this symbolism is to show that society, too, can be conceived as a system in the sense he has defined it. He divides the active population into primary laborers (who transform the environment), secondary cultural workers (whose work "is an activity capable of evoking feelings or thoughts, or supplying ideas intervening in the primary production" (WS 200)) of the social system, and tertiary managers (whose work "is an activity contributing to controlling some primary or secondary work"). (WS 201) These three groups do not constitute subsystems in themselves; rather, each provides inputs to the economic, cultural, and political output systems.
3.5.4. Any such scheme of dividing up society into such a criss-crossing network is, of course, fraught with dif lumps financing in with primary production, which may make him a closet Misesian--but few economists tackle such problems as the differences among primary and secondary production, holding such terms to be meaningless.
3.5.5. Better typologies of social systems will have to come along, and perhaps there are certain stochastic regularities in the way activities are organized that could be used to suggest that some typologies are better than others. Bunge's economy, culture, and polity are all represented by academic disciplines, but there is nothing corresponding to sociology. Nevertheless, one may often resort to sociological explanations of, say, economic problems (e.g., alienation is more responsible for the decline in economic growth rates in the United States than government regulation). Sociology has great pretensions to being t discipline that can subsume all the others, but economists--who study choice--have made similar noises.
3.5.6. Bunge's typology is probably just as good as any, but going through it in detail would be not nearly so useful as showing that an emergentist view of society is possible, as he showed regarding an emergentist view of mind. What is of greater concern for us are several philosophical remarks he makes along the way, five of which we shall proceed to relate: [16]
This is only a sketch of how the notion of man-made laws might be incorporated into Bunge's structure of a social system, and much further work needs to be done, in particular with regards to the notions of power and sovereignty in legal philosophy. My own suspicion is that there will be in practice no absolute center of power that is not subject to check by other power blocs, despite what the paper documents say. (Just how pieces of paper affect behavior is another topic about which a metaphysician ought to have something to say.) These problems in legal philosophy become especially acute when considering federalism, as we shall do in Chapter 6. Frenkel 1986 gives three conceptions of sovereignty in a federation: that the central government is sovereign, that central and state governments are sovereign in their respective spheres (but he notes that the two spheres are always complexly interlinked), and that the constitution that arches over both is the sovereign. He notes (page 75), "It is obvious that an author's preferences for one or the other doctrine often run parallel to his more or less centralizing bias." See also Ostrom 1971.
I cheerfully admit my own bias is strongly decentralist, and the type of world federalism Raymond Cattell espouses that will be described in Chapter 6 would grant only very limited powers to the central authority. However, I want to avoid converting my biases into metaphysical conclusions by semantic trickery. I cannot yield to this temptation, though, until I discover or someday work up a description of sovereignty compatible with Bunge's conception of the structure of a social system.
3.5.7. The sixth and final chapter of _A World of Systems_ is the only one of either ontology volume with more than one word in its title. "A Systemic World View" provides a summary of both ontology volumes, offers some broad speculative generalizations characterizing the systemic make up of the universe we live in, and wraps up the book with a showing of where his own philosophy stands with respect to others.
3.5.8. First, the speculative generalizations: (1) Every concrete thing is either a system or a component of one. (2) These systems come in Chinese boxes or nested layers, and the universe is itself such a system, namely the system such that every other thing is a component of it. (3) At the present state of evolution of the universe, there are five system genera: physical, chemical, biological, social, and technical (artiphysis). (4) The more complex a system, the more numerous the stages in the process of assembly and its possible breakdown modes. (5) Physical things take part (either as components or as agents) in the assembly of chemical things take part in the assembly of biological things take part in the assembly of both social and technical things (man-made artifacts).
3.5.9. For a recapitulation of this chapter, we can do no better than quote the final section entire (WS 251-52):
3.6.2. This is particularly true of the social sciences. A good many, but by no means all, social scientists and social philosophers have presumed that human action, choice, and free will are real and have proceeded accordingly. Yet they have been uneasy in so presuming, even as they attack the views of those who are not convinced that choice is real as "scientism," "positivism," and "aping the physical sciences." It is Bunge's position that positivism is inappropriate even to physics and that, at bottom, scientific understanding is much the same in the physical, chemical, biological, and social sciences. It is his notions of emergent properties and ontological layers that make this general view possible, and it is of the utmost significance that Bunge's ontology affirms the existence of free will without invoking god or a separate realm for mind. Social scientists may now accordingly proceed with good conscience--as always, until further notice.
3.6.3. Bunge is at best on his home ground, physics, and some of his definitions and concepts in psychology and the social sciences may seem deficient. But even his physics is fallible. Furthermore, his characterizations of individualism and collectivism may sound absurd, but they are only caricatures of seldom articulated positions. Caricature is often the first step to goading those so portrayed to clarify their positions. In the next two chapters I will employ Bunge's ideas and terminology to Buchanan's contractarianism and examine the issues of social justice and natural rights. Unger will reappear in the last chapter, when I shall argue for a plurality of social contracts.
4.1.2. Both justice and freedom are emergent properties of the structure of a social system. Freedom--the set of one's choices for action which others may not interfere with--is empty in the case of the lone individual living outside of society. Now which freedoms to protect, and how far to protect them, is up to the social contractors, as discussed in Chapter 1. The same is true of justice, both the older notion of the impartial administration of impartial laws and the new one called "social" justice, which may involve redistribution of income, wealth, and opportunities.
4.1.3. The metaphysical issue here is how far social justice can be rooted in an agreement among men to empower a government to further this kind of justice. Anyone can form his own private notion of what social justice is and can attach a value, even a supreme value, to it. But if he manages to get the government to carry out his personal ideal alone, we have a dictatorship, not a social contract. (As with the production of public goods by the productive state, and we may wish to regard social justice as a kind of public good, what is to be agreed upon is a constitution, with full awareness that not every law passed by the legislature will itself pass the unanimity test.) Friedrich Hayek, in The Mirage of Social Justice (1976), has delivered a strong attack on the whole notion of social justice. I shall summarize his argument, connect it with the unanimity requirement, and assess its metaphysical implications.
4.1.4. Hayek argues that men developed their moral intuitions when they lived in small groups. In these pre-capitalist societies, the chain of cause and effect of human actions was limited. Who kills what animal can be easily determined and the effect of making better flints fairly well understood, even if the capital value of such technological innovations was grossly underestimated. (After all, there were no markets that established interest rates!) But despite this error about capitalization, which he does not deal with, Hayek holds that Dawn Man had a tolerably reliable sense of desert based upon immediate consequences of human action.
4.1.5. Modern society is organized very differently. Human actions, especially in the production and exchange process, have secondary and tertiary consequences that are far removed from easily graspable primary consequences and indeed overwhelm them. Rewards for productive efforts are not determined by men sitting around a campfire but by profit and loss in the marketplace. Profits consist of revenues from a wide variety of sources minus expenditures on a wide variety of inputs. Prices for goods sold and inputs purchased depend on the goings on elsewhere in the economy and these goings on depend on remoter ones still, almost ad infinitum.
4.1.6. What profits are actually earned, then, bear only a remote relationship to any Dawn Man feelings of desert that pertain to the immediate consequences of action. In modern societies, who gets what is determined by men sitting at a distance, in accordance with abstract rules governing property. The Dawn Man's sense of justice is replaced by an abstract justice of impartial administration of impartial rules. Nevertheless, Hayek goes on, the earlier sense of justice lingers on. (How far this is due to innate factors talked about by sociobiologists or to our continuing experience with small groups, especially the family, Hayek does not say.) And there is an ever-present tendency to personify the network of abstract laws as "society" and demand that rewards be re-tied to immediately graspable desert.
4.1.7. This re-tying is what Hayek calls "social justice." It is a mirage precisely because, in advanced societies, immediate consequences are very minor and no one could conceivably analyze all the remote effects, add them all up, and come up with true deserts. *Hayek's fundamental point is that suppressing these Dawn Man intuitions is the price that has to be paid if an advanced society is to operate.* Otherwise, there will be continuous interference in the profits dished out in the market at virtually every turn. To give an example (my own), it seems clear to many people that many rock "musicians" receive outrageously high salaries, even if all the rock fans voluntarily paid to hear them. (To invoke this fact of voluntariness is indeed to consider one's willingneQs to abide by abstract rules.) It also may seem that nurses and secretaries are underpaid, even if (abstract-society-oriented) economists can find no market failures: it is the market itself that gave out rewards that are counter-intuitive.
4.1.8. Hayek sees no stopping point to Dawn Man demands for case-by-case rectification. So not only is social justice impossible to determine, but trying to achieve it could undermine almost every exchange in the market. This is gloomy enough, but Hayek could have added the Public Choice question of who would make the decisions for case-by-case redistribution of rewards by the market. Since the chains of consequences of human actions are too complex to be gone through, in practice anyone can advance whatever claim he feels like; and no doubt there are plenty of moon-eyed teenagers who wish their favorite rock stars were billionaires rather than merely hecto-millionaires. In practice, allowing for endless rectification in the name of social justice would mean a field day for the power hungry and the upshot of all this activity would be redistribution by pressure group, or what Ayn Rand called "the Aristocracy of Pull." But then, Hayek wrote The Mirage of Social Justice (1976)^ before Gordon Tullock wrote Economics of Income Redistribution (1983)^^. I remark here only that America has stopped short on the Road to Serfdom.
4.2.2. Hayek's claim that social justice is a mirage in large abstract societies, then, reduces to the factual issue of whether there can be a unanimous social contract allowing for a leader or a legislature to administer the specific kind of social justice Hayek has in mind, namely case-by-case rectification of rewards in large societies as well as in small ones. This factual issue becomes a metaphysical one, if we remember Bunge's dictum that metaphysics is the most general science. We are dealing very generally with the nature of man, the nature of human action, the nature of agreements, the issue of the possibility of agreements. Now dissenters even in small societies will have their own conception of how rewards should be distributed, case-by-case. They will disagree over matters of fact about who bagged which animal, and whether a large capture was due to 1uck or skill. They will disagree subjectively over how far both luck and skill are to be redistributed to the unlucky and the unskillful.
4.2.3. Now in small groups today, agreement will often emerge from a mutual recognition of the price of continued disagreement. We are not inclined to really believe that juries, judges, and legislators arrive at final truths. On the other hand, Dawn Man was more inclined to worship his rulers and manufacture gods, who deserved thanks for correcting his errors about justice and desert, either now or in the life hereafter. The ontological existence of gods goes against all that can now be established by scientific metaphysics, [18] and trust in the leader of even a small group to find some higher Truth in matters of justice is more than tenuous, a perennial theme in Buchanan's writings (e.g., Limits, p. 1). But what there can be is a consensus to abide by the decisions of a leader, who may or may not be hallucinating or pretending to. It is the fact of acceptance of authority that counts, not whether the authority figure or those who accept him is a bad metaphysician. Buchanan does not think politicians arrive at the Truth, but he never says that citizens must not. [19] Whether bad metaphysicians can be said to consent to a social contract, or whether people have been bamboozled through false consciousness into accepting the welfare state--Unger is plainly behind the times if he thinks that business advertising has anything like the force of the Human Betterment Industry, and public education in particular, in shaping false consciousness--is deeply problematic and, like most things, a matter of degree. [20]
Here is a possible case for theism I have invented: There are gaps in the fossil record, especially from genera on up, that are far from being explained by current evolutionary theory. Michael Denton (1985) argues that each of the genera (e.g., those comprising dogs and cats and cows) are sui generis Platonic types, in that while each genus of mammal comprises species close to each other, the genera are all equidistant (on a variety of measures) from each other. So also with orders among birds and reptiles. Higher up, mammals, birds, and reptiles, as groups, are again roughly equidistant from each other. This clustering is hierarchical in form and goes all the way up the chain of life. (Indeed, Linnaeus was a Creationist.) Saltationist theories can account for some of the gaps in the fossil record, but (according to Denton) so far saltationist theory is largely ad hoc regards mechanisms and, in my view, solves the problem of life's hierarchy only by relocating the mystery to the apparent hierarchical clustering of ecological niches.
Even assuming Denton's highly controversial book has merits--I am invoking it for its metaphysical import--such clustering now more and more appears to be a pervasive feature of the universe, not only in life forms but also in the grand structure of the universe of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, and possibly up further. (Cities, highway networks, and languages are among many other phenomena that are also hierarchically clustered.) The great Benoit Mandelbrot has described random fractal processes that lead to hierarchical clustering in "Subordination; Spatial Levy Dusts; Ordered Galaxies," Chapter 32 of his _The Fractal Geometry of Nature_ (1983). Mandelbrot's concerns are more mathematical than empirical scientific, and the investigation of empirical stochastic generators of hierarchies has barely begun. Once this science of fractal processes has advanced considerably, it may be argued that some clustering can be plausibly accounted for by processes running on their own, while others (life, perhaps) need something else, perhaps some thing or force that could be described as teleological, a concept itself that needs much further exactification. There would then be the possibility of deism. Needless to say, this is far removed from establishing the truths of Christianity or any other historic religion, especially as regards their moral aspects.
Mandelbrot's work may come to have large implications for the most basic science. (Recall that Bunge only briefly touched upon scientific laws operating at all levels of his ontology and mentioned the principle of least effort. Adding such laws will move ontology from the rather abstract science he presented in _Furniture_ to a still general but less abstract description of *this* reality.) In particular, a modified version of Platonic essentialism, that of evolving hierarchies of types, may come to be recognized as a pervasive feature of reality on all levels. This is quite compatible with epistemological essentialism, as in Rand (1966-67) and Bunge's "working definitions" (1967a).
What about Christianity? The religion is openly irrational, contradictory, even anti-rational. It is an elementary (meta-)theorem in logic that once a system contains a contradiction, every sentence (and its contrary) can be proven. Fortunately, the human brain is not a perfect logical machine and is spared the instantaneous global cancer resulting from a contradiction. Nevertheless, those who openly maintain contradictions (whether from a belief in Scripture or otherwise) and do not seek to resolve them are unpredictable. It is a difficult question what minimal requirements of rationality should be made for one to qualify for membership in the polity, and I have no answer.
From the Good Book itself:
Irrational: "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of [whatever that means] the only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18, i.e., belief, not the evidence, is the requirement for salvation).
Contradictory: "One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true...." (Titus 1:12-13, i.e., if Cretans always lie, then the Cretan's saying so cannot be true. But Paul says the witness _is_ true. This is the famous paradox of Epimenides.)
Anti-rational: "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein" (Mark 10:15, i.e., credulity is the highest virtue).
4.3.2. We should now make just this pause. The case for progressive taxation is indeed quite obscure, for as Tullock (1983) points out, rarely is what constitutes a "just" concentration of income ever articulated. Tullock cites Lester Thurow, who "feels that the highest income an American should receive is no more than five times as much as that of the lowest income American" (p. 195). But Thurow advances no reason for the factor of five, nor what and why the factor might be in other times and places. Now the actual statistical distribution of income depends on many factors, among them: 1) the institutional laws governing property rights, 2) the structure of initial endowments, 3) inheritance laws and taxes, 4) the entire social situation beyond politics, especially how the culture inspires (though far from determines) efforts to produce income, 5) the statistical distribution of said inspiration, and 6) the actual efforts individuals put forth.
4.3.3. This is a positive formula, a matter of the facts, hard though they may be to unearth. [22] But behind the factual account of income generation, there lies a normative formula that will state what amount of effort it is reasonable, all things considered, to expect various individuals to put forth. One may not, for example, think it reasonable to expect children on welfare to behave like rugged individualists, if one believes the incentives built into government programs run heavily the other way. This can and does lead to demands for reforming the welfare system rather than to redistribute money to the victims of that system. Such reformers can and do argue that to engage in redistribution would be to entrench disincentives all the more thoroughly.
4.3.4. This leads into a deep paradox that will be dealt with later, namely the problem of generations. The reformers do sense a societal injustice, name]y that welfare children, who did not consent to being born, are unfairly disadvantaged in that they were not only not properly brought up to hold the capitalist virtues but also that the state itself put positive roadblocks in the way. In later life, they may very well put forth all the effort that may humanly be expected of them to better their condition, even though such efforts will be less than those of other young adults. Social justice, then, might be taken to mean that income be redistributed to bridge that gap between reward for effort in fact put forth and reward for effort that would have been put forth had the roadblocks to the development of a normal personality not been artificially put in the way.
4.3.5. But there are (at least) two arguments against this rectifying redistribution. The first is that redistribution to these victims will perpetuate the cycle of poverty. A trade-off must be made between justice to specific victims in the present and breaking up the perpetuation of welfare culture, which would reduce injustice in the future. (I assume very few would opt for a third alternative, for the government to take welfare children away from their parents.) The other argument against rectifying redistribution is Hayek's: It may very well be that welfare programs reduce effort put forth, but the connection between effort and reward is necessarily and substantially reduced in any advanced market economy. Furthermore, administrators are fundamentally incapable of gathering the knowledge necessary to make all the case-by-case corrections of reward to desert.
4.3.6. However, no such wholesale case-by-case redistribution is being proposed. Rather, there is a feeling that a certain class of persons, namely those brought up in the welfare culture, have been damaged unfairly by it. [23] While knowledge of injustice to any one particular individual is at best knowable only within extremely broad limits, the overall statistically average impact could be known within narrower limits. How much to redistribute to these victims involves normative considerations as well, especially that of how much effort is reasonable to expect those victimized by welfare to make. And how far rectification should be allowed to run into conflict with other goals and values is also a personal matter. I am not sure how a social contract would be reached among those with diverse subjective trade-offs, but then the literature is silent on how the amount of production of one public good would be decided upon, as opposed to the voting rules in The Calculus of Consent for the production of many public goods. Very possibly, the median voter rule would be the only one the voters could reach an agreement upon. [24]
4.3.7. Hayek's argument can still come back to haunt us: There can be an endless procession of other groups with claims, many of them dubious but hard to refute, to being victims of injustice. And there is still the problem of who is going to pay for the rectification. Given the fantastic opportunities for hypocrisy and rent-seeking on the part of power brokers and guilt mongers, one could argue that a social contract empowering a state to even begin doing these things would never be signed unanimously. But this is a prudential objection--and hence an argument to build in severe constitutional safeguards--more than a metaphysical one.
4.3.8. Still, a case can be made for a very general progressive income tax, as opposed to a particular scheme of rectification aimed at a specific group. First, people might come to a factual conclusion that there is a broad correlation between enculturation into the capitalist virtues and income that is significantly greater than zero. (One argument is that capitalism perpetuates a permanent underclass.) Second, undeserved luck is also positively correlated with income. Third, people want a certain amount of insurance against unexpectedly low incomes, as witnesQed by the (actually fairly modest) markets for disability insurance. Now normative as well as factual judgments are involved here, and there are moral hazards as well as trade-offs involved also, which may well lead to regressive income taxes. L25] Whatever the upshot, social justice is something that emerges from a social contract and does not reside on an ontological plane hovering above individuals and their values. Social justice is inherently limited by the social contract and is not something to be used as moral blackmail.
4.3.9. I find no basis in Bunge's emergentist metaphysics for Rawls' allegedly contractarian claim that justice, however defined, is the first order of business of any society. Rather, justice is a value, one kind of public good, to be pursued jointly among many others. The rights to be protected by the protective state are also species of public goods, and if people want to create a right unknown to other societies, such as the right to privacy, they may do so. Furthermore, it is up to them how strongly to enforce this right, at the expense of other rights and at the expense of other goals, such as economic growth. Similarly, it is the social contractors who are the ones to define justice. They may read inconclusive arguments of social philosophers, from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls, and adopt wholly or partly their arguments. (I shall examine natural rights arguments in the next chapter.) But it is fundamentally the social contractors who are to decide, not outside critics.
4.4 Multi-Generational Social Contracts
4.4.1. A major problem for social philosophers comes in small packages weighing some eight pounds on the average and measuring some twenty inches long. These packages have blue eyes at first and come into the world kicking and screaming, even though their life support systems will last another ten minutes. Over three and a half million times a year in the U.S. alone, every ethical system ever advanced is refuted. Not only is one ethical system urged upon all mankind, with major variations rarely considered, but everyone in it is presumed to be over 18 and of sound mind. The Limits of Liberty has a fleeting reference to the descendants of the founding fathers losing respect for the earlier social contract, and Knowledge and Politics has not even this much. In neither book are there any children! The philosopher's world, unlike the real world, is peopled with immortals. Buchanan is careful to assume as much openly at the beginning of Chapter 5 of Limits, but he does not dwell upon the implications of relaxing this assumption. [26]
4.4.2. In later papers, Buchanan (1984 and 1985) does take future generations into account, although as far as one can tell new members of society spring into the world full blown. Employing the distinction between subjective costs at the time a choice is made (opportunity costs) and objective choice-influenced costs afterwards (an obligation to make payments) expounded upon in his Cost and Choice (1969a), he argues that there is a trade-off between present consumption and investment in capital stock bringing future returns that applies to individuals and collective bodies alike. The papers mainly treat deficit financing of government, but in fact many government policies, as well as private choices, affect consumption versus investment. Much of the papers is given to arguing that accounting practices, to say nothing of politicians' rhetoric, disguise this distinction between consumption and capital investment. What is important here is the idea of taking the future into account, not the specifics of the two papers.
4.4.3. In a society of immortals, there is no conflict between generations. It is difficult to gather all the living together to agree upon a social contract; to gather all generations can only be done conceptually. I propose doing so by extending Rawls' "veil of ignorance" approach. Most of the discussion Rawls' book has generated is over the thickness of his veil! Buchanan and Faith (1980), for example, treat an imagined situation where a person does not know who he will be after the social contract is signed but is nevertheless a concrete person beforehand, with his own ideas about how various alternative contracts will work out. Being ignorant about who but opinionated about how, he will opt for the constitution that provides, in his opinion, the highest average payoff. A person differently opinionated about the how may choose a different constitution.
4.4.4. In a world of generations of men, the veil can be extended to include the when dimension. In each generation, the people then alive will wish that past generations had invested more and consumed less. At the same time, each generation would rather consume now than make investments whose payoffs come in the distant future. Under a when veil of ignorance, [27] a balance can be struck. As with public debt and capital investment, so with eugenics and genetic engineering (DeNicola 1976 and Fletcher 1974). In the euthenics case (i.e., improvements in the structure of the social system as opposed to its composition), there will be disputes as to where to invest (education vs. scientific research vs. reforestation, etc.) and imperfect knowledge about the effects of such investments. So also with eugenics. In both cases, a unanimous social contract--between generations--is called for, and in both cases more perfect knowledge will produce better decisions. A healthy but not morbid regard for the worst unseen consequences is called for, which is why diversity in both euthenic (non-human animal and plant) and eugenic (human) gene pools is desirable, but not pan-mixia. Numerous agriculturalists have warned against too narrow a diversity of crops, and a much smaller number of biologists (e.g., the discussion in Ortner 1983) has warned against the destruction of varieties in humans through the more and more random intermixing of populations that has been accelerating since 1492. Whatever the methodological use of Rawls' veil of ignorance, it should not extend to willful and wanton disregard of consequences.
4.4.5. Babies clutter the tidiness of a world of supposedly fixed composition. In addition to rates of growth of various things, their existence has consequences for justice. These involuntary immigrants were not asked whether they wanted to be born, nor what particular society to be born into. The society can ask them to undergo rites of passage in the form of agreeing to the social contract and kick them out if they refuse. (That a social contract need not encompass all mankind will be dealt with in the final chapter.) But this is not obviously fair, for emigration is not free. (It would seem even less fair to demand that an emigrant repay those who had invested in his upbringing, though many countries have emigration taxes, some of them effectively infinite.) In addition, it is not obviously fair that some babies come into the world with more initial endowments than others. The inheritance may be of genes, property, business connections, parental provisions, or just an environment conducive to success. But on the other hand, neither is it obvious that social justice" demands their rectification, especially totally at the expense of everything else, and in particular through interference with the right of those who have earned wealth to pass it on as they choose. It is even less clear why the government should tax people not responsible for bringing disadvantaged babies into the world to pay for the rectification. Philosophers debate these matters incessantly, and the publication of A Theory of Justice has only stimulated the debate. Indeed, certain free-market advocates, e.g., Ayn Rand (1973a), have denounced Rawls in no uncertain terms.
4.4.6. Once again, Bunge's metaphysics demands that justice, although an emergent property of a social system, be rooted in individual values. Rawls' veil of ignorance construction, while exceedingly useful, can be abused if it is made so thick that individuals are virtually stripped of having values or else made so ignorant about their particular values that their individuality is suppressed. By contrast, the contractarian approach of an economist (Buchanan) will keep exchange and therefore individuality and individual differences uppermost in mind. However, Buchanan's constitutionalism, as opposed to his contractarianism generally, does effect something of a veil of ignorance, inasmuch as the workings of the legislature, and the gains and losses therefrom, are less predictable than if the constitutional stage were bypassed and specific provisions of every public good decided upon once and for all. As people and situations change unpredictably over longer and longer periods of time, later and later pieces of legislation will look more and more random from the standpoint of individuals at the moment of agreeing to the constitution. To this extent, the social contractors will want to design a constitution that will be expected to pay off impartially.
4.4.7. In Chapter 1, I quoted Herbert Simon's finding that the growth of business firms regressed toward the mean (geometric as the cube root every four years), thus swiftly dampening any initial advantage a firm might have. Incomes of persons, and of generations of persons, do not regress to the mean at anything like this rate. For social contractors of life spans near three score and ten, the veil of ignorance will not be thick enough to guarantee impartiality regards children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, none of whom consented to be born. It is in order not to impose a social contract upon them that I invoked a when veil of ignorance above. A person under the when veil would trade off his right to pass on his advantages to his heirs and assigns against the value he would place upon having initial advantages distributed more equitably. He would also consider the effect upon incentives, and hence upon economic growth, that such redistribution would entail and, in addition, the value he might place on living in a more equally-advantaged society. (We need not assume independence of utility functions when a person evaluates some measure of an emergent property of an economic system.)
4.4.8. Matters are otherwise, if it turns out that advantages accumulate over time rather than dissipate. The social contractors may wish to simply set up a progressive tax, but they might well undertake a searching examination of how the particular institutions of property rights generate this accumulation and consider modifications. Some modifications may slow down economic growth, but so does progressive taxation. In addition, in case there is no progressive accumulation in the same hands, but still a tendency for concentration to grow over time, with the wealthy (and wealthy families) rotating, some may want taxes to become more progressive over time, or a procedure for doing so to be somehow established at the constitutional level.
4.4.9. On the other hand, if concentration decreases over time, the contractors may wish progression to lighten, though this is rarely advocated. It is the downward redistributors who generally have the moral initiative, regardless of what the concentration is at the moment, regardless of how much economic mobility there is, how much opportunity, or how initial advantages are distributed, and regardless of any costs to liberty and prosperity. Such is the moral power of egalitarianism. This power, I submit, rests upon bad metaphysics: an unexamined claim that there exists a thing called social justice on an ontological plane transcending individuals, and not rooted in individual values, to be decided upon by the contractors themselves. The cost of this bad metaphysics is not so much the net amount of downward redistribution that constitutes (according to Tullock (1983)) only a small percent of taxes, and perhaps not even the cloud of guilt of never doing enough that hangs over us all, but rather the unleashing of the transfer state. Transfers constitute the overwhelming bulk of the activities of governments in "advanced" democracies today, and the costs besides the transfers themselves are those of rent-seeking activity and the inefficiencies generated by protectionism and other disguises of transfers.
4.4.10. Many observers are wondering, along with Tullock, whether the poor would be better off if the government did no transferring, as compared with the present situation, that the wants of the poor would be better met directly through private charity, and if not, then through greater economic growth. Observers are also wondering whether the support for downward redistributive programs rests in no little part on the interests of those who are paid to administer them and who in consequence manufacture and propagate what amount to ontologically spurious conceptions of social justice. In any case, the social contractors may not accept, say, Rawls' thesis on the centrality of what he calls "the least advantaged," perhaps as a result of reading Nozick 1974. Rather, if Bunge's metaphysics is adopted, the contractors would see that justice--and just as important, how much is going to be spent on it--emerges out of their contract. The existence of generations makes it impossible to gather together all those who are to be part of the society. Consequently, I invoked a fictional when veil of ignorance. Of course perfect unanimity, even among immortals, is a fiction. Therefore when invoking a contract as justification for conformity to law, one must be honest with oneself and not try to pass off an arrangement that lop-sidedly benefits oneself as having been agreed to. The same is true of social justice: One must pay as much attention to the future as one wishes that the past had paid to the present. But not a whole lot more.
4.5 Elitism
4.5.1. Conceptual confusion and bad metaphysics make it easier for rent-seekers to justify transfer programs in the name of social justice. Confusion is also psychologically useful to those whose ideological bias is toward expanding the state: Clarity would result in cognitive dissonance and would require a wrenching reexamination of their premises. It is just as well for them that education, largely a state activity, is a superb example of a government failure that does a poor job generally and in teaching scientific metaphysics in particular. It may be too much to expect Mario Bunge's The Furniture of the World to have filtered down fully since 1977, especially since the present essay is the first attempt to present it in a non-mathematical fashion. Nevertheless, powerful interests (whether rightly understood or not) are served by keeping the populace perpetually uneasy as to whether social justice is a bottomless pit, in which the notion of choices and trade-offs is somehow inapplicable to issues of social justice or of any kind of justice.
4.5.2. As a result, spokesmen for social justice become an elite who have the moral initiative to direct the activities of society and yet are relatively immune from criticism. Now a contractarian agreement to have an elite is not logically impossible: People do in fact turn to and even pay all manner of experts to give advice, and this advice very often goes beyond just laying out the likelihoods of various consequences of choices. People regularly pay lawyers and physicians to tell them what is in their legal and medical interests, and there is nothing stopping them from turning to pastors and philosophers for allegedly expert moral advice. The field of medical ethics is growing, and it is just possible that someone, somewhere read an editorial in The New York Times to be persuaded as opposed to finding out what the Times' latest line was.
4.5.3. It is also logically possible that people would sign a social contract to empower a state to engage in wholesale case-by-case redistributive social justice. I argued, however, that limitations on knowledge of remote consequences of human action constitute what could be plausibly called an ontological barrier to carrying out this sort of social justice. This grandiose conception of social justice is a metaphysical mirage since social contractors would not empower a government to attempt the ontologically impossible, logically possible though it may be. (People regularlv ask the impossible from government! What I am claiming is that there are enough New Contractarian Men who won't to block a unanimous social contract.) On the other hand, a social contract allowing for progressive inheritance and income taxes is not to be blocked on metaphysical grounds. It is up to the contractors, not to outside observers, to decide how much progressivity there is to be and indeed whether the net result might be regressive, all things considered, including economic growth.
4.5.4. The question is whether people might hand decisions on the extent of progressivity over to experts. Now economists might well be consulted on the trade-offs between progressivity of income taxes and economic growth, and sociologists on inheritance taxes and intergenerational social mobility. But this is asking experts to supply the facts, not to make the actual choices, which rest with the people themselves. Under constitutional government, however, the people do not have to unanimously approve every piece of legislation, and ordinarily the constitution will specify procedures for representation. [28]
4.5.5. Now representatives do indeed represent their constituents' interests, and hence they act like Downs-model politicians. But the goodness of fit is never perfect, because of a two-way limitations of knowledge problem: The representatives know only imperfectly the desires of their constituents, and the constituents know what they want and what their representatives are doing about it also only imperfectly. This gap can be grounds for distrust, but it can also be grounds for trust: Voters can hope that their representatives will act like statesmen and do what is right and, moreover, decide what is right, inasmuch as voters (like everyone else) do not have perfect knowledge of the right. Inasmuch as one's vote has a negligible chance of overturning an election, what Hartmut Kliemt (1986) has called the "veil of insignificance" is operative. This means that it is practically costless to vote for what one thinks is right rather than for what is actually in one's self-interest. In practice, people vote for a combination of both.
4.5.6. So there is plenty of room for an elite of moral experts. This elite will not, in general, coincide with the set of representatives, since they also have problems of moral knowledge, but can also consist of the intellectuals to whom the politicians, and the voters, listen. However, motives to be moral are not usually overwhelming, and this opens up room for another batch of experts, those who claim to know what the "true" interests of various individuals and groups and humanity as a whole are, as opposed to their expressed and revealed preferences.
4.5.7. Elites in this country, at least, emerge spontaneously more than come about by planning or imposition. There are elements of conscious intent, where like-minded people try to help each others' objectives and careers along, and hence there is an element of conspiracy (whose Latin root means "breathe together") though it is mostly decentralized.
4.5.8. From a contractarian standpoint, the issue is not so much whether people want to delegate moral issues to an elite, but rather how to keep the elite in check. A large part, indeed, of The Limits of Libertv is given over to the problem of keeping the state in check, but it is worth asking whether the author of Limits is so extreme in his desire for small government that he might as safely be ignored when denying any claim that near-unanimity exists about the size of government (plus or minus ten percent) in this country as one would dismiss an occasional hermit. Gargantuan government is here to stay, in other words, because that is what the people want.
4.5.9. The way out is simply to insist that gargantuan government is not what the people want. This can be done by asserting that wants have been perverted: People have become addicted to big government, public education has instilled false values, and people have been intimidated into silence, fail to appreciate the price the state exacts, are too unimaginative to conceptualize alternatives, and are hopelessly out-organized by myriad special interests. All of these charges have been made repeatedly, and Buchanan has let some of these sentiments slip into the pages of Limits, and arguably he is not entirelv free from pretensions to be an expert himself, not so much on morals, but on what people "really" want. *It is very hard to fight experts without thinking oneself to be a better expert.*
4.5.10. Buchanan's method is not to make any of these claims; rather it is to search out a basis for what he calls a constitutional revolution. This means to begin at the present and obtain ideally unanimous agreement on a wholesale package of reforms. In perhaps most cases, individuals are so harmed by all the other laws, institutions, rigidities, and inefficient transfers that they lose in the net, whence no compensation will be needed. In other cases, one-time side-payments will be necessary. But reforms will have to be wholesale, as they have a habit of getting bogged down and few want to go first.
4.5.11. Robert Whitaker (1976) argued that the cycling of elites has happened twice in American history and that a third cycling is now underway. The Virginia planter aristocracy was once in the vanguard of helping the country expand westward, but it degenerated into a slaveocracy and resisted further expansion, since new states were more likely to vote against slavery, the drier soil in the west being unsuitable for cotton. They were replaced with another expansionist power, industrialism, which degenerated into high tariff protectionism, which was replaced by the Human Betterment Industry, now degenerated into what public choice scholars call the transfer state, which is slowly on its way out, to be replaced by something we cannot yet envision. 129]
4.5.12. From the standpoint of a political (as opposed to a social) contract, the Human Betterment Industry is far more powerful than Big Business, which merely got protectionist legislation. Aristocracies of old, however, were the government. It is hard to conceive, however, of what a social contract would look like that would speed up the cycling of moral elites, including those based upon religion. Certainly, there are those who are impatient at the slowness at which the transfer state is being reduced--it is still actually expanding, though its intellectual basis has been undermined--but from a larger perspective perhaps the cycling is proceeding apace. In any case, it would probably take a super-elite to control the cycling of ordinary elites.
4.5.13. Elites, then, come into being by offering something (it is probably safe to say citizens do want at least some state-provided welfare benefits and progression of taxes to continue, even if they come to agree that much of the transfer state should be reduced), by promulgating a moral theory, and by convincing people of where their "true" interests lie. Challenges to ruling Establishments are made by contradicting these claims on all three levels and getting rival claims accepted. Thus Big Business was attacked for failing to provide effectively for welfare needs, for failure to provide for social justice, and for manipulating consumer wants (Marx's false consciousness). It is very interesting that the current human betterment elite is still justifying its expansion by attacking the business elite of the 192Os! Today, the tables are being turned around: It is the Human Betterment Industry, especially public education, that is promoting false consciousness. The transfer state is being attacked for being ineffective and wasteful. But so far, it is more that the reigning morality of (unlimited) social justice is being undermined than that a new one, or a revival and improvement of an old one, is ready to be implemented. I have no single morality to offer the world; indeed, I will argue for a plurality of social contracts in the last chapter. The next chapter will consider the revival of natural rights.
CHAPTER 5: AYN RAND AND NATURAL RIGHTS
of Frank Forman, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (1989)
5.1 Similarities and Differences with Contractarianism_
5.1.1 In the language of set theory, contractarianism and natural rights theories have a very large intersection but neither is a proper subset of the other. It might seem that the unanimity requirement of Buchanan's contractarianism, the one being examined here, incorporates natural rights. After all, it is unanimity that distinguishes the social contract: no one is forced into it, and it is precisely the ban on initiating coercion that characterizes or is a principal conclusion of natural rights theories, and in particular that of Ayn Rand. The difference is chiefly one of emphasis: natural rights theory emphasizes bilateral exchange in the economy, while contractarianism emphasizes omnilateral exchange in the polity. At first blush, the two theories, except for emphasis, are identical.
5.1.2 On the other hand, what rights are to be protected by the protective state is one of the things social contractors *decide* upon. They may write into their constitution rights like those of paid vacations (United Nations Universal Declaration of Rights), or they may fail to include rights that natural rights theorists insist ought to be protected, such as freedom of religion. Natural rights, then, exist whether any group of contractors recognizes them or not.
5.1.3. Yet the social contract is a fiction: neither Buchanan nor anyone else is busy collecting signatures! Rather, and as I argued in Chapter 1 in the section on the methodological meaning of the unanimity rule, a given piece of legislation can be judged, not as having been approved by everybody, but as having been duly enacted under a constitution that *in the ideal* might have been agreed to by everyone. I added to the fiction of a historical strict unanimity assumptions about the hypothetical contractors, whom I called New Contractarian Men. These men were to refrain from strategic bargaining at the constitutional stage, lest the contract never be made, and perhaps also had to be willing to set envy and other corrosive emotions aside. They were also presumed to be knowledgeable about the economic point of view and of the necessity of building in constitutional sageguards to keep Leviathan at bay.
5.1.4. I can't get absolutely precise about just what New Contractarian Man [p. 102:] will be like, for otherwise I could be charged--quite correctly--with supposing that every New Contractarian Man subscribes to Frank Forman's world view (whatever that is) lock, stock, and barrel, if not to his specific utility function as well. It does no good at all for me to *tell* social contractors what constitution they have agreed to! Some restrictions, like those on strategic bargaining, seem essential for the contract to be viable, and others like the ban on envy are arguably plausible, given what we know about human nature. Requiring a knowledge of economics is asking a lot, but one need only assume either that those contractors who do not have this knowledge are reasonable enough to pay heed to arguments coming from those who do or else that the economists among the New Contractarian Men are numerous enough to form a veto coalition that will render (quasi-) unanimity impossible. In any event, which subset of all conceivable social contracts will be viable is an empirical question, and I hope it is plausible to maintain that a social order based on bad economics would either have to be imposed by force, as the Bolshevik takeover was, or would disintegrate, as utopian communities have.
5.1.5. In the last chapter, I took science at the most general level of ontology and argued that a contract aimed at wholesale case-by-case redistribution was a *metaphysical* impossibility, since it would place demands upon not-so-large-brained humans that are impossible to be met. There should remain a fairly wide zone of possible social contracts, and the question for the present chapter is how closely one might expect to a social contract to adhere to natural rights.
5.1.6. If New Contractarian Man can be hoped to listen to economists, he might also listen to natural rights theoreticians, as both speak in a broad and abstract way about human nature. There are many theorists of natural rights, and I single out Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism for discussion, like I singled out Buchanan as an individualist and Unger as a collectivist. I do so even though her thought is largely outside mainstrean philosophy for several reasons. Like Bunge, she is a system builder rather than an analyst or a worker on the superstructure. Bunge's great project is to bring philosophy in line with contemporary science. This entails sweeping under the rug many old philosophical issues, like the existence of an external world (FW 112), but it also means that philosophy can come up with *results* of the sort science comes up with, in his case results of the very general science he takes ontology to be. Ayn Rand's method is different: to keep going back to basic definitions [p. 103] and rebuilding from the ground up.
5.1.7. Another reason for discussing her, as opposed to another natural rights theorist like Nozick, is that she is far from being a perfect specimen of a modern individualist as described by Unger. As we shall see, she reaches back to Unger's intelligible essences of the ancient philosophers, though not in exactly the same way the ancients used the concept. Finally, her largely deductivist approach about the nature of man and his rights--she does not use "natural rights," but "man's rights" or just plain "rights"--may be compared to the empirical scientific approach of Raymond Cattell, whose efforts at deriving ethics from social psychology will be discussed in the final chapter. I have chosen her, then, as with a11 my authors, for comparison and contrast with one another.
5.2 The Arguments for Natural Rights
5.2.1. Values, we will recall from the discussion of Bunge's _A World of Systems_ in Chapter 3, are emergent properties of certain animals. That an animal has a value system over a set of items means that it can detect and distinguish among the items and, for each pair, prefers one to the other or is indifferent. Bunge further argues that animals capable of learning can modify their value systems. The supreme end for which these values serve is the homeostatic one of maintaining life (cf. Rand 1961:17), a systemic or emergent property of the organism. Values exist in this homeostatic context and are not absolute in themselves.
5.2.2. Ayn Rand proceeds from this notion of the end of sustaining the life of a person, and her notion of rights is based upon very fundamental considerations of just what a man is. Men need food, clothing, shelter, but more basically men must exercise their reasoning powers to obtain them. Men's brains are not hard-wired together, and each must learn [30]^ for himself what he needs to do to further his own life. She also holds that the exercise of reason is a voluntary act, and that this too is a part of essential human nature (Rand 1961:19). Natural rights doctrines, then, stress that a man ought to be free to follow the dictates of his own reason as long as he respects the equal rights of others (Rand 1961:22). This definition is not circular, she argues, for it is the use of coercion, and only this use, that can block a man's exercise of reason.
^[note 30:] This means that men deliberate as well as choose. Julian Jaynes, in _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ (1976), makes a highly controversial argument that deliberation (i.e., consciousness) was unknown before the Dorian invasions of Greece. If Jaynes is right and if deliberation rather than merely choosing is to be the criterion for rationality, then natural rights *came into existence* only during historical times. As rationality came in by evolutionary degrees, one might also argue that rights came in by degrees. I am not necessarily endorsing Jaynes here, merely pointing out the metaphysical implications of a theory that could be true regards the origin and existence of rights.
5.2.2.fn30.2. In this context it is worth noting that Ayn Rand (1973b) once said, "I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent." Nathaniel Branden (1982) noted her refusal to endorse biological evolution during all the years of their friendship but did not speculate upon the reason why. I think her refusal stemmed from her excessively deductivist approach, which resulted in her regarding man, not as a product of evolution, but as something *holistically* different in kind from other animals. Bunge's ontology might have saved the day by regarding deliberative behavior as an emergent property, but this could have resulted in Ayn Rand's adopting the thesis here, that societies are emergent relative to individuals.]
5.2.3. Now, according to Unger, modern individualism entirely rejects the [p. 104] notion of intelligible essences and therefore any notion of essential human nature that informs natural rights doctrines. This denial of essences leads to a radical separation of reason and desire, as discussed in Chapter 2, and renders any sort of morally derivable basis for a social order impossible. Unger claims that any set of general public rules will unavoidably benefit "the purposes of some individuals more than those of their fe11ows" (KP 66-67). If we should choose to evaluate some kinds of behavior over others, we are willy-nilly heading toward conceiving the essence of goodness. I shall be arguing later that the case for essences can be made in a provisional way, at least. Regards Unger's claims of a bias in any set of rules, this may simply be unavoidable in our imperfect world, and he never states *how big a molehill* is involved. Fairness could instead be regarded as an ideal, much as Buchanan's unanimity criterion is an ideal. The impossibility of perfection does not entail giving up. [31]^ The argument for natural rights--zones of action with which it is wrong for anyone to coercively interfere--begins with the value of human life and happiness and proceeds to derive these rights from the essential nature of man. In a nutshell: 1) essences are real; 2) the essence of man consists in his being a rational being; 3) rights exist since there are no long-run conflicts of interests among men. This last step is necessary, for value is related contextually to the homeostatic end of a system maintaining itself. *Two or more men are so many separate homeostatic systems*, and it must be argued that, rightly understood, the maintenance of these systems does not conflict. There are four ways out of this dilemma. The first is to argue the case directly, which Ayn Rand (1962:50-56, emphases added) does:
5.2.3.1. To claim that a man's interests are sacrificed whenever a desire of his is frustrated--is to hold a subjectivist view of man's values and interests....In choosing his goals (the specific values he seeks to gain and/or to keep), a rational man is guided by his thinking (by a process of reason)--not by his feelings or desires. He does not regard desires as irreducible primaries, as the given, which he is destined irresistibly to pursue....The mere fact that two men desire the same job does not constitute proof that either of them is entitled to it or deserves it, and that his interests are damaged if he does not obtain it....Both men should know that...their *competition* for the job is to their interest, even though one of [p. 105:] them will lose in the *particular* encounter....All of the above discussion applies only to the relationships among *rational* men and only to a *free* society....In a *nonfree* society, *no* pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction."
^[note 31:] Robert Nozick (1974:25) recognizes a similar problem, when he considers that some are going to benefit more from having their rights protected than others and that therefore any scheme for the protection of rights will be redistributive. This line of reasoning has much less force, however, when it is realized that there is a large random component to having one's rights violated and that protection can be regarded as a form of insurance. Regards perfection, Harry Binswanger (1981) argues that perfection is a normative and hence contextual concept and not a metaphysical and Platonic one: "In its rational meaning, the concept of perfection denotes not the unimprovable but the best possible *in a given context*," whence a billiard ball can be perfectly spherical to the naked eye but not under a microscope. Binswanger's major point is that moral perfection, in a human context, *is* "The Possible Dream," title of his article.]
5.2.4. These are mighty claims. What is going on is deductive argumentation proceeding from a concept of the essence of man as being contained in his rationality. Yet men as they actually come, all mortal and many far from being wholly rational, do stand to gain from coercive rent-seeking. Rational Man is every bit as much an idealization as New Contractarian Man, if not more so. Something else is added, a second way out of the dilemma of potential conflict of interest: The quotation states that competition, or rather a free society, is in the long-range interests of everyone. This claim is not so mighty, and it has been put forward in milder versions by economists ever since Adam Smith, if not before. Men are no longer so drastically idealized, although sometimes the long run will come sometime between when the Sun dies and Hell freezes over. But now the claim is empirical, not a priori deductivist from the essence of man. As it happens, proponents of laissez-faire among economists tend to take a highly deductivist approach in their writings (Mises 1949 and Rothbard 1962), whence the venerable issues of monopoly, intellectual property rights, and public goods are swept under the rug.
5.2.5. A third way of dissolving potential conflicts of interest is to invoke a psychology of Rational Man such that his well-being depends upon his commitment to reason and his respect for reason in others and their rights. According to this idea--here I follow Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden (the author of several articles in Rand 1964c)--one must earn one's self-esteem by using reason to be productive. Getting something by stealing or cheating is taking a short cut that undermines self-esteem. This means that, contrary to Unger, means and ends are not separate, that the choice of means matters to well-being. This accords with Bunge's idea that animals capable of learning can modify their value structures and that men can "reason about values as well as evaluate reasons" (WS 159). Or as Buchanan (1978) has put it, "Man wants freedom to become the man he wants to become." What this means is that reason programs the emotions. Magda B. Arnold gives the neurological evidence in her _Emotion and Personality_ (1960). [p. 106:]
5.2.6. Unfortunately, while reason and desire are not as separate as Unger claims modern individualism holds them to be, no very specific values, such as which career to pursue, can be deduced from the essential rationality of man alone. Much more needs to be known generally about man the rational *animal*, in Aristotle's famous formulation, as opposed to man the rational *being*, in Ayn Rand's fomulation. It is an empirical question how far the pursuit of rationality, shaped by our evolutionary past, eliminates potential conflicts among men and thus makes the case for natural rights.
5.2.7. A fourth way of dissolving potential conflicts is to brush them aside by proclaiming that morality has to do with fairness and that moral rules must apply equally to one and all. The problem is, of course, circularity and, further, that certain kinds of seemingly general rules, such as "Subsidize all economists whose first and last names correspond to unmarried presidents of constitutional republics," should be eliminated. Time was when defining the exact location of the nose in "Your freedom ends where my *nose* begins" did not seem too problematic; but when United Nations documents speak of the right to a paid vacation, clarification is in order.
5.2.8. A further defense of natural rights, running like a thread through all the others, is that men must act on moral principles. Now in set theory, shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings can be gathered together into a set. In Bunge's ontology, on the other hand, there are collections which are not arbitrary but rather are *natural kinds* arising from the systematic lawfulness of the world (FW 143). The concept of a moral principle could be parallel here and would entail that not every arbitrarily dictated norm of behavior is a principle. Friedrich Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_ (1944) essentially advocated this and claims that a mixed economy is inherently unstable, or that, in present-day jargon, no (rather inefficient) equilibrium among competitive rent-seekers is possible. It can also be claimed that a moderately dishonest man must either completely reform or go downhill to ruin. This is to claim that, as science is a well-ordered body of lawful principles and not just a catalog description of events, morality is also based upon principles and is more than pragmatism in the negative sense of short-run expediency.
5.2.9. To return to the arguments for natural rights, the second step, that the essence of man consists in his rationality, also raises problems. That men need to exercise their reason is true enough, as it is true that human babies come very underdeveloped and with few wired-in programs to [p. 107:] help them survive. But men are not blank computers--tabula rasa is how John Locke put it--and many of our drives and values are shaped, *though far from totallv determined*, by our animal, vertebrate, mammalian, and primate heritage. Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson (1981) use mathematical arguments based upon evolutionary genetics to argue that *tabula rasa* is not efficient and give estimates of the (short) time it would take before a mixture of wired-in and open programs would come to the fore. [32]^
^[note 32:] Similarly, Noam Chomsky created quite a stir in linguistics when he argued that the human brain is such that all languages will display similar features in their grammars. The reason for the controversy is that "liberal" environmentalists make, in Unger's terminology, a radical separation of heredity and environment, so that the products of culture can be completely arbitrary. Twenty years later, what the Germans called the _Zeitgeist_, what Alfred North Whitehead called the climate of opinion, and what Thomas Kuhn belatedly called a paradigm has changed and environmentalism is now regarded as merely an extreme case. The search is on to find and assess the nature and range of language universals.
5.2.10. With the issue of essences, the first step in the argument for natural rights, I have no fundamental quarrel, even though most thinkers today reject essences and subscribe to some form of William of Occam's nominalism, wherein concepts and ideas are just arbitrary names we assign by convention. (Similarly, economists conceive of values as subjective and arbitrary.) Charles Peirce, the inventor of pragmatism, hinted at a way out. [33]^ I expand upon his hints and hold that, yes, our concepts are somewhat arbitrary and do have a random component. They become pragmatic or useful as they fit into scientific theories. Science, or the study of reality generally, shapes and controls our ideas and definitions. The deeper and truer the science, the more a preliminary working definition gets at essential characteristics of things. The idea that carbon is element number six may not be the last word, but it is far from an arbitrary change from the old idea of something hard, black, and lightweight and therefore *not* a diamond.
^[note 33:] The Founding Papers of pragmatism are Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), and "What Pragmatism Is" (1905). These papers have been reprinted many times, e.g., Thayer 1970.
5.2.10.fn33.2. For the notion of a working definition and its relationship to essences, I have used Bunge's two-volume 1967 study, _Scientific Research_. Ten years later, in his furniture book (p. 96), he propounded the ontological thesis that "all properties are essential--which is to say lawful." The problem is that we can know only some of the properties "out there" (as Buchanan would have it) that something has, while the idea of a working definition ties in with whatever theories we have at hand and is hence more relevant to *epistemology*. It is not infrequent that a man forgets what he said earlier and better. Ayn Rand takes a view remarkably similar to the earlier Bunge in her *Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology* (1966-67).]
5.2.11. If we view essences not as something eternal but rather as an ingredient in a helpful definition of a concept, then the case for liberty as stemming from man's nature as a creature with a reasoning faculty is not preposterous. What is preposterous, or rather presumptuous, is to press an idea into service too far, and this is what natural rights advocates do, especially when they rely upon arguments that are full of holes; there are disputes even in mathematical logic. This is a fact of life, but we should be suspicious of those "long chains of deductive reasoning" that the great Alfred Marshall grew to detest. Such deductions get carried away from reality at a geometric rate as one proceeds from link to link in the deductive chain.
5.3 The Advantages of Contractarianism over Natural Rights
5.3.1. A process approach is deeper than a static one, and this is the principle advantage of contractarianism over natural rights. A social contract is an *agreement*, and an agreement connotes the meeting of the [p. 108:] minds of those who do not share identical views and values. Even if there is some objective truth about how a society ought to be ordered, men will come to grasp this truth at different rates. Meanwhile, something provisional will have to be adopted as long as *some* social contract is perceived by all as being superior to the anarchist equilibrium.
5.3.2. Buchanan generally assumes that the rights to be protected by the protective state are all exactly defined and that their enforcement could be turned over to an outside agency, but in practice the contractors will have to strike a balance between rigidity and so great a flexibility that Leviathan could sneak up unawares by degrees. Natural rights advocates, by contrast, rarely consider the procedures for refining and redefining rights as men come to a better understanding of some objective truth about natural rights. When natural rights advocates discuss a social contract, they do not consider it as a bargained compromise among diverse interests but rather as all men coming to the same truth in accordance with right reason about the essential nature of man. [34]^
^[note 34:] Ayn Rand (1966-67:69) states that "the essence of a concept is that fundamental characteristic(s) of its units on which the greatest number of other characteristics depend, and which distinguishes these units from all other existents within the field of man's knowledge." The difficulty is the "s" in parentheses: when does one stop adding characteristics to the essence? The answer is not obvious, nor is the formation of units in her sentence. I should note that when she speaks of man as essentially rational (p. 58) the term "does not mean 'acting invariably in accordance with reason'; it means 'possessing the faculty of reason."' However, the capacity to reason comes in degrees, and some certifiable members of homo sapiens almost entirely lack that capacity. It remains difficult to derive absolute rights from a highly variable capacity.]
5.3.3. A second advantage of contractarianism is that it explicitly handles public goods. Natural rights advocates officially cannot gainsay a unanimous and uncoerced multi-person agreement to constitute state machinery to provide public goods, but, unlike Buchanan, they do not dwell upon the issue. Similarly, they avoid the problem of externalities or else brush it aside with an a priori conviction that *somehow* property rights could be redefined to handle the problem. Even granted that this be the case, they do not describe the machinery to redefine property nor argue that redefinition will *not* be coercive. Legislators and jurists can undertake the necessary sort of cost-benefit analysis (which is foreign to deductivist natural rights theories stemming from the essence of man), even though the problem of keeping these same legislators and jurists under control remains. Natural rights advocates, when confronted with particularly severe paradoxes in their beliefs, are prone to retreat to a "natural rights, but..." position, while contractarians handle these problems square on.
5.3.4. A third advantage of the contractarian approach is that it pays attention to institutional design. While natural rights authorities clash over whether, say, intellectual property (patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets) is a genuine natural right (compare Rand 1964b with Rothbard 1962), social contractors can simply (!) weigh costs and benefits of establishing rights in intellectual property. Moreover, they can empower a legislature to set the *duration* of patents, something that [p. 109:] natural rights theories are utterly incapable of doing. Social contractors can also set up machinery to make trade-offs between the costly accumulation of evidence in criminal cases and the probability of wrongful conviction. Economists habitually, even compulsively, reckon with trade-offs, a perspective generally absent among philosophers.
5.3.5. A fourth advantage is shown by the first study of Nietzsche in English (and quite possibly still the best), that of H.L. Mencken (1908): "With the clash of authority came the end of authority." He was speaking of Nietzsche's early rejection of religion on the grounds that there could not be more than one absolute Truth, but the statement may apply to natural rights doctrines as well. There are just too many philosophers, from Hobbes and Locke to Rand and Rothbard, laying down diverse pronouncements, each of them final, about which of the various natural rights are the true ones. Might it not be better for the people themselves to make up their own minds about which rights to protect, whether they call them natural or not? After all and unless we adopt a holistic metaphysics alien to Bunge's and believe society is some god or some transcendental object and rights only a manifestation of its glory, then rights ought to benefit people. And who is in a better position to know which rights are beneficial than the people themselves?
5.3.6. Yet "authorities" known as philosophers take over and *tell* the people which rights they have agreed to. Thomas Hobbes, for example, tells them that they are so frightfully warlike that the only right they have kept is to remove a sovereign who fails to keep the peace. (Hobbes is not usually classified as an advocate of natural rights. But the one right, that of revolution, is of the highest importance.) John Locke, who holds a less fearsome view of human nature, lets them keep a good deal more. John Rawls, as East Coast liberals read him, says the people have agreed to East Coast liberalism, though my own reading of _A Theory of Justice_ (1971) makes me think he moved in a libertarian direction during the twenty years he spent writing it. (I got this impression by reading it cover to cover in a week, or about 1/1040 the time he spent writing it.)
5.3.7. Objectivists also invoke contractarian arguments. Thus Peter Schwartz (1986): "Obviously, in a system based on *objective* procedures for uncovering the truth, some defendents will ultimately be acquitted. But even they, if they keep the full context in mind, will understand that such a system serves their true interests and protects their freedom, even though it can at times apprehend the wrong man."
5.3.8. This all would seem to mean the end of authority, too, but the [p. 110:] merit of _Limits_ is that it moves away from authority in the direction of realism, a fifth advantage that sees the social contract as economists see contracts: as agreement, exchange, bargain, compromise. Compromises can be made, and we don't have to wait for everyone to agree with every jot and tittle that John Rawls, or John Locke, or Thomas Hobbes wrote. Maybe even this distinguished trio could come to some sort of agreement, if only to stop fighting one day a week and hold a pow-wow on the ideal social contract. Buchanan, it will be recalled, very definitely recognizes that a social contract need not at all be the best one possible.
5.4 Value and Fact Again
5.4.1. In practice, the sort of political order set up by social contractors in anything approaching unanimity may differ only very slightly from a natural rights order. Natural rights arguments from the *nature* of man as a rational being have a plausibility about them that social contractors might well come to follow closely. Any society based upon natural rights will, in practice, have to keep redefining rights (sometimes coercively), and some sort of consensus regarding the legitimate authority of the redefiners will emerge, lest anarchy and blood feuds come to prevail.
5.4.2. Regards the productive state, given the unanimity requirement, it is likely that someone will use his veto power to assure that the rules of procedure for providing public goods will not depart too drastically from unanimity. So could someone favoring big government, but the costs of remaining in anarchy should result in his not holding out for very long. Big governments, so natural rights advocates seem to assert from first principles, are not stable. Buchanan might sadly retort that an inefficient equilibrium--in the sense that unanimous and wholesale revision of the constitution is possible--might be long lasting anyhow and that corrupt communism in the Soviet Union might drone on for a very long time without a relapse into the terrors of Stalinism. (That this has actually happened is described in Simis 1982.) The Soviet government is the result of a social contract only under Lenin's stretched conception of one. Perhaps the only viable polities that will remain constitutional are those whose protective states approximate the night watchman state and whose productive states are very small. If so, then describing the subset of viable constitutional orders in fundamental (essential) terms could be similar to the task of defining natural rights. And if so, the difference would then be more metaphysical, regards the kind of thing rights are, [p. 111:] than practical.
5.4.3. Ayn Rand has argued that active [35]^ rationality is the major, if not the only, means to serve the good and that the values men pursue, when rightly understood, do not conflict. I have argued that these arguments are full of holes, but my purpose here is not to engage in the easy task of nit-picking but rather to show that the case for natural rights needs to be supplemented with assumptions--by no means ridiculous ones--to complete the case. Natural rights theory postulates an abstract Rational Man that is a considerable idealization of the actual animal that evolved into homo sapiens. The jump in the argument is that actual man *should* behave like ideal man. Who would have qualms about such noble aspirations? *Still, the jump is made*, and while any natural rights derived from the essence of man should consider his essential animality as well as his essential rationality, the animality too often gets dropped.
^[note 35:] Ayn Rand never explains why thinking in man must be voluntary. An evolutionary explanation is in order and one is advanced by V.C. Wynne-Edwards 1963: "Compliance with the social code can be made obligatory and automatic, and it probably is so in almost all animals that possess social homeostatic systems at all. In at least some of the mammals, on the contrary, the individual has been released from this rigid compulsion, probably because a certain amount of intelligent individual enterprise has proved advantageous to the group." Such an explanation invokes group selection and is bound to be controversial. An alternative explanation might be that a) thinking requires work (uses up costly brain chemicals) and b) free-will feedback circuitry allows the animal (or maybe just certain humans) to choose both whether to think and what to think about. Far less brain hardware, in other words, may be required by taking the free will route. Now if Jaynes is right, we may just have been lucky to have a capacity for free will already in place, though it may not have been activated until the Dorian invasions. This is, I hasten to add, all speculation: I include it for its evolutionary and metaphysical implications.]
5.4.4. Natural rights advocates run into difficulties, even if men strive toward enlightened rationality. Reasonable men will still have disputes; the concepts of rights and property will change; the public goods problem remains. Contractarians try to handle these problems, but they encounter difficulties when they assert that rights are wholly arbitrary and have existence only as the people unanimously agree to them, which unanimity will almost never happen anyhow. Even Buchanan temporizes when he excludes strategic bargaining--how much bargaining he will allow is moot--as a legitimate factor in pronouncing a social contract to be unanimous. We may also have to rule out social contracts that will not last, such as perhaps those that legitimate envy. In short, we have to demand that actual man behave like the New Contractarian Man of Chapter 1, a creature not very different from Rational Man. So, even in contractarianism, a jump must be made from theory to practicality.
5.4.5. Buchanan, our specimen of a contractarian, similarly tends to conceive of man as a rational *being*, as he explicitly states in _Limits_ that he is being agnostic about human nature. He does not rule out that human nature may be any of a variety of things, unlike Ayn Rand, who positively asserts the *tabula rasa* doctrine, and this agnosticism serves the purpose of keeping his discussion general and of avoiding strife over the nature of human nature. But by saying nothing, Buchanan could be taken as agreeing with his fellow economists that fact and value are wholly separate.
5.4.6. Unger apparently does not realize it, but the acceptance of the radical separations he speaks of has passed a peak. Karl Marx, although [p. 112:] he ballooned a partial truth out to fatalistic proportions, popularized the notion that a man's station in life influences his political ideology. But far more scientifically, studies of neurology and evolutionary psychology have again mingled fact and value, although at times, seemingly, to replace Marx's environmental fatalism with genetic fatalism. It is the merit of Raymond Cattell, whose work will be discussed in the last chapter, to break free of these two prisons and to hold that heredity, environment, and choice are all mutually interacting determinants of individual and group behavior. Economists study choice, to be sure, but the objects of these choices are usually confined to marginal adjustments, and even there choices are seen as determined passively by "given" utility curves.
5.4.7. Some libertarians tend to exaggerate the importance of free will to the point where a person can choose to be anything he wishes. Objectivists, however, posit a less pliable human nature and stress the importance of the pursuit of integrated, rational knowledge in giving the individual a sense of efficacy and self-esteem. On this view, emotions function as a warning signal that something is amiss with the cognitive structure, by which the emotional network is programmed. Economists would instantly quarrel with this conception, not only because they have adopted the split between reason and value in its possibly naivest form, but also because their studies are geared to the fine details of marginal adjustment. It is hard to see what applicability this broad conception of the link between cognition and emotion has to do with choosing among brands of cereal. From a fine perspective, values do indeed seem wholly idiosyncratic, but, if values were wholly objective, there would be no room for *exchange*, the bread and butter of the economist's work, nor for the multilateral exchange of the social contract.
CHAPTER 6: RAYMOND BERNARD CATTELL AND EVOLUTIONARY
FEDERALISM
of Frank Forman, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (1989)
6.1 The Self of Self-Interest
6.1.1. The self of rational self-interest, like every other concept, gets fuzzy and elusive when examined up close. The reason is that making and refining concepts is a part of science, a part every bit as important as theory building with these concepts and testing out such theories. It is an ongoing activity and takes hard work. Mario Bunge devoted a large hunk of his Scientific Research (1967a) to the matter of definition and James Buchanan wrote a whole book, Cost and Choice (1969a), which he regards as his most important contribution to economic theory, to elucidate just one idea. Concept formation is no more to be completed than is any other scientific activity. As an economist would put it, concepts get refined until the marginal costs of further refinement start exceeding the marginal benefits. What saves this statement from being a pure tautology is the fact that foundational crises periodically take over and once again it becomes profitable to push for new ideas and further refinement.
6.1.2. There is a veritable industry attacking atomistic individualism these days. I examined Roberto Mangabeira Unger's Knowledge and Politics in Chapter 2. Mention should also be made of Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981), and Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (1985). All of these books pound away at what is now a commonplace thesis in sociology, that of John Donne's Devotions, "No man is an Island, entire of itself," oft repeated since Donne's death in 1631.
6.1.3. Yet none of these recent books offers much in the way of a solution to the paradox of how people might organize their government when said government will change said people. Thus, it can be charged that having the government protect "capitalist acts among consenting adults" (Nozick 1974) will result in the Consumer Society and turn people, who naturally yearn for cooperative community, into dog-eat-dog competitors (Kohn 1986) and/or self-satisfied pigs who denude Nature's Gifts. Thus, it can be contrarily charged that the Welfare State breeds dog-eat-dog rent-seekers and, through public education, dupes people into acquiescing in ever-larger government bureaucracies. (My case for the latter, "Egalitarianism as a Morality Racket," an address to the Southern Economic Association, is reprinted in the Appendix.)
6.1.4. These books, as well as a flurry of other recent writings, invoke (often explicitly) the Greek ideal of the good life and argue that man is fulfilled only when he actively participates in the polis. According to Aristotle, man is by nature a political animal. Such is his natural end, toward which, moreover, he ought to strive. Ayn Rand also invokes teleology when she distinguishes keeping the heart pumping from "man's survival qua man" (1961:24) and argues for the three cardinal values of reason, purpose, and self-esteem and the three corresponding virtues of rationality, productiveness, and pride (1961:25). She builds her theory of rights upon the claim that the virtue of productiveness is undermined when a person takes a short cut of obtaining something by force or fraud. It is this grounding of politics and natural rights in ethics that makes her philosophy an important attempt at system-building.
6.1.5. But while Ayn Rand regards government as absolutely necessary to protect rights, and has devoted some space to the challenges of developing good government and laws (e.g., 1963 and 1964a), and while talent of high order will no doubt be necessary to hammer out the details, the overwhelming mood of her writing is that the productive and virtuous life is not to be found in politics, at least not for very long. Basically, she wants to be rid of politics, as indeed do most writers of the Public Choice school. This again is the overwhelming mood of these writers, who implicitly look upon rent-seeking as the bad life, harmful to the psychological well-being of people so engaged. It is difficult to document this mood, at least in scholarly writings, and when Dwight Lee (1987) tries to correct the impression of Public Choice scholars as being entirely negative toward government, he does not provide documentation either.
6.1.6. Officially, claims Lee, Public Choice scholars are upbeat when it comes to government. This is true of Buchanan's contractarianism, especially regards the productive state in its provision of public goods, but also regards the protection of rights by the protective state. True enough, the illegal Constitution of 1789 plus all the usurpation of power since has turned our government into something richly deserving of criticism, but still, engaging in politics could be an important component of the good life were there a good (unanimously approved of) government in place. And I daresay that had Ayn Rand thought about it, and even while she holds there to be knowable principles concerning what in truth government should be doing (which is quite distinct from Buchanan's notion of government as omnilateral exchange not at all aimed at some truth), challenging opportunities to both get closer to the truth and carry out the details of its implementation would always remain, just as creative opportunities to better production in the economy always remain.
6.1.7. Unger, MacIntyre, and Bellah are not, then, so completely wrong about the polis playing an important role in the ideal of the good life. They may be naive optimists, they may be too little concerned about chaining Leviathan, they may even have few objections to the transfer state except that it doesn't transfer enough. They may, in short, be grievously underexposed to the public choice literature (or even the daily newspapers!) about how far politics has degenerated into bellum omnium in omnes; stil1, they do not have to embrace a woolly collectivism to hope for the day when politics can help transform the self into a better self. The optimism of these authors is, shall we say, premature and, in the case of case-by-case redistributive social justice, asking for the impossible, even for the metaphysically impossible, as I argued in Chapter 4, based upon the sharp finitude of the human brain in grasping remote consequences of human action. I do not want to exalt our present difficulties with keeping budgets and deficits under control to the level of ontological gloomism, at least not yet.
6.1.8. At this point I must repeat the lesson of Bunge's scientific metaphysics: No values outside of individuals. This rules out any conception of the good that aoes not redound to the benefit of, ideally, each and every one of the individuals who form, in Bunge's term, the composition of the social system. This does not rule out politics making political animals better animals, but it is just and only the animals themselves that are to benefit. Now there is truth in the statement that not everyone always knows what is good for himself--the limitations of our brains guarantee as much--but there is an ever-present temptation for those removed from any given individual (namely others) to claim to know what is in the given individual's best interests. I direct the reader back to the section on elitism in Chapter 4 and insist that anyone who is so keen upon politics making better men that he has a specific and detailed constitution for forcefully implementing his hopes be prepared to argue his case, not on the basis of hope and/or so-called good intentions, but on the basis of actual understanding of how human psychology and public choice interact. This is asking a good deal, but subjecting the unwilling to risk yet another failed utopia is asking much more. Strict oolltractarianism--notarized signatures of every last person--can stand a certain amount of compromise, but the sheer scope and quantity of government failure in the twentieth century suggest that compromises be made reluctantly.
6.2 Teleology
6.2.1. Teleology is dubious business. Some want to strip even man of this holdover anthropomorphism. Biologists look upon evolution as short-run opportunistic rather than goal-directed. This means that, while wings have an obvious function and survival value for birds now, each stage in their development had to have had additional survival value for the bird at the time. (The problem of wings is unsolved, at least using the unanimity criterion, and conferences are held to discuss it.)
6.2.2. Functional explanations in the social sciences are similarly found suspect, especially by Jon Elster, in favor of microfoundational explanations as to how individual goal-seeking leads spontaneously to overall regularities (often unwanted or even diswanted) that, to be sure, can look as if they were consciously planned. Elster may be going too far, since individuals can and do aim at collective results, such as a target rate of economic growth. Also, our readiness to attribute unconscious or concealed motives to people need not be entirely amiss just because as yet we have no really good theory of human hypocrisy. After all, public choice scholars and Marxists alike routinely unearth self-interest explanations for behavior, oftentimes much too quickly.
6.2.3. The reason why the free-rider problem is so often solved beyond any sufficient explanation from self-interest (think about just how often it is!) is because men are language- and symbol-using animals. We conceptualize some group to which we belong as having interests. We then identify our self, or part of it, with the group in a way economists would call an interdependence of utility functions. Call this a corruption of the true, primordial Ur-self, whose drives are somehow "given" (Unger's arbitrary desires, again), if you wish, but it is just as probable that language co-evolved with our emotions and drives. If so, the mere cognitive act of identifying oneself with a group brings with it a desire to further the interests of the group as such, thereby changing one's self and one's self-interests in the process. This is plainly not supposed to happen, and economists will look very hard for explanations other than one so patently irrational as this one. But why not? Why not become an enthusiastic joiner and forego free-riding in the full awareness that joining will both alter one's desires and satisfy them too? Nothing wrong with this at all, except that Unger's description of individualism fits economists to a T: Reason and desire are supposed to be utterly separate, with desires arbitrarily gushing out of the limbic system and/or reptilian brain (terms, by the way, Unger never uses. He actually wrote a whole book on emotions, Passions (1984), fully one hundred twenty-five long years after _The Origin of Species_, without any discussion of biology!)
6.2.4. I am not sure how it could be tested, but it could well be that words and symbolic constructs do not just sit on the top layer of the brain but go all the way down. See Yeo 1979 for evidence generally that the evolution of vertebrate brains involved changing the older parts of the brain as well as tacking a penthouse on top. Individualism, in other words, got its neurology wrong. Some separation, no doubt a very great deal, remains between reason and desire (similar to the specialization of the hemispheres of the cortex for theory and fact I discussed in Chapter 2), and so there is likewise no automatic justification for the other extreme of a collectivism that proclaims we'll all be happy if only we love one another. In other words, joiners and free-riders will always be with us.
6.2.5. Now, to wend our way back out of these digressions: Man is a symbol-using animal, and this confounds reason and desire. (Other animals use symbols, too, and I'm not at all clear how men differ.) This has potentially powerful implications for the design of institutions, especially as far as the propensity to identify one's self and one's self-interest with one's group goes. Social contractors who understand this may well want institutions that nudge them into being joiners. On the other hand, Robert Nisbet has argued in many books, beginning with The Quest for Community (1953), that we join readily enough as it is and that the real problem is that both radical individualists and totalitarians alike despise associations (Edmund Burke's little platoons) between the individual and the state, individualists because they despise associations of all kinds and just barely tolerate the state as a protector of atomistic individuals' rights, and totalitarians because guilds, churches, clubs, and the like get in the road of the state's total power. Nisbet doubts that isolated individuals can be much of a bulwark against Leviathan on the march. Clearly there are problems of constitutional design (checks and balances) here.
6.2.6. The role of symbols, besides changing utility functions, also allows interests to be pursued, and teleological ends to be promoted, without full conscious intent. Thus, the systematic downplaying of the role of religion in American history textbooks used in public schools need not be the result of a conscious conspiracy of Secular Humanists (implausible, given the tiny circulation of their publications). More likely is that "religion" is a trigger-word, a symbolic construct that sets off a negative reaction in those who, if they reasoned the matter through the way Nisbet does, would see in religion an intermediate body between the individual and the state that blocks their aggrandizement of power.
6.2.7. I am *not* postulating a sort of unconscious Public Choice homunculus (whose knowledge is two hundred years ahead of the authors of the journal Public Choice) inside every brain, in a manner parallel to Freud's superhuman id. Going along with the findings of modern sociobiologists and ancient Greeks that men are incurably moral, most of us (as with public school history teachers above) would be appalled at the very idea that we are power hungry. The homunculus must work by stealth and therefore not very efficiently. Besides, it seems unlikely on evolutionary grounds that the homunculus would be a better reasoner than the conscious brain. On the contrary, the homunculus is a very sentimental creature, one that spews out bad vibrations whenever the word religion pops up, inappropriately or not.
6.2.8. I am sure the metaphors and speculations I have been making recklessly will correspond with neurological reality at best tolerably, but my point is metaphysical: Contrary to Elster, we can speak of teleology in the context of group action. The microfoundations Elster seeks are to be found in the way the brain uses words, making use of hypocrisy and self-delusion when overcoming the free-rider problem. These explanations should not be overdone, but neither should appeals to self-interest by public choice scholars and Marxists agreeing with Unger's depiction of individualists, appeals that too often stop at the first explanation that comes to mind. As in so many other cases, a judicious assessment, never easy to confirm, of the strengths of various forces impinging on the human personality (raw self-interest, moral scruples, a propensity to identify with the group) must be made.
6.2.9. Teleological, or functional, explanations of group behavior, then, are not entirely out of place. But what about what Unger calls "intelligible essences" and the idea that there can be a gap between what a thing is and what it ought to be? Ayn Rand distinguishes man from "man qua man" and uses this distinction to derive natural rights. Alasdair MacIntyre unearths the Aristotelian doctrine of man the political animal and sees his fulfillment in the polis. I detailed objections to Ayn Rand's arguments in Chapter 4 and could do much the same with MacIntyre's. But social contractors are free to implement either or a mixture of both without waiting around indefinitely for philosophers to plug the arguments' holes. Moreover, they are free to ignore the teleology and ask why a man should strive toward his natural end just because it is his natural end. Instead, the contractors might learn about psychology, neurology, and evolutionary history and build their social contract upon this knowledge. In Chapter 4, I argued that the theory of psychology behind Ayn Rand's Objectivism contains the claim that there are no long-run conflicts of interests among rational men. This claim, I argued, has been far from completely established. Yet to the extent social contractors come to think it is true, to that extent will they enshrine Ayn Rand's natural rights in their contract.
6.2.10. I propose next to rope a sixth thinker into the discussion, the social psychologist Raymond B. Cattell, who is best known for his theories of human personality and as a pioneer in factor analysis, a statistical method for letting the data emerge with the dimensions or axes of personality rather than say what the major groupings are in advance.
6.3 Cattell's Morality from Science
6.3.1. Let us recall Bunge: "What distinguishes man from the other animals, with regard to evaluation, is that he can reason about values as well as evaluate reasons." (WS 159, my emphasis) Buchanan 1978 says it differently: "Man wants liberty to become the man he wants to become." Buchanan does not mean that men can sprout wings. In Bunge's terms, the laws of systems, individual human and also social, allow only certain becomings (lawful changes of state) out of all conceivable and wishful ones. These limitations are by no means as well understood as they might be, and it is the business of psychologists and sociologists, as well as economists, to try to find them out. In particular, it is the job of the social psychologist to study the possible (i.e., scientifically lawful) interactions between the individual and society. One of the best known social psychologists is Raymond B. Cattell. He has written a book combining his insights into social psychology with an ethical view, A New Morality from Science: Beyondism (1972). This book is hardly informed by the general view of economists that desires are arbitrary, and in fact Cattell seems regularly to underestimate the random component of human wants. But with this caveat, his insights into the lawful formations, or becomings, of desires are worth investigating, and we now turn to his book and its potential usefulness to the present discussion.
6.3.2. Cattell argues that a morality from science is at last becoming possible. Previous efforts foundered on excessive deduction, with too little feedback from empirical reality. Religion and art have made claims to understand life, but at best they have discovered only emotional "truths," with some value in providing for emotional integration with life. Religious values are not to be discarded lightly, for some have stood the test of time. Cattell's views here are similar to Hayek's. Both decry the undermining of values and a sense of social obligation in the wake of Reason. Being sentimental about religion, however, is not very helpful, for one still needs to choose which religious values to retain. Anti-rationality is not one of them!
6.3.3. Cattell is an explicit evolutionist and holds that evolution is the overriding theme of the universe. This may not be so, but we need to evolve further to find out. Cattell gives an argument similar to Pascal's wager that little will be lost by trying evolutionary experimentation, while much stands to be gained. While Unger, in his discussion of evolving human nature, fails to mention biological evolution, Cattell places biological on equal footing with cultural evolution. He urges the deliberate formation of new racial and cultural units, their isolation, and their eventual careful cross-fertilization.
6.3.4. Cattell sees evolution primarily as competition between groups. His book appeared before the term sociobiology gained currency, and much controversy over the reality of group selection in animals has raged since in efforts to reconcile what appears to be altruism on behalf of the group with the necessary diminution in genes fostering altruism left behind as altruists sacrifice themselves, and thus their numbers of offspring, for the group. [36] When it comes to humans, however, institutions and ideas can be passed along outside of biological reproduction, [37] thus allowing for group selection.
6.3.5. For Cattell, the final arbiter of a moral system is its survival. Knowledge of the social sciences, especially of social psychology, can be utilized to help foster the survival of each group and also to ensure a variety of man-made moralities in different groups so that evolutionarily diverse directions can be pursued, evaluated, and learned from. Cattell, himself a pioneer in factor analysis, proposes using this technique to find the factors that influence such dimensions as affluence, morale, social pressures upon individuals to make cultural advances, solidarity, order, and so forth. It may happen, for instance, that a high divorce rate has side effects on morale but that deaths from alcoholism have greater side effects (138). There will be costs and benefits of altering these causes, and what actions to recommend will depend upon the total situation of each particular society. In general, there will be maintenance values all societies share but plenty of room for values to experiment with in each society as it pursues its own evolutionary destiny.
6.3.6. Cattell claims that his morality differs from previous ones in that it is to be grounded on science rather than revelation or abstract reason, which more often than not assumes Christian values by default. (He views modern Humanism as taking tolerance to the extreme.) But more important, Cattell's morality is not universalist: "It is an easy intellectual and emotional mistake to suppose that what is super-personal, transcending the individual, ought to be universal." [38]
6.3.7. Cattell sees the selective effects of war as far too haphazard and random in character to serve as an evolutionary test of a society's moral value, and consequently he would have a world government. Beyond keeping the peace, the world government would also serve as a data collection and evaluation agency for each country's bio-social experiment. Just when Cattell would have the world government intervene in the internal affairs of a country is unclear, though he discusses the possibility of intervention in case of unambiguous racio-cultural disaster. [39]
6.3.8. The central aim of a world government is to foster cooperative competition among countries and the production of variation and natural selection. He would have countries much smaller than at present, and so would Buchanan and Unger. [40] Cattell would at times reduce cultural borrowing and immigration, both of which cloud the effects of selection, but would allow for a certain hybridization, carefully watched, to alternate with these periods of isolation. He would restrict international aid to alleviate poverty when such aid would have the perverse effect of perpetuating it.
6.3.9. Such is the basic outline of Beyondism in the abstract. Cattell has opinions aplenty about what maintenance values will be necessary for any society. He would have the government divided into a branch of experts, to decide means, and another branch, in which "every individual counts equally," [41] to decide ends. It is unclear how free a hand the second branch would have, for he also states that "toleration of differences over ends should have a limit." (450) In case there is too much disagreement over ends, Cattell sees a solution in migration or the formation of splinter groups. (450-1) He sees a basis for such legislative separation in the brain, where wants come from autonomic systems and means from the central nervous system. (345) Nevertheless, desire must be tempered and channeled by reason, for any emotion can err, since our past genetic endowment is inadequate to our modern needs. (329)
6.3.10. Of specific emotions, Cattell sees as particularly dysfunctional in the modern age envy (156,301,331,360,442,454), sexuality, [42] and pugnacity. [43] But more generally, he comes across as a stern morallst, who regards altruism as a necessity. [44] He comes down against senseless luxuries [45] and even just wasting time and against hedonism generally. [46] He stresses the importance of character education (371) and claims that the modern view that what is degenerate or in bad taste is just a matter of opinion is valid oDly when it comes to values derived from intuitive religions as opposed to empirical science. (394)
6.3.11. This stern and moralistic life has its payoffs, however, and Cattell waxes enthusiastic about the excitement to be found in communities of astronauts, scientists, and artists (430) and holds that the emotional and aesthetic quality of science is fully equal to that of the arts. (209) In general, Cattell says "feeling must adjust to reality," (441) and "the Beyondist says, 'This is the nature of the universe and my position in it. If my feelings do not fit this, it is because my emotional structure has not yet evolved harmoniously with my capacity to understand. Therefore I need to evolve and learn emotionally."' (427) He also states as a fact that "evolution toward greater cognitive understanding is also evolution toward richer emotional life." (105)
6.3.12. Cattell's intertwining of reason and desire and his opinions about what the Greeks called the good life (which implies the existence of rational ends) go strongly against the radical separation of reason and desire Unger described as characteristic of the individualist world view. More problematic still is Cattell's belief in authority for morals, (421-2) with an implied trust in experts. (424) He states: "The greater fraction of the possible diseases of authority is eliminated when authority itself is built for constant research and movement" (425) and also, "If morality becomes a branch of science it has the authority of truth." (440)
6.3.13. Such statements will hardly sit well with a contractarian like Buchanan! However, there is no automatic reason why agreement could not be achieved on some, maybe much of what Cattell has to say, particularly if the adoption of his values becomes generally recognized as necessary for a progressive society. Cattell fully appreciates the underdevelopment of the social sciences and it may turn out that some of the values he treasures are optional or even counterproductive, either in every society's common maintenance values or in the context of the experimental values particular societies may wish to adopt provisionally. In either case, it is not necessary to push any specific value to the extreme. Each society will make its own decisions, subject only to limitations on such matters as waging war.
6.3.14. Cattell, like Unger and unlike Buchanan, does not develop his ideas within an explicitly contractarian framework, and his views on contractarianism are bound to be somewhat unclear and inconsistent. Yet he does espouse contractarianism explicitly in places: "Now the position of evolutionary morality is that definable rights can be set up by a contract between the individual and his government; but there are absolutely no such things as 'man's rights' in the abstract." (266) He later says, "The control of a society regarding those to be born into it is at present so weak that no responsible party representing society could enter a contract. Certainly, society cannot be said to have chosen with whom it will enter a contract." (286) Cattell embraces a contract theory beyond that of most contemporary contractarians when he states that Beyondism "asks the state to recognize the rights of the unborn and extends morality to genetics." (270) More problematic, but still possible, would be the adoption of his position that inherited wealth "should be phased out at the same rate as that with which genetic eminence disappears in families, which is fairly fast." (152; see also 322). Also problematic in today's welfare state environment is his multi-generational contractarian perspective that enables him to say that "any realistic ethical system must regard a man who begets eight children on public welfare as someone as socially dangerous as any criminal." (35S) [47] *Cattell's morality explicitly goes to the composition of a social structure, in Bunge's sense, as well as to its structure.* On the other hand, support of free speech, fair play, mutual respect even in sharp disagreement, and the Golden Rule are much less problematic.
6.3.15. Many of the values Cattell sees as desirable within nations carry over to relations between nations, and he urges that no single nation have a monopoly of power or culture. Cattell even goes beyond the generations of humans and of new human races when he speaks of new species beyond man and invokes a "transcendental conscience which is the individual conception of purpose as it exists outside any human group." (439)
6.4 Criticism of Cattell
6.4.1. Such, then, is an outline of Cattell's "new morality from science," Beyondism. It has contractarian elements in common with Buchanan, an idea of diverse moralities in a federated structure, the concept of which lies implicit in Bunge, and the notions of an evolving human nature and of a remixing of reason and desire found in Unger. Cattell goes beyond Unger and Buchanan in applying results from social psychology to arrive at specifics, and he emphasizes the genetic half of genes and environment which Unger totally ignores. And his metaphysics, while never explicit, need not clash with Bunge's, although a familiarity with the latter's writings could well have obviated certain statements that smack of holism.
6.4.2. A11 of this means that Cattell's efforts are pioneering, but how valid is his achievement? From a contractarian, the question to ask is, How likely are Cattell's proposals to be adopted unanimously? The answer is, of course, not very likely and surely not immediately. But neither is the whole world going to adopt Buchanan's unanimity rule and stop imposing values on others. Nor will Christians adopt Bunge's metaphysics or right-wingers Unger's radical egalitarian vision. A conceptual agreement would be possible for Cattell's vision only if the contractors are placed behind a veil of ignorance of suitable thickness: If a man, say, did not know whether he was going to be a hedonist, he might well take the risk of having to live in a society, such as the one Cattell advocates, that clamps down on hedonism, assuming that he accepts Cattell's findings in social psychology.
6.4.3. A much more pointed question can be asked: Is Cattell behind a vei1 of ignorance? Probably everyone imposes his own personality on the utopia--in Cattell's case, utopias--he constructs. When Cattell states that "all progress, as far as we can control it, should be at a maximum pace" (277, my emphasis), he is exposing his own values, and not even his own, if he has any use for simple loafing and enjoyment of life. Cattell himself may not waste much time, [48] but a multi-generational social contract will compromise between the desire to loaf and each generation's wish that past generations had wasted less time. The fear that Beyondism will degenerate into a regime imposing harsh and arbitrary Puritanical values on an unwilling citizenry is a real one.
6.4.4. But Cattell's calling for a maximum rather than an optimum rate of progress may be more a lapse in reasoning than an imposition of his own values. More telling are his strictures against sexuality, which he scolds for much more than merely taking up time. He offers some evidence for this (396-7), but it strikes me at least as rather weak. Here he pitches the optimum amount of Puritanism too high, compared to what might be reasonably expected under a multi-generational social contract. If it is simply economic growth that is the multi-generational issue, any good free-marketeer could quickly reply that too much sex could be efficiently counteracted by changing the tax laws, not by regulating sex. Furthermore, coitus can be one of life's finest rewards and stimuli for some, though ruinous for others. Yet Csttell shows no recognition of this variability. It is not clear, however, whether Cattell is advocating government intervention in this area.
6.4.5. In general, Cattell has too much naive faith in experts, whether to legislate in the area of government having to do with implementing means, to speak about rational ends, or even to evaluate bio-social experiments, without grossly abusing their powers. Experts disagree among themselves, and the studies he refers to are often based upon small-numbers psychological experiments, which, although usefully indicative, are far from conclusive about peoples or countries as a whole. Cattell is also far too optimistic about controlling the experts, a problem he only vaguely alludes to. Unger is also optimistic, and both could do well to absorb Buchanan's Limits.
6.4.6. A more general problem is that, for all his talk about differentcountries having different values, but a few maintenance values in common, Cattell gives no real flavor of these differences. It seems that each value he does invoke is universal both in its validity and in its extent. If there is any point to having many countries, it is that their affairs be run differently, as best suits the social contractors in them.
6.4.7. To see how this might turn out, let us take a leaf from a constitutionalist of a wholly different sort than Buchanan. He is William H. Sheldon, best known for his classification of human physiques into strengths along the three dimensions of endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy. The extremes of human constitution or body types are represented by the fat man, the strong man, and the thin man, respectively, but every person is a mixture of all three. What Sheldon is less known for is his development, in The Varieties of Human Temperament (1942), of constitutional psychology and of his finding correlations of eighty percent between the strengths of each component of the physical constitution and a corresponding component of personality. The fat man tends to love food, comfort, and company, the strong man physical activity, and the thin man solitude and contemplation. All three are needed, these talkers, doers, and thinkers.
6.4.8. Sheldon does not claim that a person's body type determines every aspect of his behavior and gives cases of individuals with the same body type but with quite different personalities. Still, the very broad similarities observed among those of similar body types are striking. We need not ask acceptance of Sheldon's results here--the older idea of Montesquieu that climate determines the form of government will do--but since Cattell upholds the importance of group genetic differences, this is an illustration that may point up Cattell's biases. So when he decries "women with extensive fore and aft projections" (3Sl) and "the overbreasted female of American Playboy pin-ups," (397) one suspects he is simply stating his personal preference for ectomorphs, which is of course his privilege.
6.4.9. Cattell, then, fails to carry the implications of bio-cultural differences that he makes in the abstract over into the particular. For long stretches, it seems as though Cattell thinks he already has the answers, that his own particular bio-social type is the best one, and that experimentation is quite pointless. It may well turn out that Prometheans (Sheldon's 2 3 5 temperament, on his 1 to 7 scale for each of the three dimensions) are the most progressive, but it could also turn out that a society of Cattells would produce so many with Messiah complexes that constant feuding would be the norm. I am referring here to Sheldon's finding that 65 percent of paintings of Jesus depicted him as a 2 3 5 or a 2 3 6. Judging from Cattell's photograph, his own type is close to a 2 3 5. (So, incidentally, is the present author.) Other societies of different body types (somatotypes) will produce different excesses, but within each society some sort of optimal diversity about a desired mean might potentially be agreed upon.
6.4.10. These criticisms of Cattell, and pointing up of his biases, are not crucially important to the present discussion. What counts, in the metaphysics of liberty, is Cattell's idea of federalism, of different peoples having different social contracts. Values are partly objective, as in Cattell's maintenance values which all societies share, and partly subjective, as in Cattell's experimental values which can be partly shaped by group genetic differences. What we have is a kind of pluralism that could be dubbed moral federalism.
6.4.11. A further criticism of Cattell is that, like nearly everyone else, he has produced a one-planet book. While he is a far more thoroughgoing advocate of diversity than almost anyone else, his fears of an irremediable breakdown are similar to Buchanan's fears of the erosion of public capital. [49] But it would take only one or a few space colonies pursuing Beyondism for it to take hold, while all the rest could sink into hedonistic stagnation or retrogression. [50] More difficult still for any social theory in general and for multi-generational contractarian theory in particular, is that while the future can be taken into account, one basically relies upon current knowledge. If the future is progressive, future generations will know far more than we do and tear up any contract we sign, or philosophy we espouse, as being hopelessly outdated. While we might try, with Nietzsche, to build the house for the superman--or fabricate him out of silicon--we are stuck with only a very poor conception of what the superman would be.
6.5 The Ontology of Federalism
6.5.1. What exactly is a federated political order in Mario Bunge's terms? Recall that the composition of a system, social or otherwise, is the list of the system's parts. Now in Bunge's Chinese-box ontology, the parts exist on several layers. A social system may be conceptually decomposed to people, at the living layer, to all the molecules of all the people at the chemical level, and so forth. (FW 29-30) In a federated social system, there is also a country layer, into which the federation of countries is decomposed before decomposing to individuals.
6.5.2. Speaking of countries as units courts metaphysical confusion, the dangers of which are explored by Viktor Vanberg, "Organizational Goals and Organizations as Constitutional Systems" (1983). Vanberg argues that the notion of the goal of an organization is held to be both indispensable and problematic in that it suggests that an organization and its goals exist in a reified ontological realm apart from the individuals in the organization and the separate goals which each of them hold. Vanberg would rather conceive of an organization as being a constituted set of rules that regulate the actions and goal-seeking of the members, who need not have any goals in common.
6.5.3. Vanberg's formulation seems to get around the metaphysical problems. Nevertheless, few are going to adopt his circumlocutions when statements like "All institutions outlive their usefulness" are much more compact and economical to use and furthermore get the message across. [51] But what does this statement mean? Recall that the structure of a social system is limited by natural laws, including the laws of social systems. Even without government, there are customs, regularities, and predictable behavior that Buchanan calls "ordered anarchy." Much of this order has roots going back beyond mammalia. In formal organizations, ordered anarchy is supplemented by man-made rules. The workings of the organization, constrained by the laws of reality, can go contrary to the hopes and expectations of individuals. The time may come when the organization is counter-productive to all concerned but where there is no easy way out. This situation is called a dead end or a cul-de-sac by most and the "transitional gains trap" by Gordon Tullock (1975). There may be a way out, but only through wholesale reform. The "law" that all institutions outlive their usefulness is a claim that such is always bound to happen. The law is probably just a very strong tendency, [52] but institutions can outlive their usefulness because of the difference between scientific laws and man-made rules. The connection between the two is tenuous, and we apprehend these connections oftentimes at best dimly. Omniscient beings would never fall into a cul-de-sac.
6.5.4. Nevertheless, countries are organized systems and it is worth asking whether it is metaphysically sinful to attribute goals, actions, interests, etc., to them rather than just restricting such terms to individuals. Any answer will be arbitrary, for reality is constantly changing and the things in it shifting, to a certain degree, from one ontological category to another. Gordon Tullock argues, in _Coordination without Command: The The Organization of Insect Societies_ (unpublished MS, c. 1960), that for at least some purposes an ant hill can be regarded as a single organism and the individual ants as cells. When it comes to corals, distinguishing individuals within a coral becomes very problematic. By the same token and again for some purposes, individual humans can be thought of as cells of an organism called a country.
6.5.5. When metaphor stretches into reification is not always clear. Is a country somehow a "natural" unit? Recall Bunge's definition of a natural kind from Chapter 3, "Thing," of his furniture book: A natural kind is a set of things that obeys a scientific law or several such laws conjointly. A law, in turn, describes the possible states or changes of states of certain things. Bunge advances this definition of natural kind to distinguish purely arbitrary sets of things from sets that fall under various laws of science. Electrons clearly constitute a natural kind, but our knowledge of social laws is so poor that it is hard to say whether countries are.
6.5.6. Fortunately, there is another way to look at whether countries are natural kinds. This is to take a leaf from biological taxonomy. Given a taxonomy of species, one could expect a natural grouping to conform to certain statistical patterns (such as the size distribution of species in a genus) that are the results of orderly probability processes of evolution (such as the birth and death of species, the Founding Paper whereof being Yule 1924). If, for example, all genera under consideration consisted of exactly three species, the hand of the taxonomist would be evident in producing such a "rational" pattern.
6.5.7. An easy test for countries has to do with a stochastic process similar to Yule's and is given as the so-called rank-size rule, whereby the rank times the population is a constant. China times its population = India times twice its population = the Soviet Union times thrice its population, and so on. This rule works rather well, taking one country with another. China has about twenty times as many people as No. 20 (Egypt), and about forty times as many as No. 40 (Kenya). Actually, India is too big and the Soviet Union too small, [53] but the United States is quite close. A better fit can be had if an exponent to size other than one is used. Invoking more complicated rules can improve the fit even better. In any case, there is evidence of some sort that countries are as natural as biological species.
6.6 Problems for Contractarianism in the Composition of Countries
6.6.1. Countries may be natural, but the placement of boundaries has been a source of extreme friction down through the ages. Men are not necessarily the most quarrelsome animals, but only they can form social contracts, much as other animals act as if they did. [54] Judging from the amount of bloodshed, the composition of a social system is a much more contentious issue than a constitution of man-made rules designed to affect the structure of the system. Bloodshed is arguably a poor basis for judging approximation to unanimity, however, and coercion inside a system may simply be cheaper, as seems to be the case with animal societies generally. Nevertheless, the composition of countries will be less tractable than internal laws, if conceptual agreement is harder to achieve in the former case. This is almost certainly the case, since every border change is bound to make someone worse off, with practically no exceptions. Revisionist historians maintain that the plebiscite in Austria following the Anschluss of 1938 was only a little less popular than the vote of approval showed, but it is hard to come up with another instance of a quasi-unanimous border change. In any event, third nations by no means approved, let alone all the people in all the third nations.
6.6.2. A unanimous federal order requires many simultaneous unanimities on the part of each person regarding: (1) his own country's constitution for internal affairs, (2) the country to which he belongs, (3) the country to which each other person belongs, (4) every other country's constitution, and (5) every country'.s constitutional machinery for making international law, including the provisions for border changes. It would help if each person delegated to his government the power to form an international constitution, which could (among other things) change his citizenship. In such a case, nations could act as units with respect to other nations.
6.6.3. Buchanan swept the difficulties away in a paragraph quoted above (from LL l03) by assuming freedom of migration. In reality such multiple unanimities forthcoming are wildly improbable. Even if countries miraculously went against the record of all history and allowed free migration, they would no longer have contiguous borders. Pushed to the limit, individuals could secede from all states, with anarchy resulting.
6.6.4. In "Public Finance and Academic Freedom" (1979a) and elsewhere Buchanan called himself a pessimist, but he is a great optimist when it comes to the possibility of agreeing on reforms. He is not so great an optimist that he drops "quasi" from "quasi-unanimity," and he realizes that reforms will have to be thoroughgoing indeed to make everyone better off. Still, the last chapter of The Limits of Liberty, "Beyond Pragmatism: Prospects for Constitutional Revolution," is not a litany of despair. Buchanan's optimism leads him to think that, while perfect unanimity may not be achievable, only a small dent in the ideal will have to be made in order to get on with the serious business of making improvements. He would be far less sanguine were he to concentrate on the composition of countries as opposed to their man-made rules for altering their structures. Buchanan may well have to depart far from unanimity to get an international federated order and may even adopt a simple majority rule. Simple majorities, after all, have the pleasing property that some decision will be reached and the logjam broken. Buchanan, despite what Warren Samuels and Leland Yeager say (as was discussed in Chapter 1), does not want to freeze the universe to the status quo.
6.6.5. Majority rule is not sacrosanct and by no means the best possible rule from anyone's standpoint, as Buchanan and Tullock so well argued in The Calculus of Consent. It is an ethical assumption, and if majority rule can be entertained as a method for deciding on the composition of countries, so can many others. One such rule is to group people by some sort of criterion of naturalness. Possible criteria are language, religion, race, and political homogeneity. African dictators rarely want to cede territory but they frequently want to extend their rule over the remainder of the tribes they govern. Hitler's major foreign policy aim was to put all German speakers in Europe into one country, with the curious exceptions of Switzerland and the Tyrol region of Italy. Religion is a major factor in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The South tried to secede from the Union over political differences. On the other hand, over time, a territory, once seized, can become integrated into the whole, as Scotland perhaps has with England. There are Scots separatists today, but they are in a minority.
6.6.6. A multi-national country is one made up of several natural groupings called nations. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is one such, the United States of America another. The United Kingdom perhaps no longer is, while China has been a One for millennia. Ayn Rand, in "Global Balkanization" (1977), has argued that free societies best contain multi-national frictions, but other factors include the degree of centralization. Other hypotheses can be put forth, and a unanimitarian's objective would be to put knowledge on the matter to good use when designing a constitutional world government.
6.6.7. Some problems of the composition of countries are just plain intractable and the unanimitarian is bound to be sorely disappointed despite his best efforts to come up with a solution everyone could agree upon. In this case, a unanimitarian _qua_ unanimitarian has to remain silent about one far-from-unanimous proposal versus another. But there is a dubious way out, frequently seized upon. Under a not very thick veil of ignorance, I would surely prefer a social contract that empowered the government to retrieve stolen property. The veil need be only so thick that I would not know in advance that I was to be one of the relatively few criminals who would oppose the restoration of stolen property. As with individuals, so with nations. Hitler, on this reading, was not wrong to try to restore Germany's boundaries to the status quo ante of 1914. (Such a reenlarged Germany was considered a threat to peace by many, but that is another issue.) The rectitude of taking back Alsace-Lorraine is ambiguous, but that region has been war booty ever since the death of Charlemagne's grandson, Lothair. (Maybe by this time there exists a conceptual contract between France and Germany that to the victor belongs this particular spoil!) This way out is dubious, however, since any expansionist power can trump up an excuse of collective security to justify its territorial grabs.
6.6.8. Other times, no one is in the right. Take the case of Northern Ireland: The Southern Irish hold that Northern Ireland would belong to them had England not taken over their island in violation of unanimity (to put it mildly), while the Scots Irish who have lived there for hundreds of years point out that their ancestors were forced to go there by the English. When it comes to trying to restore what would have been had a (conceptual) social contract continued (or even existed in the first place), the possibilities for hypocrisy, self-delusion, and just plain lying are stupendous. The unanimity ideal, like any other, can be stretched beyond the breaking point.
6.7 Evolutionary Morality
6.7.1. Biological evolution is very definitely a testable theory, one moreover that has passed the test. In a classic 1924 paper, G. Udny Yule considered the size distribution of species in a genus and conceived the first birth and death probability process, now known by his name, to generate this skewed size distribution. Yule hypothesized that species split in two at one random rate and become extinct at another. He compared the theory against reality--made a postdiction--and got a good fit. As far as I know, Yule's paper has never been cited by evolutionists in their debate with Creationists, who construe an ambiguous passage in Genesis, "And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so" (1:24), to deny both the initial evolution of these beasts and any subsequent speciation after the Sixth Day.
6.7.2. Darwin himself noted the increasing complexity of life forms in the fossil record as time marched on. Today, we would add increasing order, organization, and information (negentropy). Peacocke 1984 describes and discusses these different directions, each of which comes somewhat at the expense of the other three. He also discusses problems of quantification and adds that there may be other dimensions. Hence, evolutionary advance is not uniform. Hence, it is open-ended. And hence, while evolution might be directed, it cannot be perfectly planned and predicted. Evolutionary theory is very much a framework in which the facts of biology are to be placed and fossils to be interpreted rather than a science so rigidly mechanistic that man could have been predicted upon the appearance of the first hesitant mammal. Evolutionary theory could indeed be called metaphysical, but in the good sense of being very general science like Bunge's ontology. Happily, the theory makes enough contacts with quite hard facts (such are fossils!), as Yule's paper showed, that the framework is a science rather than a set of assumptions so broad as to be untestable (metaphysical in the bad sense).
6.7.3. So what is Cattell up to when he calls for an evolutionary ethics? Is he just jumping on a bandwagon, hooking a prestige word onto his personal preferences? Is he calling for an incorporation of what is known about human nature as a product of evolution into ethical deliberations, as seems to be absent from several of this book's authors? Is he urging us to get realistic and stop planning utopias that go against real constraints of biology? Could he be telling economists that their ever-ready notions of constraints, like production frontiers, are far too abstract? After all, Veblen's classic 1919 paper, "Why Economics Is Not an Evolutionary Science," is still very much worth reading.
6.7.4. An evolutionary morality can mean just about anything. Marx, for example, had very definite ideas on how societies evolve. I shall propose a definition, but first a passage from Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law (1964:9,10,27,28):
6.7.4.1. As we consider the whole range of moral issues, we may conveniently imagine a kind of scale or yardstick which begins at the bottom with the most obvious demands of social living and extends upward to the highest reaches of human aspiration. Somewhere along this scale there is an invisible pointer that marks the dividing line where the pressure of duty leaves off and the challenge of excellence begins. The whole field of moral argument is dominated by a great undeclared war over the location of this pointer. There are those who struggle to push it upward; others work to pull it down. Those whom we regard as being unpleasantly--or at least, inconveniently--moralistic are forever trying to inch the pointer upward so as to expand the area of duty. Instead of inviting us to join them in realizing a pattern of life they consider worthy of human nature, they try to bludgeon us into a belief we are duty bound to embrace this pattern. All of us have probably been subjected to some variation of this technique at one time or another. Too long an exposure to it may leave in the victim a lifelong distaste for the whole notion of moral duty.
6.7.4.2. If the morality of duty reaches upward beyond its proper sphere the iron hand of imposed obligation may stifle experiment, inspiration, and spontaneity. If the morality of aspiration invades the province of duty, men may begin to weigh and qualify their obligations by standards of their own and we may end with the poet tossing his wife into the river in the belief--perhaps quite justified--that he will be able to write better poetry in her absence.
6.7.5. Fuller's morality of duty, at the minimum of "the most obvious demands of social living," corresponds with what Ayn Rand (1961) calls the (mere) "survival of man" and which I shall call the moralitv of survival. Fuller's morality of aspiration corresponds with Ayn Rand's "survival of man qua man." This I shall call a morality of evolution, the reason being that, like evolution, the paths to excellence are open-ended and extend along multiple dimensions, not unlike those of biological evolution, of increased complexity, order, organization, and information. Again, there are trade offs: Excellence does not consist entirely in piling up information; to be excellent, information needs to be organized. One could make similar analogies and play with them indefinitely and indeed generate a great deal of debate. What counts is that the pursuit of excellence is just as uncertain as that of biological advance and can only partly be directed.
6.7.6. Fuller has apparently mixed up levels of systems, for he speaks of duty in relation to "the demands of social living," while he refers to individuals when speaking of aspirations. Let us fill in the other combinations and speak, in my terminology, of moralities of survival both for the individual (system of cells) and for the social system, as well as of moralities of evolution for both. So an individual can just barely keep going or reach out for excellence in one of many ways, and so also a society can just barely survive in all due obscurity, by adhering only to Cattell's maintenance values, or it can reach out for excellence, by adopting a successful set of experimental values.
6.7.7. The problem with the last lies in avoiding holistic talk, and this is done by insisting that a society's experimental values redound to the benefit of its members. Now what benefit consists of is problematic. Economists, when speaking of benefits, usually have in mind revealed preferences and the construction of a utility function out of such preferences when constraints are varied. This is of course all static and, while useful for some purposes, it is easily subject to misuse snd a far cry from Buchanan's 1978 statement, "Man wants freedom to become the man he wants to become." It is the job of an evolutionary ethic (Cattell's, but also Fuller's morality of aspiration and Ayn Rand's virtues of rationality, productivity, and pride) to say something about what sort of man he ought to try to become. But if we emphasize the he in Buchanan's statement, it is the job of an evolutionary ethical theorist to persuade the individual of the merits of his particular version of such an ethic.
6.7.8. I could solve this problem merely by choosing the evolutionary ethic I like best and insist that New Contractarian Man holds it or that people behind the veil of ignorance would choose it. Making any such presumptions is decidedly premature, but it is not necessarily forever preposterous. Here's why: Social psychology is an immature discipline; in fact, a living person, Raymond Cattell, is one of its pioneers. As social psychology approaches being a science, its conclusions will become increasingly accepted (but remember that individual differences will remain). Even then, though, we are a ong way from a *political* contract. This contract is not about what the good life is, nor even about how people ought to interact with one another. Rather, it s about empowering a government under a constitution, and in its two aspects, the protective and productive states. Recall Buchanan's statement that men live together to pursue their *individual* objectives, not to strirve woard "some transcedental common bliss." (LL 1) If it were not for the facts that, in living *together*, individuals and individual objectives cnahge and also that individuals strive to change themselves into (at least somewhat) different individuals, designing the constitution would be comparatively straight forward and we would remain in a world not too much more complicated than that of _The Calculus of Consent_. Chaining Leviathan would remain a problem, as would designing leglislative rules to protect new kinds of property and to specify the duration of patents and copyrights. But in a world where there is such as things as *social* psychology, a feedback from what Bunge calls the social structure to the individual, matters become more subtle. The structure can do more than [p. 135:] help or hinder people in achieving their separate objectives. It can goad them into becoming better persons, or it can bring out the worst and foster degeneracy.
6.7.9. Now some people are so far sunk in degeneracy that their every act reveals a preference to become more degenerate. These are not the men Buchanan probably had in mind when he was speaking of the freedom to become the men they want to become. Nor did Frank Knight (1935)^ when he spoke of men wanting better wants, nor myself when speaking of New Contractarian Man. Can their consent honestly be excluded from the unanimity criterion for a social contract" One excuse for doing so is to suppose that men sunk this far are in fact sunk so further also that they are incapable of forming an opinion about the social contract: they do not and can not consent, but neither can they object. In particular, they will not object to a social structure that does not actively aid and abet further degeneration, whether of themselves or others. But here's the rub: the drug addicts among the degenerates will very likely object strenuously to laws controlling drugs, even if everyone else prefers such maternalism to protect *them* from degeneracy. A libertarian compromise would allow each person to go to Hell in his own way, which will please the addicts, but also to go to Heaven in his own way.
6.7.10. However this problem might be handled or ignored, an individual adopting a personal evolutionary ethic will persist at or desist from certain actions, but this does not mean he advocates forcefully prescribing or proscribing them for others. Indeed, one of the features of an *evolutionary* ethic is precisely the open-ended character of evolutionary advance: Advances might be characterized along the axes of complexity, order, organization, and information, but they cannot be reduced to sa single scale. Nor can anyone know fur sure beforehand whether his plan of action will result in advance. That only the individual in question can acquire certain kinds of information to guide him in intelligent planning, information that might better lead to advance and which is not available to others, in particular to central planners, is only not only a principle tirelessly advocated by Hayek, but also a feature of all animals with plastic neuronal systems, i.e., animals capable of learning. (Recall the section, "Bunge on Mind," in Chapter 3.) 6.7.11. *An evolutionary ethic at the social system level is one that facilitates and promotes the realization of the diverse evolutionary ethics of individuals.* This goes beyond Buchanan's 1975 formulation in _Limits_, that all that counts is what the contractors unanimously agree [p. 137] upon, and goes in the direction of his 1978 statement, "Man wants freedom to become the man he wants to become." Recall however that Buchanan explicitly states that a social contract is the "first leap out of the anarchist jungle," not the *best* leap, even from an internal point of view. His 1975 and 1978 positions can be reconciled by claiming that the agreements men *in fac* will reach will provide for the freedom men need to change themselves. I am sure Buchanan is aware of the existence of some men who are apparently hopelessly degenerate and want only to degenerate still further. I am only a little less sure that, excepting certain kinds of genetic, congenital, or infant mishaps, he has significant hopes that a good many, if not most, of these men could have been rescued from a life of degeneration and would have come to be grateful for it. His previously mentioned pessimism, I think I can say, is not over the hopelessness of the human condition as it applies to individual men nearly so much as over the prospects of a critical mass of men coming together to state a constitutional revolution. As I said earlier, reforms have a habit of getting bogged down and few will volunteer their own turf first.
6.7.12. Although Buchanan has never himself put his 1975 and 1978 positions together, neither has he retracted the first sentence of _Limits_, "Those who seek specific desriptions of the 'good society' will not find them here." But can his use of "Quasi- unanimity" and "conceptual contract" become a loophole into which an evolutionary ethic at the social system level can be wedged? Yes, of course, if the number of incurably degenerate is minute and if it is the case that most men want in fact to become better me, in the sense o f holding or wanting to hold an individual evolutionary ethic, even if not self-described as such. Buchanan say men want freedom, but to what extent they also want their government to restrict them for their own good (better: betterment) depends on the chainability of Leviathan. And this depends on their knowledge of the lessons of history, some of which may be codified and systematized by the very public choice theory Buchanan has pioneered. Buchanan may not be ready to give his own vision of the good society, but he and his colleagues do have something to say about the *feasible* society. And so does social psychology as it comes out of its infancy (ceases to be infantile, a charge Cattell is willing to heap on economics, on page 331 of his book, but apparently not on his own field?). 6.7.13, *But remember we are after "good government," not the "good society," and that we are thinking about a political contract, rather than a social contract in the wider sense.* After all, the power of government to bring [p. 138:] about chosen end states is limited enough as it is, controlling even so apparently simple a things as the money supply (no matter how measured or mismeasured) being a notorious example. (But ponder Vining 1984.)^ Hayek, for one, is convinced the government should not even try here, at least given governments as they exist today, and should get out of the money business altogether. That governments can actively nudge people towards virtue, or into adopting personal evolutionary ethics, seems very much less feasible than their keeping the money supply on target, but I must add that governments are quite successful un promoting attitudes favoring their expansion and in fostering a rent- seeking mentality. 6.7.14. So like Buchanan, I am no great optimist when it comes to government actively promoting virtue. The immediate reason is the problem of chaining the state; at present we just try to close up potential loopholes leading to Leviathan. [55] But perhaps the better reason is that we simply know very little about what it takes for government to actively promote virtue, even if he had nailed down anything like an adequate conception of it in the first place. My own analogy with biological advance along the lines of complexity, order, organizations, and information is just a suggestion about how virtue might be given some metaphysical content beyond the quest to fulfill what Unger calls arbitrary desires. 6.7.15. Now the general thrust of economic theory is that a regime of property rights will indeed reduce potential conflicts among men, in that having these rights in place is more to the long-run interests of each man than violations may benefit him in the short run. Ayn Rand (1961:31)^ sates that these long-run interests are not to be equated with whims, but it is not clear that Unger equates what he calls *arbitrary* desires with whims either. Rather, he may be taken as saying that the *long-run* desires men have are not to be grounded in any essential human nature, that one man's life goals are random with respect to anyone else's. They are, to the extent mandated by biochemical individuality, the diversity of individual histories, and the open-ended texture of human choice (i.e., heredity, environment, and free will). It is the job of evolutionary biologists, neuropsychologists, and social scientists to characterize these variations and also to nail down what men have in common.
6.7.16. Philosophers can try to clarify the issues, but scientists are the ones to answer them. [56] At present, it is safe to say that neither economics nor social psychology is enough of a science to advance much of a prescription for a positive role of government, beyond the protective [p. 139:] state, in the encouragement of evolutionary advance of individuals. That this situation might change cannot be ruled out on metaphysical grounds, but social contractors must act in the present and it is very difficult to conceive of even New Contractarian Men coming anywhere near unanimous agreement at the present time. This should be obvious in view of the current, irreconcilable strife over the public schools.
6.7.17. Cattell's Beyondism, however, is not a blueprint for the good society. He does go beyond the opening sentence of Limits in stating his opinions based upon his study of social psychology (which is certainly not appreciably less "infantile" than Cattell thinks economics is), but he could have been just as reticent as Buchanan. In fact, by sheer sentence count he spends very much less time on specifics than in beating a drum for federalism. One could, if one wished, view Cattell's specifics as tentative illustrations that the findings of his own social science need not be wholly useless.
6.7.18. *Beyondism is mostly a (meta-) blueprint for a society of societies in a cooperatively competitive federal order.* I spoke earlier of several levels of consent required for such an order. Given the strife among men that goes well back before recorded history, even a token approximation to unanimity seems outstandingly unlikely. But does not a good deal of this strife stem from bad metaphysics, from the supposition that one's own way of life is, in every one of its details, some sort of higher Truth, a Truth moreover of such pressing importance that one's group must not just be patient in hopes that the rest of the world will come to see its obvious merits, but rather must start waging war? Let me impose one final requirement upon New Contractarian Man: He need not be a good metaphysician, but he must not be an intolerant one.
6.8 Conclusion
6.8.1. So what have we learned? Possibly only that six very diverse authors (born in six different countries) can be brought together, as Buchanan would say, conceptually, or as Bunge said (WS 158), "It is possible to synthesize a variety of philosophical isms, provided the result is a coherent conceptual system rather than an eclectic bag." From Bunge (born in Argentina) we learned that the world comes in layers, with the higher layers rooted in the lower ones but emergent relative to them. In particular, values are tied to individuals and not transcendent over them in some holistic reification called society. From Buchanan (United States), that the test of good government is the (ideally) unanimous consent of the governed and not whether that government pursues objectives exterior to individuals and their values. From Unger (Brazil), the paradoxes associated with abstracting the individual out of the social system of which he is a part. From Hayek (Austria), a sense of limits on the humanly calculable and hence an overriding need for abstract rules. From Ayn Rand (Russia), a reestablishment of the pre-modern sense of the end nature of man as a rational being, leading to a harmony of men's interests in a social order that protects rights. And from Cattell (England), an empirical approach to human nature and the spirit of evolutionary experimentation in a world federalist order.
6.8.2. Along the way, I have criticized my various authors. Buchanan's constitutional contractarianism suffers from the fact that strict individualism must be tempered by placing restrictions on the social contractors, lest the social contract fall apart. Unger suffers from pushing out the paradoxes of modern individualism so far that the ordinary business of life could not possibly go on. Hayek suffers from so sweeping an insistence on abstract rules that no room is left for a role for fairness as a public good. Ayn Rand, like Unger and Hayek, suffers from an excess of deduction, in her case, too much on man the rational being and too little on man the rational animal, a product of biological evolution. By contrast, I made no real criticisms of Bunge. I do have several--the chief one is that the world is not quite so neatly ordered in layers as he (in what he cheerfully admits is just the beginning of scientific metaphysics) seems to imagine--but they are not germane to the discussion here. Nor were the criticisms of Cattell I did make germane to his overall conception of federalism and an evolutionary ethics.
6.8.3. My achievement, if such it be, has been to exploit Bunge to extend Buchanan's contractarianism in the direction of a meta-contract, if you will, for evolutionary federalism. There are many holes in my arguments, the attempted plugging of which would take at least another book and which, for now, I have swept under the rug. But two are glaring: One is the fact that the social contract is a historical fiction, to which I can only plead again that this fiction not be stretched immoderately, to presume a degree of consent far removed from actuality. Contractarian theory can be used by us to justifv to ourselves our enforcing the law against recalcitrants. But it should not be overused. The second hole is that nothing is said about comparing governments to which consent is not close tt beine unanimcus. The hope is that such o sit=etion will =ot erise or, if it does, its subjects amicably regroup into two or more countries where unanimous consent is much more closely approximated.
6.8.4. Towards this hope, I have invented New Contractarian Man, a fiction also, but one I hope will not forever be too farfetched. Tolerance of other groups of social contractors was the final virtue I placed on New Contractarian Man. This seems wildly unrealistic in today's world, but I lay this partly at the foot of a bad metaphysics that encourages a wholly premature presumption that one's own way of life is universally valid. Evolutionary federalism blocks this: Evolutionary, in that any such presumption of finality is premature; federalism, in that no solution is universal. Evolutionary federalism is universalist in that all New Contractarian Men are to agree to the metaphysical tolerance to make it go, but it is a universalist philosophy of particularism.
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER 1: JAMES McGILL BUCHANAN AND INDIVIDUALISM (Pages 1-30)
1. (p.4) Buchanan is not concerned with the issue of social welfare function, or how to rank all possible rules and/or outcomes. Indeed, he has criticized the whole concept many times, at least as far back as 1954. There has been considerable refinement of the notion of a social welfare function, some of which have been described as individualistic. The rule of unanimity (the Pareto principle in its strongest form) that Buchanan uses in _Limits_ is decidedly individualistic. It would be interesting to argue about which of the two-to-the-continuum many social welfare functions are to be called individualistic (or for that matter whether there is only a finite number of them, given the mere ten billion or so neurons in the human brain). For present purposes, however, Buchanan is interested only in the one social contract that emerges.
2. (p.12) It might be objected, at this point, that a good many dictators have been widely and wildly popular. Mayor Daley was a man who got things done, and even if he stretched the law, it can be argued, he enjoyed nearly unanimous support. Then why did he have to resort to such high-handed methods, including getting the dead to rise from their graves to attest to his high qualifications, to get reelected? The arguments go back and forth. Whatever the case with Richard Daley, it would seem that the losers under dictatorships are a whole lot worse off than losers under a majoritarian democracy.
3. (p. 15) The quotation is rarely given accurately. _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 167:26, quotes John Philpot Curran (1750-1817) as saying in a speech on the right of election of Lord Mayor of Dublin on July 10, 1790: "The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt."
4. (p. 24) A modification is necessary here. Many laws, most especially in the fine details, are rather arbitrary but nevertheless necessary to coordinate expectations. The classic example is that of requiring driving on the left side of the road, which is arbitrary; what is necessary is that everyone drive on the same side, whether left or right. Other arbitrary laws will appear biased or unfair and efforts to correct the alleged unfairnesses will be mounted. In some cases, the laws will be flouted and not enforced. What is not generally realized is that, in an economy where prices are free to change, biases will be corrected for, albeit not completely.
CHAPTER 2: ROBERTO MANGABIERA UNGER AND COLLECTIVISM (Pages 31-53)
5. (p. 31) Unger calls the post-medieval world view "liberalism," which he conceives broadly to encompass both the exponents of natural rights and of twentieth century liberal interventionism. I shall refer to both views as "individualism" instead in order to provide continuity with the last chapter.
6. (p. 36) Lewis Carroll, _Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There_, ch. 6, "Humpty Dumpty," with Illustrations by John Tenniel (London: Macmillan, 1872) in _The Philosopher's Alice_, with an Introduction and Notes by Peter Heath (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974). Heath gives an extended note here, which begins: "This famous passage has immortalized Humpty Dumpty among philosophers of language as the leading exponent of what might be called 'subjective nominalism,' a theory in which two familiar views about language are somewhat extravagantly amalgamated" (p. 192). See also _The Annotated Alice_, with an Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1960). Both books contain the texts of the two Alice books and the Tenniel illustrations.
7. (p. 37) This is not completely true. One of the first half-dozen paradoxes of set theory was Bertrand Russell's set of all sets that do not belong to themselves as members. Thus, the set of all numbers, itself not a number, belongs to the Russell set, while the set of all concepts, itself a concept, does not. The paradox is that the Russell set itself belongs to the Russell set if and only if it does not. The standard way out of this dilemma, called "the limitation of size doctrine," is to disallow the aggregation of so many things into a set in the first place, that is, to decree that the Russell set is not a set at all, in other words to decree that our main intuitions about the formation of aggregates of sets is wrong. One other possible way out of this paradox, which to my knowledge has never been tried, is to modify an axiom of set theory that seems entirely obvious, namely the Axiom of Extensionality, which states that two sets are equal if and only if they have the same members. This axiom states, essentially, that all sets are well-defined. But Russell's set is far from well-defined and in fact keeps on growing. (But, then, neither is economics well-defined. As remarked above, the field has lost a great deal of its moral content while seizing territory from political science and sociobiology.)
8. (p. 37) The Founding Papers of pragmatism are Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief," _Popular Science Monthly_ 12 (1877): 1-15, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," ibid. 12 (1878): 286-302, and "What Pragmatism Is," _The Monist_ 15 (1905): 161-81. The papers have been reprinted many times, e.g., H.S. Thayer, ed., _Pragmatism: The Classic Writings_, with an Introduction and Commentary by the editor, prepared under the editorial supervision of Robert Paul Wolff (New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1970).
9. (p. 38) See _The New Encyclopaedia Britannica in 30 Volumes_, 15 ed. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1974), _Micropaedia_ 5:891-92, s.v., "Milky Way," and _Macropaedia_ 7:833-49, s.v., "Galaxy, The."
10. (p. 43) *Note this well*: The envious are predisposed to hold that the rich got that way by crooked means. In a free society, this accusation is not very easy to get away with. In a mixed economy, it is true that many of the wealthy are recipients of political pull. This, however, should not be overstressed, since under competitive rent-seeking the successful have to invest, at the margin, just as much effort to obtain their successes as in an unregulated economy. Resentment *of the successful individual* is called for only when new rents are obtained. That the rules of the game may need drastic modification is no excuse for envy.
11. (p. 49) There seems to be no positive content to assigning praise or blame to the random processes of recombination of genetic material employed in bisexual reproduction--only certain higher animals are praiseworthy or blameworthy--but there is a certain case for saying unanimity might be achievable on some limited minimum income plan as a public goods (why public?) insurance measure, coupled with means test and possible (temporary) sterilization.
12. (p. 50) I have quoted page one often enough!
CHAPTER 3: MARIO AUGUSTO BUNGE AND SCIENTIFIC METAPHYSICS (Pages 55-81)
13. (p. 64) David B. Tanner has spoken to me of his experiments in physics at the University of Florida. They consist in measuring physical properties of small molecules. With enough data collected, chemists can try to make guesses and extrapolations to predict physical properties of other chemical compounds. Tanner tells me that we are now able to project the remarkably high freezing point of water within a factor of two, based upon data such as he has been collecting and upon quantum mechanical considerations. As more data become available, physicists may be able to make a partial (epistemological) reduction of chemistry to the physics of quantum mechanics. A full epistemological reduction, however, is at best something for the remote future.
14. (p. 68) 3 = {0,{0},{0,{0}}}, where 0 is the empty set.
15. (p. 72) _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), s.v., Mrs. Edmund Craster, page 166:23.
16. (p. 75) Pages 191, 194, 209, 221, and 242, respectively. I retain his punctuation.
17. (p. 76) Defining a legal system consistent with Bunge's notion of the structure of a social system is not as automatic as it might first seem, because man-made laws differ from natural laws, especially since man-made laws can be broken. Recall that the structure of a system is the set of relations among the system's parts (and between the parts of the system and the parts of the environment). The relations, known and unknown, specify what is possible in two senses: they limit both the possible states of the system and possible changes of states. So once a specific state is in being, only certain trajectories to certain other states are possible. Making a choice (in fact, just letting things happen) forecloses certain possibilities and allows others that would not have been possible under other choices. Thus, when a legislature exercises its choice and passes a minimum wage law, individuals have changed expectations about what would happen to them should they hire a man below the minimum wage. They may still do so--natural laws, including those about social systems, do not forbid it--but they run the risk of being punished. Some will break the law, or so economic theory predicts, as it also predicts more unemployment. But laws of social systems, as Karen Vaughn pointed out (personal communication), are not as absolute as laws of physical and chemical systems, since men have free will (which, it will be recalled, is a feature of Bunge's metaphysics). The expected effects of minimum wage laws are consequently only highly probable.
This is only a sketch of how the notion of man-made laws might be incorporated into Bunge's structure of a social system, and much further work needs to be done, in particular with regards to the notions of power and sovereignty in legal philosophy. My own suspicion is that there will be in practice no absolute center of power that is not subject to check by other power blocs, despite what the paper documents say. (Just how pieces of paper affect behavior is another topic about which a metaphysician ought to have something to say.) These problems in legal philosophy become especially acute when considering federalism, as we shall do in Chapter 6. Frenkel 1986 gives three conceptions of sovereignty in a federation: that the central government is sovereign, that central and state governments are sovereign in their respective spheres (but he notes that the two spheres are always complexly interlinked), and that the constitution that arches over both is the sovereign. He notes (page 75), "It is obvious that an author's preferences for one or the other doctrine often run parallel to his more or less centralizing bias." See also Ostrom 1971.
I cheerfully admit my own bias is strongly decentralist, and the type of world federalism Raymond Cattell espouses that will be described in Chapter 6 would grant only very limited powers to the central authority. However, I want to avoid converting my biases into metaphysical conclusions by semantic trickery. I cannot yield to this temptation, though, until I discover or someday work up a description of sovereignty compatible with Bunge's conception of the structure of a social system.
CHAPTER 4: FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK AND THE MIRAGE OF SOCIAL JUSTICE (Pages 83-99)
18. (p. 86) I have been searching for a possible test for the existence of God, gods, or just some being or organizing entity beyond this planet ever since I rejected Christianity on grounds of lack of evidence at age 14. The whole notion of god is at least confused, if not downright contradictory (George Smith 1974), and the burden of proof *and* concept clarification clearly rests upon those who make extraordinary claims. Nevertheless, to conceive of such a test is important for one's self-assurance that one's own atheism is not purely dogmatic. Hume's famous argument that human error, self-deception, and fraud can never be decisively eliminated before accepting miracles as miraculous is, of course, well made but still not absolutely decisive.
Here is a possible case for theism I have invented: There are gaps in the fossil record, especially from genera on up, that are far from being explained by current evolutionary theory. Michael Denton (1985) argues that each of the genera (e.g., those comprising dogs and cats and cows) are sui generis Platonic types, in that while each genus of mammal comprises species close to each other, the genera are all equidistant (on a variety of measures) from each other. So also with orders among birds and reptiles. Higher up, mammals, birds, and reptiles, as groups, are again roughly equidistant from each other. This clustering is hierarchical in form and goes all the way up the chain of life. (Indeed, Linnaeus was a Creationist.) Saltationist theories can account for some of the gaps in the fossil record, but (according to Denton) so far saltationist theory is largely ad hoc regards mechanisms and, in my view, solves the problem of life's hierarchy only by relocating the mystery to the apparent hierarchical clustering of ecological niches.
Even assuming Denton's highly controversial book has merits--I am invoking it for its metaphysical import--such clustering now more and more appears to be a pervasive feature of the universe, not only in life forms but also in the grand structure of the universe of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, superclusters, and possibly up further. (Cities, highway networks, and languages are among many other phenomena that are also hierarchically clustered.) The great Benoit Mandelbrot has described random fractal processes that lead to hierarchical clustering in "Subordination; Spatial Levy Dusts; Ordered Galaxies," Chapter 32 of his _The Fractal Geometry of Nature_ (1983). Mandelbrot's concerns are more mathematical than empirical scientific, and the investigation of empirical stochastic generators of hierarchies has barely begun. Once this science of fractal processes has advanced considerably, it may be argued that some clustering can be plausibly accounted for by processes running on their own, while others (life, perhaps) need something else, perhaps some thing or force that could be described as teleological, a concept itself that needs much further exactification. There would then be the possibility of deism. Needless to say, this is far removed from establishing the truths of Christianity or any other historic religion, especially as regards their moral aspects.
Mandelbrot's work may come to have large implications for the most basic science. (Recall that Bunge only briefly touched upon scientific laws operating at all levels of his ontology and mentioned the principle of least effort. Adding such laws will move ontology from the rather abstract science he presented in _Furniture_ to a still general but less abstract description of *this* reality.) In particular, a modified version of Platonic essentialism, that of evolving hierarchies of types, may come to be recognized as a pervasive feature of reality on all levels. This is quite compatible with epistemological essentialism, as in Rand (1966-67) and Bunge's "working definitions" (1967a).
19. (p. 86) Indeed many conservative writers cynically urge that citizens accept the supernatural so as to reduce their excessive quarrelsomeness. As far as I know, no one has *ever* adopted a supernatural metaphysic on this ground, and it is a puzzle why such cynical arguments continue to be repeatedly advanced. The answer may be desperation or an inability to develop a secular ethic that will steer the middle ground "Between Anarchy and Leviathan," the subtitle of _The Limits of Liberty_.
20. (p. 87) It is a delicate question whether irrational individuals can be said to have consented to a social contract, or whether their consent is required. This is part of a more general problem of how to deal with the inhuman, non-human, sub-human, and yet-to-be human (infants?). There are two extremes: the authorities classing everyone who disagrees with their rule as insane or sub-human, or giving full recognition (under strict unanimity, the veto power) to those with the craziest beliefs.
What about Christianity? The religion is openly irrational, contradictory, even anti-rational. It is an elementary (meta-)theorem in logic that once a system contains a contradiction, every sentence (and its contrary) can be proven. Fortunately, the human brain is not a perfect logical machine and is spared the instantaneous global cancer resulting from a contradiction. Nevertheless, those who openly maintain contradictions (whether from a belief in Scripture or otherwise) and do not seek to resolve them are unpredictable. It is a difficult question what minimal requirements of rationality should be made for one to qualify for membership in the polity, and I have no answer.
From the Good Book itself:
Irrational: "He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of [whatever that means] the only begotten Son of God" (John 3:18, i.e., belief, not the evidence, is the requirement for salvation).
Contradictory: "One of themselves, even a prophet of their own,
said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.
This witness is true...." (Titus 1:12-13, i.e., if Cretans always
lie, then the Cretan's saying so cannot be true. But Paul says
the witness _is_ true. This is the famous paradox of
Epimenides.)
Anti-rational: "Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not
receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter
therein" (Mark 10:15, i.e., credulity is the highest virtue).
21. (p. 87) I might add that creatures with bigger brains or who had a better science of calculating remote effects could form a larger social justice social contract group. I suspect that the computational tasks would grow at least exponentially with the size of the group but that the ability to develop a science of remote effects would also grow very rapidly as a function of average brain size. So I have no formula for the maximum size of a case-by-case social justice social contract group as a function of brain size. Needless to say, there is really no exact dividing line cutting off populations over a certain size from having a tolerably near-unanimous social contract.
22. (p. 88) What about a society where there are sharp differences of opinion on how the world works? A social contract will be far more achievable if people differ only in their subjective trade-offs (including their risk aversion to Leviathan) than if they also disagree anent matters of fact. Such factual disagreement can be mundane, regarding, say, the consequences of doubling the life of patents, or even the effect of inherited wealth upon concentration of wealth and economic mobility in future generations and the reasons for the perpetuation of poverty in families. It can be over a fundamental conception of the way the economy operates, e.g., Friedman's sovereign consumer vs. Galbraith's manipulated one (see Breit 1984). It can enshrine free will or embrace various kinds of determinism, which Bunge (1959) correctly calls fatalism, all mutually antagonistic. Or it can combine all approaches and assess their relative and changing strengths.
But a deeper cleavage is ontological. Those who see man as serving God's glory or some transcending social justice are going to have the severest difficulty agreeing with those who root values in individuals.
23. (p. 89) On the other hand, there can be a feeling that the market fails to pay secretaries and janitors, say, enough. If these are purely arbitrary feelings, they are unlikely to be persuasive. What needs to be done is to give *reasons* that pinpoint the failure. One possible reason is an externality argument, but this can be handled by Buchanan's productive state that subsidizes the production of public goods. Another is that some sort of "prejudice" is at work, in which case there are unexploited opportunities for unprejudiced entrepreneurs. But entrepreneurship is not a free good, whence the issue becomes one of why correcting the alleged prejudice in question is especially urgent. The opportunity cost is failing to correct any number of other alleged prejudices, many of which will not be immediately visible. We must beware of fashions (and the potential for rent-seeking) here.
In many cases, the initial sense of injustice may be tempered by a greater understanding of how markets work, especially how they tend to erode certain kinds of prejudice, and eventually give way to a willingness to abide by abstract rules and not pay the price of continuous interference with market results. Passions may also cool as general outrage about prejudice gives way to a search for the factors responsible for the apparent underpayment of secretaries and janitors. Thus one may come to hold that employers are not engaging in discrimination--that is, the market itself is working--but rather the educational system is at fault. The great Frank Knight repeatedly asked whether the market was being criticized for doing what it was supposed to do or for failing to do what it was supposed to do.
24. (p. 90) There are other possibilities, and rational bargaining theory is a complicated and strife-ridden field. I reproduce in an appendix my _Public Choice_ review of David Gauthier's _Morals by Agreement_ (1986). I cannot make use of his reasoning in the text, because I find his assumptions considerably more heroic than those I have made about New Contractarian Man. But his book will be of enough interest to the present readers, since it too deals with _The Limits of Liberty_, to merit the appended review.
25. (p. 90) The way regressivity is usually defined. Or they could institute a flat "one man, one tax" rule. I have argued that "true" justice must recognize the innate worth of all human lives and that protection of life is therefore of equal value to all humans, whence justice demands they all pay the same tax. Exaggerating perhaps only slightly Gordon Tullock's _Economics of Income Redistribution_ (1983) and claiming that five percent of government spending constitutes vertical redistribution, fifteen percent traditional public goods, and eighty percent horizontal redistribution to pressure groups, eliminating the eighty percent would result in a head tax of $1200 per year, per man, woman, and child. No one has accepted my conception of true justice, but no one has gone beyond _argumentum ad disgustum_ either. Neither has anyone argued that reducing taxes to a $1200 flat tax would not boost economic growth enormously.
26. (p. 91) According to the great Nietzsche, the philosopher's world is not peopled with wives either: "Thus the philosopher abhors *marriage*, together with that which might persuade to it--marriage being a hinderance and calamity on his path to the optimum. What great philosopher hitherto has been married? Heraclitus, Plato
27. (p. 92) Alas, these ignoramuses know all about rates of return on all kinds of investments. from here to eternity!
28. (p. 97) Has anyone investigated the consequences of (say) Knut Wicksell's five-sixths majority rule with freedom of contract for representation? I know of no case where there is this freedom, but I don't think restrictions have been examined from a public choice perspective as collectively helping along certain ends. Under freedom of contract, a politician could organize the teachers' lobby across states and specialize in just that one issue. He could roll logs with the lawyers' politician, and all could bargain with those that specialized in geographic blocks. I predict the upshot would be a vast increase in the number of politicians and an underrepresentation of geographical interests. Article I, Section 2 of our Constitution limits the number of Representatives to one for every thirty thousand citizens. This could allow for about eight thousand Representatives, and it is an interesting question why this number is currently only 435. Certainly, one would not expect the House to want to expand its membership and so dilute each incumbent's power, but neither has the House chosen to let the number shrink through retirements and deaths. Perhaps the reason is just the persistence of a hitherto unexamined tradition, and I hope I haven't let loose a suggestion that could have quite harmful consequences.
29. (p. 98) The notion of cycling elites goes back to Pareto. What is remarkable is the speed-up of cycling. The third cycling (fourth, if we include the American Revolution itself) is now underway in American history. By contrast Quigley (1961) reports two for all of Western civilization (from feudalism degenerated into chivalry to trade capitalism and from trade capitalism degenerated into mercantilism to industrial capitalism) but never a cycling for any other civilization, just degeneration, often culminating in outside conquest.
CHAPTER 5: AYN RAND AND NATURAL RIGHTS (Pages 101-112)
30. (p. 103) This means that men deliberate as well as choose. Julian Jaynes, in _The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ (1976), makes a highly controversial argument that deliberation (i.e., consciousness) was unknown before the Dorian invasions of Greece. If Jaynes is right and if deliberation rather than merely choosing is to be the criterion for rationality, then natural rights *came into existence* only during historical times. As rationality came in by evolutionary degrees, one might also argue that rights came in by degrees. I am not necessarily endorsing Jaynes here, merely pointing out the metaphysical implications of a theory that could be true regards the origin and existence of rights.
In this context it is worth noting that Ayn Rand (1973b) once said, "I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent." Nathaniel Branden (1982) noted her refusal to endorse biological evolution during all the years of their friendship but did not speculate upon the reason why. I think her refusal stemmed from her excessively deductivist approach, which resulted in her regarding man, not as a product of evolution, but as something *holistically* different in kind from other animals. Bunge's ontology might have saved the day by regarding deliberative behavior as an emergent property, but this could have resulted in Ayn Rand's adopting the thesis here, that societies are emergent relative to individuals.
31. (p. 101) Robert Nozick (1974:25) recognizes a similar problem, when he considers that some are going to benefit more from having their rights protected than others and that therefore any scheme for the protection of rights will be redistributive. This line of reasoning has much less force, however, when it is realized that there is a large random component to having one's rights violated and that protection can be regarded as a form of insurance. Regards perfection, Harry Binswanger (1981) argues that perfection is a normative and hence contextual concept and not a metaphysical and Platonic one: "In its rational meaning, the concept of perfection denotes not the unimprovable but the best possible *in a given context*," whence a billiard ball can be perfectly spherical to the naked eye but not under a microscope. Binswanger's major point is that moral perfection, in a human context, *is* "The Possible Dream," title of his article.
32. (p. 107) Similarly, Noam Chomsky created quite a stir in linguistics when he argued that the human brain is such that all languages will display similar features in their grammars. The reason for the controversy is that "liberal" environmentalists make, in Unger's terminology, a radical separation of heredity and environment, so that the products of culture can be completely arbitrary. Twenty years later, what the Germans called the _Zeitgeist_, what Alfred North Whitehead called the climate of opinion, and what Thomas Kuhn belatedly called a paradigm has changed and environmentalism is now regarded as merely an extreme case. The search is on to find and assess the nature and range of language universals.
33. (p. 107) The Founding Papers of pragmatism are Charles Sanders Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief" (1877), "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878), and "What Pragmatism Is" (1905). These papers have been reprinted many times, e.g., Thayer 1970.
For the notion of a working definition and its relationship to essences, I have used Bunge's two-volume 1967 study, _Scientific Research_. Ten years later, in his furniture book (p. 96), he propounded the ontological thesis that "all properties are essential--which is to say lawful." The problem is that we can know only some of the properties "out there" (as Buchanan would have it) that something has, while the idea of a working definition ties in with whatever theories we have at hand and is hence more relevant to *epistemology*. It is not infrequent that a man forgets what he said earlier and better. Ayn Rand takes a view remarkably similar to the earlier Bunge in her *Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology* (1966-67).
34. (p. 108) Ayn Rand (1966-67:69) states that "the essence of a concept is that fundamental characteristic(s) of its units on which the greatest number of other characteristics depend, and which distinguishes these units from all other existents within the field of man's knowledge." The difficulty is the "s" in parentheses: when does one stop adding characteristics to the essence? The answer is not obvious, nor is the formation of units in her sentence. I should note that when she speaks of man as essentially rational (p. 58) the term "does not mean 'acting invariably in accordance with reason'; it means 'possessing the faculty of reason."' However, the capacity to reason comes in degrees, and some certifiable members of homo sapiens almost entirely lack that capacity. It remains difficult to derive absolute rights from a highly variable capacity.
35. (p. 111) Ayn Rand never explains why thinking in man must be voluntary. An evolutionary explanation is in order and one is advanced by V.C. Wynne-Edwards 1963: "Compliance with the social code can be made obligatory and automatic, and it probably is so in almost all animals that possess social homeostatic systems at all. In at least some of the mammals, on the contrary, the individual has been released from this rigid compulsion, probably because a certain amount of intelligent individual enterprise has proved advantageous to the group." Such an explanation invokes group selection and is bound to be controversial. An alternative explanation might be that a) thinking requires work (uses up costly brain chemicals) and b) free-will feedback circuitry allows the animal (or maybe just certain humans) to choose both whether to think and what to think about. Far less brain hardware, in other words, may be required by taking the free will route. Now if Jaynes is right, we may just have been lucky to have a capacity for free will already in place, though it may not have been activated until the Dorian invasions. This is, I hasten to add, all speculation: I include it for its evolutionary and metaphysical implications.
CHAPTER 6: RAYMOND BERNARD CATTELL AND EVOLUTIONARY FEDERALISM (Pages 113-141)
36. (p. 120) See George W. Barlow and James Silverberg, eds., _Sociobiology: Beyond Nature-Nurture?_ (1980). My reading of this book supports Gordon Tullock's general observation (personal communication) that the debate is over which very narrow conditions, if any, make group selection possible.
37. (p. 120) Genuine cooperative altruistic behavior becomes possible where there is reduced "genetic competition among the cooperators," in the words of Donald T. Campbell (1975). Group selection, not of people but of their moralities, is espoused by Hayek in his epilogue, "The Three Sources of Human Values," in _Law, Legislation and Liberty_, vol. 3: _The Political Order of a Free People_ (1979).
38. (p. 121) Page 322. Unfortunately, this is holistic language, but Cattell speaks more the language of Bunge and of emergent systemic properties when he states, "Individual and group are links in an endless causally interacting chain, each indispensable to the other." (166)
39. (p. 121) Cattell is far more prepared to admit the role of biological factors in human history than is currently fashionable, but for him race means primarily the new races that will be formed under Beyondism. He decries both present-day racists as being presumptuous regarding superiority and inferiority and "ignoracists" who deny the importance of racial factors altogether.
40. (p. 121) Cattell recognizes the problems large groups have in ensuring compliance that Buchanan discusses in _Limits_ and at length in "Ethical Rules, Expected Values, and Large Numbers" (1965).
41. (p. 121) Compare Buchanan: "Each man counts for one, and that is that." (LL 2)
42. (p. 122) Page 244. He claims puberty is fifteen years too early, given today's educational requirements. (371)
43. (p. 122) Page 244. Aggressiveness, which correlates with cultural creativity, is hardly the same thing as pugnacity, as he explains on p. 190.
44. (p. 122) Page 193. On p. 258, he claims that "duties are the truly important aspect of rights," but he sometimes seems to equate altruism with self-restraint (e.g., on p. 250).
45. (p. 122) Page 394. In economics, he regards the consumption side-what money is spent on--as just as important as the production side. (192)
46. (p. 122) Page 453. "The greatest danger to [a Beyondist] future lies in man hedonistically betraying himself."
47. (p. 123) More troublesome still, his idea that the communications media should act "responsibly," and be subject to control if need be (441), would be vetoed, I daresay, by an easy majority of the present readers.
48. (p. 124) But why hasn't the promised sequel to his book appeared? The present writer feels that his continued psychological work which appeared instead is a comparative waste of time. At a more personal level, Cattell is quite fond of poetry and quotes it often. The present writer thinks it too is a waste of time, while Beethoven's chamber music is not only one of life's greatest joys but a spur to continue forging ahead.
49. (p. 127) The seventh chapter of _Limits_ is entitled "Law as Public Capital.
50. (p. 127) Cattell fears that the reason why we have not found any intelligent life in the universe is that every society lapsed into hedonism and not a single one adopted Beyondism.
51. (p. 128) Metaphysically much more confusing is the German political geographer Friedrich Ratzel's notion of a state's needing a raison d'etre around a particular, distinctive "idea." See Richard Hartshorne, "The Functional Approach in Political Geography," presidential address before the Association of Political Geographers at its Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting in Worcester, Mass., April 7, 1950, reprinted in Martin Ira Glassner and Harm J. de Blij, _Systematic Political Geography_, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1980), pp. 128-152, esp. pp. 139-142.
52. (p. 128) But is this claim about the state's need for a raison d'etre a law? Consider Hartshorne, op. cit., p. 139: "Unless Austria-Hungary, [Hugo] Hassinger wrote after the First World War, had been able to discover and establish a raison d'etre, a justification for existence, even without the calamity of the war, it could not long have continued to exist." Vanberg would have difficulties with this statement, indeed, but it does make *some* sort of sense. **It is a job of philosophers to drag as much sense out of statements as possible**, which does not seem to be very far in the case of, say, "Ex-sistent _Dasein_ is the letting-be of what-is" (Martin Heidegger, quoted by Mario Bunge, _Scientific Research_, 2 vol. (Berlin: Springer- Verlag, 1967a), 1:118).
53. (p. 129) This is not to predict that the Soviets are going to go grab a piece of India. They may, but for a much better reason than the aesthetic aim of having the world conform to the rank-size rule, namely food. Nels Winkless III and Iben Browning, _Climate and the Affairs of Men_ (New York: Harper Magazine Press, 1975), argue that the world gets colder every eight hundred years and corresponding invasions have taken place, at least as far back as history records. The wars of the twentieth century, the authors claim, are right on schedule, with worse cold, and worse wars, to come.
54. (p. 129) We let pass the issue of "conceptual" contracts in other species, as well as symbiotic arrangements between species, being mindful that such a study could be extremely fruitful in generating ideas. See, for example, Robert Ardrey, _The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Source of Order and Disorder_ (Patterson, N.J.: Atheneum, 1970; New York: Dell, 1974).
55. (p. 138) Among Objectivists a glaring loophole has appeared, one that I had not expected quite so soon after the death of Ayn Rand in 1982.
Binswanger 1987 states that American businessmen advocating protectionist legislation "want to hobble the foreign runners in the race, to hobble them either by force (tariffs) or fraud (conning Americans into believing that buying foreign products damages our economy)." Objectivists certainly want to punish fraud, but if this urging Americans to buy American products is to be classified as fraud, what is to prevent cracking down on those who peddle philosophies conflicting with Objectivism as frauds? Libel laws, which Objectivists also support, raise another issue: Given that a business's reputation is a form of property, won't its own misrepresentations be punished adequately in the market?
56. (p. 138) Recall Bunge (FW 153): "We shall not list the kinds of constituents of the world but shall leave that task to the special sciences. For no sooner does the metaphysician pronounce the world to be 'made of' such and such kinds, than the scientist discovers that some of the alleged species are empty or that others are missing from the metaphysician's list."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Frank Forman, _The Metaphysics of Liberty_ (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic, 1989)
APPENDICES [pp. 161-186]
APPENDIX 1
Why does public education persist, despite all the preaching of
free-market economists, with their mighty arsenal of moral and
economic arguments both, and despite the common experience of all
mankind that governments do things incompetently? Public choice
theory has a marvelously simple answer: politics is at bottom an
economic game and it just so happens that the coalition, the
pressure group favoring the public education Establishment is far
more organized than students and taxpayers. Just how it came
about that the education Establishment overcame its internal
free-rider problem is not a question for pure public choice
theory as such, but it manifestly did happen.
Hartmut Kliemt, a philosopher at the University of Mainz, has
thrown a monkey wrench into this sort of simple explanation. He
has come along with no less than the first major new concept in
public choice theory since rent-seeking, namely what he calls the
"veil of insignificance," a term inspired by John Rawls's "veil
of ignorance." Taking the fact that one's vote has a negligible
chance of overturning an election, Kliemt argues that it is
practically costless to vote for what one thinks is right rather
than what is actually in one's self-interest.
So if people do have moral scruples, and it is manifest that they
do, the challenge now confronting public choice theory is to
explain why they ever, or at least more than rarely, vote in
their self-interest, as they also manifestly do. The world is a
messy place, with both scruples and self-interest running at a
steady clip, and no doubt this upsets public choice theorists who
would rather not have the random noise of morals cluttering up an
ideal world of Perfect Public Choice, any more than antitrust
lawyers like the messy world of real competition as opposed to
the ideal world of Perfect Competition. (I am going to propose a
new definition of competition in a paper, "Beyond Mechanism and
Spiritualism," on Tuesday.) We need, in short, what our
distinguished former President, Bob Tollison, has called "an
economic theory of words," or in other words an explanation of
how morals and ideologies operate. [Later: Robert Dewitt
Tollison, 1942- , is an economist at George Mason University and
was President of the Southern Economic Association at the time
this paper was read.]
To get at this problem we need to get a handle on human nature
and morals. Men, far beyond the animals, are good at forming
concepts. Ideally, the concepts should be checked to see whether
they make useful working definitions for scientific theories and
the same theories checked [p. 162:] against the facts. Doing all
this checking takes hard work and determined persistence. The
scientific mind-set is a wonderful but fragile flower which came
into being in the European Middle Ages and is still being
refined.
Making concepts is a necessary activity and some of us pile them
up merrily without pausing to check them. We have moved from the
elementary observation that _some_ events have causes to reifying
a god that is the cause of everything and from the observation
that some things are beneficial to some people to reifying an
Absolute Good. Economists generally avoid these reifications;
instead they can often fail to acknowledge the reality of
something by engaging in reductionism, or what Mario Bunge calls
ontological bulldozing. Thus a society is nothing but a heap of
people and there is no such thing as social justice. The better
description is that a society is a _system_ of interacting
people, but one searches in vain for methodological
individualists to say this. As far as social justice goes, it
often sounds like a mysterious reification of something never
very clear, but sense can be made of how _individuals_ react to
_collective_ measures of the performance of an economic system,
examples being the economic growth rate and the concentration of
income. If Hayek himself has not ridiculed such examples, his
followers have.
But concept-making, as I have said, takes hard work. Most of us
most of the time just borrow the concepts others have worked out.
Such conformity is, for obvious cost-benefit reasons, almost
totally inevitable, and praise be to those hardy souls that press
on on their own. It is mora~ concepts that are at issue here, in
regard to Hartmut Kliemt's veil of insignificance. The public
choice question is _who_ controls the ideas on what is right that
lead voters to vote against their self-interest? [Later: Hartmut
Kliemt, 1949- , is a professor of philosophy at the University of
Mainz.]
The first place to look is the rent-seekers themselves.
Physicians obviously stand to gain from getting people to believe
that there is an objective, minimum standard of medical care, not
a spurious reification which just so happens to maximize the
income of the existing pressure group of doctors. Actually, the
medical Establishment has gone even further and has persuaded
millions of people to believe that no one should ever want less
than The Best, in capital letters, in medical treatment. Every
economist knows that The Best could not be purchased by the
el~tire GNP and that there are infinitely fine trade-offs between
[p. 163:] quality and price.
Yet the medical racket persists. What is astonishing is that the
veil of insignificance reinforces self-interest. While we might
and do find a senior citizen voting for a politician advocating
cuts in Social Security, a voter taken in by the medical
Establishment is not only convinced he wants only The Best but
thinks regulation is the way to get it.
This is vastly more true of education. Most people are horrified
at the prospect of privatizing education. They genuinely believe
that hordes of people would never learn to read or write, and
never mind that the public schools graduate hordes of functional
illiterates right now and largely kill off any remaining desire
to learn, which really takes some doing, given our innate need
and even compulsion to learn. Social chaos would result, so most
people have been led to think, and so the~ to vote for public
education out of their own perceived interests. They would like
reforms, to be sure, but not privatization. The exceptions are
scarce.
On top of this is moral intimidation. People are l~d to believe
that public education, for all its faults, is morally right on
the grounds that the poor deserve public support. This is where
egalitarianism comes in, and egalitarianism is the chief morality
racket today. It is exploited to the hilt by the education
Establishment. Now an awfully good case can be made that the poor
would get better educated if the government would get out of the
road, but so greatly are people intimidated that they fear that
even one poor person would not get an education. Again, never
mind that millions of the poor are ill-served by the public
schools right now.
How can this morality racket work? It works by metaphysical and
epistemological terror. Equality is left very ill-defined.
Douglas Rae and his colleagues in their 1981 book _Equalities_^
have distinguished 720 species of equality. Which of these
equalities is the right one? How much levelling is desirable?
Gordon Tullock, as most of you I am sure know, has been pestering
liberals for years to get them to specify just what concentration
of income they think best, with nary a specific answer. ^Rae,
Douglas W.; Yates, Douglas T., Jr.; Hochschild, Jennifer L.;
Monroe, Joseph; and Fessler, Carol 1981. _Equalities_. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
What it has come down to is that the voters, under the veil of
insignificance, have no clear idea of which or how much equality
is morally right and find it very difficult to oppose any growth
in egalitarian programs, especially in education. It takes hard
thinking, in the face of all the propaganda, to come up with the
right kind and amount of equality independently, and one risks
the scorn of liberals, who always [p. 164:] want more of it. The
education Establishment benefits hugely from this confusion and
the fear spread thereby of never doing enough. What is more, they
have, as no other group has, the terrible, terrible, and
dangerous power over the upbringing of youth.
One final remark, to tie things together. At the beginning, I
mentioned the internal free-rider problem. Again, morality is the
key. Morality allows people inside the rent-seeking group to
swallow their own propaganda, to believe they are truly working
for the public good. E.O. Wilson has pointed out that all social
vertebrates are hypocrites. This means both that social
vertebrates have consciences and that these consciences can be
subverted. I wish to add that this subversion is rarely total,
even if it comes close for doctors and educators. Bob Tollison
has wondered whether the little education that squeaks out of
public schools (his example was actually defense) is just an
incidental by-product of rent-seeking. He is turning the whole
idea of public goods upside down. I see his point, a frightening
point, and my explanation is that hypocrisy is not total, that
some conscience is left unsubverted, and hence we don't fully
live in the world of Perfect Public Choice. Coming at it from a
different way, perhaps Public Choice Man would be a perfect
cynic. In this case, what might happen is that rent-seekers get
duped by their own propaganda, whereupon public goods manage to
get out.
This, then, is Bob Tollison's economic theory of words. Men need
to conceptualize things, in particular in regards to morals. But
thinking is hard work, and most of us most of the time just
accept what we learn and accept even oversimplified ideologies
like extremely vague egalitarianism. Under the veil of
insignificance we often vote with our conscience, which we did
not wholly develop ourselves. Others have an interest, a public
choice or economic interest if you will, in directing this
development of conscience for their own private interests. And it
is the public education Establishment that has, far more than any
other group, the power to do so.
APPENDIX 2
What people say they want, think they want, really want, and
ought to want, what they try to get and what they really get, are
six different things. Sorting them out is the main job, maybe the
only job, of social science. Economics mostly studies the
connections between the last two: what they try to get (the
choices people make) and what they really get. Economics actually
only studies a subset of the last two, that which is produced and
exchanged in markets, and public choice theory extends this study
to non-markets. The first four, the wants and their formation,
are left to the other social sciences, especially psychology and
sociology.
Economists usually take wants as "given." In practice, this means
that the strength of a person's wants is straightaway for
absolute amounts of various goods, whether these goods are to be
consumed right away or to be used to produce other goods, such as
ingredients used in a recipe. People are implicitly held to be
autonomous; the utility of my consumption of a good depends only
on the absolute quantity and not at all upon the quantity of my
consumption relative to that of others. We all know, of course,
that this is plainly not so, but for the most part economists
rarely study the matter of relative consumption.
Along comes a book to incorporate relative consumption into
economic theory, Robert Frank's _Choosing the Right Pond_. The
book discusses the omnipresent quest for status in human affairs,
how people sort themselves out into separate, local hierarchies,
how this implies that wages are far more compressed than marginal
productivity alone would prescribe, and most importantly for
public choice theorists, how there come to be the manifold
collective restrictions on unlimited status-seeking that we
observe. The reasons usually offered for these restrictions, what
people _say_ they want, are not what they _really_ want. It is
Frank's hope that if people understood what restrictions they
_really_ wanted, namely to put brakes upon status seeking, they
would go about it better.
_Choosing the Right Pond_ is successful in showing that in the
dividing up of an industry into firms, the market place does help
people get what they _really_ want. We all know that
microeconomic theory often does just this. We all know that
theory teaches (preaches?) that firms [p. 166:] _really_ want to
maximize profits and that the way to do it is to set prices at
marginal cost. What we further know is that firms rarely actually
know their own marginal costs but that even so, economic forces
will make price equal to them. Never mind myriad objections of
and qualifications to this theory; the theory is nevertheless
helpful, even if not the entire truth.
_Choosing_ stays within the neoclassical orthodoxy but extends
its logic of utility functions to incorporate the human desire
for status. The extension is done in a wholly orthodox way. To
accomplish the job, Frank supposes not just that people value
status but also that they are somewhat myopic about it. People
are rarely concerned with where they stand relative to all
inhabitants of the Earth (and why don't people rest content with
having big brains and opposable thumbs, placing all of us very
near the top of the animal kingdom?). Rather, they compare
themselves with their neighbors, residential neighbors partly,
but also with coworkers.
Given that people vary in their demand for status, Frank's main
conclusion follows that the structure of firms in an industry
will respond to this variation in demand. The argument is
straightforward: a first person who cares greatly about relative
status will work for less in a firm where his income is
_relatively_ higher in that firm. Contrariwise, a second person
who cares little about status will accept a _relatively_ low
position in a firm that pays him more.
Firms will specialize in attracting workers of different levels
of productivity. Persons with a given level of productivity and a
great concern for status will go to work for firms with lower
productivity, achieve a relatively high status there, but be paid
less than their marginal product. Conversely, those with a low
concern for status will go to work for firms with high
productivity, achieve a relatively low status, and be paid more
than their marginal product. The upshot is that within each firm
there will be a tendency (sometimes strong) to offer compressed
wage schedules that do not fully reflect internal differences in
productivity. "Firms may be thought of as posting menus (their
wage schedules) of wage-status combinations they have to offer"
(p. 55).
In addition to theoretical considerations, Frank investigates
actual cases and finds, for example, that car dealers in upstate
New York reward a salesman who generates an extra dollar in gross
commissions only 24 cents more in wages. On the other hand, in
real estate firms, whose salesmen are not so visible to each
other, the figure is 50 to 70 cents. [p. 167:] Frank gives a host
of other examples, from university professors getting research
monies to the singularly compressed salaries of top federal
government executives.
Frank next argues that, while individuals are myopic, in that
they compare relative status more with their co-workers than with
everyone~ generally, they are not so myopic that relative status
outside the workplace is wholly unimportant. We might see, for
example, a segregation of shopping centers into those selling
low- and those selling high-priced goods. A person with a given
level of income would patronize one or the other shopping center
depending on the strength of his desire to be seen as a
conspicuous consumer. In other cases, however, market segregation
and ensuing compressions will be impractical, due to transactions
costs or economies of scale. This sets the stage for collective
action for direct redistribution to achieve what the market
cannot. (Frank's arguments here are somewhat difficult to follow,
as he overlays them with different ones on high transactions
costs of mutual agreements to put brakes on status-seeking. See
below.) But emulation can be a powerful motive to work harder, so
a balance must be struck. On the other hand, as Frank notes,
every society seeks to informally suppress envy (which used to be
regarded as the deadliest of the seven deadly sins) through
socialization of its members, whence I add that _government_
action may not be needed on a major scale.
Frank says, "I did not intend to claim that the income
distribution we currently have in the United States is just" (p.
127). It is a large step between what we _ought to want_
(justice) and _what we get_. Indeed, there is a large gap between
what we _try to get_, as embodied in our Constitution (which is
far from the ideal of unanimity of James M. Buchanan's _The
Limits of Liberty_)^, and what _we have got_, which is a
government whose main function today (as the public choice
literature often argues) is to redistribute wealth and income
among organized pressure groups. Besides, no two persons agree on
what our Constitution aims for. ^Buchanan, James M. 1975. _The
Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press; paperback as A Phoenix Book,
1978.
Along with all this, Frank argues from sociobiological and
neurological considerations that the drive for status is innate
but, also and importantly, that it can be counterproductive or at
best futile, at least in modern society. Resources are invested
in climbing up the totem pole. They are countered by expenditures
of others to do just the same, with the result that relative
positions are left largely unchanged. In many cases, from the
arms race between nations to conspicuous consumption [p. 167:]
and the chasing after college degrees within a nation, an
agreement might be negotiated to limit status-seeking. Here,
Frank's contention is that we _really want_ to limit this seeking
and that many of the laws we _get_ reflect this.
Much of the book is given over to discussing legislation that has
the effect of limiting status-seeking, a good example being
occupational safety laws. The argument is that workers _really
want_ safe workplaces but that the scramble to provide a better
start in life for their children would lead them to accept less
safe, higher paying jobs than would be the case if they could
somehow collectively agree upon limiting the status questing so
that relative positioning would stay the same. Now after Robert
Frank came along to point this out, it all sounds plausible. But:
_how_ do people get from what they _really want_ but don't know
they want to the laws that implement what they really want?
The public choice student asks, what sort of constitutional rules
might they set up? How might, not just _some_ level of safety
measures be adopted, but an _optimal_ (in some sense) level be
put into being? What will keep OSHA bureaucrats at bay? And given
powers under a constitution to limit status-seeking
generally--and our government has undertaken these powers even if
the Constitution of 1789 did not exactly provide for them--how
will laws in specific cases overshoot or undershoot the mark? The
invisible political hand must work miraculously indeed if an
inchoate desire (inchoate until Frank's ideas filter down) works
out to something even occasionally approaching an optimum.
Frank's answer is that, given _conscious_ recognition of the
desirability of putting brakes on status-seeking, we would do far
better to tax conspicuous consumption goods directly and avoid
round-about measures such as OSHA. So, ideally, there will be no
OSHA bureaucrats to keep at bay.
It would be silly to berate the author for not having provided a
complete theory to explain every piece of legislation, some of
whose side effects limit status-seeking. Public choice theory is,
after all, a perspective. It gives partial explanations of some
things, not total explanations of everything. The reader may feel
that Frank can get carried away, rather too often seeing an
unconscious intent to limit status-seeking as being _the_ major
operative force behind a piece of legislation whose secondary
effects of limiting status-seeking are rather minor.
Nevertheless, the author argues well that much status-seeking is
zero sum in nature and that collective limits on it can often be
desirable, though he realizes that the quest for status up to a
certain [p. 169:] point furnishes a powerful drive for economic
progress.
Frank expounds various other theses in later chapters. In Chapter
8, he argues that, inasmuch as incomes are bunched closer
together at the lower end of the spectrum, apparent status
increases by way of conspicuous consumption are greater, dollar
for dollar at the lower end, which is why we observe relatively
more spending and less saving at the lower end. He also argues
that trade unions can and do internalize the negative
externalities of treadmill conspicuous consumption by collective
bargaining arrangements that channel cash incomes into such
things as health care and retirement plans. In Chapter 9, he
argues that the left's critique of capitalism is simply contrary
to all evidence when claiming the economy is not competitive but
that there is an imbalance of power held by corporations. By
organizing, workers really only harm themselves, as far as cash
wages go. However, they can use this organizing to collectively
limit status seeking and the "alienation" that results. The
benefits here could outweigh the lower money wages, but this will
be more likely if the workers consciously realized that this is
what they _really want_ to do rather than to combat a spurious
imbalance of corporate power.
Chapter 10 surveys various ethical restrictions limiting the use
of money which have the effect of reducing status seeking, which
again is what people _really want_. In particular, Frank observes
that public financing of education (whether governments should
_operate_ schools is an entirely different matter) reduces the
positioning advantages parents can obtain for their children by
paying for private education. In this regard I note that, as
government aid to students has increased, so have the relative
costs of private versus public colleges. Far greater than the
effect of reducing positioning expenditures, I suspect, is simply
the effect of getting more students listening to professors.
Indeed, colleges, and especially college administrators, complain
far more loudly about proposals to reduce student aid than do the
students themselves or their parents.
The last two chapters give a general overview of the limits of
government maternalism and the tendency for government to grow
out of bounds and calls for a tax, not on all income, but on the
consumption of positional goods. Frank would have a political
constitution that would "mimic as closely as possible the
decisions that citizens would reach themselves if they could
negotiate costlessly with one another in a hypothetical
restricted environment" (p. 242). The current welfare state [p.
170:] does some of these things poorly, but what he calls a
"libertarian welfare state" would do them ideally. He calls such
a state "libertarian" to emphasize that it is only giving people
what they _really want_.
Frank will get many protests from libertarians here (isn't the
word far too stretched as it is?), but he is arguing for an
ideal, one of political freedom under an ideally unanimously
agreed-upon constitution, as well as for the traditional
individual freedoms. Skeptics, including perhaps the bulk of
public choice scholars, will doubt whether any constitution that
provides a government so powerful as to be able to restrict
status seeking will be able to keep Leviathan at bay. _Choosing
the Right Pond_, beyond extending neoclassical economics to
explain how the market oftentimes takes status into account, is
thus provocative in seeking to justify certain aspects of
government action as doing the same. Frank offers for now only a
vague evolutionism to explain what are now side consequences, and
he never says just how far such restrictions should go before
they turn off a major force for economic progress. These are
topics for a second book.
APPENDIX 3
_Morals by Agreement_ is the mirror image of
_Thecalculusofconsent_. That book looked at what happens after
the social contract is signed, at the kinds of laws that will be
passed by rational persons acting under a constitution. _Morals_
goes up to the social contract and asks what kind of agreement
might be reached by rational people in the first place. The books
intersect at the word consent and go in opposite directions.
Public choice theory has moved so far from its roots in consent
that Buchanan and Tullock's book has indeed become a single
word.^ It is an image and conjures up not consent so much as a
founding study of how pressure groups exploit the coercive power
of the state for special privileges. Buchanan almost alone, most
notably in _The Limits of Liberty_ (1975)^^, has stuck with the
idea of unanimous agreement, but even in that book he is largely
concerned with what happens once an agreement is made. For him,
just about any agreement will do, and a chief concern is in
keeping the agreement, preventing the subversion of a
constitutional order by a creeping Leviathan. ^Buchanan, James
M., and Tullock, Gordon 1962. _The Calculus of Consent: Logical
Foundations of Constitutional Democracy_. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press; Ann Arbor Paperback, 1965. ^^Buchanan, James
M. 1975. _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; paperback as A Phoenix
Book, 1978.
David Gauthier, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh,
now joins Buchanan in his concern with the concept of consent and
thus goes back to the roots of public choice theory, but from a
mirror image perspective. Buchanan takes the social contractors
to be rational, but only in a loose and perhaps nearly
tautological way, since his general concern is with what flows
from the agreement, not what leads up to it. Such vagueness in
the concept of rationality will not suffice for Gauthier's
purposes. Since every concept gets fuzzy as approached closely
enough, and since concepts are refined only until marginal costs
start exceeding marginal benefits, Gauthier spends far more time
than Buchanan on what rationality is.
_Morals_ and _Limits_ thus complement each other. (It is also
true that _Morals_ compl*i*ments _Limits_ by devoting an
important section to it, of which more anon.) The complementation
is, however, far from complete. Economists will find that
Gauthier's conception of rationality seems hyper-rational, that
Gauthier's people suffer from few of the information, decision,
and bargaining costs economists deal with so [p. 172:] regularly.
On the other hand, philosophers want to specify in some detail
just what sort of social contract rational men will agree upon
and not rest content with just about any old agreement that
happens along, as Buchanan would seem to. _Morals by Agreement_,
which term no doubt will come to loom as large in the
philosophical landscape as John Rawls' "veil of ignorance," is a
first attempt by a philosopher to bridge the gap between
economics and ethics. It will not be the last.
Gauthier defends a subjectivist view of value, preference, and
expected utility under risk and-uncertainty with which economists
will be largely familiar and have few quarrels. He states the
usual properties transitivity, and so forth, with the only
problematic assumption being that rational choices must be
considered ones, thus allowing for irrationality in choice based
upon incorrect beliefs. Gauthier then introduces some examples
from game theory, especially regards mixed strategies that rely
upon selecting among pure strategies in fixed proportions by
using a randomizing device.
In using game theory, Gauthier makes assumptions economists would
regard as heroic. Not only are the exact conditions of the game
known to all parties in perfect detail, but also all players know
each others' payoff schedules. It can often happen, as in the
Prisoners' Dilemma, that the joint strategy the players settle
into in equilibrium, while optimal, is not utility maximizing, in
the sense that all might have done better by their own lights (or
at least no one would have come out worse) if only they could
have coordinated their strategies. The rules of the game would
have to be modified, of course, but men make up new rules as well
as carry out actions under old rules.
The crucial idea in _Morals_ is that morality consists precisely
and entirely of adopting new rules, generally in the form of
placing constraints upon allowable strategies, so as to make the
optimal joint strategies utility maximizing (Pareto optimal). Now
many philosophers, but not enough economists, are going to
protest that morality consists of exhortations to excellence that
go beyond confining behavior, but still it is true that
constraints are a very large part of morality. Gauthier's
argument is that it is possible to justify these constraints, not
by any appeal to God or natural law, or to any feelings of
benevolence, but purely by a joint recognition by rational men
that these constraints can further their interests. This may seem
wholly obvious, at least for idealized Game Theoretic Man (but is
it true for actual man?). What Gauthier does is flesh out this
picture by giving details [p. 172:] _about_ these agreements.
Gauthier holds that, _given_ the so-called "perfectly"
competitive market, the rationalities of individual optimization
and utility maximization coincide, whence there is no need for
moral constraints. Here Gauthier shamefully and shamelessly
invokes the neoclassical orthodoxy, and for this reason his
treatment is weak. While it can be rigorously proven that the
coincidence Gauthier speaks of does hold under conditions of
"perfect" competition, these conditions rarely hold in the
market. Game Theoretic Man may be thoroughly informed and
rational but may still affect prices by his actions. What is
needed is a sense of when the two rationalities coincide, in
cases where competition is cut-throat but not "perfect." The
neo-Austrians proclaim but have not established that
laissez-faire _without_ antitrust legislation invariably
generates the coincidence. The mathematics would have to be
multi- if not infinitely dimensional, since under _dynamic_
competition the products change, and the neo-Austrians disdain
mathematics anyhow, which is too bad. We badly need a notion of
Pareto optimality under conditions of dynamic competition that
will go far beyond Alice-in-Wonderland "perfect" competition, but
will stop short, perhaps far short, of saying that Pareto
optimality always holds no matter what, even under competitive
rent-seeking for regulation.
Gauthier himself is not to be blamed for the shortcomings of
economic theory, even if he might have noted them. But a much
deeper issue is that a free market is not a free good. It is not
"given." If the rules of a free market are not enforced, then it
may often be rational for men to disregard them, whence the
market will not be a morally neutral zone after all. Besides,
there are many free markets. Exact definitions of property rights
will have to be debated and chosen among. Economists will surely
want to add their thoughts here, but as we shall see Gauthier
will argue that rational men will spontaneously obey the rules of
the market, thus obviating any need for enforcement.
Gauthier then proceeds to discuss situations where (moral)
constraints, in addition to those of a "given" market, can
improve outcomes. Players will bargain over which constraints to
cooperatively adopt. To study this a theory of rational
bargaining is needed to derive mutually rational constraints.
Unfortunately, "the general theory of rational bargaining is
underdeveloped territory" (p. 129), and so Gauthier will by no
means be able to propound a complete and comprehensive theory. He
discusses a hypothetical example of players [p. 176:] having
knowledge of the situation, including the initial bargaining
position, the set of possible outcomes, and the players' utility
schedules. Given that the aim is to choose a point on the Pareto
frontier, which one will be chosen? The answer depends critically
on a principle of Frederik Zeuthen from 1930, which states that
the ratios between the difference of the best point on the Pareto
frontier from his perspective to the bargained point, on the one
hand, and the difference between the best point and the starting
point, on the other, must be equal in the utility dimensions for
all players. This is called "minimax relative concession," but
unfortunately Gauthier does not argue for the merits of Zeuthen's
Principle beyond noting that minimax relative concession is
independent of the choice of utility scales and does not invoke
interpersonal comparisons of utility.
What is going to generate far more controversy than invoking
Zeuthen's Principle is Gauthier's argument that rational men will
comply with their agreements. His argument boils down to the
assertion that people _can_ force themselves to abide by their
agreements over the long haul, which is quite a statement about
human psychology indeed. Moreover, they can detect the sincerity
of others to do likewise. These seem to be new assumptions about
human rationality, psychology, and capacity, on top of full
knowledge of the game and of others' utilities. Gauthier's
justification of all this by way of group selection of societal
indoctrination is by means of essentially sociobiological
arguments but is not terribly robust. While small departures from
absolute rationality weaken conclusions in, say, economic theory
only modestly, here it would seem that it would take only a very
small departure from Gauthier's new assertions about human nature
and capacities for detecting cheating to bring about a collapse
of the game into instability. He says, "our ideal would be a
society in which the coercive enforcement of such decisions would
be unnecessary" (p. 164), but the bald fact is that every society
has such enforcement mechanisms, often of a draconian sort.
Gauthier is more right than perhaps he realizes when he says that
the Hobbist "sovereign makes morality, understood as a constraint
on each person's endeavor to maximize his own utility, as
unnecessary as does the market" (p. 164).
One could also ask whether there is any real agreement at all, in
the sense of a meeting of the minds. Given all of Gauthier's
assumptions, the outcome is already predetermined, and so there
need not be even any communication let alone any agreement. The
same can be said [p. 175:] for Rawls' social contract. Again, an
economist, dealing regularly with agreement and negotiation
costs, is more likely to ask whether Gauthier's agreements are
realistic.
So far, Gauthier has dealt with what he calls the _internal_
rationality of cooperation, which has to do with the formation of
and adherence to agreements made from a given starting point. His
next task is to examine the starting point itself and consider
when it is rational to begin the bargaining in the first place.
He strives to set up criteria here for the _external_ rationality
of cooperation, to say when the starting point is just in a
rational sense, as he conceives of rationality. He develops a
modified version of John Locke's famous proviso, that there "be
enough, and as good left for others," to serve as an external
constraint upon the initial endowments one may bring to the
bargaining table.
As mentioned earlier, Gauthier has an extended discussion of
James M. Buchanan's _The Limits of Liberty_, which regards any
so-called justice of the initial starting point in a state of
nature, out of which a social contract might emerge, as
irrelevant. For Gauthier, this is decidedly not so. In many
cases, he claims, it would not be rational for parties in an
unfair position initially to adhere to the agreement, what is
unfair being decided by the proviso. I find Gauthier's criticisms
of _Limits_ to be not entirely convincing, for reasons an
economist would spot more readily than a philosopher. Gauthier,
as I argued earlier, went beyond even Game Theoretic Man in order
to conclude that men will rationally adhere to their agreements.
He goes further yet in his development of the logic of external
rationality.
After an introductory chapter, _The Limits of Liberty_ considers
two persons in a state of nature and one good, which falls from
Heaven, perhaps unequally, upon the two. The two persons may
attempt to seize each other's holdings and exert efforts to
prevent same. Buchanan supposes that some "anarchist equilibrium"
among predation, protection (negative production), consumption,
and (presumably) leisure will emerge. Buchanan envisions that the
two anarchists, reflecting upon their situation, may come to
negotiate a peace pact, "the first leap out of the anarchist
jungle," to better their mutual lots. The requirement for any
agreement, Buchanan argues, is that what is better is to be
viewed *from the anarchist equilibrium*.
This is precisely what Gauthier disputes. He maintains that the
initial point for bargaining should be the shares of goods from
Heaven [p. 176:] and that it would not be rational for anyone to
expect to hold onto the fruits of predation. Now, Buchanan says
that the party that did come out better because of his superior
talents at predation can always threaten to plunge the society
back into the Hobbist jungle, to which Gauthier states flatly,
"the threat is unreal" (p. 196). Being unreal, therefore, no such
agreement from the anarchist equilibrium will be signed by
rational actors.
This is the crux of the matter, but is it true? In the paragraph
before he stated "the threat is unreal," Gauthier jumped ahead
three chapters in _Limits_ to Buchanan's discussion of the
prospect for the social contract being renegotiated if the
underlying anarchist equilibrium had changed in the meantime.
Ideally, perhaps, men should live up to their agreements, but if
some think they might do better by plunging society back into
anarchy and emerging with a new (and for them a better) social
contract, why, they might just do so. What Gauthier is apparently
assuming is that, once an agreement to stop predation is reached,
those who got the better end of the stick by virtue of their
predatory abilities will *throw these abilities irrevocably
away*. Now, there may very well be some partial truth in this
assertion. After all, we were speaking of an anarchist
*equilibrium*, and an economist, but not necessarily a
philosopher, will note that there are ongoing maintenance costs
of keeping up one's capital of predatory capacity. Bows and maybe
even arrows deteriorate, as do archery skills. Indeed, a main (if
not *the* main) objective in reaching an agreement is to
eliminate these ongoing expenditures.
But a certain amount of human and non-human *capital* for
predation will remain. Gauthier might have a way out of this,
however, which follows from his picking up a remark in _Limits_
that side payments might be necessary to get the social contract
off the ground. This way out may be to use said side payments to
destroy predation capital or at least to somehow equalize
advantages so that the new anarchist equilibrium will be the
hypothetical equilibrium in a state of magical enforcement of no
coercion at no cost by the Lord. It is by no means necessarily
the case that those on the short end of the stick have enough to
trade to bring this equalizing about nor that rational
individuals will consent to the brain damage that would equalize
predatory capital, especially as damaged brains would be less
productive all around. It is one thing to idealize men as
rational, having full knowledge of the situation and each other's
utilities, and able to detect one another's sincerity to abide by
[p. 178:] agreements. But it is entirely something else to
suppose that predatory capital in the state of nature is
structured in a quite specific way, seemingly ad hoc just to
derive a desired conclusion.
Unfortunately, I am unable to say how serious a defect the
implicit assumptions about predatory capital will be to
Gauthier's argument in practice. Given that moving from the state
of nature to civil society is beneficial to everyone, it may be
possible (at least in some (rare?) cases) to treat differences in
predatory capital as part of the manna falling from Heaven, and
take rights to the converted plus original manna as the
state-of-nature starting point. If so, we might continue to
follow Gauthier, who proceeds to clarify what the proviso that
defines this starting point is. Gauthier modifies Locke's proviso
"so that it prohibits worsening the situation of another person,
except to avoid worsening one's own through interaction with that
person" (p. 205). This would require compensation for negative
externalities, but would allow appropriation from the commons
provided that others will be made better off through market
exchanges with the new owner. This specification of Locke's
proviso, which I am simplifying but I hope not oversimplifying,
is necessary lest Locke be read strictly to mean that
appropriation is rarely ever justifiable.
Gauthier then attempts to justify adherence to the proviso
(before the bargaining over morals begins) as rational, still
however not by dealing with predatory capital. He wraps up this
discussion with yet another expansion of the concept of
rationality, this time having to do with the instrumental
*ability* to get what one wants. He makes the astonishing claim
that "we suppose that the unequal rationality brought about by
technological differences between societies is accidental" (p.
231), and concludes that "morals arise in and from rational
agreement of *equals*" (p. 232, my emphasis). At bottom, I cannot
but conclude that Gauthier's justification of the proviso rests
upon a kind of highly falsifiable egalitarianism.
It may however simply be that some sort of egalitarianism is
needed to derive any morality that pretends to be universal.
Otherwise, there could be situations that Gauthier mentions
briefly where it would be entirely rational for one group to
systematically exploit another. Granted, but what if such
exploitation *is* rational? (It has occurred often enough.)
Gauthier is unclear here. Instead, he argues that his scheme of
universalist rationality (a person "chooses the proviso as
constraining interactions among *all mankind*" (p. 261, my
emphasis)) [p. 177:] comports with a modification of Rawls'
"reflective equilibrium," which Gauthier dubs "the Archimedean
point." But for all his criticisms of Rawls' egalitarianism, I am
not at all sure how much Gauthier's egalitarianism would
differ.
In practice, also, Gauthier may be assuming less subjectivism
than his theory calls for. In many places throughout his book, an
economist aware of the limits of his discipline (alas, not very
many economists!) may think Gauthier overly restricts values to
the market. This is especially apparent in Chapter 9, where
Gauthier defends the seizure of land from the American Indians by
Europeans. To justify this seizure, Gauthier claims that the land
under capitalist cultivation made the Indians better off, as
required by his proviso. To do this, Gauthier overrates increased
longevity and underrates Indian lifestyles: "These old ways were
effectively doomed by the arrival of the Europeans....The effect
of European incursion was to turn cultural practices that had
been necessary into a form of play" (p. 296). By not recognizing
the utility value of play, as an economist would (or should),
Gauthier is here abandoning subjectivism for intrinsicism.
In several ways, then, Gauthier is out-economizing
(out-econom*ism*izing) economists. He assumes no lack of
information about the structure of the game; he assumes people
can read one another's utility functions; he assumes one can tell
whether another will hold to his bargains; and he assumes that
communitarian values and lifestyles are unimportant. For an
excellent critique of the premises of modern individualism, see
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, _Knowledge and Politics_.^ ^Unger,
Roberto Mangabeira 1975. _Knowledge and Politics_. New York: Free
Press.
On the other hand, Gauthier has not gone completely over to
decreeing that ethics is "a kind of glorified economics," as
Frank Knight had put it in _The Ethics of Competition_.^ He is
aware that values are not formed in a social vacuum, that "men
want to have better wants" (Knight again), and that "man wants
freedom to become the man he wants to become" (Buchanan, in
"Natural and Artifactual Man").^^ Be that as it may, _Morals by
Agreement_ is certainly a stimulating book. It is densely written
and demands attentive reading, yet it rarely drags, a
considerable achievement for a work of philosophy. At last a
philosopher has troubled himself to contemplate economics and
connect it to ethics. (Most philosophy of economics has to do
with how far economics is a science. The trick is to avoid rigid
isms without embracing an eclecticism so broad as to constitute
anarchy.) My essential reaction is that the first contribution by
a philosopher toward linking ethics and [p. 179:] economics
(_Limits_ being the first such contribution by an economist) is
still the first contribution, and that it ought to stimulate more
contributions. The next step, I think, is to relax, not the
unreal assumption that men are rational, so much as the other
assumptions of Game Theoretic Man, especially the ones about his
fantastic knowledge of other people. ^Knight, Frank Hyneman 1935.
_The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays_. New York: Harper &
Brothers. ^^Buchanan, James M. 1978. "Natural and Artifactual
Man." Lecture presented at the Liberty Fund Series Conference in
Blacksburg, VA, in July; printed in 1979b [Buchanan, James M.
1979b. _What Should Economists Do?_ With a Preface by H. Geoffrey
Brennan and Robert D. Tollison. Indianapolis: Liberty Press].
We need, in short, an ethic for *homo ignoramus*. Or rather, many
ethics. Philosophers are entirely too prone to searching for one
big system for all mankind, and so are economists and public
choice theorists. Very little time is spent examining America's
great contribution to politics, federalism. I daresay even Game
Theoretic Men would have their quarrels and might well split up
into cooperatively competing countries. As we go on moving into
the era of cyborgs, genetic engineering, and space travel,
searching for universalist answers looks more than a bit odd.
APPENDIX 4
"With the clash of authority came the end of authority." Thus
wrote H.L. Mencken in 1908 in the first biography of Nietzsche in
English^, and quite possibly still the best. He was speaking of
Nietzsche's early rejection of religion on the grounds that there
could not be more than one absolute Truth, but the statement may
apply to natural rights doctrines as well. There are just too
many philosophers laying down diverse pronouncements, each of
them final, about which of the various natural rights are the
true ones. Might it not be better for the people themselves to
make up their own minds about which rights, whether they call
them natural or not, to protect? After all and unless we believe
society is some god or some transcendental object and rights only
a manifestation of its glory, then rights ought to benefit
people. And who is in a better position to know which rights are
beneficial than the people themselves? ^Mencken, H.L. 1908. _The
Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche_. Boston: John W. Luce & Co.
Thus, the justification of the idea of a social contract is that
the people have decided upon it. Yet "authorities" known as
philosophers take over the interpretation of this idea and *tell*
the people what they have agreed to. Thomas Hobbes, for example,
tells them that they are so frightfully warlike that the only
right they have kept is to remove a sovereign who fails to keep
the peace. John Locke, who holds a less fearsome view of human
nature, lets them keep a good deal more. John Rawls, as East
Coast liberals read him, says the people have agreed to East
Coast liberalism, though my own reading of _A Theory of Justice_^
makes me think he moved in a libertarian direction during the
twenty years he spent writing it. (I got this impression by
reading it cover to cover in a week, or about 1/1040 the time he
spent writing it.) ^Rawls, John 1971. _A Theory of Justice_.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
This all would seem to mean the end of authority, too, in that
even the Mayflower Compact could no doubt be regarded as coerced,
surely so far as the children on board were concerned, to say
nothing of those yet unborn. But we can move away from authority
in the direction of realism, and such is the perspective an
economist can give, a perspective which I shall herein explore
under the name of *economic contractarianism*. My basis here is
James M. Buchanan's magnum opus, _The Limits of Liberty_ (1975)^.
He sees the social contract as economists see contracts: as [p.
182:] agreement, exchange, bargain, compromise. Before the
agreement, there is what he dubs an "anarchist equilibrium" of
production, predation, and protection. Anarchists in a state of
nature might negotiate a peace pact to reduce predation and
protection, so as to better concentrate on production. Such a
pact is not likely to be self-enforcing, and so they will empower
a government to enforce the pact. Just what pact will come about,
that is, what rights will be protected, is up to the anarchists.
No pact, and the state of nature persists. ^Buchanan, James M.
1975. _The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan_.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; paperback as A Phoenix
Book, 1978.
In the strict historical sense, we are still in a state of
nature, because there are always enough people around (it only
takes one) who are simply *dis*agreeable, thus blocking any
agreement. But we can assess how closely any situation
approximates unanimity. Compromises can be made, and we don't
have to wait for everyone to agree with every jot and tittle that
John Rawls, or John Locke, or Thomas Hobbes wrote. Maybe even
this distinguished trio could come to some sort of agreement, if
only to stop fighting one day a week and hold a pow-wow on the
ideal social contract. Buchanan very definitely recognizes that a
social contract need not at all be the best one possible.
Buchanan has also distinguished the protective from the
productive state, in which a government goes beyond protecting
rights to engage in producing public goods. The people don't
decide for all time what goods the government will provide and
how they will be paid for. This is asking too much. Rather they
set up a constitution that grants limited authority to pass
legislation under a set of rules. Thus the contractarian
productive state solves the problem of providing such public
goods as national defense and sanitation, before which
libertarians must usually modify their position. It is true that
not everyone will approve every publicly financed scheme, but
they could agree to a set of legislative rules that will benefit
everyone over the long haul. Some public goods may be judged as
"necessary," but most will not, and the *quantities* of all will
be decided on the basis of individual values and trade-offs.
Natural rights theories do not offer much of a method or solution
here.
On the other hand, natural rights theories can have their uses
when it comes to setting up the rules for the protective state.
Authorities continue to clash, but the basic idea behind natural
rights theories, that the broad features of human *nature*
determine *natural* rights, is certainly worthy of attention. The
important point is that the social contractors see that they
merely need to get out of the state of anarchy [p. 183:] and do
not have to resolve the clash of authorities perfectly and for
all time. They may agree that reason is man's tool for survival
and that this implies the protection of life, liberty, property,
and the pursuit of happiness. They need not agree upon the
existence of "positive welfare rights" (e.g., a guaranteed
minimum income paid for by taxes) to tax monies nor on
redistributive schemes for "social justice." Philosophers
certainly have not established even negative rights (e.g.,
property rights) absolutely--in other words, they continue to
clash--and a great deal of philosophy is given over to replacing
big holes in their arguments with little holes. In all strict
logic, a hole is a hole, but the contractors will not wait around
in a state of anarchy until the authorities stop clashing: At
some point they will decide that some alleged rights have been
established plausibly enough and set up a protective state. As it
happens, the case for negative rights has been far better made
than that for positive rights and redistribution. It would seem
that the unanimity ideal--that an agreement be a genuine meeting
of the minds--is an excuse for the minimal libertarian state. Two
replies: First, advocates of positive rights had better get busy
and cook up far more persuasive arguments than they have to date,
and second, the productive state goes beyond libertarian
minimalism anyhow.
The economist's contractarian approach has a further advantage
over a natural rights approach, in that it pays attention to
institutional design. While natural rights authorities clash over
whether, say, intellectual property (patents, copyrights,
trademarks, and trade secrets) is a genuine natural right, social
contractors can simply(!) weigh costs and benefits of
establishing rights in intellectual property. Moreover, they can
empower a legislature to set the *duration* of patents, something
that natural rights theories are utterly incapable of doing.
Social contractors can also set up machinery to make trade-offs
between the costly accumulation of evidence in criminal cases and
the probability of wrongful conviction. Economists habitually,
even compulsively, reckon with trade-offs, a perspective
generally absent among philosophers.
The social contractors, as I have said, are something
approximating real people, who may disagree with one another, but
hopefully not so much that there is no prospect of moving out of
the state of nature. They are also real in that they will act on
inconclusive arguments and information and not delay moving out
of the state of nature indefinitely. They can agree upon the
machinery of both the protective and the productive state. Can
they also agree upon schemes to establish social justice and [p.
184:] redistribution? In one sense, of course they can: they can
agree upon whatever they wish. But are they likely to? To answer
this, we have to make some assumptions about the contractors. Let
us assume, rather heroically, that the contractors are all good
economists and have studied the applications of economics to
political markets, called Public Choice theory. They have enough
appreciation of how a constitution may be expected to work out
that their signing of the contract will be informed. They will
also be sure to build in constitutional safeguards to ward off
the ever-present threat of Leviathan. They are also metaphysical
individualists, in that they do not grant the existence of a
transcendental entity called society, which has values of its own
apart from those of the individuals that compose it. Moreover,
they have absorbed the lessons of Friedrich Hayek's _The Mirage
of Social Justice_ (1976)^ and realize that remote consequences
of human action so far dwarf immediate ones that it is futile to
try to calculate the corrections necessary to bring rewards in
line with gut feelings about desert on a case-by-case basis. They
will cheerfully pay the price of living in a society controlled
by abstract rules and suppress their desire to take away even the
high incomes of rock "musicians." ^Hayek, Friedrich A. 1976.
_Law, Legislation and Liberty_, vol. 2: _The Mirage of Social
Justice_. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; paperback as A
Phoenix Book, 1978.
In short, these contractors are economists who have absorbed not
only the logic of the market but also the creative aspects of
capitalism emphasized by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and
others of the so-called Austrian School of economics. Natural
rights theories are often greatly informed by economics, so the
two approaches overlap quite considerably on what human nature
consists of. Nevertheless, there is some room for social justice
or redistribution, though not of the sort to attempt to rectify
each and every discrepancy between reward and desert. Social
justice can become an issue, not because the original social
contract is unfair--after all, everyone benefits from moving out
of the state of nature and the workings of competition will erode
initial privileges over time anyhow--but because new members are
added involuntarily to the society by birth. (I hold that
voluntary immigration is up to the contractors.) Inheritance laws
that forbid the alienation of property and are designed to
perpetuate family wealth, such as primogeniture laws or even
provisions like the entail that allow such perpetuation, can be
viewed as unfair to involuntary entrants. And it may be felt that
rich parents provide their children with an unfairly large head
start in life, by way both of gifts of capital and the provision
of education and otherwise superior upbringing. [p. 185:]
However and as it happens in the United States, movements to
confiscate inheritance have never been very robust and have been
restricted to moderately graduated inheritance and gift taxes and
public financing of education. (Hayek himself approves of the
latter, surprisingly for a man supposed to be a libertarian.
Whether the government should *operate* schools, as opposed to
financing vouchers, is another issue.) Evidently, Americans hold
that the incentive to pass wealth on to one's offspring is a
powerful factor in its creation and choose to *balance* this
against any unfairness, with the result being only moderately
graduated inheritance and gift taxes.
I will not try to argue that the observed inheritance taxes and
public support for education can be justified on the basis of an
historic social contract, far from it; but the important points
from a contractarian perspective are that it is up to the people
to decide how to treat new entrants *and* it is up to them to
decide what the *trade-offs* are to be between pursuing their own
conception of social justice and their many other objectives.
Social justice is neither something existing outside of
individual values, nor is it to be pursued at the expense of
everything else. The pursuit of any goal without limit will doom
liberty.
A few other points: (1) The other kind of justice, impartial
administration of laws, is a noble ideal, but the very existence
of public goods, prisoners' dilemmas, and externalities, as well
as the sheer finitude of the human brain, render perfect
neutrality unworkable. Besides, the social contract is supposed
to change things. (2) In a market economy, alleged biases in the
law, e.g., rental contracts favoring landlords over tenants, will
very often get corrected by market mechanisms, e.g., by rents
going down. (3) Legislators and bureaucrats can try to help the
poor, but the voters can and do respond by electing politicians
to change marginal tax rates. In other words, in well-oiled
political markets, voters get the amount of redistribution they
themselves want. (4) Arguments that, say, school teachers are
unjustly underpaid are usually just so many arbitrary assertions
or else involve externalities and public goods, which is a matter
for the productive state to handle, not so much a matter of
social justice. (5) While the protective and productive states,
under a well-designed constitution, are positive-sum games, they
quickly become negative when social justice becomes thought of as
an unlimited, transcendental objective. Since people never do
agree on the transcendental, the free society degenerates [p.
186:] into what Ayn Rand called "the aristocracy of pull."
In sum, the economist-contractarian perspective is not dissimilar
from natural rights approaches, but the former has several
advantages: (1) It lets the people act while authorities clash,
adopting whatever sorts of natural rights arguments they see fit
as a basis for their social contract. (2) It can take public
goods into account. (3) It can deal with specific questions of
institutional design in deciding which rights to protect and how
much. The right to privacy, for example, *comes into being* when
people conceptualize it (a process still going on) and seriously
want it. (4) It allows for trade-offs. (5) It can advance a
limited conception of social justice to take care of babies. (6)
It makes a point of recognizing that people differ and need to
bargain as opposed to finding some external truth. (7) It is
constantly on the lookout for Leviathan. But above all, economic
contractarianism is pluralistic: Different peoples will care
differently about different rights and can arrange themselves
accordingly. It rests upon the greatest tribute to the genius of
our Founding Fathers, namely federalism. It assumes and makes
room for a tolerance that, unhappily, most authorities cannot
abide. No mean advantage, this, to allow for experiment and
improvement.
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