I will debate Bryan Caplan on this topic this coming Wednesday.
Bryan’s says
My strategy, as usual, is to use an uncontroversial moral premise to show that the status quo is absurd. The premise: You are poor by your own fault if there are reasonable steps you could take – or could have taken – to avoid poverty.
Tyler correctly predicts that no one – not least myself – knows for sure which Karl Smith will show up.
Yet other perspectives must be brought to bear. There is determinism, at differing levels, ranging from “it’s tough to come from a broken home” to “lead poisoning is bad for you” to “what if the universe is a frozen four-dimensional Einsteinian/Parmenidean block of space-time?” (Ethics does look different when you are traveling at the speed of light.)
There is the view that desert simply is not very relevant for a lot of our choices. We still may wish to aid the undeserving.
Though it will be tough I will resist the urge to preemptively concede to Bryan on the grounds that desert is a fiction and morality a farce. The only question of any importance is which more unlovely to us: the manners and habits of the poor or the sight, sound and knowledge of their suffering.
Morality – like causality – is a tale told by an idiot. Or, more precisely the left prefrontal cortex. This mass of neurons is tasked with weaving purpose and meaning out of world which has no such things.
When combined with speech this application of narratives to reality allows human beings to operate as a giant hivemind, responding to events they have no direct access to and coordinating behavior in ways that greatly increases the survival rate of their offspring.
All of that having been said, it is lovely to work through the implications of what we believe.
So my basic case is that Bryan’s distinction between utility functions and budget constraints doesn’t correspond to anything that would be relevant to most folk’s well examined sense of morality.
In some cases this is because the distinction is so easily redefined simply by altering the choice set.
Bryan has famously said that the alcoholic is deserves the consequences of his alcoholism because he could have chosen differently. If you put a gun to his head and said don’t drink, the alcoholic could stop.
Fine.
But, the alcoholic cannot choose the consumption bundle that I chose all the time. That is to not drink and not experience delirium tremors. Putting a gun to his head can’t make him choose that outcome.
I’ll of course go into more detail in the debate but unless you are saying the alcoholic deserves delirium tremors it makes little sense to say that he deserves the poverty that results from his alcoholism. After all poverty is his attempt to better his situation.
I used alcohol because Bryan did but we can keep tracing down the chain to more fundamental properties of people and see that in many cases poverty is an attempt to escape a fate worse than poverty.
Unless you believe that they deserve this worse fate then why do they deserve poverty?
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Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 12:07 am
Steve the hyena
You can’t concede on those grounds as Caplan presupposes a moral universe.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 12:28 am
Tom
“After all poverty is his attempt to better his situation.”
“…in many cases poverty is an attempt to escape a fate worse than poverty.”
“Unless you believe that they deserve this worse fate then why do they deserve poverty?”
Can you clarify what you mean by these statements? I am baffled at what they can mean. Thanks.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 3:15 pm
Lord
If poor, he can’t afford to drink himself to death.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 5:25 am
anon
There’s also clear genetic and social links to alcoholism.
An alcoholic did not choose her genes nor her parents or the neighborhood she grew up in.
Plus there’s also the negative externalities of alcoholism. Even if she had the most alcoholism-resistant genes and the best parents living in the best part of town, we might still want to help her escape alcoholism because it’s better for us as well.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 7:52 am
Mr. Violet (@EuropeanViolet)
“Morality – like causality – is a tale told by an idiot. Or, more precisely the left prefrontal cortex. This mass of neurons is tasked with weaving purpose and meaning out of world which has no such things. When combined with speech this application of narratives to reality allows human beings to operate as a giant hivemind, responding to events they have no direct access to and coordinating behavior in ways that greatly increases the survival rate of their offspring.”
But this is a narrative too.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 11:06 am
BSEconomist
Like everyone else, I fear that this is going to be a counterproductive line of argumentation; whether or not you’re right, as soon as you say “Morality is a tale told by an idiot” at least two-thirds of the audience will tune you out. Not only will people “feel” like there should be a moral case, not only do they think in terms of morality in their daily lives, but perhaps worst of all you will appear to the audience their worst caricature of an elitist liberal. There is no way to overcome that. This whole line of argumentation is a trap set by Caplan.
It just so happens that I recently had a debate–if you want to call it that–with a tea party type on exactly this axis of blame, morality and punishment in an economic context and I think I almost had this guy convinced. So allow me to relay a bit about what I learned from the exchanged–from what worked to what in retrospect might have worked.
1) Don’t downplay personal morality–point out that “morality” as it intersects public policy is a very different animal.
2) As it intersects public policy, the question is not “Is behavior X out of person Y morally right”, the question is “how do we (society) get the most productivity out of person Y”
3) Assigning blame, and the shunning that goes with it, really should be thought of as the punishment phase of a repeated game–more precisely it is a spontaneous form of punishment, needing no central authority to coordinate. Individuals shun others, despite the costs to themselves, in order to prevent “improper” behavior from arising in the first place. But it is far from clear that assigning blame is necessarily effective (more on this). I think it’s clear that Caplan prefers the blame game precisely because it is a decentralized mechanism–but if your audience isn’t 100% libertarians than I think it likely that the decentralized structure will not be perceived as a good thing in and of itself. It is a major vulnerability of Caplan’s if you can link his position on this directly to his libertarian leanings.
4a) Punishment for “immoral” behavior is costly to society as well as to the punished–at this point you can go all folk theorem on Caplan’s… behind–and no one is actually better off in the punishment phase (it is a pareto loss). So, punishment is only useful to the extent that it discourages bad behavior from happening in the first place.
4b) Punishment can be counterproductive with regard to promoting “right”–which for society means productive–behavior. For example, we all know the reason that the alcoholic drinks–life sucks (and he’s addicted)! A strategy of shunning the alcoholic could easily make the behavior worse–you can argue that it’s his “fault” at this point but so what if it is? Society just wants this person to be productive again! Instead, making life suck a little less (along with a strategy to combat addiction) could (more than plausibly) reduce the need for alcohol.
5) Lastly, as per your (and Caplan’s) example, perhaps it would do well to point out that pointing a gun to someone’s head to get them to stop drinking (or even 100 years in prison) would in itself be considered by most people to be monstrously immoral/unjust of the person holding the gun. The inability of society to get really nasty, in other words, limits the efficacy of punishments in general.
I think (1)-(5) can be rightly understood in terms of your “morality is a fool’s game” statement but I’ve attempted to build the argument along a dimension in which your audience will not recoil as well as giving you one or two opportunities to trap Caplan.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 2:04 pm
Curt Doolittle
If there are no moral statements, then there can be no argument for redistribution.
Moral rules are, universally, prescriptions for the prohibition of anonymous involuntary transfer. Ethical rules are, universally, prescriptions for the prohibition of known involuntary transfers. Manners are prescriptions for decreasing the cost of coordination – they demonstrate the likelihood of adherence to contract, and are, aside from property, and use of language, the most important signaling we make use of.
Violation of ethics, and morals are simply theft from others, and violations of manners are attempts at fraud. There is no circumventing that objective reality.
You are fascinatingly selective about what ‘goods’ you advocate.
No transfers. Exchanges only. What can the, unethical, immoral, ill mannered, and ignorant exchange for financial support? Or rather stated, the wealthy will happily pay the underclasses to behave well. They will not pay them to behave poorly.
Monday ~ January 30th, 2012 at 10:32 am
Corey Mutter
One could still make an argument for redistribution if one could show that it was win-win, or “makes the pie higher” if you will. (I do not know if that’s currently true but suspect it to be).
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 3:20 pm
Psychohistorian
Caplan’s position seems does not seem capable of supporting itself. Simply because a consequence is a result of choices does not mean that consequence is acceptable or appropriate.
First, there’s an information/magnitude problem. Failure to look both ways before crossing the street can result in getting hit by a bus. Still, few would say you *deserve* to get hit by a bus, nor would anyone propose that, should you happen to not get hit by a bus, we go ahead and hit you with a bus anyways because it is a just outcome based on your actions. Where small decisions have big consequences, or where an individual is unaware of the dangers posed by certain decisions, this whole concept fails.
More importantly, we still believe it is morally right to help ameliorate the consequences of bad choices. When the unwary pedestrian gets hit by a bus, we still think he should be taken to the hospital. At the very least, a passerby should move move him out of the street and oncoming traffic should avoid running over him, even though “continuing to be run over by oncoming traffic” was a foreseeable result of his decision.
What is good and what is someone’s fault are distinct concepts. If a woman leaves her car unlocked with the keys in it, it is, significantly, her own fault that it gets stolen. Yet, in an ideal world (and in some actual neighborhoods), this consequence won’t result. If we have an opportunity to make the world one in which the car does not get stolen, we should do that (depending, of course, on the costs it entails).
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Lord
In any consideration of morality, one must consider it both from personal and social ends. If yielding to alcoholism is immoral, is society allowing alcohol moral? If society not allowing alcohol is immoral, someone’s abuse of it may be a personal failure but is it any less moral than society allowing it when it knows some will?
Tuesday ~ January 31st, 2012 at 2:21 am
Jeff
This is an interesting take. I thought it might be worthwhile to note that it is ultimately the same (albeit in different guise) as the old ethico-theological issue known as ‘the problem of evil’: Namely, even if god doesn’t actively create the evil in the world around us, he created a world in which it can exist. Moreover, if he is omniscient, he must know this; if he is omnipotent, he must be able to make it otherwise; given that it still exists anyway, he cannot simultaneously omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. I don’t have an answer for this, I just thought it interesting to point out.
Saturday ~ January 28th, 2012 at 3:48 pm
Becky Hargrove
Tom, re: my take on your question of poverty as an attempt to escape a fate worse than poverty. Over the years I have known some very different examples of people who either chose homelessness or at least thought about it who were facing intolerable circumstances where they lived. Two of those cases involved intolerable circumstance among people with money enough for middle class life, just different ideas of how people should live together under one roof. Sometimes, keeping one’s self respect just means being a bit lonely and isolated.
Monday ~ January 30th, 2012 at 10:41 am
Corey Mutter
My unsolicited $0.02:
1) Deservingness may be moot with respect to the argument of “should we help the poor?”. My current pet economic theory (I haven’t the chops to prove or disprove it yet): Top-heavy imbalance in wealth distribution is causing economic suboptimality. We don’t have enough consumption (lower classes) to sustain enough aggregate demand, but we have excess savings (higher classes) causing bubbles because the money has nowhere useful to go.
2) Poverty is prone to self-reinforcing feedback loops, and that’s getting worse; e.g. employers routinely running credit checks for non-money-handling jobs. Is there evidence that a culture of “one slip-up and you and your descendants will perpetually live in poverty” helps anything?
3) The sword of Damocles (as in #2) can be motivational, or *de*motivational. My reaction to rampant job insecurity has been *reduced* effort, despite the typical conservative argument that it should increase effort. A job loss for me is probably going to come from some event uncorrelated to my individual performance (company financial trouble and/or an industry leaving our shores).
Thursday ~ February 2nd, 2012 at 12:40 am
Joseph Ward
I was at the debate. Thank you so much for coming to GMU! I hope we weren’t too hostile; it seemed like everyone had fun… but I imagine that you are mentally exhausted after that. Almost all the questions were for you!