Perspectives on Morality and Human Well-Being. Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi

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СКАЧАТЬ multitude cannot be relieved without cutting into the ecstasy of the few rich rolling in luxury! Thus, “a society can be Pareto-optimal and still be perfectly disgusting” [Sen (1970); p. 22]. In other words, Pareto-optimality and competitive markets are immiscible with mutually advantageous production, consumption, and distribution arrangements – which is a particularly damning criticism since the gap between the rich and the poor is much too large to be socially, politically and morally acceptable. And, as if to rub salt into the neo-classical’s wounds, Pareto-optimality may even coexist with inefficiency – especially in the non-utilitarian space [Stiglitz (1988)]. Nor is it a big deal that Pareto-optimality depicts unanimity. This is because if unanimity is for the preservation of an unjust status quo, then it would be a recipe for social disaster. Thus, the moral content of the Pareto-optimality principle is next to nil – especially because observing moral principles need not always be (it seldom is) a pleasurable experience for self-seeking individuals. To be able to move towards a reasonably civilised society, a real-life economy had better be delivered from the fetters of the Pareto rule.

      ii) Libertarian Morality

      The priority of individual liberty, unanimity and impartiality in the specific context of constitution-making are the central moral values espoused by libertarians. Yet here morality misguides human endeavours into the ‘wrong’ channel: it promotes distributive inequity and fails to help the poor.

      a) The Priority of Liberty

      The central proposition here is that individual liberties must be protected regardless of the consequences of exercising them for individual well-being and social welfare. The idea here is that individual liberty is intrinsically valuable, to be pursued for its own sake. Thus, for instance, unfettered markets are preferred because these are supposed to be the best protection against the dilution of individual liberty. Indeed, capitalism is the most preferred economic arrangement because it means minimising government interference and coercion; it is not just because it most efficiently adds to national wealth [Hayek (1960); Friedman (1962)]. James Buchanan (1985) further shows that unfettered markets are morally superior as well because only these voluntary arrangements can preserve individual liberty while the involuntary arrangement reached through the government cannot. The job of the government is, therefore, to produce a legal infrastructure within which the liberty-preserving markets can function freely. The distributional issues are best settled at the time of making the constitution. At this stage, the individuals responsible for framing the constitution, being uncertain and disinterested about their chances in life, would most likely make rules and procedures which promote a juster distribution of income and wealth and safeguard the interests of the poor in society [Buchanan and Tullock (1962)]. This objective is best achieved by ensuring the unanimity and impartiality of the rules and procedures agreed upon by these “impartial spectators”. However, once the constitution-making activity, done in silence and obscurity, is passed, self-interested individuals go about their economic pursuits, unperturbed by the inevitable trade-offs between individual liberty and other worthwhile social objectives. It really amounts to laying down the rules of a savage justice whereby the “right to life is the right not to be killed, it is not the right to be given sustenance” [Hausman and McPherson (1993); p. 703].

      How good are these arguments? Briefly, they do not add up to much. Firstly, Buchanan’s assertions, as well as those of Buchanan and Tullock noted above, in support of the free markets suffer from a fatal logical flaw. They define specific economic arrangements as voluntary or involuntary according to whether these are made by the market or by the government; and then proceed to establish the superiority of market arrangements to those made by the government. But this is not a logical result at all; only a restatement of a definition! Secondly, it is not empirically a fact that (political) individual liberties are better taken care of in societies where markets are freer and government intervention minimal than where they are less free and government intervention is large. Thus, in free-market economies (e.g., the United States) the civil and political rights of the blacks have been freely trampled on; while in Scandinavian countries, with ‘nanny’ governments, political liberties are much better safeguarded together with a stellar economic performance record [Allen Buchanan (1985); pp. 78-79]. While this piece of empirical evidence does not prove that ‘nanny’ governments and suppressed markets are always better, it does prove that markets need not be altogether unfettered to produce better economic results and a superior record of political and civil freedoms. Thirdly, guaranteeing individual economic and political freedoms may produce efficient results in the Paretian sense (that, no one’s substantive freedom can be enhanced without reducing the freedom of someone else), and yet this fact (of giving absolute priority to liberty) does not say anything about the equally important issue of equity in the distribution of freedoms. Indeed, the efficiency outcome positively complicates the distribution problem: “the problem of inequality gets magnified as the attention is shifted from income inequality to the inequality in the distribution of substantive freedoms and capabilities” [Sen (1999b); p. 119; italics in the original].

      Fourthly, the ‘unanimity’ and ‘impartiality’ achieved at the constitution-making stage do not make a society any better from the egalitarian point of view. Also, the constitution-makers cannot always ensure compliance with what they prescribe; nor can they foresee all the distributional issues in the post-constitution making stage, especially those which result from the working of the capitalist system itself. Fifthly, the unanimity achieved at the constitution-making stage can be extraordinarily conservative: it need never permit any social change which benefits all but one person, who can block it no matter what the rest of society wants. True, unanimity about a change in the status-quo can somehow be achieved through public discussion and debate and by a trading of compromises among themselves (which is equivalent to a log-rolling process), yet vested interests would not voluntarily endorse it. Finally, Buchanan and Tullock’s theory is essentially positivist: what it aims to show is that the unanimity principle can be achieved entirely by self-interested individuals: “the uncertainty that is required in order for [the] individual to be led by his own interest to support constitutional provisions that are generally advantageous to all individuals and to all groups seems likely to be present at any constitutional stage of discussion” (p. 78). It is not meant to resolve any ethical or distributional issues. The fact is that all this is no more than a smart sleight of hand. It may deepen the neo-classical’s unbounded admiration of the state of self-interestedness; but it will not satisfy the curiosity of those concerned about the larger issues of human existence.

      b) Non-Consequentialist “Moral Rights”

      Nozick’s (1974) theory of ‘entitlement’ and ‘historical justice’ goes a step further – beyond the standard libertarian’s (e.g., Hayek’s (1960)) position that individual liberty is instrumental in preventing coercion. He deems liberty to be intrinsically valuable. In other words, individuals have some inalienable moral rights, which are regarded as deontological ‘side-constraints’ on action that must be satisfied regardless of any (adverse) social, economic or other consequences of doing this duty.⁷ But this is a particularly restrictive (indeed, perverse) view of moral rights because it in effect instructs the potential rights violators: “Do not violate the moral rights of others no matter what – not even to stop others from an imperfect compliance of these instructions (that is, when some violate the rights of others)”. It is not for individuals to minimise the incidence of moral-rights violations but rather to act within the bounds of given moral rights; which, if voluntarily observed by all individuals, will not be violated in the first place. The reward of this state of studied inaction is some kind of ‘political egalitarianism’: no one has a greater right to liberty than anyone else. In this framework of thought, selfishness is itself a moral right, to be defended no matter what and markets must remain unfettered even though the outcome of such ‘unfetteredness’ is mutually disadvantageous. This extremist view of the innate morality of the (moral) right to private property, including that in the means of production, rests СКАЧАТЬ