by Tyler Cowen
As you might expect of someone who speaks up for rules, I’m going to speak up for rights, too.
Common sense morality
Common sense morality holds that we should work hard, take care of our families, and live virtuous but self-centered lives, while giving to charity as we are able and helping out others on a periodic basis. Utilitarian philosophy, on the other hand, appears to suggest an extreme degree of self-sacrifice. Why should a mother tend to her baby when she could sell it and use the profits to save a greater number of babies in Haiti? Shouldn’t anyone with medical training be obliged to move to sub-Saharan Africa to save the maximum number of lives? What percentage of your income do you give to charity? Given the existence of extreme poverty, shouldn’t it be at least fifty percent? Is eating that ice cream cone really so important? Common sense morality implies it’s OK to enjoy that chocolate, but utilitarianism says otherwise.
British philosopher Henry Sidgwick was obsessed with figuring out whether the recommendations of utilitarianism and common sense morality could be made broadly compatible; later, British philosopher Derek Parfit picked up on the same theme. And if those two approaches are not compatible, which ethical perspective should we prefer, and why?
The six issues listed above all involve some tough questions. Yet I will put forward and defend a controversial claim: that all of these difficult problems are more of a piece than we might think. These problems can indeed be resolved, and with a relatively small number of intellectual and philosophical “moves.” By no means will these moves make life easy for normative evaluation; instead, they will create new problems. But I will suggest that we trade in our old problems for these new ones. In fact, I will suggest that, upon reasoned examination, we must trade in our old problems for these new ones.
The fundamental philosophical moves I have in mind are twofold:
First, I do not take the productive powers of economies for granted. Production could be much greater than it is today, and our lives could be more splendid. Or, if we make some big mistakes, production could be much lower, and we could all be much poorer. This simple observation allows us to put the idea of production at the center of our moral theory, because without production, value is problematic. For all of her failings, Ayn Rand is the one writer who has best understood the importance of production to moral theory—a point she expressed enthusiastically and at great length, albeit with numerous unfortunate caricatures. It is the work of capital, labor, and natural resources, driven by the creative individual mind, which undergird the achievements of our civilization. Whether or not you agree with all of Rand’s political views, she is correct in her stance that we must not take the existence of wealth for granted.
Second, I will seek to revise some of our intuitive assumptions about moral distance. Which individuals should exert more of an influence over our choices, and which should exert less? I will argue, for instance, that the individuals who will live in the future should be less distant from us, in moral terms, than many people currently believe. Their interests should hold greater sway over our calculations, and that means we should invest more in the future. Even though it is sometimes hard for us to imagine how our actions will affect future people, especially those from the more distant future, their moral import remains high. I will therefore be asking humans to have greater faith in the future. I am not asking for faith at the expense of reason, but it will nonetheless require an attitude very much akin to faith to consistently think so far ahead in our calculations. It is no accident that religious people often have higher rates of fertility, or that they engage in so many long-term business and charitable projects, as Max Weber observed long ago.
As I consider the questions outlined above, I will focus on clashing arguments and the substantive bottom line. I do not devote much time to building consensus on familiar material, surveying what everyone has said on a particular topic, or other such niceties. I do not retread familiar ground and then offer tentative suggestions for tackling these tough problems at the very end. I do not argue by elimination by focusing on the weaknesses of other views and downplaying the weaknesses of my own. Instead, I seek to start with the tough questions, pinpoint the hardest points of dispute, and spend the rest of my time trying to pick up the pieces. That is what I like to read, and therefore it is what I’m trying to write.
This is where my internal debate stands. I hope you enjoy it. If you are the kind of reader I want, you will feel I have not pushed hard enough on the tough questions, no matter how hard I push.
I also hope that you will respond by taking a stronger stand on behalf of the ideals of freedom and prosperity. I hope you will join more firmly in the cause of making our civilization stronger, more durable, and more wondrous. In this book, I suggest that we need a radical reawakening. And this reawakening will prove to be a new and compelling way of reaffirming our own power as individuals.
With that in mind, let’s proceed.
1. Smart and Williams (1973), Scheffler (1982), and Singer (1993) offer some standard treatments of consequentialism, the evaluation of choices in terms of their consequences, a philosophical doctrine that includes utilitarianism as one variant. Pettit (1997) offers a good introduction to consequentialist reasoning and why it is persuasive.
2. For two recent discussions of what consequentialism means, see Hurley (2009) and Brown (2011).
3. For one recent look at rights, which also surveys many of the major questions I address here, see Griffin (2008). Wenar (2013) also surveys some aspects of the current debate, in addition to his original contributions. On intuitionism, see Huemer (2005).
2—Wealth makes the world go round
Where does value come from? How is value created and maintained and augmented over time? These simple questions sound like clichés, but they are central to ethics.
Let’s consider the idea of systems, networks, norms, or policies which create systematically increasing value over time, without apparent end. Milton Friedman used to argue that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but at some level this has to be false. The universe exists—who had to pay for it? (Moreover, some cosmological hypotheses hold that the universe arose out of quantum fluctuations and is forever giving rise to offshoots, baby universes, all “for free.”) This seems to suggest that there has been at least one free lunch—a big one—in our history, so maybe there are others. So, what can we usefully think of as a free lunch when it comes to social decision-making? After all, planet Earth somehow evolved from a bunch of trilobites to trillions of dollars in GDP and a Louvre full of paintings.
Since free lunches aren’t always easy to find, we should think about where free lunches might be hiding and why some of those free lunches might be less than evident. In particular, we might uncover hidden gains if we more closely consider the dimension of time. Maybe some of our choices release a steady stream of benefits, but we don’t see them as clearly as we ought to. As Adam Smith noted in the eighteenth century, we tend to visualize future events very poorly and with a deficit of proper imagination.
In economics, there is at least one (hypothetical) example of a free lunch. Economist Frank Knight wrote of the Crusonia plant, a mythical, automatically growing crop which generates more output each period. If you lay the seeds, the plant just grows; you don’t have to water it or tend to it. Imagine, for example, an apple tree that yields several apples each year. The tree also produces apple seeds. The apple seeds germinate, resulting in a steady and indeed growing supply of new apples and also of new apple trees, albeit based on some measure of sun and rain. A Crusonia plant, measured in terms of its ability to produce apples, might grow five percent each year on net. At the same time, it looks like a modest apple tree and does not appear to resolve any key ethical or political questions.
The idea of the Crusonia plant may sound unrealistic or a bit silly, but it’s a useful example for pinpointing the nature of our quest. The Crusoni
a plant is an example of a free lunch—at least a free lunch of apples—once you have obtained it. (By the way, if you’re wondering why it’s called the Crusonia plant, it’s named after Robinson Crusoe’s island; in the Daniel Defoe novel, Crusonia was littered with trees that yielded fruit for nothing, requiring no labor or effort from Crusoe or anyone else. Thus Crusoe enjoyed some free lunches of his own.)
Frank Knight postulated the Crusonia plant in order to make some technical points about the theory of capital and investment, but those debates have since passed. In contrast, I see the Crusonia plant as an entry point for resolving aggregation problems. A Crusonia plant would be more desirable than a plant that dies after a month and leaves no successors, even if this short-lived plant were quite lovely or brilliant. We could compare the two plants in terms of various qualities, such as their color or their scent, but after a while the unceasing free yield of the Crusonia plant has to prove the better choice. At some point the sheer accretion of value from the ongoing growth of the Crusonia plant dominates the comparison. We thus have a principle of both ethics and prudence: when in doubt, choose the Crusonia plant.
When it comes to making tough decisions, we should try to identify which elements in the choice set resemble a Crusonia plant. If we can identify certain choices or policies that give rise to the equivalent of the Crusonia plant’s unceasing yield, namely ongoing and self-sustaining surges in value, the case for those choices would be compelling. Furthermore, if it turned out that Crusonia plants were more common than we first thought, aggregation problems would be eased more generally.
So, in a social setting, what might count as analogous to a Crusonia plant? Look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time. The natural candidate for such a process is economic growth, or some modified version of that concept. If sustainably positive-sum institutions exist, there may be Crusonia plants all over the place. As we’ll see, standard definitions of economic growth do not fully qualify as true Crusonia plants, in part because they ignore environmental sustainability and in part because they do not adequately value leisure time. Nevertheless, if we think about economic growth a little more broadly, we will have a relevant Crusonia plant on which to base our decisions.
Economists use the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) to refer to the total value of goods and services produced over some period of time, usually a year or a quarter. The rate of economic growth is the rate at which GDP increases. I will use the concept somewhat differently, postulating that GDP should properly be measured in terms of maximizing the long-term rate of economic growth. This is not how GDP is currently measured by most governments. “Wealth Plus,” if I may use that term to refer to the accumulated gains from growth, accounts for leisure time, household production (valuable activities you perform at home for free, be it mending socks or using Facebook), and environmental amenities, among other adjustments. Current GDP statistics have a bias toward what can be measured easily and relatively precisely, rather than focusing on what contributes to human welfare.
With that in mind, I will define the concept of Wealth Plus as follows:
Wealth Plus: The total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.
In this context, maximizing Wealth Plus does not mean that everyone should work as much as possible. A fourteen-hour work day might maximize measured GDP in the short run, but it would be less propitious over time once we take into account the value of leisure, not to mention the potential for burnout. Still, this standard is going to value a strong work ethic.1
Maximizing Wealth Plus also does not mean destroying the natural environment. It’s now well understood that environmental problems can lower or destroy economic growth through feedback effects. We should therefore protect the environment enough to preserve and indeed extend economic growth into the more distant future.
More broadly, the principle of Wealth Plus holds that we should maintain higher growth over time, and not just for a single year or for some other, shorter period of time. Maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth does not mean pursuing immediate growth at the expense of all other values. Policies that prioritize growth at breakneck speed are frequently unstable, both economically and politically. The Shah of Iran, for instance, tried to bring his country into the modern age very rapidly. Growth rates were high for a while but in the longer run could not be maintained. Since the Iranian Revolution, Iran’s economy has backslid. The Shah’s forced modernization did not maximize true economic growth, and more cautious policies likely would have been better and more sustainable.2
The concept of sustainability, as embedded within the Crusonia plant idea, thus focuses our attention on the prerequisites for a durable civilization. And although many people currently live in relative peace and prosperity, we should not take its durability for granted. If we look at the broader historical record, economic growth is hardly the rule, and civilizations are fragile. Michael Shermer has compiled an informal database on civilizational survival that catalogues sixty civilizations, including Sumeria, Mesopotamia, Babylonia, the eight dynasties of Egypt, six civilizations in Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, various dynasties and republics of China, four periods in Africa, three in India, two in Japan, six in Central and South America, and six in modern Europe and America. He finds that the average civilization endured for 402.6 years. He also finds that decline comes more rapidly over time; since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the average duration of a civilization has been only 304.5 years.3
While the exact numerical estimates depend on how we define the concept of civilization and how we pin down start and end points, the more general point about the fragility of civilizations stands. Human beings can and indeed do experience significant and ongoing losses of their prosperity and freedom.4
We might wonder whether we could maximize the relevant pluralist values by existing at a very modest population size and economic level for a very long time—living in harmony with nature, so to speak. Think of Tolkien’s quaint hobbits. But poorer societies from the past have collapsed repeatedly through military weakness, ecological catastrophe, famine, tyranny, and natural disasters, among other factors.
Keep in mind that the wealthier tyrant will conquer or at least disrupt the noble savage. Even if in principle the life of the noble savage were best, no society that follows this path can, on its own, keep its autonomy in the longer run. Given the trajectory of human development, some society will always have tanks and nuclear weapons, whether we like it or not. It is also important to note that the more benevolent societies tend to be both richer and more technologically advanced—further evidence of the importance of sustainable economic growth.
Furthermore, primitive warfare appears to have been at least as frequent, as bloody, and as arbitrary in its violence as modern warfare.5 Earlier societies were neither idyllic nor peaceful. So returning to the past, or attempting to throttle economic growth, does not guarantee the future prospects of a civilization, much less its comfort. In other words, we need to move forward rather than seek a static, quiet existence, yet our path requires a tightrope act, balancing progress and stability along the way.
We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance, namely:
What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth?
What can we do to make our civilization more stable?
How should we deal with environmental problems?
The first of these is commonly considered a right-wing or libertarian concern, the second a conservative preoccupation, and the third, especially in the United States, is most commonly associated with left-wing perspectives. Yet these questions should be
central, rather than peripheral, to every political body. We can see right away how the political spectrum must be reshaped to adequately address these concerns. Politics should be about finding the best means to achieve these ends, rather than disputing the importance of these ends.
How good is growth, anyway?
The history of economic growth indicates that, with some qualifications, growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. While measured wealth does not exactly correspond to Wealth Plus, these two concepts have come pretty close to one another in the past, especially across the range of outcomes we have observed (as opposed to hypothetical thought experiments and counterfactuals).
We often forget how overwhelmingly positive the effects of economic growth have been. Economist Russ Roberts reports that he frequently polls journalists about how much economic growth there has been since the year 1900. According to Russ, the typical response is that the standard of living has gone up by around fifty percent. In reality, the U.S. standard of living has increased by a factor of five to seven, estimated conservatively, and possibly much more, depending on how we measure prices and the values of outputs over time, a highly inexact science.