Review of Ethics As Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation
Leland B. Yeager 334pp. Edward Elgar. £65.95

The frequent complaint against postwar analytic philosophy, that it did not tell people how to behave, was wide of the mark. There may be some people who still believe with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment that if there is no God everything is permitted. But once their error is pointed out, they should not expect university professors to formulate codes of behaviour for them. After all if someone has rejected a traditional moral code derived from the Bible or other religious authority, why should he or she follow an Oxbridge or Harvard academic instead? We can learn from people who have had many and varied experiences and reflected deeply upon them. But such people are rarely academic philosophers.

Academic writers on ethics are, or ought to be, authorities on the main moral codes which have been suggested in the past and be alert to their strong and weak points, as well as their consistency with each other. They thus ought to be able provide clues about how to treat conflicts between accepted moral principles, such as truth telling and avoiding suffering. They cannot settle them. But they might help people from committing harm because they have unreflectively accepted ideas such as duty to country or other absolute rules, e.g. “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.” They cannot provide a knockdown argument against causing suffering in the name of high principle, but they can at least encourage people to reflect in a calm moment on what their principles really are.

These aspects of moral philosophy may help explain the peculiarly intimate relation between it and the higher reaches of economics over several centuries. Adam Smith was a professor of philosophy and wrote a well known book on ethics; David Hume was primarily a philosopher but wrote essays on subjects such as money and trade which can be profitably read today. In more recent times Keynes always regarded his economic studies as subordinate to his wider philosophical vision.

Economists have their own ethical bias. They are trained to ask when told that something is good or bad: “Good or bad compared to what?” Notions of marginalism and trade-offs count against absolutist formulations, for instance that some particular good or particular virtue has unquestionable priority and must be served at all costs. Economists’ ways of thinking will point away from deontological and towards consequentialist ethical systems.

This intimacy has involved only a small fraction of economists and an even smaller one of philosophers. It may moreover be drawing to an end as economics is coming to be more and more a branch of applied mathematics and advancement in it dependent on facility with formal exercises. The traditional relationship is, however, still worth exploring. Economists have been interested in influencing the world as well as understanding it. But how does one distinguish a change for the better from a change for the worse? What are the criteria by which developments and policies should be judged?

There is one kind of ethical system which has held particular appeal for economists - and for philosophers who have been interested in economics - namely utilitarianism. This is popularly defined as seeking the greatest good for the greatest number. According to Lealand Yeager its fundamental value judgment is “approval of happiness and disapproval of misery”.In the last resort the products of an economic system are valuable for the satisfaction to which they give rise in human beings. A good economist, observing people cheerfully working in suburban allotments will not say that this is an irrational way of producing vegetables - it may be an entirely rational way of producing happiness.

Economists are, of course, under no compulsion to adopt utilitarian ethics. A practitioner can analyse utility without being at all devoted to maximising its quantity. There have been economists whose yardstick has been the advancement of the German state; Keynes regarded the supreme good as personal relations and aesthetic contemplation and saw the increase of wealth as a (fallible) means to their achievement. Nevertheless the instinctive bias of scholars who have studied the generation of income and wealth has been to believe it better that human beings should be more satisfied rather than less and have treated economic performance as a means to that end.

Leland Yeager, who is a retired American professor of economics, known for his work on monetary systems, has mounted a vigorous defence of utilitarianism. Scoffers should resist all temptation to write it off as a retirement job. The bibliography makes it clear that he has been concerned with questions of moral philosophy for many decades. If anything he tries too hard to establish his philosophical credentials. Almost every assertion he makes is backed by references to other writers. He also feels it necessary to refer to the work of nearly all late 20th century moral philosophers. This makes the volume useful as a guide, but will hold up those who want mainly to find the gist of the author’s own argument.

Utilitarians are sometimes divided into act and rule utilitarians. Act utilitarians try to judge every act or policy directly by its effects on human satisfaction. Rule utilitarians insist that we do not have the knowledge and disinterestedness to start from scratch on each separate occasion and that we need to use subordinate principles - whether those of common sense morality or the maxims of particular disciplines such as political economy - as a guide to action. Direct appeals to utility should be confined to occasions when the subordinate principles clash or to exceptional instances when there may appear to be a strong case for overriding them.

Yeager is emphatically a rule utilitarian. This is contrast to many contemporary economists, especially those of an interventionist bent who - whether they reflect on these matters or not - are instinctive act utilitarians. They rush to “look at the figures“, insist on “research-based“ policies and have little time for the traditional maxims which could save them from many pitfalls.

This difference may have some relation to another contrast. Most English utilitarians have been interested in aggregate utility, even if they have been sensible enough to divide it by the population to obtain utility per head. They have had moreover a strong egalitarian bias. Sometimes they have tried to derive this from the principle of diminishing marginal utility -- an extra pound is worth more to a poor man than a rich man. At other times, and more convincingly, they have simply reiterated Bentham’s dictum that each person must count for one and only one.

Indeed, some utilitarians claim not only to place an equal value on the happiness of all the inhabitants of the world but also of future generations. This causes them, they claim, to downgrade their own selfish concerns and identify their welfare with that of the of the aggregate mass of humanity. Yeager is much more individualistic and thinks in terms of each individual pursuing his satisfaction in his or her own way. He justifies this bias, as have some previous writers, by asserting that the best way of promoting the happiness of a large group is for each of us to look after the interests of ourselves, our families and those closest to us. This may well be true; but the localised and small scale approach is ultimately justified by such thinkers because it is seen as the best way of promoting some form of aggregate satisfaction.

The strongest part of Yeager’s argument is that he tries to transform apparently moral arguments, which cannot be conclusively settled, into “researchable“ topics. He respects David Hume’s demonstration that you cannot derive an “ought“ from an “is“. But he does depend quite heavily on the view that many apparently normative propositions actually contain factual assertions together with recommendations for action. This goes back at least as far as Richard Hare’s early post-war book, The Language of Morals. He also makes use of Amartya Sen’s demonstration that we can argue about seemingly moral propositions which do not turn out to be ultimate ones. For instance the libertarian proposition that people should be allowed to dress as they like might be abandoned if it could be shown that, for instance, green dresses cause cancer in the eye of the beholder. Such considerations may narrow differences. Nevertheless the author is indulging in wishful thinking when he says that human beings find little scope for disagreement about value judgments. Would any amount of philosophy or economics bring together a Taleban enthusiast, a Quaker and a scientific humanist?

The author is also unusual, compared with at least most British writers, in taking seriously the whole corpus of work by libertarian philosophers and economists. In the USA there are enough of these for them to form their own schools and sub-divisions. He is acutely aware that many of his fellow libertarians are highly suspicious of utilitarianism because they suspect that it will subordinate personal freedom to some concept of welfare. The second half of the book can be seen as an attempt to bring the libertarian writers into the utilitarian fold by assuring them that their feared consequences need not occur.

He would be helped in this reconciliation if he were to substitute something like range of choice for happiness. We would then move away from the concept of a happiness meter or the soma pills of Brave New World to the more individualistic idea of maximising individual opportunities. A reconstructed utilitarian who thinks in terms of choice need not be embarrassed by the questionnaire-type evidence that there is little increase in the average level of happiness as national income rises.

Yeager will not take this way out and, despite his stress on freedom, ultimately identifies utility with happiness in a straightforward old-fashioned way. He is not even willing to exclude envy or malice from his utility calculus, relying on the hope they would not figure heavily in realistic policy formulation. If it could be demonstrated that some or all people are bad judges of what will promote their own happiness in the longer run, he would be committed to paternalistic intervention.

Suppose that, at the end of the day, one cannot accept the author’s view that most people are already utilitarians under the skin; or that he has disposed of all the objections to utilitarianism as a complete system, where does one go? The obvious rival is known by the ungainly name of “contractarianism“. Its basis is to inquire what people who are ignorant of their own material position, social standing or other relevant details might agree on as the principles for running their society. This has been christened by John Rawls as the “veil of ignorance“.

Yeager’s main and valid objection is that writers of this school concentrate on armchair inquiries on what it might be reasonable for people to agree under these circumstances. But why not actually conduct controlled experiments and try to find out what people would favour if they can make the effort of imagination to abstract from their own specific circumstances?It is worth, for instance, asking what tax or social security system someone would favour if he or she did not know whether he would be a billionaire or a beggar sleeping in a doorway or anything in between. Such inquiries would not of course establish any objective principles of ethics and public policy, but they would at least introduce an element of disinterestedness.

They might even produce a degree of consensus in western-type societies. Might one dare conjecture that utilitarian principles would be favoured for a large part of law and policy, but subject to certain overrides, for instance in the sphere of personal rights? Meanwhile, for all its shortcomings, the great attraction of utilitarianism is the assertion that laws and policies should be guided by their probable effects on the welfare of individual persons. Any one who thinks this trite or obvious need only reflect on the variety of reasons for which wars have been fought and punishment inflicted. We more often fall short of utilitarianism than we rise above it.