Daniel Little — Moral progress and critical realism

Critical realists share a rejection of the fact-value distinction as a fundamental criterion of scientific rationality -- and rightly so (link). They believe that social research and theorizing involve value commitments all the way down. Further, they commonly believe that good social science should lead to improvement in the world and in our system of moral judgments.

So far, so good. But some critical realists think that this points to "moral realism" as well as scientific realism. Moral realism maintains that there are objective and timeless answers to the questions, what is justice? what should we do? what rights do people have? Moral realists hold that the moral facts are out there and waiting for discovery; there is a domain of "moral facts" that ultimately goes beyond the limits of rational disagreement.

This impulse towards moral realism is a problem. Moral realism and scientific realism are not analogous. There is no philosophical or theological method that will resolve moral questions into an unquestionable foundation or set of universal moral truths. Neither Kantianism, nor Aristotelianism, nor utilitarianism, nor traditional religious systems have the capacity to establish universal and unquestionable moral conclusions. The impulse towards moral realism has the perilous possibility of morphing into a dogmatic view of morality that substitutes one's own convictions for eternal moral truths. In my view, this is farfetched and ultimately implies an unreflective dogmatism about values. Fortunately there is a better and more modest position available that drives from the same pragmatist origins that are inspiring other advances in critical realism....

Understanding Society
Moral progress and critical realism
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Scotty Hendricks — Beyond the Welfare State: John Rawls and the Property Owning Democracy

Brief explanation of the political theory of John Rawls based on fairness.

Big Think
Beyond the Welfare State: John Rawls and the Property Owning Democracy
Scotty Hendricks

Branko Milanovic — The forthcoming changes in capitalism? and Time to ditch Rawls?

Two from Branko.

Global Inequality
The forthcoming changes in capitalism?

Time to ditch Rawls?
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Branko Milanovic — In defense of equality (without welfare economics)

Important in the current debate about policy, political economy and politics with respect to the rising significance of economic (income and wealth) distribution.

Global Inequality
In defense of equality (without welfare economics)
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Eric Schliesser — The Failure of Human Rights and Democratic Faith

To understand the political background of the refugee crisis, we must turn our gaze elsewhere; in fact, in the opposite direction. The crisis at hand confronts us with a predicament of modern political thought — modern liberalism even. It is a problem that we have successfully repressed but that now returns with a vengeance, namely the inadequacy of the lingo of human rights.…

Foundations of liberal social and political theory.

Digressions&Impressions
The Failure of Human Rights and Democratic Faith
Eric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

Edward Martin And Mateo Pimentel — The Inadequacies of Liberalism: The Centrality of Socio-Economic rights for Marxism and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition

Weekend reading.

Counterpunch
The Inadequacies of Liberalism – The Centrality of Socio-Economic rights for Marxism and the Catholic Social Justice Tradition
Edward Martin And Mateo Pimentel

Edward Martin is Professor of Public Policy and Administration, Graduate Center for Public Policy and Administration at California State University, Long Beach, and co-author of Savage State: Welfare Capitalism and Inequality.

Mateo Pimentel lives on the Mexican-US border. You can follow him on Twitter @mateo_pimentel, or read more at www.guerrillaprose.info.

Eric Schliesser — The Technocratic Conception of Politics (The Economists and Rawls redux)

By a 'technocratic conception of politics,' (recall) I mean to capture the following three features of an enduringimage of politics present in (social) science:

first, it is characterized by the ideal that with social knowledge and its progress, substantial political disagreement can be eliminated.… 

…second, this ideal of conflict-free politics presupposes … considerable value-unanimity in society.… 

Third, the conception requires an image of science in which one of the central aims of policy scientists is to achieve consensus (or lack of disagreement).

In short, this is the assumption of the possibility of achieving a universally true conceptual model free of the cognitive-volitional-affective-sensory biases of ideology. This assumption is based on a level of symmetry that evidence does not support.

The assumption of universalizability of knowledge is grounded in an assumption of methodological individualism, namely, that human individuals are "atomic" in the sense of "rational" human behavior being capable of being modeled in terms of a representative agent. What this type of thinking leads to is generalization from introspection on the part of theorists, assuming lack of bias even admitting bounded rationality: Rational individuals will come to the same conclusion based on the same information. This assumes away ideological bias, as well as the logical problems associated with criteria being foundational to the construction of different world views and ideologies.

There's also a link to download Kenneth Boulding's Economics as a Moral Science.

Digressions&Impressions

The Technocratic Conception of Politics (The Economists and Rawls redux)

Eric Schliesser | BOF Research Professor in Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Sarton Centre for History of Science, Ghent University, Belgium

Daniel Little — Basic social institutions and democratic equality [John Rawls and James Meade meet Piketty]

We would like to think that it is possible for a society to embody basic institutions that work to preserve and enhance the wellbeing of all members of society in a fair way. We want social institutions to be beneficent (producing good outcomes for everyone), and we want them to be fair (treating all individuals and groups with equal consideration; creating comparable opportunities for everyone). There is a particularly fundamental component of liberal optimism that holds that the institutions of a market-based democracy accomplish both goals. Economic liberals maintain that the economic institutions of the market create efficient allocations of resources across activities, permitting the highest level of average wellbeing. Free public education permits all persons to develop their talents. And the political institutions of electoral democracy permit all groups to express and defend their interests in the arena of government and law.

But social critics cast doubt on all parts of this story, based on the role played by social inequalities within both sets of institutions. The market embodies and reproduces a set of economic inequalities that result in grave inequalities of wellbeing for different groups. Economic and social inequalities influence the quality of education available to young people. And electoral democracy permits the grossly disproportionate influence of wealth holders relative to other groups in society. So instead of reducing inequalities among citizens, these basic institutions seem to amplify them. ...

So how should progressives think about a better future for our country and our world? What institutional arrangements might do a better job of ensuring greater economic justice and political legitimacy in the next fifty years in this country and other democracies of western Europe and North America?

Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson’s recent collection, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyondcontains an excellent range of reflections on this set of problems, centered around the idea of a property-owning democracy that is articulated within John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice....

One thing that is striking about the discussions that recur throughout the essays in this volume is the important relationship they seem to have to Thomas Piketty’s arguments about rising inequalities in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty presents rising inequality as almost unavoidable; whereas the advocates for a property-owning democracy offer a vision of the future in which inequalities of assets are narrowed. The dissonance disappears, however, when we consider the possibility that the institutional arrangements of POD are in fact a powerful antidote to the economic imperatives identified by Piketty....

Two questions arise with respect to any political philosophy: is the end-state that it describes a genuinely desirable outcome; and is there a feasible path by which we can get from here to there? One might argue that POD is an appealing end-state; and yet it is an outcome that is virtually impossible to achieve within modern political and economic institutions. (Here is an earlier discussion of this idea; link.) These contributors give at least a moderate level of reason to believe that a progressive foundation for democratic action is available that may provide an effective counterweight to the conservative rhetoric that has dominated the scene for decades.

Understanding Society
Basic social institutions and democratic equality
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Chris Dillow — Meritocracy, Mobility & Fairness

There's one point Greg Clark makes in The Son Also Rises which strikes me as plain wrong. It's this:

The world is a much fairer place than we intuit. Innate talent, not inherited privilege, is the main source of economic success (p14).

The problem here isn't merely that, as Rawls said, talent is arbitrary from a moral point of view and so should not be the basis for unequal incomes. (In fairness, Clark endorses this view). Instead, it's that a strong correlation between talent - innate or not - and economic success is no indicator of a just society....

Stumbling and Mumbling
Meritocracy, Mobility & Fairness
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle

Chris Bertram — Teaching Rawls after Piketty

Weekend Reading:

I’ll permit myself to share a few thoughts that I had about the way in which reading Piketty might impact on teaching political philosophy, and, specifically, teaching Rawls and the difference principle.

A Theory of Justice came out in 1971 and was composed during the period the French call the trente glorieuses . During that period it was easy to believe that the power of inherited wealth had melted away and that we were living in a new era of more equal opportunity, with careers open to talents and income inequalities largely explained by the differences in talent and ability that the parties in the original position were denied knowledge of. To be sure, 1960s America (like 1960s Europe) hadn’t accomplished that social-democratic meritocratic ideal, but it was kind of visible in embryo, waiting to be born. Rawls’s book took us way beyond that, challenging the glib assumptions about desert that the winners flattered themselves with, but in its toleration of some inequality for the greater good (and particularly for the benefit of the least advantaged), Rawls’s view was recognizably connected to a then-emerging social reality.

Today things look very different. What we thought would be normal—widely spread prosperity, reduced income inequality, and constant growth—has been replaced by the world of the 1 per cent (indeed of the 1 per cent of the 1 per cent). Accumulated wealth and capital ownership in the hands of the few, which never completely went away but retreated into the shadows, is back and (if Piketty is right), threatens to subject us all to the dominance of a new rentier class if we don’t do something pretty drastic fairly soon.

I suspect, though, that the teaching of Rawls hasn’t really moved on in the light of the new social reality.

Crooked Timber

Teaching Rawls after Piketty
Chris Bertram

Lynne Kiesling — “Free Market Fairness” and self-authorship

John [Tomasi]’s project is laudable — rediscover and synthesize common ethical ground between the two dominant branches of classical liberal thought. Roughly speaking, the bifurcation into what John labels “libertarianism” and “high liberalism” arose out of John Stuart Mill’s argument for the treatment of economic liberty as less essential than other civil liberties.

Thus the two branches of thought bifurcate from the classical liberalism tree trunk: modern libertarianism, which prioritizes property rights and economic liberty as foundational to all other civil liberties (e.g., Rothbard), and high liberalism, which picks up Mill’s moral demotion of economic liberty and builds upon it to justify a substantial government apparatus for regulation and intervention in the private economic decisions of individuals, with the stated objective of designing a social system that will generate benefit particularly for the least advantaged in society (Rawls’ operationalization of the maximin principle).

Read it at Knowledge Problem | Commentary on Economics, Information, and Human Action
“Free Market Fairness” and self-authorship
Lynne Kiesling | Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. At Northwestern she is also a Faculty Member in the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and a Faculty Affiliate in the Center for the Study of Industrial Organization (CSIO)

Most provocative paragraph:

Ironically, actually, one justification often offered for this regulatory system is to maintain uniform treatment of residential customers in a way that will ensure that prices stay low and stable for “vulnerable” consumers such as elderly and low-income consumers; this justification sounds Rawlsian. But it also does constrain the self-authorship of other consumers, producers, and innovators in ways that may make them worse off, and moreover, if those others were allowed choice and freedom of expression through their technology and energy consumption decisions, they may bring about a world in which new products and services actually drive down costs or create unanticipated value that could benefit those vulnerable consumers. Is that tradeoff worth it, ethically or economically?

What is questionable here is the "may." Evidence seems to point in the direction of the most vulnerable becoming worse off through deregulation initially with out some countervailing action like a subsidy.

What is the evidence that they "may" be benefited in the long run. What does that mean exactly? What are the social costs in the meanwhile even if it does transpire some time out? Is there a realistic estimate of a time frame? What evidence is it based on?

The basic contention between Libertarianism and Liberalism revolves around this issue. Libertarians claim that government intervention is less efficient than "economic freedom" and that given a chance laissez-faire will also be more effective at meeting social goals. Liberals are skeptical of the claim based the objection that they see little evidence for it, and much more evidence of abuse, so they suspect it is based more on ideological preference stemming from norms than on factual analysis.

John Rawls on capitalism and democracy

John Rawls's critique of capitalism was deeper than has been commonly recognized -- this is a central thrust of quite a bit of important recent work on Rawls's theory of justice. Much of this recent discussion focuses on Rawls's idea of a "property-owning democracy" as an alternative to both laissez-faire and welfare-state capitalism. This more disruptive reading of Rawls is especially important today, forty years later, given the great degree to which wealth stratification has increased and the political influence of wealth has mushroomed. (I've addressed this set of issues in prior posts; link, link.) Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson's recent volume, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, provides an excellent and detailed discussion of the many dimensions of this idea and its relevance to the capitalism we experience in 2012. It includes contributions by a number of important younger political philosophers. 

O'Neill and Williamson make the point in their introduction that this issue is not merely of interest within academic philosophy. It also provides a powerful conceptual and normative system that might serve as a basis for a more successful version of progressive politics in North America and the UK. Politicians on the left have found themselves locked into a defensive battle trying to preserve some of the features of welfare state capitalism -- usually unsuccessfully. The arguments underlying the idea of a property owning democracy have the potential for resetting practical policy and political debates on more defensible terrain.

Read the rest at Understanding Society (short)
Rawls on a property-owning democracy

by Daniel Little

Rick Bookstaber on Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest, and Income Inequality

We are seeing the specter of instability in the growing protests of income inequality, economic distress of the middle class, and economic and political power of the very wealthy. There is Occupy Wall Street in the U.S., and similar protests ranging across the globe. In parts of Europe there is rioting in the streets, in parts of China protests have turned deadly.

Rick Bookstaber on Occupy Wall Street, Social Unrest, and Income Inequality

If you are not familiar with him, Rick Bookstaber is a very intelligent and erudite person with an extremely impressive background in both finance and marital arts (Brazilian (Gracie) Jiu Jitsu). He blogs somewhat occasionally at RickBookstaber.com.

Bruce Judson asks who the real capitalists are

You are a visitor from a foreign country or an alien world with no knowledge of Wall Street or capitalism. Then the principles of capitalism are explained to you and you are asked to identify the capitalists in this confrontation: the people in the buildings or the people congregating on the street. Which would you choose?

Read the whole post, The Kids Camping on Wall Street Are The Capitalists, Not the People in the Buildings, by Bruce Judson at New Deal 2.0

Bruce Judson is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and a former Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management.