There is so much not to like in this book that I feel like I need to write a well organized essay about it at some point rather than these quick slapdThere is so much not to like in this book that I feel like I need to write a well organized essay about it at some point rather than these quick slapdash notes. But for now all I have are these quick slapdash notes.
That is not to say the entire book is wrong, much of it is right and important--but none of what is right and important is particularly novel, it is in fact common fare on the oped pages of major publications, like inequality has risen, opportunity is not as high as many think, elite colleges do not live up to their stated meritocratic ideals and the increase in non-employment is a problem. At one point it had a novel framing of a familiar issue that I liked--which is the need to focus not just on distributive justice but also on contributive justice, particularly how to do justice to people's contributions. To some degree this was saying work should be in the utility function as a positive--and that we should reshape social attitudes so we think that way about our own work and others work.
But most of the book reads like the sophmoric ranting of a random person on Twitter going on about neoliberalism and globalization without seriously engaging with what either of them actually proposed or their consequences. You would think that Bill Clinton's and Barack Obama's only solution to our economic problems was to hector people into going to college without acknowledging they had much, much more to their agenda than that--including expanding wage subsidies (i.e., the EITC), an idea Sandel mistakenly claims is heterodox and attributes to Oren Cass. (To be clear, Cass has a bigger proposal--but it is reminiscent of Ned Phelps not to mention one that I developed with Phill Swagel, two people Sandel would consider "neoliberal").
Sandel goes on about the financialization of the economy which wastes resources and creates rents, crediting these ideas to heterodox thinkers when he could just have easily have cited leading mainstream economists publishing in leading journals like Jeremy Stein and Thomas Philippon. But then Sandel throws in legitimate issues (e.g., the wasted resources for high-speed trading) with ones where is probably wrong (e.g., objecting to Credit Default Swaps because people do not buy the actual company) and certainly wrong (e.g., objecting to stock buybacks). And, like most of the issues he identifies, he does not have a real solution (he proposes a financial transactions tax which would address a small subset of the issues he raises).
Sandel is completely obsessed with the very elite universities which are a much smaller part of the overall story of what he claims to care about. And he does not address the awkward fact that even if Harvard eliminated legacies, athletics and extracurriculars a pure merit-based admissions would still admit about 10% of students from the top 1%. At the very least this says that a lot of the solution to the issues he is worried about has to happen before students are 17 and apply to college, like preschool, school reform, and then the awkwardness of differential parental inputs and genes. (By the say, like so much else in the book, his discussion of SATs as exacerbating inequalities of opportunity does not seriously engage much of the research that finds the opposite).
Sandel over claims on the proposition that the elevation of a meritocracy means that people are blamed more for their failings today than they were in the past. He argues, "The providentialist notion that people get what they deserve reverberates in contemporary public discourse." He then cites as an example Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on America's sins like abortion, feminism and LGBT. But Falwell was widely reviled for that statement, if anything the reaction to it is the opposite of what Sandel is claiming.
Other anecdotes he offers (and yes, the evidence is almost all anecdotes), go directly against his thesis. He talks about when he was in high school (presumably the late 1960s) and how they sat people in his math class in order of their grades, with a resorting of the seating periodically after new tests. It is impossible to imagine that happening today in the "everyone gets a trophy" world.
Sandel is very negative on just about every consequentialist and person focused on distributive justice (e.g., Rawls is blamed for legitimating wealth and letting the wealthy feel good about themselves for creating jobs and reducing poverty). But then everything comes back to money for him. He talks a lot about "esteem" and "dignity" but for him it really does seem to come down to money. Which is fine, but then admit that distributive justice is an important part of the answer. But also the "common good" and shared project can't just be people discussing philosophy with each other but bonding over sports, Taylor Swift, a shared identity as Americans, and many other aspects of life that bring meaning, purpose, dignity and connection that are outside the economic sphere.
But perhaps what bothered me most was that the book jumbles up positive and normative claims with no clear delineation between them. I could not tell if he had a different moral philosophy than the people he criticizes (in many cases straw mans). Or a different reading of the data. Much of the argument is about Trump being elected means we need to change the way we talk about various issues. If Trump had lost would we have not needed to change? He makes sweeping (and wrong) statements about wages falling in inflation-adjusted terms over fifty years and (possibly wrong) statements like after-tax inequality continuing to rise. If those facts were the opposite would that change his philosophy? I wish I knew because there are some valid and interesting philosophical ideas but they are messily mixed together with a lot more that does not seriously engage with economics, economic policy, or the often messy and subtle facts about the world....more
Joshua Greene, an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher, sets out to “use twenty-first-century science [neuroscience] to vindicateJoshua Greene, an experimental psychologist, neuroscientist and philosopher, sets out to “use twenty-first-century science [neuroscience] to vindicate nineteenth-century moral philosophy [utilitarianism] against its twentieth-century critics [Rawls and other deontological ethicists].” And he succeeds admirably. This book persuasively and creatively tied together several strands of literature that interest me and will have an enduring impact on the way I think about ethical issues.
Greene’s core argument is that humans evolved to be able to cooperate with each other, solving the problem of “me vs. us” (the “Tragedy of the Commons”) but in the process we created a new problem that is increasingly bedeviling us today of “us vs. them” (the “Tragedy of the Commonsense Morality”) where different “tribes” clash not because they are selfish and immoral but instead because they are deeply motivated by their morality to see their tribe as right and the other tribe as wrong. Greene proposes a solution to this which is to use “utilitarianism” as a “metamorality” to adjudicate places where different tribes have fundamental disagreements with each other. Greene grounds his arguments in a combination of critique of traditional deontological philosophical attempts to settle these issues (e.g., Kant and Rawls) along with an understanding of the neuroscience and psychology of how we actually do make decisions.
A little more detail (and most of this is a summary of the book rather than a critique, in part for my own sake):
Greene points out that humans are much better at solving the “tragedy of the commons” or the “prisoner’s dilemma” than a simplistic, selfish economic model would lead you to believe. A combination of moral beliefs, reciprocity, repeated games, willingness to punish, willingness to have asocial punishments of others, etc., can keep us working together. The way we overcome the Tragedy of the Commons is not original to Greene, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for it in the context of the tragedy of the commons and Thomas Schelling in the context of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Greene puts these solutions in the context of our “automatic settings” or quick reactions, that put us in a better position to solve these types of problems.
Part of the solutions to the tragedy of the commons to have a tribal identity which comes with incidental beliefs about what is and is not wrong about a wide range of behavior. This is what gives rise to the tragedy of the commonsense morality where different tribes clash on issues like religion, abortion, LGBT rights, etc. This tragedy can’t be solved by our automatic settings but instead requires us to use our “manual mode” or reason. Greene argues that we all “get” utilitarianism, agree in general, and just need to work together on the facts/analysis so that we can use it in practice.
Greene is scathing on the alternatives to his approach. One is religion/virtue, but this can solve the tragedy of the commons, but is really just elevating one tribe’s moral views and thus can’t solve conflicts between tribes. Another is Kant/Rawls, which Greene argues have failed to actually use reason, are riddled with logical flaws, and instead are just rationalizations of their particular tribe’s moralities. Instead utilitarianism allows one to transcend the limits of one’s tribal views.
Greene defends utilitarianism against the idea that it us overly strong (e.g., requiring us to give up all our money to the least well off) by saying utilitarianism is really “deep pragmatism” and asking people to do something impossible they won’t do is itself not actually utilitarian. And he argues against the idea that it is to weak in not respecting “fundamental right” by pointing out that the reason these rights see so important is that they involve horrible consequences, and that more generally no one actually views the rights as absolute, and that they exacerbate tribal tensions, so appealing to rights is an emotional weapon not a sound argument.
A lot of the argument and analysis of the book also involves empirical psychology, in particular Greene’s studies of various Trolley dilemmas, and trying to learn from how people make moral decisions and infer from this what a workable “deeply pragmatic” moral approach could be.
As an aspiring but highly imperfect and inconsistent utilitarian/consequentialist, I was very happy to see that Greene grounds the approach in 21st century science, makes an argument for its universality, and addresses some of the shortcomings that intuitively bothered me, including the ways in which all of us fail to live up to Peter Singer’s vision of utilitarianism. I also appreciated that while Greene shared a certain amount of the analysis of Jonathan Haidt’s Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, he was much less nihilistic and actually reached a conclusion with more teeth than just that liberals were morally deficient and we should understand each other better.
But I still have a nagging worry that all of this is less reason than rationalization for a particular modern ideology that I happen to like. Moreover, even if it is correct, I’m still not sure that it is as applicable to solving the problem’s of warring tribes as Greene believes when so much of the wars involve different views of happiness, whose happiness and what happiness (e.g., in the case of abortion, does the “happiness” of the fetus count or not? Greene thinks utilitarianism can solve the abortion debates, I’m less sure). But those are nagging suspicions and I don’t think there is a better moral approach. And more important, by grounding this in empirical psychology and neuroscience Greene’s approach holds out the prospect of making further progress. I look forward to seeing it....more
One of the best books I read this year and not one I had been planning to read. I skimmed a few reviews, which were interesting but did not leave me tOne of the best books I read this year and not one I had been planning to read. I skimmed a few reviews, which were interesting but did not leave me thinking that I needed to read the full book. But then I started a sample on a whim and was swept away by the carefully observed descriptions of octopuses (and to a lesser degree cuttlefish) and the use of that as a springboard to discuss evolutionary biology and the philosophy of the mind.
Octopuses are a type of mollusk and, like all invertebrates, branched off from the stream of animals that led to humans enormously long ago--and well before the evolution of central nervous systems, eyes, or much else of any sophistication. But now octopuses have large collections of neurons, rivaling mammals, but they are evolved largely independently of ours. And they have important differences, for example most of their neurons are distributed in their arms rather than collected together in their brain. This leads Peter Godfrey-Smith to speculate about what this says about intelligence and whether we should think of body parts as having their own autonomous intelligences (in the form of reflexes or even higher order thought in octopuses). Some of the interesting speculations are about how humans benefited from the feedback loop between our sensing of our own actions (e.g., we can hear ourselves talk) while octopuses and cuttlefish can make impressive color displays but are themselves colorblind so they do not see their own displays nor do they use them to communicate with others.
Towards the end the book turns poignant as Godfrey-Smith relates how this highly curious and interactive animal, the closest thing to an alien we have on earth, only lives for about two years--much less than anything else its size and intellectual sophistication. This leads into both the evolutionary biology of aging and its link to reproduction and ultimately an homage to the ocean and conservation that is less original than much of the book but powerful for how much he learned about the human mind from swimming on the bottom of the ocean....more
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