Today we're going to concern ourselves with the transition from classical utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham, which we've been discussing, to the neoclassical doctrine of utilitarianism that we're going to attend to through the lens of the works of John Stuart Mill, the 19 century British political theorist. But what we're going to do today is talk about the, the larger intellectual context within that transition occurred. So we won't in fact get to Mill himself, until next time. Instead we're going to talk about the, the philosophical background through the lens of looking at, at David Hume. The logical positivists, of whom the most famous was A.J. Ayer or Sir Freddie Ayer, as he was called. And, an American philosopher by the name of Charles Stevenson. And then also, at the economic background, through the lens of the works of Vilfredo Pareto and Francis Edgeworth. And this will set the background, will need that to make a central sense of male's argument next time. So to some degree I need you to take me on trust today. Because you'll have some trouble joining the dots for yourself and seeing how this all fits together. But I think by the end of, of today's session and certainly by the end of next time's, class, all of the pieces of the puzzle will have fit together. and, a side benefit is I think you will be able to learn everything you need to know about neoclassical economics in two lectures. So but before we get into all of this, let's just recap a little bit about what we ended on last time. Particularly, I'm thinking here of the distributive radicalism of classical utilitarianism. You'll recall that where we ended up was that Bentham recognized that if you both allow, interpersonal comparisons of utility. And, affirm the idea of diminishing marginal utility, you suddenly have a very radically redistributive doctrine on your hands because, if you take a dollar from a wealthy person and give it to a pauper, the pauper gains much more utility than the wealthy person loses. And you would do, do it and you would do the next dollar and the next dollar and the next dollar, until you reached and egalitarian society. This is obviously a doctrine which was frightening to rich men of which there were many who were also powerful men in Britain in the 18th and 19th century. And Bentham though he was quite radical, certainly didn't want to go all the way there. So he came up with a way out. Can you tell us what that was? >> that you should basically, equalize the game without really shrinking the pie of the rich. >> Equalize to the point where the pie doesn't begin to shrink. This was his distinction between absolute and practical equality. But what would make it shrink? Why would the pie shrink? >> Because the reach with protest, how far, what extent they could be deprived from their wealth. >> Right, so in the limiting case we said the, the rich would burn their crops before giving them to the poor. The way people put it more, more less dramatically is to say that the more you tax the rich the less incentive they have to work, and the less that they work the less there is for everybody to share. So that if you redistribute beyond a certain point it becomes self-defeat, defeating from the point of the view of helping the people at the bottom, and that was essentially Bentham's way out. But what's the problem with that? You see a problem with that? >> I don't, I don't know what you mean. >> Gary, it's a problem because how far you can go. Right, where is the line? >> How would you know when you reached that point? >> Yeah. >> Right, how would you know, for example I asked you last time in South Africa during the run up to the transition from apartheid to modern democracy. Many people said, that there's no way the white minority will give up their property and their wealth to the possibility of redistribution from the black majority. In fact, though, they did give up that possibility. And so, another way of thinking about the problem with Bentham's way out is that you won't really know what the point is until you reach it where the redistribution becomes self-defeating. And of course, the rich will always an incentive to say, if you tax us one more nickel, the pie's going to start shrinking. Whereas the poor are going to say, oh nonsense, there's plenty of room to tax them without them feeling the pain. And so you're going to get this kind of messy debate about the macroeconomic effects of redistribution, to which there's no obvious answer. And because so many other things affect the size of the economic pie. It's going to be impossible to get a clear cut definitive answer to that question. And instead, distributive policy is going to become mired, in big macroeconomic debates, about what it is that effects the size of the pie and where, just where this elusive line between practical and absolute equality actually lies. So one of the important implications of the Neoclassical alternative is that it take's all those messy macroeconomic debates off the table. Because the transition to Neoclassical economics puts distributive questions under a very different analytical lens. And one of the things we're going to need to understand is how that works. Now, I should say that when we get into some of these debates, there are some technical concepts and it's possible that, I will go through them too quickly. And if I do that you should stop me and get me to go through them again. Because if, if you don't follow it, it's probably likely that somebody else doesn't follow it as well. And they'll actually be grateful to you for having stopped me and, and made me go over it again. But first, we're going to tend to philosophy, before we get to the economics. And we're going to look at the work of David Hume in his famous treaties on Human Nature, and in particular what he had to say about how we make moral judgments based on a scientific theory of human beings. Hume was famous for the proposition that we cannot derive statements about what ought to be the case from statements about what is the case. You can't derive an ought from an is, otherwise known as the fact/value problem by moral philosophists. And here's Hume's famous formulation of that he says, in every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I've always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when all of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or ought not. This change is imperceptible, but it is however, of the last consequence. By which he means, of the greatest consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation. It is necessary that it should be observed and explained and at the same time that a reason should be given for what seems altogether inconceivable. How this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it. So he's saying, people talk about what is the case, they give their theories about how things work in the world, and suddenly I discover they're talking about what ought to be the case. You'll remember when we, we talked about Bentham, for example, in the very beginning he says, the principle of utility both describes how people do act and how they ought to act. Hume says, wait a minute. How do you get from is to ought? I don't get it. You can talk until the end of time about what is the case and it entails nothing about what ought to be the case. Now, you might think that this would be troubling to Hume, because it seems to make the foundations of morality very shaky. But, he thought, not really because people are so much alike, that pretty much what one person's going to like is going to be the same as what other people are going to like. And you're not going to have this problem, actually rear its head very often in actual life. So in fact, at on point, echoing the, the optimism of the scientific enlightenment he says, if all factual disagreements were resolved, no moral disagreements would remain. So in other words, the fact/value gulf is there, it's real, but it doesn't really matter. Because most of the time the judgments that we make about what's good for one person are going to be good for everybody else, and what's bad for one person are going to be bad for everybody else. And indeed, Hume himself was a utilitarian and developed a scheme that wasn't that different from the classical doctrines of utilitarianism. But just as Hume said wait a minute when confronted with the Benthamite crossing of this gap, between is and ought so did a 20th century American moral philosopher by the name of Carl Stevenson say wait a minute when confronted with Hume's proposition that actually these differences don't matter very much. People are pretty similar, and what one person likes the next person is going to like as well. And Stevenson said, how do you know? How do you know. That what one person likes, is going to be the same as what the next person likes. And I should say here that, that Stevenson is writing in the wake of a philosophical movement, that came to be known as logical positivism. And it was most famously associated with Sir Freddie Ayer. He became Sir Freddie Ayer much later. Sir Freddie Ayer in the picture down in the left hand corner but as a brilliant young philosopher at Cambridge in, in, in, the early part of the century, he, he developed the notion that there are only three kinds of assertions. There are analytical truths, there are empirical truths, and everything else is meaningless nonsense. >> Isn't that very different from earlier, earlier Enlightenment thought? >> Yes. Very good question. So if you think back to when we were talking about the early Enlightenment thinkers. They distinguished propositions set with the product of a human will from propositions that were not. And if you remember, Hobbes said that the propositions like the sum of the interior of the angles of a triangle add up to 180, is the same as propositions about the commonwealth. Because we make the triangle and we make the commonwealth, whereas empirical things, we can only guess about the causes. So it was the real dependent notion of certainty, right? The logical positivists have a very different view. They say, on the one hand there are analytic truths. Things that follow by definition. Such as the sum of the interior angles add up to 180, or a bachelor's a unmarried man. We don't rely on any part of empirical experience to decide whether they're true or false. We just say they must be true because they follow definitionally. In math, there's a theorem. Empirical truths are propositions about which we observe. And they are studied with the methods of science for the point of view of erring the logical positivus, everything else is claptrap. Everything else, Ayer said at one point, should be thrown into the trash can of metaphysics. There is nothing, beyond analytic truths and empirical truths. So most importantly, what is banished is all moral propositions, all normative propositions, all propositions about what ought to be the case. And this was this central assertion of the logical positivist with Herr as one of their champions in the early part of the century. A footnote to this that's worth having is that we should distinguish logical positivism. Which I've just explained from a doctrine called Legal Positivism, which says that the only kind of law that's worth talking about is the law that actually exists in the world. And I'll come back to that doctrine later, but I don't want you to confuse it with logical positivism. So we're talking about logical positivism, not legal positivism. So back to Stevenson. Stevenson, says what is ethics? And he's got all this air floating around in the back of his head, the logical positivists, saying they're, it's not an analytic truth, it's not a, it's not a, an empirical truth. What is it? It's basically moral arguments are exercises in what equaled persuasive definition. When I say to you murder is wrong, I'm trying to get you to agree with my antipathy for murder. When I say to you, redistribution to the poor is good, I'm trying to get you to agree with my feeling. That redistribution to the poor is good, and I might, I might draw heart-wrenching pictures of the poor. I might describe their terrible conditions, but it's all basically to, to move you emotionally. There is no rational argument, and there's no scientific proof to convince you, that taking care of the poor is a good thing. There's no theorem, and there's no way you can get from descriptive assertions about the condition of the poor to anything that would actually entail in any scientific sense that we should take care of them. And this is why one of Stevenson's critics called it the hurrah/boo theory of morality. You say hurrah for the things you like. You say boo for the things you hate. And you try to get people to cheer with you and boo with you. But there's nothing more to moral philosophy than that. It all comes down basically to kind of screaming yahoos trying to get others to scream with them. And there is nothing more to ethics than that. Now interestingly although Stevenson is probably one of the most influential moral philosophers of the 20th century. I think if you asked any, any philosopher to list say the two or three most important moral philosophers of the 20th century, Stevenson would be one of them. In fact it cost him his job in the Yale philosophy department. He was denied tenure, on the grounds that this was such an obnoxious moral doctrine that he couldn't be tolerated a, at the university. So that, that's how visceral our reaction, in that the Yale Corporation had, they said boo with a big B. To his yah, you, his, yah boo theory of morality. but, to, to sum it up, Stevenson's emotivism. He accepted Hume on the fact/value distinction, but he did it with a cherry on top. He said yes that you can't arrive values from facts. But no, David Hume, you don't have any way of knowing that people are basically alike. So maybe the fact value gap is really important. He says, if there were nothing for which all or most informed people would have similar approbation, that saying yay. People being temperamentally different in some respect, then nothing would be a virtue and nothing would be a vice. So as I said, just as Hume questioned Bentham's ignoring of the fact value problem, Stevenson question's Hume's assertion, that it doesn't matter very much because people are similar, saying how do you really know? So another way of thinking about this is that, Stevenson says, no interpersonal comparisons of utility. So this is a huge departure from Bentham. Who said interpersonal comparisons of utility are fine. Hume says their not really fine but why worry? Nothing really turns on them. Stevenson says maybe a lot turns on them, right? And so this should call to mind this should call to mind the Eichmann problem. Because we're now back in this world in which somebody might say how can you judge Eichmann? Right, or we're saying boo to Eichmann. Maybe if the, if the Germans had won World War II. People would be saying yay to Eichmann, right? So it seems radically to threaten to our capacity to make moral judgments of any sort. So that's the important set of development in moral philosophy, that informs the transition from classical to neoclassical utilitarianism.
