Moral Sciences and Political Economy
Some Remarks on David Schmidtz’s book “Living Together” (Oxford University Press, 2023)
Within the broad and complex liberal tradition of philosophical and political thought, a relatively recent “school” or, at least, research program has been developing at a significant pace. This research program is sometimes labeled “neoclassical liberalism” and is strongly associated with the University of Arizona. It has at least two characteristics that distinguish it from the “classical” brand of liberalism. First, on top of the usual considerations about the limitations of political power and the emphasis on market mechanisms as the best way to allocate resources and deal with the dispersion of knowledge in society, neoclassical liberals tend to argue for the normative importance of social justice issues. That makes neoclassical liberalism related to, if not identical with so-called “bleeding heart libertarianism”. Contrary to the Hayekian brand of classical liberalism, for instance, neoclassical liberals will not dismiss concerns of justice as being misguided or illusory.
The second characteristic is more methodological and concerns the way of doing political philosophy in relation to social sciences. Neoclassical liberalism promotes an observation-based and facts-sensitive political philosophy and emphasizes the need to rely on the methods and models of social sciences – especially economics – to complement standard philosophical analytical reasoning. The conjunction of these two characteristics results in a very distinctive approach to political philosophy, consisting of a qualified defense of most of the ideas of classical liberalism with a sensitivity toward justice issues and a systematic appeal to social sciences models and results.
Though he does not revendicate any belonging to a particular school of thought, David Schmidtz develops in his recent book Living Together: Inventing Moral Science an account of the “science of morals” that is largely representative of neoclassical liberalism.[1] Though now holding a chair of moral science at West Virginia University, Schmidtz has been a professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona, where he was the head of the Department of political economy and moral science. Unsurprisingly, many of the ideas pushed forward in this book echo those developed by some of Schmidtz’s former colleagues, especially Gerald Gaus.
Schmidtz’s book is organized based on a central idea around which a small number of these are developed. The central idea can be formulated as follows: rather than looking for ultimate principles about how to live, moral and political philosophers should focus their attention on what works for people whose priority is to find ways to make life together possible. In other words, Schmidtz calls for a return to the idea of moral science as it was conceived by the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular by Adam Smith and David Hume. From this central idea, Schmidtz makes a number of claims about the nature of justice and how to inquire into it. I would list these as the most important: i) peace is at least as important as justice for the justification of political principles and institutions; ii) you cannot think of ideal principles of justice without reflecting on the features of reality, especially with respect to the conditions under which people are likely to comply or not; iii) justice is not a “peak” to climb out, a just society is one that avoids “pits” of obvious injustices; iv) limiting political power is the function of the constitutional part of constitutional democracy, and the best way to limit power is to disperse it by giving people exit options, i.e., the “right to say no”; v) property rights are what give people the right to say no; vi) cost-benefit analysis is an important component of the toolbox of moral sciences; vii) the ability to deal with strangers is the distinctive capacity that puts homo sapiens, a capacity that we should continue to cultivate.
What emerges from this set of claims is what I would call a realist and negative conception of justice. The realist part is relatively obvious and is tightly related to the core idea that the goal of moral sciences is to look for “what works” for people. We could summarize the realist aspect by a simple motto: “incentive-compatibility matters”. There is no social practice that is not incentive-compatible. By definition, if a practice is observed within a population of agents whose behavior is rational in the minimal sense that it responds at the margin to changes in opportunity costs, that means that this practice is consistent with the agents’ preferences. In other words, except for short-term disturbances, the behavioral patterns that with observe in a population are equilibria: each agent is properly incentivized to act as they do, given the ends they pursue and what they believe about others’ behavior. This puts a fundamental constraint on the kind of justice principles that can be implemented. This is obviously relevant to the old ideal/non-ideal theory debate. Schmidtz’s original – and maybe contentious – claim here is that even in the perspective of ideal theory, identifying the ideal necessitates acknowledging how people would respond to principles of justice.[2]
The negative part is well illustrated by Schmidtz’s rejection of the metaphorical view of justice as a peak to climb. Schmidtz prefers another metaphor: justice consists in avoiding pits in which we could fall. These pits consist of blatant injustices putting part of the population under the domination of others or in miserable situations that cannot be reasonably justified. We should not hope for more however than avoiding these pits. As Schmidtz puts it, “[j]ustice is not a property so much as an absence of properties that make for injustice.”[3] This negative conception of justice echoes in some ways the “liberalism of fear” theorized by Judith Shklar and which is sometimes associated with figures of 20th-century liberalism like Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper.[4] It is an integral part of a broader naturalistic project: given what we know about human nature, can we identify ways through which individuals solve their conflicts and coordinate such that no obvious injustices remain? There is no claim that these ways are ideal or the “best”. They just work well enough given the circumstances.
Schmidtz’s take on the role of cost-benefit analysis in this general account of moral sciences is one of the most interesting contributions of the book. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is as pervasive in policymaking as it has a bad reputation among non-economists who are not policymakers. It goes for CBA as it goes for many other economists’ practices: its bad reputation is not completely unjustified, as it results from misapplications and the naïve belief that one tool is enough to solve all kinds of problems. On the other hand, the critics of CBA are also making caricatural and poorly informed claims about a practice that they don’t necessarily understand well. A great example that I’ve discussed recently is the idea that the fact values are incommensurable makes CBA irrelevant or even mistaken. Schmidtz offers a careful answer to this and other criticisms of this kind. First, whatever one’s opinion about the incommensurability of values, it is a fact of life that (individual and social) choices have to be made. Incommensurate values or options can be the starting point, but in many cases, we don’t have the luxury to remain in this agnostic state of affairs. Values and options must be made commensurate and for that we need tools. CBA is one of those tools and unless it is demonstrated that it is systematically inferior to other tools available, it cannot be fully dispensed with.
Schmidtz nonetheless rightly emphasizes that this point doesn’t license a widespread and unreflective use of CBA. It would be foolish to deny that CBA, like any tool, is morally biased in the sense that it steers the analysis in some directions. For instance, a well-known bias of CBA is that it gives more weight to individuals with a higher willingness to pay, the latter being directly determined by individuals’ real income and wealth. CBA is relevant in those cases where we judge that this kind of bias is not problematical or can be easily neutralized. In other words, using CBA is warranted if the problem we try to solve can be answered by the kind of answer that CBA will give (which option maximizes monetary value). Here again, Schmidtz defends what I would call a “negative” approach to CBA within moral sciences: making sure that we don’t make obviously bad or inferior collective decisions that affect their situations and moreover often infringe on their property rights. Used in this perspective, CBA is perfectly compatible with the fundamental demand of respecting persons that is at the core of liberalism.
Not everyone will be satisfied with this realist and negative conception of moral and political philosophy and its methodological subordination to social sciences. More than the fact of giving up any goal of achieving an ideal (even if partially indeterminate) conception of justice, the idea that political philosophy should be focused on identifying “what works” may be criticized for being naively empiricist and naturalist. How to identify what works without theoretical and normative precommitments about what is acceptable, good, or right? There must be at least a conception of the person lurking in the background. And what about forms of injustices that cannot be reduced obvious relations of domination or blatant states of misery and suffering? While these are well-founded concerns, I don’t think that they present a real problem to Schmidtz’s account of moral sciences and to “neoclassical liberalism” more generally. More importantly, the more modest but still ambitious goal of this version of liberalism to identify ways of living together must be put in the current context of cultural fragmentation, political division, and economic tensions. The emergency today is not to convince everyone of how the ideal society would look like. It is to make a strong case that in spite of many differences and fears about the future, it is in our individual and common interests to live in a free society.
[1] David Schmidtz, Living Together: Inventing Moral Science (New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press Inc, 2023).
[2] See p. 73 in particular.
[3] P. 81.
[4] Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On `Cold War Liberalism’,” European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (2008): 45–64.