Atheist Ethicist

A part of recent discussion where I suggested demanding that the executives of these companies getting government assistance join the unemployed generated the following response:

By what right should they be removed from their jobs? The government has no right to remove them–they have committed no crime (it should also be noted that the government should not be bailing them out either. We the people don’t have that right–the company does not belong to us, so how it is run and who is allowed to work there is none of our legal or moral concern. The only people with the right to fire the CEO are the people on the board (as well as anyone else the CEO answers too, depending on the company charter).

These “rights” that people allegedly have or do not have are supposed to provide reasons for action for doing or not doing particular types of actions. The question then comes up: What are these rights? Are they real or are they just made up? If they are real, how can they possibly exist as “reasons for action”?

I have discussed the issue of rights in the abstract recently. However, I thought it would e useful to look at a specific case.

The problem that I have with rights is that, on one sense in which they are widely used, they do not exist. This is the form that says that a “right” is a reason to engage in or forbear in some action that is built directly into that action. This property is at least as mysterious as any God. When I look for a right I want to see something real. Either that, or the person who claims that some “right” provides a reason for me to perform or refrain from performing some activity is simply making a false statement.

Then one confronts a dichotomy – if rights do not exist, then people may do anything without moral constraints. Nothing a person can do can violate a right if there are no rights to violate.

It is the same as the argument that nothing one can do can offend a God if there is no God to offend.

Yet, the claim that rights in this sense do not exist . . . just like the claim that God does not exist . . . is not the same as the claim that reasons to engage in or refrain from certain actions do not exist. Reasons to engage in or refrain from actions certainly do exist. They are very real. Consider the reasons that exist for keeping one’s hand out of a hot flame, or reasons for action to eat, or reasons for action to turn up the heat on a cold winter night.

The argument that people too often make, “Either this moral entity exists or reasons for action do not exist,” is absurd on its face. It is a ploy, really, to manipulate people into accepting the claim ‘this moral entity exists’ because the opposite is too absurd to accept.

If we look at reasons for action that exist, then what reasons for action exist for keeping the executives who have driven their companies into the ground in power – or for refraining from actions that will remove such people and replace them with a better track record for running companies well?

This, ultimately, is the question to be asked or answered.

Now, we do, in fact, have good reason to promote an aversion to governments hiring or firing business executives at will. The main argument for such an aversion is that politicians will then award lucrative positions to their political supporters and terminate their political rivals. We can well imagine what politics would be like if Presidential candidates not only got to appoint cabinet secretaries and judges, but also gets to appoint the executives in Fortune 500 companies.

Imagine if Bush had such power.

It makes perfectly good sense to speak of this prohibition on - this promotion of an aversion to - governments dictating the leadership of major companies in terms of “rights”. It makes perfectly good sense to say that government has no right to dictate who will lead private companies, and that the companies themselves retain this right.

Only, when we look at the reasons for action that back these rights we find them not in God’s will or an intrinsic property of “ought to be doneness”. We find the reasons for action in desires - in the many and strong desire-based reasons for action people have not to create a society where political figures have this power.

A recent discussion among a couple members of the studio audience touched briefly on the question of what it takes for something to count as punishment.

Specifically, it touched on the question of whether taxation can be properly classified as punishment.

The discussion merely grazed the surface of this question, then ricocheted off. However, I have heard the statement a number of times – particularly by libertarians (a tribe in which I was once a member).

Furthermore, this is a blog that suggests that the institution of morality is (or should be) the application of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote good desires and inhibit bad desires. It would be useful to say a few things about what punishment is.

Punishment involves intentionally doing harm to somebody. In other words, the act of punishment seeks to create a state of affairs in which the desires of others (those who are being punished) are deliberately thwarted. The thwarting of the desires of others is not a side-effect of punishment, it is a part of the purpose of punishment.

Furthermore . . . and this is the part that those who misuse the concept of punishment often miss . . . punishment is a statement of condemnation. To punish somebody is to insult them, to put them down, to condemn them, to assert in clear language that the person being punished is somebody who deserves punishment.

On the question of whether taxation is punishment – taxation does not qualify.

First, it is not clear that the act of taxation is an act that aims to do harm to those who are taxed. Ultimately, taxation aims to provide people with benefits. It aims to provide them with goods and services – such as national defense, a police and court system, a fire department, an educated population, an infrastructure, medical care, retirement benefits, and the like, none of which count as deliberately causing harm to the individual taxed.

The benefits do not always match the costs. Some people obtain in terms of benefits more than they pay in terms of taxes, and some people pay more in terms of taxes than they get in terms of benefits. However, the aim of taxation is not to do harm.

More importantly, a tax form is not a statement of condemnation.

I just finished paying my taxes today. There is absolutely no sense (except in the minds of certain individuals) that the tax bill I received came with a statement of condemnation for the moral crime of earning a salary.

Meaning, by the way, is a matter of linguistic convention. We can assign the meaning of condemnation to just about anything. We can define it into a hand gesture, or into an act such as the act of hitting the poster of an individual with a shoe. It is quite possible that we can attach a statement of condemnation to the act of giving a person a bill. However, when we do this, we tend to call the demand for money a “fine”, not a “tax”.

In fact, the very quality that distinguishes a fine from a tax is the fact that the fine carries with it the meaning, “Your act is to be condemned, and you are to be condemned for being somebody who could perform an act like that.”

Even penalties in a game carry a statement of condemnation. If a quarterback in a football game is sacked, the team may lose five yards. Yet, this is not considered a penalty. This is simply a loss.

However, when the referee moves the ball back five yards because a team member has been caught breaking the rules, a loss becomes a penalty. It contains within it a statement of condemnation. “The rules are to be followed, and those who do not follow the rules will be made to suffer for their transgression.

So, if somebody should use the term “punishment” in a context where the element of condemnation is missing, their statement is simply false.

As with any false statement, when a person makes a mistake such as this, we can then start to ask a different set of questions. “Of all the mistakes that one could make, why did you make this one?”

Sometimes – in morally culpable cases – we can find the reason in what the agent wanted to believe or wanted others to believe regardless of the truth of the matter. In these cases, we may discover that the person misusing the term is the one who deserves condemnation.

In other cases, a mistake is just a mistake.

There was an interesting exchange in the comments section between two members of the studio audience that generated some interesting comments on the nature of lying, the nature of punishment, and what counts as a moral reason.

Since this is an ethics blog, I thought I would weigh in on some of those comments.

This post concerns the question of whether an omission is a lie.

Eneasz wrote:

“First - is not an omission of crucial and possibly life-destroying information as morally reprehensible as a lie?”

Katecickle responded:

Why does the type of information being omitted matter? Either not mentioning something is the same as lying, or it isn’t–the actual information being omitted should not matter.

Katecickle added:

(I would like to add that while companies may omit things when giving information freely, such as in marketing, it is not acceptable to omit information that has been directly asked about. I probably made that clear already, but I just wanted to be sure).

Ultimately, we cannot consider the omission of information to be the same as a lie.

In any given instance of communication, there must necessarily be a huge quantity of information that people do not give. We simply do not have time to say everything. So, we must pick and choose which information to give, and which to refrain from giving - for the sake of efficiency.

However, Eneasz did not say that withholding information is the same as lying. Eneasz said that withholding “crucial and possibly life-destroying information” is as reprehensible as lying.

Assume that I was comparing my wife to a rose bush outside of our house. I could say, “The rose bush is as tall as my wife.” In saying that, I am not saying that my wife is a rose bush. I am merely saying that they have a common property. In this case, I am comparing their height.

Accordingly, Eneasz is comparing the moral quality of crucial and possibly life-destroying information to lying.

Not all lies have the same moral qualities. In fact, the lies associated with surprise parties and “white lies” are not morally bad at all. So, I am going to assume that withholding information, in this case, has the same moral quality as lying.

So, let’s take an example. I invite my noisy, obnoxious, co-worker to my home for dinner. I then poison the food (because we are both in line for the same promotion and I want the job).

As luck would have it, my guest does not as what is in the food. Consequently, following Katesickle’s recommendation, I do not have to tell him what is in it. If he had asked, “Is the food poisoned” or even “What’s in this?” I would have been obligated to say that it contains a deadly poison. Fortunately, I was not asked, and I am not under any obligation to reveal information not asked for.

Katesickle, then, would have to conclude that I am not guilty of murder. Or, at the very least, under the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, prosecutors will have to demonstrate not only that I intentionally put poison in the food, but that I was asked if the food was poisoned and did not provide an honest answer.

Actually, Eneasz was mistaken. It is not the case that an omission of crucial and possibly life-destroying information is the same as lying. Instead, the omission of crucial and possibly life-destroying information is the same as attempted or actual homicide.

We would have to ask about the agent’s intentions to determine if the agent is guilty of an intentional murder (wanting the victim dead), or a lesser form of murder (simply not caring that the victim ended up dead), but the charge is murder either way. This defines not only what the moral crime is, but what the legal crime should be.

I have defined lying elsewhere as an act of communication that seeks to persuade the victim to adopt a proposition that the agent knows to be false.

It is possible to lie through silence. However, for this to happen, silence has to be given a meaning within a language. Silence itself has to communicate a proposition that the speaker knows to be false.

For example, if we agree on a convention that says, “If you answer my question with silence, I will understand to mean that you were out with your wife.” I then ask the question, and the person asked remains silent. In this case, the silence is a lie.

However, in general, it is not a lie.

Yet, there are a lot of different types of wrongs in the world. Lying is just one of them.

I would like to use a statement from a comment made by a member of the stuido audience to an earlier post to make a point against what passes for “capitalism” in America - the practice of engaging in practices that threaten the lives, health, and property of others for profit and of engaging in deceptive campaigns to protect those activities.

It is not a culture that values the property rights of others or that values truth, because such a culture would not allow these practices.

I suggested that the issue of global warming illustrated these practices. Specifically, I mentioned that if we doubled the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, it would take an act of God or some form of magic to prevent that CO2 from absorbing additional energy. This is given what we know about the absorption spectrum of CO2 and the emission spectrum of the Earth.

In response to this, Katecickle wrote:

Except we haven’t doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere–again, we only contribute about 3.5% of the CO2 put into the atmosphere annually.

This simply repeats pure propaganda that no person with a respect for logic or truth would allow to go unchallenged.

It does not matter what percent humans contribute to annual CO2 output. What matters is the amount that humans contribute to the increase in concentration

Take a tub of water, and set it up so that water is pouring into the tub at 100 gallons per minute. However, the water is in equilibrium so that the tub also loses 100 gallons per minute through holes in the side.

Now, you open a second faucet into the tub. This faucet puts 3.5 gallons per minute into the tub. The tub is now getting 103.5 gallons per minute, but still only losing 100 gallons per minute.

So, the tub is filling up.

Somebody protests that the tub is filling up and suggests that we should turn off the second faucet.

Yet, the owner of the faucet argues, “It is absurd to say that my faucet is responsible for the tub filling up. After all, I am contributing only 3.5% of the volume of water entering the tub.”

It not a difficult matter to understand that the contribution to the total inflow of water is not what matters. What matters is the degree to which the new faucet contributes to the change of volume over time. In this case, the second faucet is 100% responsible for the change in volume over time. The faucet puts 3.5 gallons per minute into the tub, and the volume in the tub is increasing at 3.5 gallons per minute.

This is an extremely simple argument to understand and to explain.

I need only a few minor adjustments to make this more like the case of global warming.

For millions of years, the atmosphere held between 200 parts per million and 280 parts per million of CO2. Lower values are associated with ice ages, while higher values are associated with warmer times.

Each year, billions of tonnes of carbon circulate through the system. Animals breathe CO2, plants take it up, falling leaves decay, then gets absorbed by plant growth the following spring. Oceans absorb CO2 in winter months and lose CO2 to the atmosphere in the spring as well.

This system has been substantially in equilibrium for tens of millions of years.

Along comes humans, who open up a carbon faucet that puts 7 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Half of this “leaks out” by being absorbed into the oceans and into new plant growth.

So, humans are increasing the level of CO2 in the atmospheric tub by 3.5 units per year. We have already increased the volume from 280 ppmv to 385 ppmv and the level keeps rising.

It could reach 1000 ppmv or even higher.

This is not a difficult point to understand. And I have no doubt that many of the people who “market” this particular deception are capable of understanding this argument.

The problem is, they do not care.

The values that these so-called “capitalists” are not respect exhibit are not the values of respect for the rights individuals to life, health, and property and of truth that would mark a practice as being virtuous in capitalist terms. The values they exhibit are those of willingly destroying the lives, health, and property of others and of engaging in whatever campaigns of deception may be useful in defending those practices, as long as it is profitable to do so.

In a comment on a posting on corporate feudalism - the idea that corporate “lords” have the right to kill, maim, or poison or to destroy the property of non-corporate “serfs” - this issue of executive compensation came up. Specifically, the comment concerned executive compensation for companies that received billions of dollars in government assistance.

I would like to look at this issue from a desire utilitarian perspective.

President Obama has said that one of his three objectives in this bailout is to establish a regulatory framework to make sure that nothing like this happens again.

Desire utilitarianism suggests another avenue to pursue in addition to regulation. That is condemnation and punishment.

Ninety percent of the executives of companies that have received government bailouts are still on the job. Furthermore, those companies gave their executives a combined $18 billion in bonuses at the end of the year.

A bonus is a reward.

In desire utilitarian terms, rewards are used to promote that which people generally have reason to promote. Condemnation and punishment are used to inhibit that which people generally have reason to inhibit.

People generally have reason to inhibit the type of behavior that these executives engaged in over the past several years, not to promote it. So, that behavior needs to be met with condemnation and punishment, rather than reward or (at best) indifference as the people responsible keep their jobs and live their lives as normal (while millions of others lose their jobs).

So, the quick prima facie recommendation regarding these executives from a desire utilitarian perspective is that they should be told to clean out their offices and leave the company - and new executives should be brought in who will have the duty to bring these businesses back to life.

I have called this system “corporate feudalism”. One of its distinguishing characteristics is that it is deemed inappropriate to strip a noble of his title. Regardless of the quality of his leadership, he is still a noble, and thus “entitled” to his throne.

So, we see little movement in the direction of dethroning this particular nobility. Little movement to strip these people of their titles and to remove them from the head of their kingdoms. Instead, in spite of the harms they cause, they keep their thrones and their (political - not moral) right to rule.

By the way, the doctrine of capitalism, for those who understand it, is a philosophy of individual responsibility and would also call for ousting these executives. What we see happening here is not capitalism.

What we see happening is marketed under the name ‘capitalism’. It has been marketed under that name to convince people to buy the product. However, the marketing in this case is deceptive.

Unfortunately, this deception produces some collateral damage, when the people who respond to this particular set of injustices takes their anger out on the “fall guy” in this case, instead of the actual culprit.

Ultimately, these executives should be fired and replaced with people who have a track record of taking their moral and business responsibilities seriously.

Why are we giving multi-billion dollar checks to people with a proven track record of losing billions and billions of dollars?

Recently, in a post on the flaws of socialism, I pointed

out that socialism responds too closely to changes in information.

See: The Three Flaws of Socialism

A member of the studio audience challenged me with the following:

Is that why trans-fats had been banned in several countries of the world long before US America would even admit they could be problem? Is that why the various bans on cigarette advertising and smoking in stipulated places was slow to occur in the US?

Part of the answer to this is that a portion of the American economy and its culture is neither capitalist nor socialist. It follows another set of terms that I identify with the label “corporate feudalism”.

I call it this because it is an ideology that divides the population into two groups – those who own businesses, and everybody else. It then grants to the former all sorts of legal rights (not moral rights) and privileges that neither capitalism nor socialism would permit.

Capitalism does not grant any person the moral right to kill or maim or poison others, or to destroy their property, merely because the person doing the killing, maiming, poisoning, or destroying considers it profitable to do so. According to capitalist principles, these would be considered violations of the rights of the person being killed, maimed, poisoned, or whose property is being destroyed.

The American system of government, on the other hand, is one in which the argument is often made that businesses must be given such rights because it is good for the economy – because to prohibit businesses from doing such things is bad for business.

So, for example, we have the issue of global warming. The reason the Bush Administration offered for not taking steps against this problem is that it would harm the American economy to do so. Yet, what he was permitting, according to the best scientific evidence, was the rights of business to engage in actions that scientist told us would take tens of millions to hundreds of millions of lives, and destroy a great deal of coastal property.

I have yet to hear of a Republican candidate, in spite of claiming to be a defender of capitalism, bring up this argument against business practices that kill, maim, or poison others or destroy their property. Instead, Republican candidates seem to exist to do the opposite – to defend the practices – which is inconsistent with capitalism.

Now, we are familiar with those businesses branding their practice of killing, maiming, and poisoning others and destroying their property as “capitalism”. This is because lying is another “right” that the corporate feudalists have. We must remember that these businesses are masters of marketing – at least those that survive tend to be.

In a country like America, businesses that refrain from engaging in the practice of killing, maiming, and poisoning others an destroying their property finds themselves at an economic disadvantage – unable to compete against companies that do kill, maim, poison, and destroy the property of others for profit. Those businesses close their doors, leaving only those willing to inflict such harms to rule the marketplace.

It would actually be an act of instituting capitalism to condemn businesses that engage in these practices. However, any attempt to make the country more capitalistic by prohibiting businesses from inflicting these harms – creating these externalities – is met with political stonewalling from a group of politicians who tend to call themselves capitalists.

It is quite ironic, if you think about it.

Well, actually, it is just another component of this package of deception.

This is not a flaw either with socialism or with capitalism. It is a deviation from an area in which both of these systems speak with a common voice. They both prohibit people with capital from treating people without capital as mere tools of production - or as “statistics” who may be made to suffer externalities without a trace of a moral qualm. Yet, this is exactly what the American system of government permits in far too many cases.

The Democrats in House of Representatives have put something particularly stupid in the national recovery legislation they have just passed. It is a requirement that none of the infrastructure projects purchase steel from any country other than the United States.

The stimulus bill passed by the House last night contains a controversial provision that would mostly bar foreign steel and iron from the infrastructure projects laid out by the $819 billion economic package.

A Senate version, yet to be acted upon, goes further, requiring, with few exceptions, that all stimulus-funded projects use only American-made equipment and goods.

See: Washington Post, ‘Buy American’ Rider Sparks Trade Debate

It is widely accepted that one of the things that made the Great Depression far worse than it would have otherwise been, and that made the war that followed much more likely, was the protectionist legislation that sprang up as the world economies crashed. Countries cut economic ties with other countries, demanding that more and more purchases be done locally.

One of the effects of cutting international trade was to promote international job loss and economic decline.

Another effect comes from the fact that as economic relationships between countries weaken, the possibilities for armed conflict tend to increase.

To see the truth of the first of these effects, simply imagine that you are living alone. You are stranded on an island where you must gather food and water buy yourself, create your own clothes, build your own shelter, build your own tools for farming, tailoring, and construction, provide for your own health care, predict the weather, determine which natural foods are poisonous, and the like.

This is not a life with a particularly high standard of living.

Introduce just one more person, and both of you are better off. That one person can focus on growing and preserving food for two people. This makes him much more efficient at his job. Furthermore, it gives him an opportunity to learn how to do his job better. He need not be distracted by other jobs such as building a house or making clothes – you are doing those things. And, as with your partner, you become better and more efficient at the tasks you specialize in.

Add a third person, and a fourth. Every additional person creates more opportunity for specialization and trade.

Add enough people, and soon you have people specifically devoted to the study of health, to predicting the weather so as to better determine when to plant and when to harvest, the study of engineering, and construction itself allowing the community to build aqueducts and to harvest power from the flowing streams.

It no more matters that some of your trading partners live across the ocean than that some of them once lived on the other side of the stream or a mountain. Distance increases the cost of trade (more so for physical goods and services, and less so for information) but is not relevant to the fundamental benefit of trade.

Any time anybody stands up and demands that we cut off trade with some group of people, that we make the economic community smaller rather than larger, then this person is promoting a system that will make all of us worse off. It makes us worse off by blocking our trade with others, and makes those others worse off by blocking their trade with us.

If it makes sense to say that smaller communities can be more prosperous than larger communities, then it makes sense to say that none of us should be engaged in trade with any other person, and we should all live a life where we each grow our own food, manufacture our own clothes, construct our own shelter, and tend to our own doctoring.

Perhaps more important is the fact that isolated tribes are the type who are more likely to go to war with each other. If two tribes have economic links – if the wealth and well-being of one tribe is tied to the wealth and well-being of the other – then there are all sorts of incentives to preserve the peace. But, if there economic borders are closed, then the only way to get something that the other tribe has is to take it by force of arms.

It is quite reasonable to suspect that, without the protectionist policies of the 1930s and its adverse effects not only on the global economy but the severing of incentives to maintain peace between nations, came to be followed by the largest global military conflict in human history.

What the United States does in this economic crisis sets an example for the rest of the world. We have many and good reasons to set an example of keeping economic relationships between different countries open – to foster trade rather than sever economic ties. We have many and strong reasons to demand that, this time, the world works together to get through this economic crisis, rather than split off into isolated tribes.

Because it typically is not long after countries quit trading bread and butter across their national boundaries, that the find they are soon trading bullets.

A few posts ago I mentioned that there was an interview of me up at Common Sense Atheism: CPBD 003: Alonzo Fyfe - Morality without God.

The interviewer wrote:

For today’s episode of Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, I interview Alonzo Fyfe, who completely changed the way I think about morality with this very interview.

I hope it was changed for the better. Comments like this always cause a bit of moral anxiety.

What if I am wrong?

A morally responsible person is always asking that question when he is making claims which, if adopted, would interfere with the lives of others. He recognizes the duty to continually sifting through the reasons for his belief, looking for a sign that he might have been a mistake.

Similarly, any institution that teaches its people that they need not do this – that they can accept propositions leading to harm to others on the basis of faith alone, and never need to question their legitimacy – teaches moral irresponsibility.

In this area, the institution that teaches intellectual recklessness is less moral than the institution that teaches care and prudence with respect to beliefs, in the same way that the drunk driver is less moral than the sober and careful driver.

So, whenever I get praise for what I write it always makes me nervous. It always causes me to ask, once again, “What if I am wrong?” And to invite others to consider critically anything I may write.

This is . . . or should be the standard throughout. Any person who leads an organization that tells people that their support for policies harmful to others can be grounded on groundless beliefs, he is teaching them to behave recklessly. This is no different than telling a person that he may drink as much as he wants and go ahead and drive home.

In fact, the person who is counseling others to engage in drunk driving would be by far the lesser of these two evils, compared to the proponent of reckless thinking. The drunk driver will, at worst, wipe out a school bus or a family on vacation. The reckless thinker, on the other hand, have wiped out whole civilizations or aided in the death and suffering of millions.

“We are the most moral people in the world, and you are to trust that what I tell you is the right thing to do, even though others may be harmed, and the worst thing you can do is question me or what I say because what I tell you is necessarily true and true without question.”

The person who makes any claim like this is uttering a flat contradiction. The person who preaches this type of intellectual recklessness is preaching immorality, not morality.

So, in contrast with their teachings, I have said often and I will say again . . .

It is certain that at least one thing that I have written is false, though I do not know what it is (or, more accurately, what they are).

The morally responsible person takes this attitude towards everything they hear and read. The person who does not question is by that very fact loses all right to claim to being or even knowing the measure of virtue.

Well, yesterday I looked at three flaws with socialist solutions to a nation’s problems.

(1) Decisions are made by people other than those who are the best informed.

(2) Decision makers are motivated by a number of concerns other than the public good.

(3) Political systems respond slowly (way too slowly) to changes circumstances.

So, let’s look at three significant problems with capitalist solutions to social problems.

(1) The wealth effect. In a capitalist system, those with money have the power to bid resources away from the more valuable uses to which the poor people would put them.

Capitalists often boast that its system allows for the most efficient allocation of resources because, if you want something more than somebody else, you simply pay more. Resources always go to the person who will pay more, so resources always are given to the person who values them more.

This is false.

Differences in wealth mean that those people who have wealth can outbid those who have significantly less wealth, even if the wealthy person has a trivial interest in those resources.

I have illustrated this in previous posts with the case of a woman with $20 in a drought-infested land wanting to buy water for her sick child, while another woman with $20 million wanting that water to shampoo her poodle. If the two people had equal wealth, the woman with the sick child would certainly outbid the woman with the poodle for that water. Unfortunately, because of differences in wealth, the water is allocated to its socially least valuable use.

The world is filled with wealthy people bidding resources away from poorer people who, nonetheless, would put those resources to more highly valued use.

It takes about nine pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat. If poor people had the means, they would buy that grain to feed themselves and their families. Instead, wealthier people literally bid the grain off of their table and demand that it be used for what merely amounts to an increase in flavor.

The same thing is now happening with ethanol production. Wealthier people are bidding the food away from poorer people to produce energy that they can then continue to use for purposes, many of which are substantially trivial.

(2) Capitalism is a regulatory system.

Capitalists often market the distinction between them and their competitor as a conflict between “regulation” and “no regulagion”.

The fact of the matter is that this is a conflict between two different types of regulatory systems.

What is the difference between an action that imposes a legitimate cost on other people, and one that violates their rights? I lower prices in my store, taking your customers, lowering the value of your business. Did I violate your rights? What is the difference between that and letting my property deteriorate, when you live next to me, lowering the value of your property?

What if I build a dam on my property that breaks, causing a rush of water that destroys your house and kills your wife and daughter? Is this a violation of your rights?

How do we define what risks you voluntarily adopt, and what risks I wrongfully impose upon you?

Even in a purely capitalist system, it would take a mountain of legislators, judges, and lawyers to sift through the minutia of what capitalists call “voluntary exchange”. It is no different then the effort that we must also go through with respect to any other type of regulatory system that we choose to set up.

Capitalism is not regulation free. It is, itself, a system for regulating the ownership and transfer of property.

(3) Capitalism is expensive.

I originally entitled this section, “Externalities and the Free Rider Problem.” However, externalities are not a problem with capitalism. Externalities occur where capitalism does not exist. Externalities are costs or benefits that are imposed on other people that are not imposed on the people who cause them.

In order for resources to be perfectly allocated, a person who produces benefits for others needs to be compensated for every single benefit provided – and a person who imposes costs on others has to be made to pay those costs.

If he produces benefits where he does not capture any rents, then others are “taking from him” that which is rightfully his. In the economic realm, it means that people are not going to put as much effort into those activities as they would if those benefits could be properly captured.

If he produces costs that others are forced to pay, this is the equivalent of buying things on somebody else’s credit card without their consent. Activities where people can force others to pay the bill are activities that people are likely to perform even when the social benefit of their actions is negative.

Imagine what it would cost to have a system where every single benefit that one produces for others is captured in terms of rents or payments, and one is forced to pay for every single cost that one imposes on others.

At some point, we have to say that the marginal cost of additional capitalism simply is not worth the marginal benefits. At that point, we say, “We’re just going to stop capitalism right here and allow the “thefts” in capitalist terms beyond this point to stand without worrying about them.”

Ultimately, we are forced into a choice - to not use capitalism when it does not pay to do so, or to institute some very expensive systems of property rights that cover absolutely every externality produced both positive and negative.

Conclusion

So, capitalism has its problems. It allows for the gross misallocation of resources, it is a regulatory framework that is subject to all of the abuses of any regulatory abuses, and it can be fully extended and applied only at very great expense.

Socialism has its problems.

The question of whether to adopt capitalist or socialist solutions to our problems is not an either or question. It is a question that requires taking seriously the benefits and the problems that exist in each system and then trying to choose which tool is best for a given job.

Sometimes, that is not going to be an easy question to answer. Sometimes, morally reprehensible people are going to get in and muddy the waters as much as they can because they see an opportunity to gain personal benefit by generating confusion and manipulating us into choosing poorly.

These are facts that we simply have to include in our decision making.

One this issue of the relative merits of socialism and capitalism, one question that I have gotten from the studio audience is:

do you find it possible for me to consider myself a libertarian (free market anarchist/voluntaryist) as my legal framework position and a desire utilitarian as my moral position, or do you consider that would be an absurd/totally inconsistent thing to be?

Desire utilitarianism does not contradict libertarianism in one sense.

There are, actually, two types of libertarians. There are natural rights libertarians (such as Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard) who argued that libertarianism represented a system of natural rights discoverable in nature. These natural rights, they argued, were revealed by reason alone and were grounded on one is true of “man qua man”.

This theory is not at all compatible with desire utilitarianism. This form of libertarianism is guilty of the is-ought fallacy. First of all, this entity that lies at the root of this type of libertarianism, this entity known as “man qua man”, is as fictitious as any God. So, libertarianism (in this form) is grounded on a false premise.

Second, even if there were such a thing as “man qua man”, the libertarian would need to explain how he can make the leap from certain factual or “is” statements about such an entity to conclusions about what ought or ought not to be done.

At both of these steps, the natural-rights libertarian fails miserably. There morality is grounded on entities as fictitious as those of any religion and their reasoning about those entities is no more sound.

On the other hand, there is another group of libertarians who are utilitarian libertarians. They hold that capitalism has merit precisely because it fulfills the requirement of bringing the greatest good to the greatest number,

However, utilitarian libertarianism holds that if it were to be shown that libertarianism did not bring the greatest good to the greatest number – if it were to be shown that some aspect of socialism did a better job, the utilitarian libertarian would give up on libertarianism (in those cases) and go with the alternative.

Whereas a natural rights libertarian would hold that any socialist scheme would be a violation of those natural rights such that, even though some alternative will bring a greater good to more people, it should be rejected in favor of the intrinsically obligatory obedience to natural moral law.

In fact, some libertarians that I know when I was young said that, even where a violation of the moral law were necessary to save the whole Earth from destruction (one had to forcefully take a plain granite rock from its rightful owner to prevent aliens from destroying the Earth and everybody on it), it would be better that the earth be destroyed than that a single item of property be taken without consent.

Of these two options, natural rights libertarianism is not at all compatible with desire utilitarianism. It asserts that intrinsic value properties exist and can be found in certain families of actions. Intrinsic value properties do not exist.

It also asserts that people can be made to suffer where necessary so as to help to preserve and promote these imaginary entities. This is different than the religious practice of calling for the sacrifice of individuals so that God will show us favor and protect us from natural disasters and foreign aggression. In this, too, it is little different from religion.

In contrast, utilitarian libertarianism can be compatible with desire utilitarianism. A desire utilitarian holds that there are certain desires that people generally have reason to promote or inhibit. It may be that the desires that people generally have reason to promote are those of a capitalist system. They may have reason the libertarian non-aggression policy for the specific reason that if everybody had such an aversion to aggression that the more and stronger of all of our desires will be better realized.

Ultimately, I think that utilitarian capitalism fails as well. I will mention a few of its problems in my next post. However, its problem is not some fundamental conflict with the basics of desire utilitarianism. Its problem is that there are areas in which it fails the utilitarian test of making good people better off.