Paleo-libertarians and their allies in the paleo-conservative camp like to romanticize a bygone era of decentralization, individual responsibility and hearth and home. Bill Kauffman is an example of this overlap, of the sentimental juncture at which self-ownership and a Schumacherian ethos of “small is beautiful” meet. (An audience member at the CATO book forum for Kauffman’s newest described his talk as a “Whitmanesque rant.”) These folks tend to criticize the “beltway libertarians” for being without the gusto, zeal and passion of the paleo-libs, who truck with no apologists for the grim, faceless, bureaucratic state.
Reading this piece at LRC (HT: Roderick Long) on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers movement illustrated the tension between “economistic” libertarians and, shall I say, “visceral” libertarians:
It is difficult to define, in terms of a political system, what the Catholic Worker movement stood for, because their philosophy of personalism, which lies at the heart of their ideas, is inherently antithetical to the objectivism, centralization and institutionalism that characterize the activities of the State.
Approvingly quoting a close friend of Day’s, Peter Maurin:
“We must have a sense of responsibility to take care of our own, and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice. That is the first principle. It is not the function of the state to enter into these realms… Charity is personal. Charity is love.”
It ends with this:
The fundamental Christian value is love, and the political world always has, always will revolve around money and power.
The visceral libertarian agrees, referencing their inner (non-statist) communitarian to damn the Hayekian extended order of corruption, vice and distant, unaccountable “greed.” As an aside, would not a leftist prefer to describe “personalism” (or whatever is antithetical to alienation) as contradictory to the objectivism and organization-man mentality of the rationalizing market? It cuts both ways, and passionate Ron Paul fans are matched by equally passionate folks who find his defense of the free market abysmal.
The economistic libertarian is less moved by intuitively appealing (read: evolutionarily psychological) notions of face-to-face contact, non-instrumental relationships, and chains of association not mediated by the cash nexus. For them, the decision to personally take care of ones neighbor is an amoral one. It isn’t obvious that outsourcing that task to an immigrant entrepreneur is detrimental to humanity. As for charity, the presence of the state is irrelevant to its “personal” quality. That has far more to do with size and organizational structure.
The very economic calculation that the Austrian school (for whom natural rights anarchists – paleo-libertians – comprise the “political wing”) submits is vital to civilization and prosperity (synonymous with urbanity, or impersonalism) is at odds with the reflexively sentimental sense of voluntary association and localism that their Anglo-American, Tocquevillian cultural disposition inspires them to value. Jeffrey Friedman has referred to this as the “libertarian straddle,” or the desire to show that free markets lead to ever better consequences – but if they don’t, well, one can still fall back on the “voluntary” clause, and thus the warm and fuzzy feeling that Tocqueville evokes.
I no longer get so emotionally worked up about the state’s activities – the normative edge for me is quickly waning. Partly this is due to my being in a relationship with someone who is not a libertarian and thus has no tolerance for angry rants that leave no room for nuance and debate. But it also has to do with the stridency of natural rights dogma in its rejection of utilitarianism (which for the purpose of this post will be synonymous with consequentialism). I’m reminded of the telling quote by Rothbard, frustratingly not on hand, in which he states that positive social outcomes (health, wealth, etc.) and the inviolable (modified) Lockean appropriation of property are merely a “happy coincidence.”
And if it wasn’t a happy coincidence? He’d be for natural rights anyway.
Blah. What could possibly be of value in such a political philosophy?
The truth is you can measure utility, and the Austrians who remain committed to the “impossibility” of cardinal rankings of want-satisfaction are being left in the dust (though Mario Rizzo has an excellent grasp of this type of literature). Swiss economist Bruno Frey has been doing work in precisely this area for some time. He writes:
Happiness research has designed several indicators of subjective well-being, relying on different measurement techniques: global evaluations of individual life satisfaction, based on representative surveys; the Experience Sampling Method, collecting information individuals’ actual experience in real time in their natural environments; the Day Reconstruction Method, asking people to reflect on how satisfied they felt at various times during the day; the U (“unpleasant”)- Index, defined as the fraction of time per day that an individual spends in an unpleasant state; and [most importantly for cardinal, interval measurement] Brain Imaging, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan individuals’ for correlates of positive and negative effect.
But this is far from a conclusion that one can construct a measure of national well-being in the fashion of a libertarian paternalist who’s decided to ditch the libertarian part. Most importantly, the individual variation in responsiveness to what are generally agreeable prerequisites for happiness/well being cannot be accounted for by any such necessarily distant and thus merely speculative planners and committee members tasked with maximizing “GNH”, or Gross National Happiness. As Judith Rich Harris would say, “no two are alike.”
In addition, and as Frey stresses, an apparently vital component to happiness (utility gain) is procedural in nature. In other words, the pursuit of happiness itself really is rather happiness inducing. Much of Frey’s critique of the possibility of achieving GNH lies in its anti-democratic implications, and the concomitant risk of undermining the process – or procedure – that is a large part of feeling happy to begin with. An individual sense of agency and self-determination is a significant component of subjective well-being. Frey finds that those in his native Switzerland gain much in utility from their rather extensive democratic (as well as negative) rights, a veritable heaven of participatory democracy relative to many other western nations. The principle-agent problems endemic to large-scale representative democracy, and what the critical theorists refer to as “administered society,” are anathema to even a utility-maximizing apolitical droid – or at least, all else being equal.
Frey writes:
The social welfare maximizing approach, based on empirically estimated happiness functions…disregards the institutions on which democracy is based. Citizens are reduced to “metric stations.” They are forced into a state of passivity, which tends to increase their alienation from the state. In this respect, a happiness maximizing approach is inimical to democracy. It disregards the interaction between citizens and politicians, the interest representation by organized groups and the concomitant information and learning processes.
So it would seem the paleo-libertarians (and their left-leaning, more “thickly” communitarian compatriots) find surprising confirmation in happiness research, or just the sort of statist scientism, aiming for the elevation of an abstract humanism, they so often detest.
It’s hardly a knock-down case, I know, but an interesting angle to push methinks.
UPDATE: Here is the quote from Rothbard, from “For a New Liberty”:
It so happens that the free- market economy, and the specialization and division of labor it implies, is by far the most productive form of economy known to man, and has been responsible for industrialization and for the modern economy on which civilization has been built. This is a fortunate utilitarian result of the free market, but it is not, to the libertarian, the prime reason for his support of this system. That prime reason is moral and is rooted in the natural-rights defense of private property we have developed above. Even if a society of despotism and systematic invasion of rights could be shown to be more productive than what Adam Smith called “the system of natural liberty,” the libertarian would support this system. Fortunately, as in so many other areas, the utilitarian and the moral, natural rights and general prosperity, go hand in hand.
February 9, 2009 at 2:44 pm
I feel like happiness research undermines preference utilitarianism because it allows one to plausibly say that you know better what will make someone else happy then they do.
Said happiness study results are a statistical average.
February 9, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Well, in the abstract I think that happiness research is grasping at the idea that somebody other than one’s self really does know better what will (very statistically likely) make one happy – or, maybe more accurately, less unhappy than one would think. But this hypothetical person would have to be close enough to know innumerable personal quirks and circumstantial contingencies.
The thing that really craps all over the idea of experts running the show is the fact that these experts are perhaps only slightly – maybe not at all – less likely to fall prey to the same cognitive biases they’ve uncovered. Plus the political reality of rent-seeking and the corruption of pristine administrative management.
February 9, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Good post. This really got me thinking. I haven’t read it yet, but I am reminded of James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. I had a post on a podcast of his here. Another relevant post might be Roderick Long’s What Empire Does to a Culture.
I’ve always been an econonomistic libertarian. Even when I was very religious, I have never been spiritual. It’s just not something I experience. I’ve never read Ayn Rand, but I think I used to hold to something more like here glorification of big business & businessmen, modernist technological capitalism and had a more derisive attitude toward people we might call “crunchy” now. I don’t know if I was conscious of it, but I probably regarded their preferences as somehow invalid and inferior to my own. It might even be related to the brief period of time as an elementary schooler when I considered myself a communist (since I was ignorant of what communism actually was, it was probably more technocratic authoritarianism mixed with Christian altruistic & puritanical moralism). Since then, though I dropped religion completely and became interested in empiricism, rationalism & reductionist materialism, I came to view my prior sense of superiority over wooly-headed folks as itself irrational.
Continuing on with religion, though I have no belief I cannot join in with the secularists/anti-clericalists or “New Atheists”. It’s false and there’s nothing wrong with saying so. I’m glad for their to be criticism of ill-founded beliefs. I just can’t see it as the bogeyman or the religious as so especially benighted. Optical illusions are false and it is helpful to point them out so we are not fooled, but we don’t get as worked up by them.
I still think that impersonal economic exchange and other such institutions (especially the ones giving rise to science) have been a tremendous boon while more rooted connections may cause significant harm. But precisely because they are so natural for us, they cause a more normal and bearable sort of harm. Other large impersonal institutions, most notably states, are functional enough to have huge effects and tremendous harm without the stabilizing brakes found in our more natural (though nasty, brutish and short) state. In Friedman’s saddle paper he identifies Charles Murray has a communitarian libertarian, and I have come closer to that view over time. Murray is also a consequentialist trained in social science who (here we go again) doesn’t believe in religion though he seems to acknowledge its Durkheimian benefits. I see myself as similar, although unlike me he also seems to believe in objective norms in both ethics and art.
I recently encountered a Randian who insisted that it is necessary for society to replace all its ethics as “no civilization can be built on altruism”. Has any civilization ever not been? I responded that it was as implausible as the creation of the New Socialist Man who would not be self-interested but work solely for the good of the whole. The fact that I don’t experience the same deeper connection that most people do to something larger than themselves simply makes me a weirdo.
I’m afraid I can’t join you on objective utility. I’ve been discussing recently here the problems with self-reports. I think there’s value in Bruno Frey’s work (what little I know of it) but I don’t think it gets us to utilons. I’m especially distrustful of things like Bhutan’s attempt at “Gross National Happiness”. It was especially funny when some people used such a happiness measurement to claim that universal healthcare makes people happy when the measurement itself gave great weight to the universality of healthcare, regardless of its effect.
Robert Nozick seemed to believe in that sort of procedural fairness, where Wilt Chamberlain’s wealth is okay because all the steps that lead to that wealth are just. A lot of people find that sort of argument convincing, and I think one reason it might work so well for an athlete is Robin Hanson’s point about fairness meaning accurate signals of fitness. I really wish I could find that post at Overcoming Bias right now. I think people are happier if they feel the rules are being followed and nobody is cheating. That reminds me that I still haven’t gotten around to writing my promised post on why I don’t favor a caste system!
Steven Landsburg’s paper on not only counting the direct outcomes for individuals but their preferences on “social justice” seems relevant.
February 10, 2009 at 10:24 am
“Optical illusions are false and it is helpful to point them out so we are not fooled, but we don’t get as worked up by them.”
Most optical illusions either go away when they are recognized as such, or are easily recognized as illusions.
Additionally, few people go around trying to break down people’s visual perception so that they see illusions where they did not before.
Finally, visual illusions usually don’t have profound implications for people’s social and political behavior.
February 10, 2009 at 6:53 pm
“Friedman has referred to this as the “libertarian straddle,” or the desire to show that free markets lead to ever better consequences – but if they don’t, well, one can still fall back on the “voluntary” clause.”
I fail to see what is so innovative about Friedman’s piece (or any of his writings). All political ideologies engage in similar “straddles.” This seems inevitable when one talks about politics in a justificationist framework.
Friedman invites us to the “joyous freedom of inquiry” if we go beyond ideology. He is basically saying that we should do science without prejudice. Duh!
I see a lot of talk about “the crisis” of this and a “post-” that; academics talking about academics to other academics with all the usual “A critique of…”, followed by “A rejoinder to…” etc. Seems like a ex-ideologue with a long hangover to me.
Ironically, it also reminds me a lot of how the Frankfurt School responded to orthodox Marxism. Even his journal is called “Critical Review.” ;-)
February 10, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Most optical illusions either go away when they are recognized as such
Really? The lilac chaser still works on me, for instance, although if I was trying not to see it I could avoid it.
Additionally, few people go around trying to break down people’s visual perception so that they see illusions where they did not before.
My guess is that a number of people in marketing make it a point to learn and exploit such illusions.
Aschwin, I think Jeffrey Friedman has studied and been influenced by the Frankfurt School. So it’s not terribly surprising.
February 10, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Aschwin,
Jeffrey Friedman felt compelled to engage in criticism of libertarianism partly for “familiarity breeds contempt” purposes I’m guessing. He’s described himself as a former Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist.
I actually agree with J.C. Lester’s response to Friedman regarding justificationism. It’s here:
http://www.la-articles.org.uk/friedman.htm
So essentially what’s missing from both Friedman’s work and the work of Charles Murray, Boaz et al. is the Popperian perspective Lester brings.
February 10, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Some scientific support for the small-is-beautiful crowd.
February 11, 2009 at 11:46 am
Thanks, Dain.
That was quite interesting. I think that Lester nails it when he writes that Friedman
“is also guilty of an anti-libertarian straddle whereby he wants to cite evidence against libertarianism but can always fall back on its lack of justification and its supposed conceptual inclarity.”
I read Lester’s book when it came out but I would like to revisit it again.
I raised some points about the justificationist tradition in libertarianism in my recent review of “Ordered Anarchy: Jasay and his Surroundings:”
http://libertarianpapers.org/2009/13-book-review-review-of-ordered-anarchy-jasay-and-his-surroundings/
I am quite sympathetic to Popper’s critical rationalism but find his own application of this perspective to society rather crude (to put it mildly). I wrote about this here:
http://www.againstpolitics.com/2009/01/20/karl-poppers-authoritarian-social-technologies/
And here:
http://www.depressedmetabolism.com/2009/02/06/avoiding-karl-popper/
February 13, 2009 at 12:01 am
Hat’s off to muppetblast for an excellent post.
TGGP,
I’m always curious about your reasons for dismissing hedonic calculus. Are you arguing that the idea of measuring happiness is epistemologically problematic, perhaps at some insoluble confounding level — which might be akin to Hayek’s take on the problem of free will in The Sensory Order? Or are you saying that utilons simply cannot be in principle, no matter how refined the metrics and methods should become? If it’s the former, I’m more apt to agree for the simple reason that subjectivity is a bitch. If it’s the latter, I think you may yet have some serious physicalist problems to wrangle.
I mean, happiness is just a subjective state, which should be reducible to stuff, no? And if so, shouldn’t it yield to measurement, at least in principle? And if not, is there any account that doesn’t raise the specter of ghost-in-the-machine flummery?
Yardsticks are always crude at some level, but happiness is a widely agreed upon mental state, which I take to be a thing or a bundle of things. Are you saying that it’s a special kind of phenomena — one that intrinsically resists quantification?
(Obviously, I’m trying to trick you into writing about qualia.)
February 13, 2009 at 1:44 am
Dain,
Have you ever been able to track down a copy of Friedman’s response to Lester?
February 13, 2009 at 9:58 am
“(Obviously, I’m trying to trick you into writing about qualia.)”
It’s a trap!
February 13, 2009 at 11:26 am
Anon, No I haven’t. I’m not sure there is one. Friedman doesn’t have one at his publications page, but there is a rejoinder to critics other than Lester.
http://www.criticalreview.com/crf/jeffreyfriedman.html
February 13, 2009 at 1:24 pm
There was a back and forth between Friedman and Lester in a subsequent issue but I am not sure if it’s ever been available electronically.
I think I also recall Friedman having some harsh words about Lester on the original Critical Review alumni forum, but that too is no longer available
February 13, 2009 at 1:38 pm
By the way Chip, thanks. To clear up any confusion, Mupetblast is Dain is Mupetblast.
February 13, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Will Wilkinson sums up the core reason, I think, for libertarian hostility towards happiness research: “A number of psychologists and social scientists have drawn upon this work recently to argue that the American model of relatively limited government and a dynamic market economy corrodes happiness…”
After debunking these arguments, he also concludes: “[If] we are very careful when comparing happiness survey results … it is possible to glean solid information about things almost all of us care about that ought to have real weight—if not all the weight—in our public deliberation about our political and economic institutions and policies.”
So it certainly is possible the libertarian will increasingly become the new champion of HR, and the socialist will become its new resistor.
February 14, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I’ve mentioned why I think self-reports are unreliable, even for things that are objectively measurable rather than on a subjective scale. I think of happiness as somewhat akin to status: it has a physicalist basis, but I don’t know how you’d go about measuring it. What would be the units? It could be that like “consciousness” or “vitality” it is based on intuitions that don’t necessarily reflect the reality accurately. It may not be a unitary phenomena but perhaps a bundle of related ones. It could be that when neuroscience gets good enough, what we measure in its place won’t be called “happiness” at all.
February 14, 2009 at 6:32 pm
[…] Can Procedural Utility Lend a Hand to Paleo-Libertarianism? by Dain Fitzgerald […]
February 14, 2009 at 8:17 pm
TGGP,
There was more than just self-reports involved. Brain imaging reveals the comparable intensity of “positive” and “negative” chemical reactions in the brain. Positive reactions often involve dopamine, but I’m really not qualifed to further wax eloquent on the actual chemicals involved.
So unlike self-reports, which are purely ordinal at best, one can actually say that subject A is 35% happier (or gloomier) than subject B, even if this “happiness” is merely a snapshot in hedonic time.
February 15, 2009 at 12:04 am
right, but what if it turns out the best way to maximize happiness is to have the person experience torture once a year so that their hedonic treadmill resets at a lower level?
this is obviously bad, but i fear other subtler situations could arise i in the same vein.
February 15, 2009 at 11:55 am
“It could be that when neuroscience gets good enough, what we measure in its place won’t be called “happiness” at all.”
Then the neuroscientists will be measuring something different, unless it breaks down to a close scholarly distinction, like “g” vs IQ, in which case, caveats notwithstanding, same thing.
Should happiness turn out to be deeply flawed in concept, which seems unlikely given its historical pedigree and cross-cultural overlap, then maybe the empirical approach will burn itself out. My default assumption is simply that subjective states are reducible to objective states, and anything objective can in principle be calculated. Unitization is always arbitrary.
Crude self reports of intelligence are unreliable, yet intellectual ability is experienced subjectively. Pychometricians get behind the problem by devising standardized tests that have verifiable real-world explanatory power, at least until neuroscience comes along to tidy things up. Significantly, intelligence tests are still self-reports; they’re just more probing and more meaningful.
Likewise, if the aggregate metrics yielded through hedonic surveys have any worth, it should be possible to use them to predict, say, whether or not someone is more or less likely to become depressed or attempt suicide. Then you look at the data and try to tease out the genetic and environmental factors that play a determinative role, leaving philosophers and policy wonks to worry about what, if anything, to do. The problem of a torture-reset is disturbing, but it doesn’t preempt the first order empirical question, or the question of whether it’s a valid question.
The utilon problem is a herring. You won’t find IQ points lurking like germs on a brain scan, just different chemical patterns which correlate with behavioral phenomena. Surveys of subjective well being may be crude at present. They surely present special problems. But I don’t think a seeming intuitional barrier is sufficient to dismiss the project. I would say the same holds for jealousy or conscientiousness or even status. You just refine the tools until noise is traded for replicable predictive patterns. You don’t shoot for perfection.
February 16, 2009 at 10:34 am
“this is obviously bad,”
Maybe it’s time to cease being concerned with the obvious, and start trying to find out what’s true.
It’s the things we know that just ain’t so…
February 16, 2009 at 8:16 pm
I guess you’re right about brain imaging.
Intelligence tests aren’t self-reports. Most people would report themselves above average. I think Steve Sailer went too far in his dismissal of personality tests, but he had a point about being able to outsmart an IQ test itself being an indicator of high IQ. Self-reporting a high score is simply beyond the capabilities of the average person.
I think Sister Y claimed recently that depression and suicide aren’t terribly correlated. I think I heard somewhere else that the depressed are too demotivated to do something like kill themselves, so recovering from depression may actually increase the probability.
February 17, 2009 at 3:09 am
It’s not so much that they’re not terribly correlated as that depression (esp. DSM-IV “Major Depressive Disorder” which everyone has) is not that much of a risk factor for suicide compared to other things.
I think optimistic bias is a serious problem for self-reports of happiness. There’s all that research tying happiness to self-deception.
February 17, 2009 at 11:33 am
Oddly, I think all mental tests are a kind of “self report” inasmuch as the subject is simply responding to questions. It’s just that asking “how smart are you” is less informative than asking which number comes next in a series, or whatever. Perhaps there are similar ways of mining for more objective hedonic self-portraits? I can’t help wondering. But very well. There’s no need to bend conventional definitions. IQ tests are not self reports.
I agree that optimistic bias is a serious problem for happiness research. I also acknowledge that there are crucial distinctions to be drawn between mental states and mental abilities. And the problem of self-deception is just maddening at so many levels.
It’s complicated stuff. But it’s still stuff. There are still baselines, and relatively stable patterns of some brain-nested sensory phenomena intuitively understood as “happiness” that come up in surveys and in behavior-genetics. There are pills that sort of work and pills that don’t work at all and pills yet to be cooked up. There is less and there is more. Current methods and metrics are surely and severely flawed, but I don’t think anyone has provided reason to believe that the task is futile.
February 19, 2009 at 1:01 pm
“Brain imaging reveals the comparable intensity of “positive” and “negative” chemical reactions in the brain.”
That doesn’t help if you don’t know how sensitive the brains in question are to specific levels of the neurotransmitter.
Brains adapt, y’know. They adjust and compensate, which is why flooding the brain with chemicals involved with pleasure and reward ultimately just causes the brain to redefine what concentration is associated with normality.
February 19, 2009 at 5:48 pm
I suppose one can discover how sensitive a given brain is to these neurotransmitters. This doesn’t seem immutably non-testable.
February 23, 2009 at 5:27 pm
There has been a study, which shows that liberal people are less likely to be happy than democrats. I think this result is too general. However, I appreciate the analysis conducted by IIM, which takes the socioeconomic system in US in consideration. It also proposes several policy reforms to help address these liabilities. The paper summarizes the study in three sections: 1. Statement of the problem; 2. Root cause analysis; 3. Recommendations. You can find additional information at
http://www.iim-edu.org/grossnationalhappiness/index.htm
January 22, 2011 at 1:57 am
[…] rootless atomism, I have some sympathies for localist varieties of communitarianism (like that of Bill Kauffman) because other people like the tight-bonds of community. Versions of communitarianism which treat […]