Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

  • Military virtues, and gays in the military (WSJ letters)

    Mark D. White

    Really two separate topics here, both inspired by recent articles in the Wall Street Journal regarding the issue of gays in the U.S. armed forces.

    1. The Journal is printing one of my recent letters to the editor tomorrow (Thursday, February 11) under the heading "All Society Could Use Some Military Virtues":

    In Bret Stephens's "Gays in the Militaries" (Global View, Feb. 9), he makes a very profound statement that speaks to much more than the topic at hand. Regarding the military, he writes, "Its value system of duty, honor and country is very nearly the opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

    This perceived but false dichotomy explains so much of what is wrong with society these days. If we are to live together in any semblance of harmony, then our pursuit of happiness must be tempered by considerations of duty, honor and country. The men and women who choose to serve in the military know this and live by it; the rest of us could learn a thing or two from them.

    2. As long as I'm here, here's an unpublished letter of mine from last week, actually on the issue of gays in the military (they published many letters on this piece earlier this week which together covered the same points I did):

    As a lifelong supporter of our armed forces, I have the utmost respect for Mr. Owens' service and his reasoned arguments against open homosexuality in the military ("The Case Against Gays in the Military," Feb. 3). In particular, I appreciate that he does not rely on the tired argument that straight personnel will not work well alongside gay ones, one which does have direct parallels to the racial integration debates of old (which Mr. Owens rightly eschews). Yet I have to disagree with his central argument regarding inappropriate personal attachments if gays are allowed to serve openly.
     
    While his description of the ideal state of philia among servicemen and women is inspiring, and the dangers of eros being realized in combat situations are significant, I think Mr. Owens overstates the threat of romantic or sexual love being "unleashed" if homosexuals are allowed to serve openly alongside heterosexuals. Yes, sexual orientation is an intrinsic part of who we are, gay or straight, but it does not determine our behavior. Let us trust the brave men and women who are willing and eager to risk their lives defending their country to be able to resist inappropriate impulses and focus on the mission. I think we owe them that.

  • Ethical robots?

    Mark D. White

    Thanks to Orly Lobel at Prawfsblawg for pointing out this New York Times Magazine piece on new ideas. The one he points out in particular involves "ethical robots" (scroll down in the piece a few items), which will be programmed with basic ethical tenets and will perform more reliably (according to this programming) on the battlefield than humans would.

    The idea that robots can be programmed for ethical behavior is based on the false impression that morality boils down to rules, a view that Deirdre McCloskey lampoons so well with her 3×5 index card metaphor. (The fact that the writer of the article mentions Kant's categorical imperative, often mistakenly interpreted as generating easily applicable rules, serves to reinforce this.) Anyone was has read Isaac Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw novels knows that even a handful of "simple" rules (such as his Three Laws of Robotics) creates endless conflicts and conundrums that require judgment to resolve – and even Asimov's robots, with their advanced positronic brains, struggled with judgment.

    The article does say that ethical robots would work "in limited situations," which suggests that the researchers have some idea of the minefield (pun intended) that they're getting into. But my concern is that people will read this piece, appreciating (as I do) what the researchers are trying to do to improve battlefield conditions (though I remain skeptical about the real-world prospects), and this will reinforce the "morality-as-rules" idea of ethics, and that the only reason people fail to follow these "rules" is weaknes of will, not that ethical dilemmas are complicated, contentious, and often irresolvable.

    Even more curiously, the article claims that the robots ar programmed to "feel" guilt, in order "to condemn specific behavior and generate constructive change." Certainly, guilt (as with emotions in general) are essential to reinforcing moral behavior in imperfect humans (as well as being an integral part of the human experience), but why would robots need them – are they going to be tempted to resist their programming? One would think the point of developing robots was to guarantee "ethical" rule-based behavior – so where does the guilt come in?

  • Nudge meets long-term health care in reform bills

    Mark D. White

    Apparently, according to a recent AP article by Carla K. Johnson, present in both the House and Senate health care reform bills is a program in which

    workers at participating companies would be automatically enrolled – critics say "tricked into" enrolling – unless they opted out. People would see a deduction for the program from their paychecks – estimates range from $160 to $240 a month – unless they signed a form or clicked a box saying they wanted to keep the money.

    This idea can be traced most directly to Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the bestselling book by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, in which the authors recommend that governments and businesses rearrange options and design default choices to (in Thaler's words from the AP article) "try to help people make decisions without telling them what they have to do."

    However, as I explain in my chapter in the forthcoming book, Essays on Philosophy, Politics & Economics: Integration & Common Research Projects, edited by Christi Favor, Gerald Gaus, and Julian Lamont, when governments or businesses act to "nudge" people to make choices, these nudges unavoidably help people make decisions the policymakers want them to make, not the decisions the people want to make themselves.

    That is exactly what this long-term care proposal does–by automically enrolling people in the plan, the policymakers are assuming people want to be in the plan (or should want to be in the plan, according to the policymakers), and they use people's cognitive imperfections to put them in the plan. They claim that people are too shortsighted, lazy, or prone to procrastition to sign up for the plan themselves, so they take advantage of this behavioral quirk, counting on people to be too shortsighted, lazy, or prone to procrastination to opt out of the plan. And if this component of the reform bills passes, you can bet that the policymakers will claim success by pointing the number of people who did not opt out. But this does not prove that this reflects their true choice, preference, or well-being, but just that people acted as the policymakers predicted to the plan they designed, which reflects their preferences, not (necessarily) the employees'.

    (For more on my opinions regarding Nudge, besides the book chapter linked above, see this blog exchange in which I posted an unpublished op-ed.)

  • That oldtime utilitarian economics (no, thank you) [UPDATED AGAIN]

    Mark D. White

    The Wall Street Journal today features a paean to A.C. Pigou and good old-fashioned utilitarian economics, written by John Cassidy, author of How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. To Cassidy's (or the editors') credit, statements from other economists (such as Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises) are included for counterpoint, and Cassidy even mentions some pre-Coasean insight from Pigou:

    The mere existence of negative spillovers doesn't necessarily justify government intervention, Mr. Pigou conceded. In some cases, the parties concerned might be able to come to a voluntary agreement about how to compensate innocent bystanders. A landlord, for instance, may reduce the rents for tenants who have to live over a noisy bar.

    The landlord doen't do this out of the kindness of his heart, of course; more likely he has to lower the rent to attract tenants to a less attractive apartment.

    A better example would be the tenant confronting the bar owner directly for compensation; as Coase showed, if the two parties can bargain relatively costlessly, and one can be shown to have a right to control the noise in the situation, they will come to an agreement that will resolve the conflict efficiently, using information only they have (especially their subjective disutilities from various solutions), rather than relying on the incomplete information (and possibly skewed incentives) of government officials.

    The role of the courts here is not a hindrance, as many have assumed, but rather highlights an ignored aspect of externalities that stands in contradiction to entire utilitarian/Pigouvian economics tradition: harm is only of social (and governmental) concern if it is wrongful, i.e. if it violates a legal right. It can be argued that all actions (except the most private ones) create externalities of some sort, but nonetheless only the wrongfully caused ones are of legitimate concern to society and to the government. Hence the requirement of the Coase Theorem that rights be clearly assigned; the legal right in a situation must be ascertained, either by statutes, common law, or judicial decision, and then (and only then) the wronged party can either demand compensation or consent to a deal with the party found to be at fault. After all, that's what tort law is for (according to most legal scholars, with subtle differences): providing a mechanism for harmed parties to shift their burden to parties that caused it (depending, in most cases, on fault).

    But given their refusal to recognize rights (or wrongs), economists in the utilitarian/Pigouvian tradition cannot see this, and they simply add up benefits and harms. This is particularly pernicious when they counsel not the elimination of externalities, but the optimization of them: eliminate only the inefficient externalities, and leave the rest alone. If they acknowledged that some externalities are wrongful, they could not in good conscience (or at least without regret) recommend any less than elimination (recall the ridicule attending to 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry's statement that he would reduce terrorism to a "manageable level"). That's why normal people are so incredulous when you tell them it isn't efficient to eliminate pollution, because most people (for better or for worse) regard pollution as a moral wrong, not to be optimized but to be eliminated. (Imagine if some brilliant young economist were to recommend the "efficient level of torture.")

    Rather than turn back to this Pigovian mindset (not that I think we ever left it), why can't we start looking at the roles of right and wrong in the economy (however one chooses to define them), rather than simply adding up benefits and harms?  We may see that not all the benefits are "right," not all the harms are "wrong," and all the benefit in the world might not be worth a little wrongful harm.

    UPDATE (Dec 4): The Wall Street Journal printed my letter to the editor along the same lines today.

    UPDATE (Dec 7): Another economist jumps on the Pigouvian bandwagon.

  • David Brooks on health care reform and the values question

    Mark D. White

    In his recent column, "The Values Question," David Brooks definitely has the right idea in general regarding health care reform, making a bold statement that I completely agree with (especially the bolded part, emphasis mine):

    It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when talking about health care reform. But, like all great public issues, the health care debate is fundamentally a debate about values. It’s a debate about what kind of country we want America to be.

    At their core, great public issues are rarely economic–they're ethical. Focusing on costs–whether we're discussing health care, national security, and so on–misses the point, since it assumes that costs are the only (or most) relevant factor, and this is itself a normative statement. While costs may be a critical component of any public debate (especially when scarce resources are involved), they are rarely to be considered to the exclusion of other values (such as justice, dignity, rights, and so on).

    Brooks ends on the same note:

    We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.

    While I disagree with most of how Brooks fleshes out the debate, I do appreciate that he is focusing on values, which is what the debate truly is (or should be) about. I hope to have much more to say on this in the future.

    Any thoughts?

  • Superfreakonomics and irrelevance of moral analysis

    Jonathan B. Wight

    Superfreakonomics has received a lot of criticism for its lapses in science.  But there's a larger philosophical issue, which is how the authors see the role of technocrats in policy making.  For example, in discussing global warming, the authors propose a geo-engineering solution, e.g., causing man-made volcanic-like cloud eruptions to block the sun's rays. 

    Levitt and Dubner write, “Once you eliminate the moralism
    and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward
    engineering problem.”

    Ahhh!!!  It's so simple!  It's just engineering!  I thought
    public policy actually involved serious discussion about ethical frameworks,
    about goals, about acceptable means–economics as a social science. 

    It’s
    nice to see that these authors have cut to the chase, and can tell us exactly
    what we should wish to value (wealth maximization) and how to achieve it.  Who needs ethics?

    The American Economic Association’s Commission on Graduate
    Education warned in the early 1990s that programs were producing “idiot savants, skilled in technique but
    innocent of real economic issues.”[1]  Hmmm…. 
    when did Levitt earn his PhD?

    Real economic issues come as bundles of intersecting and
    often conflicting moral demands.  The
    thesis of this website is that:

    ·                          
    Ethical considerations play a role in the
    formulation of economic theories and research programs.  Science is not value free.

    ·                          
    Ethical considerations play a role in the
    choices of economic agents and in the outcomes of economic processes.  Doing positive economics requires some
    knowledge of and attention to ethical systems.

    ·                          
    Choice of goals (e.g., wealth versus other
    goals) and non-goal oriented ethical frameworks inform debate about public
    policies.

    The glib and shallow way in which the Superfreakonomics authors deal with public policies is super disappointing.

    [1] Cited in William J. Barber, “Reconfigurations in
    American Academic Economics: A General Practitioner’s Perspective.” Daedelus (Winter 1997): p. 98.

     

  • Adultery and Alzheimer’s

    Mark D. White

    No economics here (not obviously, anyway)–just a topic I'm interested in, the ethical aspects of marital relations, infidelity, and divorce.

    From The Wall Street Journal last week comes an article by Alicia Mundy titled "Of Love and Alzheimer's" regarding the ethics of adultery on the part of spouses of Alzheimer's sufferers. It details the emotional withdrawal that that a person goes through when his or her spouse gradually succumbs to the disease, as he or she forgets details of their life together, perhaps no longer recognizes them, and loses the ability to provide emotional support and companionship. While continuing to provide care and company to their patient-spouses, the well spouses have needs as well, and often seek friendship and intimacy (sexual or not) with other people, to some controversy:

    Caregivers often face a stark choice: Either start an extramarital relationship and risk estrangement from friends and family—not to mention their own guilt—or live without a real companion for many years. The trend is prompting religious leaders, counselors and others to rethink how they define adultery.

    I think it really is a matter of how you define adultery (or, more generally, infidelity). If you define it as violating the (marital) exclusivity of romantic or sexual activity, regardless of any realized negative impact on one's spouse, then clearly there can be no exception for infirmity of any kind; this may excuse the adultery, but it cannot justify it. But even such a duty, derived from a general prohibition on promise-breaking, can be overridden by another duty, such as the duty of self-preservation of the part of the well spouse, who must care not only for the patient-spouse but also for him- or herself. As the article notes, spouses of Alzheimer's sufferers are more likely to die with a year of their partners than are spouses of people suffering from other diseases such as cancer; one would assume the difference is the mental deterioration involved with Alzheimer's (a cancer patient can express love for his or her spouse while an Alzheimer's patient often cannot). If affection and intimacy are taken to be essential human needs, they should not be sacrificed simply to adhere to a rule prohibiting adultery regardless of circumstances, which would be a tragic case of rule worship.

    If you include in your definition some concept of the realized harm from the infidelity, then the picture is slightly different. If some aspect of the true wrong in adultery lies in the feelings of deception or violation it creates, rather than in (or in addition to) the act itself, then extramarital activity when one's spouse is (relatively severely) mentally incapacitated may be justified. If the well spouse still spends time with the patient, and doesn't neglect him or her to spend time with the new partner, then the wrong in the situation is more difficult to see, as the patient is not being harmed in any apparent way, especially if he or she is not cognizant of the other relationship. (At the risk of giving credence to the normal adulterer's excuse that "I did it for the good of our marriage," one may even imagine that, in providing much-needed emotional support for the well spouse, the affair may have secondary benefits for the patient, who cannot provide the same support previously given.)

    The morality of adultery is never clear-cut; while usually wrong, of course, there will always be situations, and not always uncommon ones, in which mitigating factors exist that any reasonable ethical system will recognize. Being married to an Alzheimer's sufferer in advanced stages of the disease is certainly one of those cases, and an intensely tragic one at that, since both spouses are lacking the emotional connection on which they relied on for years, one directly due to cognitive decay and the other indirectly. But the other, the well spouse, can do something about it without (apparently) imposing harm on the patient. Personally, I appreciate that the people in this situation struggle with the morality of their actions, but I would hope they (and their children, their friends, and so forth) can come to terms with the tragedy of the entire situation, and give their blessings to the person trying to balance caring for the patient and him- or herself.

  • Social effects on preference and choice (some thoughts)

    Mark D. White

    Prawfsblawg featured a post today by David Schleicher (nspired by this NYT article) on the topic of Pandora, the online music service that suggests new selections based on the musical characteristics (tempo, style, etc.) of your current musical preferences. Schleicher compares this to a blind taste test for coffee, and argues that both miss the point by focusing on a limited set of attributes of the items in question (what I called "intrinsic qualities" in my comment), but not on the social factors involved in choosing music, coffee, etc., and then implying that choices should be made according to only those narrow attributes.

    My comment there was:

    I think you're discounting the importance of intrinsic qualities over social aspects for some people. Some people do not regard coffee or music as network goods – for instance, I prefer the taste of Dunkin' Donuts coffee to Starbucks, so that's what I drink. It would never occur to me to pick my coffee based on what other people drink or what they'll think about my choice. If I find an artist, song, or album that I like, I seek out other music in the same style or vein, and so forth."

    (This comment reflects a profound antipathy for the concept of "relative tastes" or "envy effects" on choice or well-being.)

    In this post, I want to muse a bit on my professed antipathy for these concepts, which I've never analyzed.

    Part of my antipathy is based on introspection; as I said in my comment, I choose my coffee, food, music, reading material, etc., on the basis of intrinsic qualities, and not on other people's tastes or opinions of my choices. I'm not going to say I never care about what other people think–for instance, I do hope that my colleagues think I'm a good person and do respectable work, and I do try not to dress too strangely–but I don't care what anybody thinks about my personal tastes, which in turn do not depend on theirs.

    As a result, I am always skeptical of studies that purport to show strong status effects in choice (following Veblen) or an inordinate emphasis on relative (versus absolute) income (Robert Frank's thesis). But I am willing to admit that there's a decent chance I'm just a freak, and maybe everyone else is like these studies show. (The popularity of Starbucks coffee, rancid burnt swill that it is, would certainly support that.)

    Of course, to each his or her own; if what a person truly cares about is her relative status or income, that is her own business. Yet, it still bothers me. I think it has something to do with basing your own well-being and happiness too much on those of other people, which implies that your choices and actions will be unduly impacted by those of other people, rather than by reasons that "should" matter more. Obviously, that "should" carrries a lot of weight here; it seems to me that your reasons for acting should come from essential aspects of you, representing what you like, reflecting your personality and identity, and not just what other people do, have, or think. (Of course, some think that personal identity is, to some extent, socially determined, but I don't think that should be taken to imply that tastes and preferences need be relative.)

    So where's the ethics here? It would seem to be a failure to respect yourself: acting on relative preferences compromises your integrity by subordinating your reasons for action to what other people choose to do, and in turn subsuming your essential tastes and preferences. Look at popular culture: we celebrate the characters in books, TV, and movies who march to the beat of a different drummer, who follow their own paths, who defy the aesthetic conventions of their peer groups and express their individuality regardless of what other people think. If we do admire such people, it follows that we find something virtuous in such behavior, that these people are being more true to themselves than those who merely follow the crowd.

    Any thoughts?

  • Ethics and the Nobel Laureates in Economics

    Jonathan Wight

    I’ve compiled a list over the years of Nobel prize winners who’ve
    shown a willingness to engage in a discussion about ethics and economics.  Merely engaging is to be applauded—when this
    subject is so often considered taboo. 

    My list is below—but I'm sure it needs editing.  Who would like to add or make corrections?  Thanks!

    THE LIST:

    •         
    Paul Samuelson (1970)

    –       
    Altruism can exist independent of self-interest.

    •         
    Kenneth Arrow (1972)

    –       
    Virtues play a significant role in the operation of
    the economic system, particularly when there is asymmetric information.

    •         
    Gunner Myrdal (1974)

    –       
    Race relations and equity in development

    •         
    F.A. Hayek (1974)

    –       
    Social order depends upon complex ethical
    regularities – which for the most part we do not understand and hence we
    underestimate.

    •         
    Milton Friedman (1976)

    –       
    No society can be stable unless its citizens accept
    basic core values and institutions. 
    These values and institutions must be accepted without reliance on
    instrumental, cost-benefit calculations. 

    •         
    Herbert Simon (1978)

    –       
    Bounded rationality and “docility” unite to make
    ethical constructs successful.

    •         
    James Buchanan (1986)

    –       
    Individual behavior
    is morally-ethically constrained.

    –       
    The standard
    cost-benefit reckoning (consequentialist) is not operative in this realm.

    •         
    Robert Solow (1987)

    –       
    Intergenerational
    justice and sustainability concerns should be addressed

    •         
    Robert Fogel (1993)

    –       
    Religious ethics
    promote social reforms (e.g., abolition of slavery).

    –       
    The
    redistribution of spiritual resources is key concern for next generation (sense
    of purpose, self discipline, work ethic, thirst for knowledege).

    •         
    Reinhardt Selten (1994)

    –       
    Evolutionary game
    theory

    •         
    Amartya Sen (1998)

    –       
    The strict
    dichotomy between normative and positive economics is false.

    –       
    The neoclassical
    utility maximization model is seriously deficient.

    –       
    Role of
    commitment to others and to principles [Railway story]

    •         
    Daniel Kahneman (2002): 

    –       
    Psychology, bounded
    rationality, and concern for fairness (e.g., ethics?) permeates many economic
    relationships.

    •         
    Elinor Ostrom (2009): 

    –       
    Governance in local
    communities to solve tragedy of commons problems

     

  • Edmund Phelps on ethics and economics

    Mark D. White

    Just found 2006 Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps' recent First Things article entitled "Economic Justice and the Spirit of Innovation" – to give you a quick idea of where he goes, here are the last two paragraphs of the article:

    Most observers now acknowledge that capitalism, even in the midst of the 1930s depression, has long been creating unprecedented, unimagined levels of productivity and wage rates—for the rest of the world as well as for the handful of capitalist economies themselves. Now, however, some philosophers and social critics are suggesting that even capitalism has outlived its usefulness—that pursuit of new goals requires another system.

    It must be clear by now that this analysis overlooks what has been the key dimension of capitalism from its first functioning early in the nineteenth century. This dimension is what capitalism’s dynamism offers to human experience and human benefit—the true moral dimension of economics, in other words. Well-functioning capitalism, where it is attainable, is of undimmed value because it allows human beings to realize their true nature as creators and innovators.

    Let the discussion begin!