Digressions&Impressions

Fear is the Cause of Hatred: Joshua Child on economic growth and Jewish naturalization

Those that are for the admission of the Jews, say in answer to the aforesaid Reasons, viz .
1st, The subtler the Jews are, and the more Trades they pry into while they live here, the more they are like to increase Trade; and the more they do that, the better it is for the Kingdom in general, though the worse for the English Merchant, who comparatively to the rest of the People of England is not one of a thousand.
2dly, The thriftier they live, the better Example to our People; there being nothing in the World more conducing to enrich a Kingdom than thriftiness.
3dly, it is denied that they bring over nothing with them; for many have brought hither very good Estates, and hundreds more would do the like, and settle here for their Lives, and their Posterities after them, if they had the same freedom and Security here as they have in Holland and Italy, where the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and other Princes allow them not only perfect Liberty and Security, but give them the privilege of making Laws among themselves'; and that they would reside with us, is proved from the known  Principles of Nature, vz.
Principle 1. All Men by Nature are alike, as I have before demonstrated, and Mr. Hobbs hath truly asserted, how Erroneous soever he may be in other things.
Principle 2. Fear is the cause of Hatred, and hatred of separation from, as well as evil Deeds to, the Parties or Government hated, when opportunity is offered: This by the way shews the difference between a bare connivance at Dissenters in matters of Religion, and a toleration by Law; the former keeps them continually in Fear, and consequently apt to Sedition and Rebellion, when any probable occasion of success presents: The latter disarms cunning, ambitious minded Men, who, wanting a popular discontented Party to work upon, can effect little or nothing to the prejudice of the Government. And this methinks discovers clearly the cause why the Lutherans in Germany, Protestants in France, Greeks in Turkey, and Sectaries in Holland, are such quiet peaceable-minded-men, while our Non-conformists in England are said to be inclined to strife, War, and Bloodshed; Take away the cause and the Effect will cease.
While the Laws are in Force against Men, they think the Sword hangs over their Heads, and are always in fear (though the Execution be suspended) not knowing how soon Councils, or Counselors, Times or Persons, may change, it is only only Perfect Love that casts out fear; and all Men are in love with Liberty and security: It cannot be denied that the Industrious Bees have Stings (though Drones have not) yet Bees sting not, except those that hurt them, or disturb their Hives.

    It is said, the Jews cannot Intermarry with us, and therefore it cannot be supposed they will reside long amongst us, although they were treated never so kindly: Why not reside here as well as in Italy, Poland, and Holland? They have now no Country of their own to go to, and therefore that is their Country, and must needs so esteemed by them, where they are best used, and have the greatest Security.--Sir Josiah Child (1698) A new discourse of trade: wherein is recommended several weighty points relating to companies of merchants, the Act of Navigation, naturalization of strangers, and our woolen manufactures, the balance of trade, and the nature of plantations, p. 142-144 [I modestly modernized spelling--ES]

As I noted in a piece I contributed to The Reading Room, Josiah Child's writings on the naturalization of the Jews, which he developed in successive editions of his works, and his mercantile thought more generally were influential through the intercession of Vincent de Gournay in the political economy circles associated with the Encyclopédie. Child (1630/31–1699) was a MP, and governor of the East India Company, and had not trivial importance for its expansion in India. He is generally treated as a Mercantilist. As can be gleaned from the quoted passage (and larger context), he is advocating for policies that are meant to fundamentally copy Dutch success in trade and economics, and thereby displace their power. He has some claim to being the source of the very idea of economic progress.

Child frankly acknowledges that Jewish immigration and naturalization, which will bring in stock and trade-connections, may have zero-sum effects for relatively small number of English traders. But the overall effect will be good for the English economy due to the expansion of exports and change in culture they will bring. Child clearly thinks that, alongside trade, savings are essential to economic growth. The underlying idea is that once one opens borders to people and capital, a rising population and capital will facilitate trade and enhance competitiveness, and so allow the English to compete more successfully with the Dutch. Child does not suggest here that one should open borders to goods and commodities. People and capital are de facto treated as inputs with the goal (or output) being export of goods and a competitive trade balance.

That immigration may harm some locals was, as regular readers know (recall this post), tackled by John Toland in his (1714) Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, Chapter XVI, by explicitly drawing on Locke’s political economy. But unlike Child, Toland addresses the displacement concerns of what one may call the working poor. Yes, they will have to compete with new workers. But these new workers will also ensure a larger internal market with an improved cost of living (due to "cheaper wrought" goods). And the goods will be cheaper not just because the division of labor can be more specialized, but also because the newcomers will bring technological improvements. The newcomer’s ‘stock’ is also a human capital. This build's on Child's own claim about the Jews ("subtler").  That is to say, Toland grasps and fully articulates the more liberal win-win logic that is essential to Locke's more liberal arguments, and later generalized by Hume and Smith. 

I can't prove that Toland read Child (although it would be surprising if he had not), but I would be amazed if Mandeville hadn't. For Child's "thrifty bees,' are clearly Mandeville's target in the Fable. In Mandeville's hive, they will indulge in luxury spending. 

Child inscribes his argument in what I (following Levy and Peart) call methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE): the positing of homogeneous human nature such that we're equal for theoretical (including moral and political) purposes. Observed differences are due to cultural, educational, institutional factors. This is developed (as I have argued) by Mandeville, but, as Child also notes, first articulated by Hobbes (recall here). 

That there is an important difference between mere toleration and formal legal recognition/protection is explained by Child in terms of its effect on one's expectations. The underlying logic is Hobbes', but I don't think Hobbes (who emphasizes the positive impact of the rule of law on stabilizing expectations and reducing uncertainty) actually makes this point. The security afforded by the rule of law is conducive to liberty and economic growth.

That "fear is the cause of hatred" does not, I think, have a Hobbesian provenance (although I would be delighted to learn otherwise).* It does have a Shakespearian ring: "In time we hate that which we often fear." And I suspect that lurking behind Shakespeare and Child is Machiavelli's Prince, Chapters 17&19. (There are other Machiavellian allusions in Child.) To be sure  Machiavelli is clear that part of political skill is to be feared without causing hatred. 

In fact, Child clearly recognizes that the benefit of an impartial rule of law, which does not discriminate against some groups, is not in the first instance economic but to reduce civil unrest greatly. And for him this is compatible with a thoroughgoing multiculturalism because he sees no problem in allowing the Jews self-government ("the privilege of making Laws among themselves') so they can maintain their identity.

Effective Altruism and Gary Becker

The conclusion is that firms making cash transfers because of their altruism obtain greater utility than other firms with the same preferences and market opportunities who subsidize customers, workers or suppliers. Consequently, firms making cash transfers are more likely to "survive" because they do better than firms using market transactions to convey their altruism. Although participants in market transactions may be highly altruistic, they act as if they are selfish and maximize their money incomes. They express their altruism through cash transfers not tied to market transactions, as dramatically illustrated by the enormous charitable contributions by allegedly selfish captains of industry in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.'--Gary Becker (1981) Altruism in the Family and Selfishness in the Market Place, Economica, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 189 (Feb., 1981), 11

As regular readers know (recall), because of Melinda Cooper's excellent Family Values, I have been re-reading neoliberal texts in light of their analysis of the family. Gary Becker's work on the role of the family of making the division of labor possible is crucial to her argument (see p. 10 in linked piece), and something I wish to discuss in the future. But the passage above caught my eye because it is a quasi-Darwinian style of argument (indebted to Alchian and Milton Friedman in the early 1950s) that shows, in context, why cash transfers are more "efficient." And while the official point is not to make the normative argument that we ought to prefer expressing our "altruism through cash transfers not tied to market transactions," the rhetoric of the passage leaves no doubt that's implied. It turns out that the "captains of industry" are worth emulating for  their altruism!

Now, this idea is a core feature (see here) of the so-called effective altruism movement which ordinarily is traced back to Peter Singer's writings, especially his (1972) "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."  When the efficiency of cash transfers is connected to the idea one can give most and so generate highest utility if one makes a lot of money in market economy, one can obtain the result that a successful mergers & acquisition consultant who annually donates 70% of her salary to Give Well does more good than most aid workers in crisis areas. Critics dislike this feature of effective altruism not because it violates our intuitions but because it may well be that market transactions actually generate the structural causes that do -- or the political forces that reinforce -- real damage to people's lives.*

As it happens, Becker's argument is articulated in terms of "effective altruism" and "effective altruist." A google-scholar search (1900-1981) shows nobody used the term "effective altruist" in a scholarly context before Becker's influential article. (This surprised me!) And if we search on "effective altruism," the term gets used extremely rarely (see especially Quinton's (1973) Utilitarian Ethics) and never in this specific context. For example, granting Bradley that "it is, no doubt, true that a consequentialist manner of reasoning in morals leaves more scope for self-regarding distortion," Quinton writes, "on the other hand it also leaves more room for apt and effective altruism than a set of rigidly unconditional specific principles." (96; I thank Neil Levy for locating this passage.) This foreshadows the ruling idea of the movement, but it is underdeveloped in Quinton.

Now, by linking these ideas to Becker I mean to suggest that the effective altruism movement has clear neoliberal features, in particular, the technocratic wing of neoliberalism. Of course, I do not mean to deny that elements of the effective altruism movement are developed independently from Chicago economics and its cultural influence. But I got thinking about the links because of the following passage in Becker's article: 

The effect of a little altruism on cooperative and efficient behaviour can be illustrated by Good Samaritan situations (see the analysis in Landes and Posner, 1978). A selfish person encountering someone drowning, being assaulted or in other dire circumstances would refuse to help without the expectation of monetary or psychic compensation. An altruist, however, might help even if he became exposed to danger, and even if his altruism were sufficiently weak that he did not help in any way prior to the misfortune. Although the marginal utility from helping might have been small prior to the misfortune, the total increase in utility to the altruist from helping could exceed the disutility of the effort or risk involved because of the large imminent decline in the victim's welfare. Note that this example shows not only how altruism can induce efficient behaviour where selfishness fails, but also how altruism can significantly change behaviour even when the altruism is weak. (10)

Landes and Posner (1978) is "Salvors, finders, good samaritans, and other rescuers: an economic study of law and altruism," which is a famous article in Chicago law and economics. It discusses rescuing drowning people cases in terms of "the economics of altruism." (Altruism is understood in terms of lack of expectation of compensation.) And they offer a utilitarian model to do so that clearly anticipates Becker. But their interest is really in to what degree the law should require compensation for failures to rescue. (Their prototypical case is: "A drowning man cries for help, a strong swimmer ignores his cries, and the man drowns. Is the decedent's estate entitled to damages from the swimmer?"

Now Landes and Posner do not cite any philosophers. As regular readers know (recall) drowning child/adult cases have a long history in philosophy, from Mencius to Sophie de Grouchy, to motivate (the existence of) natural compassion. But the central example for our present purposes is Peter Singer's own famous drowning man case:

 If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. Singer (1972) "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."  (231)

Here the case is used to motivate the idea that, "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it." This duty itself does not require commitment to utilitarianism, but in Singer's hands it is a key step toward the idea that "we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility-that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift."

Now, in his main line of argument, Becker is thinking about altruism in terms of a kind of intra-family insurance scheme. And so I don't want to suggest that he and Singer agree on all important issues. And I don't think Becker ought to accept Singer's strong version of his intuition. After, all Becker wants to explain why altruism, even at considerable cost to oneself, can be genuinely utility enhancing even efficient. (And, in fact, he can explain why all things equal altruists tend to be more responsive to disaster relief than prevention.) I don't want to claim that Singer influenced Becker. 

Okay, let me wrap up. It is conventional wisdom to think that in the nineteenth century, the economic, normative, and psychological branches of utilitarianism were tightly bound up with each other. And that in the twentieth century, as economists moved to revealed preference, these connections weakened if not dissolved. Much (PPE style) research in policy relevant philosophy on, say, inter-generational justice and climate policy, shows that utilitarianism is not exhausted as a living tradition in which the different branches influence each other.

And, if we look at the history of the effective altruism movement, it is undeniable that some of its most important ideas were developed, perhaps independently, within Chicago economics and law & economics. And so when critics say that effective altruism is neoliberal in character, they have a point. Some other time I'll explore if effective altruism also inherits the problems (and benefits) I associate with Chicago.

 

On Rationality and Condorcet's Feminism

This observation is not correct. Women are not governed, it is true, by the reason (and experience) of men; they are governed by their own reason (and experience).

Their interests not being the same (as those of men) by the fault of the law, the same things not having the same importance for them as for men, they may, without failing in rational conduct, govern themselves by different principles, and [8] tend towards a different result. It is as reasonable for a woman to concern herself respecting her personal attractions as it was for Demosthenes to cultivate his voice and his gestures.'--Condorcet (1791) On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship.

With his work on juries and voting, Condorcet is, of course, a true hero of formal philosophers--about which some other time more. (I have a tendency to focus on his better half, herself a very fine political economist.) But he was also a major feminist thinker. And the quote is from his major statement on the topic.* 

It's easy to misunderstand what he is saying here in two ways. First, he may be thought to be promoting gender-stereotypical behavior. I don't think that's right. He is rather explaining what we would call adaptive behavior (even Stockholm syndrome). He is not claiming the should develop their interest being attractive to men. (In fact, in immediate context he is claiming that when given the chance, in rare instances or emergencies, women express citizen virtues as nobly as any republican hero.)

Second, he is not claiming that women naturally or essentially have a different kind of reason than men have.  A view like this centered on male and female virtues, primarily, was familiar enough. Rather, he is saying that given certain institutional constraints  -- especially the unequal treatment of men and women by the law, which entails a legal servitude of women -- , men and women have different kinds experiences. And, anticipating the stand-point epistemologists, those experiences give rise to different standards ("principles") and conceptions of rationality.

Now, there is a way to domesticate the thought of the previous paragraph that's not wrong. One can read Condorcet as saying that what counts as rational depends on circumstances. In particular, if one thinks of rationality in terms of the means to achieve some (given) ends in the context of certain constraints, then when either the means and/or the constraints change, or even the ends change, then what counts as the rational thing to do also changes. 

Admittedly the two reasons may be thought to be in tension because one may think that to engage in adaptive behavior should not be called rational. But Condorcet's argument is precisely that in very bad social, legal, and political circumstances rationality expresses itself as a species of Stockholm syndrome. To put this in game-theoretical terms sometimes the optimal (or rational) move is objectively awful. 

This is not to deny that there is a tension here. Condorcet clearly (i) wants to give the lived experience of subjugated women epistemic and normative standing such that her actions and claims need not be evaluated by those of men, who do not face the same experiences. But (ii) he also has -- not unlike Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy -- an objective conception of human flourishing. And one can easily imagine the two [(i) & (ii)] coming into conflict in particular instances.

One final thought. One may think that Condorcet is committed to the idea that once the legal-institutional barriers to women's participation in commercial, social, and political life have disappeared women's rationality will disappear and become like male rationality. But I think there is a more radical thought lurking in Condorcet's though: men's experiences will be transformed by such  female emancipation. (This is a point that both Wollstonecraft and Mill/Taylor also emphasize.) For, on Condorcet's view, prior to female emancipation men are de facto tyrants. And this means that what counts as rational for them is adaptive to bad social and political circumstances.

That is, male experience and rationality will be transformed by the admission of women to the rights of citizenship. And what will count as rational in that future state will be grounded in wholly new experiences (and ad infinitum). Thus, the age of reason comes to a close in this most optimistic Enlightenment thinker, who invents, in part, not just the fracturing of reason into different standpoints, but the discovery of rationality as an open-ended historical process*

 

Not all Philosophers Were Misogynists

Hegel aside, philosophy was never the easy path for Sedgwick. As a graduate student in UChicago’s Department of Philosophy, she was one of only two women in her cohort—the other dropped out after the first year—and there were no female faculty members. (Today, four of the deparment’s 20 tenure-track faculty members are women.)

Sedgwick credits her adviser, the late Manley Thompson, AB’38, AM’38, PhD’42, an authority on Kant, for taking her seriously in a way many other faculty didn’t. “It’s not as if they were bad guys,” she explains. “In their experience, women were daughters, mothers, lovers. They weren’t philosophers.”

...

Although feminist philosophy isn’t an area she works in directly (“Kant and Hegel were both big misogynists, just as all philosophers were,” she says), she welcomes its investigations. “One really great thing about philosophy,” Sedgwick says, “is that if it is working correctly, it should wean all of us of the idea that anything is simple.”[see here]

I have long admired Prof. Sedgwick from a distance; a former President of the Central APA, she is one of the leading scholars of Kant and his relationship to what is called German idealism. Her work exhibits the virtues of clarity, precision, and profundity. She is featured in the Alumni magazine of The University of Chicago, and I was moved by reading of her personal struggles in the department. Sadly, Manley Thompson had passed away by the time I became a graduate student at Chicago, but a (dwindling) number of the peers that could not really see women as philosophers were still around. Given their exacting standards, and adherence to truth and justice, this dissonance revealed itself only obliquely and unexpectedly to somebody (like me), who was not on the look out for it and not much affected personally by it.

Even so, I was dismayed by Sedgwick's claim that "all philosophers were" big "misogynists." Now, I recognize that this is an interview and that if we treat Sedgwick's remark as a statistical generalization it is probably broadly true. But it really needs emphasizing that in the centuries before Kant and Hegel, there were female and male philosophers who, in their declared philosophies, were anti-misogynists.* Problem is if I list their names -- Cavendish, De Gournay (recall here and here), Van Schuurman, Mandeville, Poulain de la Barre, De Grouchy, Condorcet, Millar, and Wollstonecraft (recall here and here), as well as, perhaps, Diderot and D'Holbach -- they are mostly unfamiliar or not read as philosophers because Kant and Hegel -- and the historiographers they inspired -- chose not to take them seriously qua philosophy. [For an excellent volume on the women, see here.]

This is not just a matter of historical justice.

De Gournay's Criticism of Political Christianity

Consequently, it is clear that, by conceding women this faculty for administering baptism, [the Fathers of the Church]  considered them worthy of that office, and that they forbade them to administer the other sacraments simply to maintain the scope of men's authority for all time, either because they themselves were male or, rightly or wrongly, in order to maintain peace between the two sexes by the incapacity and repression of one of them.--Marie Le Jars De Gournay ("The Equality of Men and Women" translated by D.M. Clarke, p. 69)

In the quoted passage, De Gournay (1565-1645), who wrote a generation (or two) before Hobbes and Spinoza, interprets church teachings and practice politically. By using 'politically' I have three or four things in mind: (1) most obviously, church practice has political consequences: (a) this practice creates "the repression" of women, and (b) it ensures this repression in perpetuity by creating circumstances in which women remain incapable of equality. (2) She attributes to the church political motives: (i) male solidarity;  (ii) the desire to solve a pre-existing political problem. (3) She presupposes that prior to the political establishment of Christianity, there is a natural battle between the sexes; (4) this battle is settled by the political imposition of Christian mores. According to De Gournay, it's because the church is political (in the senses described) that it ignores it's own understanding of the equal worth of men and women. In context she implies that Christianity has been regressive political force for women because prior to the establishment Christianity "all nations used to admit women and men without distinction to the priesthood." (69)*

As mentioned a few weeks ago De Gournay returns to the natural battle of the sexes near the end of her argument. When she addresses the need to foster "peace within marriages." (73) Ideally, men and women “should” use “rational discussions” and not force (73). The reader is left to wonder if this is also true for settling political authority generally. In context she implies that rational agreement is not to be expected “because” of “the common frailty of human minds.” (73) However, as we have seen above, she had already argued that woman's incapacity is due not to some innate defects, but rather due to their political and marital oppression. So, she strongly implies that women would be capable of more rational participation under an alternative institutional framework with a better political theology (in context she is critical of Scriptures' advocacy that "the husband is the head of his wife." Ephesians 5.21-2)* She is explicit about this by citing the 'divine' Plato approvingly for his assigning "to women the same rights, faculties, and offices in their republics and everywhere else." (56)