I woke up in a panic this morning.

You know all that hype last spring about the end of HBO’s The Wire?

It was real.

It’s over.

The characters are gone.

Omar, Rawls, Bunk, Rhonda, Valchek, Beadie, Jimmy, Carver, Herc, Kima, Daniels, Freamon, Prop Joe, Marlo, Stringer Bell, Butchie, Brother Mouzone, Avon, Cutty, Levy, Bubbs, Snoop, D’Angelo, Tommy, Mayor Royce, Clay Davis, Frank Sobotka, The Greek, Namond, Michael, Randy, Prez, Bunny Colvin, Duquan.

Gone.

This is horrible.

Anyway, foolish as this is, I'm going to  try again. Here's the question:

Given a) the fact of deep disagreement over conceptions of the good, and b) that reasonable people can reasonable disagree over the moral valence of something abortion, is it legitimate for a liberal society to give public honours to polarizing figures such as Dr. Morgentaler. Another way of putting it: Could we reasonably expects someone to accept something like the following: "Even though you disagree with what this person stands for, you must respect what they did enough to honour them"?

Interesting answers might reference the following: Louis Riel, Malcolm X, John Rawls, Creationism vs. Darwinism.

(image: World Bank's East Asia blog)

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) opened its High Level Conference on World Food Security today in the midst of soaring world food prices.

From the Conference website:

An estimated 850 million people in the world today suffer from hunger. Of those, about 820 million live in developing countries.

850 million is more than 1 person in every 8 people on the planet.

The World Bank says:

High food prices are a matter of daily struggle for more than 2 billion people. High prices threaten to increase malnutrition, already an underlying cause of death in over 3.5 million children a year.

* An estimated 100 million people have fallen into poverty in the last 2 years
* Prices are expected to stay high through 2015

This is far from a simple problem. In it are tied the issues of climate change, international trade, security, economic development, sustainability, equity, corruption, race relations (think Zimbabwe), fiscal and monetary policy, bioethics and religion... thorny is an understatement.

Short term solutions are likely to focus on food aid to countries suffering most from high prices. More systemic solutions are likely to get bogged down in politics. But the conference is continuing, so there is still hope.

Suprisingly, there seems to be more disagreement about the causes than the solutions. And there isn't even complete agreement on the primary question: are high prices really a problem?

How can such disagreement exist? Dani Rodrick (in his excellent blog) wrote a while back about a contradiction in the way people talk about the impact of food prices on the poor. The crux of the contradiction is that some poor people mostly buy food and some poor people mostly sell food. Obviously if you spend most of your money on food and you sell labour, higher food prices make you poorer. But if you sell food and mostly eat your own produce, higher prices make you richer. So higher prices aren't unambiguously a bad thing (indeed, much of the argument in the Doha round at the WTO is about reducing subsidies to agriculture with the specific objective of raising world food prices!)

For me, whether a price change is good or bad revolves around two factors:

1. Is the price real or manipulated? When rich countries subsidise agricultural exports and dump food in developing economies, the incentives created are not sustainable, nor are they efficient. Similarly, when developing countries place tariffs on food, the incentives aren't efficient. The short term impact on prices may be the same as the impact from a some natural event (drought, new technology, shift in aggregate demand etc) but if the incentives are created artificially, they will lead to inefficient outcomes.
2. Rawls' Second Principle of Justice. This focuses on "the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society". If a rise in prices pulls more people out of poverty than it pushes into poverty, then its a good thing. This is possible if a higher number of poor people are dependent on food prices for income than the number for whom food represents the majority of their expenditure.

These are, broadly speaking, cause (1) and effect (2). In the context of the current situation, there is considerable disagreement regarding the cause, but there is wide agreement that the effect of current high prices is a negative impact on a large number of the least advantaged members of society. This is revealed as sufficient to generate agreement that something needs to be done.

What that something might be, depends significantly on the causes of current high prices. There's a tendency for people to blame their favorite "whipping boy". Some people blame biofuel production. Brazil takes offence and points to rising demand. China points to trade barriers... the duel goes on.

Fortunately the FAO maintains a clear head. The FAO (in their backgrounder for today's conference [pdf]) refer to a "confluence of different forces":

• Weather related production shortfalls (particularly in Australia and Canada but also other major exporting countries)
• Gradual reduction of food stocks (mainly of cereals) since the 1990s. This is a bad thing to have in combination with the above. Cereal stocks are expected to be at their lowest level in 25 years by the end of this year.
• Increasing fuel costs. Fuel is a factor of production for agriculture, but it has a double effect in this case because...
• Biofuels: this has pushed demand for sugar, maize, cassava, oilseeds and palm oil, pushing up their prices. Farmers have been diverting land to produce these crops in stead of other crops to take advantage of the higher prices. The result is lower supply of other crops, which, in turn, pushes the price up their prices. Biofuels are also the subjects of large subsidies. (The possibility that these are politically motivated angers many people, but the FAO didn't dwell on motivations).
• Changing structure of demand. This is an obtuse way of saying China, India and others are getting richer, and can afford more and better food. It manages to make the point without appearing to blame these countries for their success. When so many people begin spending more money on something, obviously the price will go up. The FAO points out that this doesn't account for the "sudden spike that began in 2006".
• Some other factors which, while having influence don't appear to be as important (financial derivatives and US$ exchange rate among them).

So the debate will go on this week. We will likely see an urgent World Bank and UNFAO led food aid drive extending over the next year or two. From the FAO News Room:

Noting that the time for talk was over and that action was urgently needed, FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf today appealed to world leaders for US$30 billion a year to re-launch agriculture and avert future threats of conflicts over food.

I hope Dr Diouf is successful. He's going to need all the help he can get.

----------------

Update:

Yesterday, Ross Garnaut gave a presentation at the ANU titled Measuring the Unmeasurable. Shiro's post today:

Ross, in response to another question, observed that high food prices unambiguously reduce the welfare of the poor in developing countries.

This might seem to contradict the comment from this post: "higher prices aren't unambiguously a bad thing." My comment is meant in a theoretical sense. While I (regrettably) missed Ross' presentation last night I suspect he was making an empirical comment; that given who the poor are, what they do for income, and what they spend their money on, high food prices have an unambiguously negative net impact on poor in developing countries. The two claims contain no contradiction.

Kant requests that my moral acts be impartial, even from my interest in the person who is the recipient of my good act. It is not that I cannot act morally right in relation to someone I personally care for, but I should rise above that care as I determine that morally right course of action. Subsequently, I can then reintroduce any personal involvement into the situation, at which point it becomes “a matter of the relations of the moral point of view to other points of view,” (2) in this case the point of view of personal care. In other words, I must, as a moral agent, intentionally distinguish between moral and personal interests. Interestingly, Williams illustrates his point by reference to Rawls’ idea of social contracting, which is only seemingly about self-interest and therefore perfectly reflects the Kantian principle of impartial moral deliberation: “For while the contracting parties are pictured as making some kind of self-interested ... choice ..., they are entirely abstract persons making this choice in ignorance of their own particular properties, tastes, and so forth.” (3) Although Rawls claims that “impartiality does not mean impersonality,” (3) Williams still detects in his position an unfortunate adherence to the Kantian principle of moral deliberation which is not allowed to involve the personal identity of concrete actual agents, i.e. a person’s desires, concerns, and projects.

Now, “if Kantianism abstracts in moral thought from the identity of persons, Utilitarianism strikingly abstracts from their separateness.” (3) For a Utilitarian, the goal is a maximization of global utility, not individual utility. Additionally, “the basic bearer of value for Utilitarianism is the state of affairs,” (4) not the moral agent. Utilitarianism is therefore, in some sense, committed to a greater level of abstraction than Kantian moral philosophy because it considers neither the actual personal moral agent, nor the individuality of moral agents. From this perspective, the Kantian is less abstract than the Utilitarian because he does emphasize the individual, just not the actual individual’s desires, concerns etc. This is to say that Utilitarianism evaluates the projected consequences of certain moral acts, or the “empirical information which actually exists,” (3) to formal and structural evaluation. As a member of the Utilitarian moral system, I am therefore reduced to a mere “representative of the satisfaction system who happens to be near certain causal levers at a certain time.” (4)

Even though Kant stands stronger than Utilitarianism, with respect to recognizing the individual agent, Williams keeps pressing the critical point that not even for Kantians (such as Rawls) is “the conception of the individual provided by the Kantian theories ... in fact enough to ... allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience.” (5) How, then, do we allow for personal character?

Williams suggests that to allow for personal character “we need only the idea of a man’s ground projects providing the motive force which propels him into the future, and gives him a reason for living.” (13) A person’s projects, desires, and reasons to keep living are of moral significance because they express this person’s values. The projects I desire to accomplish will, for that reason, determine the choices I make. Quite simply, I will do the things that advance my projects, and avoid doing the things that do not advance my projects. Now, think of the contrast between a person’s present and future projects, or values. As in the case of a young man who may have “a theory of degeneration of the middle-aged, but then … when middle-aged, he will have a theory of the naivité of the young.” (10) It is quite revealing, Williams argues, that a man of these opposing value theories will keep on living. Why should he, if he is bound to develop into a person he has no desire to become? The fact that he does keep on living is the most powerful identifier of this man as a person. Hence, Williams accounts for personal identity by the continuity of what he pointedly calls the “categorical desires,” (12) which propel someone to move with one set of desired values into a future of a different set of desired values where the first set will disappear.

With this argument, Williams concludes about Kantian moral philosophy that it exaggerates the difference in degree of how I relate to my own projects and desires. He is here thinking of a situation where I consider some of my projects, say my future projects, of less significance because they seem to almost belong to someone else, namely the person that I will become in the future. In this case, I am less closely related to my future projects than to my present projects; I do not really consider them mine. Hence, Kantian moral philosophy dismisses the significance of what identifies me as a person and, in Williams’ words, it does so by virtue of its “emphasis on moral impartiality [and] by providing ultimately too slim a sense in which any projects are mine at all.” (12, Emphasis added) Not only am I, if we agree with Kant, removed from my future projects and desired values, I am too removed from any of them because my primary attitude must be one of detachment from them.

This makes me think about The Prestige again, if you can believe it...

Consider Angier, the magician who invests all his professional and personal resources in the perfect performance of The Transported Man, which is the same as outdoing his rival magician, Borden. He envies Borden’s natural talent as a magician and, more specifically, the performance of The Transported Man which gets more public acclaim that his own. As Angier contemplates the ways he might reach his goal, he employs a cutting edge scientist, Tesla, whose experiment with a cloning machine promises to provide what Angier needs. Angier is eventually able to accomplish his goal, but in the process he makes some moral choices that affect others negatively, and also cause significant losses for himself – including the loss of his own life.

To an unhealthy, and even destructive, extent, Angier is driven by his projects and desires. The situation he creates by his obsessive focus on his rival, Borden, is not only destructive of others but also destructive of himself. Although Borden is responsible for his own response to Angier’s envy, Angier’s obsession is provocative enough to keep Borden in the rivalry game until the point where Borden chooses to exit, and Fallon (his double) chooses to stay. In a word, their rivalry is very much driven by personal desires and projects. Noticing this central theme in The Prestige, of personal desires and the power they have to drive us to act against normative moral standards, I suggest the following. The Prestige plays very strongly to our intuition “that the Kantian conception embodies, in a very pure form, something which is basic to our ideas of morality:” (21) that we can assume a point of impartiality in relation to the morally right and, from there, rationally determine our own course of action.

In the case of the rivalry between Angier and Borden, we think it would serve Angier well to exercise a good dose of Kantian impartiality, both in relation to his own projects, and in relation to his personal interests in Borden. When Tesla advices Angier about how to handle one's obsessions he admits, “I’m their slave,” and then suggests that Angier not become a slave of his obsession with Borden. Also, The Prestige emphasizes this point quite strongly when Borden finally decides to simply exit the rivalry and it turns out to be the act that frees him to walk away from the situation alive.

If The Prestige plays to our Kantian moral intuitions, it also plays to some version of utilitarian intuitions, or shall we say consequentialism. Listen, for instance, to this exchange between Tesla and Angier:

Tesla:  Angier, have you considered the cost of such a machine?
Angier: Price is not an object.
Tesla:  Perhaps not, but have you considered the cost?
Angier: I’m not sure I follow.
Tesla:  Go home. Forget this thing. I can recognize an obsession, no good will come of it.
Angier: Why, haven’t good come of your obsessions?
Tesla:  Well at first. But I followed them too long. I’m their slave ... and one day they’ll choose to destroy me.
Angier: If you understand an obsession then you know you won’t change my mind.

Tesla’s moral strategy here is clearly to make Angier think carefully about the consequences it could have for him to employ Tesla’s cloning machine in his personal pursuit of the perfect performance of The Transported Man. It is interesting to notice, however, that Tesla predicts, or warns Angier against, the negative consequences that obsessive and enslaving desires may bring upon a person in the form of the destruction of a person, i.e. Angier.

What happens if we apply Williams’ definition of personal identity (the continuity between present and future desires) to Angier? It seems that the way Angier’s life develops from having very specific present desires to somehow being caught in a situation where he, literally, has turned into several persons and therefore cannot even have one specific desire is of some significance for how The Prestige ultimately describes personal identity. I want to say that it supports Williams’ definition of personal identity, but I will have to think of this in more detail.

Then I think, well Romney is Mormon, and maybe a lot of middle America wouldn't vote for a Mormon.  Because Mormons may not be Christians.   So he might be the best Republican nominee for us Democrats.  But then I think, well what if he wins though?  Don't Mormons have even crazier beliefs than Evangelical Christians?

But where all this led to is an understanding that once you believe in a supernatural creator / ruler who formulates all laws physical, philosophical and moral without regard to any external moral system you just end up with the same pile of shit.  Doesn't matter that Mormons believe in extra 'weird' stuff like becoming gods of their own planets.  Is that any stranger than believing in bodily resurrection at 'Rapture'?  Not even stranger I would posit than the beliefs of Scientologists.  Which is to say, I think its all too strange to believe.

Even if the Christian beliefs are true, who really wants to go to their Heaven?  I have this vague idea that it would be an eternal existence among clouds, soft lighting, and choir practice.  Boring!  I would rather die, thank you.

For those who think a supernatural law giver is needed to provide for justice and morality on Earth, I also say bullshit.  Try John Rawls a Theory of Justice for instance.

Now that leads me back to the topic of the election, and Super Tuesday.  On the Democratic side,  I am leery of Obama because of some of his religious affiliates and their disparagement of GLBT rights.  But either way I won't be terribly disappointed.

But Rawls (...) is a triumph. A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work. The amazon reviewer who says “this is the one” gets it right. Forcing students to read Rawls is the right thing to do; but I shall never again force them to read him without providing Freeman’s text as indispensable help.

Take a look!

O trecho acima é de um working paper de 2005 que trata do nosso país. Não sei se virou artigo, mas é bom ver que, ao contrário do que se pode imaginar, reeleição de um político cercado por corruptos (seja ele um Ali Babá ou um fantoche dos assessores corruptos) é algo bem palpável. Basta que se construa uma máquina política que produza espelhos e colares para os eleitores. Por exemplo: se eu dou R$ 100,00 para você, a chance de você votar em mim é maior do que se eu não te dou nada.

Outro ponto interessante: se eu faço com que você possa, por escolha própria, obter um aparelho que lhe permita falar com as pessoas onde quer que esteja a um preço bacana (chamamos isto, claro, de "telefone celular", mas eu prefiro destacar o pacote de serviços envolvido: mp3, câmera fotográfica, etc), será que você votará em mim? E se eu te dou o equivalente do aparelho em dinheiro?

Veja só: um candidato pode ser punido mesmo que tenha criado toda a infra-estrutura que a esmola do outro lhe permita usar. Em outras palavras, talvez seja importante considerar a forma como o benefício do político lhe é dado.

Eleitores, creio, podem até ser indivíduos cruéis. Digo: talvez eles prefiram que você tire dos outros para lhes dar (a visão errônea, mas difundida, de que, em um mercado livre, só se enriquece se alguém empobrece) do que alguém que crie condições para que todos tenham acesso a um determinado serviço, embora o acesso dependa da renda de cada um. O segundo meio é mais democrático (universal) do que o primeiro (eu escolho quem recebe os espelhos e colares) mas, mesmo assim, o eleitor prefere o meio mais injusto.

John Rawls, se morasse no Brasil, reescreveria suas teses?

As you know, fairness is a concept that was invented so that children and idiots could participate in arguments.

Scott Adams entendeu Rawls perfeitamente. E tudo mais sobre o universo, diga-se de passagem.

My last meeting in San Francisco this morning was with Labor Fair, a cool startup headed by Jenna Raby, and it occurred on Folsom and 5th. I showed up 15 minutes early so I walked around the neighborhood to find the Intercontinental hotel one block north of their offices... and it brought me back to my last day in India a month before…

Virgin messed up my flight and so I was not allowed in the Mumbai airport on return. After a four hour morning drive from Pune, this left me particularly pissed off. It was 42 degrees Celsius and I had all my bags for three months so I decided to splurge on a nice hotel for the night.

If you go to Mumbai, go to the Intercontinental Hotel. Like most five star hotels in India (or anyone in the world for that matter), it is a nice exploration into “fuck you money”. I found myself looking for the vomitorium after dinner there; alas they did not have one…yet. The Intercontinental is right next to Mumbai’s airport which is surrounded by the largest slum in Asia, Dharavi. If you walk out of the hotel, you are literally right in the slum with people bathing in the streets. The juxtaposition of the waterfall within the Intercontinental’s lobby and the water starved slums outside is particularly post modern. For the first time since I was in India, I was ready to go home because at least things were not this messed up in America.

But India is just not as good as the US is at hiding the extremes, after all we have had a two hundred year head start. I walked from my hotel on Taylor and O’Farrell in San Francisco down 6th street into the Mission for my meeting with Jenna. And here I was again, one block from the Intercontinental hotel and the streets were lined with the poor and destitute. This time it was early morning in America, and the police had yet to "clean the streets" of those less fortunate.

This experience brought me back to an earlier trip to Mumbai in January. I was staying in New Marine Lines near Churchgate Station with a friend who works for the US government at the American Center, a nice building that says “Please, just bomb me already.” On my third night there, I returned with five laptops on my back (another story for another day). New Marine Lines is packed with Indian families living on the sidewalks on either side of the street. It was around 10pm and many were cooking dinner over open fires before heading to their nice rest on the bare pavement. The laptops on my back were worth at least 3 lachs ($7,500 currently, but with the help of the FED, maybe lower soon!) Selling those laptops could have easily fed those families for a month if not a year…or bought them clothes, or a water purifier, or inoculations against Mumbai’s variety of diseases. But of course, I did not sell them, because I was going to use them to build a social media platform that was going to help solve inequality, poverty, climate change, and all the other worlds afflictions. Right? I mean a first week University of Chicago freshman econ major could back this argument up against every possible attack.

A month later, I was in London with Kevin in a meeting with someone from a very prominent sustainability consulting company. I relayed this story to them, and of course this Harvard educated graduate looked at me skeptically, that look of “Of course you did not sell them you idiot, that is not the way the world works!” I found it particularly funny that this woman was arguing against selling the laptops, after all, she works for a company that is trying to fundamentally shift the way people think about business value creation (by valuing intangibles).

I think back to that day often. And I think that’s where it begins, no vast system that perpetuates some sinister conspiracy. It begins with small decisions with every day people who rationalize their decisions as helping the greater good, instead of the good six inches in front of their face. “ Don’t hire ex-offenders or veterans because they have issues. Don’t give to the poor, they might spend it on alcohol. And never, never do the irrational.” Fast forward and in San Francisco, London, New York, and Mumbai, it suddenly becomes OK to have slums and homeless shelters next to Intercontinentals. We no longer think about it because we are rational creatures.

3 of those computers are currently in use. One, my mac (no warranty) died after picking up a virus in the Intercontinental hotel in Boston at the Center for Corporate Citizenship conference 12 hours after I landed in Newark from Mumbai. The fifth sits unused in my desk at home. We may use it in a few months when we make new hires.

Once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived in a valley far, far away in the mountains, the most contented kingdom the world haad ever known. It was called "Happy Valley", and it was ruled over by a wise old king named Otto. And all his subjects flourished and were happy, and there were no discontents or grumblers, because wise king Otto had had them all put to death along with the trade union leaders many years before. And all the good happy folk of Happy Valley sang and danced all day long. And anyone who was for any reason miserable or unhappy or who had any difficult personal problems was prosecuted under the "Happiness Act".

Na história, ao matar todas as pessoas infelizes (para nossos fins leia-se: com bem-estar de baixo nível), o Rei Otto atinge felicidade média ótima. Obviamente não foi pensado que matando aqueles que vivem mal levaria alguns daqueles que vivem bem a viver mal, os quais seriam eliminados, e assim por diante. O ponto é devermos tomar a importância da felicidade média cum granum salis.

Referência

• J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, cap. 3, seções 27-8.

[Sobre o princípio de utilidade média.]

Hayeks tanke är att samhället inte kan planneras, att försöka kontrollera samhällets utveckling är att kontrollera individerna som samhället består av, betyder inte att samhället får utvecklas hur som helst. Inom denna ram om vad som får göras handlar individerna efter sin moral. Detta är i princip det samma som Rawls grundstruktur. Rawls differensprincip får också den stöd av Hayek då han uttryckligen säger att grundläggande sjukvård, utbildning etc. borde kunna tillgodoses i ett rikt och utvecklat samhälle.

Ett citat från Cato Institutes blogg av Will Wilkinson får sammanfatta det hela:

If you fortify Rawls’ theory of justice with a Hayekian grasp of the coordinating function of prices, and the dynamics of spontaneous order (or fortify Hayek with Rawls’ rather more intelligible normative framework), you will arrive, as Brink argues in less esoteric terms, at something like a system that gives free rein to the informational and dynamically equilibrating function of market prices, while creating a framework for well-targeted and effective social insurance that mitigates counterproductive incentives."

Mesmo autores educados em uma tradição continental, como Habermas e Tugendhat, acabaram cedendo ao debate em termos analíticos, seja por influência de Bernard Williams (Tugendhat) ou para debater com Rawls nos mesmos termos (Habermas). Ainda que Habermas tenha tentado introduzir o debate em termos fenomenológicos, ao trazer a idéia da colonização sub-sistêmica do mundo da vida, e da relação entre Lebensform e Lebenswelt, parece que o esforço habermasiano acontece mais em termos analíticos do que fenomênicos.

Com este cenário, como ainda podemos defender a relevância da fenomenologia para o debate político? Mais ainda, qual é a contribuição metodológica que um fenomenólogo pode trazer?

Penso que a primeira providência seria desmistificar o vocabulário fenomenológico. Enquanto os textos de filosofia política de origem analítica focam em assuntos correntes, de forma acessível e direta, quem pesquisa na área de fenomenologia insiste em um vocabulário por vezes obtuso e desconecto da realidade conceitual de qualquer um que não seja um especialista na área. Enquanto isso, autores como Nagel podem alegar um ponto de vista de lugar nenhum, sem precisar se preocupar com reações por parte dos fenomenólogos, que teriam todas as ferramentas para denunciar este tipo de discurso.

Justamente neste ponto que eu gostaria de demonstrar como ainda podemos fazer fenomenologia no âmbito político: com uma idéia forte de intuição, em termos Husserlianos, podemos indicar diversos problemas no debate que sugere uma objetivização da moral e da política:

It was only with phenomenology that we first had avenues of access, methods, and insights that make possible an actual theory of science, namely, through its radicality in going back to sense-giving consciousness and the whole of conscious life. It is phenomenology that seriously inquires back from the ready-made propositions, theories, to thinking consciousness and to the broader nexus of the life of consciousness in which these formations are constituted; and it inquires back, going still more deeply from all types of objects as the substrata of possible theories, to experiencing consciousness and its essential characteristics which make the experiencing accomplishment intelligible. It thus allowed us to see in a presuppositionless manner the feature of intentionality as the very feature that makes up the fundamental essence of consciousness. It has generated methods of developing the hidden implication of one consciousness in another, an implication that is given everywhere with this feature, and therefore of making intelligible how objectivity as a true being of every kind is shaped as an accomplishment in the subjectivity of the life of consciousness, and is then shaped as a higher level of accomplishment which is there as theory. If one goes back from theory that is dead, so to speak, and has become objective, to the living, streaming life in which it arises in an evident manner, and if one reflectively investigates the intentionality of this evident judging, deducing, etc., one will immediately be lead to the fact that what stands before us as the accomplishment of thougt and was able to show itself linguistically rests upon deeper accomplishments of consciousness. Thus, for example, in order to be able to emanate from actual evidence every theory that refers to nature presupposes natural experience - what we call outer experience. In this way, all theoretical knowledge in genreal ultimately leads back to an experience. (Husserl, Analyses:31-32)

O debate em termos analíticos tem sucessivamente ignorado o tipo de contribuição que uma idéia de intuição pode trazer: A edição da primeira semana de outubro da The Economist (já um pouco defasada, portanto), tem uma matéria meio escondida, mas que me interessa diretamente (tanto que vou digitalizar e guardar). Se chama Pacience, fairness and the human condition.

Já tem algum tempo, tenho estudado questões de antropologia e moral como inseparáveis. Dawkins foi um head turner no sentido de apontar para uma espécie de normativismo biológico - o Dawkins, parece, identifica a moral como uma reação genética, evolutiva.

A reportagem da Economist, não é nenhuma surpresa, indica um caminho parecido. Basicamente, a reportagem relata uma pesquisa de uma universidade inglesa sobre as diferenças evolutivas principais entre o homem e o chipanzé, focando em diferentes respostas à estimulos externos. O que mais me impressionou na matéria foram duas conclusões:

1) A tese economica, do homem como animal capaz de agregar valor para si mesmo e acumular bens para seguir em frente caiu na pesquisa.

2) A queda da tese economica foi causada por uma prevalencia de estratégias de fairness nas respostas aos impulsos externos.

A idéia de fairness entra em jogo como estratégia de sobrevivência: o indivíduo tem que levar o interesse do outro em consideração para que a continuidade dele mesmo não seja ameaçada ao longo prazo. Claro, isso não tem um sentido ontológico, ou metafísico. É um sentido bem fundamental, bem chão. O repórter da Economist explica melhor que eu:

A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness -and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself - is humanity’s killer app. It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value.

Duas considerações são interessantes, neste momento: 1) John Rawls tinha razão: o sentido de Fairness é derivado de uma necessidade comunitária. Em uma situação de posição original, que na pesquisa não teve o sentido hipotético do Rawls, indivíduos desenvolvem um sentido de Fairness para dar conta de algo que depois vai ser chamado de democracia. 2) John Ralws não tinha razão: Não é o princípio de Fairness, é um princípio. Claro, alguém pode argumentar que o Rawls sugere uma teoria da justiça, não A teoria. É verdade. Mas Fairness, no sentido que ele expõe, não é negociável. Bem, na formação da identidade, esta pesquisa indica, parece que é.

Mas algumas considerações continuam no esquema kantiano, querem ver?

1) Quanto mais fairness, mais fairness: como assim? Grupos com mais jogo limpo não aceitam com tanta facilidade jogo sujo, e vice-versa. Portanto, quanto mais corruptos os individuos, mais corrupta vai se tornar a sociedade a longo prazo.

2) O sentido da moralidade tá escrito na nossa constituição enquanto sujeito. Se a gente desenvolve ele, ou não, é um problema de adequação e pedagogia.

Claro, isso também implica que o sentido da moral é informado ao alcance da mão, o que abre para um certo relativismo de conteúdo que certamente não está de acordo com os termos de Rawls ou de Kant. Mais ainda, esquemas matemáticos-deterministas, do tipo utilitaristas ou emotivistas, acabam caindo por terra enquanto teorias universalisáveis. Existem emoções determinando condutas morais, mas elas não são universalizáveis, elas são consequências de concepções de mundo. O mesmo para o utilitarismo: ainda que pessoas tenham bens em vista quando tomam decisões morais, este bem é conseqüênciade uma necessidade local. Geertz, neste sentido, tem mais a dizer sobre a moral do que Hare.

Não creio que que isso nos leve de volta para uma naturalização da moral. Se tu queres dizer que existe uma propensão do indivíduo para jogar limpo, e que isso tá escrito nos genes, tudo bem. Mas o que está escrito nos genes é formal. A gente só informa esta forma depois. E o que interessa, no fim das contas, não é ter uma compreensão de Fairness, mas o quê se compreende enquanto Fairness. Portanto, se existem genes para a moral, eles só nos tornam capazes de desenvolver algo como um sentimento moral, mas não dizem nada sobre que tipo de sentimento vamos desenvolver. O biólogo só coloca que a gente consegue se organizar porque temos a capacidade de desenvolver uma concepção de jogo limpo. Todo o resto, todos os conflitos que surgem daí, continuam sendo problemas nossos. E problemas que o biólogo não consegue responder.

No entanto, se voltamos para uma concepção fenomênica de mundo, muitos dos problemas da objetivização da moral e da política que o debate em termos analíticos trás podem ser superadas - e com ela, esta concepção normativa de pessoa que não diz nada sobre nossa forma de se relacionar com o mundo que nos cerca.

Ich befürchte, Nietzsche hatte Recht, als er Europa eine Sklavenmoral attestierte. Ich behaupte, er hat heute unrecht, wenn die Ursache eben jener im Juden- und Christentum gesucht wird. Lange Zeit war die Sklavenmoral den Herrschenden nützlich. Der Wert einer Sache, ihre Nützlichkeit, machte die Frage nach Wahrheit letzlich belanglos. Inzwischen wendet sich das Blatt. Doch es sind nicht die Untertanen, die erfolgreich zum Aufstand rüsten, sondern die Herrschenden selbst, die erkennen, dass die Beibehaltung des status quo ihre Niederlage besiegeln würde.

Doch der Reihe nach. Sklavenmoral wird aufgrund ihrer Nützlichkeit von Herrschenden aufrechterhalten. "Gut" und "dumm" nähern sich einander an. Wickerts "Der Ehrliche ist der Dumme" trifft in all jenen Systemen zu, in welchen falsche Anreizsysteme vorliegen, in welchen moralisch gutes Verhalten nicht belohnt, sondern bestraft wird. Institutionen in den Fokus der wissenschaftlichen Betrachtung zu nehmen, wie etwa in den Internationalen Beziehungen (neuer Institutionalismus), der Ökonomik (neue Institutionenökonomie) und der Wirtschaftsethik (Homann, Suchanek, Pies) geschehen, war der logische nächste Schritt.

Diese Analyse ist an sich schon komplex genug, vernachlässigt aber wichtige Punkte. Akzeptanz- und Legitimationsprobleme, individuelles Gerechtigkeitsempfinden (etwa, was als gerechte Verteilung wahrgenommen wird) und Aggregationsprobleme dürfen nicht vernachlässigt werden. Damit eine Gesellschaft eine Unternehmung zum Wohle aller wird, so Rawls in seiner berühmten Einleitung zur theory of justice, müssen weit mehr Faktoren berücksichtigt werden, als dem positivistischen Ökonomen lieb sein kann.

Zurück zum alten Friedrich. Nehmen wir an, dass funktionalistische Erklärungen nicht ganz so schlimm sind, wie von John Elster gerne behauptet und akzeptieren wir ferner, dass freies Assoziieren Denkverbote durchbrechen und damit wichtige Fragen stellen kann, wodurch wiederum die Definitionshoheit bestehender Begrifflichkeiten und den dahinterstehenden Definierenden zumindest in Frage gestellt werden.

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral

Brechts berühmter Ausspruch leitet meine erste These ein. Wir haben die Phase des reinen Fressens in großen Teilen der Welt längt überwunden. Anders gesagt: Wir sind anspruchsvoller geworden.

Nehmen wir an, dass die seit etwa 20 Jahren vorherrschenden Rahmenbedingungen eine neue Qualität, etwas bisher unvergleichbares Darstellen. Und nehmen wir ferner an, dass viele Menschen dieser so genannten "Globalisierung" (im Folgenden nur im wirtschaftlichen Sinne) kritisch gegenüber stehen.

Globalisierung und Ungleichheit

Neben dem HDI-Index, der auf Sens und Nussbaums Untersuchungen basiert, bestehen diverse Indizes um Lebensqualität und Ungleichheit zu messen. Lässt man die Problematik, wie interpersonelle Vergleichbarkeit überhaupt möglich ist, beiseite, so ergibt sich folgendes Bild.

Der Gini Koeffizient zeigt Ungleichheit auf einer Skala von 0 (perfekte Gleichheit) bis 1 (totale Ungleichheit) an. Er bezieht sich ausschließlich auf Einkommen und Wohlstand.

Das aktuelle UN-Ranking spricht Bände.

"The average Gini coefficient for private households’ net income for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries climbed from 0.29 in 1985 to 0.31 in 2000. [...]Above-average inequality can be found in the UK, Italy, Spain and especially the US, with 0.37, while income is less concentrated in Germany with 0.29 and especially the Nordic countries." Quelle

Warum scheinen in Deutschland also mehr Leute globalisierungskritisch (d.h. sie sind mit der eingeschlagenen Entwicklung, aber nicht mit dem Prozess an sich unzufrieden) eingestellt zu sein und organisieren sich bei ATTAC und Co? Bestehen unterschiedliche Kulturen der Zivilgesellschaft oder liegen unterschiedliche Erwartungen und Anreize vor?

Neue Herausforderungen

Bestehende Gewohnheiten und Moralvorstellungen ver- oder behindern viele Menschen, sich heutigen "Notwendigkeiten" anzupassen. Ein Arbeitsplatzwechsel, die Pflicht einem Arbeitsplatz hinterherzuziehen, ist für viele heute noch undenkbar. Dies gilt v.a. für Wenig- und Nichtqualifizierte. Dies verhindert jedoch eine Beteiligung am Gewinn der Globalisierung.

"As long as less-skilled workers cannot shift to more productive tasks, increasing income inequality remains a threat." Quelle

Damit stellt sich im nietzscheanischen Sinne die Frage, ob und wem die bestehende Sklavenmoral noch nützt. Ist sie nicht längt überfällig?

Der schlaue Unternehmer und Freigeist hat die Zeichen der Zeit längst erkannt und setzt auf "Gesinnungs- durch Bedinungswandel". Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Akzeptanzproblemen, mit der Legitimation von Maßnahmen und Prozessveränderungen und eine Verstärkung um Bereich CSR aber auch die Einbindung der Ärmster der Armen in Wertschöpfungsketten (etwa durch BOP-Ansätze) ist keinem Samaritertum, sondern der Erkenntnis geschuldet, dass diese Maßnahmen notwendig sind, um ein Gesamtsystem aufrecht zu erhalten, das momentan in große Schwierigkeiten (ob eingebildet oder real ist hier unwichtig) geraten ist.

Die Aufgabe, unsere Welt umwelt- und sozialgerechter zu gestalten, wird somit zwangsweise auf die Agenda großer MNCs gesetzt. Die hermeneutische Trennung zwischen Wirtschaft, Politik und Moral dient zwar der Orientierung, ist aber lebensweltlich nicht mehr aufrecht zu erhalten. Die Auseinandersetzung mit ganzheitlich(er)en Ansätzen ist deshalb dringend erforderlich.

"Nietzsches Credo"

Wenn die vorherschende Moralvorstellung nicht mehr nützlich und anwendbar ist, muss sie hinterfragt und angepasst werden.

Was kommt dabei zu kurz? Der Status quo ist weder naturgegeben noch naturwüchsig und als solcher nicht unveränderlich. Analog zum rawls´schen Überlegungsgleichgewicht müssen Realität und Anspruch in einem wechselseitigen Prozess aneinander angepasst werden. Dies mag nur eine zweitbeste Lösung sein, sie ist jedoch in der Lage schwierige Veränderungen zur rechten Zeit zu ermöglichen und zugleich selbstkritisch und fragend in die Welt zu schauen.

In turn, I would like to dedicate this blog post to Mrs. Wilson Rawls, without whose help I would not have befriended Billy, Old Dan and Little Ann, and cried through all of chapter 19.

There is, however, one big problem with the entire premise of the book, or rather with its conclusion: Nowhere to my knowledge does Hauser address the question of the moral bindingness of the evolutionary moral rules. Of course, this is not 19th century social darwinism where the laws of evolution were supposed to permit all sorts of inhumane societies. These are rules particular to our species, rules that fit and work, that have evolved alongside (actually 'in') living beings. These are therefore 'good' rules in the sense that they usually get us to do what is in our interest.

However, the meta-question is never raised as to how we can assess the goodness of the moral rules themselves.  There is no reason why we should go with them all the time. For one, our environment has changed and is rapidly changing, probably rendering some of the rules obsolete. For another, though some of the rules might have gotten us thus far, we might no longer find them very acceptable, i.e. they might conflict with other moral rules/intuitions or with our reason.

The last point bears a tad bit more explaining. In economics, it is well known that we humans have some intuitions that do not serve us well. We discount the future too much (exponentially), which causes us to buy into dangerous schemes, like, say, sub-prime housing loans. This is an innate, evolutionary intuition that has served us in the past when the future was indeed very uncertain. Now it simply gets us into trouble. It is very likely that we now have similar problems with our moral intuitions. What is important is that if enough people think through the situations they can explain to us why such and such a moral intuition is wrong so that once we understand what thy mean, we can work against, or perhaps even shed, the offending moral intuition.

Of course, I expect Hauser wouldn't disagree. After all, this is just a different part of human brains taking over some of the moral workload. There is nothing un-evolutionary about it. However, not pointing this out makes the text sound like it is equating innate moral intuitions with THE GOOD. And that is just wrong.

The Veil of Ignorance (or VoI for us scholar-types) is pretty much the greatest idea ever. Here's what it is, as best as I can remember.

Pretend you don't know anything about yourself. NOTHING. You don't know your name, religion, political persuasion, height, sex, gender (how progressively minded I am, I know), race, favourite soft drink...NOTHING. Anything that could give you any clue about yourself is gone. You have only your reason, and the knowledge that you are a human. Now you meet with a bunch of other people in a similar situation and try to decide what principles of justice society should have to guide the making of laws, constitutions, board games, etc. I know it doesn't seem like much, but in the 70's people pretty much just went NUTS for this crap. The idea is that even if you really are a white male nazi in Montana, under this VoI, you might think about what it is like to be a black person or a Jew, so you're not going to adopt a principle that allows for racial inequality. Then when you realize that you're really a nazi, as long as you remain a rational person, you should agree with whatever principles you originally agreed to under the VoI, or the Original Position.

Karazy Stuff!

Well there were a million people who had a problem with this, and they wrote books and articles and eventually Rawls whittled down his argument to a 100 (and change) page book, which kept the cool VoI, but toned down the whole COMPREHENSIVE THEORY OF JUSTICE thing down a bit.

Anywho, Rawls always said that this would only work in a country like the US, since it only accounts for a society with our values for democracy, pluralism, and liberty. Basically he said this wouldn't work for other countries.

But could it be used to determine how countries deal with each other? This is my contribution to the discussion, as it were, that above line. It wouldn't prove much, since the principles that would be achieved from a VoI being used internationally are ones we pretty much have now. By "internationally" I mean that we would have a representative for each country meet under the VoI, and decide what principles should guide the interactions between each country. Obviously aggressive war is out. No country would want to be invaded, and the chance of being the aggressor country does not balance out the risk of being invaded, so everyone would agree that offensive war is pretty much a Bad Thing. They would also probably agree that trade is probably a good thing. If I'm a country in the VoI, I'm gonna be thinking that if I'm a poor country, I can only benefit from free trade with a rich country, but that if I'm a rich country, I don't want to be in a forced relationship with weaker countries feeding off of me with nothing in return. This would eliminate any sort of conspiracy theorist "new world order" or "one world government" as a principle. It would also encourage free trade.

Free trade is a ways off, and may never happen; and the one world government should stay in the realm of conspiracy theory for a while now. But I'm pretty sure we're all on agreement that aggressive war is bad. This is what is rather perplexing about US foreign policy, since it seems all about aggressive war as of late. Afghanistan was a just war, and has been largely effective, but Iraq as well as the countless military conflicts over the years seem to contradict this principle.

I guess there's not much we can do about it, except write blog entries and hope that elected officials read them.

(and you thought I wouldn't write about this)