Hi PEN-lers
The following response can be filed under Justice (I know
everyone keeps extensive files) or, if you perfer, example par
excellence of a fallacy closedly related to what you economists
call the fallacy of composition. (I wonder if this fallacy has a
name?) At any rate, for "fallacy of composition," see Samuelson
*Economics* 4th edition, p.10-11. However, I suppose he says
much the same thing in later editions.
This is a response to what Bill Mitchell wrote May 7 under
the topic "revolt of the haves." -- remember that one? [The post
is reproduced below.] One of the hats I wear is the treasurer's
hat for Marin Small Publishers Association. We meet once a month
and each year put on our Annual Spring Seminar in Corte Madera,
Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge (it occurred last
Saturday --with one hour demo on publishing, etc. on the www).
In preparing for this one I had occasion to visit our current
president in his office and it turned out that he is an
editor of a periodical called United Church News. As I left his
office he gave me the latest copy of the periodical he edits.
As I glanced at this periodical I saw that one of the
feature articles bore on what I had just read in PEN-l in a post
by Bill Mitchell. This article is as follows:
Page 4. United Church News/April 1995
`BOOK OF VIRTUES' MISSING A CHAPTER. The fallacy is that
virtuous people will become a virtuous society. by W. Evan
Golder
Editor
As of late March, "The Book of Virtues," edited, with
commentary, by William J. Bennett, had been on the best seller
list for 66 weeks. The 831-page book has a certain nostalgic
appeal. Browsing through it, one recognizes familiar fables
("The Ants and the Grasshopper"), poems ("All things bright and
beautiful"), stories ("How the Camel Got His Hump"), speeches
(The Gettysburg Address) and heroes (William Tell, George
Washington, Clara Barton, Rosa Parks).
Bennett's book lists 10 virtues, with a chapter for each: self-
discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work,courage,
perseverence, honesty, loyalty and faith. Only gradually does
the reader realize what virtue is missing: justice, that is, a
sense of community, of the common good. Oh, the word is there,
as in Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham City Jail"
("Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere") -- but
its's under "responsibility." Plato on justice is under
"honesty."
In March a group of Fortune 500 corporations held a news
conference to advocate rolling back the Clean Air Act. Here was
a clear example of corporations sacrificing our planet's life
tomorrow for their profits today. This attitude of selfishness
("Me first") gained renewed acceptance during the Reagan years,
when Bennett served as Secretary of Education. It is the
logical outcome of moral education which sees virtues only as
individual character traits.
The book's fallacy lies in thinking that virtuous people will
grow up to become a virtuous society. On the contrary, as
Reinhold Niebuhr taught us, there is a "basic difference between
the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives."
Virtuous people grow up to hold news conferences putting
corporate concerns ahead of the common good.
Aristotle and Plato considered justice a virtue. Concern for
the common good is also a strong biblical theme. "The word of
God is addressed to communities, to cities, to nations, to the
whole family of nations," says a 1993 document, "A Call to The
Common Good," issued jointly by the National Council of Churches,
the Synagogue Council of America and the U.S. Catholic Confer-
ence. But too often, the paper reminds us, genuine focus on the
common good has been "lost in a confusing clash of individual
aspirations and narrow appeals."
Examples surround us: polluted air, underfunded schools,
overpriced health care. Until social virtues are valued along-
side personal virtues, the breadkown of community life in this
country will only get worse.
END QUOTE
I guess that the point of the above article as it relates to
Bill Mitchell's post (see below) is that we as individuals have
to do something MORE than simply practice personal virtues, or
society isn't going to get any better. This something more
surely involves actively promoting a good social democratic
POLITICAL agenda as another PEN-ler pointed out in response to
Mitchell's post. But I thought that the article above said
something tersely that I haven't seen expressed as well.
[Cf also, Adam Smith's invisible hand argument: each capitalist
practicing GREED (Note, not virtue, mind you but greed) and
maximizing his individual profits leads by the famous invisible
hand to the betterment of society as a whole. -- Huh?]
Curtis Moore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
179 Bocana Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
>>** Topic: [PEN-L:4987] Re: revolt of the have **
** Written 1:32 AM May 7, 1995 by [EMAIL PROTECTED] in
cdp:bitl.pen **
From: BILL MITCHELL <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [PEN-L:4987] Re: revolt of the haves
>Like all countries OZ has gone "global" which really means
>lowering the growth
>of real wages (making it negative for the last 12 years on
>average - and that
>has been in the hands of a labour government, although it is
>getting hard
>to tell the difference these days), allowing speculators to
>govern your
>policy choices, and extending the environmental degradation
>across the world
>(in the name of paying back the IMF or the World Bank).
>the inability of domestic governments to clearly target social
>policies is
>an alarming consequence of this. Our Govt. is continually saying
>what would
>the markets think? that is what would the jerks that Doug so
>eloquently
>describes from time to time who wouldn't have a brain between
>them.
>While clearly the imperative is being driven by international
>capital in search
>of cheaper places to produce, it is also the fault of all of us
- who might
>collectively be called the workers.
>and this raises in my mind one of the real quandaries of this
>area of
>discussion or thought.
>(a) By consuming we give the global world jobs. How else are the
>poor going
>to become less so. we had a bit of a debate about this some time
>in the past.
>(b) By consuming we ratify the push by the cappos (whose goal is
>not to make
>the poor less poor - that is only a passing consequence - and
>maybe not a
>permanent effect), into wider markets and buttress the
>"globalisation".
>if the left adopted an aesetic position w.r.t. consumption and
>especially
>abandoned buying all the trash from asia and elsewhere (that is
>where we
>get most of our trash from), and pushed harder for environmental
>protection,
>the economics of globalisation would be less attractive to the
>cappos.
>sure it leaves the workers who have left the poverty of the
>village to the
>almost poverty of the factory job in the crowded city in a hole.
>but really, not meaning to preach, every time we, in the
>so-called advanced
>world, eat meat on the table, we have ratified the destruction
>of forests in
>less advanced countries. every time we feed our pets meat we
>have denied people
>in the third world of resources. every time we buy some piece of
>shit from
>k mart the global economy gets stronger. there are so many
>aspects to all of
>this.
>less material and more soul is a good place to start the
>fightback.
>it only touches the surface i know.
>kind regards
>bill
