Ted Winslow wrote:
The ethical ideal actualized in both realms
is "mutual recognition," an ideal that
sublates Aristotle on "friendship."
This can't be elaborated as "altruistic
preferences." It actualizes rational
self-interest understood as the interest in
living a "good" life, a "flourishing life,"
having internally related (this ontological
idea being one of the grounds on which
Keynes rejected the "utilitarian" conception
"ethics" as well as, as I said, the
"utilitarian" conception of "psychology")
intellectual, aesthetic and ethical aspects.
The "good" in this sense is "non-economic"
(this is another of the grounds on which
Keynes rejected "utilitarian ethics").
Ted,
This is one of the stickiest misunderstandings I find among radicals
with regards to economic theory. They view it as infused,
contaminated with utilitarian ethics, tied to one or another view of
human psychology, and crap like that. Regardless of what Keynes
thought about Edgeworth's views, it is not. Some economists would
have you believe that. But that's not it. Now, I don't think I can
persuade you that such is the case, because you obviously have a
strong prejudice about it and you are not going to engage economic
theory on its own terms.
And that's the reason why I call that a prejudice. It is prior to
judgment, insofar as judgment requires engagement with the subject
matter... kind of like Marx engaged German philosophy or English
political economy. Not as something alien to your own personal way of
mentally appropriating the world, but as something that *communicates*
with it. To paraphrase Louis Proyect, you have an "exogamous"
attitude towards economic theory. And that won't work.
You may say that you're engaging it, because you're quoting Keynes'
critique of Edgeworth, and on the basis of generalities, rejecting
game theory. But that's like saying that Marx didn't have to engage
Smith or Ricardo or Mill on their own. That critiquing Petty or Hume
would have sufficed. That he didn't have to engage the German
philosophers. Taking up the classic Greek philosophers would have
been enough.
At the end of the day, if economic theory, as the social product it
is, and your own private, personal view of economics can't face off at
the same cognitive level, if they can't touch each other, if they
can't exchange some juices (don't complain about this; Marx often used
the German word equivalent to "intercourse" to refer to appropriating
ideas or other human products), then how can you make a judgment about
one in terms of the other? And how can they be matched at any
cognitive level if your attitude towards the former is "exogamous."
When in 1842 (?), Marx edited the Rheinezsche Zeitung (a liberal
democratic rag) and a polemic on communism broke out in the paper, the
man admitted his ignorance of the subject and convoked people to study
it seriously. If small things can be compared to big ones, that's all
I'm trying to do here: invite people, especially young people, to
engage and transform economic theory -- and, on the trip, transform
themselves. Who should be afraid of that engagement? Not those of us
who believe in the Prometheic, rebellious character of the human
spirit.
Economic theory, as it's evolved in the last few decades, with the
limitations inherent to this, is *a branch of applied math*. Simple
as that. It's a set of statements of the "if X, then Y" type. That
determines both its power and its limitations. But those limitations
are those shared with all other mathematical theories. A term like
"altruistic preferences" refers simply to a postulate of this kind:
u_i = u(c_1, ..., c_i, ..., c_n)
That's all. Now please tell me, where is the utilitarian ethics
embedded there, since you have ample room to determine the content of
each of the c's, the form of u(.), and the content of u_i?
You use scare quotes to refer to "internal relations,"
"self-determination," and "final causation," as if those resounding
terms were invested with some magic power to denote a degree of
semantic subtlety prohibited to mathematical symbols. People complain
that mathematicians (and, worse, economists!) often confound people
with the dryness of their terms, the unnecessary mathematization of
things that can be well communicated without appeal to mathematical
language. But exactly the same, if not a worse, complaint could be
filed against the abuse of philosophical terms as if they were
fetishes.
That the Aristotelian, or Marxian, or Keynesian "good" is noneconomic
is not something I'd disagree with you about. But the "economic" is
not alien to humans in the sense of being from another universe.
Aristotle's category of tragedy, or its translation into Hegelianesse
or Marxspeak as a "theory of alienation," has made us well aware that
under some social conditions, human good takes the form of "economic"
good, i.e. an unmanned force that betrays its content. But those
social conditions are not necessarily attached to a postulate like the
one above.
And with this long posting, I close shop on the thread. I just can't
keep up. Thanks for the interesting quotations, Ted.
