Autonomy

John,

I don’t understand why you imply we have to chose between exploitation and alienation. The fact that alienation and loss of autonomy is worse for your health than being exploited doesn’t suffice to show that exploitation isn’t a proper matter for moral concern. A different argument would be needed to do that.

It’s been noted elsewhere (if only in a column in the Guardian) that the countries boasting the greatest longevity are also those presenting the least social inequality. Whether or not a flatter hierarchy or a leveled status ladder offers more autonomy, the countries in question also offer considerable greater economic security than their neighbors.

Security at work guarantees ample autonomy in one’s free time, without which a healthy lifestyle is generally out of reach. With security one can plan, anticipate, and take time for one’s self. This seems more directly relevant to health outcomes than subjective measures of stress due to status differences, although the quality and availablity of health care, the local environment and the rest of the public infrastructure might just have some effect as well.

But, yeah, it’s often the case that bosses have more fun at work, too.

I don’t want to get too far OT here, but just to respond re exploitation….

Of course you’re right about Marx’s own official attitude to exploitation in his sense. But we aren’t obliged to take that same attitude just because he did, and if Marxian exploitation is unjust then it is properly the object of moral concern.

But I’m inclined to reject Marx’s technical theory of exploitation to the extent to which it depends on his labour theory of value. However, since I think that the basic insight is reformulable without recourse to the LTV, I can still use the term in a semi-technical sense without going the whole hog and endorsing your much looser “being badly used” sense.

The charge that situation S is objectionable because unjust since person A is (unjustifiably) living off the work of person B is distinct from the charge that situation S is objectionable because of B’s loss of autonomy or alienation.

Regarding Marmot’s evidence, why couldn’t causation run the other way: those who are healthy and vigorous are more likely to rise in hierarchies than those who aren’t. Rather than high status and autonomous working conditions causing better health, better health could be one of several factors leading to high status.

This is where a concept of autonomy does better than liberty, negative or positive. To have autonomy, you must be operating in an environment that is reasonably predictable and amenable to your control.

Interesting. Perhaps this could be put in terms of a republican notion of freedom (which is in fact often used as a way of breaking the deadlock of the negative-positive liberty debate).

John,
This is very interesting, but perhaps because I am not a political theorist, I don’t quite grasp a distinction you made. “This is where a concept of autonomy does better than liberty, negative or positive. To have autonomy, you must be operating in an environment that is reasonably predictable and amenable to your control.” I understand ‘positive freedom’ as ‘being able to do things.’ So I would have thought that autonomy, in your sense, is captured by the notion of positive freedom. (Maybe my error is in not grasping the distinction between freedom and liberty?)

BTW, the Marmot discussion has now lasted, what, a month? Pretty much a geological epoch in Internet time.

Autonomy vs. Liberty, an example:

A beetle flipped on its back is at liberty to wiggle its beetly little legs; it nonetheless does not have locomotional autonomy.

The added ingredient in autonomy, selon moi, is that one’s actions should have a predictable impact on one’s destiny.

Chris,

The technical concept of exploitation basically holds that profit margins are objectionable. Thus a unionized auto-worker in Michigan who gets paid $60,000/year to build $120,000 worth of SUVs is being pretty harshly exploited. In contrast, a garment worker in Thailand who gets paid $1000/year to sew $1100 worth of t-shirts is far less exploited. Nonetheless, I would rather be an auto worker than a garment worker and I suspect so would everyone else. So in today’s economy compensation often has much more to do with productivity than with exploitation.

Now you can turn it around and say that the garment worker is not being exploited by the manufacturer but by the consumer or the market or globalization. While there is some sense to this it still ultimately relies on a labor theory of value since such an argument assumes that the consumer isn’t paying the full value (as compared to reservation price) of the shirt. If one has to twist the meaning of exploitation so severely to make it work, one might as well be rid of it and admit that the objection is not to exploitation per se but simply to poverty and inequality. I suspect that the real attraction of exploitation is that poverty is simply a state whereas “exploit” is a transitive verb so the term implies wrong-doing.

“The technical concept of exploitation basically holds that profit margins are objectionable.”

No, for the reasons John stated, the _technical_ concept of exploitation says nothing whatsoever about _anything_ being objectionable. But I feel we’re diverting John’s thread here. If you want a better idea where I’m coming from on this, read G.A. Cohen’s “The Labour Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation”.

What follows from this? Or to quote someone or other What Is to Be Done?

I mentioned Marmot’s research to Michael Albert once at the ZNET site–Albert is one of the two inventors of a utopian scheme they call participatory economics, which is about how you could construct a worker’s state sort of economy, but without the existence of a bunch of commie apparatchiks telling people what to do. In Albert’s view, the big problem with capitalism and communism is the existence of bosses, who in capitalist societies can be either the owners or the managers. Albert and his colleague Hahnel agree that the labor theory of value is garbage. So the two have devised their own version of socialism to eliminate the existence of bosses, only they don’t call it socialism because they think all other socialist variants have gone wrong by continuing to have an elite class of people who get to be the big bosses. In their version everything is decided democratically.

I have no idea if their idea would work, but obviously Marmot’s research would be a moral point in favor of drastically changing how our economy functions. Is there a way to give everyone more autonomy in the workplace in a capitalist system?

Why this focus on Bosses? In life society its self restricts autonomy far more than bosses. And even in the workplace, it’s often the case that colleagues restrict autonomy far more than you boss.

The real problem with managerialism is when it’s imposed on the wrong structure e.g. Universities. When imposed on the rights structures, e.g. factories it is often liberating.

So isnt Albert just describing “forming a partnership” – which is a good idea if running a law firm but would really reduce workers autonomy in a factory.

Donald Johnson,

At the risk of repeating Giles’ comment above, it seems that democracy is just as much of a threat to autonomy as capitalist or socialist bosses. In fact, it may be a much greater threat, for at least one can try to reason with one’s boss and hope to one day convince her of the error of her ways. The average individual cannot hope to reason with a large enough portion of the voting public to change the outcome of an election. Perhaps you are all using a unique definition of “autonomy”, but the dictionary defines it as the right of self-government. Unless we equate the will of the majority (or plurality) with the concept of “self”, I hardly see how democracy promotes autonomous self-government.

Micha,

I think your point is better put as all government is a threat to autonomy, since, after all, you’ve got just as little chance of persuading aristocrats, priests or whoever else might be ruling you of changing their minds as you have of changing the minds of fellow citizens. Once you acknowledge this though, democracy becomes much less problematic, because it has the advantage over all the other systems that you have an admittedly marginal say in the laws that you live under. Not only has this feature of democracy been used to argue for it since at least the Ancient Greeks, but it can be connected to autonomy by talking about self-direction as making one’s own laws. Especially if you are prepared to conceptualize democracy more widely than just voting – a sphere of civil rights and so on – then this does not seem excessively anti-autonomy.

Sorry about the repeat post: I got a server problem message.

“you are right that consultants who move from company to company have more autonomy – but they also have less security/predictability (and indeed the ones who are properly self-employed, rather than working for a firm of consultants, have the most autonomy but also the least security/predictability)”

Don’t you think that autonomy and what you call “security/predictability” are almost logically opposed concepts? Or if not that they have strongly inverse relation? If you personally make all the choices, you can’t expect other people to offer all the security, right? That is one of the current problems in EU/US relations for instance.

And a lot of it comes down to individual temperament or choices not likely to be captured in government rules. I know some people who would be great consultants, but temperamentally they prefer the stability of a corporate job. Others are merely good consultants, but they like the risks related rewards of living outside the corporate bubble. Some people have children, and want to skew toward security for that reason. Some people might dislike their wives and take consulting work to make it easier to stay away from home. That kind of stuff is pretty much beyond useful legislative capability.

Micah,

I was going to say this in my earlier post, because I thought that you might be going on to say something like this, but anarchism is also a restriction of autonomy, particularly if you equate it with pure market relations, which it is a pretty weird thing to do anyway. Pure market relations would leave some people in a state of extreme poverty, and people in extreme poverty do not have autonomy, because they are dependent on others to provide them with the material resources to do anything. Thus they cannot be self-directing, because they must do what others want in order to get the resources to do anything, in some cases, even survive at all. The state’s coercive apparatus is not the only source of the loss of autonomy: poverty and indoctrination can also cause the loss of autonomy, because they prevent people from acting on their own reasons, rather than someone else’s. The Nozickean libertarian claim about freedom is a negative liberty type claim, and while there may be something to said for the view, equating that type of freedom with autonomy is quite misleading: autonomy implies some level of control, and negative freedom is not about control, but freedom from interference.

Speaking of indoctrination, this is the root of the worry about consumerism. The claim is not that people are not, in a negative liberty sense, free to not be consumers in the sense that worries the left and some conservatives, but that, at least for the left, they are indoctrinated into relentless consumption by a culture of
consumerism. If this claim is true, which I am not claiming it is, then consumerism is a loss of autonomy, because it is heteronomous: rather than being directed by your own reasons, you are being directed by the reasons of the capitalist economy.

You are right, though, to identify a conventional liberal ambivalence about democracy. Complete control of people’s lives by law, whether enacted by a democracy or some other system of government, would be severely autonomy restricting, and thus liberals tend to advocate either serious constitutional restrictions on democracy, or hold out the hope of increased participation removing the threat of the state interfering in the minutae of daily life.

Rob,

I don’t see much empirical evidence pro or con for the assertion that “pure market relations would leave some people in a state of extreme poverty.” Sure, people would no longer be forced to give to charity in the absence of state redistribution, but it does not follow that people would no longer give to charity voluntarily. Further, even if people donate smaller portions of their income to charity when they are not coerced, the total amount may be greater given the absence of taxation and larger growth rates.

But more importantly, when you say that dependency on the charity of others weakens autonomy, it is not clear to me what you mean by this. Under any system, those who cannot produce enough to sustain themselves through voluntary relations will necessarily depend on the charity of others, whether that charity is coerced or voluntary. If you consider welfare dependency a mark against autonomy, this is true under both pure capitalism and any mix of capitalism with socialism you can think of. However, under mixed economies, not only is the autonomy of the dependent weakened, but the autonomy of the coerced is weakened as well, for all coercion is a movement away from autonomy. Redistributing autonomy is a zero-sum (if not a negative-sum) game.

As for indoctrination, you didn’t address my argument that this criticism can be made of any socioeconomic system. Sure, capitalism indoctrinates people by influencing their preferences. And so does every other system. The advantage of capitalism, though, is four-fold: (1) people still have the option of choosing voluntary socialist arrangements under capitalism, whereas people do not have the option of choosing voluntary capitalist arrangements under socialism, (2) capitalism doesn’t monopolize the education system, as socialism (and our current system does), (3) capitalism doesn’t force people to pay for their own indoctrination and the indoctrination of others with ideas they strongly oppose, and (4) no matter how beautiful a celebrity spokeswoman may be, she isn’t going to make a bad-tasting cigarette a long-term market success. I’m sure I could think of many more ways capitalism is less indoctrinating than socialism if I sat here long enough.

I’m confused by your last sentence. It seems to me that increased political participation is much more likely to exacerbate rather than mollify the threat of the state interfering in the minutiae of daily life. When people mind their own business, avoid politics and instead focus their daily efforts solely on civil society, they have no reason to engage in the perpetual political bickering and nosey busybodying we witness so much of today on both the right and the left.

The people I know who worked as consultants had very mixed feelings. Not only the lack of security, but also the need to hustle up work while still working. In some cases consulting is used simply to reduce labor costs (like “independent contracting” in janitorial) so there was no real advantage.

People who are doing very well in the consulting system might love the system, but that state of being is usually a fairly transient state of the labor market (diminishing margin of profit or whatever). When things go bad on them their ideologies change.

Abb1,

you’re taking the piss, right?

Micah,

you’re right to say that what I said about consumerism doesn’t properly address what you said: I didn’t express myself very well. Pointing out that capitalism tends to encourage people to consume things mindlessly is not a critique of capitalism if you think that all social systems encourage people to do something mindlessly. The question is whether all social system do in fact do this, and I should point out that I am not committing myself to this thesis, but merely noting its existence. Marxists, for example, have claimed that in the communist utopia to come, the rules of the social system will become transparent in a way which means that the social system is not guilty of creating its own rationalization to sustain, reinforce and extend itself any more. Noting that capitalism offers us some negative freedoms does not show that this thesis, about a positive freedom – to be able to act according to one’s proper nature as a social and productive animal – is false, which is the critique that lies at the heart of the Marxist critique of consumerism. I think there are probably other ways of making the critique, which aren’t dependent on such strong claims about the good life for human beings, but either way, the point remains that if you can conceive of a social system which offers you more positive freedoms than the current one, then, although all social system influence preferences, they do not influence preferences in the same way, and some ways are to be prefered to others.

For example, you say that people are free to set up communes and so on under a capitalist system, and they are, in a non-interference, largely descriptive sense, but what you have to do is show that that freedom is of some moral value. Sure, they have the choice in that no-one is forbidding them, but that’s not by itself the same thing as being free, in a morally relevant sense, to do it: I am free not to give my money to the highwayman who says ‘your money or your life’, but we don’t, rightly, think of that as a morally important freedom. It’s this kind of positive freedom claim that’s doing the work in most left-wing critiques of capitalism, and if you’re going to defend capitalism against such critiques, you need to address that, not just point to negative freedoms which require some argumentation to show that we should care about them. I’m not saying this is impossible, I’m just saying, do it.

It’s true that there has probably never been a pure market society, but there are a number of pieces of empirical and theoretical evidence we can draw on to substantiate the claim that some people would be extremely poor under such a society. Late Victorian society, at least in Britain, was fairly close to be a pure market society: rates of income tax were more or less neglible, the welfare safety net provided was so awful that people would take any job rather than fall into it, and there was little state support of industry. Yet people starved to death. Infant mortality rates were huge. When a genuinely philanthropic factory owner, Joseph Rowntree, did a survey of his workforce, he found that large proportions of them lived in abject poverty. We can also draw on the experience of more and less laissez faire states. Sweden has had consistently high economic growth rates and one of the lowest levels of poverty in the world since the nineteen thirties, when it became a virtual one-party, social democratic, state. Although the US has had very high economic growth rates, it still has a comparatively high level of poverty in for an industrialized Western nation. As for the theoretical evidence, I’m not an economist, but what I remember of market theory says a perfect market will clear at the intersection of marginal cost and marginal revenue, that is, for labour, where the marginal utility of income meets the marginal utility of leisure. If the alternative to income is starvation, its utility is going to be vast proportionally to that of leisure, meaning that people will take very low paid jobs, so as to avoid starving. Thus, a perfect labour market may leave people extremely poor (I think). This is to say nothing of market failures, collective action problems and so on, the theoretical literature on which is quite large, I understand.

I also think you are misusing the term charity: charity is by definition voluntary, so you can’t have coerced charity. This is part of a general libertarian misconception: the welfare system isn’t about charity, it’s about rights. Coercive intervention to uphold rights is justified, so libertarians can’t complain about it unless they can show that they aren’t really rights. By all means, try and show that people don’t have a right to some minimal level of income so that they can have some control over their lives, but don’t just wave attempts to instantiate that right as charity.

You say redistributing autonomy is a zero-sum game: this might be definitionally true. That, however, has no direct relation to redistributing income and wealth. Redistributing income and wealth is, in autonomy terms, a positive sum game if, which seems plausible, the rate at which income and wealth are converted into autonomy is subject to diminishing marginal returns (for example, I am not autonomous if I have to beg to survive, while if I have an income of ten thousand pounds a year, I’m probably not fully autonomous, but I am substanially more autonomous than a beggar; on the other hand, the difference between an income of ten million a year and nine million a year does not make any obviously substanial difference to my ability to direct my life as I please). Of course, if you equate autonomy with property rights, redistributing income and wealth does become a zero-sum game in terms of autonomy. But that’s begging the question, because the libertarian position is that freedom is property rights.

The libertarian animosity to politics has always seemed a little odd to me, because, surely, if they think they’re right, they must think that they can show others that they’re right. A more open democratic system would provide them with more opportunities to show they’re right.

I’m sorry about the length of the post. I got a bit carried away.

Re Marx’s comment about a society in which a person could: “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, write literary criticism after dinner..”…..I wonder if Marx himself had any interest in hunting, fishing, and cattle-herding?

Interesting stuff. I’m not sure I agree with the “To have autonomy, you must be operating in an environment that is reasonably predictable and amenable to your control” bit.

Autonomy, I thought, meant self-rule – in any environment, predictable, malleable, both and neither. As such, rather than control, I thought the big thing about individual autonomy is being able to choose your own actions, even though they may amount to nothing and even though you might just be kidding yourself (in a determinist’ eyes).

On a group level, presumably this being able to choose has more or less to do with social participation and engagement – feeling as though you (as part of the group) are impacting on the choice.

That said, I’d probably spin it, in that (the perceived) lack of choice probably does more damage than (the perceived) ability to choose. And you can choose your hierarchy can’t you?

All – eek – of that said, I haven’t read the book so apologies if it’s way off base. Thanks again for the thoughts though!