Comments on: Just deserts and the market

By: Xboy

Xboy — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 06:28:23 +0000

NW: I’m having a hard time getting my head around this statement of yours: the idea that taxpayers’ money is rightfully theirs follows easily from the notion that justice is about process not outcome. The reasoning goes: taxpayers’ money is theirs because they got it through free exchanges for mutual benefit, which are inherently just. Taking money by force, which is what the government does, is inherently unjust. The substantive content of the outcomes— who has how much money— is irrelevant to the justice of the process. Isn’t taxation also the result of processes which have been openly discussed and agreed upon, including the constitution, the elections that sent our representatives to Washington, the votes that passed our current tax laws, etc? “Taking money by force” is a loaded term that I suspect has been added to sabotage reasonable debate. Yes, the feds will come and get you if you don’t pay your taxes willingly, but they will also come for you if you don’t live up to your end of the “free exchanges for mutual benefit” that you make with others. That’s why we have laws against theft, fraud, etc. It sure would be groovy if we could accept as just the processes that put money in our pockets while rejecting as unjust any process that asks us to pony up, but I don’t think that would work out very well in the real world. SE: a barista is the person behind the bar at a coffee house who makes your drink. CT: Why do lines of text on this website keep disappearing? I need to hit “refresh” every minute or so. I don’t have this problem with other sites.

By: Jean Lepley

Jean Lepley — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:49:16 +0000

Just to be nitpicky—if you really insist on “just deserts” instead of “just desserts,” I presume you’re also pronouncing the word “desert” with the stress on the second syllable? That would strike most people as odd, but it IS how the two words are differentiated in speech…

By: se

se — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 00:09:24 +0000

My point was this: Elizabeth Anderson’s argument about the forward-looking nature of the market read almost as an argument against even historical reflection. And in a context where the market as such faces no opposition even from an idea, this marks the end of any rational need for professors of history or literature. Anderson has philosophized the end of the humanities as subjects worthy of attention. As I said above, by this logic a the only reason to ‘look backward’ is to care for the fallen. And no one else here mocks this!? Pete, you’re right, I don’t have a graduate degree. My parents have enough of them for all their children, and for you as well. But they grew tired of this shit years ago, while I still know how to hate. I don’t go to Starbuck’s, they burn the coffee. What’s a ‘barista?’

By: Ajax Bucky

Ajax Bucky — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 23:13:26 +0000

There is no East or West. Shoes and a headstart. One good shoe, in search of a matching other or a matching foot, depending.

By: pierre

pierre — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:02:29 +0000

Has it been pointed out that you frequently change the subject, in “performative mode”, when a real question gets asked? Maybe that’s part of your communication theory. Fine with me, I’m just sayin’. But looking at your rhetoric, it seems to boil down to this: “I don’t see why I should have to bark at all these people with graduate degrees about the moral implications of standard theories.” The thing is, they don’t see it either. Your intuition that the academic world should be different is like being angry you can’t have a root canal done at Starbucks. Some of the baristas individually might even agree with you about the importance of dental care, but they’re not going to speak up while you’re ranting at the half-n-half, and it’s got nothing to do with Starbucks.

By: se

se — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:37:33 +0000

Duchamp put it well. People either are interesting or are not. Curiosity is a value, yes.

By: pierre

pierre — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 02:23:28 +0000

Seth, what's up with this values thing? Is being a skeptical observer like being a mystic? Seems to be just as rare and badly explained. Coincidence?

By: se

se — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:27:06 +0000

Pete, what’s up with this soul thing? WTF does trying to imagine yourself as someone else might have to do with religion? Is being a skeptical observer like being a mystic? Dude, enlighten me.

By: pierre

pierre — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 01:15:05 +0000

I’m still trying to figure out why people are so stupid. How do you propose to answer this question? Also, is it possible that you have unconsciously surrounded yourself with only stupid people? What is the positive value of reflection? Any academic in the humanities should be able to answer this question. Why did Bodhidharma come from the West? What separates us from the beasts? What is the nature of the soul? Twenty-five words or less, go.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:25:36 +0000

John Halasz- I understood your point and was not arguing with it; but as you say you offered only a ‘snippet’ of defense. That is what I was arguing against. You mounted a criticism of libertarian crap, you did not describe the alternative. My interest is in skill, not freedom. I’m more interested in skill than truth. I want to be articulate. I want to be good at arguing (I grew up around lawyers). I want to ‘good’ at writing, at filmaking, at photography, at painting, at set design. In order to be good my work has to be judged by others, according to categories that are not of my making. My individuality is only recognizable as being a variation of a form. Freedom in a very real sense does not exist. Moreover I want to be good at things that accomidate the response of others I am not alone but I am a ‘self’, and am in a relationship of negotiating with other ‘selves’ all of us in the same ambiguous relationship to each other: the world ‘outside’. I am not arguing against the existence of the market but against the idea of the market as truth. and agaisnt the idea of the individual as truth. I value curiosity more highly than I value anything else. Does the market bring about an increase in curiosity, or knowledge? In some ways yes, in many others no. Does it expand or limit debate? It can do both. All this is pretty basic stuff. What interests me is why people should want to transform themselves into machines. Why mimic autistim. Why pretend that words, and people, are the equivalent of numbers. I understand the need for statistics, but why should some people prefer numbers to people? It’s just a matter of taste I suppose. But I’ll be god damned if those people who seem unable or unwilling to accept ambiguity in their own lives try do define it away in mine. You want to live with other people, you’re gonna get taxed. Most people don’t even want to be rich, so in a world of limited resources what the hell gives you the right to have so much? Elizabeth Anderson argues from market theory to defend taxation, as if the market were the template for all communiaction. Bullshit. Absolute fucking bullshit.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 04:41:42 +0000

seth edelbaum: That was a curiously selective quotation, as the second half of the sentence bore its main burden and I clearly was not say “individual choice is meaningless”. In fact, I was mounting a snippet of defense of ethical community and political society, by way of criticism of libertarian notions that atomic individuals, defined solely through volitional capacity, which must remain untainted by coercion, inspite of the conflictual potential obtaining between unconstrained exercize of individual volitions, could constitute human society solely through the model of explicit contractual relations between individuals, on the basis of an absurdly idealized view of the market as the exemplar of human freedom. (The original occasion for this thread, if you’ll recall, was von Hayek’s notion of markets as information-processing mechanisms, which hence frustrate individual purposes and bear no relation to individual moral desert or justice.) In fact, contrary to both libertarians and von Hayek, I was concerned to rehabilitate the notion of outcomes or ends, individual and collective, as being relevant to questions of justice. Markets are a quasi-institution which are effective and useful for arranging many of the necessities of social life, but they are hardly the whole, or even exemplar, of human freedom: their much-vaunted “freedom” is a functional property rather than a moral value. And I hardly think that human society can be modeled on the basis of individual contractual relations. (“I, as the star of the show, require that Perrier water be provided to my dressing-room,etc.,etc….”) Even the heuristic idea of a social contract functions less as an account of extant social reality than as a device for critical reflection on the social relations and agreements that must precede any explicit contract and the extent to which extant social reality violates the putative terms of such a would-be contract. A constitution could be viewed as such a social contract, inspite of the abuses that politicians and other anointed power-holders make of it, except that it suffers from the inherent ambiguity of the constituting/constituted power. So I would be careful about speaking of the state as “an agent of the people as a whole”. Everything depends on whether the public sphere, with all its conflicts and reconcilements, can be a legitimating power effecting the conduct of affairs of state, or whether the state, in its functional interlock with the market economy and its effects, becomes merely the administrative arm captured by particular interests, marching in universal guise. But as to the question of historical amenseusis, that is a favorite topic of mine, especially when it concerns questions of social justice and their precedence.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 01:10:28 +0000

Ajax (the greater?), I should have been clearer, or paid more attention. In my reference to eating etc… I was only playing, or trying to play, the village athiest, toasting a friendly indifference to big time intellectual/ theological questions. There have always been a lot of such people, and they bother me a whole lot less than formalists who think their models represent the world. That being said, we have no argument. s.e.

By: seth edenbaum

seth edenbaum — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 00:44:17 +0000

The constitution grants a right to ‘due process,’ it does not guarantee justice. A courtroom however is about as fundamentally artificial a construct as I can imagine. If you’re willing to accept a market as constrained as that Mr Weininger, I might be willing to listen, if only for the laughs. Still I’m amazed at the unwillingness of people to argue that the goverment as an agent of the people as a whole should have a right to limit individual economic freedom. Why not come out and say it? John Halasz writes: “the notion of choice is meaningless,’ and that may be true, but he falls into the same trap that people accuse the democrats of falling into: of attacking a policy while offering nothing to replace it. The critique of individualism has to be more than a critique as such. Negative dialectics, if I’m using the term correctly, makes for lousy argument. But from the standpoint of much that I read on CT, including the appreciative comments concerning Elizabeth Anderson’s absurdities, reflection, or ‘backward-looking’ is only to be done as in the name of charity. It has no positive value Curiosity has no value, unless it can be seen as related to the logic of the individual or of the market. So what opposes the rule of the market, the vague sense that we are never really alone in the world? That’s not enough. A real defense would involve a discussion of the positive effects and the responsibilities of a rigorous uncertainty, of an uncertain understanding of the world. For example: What is the difference between seeing Michelangelo as a one of the greatest creators of the renaissance and as one of its greatest creations? The market may ask us to choose the first designation, but it should not be allowed deny us the right to consider the second. What is the positive value of reflection? Any academic in the humanities should be able to answer this question.

By: ajax bucky

ajax bucky — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 00:26:40 +0000

seth- Closer still, and yet… “The eat, shit, fuck, and die…” imperative (and never were commas so vitally important) is pure subjectivity. It’s the consumer outlook, the unit view, the landscape through the eyes of the lonesome individualist, there’s no larger context – just the solitary consumer-unit and its needs, drifting through a harsh landscape. It’s not impossible to see the aggregate the consumer operates within as a thing, a creature or creature-like being, or even a collection of creature-like aggregates like tribes within a larger gathering of tribes, within an interwoven still-greater aggregate, and once you do see it – once you really get that – a lot of what seems airy-fairy about “natural” and “organic” gets gritty, real and crucial, closer than medicine to what we need. I should have been more specific about the Nicobarese and Andaman Islanders. The more “assimilated” they were, the more damage they took; direct linear relationship there. And as Survival Int’l points out – even the most uncivilized among them aren’t “primitive” or “cavemen”. These are terms of bigotry, and they’re applied for the same covert reasons all bigotry is – competition that seeks to end-run the actual contest and bestow the reward on the only deserving team – the pre-game trophy ceremony. Convincing everyone you won the game before it begins can save a great deal of energy. We lived as “cavemen” tens of thousands of years longer than we’ve lived as “citizens”. Possibly a lot more than that. Not all of those years were filled with unremitting suffering. Coercion and adaptation differ only in the p.o.v. of the describer. Again, it’s a unit/context response. Submission and respect get close that way too. We thwart the evolutionary process that gave us the tools that allow us to thwart it. Scientists battle religionists over the validity of evolutionary principles that they both actively seek to avoid in their own, real, lives. The bushmen have lived that way so long because it works, they are contemporary in every sense that matters, and their main dilemmas and threats are coming from us, and us exclusively. Communion is what happens when communication works, eh? But then the natural process says not everyone gets to, and there we go. Game on, game over. And it all begins again.

By: john c. halasz

john c. halasz — Sun, 30 Jan 2005 22:02:47 +0000

Nicholas Weiniger: You claim that justice is a process, not an outcome. Prsumably, what you mean is that justice is what is achieved by affairs being conducted in terms of fair rules of the game. Leaving aside any implication about aesthetist ludism, as to it being “all just a game” and its accompanying obtuseness, presumably you mean that the rules to the game concern property rights, defined as the exclusive access to the use of resources, which is then identified with capacities for the exercise of individual agency. The assumption is then, that assuming an equal or equitable initial distribution of resources, all exhanges, being voluntary acts, must be mutually beneficial and optimal in outcome. But, leaving aside that there is no prior equitable distribution of resources, not all resources, defined as whatever sustains the capacity for the exercize of personal agency, can be defined and regulated in terms of individual property. (Are knowledge or education a species of private property? What educated person would be so foolish or so uncultured as to believe that his acquired capacities are uniquely his own attainment?) Furthermore, exchanges are not merely bilateral volitional acts, but can have effects on third parties, or, more generally, the environment in which they occur. And leaving aside any coercive effects of power relationships in which they may occur, they may be predicated on asymmetries of information or preference intensities that put in doubt whether they are necessarily mutually beneficial, optimal, or equitable. But still more realistically to the point, modern economic production involves the joint combination of several distinct labors, which are not individually distinguishable, and virtually anything that gets called property in a modern economy is the product of such a collective process. (Yes, let us not fall for the fallacy that it is market exchanges that produce wealth unto themselves and ignore the sphere of production that is responsible for the rates of productivity behind relative scarcities and their ratios of exchange.) And, in turn, such modern production requires the collective provision of the infrastructure that renders it possible, in the form of public goods, regulations, and social supports: hence taxes. Finally, consider that there are no static rules of the game, that the “game” has successive rounds and that the results of previous rounds feed into subsequent rounds, such that what would constitute fair rules of the game can not be deduced from a priori premises, in ignorance of the evolving muddle. The Platonic definition of justice as “giving what is due” hardly clarifies the matter, but at least it focuses the matter on a consideration of what is due, rather than disregarding the matter in favor of a vaunting of individual autonomy under a set of artificially gerrymandered rules or assumptions that have no more substance than life on the planet Venus. The fact of the matter is that individual human agency and choice are not magic, metaphysical properties that can instantaneously generate all values, but human agents necessarily live in social groups and are subject to the complex consequentiality of the dynamics of social groups, which at once constrain and constitute them. Indeed, it is the constraint of underlying, implicit rules that constitutes the phenomenon of human agency in the first place. The very notion of choice is meaningless, no more than a metaphysical fantasy, without the reality and consequentiality of social groups.