The Cambridge Platonists

Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683)

As mentioned in my previous post, this is the first of a series on the great period of the British moralists, extending from roughly 1650 to 1800.

Professional philosophers make a living by arguing against one another, and society has decided, for its own reasons, that it would like to pay certain people to make a profession out of disagreeing. And yet, strangely, the fact is that modern Anglo-American academic philosophers are really birds of a feather. The majority of them, it seems, share the following beliefs in some form: free will is an illusion; truth is subjective or is a function of power; veridical knowledge about the world is not possible (scepticism); morality is largely a matter of either subjective feeling (emotivism, non-cognitivism) or group agreement (cultural relativism), or an illusion (nihilism); the universe is reducible to force acting on passive matter ; the human agent is a causally determined machine made of flesh and propelled by desires and appetites; human beings are not special, but are just animals with somewhat more complicated brains; there is no such thing as objective beauty; there is no such thing as a soul; there is no such thing as a God.

This list is not exhaustive, but it is certainly depressing. And looking at it, one is struck by how much the modern philosopher is the direct heir of her famous 17th-century predecessors. During the middle of that century, Descartes was arguing that the universe was reducible to matter pushed by matter. At the same time, Hobbes was arguing that men were nothing more than meat puppets motivated by selfish appetites, and that right and wrong had no basis in reality other than a sovereign’s ability to impose them by force.

Some brave souls struggled, however vainly, against this reductionist impulse. Imagine for a moment a time and place where there were English-language academic philosophers who (i) wrote in elegant and beautiful prose (almost inconceivable now); who (ii) believed that Right and Wrong, Good and Evil, were distinctions with a sound basis in the nature of things; who (iii) defended the concepts of free will and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions; who (iv) believed that rather than being an inert, passive collection of matter, the universe is alive and active; and who (v) similarly believed that the mind is an active power that makes knowledge as much as it passively receives it.

This broad and unfashionable-sounding philosophical profile is characteristic of a group of 17th-century thinkers associated with Cambridge University, and particularly with Emmanuel College, a group that later came to be labelled “the Cambridge Platonists”. It is precisely this broad and unfashionable profile that makes these figures rather difficult to explain today.

To be honest, in discussing the Cambridge Platonists, I’m not quite sure where to begin. I suppose we might start with style, with their elegant prose. The first thing to keep in mind is that although they were academics, they were also clergymen. In other words, the course of their professional duties required a lighter touch, since they had to deliver sound theological doctrine, moral exhortation, and religious inspiration to congregations who were not academics themselves, or indeed were illiterate. Hence, to a professional academic philosopher of today, their writings — many of which appear in the form of sermons — can seem flaky and eccentric. But they are often extremely poetic. Take, for example, this characterization of the spiritually deadening effects of excessive self-interest offered by Peter Sterry (1613-1672): “A little Bird ty’d by the Leg with a String, often flutters and strives to raise itself; but still it is pull’d down to the Earth again: Thus a Soul fixt in a Self-Principle, may make attempts to Pray and Offer at the Bosom of God; but still it is snatch’d down by that String of Self, which ties it to the Ground” (Pinto 169). I admit there is great charm in this little simile. The author has that poetic eye, which sees the very great in the very small.

Not all of Sterry’s imagery was equally felicitous. For example, there is something rather improper in this one: “There is not the lowest thing, which hath not God in it; for God fills all: Yet as the Sun-Beams fall on a Dunghill, and are not polluted; so God is still himself to himself, high and glorious in the lowest Things” (Pinto 150). Put charitably, this might be characterized as the author’s poetic eye seeing the very small in the very great, to ill effect.

Another choice little gem comes from the lyrical pen of John Smith: “When we look unto the Earth, then behold darkness and dimness of anguish, that I may use those words of the Prophet Esay [Isaiah 8:22]: But when we look towards Heaven, then behold light breaking forth upon us, like the Eye-lids of the Morning, and spreading its wings over the Horizon of mankind sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace [Luke 1:79]” (Patrides 151).

Interestingly, among the Cambridge Platonists, Sterry was a bit of an oddball. For one thing, he was a Puritan. As a matter of fact, he was Oliver Cromwell’s chaplain. Most of the other Cambridge Platonists were Anglican, though of a latitudinarian persuasion. Also, while the others had their poetic flights, they usually succeeded in remaining firmly grounded in reason. Sterry, on the other hand, was a mystic, and some of his flights, though somehow quite dazzling, were also utterly incomprehensible if one stopped to reflect on them for too long, as in this example: “A bright or light Body, like the Sun, sends forth millions of Beams round about from every Point of itself. Such a Brightness, such a Fruitfulness is there in the Person of Christ; Millions of Angels every Moment spring and sparkle forth from him” (Pinto 153). This is a beautiful gem, but one isn’t quite sure what to do with it.

At his mystical best, Sterry was a poet of those little contemplative silences, where God is to be found: “Put out then every Spark of Creature Light or Life in your Spirits, and you shall find yourselves immediately in the Light of God. A deep Silence of all created Objects ushers in the Appearances of God in the Soul” (Pinto 184). And consider this, which he wrote in a letter to his son: “As musick is conveyed sweetest and furthest upon a river in ye Night: so is ye Musick of ye heavenly voice carried most clearly, pleasantly to ye understanding, when all ye outward senses ly wrapt up in darkness, and ye depth of night” (Pinto 184).

Sterry was a sort of poet who wrote in prose. Not all of the Cambridge Platonists were excellent stylists. Henry More (1614-1687), for instance, was a wretched writer. He also tried his hand at actual poetry, to embarrassing effect. Two things were mainly responsible for making More’s poetry bad. First, his favourite poet was Edmund Spenser, particularly the latter’s Faerie Queen, which was written in a peculiar stanza form, and used language that was self-consciously archaic and hearkened back to Middle English verse. With Spenser it has a certain charm, and certainly it flows. Here’s the effect when More employs (perpetrates?) a similar style:

     Nor Ladies loves, nor Knights brave martiall deeds,
     Ywrapt in rolls of hid Antiquitie;
     But th’inward Fountain, and the unseen Seeds,
     From whence are these and what so under eye
     Doth fall, or is record in memorie,
     Psyche, I’ll sing. Psyche! from thee they sprong.
     O life of Time, and all Alterity!
     The life of lives instill his nectar strong,
   My soul t’inebriate, while I sing Psyches song.
(“Psychozoia,” Canto I, stanza 1, in Philosophicall Poems, p. 1).

Secondly, More uses this poetical form to express very abstract philosophical concepts, deploying a Greek-derived philosophical inkhorn jargon. Long Greek words tend not to sit very naturally within English versification, partly because they don’t scan well, and partly because the reader must stop the flow to mentally construe the meaning of such terms:

    “Plain death’s as good as such a Psychopannychie.”

Wretched stuff. None of this is to say that More wasn’t a good philosopher; he was just a terrible writer, bad enough to make Kant proud. I could say much more about style, but I’d rather move on to content.

Active Minds

I mentioned above that unlike Hobbes and Descartes (and later Locke), who saw the human mind along the lines of a lump of wax passively receiving sensory impressions, the Cambridge Platonists conceptualized the mind as an active power that makes knowledge rather than merely receiving it. On this, the best spokesperson is probably Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688). Cudworth insisted that one way the active nature of the human mind manifests itself is in the integration of the various sensory impressions it receives: “The Sight cannot Judge of Sounds which belong to the Hearing, nor the Hearing of Light and Colours; wherefore that which judges of all the Senses and their several Objects, cannot be it self any Sense, but something of a superior Nature” (Treatise 70). In other words, there must be some active intellectual power that actively integrates and interprets information from all the various senses, and which cannot itself be a sense, but is something that is prior to sensory knowledge.

It is not just that the sensationalist psychology leaves unexplained how the various passively received sensory impressions get integrated without the active power of the mind. Hobbes and his ilk, in their rush to reduce knowledge to sensory impressions, effectively reduce all sense impressions to impressions of one sense — touch, since all sense is a reducible to matter impacting upon the sensory organs. Thus, they lose the basis for differentiation between the various senses (e.g. touch versus taste), and between different sensations within a sensory dimension (hard versus soft). Again, it is the active powers of the mind that make these discriminations (ibid. 60).

And since, says Cudworth, knowledge cannot be reduced to passively acquired sense-impressions without positing an active integrating and discriminating power, “Knowledge is not a Knock or Thrust from without, but it consisteth in the Awakening and Exciting of the Inward Active Powers of the Mind” (ibid. 99-100). Thus, he says, “It must needs follow from hence, that Knowledge is an Inward and Active Energy of the Mind it self, and the displaying of its own Innate Vigour from within, whereby it doth Conquer, Master and Command its Objects…” (ibid. 126).

“Connate” Knowledge and the Moral Sense

So, knowledge does not come solely — or even primarily — from the senses. The mind is active and, in a sense, creates knowledge using its own pre-existing resources. There is, then, such a thing as innate knowledge, prior to sensory experience. It is in this claim of innate knowledge that we find the Platonism of the Cambridge Platonists on display. However, instead of using the word “innate” they often prefer to use the term “connate” or “connatural”. Indeed, this latter terminology is so frequent in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, and infrequent enough elsewhere, that it can almost serve as an identifier of the group. (As we’ll see, there are two other terms that also serve this purpose.) “Connatural” is not always used in the same way in their writings. For example, there are many places where it is synonymous with “innate”, in the sense of a kind of knowledge that is in the mind ab initio, not acquired. In other places it serves to describe knowledge that, though not necessarily present from the very first, develops early on and necessarily, as a function of the life form and history of the species. And sometimes for the Cambridge Platonists, “connatural” is used in the sense of “consistent with one’s nature”, as when Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683) writes that “Man, as Man, is Averse to what is Evil and Wicked; for Evil is unnatural, and Good is connatural, to Man” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #42).

Whichcote’s words show that moral knowledge is among that body of knowledge which is connate to man. Although we learn to make finer moral distinctions through experience, human beings have an innate understanding of right and wrong, good and evil. For the Cambridge Platonists, this understanding is sometimes ascribed to reason, and sometimes to “conscience”, though the latter term is often used as if it were the same thing as reason. This is because for them, reason is more akin to a sort of intuition; it is not necessarily ratiocinative. Again, here their Platonism is on display: understanding is often more a matter of directly grasping the truth rather than arriving at it by a process of explicit reasoning, of consciously moving stepwise from premises to conclusion.

For the Cambridge Platonists, there is a normative dimension to reason that allows for this identification of reason with conscience. Whichcote notes that reason has a directing force, because it is the voice of God. Therefore, “To go against Reason, is to go against God: it is the self same thing, to do that which the Reason of the Case doth require; and that which God Himself doth appoint: Reason is the Divine Governor of Man’s Life; it is the very Voice of God” (ibid. #76). The moral person listens to this voice and follows it. Disobedience to it is immorality. And when we ignore it, says Whichcote, we not only pay the price in terms of suffering the worldly consequences of error, we also suffer the sting of conscience: “If Reason may not command; it will condemn” (Select Sermons, p. 63; Moral & Religious Aphorisms #98).

Placed within the tradition of the British moralists, it is easy to see how this view of conscience as an intuitive grasping of moral truth leads naturally to the notion that we have a moral sense, which gives us access to moral truths much as sight grasps colours and shapes, and hearing grasps sounds. In other words, we can see in the Cambridge Platonists the beginnings of a “moral sense” school of thought. Shaftesbury, usually accredited as the founder of the moral sense school, edited — with a lengthy preface — an edition of Whichcote’s sermons (Select Sermons). As a matter of fact, this was Shaftesbury’s first published work. To credit Shaftesbury with inventing the moral sense is to ignore the fact that in the very volume that Shaftesbury edited, Whichcote wrote, “Man by his Nature and Constitution, as God made him at first, being an intelligent Agent, hath Sense of Good and Evil, upon a Moral account” (Select Sermons 232). Elsewhere, Whichcote wrote in a similar strain, “Man, by Reason, has apprehensions of Moral Good and Evil; as Animals, by Sense, distinguish Natural Good and Evil” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #146). Of Shaftesbury’s two most prominent followers, Hutcheson preferred the language of “moral sense”, while Butler seems to have preferred “conscience”, the term more commonly used among the Cambridge Platonists.

“The Candle of the Lord”

So, in the Cambridge Platonists, we have a view of the mind as active, and as directing conduct through reason or conscience. This “reason-or-conscience” is connatural to man. I also said that the use of the word “connatural” is often a telltale sign that one is reading the Cambridge Platonists (Shaftesbury used it too). This is a good place to introduce another phrase peculiar to the Cambridge Platonists. They seem to have had an obsession with Proverbs 20:27: “The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord.” This image of the mind as the candle of the Lord is recurrent throughout the writings of this group.

Whichcote uses it when he writes that “The Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the Lord; Lighted by God, and Lighting us to God” (Moral & Religious Aphorisms #916). Nathaniel Culverwell (1619-1651) is often mentioned in connection with the Cambridge Platonists, because he taught at Emmanuel College, but he is usually considered not to be one of them, because his philosophical opinions are more heterodox — in his writings there is a heavy natural law influence, and he often cites Descartes with approval. However, I do consider him a Cambridge Platonist, largely on the grounds that he too was a heavy user of the “candle of the Lord” metaphor, as when he writes, “But the publishing and manifestation of this Law which must give notice of all this, does flow from that heavenly beame which God has darted into the soul of man; from the Candle of the Lord, which God has lighted up for the discovery of his owne Lawes; from that intellectual eye which God has fram’d and made exactly proportionable to this light” (Elegant and Learned Discourse 71).

What do Cambridge Platonists mean when they say that the mind is the “candle of the Lord”? Well, first, God is the source of all intellectual light (again, this is Platonism). But a finite portion of this infinite light has been placed in each of us, on purpose, that we may shed some of its rays to cut through darkness and illuminate His works. Recall John Smith’s words, quoted earlier: “But when we look towards Heaven, then behold light breaking forth upon us, like the Eye-lids of the Morning, and spreading its wings over the Horizon of mankind sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” We are surrounded by darkness, and all we have is this little candle to guide us and prevent us from stumbling around blindly.

Henry More has an interesting take on the “candle of the Lord” image. He seems to include our passions and affections as part of this luminous candle: “Nevertheless, we do not pretend, in the least, to have the Passions of the Mind exterminated. We rather account of them… as of the very Organs of the Body, and as distinctly useful… Wherefore if we can but skill our Passions aright, They are as Lamps or Beacons, to conduct and excite us to our Journey’s end” (Account of Virtue 82-83). This is a truly remarkable passage. Most philosophers in the Western tradition, Descartes included, viewed the passions with deep suspicion, since they were seen to interfere with reason, clouding or distorting it. More, on the other hand, does not distrust the passions as such. Rather, since the passions are natural, we must have them for a purpose. The passions, “rightly skilled” or trained, are guides to the understanding of good and evil, or are at least tokens of such understanding. This acceptance of our passionate nature is another foreshadowing of Shaftesbury’s philosophy.

“Plastick Nature”

I mentioned earlier that the Cambridge Platonists set themselves against those philosophers, such as Hobbes, who viewed the universe as an inert, passive collection of matter bounces against other matter in the void, to no particular purpose. For the Cambridge Platonists, by contrast, the universe is active and purposive, a sort of living organism. Instead of simply existing, with its component parts bouncing against each other endlessly, the Cambridge Platonist universe can be said to be in a process of unfolding. Since the universe is God’s creation, it can even be said to be a thought in God’s mind, with a logic to it, much as there is with a chain of reasoning in the mind. We’ve already seen that minds are active. As with minds, so with larger nature. Everything is active, unfolding according to its own internal principles.

This brings us to the third of those terms — along with “connatural” and “candle of the Lord” — that are identifiers of Cambridge Platonist writing. This activity, this “unfolding of nature according to its internal principles” is called the universe’s “plastic nature”. Although the phrase, and variants of it, is common among all the writers in this group, it is especially prominent in Ralph Cudworth and John Smith. Cudworth, for example, complains of the inertness of the materialist philosophers’ universe in the following terms: “They make a kind of Dead and Wooden World, as it were a Carved Statue, that hath nothing neither Vital nor Magical at all in it. Whereas to those who are Considerative, it will plainly appear, that there is a Mixture of Life or Playstick [sic.] Nature together with Mechanism, which runs through the whole Corporeal Universe” (Patrides 290). The universe is not a mere machine. It is an organism that grows and develops: “[T]he World was not made by any whatsoever, after such a manner as an Artificer makes an House, by Machins and Engins, acting from without upon the Matter, Cumbersomly and Moliminously, but by a certain Inward Plastick Nature of its own” (Patrides 296).

John Smith makes an important point that serves to tie much of this metaphysics together with the concept of free will, for he says that as with nature, so too with the mind. Neither nature as a whole, nor the mind as a subset of nature, is wholly compelled by extraneous forces. Rather, it moves towards ends proposed by its own internal force: “There is a Plastick Virtue, a Secret Energy issuing forth from that which the Mind propounds to itself as its End, to mold and fashion it according to its own Model. The soul is alwaies stamp’d with the same Characters that are engraven upon the End it aims at; and while it converses with it, and sets it self before it, it is turned as Wax to the Seal, to use that phrase in Job [Job 38:14]” (Patrides 166). Where a Hobbist sees the motions of the mind as being caused by contingent, occurrent wants and desires, Smith sees the mind as active in proposing ends to itself, and that there is a “fit” between agent and ends. Note too the reversal here of the Cartesian image of the mind as wax passively receiving sensory impressions from the external world. Instead, Smith proposes that the mind is itself the seal, which leaves its impression upon the external world, through willing and acting.

A living and unfolding universe with meaning, free and active minds, an innate moral faculty, a sense of beauty, the reality of good and evil, the acceptance and celebration of our passionate nature… these things are the philosophical legacy of the Cambridge Platonists. Unfortunately, it is a legacy we have mostly squandered.

Bibliography

CUDWORTH, Ralph. A Treatise concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. London: James and John Knapton, 1731 (facsimile, New York: Garland, 1976).

CULVERWELL, Nathaniel. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature. Robert A. Greene and Hugh McCallum (eds.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.

MORE, Henry. Philosophicall Poems. Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1647 (facsimile, Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1969).

— An Account of Virtue. Edward Southwell (trans.). London: Benjamin Tooke, 1690 (facsimile, New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930).

PATRIDES, C. A. (ed.). The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

PINTO, Vivian de Sola (ed.). Peter Sterry, Platonist and Puritan, 1613-1672: A Biographical and Critical Study with passages selected from his Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934.

WHICHCOTE, Benjamin. Select Sermons of Dr. Whichcot [sic.]. Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1742 (facsimile, Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977).

— Moral and Religious Aphorisms. London: Mathew Elkins and Marrot, 1930.

Conflict of Interest: Case Study #3

My third and final case study in conflict of interest will be brief, since it is a relatively straightforward case of good old-fashioned nepotism. Quaint stuff, really…

Now, not every instance of what we commonly call “nepotism” is bad. For instance, if I need my driveway shoveled, and I “hire” my son to do it, there is no harm done — unless of course my son is shiftless, lazy, or not physically up to the task. But even then, the harm is to myself only. Similarly, if I am the proprietor of a family business, say a restaurant, I commit no breach of ethics in giving my daughter a job in the company. Indeed, there may be very good reasons for doing so; she may be part of my “succession plan” and will need to learn the ropes if she is to follow in my footsteps. If it turns out that she doesn’t have what it takes, lacks the “right stuff” or the “royal jelly”, again, that’s a risk I take, and one I’m entitled to take.

Perhaps it could be argued that I am “denying” a better qualified person a job. But that presumes I have a duty to provide jobs for people, which seems implausible. I almost want to say that my hiring my son is a decision about consumption rather than production: I may be perfectly aware that my son is a waste of oxygen, and that looked at from the perspective of production, my decision may seem inefficient. But in our consumption decisions, an inefficient choice is not the same thing as an unethical one. As with many other purchases that seem wasteful to observers, I derive some personal gratification from this “purchase” of a job for my son, and so I do it, efficiency be damned. And a case could be made that, at the end of the day, for all his uselessness, my son is at least a known quantity. In hiring outside the family I would of necessity be turning to strangers, with all the risks that entails. I may have to hire and fire a few duds before I find the right person for the job, and some of those duds may be far worse than my son. 

The matter is different where I am a representative of a public institution, corporation, or publicly-traded company. In that context, my decision is one concerning production. My choice is open to the judgment of others. Where I am spending money that belongs to others, money that has been entrusted to me as their agent, money that is to be spent on furthering their objectives, then to spend it on my own objectives — in effect, on consumption — may or may not be inefficient, but it is certainly unethical.

Put that way, it is akin to embezzlement. If I give my useless son a job in a public institution, corporation, or publicly-traded company, I bear none of the risk for the harm his uselessness may cause. Taxpayers or shareholders foot the bill, while I receive the direct or indirect benefits of the hire. I may as well be stealing from the till.

Therefore, we are concerned with nepotism only insofar as it is practiced within organizations not owned by the practicing “nepotist”. Furthermore, though its similarity to theft would in itself make nepotism morally wrong, we are mainly concerned with nepotism as it relates to conflict of interest. Wherein does the conflict of interest in nepotism lie? Well, from the foregoing, and from the previous two case studies, it should be fairly obvious: The nepotist’s (self)interest in furthering the interests of his relations conflicts — or is likely to conflict, or at the very least is likely to be perceived to conflict — with the interest of the organization. The organization’s interest herein consists of having the right person for the job, whether that person be an employee, a contractor, or a consultant.

(To these latter we might even conceivably add volunteer, at least insofar as the importance of the volunteer’s role is sufficiently greater than the mere value of her free labour. "Importance" here should be understood in terms of the potential value added by the volunteer's labour or the potential harm caused by a volunteer's incompetence. And as the use of free labour — interns, for example — in highly skilled positions becomes ever more common, having good volunteers in an organization approaches in importance the interest of having good employees, contractors, and consultants.)

With these fairly obvious remarks out of the way, here’s the case study. 

Case Study #3: 

A researcher at my university was the recipient of a multi-million dollar research grant. It was for a large-scale project, the type that necessarily requires a certain amount of administration. Receiving and spending millions of dollars of public funds requires that there be financial accounting and reporting.  A meeting of various interested parties was held before the project started, amongst whom was a certain accounting manager — let’s call her Angelica.

A few hours after the meeting, Angelica sent an e-mail message to the researcher. After the usual pleasantries, the message quickly came to the point: Angelica’s daughter — let’s call her Laura — needed a job for the summer, and wouldn’t it be nice if the researcher hired her on the project? There was, of course, no indication of what special skills Laura might bring to the project or in what capacity she might serve. Just an expectation that she be provided with a job for the summer.

The researcher immediately forwarded the correspondence to me, seeking my advice. I advised her to be evasive for the time being, while I pursued the matter with the powers that be. I was frankly incensed that Angelica was shaking down my researchers for jobs for her kids. What made it all the more galling to me was that Angelica was precisely in a position to know better. As the person in charge of research accounting at my institution, she would be intimately familiar with our policies around hiring research personnel, and with our policy on conflict of interest. Indeed, she was partly responsible for making sure researchers were compliant with them.

I made some inquiries and found out that this was not the first time Angelica had pulled this stunt. Indeed, Laura had been making the rounds all over the university as an employee in one capacity or another, thanks to her mother’s influence. I brought the matter to the attention of various higher-ups, but nothing was done about it. So I brought it to the attention of the office of the Vice President, and again nothing was done. All agreed that what Angelica was doing was wrong, but Angelica had been around for a long time, and nobody seemed inclined to rock the boat. Indeed, my impression was that there was some annoyance directed towards me for bringing up a problem that they would rather pretend didn’t exist.

In any case, I had pursued the matter as far as I was able to without doing harm to my own interests. The particular researcher in question did not hire Laura. That is because a few weeks later she was employed by a different researcher of mine, after having been likewise shaken down by Angelica.

(Incidentally, it was then that I had a first-hand opportunity to observe Laura at work. As I suspected from what I knew of her mother, Laura had little that I could discern in the way of skill or intelligence.)

I cannot resist noting that Angelica is of Italian heritage, a culture for which nepotism is the rule rather than the exception. (What we call “corruption” might in Italy be rather accurately referred to as “the economy”). If this sounds bigoted, I can only say in my defense that I am half Italian myself. I have had enough opportunity to observe the culture’s workings to feel justified in pointing out this predilection. It is also why I never have and never will vote for an Italian candidate for public office. They simply can’t help themselves. Indeed, if you try to explain the wrongness of nepotism to an Italian, he will only stare at you uncomprehendingly. For him, to not hire a relative is to be in grave dereliction of duty.

Conflict of Interest: Case Study #2

How real estate markets inflate

In February, I promised three case studies in professional conflict of interest, derived from personal experience. Here is the second one. Although I suspect you may find these examples rather mundane, it is their very mundaneness that I find interesting. I keep coming across issues of conflict of interest in my everyday professional life, so in that sense, they are literally mundane. And they arise from the actions of people who should know better. This I find interesting. People that are intelligent and not otherwise immoral seem unable to identify conflicts of interest in their own conduct. This may be because examples presented to them in various resources on the subject tend to be more dramatic than the situations in which they are most likely experience it. So, mundane examples might be more helpful than very dramatic ones that people are less likely to encounter in their daily lives.

Here is the situation. There was a certain research funding competition, with the following two characteristics:

1.    Applications were institutional, meaning that the university was technically the applicant, rather than an individual researcher, though the latter would still be the project leader.

2.    There was a certain “envelope” of funds allotted to each institution by the funding agency, meaning roughly that there was a limited amount of funding a given institution could apply for.

Under these circumstances, it was in the university’s interest to make sure that they put forward the best quality projects so that they could capture as much of their allotted funding envelope as possible. It was also in the university’s interest to not put forward too many projects, since doing so would mean that the university’s own projects were essentially competing against each other, while wasting the resources that go into putting together unsuccessful applications (the application process for this competition is remarkably onerous and difficult).

With all this in mind, the university devised a process whereby interested applicants were required to submit an internal notice of intent (NOI) — through their faculty’s Dean — to the university’s Vice-President Research. The Vice-President would then make decisions about which projects would go forward to the application stage.

If a faculty was forwarding more than one NOI, the Vice-President required that faculty’s Dean to rank them. In our faculty’s case, we had a problem: we had two NOIs being submitted, one of which belonged to our Dean (the other belonged to a high-performing researcher who also was a prima donna — but that’s another story). To his credit, our Dean immediately recognized the conflict of interest this put him in with respect to ranking. Clearly it would have violated the fundamental principle of justice that nemo iudex in causa sua (“No one ought to be a judge in his own case”).  I phoned the Vice-President’s office to explain the situation and find out if this requirement still applied to us. I was told that it did. Furthermore, I was told that it was the prerogative of the Dean, by virtue of his office, to rank his own application higher if he wished.

Not even the Crown’s prerogative extends to violating the principles of fundamental justice. A large and burgeoning branch of law — administrative law — is predicated on the idea that there are limits to such prerogative. But apparently, high-ranking university administrators do not have such a limited prerogative.

It is not difficult to see that it would be wrong for the Dean to take part in his own ranking. If he had ranked his own project higher, his competitor would naturally believe that the fix was in, even if the Dean ranked honestly. And if he had ranked himself lower, his competitor might still conclude that he had done so only to avoid controversy, even if the Dean had ranked honestly. The issue is not about the Dean’s honesty, but about justice being done and, as importantly, being seen to be done. In this case there would have been no way for justice to be seen to be done, even if it had been done.

Beyond the principle that justice must be done and seen to be done, conflict of interest also has the corrosive effect of lessening respect and trust in legitimate authority. (Illegitimate authority, however, deserves no respect or trust; but legitimate authority may become illegitimate precisely because it is prey to systemic conflicts of interest, also known as corruption.)

Another way to look at the wrongness of conflict of interest is by looking to the objective supposedly being served by a process or system: if the objective is good, and if the conflict of interest thwarts the process and/or undermines the objective it serves, then the conflict of interest is bad. In this case, a process was put in place to serve the objective of efficient use of resources, by a) not duplicating effort, and b) making maximal use of the available envelope — i.e. not “leaving money on the table”. This required that those projects be identified which are of the highest quality, and hence, most likely to succeed. The Dean’s participation in his own ranking would have muddied the waters in this last regard. The Vice-President would not be able to rely on the rankings he received. This makes the Vice-President’s attitude all the more puzzling. He was essentially asking our Dean to undermine his (i.e. the VP’s) own process.

The Vice-President’s insistence on the Dean’s prerogatives at first troubled me most because it caused problems for us that are best described as “political”. A prominent and accomplished researcher with an ego to match would have been rightly angered at being cheated, with predictable internal repercussions down the road for our faculty. But aside from politics, there was the greater ethical problem conflict of interest represents. Laudably, our Dean simply forwarded both NOIs without providing the required ranking. But if he had provided it, and especially if he had ranked himself higher, his action would have the effect of:

1. Undermining reasonable goals.
2. Undermining institutional trust.
3. Advancing personal interests at the expense of the common good.

Therein lies the wrongness of conflict of interest in this case.

Economics as a Moral Science

“Similarly, calls for ‘solidarity’ (or fiscal transfers) run straight into concerns over moral hazard. Mario Monti, a former Italian prime minister, likes to claim that in Germany economics is seen as a branch of moral philosophy.”

— “Of Rules and Order,” The Economist (9 May 2015), p. 47.

The above lines appear in an article on German ordoliberalism that claims the doctrine has become unquestioned orthodoxy among economists and policymakers in Germany, to sometimes detrimental effect. Ordoliberalism is an offshoot of classical liberalism, which advocates a strong role for the state in setting the legal and regulatory framework within which markets can operate to their full potential. It was named after ORDO, the journal strongly associated with the school of thought.

It is not my aim to critique ordoliberalism. I am more interested in Monti’s statement to the effect that Germans see economics as a branch of moral philosophy. The impression given is that Monti sees this as a bad thing, as if economics and moral philosophy should properly be kept separate. On the contrary, I see them as almost necessarily connected and that any attempt to pretend economics has nothing to do with moral philosophy is quixotic at best, downright harmful at worst. It is my belief that economics is a branch of applied ethics.

I will begin by observing that many of the big names in the founding pantheon of economics saw themselves as moral philosophers. Let us not forget that the sainted Adam Smith was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow from 1752 to 1764, and that before The Wealth of Nations (1776), he was already well-known as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Smith’s friend David Hume wrote extensively on moral philosophy in addition to his many well-regarded essays on political economy. In the 18th century there was indeed no clear line separating the one from the other.

Even in the 19th century, Thomas Malthus was a clergyman before he was an economist. His solution to his famed population problem was a moral one: personal sexual restraint. His rejection of birth control was based on the belief that it would undermine public morals.

John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848), which went through seven editions in his lifetime, was the standard textbook on economics in the 19th century. At the same time, Mill was an exponent of the moral philosophy of utilitarianism who wrote extensively on politics and such questions of “applied” ethics as women’s rights and slavery. Book Six of his A System of Logic (1843) was entitled “The Logic of the Moral Sciences”.

Put simply, the history of economics is littered with famous economists that were also (and even primarily) moral philosophers.

At some point late in the 19th or early in the 20th century, academic philosophy in the English-speaking world decided it would be a value-free “hard” science, akin to physics or mathematics. The fad was to reduce all philosophical problems to linguistic ones, which were in turn seen to be reducible to mathematical ones. This process made academic philosophy the irrelevancy it largely is today. The fact is, not all philosophical problems are linguistic in nature, nor is a language simply a calculus. Indeed, the most interesting things about languages are not mathematical but social.

Economics underwent a similar transformation, at least insofar as it aspired to be a value-free hard science. The problem here is twofold: First, economics necessarily deals with human beings as its subject matter, and human beings are not value-free. Second, stripped of values, it is difficult see what would be the point of economics at all other than to serve basic human curiosity — hardly the sort of endeavor that will attract much grant funding.

Fortunately for us, try as it might, economics cannot avoid being value-laden. The fundamental dependence of economics on morality was exemplified by Adam Smith early on in The Wealth of Nations when he wrote that “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog” (Bk. I, ch. 2). The notion of voluntary exchange is fundamental to economics, and neither the word “voluntary” nor the word “exchange” is value free. And once we start talking about fair voluntary exchange, we have arguably left the realm of economics proper and stumbled into the land of moral philosophy.

Aside from the concepts used in economics being value-laden, there is a deeper sense in which the discipline is a moral science. It helps to think of what economists do, and of why they do it. Yes, there is the descriptive side of it, the study and explanation of human interaction as embodied in exchange. To be able to do this well it helps to understand and be able to deploy such concepts as “value”, “institution”, “law”, “rule”, custom”, “contract”, “property” (and property “rights”), all of which are grounded in human morality. In other words, a good economist should understand that there is a moral framework that makes economic phenomena possible (it seems to me that German ordoliberalism is on the right track here). Morality is the specie that backs the economist’s paper currency.

But as importantly, there is the prescriptive side of economics, insofar as economists study with an eye to being able to make recommendations as to what will facilitate exchange, maximize production, improve well-being, etc. The bare desire to achieve any of these things presupposes, directly or indirectly, some ethical stance. Put another way,

Every economic policy prescription presupposes a moral philosophy.

By “moral philosophy” here I mean roughly a system of beliefs about what will make people happy (or good, as we’ll see). Philosophers have always asked the fundamental question, “What is the good life?” Economists ultimately ask “What is the best way to achieve the good life?” Whether they know it or not, their prescriptions presuppose an answer to the philosopher’s question.

Now, the prescriptive economist’s moral philosophy may not be a fully conscious thought in the mind of the economist who is prescribing, and whether conscious or not, it may not be all that well worked out. But trust me, it is there.

CONSEQUENTIALISM:

What is the moral philosophy of the prescriptive economist? Most commonly it is some form of maximizing consequentialism, such as utilitarianism. The consequentialist aims at maximizing the good. There is no good unless there is a person who experiences it, and the most obvious candidate for such an experienced good is pleasure. Pleasure has a necessary material basis, and the goal of prescriptive economists is to find ways to create more pleasure, mostly through expanding that material basis. However, beyond this point the details get messy.

For example, one economic prescription may be better at producing a greater amount of pleasure, while another is less good at that but better at making sure that more people get to experience the lesser amount produced. Which should be favoured, the production of greater overall pleasure, regardless of who gets to experience it? Or does distribution matter?

Then there is the sacrifice problem: if we agree that our goal is to maximize overall happiness, this may have to be done by sacrificing the happiness of particular individuals. It may seem like a good bargain from a disinterested point of view (though Nietzsche argued that there is ultimately no such thing as a disinterested point of view). But from the point of view of the person whose interest is being sacrificed, it can justifiably be asked, “Why me? Why should my happiness count for less than another person’s?”

There is also the “poetry or pushpin” problem: not all pleasures are the same. Some seem more worthwhile than others in terms of quality, even if not in terms of quantity. The sadist’s pleasure should not be privileged in the same way as other more innocent pleasures (though if the sadists can be happily paired off with the masochists…). If it’s easier to produce violent video games than sonnets, should we simply abandon sonnets as the less efficient form of pleasure production and plough all our economic efforts into improving on Grand Theft Auto and its dubious ilk? Or are there certain pleasures we should encourage and others we should discourage? If so, on what grounds? These are unavoidably questions of value. If we choose to value some pleasures over others, we must be able to justify that choice, and it seems impossible to do so without leaving the confines of pure utilitarianism.

DEONTOLOGY:
 
After consequentialism, the most common moral philosophy of the prescriptive economist seems to be some form of deontology or rights-based approach. For example, economists of a more libertarian bent will tend to see property rights as inviolable, no matter how much more pleasure the utilitarian might be able to produce through expropriation and redistribution. Often these rights are called “side constraints” in that they constrain the extent to which consequentialists can carry forward their pleasure-producing projects. There is something attractive to this approach, insofar as we feel intuitively that there should be certain things that are simply off-limits to governments, policymakers, regulators, and other assorted do-gooders. We feel that there ought to be a certain sphere in which we can make our own choices (and mistakes) without interference, even if we disagree on just what size and shape that sphere should be.

It is not just libertarian economists that have a tendency to defend their prescriptions in deontological terms. While the libertarian defends an extensive personal sphere, the socialist will emphasize the rights of others, and defend a redistributive scheme on the grounds that others are equally deserving of the fruits of production as those who currently happen to own them. If I own everything and everybody else is starving, how can I defend my holdings in a way that will carry weight with those who are starving? What about their right to eat? When redistribution is defended on the basis that those on the receiving end have a right to what they are given, it is being defended deontologically.

This brings out a central instability in just about any deontological economics. If pushed, the libertarian will often be compelled to shift from deontological to consequentialist argument to defend his rights: “I’m entitled to my entitlements because if I weren’t, production would suffer and we’d all be worse off. I’m a job creator.” This is a consequentialist argument. Deontological ethics requires far more metaphysics to defend it than an economist is typically able to offer; it’s usually easier to make a strategic retreat to consequentialism instead.

It should be noted that the consequentialist can be forced into a similar kind of strategic retreat. Finding that she too ultimately agrees that not everything can be sacrificed on the altar of pleasure production, she will usually fall back on the notion of rules, which can look very much like the deontologist’s side constraints. The difference is that the consequentialist will defend these rules on consequentialist grounds, again avoiding metaphysics. For example, having a rule allowing for inviolable property rights, a rule utilitarian will argue, leads to greater production by allowing property owners to put their property to its most productive use, etc. This rule will contribute to overall happiness in the long run and for greater numbers, even if in specific cases it works what seem like grave injustices. Of course, these claims of ultimate utility may or may not be empirically verifiable, but they allow the utilitarian to seemingly serve two incompatible imperatives — that happiness should be maximized while personal liberty remain unviolated.

PERFECTIONISM:

Aside from consequentialism and deontology, there is another moral position sometimes implicitly adopted by prescriptive economists. Though somewhat rarer, I find it very interesting when I see it, in part because it seems to go against the grain of everything we think of when we think of economics, in that it doesn’t necessarily concern itself with producing utility (nor with personal liberty). Let us call it perfectionism. There are many different kinds of perfectionism. What they tend to have in common is that, put in ethical jargon, they are non-eudaimonistic, meaning that they are not centered around the concept of happiness as such.

Utilitarianism is eudaimonistic, in that it offers views on how to increase happiness, ultimately identifying happiness with goodness. Perfectionism is the opposite of this; it uncouples happiness and goodness. The good may very well be something that has nothing to do with happiness at all. Maybe we live in a kind of broken universe, where the ethical life requires us to be unhappy, in the service of some impersonal good. It may simply be the case that ethical goodness is incompatible with being happy. Up to a point, Christianity presents us with a perfectionist morality, since it counsels us that doing our duties as God wills may require us to suffer greatly. On the other hand, Christianity degenerates into a sort of bastard utilitarianism once it starts offering future rewards and punishments in the hereafter.

Another example of a perfectionist moral theory might be certain versions of virtue ethics, which begin with an account of the virtuous moral agent, while not necessarily tying that virtue to human flourishing or happiness. It is possible to read Nietzsche this way. Malthus arguing against the use of birth control might be another instance.

What does a perfectionist economic prescription look like? Well one sees hints of it in talk of “moral hazard”. For example, some economists argue against certain schemes of public insurance because they remove the incentive to exercise caution in one’s affairs. Now this could be given a utilitarian spin: public insurance increases negligence, which increases the number of accidents, which increases overall costs, thereby decreasing overall utility and happiness. But it sometimes sounds more as if the economist is offering a virtue-ethical position: negligent citizens are less virtuous than prudent ones, so that if insurance encourages negligent behavior, it is encouraging vice. In other words, it’s not about negligence as it pertains to productivity, but negligence as it is a vicious trait of character.

A similar situation holds with regard to many of the arguments one hears against welfare or other forms of poor relief: it removes the incentive for poor people to work. This can mean that it discourages productivity (utilitarianism), or it can mean that it makes poor people lazy (virtue ethical perfectionism). Another example might be arguments offered against safe injection sites.

In practice, economists have a tendency to slide from one way of speaking to the other without thinking much about it. This interests me, because this slippage gives a window into the economist’s moral stance and value commitments at the exact moment when they think they are practicing a value-free science. The economist who speaks of the “unintended consequences” of welfare sometimes betrays an assumption that poor people are naturally vicious — or will be if given the barest opportunity.

In any case, whether consequentialist, deontological, or perfectionist, or some inconsistent mixture of these, economists are unavoidably practicing a kind of moral philosophy in doing what they do. Whether they are also practicing a moral science is less clear.