Hamilton's Choice

This is a mere jeu d’esprit to get myself back into the habit of writing.

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I was bred a scholar, and a scholar’s habits die hard. Among these is my habit of becoming interested in a subject and reading compulsively about it until I have satisfied myself that I have become a lay expert. And of course, since it is also a scholarly habit to distrust other scholars, such reading will preferably consist of primary sources.

My latest intellectual compulsion is the political history of the American Founding and early Republic. I recently finished working my way through the writings of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton, despite his many flaws of character, is one of my favourite Founding Fathers. He is also among the least well-known of the major figures. The average American probably knows that it his face which adorns the US ten dollar bill, and perhaps they might even know that he was the one killed in that duel with Aaron Burr (whoever he was). And that is probably about all they know.

This is a shame, since Hamilton has probably left a deeper stamp on the institutions of the United States than any other of the Founders. He was leader of the Federalists, one of the two parties that emerged during Washington’s presidency — the other being the Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson (no relation to the existing party of the same name). The Federalists had a strong political program, which was mostly the brainchild of Hamilton. Foremost, they believed in an energetic federal government which they hoped would in time supplant the individual state governments in the consciousness and allegiance of Americans.

Federalists advocated the creation of a national debt, which to modern ears does not sound like a particularly praiseworthy objective. However, the United States was a new country, and its credit was not established on the world stage (nor indeed with its own citizens). As with consumers, so with nations: if you want to borrow money, you’d better have a credit history. But how is such a history to be established? Hamilton, as the first Secretary of the Treasury under George Washington, proposed the assumption by the newly-formed federal government of the debts incurred by the individual state governments during and after the Revolutionary war. He also proposed a national bank. Through these two schemes it was hoped that citizens would be more closely tied to the federal government. Through the former, citizens would become the creditors of the government, and through the latter they would become its debtors. Along with a national paper currency, the national bank and debt would ensure that the federal government’s reach would extend into the homes, minds and hearts of the citizenry of the new nation. All of these initiatives were pushed through and survived despite much opposition.

Another hallmark of Federalist thought was a deep distrust of direct democracy. It is somewhat difficult now for us to imagine, but in the eighteenth century the term “democracy” was more likely to be used pejoratively. The system of checks and balances for which the US Constitution is so well-known, were largely of Federalist construction. Republicans, especially Jefferson, were viewed by them as irresponsible demagogues and supporters of mob rule who, if allowed, would bring upon the infant Republic all the evils of the French Revolution with its anarchy and Terror. Back then, if you wished to use a term to denote a political system where government derived its powers from the consent of the governed, the accepted term was “republic”, as it connoted the rule of laws and not of men. “Democracy” on the other hand tended to signify the arbitrary rule of unreflective mob passions. (This, incidentally, is the way I still prefer to use these terms, but I’m the first to admit how out of step I am with the political idols of this age.)

Federalists were also advocates of a strong federal judiciary and Supreme Court. Indeed, it was through the federal legal institutions that the Federalists maintained any influence at all in the new Republic, as by 1800 they had lost control of the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the presidency to their Republican rivals. In fact, there was only ever one Federalist president of the United States, John Adams, and he only served a single term. (Washington was not officially allied to either party, although his policies tended to favour the Federalists. His cabinet was deeply divided, his Secretary of State being Thomas Jefferson, bitter rival of his Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton.) Although they lost their brief grip on power, the US Constitution would be interpreted throughout the early formative decades by a largely Federalist Supreme Court, led by John Marshall, an Adams appointee.

Hamilton could be a brutally ruthless political tactician. To put this in context, Talleyrand considered him to be the foremost politician of the age, and Talleyrand was about as unscrupulous as they come. Hamilton twice ran backroom campaigns to undermine his own party’s putative presidential nominee, Adams. The first time, in 1796, he was unsuccessful, but he managed to engineer Adams’ defeat in 1800. He did this for the simple reason that he thought Adams — with his vanity, perceived aristocratic bias, and uncontrolled temper — unsuitable presidential material.

However, if you think about it, rather than an example of “moral flexibility”, might not Hamilton’s Machiavellian maneuverings be indicative of moral scruple? After all, he wasn’t vying for the presidency himself, and I’m not really sure he even considered Adams a rival in any sense. He did seem to dislike Adams in that way that you can dislike someone disinterestedly. At least in 1796, Adams had not really done anything to hurt Hamilton’s interests, so Hamilton’s dislike was not personal in that way. It was simply based on an objective assessment of Adams’ character.

I believe that Hamilton put a lot of stock in moral character (even though the details of his own private life were rather sordid and not a model of uprightness). I also believe it is perfectly possible that he simply didn’t want the wrong candidate, of whatever party, to do irreparable damage to the office of the presidency itself. This is an especially pertinent consideration in a nation whose institutions were quite new and relatively fragile. Both of these motivations, regard for character and concern for the integrity of office, are evident in his actions during the contested election of 1800.

Without getting into the complicated details, after successfully thwarting Adams’ re-election bid, Hamilton’s Federalists found themselves faced with a dilemma. Two Republican candidates, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, were tied in Electoral College votes. Repeated run-off balloting could not break the impasse. Of the two candidates, Burr had a reputation for self-serving ambition and was the least committed to the Republican cause, and therefore would be most susceptible to the blandishments of Federalists in return for their support. In other words, the Federalists were in the position of being possible kingmakers, and Burr was the most probable candidate with whom they could do a deal.

It was a very serious situation. The nation’s Constitution was only a dozen years old and already seemed to be fatally flawed. There was talk of military intervention to decide the issue. Civil war loomed. And, as historian Bruce Ackerman has put it, there had already been more than a whiff of the banana republic surrounding this election.

For example, earlier, when there were minor irregularities in the return from Georgia, a quick-thinking President pro tempore of the Senate — the person responsible for overseeing the counting — allowed the return. This effectively eliminated all other candidates except Jefferson and Burr. It was unfortunate that the Constitution gave the role of President Pro-Tem of the Senate to the Vice President, since the Vice President in this case was Jefferson himself.

It should be noted that there was no doubt about the way Georgia electors intended to vote. It was merely a procedural irregularity in the form and sealing of the certification. Jefferson was not necessarily stuffing the ballot box. The point is, as Ackerman correctly notes, the Constitution should never have put him in that situation in the first place. If he had disallowed the return, besides hurting his own interests, he would clearly have been ignoring the will of the Georgia electors.

In any case, given that the new nation’s institutions were so weak and in danger of failure, it was understandable that Hamilton would worry about the moral qualities of whoever assumed the presidency, since this could decide whether the institution would have a future. A man unworthy of the office could ensure that he presided over the dissolution of the Republic.

There is no doubt that Hamilton considered Burr unworthy. For one thing, he had the reputation of being a panderer to the mob. As Hamilton put it in a letter of January 16, 1801 to James Bayard, a Federalist Representative from Delaware, “No man has trafficked more than he in the floating passions of the multitude.” Remember that the Federalists were not keen on democracy, and there seemed to be a touch of the demagogue about Burr.

There was also the fact that Burr seemed to have no fixed principles. It was the very fact that he was a man that the Federalists could do a deal with that made him unsuitable to do a deal with. As Hamilton put it,

The truth is that Burr is a man of a very subtile imagination, and a mind of this make is rarely free from ingenious whimsies. Yet I admit that he has no fixed theory & that his peculiar notions will easily give way to his interest. But is it a recommendation to have no theory? Can that man be a systematic or able statesman who has none? I believe not. No general principles will hardly work much better than erroneous ones.

Although Jefferson was Hamilton’s great party rival and ideological nemesis, there were reasons for preferring him over Burr. As he told Bayard, Jefferson was not “zealous enough to do anything in pursuance of his principles which will contravene his popularity, or his interest.” He might be too democratical for Federalist tastes, but at least he was not impulsive, and his interest in his own political reputation would keep him in line. In addition to this, “there is no fair reason to suppose him capable of being corrupted, which is a security that he will not go beyond certain limits.” The same could not be said about Burr.

Besides questions of character and the desire to leave the fragile Republic in capable hands, there were also more political, less high-minded, considerations in favour of supporting Jefferson. If he got the job and made a cock-up of it, no blame for the mess could be placed on the Federalists themselves. With a little patience, they could be positioned to resist bad policies and perhaps win the office next time around, with a proper candidate of their own choosing rather than with a cheap compromise one like Burr. The survival of the Republic might very well depend on a credible and effective opposition, and the Federalists would be less able to assume this role of they were seen to be implicated in the election of the government to which they were opposed:

If the Antifœderalists who prevailed in the election are left to take their own man [i.e. Jefferson], they remain responsible, and the Fœderalists remain free united and without stain, in a situation to resist with effect pernicious measures. If the Fœderalists substitute Burr, they adopt him and become answerable for him…. And if he acts ill, we must share in the blame and disgrace.

It seems that Hamilton’s argument had a persuasive effect on Bayard, because on February 17, 1801, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Bayard switched his vote from Burr to blank, thereby allowing Jefferson to win.

Burr did not take kindly to Hamilton’s meddling, nor to the imputation of lack of moral character. Three years later, in Weehawken, New Jersey, he killed Hamilton in that famous duel. That event, and the appearance of Hamilton’s face on the ten dollar bill, gave rise to that clever Saturday Night Live hip hop send-up: “You can call us Aaron Burr from the way we’re dropping Hamiltons.”

The Incredible Shrinking Self

I proposed in the post before last to discuss my objections to the “multiple selves” approach to human agency. To refresh your memory, this is roughly the idea that instead of viewing the human agent as a single overarching self that makes choices from some set of feasible options and that retains its identity through time, the agent should rather be seen as an indefinite number of separate selves existing at different times. Some of these selves may have preferences and projects which happen to overlap, but insofar as they do not, this is to be explained by the fact that they are different persons in some relevant sense.

The idea that each of us is but a series of temporally separate selves is supposedly congruent with phenomena like time inconsistency: we tend to rate a good as better the nearer it is to us in time, while rating a prospective bad as less bad the further off in the future it is. An example of time inconsistency would be a case where I wish at time 1 to quit smoking, but at time 2 I wish for nothing more than a cigarette. Thus, my self at time 2 may end up doing something (having a cigarette) that is directly against the interests of my self at time 1. A well-known example of a certain kind of time inconsistency is what is called hyperbolic discounting (the phenomenon is called “hyperbolic” discounting because, when plotted on a graph, the shape of the discount function is a hyperbola).

Put simply, hyperbolic discounting occurs when two goods of equal utility are not valued equally when they offer themselves at different times. For example, it is often the case that an agent would prefer to have $10 now, rather than $30 a year from now. This represents a huge discounting rate: here money loses 200 percent of its value in the space of a year. In reality, the discount rate in this example is quite moderate. George Ainslie notes that “both normal and impulsive human subjects, reporting how long they would wait to get double a hypothetical prize, usually generate answers reflecting annual discount rates in the billions, trillions, or quadrillions of per cent; and a large proportion of adult human subjects who could wait 3 days to receive 25 per cent higher subject pay chose not to do so, a choice which represents a rejection of an annual 5 billion per cent interest rate” (Ainslie 138-139).

With such steep discounting, it is a wonder that we ever manage to delay immediate gratification. As Ainslie sardonically asks, “How may we reconcile this finding with the widespread savings ethic? What would even give primitive farmers a sufficient savings tendency to get through the winter?”

Parfit’s Present Aim Theory.

In the course of presenting the “multiple selves” theory, I had dropped the name of the philosopher Derek Parfit, and I’d like to use his approach to the subject as a starting point for my critique.

Parfit uses the phenomenon of time inconsistency and hyperbolic discounting to argue for his Present Aim Theory of rationality, which says roughly the following: Hyperbolic discounting shows that there is a sense in which I am not necessarily one self, but many sequential selves. The idea that I am one unified self stretching across time is more fiction than reality. Thus, where I find my later self having different interests and evaluations from my earlier self, it is not necessarily the earlier self whose interests must take priority. If indeed we take seriously such a metaphysic of many successive selves, then we must seemingly treat each such self with the same respect as we would any other moral agent. Therefore, if, for instance, at time 1 I want (all things considered) to quit smoking, but at time 2 I want (all things considered) a cigarette, then at time 2 my desire to smoke must be given just as much weight — more weight in fact — than my previous desire to quit. My earlier self’s desire for a smoke-free life was a different person’s desire from my later self’s desire to smoke.

There is both a metaphysical and an ethical aspect to Parfit’s Present Aim Theory. There is the “successive selves” metaphysic, and following from that is Parfit’s utilitarian ethic, which says that since each successive self is a separate person, its preferences are worthy of moral consideration just as any person’s preferences are. We do the most overall good, from a utilitarian perspective, by satisfying as many desires as we can at any given time. We should not make temporal (or other) distinctions. This is, according to him, the best way of aggregating preferences. To use the terminology of my discussion of Elster’s Ulysses and the Sirens, the Present Aim Theory is locally-maximizing rather than globally-maximizing.

Parfit’s approach is to accept time inconsistency as natural and not necessarily pathological, and to take it to its logical conclusion. That conclusion is counterintuitive, and Parfit admits as much, but he’d say that given time and education we can overcome the prejudice that would have us believe that there is a single self, or that some selves’ desires are normatively prior to other selves’ desires. Luckily, there is more than one reason for us not to accept either a successive selves metaphysic or a Present Aim Theory.

“Thin” versus “Thick” Selves.

First, we can question the implicit claim that one or two differing desires at different times are enough to make for different selves. Without delving too much into the problem of personal identity, we can say that though at one time I want to quit smoking and at another I want to smoke, both “selves” still share too much in terms of memories, interests, and desires for us to really consider them distinct selves. If all that changes in me is a desire to smoke, is that enough to form the basis of a new person? Or is what we mean by a “self” or “person” much thicker than this? To accept the successive selves metaphysic is to accept the possibility that a person can be identified with a single desire, such as a desire for a cigarette.

Is it really the case that by according rights and respect to an agent we intend to accord them to something so thin, so minimal? If so, we would have to accord such rights and respect to dogs and cats, and not only such, but also to temporally successive dogs and cats. Anything, in fact, capable of desire, and capable of changes in desire, would be due such moral consideration. Of course, Parfit might be willing to “bite the bullet” and accept such consequences. However, I believe that most of us have something thicker, more substantive in mind when we think of a “person” and a “self”.

(Incidentally, much the same argument as mine has been deployed to deny full personhood to the separate identities in many cases of multiple personality disorder. The separate “identities” are usually too thin to constitute individual persons. Instead they should be viewed as instances of personality fragmentation. They are parts of a self, rather than full and autonomous selves. As such, their psychotherapeutic “exorcism” is not morally equivalent to homicide. Indeed, the therapist doesn’t see herself as getting rid of these separate identities so much as putting them back together into a single whole. Like Humpty Dumpty. See Radden 37ff.)

Interself Epistemology.

Second, there is a notable difference between separate agents on the one hand, and the separate “selves” of Parfit’s scheme on the other. Agents’ access to other agents’ minds is highly restricted, whereas a later self would seem to have privileged access to an earlier self’s mind. This is an expression of what Jennifer Radden has, in another context, referred to as an “interself epistemology” (Radden 47).

The relation seems to be asymmetric: a later self has access to an earlier self’s mind, but the reverse is not the case. However, this may be somewhat overstating the point: although later Jack has privileged knowledge of earlier Jack’s mind in a way that Jill does not, barring self-deception or willful ignorance, it does not take much imagination to see that earlier Jack likely has more insight into what may be going on in a potential later Jack’s head than he has into what goes on in Jill’s.

Causal Proximity of Selves.

Third, it should be evident that a later self is causally related to an earlier self, in a stronger sense than can be the case with separate agents proper. One agent can causally influence another, just not as thoroughly as she can causally influence her later self. I can make or persuade someone to do what I want them to do on occasion, but it is less simple to make them be someone I want them to be. Even parents can hope for only limited success in causally influencing their children’s identities.

We can go further. Assuming my earlier self is to be considered an autonomous agent, the later self is not just causally related to the earlier one, but he is in a sense a creation of him. Thanks to path-dependency, later Jack has been formed by the previous choices of earlier Jack. By contrast, we cannot say that Jack is formed by the previous choices of Jill, or at least not to nearly the same degree.

The scheme of Parfitian successive selves seems to rely upon a mistaken “snapshot” view of the self, where one takes a temporal slice or snapshot of the agent and accords it full personological or moral standing, while losing sight of the fact that the snapshot is embedded in the larger panorama that is the life course of the agent. Such a snapshot is necessarily a distorted one, lacking all connection to the other slices of agency. It ignores the continuity and basic integrity of character, finding instead mere fragments.

Pride, Shame, and Guilt.

Fourth, successive “selves” usually have an emotional investment in each other that is of a different nature from the emotional investment — if any — between different persons. I do not, under normal circumstances, feel shame or guilt at the actions of others the way I might feel them towards the actions of other selves. Instead, it is more proper to say that I can feel embarrassment or anger at the actions of others. Shame and guilt, on the other hand, are self-directed. Such self-directed emotions can be called emotions of self-assessment.

(Pride too is an emotion of self-assessment. This may seem strange at first glance, given that I may, for example, feel proud of the actions of other persons. But as Hume pointed out, such pride has, at bottom, some reference to myself. Thus, I am proud of my daughter’s stellar report card because her achievement at school is perceived as somehow reflecting on my own self-worth. This is not to say that I do not at the same time feel simple joy at her success, irrespective of its effect on myself; but pride and joy are not the same emotions. Pride is self-directed while joy may be other-directed.)

All of these observations serve as refutation of a Parfitian metaphysic of successive selves. The relation between my temporal selves is not relevantly similar to the relation between different persons proper. Thus, we can safely reject the Present Aim Theory of morals that Parfit claims follows from such a metaphysic. Rejection of the Present Aim Theory is not the only normative consequence attending this asymmetry. The existence of emotions of self-assessment and the interest an agent takes in her other temporal selves generate duties of a quite different nature from whatever duties follow from agents’ status as different persons from oneself. The nature of moral praise and blame is different in the two cases: I can direct approval, anger, disappointment, and so on, at myself and others; but pride, shame, and guilt can only really be directed towards myself.

Besides helping to refute the metaphysics of successive selves and any Present Aim Theory following from it, emotions of self-assessment constitute a form of endogenous self-binding that can help an agent overcome phenomena like hyperbolic discounting that may work against an agent’s longer-term interests. (By way of reiteration, in the Parfitian scheme, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as an agent’s “longer-term interest”. There are only fleeting present interests of multiple agents who happen to have a time-share arrangement over a body.)

For example, the tendency to feel ashamed of precipitant discounting behaviour may contribute as a corrective to such behaviour. And pride felt in the achievement of continence may serve as a reinforcement of such continent behaviour. At the very least, foreseeing that a course of action is likely to result in avoidable and unpleasant feelings of shame can be a consideration affecting my evaluation of a present good vis-à-vis a future one, making the discount curve that much less steep.

Aims Outrun Agency.

Some of what is contained in the above refutation of Parfit was already developed by Christine Korsgaard in her 1989 paper “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency”. Korsgaard rightly notes that as agents, many if not most of the projects we choose and pursue take time to achieve: “Some of the things we do are intelligible only in the context of projects that extend over long periods. This is especially true of the pursuit of our ultimate ends. In choosing our careers, and pursuing our friendships and family lives, we both presuppose and construct a continuity of identity and agency” (Korsgaard 113). A Parfitian present self’s aims often extend beyond the “life” of the present self whose aims they are. Thus, the “present aims” in the Present Aim Theory are more fiction than reality. Aims outrun agency.

It is simply not intelligible, or at the very least foolishly optimistic, for a self whose “shelf life” does not extend beyond perhaps the next minute or so, to set itself ends achievable only weeks, months, or years into the future. It would be as if I were to make plans on the expectation that I would live to be a thousand years old. On the most optimistic forecast I could live to perhaps the age of 120 years. Therefore, my ends should be tailored to the time allotted. As a matter of fact, the expectable human lifespan is enough time to achieve most of the ends we choose to pursue, fate and circumstances willing. But a Parfitian self may not be allotted enough time to expect any end to be fulfilled; at the very next moment it is at least conceivable that a future self will throw out an end in the pursuit of a different end. A life cannot be constructed from such disposable material. And the problem is not the change of mind per se, but the fact that because the new mind belongs to what is morally equivalent to a different person, the new mind must have its way, even at the expense of interests of selves who no longer exist (or who do not yet exist). We’re not just talking about a change of mind; we’re talking about a change of minds.

According to Korsgaard, the unity of the self is not so much metaphysical as practical. Such unity derives in part from the brute practical need to eliminate conflicts in motivation, in order to serve ends that extend beyond the current moment (p. 110). The Parfitian view identifies the agent with his occurrent set of desires at a given time. Korsgaard on the other hand locates agency in the choosing from among such a conflicting set of desires according to one’s reasons for choosing:

“When you deliberate, it is as if there were something over and above all your desires, something that is you, and that chooses which one to act on. The idea that you choose among your conflicting desires, rather than just waiting to see which one wins, suggests that you have reasons for or against acting on them. And it is these reasons, rather than the desires themselves, which are expressive of your will. The strength of a desire may be counted by you as a reason for acting on it; but this is different from its simply winning.” (p. 111)

This is not to say that it is never the case that a desire simply wins out. We are not always as reflective as Korsgaard’s account would have us believe. However, note that even when this is the case, we may still find ourselves subject to those emotions of self-assessment discussed above. I may regret that a desire has won out and feel guilty for pursuing it. But such guilt would be unintelligible if different desires were “on all fours” with each other, where the desire that wins just wins, end of story. There is no room here for the intelligibility of guilt or shame. After all, what should I care if a previous self (who is not me) chose to pursue a desire that my present self no longer shared? It would be as if I were to feel guilty for someone else who lights up a cigarette, just because I am trying to quit.

Korsgaard’s account is perhaps too rationalistic, concentrating on the practical reasoning aspect of moral agency. I prefer an account of agency that considers the role of the moral sentiments as well. And, as we have seen, the emotions, though integral to moral agency, are such by virtue of their autonomic nature; they lie largely outside the sphere of practical reasoning as such.

Identity is Forward-Looking.

It should be noted that at the core of Korsgaard’s critique of Parfit is a feature of identity and agency that tends to get overlooked. Traditionally, when philosophers have discussed the hoary old problem of personal identity, they have tended to focus on the criterion of memory, which is essentially backward-looking. Parfit may be included in this characterization. He is the acknowledged master of the potted philosophical thought-experiment, and almost all of his thought-experiments stress discontinuities of memory and experience. However, as Richard Sorabji has pointed out (and as Korsgaard’s critique implies), future plans, or forward-looking criteria, may be even more important in the constitution of identity than backward-looking criteria. Sorabji illustrates this with the example of one of the patients of the famous neurologist, A. R. Luria. This patient was shot in the head during the Second World War and as a result had lost all memory of who he was. He made it his personal project to regain his identity. He kept a diary, writing at the painstaking pace of a word or so a day, documenting his struggle to regain himself. As it turns out, this exercise was itself instrumental in giving this man an identity: “Luria comments that those of his patients who lost the ability to plan future projects disintegrated far more than those who had lost their memories. For tranquility, no doubt, this man would have had to succeed in remembering his past. But to have a firm identity, the continuing project was enough” (Sorabji 176). Korsgaard’s account has the advantage of stressing this forward-looking aspect of identity and agency.

Bibliography

AINSLIE, George. “Beyond Microeconomics: Conflict among Interests in a Multiple Self as a Determinant of Value,” in Jon Elster (ed.), The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

KORSGAARD, Christine M. “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18 (1989), 101-132.

PARFIT, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

RADDEN, Jennifer. Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

SORABJI, Richard. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

TAYLOR, Gabrielle. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

Jon Elster, "Sour Grapes"

I now move on to the second of Jon Elster’s books that I proposed to discuss in the previous post. Please note that, since I’ve dropped several names there — and since I’ll likely be dropping some more here — at the end of this post you’ll find a list of readings referred to in both.
 

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

I claimed earlier that Elster’s work has some possibly very damaging implications for economics as a rational science, particularly economics done in the rational choice tradition.

By “rational choice”, I refer to an approach to economic analysis that takes as its methodological starting point the idea that the preferences of agents are to be viewed as rational, even if they seem prima facie irrational to the third party observer. An example might be the approach of Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker to a phenomenon like addiction: it may seem as if the choices of smokers are irrational, but they begin to make more sense if we view them as rational from the point of view of maximizing one’s present preferences. After all, if the choice of smokers to smoke were completely irrational, then why is it that when the price of cigarettes goes up, their consumption goes down? Economically, there is much about the behaviour of addicts that displays characteristics of rational economic choice.

(I would counter that this is correct to a certain extent, but that addictive products display a notable lack of demand elasticity — although demand falls when prices rise, the reaction of demand to price is much less sensitive than it is with, say, pickles or ice cream. If the price of heroin goes up, although a few addicts may kick, many will simply steal more purses to keep up with the rise in price. Few turn to crime to support their taste for expensive ice cream. There are many good reasons not to accept a rational choice theory of addiction. For an excellent critique, see Rogeberg 2004.)

Satisfying Preferences: Whose? Which?

Ulysses and the Sirens very much concerns the difficulty of whose preferences are to be satisfied. We might say that, in utilitarian or rational choice fashion, the preferences of all agents are to be given equal consideration. But Elster complicates this by showing us that each of those agents is composed of an indefinite number of intertemporal agents with possibly conflicting preferences, and with no clear cut indication of which of these selves is to have normative priority.

Sour Grapes takes things to a deeper level. Whereas economics pretends to be a descriptive rather than a prescriptive or normative science, Elster examines the nature of desires to demonstrate that it might not be so easy for economics to avoid normative prescriptions. To be more clear: whereas economics claims to be concerned with finding the best way of satisfying the preferences of the greatest number of people regardless of what those preferences are, Elster shows that economics cannot avoid making evaluative judgments about people’s preferences.

Economists are too apt to take people’s wants (or the ordering of these wants, in the form of preferences) as brute facts, as given. Their task then becomes the technocratically straightforward one of figuring out how best to satisfy the greatest number of them.

By contrast, Elster shows that not all desires are worthy of being satisfied. Now, on the face of it this is nothing new; moral philosophers have been saying as much since the time of Socrates. But Elster is not just concerned with the immoral nature of some desires. No economist in his right mind denies that satisfying the desires of sadists is on all fours with satisfying the desires of people with less perverted tastes. But the economist will try to parse this in terms of utility: they will say that as a matter of (contingent) fact, one satisfied sadist must mean one or more normal people must be made very dissatisfied victims of the sadists, the predictable result of which would be net disutility. That, they’d say, is why the preferences of sadists should not be satisfied. But notice that they are still taken into account.

This explanatory scheme might give economists some rationale for discriminating against the wants of sadists, although not on the grounds that the desires of sadists were wrong or immoral. After all, if it so happened that sadists and masochists were evenly distributed in the population and could somehow be paired up, the economists might have to revise their judgment, and take the preferences of sadists (and masochists) seriously.

Elster’s critique of preference-satisfaction has less to with variations in the moral worthiness of desires, and more to do with the fact that some desires are to be preferred to others in terms of their rationality. Indeed, his analysis implies that rationality is so easily subverted, that we ought not to put too much stock in the satisfaction of preferences at all, at least not unless we are willing to roll up our sleeves and examine the nature of the preferences we propose to satisfy.

We tend to think that preferences have at least some minimal rational ordering. For example, it is comforting to believe that our preferences obey the law of transitivity: If I prefer A to B, and I prefer B to C, then all things considered I must prefer A to C. Elster presents a variety of situations in which people’s preferences are not transitive in this way.

Path-Dependency and Context Dependency.

Often our preferences are path-dependent in that they are dependent on my previous history of choices and desires. In other words, they depend heavily on the temporal order in which choices are presented. Preferences are also context-dependent in that they are responsive to changes in the situational variables in the choice-context. Path-dependency is evident, for example, in what psychologists call “availability bias”, the observed tendency of people to prefer that which is most recently presented to them over that which was presented to them earlier. I may prefer A to B and B to C, but where C is presented to me after A, I might prefer C. So what is my real preference, the one that economists should be trying to figure out how to satisfy?

Here’s a rather cute example illustrating both path-dependency and context-dependency. Let x = a Vermeer painting, y = a Renoir painting, and z = a Monet painting. One each of x, y and z is up for auction. Let’s assume I have a lot of money, I’m not a huge fan of Impressionism, and that I don’t currently own a painting by any of these artists. Because I am rich and the paintings are for sale, the feasible set is {x,y,z}. In this situation, I have the following preference ordering: x > y > z. But, if the context is one in which a week earlier I inherited my uncle’s Monet painting, then it becomes conceivable that my preference ordering could be z > x > y (because I already have the beginnings of a Monet collection), or possibly z > y > x (because in addition to the beginnings of a Monet collection, I also already have the beginnings of an Impressionist collection).

The point is that our desires and preferences are closely tied to our previous experience and life history. For example, it is highly unlikely that I will have a preference for fine wines if no wine at all has ever passed my lips.

If Ulysses and the Sirens demonstrated the importance of the time dimension in human preference, Sour Grapes demonstrates the importance of how preferences are formed. Hence the title of the book, referring to Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes, in which the fox pretends not to care for the grapes that he cannot have, by telling himself that the grapes are in any case sour.

Adaptive Preferences.

Elster brings our attention to a phenomenon similar to sour grapes, which he calls adaptive preferences. The latter differs from the former in the fact that where the fox pretends not to like the grapes he cannot have, a person with an adaptive preference actually prefers precisely that which he can have over that which he cannot. His preferences are formed out of his feasible set of choices.

This is not just a phenomenon of settling for second-best, because it’s not something that is necessarily conscious. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing, for in countless cases it is a healthy response. After all, imagine how unbearable life would be if we continually felt discomfort at not having the things we want, given that we simply cannot have most of the things we want. Our minds tend naturally to tailor our desires to our possibilities and that’s probably a good thing. It seems only reasonable that our preferences be limited to some feasible set of options.

But adaptive preferences can also have a more sinister aspect. A slave for example might come to “prefer” the life of a slave and to “love” his master, because in the absence of other options, he settles for what he has. Does this mean that the “preferences” of slaves ought to be respected? Can such preferences serve as a justification of the institution of slavery? Economists have few resources to answer these questions because they are normative/evaluative.

It is part of the economist’s training not to care about the ethical nature of slavery, but only whether as an institution it is efficient. In assessing this efficiency they will presumably do a calculation of how well it satisfies the aggregate preferences of society, and within this aggregate, for the purposes of calculation, the desires of slaves are on all fours with – count for no more or less than – the preferences of masters. Therefore, if the masters are happy, and the slaves are “happy” (in the adaptive preferences sense of the term), then, other things being equal, there is nothing (economically) wrong with slavery. Luckily for society, most economists have historically found slavery to be an inefficient institution.

I should like to presume, dear reader, that your intuitions accord with mine in finding that the economist misses the main point. The preferences of the slaves, being adaptive in the worst way, have been perverted. Slaves tailor their desires to their feasible set, but that feasible set has been artificially and immorally limited by the masters. The adaptive preferences of slaves should not count in the way that normal preferences count (I am intentionally using evaluative terminology like “worst”, “perverted” and “normal” here, because they don’t scare me in the way they seem to scare economists and other social scientists). As Elster puts it, “my suggestion is that we should evaluate the broad rationality of beliefs and desires by looking at the way in which they are shaped” (p. 15). Much later on in the book, he elaborates this point:

“[W]e should not take wants as given, but inquire into their rationality or autonomy. These, in the general case, are properties that cannot be immediately read off the wants themselves…. Rationality in the broad sense depends on the way in which the states are actually formed. Two individuals may be exactly alike in their beliefs and wants, and yet we might assess them differently from the point of view of rationality, judgment and autonomy.” (p. 140)

I fear I have not managed to do full justice to the genius of Elster’s book. Sour Grapes is really a virtuoso performance, so far-reaching are the topics with which it deals with and the sources upon which it draws. I mentioned in the previous post that Elster is an analytical Marxist. But even a Marxist is capable of speaking good sense from time to time. By way of an ending to this post, here are some other propositions Elster defends in Sour Grapes, propositions that Marxists (and indeed all social scientists) must grapple with:

1. There is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped by a social position tend to serve the interests of the persons in that position (p. 143).

2. There is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped by a social position tend to serve the interests of the ruling or dominant group (p. 147).

3. There is no reason to suppose that beliefs shaped by interests tend to serve these interests (p. 156).

4. There is no reason to suppose that beliefs which serve certain interests are also to be explained by those interests (p. 163).

Further Reading

AINSLIE, George. Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. [Picoeconomics as a field of study can be thought of as micro-micro-economics. It concerns itself with such phenomena as time-preference, time-inconsistency, and hyperbolic discounting.]

BECKER, Gary and Kevin MURPHY. “A Theory of Rational Addiction,” Journal of Political Economy 96 (1988), 675-700. [Locus classicus for the rational choice approach to addiction.]

BRENNAN, Geoffrey and James M. BUCHANAN. The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (Reprint, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000.) [Deals with the political and constitutional dimensions of a “multiple selves” theory.]

ELSTER, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. [More recent book carrying forward his work in Sour Grapes and Ulysses and the Sirens. He even applies his ideas to film and jazz music.]

ELSTER, Jon (ed.). The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. [A collection of essays by various authors, including Schelling and Ainslie.]

FRANFURT, Harry. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. [On the difference between first- and second-order desires, or roughly, between desires and values.]

KAVKA, Gregory. Moral Paradoxes of Nuclear Deterrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

PARFIT, Derek. Reasons and Persons Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. [Presents a utilitarian ethical theory based on a “multiple selves” conception of agency. The gist of Parfit’s position is that utilitarianism should only concern itself with satisfying the desires of present selves. I strongly disagree.]

ROGEBERG, Ole. “Taking Absurd Theories Seriously: Economics and the Case of Rational Addiction Theories,” Philosophy of Science 71 (2004), 263-285.

SCHELLING, Thomas. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. [Book in which Schelling explored the notion of rationally motivated irrationality, especially in the context of relations between nuclear-armed nations. A Cold War classic.]

SCHELLING, Thomas. Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. [Title essay concerns precommitment.]

THALER, Richard H. and Cass R. SUNSTEIN. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. [Applies some grossly oversimplified findings in social and cognitive psychology to problems of rational decision-making. They advocate a position they call "libertarian paternalism", in which the powers that be should design better institutions and choice-situations so that people can make better decisions. After reading it, I was left wondering why they bothered using the descriptor "libertarian".]

Jon Elster, "Ulysses and the Sirens"

Methinks this blog has become a little too obsessed with economics. It was certainly never the intention of The Spectacled Avenger to run an economics blog, but unfortunately that is the channel in which his slender genius hath run of late.

I have decided it’s time to switch gears a bit, but like any habit, breaking this one can be accomplished only gradually. As a first step, I propose to discuss the work of a man who is possibly the living thinker with the greatest influence on my thought. He is the Norwegian philosopher, economist, political theorist, social scientists, and all-around polymath Jon Elster. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any length of time should be surprised that I’m such a fan of Elster’s. He is, after all, an analytical Marxist. On the other hand, he’s my favourite kind of thinker: the adventurous type, not afraid of Big Ideas, and also not afraid to use the insights of authors like Montaigne and Stendhal in the service of economics and social science. He has written on such diverse topics as addiction, the emotions, Alexis de Tocqueville, constitutional design in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, economics, jazz, film, and the conceptual foundations of the social sciences.

So smitten am I with Elster’s work, that I could not limit myself to discussing just one of his books, so I’m discussing what I consider to be his two best, Ulysses and the Sirens and Sour Grapes. As this will be done in two posts, I’ll begin with the former title first.

I consider discussing Elster as a natural step in the process of weaning myself from my late obsession with economics because his work has implications that sap the very foundations of economics as a rational science. It also represents the vanguard of many more recent – and in my opinion less insightful – books in the burgeoning field of what has come to be called “behavioural economics”, possibly the most sensational (and unsatisfying) of which is Richard Thaler’s and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge (Yale University Press, 2008).

Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

In Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, which is perhaps his most-cited book, Elster critiques the notion of rationality in the economist’s sense, as a faculty that is concerned with maximizing the satisfaction of agents’ present preferences. He contrasts this notion of locally maximizing rationality with what can be called globally maximizing rationality. This latter concept is perhaps best illustrated by those interesting situations where the best “strategy” is irrationality.

An example of this is the sort of Cold War nuclear strategy that Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling famously explored: as a nation you make a nuclear threat, but the threat cannot be made credible because your opponent knows that you would be irrational (in the locally maximizing sense) to carry through on the threat. So you put in place mechanisms that effectively take the decision to launch out of your hands, mechanisms that will automatically trigger a launch after a certain point has been reached, and which cannot be overridden. This is the idea behind the “fail-safe” deterrent. The deterrent is globally maximizing (or so it is postulated). There is a gain from the deterrent that can only be achieved by seemingly non-rational means. In sum, if you want people to leave you alone, act crazy. And the best way of getting people to believe that you’re crazy is by actually being crazy. The paradox, of course, is that it is no mean feat to go mad on purpose.

On a more mundane level, "rational irrationality" occurs when you make any kind of inter-temporal threat or promise in which carrying out the threat or promise involves some cost to yourself. Let’s imagine that Alice threatens Bob at time 1 with X at time 3, if Bob doesn’t do Y at time 2. Let’s further assume that there is some cost attached to Alice if she carries out X. If Alice is perfectly rational (in the maximizing sense), and if Bob knows this, then if Bob is also rational he won’t do Y – in other words, Alice’s threat will have no effect. This is because at time 3 Alice will no longer have an incentive to carry out her threat. After all, doing so would now represent a net cost to her. The damage has been done; there’s no point in adding to it by incurring a cost that no longer serves a purpose.

Notice that the same incentive structure applies to promises: Alice promises at time 1 to do X for Bob at time 3 if Bob does Y for her at time 2. Assuming both are rational and that X has some cost to Alice attached, Bob will not rely on Alice’s promise because he knows that at time 3 she’ll have no incentive to hold up her end of the bargain. Once Alice has got what she wants, why would she bother to incur the cost of giving Bob what she promised to give him?

(Of course, we should note that this whole dynamic changes where there is the prospect of repeated interactions between Alice and Bob. We're only contemplating one-off interactions here.)

What kind of a society could we expect if it were impossible to make credible threats and promises? Most market exchanges in the form of contracts with intertemporal performance (which is most if not all contracts) in a large and impersonal society like ours would be impossible. In short, if economic coordination and market exchange are dependent on the making of credible promissory contracts, and on making credible threats for breaches of those contracts, then such economic coordination and market exchange would be impossible if human nature were modeled after the economist’s homo economicus, the rational maximizer. Luckily we’re not perfectly rational. We have the ability to bind ourselves to actions that are not strictly rational from the narrow locally maximizing point of view. By “bind ourselves” I mean to bind our selves. In the example given above, it would be helpful if Alice could somehow bind her later self to carry out the intentions of her earlier self. Such self-binding can be done, broadly speaking, in two ways.

Endogenous self-binding. This relies heavily on the inculcation of moral norms, and on emotional responses to those norms. This can come through upbringing or through the kind of character formation recommended in Stoic philosophy. Either way, it is dependent on appropriate emotional response. (Contrary to popular misconception, the Stoics did not advocate the extirpation of the emotions, but rather their harmonization.) In the example of Alice and Bob, Alice might be motivated to carry through on her promise by wishing to avoid the emotional cost of the guilt or shame she would incur for breaking it.

There is a good reason why emotions play this crucial role. Emotions are largely autonomic, meaning they happen whether or not we think it’s in our interests to have them. In our rationalistic culture we tend to view this as a bad thing, as a weakness in which passion overcomes our better judgment. But in the kinds of cases I’ve been describing, our “better judgment” is not better at all, at least not in the overall global sense. If Alice were red-faced with anger, Bob would have a signal that she is capable of carrying out her threat despite her better judgment. The signal gains its efficacy by virtue of the fact that it can’t easily be faked. There are good functional reasons why such mechanisms have been evolutionarily selected. You see, within a framework of strategic interaction, evolution selects for global maximization. And although some responses can be faked some of the time, evolution has also selected for human beings with an ability to sniff out the fakes.

Exogenous self-binding. This is best illustrated by the example of Elster’s chosen title. In order to be able to hear the song of the Sirens, a sound which drove men mad and made them steer into the rocks, Ulysses had his crewmen put wax in their ears and bind him to the mast of his ship. The crewmen were to have their swords drawn and were to ignore any appeals Ulysses might make to be untied. Rather than draw on internal resources for resisting the call of the Sirens, and assuming that he would be weak under its influence, Ulysses relied on externally imposed constraints.

In the example of Alice and Bob, Alice might be motivated to keep her promise because of the existence of an institution like contract law that attaches heavy penalties to such breaches of trust. Similarly, if I want to quit drinking, it might help if I give the keys to my liquor cabinet to a friend. If I want to quit smoking, I might place a hefty side bet with friends so that I’ll incur a financial penalty if my later self gives in to temptation. Thus, my later self will have an incentive to stay quit. If I need to save money for Christmas presents, I might open a savings account that does not allow me to make withdrawals before December, in the knowledge that I am likely to be tempted to spend the money before then. If I am a nuclear-armed nation, I may have a computer system rigged up to launch missiles upon detection of a credible and impending threat, in the knowledge that my later self might have doubts or lack the guts to press the launch button. The difference between endogenous and exogenous self-binding is that while the former depends on internal resources for binding, the latter depends on what could broadly be called "external technologies", whether in the form of artificial incentives or determinative mechanisms. Another term for such technologies of exogenous self-binding is “precommitment”. They constitute pre-commitment because they effectively determine me on a course of action before the occasion for choice even arises.

One can overemphasize the distinction between endogenous and exogenous self-binding. I may refrain from doing something I am tempted to do because of moral principles that have been internalized (i.e. made endogenous) through some process of exogenous moral training (e.g. reward and punishment structures inculcated from parents).

Elster’s work in this area dovetails with work by others, notably psychologist George Ainslie and philosopher Derek Parfit, on the notion of “multiple selves”. Put (over)simply, the idea here is that the human agent is best conceptualized not as one overarching self who has an ordering of preferences and who chooses between them, but rather as an indefinite number of intertemporal selves. In many of the examples we have been considering, the preferences of earlier selves may be thwarted by later selves that give in to temptation.

In situations like addiction, it is taken for granted that the earlier “pre-craving” self knows what is best for the later “tempted” self and so is in a position to constrain the latter through precommitment devices. But one can also conceive of cases where the later self is in danger from the irrational choices of the earlier selves. Indeed, even with addiction, we can take a broader view in which the earlier rational self binds the later irrational self in the interest of some still-later self.

I must admit my own reservations here about the “multiple selves” view of agency. It seems to me that it is difficult to make sense of these various selves wishing to manipulate each other unless we preserve some notion of unified agency, where these various intertemporal selves somehow retain identification with each other. Why would I now wish to go to such great lengths to “legislate” for my later selves, unless I identify them as me? After all, by the time the occasion comes for a later self to act, the earlier self will no longer exist. There seems to be an incoherence lurking here. Still, the “multiple selves” notion is provocative, with far-reaching implications.

Some of these implications are ethical, rather than merely metaphysical: if I am not me, but am rather a series of intertemporal selves, then it would seem that the relation between successive selves is no different than the relation between simultaneous agents, i.e. between different agents at a given time. If that is the case, what right does my earlier self have to limit the choices of my later selves? It is no different than my claiming the right to limit your choices? This is paternalism at best, tyranny at worst.

(On the other hand, we might view a person in the throes of addiction as exercising precisely such a self-tyranny: sacrificing the interests of later selves to the arbitrary desires of the present self. An analogous kind of tyranny occurs at the aggregate level, when a society sacrifices the interests of future generations through deep or prolonged deficit financing for current consumption.)

I could go on exploring the ethical and metaphysical difficulties of the “multiple selves” approach, but I’ll save it for the post immediately following the next one.