Where Did All the Jobs Go? 

Harlan B. Miller

We are in what we all hope is a fairly short-term economic crisis, one that was triggered by financial greed and by the irresponsibility of lenders, borrowers, speculators and regulators. As a result of this economic slowdown, many people are out of work, and many have just given up looking for work. But, important as this transitory unemployment is, it isn’t what I want to address here.

 Instead I am interested in a jobs problem on a much longer time scale. Jobs are disappearing not just here but around the world. In the long term, if we don’t change our ways, we are headed for a rising and permanent labor surplus. We already have significant numbers of adults who have never been employed. Without substantial changes we can expect the never-employed to become the majority, perhaps in less than a century.
Most of the things I will tell you, you already know. But you have probably not put them together.

I

Let’s take a very, very, long view. When first we came down from the trees we weren’t really well equipped to meet our needs. Our needs were quite simple, enough food and shelter so that enough of our children could live to puberty and maintain the numbers of our group. Everybody worked full time hunting and gathering, and probably it took, on average the labor of, say, 101 or 102 humans (or proto-humans) to meet the needs of 100 humans. So most groups failed, and either died out or were absorbed by other groups. Some were lucky enough or lucky to be hardworking or smart enough, to bring the ratio down to even, 100 working could support 100. These groups became the ancestors of us all. By the way, I’m just making up all these numbers.

Then we got even smarter and invented spears, and stone tools, and fire. Now maybe just, say, 96 at work could support 100, at the previous level of need. However, we are no longer at that level of need, now we need firewood gatherers, and fire tenders and starters, and people to chip the flints. Our raw productivity has increased, but so has our level of need, so we are still just about even.

Eventually we create agriculture and start living in larger groups. Our raw productivity zooms up, but so do our needs. Now we need food storage and digging sticks, and a lot more medicine men because we have much more disease when we are more crowded and less mobile. And very soon we are going to need traders and bookkeepers.

 Fast forward past bronze and iron and efficient fishing, and so on. By the Classical Age of Greece we are enormously more productive, worker for worker, than the hunter-gatherer, but our needs have increased enormously. We need temples and priests, theatres and playwrights, money, warships, lots of bookkeeping, law courts, marriage, and so on and on.

Very approximately the increased curve of productivity and the increased curve of needs stay together. Really important inventions, like the wheelbarrow, kick the productivity curve upward. Social developments such as the transformation of women of the wealthier classes from workers to status-symbol birds in gilded cages can push the overall productivity down. But more or less, on the whole, by and large the supply of productivity and the demand of needs (or at least wants) ran side by side.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, and the Transportation/Communication Revolution and the Information Revolution. Beginning early in the 19th Century productivity per worker began to accelerate, and to pull away from aggregate needs (wants). Needs greatly accelerated, too. We needed highways and railroads and telegraph systems and telephones and to explore the planet, and eventually at least the solar system. Now we all need fast internet connections, and dentists, and insurance, and at least an automobile apiece.

Still, despite our seemingly endless desires, our ability to meet those desires has far outstripped them. If, with my imaginary numbers, it has almost always in the past taken just about all the workers in a population to support that population, so if in the past a population of 100 could meet its needs with full employment, then today probably no more than 75% or 80% of the workers are needed. This percentage is dropping and will continue to drop.

We have, and will continue to have a structural labor surplus.

Now let me pitch things a bit less abstractly and come to the present day.

II

First consider the jobs that left the U.S. (and the UK and Germany and Japan, etc.) and went elsewhere. This is not a new development. American shoe manufacture left New England for the lower labor costs of the Carolinas, then left the country for Spain, then left Europe for Indonesia. Now clothing is made in sweatshops all over the world including such unlikely places as Nepal and the United Arab Emirates. Everything else is made in China, much of it in factories owned by Taiwanese.

I’ve been struck for several decades by the manufacture of manhole covers. One would think that the ratio of labor cost to material cost is very low for manhole covers, and since they are quite heavy, that shipping would be a significant part of the end price. But for quite some time almost all the manhole covers in the US have been made in India. It doesn’t seem that that could make sense, but obviously it does.

The factory jobs that have left are just not coming back (unless the world economy collapses). In time wages and conditions for Chinese workers should improve, but barring catastrophe American workers will never be cheaper by the hour than Chinese, and almost certainly they will never be cheaper per unit of production.

There are still areas of production in which we and the other prosperous countries dominate, including construction machinery and some types of instrumentation. But there is no reason to think that will be so forever.

A decade or so ago some of the futurist literature told us, or anyway people like me, not to worry about all the factory jobs moving away, since there would always be jobs for us “symbolic analysts” who design the systems and write the software, and so on. Workers would work, but we would direct.

Of course this was always nonsense, and some of it was racist nonsense. The populations of India and China, put together, are about eight times the population of the US. So there are about eight times as many smart Indians and Chinese, in any of the many varieties of smart you choose, as there are smart Americans. Fortunately for us, it will be some time before their education systems catch up. But already we outsource lots of programming, medical diagnosis, and so on.

With all the fondness for “distance learning” one could surely outsource the teaching I used to do.

These jobs are gone or going, and they’re not coming back.

III

Second are the jobs that simply disappeared.

My first job was a high school summer job in a large bank. It was 1953 or 1954. I was given trays of cancelled checks, in order by account holder name. There were no account numbers. I checked the signatures against the account cards and filed the checks in chronological order in folders for each account. Other people had already checked signatures and deducted amounts, and yet others prepared statements. The back offices of banks were well populated.

Today almost all of this is done without human intervention once a teller has scanned the check. And, of course, since there are, relatively, many fewer paper checks in the system than there were a half-century ago the number of tellers and cashiers is also proportionately much lower. The transformation of the financial world has multiplied the possible varieties of fraud, but radically decreased employment opportunities.

There are essentially no more telephone operators, and very few gas station attendants. There are still gas station attendants in Oregon and New Jersey, which illustrates the fact that quite unnecessary jobs can be created or preserved by government intervention in the market.

There are still court reporters, but there are now very few stenographers (that there are any is due to the persistence of ego).

It is probably impossible to specify how many jobs have disappeared because of the transformation of logistics. Containerization has revolutionized shipping, radically cutting costs and pilferage. Hundreds of thousands of low-wage longshoremen world-wide have been replaced by thousands of well-paid, highly skilled crane operators and directors. And the number of these expert technicians will continue to decrease as robotics improves.

More visible to most of us is the effect of bar codes and radio-frequency IDs and other machine-readable tagging. Try to imagine how many check-out lanes your favorite grocery store would need if the cashiers had to read prices on the products and enter them manually. Then add in the needed additional pricing and stocking personnel, inventory takers, warehouse workers, and so on. Thousands and thousands more people would be employed, consumer prices would necessarily be much higher, and you would no longer get customized coupons.

In agriculture changes in technology and especially in market organization have largely eliminated the family farm. In almost any non-corporate farm in our part of the country at least one adult has, of necessity, an outside job. As I once overheard “In the Depression people could go back to the farm, but now there ain’t no farm to go back to”.

Not only are there many fewer farmers, there are now very few citizen farm hands. Consider hay bales. I’m certainly no authority here, but it seems to me that in the 40s and 50s and probably earlier baling machines produced a package, roughly contained by twine, about a foot square in cross-section and perhaps three feet long. Such bales could be hauled and stacked by humans. (Not easily. They were heavy and awkward.) One rarely sees such bales today. Instead hay is stored in enormous plastic tubes, or in gigantic wheels. In any case it is optimized for mechanical, not muscular, moving and storage.

In the US the radical reduction in agricultural labor was spread over perhaps half a century, but in Mexico, whose smaller peasant farms were even more vulnerable, it was a matter of at most half-a-dozen years, and there is no telling when that economy will recover from the shock.

When, in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, weavers and others were displaced by the new and enormously more efficient mills, many protested and some tried to destroy the machinery. In England they were called Luddites from a leader named Ludd. On the European continent they were “saboteurs” because they put their sabots (wooden shoes) in the gears.

The Luddites and saboteurs lost, obviously. We’re simply not going back to spreading manure by hand, or reading and writing price tags, or shipping towels or televisions one box at a time. Almost none of the technologically-displaced jobs are coming back. (There are a very few possible exceptions.)

 IV

Third are the jobs that we just won’t take. Varying combinations of low pay and difficult, dangerous, or just very unpleasant labor result in jobs that most American citizens just won’t do. Agricultural stoop labor, such as picking strawberries or cabbages is out-sourced in-country to foreign laborers who may or may not be legal. The same is true of much of what little domestic service remains, and of animal slaughter. Our apples are picked by Guatemalans; English apples are picked by Moroccans.

Eventually even some of these jobs will disappear. Machines harvest corn and potatoes. Perhaps someday even berries will be delicately gathered by robots.

V

The forces that produce the labor surplus are effectively both universal and irresistible. In time fewer and fewer Chinese workers will be needed. A dozen years ago, at earlier stages of miniaturization, thousands of 12- and 13-year old Malaysian girls assembled and soldered tiny components on circuit boards. They were valued for their small and nimble fingers and the superior vision often found in the pubescent. Now they are in their late 20s and need glasses. No one replaced them. All the components are already on the chip.

So, barring catastrophe, we face substantial labor surpluses, effectively forever. If we look at this as meaning that larger and larger percentages of the population will be unemployed and require assistance, it sounds pretty bad. But if we look at it differently what it comes to is that keeping things running will require proportionately fewer and fewer hours of work thus providing more and more hours of leisure, then it doesn’t sound bad at all.

 In fact what is before us is the realization of the dream of some Nineteenth Century utopians. No one will have to work unless they want to. We can rest and play and read and write and contribute to productivity as a hobby. A dream come true.

But in fact we have so organized our world that the dream is a nightmare.

The nightmare we can still try to avoid is already reality in much of the Third World and what used to be the Second World. For millions and millions in the megacities of the global South there are no real jobs and no real relief. There is at best what is euphemistically referred to as the “informal” economy. 

VI

Just imagine a world in which we all share the work and share the leisure How do we get there?

Right off the bat let’s mention some things that are definitely NOT part of the problem. The Social Security retirement age should be lowered, not raised. The best thing I ever did for the job market was to retire and get out of the way. Liberal education is not a waste or impediment to employment, it is preparation for a good human life with adequate leisure. Liberal education should not be seen as competing with vocational preparation but as primary. Perhaps we should extend K-12 education to become something like K-14. There’s no rush to get young folks into the job market.

There are a few steps in the right direction we could take right away. As things stand our tax structure provides real disincentives to hiring. It costs less to give a $1,000,000 raise to the CEO than it costs to give $1,000 raises to 1000 production employees, and much less than it costs to hire 25 new workers as $40,000 each. The reasons are the cut-off of Social Security contributions above $106,800 and, in the case of new workers, the cost of medical insurance for new hires. Just removing the cap and collecting at the full FICA rate on all income would both strengthen the long-term prospects of Social Security and level the cost to the company of raises. Going to a universal single-payer health care system would really encourage additional hires.

We already know some other near-term steps that would help the employment situation. Here and now we could create at least hundreds of thousands of public or semi-public jobs to repair our roads and rebuild our bridges and put power lines underground. It wouldn’t employ as many people as the CCC did in the 1930s; we don’t need millions of shovels, but thousands of machines with skilled operators.

This would require lots of training and retraining, but retraining is no panacea and certainly cannot return us to what we used to call full employment. Thousands of former fabric and furniture workers of the Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas could in principle be retained for other work - but there is no other work. And of course the Indians and Chinese can retrain just as well.

The only long-term solution to the labor surplus problem, the only real way to change it from problem to pleasure, is a dramatic shortening of the work year. Varying mixes of shorter days and/or shorter weeks and/more vacations could be used. The nominal work year in the United States is 2000 hours (40 hours a week for 50 weeks). In practice the average is closer to 1800 hours. In Germany the average is about 1400 hours. And Germany, unlike the United States, and despite its relative poverty of natural resources, maintains a positive trade balance. They export more than they import.
In the long run even Germany’s 1400 hours will be too much.

Predictions are just predictions and maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this will all become irrelevant when climate change, population growth, and fanaticism produce disintegration of the global system and we have jobs for everyone defending the seawalls of our North American fortress from the starving multitudes. But if we are reasonably lucky progress will continue and less and less labor will be needed to run the world. It is already very late to start thinking about this. Widespread leisure not something to be feared.

Sympathy and Self-interest

Sympathy and Self-interest

(a talk given at Virginia Tech, March 28, 2012)

I – Introduction

I want to discuss what might be called the psychological foundations of ethics, or perhaps of ethical systems.  It’s not really a question of what goes on inside us when we act ethically, but rather of what it is about us that underlies having ethical rules at all.

When you or I act morally, do the right thing, any number of things may be going on in our minds.  Perhaps, when I help you collect the papers you dropped, nothing much is going on in my mind; I’m just acting from habit in accordance with a vague system of moral imperatives that I’ve internalized.  It’s tempting to call such acts ‘instinctive’ but these dispositions are in large part learned.

Sometimes a lot more is going on.  Perhaps Homer Hokie finds himself tempted to try to appropriate his friend’s beer, or his date, at a party, and he has to resist the temptation either by giving himself an internal talking-to about right and wrong, or about the obligations of friendship, or by more complicated reflection to reconcile his conflicting motivations.

And of course sometimes when one does the right thing one isn’t acting ethically at all.  If I refrain from misbehavior only because someone is watching or because I fear some sort of punishment, then even though I’m doing the right thing, I’m not doing it for the right reason.

Action in accordance with the ethical rules because they are the ethical rules is right action.  So is action flowing, more or less automatically, from good character.  What I am interested in right now are the psychological motivators of the rules, that is, about the foundations of morality in the sense of those aspects of our nature that make it possible for us to have systems that restrain our behavior in light of the interests of others.

Moral theory, of the nature of the good, of the organization of society, of life well conducted and life well led, can become quite complicated and controversial, but it has to start with our capacities for caring.  Just as physical science has to start with our capacities for perception even though it obviously goes far, far beyond them, so in ethics we can only start with who we are.

We have no sense organ for perceiving goodness, and even if we did, it would not follow that we would care about it one way or the other.

Pure reason cannot by itself motivate us to do anything, and this is true both when motivation is taken to be giving a reason to act and when it means actually moving us to act.

As Hume puts it in his delightfully subversive way:

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to

any other office than to serve and obey them.”

And, a little later:

“’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching

of my little finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to

prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as

little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg’d lesser good to my

greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter.”[1]

Hume’s point is that reason alone can never motivate us.  We must care, one way or another, about something to begin with.

Hume and his friend Adam Smith and most of the whole tradition recognize two basic motivators, self-interest and sympathy.

Some things are pleasant and some are unpleasant and we are drawn to the pleasant and repelled by the unpleasant.  This is really a tautology, since the pleasant is just the attractive and the unpleasant the aversive.  Maximizing the pleasant and minimizing the unpleasant is in (or just is) our self-interest.  That’s one motivator.

The second motivator is the interests of others with whom we sympathize. 

I would in fact go further than saying that positive and negative feelings are the available motivators of action.  They are the sources, and the only ultimate sources, of moral values.  The only things that are intrinsically good or bad are the mental states of conscious beings.  As my friend Steve Sapontzis likes to put it, values require feelings.  More on this later. At present I want to address the motivators for doing the right thing, however the right thing is determined.

II Self-interest and Sympathy

Every conscious being is subject to pain and ipso facto has an interest in avoiding or minimizing it, and thus has at least rudimentary self-interest.  This is nearly a logical truth. It is false if there can be a conscious being without the possibility of aversion or attraction.  I suppose that is logically possible although it is difficult to see what the point would be of having such consciousness. 

In any event we know that (at least) all vertebrates can experience pain, and therefore all humans, past a very early stage of development, can do so.  So we all have self-interest.

The evidence is very strong that all primates have some degree of sympathy, at least for their kin, and this is probably true of all mammals and many other animals.

Thus both sympathy and self-interest are natural for us.

It does not follow that they are therefore desirable, or that we are better off with both.  Contrary to the suppositions of many advertisements for foods, medicines, and cosmetics, being natural is not automatically being good.  Love, sunshine, and flowers are natural, but so are hate, smallpox, and old age.  My presbyopia is a natural condition of my advanced years, but it’s not a good thing, and there is nothing wrong with the quite unnatural bifocals that help correct for it.

Self-interest and sympathy are both natural and effectively inescapable, but both can be modified by conscious or unconscious factors.

Of course in most of us, and in all of us originally, sympathy is more or less limited, to our family or tribe or nation or race or species.  Similarly self-interest is originally crude and short-sighted. But both individuals and societies have seen the circle of concern broaden more and more.  So even though we start with the sympathy and self-interest we are born with, education and experience and reflection, and even the systematic development of moral theory can extend are modify them.  We can, and usually do, learn to share.  We can, and usually do, learn to delay gratification in order to improve future satisfaction.

Here is the place to consider a couple of objections.  Some claim that all our acts, even those that appear to be altruistic, are actually selfish.  This is preposterous on its face.  People run into fires to save strangers, soldiers throw themselves on grenades, cabbies turn in fortunes left in their cabs.  Life is full of  much less dramatic altruistic acts. We buy life insurance, pay taxes more or less cheerfully to support schools that neither we nor ours will attend, contribute to causes that cannot benefit us directly.  Can all these acts be selfish?

The sympathy-denier has to say that I buy life insurance, which will pay only once I’m dead, for some selfish reason.  Could it be that I will be shunned and shamed if I don’t?  No, because almost no one knows whether I have life insurance or not, and almost no one cares.  My wife knows, but I could have deceived her with phony insurance, and maybe I wouldn’t have to.  Love is blind after all.  Isn’t it interesting that, as far as I know, there is no phony life insurance.  There must be no market for it.

Perhaps the denier will suggest that  I buy life insurance because I will be pleased to look down from Heaven (or, more likely, up from Hell) and see my wife and daughter flourishing?  But I don’t expect to survive death in any form or any place.  Much more to the point, I would gain pleasure from my family’s flourishing, only because I care about them, not just about myself.

When I do something that I think I should do, or act from generosity or love, I may get a feeling of satisfaction or at least avoid remorse.  To think that I act in order to get the satisfaction or avoid the remorse is just a muddle.  I get the satisfaction or the remorse because of my judgment of the act.  If I do in fact feel good about contributing to the food bank, that is because I think that the food bank should be supported.  I certainly don’t contribute in order to increase my own pleasure.  If that were my goal several cases of good dark beer would be much more cost-effective.

When I act deliberately, my choice is what I think best to do.  That’s a truism.  But what I think best to do is generally not just what I think  is in my selfish interest.

Almost all of us, almost all of the time, are guided at least in part by sympathy.  It is unfortunately true that some humans seem totally devoid of any consideration whatever for the good of others.  There are not many of them.  We call them sociopaths and do what we can to restrain their actions.

There are others, most clearly Ayn Rand and her devotees, who admit that there is such a thing as sympathy, but claim that we should resist it and try to suppress it entirely.  Don’t be a sucker.  Look out for number one.  You should never let concern for anyone else get in the way of your only duty, pursuing your own self-interest.  The weak may call that selfishness, but for the truly heroic it’s a virtue, not a vice.

There is no ironclad logical refutation of this view, but it is exceptionally poor advice.  Of course if one never really cares about another human or animal then one’s heart will never be broken.  But a life without risk of heartbreak is a life without love, a life hardly worth living at all.

Adam Smith claimed that sympathy is universal. “The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it”.[2]  Society is formed by human connections of both sympathy and self-interest, and perfected by the “invisible hand,” primarily a product of  self-interest.

And Hume, too:

“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.”[3]

III Contract Theories

Even though sympathy was long recognized as powerful, essentially universal, and capable of great extension through education, very few have concluded that it alone is a sufficient basis for morality or the organization of society.  We need more, so we need to draw on that other basic motivator, self-interest.

Theories basing all or some of the moral rules on self-interest are, broadly speaking, contract theories.  The rules are those we all agree upon. We do unto others just as they agree to do unto us.  Historically there have been a few real contracts, or approximations to them.  The Mayflower Compact is often cited as an example.

Still, I never agreed to any universal contract to obey the law, tell the truth, refrain from theft, etc.  Did you?   So almost always the contract is a theoretical construct.  It’s a matter of what we would agree to, or to which we  be taken to have implicitly agreed.

There is vague form of implicit contract theory that has some, but not much, plausibility.  I’m sure most of you have encountered it.  On this view by living in society and receiving its benefits you have you have incurred an obligation to comply with the rules.  You have benefitted from police protection, public education, clean water, transportation, the enforceability of contracts and so on, and in return society has the right to expect that you will behave yourself. 

This is not a ridiculous theory but it’s not a persuasive one, either.  As a child one does of course benefit from society, but children can’t make contracts.  We can imagine a society in which at a certain age, maybe 16 or 18, one takes an oath to obey the rules in return for the benefits one has received and will continue to receive.  Those who declined would be expelled from the society.  That might be an interesting society, but it isn’t ours.

Another position that looks something like a contract is this.  We (whoever ‘we’ are, perhaps a sovereign to whom we all submit) lay out the rules and we set up  severe punishments for violators of those rules.  But this isn’t a contract theory because it isn’t really a moral theory at all, just a variety of the appeal to fear.

The plausible forms of contract theories argue that the proper rules of justice are those we would all agree to if were weren’t biased or ignorant or short-sighted.  It’s clear that as we are we could not come to an agreement about, say, justice in taxation.  Mitt Romney and I are just not going to agree about marginal tax rates for the very wealthy.

The proper rules, on this theory, are not those to which we, as we are, would  agree.  Rather they are the rules to which we would agree if we were free of our limitations of knowledge and rationality.  They those to which we, if purified of the relevant imperfections, would agree.

John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, imagines us coming to agreement behind a “veil of ignorance.”  Behind the veil we have a lot of general information, but lack some important specifics.  We know very much about human nature, but we do not know who we are or our age or gender.  We know a lot of social science, we understand how societies and economies work, but we do not know our place in society or our economic status.  We all have the same, very extensive, information and we are all at least reasonably rational.  There are many more complications, some of which I will mention later. 

Behind such a veil, Rawls argues, we would agree to a democratic society with hefty protection of individual rights.  In this society economic inequality, even fairly substantial inequality, would be permitted as long it made the whole society better off and no one worse off.  We would have a free market economy with a substantial and fairly high safety net, moderately progressive taxation, and equal opportunity for all ethnic groups, genders, religions, and orientations

A Theory of Justice is a very impressive work, but naturally not everyone was convinced.  To the objection that the conclusion’s correspondence to the ideals of 20^th Century American liberals showed that it could hardly be taken as an eternal ideal, Rawls replied that his goal was not a theory of justice for all time, but one for us here and now.

The literature on A Theory of Justice  is enormous, and I have read only a tiny fraction of it.  As you would expect, much of the controversy is about whether or not our agreement behind the veil would be as Rawls describes.  Those of us with a high tolerance for risk might prefer a society in which some are much worse off  and some extremely better off, given our chances of being in the preferred group.  Both libertarians and socialists think that Rawls has cooked the books.

I am arguing not that Rawls has gotten it wrong, but that the whole idealized contract project is misguided.  Ideal contracts just aren’t what we need.

IV Problems with contracts

Any theory or justice or any other good that rests on mutual agreement between self-interested agents necessarily leaves out those who are not party to the agreement, the non-contractors.

For Hume justice and property rights rest on contract, and he draws the conclusion that any being too weak to harm us would not be a party to that contract, since we have nothing to fear from them and they have no bargaining power. 

“Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right of property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords.[4]”

Here Hume recognizes the limits of contract-based justice and invokes “the laws of humanity” resting, I take it, on sympathy, beyond those limits.  Rawls also explicitly recognizes that justice is not the whole of morality, but he wants to bring at least children and the senile within the scope of justice.  He does this by stipulating that the contractors behind the veil see themselves as heads of families.  They will, presumably, agree to rules that protect both the rights (of property, etc.) and the persons of these pre- or post-contracting family members.

This gives young children, for example, only derivative standing in the justice community.  They matter, but only because full-fledged contractors care for them.  Of course for Rawls children in the real world have standing in accordance with the rules of justice.  It is the rules that are derived from the agreement of the contractors behind the veil, and those (that is, us purified) care about children and thus set up appropriate rules.

There are two important questions about Rawls’s theory.  that I am not going to pursue.  First, how can he prove that the imaginary contractors would make the decisions he attributes to them? For example, might not less risk-adverse contractors agree to a less equal society? And second, even if we did know what these veiled and purified beings would conclude, can it be shown that we should care?

I’m not after Rawls here, I’m after the reliance on contracts, real or imagined, to determine all or most of the moral rules.

Any contract-based theory of justice (or anything else) must divide the moral universe into two exclusive classes, those who are  party to the contract and those who are not.  There is the moral community of those who agree, and then there is everything else.  Full-fledged contractors are persons, with inherent value.  Everything else, young children, fetuses, chimpanzees, dogs, fish, dandelions, gravel is inherently valueless.  If, but only if, some person cares about a rock, or a dog, or a child, that rock, dog, or child, has derivative value. 

There are problems here both in what is inside and what is outside the charmed circle.

Consider the assumption that all the contractors have equal status, i.e. that all persons should have the same rights and responsibilities.  We see this in the recent ‘personhood’ legislation in the Virginia General Assembly.  The goal is to assign to fetuses, even as very early zygotes, the same legal status as adult humans. 

But there are degrees and varieties of personhood.  A number of years ago, when my daughter was 10, she asked how old one had to be to drive.  I told her the minimum age was 16. “I think you ought to be able to drive at 10,” she said.  Knowing her judgment of some of her classmates, I asked “Do you think all the boys in your class should be able to drive?”  “Well, girls should be able to drive at 10.”

That conversation was probably a tactical draw, which is doing pretty well for a parent, but it demonstrates that a 10-year-old is perfectly well aware that not all people of the same age are equally responsible, or intelligent, or mature.  Some people are more responsible at 10 or 12 than others are at 20 or 30 or ever.  Often one can reason fairly well with very young children, and sometimes reasonable beings cease to be reasonable.

There are excellent reasons for using arbitrary boundaries such as the nearly magic age of 18.  Such cut-offs are imperfect, of course, but the alternative would be some system of  judging individual cases.  Any such system would be open to drastic abuse.  We all know how literacy tests were used.  So if you’re 18, you’re in, unless you’re very, very seriously impaired.

Legally minor children have rights, but not the same ones as adults, and not the same ones at all ages.  Less egalitarian societies may have a much larger variety of  ‘persons’  Until fairly recently in our society, women had  important legal rights, but not the same as men. This did not mean that women were not considered persons.  They were, to be blunt, lesser persons.   Of course this is true today in Saudi Arabia and other places. 

Within the boundaries established, let us assume, by contract, the parties in fact almost never have the same bargaining power, wit, or predictive skill. 

In the fully abstract bargaining theories historically popular in economics and political theory, all the parties are assumed to have the same, complete, knowledge, the same mastery of probability, the same foresight, and each to have a fixed initial set of preferences.  These stipulations are, of course, recognized by all to be false of the real world.  Still I think it is very easily overlooked how very false they are. 

In fact some of us are quite ignorant most of the time, and very rarely do both parties have the same understanding of the facts relevant to their situation.  We’re lazy, or in a hurry, or just out of our depth.  We don’t read the fine print, or don’t understand it, or rely on professional advice about what we don’t understand.  That professional advice may or may not be competent and may or may not be honest.  Eager to install the new software update, I click to accept the agreement without reading it to be sure it doesn’t provide for seizure of my home or sexual services on demand.  I’m sure you’re much more careful and always read those licenses. 

Contracts are often invalidated in courts, but probably not as often as they should be.  Some sorts of contracts are just illegal.  You cannot, in the United States, sell yourself into slavery.  Bad contacts, starting with insane and often fraudulent mortgages and moving on to the deceptive sales of  securities based on those mortgages, triggered the financial misfortunes from which we are only now starting to recover.  In this case a mix of greed, stupidity, and deception, impossible in the pure theory of contracts, had results that were all too actual.

No true believer in the value of contract theory would deny any of the defects of actual contracts I have just rehearsed.  Still, she or he would insist, abstract contract theory is a valuable theoretical tool.  Of course abstract contractors aren’t just like us, but they are importantly similar.

This I deny.  The abstract contractors just pop into existence on a desert island or uninhabited planet as rational adults with a set of likes and dislikes.  They have no parents, and their personalities are simply given.  We’re certainly not like that at all.

We are social animals, social not just in our lives but in our selves.  How we see the world, and just what world we see, is very largely determined by how we grow up, who we know, how we are treated and how we are perceived.  Our most basic wants and needs are doubtless built in.  We need and want food and drink and shelter from heat and cold, and companionship and, in due time, sex.  But even here the forms these basic wants take are shaped by our surroundings and by the actions and opinions and desires of others. 

Beyond the basics our desires are profoundly shaped, and sometimes wholly created, by the people and systems with which we live.  In many cases, in fact, our desires are quite indeterminate, and we don’t know what we want.  We follow the incentives and disincentives, the pats on the head and the disappointing grades, and we end up somewhere, somewhere comfortable if we’re lucky.

Not often, but every now and then, there is a very satisfactory committee meeting.  The participants begin with conflicting views, some determinate and others quite vague, and at the end a genuinely unanimous conclusion is reached that corresponds to none of the starting positions.  Of course the conclusion may turn out to be disastrous, that’s the way of  the world.  Unanimity is never a guarantee of wisdom.  But the meeting was a success in an important way that demonstrates the connection between sympathy and individual preferences.  Everyone’s preferences have changed and the new shared preference is importantly that of the group as a whole.

It’s not just that we are always more or less ignorant, more or less irrational, often distracted – these of our defects everyone admits.  But the implicit requirement of fixed preferences independent of social interaction is a fatal flaw in contract-based theory. 

We just aren’t like that. 

A few of us, some of the time, are rational contractors, but most of us, most of the time, and the vast majority of conscious beings all of the time, are not.  I’ve been arguing that we are too unlike the idealized contractors for conclusions about them to be of much use.  And for infants, fetuses, nonhuman animals, the severely impaired and the demented, the contract game can’t even get started.

Smith and Hume insist that there is more to morality than contract-based justice, and Rawls concurs, though not as prominently.  But whatever that ‘more’ is we hear rather little of it.  Much of common, educated talk about morality, seems to take the self-interested rational bargainer as the standard.  The insistence on the primacy of self-interest is so widespread that I would term it the dogma of selfishness. 

V The Dogma of Selfishness

There is an ideal I can only call macho, to see oneself and be seen as cool, tough, rational, but not soft, a Clint Eastwood character, perhaps.  This is not new in our society.  There is a tale that Abraham Lincoln once muddied a new suit rescuing a pig trapped in the mud.  He later claimed that he did it not out of concern for the pig, but because if he hadn’t it would have bothered him all day.  There’s a muddle here, but it’s not the one in which the pig is stuck.  Why would it have bothered him?  Why, to Lincoln or the teller of this tale, would it be embarrassing to admit sympathy with the pig?

Quite often our  judgments and explanations are distorted by the need to appear tough.  We pretend to be concerned about the boy who set fire to a cat because animal abuse is a very good predictor of future abuse of humans.  In reality what’s wrong with setting a cat on fire is what happens to the cat.  That’s straightforward enough, but we have to disguise it rather than be a softie.

It is unstylish to try to teach a child to restrain their appetites, but perfectly all right to encourage them to defer gratification.  Defer, but don’t share or give away.

It is as if there were something shameful in admitting to any motive other than self-interest.  Sympathy with animals or the poor is weakness.  Love is embarrassing.  Caring for one’s community at any cost to oneself is either stupid or fraudulent.

Why would anyone want to take such positions, or even pretend to do so?  What’s missing?

VI Sympathy and its limits

Both Hume and Smith, as I mentioned earlier, hold that every human naturally has some degree of sympathy for others.  Perhaps they are a little too optimistic.  Or perhaps 18^th Century Edinburgh lacked sociopaths.  In any event, I want now to focus on a particular sort of sympathy, the sympathetic identification with a group, including all members of the group. 

One of the minor costs of the creation of the euro is that one no longer sees those great French coins with the ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’  inscription.  Liberty, equality, brotherhood:  In our political discourse we are perfectly comfortable with talk of liberty and equality, but what’s this brotherhood business?  I’ll use the less familiar word ‘solidarity’ which is free of the tiny whiff of sexism in ‘brotherhood.’ 

Solidarity in the strongest ‘all for one and one for all’ form is rare, but family loyalty, team spirit, patriotism and humanism aren’t.  The point is that one more or less identifies with a group and wishes well all its members.  Solidarity is what makes community.  All of us are members, in highly variable degrees, of many communities.  I belong to family in at least three senses: the so-called ‘nuclear’ family of my partner, our child, and myself; my birth family, now a small group, and the extended family of in-laws, nieces and nephews, cousins, etc.  I’m an American, a Virginian, a resident of Montgomery County and of the Town of Blacksburg,  I’m a member of the Virginia Tech community and of its Department of Philosophy subset.  I belong to the U.S. Navy and to the Democratic Party.  I’m an alumnus of four schools, one of which no longer exists.

It’s worth noticing that most of these community memberships are not really voluntary and that the obligations of many of them are very slight.  But each one of them is some sort of tie to other people.  We may well come to identify ourselves with groups whose existence we had not previously considered.  I’m a primate, and a member of the 99%.

Usually the smaller the group the stronger the bonds and the more weighty the obligations.  That is, if the group has some sort of genuine unity.  I am a member of the group of several thousand people with whom I share the last 5 digits of my Social Security number. But there is no reason that I feel any bond to the rest of the members, since this grouping is so artificial. 

But that a group is artificial does not mean that it cannot be a significant community.  It is an artifact of the Virginia Constitution that counties are responsible for public education, and there is nothing natural about the boundaries of counties.  But as it is Montgomery County is the unit I happen to be in, and the level concerned with some important community matters, most especially the schools.  That makes it my community and brings with it rights to vote and speak, and obligations to, especially, pay taxes.  I care about those schools, even though I never went to them and no one of mine will go to them in the future.  I care because they are central to my community.  I certainly care enough to pay my share for teachers and students.  They weren’t my teachers and they won’t be my students, but they are our teachers and our students.  That is what it is to belong to a community. 

Community solidarity is a powerful force in our history and in our lives, despite the common reluctance to talk about it.  It is most powerful, as a rule, when it is limited by contrast.  That is, the most strongly motivating versions of “us” are the ones in opposition to “them.”   Us versus them, Hokies versus Wahoos, liberals versus conservatives, our nation versus the enemy, humans versus alien invaders or machines from the future.  It’s no accident that this theme is so common in history and in fiction.

Love thy neighbor.  But who is my neighbor?  Much of moral progress consists in extending the limits of the neighborhood, the limits of sympathy.  Jesus, on some readings, wants the neighborhood to include all humanity.  Others would go even farther.  Still it is a real question how far it is psychologically possible for the majority of people to extend the philia, the caritas, the brotherly love called for in the Gospels, how far solidarity can reach.  

VII Perils of Sympathy

In fact the greatest threat to solidarity is not selfishness but solidarity.  The moral catastrophe of Germany in the 1930s wasn’t caused by the atomization of society by people withdrawing into a self-centered insistence on their individual rights.  Rather it was the subversion and finally destruction of the precarious solidarity of the German Republic by a narrower solidarity of resentment, aggression, and rejection.  Us Aryan Germans versus a them compounded of Jews, Slavs, Bolshevists, and so on.

Ours is much stronger, much healthier community than that of Weimar Germany.  Part of its strength, and an important part of our political ideal is diversity of opinion and respect for differing views.  But it does seem to me that our social solidarity is under strain.  The politically active are largely polarized, each side reading its own magazines and watching its own television.  Part, just part, of the home-school movement seems motivated by a rejection of the community values exemplified in the public schools.  Much of the vocal derision of government is effectively a rejection of community.  A very few crazies have declared themselves sovereign citizens, independent of our laws.  Presumably they would be happier in Somalia.  At the other end of the scariness scale, the U. S. Post Office, a vital agent of community in the early days of our country and still the identifying center of many villages, faces dismantling.

Some level of this fragmenting tension is to be expected in any healthy liberal society; only effective dictatorship can drive it underground.  And perhaps I’m over-interpreting things.  It seems to me that some of those who strongly oppose raising local taxes are rejecting our community responsibility to our schools.  But perhaps I’m wrong and they are just as committed as I to the school system.  Perhaps the difference is that they really do believe that our property taxes and teacher salaries are too high, despite being near the bottom in the state.  Perhaps.

Sympathy either for individuals or in its community form of solidarity is an essential complement to rules derived from contemplation of self-interested bargainers.  Yet sympathy in itself is hardly enough.  What justice talk protects is our autonomy as agents, the respect to which we are entitled as, ultimately, masters of our own lives.  Sympathy and love, inappropriately given complete precedence, lead at least to paternalism, and at worst to totalitarianism.  The dictatorship of the proletariat was for the good of the whole, or at least so it was said.  No doubt by some it was sincerely believed.  The same is true of American Prohibition, except that probably a higher percentage of the supporters were sincere.  It is certainly possible to have any one or two of liberty, equality, and fraternity without the others. 

 

Grownups and near-grownups have the right, within arguable limits, to make choices of which others may disapprove; choices which may well be against the best interests of the chooser. That’s just what it is to respect autonomy.  In their classic work Yellow Submarine the Beatles proclaim that “ all you need is love, love, love is all you need.”.  I hesitate to go against such great moral teachers, and love may indeed be all you need if you only deal with bunnies or infants.  But if you live among adult or near-adult persons, love alone is not enough. 

VIII Trying to get it right

In the end, both as a society and as individuals, we need both respect and compassion, with compassion having the wider scope, since it applies to all.  The scope of justice is narrower.  Balancing concern with  the good of all and  respect for the  autonomy of persons is very difficult.  It is even more complex once we recognize that autonomy and the commensurate moral responsibility are matters of degree.  It is the basic challenge of being a parent, a job that none of us ever gets completely right.  Being a citizen is easier, but tempering justice with mercy is almost never a snap.

It won’t have escaped the notice of some of you that much of what I’ve been saying, about the importance of care, of recognizing that what we can ask and what can be asked of us varies through our lives, seeing child-rearing as at least as important a moral model as macho bargaining, echoes the points many feminists are making.  I don’t deny it.  Most of the thinkers to whom I have referred are dead white males, and I’m a pretty old white male myself.

Hume and Smith both knew that satisfactory lives rested on both sympathy and self-interest.  More recently much theory seems to have lost sight of that.  We are all indebted to feminism for bringing this back to the fore.

IX Does any of this matter?

On most days most of us get along just fine without a bit of moral theory.  Most of us (but, alas, not all) habitually tell the truth.  It’s not that we never lie or at least fib a little, but that telling the truth is what we automatically do, other things being equal. (Or ceteris paribus, as we like to say, demonstrating that we know two words of Latin.)   And most of us (but again, unfortunately not all) do not steal unattended valuables.  It’s really a matter of being more or less properly brought up.  Just as social pressures and both formal and informal education can expand or contract our sympathies, so these forces shape us and gradually we internalize a set of moral rules fairly well fitting the standards of our group.  As Aristotle puts it, we become just by acting justly.  Most of our ordinary moral behavior is not a matter of resisting temptation but rather of not being tempted in the first place.

There is nothing wrong or defective about acting the right way without thinking about it, either by habit or by spontaneous sympathy or love.  Such actions may not be moral actions in a strict Kantian sense, but so much the worse for  strict reading of Kant.  They are good actions and reflect good character.  A mother who had to reflect in order to decide to care for her child wouldn’t be a virtuous being, but rather a monster. 

But we do  need to put on our moral thinking caps when other things aren’t equal  If I find a wallet in the street I just take it to the police station without a second thought.  But then I’m not starving, nor do I have a loved one near death from lack of medical care.  I’m not in a concentration camp or terrified of torture or of humiliation. I am fortunate enough to live in a fairly well-regulated society where I don’t have to worry about the honesty of the police.  But for other people or other situations moral reflection, sometimes very difficult, may be required.  And for us, too, in our fairly comfortable worlds, loyalty and friendship can conflict with honesty, or, for that matter, loyalty with loyalty, or promise-keeping and truth-telling.  Then moral reflection is inescapable.

The other sort of situation requiring moral reflection is when the moral standards of our group are being challenged.  Thousands and thousands of intelligent and basically decent people, for thousands of years, accepted human slavery as a reasonable, perhaps even necessary, part of their society.  Changing that took a long time, and a lot of argument, both public and internal, and, here in Virginia, war followed by decades of transformation.

Many of the matters that need serious thinking about here and now concern the boundaries of the moral community or communities. Who counts, and how much?  Are fetuses and grown women really moral equals?  Can it really be permissible to kill a pig just for the pleasure of eating its flesh, but forbidden to kill a vastly less conscious zygote to maintain a woman’s control of her life?

Some of our challenges, on the other hand, involve the contrast I’ve made throughout this talk between benevolence and respect.  Paternalism is basically the right policy toward the very young and at least some animals.  But not toward informed and consenting adults.

If we are to do more than shout at one another about these things we need factually informed moral reasoning without blinders. 

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[1] Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), pp. 415, 416 of Selby-Bigge edition

[2] Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment  Part I, Section 1, Chapter  I

[3] Hume, Treatise, p. 316

[4] Hume, Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1752), Section 3, 19