A collage of images, featuring most prominently a person holding a sign reading "no justice no peace"

Author: Lisa Herzog

Democracy / Distribution / Economics / International

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TTIP – What we’ve learned in the debate

This post is Part 2 of the special series on TTIP that we’ll be running in the coming weeks.

12/07/2014 - Protestors against the EU-US trade deal (TTIP - Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) march from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to Europe House, the London Headquarters of the European Commission and the European Parliament, in Smith Square, London.

Anti-TTIP protesters in London, 2014. Wikimedia Commons.

TTIP is a complicated issue – but the fact that there is so much public debate about it shows that we have, after all, learned something from the Great Financial Crisis, or so I will argue. Before this crisis, many debates about economic policy took the form of “more market, please” (usually coming from the right) versus “more state, please” (usually coming from the left). But this way of carving up the terrain overlooks the essential preconditions of markets that are themselves political. In addition to questions about “more market” versus “more state”, we need to ask questions about who sets the rules of the economic game.

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General

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Dear fellow Europeans (in passport and spirit),

this is a dark day for the European Union. Great Britain has cast its vote, and will part ways from the EU. Both for Great Britain and for the EU, things won’t continue as before. But it is up to us where they go from here.

It is sometimes said that the EU has become a cold and technocratic projects. But the EU is, first and foremost, a project of peace, and peace is a matter of the heart. The EU a project of peaceful cooperation among people who have fight endless wars, for centuries after centuries. It is heart-wrenching to see it falter as it does today, threatened by waves of nationalism and chauvinism, in Great Britain and elsewhere.  (more…)

Animals / Climate / Duties

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Why good intentions need informed intentions

IMG_20150802_164103738

In discussions about climate change and climate justice, there has been quite some debate about individual duties – should we try to change our lifestyle to reduce emissions, or should we try to influence political processes that bring about institutional change? It always seemed to me that the correct answer is: do both, or whatever you are able to do. Given how drastic the consequences of climate change are likely to be, and given how climate-unfriendly our Western lifestyle typically is, this seemed the right answer. Wouter Peeters has made this case in previous posts, so there is no need to repeat the arguments here. But I’ll add a third point: in our attempts to do good, we also have a duty to be as well-informed as possible.

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Democracy / Economics / Governance

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Are financial markets – markets?

Philippine-stock-market-board

(source: wikimedia)

What a weird question, you may think. But consider:

  • In textbook markets, what is traded are products that are supposedly useful to customers. What is traded in many financial markets are highly artificial contractual arrangements that are several layers away from what happens in the real economy.
  • In textbook markets, participants are liable to go bankrupt if they overspend. In financial markets, some market participants know that they are too big to fail, creating problems of “moral hazard.”
  • In textbook markets, participants are expected to inform themselves about the products they trade. At least in some financial markets, what matters are not the “fundamentals” (e.g. the economic success of a company the shares of which are traded), but what other participants do. Many participants try to make profits by outrunning market movements or “sentiments”; this can lead to large swings, in disconnect from fundamentals (more…)

General

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If everything is measured, can we still see one another as equals?

Relational egalitarians hold what matters for justice is that all members of a society “stand in relations of equality to others.” The idea that all human beings are moral equals is widely shared: it underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many national constitutions. How will this norm be affected by the arrival of “big data,” the collecting and analysing of huge amounts of data about individuals? Internet companies and government services collect data about individuals’ activities, including geographic locations, shopping behaviour and friendships. Many individuals voluntarily share such information on social media, some also track their physical activities in meticulous details. Experts expect that “people analytics” – big data applied to the measurement of work performance – will have a revolutionary impact on labour markets. (more…)

Moral values

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Addressing “the social” in normative theorizing

CIMG4071

Normative theorists are not a species known for an oversupply of consensus. But one of the most heated debate of recent years has led to a kind of consensus: the debate about “situationism”, which was raised as a challenge to virtue ethics. With virtue ethicists referring to the character of virtuous agents for guidance about moral behaviour, situationists drew attention to the problem that human behaviour is greatly influenced by the situations they find themselves in. For example, they are more altruistic when exposed to the good smells of a bakery. They are more likely to cooperate in a game call “Community Game” than in one called “Wall Street Game” even if they payoffs are the same. And if they are told to play the role of “prison guards”, while others play the role of “prisoners”, the situation can easily get out of hand. Reading such accounts, one might think that all talk about individual agency and responsibility had been based on an illusion: on an account of a “Cartesian” or “Kantian” self, or on an “Aristotelian” notion of stable character, that simply do not exist. All that there is, it seems, are situational forces. (more…)

Democracy / Moral values

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Leaders and their responsibility for knowledge

This article in the Guardian, which some members of our team have shared on Facebook, suggests that the British prime minister David Cameron may have (had) no clue about what his policies did to local services. If we assume that this is true, it raises a moral question of great importance for today’s societies: how can leaders make sure that they know enough about the consequences of their decisions to make decisions at all? (more…)

Distribution / Duties / Economics / International

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(One of) Effective Altruism’s blind spot(s), or: why moral theory needs institutional theory

Blick aus dem Bürofenster kleinThere has been much talk about effective altruism recently (see e.g. here or here) – the idea that you should try to do as much good as you can, using the most effective means. It reads a bit like an update of good old Jeremy Bentham and “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” by a McKinsey consultant. It is easy to ridicule, and ridicule is indeed a frequent reaction because humour eases the tension that one can feel when confronted with these ideas. For there seems to be more than a grain of truth in effective altruists’ claim that we could do so much more to help those who were less fortunate in the “natural lottery” of where and when they were born. One thing that speaks in their favor, after all, is that effective altruists ask serious questions about what it means to be a moral agent in today’s world. What I here want to pick out from the debate is their picture the social world and of human institutions, which I take to be flawed. It is an illustration of why moral philosophy should not neglect the world we live in and the institutions that structure it.

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Democracy / Liberty / Punishment

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Mass incarceration

One thing that I learned as a PhD student at Oxford was that philosophically interesting questions and questions about existing injustice do not always overlap – some existing practices are so obviously wrong from a normative perspective, I was told, that there is no point in writing normative theories about them. This seems right for certain cases, but I still haven’t quite made up my mind about whether it is always true.

I remember this Oxford seminar while reading this utterly depressing piece about incarceration and its effect on black communities in the U.S. in this month’s issue of the Atlantic. (more…)

Economics / Old Blog

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Can Grading Love & Care be an Injustice?

Can grading love and care (and other goods) be an injustice?
It is a widespread intuition that some things in life cannot and should not be measured. For example, quantifying our love for a partner seems problematic. We do not want to rate our affection on a scale of 0-100.*  It is an important question, though, whether we can have a complaint of justice about measuring certain goods.  Here I consider two lines of argument for thinking that measuring certain things in quantifiable terms can be objectionable.
The first is indirect. It concerns unjust effects of things being measured that were not measured previously. An example is the measurement of the willingness to pay for parking spaces, which Joshua Kopstein recently discussed. Some start-up companies have developed apps through which people bid for spare parking spaces. Kopstein suggests that this system turns a public good into a private good that is allocated according to willingness and ability to pay, thus privileging the rich. This example does suggest that certain kinds of measurement can lead to complaints of justice, if they introduce an allocation mechanism that is not appropriate for the good. But in such cases it is the possibility of wrongful use, not the measuring itself, that can be criticized.
The second way in which measuring could raise complaints of injustice is more direct. Consider a stylized example. Assume that elderly relatives have a legitimate claim to receive some acts of love and care from younger family members. Assume that a start-up company develops an app that evaluates family members, on a score from 0 to 100, on how well their acts deliver care to elderly relatives. And assume that using the app becomes a social trend, such that most people start using it. This might have some beneficial effects. For example, it might become easier to share knowledge about how to cheer up grandma “efficiently” when she is gloomy. But could it also mean that what the elderly relatives receive are not, any longer, acts of love and care, but something else: acts calculated to enhance the wellbeing of elderly relatives? If this is the case, it seems that they could raise a claim of justice. They are denied what they have a legitimate claim to receive. Schematically put, they have a legitimate claim to good X (love and care), but what they receive is good Y (acts that will efficiently enhance wellbeing), because by measuring and quantifying X, it is transformed into Y.
One problem here is whether we can specify a sufficiently clear and plausible account of what good X is and why good Y is different from it.** One possible issue might be that good X is a complex and multi-dimensional good, but by measuring it, we necessarily reduce it to fewer dimensions. Although modern technologies offer increasingly sophisticated ways of measuring things, they still cannot capture all the dimensions of what it means, for example, to have a trusting and loving relationship with someone. Another issue could be that offering good X requires openness to new challenges or a certain degree of spontaneity. Again, these cannot be easily captured in quantitative terms and are, thus, likely to be excluded if one tried to measure X. For example, an important aspect of a loving relationship is that one is sensitive to subtle changes in the other person’s situation, and maybe even that one understands such changes before the person herself fully understands them. It is therefore unclear how they could be included in quantitative measures.
Certain forms of measurement may be simply dysfunctional. In finance, there is Goodhart’s law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” This might also hold for other areas and make it simply unwise to try to utilise measurements there. But in additional to dysfunctionality, we should not exclude the possibility that measuring certain things may be an injustice.  At least in the case of care and love, it seems there is reason to believe that that is the case.
*In Dave Egger’s The Circle there is an episode in which one of the protagonist’s lovers asks for an evaluation of his qualities, on a scale from 0 to 100, directly after the sexual act. The protagonist is somewhat startled, and then resorts to a white lie.
**Aspects of this question have been explored in the debate about limits of the market, where one concern is whether the socially defined “meaning” of goods can be a basis for not measuring goods in market terms. See for example Debra Satz’s discussion of Elizabeth Anderson’s approach in her Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale.