Published on March 22, 2010
A litmus test for liberalism
The last two posts on inalienable rights here and here outlined the theory that descends from the Reformation and Enlightenment. The theory of inalienable rights serves as a litmus test for modern liberal and contractarian theories of justice. There are some historical voluntary contracts that are now deemed invalid and outlawed:
- an individual self-sale, voluntary slavery, or lifetime labor contract and
- a political pact of subjection or pactum subjectionis.
Surely it is not too much to ask a modern liberal theory of justice that it provide a coherent account of why such contracts should be deemed invalid and why the rights such contracts would legally alienate are inalienable. In that sense, the theory of inalienable rights provides a historical litmus test for liberalism.
Inalienable Rights: Part III A Litmus Test for Liberalism continued »
Filed in Fatal Flaws,Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory |
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Tags: employment contract, Inalienable rights, John Rawls, Montesquieu, pact of subjection, Robert Nozick, self-rental contract, self-sale contract
Published on March 5, 2010
What an inalienable right is and is not
In two previous posts about slavery and non-democratic government, we saw that the basic question was not a contrast of consent versus coercion. From Antiquity down to the present, there were consent-based arguments for slavery and non-democratic government as being founded on certain explicit or implicit contracts. The most recent example was the Harvard philosopher, Robert Nozick, who has been the most prominent figure in free-market libertarianism. Nozick explicitly argued that people should be allowed to voluntarily sell or transfer their self-government rights to a “dominant protective association” [Nozick 1974, 15] which would then rule in its own name (not as a representative or delegate of its subjects). Nozick continued:
The comparable question about an individual is whether a free system will allow him to sell himself into slavery. I believe that it would. [Nozick 1974, 331]
An inalienable right is a right that may not be ceded or transferred away even with the consent of the holders of the right. Any contract to alienate such a right would be an inherently invalid contract, and, vice-versa, a right such that any contract to alienate it was inherently invalid would thus be an inalienable right. From the American Declaration of Independence onward, the phrase “inalienable rights” has been a part of the American political lexicon.
Inalienable Rights: Part I The Basic Argument continued »
Published on March 5, 2010
Brief History of the Inalienability Rights Argument
Part I of this inalienable rights post tried to give a clear modern explanation of the inalienable rights theory that was slowly hammered out in the anti-slavery and democratic movements. This Part II looks at where these ideas emerged, perhaps only in an inchoate way, in the history of ideas.
Inalienable Rights: Part II Intellectual History continued »
Filed in Fatal Flaws,Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political theory |
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Tags: Hegel, Hutcheson, Inalienable rights, Kant, Liberty of Conscience, Luther, Reformation, Spinoza, Stoics
Published on March 2, 2010
Is Democracy Government based only on the Consent of the Governed?
Classical liberalism takes the most basic question about a social institution as: “consent or coercion.” Democracy is often characterized as “government based on the consent of the governed” so non-democratic government is then typically condemned as being involuntary and coercive.
This common condemnation of non-democratic government on the basis of involuntariness has caused much intellectual history to just go “down the memory hole.” Those who routinely condemn autocracy on coercive grounds have either forgotten or never knew that from Antiquity down almost to the present there have always been those anti-democratic (or non-democratic) writers who: (1) presented a defense of non-democratic government based on consent or contract, and (2) interpreted much of historical autocracy as being based on implicit or explicit social contracts of subjection.
My focus here is not on (2), the empirical question of whether or not any historical autocracy could be interpreted as being voluntary, but (1), the fact of intellectual history that so many classical authorities defended non-democratic government if based on consent.
Why is Non-democratic Government Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things? continued »
Filed in Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory |
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Tags: alienable natural rights, consent vs. coercion, delegation vs. alienation, employment contract, Gierke, Grotius, Hobbes, lex regia, Nozick, pactum subjectionis, Thomas Aquinas, translatio vs. concessio
Published on March 1, 2010
Neverfox’s comment to my last post, Why Was Slavery Wrong?, was so rich that I will reply by this new posting, rather than just a comment on the comment. That post asked the question of whether historical slavery was wrong because it was involuntary or because it treated persons as things. The usual answer is that slavery was wrong because it was involuntary. And since the current system of employing, hiring, or renting workers is voluntary, there is a clear moral separation between the old economic system of owning workers and the current system of renting workers. But the “problem” in that standard view was that from Antiquity up to the present, there have been prominent moral and legal philosophers who have argued that slavery (i.e., lifetime labor obligations) should be allowed if based on a voluntary contract. Moreover, examples of voluntary slavery contracts existed even in the ante-bellum United States.
But voluntary as well as involuntary slavery has been outlawed. If “involuntariness” was “why slavery was wrong”, then why is voluntary slavery outlawed too? Indeed, some modern libertarians such as Harvard’s Robert Nozick have argued that a free libertarian society would permit voluntary slavery. If, on the other hand, the case against slavery, either involuntary or voluntary, is based on it legally treating persons as things, then the voluntary self-rental contract appears in a different moral light.
Published on February 28, 2010
“Involuntariness” is the usual answer.
Indeed, classical liberalism takes the most basic framing of a social question as: “consent or coercion?” In this view, democracy is characterized as government “with the consent of the governed” so slavery and non-democratic government were both condemned for the lack of consent.
This common condemnation of slavery on the basis of involuntariness has caused a large amount of intellectual history to just go “down the memory hole.” Those who routinely condemn involuntary slavery have either forgotten or never knew that from Antiquity down almost to the present there have always been those pro-slavery writers who: (1) presented a defense of slavery based on consent or contract, and (2) interpreted much of historical slavery as being based on implicit or explicit contracts.
Why was Slavery Wrong? Involuntariness or Treating Persons as Things? continued »
Filed in Intellectual history,Legal theory,Political economy,Political theory |
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Tags: alienable natural rights, Blackstone, Hobbes, Locke, Nozick, Pufendorf, renting people, Roman law, Seabury, voluntary slavery contract
Published on February 15, 2010
Is the debate about evaluation asking the wrong questions?
There are such strong debates about evaluations in the field of economic development that it sometimes seems like a civil war. But the debates about evaluation may be to some extent ill-posed. We might conceptualize the practice of development assistance as the “helpers” (development agencies, funding sources, and North NGOs) trying to give some assistance to the “doers” (people, organizations, and governments in developing countries). The assumed model is that those helpers sponsoring (and funding) a development program will want to do evaluations to see “what works and what doesn’t” so they will know how to better structure programs in the future. Then the debate rages about which evaluations are “best.”
Evaluations versus Peer-to-Peer Social Learning continued »
Published on February 5, 2010
The fatal flaw series
When one is criticizing a certain discipline, such as orthodox economics, then it is best if one can boil down the criticism to one specific “fatal flaw” rather than just giving a “lawyer’s list” of criticisms. Much criticism of economics is so spread “all over the map” that it seems to be more part of “identity maintenance” for the critic—with Marxism (not to mention post-modernism) being the leading example of that sort of identity-maintenance criticism. But that’s a topic for another posting. A “fatal flaw” may appear in several guises but it should still boil down to one single basic error.
Since so many of my posts will be about “the fatal flaw” in this or that, I have made it a category. The category already has one post which gives the fatal flaw in cost-benefit analysis and in the economic analysis of law (particularly the Chicago variant of that virus). The fatal flaw at the root of today’s post is really what might be called “the fundamental myth” about the current property system, namely that the market-contractual role of being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is treated as a “property right” that is currently owned by some legal party (e.g., the corporation having the contractual role) and that may be bought and sold as well as capitalized into the party’s current valuation. In today’s post, we look at the guise this myth takes in finance theory where it is behind the seemingly innocuous controversy about accounting for “goodwill”—but in a more fundamental way, it is behind the basic formulas of finance theory for the “capitalized value of an asset” including the case when the asset is a whole corporation.
The fatal flaw in finance theory: Capitalizing “goodwill” continued »
Published on February 3, 2010
Many of the debates about foreign aid and development assistance seem to pivot on different visions of the goal: development or just poverty reduction?
- Remittances from labor migration certainly help poverty reduction in the sending country, but do they tend to help or perhaps even retard development?
- The discovery of natural resources in a developing country will lead to some poverty reduction (at least for the elites) but does it tend to help or retard development?
- Within the US, gambling casinos on Indian reservation land have certainly helped reduce poverty but will they also lead to economic development for the Native American peoples?
- Microfinance programs seem to often provide a dignified form of poverty reduction but can they even remotely live up to the hype as a road to development?
These questions hardly make sense unless one makes some distinction between poverty reduction and development. Too many commentators on aid, both lay and professional, seem to slip into a discourse that takes poverty reduction as the end goal of foreign aid and development assistance, and then debate about specific programs is rather pointless without refocusing on this basic distinction.
Development or just poverty reduction? continued »
Published on January 31, 2010
My former boss at the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has just completed a stint as the head of Sarkozy’s Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. The report and the whole exercise behind it says a lot about the economics profession. After modeling individual actions as maximizing some function, in this case an individual’s “utility function,” the economics profession (with a few exceptions) seems hell bent on applying the same model to the “decisions” and “actions” of a whole society—as if there was some “group mind” making the decision and then some composite Leviathan taking the action. In the case of a society, the quantity to be maximized is variously thought of as “social welfare,” “social well-being,” “social wealth,” gross national product (GNP), net national product, or a host of other composite indices (see one of the Commission’s working papers for a survey).
Social Engineering vs. Pragmatism: Part I of Commentary on the Sarkozy-Stiglitz Commission continued »