I think that the questions that political philosophers have taken to debating professionally in recent decades have a limited relevance to contemporary politics. But I think a number of fairly abstract misguided ideas in ethics, political philosophy, and economics have come to have extraordinary cultural and political power in the United States and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the English speaking world, all to incredibly pernicious effect. What’s more, though most of these ideas are propounded, originally, by people whose degrees are in economics most of them are really ideas of a philosophical character.
Which ideas?
Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law. I’ve been writing a bit about this lately with respect to greedy financiers, but it’s a more general thing. If a person announced to his friends and family “I’m going to steal $17 billion from aspiring college students and give the money to banks” we would expect a degree of shock and ostracism to follow. Indeed, if a person said “I’m going to pick a student’s pocket at rob him of $17″ we would expect some shock and ostracism.
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Another example is that, as Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and it’s viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.
As a third example, as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive.
A big part of changing America is much more practical interventions into specific elections, congressional debates, media controversies, etc. But ultimately I do think that these big ideas matter as well. They’re enormously important in terms of setting the terms of political debate, in terms of influence what’s considered “possible” and what kinds of people have standing to have their views taken seriously. Building a better world ultimately requires getting people to understand that both the empirical and philosophical underpinnings of America’s free market society are much weaker than is generally understood.
What is important to note here is that Yglesias is taking some pretty abstruse philosophical positions and plugging in names and (corporate) faces and making them real. Philosophy, properly understood, isn't at all about "first principles" (what ever they might be). It's about taking a moment to figure out what's going on in the world.
As long as one is explicit about one's preferences, the joints and marrow of one's own web of beliefs and desires, and is willing to risk a clash over these, then we have the makings of serious public fun. For the most part, liberals have shied away from taking on conservatives on this very point - conceding the very ground, for example, on matters of political economy rather than challenging them - because liberals begin by conceding the mundane reality that conservative and liberal sets of beliefs are equally valid for those who share them, rather than insisting that just for that very reason it is important to take on the notion that the conservative set is vulnerable to the criticism that it has no prior claim upon us.
I also think Yglesias' point about the priority of a theory that aligns with empirical studies is important, but is also subject to the same criticism. After all, people can find fault with just about any empirical study and set of data (we have been having this discussion far too long not to recognize how muddied the waters have become on this very point). He and I and others may valorize these kinds of things, but that doesn't make them Gospel. They are just our preferences.
In any case, his more basic point - ideas matter - is demonstrably true, and needs to be remembered as we move along.
