Ethics and Social Transformation

by Benjamin Geer

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This is an outdated version of this essay, left here for historical reasons. It's still a work in progress. You can email me at benjamin DOT geer AT gmail DOT com for the current version.

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"The critical understanding of oneself therefore takes place through a struggle between political 'hegemonies', between opposing directions, first in the field of ethics, then in politics, in order to reach a better elaboration of one's conception of the real." --Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q 11, §12

The Priority of the Social

Ethical philosophy has tended to deal with choices made by individuals. For example, philosophers have asked whether it is wrong to lie, or whether someone with excess wealth has a responsibility to give money to charity. Few have asked how to choose between different possible political or economic systems on ethical grounds. One might be tempted to respond that individual evaluations and decisions are more basic and should therefore be considered before social ones. But this view is misguided; all individual choice presumes an already existing society.

In "Freedom and Resentment", P. F. Strawson writes:

The existence of the general framework of [moral] attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external rational justification.¹

But it is not only our ethical attitudes that are constrained by society; our ethical choices are constrained, too, because the structure of each society creates particular kinds of moral problems and opportunities to act.

For example, charities exist because capitalism perpetuates huge inequalities. In a society where economic arrangements did not create poverty, the question of whether to give money to charity would not exist. Moreover, as Antonio Gramsci argued:

...we have to dispense with the idea of abstract or speculative "absolute philosophy", i.e. philosophy that arises from the preceding philosophy and inherits its so-called "supreme problems", and even with the idea of the "philosophical problem".... Practice, the real history of changing social relations, takes precedence; the problems that philosophers deal with arise from these changes, and hence ultimately from the economy.... if philosophy develops because world history develops (i.e. the social relations in which people live) rather than because a great philosopher is followed by an even greater one and so on, it is clear that by doing work that makes history in a practical sense, one is also creating an "implicit" philosophy, which will become "explicit" to the extent that philosophers elaborate it coherently....²

It does not make sense to consider the moral choices of individuals before considering the moral effects of society itself. The question of what kind of society we should have in order to prevent poverty is in fact more basic than the question of whether a well-off individual should give money to an impoverished one. The answer to the individual question cannot help us at all in answering the social one. The answer to the social question can either vastly simplify or vastly complicate the task of answering the individual one.

Another reason for this approach is that human beings are generally unwilling to follow moral principles that (at least in their view) threaten their interests. For example, anyone who has worked in an office will be aware that most employees carefully avoid telling their bosses what they really think about all sorts of things, for fear of losing their jobs. Because of this tremendous pressure, insincerity permeates relations between bosses and employees everywhere. In this context, it is pointless to ask whether it is right or wrong to lie to one's boss. In a society where work relationships were structured in such a way that people could tell the truth without fear, the question might not be pointless. Moral standards that attempt to pit individuals against the prevailing social order stand little chance of being widely implemented. In order to become a social norm, a moral standard must on the contrary be implemented by the normal operation of that social order.

Poverty is a systemic problem, caused by characteristics of the global economic system, and only a systemic change can solve a systemic problem. There are many such problems; not a few of them pose, like poverty, ethical dilemmas regarding individual action. Solutions to these problems would eliminate the associated ethical dilemmas as well; speculation about these dilemmas would thereby become entirely academic. It may be objected that this approach simply moves the problem from the domain of philosophy into that of politics. But this is an improvement, because it is only in the realm of politics that systemic problems can be solved; that is the only sort of solution that can end the suffering caused by those problems. Ethics must take this step if it is to have any practical value.

Since one cannot do everything, it is sensible to concentrate one's efforts where they can have the greatest effect. Moral problems are numerous and hard, and it seems unlikely that anyone will devise a satisfactory universal decision procedure for solving all of them.³ In such situations, it makes sense to apply heuristics, i.e. approaches that can solve a large number of particularly important problems, or at least make them easier to solve. Social transformation is such a heuristic. Therefore, the first responsibility of ethics is describe principles to guide social transformation.

Well-Being

I would like to discuss a particular ethical feeling I have, and explore its potential consequences for social transformation.

In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, Theodor Adorno writes:

There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no-one shall go hungry any more. Every other seeks to apply to a condition that ought to be determined by human needs, a mode of human conduct adapted to production as an end in itself.⁴

This much of Adorno's argument is sound: from the standpoint of "damaged life", we cannot clearly envisage what life would be like in an emancipated society, because everything we currently experience (even those aspects of life that we consider positive) is to an extent "damaged". Even our desires are damaged, and are therefore not reliable guides for imagining an emancipated existence. But there are two serious problems with his negative proposal. First, hunger is only one cause of widespread suffering that social change can eliminate. One could add torture, preventable disease, slavery and war; the list is in fact very long. Second, having compiled such a list, we are no closer to knowing what sort of social change is required. We know that systemic change will be needed in order to solve these problems: different political and economic structures will surely be necessary. But a purely negative goal does not help us imagine what those structures might be, still less how to create them. We need a goal that can serve as a guide to strategy, as a bridge between our current situation and a better one.

I would like to propose a positive goal, one that I believe avoids the trap Adorno warns of, as well as the problems I have just mentioned. This goal can be summed up as follows: that everyone shall have a good life.

What do people need in order to have a good life? All answers are, to an extent, culture-specific. Concepts such as English "well-being", Arabic hayat karima and Japanese yutori⁵ are partial expressions of such culture-specific conceptions. For the sake of convenience, in this essay I will use "well-being" and "good quality of life" to refer to the requirements for a good life by any standards (not necessarily the standards implied by those English terms). Phrases such as "culture-specific standards of well-being" would otherwise be nonsense; with this caveat, I hope my meaning will be clear.

These conceptions can change over time; as Adorno points out, they are likely to change as a result of social transformation. There is no reason to suppose that any particular set of standards could ever satisfy everyone. Therefore, ethical philosophy should not propose standards of well-being; instead, it should identify social and political processes that can enable people to implement whatever standards they have in a given time and place. Thus we can have a positive goal, while still heeding Adorno's warning.

The ethical feeling I wish to explore is one that is not content merely to hope for everyone's well-being; rather, it sees this goal as an immediate, urgent requirement that must guide action in all situations and at all times, and is all the more urgent the more it is lacking or threatened. For simplicity's sake, I will refer to this feeling as the "urgency of well-being". I will not attempt to justify it, nor do I think it can be justified. An account of its relationship to the "general framework of attitudes... given with the fact of human society" that Strawson appeals to may be possible, but that would be a psychosocial explanation and would not count as justification. As Wittgenstein said, "Explanations come to an end somewhere,"⁶ and in ethics it seems to me that they come to an end with feelings such as this.

The urgency of well-being is not the same as Kant's idea that people are ends in themselves;⁷ the latter would mean that it is an end in itself for people to be as they are, i.e. shaped by "damaged life". Moreover, I can acknowledge that some things are ends in themselves (like pure mathematics) without feeling any moral obligation to preserve them. Nor can I agree with Kant that human life matters because of human beings' capacity to reason;⁸ it seems to me that this is entirely the wrong category of judgement. Compassion is not a reward for sophistication. I would be tempted to say that human life is precious because people can suffer and hope, but such talk would be absurd. To quote Wittgenstein again: "Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water [even] if I were to pour out a gallon over it."⁹ Instead, let us ask: if we accept the urgency of well-being, what sort of social transformation should we envisage?

Social transformation cannot aim to fulfil all aspects of well-being. In English, love is considered to be a basic need. Social processes can increase people's chances of finding love (e.g. by making sure they have enough free time), but love still depends on individual and imponderable factors. Social transformation can only aim to bring about socially producible aspects of good lives. We can call for a society in which everyone will have the time to look for love, but we cannot call for a society in which everyone will be loved. Even socially producible protections cannot always be made wholly reliable; no society could guarantee that illness and natural disasters would never strike. However, it is now widely accepted that the main reason for poor quality of life is poor distribution of resources and opportunities, rather than bad luck, individual failings or the inherent limitations of human existence. In this essay I will take it for granted that, within the limits just mentioned, the goal of well-being for all is achievable. On that view, if an ethics of well-being were successfully implemented worldwide, everyone would, by definition, be content with the result. That, I think, is a strong test of the worth of any ethical principle. I now intend to show that it can be a useful tool for crafting practical objectives and strategies for social transformation.

Moral Dialogue and Universality

It is easier to determine whether one's own quality of life is adequate than to determine whether someone else's is. Faced with a possible change in my way of life, I may consult the opinion of others, but ultimately I will trust myself more than anyone else to determine whether the proposed change would be beneficial or harmful to me. But there are limits to individual moral insight. Let us consider them in the following way. There are three steps to solving a problem:

1. Recognising that there is a problem. In many cases, an individual can do this alone.
2. Correctly identifying the problem. This is more difficult to do alone. It may be that the problem is to be found solely in your own perceptions of the situation; it can be difficult to find out without a dialogue.
3. Finding the best solution for everyone concerned. The more people are affected by the problem, the more difficult it is to find the best solution alone, because this requires being aware of interdependencies that are likely to be known only to the other individuals affected.

In Kantian ethics, each individual is expected to imagine whether a particular moral rule could be made into a universal law that would be acceptable in all situations. Such a cognitive act would require the individual to be a sort of universal subject, capable of imagining all possible situations in human life, from the point of view of every possible human being. Since this is beyond the abilities of any real individual, we are obliged to consult other people to find out the effect that any given policy would have on them. In other words, we are obliged to have a dialogue.

Jürgen Habermas argues, erroneously I think, that dialogue can produce universal moral laws:

From this viewpoint, the categorical imperative needs to be reformulated as follows: "Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a universal law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm." This version of the universality principle does in fact entail the idea of a cooperative process of argumentation. For one thing, nothing better prevents others from perspectivally distorting one's own interests than actual participation.¹⁰

There are several reasons why this does not make sense. First of all, it is not possible to consult "all others" who might be concerned by a putative universal law, i.e. everyone who exists or will exist in the future. Even if we limit ourselves to attempting a dialogue with everyone now living who might be affected, it is easy to see that this might include every living human being. For every individual on Earth to have even a brief dialogue with every other individual would take until the end of time.

Different societies have different conceptions of well-being. Anna Wierzbicka points out the fallacy of ethnocentric accounts of ethical concepts:

In particular, what most Anglo-Saxon ethical works tend to do is discuss ethical concepts embodied in English words as if they were language-independent moral ideas, culture-free and fully transferable from one language to another. For example, concepts such as 'justice', 'honesty', 'hypocrisy', or 'greed' are discussed as if they stood for some universally valid categories, rooted in human nature and human reason rather than in the English language and in the broad cultural tradition which has given the English lexicon its present shape.¹¹

Wierzbicka's argument is not that moral concepts are untranslatable, but rather that to translate them accurately requires a "culture-independent semantic metalanguage... a non-arbitrary system of universal semantic primitives"¹², whose development is the focus of her work. (The concepts "good" and "life", which I used above to define the basic ethical principle I am proposing, are included in her inventory of universal semantic primitives.) However, this is no help for those who wish for universal moral laws, because translatability does not equal universality. Wierzbicka shows that there are stark differences between the vocabulary available in different languages for talking about personal characteristics seen as morally good or bad. In her view, historical processes account for these differences.

In medieval Europe, including England, the sin called "superbia" (that is, 'bad pride') was regarded as the "king of all vices", as the "eldest daughter of hell", and as the "leader of Sins". Yet in modern English there is not even a word to refer to this concept. Is this an accident of language or a meaningful expression of culture and society?

I believe it is the latter. The idea that it is good to view oneself as 'small' and that it is bad to view oneself as 'great' lay at the heart of the medieval European world view and was expressed in the contrast between the virtue of 'humilitas' and the vice of 'superbia'.

The spread of the ideology of humanism was of course hard to reconcile with that idea, and from the time of the Renaissance both 'humility' and 'superbia' lost their central place in the European moral outlook. It appears, however, that in the Anglo-Saxon culture this process of decline of both 'humilitas' and 'superbia' went further than in other European countries. Presumably, the relevant factor was religion, and it appears that in Catholic countries the concepts in question maintained their position better than they did in Protestant countries. Weber's speculations about the link between the Protestant ethic and the development of capitalism may apply to the concepts of 'humility' and 'bad pride'.... If an ethical ideology places a great emphasis on individual success and competition, then it is hard for it to continue to regard 'pride' as the "king of all vices". The thought 'I am better than other people' can no longer be regarded as the root of all evil; on the contrary, it must come to be seen as linked with 'cardinal virtues' rather than with cardinal sins.¹³

This is not to say that no moral norm can possibly apply to all human beings; only that any such cases would be the result of similarities between the ways in which all human beings live, rather than of the inherent universality of sound moral judgements. However, observations of these sorts of similarities are of limited ethical value. Universality is not the same as validity. For example, let us suppose that until recently, all human societies without exception had assigned a subordinate status to women. This would mean that for a long period of time, women's subordinate status had been a universal norm. Yet we would still have every reason to reject that norm.

Even if universal and valid moral norms can exist, we cannot know at present what they might be. It is impossible for us to imagine in any detail, from our current vantage point, how all the world's societies would function if all the socially producible conditions for a good life were met for everyone on Earth. This is partly because of the inherent difficulty of predicting future events, partly because of the vast complexity of any real world order, and partly because, as Adorno points out, even our moral intuitions are currently damaged. As long as the whole world has not yet had the opportunity to verify empirically what it is to live in societies that look after everyone's well-being, we will not be able to know what global well-being is and what norms are capable of sustaining it, still less which of those norms could be considered universal in that scenario. Questions of universality are therefore of purely academic interest.

Habermas is concerned that if moral dialogue abandons the attempt to produce universally valid norms, it will be reduced to a mere reflection of the balance of power between the participants:

...the idea of impartiality, which cognitivist moral philosophers develop in the form of universality principles, cannot be reduced to the idea of a balance of power. Testing a norm to determine whether one can ascribe to it [the] predicate "equally good for everyone" demands an impartial judgment about the interests of all concerned. This requirement is not met by equality of opportunity to make one's own interests prevail.... In the first case it is assumed that the parties concerned perceive the common interest of all. In the second case it is assumed that generalizable interests are not at issue. Participants in a practical discourse strive to clarify a common interest, whereas in negotiating a compromise they try to strike a balance between conflicting particular interests.¹⁴

There is something valid in what Habermas is saying here, but it isn't quite what he seems to think it is, and it doesn't support his conclusion. What is certainly valid is his dissatisfaction with a type of politics characterised by negotiation, which Marion Gret and Yves Sintomer define in the following way:

Political negotiation is a particular type of bargaining. In this dynamic, interests, values, identities and motivations exist prior to political exchange, which is used in an instrumental way, everyone looking out for number one, as it were. At best, it makes it possible to satisfy, or fail to satisfy, partially or totally, these conflicting interests, values or identities. Negotiation enables the comparison and aggregation of extremely diverse demands, and facilitates choice by means of such mechanisms as voting. In this logic, the force of the arguments exchanged resides less in their intrinsic fairness than in their adequacy with regard to preliminary power relations: an argument can prevail because it 'counts' for so many voters or participants at an assembly, or so much investment, and so forth. People confront one another in strategic fashion and the common good is merely constructed on an aggregative basis, by counting up particular interests. It is never anything but the sum total of corporatisms, or more exactly of their majority.¹⁵

What is the alternative? Here we need to ask two questions about what Habermas proposes. First, what does it mean to make "an impartial judgment about the interests of all concerned" in which "the parties concerned perceive the common interest of all"?

Does it mean that all parties fully understand each other's interests, values, identities and motivations, and can therefore evaluate each other's needs as well as they can evaluate their own needs? What does it mean to "perceive the common interest"? Does it mean that everyone understands fully how a proposed solution will affect everyone else concerned, as well as those others understand it themselves? For example, does it mean that I, a non-Catholic, need to understand Catholic theology in order to agree to the construction of a Catholic seminary in my town? For without such an understanding, how can I hope to make an impartial judgement? A possible objection is that it is enough to understand in a general sense what a seminary is. Perhaps this is sufficient to enable me to understand some of the consequences of the proposal (e.g. that since a seminary is a building it will require heating, etc.), but how can I know when I have understood enough to decide whether the seminary is really needed? This problem becomes all the more serious the greater the number of specialised subjects I am called upon to understand; in a large society, I may find that I only have time to gain the most superficial understanding of many pressing issues. There are undoubtedly problems (e.g. certain psychological disorders) that can only be understood by people who have experienced them. The more superficial my understanding is of other people's problems, the more I will have to trust them to tell me their needs, rather than attempting to make an impartial judgement of my own.

Second, even if we all reach an agreement on the common interest, there are formidable obstacles to any attempt to derive a valid universal moral law from our decision. In fact, with respect to universalisability, our town faces the same problems with Kantian ethics that Habermas's discourse ethics was meant to solve. First we would need to identify the "maxim" of our decision. But real decisions must often be justified by a complex mixture of moral and practical reasons. Our decision is necessarily contingent on our particular set of circumstances, e.g. on the fact that we had a bad harvest this year, or conversely that we happen to have an unused building that could be made into a seminary. In order to know which aspects of our decision to isolate as the maxim, we would need to determine which parts could be applicable to people elsewhere. Should this be a maxim about Catholic seminaries, about educational or religious instutions, about finding uses for unused buildings, or perhaps about resource allocation in general? Any these ways of framing the problem and its solution might be applicable to someone, somewhere, someday.

At one extreme, we could say, "All towns exactly like ours, in exactly the same situation, should do exactly what we did." Such a maxim might be universalisable (perhaps everyone in the world would agree that in our circumstances, they would have done the same thing), at the expense of being applicable only once in history. At the other extreme, we could say, "All proposals regarding religion or education should always be approved." But this would clearly be an impractical rule. We might try to choose a middle ground, and say, "All proposed educational or religious institutions should always be established, as long as this does not interfere with higher-priority projects." But this sidesteps the heart of the matter: how should we determine which projects should be given a higher priority? Moreover, how can we be sure that this formulation (or any other) does not leave out some crucial aspect of our situation, which, if changed, would have rendered our decision invalid? How, indeed, can we be sure that our decision was in fact valid? Unanimous agreement on a particular course of action does not guarantee that it is a good one. We may later realise that we made a mistake.

Whatever we choose as our maxim, the only way to be sure that it is universal is to do an empirical study, i.e. to find out whether other groups of people, faced with similar problems, have invariably agreed on solutions similar to ours. The only way to determine with any certainty whether it is also universally valid is to find out whether, in all those cases, everyone affected still agreed with those solutions after they had been put to the test. (Even then, as with all knowledge, there can only be degrees of certainty; previously unanimously accepted norms might always turn out to have had unintended long-term consequences and might therefore need to be modified or abandoned.) Social norms (universal or otherwise) can only be identified retrospectively, through an examination of many real decisions taken by particular groups of people, not speculatively, on the basis of only one instance of decision-making. In other words, the identification of norms is a task for sociology, not for philosophy. While the search for the moral norms of different social groups can be carried out at any time, it is currently impossible to determine which norms are plausible candidates for universal validity, for the reason given above: the necessary empirical data will not be available until a global social transformation, establishing the socially producible conditions for everyone's well-being, has already taken place.

Even if this were possible today, it would not help anyone in our situation arrive at a decision. Let us carry out a thought experiment. Suppose that in the future, global well-being becomes a reality, and an empirical study is done that conclusively identifies universally valid moral norms. Suppose further that a time machine is invented that enables people to send messages back into the past. (For the purposes of this thought experiment, we will ignore the usual paradoxes associated with time machines.) Here in the present day, before that social transformation has taken place, we receive a message from the future, listing those universal norms, and one of them reads: "Everyone should be able to practice their religion." Such a norm will not help us make a decision about the seminary, because in our instance of real decision-making, the need for a seminary will need to be weighed against other priorities (even among Catholics), and we may all finally agree that other needs should come first for now. The putative universal norm does not give us any indication of how to weigh religious needs against other sorts of needs. More to the point, once we have acknowledged that everyone should have a good life by their own standards, we do not need a universal norm to tell us that those standards may include religious ones; the Catholics in our town will tell us that.

Thus our inability to identify universally valid moral rules does not matter in practice. All that matters is that we are able to solve the problems that come up to the satisfaction of everyone affected. By way of analogy, we can observe that, while it is certainly interesting for a linguist such as Anna Wierzbicka to conduct empirical studies to find out which concepts are universal, i.e. present in all languages, the absence of an answer to this question doesn't in any way prevent translators from doing their jobs, or individuals from learning foreign languages.

The alternative to negotiation suggested by Gret and Sintomer does not require impartial judgements about needs and remedies, nor does it imply that universally valid norms might be generated:

Political deliberation, on the other hand, establishes a special kind of play, characterized by powerful constraints. One does not walk away from deliberation 'unscathed': one's motivations and convictions, one's conception of one's own identity and interests, are put to the test. This experience is frequent in everyday life: one emerges 'shaken' from a conversation, and though one can grumble or behave outwardly as if it were nothing, one cannot resist being convinced by the arguments exchanged. Public deliberation establishes a true dialogue: pure egotistical reasoning has little chance of convincing those listening. Public deliberation implies the capacity to take the interests and values of the other into account. The point is not merely to 'put oneself in someone else's place' in their absence, through silent introspection: one has to face the actual arguments of actual interlocutors who alone are able to bring you out of yourself. Of course the arguments exchanged in political deliberation differ considerably from those used in the scientific field in that they cannot be rigorously proved, and are more or less convincing (or unconvincing) rather than more or less true (or false). But as the French philosopher Claude Lefort has argued, they make it possible for different parties, if not to come to an agreement, then at least to be able to listen to one another. Public discussion has a dynamic that encourages generalization, surpassing the selfishness of individual points of view to inscribe the individual into a broader collectivity or community.¹⁶

I can accept that for a group of Catholics it is important to have a seminary, that this will improve their quality of life, simply because they assert that it's part of their standards for well-being. I don't need to know anything about Catholicism. In order to convince me that the seminary should be given higher priority than something else, they will have to show that the resources they wish to use could not be used to improve the well-being of someone who is worse off, i.e. whose need is more urgent. To an extent, this comparison can be made impartially: it is easier to determine whether people are content with their life than to understand Catholic theology. But if people are not content, it will always be necessary, to an extent, to trust their judgement about the remedies needed, precisely because often we are not in a position to understand their situation as well as they do. We can be impartial in seeing everyone's well-being as equally urgent, but we cannot always be impartial in determining people's needs, because that would require knowledge we cannot always possess.

Impediments to Dialogue

This is not the place to make a thorough study the characteristics of good political deliberation, but I want to consider some of the reasons why deliberation can fail, and in so doing to address some common objections to the idea that successful deliberation is even possible.

An extreme case is when a participant is mad. In a conflict between an individual and a group, it is also possible that the individual is sane and the group is mad. (Everything I say here about individuals and groups should be taken to apply equally to minorities and majorities.) It is not necessarily always possible to know who is mad and who is sane, because madness can be diagnosed only with the help of someone else, who might themselves be mad.

Lesser impairments are widespread. As I observed at the beginning of this essay, individual choice presumes social processes; these processes shape people's knowledge of their options and their judgement about what is best for them. This line of argument leads to what is usually called the "problem of expensive tastes". As Elizabeth Anderson puts it:

Some people--spoiled brats, snobs, sybarites--have preferences that are expensive to satisfy. It takes a lot more resources to satisfy them to the same degree that a modest, self-controlled person can be satisfied. If equalizing welfare or opportunities for welfare were the object of equality, then the satisfaction of self-controlled people would be held hostage to the self-indulgent. This seems unfair. Resource egalitarians argue, therefore, that people should be entitled to equal resources, but be held responsible for developing their tastes so that they can live satisfactorily within their means.¹⁷

This problem is similar to the one Adorno warns about: it is likely that some people, whose present way of life is unsustainable and incompatible with the well-being of others, would be equally content with a different way of life, but cannot know this, because the pleasures of that other way of life are unfamiliar to them, and must be experienced to be appreciated.

I will suggest one possible solution to this problem in the next section, but first I want to examine its causes. Tastes do not appear out of nowhere. Building on Marx's account of commodity fetishism,¹⁸ Gramsci and Althusser have argued that institutions such as education and the media function as ideological apparatuses¹⁹; these institutions make people believe that, by pursuing lives in which acquisition is the main source of satisfaction, they are freely expressing an autonomous subjectivity. This is necessary in order to offset the cold, alienating character of "damaged life" that Adorno eloquently describes, in which enforced competition makes solidarity a rare luxury. It also serves to mask the awareness that, in a capitalist society, the safety net that protects individuals from misfortune is often precariously thin, and is at best constantly under threat of being dismantled.

In order to loosen the grip of such ideologies, and to enable those who are attached to them to imagine another way of life, we can envisage transitional forms of society, in which people can participate on a small scale in some of the processes that will characterise the transformed society, and experience the benefits of those processes. Arguably, in a society based on the sort of cooperative production that I will sketch out below, we could expect the satisfactions of cooperative work and solidarity to reappear, compensating for the loss of other pleasures. Taking the Trobriand Islanders of Western Melanesia as an example, Karl Polanyi argued:

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only so far as they serve this end. Neither the process of production nor that of distribution is linked to specific economic interests attached to the possession of goods; but every single step in that process is geared to a number of social interests which eventually ensure that the required step be taken. These interests will be very different in a small hunting or fishing community from those in a vast despotic society, but in either case the economic system will be run on noneconomic motives....

In this sketch of the general traits characteristic of a Western Melanesian community.... it is on this one negative point that modern ethnographers agree: the absence of the motive of gain; the absence of the principle of laboring for remuneration; the absence of the principle of least effort; and, especially, the absence of any separate and distinct institution based on economic motives.

The answer is provided in the main by two principles of behavior not primarily associated with economics: reciprocity and redistribution.²⁰

Reciprocity means that one's social standing and reputation depend on one's "good behaviour", specifically on specific obligatory acts of generosity. The giver is indirectly compensated for these acts because others fulfil their obligations for the same reasons. Redistribution means that, similarly, a substantial portion of everything produced is given to the village chief, who redistributes it as gifts, according to the rules of etiquette, on ceremonial occasions which are the focus of communal life.

Reciprocity is enormously facilitated by the institutional pattern of symmetry, a frequent feature of social organization among nonliterate peoples.... each coastal village on the Trobriand Islands appears to have its counterpart in an inland village, so that the important exchange of breadfruits and fish, though disguised as a reciprocal distribution of gifts, and actually disjoint in time, can be organized smoothly. In the Kula trade, too, each individual has his partner on another isle, thus personalizing to a remarkable extent the relationship of reciprocity.²¹

If Polanyi is right, one goal of social transformation ought to be to embed economic processes in social relationships based on reciprocity and redistribution, whose satisfactions could replace those of competitive acquisition.

Proportional Influence

I want to return to Habermas's suspicion of a politics based on a "balance of power". It is important to distinguish what this term refers to in existing political systems, and what it might refer to in a political system based on the sort of ethics I am proposing here. In current societies, those who have more wealth or military strength, or are more numerous, can have more power than others, and this sort of power is what gives the idea of a "balance of power" a bad name. But there can be no politics without power. Even if we aim to construct a system based on deliberation as outlined above, some sort of political power must exist to require this deliberation to take place. We must therefore consider how power ought to be allocated. Consider these examples given by Michael Albert:

Imagine a worker in a large group. He or she wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The one worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case.

Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk, and to play it very loud, listening to raucous rock and roll or even heavy metal. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered -- or more benefited -- should have more say.

And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-à-vis decision making.... What we hope to accomplish when we choose a mode of decision making as well as associated processes of discussion, agenda setting, and so on, is that each actor should have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by them.²²

Let us call this the doctrine of "proportional influence". It represents a very different sort of "balance of power" from that which exists in existing political systems. With proportional influence, the influence of your group over an issue isn't proportional to how many people are in your group; it's proportional to how much that issue affects your well-being. If you're a small group, but your life is threatened, that should give you more power than a large group that is merely facing an inconvenience.

Albert's examples concern highly localised issues. It is worth considering the implications of this doctrine for large-scale problems as well, such as environmental degradation. There is widespread agreement among scientists that if the present worldwide use of fossil fuels is not drastically reduced, the resulting climate change will ruin the environment in which many people live. This is the view expressed by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

Overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries.... Warming of a few degrees or more is projected to increase food prices globally, and may increase the risk of hunger in vulnerable populations.... Climate change will exacerbate water shortages in many water-scarce areas of the world... The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water, and other resources.²³

Proportional influence means that those who will be most severely affected -- the poorest, particularly in the regions that stand to be the hardest hit -- should have the greatest influence over the world's use or abandonment of fossil fuels.

What sort of decision-making processes are capable of implementing this doctrine? More will be said about this in a future version of this essay, but here I want to point out a few considerations that the construction of any such processes must take into account.

I have already mentioned one constraint on decision-making in large groups: the greater the number of participants in a discussion, the longer it takes. Moreover, large meetings where individuals can speak one after the other often resemble a series of unrelated monologues, rather than a discussion progressing towards a collective decision. Decision-making processes for large numbers of people must therefore use heuristics to identify the main points of agreement and disagreement, and craft proposals that are likely to be acceptable to all. Attempts to do this often take the form of some type of delegation.

What sorts of delegation are up to the task? Making decisions to promote other people's well-being requires knowing their needs and having the will to champion those needs. This is a risky endeavour at best. Anyone who has tried to make difficult decisions on behalf of a spouse, family member or close friend knows that, even with the best of intentions, it is easy to make mistakes. If making decisions for someone you know well is difficult, making decisions for thousands or millions of complete strangers is an enterprise bordering on madness. But when applied to parliamentary democracy, such a critique is too kind, because it presumes a world in which political candidates are motivated by the best of intentions. In reality, parliaments are an ideal instrument for consolidating the power of a particular class:

...that characteristic bourgeois political system we know as parliamentary democracy [is] the style of regime with which all ambitious, prosperous, and self-confident bourgeoisies feel most comfortable, precisely because it maximizes their power and minimizes that of their competitors.... Money is crucial for sustained electoral success, and money is precisely the resource with which the bourgeoisie is most amply endowed. On the other hand, the prestige of electoral politics, if it can be solidly entrenched, serves to delegitimize extra-parliamentary political activity--especially strikes, demonstrations, and popular movements, which the bourgeoisie is less likely to be able to control and may, on occasion, profoundly fear.²⁴

Another, more general failing of delegation is worth mentioning. Delegation tends to give priority to problems that affect many people. This is a reasonable heuristic, because many serious problems are like that. But when delegation is used, there must also be ways for small numbers of people with serious problems, and even for individuals, to escalate their issue, bypassing the normal decision-making processes, in order to get society to spend more than the usual amount of resources on examining the problem, determining its gravity, and solving it. A challenge for designers of decision-making systems is to make escalation fair, so that it remains exceptional and excludes frivolous complaints, while responding quickly and effectively to serious ones.

In existing forms of government, escalation is typically implemented by judicial systems. But such systems have serious inherent limitations. Courtroom discussions are limited to a small number of participants; a trial is not a broad popular consultation, capable of meeting the requirements for proportional influence. Moreover, judicial power is dependent on the military and political power of the state, which is in turn based on economic power. Returning to the environmental example, in a world in which fossil fuels are one of the main sources of that economic power, no judicial system can produce a ban on fossil fuels. Rather, fossil fuels must be abolished by replacing the economic processes that depend on them, from below rather than from above. Judicial processes are therefore better suited to resolving local problems by making small exceptions to standard practice than to solving large-scale problems by introducing sweeping and innovative reforms.

If proportional influence can be implemented on a large scale, it appears to offer a solution to the problem of expensive tastes. If people have the power to obstruct important decisions when they feel their needs have not been met, there are two possible political outcomes: compromise and paralysis. In such situations, survival depends on compromise; that should be a strong incentive.

Cooperative Economic Management

What sorts of economic arrangements would enable societies to attain the goal of well-being for all? Within any group of people, standards for well-being will include a constellation of requirements, many of them involving work and the availability of goods and services. How can those requirements be translated into economic processes? There is no single answer: different groups of people, in different times and places, will have different priorities and will be faced with different circumstances. However, I think we can imagine some elements that most answers to this question would probably contain.

To satisfy needs, we must use resources, such as land and labour. We will therefore need to set about matching resources to needs. Many resources are scarce. When considering how best to use scarce resources, one must set priorities. A group could begin by attempting first to devise an economic strategy that would meet its highest-priority needs. If such a strategy is found and sufficient resources remain, lower-priority needs can be accommodated in turn.

How can priorities be set among different needs? The urgency of well-being can serve as a guide: it will be most important to meet needs that will improve the quality of life of those who are worst off, or protect the well-being of those who are most at risk. The goal of a political system based on proportional influence is indeed to enable those groups of people to have the greatest say in setting society's priorities.

To assess the risks and possible adverse effects of a proposed economic strategy, one can examine its inputs and outputs (what is produced and where it goes, what is consumed and where it comes from), and examine the dependencies that these inputs and outputs would create. Some dependencies can be rejected as too risky; others can be rejected as incompatible with the group's own well-being or with that of others.

For example, every economic strategy depends on environmental resources. It is self-defeating to depend on the depletion of scarce resources, or to damage aspects of the environment on which well-being depends. Human dependencies include relationships between producers and consumers. A region whose economy depends on the export of a single commodity will find its well-being in danger if the demand for that commodity decreases; this risk may be deemed excessive.

As needs and circumstances change, economic processes will have to change to accommodate them. Change introduces risk. One way to reduce the risk of change is to begin with a prototype on a small scale. In addition to testing whether a new process actually works, a prototype can help identify unforeseen dependencies that the process involves.

We can broadly imagine a process of periodic collective deliberation in which a people living in a political unit would consider the needs to be met and the available resources, and design a strategy that, in their view, would meet those needs without introducing unacceptable dependencies, using the sort of political system hinted at in the previous section. Participatory Economics²⁵ is one proposal for such a process.

Strategies for Social Transformation

Certain kinds of strategies for social transformation follow from the preceding discussion. Real strategies, of course, are rooted not only in ethical principles, but also in concrete circumstances, in the histories and opportunities of particular times and places. It is possible, however, to indicate a few ways in which this particular ethical approach can guide strategy.

Proportional influence would require political systems very different from nearly all those in existence today. Such systems would need to be invented and tested, and a body of knowledge would need to be developed about their use.

I have briefly mentioned the value of a transitional period; now I can better explain what I mean by this. During this period, productive transitional organisations could be created to meet high-priority needs such as food and shelter; these organisations would use, as much as possible, political and economic processes that a transformed society could be based on. The experience of participating in these organisations would enable people to imagine more clearly what life would be like in a transformed society, and what their needs would be in such a society. These organisations would also function as prototypes, to reduce the risk of bringing about a failed social transformation. Inevitably, different organisations would adopt different approaches (e.g. different decision-making processes), and could therefore learn from each other's successes and failures.

Transitional organisations would not be able to fully implement proportional influence, which would allow everyone affected by them to have power over them, because this would require the creation of a political system capable of including the entire society, and such a system cannot exist until a large-scale social transformation has taken place. Therefore, in their relations with the rest of society, transitional organisations would need a strategy of heuristics, aimed at approximating as closely as possible the results that they would be able to obtain from true proportional influence.

At the outset, transitional organisations would depend heavily on the capitalist economy; this dependency would be a risk (as it is for most of us who depend on that economy). Over time, they would have to decrease this dependency by increasing and diversifying their own productive capacities, so that they could depend more on each other. As a result of this process, society would come to depend increasingly on the these organisations, and less and less on the pre-transitional structures, until the old structures could be abandoned entirely.

A Critique of Human Rights

It is worth comparing an ethics of well-being with another sort of ethics that is widely accepted: the ethics of human rights.

Rights have a clear role to play in contracts. If you and I agree to an exchange of goods, and I don't honour my end of the bargain even though it is well within my ability to do so, you have a legitimate grievance, and would expect a fair judicial system to grant you some sort of remedy.

Human rights describe expectations that far exceed this limited sphere of application. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights²⁶ adopted by the United Nations begins by saying that "human rights should be protected by the rule of law". However, it lists many rights that cannot be enforced in this way. For example:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

Suppose that I do not have access to a reasonable standard of living, or to education, and that I therefore conclude that my rights have been violated. To what judicial body should I bring my grievance? The courts of national judicial systems judge violations of the law, and no law has been broken in this case. Even supposing some national or international court were competent to hear the case, and ruled in my favour, what remedy could they propose? If my country has no public education or health care system, a court ruling will not suffice to create one. It is not obvious what form such a system should take; the Declaration does not, and could not, spell this out in detail. Any such system will inevitably affect many people besides me; they should also have a say in its design. In other words, the creation of public services is a legislative responsibility, not a judicial one. The fulfilment of that responsibility requires a political system that is accountable to all citizens. But if my country had such a political system, citizens would already be able to create the public services they need, and there would be no need to speak of human rights.

If there were any doubt that human rights are not the sorts of rights that can be protected by a judicial system, the Declaration adds:

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

No court could ever be capable of imposing a new social and international order on the world; therefore, such a right cannot be "protected by the rule of law". Instead, social transformation will be needed; new political and economic institutions will have to be created. But the concept of rights does not help us to envisage those institutions, still less a transformation that could bring them about. The basic problem is that the concept of rights makes sense only in the context of a judicial process, but the aspirations expressed as human rights cannot possibly be satisfied by any such process. Therefore it seems to me that the concept of a human right is incoherent.

The Universal Declaration lists some rights that are very vague:

Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance.

Others are very specific:

No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

We may therefore ask: why were these rights chosen, and not others? This question is especially pertinent since the Declaration purports to enumerate universal rights. On what grounds should we accept these rights as universal? From what do they derive their legitimacy? The Declaration offers no answer to this question. But there is a deeper problem with the claim to universality.

Consider the right concerning motherhood and childhood. The human need it refers to may well be universal, but it is described so vaguely that it is impossible to know what it might mean in practice. One could certainly imagine a society that, by means of a devious interpretation of the words "care" and "assistance", conformed to this principle by implementing processes that would horrify the mothers and children affected. However, any attempt to make it more specific would risk sacrificing its universality. In different societies, mothers and children will have different ideas about exactly what sort of care and assistance they should receive.

In order to get round this problem, we could propose reducing all human rights to a single one, the right to well-being, and leave the definition of well-being up to the people affected. Then, for example, mothers and children could decide for themselves what sort of special care and assistance they require. But then the goal of well-being would be doing all the work; it's not clear what, if anything, the concept of rights would be contributing. Since a human right does not give mothers and children any means of ensuring that their needs are met, their success in reaching that goal will depend on their political power alone.

I will mention a final problem with rights: why should anyone care about them at all? Consider this one:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

If I agree that no one should be subjected to torture (as I do), it is surely because I believe that everyone's well-being matters and should always be protected. But in that case, I don't need to be told that torture is wrong. Conversely, if I don't care about people's well-being, why should I care about their rights?

In short, human rights are inherently unenforceable and therefore incoherent. Unlike the concept of well-being, they do not help us formulate a strategy for reaching the objectives they describe. Their attempt to be universal forces them to be too vague to provide any practical guidance. And they seem to presume a concern for well-being, without adding anything useful to that concern.

It may be that this is, in fact, what human rights are intended to do: express a concern for well-being in a manner that is bound to be ineffective. An effective concern would require the transformation of the existing political and economic order, which most governments are at pains to protect. I am sure that many well-intentioned people believe that caring about well-being and caring about human rights are the same thing; I hope this essay will give them reason to reconsider.

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Notes

1. P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment" (1962), in Freedom and Resentment, London: Methuen, 1974. Reproduced here.

2. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q 10, II, §31.

3. For a parody of this state of affairs, see Tissues in the Profession: Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things?

4. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia. London: Verso, 1974, p. 156.

5. Mikayo Yamashita et al., "The structure of yutori and its functions", Japanese Psychological Research, 2001, vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 225-34.

6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §1.

7. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), tr. Allen Wood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, Ak 4:429.

8. Ibid., Ak 4:428.

9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "A Lecture on Ethics", 1965, The Philosophical Review 74: 3-12. Reproduced here.

10. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983). Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 67.

11. Anna Wierzbicka, Semantics, Culture, and Cognition (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 183.

12. Ibid., p. 200. The current list of semantic primes can be found on the Natural Semantic Metalanguage web site.

13. Ibid., p. 198.

14. Habermas, op. cit., p. 72.

15. Marion Gret and Yves Sintomer, The Porto Alegre Experiment: Learning Lessons for Better Democracy, tr. Stephen Wright (London: Zed Books, 2005), p. 115. (Translation of Porto Alegre: L'espoir d'une autre démocratie, Paris, La Découverte, 2002.)

16. Ibid., pp. 115-116.

17. Elizabeth S. Anderson, "What Is the Point of Equality?", Ethics 109, no. 2 (January 1999). Reproduced here.

18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 163-77.

19. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press (1971). Reproduced here.

20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, pp. 49-50.

21. Ibid., p. 51.

22. http://www.zmag.org/alblacpe.htm

23. Robert T. Watson (ed.), Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 9-12.

24. Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World. London: Verso, 1998, pp. 182-184.

25. http://www.parecon.org

26. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

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