Perspectives on Morality and Human Well-Being. Syed Nawab Haider Naqvi
therefore, be necessary to make acts of non-contribution subject to penal action, even if it is accepted that, as Nozick asserts, the poor have no moral right to aid. In this connection a distinction can be made between people who may desire to be charitable and those who desire that the poor should be provided for. In the latter case, free-rider and assurance problems will apply with even greater force because knowledge that the poor have been provided for by someone may satisfy their rather shallow concern for the poor. What may not be so obvious is that the outcome will be no different in the former case as well. The need for government action, therefore, remains vital in both cases. The point is that foundational issues such as poverty alleviation cannot be addressed just by appealing to moral intuition and voluntary beneficence, and leaving it at that.
Fourthly, Nozick’s defence of the nearly unlimited right to private property, on the ground that inequities in income and wealth mostly flow from the differential abilities of the people and their use of these abilities, is also weak. It neglects the cumulative adverse effect of the morally unexceptionable individual cases in which merit is rewarded. But “to assume that the cumulative result of a series of just actions must itself be just is to commit the fallacy of composition” [Allen Buchanan (1985); p. 68].9 In fact, wealthy individuals, even those who earn their wealth legitimately, come to exercise a disproportionate amount of political, social and economic influence, which is then used to deny (poor) people their legitimate political and economic rights. Finally, Nozick’s insistence that the state confine itself only to preventing the violations of “negative freedoms” (i.e., the freedoms from…., rather than the freedoms to...) is altogether extraordinary because having some freedoms does not by itself guarantee that the same will also be exercised effectively. Thus, for instance, large inequalities of income and wealth preclude poor people’s exercise of their political rights (say, to free speech and to free political participation). Sen (1999b) observes: “Economic unfreedom can breed social unfreedom, just as social or political unfreedom can also foster economic unfreedom” (p. 8). Whence follows that some coercion (state intervention) is required even to achieve the libertarian’s apparently well-meaning aim that no one should have a greater moral right than any other. This is granted even by Hayek (1960), who recognises that a free society has conferred on the state a “monopoly of coercion” to protect “known private spheres of the individual against interference by others...” (p. 21). It is really common sense to assert that the worth of most rights lies in people’s ability to use them rather than in the mere knowledge that they have them. For these reasons, Nagel (1975) has derided Nozick’s entitlement theory as “libertarianism without foundations”.
c) The ‘Morality’ of Utilitarianism
Nineteenth century utilitarian philosophy (due to Jeremy Bentham), which has dominated economic thought, has been regarded as a theory of distributive justice. The maximisation rule says: “seek the greatest good for the greatest number”. ‘Good’ here has been synonymously used with (mental state) subjectively experienced individual happiness; and it is measured exclusively in terms of the metric of utility. Thus, those aspects of life which cannot be translated into a utility number (e.g., the fulfilment/violation of rights, duties, etc.) are excluded from the utilitarian calculus of human happiness.10 Sen (1987; 1999a; 1999b) points out that utilitarianism has three irreducible components: (i) ‘welfarism’, that which reflects the goodness of the human condition in a given state as a function of only the utility information about that state; (ii) ‘sum-ranking’, that which instructs that the utility information about a given state be measured only by the sum-total of utilities in that state, paying no regard to the distribution of this total among the individuals; and (iii) ‘consequentialism’, that which weighs the worth of any action and institution by their consequences, as measured by the utilities they generate. The aim of public policy should, therefore, be to maximise social welfare, which is defined as the sum-total of utilities generated by it. It is not always clear whether the maximisation of utility is secured through the market or brought about by the government; but that should not matter. All that utilitarianism requires is maximising the sum-total, regardless of how it is distributed.11
The utilitarian approach to distributive justice has the wisdom to seek information about the consequences entailed by specific policies. The objective is to evaluate the worth of such policies and to redesign them on the basis of such information. Quite properly, it worries about the well-being (welfare) of the people in the design of public policy. But its demerits offset its merits as a basis for public policy. Firstly, its central instruction to the policymaker: “seek the greatest good of the greatest number” is, at best, an ambiguous formula to maximise human economic well-being. Now, if this instruction is taken to mean that, for any given population, “aim at that distribution of resources that maximizes social welfare (measured by the sum total of utilities), and then choose a population size which maximizes this number”, then such a policy will, obviously, give no more than is necessary to keep the largest number of population so chosen at little more than starvation level [Roemer (1996)]! More specific instructions are required. To this end, if it is assumed, as some economists do, that utility functions are the same for all people, then the maximisation of total utility, for a given population size, will give equal distribution. However, if utility functions are not the same across individuals (which is a more sensible assumption to make), then the instruction to maximise total utility will result in extremely unequal distribution levels for individuals. This situation is not significantly changed if the maximisation of utility through the market is backed by decent government-backed safety nets. This is because it does not follow from it that “maximizing total utility would justify a decent minimum for everyone” [Allen Buchanan (1985); p. 59; italics in the original]. Furthermore, utility as a subjective mental state measure does not adequately register the pleasure/pain experiences of different individuals. Thus, a disabled person, or one who is resigned to his/her fallen state (e.g., a slave), may not register the same pleasure/pain as a person enjoying good health and the blessings of freedom. But, on the utilitarian scale, the latter will get more than the former; and some of the former may be altogether excluded from the benefits flowing from public policy. Thus, far from suggesting any progressive egalitarianism, utilitarianism will actually recommend a highly regressive social policy!
Secondly, utilitarianism suffers from a deep dilemma. it works only if interpersonal comparisons of the utilities of different people affected by a change is allowed; but in this case all the unsavoury distributional consequences noted above will follow. But, if interpersonal comparisons of individuals are not allowed, which is what neo-classical economists have invariably come to believe since the 1930s, then utilitarianism will lose all operational significance.12 It is for this reason that it has been replaced by the Pareto-optimality criterion, which does not make this assumption. In this sense, Pareto-optimality can be regarded as a second-best indicator of human well-being (the first-best indicator being the inoperational utilitarianism). But, as noted above, Pareto-optimality and utilitarianism, are entirely focused on efficiency and not at all on distributive justice; nor do they represent a mutually advantageous arrangement – the former, because it places restrictions on how the sum-total of utility is distributed as long as the net amount of benefits are as high as possible; and the latter, because it does not recognise any conflict of interest between parties to the exchange. Little wonder, then, that utilitarianism has all but been discarded in modern scientific discourse. The irony is that the inter-personal comparisons of utilities are again back in intellectual fashion; and yet utilitarianism remains discredited. The reason is that utilities are not the proper metric to register adequately and correctly any increase/decrease in human happiness, or well-being.
The (positive) collective-choice theories reviewed so far assume no trade-offs between rival interests; public choices, therefore, help everyone. We now turn to those (normative) collective-choice theories which postulate a more realistic social setting where ideas and