I’ve now finished Elizabeth Anderson’s Value in Ethics and Economics, with mixed reactions. The part I really liked is her critique of utilitarianism/consequentialism. She advocates a ‘pluralist-expressive’ approach to value.
Consequentialism “promises to provide a single, simple, precise and determinate procedure of justification that employs objective calculation to overcome disputes about what to do.” Deliberation – be it rational or not – aims to deliver an optimum result on a single dimension. This is inevitably reductionist because all goods need to be made commensurate. This approach has the merit of making decisions easy to explain, and an inherent pragmatism because after all choices are always inevitable.
Anderson’s ‘expressive-pluralist’ alternative requires choices to be guided by norms which refer to ideals or evaluative concepts such as ‘respect’, ‘friendship’, ‘charity’. “Because their constitutive concepts are essentially contestable, the expressive theory cannot provide a procedure for respolving conflicting interpretations.” Confusingly, Anderson also describes this as pragmatic; I think she means realistic. This is, of course, what we do. “No compelling theoretical or practical reasons demand the global maximization of value. Evidence form our actual practice and failures to construct plausible global measures of value suggests there is no single measure of value valid for all contexts.”
The realism here is attractive, the reductionism of the former is not. And yet in public policy contexts where people’s conflicting values have to be considered, consequentialism has great force. This is more than pragmatic, I think. It serves in its own right as a form of evaluative concept to try to build consent for decisions. Having said that, of course one has to wear the pluralist spectacles too.
The weaker part of the book is the second half, applying the philosophy to an analysis of markets and cost benefit analysis. Like many critics of ‘markets’ she treats markets as an abstraction characterised by anonymity and concerned ‘merely’ with ‘use value’, absolutely failing to recognise that they are social institutions taking many forms and embedding social relations. Some economists are equally abstract, many are not. None I know would disagree with the statement that “the market does not provide a sufficient domain for the expression of all our valuations but must leave room for other social spheres to operate on non-market principles.” And while there are certainly major limitations with cost benefit analysis, some of which I’ve written about here and here, there is a choice when it comes to issues like valuing life (QALYs) or intrinsic environmental or heritage value: either try to do this in a common metric (money), or implicitly value them at zero.
Still, it’s an interesting book. And I’ve just been recommended her Private Government by my esteemed co-author Leonard Nakamura.
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