CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, VOL. 2, NO. 2, 1991

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MORRIS SILVER (1989) Foundations of Economic Justice. New York: Basil Blackwell. viii + 211 pp. Philosophical analyses of the nature of ethical judgment fall into two broad camps. The tradition that I shall call Kantian takes our understandings of right and wrong, good and bad to be grounded in the exercise of reason. Plato's ethics, most of the natural law tradition, and Kant himself maintain, albeit in very different ways, that it is through application of our rational faculties that we come to ascertain the rights and obligations we bear. Opposed to Kantianism is a Humean tradition of moral philosophy that lodges moral concepts and propositions in affective states, variously characterized as "passions," "emotions," "sentiments," or "feelings." This view's origins are traceable to the sophists, and it finds expression in Hobbes, Scottish enlightenment moralists, including Hume himself, and the logical positivism of this century. Silver unmistakably situates himself among the Humeans:" 'Right' and other moral or ethical terms belong to a family of what might be called feeling words. The emotive meaning of feeling words is covered by the rules or conventions of language. For instance, the meaning of the word 'fight' is comprehended by recalling a kind of feeling of approval. This feeling of approval is the common core meaning of 'right'." (12) Silver argues that the feelings associated with production and control of property are remarkably uniform over time, place, and persons. Within preliterate cultures and modern industrial societies alike, there exists a weft-nigh universal disposition to approve of individuals controlling that which they produce and to disapprove of any incursions by others on their holdings. Because of the ubiquity of this feeling, it is erroneous to hold, as many contemporary philosophers and economists do, that property relations are merely conventional--and thus subject to endless tinkering in the service of whatever goals may inspire the social planners. Rather, there are natural rights to property deriving from invariant traits of human nature. Silver constrnes these natural rights as robustly libertarian in substance, blocking all governmental and extragovernmental coercive transfers. Silver travels far afield in defense of this thesis. He draws heavily from the findings of psychology, sociobiology, anthropology and etymological research to support the uniformity assertion, and he critically examines, though not always with the accuracy that might be desired, the most significant recent arguments for conventionalism and redistributivism. Much of this material is useful. Unfortunately, though, the emotivist core of his theory is too crude to support the weight placed on it. Silver believes that he has discovered a means to firmly shore up libertarian rights, but what he has in fact (re)discovered is a Humean moral psychology. Unfortunately, it falls decisively short of the nuanced sophistication of its forebear. 243

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Central to the difficulties of this account is its promiscuous way with the category, "feelings." Taken in by language, Silver assigns to this category anything to which one might advert by expressions of the form, "So-and-so feels X." But this is to run roughshod over distinctions between affective states and discursive judgments. We say, " I feel angry," and "I feel pain in my left big toe," but also, "I feel that Gorbachev's perestroika policy is doomed to fail." Although these carry a superficial linguistic similarity, they differ fundamentally in their logic. "Feelings that" take propositions as their object and carry a truth value. "Feelings of' have as their objects emotional states. A feeling of anger may be appropriate or inappropriate given the circumstances, but it cannot be true or false. One's feeling that perestroika will fail, though, is to hold a belief, and that belief does not come attached to any particular affective coloration--though use of the "feeling" locution typically indicates either a certain tentativeness or conversational modesty on the part of the speaker. Whether that belief is well or ill-justified depends on rationally determinable relations between it and propositions standing to it as evidence, not on the timbre of the believer's internal psychological states. Because Silver runs together importantly different kinds of locutions, the ostensibly emotivist basis of his theory is undermined. So, for example, he writes in defense of freedom of exchange, "[I]ndividuals feel that they have produced the objects they previously agreed to accept from others in exchange for their services." (170, emphasis added) Whatever Silver may think, this is not to ground a normative prescription in affective states. Silver also fails to distinguish between mediated and unmediated emotional reactions. I taste rancid meat and am overcome by revulsion: this is a direct emotional response unmediated by a set of beliefs. I read in the newspaper that Madonna earns more in a year than do a thousand school teachers and am again overcome by revulsion: this is an emotional response predicated on beliefs I hold concerning the propriety of various social arrangements. If I did not antecedently hold those beliefs, I would not be repelled. Mediated, unlike unmediated, feelings are subject to rational suasion. When I receive instruction in the tenets of subjective utility theory I may come to realize that my previous responses were ill-judged and no longer begrudge Madonna her millions. Much of Silver's argument is question-begging because the emotional responses to which he appeals are mediated. Some people approve of taxation for redistributive purposes and others disapprove. These are not brute responses to experiential data but instead spring from beliefs about, say, the rightness of taking from producers to give to nonproducers or allowing some to live in misery while others enjoy luxuries. (Those feelings may, of course, also in part be a function of one's beliefs about the long term effects of different economic and political institutions.) Rather than being logically and psychologically basic, such mediated feelings are themselves consequent on moral judgments. Hume, unlike Silver, displays explicit awareness of the mediated character of our moral sentiments. It underpins his well-known distinction between natural and artificial virtues. Hume classifies justice as an artificial virtue because 244

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its rules cannot be reduced without remainder to our instinctive likes and dislikes. Thus he writes (A Treatise of Human Nature, Bk 3, Pt 3, See 1): When I relieve persons in distress, my natural humanity is my motive: and so far as my succour extends, so far have I promoted the happiness of my fellow-creatures. But if we examine all the questions that come before any tribunal of justice, we shall find that, considering each case apart, it would as often be an instance of humanity to decide contrary to the laws of justice as conformable to them. Judges take from a poor man to give to a rich; they bestow on the dissolute the labour of the industrious; and put into the hands of the vicious the means of harming both themselves and others. The whole scheme, however, of law and justice is advantageous to the society; and it was with a view to this advantage that men, by their voluntary conventions, established it. In other ways, too, Hume's moral psychology displays refinement absent from Foundations of Economic Justice. Like Silver, Hume aims to develop a theory based on a premise of generally uniform human nature, but he is aware that social practices and the patterns of approbation and disapprobation that give rise to them differ markedly across cultures. These discrepancies, he acknowledges, give an appearance of conflicting with the uniformity thesis. Deeper scrutiny reveals, however, that the same basic motivational stock is drawn upon in these disparate cases, giving rise to different social conventions in virtue of variations in environmental variables. Hume's discussions of the mechanisms through which this process operates represent one of the most subtle and profound components of his project. Silver, on the other hand, is often simply oblivious to differences. Concerning economic regulation he maintains, "The individual feels that he has been robbed just as surely as the individual who hands his wallet to the stick-up man to save his life." (22) By and large, people don't feel regulation to be the same as theft. Why they do not is well worth investigating, but this Silver never attempts. It is hardly an indictment of an author to say that his work does not display skill comparable to Hume's; or if it were, we would all be in the dock. Silver has assembled some fascinating data, and his attempt to bring together findings from a host of disciplines is laudable. Still, the book's philosophical naivet6 vitiates its theoretical aspirations. Loren E. Lomasky Bowling Green State University, Ohio

MICHAEL ROTHSCHILD (1990) Bionomics : The Inevitability of Capitalism. N e w Y o r k : H e n r y Holt. xviii + 423 pp. Various forms o f evolutionary theories of society are attracting renewed interest in the social sciences. In economics, this is no doubt due to a belated realization of the limitations of a narrowly conceived neoclassical approach, especially in explaining truly dynamic phenomena. A broad spectrum of such 245

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newer evolutionary economics is collected in Witt (forthcoming). Of course, there have been those who have known all along. Evolutionary economics, as a subculture, is as old as the discipline itself. From Smith through Menger and Hayek, the evolutionary view of economic and social institutions has been kept very much alive, mainly by authors in the Austrian tradition. There are also examples of non-Austrians proposing evolutionary paradigms [see Day (1975) for a radical example]. These attempts have, however, for the most part been ignored by mainstream economists. For evidence on how widespread the new dissatisfaction is, a good place to look is the recent anniversary issue of the Economic Journal where several well-known authors express their views on possible futures for economics. There may be some confusion about what constitutes an evolutionary theory. I think it can safely be said, however, that serious evolutionary approaches to social phenomena share the feature that the explananda are institutions, i.e., such stable social practices as the use of language, respect for property rights, and the use of money. The approach consists of studying the consequences of the fact that at any time many different behavioral rules are competing With one another, and trying to understand why some survive to become institutions and others not. Of special interest are selection mechanisms that do not specifically "look for" the phenomenon to be explained. An example would be the order of the market economy, which arises out of the self-interested activities of a myriad of individuals, despite the fact that none of the agents involved intend to bring it about. On this interpretation, an evolutionary theory is a theory of unintended selection. The evolutionary approach is therefore not tied to any specific discipline. It is a manner of looking for explanations that can be applied to any subject matter. Indeed, evolutionary thinking is older in the social sciences than in biology, the discipline one perhaps most readily associates with the approach. There is evidence that Charles Darwin got his inspiration from reading Adam Smith. In particular--and the reason I stress this point will become clearer below--evolutionary social theories worth taking seriously do not proceed by comparing their explananda with various animals. Michael Rothschild's book initially appears like it might be a timely and interesting entry in the growing new evolutionary tradition. No less an authority than Kenneth Boulding endorses it in glowing terms on the dustjacket. Although clearly a popular work, it has an ambitious mission. I interpret the intriguing title and introduction of the book as promising to show that from an evolutionary perspective, capitalism is the only stable state to which social evolution can lead. Within a framework of the study of institutions, as sketched above, a claim that capitalism is inevitable would have content. It would be a hypothesis that among different practices, those we associate with capitalism, such as private property rights, would inevitably outcompete their rivals. This is not the view Rothschild takes, however. While the book is clearly not intended as an academic treatise, it is unforgivable that the author nowhere gives a definition of what he means by "capitalism." Its meaning is left to emerge through its use. What emerges seems rather different from what I think most economists who 246

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perceive themselves as supporters of"capitalism" mean by the term. In particular, it is not defined in institutional terms. Often it seems to be the kind of occasional dubious activities engaged in by big corporations in conspiracy with government that opponents of capitalism like to associate with the term. Rothschild's capitalism does not necessarily involve the free market or free trade. On the contrary he suggests, using a variant of the old infant-industry argument couched in "bionomical" terms, that drastic protectionism is the solution to the problems of the American economy. So what exactly is "bionomics"? Although there are many hints that what the author really is after is something like an evolutionary social theory, the end product is not one. It does not help that Rothschild appears completely ignorant of the modem evolutionary strands in the social sciences, let alone most of the classic ones. Although there is a chapter entitled "Spontaneous Order," there is no mention of the Austrians or Michael Polanyi (with whom the term originated). What Michael Rothschild actually promotes might more correctly be termed organicism, an approach that is not original, but has a long and not very glorious history. Bionomics, essentially, seems to be the art of finding clever biological similes for social phenomena. In a typical example, a nonreciprocal economic relationship is said to be like that between the tapeworm and its unfortunate host. The author also gets very close to the classic likening of organizations and societies to human bodies. Some quotes may be in order. We learn that "just as every complex organism is comprised ofceUs organized in tissues and organs, large firms are composed of work cells arranged in hierarchies of departments and divisions" (81). This striking finding is no coincidence, because "the biologic and economic systems owe their similarity of form to their similarity of function" (82). Furthermore, we are to believe the bold claim that "once the profound likeness of organisms and organizations is appreciated, it is easier to understand the forces presently propelling economic restructuring in the Soviet Union and elsewhere" (82). It is symptomatic of this book that the rest of the chapter from which these quotes come deals mainly with a popularized account of advances in the study of organic cell physiology. In this and other respects it is like many popular works that use scientific results with some seemingly mysterious and compelling element as the basis for wild speculation about anything and everything. Recently, for example, this genre has given us numerous books on "chaos." Nor does Rothschild neglect this subject. He sometimes uses the terms' 'chaos" and "order" interchangeably, thus making them both meaningless. It is curious and ironic that Rothschild should think of a potential evolutionary economics only as an analogy with biology, especially since he correctly notes that selection theories were originally imported into biology from the social sciences. Most evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, would probably regard cultural evolution as part of their subject matter. The highly influential work of Maynard Smith (1982) deals mostly with culture and learning. The author's explicit purpose is to change the way we view society and bow it should be organized. In particular, Rothschild denounces most of economic 247

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theory (as he conceives it), arguing that the discipline has to be restructured to take into account the lessons he sees in biology. Therefore, while some things of interest can be learned about natural history from this book, we must ultimately ask whether, as the author thinks, these examples provide any insights about society. The answer, unfortunately, must be no. Ultimately, Rothschild's thesis fails even as an analogy. A modem capitalist society, properly conceived, is manifestly not like the natural world. I can put it no better than Drexler and Miller (1988): Imagine that predation were as fundamental to markets as it is to biology. Instead of confronting occasional incidents of theft in a background of trade, one would be surrounded by neighbors who had stolen their cars from dealers who had mounted an armed assault on factories in Detroit, which in turn had grabbed their parts and equipment by pillagingjob-shops in the surrounding countryside. So-called "hostile corporate takeovers" would involve, not purchase of shares of ownership from willing stockholders, but a sudden invasion of offices by an armed gang. Karl W~trneryd Stockholm School of Economics

REFERENCES Day, R.H. (1975) "Adaptive Processes and Economic Theory." In: R.H. Day and T. Groves (eds) Adaptive Economic Models. New York: Academic Press. Drexler, K.E. and M.S. Miller (1988) "Comparative Ecology: A Computational Perspecfive." In: B.A. Huberman (ed) The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: NorthHolland. Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridgei Cambridge University Press. Witt, U. (ed) (forthcoming) Contributions to Evolutionary Economics. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.

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