Why I don't address philosophical issues

A comment on my previous post suggested I might include Isiah Berlin’s philosophical concepts of positive and a negative liberty in my discussion of economic and political evolution and how they have led to our current times. A quick skimming of Berlin’s ideas showed me that what I talk about could indeed be related to this way of thinking, but I question the utility of doing so. The role for political or moral philosophy, as I see it, is to decide what should be done. This question has (for me) already been answered.

I am not a moral realist. I do not believe that morality is an objective reality that can be determined through philosophical inquiry. I believe morality is a cultural construct that promotes cooperation between unrelated individuals allowing human societies to scale up in size. Hence my moral views are something I picked up from the culture in which I grew up, and through experience. I accept as given the idea that an economy that lifts all boats rather than just some is preferable. As I have argued extensively, we used to have an economy that was more consistent with this egalitarian sensibility than the one today and that it was preferable.

I use cultural evolution to analyze how it came to be that the more equal economy of my youth transformed into the stratified economy of today. That is, what are the mechanisms through which this transformation happened, and why did it happen when it did? And finally, could things be changed to go back to the more egalitarian outcome we had in the past?

The problem I see with a philosophical approach to political questions
There are many Substack bloggers who would argue with my philosophical position. Conservatives like Nathan Cofnas oppose my egalitarian preference because they believe that people are not equal and that a hierarchy of value exists:

The egalitarian ethos is epitomized in the false declaration that “all men are created equal.” The hereditarian says what every sensible person already knows to be true, namely, that there is a natural hierarchy for everything. Coming from a background of Christian egalitarianism, we hesitate to state the truth so nakedly. The task is to align our moral intuitions with the truth of hereditarianism

This passage brought to mind something I read in Up From Liberalism by William F. Buckley when I was in college:

the white community is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail politically because, for the time being, the leaders of American civilization are white—as one would expect given preternatural advantages, of tradition, training, and economic status. It is unpleasant to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural advancement of white over Negro; but the statistics are there and not easily challenged by those who associate together and call for the Advancement of Colored People…The problem is not biological, but cultural and educational.

Buckley’s take was the inferiority of blacks with respect to whites entitled whites to prevail politically. In an earlier essay Buckley argued for the right to prevail politically and culturally. It is a short step from here to Alexander Stephens 1860 defense of Southern cultural norms:

The prevailing ideas entertained by him (Jefferson) and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with…Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error… Our new government is founded upon…the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

Buckley believed that racial inferiority was the result of cultural and educational shortfalls and so could be remedied over time, whereas Cofnas holds that this is inherent, which if true, brings their positions closer to that of Stephens.

It is true that people are not equal in the value of their contributions to society. To the extent that human value is based on utility, then people do have different worths. Some might be best suited to serve as philosopher kings while others might be natural slaves. Most people can see how these ideas could present a problem politically, after all we fought a civil war over the latter issue.

Historical cultural evolution plays a major role in these issues
Natural hierarchy arguments like these seem rational. Top-drawer philosophers have made such arguments. Given this, how is it that I have culturally-inherited egalitarian beliefs? America was once more in tune with the views of Cofnas, Buckley and Stephens, but this changed. Had I been born two hundred years earlier, my beliefs would probably be in line with theirs, but I was not and so my beliefs are different.

It is easy to argue for the validity of slavery when you are not one of those at risk for becoming a slave. Slavery in the American South was established on racial grounds as Stevens notes, and used in plantation agriculture, an industry in which whites did not work. So, whites too poor to own slaves could still hold a pro-slavery view because they were ineligible for slavery and planation slaves were not economic competitors.

Before the Civil War there was a conspiracy theory that an aggressive Slave Power was trying to take over the federal government illegitimately to expand slavery. Extension of slavery to places where plantation agriculture was uneconomic would pit slave labor against that of whites, lowering their wages, which would generate an anti-slave reaction similar to today’s opposition to immigration. A wilder interpretation of Slave Power I once saw held that since the Constitution never stipulated that slavery was restricted to blacks, introducing slavery into regions with no tradition of black slavery could lead to debt slavery for whites.¹ Given beliefs like this, it is not hard to see how the extension of slave power outside the South could motivate intense opposition to the Slave Power even among racist whites who cared nothing about the plight of black people.

Slavery ended not because Americans came to understand that all men really were created equal, but because of power struggles between elite factions. The anti-slave faction prevailed because legal slavery was connected to a system of production that was inferior to industrial capitalism. Similarly, I do not see how the financial capitalism championed by our crypto-issuing president and his fellow oligarchs is a match for Chinese industrial capitalism, and I suspect, neither does he. When this becomes clear it may then be replaced by something else.

Cultural systems that perform better than others will tend to displace them, implying that we have the system we have because it was more adaptive in some way. Hence, I follow Chesterton’s fence principle in that I accept much of the morality I grew up with, only modifying my beliefs after I understand the reason for them and determine that they no longer apply. This is why I consider myself a dispositional conservative despite being politically left-liberal.

There is an important role for philosophy and moral theory
So far, I have presented a fairly mechanistic cultural evolutionary account of humanity, as if we are all cogs in the grand social machine and there is no room for human choice. This is illusionary. Buried within this description are cultural constellations treated as units (memes) on which cultural evolution operates in an impersonal manner. But these cultural constellations themselves have undergone their own cultural evolution in the realms of religion and the humanities. For example, I argued that slavery disappeared because the industrial world that had no use for slaves outcompeted the agrarian world that did use slaves. But why did the industrial world have no use for slaves? The northern states had slaves in colonial times, but by 1830’s slavery was largely gone. There was no obvious environmental force selecting against slavery. So why did the Northern states become free states? I asked the Google AI and it said “The Northern states wanted to abolish slavery primarily because their economies were not reliant on slave labor, and they viewed slavery as morally wrong.”

They viewed slavery as morally wrong and since it cost them little to get rid of it, they did so. But why did they see slavery as morally wrong when they had grown up with slavery? After all, centuries of Christian teachings and Jesus himself had never condemned it. Going by the Chesterton’s fence principle, given we live in a world in which slavery had always been acceptable why should we change this?

My reading tells me that new moral conceptions arising out the Second Great Awakening and the contemporaneous abolitionist CPP (1818-33) established slavery as morally wrong. This is still a mechanistic account, but it provides a specific period during which these new moral conceptions were created. Moral creation happens through a cultural evolutionary process involving prophets,² theologians, philosophers and humanists, as well as the public. Bentham’s Bulldog, a young Substacker I follow, is involved in such a morality creation process (in regard to animal welfare) in the present CPP. This process is central to the ongoing development of our moral frameworks that we call Progress. This is why political critiques often focus on the development of ideas over time, it is important for addressing the problem of what should be done?³

But a philosophical focus can distract one from what is actually happening
I can illustrate this issue with an example. When I do an internet search about neoliberalism I find references to Hayek and the Mont Pelerin Society and ideas about how society, or at least the economy, should be run, that is, it is a moral argument and fits in well with the things discussed in the previous section. I also see leftist social critics use neoliberalism as a label for economic trends (e.g. rising inequality) and an associated political program (Reaganomics) they see as bad. When I wrote my own take, I began with a rising trend in the frequency of the word neoliberalism in published books that began less than a decade after the 1981 shift to conservative economic policy and coincident rise in income inequality.

So, we have two conceptions of neoliberalism. One is a set of ideas about the way the world should work, and the other is a label used to describe an empirical reality and associated conservative policies. The table below presents another take on this reality: the number of ultrawealthy persons today after four decades of neoliberalism are compared to the number in 1957, thirty-four years into the New Deal era. The 1957 wealth levels are adjusted sixty-fold higher to adjust for increases in nominal GDP since 1957.

The effect of neoliberalism is clear: four times more ultrawealthy today than in 1957, with a 22-fold increase in very top tier of extreme wealth. I note that 17 of today’s top billionaires are richer than ultra-miser J Paul Getty, the top entry in 1957. It is obvious that cutting their taxes has been very good for the super-rich and also good for the top 1% who have seen their share of total income double. The Republican party has traditionally been the party of the rich and this rang true at President Trump’s inaugural where he was flanked by the three richest men in America. I see no need for ideas to understand why Republicans pursue (neoliberal) policy that boosts inequality: cutting taxes on rich people is clearly something the party of the rich would do.

A mechanistic, cultural take can provide a less value-laden analysis
What needs explaining is how it is that we have a president associated with the richest men in the country who was elected by working-class men opposed to the “elites” who were keeping them down. Or, how is it that the top business moguls of my youth were weirdos like J. Paul Getty (too cheap to ransom his grandson) and Howard Hughes (kept his urine in jars) or cranks like H. L. Hunt (called “stupid” by Republican president Dwight Eisenhower), while those we have today are comparatively normal?

The answer to the first question is straightforward. When I looked at the rate at which the top 1% income share rose since 1980 during Republican versus Democratic administrations, I found them to be the same. That is, both parties are equally neoliberal and equally opposed to the economic interests of ordinary working people. Hence people voted on other things. Working-class men tend to prefer Republican social positions and so vote for them.

The second answer is subtle. At some level of wealth, additional money has no value in terms of what it can buy since all consumption needs and wants are saturated. This level varies between individuals, but I expect it usually falls in the multimillionaire category. People above this level (nearly 1.5 million American households) have all their material needs satisfied. Any goods they still desire but cannot as yet obtain would be conspicuous consumption that serves as a status symbol. These and other things can serve as prestige markers in cultural evolution, which I believe play a major role in the phenomenon of capitalism.

Capitalism, as a see it, is the growth of capital, which serves as a prestige signal that aids in its transmission to other businessmen, leading them to become capitalists. Part of the content of the “capitalism meme complex” is that growing capital is what capitalists do. During the postwar era stakeholder culture was dominant and it was productive capital that was grown, leading to strong, widely shared economic growth. Under neoliberalism it is shareholder primacy culture that is dominant and financial capital (market capitalization) that is accumulated. Under stakeholder capitalism, accumulating great wealth was not what capitalists were supposed to do, as shown by the small number of top-level wealthy in the table. Growing great wealth anyway was something only obsessive-compulsive weirdos like Getty would pursue.

Today, growing great wealth is what capitalists are supposed to do. Those at the top today got there doing what they are supposed to and not weird. The situation today is not dissimilar to the period before the New Deal, when there were also many men of great wealth. The richest American then, John D. Rockefeller possessed wealth twice that of today’s richest American. Rockefeller’s Wikipedia bio has no suggestion of weirdness. Henry Ford’s wealth would make him #2 on today’s list. Though flawed, in many ways he strikes me as an admirable figure and in no way a weirdo.

So, we have two systems that result in moguls having very different levels of wealth. Are the moguls with much lower wealth under the stakeholder culture being harmed? I suggest no and offer an analogy. Which is better: (1) your basketball team has 60 points in a 60-80 game or (2) your baseball team has 6 points in a 6-4 game? Obviously, 2 is better. Even though you have ten times more points in 1, you lost and that is what counts, points are arbitrary. Under stakeholder capitalism, capitalists are playing baseball, while under shareholder capitalism, they play basketball. It doesn’t matter to the players how the game is scored, winning is the only thing that matters. It does matter to the public because what are arbitrary points for the players have real value (in terms of the consumption they could buy) for those whose income level is below the saturation level. Thus, from a societal perspective, baseball (stakeholder culture) is to be preferred to basketball (shareholder culture).

1. This sounds (and is) crazy, but modern conspiracy theories (e.g. Q-Anon) are no less crazy.

2. By which I mean charismatic, spirit-filled preachers and religious innovators such as Jonathon Edwards or Joseph Smith.

3. There are several ways of knowing. Science can give objectively correct answers to yes/no questions but includes “I don’t know” as a valid answer. Politics/Law can give decisive answers to yes/no questions, but the answer may change later. Religion/Philosophy can give answers to “should” questions, but the results are often contradictory.