Fear

Fear, panic, terror: these things arise involuntarily, when the tyger tyger burning bright creeps past the perimeter in the night. I must wonder if they're truly involuntary however.

As far back as I can remember, there's always been some sort of moral panic. I'm not quite old enough to recall firsthand whatever the pearl-clutching du jour of the 70s was (to be fair, dealing with stagflation was probably of legitimate concern), but I do recall panics over: heavy metal music, the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Satanic worship, drugs, teen sex, vaccines, euthanasia, and on and on and on (remember acid rain?). And now, with Newsweek's latest cover story (h/t/ ENB), it looks like we're reaching the event horizon of sex trafficking. 

Actual humans who earn actual paychecks pay actual money for these easily-debunked, flatulent puff-pastry articles with the actual intent of reading them. I find it difficult to believe that people are so deliberately stupid that they'd be willing to accept with open hearts and minds that rubbish like "kids are sacrificing fatted calves to Lucifer in America's cemeteries at midnight" is even remotely true. I find it difficult (sadly, in the absence of decent evidence) to reject the hypothesis that people buy this tripe with the express intent to raise their dander.

Humanity has slain all the dragons. Child mortality is statistically indistinguishable from zero, at least compared to what it was even as recently as a hundred years ago. Proper bloody war is something that happens far from our shores. Bear attacks are rare. Even the ceaseless owl scourge has waned of late. There is little left in the natural world for ordinary folks to fear. Increasingly, there's little in the world of men for ordinary folks to fear (yes, this is an Anglophonic observation, but living standards are rising even among the bottom billion). So could it be that moral panics like the one pictured above is simply a way for a producer to meet consumer demand? People want to be scared of something once in a while. The wolves at the gate are all dead, so why not just pick some random bullshit with a kernel of truth buried in there really deep? Can't that be a euvoluntary transaction?

I suppose it's a matter of proportionality (#TeamAristotle). Moral panics about genuine problems can divert resources towards reducing genuine harms. By the time my daughter is old enough to learn what mesothelioma is, home asbestos insulation will be something from the history books. Maybe part of the trouble is that it's harder to generate indignant panics about chronic heart disease or inattentive driving the way it is about violence in video games. I am beginning to suspect that harm-reduction isn't actually the relevant margin for collective action. Perhaps the telos is that sweet, sweet hit of imminent danger.

Not All Substitutions are Created Equal

The Dub-MOE takes up Bryan Caplan's challenge and issues an essay on conservative authoritarianism. An excerpt:

Like liberals (and everyone else), conservatives can be guilty of mental substitution, which happens when people confronted with very difficult questions substitute much easier questions that don't require much reflection. This isn't the same thing as breaking a complex problem down into its constituent parts. It's changing the question, albeit subtly: "should the government punish people who produce and listen to this music?" becomes "do I want my kids listening to this music?" Sometimes the substitution is explicit for rhetorical effect: "do you want your kids listening to this garbage?!" Indeed, the best examples of conservative authoritarianism that come immediately to mind involve sex, drugs, rock & roll, war, and immigrants.

Art (who I can now count as a co-author!) buries the lede a little. The problem isn't that conservatives (or anyone, really) make little mental substitutions, but that they make rubbish substitutions.

Consider the same question mulled by Solon. Instead of "do I want my kids listening to this music?", the Divine Maxim of Plato would ask "would I be willing to bar my parents from listening to this music?"

The role of the government is to act as the servant of the people. When the reverse occurs, dominion and injustice probably aren't all that far behind.

Substitute questions aren't wrong in principle. The puzzle is how to align folks' incentives to start making good ones.

Daunting, but our euvoluntary future depends on it.

Turning Aretaic

VA House candidate (and economist) Dave Brat is a fan of Deirdre McCloskey. Oh my. Oh me oh my. People, if stuff like this can happen, why do we even have an AEA at all?

Madison knew something about Democracy (big D for the system rather than for the everyday practice) that might perhaps have eluded more populist thinkers: pure majority rule can be as tyrannical as the worst despot who ever sat on a throne. His prophylactic against public tyranny was constitutional republican constraints on the authority of the US sovereign. I kindly suggest to you that this is insufficient.

Tradeoffs abound, including in politics. The typical high-level tradeoff is between rules and discretion. The Constitution needs to provide a framework for a functioning rule of law, but it must be amendable. The dilemma should be obvious: given enough time and effort, an ambitious sovereign can erode its constitutional fetters enough to get back to the serious business of encreasing its dominion (Hume, of Commerce).

So if in a democracy, the government is us, and we want to gird ourselves against our own propensity for tyranny, what shall we do?

I return to Plato's Divine Maxim: never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents. If the citizen is sovereign, this antique, forgotten little gem of jurisprudence is the spoonful of sugar that can help the medicine of citizen governance go down. In Jim Buchanan's terms, it wrings the romance right out of politics. It's delightfully sobering to force yourself to ask "would I be willing to fine, imprison, or execute my parents for this infraction?" And of course, sometimes the answer will be "yes", and of course, people will still disagree on important issues, but this tiny heuristic obliges voters to rid themselves of the many far-mode biases they carry, at least when they enter the voting booth.

So here's my dilemma, closely related to Andrea's Question: knowing this, what should I do? I know from studying economics that the deadweight costs of rent-seeking brought on by ignoring Plato's Divine Maxim erode folks' capacity to cooperate peacefully on their own terms. But I also know that Plato's Divine Maxim is massively unpopular. Scorned, even. I might encourage some of my friends and colleagues to bring it up when they get to the voter preferences part of their Public Choice courses. I might even prod my fellows in the land of PPE to write more about it. But I think the best chance I have of actually convincing another human for realsy-dealsies is to teach my daughter why I think it's a good, low-cost tool for evaluating policy and politicians. And that's the problem. That's exactly the problem.

Imagine if you will the tableau where a precocious middle school girl holds forth on forgotten antique jurisprudence in her civics class. No interpretation of government, progressive, conservative, whiggish, or otherwise (not even mainstream libertarian) hews to this doctrine. It's perhaps classically liberal, as Adam Smith sang of Solon's virtue in TMS, but classical liberalism is a fossil, and it's in neither my self-interest nor my daughter's to have her rile up her teachers or fail her classes.

Then again, if that's what I'm worried about, perhaps I need to learn to exercise another of the classical virtues: courage. The vitality of the Republic may just depend on such small gestures.

Cicero Is not Dead

I like Adam Smith's distillation of Plato via Cicero not just because Smith is the father of modern economics, but because the triapartite relationship between Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero reminds me a bit of the three big names in Japan's warring states period: Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

An old Shogun-era Japanese fable says that Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu were sharing tea in a courtyard one spring evening. A nightingale lit upon a nearby cherry bough. Wishing to hear birdsong, Nobunaga drew a blade and said, "little bird, if you do not sing, I will kill you." Hideyoshi, a trifle less bloodlust in his voice, clenched a fist and cried, "little bird, if you do not sing, I will make you sing." Ieyasu took a sip of his tea, looked up into the tree and said, "little bird, if you do not sing, I will wait for you to sing." The punchline is of course, that the Tokugawa shogunate lasted for 265 years.

Though they wrote on similar topics, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero impress Western political economy the way the three daimyo impressed Japanese political economy: if you squint hard enough, you see one idealist, one moderate, and one practical realist. Of course, squinting hard enough to mix up samurai armor with a toga might require a bit of vinegar in the eyes.

When, centuries later, Smith finds that Cicero the hardbitten realist has taken from Plato the vaporous idealist a distillation important enough to call a "divine maxim", the alert student should take note. Cicero found a 300-year-old bit of political philosophy important enough to annex for use in the Roman senate. That's important enough on it own. More to the point, a Scot near to two thousand years later thought this expropriation important enough to include in one of the most important passages in his most cherished work. I assert that this heuristic of governance, to "never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents" has passed two critical filters: salience and longevity. This rule is important enough to Plato to have developed it, important enough to Cicero to have adopted it, and important enough to Smith to have used it in an admonition against the natural hubris of political elites. It has survived for more than 2000 years, and since the 1890s or so, it has been tacitly found wanting.

Consider many of the results of laboratory psychology, or of experimental economics. In laboratory settings, participants demonstrate time inconsistency, valuation asymmetries, maladapative heuristics, and a rather startling capacity to be fooled, tricked, swindled, and hoodwinked. Hucksters have their own divine maxim: "a fool and his money are soon parted." Does not the panoply of non-euvoluntary, irrational exchange vitiate Plato's Divine Maxim?

Well, judging from the few times I've crossed sabers with Richard Thaler on Twitter, I think he'd say "no." His idea of soft paternalism is consistent with Plato, with Cicero, with Smith, with the durable traditions of personal autonomy in Western Civilization. I think the only fatal error bound in the choice architecture project is to imagine that legislatures are populated with modern-day Solons and Ciceros, that the median politician will temper legislation with decent Aristotelian phronesis. If actual flesh-and-blood politicians were reliably keen to adhere to a heuristic of doing no violence to constituents than they would to their parents, I'd be happier than a clam to hand over the design of choice defaults.

But if instead, politicians prove intemperate in their reign, if they are fallible, corruptible, or prone to err, I might be a bit more leery about aiming their truncheons in the direction of constituents' personal affairs. Do you really want Chris Christie nudging you?

Open Borders vs The Divine Maxim of Plato

Reason hosted a debate on "Should America Open its Borders" recently. Presenting in favor were Bryan Caplan of George Mason University and Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. Against, and unfortunately outnumbered, was Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. Caplan, as is his wont, relied chiefly on appeals to common sense morality. Since he's done extensive work on voter opinion, this makes good sense. Voters tend to use far-mode, impressionistic thinking when discussing policy, and it seems eminently reasonable to ask folks to employ the same sorts of moral reasoning they use in their daily lives to issues of policy. Nowrasteh mostly confined his remarks to empirical questions: do immigrants actually assimilate (yes), do immigrants vote for the bad policies that ruined their home countries (no), do immigrants commit crime at higher rates (no), etc. Krikorian went another route. Here, lend him your ear:


Note the appeal to Aristotle. Aristotle wrote that the political life was the pinnacle of the human endeavor. I beg you to grant that this is an accurate reading of Aristotle and that the conflation of the Greek city-state with the modern nation-state is not at all fatal to Krikorian's point. Even if we grant that, does it follow that any policy in the core of the game is just and fair governance so long as it flows from the will of the constituency?

In a democracy, the role of the archon is played in equal measure by each voter. I find plausible theories of expressive voting, that voters feel at liberty to shirk the best practices of idealized philosopher kings thanks to the ordinary results described by political economists. But this positive result cannot support the normative claim that voters' intents needn't be consistent with the best practices of idealized philosopher kings.

Recall via Smith, Cicero's formulation of the Divine Maxim of Plato: the sovereign is "never to use violence to his country no more than to his parents." As long as we are making appeals to NE, it's worth considering what constitutes good governance. If you would sleep easy having trapped your parents in a third world country for having the misfortune of merely being born there, then you act in accord with Plato's Maxim. Contrarily, if you find the idea of your parents languishing in misery in the service of economic fallacies monstrous, then supporting heavy prior restraint immigration restrictions on Aristotelian grounds lacks phronesis. Which would it be for the median American voter? Would the typical registered voter be cool with packing up their folks' bags and sending them off to live in Bangladesh, having committed no crime?

Look, there may be valid reasons to oppose unlimited immigration. Appealing to a lean reading of Aristotle may not be the most robust approach.

P.S. Today's podcast will be with my good friend Robin Hanson. There's a bit of a technical delay, but it should be up before midnight. I hope you'll like it.

The Greatest Trick Ever Pulled

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36 (KJV)

God Himself sits in judgement over the souls of men But His patience is eternal... not so the IRS. To the tax collector, the letter of the law is the Final Arbiter what Sits o'er All. And into yon letter the American constituency and its elected elite have carved, jointly and severally, an exception from taxation so deeply etched that only the most hard-bitten secularist would creak her jaw to call it a "loophole": churches shall pay no taxes.

Of course, Old Scratch hangs his hat in the details, so they say. Church organizations aren't on the hook to the Treasury, but that doesn't necessarily extend to preachers' spouses or their kids. So as Kenneth Copeland can attest, if you find yourself getting a little too cozy with political aspirants, expect the State's Infernal Revenue Service mephits to hound you till the rivers run red with the blood of the innocent (or from 2007-2011, whichever comes first). Similarly, if you minister to a huge congregation and if they tithe, and if you turn that lucre into comfortable mansions, plush lifesytles, and dalliances with aristocratic and oligarchic elites, you probably shouldn't be too agog when (not if) you run afoul of ordinary folks' ordinary moral sentiments.

In Aristotelian terms, it ain't proportionate for a loquacious preacher to amass wealth that would make Solomon blush and to then be given special dispense from the state, most especially when the underlying religious tradition has strong overtones of modesty, service, and charity.

One of the best lessons I ever learned from a Munger lecture is that accumulated wealth is a byproduct of exchange. It's effluvium, waste, all those ledgers cramped with artifacts of past exchanges. What we should care about, what produces satisfaction is the exchange itself that gave rise to plump capital holdings. When we focus on the hoard alone, we commit the nasty analytical error of judging outcomes rather than processes, dead artifacts instead of living rules. Anyone drenched in the economic way of thinking (and boy howdy, if you ever need a good example of a natural economist, you could do a hell of a lot worse than bending your gaze towards Mungo) should kick and scream any time there's talk of just or unjust outcomes. Wealth concentration itself is too dumb a bunny to estimate the justice lurking in pairwise exchange. If I drop a dollar in the collection plate, that transaction is part of the covenant I have with God, with my religious community, and with my pastor. That moment of choice (and the moment I initially chose to stand as part of the flock) is where the careful analyst can raise hue and cry should injustice lurk.

Of course, economists will be perhaps more prone than others to punt on any justice that dwells in the collection plate exchange. The epistemological problem of cracking someone's skull open to see if they truly are better off or not making the trade is pretty dang tough. How many people end up regretting religious faith? In which direction do deathbed conversions typically go? But even if we conclude that flim-flam multi-millionaire bs artistes like Benny Hinn provide valuable spiritual services to their congregations, how do we square that with proportional Aristotelian justice? What is the common-sense moral justification for the asymmetrical tax treatment of religious organizations? Do they consume fewer public goods? Perhaps there's a case that churches actually produce public goods on net, beyond the private joys of salvation and community membership mentioned above, beyond the club goods shared by flock members. If that's the case though, wouldn't it be prudent to compare spillover benefits from religious organizations to spillover benefits from other organizations, including for-profit firms? There's a Whole Foods down the street from where I work, and I assure you that the sense of satisfaction I detect in many of the shoppers is almost impossible to distinguish from the spiritual rapture that clings to the faithful I run across on Sunday mornings.

Revisit your null hypothesis. Wealthy preachers might be a symptom that something has gone wrong, but don't let the Devil convince you he doesn't exist: problems happen when we treat a metric as a goal, when we confuse outcomes with intent, when we indulge analytical laziness. Consider whether or not congregants retain the wherewithal to revoke their patronage. Consider if they think themselves exploited. Talk to them if you must. And do please consider that the 16th amendment was a mistake. Perhaps the problem isn't that churches don't pay income tax, but that the rest of us do.

Dr. Duty or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thick vs. Thin Libertarian Squabble

"Never to use violence more to his country than to his parents." Cicero's Divine Maxim of Plato appeals to an innate sense of justice ideally found in both the sovereign and the constituent. The sovereign has the responsibility to respect the autonomy of the constituent not to exceed acts egregious enough to warrant clapping mom and dad in the pillory. And the constituent has the obligation to act like an adult.

Both kinds of libertarians agree on the first half of that: to the extent the public suffers the existence of the state, its functions should be limited to providing law and order and should by no means be extended to how free individuals, singly and in the organizations great and small that they form, choose to direct their peaceful, productive energies. But the thin libertarians stop there. They hold that since liberty is a political project, confined to arguments about the proper scope of government, further discussions of social issues is outside the scope of libertarianism. Thick libertarians proceed as if the private choices of free individuals in society are important enough to discuss. They're willing to consider that private virtues like honor, decency, respect, and professionalism et al constitute the sinew that binds the skeleton of simple rule of law together. 

What can EE offer the debate? Good question. One of the troubles I have with the term "marketplace of ideas" is that it omits (or tends to omit) a tremendously important coordination mechanism: price. The sticker price for my ideas here on this blog is zero. All it costs you to read this post is some time, attention, and maybe a slight willingness to soften your priors a little. The goods on offer here in this marketplace of ideas are non-rival, non-excludable, and more to the point, (effectively) endlessly recombinable. As long as everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute to the discussion, fairness rules. Of course, this does not imply that everyone's contribution will be equally useful or compelling, but I urge you to refrain from using ex post judgement to critique ex ante institutional arrangements.

The natural exchange of ideas and talents between thick and thin libertarians is for the thin folks to direct their message towards the sovereign and for the thick folks to direct their message towards constituents. If I were a man of system arranging the men and women of the liberty movement as if arranging pieces upon a chess-board, that's what I'd do (ha ha, can you even imagine?). Unfortunately, any trade needs both offer and acceptance, and I'm not even sure there's been a proper offer tendered.

Marsellus Wallace, to Butch Coolidge: "The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps."

Coase didn't make it perfectly clear in The Problem of Social Cost that sometimes the bargaining set is null, that sometimes pride does get in the way of what would otherwise be a fruitful transaction. If you find yourself teaching the Coase Theorem any time soon, please consider some brief classroom discussion on this too often neglected point.

Episode 5: Adam Gurri (round 2) on Justice

Today's episode was (mostly) about Aristotelian Justice, but Adam and I wandered a little here and there. I also made a few factual flubs. The name of the Lithuanian coat of arms is the Vytis (Vyčio Kryžiaus ordinas). Aristotle was born in Stagira, on the east coast of Greece. He didn't found the Lyceum until he was pushing 50.


download

Here is the Life of Brian scene I referenced:



Caplan on King
Adam rebuts
Nick "The Jacket" Gillespie on systematic injustice:



The full text of the Nicomachean Ethics
A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume
The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant
David Wong on the Monkeysphere

And yes, I acknowledge that the philosophy in our discussion is a little on the sophomoric side, but Justice is a hard topic, even for the professionals (which we are not). Just imagine how challenging it is for the ordinary citizen. Imagine further how easy it would be for a sinister sovereign to exploit weaknesses in everyday approaches to justice. Tumpety-tump.

The 3 formulations of the categorical imperative:

• The first (Universal Law formulation): "Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
• The second (Humanity or End in Itself formulation): "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end."
• The third (Kingdom of Ends formulation) combines the two: "All maxims as proceeding from our own [hypothetical] making of law ought to harmonise with a possible kingdom of ends."

Perhaps you can understand my confusion early on in the discussion.

Cage Match: Hume vs Aristotle in the Arena of Justice

Much of what we write about here at EE is underpinned by a tacit appeal to an ordinary sense of justice. Justice is the virtue offended when exchange veers from the confines of the euvoluntary world, and justice is the grand dame who hangs her head in despair when men seek improper dominion over their fellows. Justice is also the chief among the so-called pagan virtues, which helps explain why several intellectual traditions yearn to lay claim to its definition. I assure you that if you have a tough time trying to reconcile notions of divine justice and social justice, you are not alone. There's justice in thought, justice in deed, justice in outcome, justice as fairness... it's all quite Procrustean. And as with such things, the confusion and general disorder found in the wider society has a pedigree in the academy.

Consider this case (h/t T. Gill). The short version is that a guy in Nevada is riled up because the NFL and Ticketmaster won't sell Hawks tickets in the Silver State. There's an injustice in public funds going towards stadium construction, when the public at large is restricted from enjoying the spoils of the project. Without arguing the specific merits of the "lawsuit", or even the economics of the complaint, let's instead visit a brief conversation I overheard while in a bar in earshot of Aristotle and David Hume.

Aritstotle: Not that I'm a fan of the Seahawks or anything, but you'd figure that if the NFL had a passing familiarity with justice, they'd make their tickets available to any customer, not just the ones in the Pacific Northwest.

Hume: "Passing" familiarity, eh Ari? Cute. I'm not sure I understand your objection though. It's not like Ticketmaster and the NFL are gaining at the expense (your words, my friend [N.E. V.2]) of this dude in Nevada.

Aristotle: Oh, so you've read me then? Great. Then you surely read the very next passage dealing with proportionality. Justice is just insofar as it is proportional. I don't argue that playground fairness has to rule, that in an exchange both parties must in all times, places, and circumstances distribute the gains from exchange even-steven 50-50 equal, but rather something more like the old barnyard aphorism that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. The just is a species of the proportionate. There's nothing inherent to Nevada residency that warrants exclusion here.

Hume: Well, I'll readily admit that you do avoid the traps of relying on vulgar, peripatetic philosophies of justice, but I still think you're missing something important.

Aristotle: Oh? What's that?

Hume: The artifice of it.

Aristotle: Go on.

Hume: Remember what I wrote in my Treatise? Property arises from sense and sentiment. It is a product of enterprise, and any sense of justice so enjoyed is found in the relations between human minds. This distraught guy in Nevada has entirely misapprehended the nature of the offer if he thinks these organizations owe him consideration.

Aristotle: I'm with you to some extent. We're discussing the nature of voluntary acts, and in that regard, we needn't split hairs about restoring to this guy something that was taken from him. I urge you to review my third question in Book V: "whether it is the man who has assigned to another more than his share that acts unjustly."

Hume: Well, it so happens that I have my copy handy, so while I'm dong that, why don't you review what I noted in Part II, Section VI about the shimmering, insensate border between justice and injustice?

At this point in the conversation, Where Is My Mind by The Pixies came on the jukebox, and their murmurs got drowned out. Which I think was okay since they were mostly reading anyway. Here, enjoy:



Hume: "It is plain too that the distributor acts unjustly, but not always the man who has the excessive share; for it is not he to whom what is unjust appertains that acts unjustly, but he to whom it appertains to do the unjust act voluntarily, i.e. the person in whom lies the origin of the action, and this lies in the distributor, not in the receiver... he who gets an excessive share does not act unjustly, though he 'does' what is unjust."

Aristotle: "If we consider the ordinary course of human actions, we shall find, that the mind restrains not itself by any general and universal rules; but acts on most occasions as it is determined by its present motives and inclination. As each action is a particular individual event, it must proceed from particular principles, and from our immediate situation within ourselves, and with respect to the rest of the universe. If on some occasions we extend our motives beyond those very circumstances, which gave rise to them, and form something like general rules for our conduct, it is easy to observe, that these rules are not perfectly inflexible, but allow of many exceptions."

Hume: So you're saying that we should judge the NFL and Ticketmaster by their willingness to transact, but not so much simply by their large stores of wealth. That Piketty guy might disagree with you.

Aristotle: And you're saying that we're not especially well suited to judge the merits of this case from afar, since Justice, like other artifice, is subject to deliberative change. I think that Piketty guy might disagree with you, too.

After that, they paid their tab and left, so I missed whatever else they mentioned. But I did have a few lingering questions. Once something exists, is it reasonable to treat it as an endowment? The Roman god Janus had two faces, one looking forward, one looking back. Did each of his faces understand Justice in the same regard? It is plainly unjust in both an Aristotelian and a Humean sense to throttle innovation in the cradle, but shouldn't our sense of justice feel offended at blatant disproportionality in exchange, even if the natural alternative is no exchange whatsoever? Asking in EE terms: if there is no desperation in BATNA, is there justice in barring (ex ante!) disproportional trade under conditions of BATNA disparity? And if so, would this NFL case fit the bill? And is there a Coasean solution that doesn't rely on an embarrassing lawsuit?

Mama always said monopoly rents are like a box of chocolates.

Was Aristotle a Euvoluntary Exchangeur? NE Bk 1

How do each of the classical virtues inform and support euvoluntary exchange? It's philosophy amateur hour here at EE as I review first Nicomachean Ethics and later Aquinas on the relationships between virtue and purposeful human action. I don't plan to reinvent the wheel, but perhaps it's wise to check the foundations of the canon from time to time to see if and where modern moral intuitions disagree. Let's start with Book 1.

In NE Bk 1, section 5, we find the following, a point perhaps insufficiently stressed by economists when speaking to the public:

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. And so one might rather take the aforenamed objects to be ends; for they are loved for themselves.

In econo-speak, our lectures (and our equations) are full of what we call "derived utility." This is simply to say that with a few oddball exceptions, people don't collect wealth simply to have access to an idle vault full of gold bullion or stacks of paper bills. Even Walter White collected that storage locker full of Benjamins for his family (NO SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS PLEASE). Measured wealth is an idle claim on something that we actually value like happiness, satisfaction, fun, pleasure, joy, or the abatement of discomfort. For economists, this is a wholly unremarkable point. For the pundit class and for the income inequality agitator, this point is often casually ignored. To Aristotle, as to your garden-variety economist, the value generated by a voluntary exchange is prima facie evidence that the fruits of the trade are to be "loved for themselves," and the money-making part of it is mere chaff.

nb: you can't bake bread without chaff.

An unexpected upshot of this is that analytical tools like the Gini coefficient misstate the underlying value generated by economic activity, relying on the imperfect proxies of wealth or income (and I urge you to pay close attention to which version of the Lorenz Curve is being peddled) to estimate how much better off some are than others.

As I'm a little strapped for leisure time today, I'll leave you with this passage:

Presumably, however, to say that happiness is the chief good seems a platitude, and a clearer account of what it is still desired. This might perhaps be given, if we could first ascertain the function of man. For just as for a flute-player, a sculptor, or an artist, and, in general, for all things that have a function or activity, the good and the 'well' is thought to reside in the function, so would it seem to be for man, if he has a function. Have the carpenter, then, and the tanner certain functions or activities, and has man none? Is he born without a function? Or as eye, hand, foot, and in general each of the parts evidently has a function, may one lay it down that man similarly has a function apart from all these? What then can this be? Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as 'life of the rational element' also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say 'so-and-so-and 'a good so-and-so' have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being idded to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

This, my dear readers, is a sketch of the first mainstay of Aristotelian virtue: arete (ἀρετή), roughly translated as "excellence", though it's a particular flavor of excellence, devoted to ends that are consonant with the other limbs of a virtuous life. Of course, Andrea's Question again occurs to me: knowing that virtuous euvoluntary exchange is fine and dandy, but is there anything practical to do with this knowledge? The idea of mounting a soapbox to proclaim the superiority of a life lived in harmony with classical virtue is just absurd enough that people like me would find it appealing. I guess there's some hope to be found earlier on in Book1:

To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment.

Even vulgar types can enjoy life. Remember this the next time you find yourself inclined to badmouth crap TV reality programming or ban sugar.

You got to know there's fun to be had.



I like this song, but I genuinely had no idea how silly the video is. This is the first time I've seen it.