On Civilizing Capitalism 303129680X, 9783031296802

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On Civilizing Capitalism

Brian Ellis

On Civilizing Capitalism

Brian Ellis

On Civilizing Capitalism

Brian Ellis La Trobe University Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-29680-2    ISBN 978-3-031-29681-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book has arisen out of my disappointment with the rejection of the welfare state in Australia, as in other countries, in the 1980s and 1990s, and the dismantling of its institutions. I thought the welfare state was civilized. It had the balance between private investment and government expenditure about right. It provided adequate levels of government assistance to people in need, played its part in the post-war resettlement of refugees, and welcomed more than two million immigrants from war-torn Europe in the 20 years from 1945 to 1965. It embarked on major social projects, such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, participated in the building of Australian car and aviation industries, and was at the forefront of developments in radio-telescopic research. These are all the sorts of things that I thought our governments should be doing. I do not like the combative, do-nothing governments we’ve had in the present neoliberal era. I think we need a form of government that will advance Australia in the sorts of ways that the old welfare state sought to do. Of course, the old welfare state had many faults. It was racist, sexist, and homophobic, and seemed blind to the needs of our first peoples. So there were many things about the old welfare state I did not like. But these were failings of the kinds that are common to settler societies everywhere. They had nothing to do with the forms of government they embraced. A welfare state, or ‘social democracy’, is often seen as an impure political program, motivated by a desire to increase human welfare, but lacking any sound philosophical justification. This may help explain the limited resistance to its eventual dismantling. It is seen as a mixture between socialism and capitalism. But it is not an arbitrary mix, and it has an v

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underlying philosophical basis. The same philosophical basis that supported the founding of the United Nations, but one that does not fit with many deeply entrenched ways of thinking. Our ways of thinking about morality, for example, are fundamentally individualistic. But our social morality cannot be explained individualistically, even though social morality is the kind of moral thinking we need for constructing national constitutions, bills of rights, or defining national priorities. Our conception of the national economy is likewise at odds with what is required for a welfare state. Welfare states were supported by Keynesian economic theory. Franklin D. Roosevelt depended upon it to create the New Deal, and after the war, it became the theory of choice, almost everywhere in the Western world. It managed successfully the reconstruction of Europe, and, if they were honest, today’s economists would have to acknowledge that they too have been using Keynesianism to manage the fight against Covid 19. In fact, that is the general rule. When things get rough, go Keynesian. However, there is a widespread belief, in most capitalist societies, that any expenditures of money by governments to supply social needs are burdens, even if they are socially necessary ones. The pure theory of capitalism must ignore them. The pure theory is just that of laissez-faire capitalism, which refers to an economy that is driven only by the expenditure of money by individuals or firms on goods or services, and has no burdens placed upon it other than to maintain the market mechanism that was described by Adam Smith. A core thesis of the book is that economic thought is trapped in an a priori thought bubble, which, like a system of geometry, has no causal structure. It is based on an axiom system of fairly plausible assumptions. But these axioms are not concerned with fundamental causal processes. Similarly, political and moral theory, including concepts of liberty, rights and individualism are based on seventeenth and eighteenth-century European intuitions about human nature and collective behaviour rather than on a modern scientific understanding of actual people and actual societies. So we need to re-assess the economic, political and moral philosophies of the Enlightenment and develop a new, globally relevant philosophy. A philosophy which more fully  supports the creation of modern welfare states and so better enables human beings to flourish.

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The present book is the culmination of a series of studies in moral, social and economic theory arising out of the philosophical position of social humanism, which I take now to be reasonably firm ground on which to stand. Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Brian Ellis

Contents

1 Evolution and Structure  1 1.1 Introduction  1 1.2 Chapter Outlines  3 1.3 Social Humanism  8 1.4 Rationalism 10 1.5 A Globally Progressive Enlightenment 11 Social Democracy  15 2 Realism  in Social Theory 17 2.1 The Ideal of Realism 17 2.2 Scientific History 19 2.3 Dynamics and Kinematics 23 2.4 Inquiring into the Nature and Causes of Motion 24 2.5 Economics 25 2.6 Good Value for Money! Keep Up the Good Work! 26 2.7 Social Scientific Realism 31 2.8 Causal Power Realism 33 3 Social Morality 39 3.1 The Scope of Social Morality 39 3.2 Government with the Consent of the Governed 47 3.3 Civilizing Capitalism 48 ix

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4 First Philosophy 51 4.1 First Philosophy for Physical Theory 51 4.2 Rationalism and Empiricism 53 4.3 The Dynamics of Capitalism 56 4.4 First Philosophy for Economic Theory 59 4.5 First Philosophy for Moral Theory 66 4.6 States of Mind and Brain 70 4.7 Rationalism in Political Philosophy 74 4.8 The New Metaphysics of Morals 76 4.9 Theory of Social Equality 84 5 Social  Democracy and Social Progress 89 5.1 Basic Capitalism 89 5.2 Basic Socialism 94 5.3 Natural Rights 97 5.4 Political Philosophy in the 1970s 99 5.5 The Welfare States102 5.6 Trumpism106 5.7 First Philosophy for Deliberate Action109 5.8 Social and Cultural Evolution111 The Philosophy of the Welfare State 113 6 The Secular States115 6.1 Political Location115 6.2 The Good Life (2004)116 6.3 Comments on Sect. 6.2122 7 Eudaimonism127 7.1 Human Flourishing127 7.2 Social Humanism131 7.3 The Importance of Planning134 7.4 Some Pathologies of Capitalism136 8 Liberty141 8.1 Three Concepts of Liberty141 8.2 Inner Freedom147

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8.3 Freedom of Speech149 8.4 Negative Liberty152 8.5 Social Humanism and Practical Liberty153 8.6 Critique of Practical Liberty155 9 Rights157 9.1 The Social Contract in Locke’s Treatise158 9.2 De Facto Social Contracts159 9.3 Origins of Moral Obligation164 9.4 Individualism in Moral Theory166 10 Individualism173 10.1 Political and Methodological Individualism174 10.2 Methodological Individualism176 10.3 Social and Moral Agents179 10.4 Social Moral Systems180 10.5 Social Humanism and Consequentialism183 11 Social Contracts185 11.1 Natural Rights and Moral Essentialism186 11.2 Minimal and Semi-minimal States191 11.3 Rousseau’s Social Contract194 11.4 Contract Theories of Justice and Equality196 11.5 Starting from Where We Are198 11.6 The De Facto Social Contract and the Criminal Law200 12 Humanistic Ethics205 12.1 Welfarism206 12.2 Acceptable Moral Frameworks209 12.3 The Ethics of Humanism211 13 The  New Welfare State215 13.1 Description215 13.2 How the World Has Changed216 13.3 Public versus Private Ownership220 13.4 The Social Humanist Programme222 13.5 On Corporate Responsibility224

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14 The New World227 14.1 The Growing Movement227 14.2 Failures of the European Enlightenment228 14.3 Philosophy in the European Enlightenment233 14.4 Scientific Realism Required237 14.5 What Is Now Needed240 References241 Index249

About the Author

Brian Ellis  is one of the world’s most distinguished philosophers of science and a leading metaphysician, with remarkably wide-ranging expertise in logic, probability theory, the philosophy of mind and action, extending into ethical, political and economic philosophy. He has published an extensive range of academic books and articles over a 70-year academic career. He brings a deeply informed scientific realist perspective to the social sciences, the scale of his analysis has not been seen, according to one reviewer, since Immanuel Kant.He is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at La Trobe University and former Professorial fellow of History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. A graduate of Adelaide and Oxford Universities, he was born in 1929. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, with Jenny, his wife of 65 years.

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CHAPTER 1

Evolution and Structure

1.1   Introduction A welfare state, or ‘social democracy’, as it is more often called these days, is seen as a mixture between socialism and capitalism—as pink rather than red or white. It is, I suppose. But it is not an arbitrary mix. It has what is essentially a capitalist economic system, and must, therefore, be seen as a kind of capitalist society. But I do not think it takes anything from socialism that would not be considered a desirable feature of any capitalist system. There is, however, an inherent difficulty in developing a general theory of ‘the good society’ that has the welfare state as its unique expression. And this difficulty is deeply entrenched in our ways of thinking and talking about the societies in which we live. Our ways of thinking about morality, for example, are fundamentally individualistic. But our social morality cannot be explained individualistically, as I will explain in Chap. 3, even though social morality is the kind of moral thinking we need for constructing national constitutions, bills of rights, or defining national priorities. It is not really an unknown quantity. Our conception of the national economy is likewise at odds with what is required for a welfare state. There is, for example, a widespread belief, in most capitalist societies, that any expenditures of money by governments to supply social needs are burdens, even if they are socially necessary ones. But, the pure theory of capitalism must ignore them. The pure theory is

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_1

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just that of laissez-faire capitalism, which refers to an economy that is driven only by the expenditure of money by individuals or firms on goods or services, and has no burdens placed upon it other than to maintain the market mechanism that was described by Adam Smith. Money, simply conceived as legal tender, is necessarily the driving force of capitalist dynamics, or so I will argue. Thus, an economy is, by definition, laissez-­ faire, if and only if, it is unencumbered by any responsibilities other than those required to maintain the system. Of course, as stated, the old welfare state had many faults. It was racist, sexist and homophobic, and seemed blind to the needs of our first peoples, the Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. So there were many things about the old welfare state I did not like. But these were failings of the kinds that are common to settler societies everywhere. They had nothing to do with the forms of government they embraced. They had everything to do with the attitudes of our European forefathers, who had set out, and largely succeeded, in colonizing most of the non-European world. But none of these were good reasons for ditching the welfare states. To recreate such a government we shall need to revive the kinds of economic theory and management strategy, we used in the welfare state era. The old strategies were abandoned for the same bad reason that the welfare state itself was abandoned. It was seen as an integral part of an unsatisfactory system. The economy was stagnant, and inflation was rife. So clearly something had to be done. But it was neither necessary nor wise to abandon both Keynesianism and the welfare state to set matters right. The government’s task was to stimulate the economy, while simultaneously controlling inflation. And the Accord strategy: of paying what was called a ‘social wage’ to compensate workers who were adversely affected by stagflation, was exactly what was needed. The aggressive trade union movement had no doubt made things worse than they would otherwise have been. And they were widely seen as causing stagflation, when it was not. Most likely, the stagflation was caused by externally imposed increases in the costs of production. There were two such imposts: (1) the increases in the cost of imports caused by the floating of the US currency in 1971, thus increasing the costs of all goods and services for which US currency was required, and (2) successive increases in the cost of crude oil, beginning with the fourfold increase imposed by OPEC in October 1973 to punish the US and its allies for its support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. There were therefore, great external pressures being exerted on the

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Australian dollar to fall in value (inflation), combined a push to cause stagnation in the rate of growth of our economy. If common sense had prevailed in the UK and Australasia, the disturbance in the world’s economies could have been brought under control without any of us abandoning our progressive and well-balanced governments. But common sense did not prevail, The US and UK were engaged in a Cold War with the USSR, which they saw as a winner-takes-all battle for the hearts and minds of the Third World. As they saw it, there were only two kinds of governments in the civilized world—Socialist (as defined by Marx and Engels) and Capitalist (defined as the laissez-faire system that fuelled the European Industrial Revolution). So the US and the UK colluded to pull out all stops to win the economic war with the USSR. I think we should have followed the lead of the countries of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, and persisted with the welfare state.

1.2  Chapter Outlines Chapters 2, 3 and 4 develop the new perspective on moral, economic and political matters that this book promises. The remaining chapters deal with some of the consequences of looking at the social world from this perspective. That is, Chaps. 2, 3 and 4 develop the theoretical position, and the remaining chapters consider its ramifications. But, historically, this was not the order in which this research project was developed. Historically, I began by writing essays on various topics from the point of view at which I had already arrived after a career-long study of philosophy of science— viz. that of scientific realism. And, in 2009, I wrote a book, The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, the final two chapters of which were concerned with social reality. So, to begin with, I had a well-developed theoretical perspective to bring to bear on the subject. But philosophy is not, and never can be, a linearly progressive discipline. Its growth pattern must be more like that of a tree; its branches and leaves feed off its roots, but the roots themselves must grow to support them. As I progressed in my understanding of the social sciences, so I increased in my understanding of the constructed reality upon which they are built. And this is why, I have left the roots (metatheory) of the social sciences till now. With an evolving root system, the logical order cannot be the historical one. I began the project, outlined in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4 by writing a short paper on Aristotle’s conception of human happiness in 2004. It would be helpful, I thought, if I reproduced this paper, just as I wrote it back then,

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and I do so in Chap. 6. But I have, at the end of this chapter, in Sect. 6.3, added some reflective commentary explaining what I think was its primary inadequacy. Chapter 5 will develop the theories of capitalism and socialism, and explore the multidimensional spectrum of kinds of states in between. It will also develop the conceptions of social progress appropriate for states in the intermediate zones, but outside of the zone of the well developed. It will be argued here that social progress is to be gauged by the degree to which it caters for the social, economic and cultural rights of residents. These rights are clearly defined by Articles 22 to 29 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This document, I will argue, was designed, selected and articulated as a ‘Universal Bill of Rights’ for the member states of United Nations. So, presumably, it was seen by the drafting committee as being (a) for everyone, and (b) above politics. Therefore, the welfare states of the world may reasonably be defined as the set of all countries in the world, whose economies are classically economic, in the sense defined by Adam Smith, and whose de facto social contracts accord with, and provide well for, the social, economic and cultural rights of human kind. Chapters 6 and 7 develop the theory of Eudaimonism as a plausible theory of the welfare state, conceived as a classically humanist one that is fixed on maximizing human flourishing. But, I do not start with this as a premise, from which the kind of state required may be deduced. It is far too flimsy for that. What I did is, what no other philosopher to my knowledge has advocated before, suggested a mechanism for realizing the ambition of creating a eudemonic society, which could be constantly monitored, and its imperfections, as they arise, corrected. Specifically, I suggested that the state should be self-reflexive, as every well-functioning democratic state should be, and its de facto social contract (which defines its rules and institutions) should be monitored to gauge how successful it has been in its endeavour to maximize eudaimonia. In other words, I was suggesting that the people in a democratic welfare state should be educated to recognize human flourishing when they see it, and must, somehow, be given the opportunity to vote for our representatives in government, who are committed to promoting it. I called this strategy one of ‘Social Contractual Utilitarianism’. If it were successful, it would naturally lead to the creation of legislation, and the development of institutions, that would ultimately increase people’s social well-being. Chapter 8 begins by discussing three concepts of liberty; the traditional ones of positive and negative liberty distinguished by Isiah Berlin, and

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widely discussed in the literature, and the more recent ‘capability’ concept of Amartya Sen, developed in his then recent book The Idea of Justice. For convenience, I called this concept one of practical liberty, because it is defined by the choice sets that people conceive themselves as having. So, this concept of liberty is one that could be constrained by ignorance, indoctrination, or the lack of means or self-awareness. But in the end my preferred concept of liberty was Clive Hamilton’s concept of inner freedom, the absence of which is the dominant characteristic of modern consumer capitalism, i.e. a social system that cultivates behaviour driven by momentary impulse, temporary emotions and moral and intellectual weakness. The very purpose of the marketing society is to make us ‘the slaves of our passions’. If we do not have ‘inner freedom’, as Hamilton defines it, then it seems to me, we are not only slaves of our passions, we are inveigled into doing what the professional control freaks of the advertising profession want us to do, which is worse. Chapter 9 is important, because, to my knowledge, it contains the first statement of my original idea of a de facto social contract, i.e. of a social anthropological definition of the social contract that actually exists in a given society. Such a description, I said, would set forth: the patterns of behaviour or probable behaviour that really exist in the society, whether covered by laws of the land or not, and the circumstances in which it will be apparent, and (b) the kinds on institutions that exist in the society, which are concerned with human behaviour, and how they function. I argued that, if you know the de facto social contract of a given society, then you know all that there is to know about how people are disposed to behave in that society. The de facto social contract of a given society, as defined in my earlier manuscript, is a scientifically accurate description of that society, and, therefore, one that can be used to describe and evaluate the society. If the society is in fact a democracy, and if, in that democracy, the people are able to assess the eudaimonism of its subjects, then this will be a society, which, in principle, could successfully promote this value. Chapters 10 and 11 are transitional. They are critiques of the rationalist theories of social justice. In these chapters, I argue from a position of pragmatic social humanism. That is, the only social contract with which I am concerned is the real one, the ‘de facto’ one. And the only reason for changing it is that there is good reason to believe that doing so would make it better for the people overall. This political philosophy, I argue, neatly sidesteps the issue of individualism v. collectivism in political theory. From the point of view of people living in an established society, it is

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individualistic. A social humanist believes that we all have a right to choose how we are going to live from within the range of alternatives that are plausibly available to us, and plan our lives accordingly. In this sense it is individualistic. But this does not mean that we are free to live as we please, according to our own lights. For our rights and responsibilities as members of society, or as occupants of various social or political positions in society, should be collectively, not individually, determined. Social humanism is therefore politically individualistic, but methodologically collectivist. It is politically individualistic, because it supports practical liberty, and therefore a kind of political individualism, as a social ideal. But it is methodologically collectivist in social and political theory, because it argues that answers to questions of social or political responsibility cannot normally be derived from answers to ones about the freedoms that people want. In moral and political philosophy, we should settle on the social institutions and behavioural norms we most want collectively, and, within this framework, choose what kind of life would be best for us. In Chap. 11, I turn my attention to the long tradition of founding states theoretically on mythical social contracts. In the modern era, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin all provided such theories to justify the kinds of states they preferred. This chapter offers a critique of such theories. Hobbes used his theory to justify a Leviathan—a ruler with absolute powers. Locke provided the foundations for liberalism, more or less as we know it today. Rousseau’s social contract was widely influential in the construction of the French Republic, following the revolution of 1789. Rawls and Nozick built on Locke’s fictional theory to construct their own models. Rawls sought to provide theoretical foundations for a state that were not only liberal, but also socially just. Nozick defended what he called the ‘minimal’, or ‘nightwatchman’, state, which is the kind of state that is generally preferred by today’s neoliberals. Dworkin used his ideal social contract to construct a theory of social equality. However, none of these theories is tenable. They all begin with imagined states of nature, or of ignorance, and then ask: What kind of bargain would you make in such a state to protect yourself, your family and your possessions from attack? Or, in Rawls’s case: What kind of state would you consider to be both secure and fair, if you had to choose from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’?

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But the imagined states of nature are nothing like the real ones. More importantly, the social contracts that were supposedly agreed are not much like the de facto social contracts of any existing societies, since they tell us nothing about the rights or responsibilities of many of the most important kinds of agents in such societies, such as their institutions, governments and corporations. I will argue here that the whole mythological approach is wrong. We should work with the realities of the existing social structures, not with creation myths, or veils of ignorance. We should then ask: How could the existing social structures be improved upon, i.e. made more eudemonic, not what these structures would have been if our ancestors in the mythical states of nature had been more rational. The real question is: What kinds of laws, customs and institutions would we need to establish a de facto social contract that would provide most adequately for our people. And, this question can only be answered empirically, by trial and error. Creation myths and veils of ignorance are for idealists; pragmatically adjustable de facto social contracts are for realists. The last three chapters deal with: the metaphysics of social humanism (Chap. 12); the preferred methodology of its pursuit (Chap. 13); the need for a universally grounded social moral theory (Chap. 14), which are the subject matters of three books I have had published since the GFC exhibited the poverty of State-sponsored Nozickian capitalism. The books are: ‘Social Humanism; A New Metaphysics’ (Routledge, 2012b); ‘Rationalism; A Critique of Pure Theory’ (ASP, 2017); and ‘The New Enlightenment; Steven Pinker and Beyond’ (ASP, 2019). Chapter 13 takes a closer look at what a new welfare state would be like. Those interested in political realities should read this chapter, because it portrays the kind of state that one could reasonably expect to evolve in place of the neoliberal one. It is much more like the kind of state that Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was intent on building, when his hold on power was cut short in 1975, for reasons no one can reasonably justify. But it would not suffer from all of the dystopian attitudes that marred the old one. It would be fair and inclusive, and legislate to ensure that everyone is able to pursue the legitimate kind of life that they would prefer, and live with dignity in doing so.

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1.3  Social Humanism My book on social humanism was originally subtitled ‘Its Metaphysical Foundations and Global Consequences’ which was a more descriptive title than the one I was persuaded to use. For as explained in my review of Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now; the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, I find myself at odds with Pinker on a number of issues. Another book subtitle was The Case for Scientific Realism in Morals, Economics and Politics. For, I was intent on arguing that a new enlightenment is needed now to overcome the poverty of present-day social theory, and to bring our economists and social theorists up to date in the socially connected, commercially integrated and existentially threatened world of the twenty-first century. The reviewers of my book were Ruth Groff (University of St Louis), and Jonathan Lowe (University of Durham). Both wrote in strong support for its publication. Lowe wrote: This is a remarkable and potentially very important book, not only for academic philosophers but also for social policy makers and the public at large. Brian Ellis, one of the world’s most distinguished philosophers of science and a leading metaphysician, is unusually well-qualified to write it in virtue of his remarkably wide-ranging expertise, which extends to logic and probability theory, the philosophy of mind and action, and ethical and political philosophy. What he does in this book is something not really attempted on this scale since Immanuel Kant, namely, the articulation of a metaphysical basis for a new approach to morality and politics, unifying these and arguing for the global applicability of the key precepts of the resulting theory, which he calls ‘social humanism‘. The theory extends the purview of morality beyond the domain of individual agents to include social organizations and defends an egalitarian and welfarist approach to political theory and social policy, incorporating a new form of utilitarianism, ‘social contractual utilitarianism’. In defending the theory, Ellis also explains why its major rivals, including Marxist communism and individualistic free-market capitalism, are inherently unstable and doomed to failure. At the core of Ellis’s book is a clear and detailed defence of metaphysical realism, applying this to the realm of human agency, both individual and corporate. And at the core of Ellis’s version of metaphysical realism is his appeal to the notion of causal powers as being ubiquitous in the natural world, overturning the still dominant Humean view that causation resides merely in regular succession between otherwise unconnected events. The resulting account of the metaphysical basis of morals is called by Ellis ‘social

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idealism’, in direct and deliberate contrast with Kant‘s own ‘rational idealism’. It is an account that is thoroughly naturalistic, again in contrast with Kant‘s. Ellis has already, in important earlier work, extensively defended such an ontology of powers and is one of the leading figures in current debates on the metaphysics of powers and causation. His deep knowledge of modern scientific theory gives his work on this topic a special authority and depth. But, as mentioned above, Ellis also brings to this book a great expertise in logic, probability theory, and the philosophy of mind and action, as well as longstanding interest in ethics and politics, giving the book as a whole a solidity and profundity that few if any other contemporary philosophers could hope to achieve. A particularly attractive aspect of Ellis’s new approach to morality and politics is that it justifies a universalist approach to fundamental principles of ethics and justice while also accommodating cultural differences between different societies with different historical origins, making it a truly global theory which could hope to achieve a worldwide consensus in its favour. Integral to this aspect of Ellis’s approach is his view that moral principles are not, in general, discoverable purely a priori, but need to take into account historical actualities, giving his theory a pragmatic character which does not, however, license any kind of wholesale relativism where ethical principles are concerned. This book will be of immense interest to a very wide range of academic philosophers and their students, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to politicians and social policy makers, as well as the educated general public. It is clearly but rigorously constructed and written, in a way that makes it at once a pleasure to read and deeply thought-provoking. Ellis engages actively and critically with other ethical and political theorists, both contemporary and historical, but without losing sight of the main aim of the book, which is to articulate and defend a new global vision of morality, politics, and social policy. … I also hope and expect that it will have a considerably wider audience and impact, of the kind achieved by, for example, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which Ellis’s book matches in scope and even exceeds in its ambitions. As remarked above, we really have to return to Kant to see a prior attempt on this scale to provide a universal metaphysical foundation for morals and politics. … Social Humanism may well turn out to be his most abiding and influential contribution to philosophy and to the intellectual and ethical development of humanity more generally.

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I quote this review, for three reasons: because (a) my ‘Social Humanism’ book has not been widely reviewed in the philosophical literature,1 (b) no philosophers have acknowledged, or taken issue with me, in any of the major journals, and (c) I could not have explained better, or more accurately, what I was trying to do than Jonathan.

1.4  Rationalism Rationalism: A Critique of Pure Theory was written to challenge the dogmatic use of our powers of rational intuition in areas where they may well have little or no proper place—in moral and political theory, economics, and truth theory. In writing this book, I was, of course aware that I would be challenging the authority of Kant, who was, unquestionably, one of the greatest philosophers of all time. But in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, when Kant was writing, the social and moral sciences were in their infancy, and it should be no great surprise that he could have got some things wrong. The primary reason for my scepticism of intuitive knowledge in the social and moral sciences is that intuitive knowledge must be the practical knowledge (i.e. knowledge of how to do things) that becomes entrenched in our minds by the biological processes of natural selection. Therefore, it must be the sort of practical knowledge that we need for surviving in kinds of environments in which we have lived for many, probably hundreds, of generations. But the social sciences are mostly not concerned with survival in in the wild. Mostly, they are concerned with flourishing in technically advanced societies in which we have lived for, at most, only a few thousand years. It is plausible that natural selection would develop animal capacities to hunt, locate, flee, remember, procreate, fight, hide, seek safety, protect the young, build or seek shelter and become very efficient at all of these things. For these are all animal capacities. But it is unlikely that our own 1  As far as I know there was only one review of this book in the major philosophical journals, that by Geoffrey Cupit, of the University of Waikato in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Yet Jonathan Lowe, who wrote the above review for Routledge was, at the time of his writing, the UK’s foremost metaphysician. However, the political philosopher, Tony Lynch at the University of New England, did review it for the Australian current affairs journal Dissent in 2013, where it was compared and contrasted with Tony Judt’s well-known book Ill Fares the Land. A copy of this review was published in full in my book The New Enlightenment, Steven Pinker and Beyond.

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animal capacities go much beyond these items. Most of our animal knowledge must surely be tribal in origin. Fairly clearly, like most animals, we have the capacity to learn from experience, and because of our early development of language, we also have the capacity to articulate this knowledge. Therefore, in addition to a priori knowledge, we are likely to have some valuable tribal knowledge, which is relevant to how we should work together for the good of the tribe—if for example, its territory should be invaded by other tribes, or by hordes of other animals. But if this is the scope of the a priori in the social sciences, it is unlikely that the social sciences could be developed in the way that the physical sciences have been. And, in my book on rationalism, I seek to define and understand the scope of the a priori, i.e. knowledge that is truly intuitive. I believe that the scope of a priori knowledge is, in fact, always strictly limited to the kinds of experiences we are capable of having in primitive societies. That is, it becomes unreliable at the extremes. Our intuitions of space and time, for example, are clearly limited in this way. We know a priori that space is three dimensional, and that time has no beginning or end. But these intuitions have been revealed to be inadequate for advanced studies of the processes occurring in nature. And few physicists today would accept either of these propositions unconditionally. But, in the social sciences, these advanced understandings are irrelevant. For the social sciences are limited to studying the ways that people are likely to act, perceive change, or behave in the societies in which they live. And, whatever physicists may have to tell us about causation at the fundamental level of quantum mechanics, is irrelevant.

1.5  A Globally Progressive Enlightenment I do not wish to say much about this movement here. There is, I think, gathering momentum for it. Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now; the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Pinker, 2018) suggests that something like this is already developing. But, it is important that the new movement should, above all, be seen as a Progressive Enlightenment, and the movement itself must be essentially a Global Movement. So, let us settle for the name ‘a Globally Progressive Enlightenment’. We must seek to make the world proud of its human achievements, and for this pride to be spread throughout the world. There is indeed cause for the world to be proud of its achievements in the arts and sciences. But the new

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enlightenment must be marked by its global spread and inclusiveness. For the forces of civilization, and those of national development, are now both very dominant. But together these forces can be very destructive. The promise of such a movement is huge. For we could see the great Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations of Turkey, Persia, India, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia all celebrating the achievements of human kind, and proudly taking their place on the international stage. But we could also see them as being systematically humiliated by their traditional or present-day enemies. The Globally Progressive Enlightenment must avoid this tragedy. There is, therefore, a great danger that any movement to celebrate the achievements of human kind, could quickly turn into ‘a history war’, in which some of the great injustices of the past are re-lived, and thus renewed. So, we must earnestly seek to avoid this calamity. The old European Enlightenment did not do so, unfortunately. It allowed the Age of Enlightenment to deteriorate quickly into an Age of Empire—an age in which many of the rich countries of Europe attempted to interpret their celebration of the advancement of learning by processes of conquest or settlement. For, they all thought they had somehow to spread the word, and, if necessary, to do so by the force of arms. Thus, what should have been a celebration of the achievements of human civilization were clearly stamped ‘Made in Europe’. To steer clear of this disaster, the Globally Progressive Enlightenment must have some rules. There needs to be an international culture of mutual acceptance amongst the members of different cultures which exists independently of their past histories. Any critiques of the social, cultural or economic activities of foreign countries must be fair and equal, and be seen to be so. That is, if country A believes that country B is acting contrary to the UN Charter on human rights, then A must notify B of its concerns, and, if it wishes to publish this complaint, it must also extend to country B the right of reply, and agree to put this on official record in country A, where it may be inspected by the citizens of both countries. This should, I think, be a common courtesy. Of course, this may not be precisely the rule that should be followed. But it should, at least, be possible to establish some procedure to block the worst of such procedures. For it is my belief that a new enlightenment must demand much better rules of international engagement than we have at present. We do not

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allow individuals to slander one another. Why should we allow nation states to slander one another with impunity, where the consequences of the slander can be much more serious? I make this point because I believe that the old enlightenment failed entirely to deal with the issue of ‘cultural libel’, or ‘international slander’, or whatever you want to call it. Yet, it is a real and potentially very destructive crime, which feeds upon racism, and can easily be used to reinforce such hateful attitudes, by creating international fear and/or loathing. National rights should be treated as a fitting subject for a future UN charter. And it should be constructed as a Bill of National Rights, for the United Nations. In this book I will argue that the Globally Progressive enlightenment has a lot of work to do. As my colleague, Nicholas Maxwell has argued, we need to learn how to act wisely, not just rationally, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Social Democracy

CHAPTER 2

Realism in Social Theory

2.1   The Ideal of Realism Realism in social theory stems from the demand that all social sciences should be physically realistic about their subject matters. And their methodologies should be fit for purpose. But historically this has not been the case. At the time of the European Enlightenment, the social sciences were all in their infancies—as sciences. They had been studied and speculated about for centuries in most cases, and for millennia in others. But their assumptions about human nature and human societies were all dominated by religious institutions, and by individual philosophers, scholars, writers and playwrights of all kinds. But the scientific study of human beings, their capacities, languages and thought processes, and their mental processes more generally, did not become matters for serious scientific investigation until the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. And the same is true of the studies of human collective behaviour, of the societies they created and of the social and political structures that people had built. These too had long been the subjects of investigation by religious groups, individual philosophers and so on, but they had not become the subjects of scientific investigation—even in the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century ways of thinking were manifestly affected by Enlightenment myths about the intuitive powers of the human mind. For example, it was widely believed, that we all had the power to intuit the

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necessary conditions for the possibility of experience in all areas where scientific knowledge is possible—a fact which Kant believed would enable us to set out on all of the paths to scientific discovery that we had yet to find— including, presumably, those in the moral sciences. If I am right about this, then the European Enlightenment has become a victim of its own success. For, it opened up many new fields of inquiry, which led to big advances in physics and engineering, to the Industrial Revolution, and ultimately to providing the Western world with the mechanical and electrical tools it needed to explore and conquer most of the rest of the world. In doing this it subjugated and humiliated the residents of these conquered lands. It installed Western ways of thinking and working upon the citizens of these countries, and gave the West an undeserved and unearned superiority complex. At the same time, it locked economists, philosophers, political theorists and moralists into a Cartesian rationalist thought bubble, from which we seem unable to escape. But escape is possible. And, escape we must, if we wish to target our growth and development. The way of escape requires a change in how we think about problems in the moral sciences, and the kinds of theoretical structures we should be building in these areas. What we need, I will argue is a change in First Philosophy—from Cartesian Rationalism to Scientific Realism. In the eighteenth century, Cartesian Rationalism was First Philosophy in economic thinking, and Cartesian Rationalism and British Empiricism were rivals for this role in the natural sciences. But neither perspective was appropriate for the moral sciences. For what was required was only that we should seek to explain the phenomena in scientifically realistic terms. Specifically, we should not be seeking to construct universal theories in areas where there is no reason to think that the phenomena we are trying to explain really are global (as they plausibly are for the natural sciences), or universal (as they most plausibly are for the physical sciences). The biological sciences, for example, are plausibly dealing with processes which may be found in living things anywhere in the world. And the physical sciences are presumably concerned with the natures of things wherever they may be in the universe. But to explain the point I wish to make here I must first explain what is meant by First Philosophy. Many of us will remember the famous speech of Ronald Reagan in which he announced that ‘Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem’. No, Mr Reagan, it is the thought bubble in which you are trapped that is the problem.

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Culturally, the European Enlightenment was grand. Music and the arts flourished as never before. The royal houses of Europe fostered and encouraged the development of what we now think of as classical music, which could, but did not have to be, devotional in character. They built music halls, established orchestras and choirs, financed musical education, put on concerts, and eventually built the great opera houses of Europe. The cities of Leipzig, Vienna, Paris and London come readily to mind as flourishing cities of the Enlightenment. But, my concern in this volume is with the evolution of social theory in the Enlightenment. I seek specifically to understand the contributions of Enlightenment thinking, and scientific methodology in the post-Newtonian era to the development of social theory.

2.2  Scientific History Academically, I see the European Enlightenment as essentially a continuation of the scientific revolution in the physical sciences, which began in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or so I will argue, as a revolution in astronomy. In his book Astronomia Nova (1609), Johannes Kepler, the great German mathematician, announced the results of his collaborative work with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in the Austrian city of Linz concerning the laws of planetary motion. This book, by itself, changed the way that the world was understood. It was immediately very plausible, despite the fact that it broke with two long-standing traditions in astronomical thinking concerning the motions of the planets. It was not only a Sun-centred theory that Kepler had constructed; it was one in which the planets moved in orbits that were neither circular, nor tracked uniformly. Yet, they were geometrically describable. All of the planets, he concluded, must be: (i) moving in elliptical orbits about the Sun, with the Sun in one focus, (ii) such that the straight lines between the Sun and the various planets all sweep out equal areas in equal times, and (iii) the squares of the orbital periods of the planets are proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from the Sun. And these conclusions were all compatible with the results of Tycho Brahe’s careful, painstaking and comprehensive observations of the locations of the planets against their stellar backgrounds. These laws of planetary motion cleared the heavens of many scores of epicycles that were to be found in all of the earlier models (since the time of Ptolemy in the second century CE). They not only changed cosmology

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fundamentally; they were also a triumph for British empiricist methodology, which was elaborated by Sir Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning (1605b). And, of course, they were also a demonstration of Kepler’s dogged determination and extraordinary mathematical skills in curve-fitting. However, this was not the end of the story of how our ideas progress scientifically. Bacon’s and Kepler’s approaches were straightforwardly empiricist. Kepler’s results were good as far as they went. But this achievement did not yield the advanced kind scientific understanding that was eventually required for the Enlightenment. It did not explain, or even seek to explain, what was causing these motions. The laws of kinematics are concerned with how relatively closed physical systems change. A physical system is relatively closed if the patterns of physical change within it are fairly constant. Hence the concept of being a relatively closed physical system is weaker than that of the ideal of causal isolation, but it is useful, nevertheless. By a ‘closed physical system’, I mean one that is not interacting with any other physical system—which is a more stringent ideal. The solar system, for example, is plausibly such a system, because there is no reason to think that anything external to it is interfering with the planetary movements in any substantial ways. Therefore, the laws of planetary motion, as described by Kepler, are good examples of what we will call ‘kinematic’ laws. They do not explain why the planets move as they do. But they do explain, at least approximately, how they must really be moving in space. The apparent motions that Kepler relied upon were recorded very precisely by the astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observations were as good as his very good telescope, and the not-so-good the weather, would allow. And, Kepler vowed to respect these observations, and to construct a model of the solar system that would explain them as well and accurately as possible. Kepler’s aim was to construct a kinematic theory for a supposed solar system, placing the Sun at the centre, as Aristarchus and Copernicus had done before him. With a Sun-centred Cosmos, Kepler reasoned, the outermost sphere of the fixed stars could be fixed, and the patterns of epicycles required to save the phenomena could, in principle, be simplified. Copernicus had shown how such a construction could be achieved. But the Copernican model was still very complex. For none of the planets, not even the Earth, move around the Sun in uniform circular orbits. So, no great simplification was achieved. And the question of what the real motions of the planets must be, relative to the background of the fixed

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stars, remained unanswered. Johannes Kepler set himself the task of answering this question. It was one that had defeated astronomers and mathematicians for nearly 2000 years. The European Enlightenment took its second major step forward, with the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687. For this book took our understanding of the theory of motion to a whole new level. It did so by using the methodology developed by French philosopher René Descartes’ ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences’, which is more generally known now, simply, as his Discourse on Method (1637). It built upon Kepler’s novel theory of planetary motion. It did not seek to dispute Kepler’s findings, but only to explain them. And, to explain them adequately. The brief biography published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Descartes ‘as a creative mathematician of the first order, an important scientific thinker, and an original metaphysician’. During the course of his life, they said, ‘he was a mathematician first, a natural scientist or ‘natural philosopher’ second, and a metaphysician third’. I have no quarrel with this judgment. But I should add that Descartes’ theory of scientific method contributed fundamentally to the academic development of scientific understanding in the Enlightenment, both directly through the Philosophe movement, and indirectly, through his profound influence on the young Newton. The young Newton, who wrote the Principia was, without doubt, a convinced Cartesian. His assumptions and methodology in writing the Principia bear this out. He was not, at this early stage of his life, much interested in pursuing Baconian Empirical research. And there is no suggestion anywhere in the first edition of his Principia that he had direct empirical evidence for the veracity of his Axioms. Axiom 1 was, quite straightforwardly, Descartes’ principle of natural motion. Axiom 2 was that the change of motion that a body undergoes when it is subject to a motive force of magnitude F is proportional to the change of momentum m(V2 – V1) that results. So, F, as defined by Newton, was, quite simply, an energy concept of the kind advocated by Leibniz in his defence of his concept of vis viva. Newton’s Axiom 3 was the principle of action and reaction, which was a corollary of Descartes’ speculations, and was clearly presaged in the writings of Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s. So the whole of the Principia bears witness to Descartes’ methodology, and to some of his speculative conclusions. Newton’s so-called Second Law of Motion was originally conceived as a cause-and-effect relationship—the cause being the total motive force

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impressed, and the effect the total change of momentum that occurs in the direction of this action. That is, the force was conceived as being the measure of an impulse (e.g. in the form of a kick, a tug or a straight drive) given by the action, and impressed upon a body in a given direction. The variables related in this second assumption (Axiom 2) were not those of instantaneous force (f ), mass (m) and acceleration (a), as in what is now called Newton’s Second Law of Motion. I call this principle ‘Axiom 2’, rather than Newton’s Second Law, partly because Newton himself called it an axiom, but more importantly, because the Second Law of Motion is the time derivative of Newton’s Axiom 2. And, as such, it is both more intuitive, and more powerful than Newton’s Second Law, because the latter sets the constant of integration to zero, and consequently implies Axiom 1 as well. I want to make this distinction between ‘total force impressed’ and ‘instantaneous magnitude of force’ here and now, because, conceptually, there is a world of difference between the two. Newton’s concept of motive force impressed was an energy concept, like Leibniz’s concept of the vis viva. But it has to be appreciated that the young Newton who was born in 1643 was working on these things in the 1670s, just 10 years or so after the reign Oliver Cromwell, and the wars between the Royalists and the Roundheads. British aristocrats feared the abstract rationalist thinking of the kind developed by Descartes was not only useless, it might just lead to another revolution, and feared for their lives that such a revolution might succeed. Support for Cartesianism in Cambridge at this time might well have been seen as politically incorrect, if not actually treasonable. For it is surely notable that, despite the obvious influence that Cartesian writings had had on Newton, and the standing that Newton must have had in the world of letters at this time, Newton wrote as though he had never heard of Descartes or Leibniz. The concept of force became a matter of some considerable concern in the scientific community in the eighteenth century when the so-called vis viva controversy was at its height.1 Those intent upon employing the concept of instantaneous force in dynamics would not have looked kindly upon a Cartesian in their midst, who was more inclined to use the concept of ‘living force’, rather than that of a continuously changing instantaneous forces. Living forces were thought of as bursts of energy that bring about changes in things, and continue to 1

 See Caroline Iltis (1970).

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live on in the things they affect. Newton’s original conception of motive force was clearly a concept like this. i.e. a burst of energy that is capable of manifesting itself in different ways. So, plausibly, Newton was under considerable pressure to keep quiet about his own engagement with this conception. In the end, the scientific community came to terms with the existence of these rival conceptions of motive force. And they were content to re-frame Newton’s Axiom 2 as ‘Newton’s Second Law of Motion’ (f = ma), which is what it is now called. As d’Alembert demonstrated, it makes no practical difference. We can have either (a) an isolated dynamical system with fixed laws of motion and changing forces acting on things within it, or (b) an isolated system with fixed total energy (Kraft) redistributing that energy according to laws of conservation of energy. But the latter idea did not gain much currency until the 1840s, when this way of thinking about forces was revived by Robert Meyer, and Ludwig von Helmholtz (W. F. Magie, 1935).

2.3  Dynamics and Kinematics In the Principia, Newton invented a wholly new way of thinking about forces—a logic of dynamical reasoning, if you like. And, his dynamics of the solar system clearly went well beyond Kepler’s laws of planetary motion. For, his rules of reasoning in dynamics are very much stronger than those required for kinematics. Newton’s logic of causal reasoning was characterized by the following principles: 1. No more causes of natural things should be admitted than are both true and sufficient to explain their effects. 2. Therefore, the causes assigned to natural effects of the same kind must be, so far as possible, the same. 3. Those qualities of the bodies that cannot be increased or diminished and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made, should be taken as qualities of all bodies whatsoever. 4. In experimental philosophy, a proposition gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered to be either exactly, or very nearly, true, notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena may make such propositions either more exact or liable to exception.

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These principles are all plausible, and all would apply equally well to reasoning in economics. And of these principles, No. 4 might be called the principle of pragmatism, which is, indeed, a very powerful principle. Newton demonstrated that these principles of causal reasoning, together with the axioms of motion, are sufficient to allow the derivation the universal law of gravitation from Kepler’s laws. (Yes in that direction.)2 Yet, the principles are very seldom discussed in the philosophical literature. I do not know why this should be so. Perhaps there was no consciousness of political correctness in Britain in the seventeenth century, and the British were just very conservative in their thinking. Or, perhaps it was all just a question of loyalty.

2.4   Inquiring into the Nature and Causes of Motion Newton took the view that the empirically discovered laws of motion, including those of free fall, balls rolling down inclined planes, masses impacting on one another and so on, are all facts that needed to be explained. These were his starting points. And the principles of dynamics he developed in the Principia defined his approach to all of these problems. The power of the principles of causal reasoning is demonstrated by the fact Newton’s theory of universal gravitation not only explained Kepler’s laws, it corrected them. It did so by explaining why Kepler thought that they were exactly as he said they were. He accepted that Kepler’s laws would all have to be very nearly true, given Tycho’s results. But, using his rules of empirical pragmatism, Newton demonstrated that his theory of universal gravitation was, nevertheless, the best causal explanation of these results available, because the Sun is very much more massive than the planets. Thus, the rules of reasoning in natural philosophy adopted by Newton were a very powerful tool. Given these new rules, and the conclusions he draws from them, it follows that the Sun itself must be affected by gravitational forces. For example, it cannot be at the centre off the Cosmos, as Kepler thought; it must wobble around a bit as the planets move around in their orbits. Moreover, the planets must interact with each other.

2  Newton’s law of gravitation was not, of course, the last word in gravitational theory. But it was, undoubtedly a giant step forward.

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2.5  Economics There was one serious attempt to create a useful social science in the century of the European Enlightenment—that of Adam Smith in the field of economics. His book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. It was arguably the first serious study of the role of social choice in economic development. As such, this book must now be seen as a pioneering work in social dynamical theory. In general, the theory of the dynamics of a system is, necessarily, much stronger than its kinematics. Economists should all learn this lesson. For a sound causal theory of economics is necessarily stronger and better than a simple behavioural theory. Dynamics was then a relatively new kind of scientific theory. Even in physics, there were few, if any, dynamical theories before 1687, when the first edition of Newton’s Principia was published. Being the scholar that he undoubtedly was, Adam Smith would probably have read Newton’s theory of motive force (possibly in the original Latin). So, plausibly, Newton’s Principia may have served as a role model for Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It was, at that time, certainly the most prominent physical causal theory in existence. And, in writing it, Newton had to invent his own logic of causal reasoning. So, to appreciate what Adam Smith was trying to do, it is important that we should be aware of the relevant concepts of Newton’s Principia. The general concept of motive force is that of physical energy. It is the concept designated as ‘Kraft’ (the German word for ‘force’) in Helmholtz’s law of conservation of energy. If Adam Smith’s dynamics of capitalism was modelled on Newton’s dynamics, which it probably was, then Smith’s concept of money spent would be an energy concept too—one that is capable of producing legal changes of ownership or the legal settlements of debts. And, as such, money would have to be the foundational concept in any genuinely Smithian theory of economics. And, any such a theory of economics would have to be a causal process theory, not an a priori rationalistic one. If ‘money spent’ was an energy concept, then, like other energy concepts, it would have to be capable of manifesting itself in different ways, as any ‘living’ force is. And, indeed it can be. It can be presented as notes or coins of the realm, or as credit in a bank, which is withdrawn by cheque, or as the balance remaining on a credit card. Since Smith set out to explore the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, the energy concept required

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for a country’s economic management must, presumably, be the kind of money that is legal tender in that nation’s economy. For this is the social force, the expenditure of which creates the nation’s exchanges in goods and services. Its level of expenditure must at least be maintained if employment and productivity are to be kept the same. But to stimulate the economy, where it needs to be stimulated, the economic manager’s job must be to manage the levels of local demand, and/or the productive and market-­targeting skills of its producers—which is standard practice for Keynesian economic managers. If the theory of money is to be developed in parallel with the physical concept of energy, money must ultimately become a universal concept of social energy. However, there is, as yet, no universal currency, and I do not think we should be in any hurry to create one. For a feedback mechanism that works well at the village level, may fail at the national level, and fail hopelessly when used globally. Indeed, it is obvious that the messages that our global purchasing habits are sending back to the global community— viz. ‘Keep it up, whatever you are doing, you are doing well’—may only be giving our approval for child labour or slavery.

2.6  Good Value for Money! Keep Up the Good Work! This is the message that successful marketers in Adam Smith’s time presumably took home on market day. And, essentially, such inadvertent messaging is still the what drives growth in a capitalist economy. It steers the directions of its growth, the maintenance of its standards, and provides successful producers with the means they need to expand their businesses. And, those who hear this message most strongly, or are best at reading the market, or have the most skilful workers, or the best workshops, will probably be those who are most successful. Smith had argued that the money that is spent at the market is well directed. For, in the course of a day (or year), it is, necessarily, directed to the marketers of the goods and services according to the perceived utilities of their products. Laws of nature do not come into the equation. But efficiency of production, quality of product and demand for product at the advertised price, all do. And, they do so in ways that must, ceteris paribus, reward especially the best directed or most efficient producers of goods or services. We have seen already that the key concept of general dynamics is

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simply that of the motive force required to produce a given change of motion. By parity of reasoning, Smith argued, the key concepts of trading dynamics, must be those of the quality, price and the targeting of goods or services produced. A cause and effect relationship of the same abstract kind as Newton’s so-called Second Law of Motion as it was originally conceived. There is good reason to believe that there is a sound dynamical theory of economics, a version of which was developed by John Maynard Keynes at the height of the Great Depression. We know that managing the levels of local demand, and/or the productive and market-targeting skills of its producers works well in normal times, i.e. where there is no need for central control to deal with a crisis, such as the crises faced by the world’s largest economies, during the OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s, or to what we now face with Covid 19. In normal times, Keynesian economic management works well. For 25 years, from 1947 to 1972, unemployment in Australia averaged just 2.0%. The French called the 30 years following World War II ‘les Trente Glorieuses’ But in the neoliberal era, from the late 1970s to the present, the unemployment level in Australia has averaged more than 6%, and has always been more than double that of the post-war period.3 Moreover, employment in the welfare state era was secure, and the conditions under which people worked were luxurious, compared with those under which people are expected to work today. In all of the neoliberal period, the management of Australia’s economy by conservative governments has been strictly ‘supply-side’. That is, if the economy is sluggish, then it is assumed by them that one should always: (a) reduce interest rates or (b) lower taxation levels, presumably to encourage the nation’s producers to do something about it. But conservative governments steered clear of injecting money into the economy to boost demand, e.g. by running a budget deficit, or to target production, e.g. by investing in social housing. It is easy to see why this policy is popular in the business community, and why it is so bad for nearly everyone else. ‘Demand-side’ management, we are told, necessarily involves measures to increase or decrease levels of demand in the economy, which would be either ‘socialist’, or ‘Keynesian’, as though these were somehow terms of abuse. True, the Chinese economy has managed their brilliant economy in 3  John Howard’s government got it down to 4.0% in 2008, just before the GFC caused the biggest slump since the Great Depression.

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Keynesian fashion. And Kevin Rudd used it too, in his first term as Prime Minister, to avoid recession following the GFC. But this is hardly a criticism. Australia was one of the few capitalist countries in the world to avoid a recession at that time. Moreover, the Chinese economy has, by every measure, been by far the best managed of any economy in the world. It sailed through the GFC with flying colours. The Keynesian management strategy can hardly be accused of being socialist per se. For it is not necessarily socialist in any sense that really matters. On the contrary, it is only what is needed in any good capitalist democracy, when it is responding to a serious economic challenge. If demand management is socially better than doing nothing in a crisis, then there is nothing at all wrong with doing it. It is not a step in the direction of nationalizing all of the means of production, distribution and exchange, which used to be the catch-cry of socialists—unless this happened to be what one really wanted to do. But no one wants that anymore, not even the leaders of today’s Communist regimes. And, if it is Keynesian, then, so what? As an economic theory, Keynes’s monetary theory may not be perfect. No scientific theory ever is. But it is a scientific theory, indeed, a causal process theory, and therefore one that is fit for purpose. Moreover, its track record has been magnificent. It ended the Great Depression, enabled the allied forces to arm and feed themselves throughout the war, and it coped magnificently with the post-war restoration and resettlement programmes. Like Adam Smith’s theory, it is one that is concerned with the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. And, as such, it works. Keynesian theory explains economic reality. Neo-classical theory does not; it is a kinematic theory of some considerable merit, no doubt, but it is not a theory for economic management. Keynes’ dynamics of capitalism is capable of explaining anything that neo-classical economic theory can explain. But, because the force concept of money is a real variable in Keynesian theory, Keynesians can diagnose the causes of failure in economic systems that neo-classicist theorists cannot. We know this, because of the lamentable failure of neo-classical economists to predict either the Great Depression in the 1930s, and the GFC in 2008/2009. We also know it from the fact that governments continue, in all good faith, to act on the assumption that it is private investment that drives economic growth, not money. Presumably, economists commit this furphy, because business people all like to believe that they are the causes of economic growth. But, unfortunately for them, this is false. The power that drives economic growth is money. And money is just purchasing power. This is the energy

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concept of economics, not the minds of the business community. And, this is what Smith’s dynamics of capitalism clearly implies. And it is probably true. Therefore, neoliberal theory has no solid foundation in classical economics. Economics is not founded in the laws of nature. It is founded in the laws of the land, i.e. in social law (and perhaps also in social convention). Keynes theory is effective because the legal uses of money to purchase things, or hire people, are all backed by the laws of the land. And it is precisely this legal backing that creates the legal force of money. When Ronald Reagan said ‘Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem’, he and his economic advisors saw the economies of the Western world as driven by forces over which governments could have no effective control. For, although they could push their foot down on the accelerator of the economy, e.g. by lowering interest rates or offering tax cuts, or put on the hand-break by doing the opposite, they could not profitably steer the economy in whatever way they wanted to go. They thought that any attempt to steer the economy of a nation, e.g. by using Keynesian directed stimulus packages, could only be an interference with the economy, and therefore a hindrance to its development. This thought bubble arises from a Cartesian Rationalist economic theory, which was perfected, we are told, by the pure theories that were developed at the turn of the twentieth century—the best known of which was that of Alfred Marshall. These pure theories, which contain the so-­ called Neutral Money hypothesis are widely accepted now as defining neo-­ classical economics. But this hypothesis, if it means anything at all, implies that money is not to be regarded as a real economic variable. Rather, it was thought that money is really just a token of value, which serves to make exchanging goods and services more flexible. But the fundamental process, the neo-classical economists thought was exchange, which is swopping things of supposedly equal value. This is, I believe, a weaker conception of money than Adam Smith’s original one. For there is reason to think that Smith’s original conception of money was a force concept, like that of motive force in Newtonian dynamics, rather than a neutral mass concept, like that of quantity of matter. As I understand it, the Neutral Money hypothesis signals the belief that neo-classical economics stands to a Keynesian monetary theory, as economic kinematics stands to economic dynamics, i.e. it removes the driving force of purchasing power from the theory in order to describe the phenomena neutrally, leaving the question of why the economy runs at all in limbo. But this suits the economic purist, who believes that the economy

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of a country is like and engine in a capitalist system. It can be put into neutral, as it is now in this city, where the Covid-19 virus has forced a lock-­ down. Or it can be fired up again, by injecting money into it, and taking the brakes of government regulations off, and letting business enterprises get on with it. For, that is how it is with kinematic theories. There are thought to be natural levels of productivity and employment in a capitalist state, which would inevitably be reached in the long run, when the system settles down to work at its equilibrium level, which would then remain in place indefinitely, until the equilibrium is disturbed by a major catastrophe, a war, a collapse of the stock exchange or an unforeseen boost to the economy caused by the discovery of gold or a technological breakthrough. I know that this is how most people like to think about the economy of a country, and, indeed, they are encouraged to think about it by the wealthy establishments of capitalist countries. Keynes’ theory was a monetary one, in which money has a role in economic dynamics, which matches, in appropriate ways, the role of motive force in Newton’s dynamics of motion. But, unfortunately, there is no conception of intrinsic value that is objective enough to play the role that inertial mass plays in Newtonian dynamics. Consequently, Keynesian economic theory does not have all of the nice life-affirming properties of Marshallian economic kinematics.4 This theory was derived from neo-­ classical economics by adjusting its axiom system in response to (a) its failure to anticipate the Great Depression, and (b) its subsequent failure to respond adequately to the phenomena of low productivity and high unemployment. Given Scientific Realism as First Philosophy, Keynes’s theory was an advance on its neo-classical predecessors. For, most importantly, and among other objectionable axioms, Keynes’ theory was a theory of economic dynamism, in the sense that Newton’s general dynamics in the Principia was an advance on Kepler’s kinematics of planetary motion. For, just as the dynamics of planetary motion of the solar system overthrew the kinematics of Kepler’s earlier theory, so Keynes’s dynamic theory of economic well-being should have overthrown Marshallian kinematic complacency. Keynes’ theory was manifestly superior to its kinematic predecessor. It was weaker for kinematic theories are just neutral structures, like branches of mathematics, which can tell us nothing about what causes are operating 4

 The dynamics of capitalism will be discussed in some detail in Chap. 4, Sect. 4.3 below.

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in the real world. Such a theory might be capable of describing what will happen economically in a society in the long run, provided that it behaves strictly as a village market is supposed to behave. But, for a diagnosis of why it is happening as it is, in the circumstances that have come to exist, we need a dynamical theory, such as that of Keynes. For dynamical theories are built upon scientifically realistic premises, as they would be, if Scientific Realism were First Philosophy for economics, rather than Cartesian Rationalism. But, to achieve such an outcome, I believe we would need a new enlightenment. I, and my colleagues, Tony Lynch, Greg Bailey and Gideon Polya have all advocated a strategy for achieving the objective in the last of the four books that have evolved out of our adoption of Scientific Realism as First Philosophy.5 We argued there that the best, and probably the only, way of breaking the hold of the old enlightenment on people’s thinking about issues like this one is to create a new enlightenment—and thus get all of the best minds in the morally conscious world to rethink the social foundations of morals, economics and politics. For, all of them, are in desperate need of reform.

2.7  Social Scientific Realism The social sciences are essentially different from the natural ones. For they are concerned with socially created entities, which do not occur naturally in the world. Of course, these socially created entities are potent for people in the societies in which they are created. And the effects they have on them in these social systems are real enough. For, these effects are produced by ordinary physical causes. But the effects they produce are not only physical, they are also social, i.e. they are physical changes that cause changes to the traditions, customs, morality, institutions or legal systems of the societies in which they occur. One entity that is capable of effecting great changes to our social system is money, which is a social causal power. It is a social power, which is created by government legislation. It can be acquired legally, by gift or 5  The books that make up Vols. 2 to 5 of the series are: Vol 2. The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism. Durham, UK; Acumen, 2009, 179 pp. Vol 3. Social Humanism: A New Metaphysics. London and New York; Routledge, 2012, 227 pp.Vol 4. Rationalism: A Critique of Pure Theory. Melbourne; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2017, 249  pp. and Vol. 5. The New Enlightenment: Steven Pinker and Beyond; Melbourne; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2019, 295 pp.

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inheritance, or it can be obtained legally by the performance of services, or the supply of goods, in exchange. A person or organization with money can then purchase goods or services in any such legal exchange process with any other person or organization that is licensed to supply the goods in question. Social causal powers, such as money, are like physical ones, if viewed from the outside. For no one has to do anything magical to use them. One can, say, use money to buy a pot of jam at the local market. One just has to hand over money to the value advertised price of the jam, or whatever else is being bought. And, if the money is legal tender, then the process of sale is at an end, and a change of ownership has occurred. And, this change of ownership is a legal, and therefore social, change. It is a change in the legal status of the purchased object. If someone has bought one of the goods or services on sale at the market, then a new social process, known as that of supply, is legally required to follow. Specifically the vendor must supply the goods or services that the customer has purchased. Again, the act of supplying the goods or services (the jam or a job) is just a physical causal process. For, to a social outsider, the act of supplying is indistinguishable from that of just giving the jam away, or doing the job they agreed to do. For the only difference between supplying the goods or services bought, and complying with what was agreed, depends on whether the supplier is, or is not, fulfilling a legal obligation. In the case of hiring, the supplier is the worker, and the contractual obligation is on the hirer to pay the agreed price for the work done, provided that it has been done satisfactorily. There is nothing magical going on in the heads of the participants in these processes. In the act of purchase there was the buyer’s decision to buy the jam from the vendor’s stall, and the vendor’s decision to accept the price offered, neither of which resulted from coercion. But the whole transaction was a physical causal process, with no non-physical acts of will occurring in the minds of those involved. The decisions were events that occurred in the brains of the two people, without any body-to-mind acts of perception, or mind-to-body acts of will taking place. For, the mind-­ body distinction is just as bogus and that between what is social and what is physical. The social changes (of ownership and commitment to supply) are legal ones that occur as the inevitable result of what are really just physical transactional processes. But the language of economics is like that of classical dynamics. For, money and motive force are co-relative concepts in their respective

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disciplines—as we shall see. The social dynamics of purchase is a very important kind of theory for us all to master. For, the concept of money is as important to the dynamics of ownership and wealth, as the concept of motive force is to the changes of speed and direction of motion that occur in physical systems. But the laws of economics are fundamentally legal or conventional, and therefore, potentially socially relative, whereas the laws of motion are laws of nature, and therefore immutable.

2.8  Causal Power Realism My book The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism was written with the aim of establishing scientific realism as First Philosophy for all of the sciences. But the kind of scientific realism required for a given area may well depend on the epistemic level of that inquiry. The kind of scientific realism required for quantum mechanics is as yet unknown, and may well be different fundamentally from the kinds of scientific realism that are required for those concerned with middle-sized particulars and observable processes of, say the nineteenth century. For that is the kind of old-fashioned level at which the social sciences do work. And this is the kind of level at which we must work, if our aim is to define the kind of scientific realism required for the social sciences. For these sciences make no use of the kinds of technologies required for, say, cosmology or quantum mechanics. However, the methodologies required for the various sciences are well known, and generally fairly similar, And, I am happy to accept Imre Lakatos’s general account scientific method described in The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs. This theory is certainly adequate for the purposes of this book. The structures and conceptual frameworks required for the social sciences are more like those for the natural sciences of, the nineteenth century. For the kinds of things we have to deal with here not like those that exist naturally, and independently of what we do. Anthropology is, I suppose, the exception to this general rule, because it is itself a natural science. But the social sciences, which are my primary focus, are fairly unique. For the structures that exist in social systems are constructed, and operate by human laws or conventions, rather than natural ones. A great deal of what passes for philosophy is more prophylactic than progressive. For there was once the widespread belief that philosophers are, and ought only to be, the guardians of common sense. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, took the view that ordinary language is all very well as it stands. It does not need to be revised, and philosophical

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problems can usually, or even always, be resolved by paying careful attention to the meanings of words. As an undergraduate in philosophy, I once won a year’s free subscription to the journal Analysis with an essay on the set topic ‘What sort of “if” is the “if” in “I can if I choose”?’6 These were the sorts of questions that philosophers asked in the early 1950s. But I have long since rejected this ‘ordinary language’ conception of philosophy. It focuses attention on the meanings of words, which is important for the reading of philosophy. But it cannot be creative of any essentially new ways of thinking. Like any other academic study, philosophy needs to progress. Given scientific realism as First Philosophy, philosophers must proceed by creating ways of thinking that are scientifically realistic, and rejecting forms of thought that were created to satisfy the demands of Rationalism, or British Empiricism, which were the dominant First Philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, I suppose it is true today that most philosophers in the English-speaking world see themselves as thinkers, and their task as being to expose the muddled thought of others— for what it is, wherever it may exist. In a recent essay on progress in philosophy, David Chalmers listed a number of philosophical problems, which he thinks still need the attention of philosophers, and proposed to measure philosophical progress by the degree to which they, by their own judgment, have succeeded in resolving these problems. I would agree with Chalmers that solving such problems is a worthwhile aim. But it cannot be that this is all that we should expect from philosophy. For there are more fundamental questions that need to be asked about the effectiveness of our ways of thinking—especially in the social sciences. For these need to be changed. If we are to make good progress in this area, we will need to equip ourselves with theoretical tools for making the world a better place. And these theoretical tools are either new, or at least relatively unexplored, concepts in the languages we speak. I do not pretend to be a disinterested observer of the social scene, because I am not. And, what I have to say will inevitably be somewhat autobiographical—which is fitting, because philosophy is essentially a reflective study. Consequently, the logical time for one to write the introductory book for a progressive series, like the one in which I have been engaged,7 would naturally be at the end, when one has finally worked out how to discuss these issues. And the logical place for such a book to be 6 7

 Analysis 12(6):128–129 June 1952.  As will shortly be explained.

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read is at the beginning, to lay out the path ahead. But progress in our ways of thinking cannot easily be foreseen like this. For, it is like walking on stepping stones at night—one can only take one step at a time—and one cannot see very far ahead. So, inevitably, this book has had to be written last. The book I present here is logically the first in a series of books I have written on fundamental issues in the social sciences. But, due to a lack of adequate foresight, it is the last to be written. In The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism I developed the theme that scientific realism is not only a theory about the relationship between science and reality. It defends the case that the scientific world-view is a First Philosophy, which must come to replace the accepted First Philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, viz. Cartesian Rationalism and British Empiricism. In the eighteenth century, there was good reason to embrace a rationalist methodology in the physical sciences, and many did, including three of the giants of this era, the young Newton of the 1670s, Gottfried Leibniz, who pioneered the conception of force as vis viva, and Immanuel Kant, who developed a theory concerning the existence and justification of synthetic a priori truths. But Cartesian Rationalism was never the appropriate methodology for the social sciences. Nor was the empiricism of the Scottish enlightenment (now known as British Empiricism) the approach that was required. For neither was ever designed for developing a better understanding of the social sciences. British Empiricism, even if it is embellished with Baconian extrapolation, and with Keplerian curve-fitting techniques, can only lead to the discovery of the kinematics of nature, never to its dynamics. For, the kinematics of nature is concerned with the structure of what exists in reality, and how this structure can change over time. It is only in dynamics that we can get answers to questions about why things exist, or change as they do, and what courses of action (if any) may be taken to change this course. Rational intuition, along with the methodology of a priori reasoning, is no good either in this area. For, it is only useful for studies in logic and mathematics, and in those parts of the physical sciences for which we must have practical know-how, if we are to survive as a species. But it is not an appropriate methodology for the studies of morals, economics and politics. For these all require the testing in practice of the social effects of the sorts of hypotheses under investigation. And these results cannot be known in advance of their being made, and require the sophisticated use of social statistics.

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So, the embrace of British Empiricism by the philosophers of my own generation, and the Cartesian Rationalist approach by the ethicists, economists and political theorists from the Enlightenment onwards, have made my task one of great difficulty. For, I find myself confronted with deeply entrenched thought bubbles that have no good empirical foundations. In my work as a philosopher of science, I found myself gradually moving away from the British Empiricist theory of human knowledge, i.e. the epistemological theories of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume—which were the epistemologies our teachers, and we as students, all admired. And, for these reasons, these were the epistemologies that became the most widely accepted views in the Anglophone philosophical world—at least until the 1980s. David Hume’s devastating critique of physical causation dominated the philosophy of science that students were taught in most universities. Consequently, it created deep scepticism in the philosophical world concerning the forces of nature, and their reliability as guides to the future. But, in doing so, they deprived the Anglophone philosophical world of any deep understanding of the dynamics of human societies. And this was, I believe, one of the unfortunate legacies of the European Enlightenment. For it set back the cause of scientific realism in Western philosophy, and deprived the social sciences of any truly adequate philosophical foundations. For these, and other reasons, having to do with the concept of space-­ time in the General Theory of Relativity, I was engaged for about 20 years on a project to restore respectability to the concept of a causal power. I was well placed to pursue this objective, and pursued it diligently— roughly, from 1990 to 2009. And in this endeavour, I believe I have been quite successful. But my confidence in the viability of causal power realism does not extend all the way down to fundamental physics. Quantum phenomena do at least require a probabilistic conception of causation, and it may well be that, at the most fundamental level neither Humean regularity nor my own view of physical causation will survive. But, in my mind, there is no doubt whatever that viable theories of physical and social causation are required for satisfactory analyses of individual and collective social behaviour. And, if this is true, then there is even more reason for us to have a new enlightenment. For the Scottish Enlightenment has established the Humean regularity theory of causation firmly in the rational platforms of most Anglophone philosophers. At this level of inquiry, and further down to the Newtonian conception of reality, causal power realism, and a commitment to the existence of causal powers, is clearly demanded.

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For example, as mentioned earlier, Newtonian celestial dynamics require that there should be a centre of gravity for the solar system as a whole—which is not located at the centre of the Sun. For, Newton’s derivation of the Law of Gravity really amounts to a proof that Kepler’s laws are only approximately true. They cannot be precisely true (a) because the centre of gravity of the solar system in not located at the centre of the Sun, (b) because the planets must all interact gravitationally, and thus cause the perturbations (which, of course, were unknown at that time of Kepler). Kepler’s theory of the planetary orbits was, of course, purely kinematic. Consequently, if the discovery of these facts had had to wait until the technical developments required to observe the perturbations had occurred, then the falsity of Kepler’s would not have been known for at least 100 years after Newton. And, indeed, the true laws of planetary motion are still unknown, because there is, even now, still no known set of kinematic laws which accurately describes them.8 In gravitational theory, however, the important concept of the centre of gravity of a system is not lost (as it would be in any Humean analysis) but is known in advance to be negligible, for the purpose of explaining the macroscopic motions of the planets, so that it could reasonably be ignored.9

8  For the n-body problem for n > 3 has no analytic solution. Therefore, there is no known kinematic theory of true planetary motion. So, if Humeanism had existed, and been accepted in the seventeenth century, there would be no planetary laws of motion. 9  For example, the centre of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, for example, is at a point between the centre of the Earth and the centre of the Moon, and this is the point around which the system rotates. And the fact that this is so is needed to explain the full extent of the rising tide on the side of the Earth facing away from the Moon.

CHAPTER 3

Social Morality

The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism established a platform upon which to build sound metaphysical foundations for the so-called moral sciences, including sociology, economics and politics. Social morality, which is rarely discussed in the philosophical journals, is one such development, and as I see it, is bound to become increasingly more important. It is likely to do so, because many of the greatest problems with which the world is now confronted are global. And, many of which arise from the inappropriate use of rationalistic methodology in the social sciences.

3.1   The Scope of Social Morality Social morality is concerned with the kinds of societies that should exist in the world, with what their aims should be, and how they should be structured and related to one another. It must deal also with the moral responsibilities of collectives more generally, and what their relations should be to those who work and profit from them. Its main purpose, however, must be to enable the members of the present nation states to live and work together peacefully and constructively for the mutual benefit of all, and also for the living environments for which they are jointly responsible. We know in advance that there are many ways in which social morality is, or is not, like interpersonal morality. Like Hume’s ethics, it is founded upon our natural sociability, and feelings of empathy for others. But,

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unlike Hume’s theory, it is not individualistic. For social morality is concerned with inter-organizational matters, and the relationships between organizations, their members and the individuals they deal with. Thus, the primary moral responsibilities of national governments are presumably: (a) to provide adequately for human rights observance; (b) to maintain peace, security and prosperity as best they can; (c) to manage the affairs of state to enable all people for whom the state is responsible to live as well as they can, and do so with respect, dignity and social moral purpose; and (d) to ensure that the natural and living environments for which they are primarily responsible are well preserved. But the quality of the lives that can be enjoyed in one country now depend on the qualities of the lives that can be had in other countries. And, these days, the very existence of civilized life as we know it is threatened, as Toby Ord argues forcefully in his recent book The Precipice (2020). So, we need a social morality to counter these threats—protocols that are accepted throughout the world which eliminate existential risk. Social moral theory is concerned with the elaboration of the principles, as well as those that will enable people with diverse cultures and backgrounds to live and work together for the benefit of all. It is not written into our genes what these principles must be. So, presumably, the principles are not discoverable by rational intuition. What are determined by nature are only our animal proclivities, the laws of nature and the natural dispositions of the animate world. But people have choices to make concerning the organizations they create; most animals don’t. So, it is highly desirable that we should not create organizations that are likely to tread roughshod over people, or the relations we have with each other, or the governments they create. The scope for social moral theory concerning organizations is therefore great, and important for our future. Like Bentham’s theory, social moral theory requires an empirical and pragmatic approach. But, unlike in Bentham’s theory, social moral agents are not all individuals. All organizations that create or implement policies that affect the lives of people or other sentient creatures are potentially social moral agents. The agents need not even be human. At present, artefacts have to be judged by what they can be used to do. But, perhaps in future, they may have to be judged by what they choose to do. Machines do not think for themselves—as yet. But, with the development of artificial intelligence, it is likely that they will do so in future. And this will undoubtedly create lots of moral problems. Social morality is already needed for specialists, and has been for a very long time. Because people

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in highly responsible positions clearly have moral responsibilities that others do not have. And this has long been obvious. It has also been obvious that people with lots of money have social and legal powers that poorer people do not have. For money, as I will argue shortly, is a social causal power. And the degrees of difference in the wealth of individuals and nations have recently become so extreme that they can no longer be ignored. Many individuals now have the wealth of nations—indeed, some have the wealth of middle-sized powers like New Zealand or the Philippines. And, many nations have very little wealth, and therefore very little power to influence things that affect them vitally. Every society that is ruled by consent has what I have called a ‘de facto social contract’, i.e. a set of rules, procedures, institutions, customs and practices, which together define the society’s social structure. These things are either controlling or enabling—or are often both. They limit the choices that people have, and define or construct the social mechanisms for achieving their objectives. So, ultimately, they determine the qualities of the lives that people are able to live in their own societies, and determine the range of life-styles available to them. The mechanisms are mostly understood and controllable, and the qualities of life they enable are manifest to the people. So, the way forward to achieving a good society is open to us all. For, by these means, we can all observe the effects of the changes that we may make to our de facto social contracts in the course of our lives. But the poorer nations of the world have very little scope to develop fully. So, what is needed to is a global social contract, which will, among other things, define the limits of the powers of nations to impose their wills upon the rest of the world. And, this must be kept in perspective. Propaganda, which involves international naming and shaming other nations, often regardless of the truth, must be seen for what it is: a crime that is the equivalent on a global scale of libel. The point of changing the de facto social contract of a country is normally to make life better. But sometimes the political system favours one group of people much more than it does others. In these cases, the changes to the social contract are usually counterproductive. For a political system that reserves progress for the chosen few often makes life worse for others. Naturally, our own views on social progress are limited by our circumstances and the information we receive. But social progress should normally be achievable, provided that we can maintain the practice of rule by the informed consent of the governed. So, this should be everyone’s aim. Governments must aim to improve the de facto social contracts of their

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own societies, which define the nations’ social structure. They must also aim to create and maintain a form of government that seeks to: (a) improve the social contract of their society for everyone, (b) avoid the alienation of any substantial sector of the community, and (c) and keep the people well informed with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Therefore, whatever other media there may be, there must be honest, reliable and complete information available to all people in all commonly spoken languages. And the responsibility for providing such a service must be taken by the government of the nation at the highest level. These ambitions must also be felt in the sphere of international relations. For everyone must aim to allow the United Nations, or whatever organization may eventually come to replace it to (a) to improve the global social contract for all nations, and (b) to avoid the alienation of nation states other than one’s own. And, this social moral obligation should be paramount in international affairs. So the fundamental questions are (a) what is an ideal society, and how do we get there, (b) how does this ideal translate as a guide to the construction of an ideal world. My contention is that the constitution of an ideal society cannot be known in advance. If a given society is one that is, and continues to be: (a) ruled by the informed consent of the governed, and (b) is steadily progressing to become more equitable, fair and prosperous, then that is good society. But every individual may have views about what an ideal society would be like, and such ideals might well be quite diverse. But none should be allowed to dominate, unless they can bring the vast majority of the citizenry to support them. And, the same must be true at the international level. In 2010, I presented a paper at what was known as the Parliament of the World’s Religions on the subject of ‘Morality and Humanism’, a paper that was later (in 2011) published in Sophia. I had lost my own copy of this paper, but its Senior Editor, Purushottama Bilimoria, supplied me with one, which, I was pleased to see foreshadowed the kind of research programme upon which I would be engaged for the decade that followed. The book that I am writing now is clearly derived from the secular moral philosophy that I had developed in this early paper. But its emphasis is now changed—from the individual to the social. The secular theory had elements of the social theory. But in this book it is where I begin. I begin with social moral theory, because I believe that social theory is now the more fundamental. I do not know that it always was. But in the twenty-­ first century, all except for a few nomads and forest people, live in

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moneyed states, and social moral theory has come to dominate moral theory generally. Social moral theory also differs from most traditional theories, by its recognition of possible differences in moral responsibility. There are of course, some social moral principles that would be considered binding on all socially responsible people or nations. But people might well have social moral responsibilities other than these. At the national level, they might be the members of certain kinds of socially specialized people, such as judges, schoolteachers, plumbers or doctors, each of which has its own set of moral responsibilities. Or, the responsible agents might be managerial or judgmental collectives, such as juries, advisory boards, government departments, corporate boards, hospital boards and so on, each of which has its own range of moral responsibilities. The decisions they make may affect not only the societies to which they belong, but also the professions of which they are members. So, we should be holding them morally responsible for the choices they make. The focus on individuals, whether as moral agents or victims, is unjustified, and in secular societies, is unjustifiable. And, if the full thesis of social morality is accepted, then all of these specialized areas of moral responsibility must have their inter-­ organizational or international equivalents. In its purest form, social morality is the moral theory required for the writing of constitutions, settling disputes between corporations and trade unions, and for thinking about human rights and the duties of governments. It is of the kind that Kevin Rudd evoked, when he said that ‘climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time’. For this is a life and death issue that is of great concern to the lives of sentient creatures everywhere, but may not be an issue of immediate concern to the lives of anyone anywhere. It is not, for example, an issue for people to make up their own minds about, and act as individuals typically do—in their own self-­interest. For the issues may be beyond the powers of any individual, or even of any nation state, to respond to meaningfully. Social morality seeks to establish principles of social behaviour that are generally acceptable within the societies for which they are intended, with settlements between organizations, such as the United Nations and all of the people of the world, or between the governments of various countries and their respective citizens. The aim of social moral theory must be to arrive at principles that are socially acceptable to the vast majority of the members of all of the parties involved. For this is required, if the principles are ever to become entrenched in the social contracts of any of the organizations involved. In the case of human rights, the issue is one concerning the social moral rights of people generally, and,

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therefore, the social moral duties of governments everywhere. It is an issue that requires a very broadly based settlement—one that has to be reached ultimately by careful study and well-considered but honest negotiation, as all genuine social moral issues should be. The kinds of societies for which settlements with their memberships are needed may vary greatly in size and sophistication, ranging from an organization, such as a shire, a province, a state, a federation, an empire or, hopefully one day, a world authority. Therefore, with few exceptions, what is acceptable within any given society must be compatible with nearly every organization within which that society is wholly included. Exceptions could arise at the level of a province or below, if it were very religious, as in Tibet, or culturally isolated. For then, it would be reasonable to make exceptions in these provinces for these people, and consider the establishment of a Chinese style, ‘one government, two systems’, but upgraded to ensure that full spectrum of human rights is fully respected. For, with a one-government-two-systems approach, the rights and freedoms enjoyed in the included system need not be required, or even allowed, in the system in which it is included. Such arrangements are, however, always precarious. For the social contract of a society is what holds it together socially, and the differences between the social contracts of different societies is what divides them. This general conception of social moral theory is hierarchical. It envisages a mountain of social moral theories defining the slopes of this mountain, with a global social moral theory at the summit. This is surprisingly like the vision that Derek Parfit had of the mountain that moral theorists everywhere are trying to scale, leading eventually, he thought, to the ultimate truth about morality at the summit. But I don’t view the mountain as a heap of moral theories, with moral truth at the top. It is a mountain of social moral theories for progressively more inclusive societies. So, I see the moral task as that of bringing the world together, eventually under the constitution of a world body that is ruled by the rational consent of the governed. But despite my differences with Derek Parfit, there is a point on which we are agreed. Moral philosophers are seeking universal agreement, and are struggling with bringing the different traditions of moral philosophy together. I think that the theory of social morality could prove to be the unifying force. We don’t yet know whether there is a social moral summit of the required kind, or whether there is just a plateau of more or less equally high-level social moral constitutions that could be amicably negotiated for

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different empires. And, if this should prove to be the case, it would not matter very much, provided that every morally cohesive empire was willing to live cooperatively and at peace with every other. For then we should just have a world order a bit like the one that exists today, but much better. For, it would have to be one in which people were resigned to accepting the existence of a number of different social moral systems, each governed by the rational consent of the governed—or, as Jean Jacques Rousseau would have said, each governed by ‘the general will’ of its citizens. If this should turn out to be the case, then, presumably, there will be no ideal kind of character for every empire, only ideal kinds of characters for each empire. In the months leading up to the end of World War II, a number of the neutral and victorious nations in that war, got together at the San Francisco Conference, held between 25 April and 26 June 1945, with the aim of creating a new world order. It was widely believed at the time, that the world had lost its way morally, in this social sense, and was threatened by social and economic chaos, and perhaps eventually, by a new and even more catastrophic conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons.1 The delegates to that conference mostly believed that a properly constituted world body, which could act with much greater authority than the old League of Nations, was sorely needed for the task of managing the new world order. Accordingly, the UN was set up with the aim of achieving these aims, and of being the voice of reason and decency in social relations—both between nations, and between the nations and with the peoples they were required to serve. It was widely thought that the social moral issues concerning relations between states and their peoples had been sadly neglected, and grossly abused. For the trashing of human dignity in the concentration camps of the Nazi regime became one of the most shocking and horrifying events of WWII—equal, and in many ways, even surpassing, those of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, Stalingrad and the Blitz. There was, therefore, a strongly felt need for a more powerful and more representative body to be given prime social moral responsibility for managing the overall recovery of world from these dreadful years—one which was morally much better equipped than the old League of Nations for this important task. But to arm it morally, as the Conference believed it should be armed, it was decided that the United Nations should, like the United States of America, have its own bill of rights. And, since the bill had to be 1

 Although at the time of the conference, atomic weapons had never been used in conflict.

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suitable for all people, in all nations, it would have to be a bill of rights for all people, not just those for those in the US. These are the rights that are now known as ‘human’ rights. Clearly, these rights do not have the same status as the ‘natural’ rights of the eighteenth-century doctrines. For, human rights are moral rights, not just social or legal ones. A high level, and widely representative, Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, was therefore created at the Conference to draft the required legislation. The document, which finally passed was drafted and re-drafted many times by its author, Canadian Professor John P. Humphrey. The story of the drafting, and of the Commission’s conception of the nature of their task, is elegantly documented in Michael Kirby’s lecture, ‘H.V. Evatt & the UN after 60 years’, which was delivered at the Evatt Foundation in 2008. Evatt, who had initially sought to create an International Court of Human Rights, was a strong supporter and shaper of the project from the start and steered it though the General Assembly, where it was passed nem con by the member states of the UN in 1948. Two states (South Africa and Saudi Arabia) abstained from the voting because it was threatening to their regimes, and the six governments of the European Communist bloc, also abstained —but not for this reason. They thought the charter did not go far enough. It should also, they thought, have effectively outlawed fascism. These six supported all the listed human rights. The final document, now known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a paradigm of social morality. It is not, by design or purpose, just a legal document. It is one, which, at the time of its passage, set forth what the drafting committee believed to be the social moral obligations of states everywhere, and the moral rights, obligations and freedoms of individuals that they are obliged to uphold. The underlying philosophy of these documents is what I call ‘Social Humanism’, which is the subject of a book I wrote in 2012. The key concepts of this book are the ones that must now take their place in the literature on social morality. For there is no discipline of social morality developed in the moral philosophical literature, even though the conception of social morality was clearly a living force in the areas of social conflict and social development. Social morality is much broader in its conception than personal. For personal morality has traditionally been the principal concern of religious institutions, and are, therefore, at least in the West, much more concerned with human salvation than with peace, justice or human dignity. But our societies are no longer dominated by any such issues. Our religions may

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still offer salvation to the faithful, and threaten purgatory to those who fall by the wayside. But today we are much more concerned about our secular lives, and the kinds of societies in which we live. Consequently, social issues now dominate the news channels, and people everywhere are aiming to live well, and with dignity, in their own societies, and do so with freely chosen moral purpose. So the paramount questions are: In what kind of society do we want to live? How best can individuals work to shape themselves and their societies to achieve their ambitions? And these are all social moral questions.

3.2   Government with the Consent of the Governed We think of democracy as a form of government that normally acts with the consent of the governed. But trust in government is at a very low ebb in Western democracies—in the US for obvious reasons, but elsewhere in the West, because of the social policy vacuums that exist almost everywhere in the Western world. The policy vacuums are due to the militarization of politics, and the determination of Western governments to reduce their spending on government programmes as much as possible—in order (a) to make room for more private investment, and (b) to develop corporations capable of world domination in their various fields. By the ‘militarization of politics’ I mean, not only the subjection of government and opposition members to strict party disciplines (violations of which would mean, effectively, termination of their political careers), but also nationalist objectives of achieving world domination in significant areas of corporate activity. The first of these policies is straightforwardly a neoliberal one, of the kind advocated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The second is one that appears to be coming much more common, a neoliberal governments struggle to find a sense of purpose—having handed most of their traditional responsibilities to the business community to sort out, and pay for. As I see it, the militarization of politics, is a neo-fascist response to perceived threats from those on the left of politics. But, it seems to me that they only have this perspective because they have moved so far to the right, that a socially caring government, like that in Sweden or Denmark seems to them like the revolutionary governments of Joseph Stalin in USSR, or under Mao Zedong in China. So, it is hardly surprising that Western libertarian governments are in trouble. Ideologically, they are miles away.

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Where there is government by the informed consent of the governed, there must exist in one’s country a kind of general will, of the kind spoken about by Jean Jacques Rousseau. For, trust in government can exist, only if it shows, somehow, that it is one that is sensitive to the will of the people. A government that rules by consent of the governed may be a democracy. But it need not be. For there is no doubt that, from 1978 until quite recently, China was ruled by the consent of the governed. And, in this period, the country was united in its quest to eliminate poverty, and to stand up against Western domination. But the general will is now in the process of breaking down. It still remains strong among the Han Chinese. But that may only be because the ‘national consent of the governed’ has come to be replaced by the ‘Han Chinese consent of the governed’, which indeed would present a problem. For, if this diagnosis is right, then the Chinese empire is in danger of falling apart. It would be in trouble, just as the Russian empire following the breaking down of the Berlin wall, was in trouble. China has, for 40 years or so now, pursued a vigorous capitalist ideological push for jobs and growth. In doing so, it has become what is now, unquestionably, one of the most significant economic and political powers in the world. But, as yet, it lacks global legitimacy. For the rest of the world has yet to be convinced that the present government of China holds power legitimately, i.e. with the rational consent of the governed. But I fear that the corporate neo-fascist movements in the US and the UK, will not allow China to take the lead in any high-tech economic field—as the concerted attack on Huawei fairly clearly demonstrates.

3.3  Civilizing Capitalism In a modern society, one can hardly escape the need for money. For, everyone has non-negotiable needs. And, everyone should legally be entitled to sufficient money to meet them. Of course, what people want normally goes well beyond what they really need. But there is no fixed line to be drawn between needs and wants. For each category is a function of the social moral purpose that a person has in life, and on the force by which he or she is driven in its pursuit, and on that person’s mental and physical health. My solution to the problem of how to create a healthy and fair society would be to institute a UBI, or universal basic income, set at a level that would be enough for most able-bodied people to satisfy their basic needs. And not worry too much about balancing the books. Balancing the

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books is an accountant’s job. The job of an economic manager is to balance supply and demand, and to maintain a fair and equitable balance of GDP per capita across in all pockets of the nation. Overall, the monetary theory of free market capitalism, has been, and should continue to be, the dominant force in its developing structure. It explains in detail how the social causal processes of effecting legal changes of status (of purchased objects or service commitments) can come about, and how the money, which is thus injected into an economy, can effectively drive its economic development. And yet, despite this sound beginning, the theory of free market capitalism has not evolved significantly in a socially progressive manner. It has, indeed, gone backwards since the 1970s. In 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed at the General Assembly of the UN, this document was widely seen as a great leap forward in the social acceptability of capitalism. For the Human Rights Declaration was designed, and widely accepted as, ‘a Universal Bill of Rights;’2 and, consequently, as a document that mandated strong welfare legislation in all societies, including the capitalist ones. Consequently, human rights and the welfare state went well together, and both were advocated at the end of World War II to address the seemingly insurmountable problems of distributing the profits of the capitalist market fairly between (a) those involved in designing, producing, packaging and presenting things for sale, and (b) those doing everything else that needs to be done in a civilized community. Smith’s theory rewards only the private producers of goods and services, and all of their hangers on (advertisers, packagers, sales people, political parties and so on). But the welfare state ensures that the rest of the community, which do all of the other things that need to be done, are well supplied to make our society a fit and decent place for human habitation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the mechanism devised at the UN for such redistribution, which included Articles 21 to 28. These Articles are, together with their later protocols, the recognized social, economic and cultural rights of human kind. There is contained within these rights the articulation of a right that had not previously been recognized—which we may summarize as the right to live with dignity and social moral purpose in one’s own society. The need for such a right became increasingly clear to the founders of the United Nations, as they  Michael Kirby ‘H. V. Evatt & the UN after 60 years.’ H. V. Evatt Lecture, 2008.

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pondered the tragedies of the two world wars and the Holocaust in the first half of the twentieth century. The crucial concepts, as the authors of this great document came to understand them, were those of human flourishing, of living with dignity, and of pursuing a life of social moral purpose. In the 1970s, these understandings of human rights were not entirely new, but sufficiently removed from the rights acknowledged in the charters of the eighteenth century to make a crucial difference, and require the attention of people everywhere. They are not contained in the US constitution or any of its amendments, nor in the long tradition of British society. But they are recognized in the welfare states of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, and in New Zealand. In the post-war years in Australia, we had a pretty good record on Article 25, and some of the others. But we were racist, bigoted and homophobic back then. And our record since then, even on Article 25, has been very poor. I think we are people living in a glass house. And, as the saying goes, we should not be throwing stones at China, Russia, the USA or anyone else. The state we need to create should be a democracy, in which people are well informed about society. But I am not sure about the Party system that exists in most Anglophone countries. This is probably now a relic of the old Class system of Great Britain, but not of great relevance in modern societies. Relatively few people these days would identify themselves as ‘working class’. And, those who do may not be representative. But this is not the subject of the present debate. Legislation should always be judged on its merits not on old-fashioned Party lines. What is clear is that we need a society that works hard on providing adequately for the human rights of its citizens, as New Zealand appears now to be doing. Forget about capitalism versus socialism. That is no longer an issue. What is important is that everyone should be able live with dignity and respect in their own society, enjoy enough social and personal security to enable them to plan for their futures in a world with a congenial and stable climate, raise their children with love, understanding and tolerance, and guarantee them an adequate practical and realistic knowledge of the world and its people. To achieve them, we shall probably need to appoint another H. C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs to advise the government—someone who really understands the Keynesian economy, understands the methodology or modern science, and one who could plausibly guarantee the high levels of employment and social security that would make a eudemonic world of the kind I would like to see.

CHAPTER 4

First Philosophy

4.1   First Philosophy for Physical Theory A first philosophy for a given field of inquiry is like a supreme court. It is the final court of appeal for disputed knowledge. In the supreme court, the appeal concerns the interpretation or constitutionality of the law. But in the case of a first philosophy, a dispute concerns the belief-worthiness of a claim to knowledge. There are several kinds of first philosophies — depending on the established epistemology (theory of knowledge) for the area in question. Broadly, the established epistemologies depend on the areas they cover. The aim of this book is to develop a first philosophy, or set of first philosophies for the social sciences. In his logical treatises, collectively known as the ‘Organon’, Aristotle developed his epistemology for a priori knowledge. Such knowledge was contrasted with what we acquire by observation, or otherwise by experience, which he called accidental knowledge. All tradespeople have knowledge of this kind, and some of it is invaluable. But what was prized above all was what could be known independently of experience, such as the knowledge we have of geometrical forms, numbers, proportions, symmetries and so on, which refer to idealized entities, not to things that exist in reality. This knowledge, which he called ‘a priori’, was thought to be ‘true, primary, immediate, and better known than’ any merely empirical knowledge, even though the empirical may be much more important for

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_4

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immediate or practical purposes, and was not to be disparaged. But, a priori knowledge stood apart from any merely empirical knowledge. For it enabled the creation of formal knowledge systems or sciences, such as geometry, arithmetic and deductive logic. Today, the dominant theories of morals, economics and politics in the Western world mostly depend on the assumption that human beings are (a) the only creatures with free will, (b) have an innate capacity to know important truths a priori and (c) are the only creatures who know a priori the difference between right and wrong. Therefore, it is said, if we want to develop basic theories of morals, economics or politics, we must develop systems that allow, and ultimately depend on, individuals choosing freely to do what they know to be right. That is: our moral theory must depend ultimately on our moral psychology; our economic theory must depend on the basic preferences and interests of individuals; and our political theory on how groups of individuals may, rationally, seek to organize themselves to maximize their freedom of choice. This, briefly, is how individualism was understood in the eighteenth century, and our theories of morals, economics and politics all have their origins in this period. The eighteenth century was the age of Cartesian Rationalism, i.e. the period in which Descartes’ ‘Discourse on Method’, subtitled: ‘the method of rightly conducting one’s reasoning in the sciences’, became accepted as the preferred option for theory construction in all fields of knowledge. Descartes based his first philosophy on upon the methodology displayed in Euclid’s Elements (of geometry). In the 1620s, Descartes wrote: The long chains of simple and easy reasonings by means of which geometers are accustomed to reach the conclusions of their most difficult demonstrations, had led me to imagine that all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only that we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. (Discourse on Method p. 16)

Such reasoning, he said, must always begin from axioms, which are considered to be self-evidently true, and from definitions, which supposedly capture the essences of the things being analysed. And, as in

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geometry, the theorems, which are logically derived from these axioms, must then all be (a) necessarily true, (b) universal and (c) exact. This ideal of ‘pure theory’ was accepted by the young Newton in the 1660s, and provided him with the constructive methodology for his greatest work The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which was eventually published in 1687. Newton’s Principia did for the theories of mechanics and cosmology, more or less what Euclid’s Elements did for geometry in the third century BCE. It blew people’s minds. It changed the way they thought of the world, and did much to contribute to the ‘can-do’ theoretical confidence of the Enlightenment. It unified, and provided a methodology for the basic theories of space, time, force and motion in an unprecedented way. And, it inspired European thought and creativity in all of the ways that Plato and Aristotle inspired the Greeks of the Hellenistic Age. My book Rationalism; A Critique of Pure Theory is a critique of Cartesian rationalism, not of rationality itself. It is a critique of the methodology that created the theories of statics and dynamics in the Enlightenment era. There is indeed a place for Cartesian rationalism in the mathematical and physical sciences. But, as I have argued in this book, such rationalism is not the appropriate methodology for the social or moral sciences. It never has been. And it never will be. For these sciences we need a first philosophy of empirical science, which is hypothetico-­ deductive in structure, and so subject to empirical testing. The theories of morals, economics and politics that we have inherited from the Enlightenment era are mostly Cartesian rationalist constructions, which are founded on intuitive judgements about what in general is right or good. Let me begin by considering the dynamics of capitalism.

4.2  Rationalism and Empiricism In the seventeenth century, there was a dispute between rationalists and empiricists about the search for useful knowledge. The rationalists were the Aristotelians and the Cartesians, who believed that the kind of knowledge of reality that is exemplified by geometry is qualitatively superior to any other. For if an axiom of a geometrical system is known, then it is known for certain to be true, universally true, and is absolutely precise. And, if it is a theorem that is known, then it is derived step by inevitable step from the axioms and definitions of the system. Therefore, the whole structure of a geometry is in some sense perfectly known. Aristotle called

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such knowledge epistemic. But it is clear from Book 2 of Posterior Analytics that Aristotle believed epistemic knowledge to be possible in areas other than mathematics (e.g. in cosmology). The whole of Book 1 of Aristotle’s De Caelo is a priori speculation about the shape of the Cosmos, and the kinds of motions appropriate for the kinds of substances that were thought then to exist in the heavens. And Descartes thought like that too about the Cosmos. But Sir Francis Bacon thought that knowledge of reality should be acquired by a painstaking process of accumulating materials, observing them closely and generalizing from the observational data. For, with this experience, one could ascend what he called ‘the ladder of the intellect’. If this strategy were to be followed, he argued, we could eventually arrive at something like perfect knowledge. But, of a priori knowledge, and its rationalist theoretical derivatives, he was somewhat less than flattering. Here is what he said about the Aristotelian rationalist ideal of human knowledge: The wit and mind of man, if it worketh upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God, is working according to the stuff, and is limited thereby, but if it worketh upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed cobwebs of learning, admirable for their fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit. (Advancement of Learning, Vol I, Ch IV, para 3)

It is reasonable to say that these thinkers both believed first philosophy to be true scientific knowledge. But they disagreed radically about what scientific knowledge really is. In the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth, the Aristotelian, and subsequently the Cartesian, view prevailed—at least in continental Europe. It is true that Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei had all made significant discoveries of the laws of nature by ascending Bacon’s ‘ladder of the intellect’, i.e. empirically. But, the young Newton was a Cartesian at heart, and he, and the eighteenth-century defenders of vis viva in the ongoing debate about the nature of force, were all on the side of the Aristotelian rationalists. And, later in that century, Immanuel Kant articulated a philosophical theory of synthetic a priori knowledge, which made the rationalism seem much more plausible than it should be. For, according to Kant, a priori knowledge of scientific truths might well be possible, just because we are by nature well

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adapted to the world in which we live. And, in my view, the latter is almost certainly true. According to Descartes, to whom we owe the concept of first philosophy, we have scientific knowledge of a thing only if we can demonstrate its truth rationally. But geometry is not the core science that it once was. Indeed, it is not now regarded as a science at all. Rather, it is a branch of mathematics. Nevertheless, I still think that the idea that scientific knowledge, as science is now understood, is fundamental for human knowledge. For science has taken over from geometry, as the paradigm required for first philosophy. Thus, modern science has become the fundamental court of appeal for claims to knowledge, whether they be about the past, the present, the future or the structure of the whole universe. There is no other established court of appeal, and no prospect that any higher court is ever likely to take over that role. Consequently, my approach to the philosophy of the social sciences, and indeed to philosophy generally, has long been a scientifically realistic one. That is, I think of philosophers as conceptual explorers who think and talk about how people ought to think and talk about things. And, I see no reason why this should not be an area in which genuine progress is not only possible, but, potentially, is of very considerable value. For the question of the nature of scientific knowledge is still open, and I see no good reason to believe that the applicability of the present concept of scientific knowledge cannot be improved upon, or be extended reasonably into the social, economic, political and moral sciences. I do not wish to challenge the works of genuine scientific practitioners in areas where I do not think the science has gone off the rails. But if scientists did in fact allow inconsistencies or inadequacies of the kinds that haunt economists today, I would be opposed to their way of thinking. So, I will say without apology that if a philosopher can construct a conceptual system that is immune from the inconsistencies, and the hang-ups of older systems, such as phlogiston theory, then that philosopher has made some real progress. And, if one is confronted with a body of so-called knowledge that is manifestly inadequate as a theoretical system, and can provide the alternative of a coherent way of talking and thinking about the phenomena in question, then that philosopher has also made genuine progress. In this research project that I have striven to understand, integrate and evaluate the social sciences, as they presently exist. The studies that I have focused upon are all ones that featured strongly in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century—morals, economics and politics.

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4.3  The Dynamics of Capitalism The welfare state and the theory of human rights were by far the most progressive developments of capitalist theory to have occurred since the eighteenth century. Modern capitalist theory was founded on Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. For this is the book that put the model of an ideal market up front and centre in that kind of society. To explain Smith’s theory of the market economy I must take you back again to the eighteenth century, when the full magnitude of Newton’s achievement of constructing a general theory dynamics became known. It had solved, beyond reasonable doubt, the 2000-year-old problem of the dynamics of the planetary motions. Below I shall present Newtonian dynamics as a model for the development of dynamical systems generally. For, I believe that it has been widely used for precisely this purpose, not only by physicists working on other kinds of motions, but also as a model for dynamical systems in economics. In this section, my aim is to explain its employment in economic theory, and demonstrate that money, as analysed in this way, has the logic of a force concept that energizes the things upon which it operates, and causes it to change in a certain kind of way. The argument to this effect is a little bit technical, and I shall present it in more detail in the following section. Here, I wish to say briefly how I came to understand Newton’s concept of motive force, when I was a young philosopher of science lecturer in the Department of History and Methods of Science at the University of Melbourne in the late 1950s.1 This account of Newton’s axiom system is not well known, but, to obtain a proper understanding of Smith’s market dynamics, it is important we should understand it. The key to doing so is to note carefully the wording of Newton’s Axiom 2 in the original Latin text in Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis. Good English translations of Newton’s Principia do exist, of course. But, unfortunately, they have been changed to accommodate the modern conception of instantaneous force, which is the concept required for his universal theory of gravitation.2 This gravitational concept of force is the one that is taught in schools and universities everywhere in the English-speaking world, and probably in 1  The name of the department was later (in the late 1950s) changed to ‘History and Philosophy of Science’. 2  The history of this distortion is recorded in my 1962 paper ‘Newton’s Concept of Motive Force’ in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol XXIII, No 2, pp. 273–278.

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most other places. So, the fact that this was not Newton’s original conception of motive force will come as a surprise to many people. According to an accurate translation by the notable Florian Cajori, Newton’s axiom (properly translated) reads: The change of motion is proportional to the motive force impressed, and is made in the direction in which it is impressed. (My italics)

And, there is no doubt that by ‘the change of motion’ Newton meant simply the change of motion, as motion was then measured, which is an energy concept, That is, it is a force that measures, not the strength of a push or pull at given instant, but the overall impact of that push or pull on the system on which it is acting. We know that this is true, because in the very next sentence, Newton continues: If any force generates a motion, a double force will generate double the motion, a triple force triple the motion, whether that force be impressed altogether and at once or gradually and successively. (my italics)

Newton’s concept of motive force was therefore not the concept that is employed in what is now known as Newton’s Second Law of Motion (the relationship commonly described by the equation: f = ma). Newton’s concept of motive force was that of living force, or vis viva, not that of instantaneous force. And, Newton’s second Axiom of motion was simply the proposition that the magnitude of any cause of motion is simply equal to the magnitude of its effect, i.e. the amount of motion it produces in the direction in which it acts. The variables related were the total change of momentum, m(V2 – V1) produced by the directed impulse F (B. D. Ellis, 1962). And, in this integral form, what I am calling Newton’s Second Axiom of Motion states that F = m(V2 – V1). It follows that Newton’s second axiom of motion is m∆V = F∆t, where ‘∆t’ is the time it takes to apply all of this force. Newton’s Second Axiom of Motion certainly entails its derivative, viz. f = ma,3 But, in the integral form, the statement of this principle is, quite straightforwardly, a special case of Gottfried Leibniz’s a priori principle of ‘Causa aequeat effectum’, i.e. that a cause is always equal to its effect. 3  For, the limit ∆V/∆t, as ∆t tends to zero, is the acceleration a at any given instant, where f is the accelerative force acting at that instant. This is all explained in my old 1962 paper.

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Hence, the integral form of Newton’s second law might well have been believed by Newton to be self-evidently true, as Newton claim to its axiomatic status clearly implies.4 The general theory of the capitalist state is, I believe, founded on this reading of Axiom 2 of Newton’s general theory, wherein motive force was an energy concept. And, given Adam Smith’s theory of money, it is then easy to explain why monetary economies are so successful. His argument was to the effect that free-market economies derive their energy from the very act of purchasing goods for sale at the market; and they do so automatically. For, when people buy things in free markets, they are effectively rewarding the producers of the goods for sale: (a) for the economic efficiency of their production, and (b) for tailoring that production to fit the market’s requirements. And, with these rewards, he argued, the wealth of nations with free-market economies is readily explained. As with Newton’s conception of motive force, it does not matter whether the amount of money spent is spent altogether and at once, or gradually and successively. In the course of a day, the money spent by people to purchase goods and services is proportional to the (perceived) values of the goods and services purchased, and is directed to the people who made, marketed and sold them. That is, money must have been conceived by Adam Smith’s as being the vis viva of the market economy, just as Newton’s concept of motive force was seen as being the vis viva (motive force) of general dynamics. Money is, on this account, the driving force of all monetary economies. And it is the spending of money in the nation’s markets that drives national prosperity. It does so, Smith argued, because all money spent at markets is automatically distributed to those who supply the market stalls. And this distribution is what gives the producers the purchasing power to buy whatever they need to carry on their good work. Money, on this conception, is just purchasing power. The more money a person or organization has, the greater is the purchasing power of that person or organization. And this purchasing power has legal force. That is to say, if legal tender, as defined in law, is offered, and this money is 4  I know that Leibniz and others ridiculed Newton for his ‘viz mortua’, or ‘dead force’, i.e. a force which disappears when it has done its job. But in my view it would have been ‘politically incorrect’ for him to be seen defending Descartes. So, he did not object to those who rewrote his axiomatic dynamical theory as a set of physical laws. His original formulation was clearly that of an axiom system.

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accepted in exchange for any goods or services for sale, then the purchaser becomes the legal owner of those goods and services, provided that the goods or services in question can lawfully be owned by that purchaser. Alternatively, one could say that money is a socially created form of energy that drives the growth of the nation’s economy, just as gravity is (according to Newton) the natural force that pulls the planets around in their orbits, and causes things to fall if they are dropped from a height. The money that is spent at the market on market day includes a bonus given to the producers and marketers of goods and services, and this effectively gives them the purchasing power to buy what they need to continue doing what they have been doing. This, I believe is the monetary theory of free market capitalism, which has been the dominant force in its developing structure. However, capitalism has not evolved in a socially progressive manner since the eighteenth century. The old Cartesian rationalist theory is still accepted and presented as the foundation stone of neoliberal society. Monetarism, which is, in part, recognition of its power to drive the economy, was not a theory of market capitalism that was developed entirely in the mid-twentieth century. It was a theory that clearly had its origins in the mid-eighteenth century. But, given the power of the Enlightenment to inspire social change, one would have expected social progress in capitalism to have been at the top of the list of projects to earnestly pursue. For the capitalist mechanism of rewarding the manufacturers with purchasing power should have led them to: (a) make things for sale more efficiently, and (b) distribute the Smith bonus (i.e. the profits) more equally between the owners, the managers, and must be seen as being the workers who are paid to produce the goods and services for sale. Thus, paid work is, and is seen as being, a cooperative activity—one that should clearly be for the benefit of all. As the workers, who were making greater demands on the Smith bonus, used to say: a good day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay, and conversely, a good day’s pay deserves a good day’s work.

4.4   First Philosophy for Economic Theory To construct scientific theories of morals, economic and politics we need to identify moral, economic and political facts. For there needs to be an evidence base that can be used to test these theories. The required evidence base for a national society, must be must be social facts about that

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society, i.e. the sorts of facts collected in Bureaus of Statistics in every advanced country. It must also depend upon the social structure of each society. If human rights are observed in that society, then presumably this is because the government and/or the courts of the land regularly uphold human rights. If money is used in that society, then the social structure required for the validity of acts of purchase have to be established. If the country is a democracy in more that name only then there must be a social structure built into the nation’s constitution, or some otherwise well-­ established practice, which mandates that (a) elections must be held periodically, or when legally required, (b) the conditions on which candidates for election are chosen are specified, and (c) the opportunities afforded to citizens to freely cast their votes as they please is offered. So, there are plenty of social facts out there to ground the societies institutions and practices. Neo-classical economics has what is called a Neutral Money Hypothesis, which is the theory that quantities of money are not real variables in economic theory. A debt, for example, is a quantity of money that is owed by someone to someone else—or to a bank of other money-lending institution. Such debts, neo-classical economists say can safely be ignored. But if money is an energy concept, then this is a very dangerous policy. It is dangerous, because money is a very powerful force. It drives the world’s economies, and is by far the most powerful social force in existence. Ignoring the existence of money is, really, to treat economic theory as the kinematics of the economy, not its dynamics. One can play the same trick with any system of dynamics. One only has to combine the laws of distribution of the kind of force one is dealing with, with the laws of distribution of forces of this kind, and the result is a set of laws of distribution of effects.5 But in the case of economics there are no laws of distribution of 5  One can, for example, combine the law of distribution of gravitational forces (the law of gravity) with the laws of action of such forces (Newton’s Second Law of Motion) to obtain the laws of motion of the solar system. But such laws are pretty useless. If the world were strictly a Newtonian one, then the derived law that every material body in the universe has a component of acceleration toward every other body, which is directly proportional to the sums (not the products!) of their masses, and inversely proportional to the squares of the distances between them, would certainly be true. But it would be practically useless. For it would tell us nothing about how these motions are caused. And, if one does not know about how they are caused, then one cannot ignore the unimportant ones (which only cause perturbations) in order to focus on those that are really important (e.g. the Sun and the planets), which together are responsible for the basically elliptical orbits of the planets, as in Kepler’s laws.

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forces. The rich people of the world have nearly all of the money, but do not use it, except as security. But it is absurd to ignore the fact that money is world economy’s driving force. I suppose, really, that business people must really hate the idea that it is the shoppers, workers, tradespeople and service professionals, who drive the world’s economies, not the people who own nearly all of the world’s money, but in fact spend very little of it. For they are really just a drag on the world’s economies. It would be much better, and the world would be much more productive, if the ultra-rich gave all of their money to the world’s poor. For they, in their billions, would all happily spend it, and really get the world’s economies going. To evaluate programmes in in the social sciences, one needs to look at how successful they are at improving people’s well-being. And, one way of evaluating this is to see how the money that has been made is distributed. If it is well distributed, and there are no ill effects to offset this gain, then the programme must have been successful. The departments of national statistics in most advanced countries already publish most of the economic data that any good scientific realist would need to make most of the sorts of economic predictions that anyone could wish for. But they rarely publish maps, like weather maps, showing where, by whom, and by how much, people in various classes would be affected by a piece of legislation. Presumably, there are pragmatic reasons for not doing this. For, there is no doubt that it would be possible to construct maps indicating how different groups of people would be affected, and in what ways. Perhaps the reason is: if they did do this, the members of parliament would be too authoritatively informed to allow the political parties to function so blatantly in the interests of the classes they represent. For such publications would make it difficult to put the spin on the data that they would like to use. But, whatever the reason, it is not an established practice in any democracy of which I am aware to publish economic maps. My informed guess is that this is how the economists like it. And, they do not do what I am suggesting simply because (a) the maps would make neoliberal government with the consent of the people virtually impossible. For every neoliberal government of the world would come to be seen for what it is: a government that rules, not with the consent of the people, but with the consent of the economic establishment. If the people really understood what the science was telling them, and the economists were respected as scientists, then they would demand that the government of the day should return to the practices of the welfare

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state era—when scientifically much more respectable Keynesian economic theory was dominant. It is much more respectable, because Keynesianism is a dynamics of the economy, not a kinematics. Kinematically, there is no doubt that neoliberal policies have been very successful. Overall productivity has been very high in third world countries, and the rich countries are making lots of money. What more could you want. Both of these statements are true of the world’s economies since the GFC. In his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association in 2003, Nobel Prize winning macroeconomist Robert E Lucas Jr. argued that the central problem of ‘Depression prevention’ has been solved. Lanchester (2018) quotes him as saying: Taking U.S. performance over the past 50 years as a benchmark, the potential for welfare gains from better long-run, supply-side policies exceeds by far the potential from further improvements in short-run demand management.

He then goes on to say: How’s that been working out? How it’s been working out here in the UK is the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history. ‘Recorded economic history’ means as far back as current techniques can reach, which is back to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Worse than the decades that followed the Napoleonic Wars, worse than the crises that followed them, worse than the financial crises that inspired Marx, worse than the Depression, worse than both world wars. That is a truly stupendous statistic and if you knew nothing about the economy, sociology or politics of a country, and were told that single fact about it—that real incomes had been falling for the longest period ever—you would expect serious convulsions in the national life.

Later in the same paper, Lanchester adds that the US has fared no better. … the real median hourly income in the US is [now] about the same as it was in 1971. Anyone time-travelling back to the early 1970s would have great difficulty in explaining why the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world had four and a half decades without pandemics, country-wide disaster or world war, accompanied by unprecedented growth in corporate profits, and yet ordinary people’s pay remained the same.

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I am not in a position to vouch for Lanchester’s observations. But if they are even roughly true, they strongly support my case for a new enlightenment. The neoliberal consensus has got to be challenged, and the reverse application strategy condemned as contrary to the trial and error methodology of science. So, I think we need a new enlightenment. Not just the old one. We need a New Enlightenment Now. We need one to correct many of the old ways of thinking about human rights and morality too. And this is precisely what I have been trying to achieve by: (a) using scientific realism as my first philosophy (Ellis, 2009) to develop a scientifically realistic theory of social morality to replace Kant’s rationalist one (Ellis, 2012b), and (b) replacing neo-classical economics with a pragmatic neo-Keynesian one (Ellis, 2017)—a theory, which like all empirical scientific theories, tries to adapt its hypotheses to fit social reality. We must not, as neoliberals advocate, attempt to change social reality to make it fit the theory. Instead, we must change the theory to fit the facts, as all good scientific theories must. Certainly, economists could still make a good living, if they reported scientifically on the social consequences of legislation. If they did so, then the more successful commentators might may well earn some considerable academic kudos. Like botanists, chemists, meteorologists and oceanographers, economists would be back-room boys and girls working with computers to keep the politicians honest. But, unfortunately for them, they, just like other scientists working in their professions, would be relatively poor and unrecognized. But, Western societies would benefit. The big banks, the social media companies, and the public broadcasting giants, who all benefit grotesquely by the present arrangements, would be less likely to benefit, however. For, they would no longer be able to plunder the nation for its wealth, for the benefit of their managers, wealthy investors and economic advisors. And, no doubt, that would be a boon. Following the failure of neo-classical economists to anticipate the Great Depression, and consequently, the bad advice they gave to their governments, Keynes (1936/1973) did, what every good scientist working conscientiously on the scientific frontier would do, he went back to review the theory’s basic postulates. Paul Davidson (2009, and 2012) reports that Keynes rejected three of the neo-classical axioms: the Neutral Money Hypothesis, the Gross Substitution Thesis and the Ergodic Principle.6 My 6  For those who would like to follow this up, I refer the reader to Davidson’s book John Maynard Keynes, published in the series Great Thinkers in Economics, edited by J. Thirwell.

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focus here will be on the thesis concerning the neutrality of money. This axiom asserts that money is not a real economic variable. The nations of the world could all agree to double the values of their currencies at some given point in sidereal time. But, if they did, they would make no difference to the value of anything. For such a change would affect only the nominal values of things, and no one would be any better or worse off. So, in neo-classical economics, money is thought to be just a measure of value on a ratio scale.7 And, like every such measure, it depends on the choice of the unit of measurement. And, if one just changes the scale on which one is measuring value, say, then one does not change the value of anything. But economics is all about how to increase value, and must therefore be concerned with a quantitative theory of value—with the value of what exists, and the causes of increase or decrease in value. However, if this is indeed what Neutral Money Hypothesis is all about, then it is trivial and unobjectionable. For the same argument applies to every quantity that is measurable on a ratio scale. One does not change the world if one just changes one’s units of measurement. Therefore, if the argument were any good, no fully fledged quantity would be a real variable of any physical theory. So, we must ask, what is the neutral money hypothesis really all about? If it does mean anything, it must be the hypothesis that the quantity that money measures is useless, because it not a real economic variable. But, if the power of purchase is not a real variable, which is what I think they are implying, then that explains a lot about the neutral money hypothesis. For what it must be saying is that money is just a promissory note for something else, viz. for the acquisition of goods of services of equal value to the goods or services one has sold or performed in order to earn the money to buy the things in question. For, this brings us back to the idea that money is just a ’bit’ player in the exchange process—a holder for its completion. If this is what money is supposed to be on the neo-classical theory, then (a) the theory is dead wrong, and (b) this wrong theory explains why neo-classical economists talk so much about exchange, when they should be talking about buying or selling. My guess is that neo-­ classical economists simply could not stomach the idea that purchasing is a social causal process—an act of legal acquisition. The purchaser legally acquires ownership of the object by providing the vendor with legal tender 7  The concept of a ratio scale is the kind of scale upon which the numerical assignments represent the relative magnitudes of the quantities being measured.

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to match the sale price. Or in the case of purchasing a service, the purchaser acquires the legal commitment of the service provider to provide a service, by agreeing to pay the service provider the agreed sum of money. In ‘The Dynamics of Capitalism’ above, I argued that money is a social force, the employment of which, in an act of purchase, can cause a change of ownership and which, in an act of hiring, can cause a worker to become legally committed to the performance of a service. This concept of social force is an energy concept of potentially enormous causal power. For, it can be employed in various ways to produce social effects. Its primary uses are (a) to effect legal changes of ownership, or (b) to effect legal commitments to the performance of services, or (c) to increase sales of goods or services by advertising, or (d) to borrow money to purchase goods that generate money (negative gearing). Money has thus become a sort of all-purpose social force with immense causal powers. For it can, in effect, be used in any of a thousand different ways to change the society, or, as the US and China have been demonstrating, of changing the world. A theory of economics without the social causal power of purchase is a kind of social kinematics. Thus Galileo’s law of free fall is a kinematic law, since it is neutral about the causes of free fall. Kepler’s laws of planetary motion were also kinematic. They described the motions of the planets, but remained agnostic about the causes of their motions. The laws of neo-­ classical economics must likewise neutral about the causes of the complex changes of legal ownership or of responsibility that occur in the course of a day or a year, and of the changes of ownership of money that occur over this time. They are just changes for which no individual, and no corporation or government is responsible. And, professionally, neo-classical economists must, by the neutral money hypothesis, must remain strictly neutral about the social causes of these changes. For that is what the Neutral Money Hypothesis telling them to do. So, practically, there is a world of difference between kinematics and dynamics. For the laws of dynamics are about the causes of change, and, of course, these are the things you need to know about, if you wish to effect change. Note: From laws of distribution of forces to laws of distribution of effects

Given that the Sun is very much more massive than any of the planets, it follows that the Sun does not wobble around much as a result of the planets tugging it toward them. So Kepler’s laws are only a good approximation to the truth. For, according to Newton’s theory, the centre of

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gravity of the solar system is not located at the centre of the Sun, as Kepler supposed it was. And so, it follows that Kepler’s laws are not quite accurate. Newton’s dynamical theory of planetary motion is certainly more accurate than Kepler’s kinematic one. But, this is often what is characteristic of dynamical theories. They correct the kinematic theories that lead to their development. The same is true in economics. Neo-classical kinematic theory was made redundant by Keynes’ dynamical development of it, which is not as likely to lead to events like those of 1929 or 2008. To understand the dynamics of a society, one needs to know the causes of the directions of its economic development. But, as I understand neo-classical theory, it requires economists to focus on the real variables of economics, and ignore who owes what to whom (private debt). For, in the long run, neo-­classicists say, money is not a relevant variable, because one person’s debt is another one’s asset. It is hard to believe that real economists would take this proposition seriously. As Keynes once said, ‘In the long run we are all dead’. I do not, of course, wish to downplay the developments that led up to the neo-classical perspective. But, from a scientific point of view, the Keynesian one must be considered to the better. It superseded neo-classical theory of economics in just the way that Newton’s theory of planetary dynamics superseded Kepler’s planetary kinematics. You’d think that the whole world would be using Keynesian economic dynamics now, rather than Marshallian economic kinematics—at least until a more sophisticated post-Keynesian dynamics could be developed. Of course, there is no reason to believe that Keynes is the last word in economics. Probably, there is no last word. General Relativity came to replace the Newtonian theory, Quantum dynamics requires a more sophisticated probabilistic theory of causation than the deterministic one. Science progresses—apparently endlessly—it does not go back to earlier perspectives. No doubt the present theory of social causation will one day be replaced by a still more realistic one than that required by Keynesianism.

4.5   First Philosophy for Moral Theory If scientific realism is first philosophy for truth claims, what, we may ask, is first philosophy for moral theory? For truth and moral rightness would appear to be in the same line of business. The subjectivist concept of truth, which is the conception of truth, upon which my book Rational Belief Systems was founded, is the theory that truth is epistemic rightness. And,

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according to this theory, a proposition is rationally believed to be true, if and only if, according to First Philosophy for truth claims, it would be epistemically right to believe it. What is evidently needed for moral philosophy is a theory for the moral rightness of actions. For, we could then construct such a theory, along the same lines as the theory of rational belief systems, if we had a first philosophy for morals. A first philosophy of morals would have to be a general theory of what would make a given action morally right. And, many philosophers have set out along this path. In the end, we need eventually to distinguish between what would make a given action objectively the right thing to do, and what would make it the morally right choice (subjectively right) for one to make. For, just as there is a distinction between what it is epistemically right to believe (what ticks all the boxes of truth indicators) and what corresponds to reality, so there must also be a distinction between what is morally the right course of action to take, and what would in fact be the best possible course that could be taken in the circumstances. In his two-volume work On What Matters, Derek Parfit set out to evaluate and locate conceptually the full range of theories of morals currently being pursued, and to identify, if possible, the required first philosophy for morally right actions. It is a monumental task. He thinks that the project of developing what must ultimately be an objective theory of morality is like that of climbing a mountain, which is so high that the summit cannot be seen (and perhaps can never be). As he sees the project, there are many possible paths to the summit, and philosophers of different persuasions differ from each other primarily by paths they are pioneering. But he sees these theoretical developments as struggles to occupy progressively higher ground along the route that has been taken. Parfit’s heroes are Immanuel Kant and Henry Sidgwick, and his ultimate objective is to discover the objective theory that he thinks will eventually be needed. The theory that Parfit ultimately favours is a version of Kant’s Formula of Universal Law, which is, like Parfit’s own principle, a social contractual one. It is also very similar to Thomas Scanlon’s theory. As Parfit states it ‘Scanlon’s formula’ holds that ‘Everyone ought to follow the principles that no one could reasonably reject’. Parfit argues that on some interpretations at least Scanlonian Contractualism coincides with Kantian Contractualism; on these interpretations, the principles upon whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will, will turn out to be just the same as the principles that no one could reasonably reject. The ­possibility

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of convergence between these two forms of contractualism may not seem terribly surprising, although Parfit and Scanlon disagree about the precise extent of the convergence. What is more surprising is Parfit’s assessment of the relations between contractualism and consequentialism. (p. xxii)

In my view, the mountain to be climbed is a socio-political one. Every country that is ruled by consent of the governed must have a de facto Social Contract (DSC), and the real problem, which is a political one, is how to establish a global DSC. For we cannot say now that the world is governed with the consent of the governed. So, what we need, if we wish to define a globally valid system of morality is a universally accepted social moral system to define how this system will operate. Consequently, Parfit’s image of struggling up different sides of a mountain is surprisingly apt. But, the mountain to be climbed, I would say, is not a pyramid of theories. It is the construction of a valid DSC for the world in which we live. This could take two forms. It could be a DSC for a world order, to which all countries that are ruled by consent would belong. But such a DSC, would be limited by whatever are the limitations of the world order that has been achieved. Or it could be the DSC for a human world that is ruled by consent, with the kind of authority that a national government normally has. Whichever way, let us call it the ‘global DSC’. As the philosophical world now understands them, moral principles pertain to the actions of individuals, but not to those of collective agents. They are simply principles concerned with the personal or social behaviour of individuals, which would probably be the ones that would eventually become entrenched in the global DSC—but, of course, we don’t know whether there will ever be anything more than a global world order of the sort we have now. So, we may never know what is ultimately right or wrong that covers the choices and activities of all social agents. We do know now what is considered to be morally right or wrong nationally, and also, to some extent, what is considered to be morally right of wrong internationally. For there are in fact many principles of social behaviour in these areas that no individual could reasonably reject, and are, therefore, included in the DSCs of all countries—if not by law, then at least by custom. But that is, so far, all we have. But it is not all that we can hope for. The San Francisco Conference of 1945 was established to create an international body that would serve to keep the peace, and define a path to multinational social development and permanent security. Good progress towards these ends has been made, but

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it seems to have stalled lately. We now live in a world that is no longer progressing in this direction, and which has become socially amoral in all sorts of ways. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted to charter the rights of human beings, and hence define: (a) the social moral duties of governments around the world, and (b) the boundaries of social moral behaviour for all social agents to observe. Social agents, as I define them, are not necessarily individuals. Corporations, governments at all levels, hospitals, universities, schools, armies, police forces, fire brigades and so on are all social decision-makers, but none of them is an individual, and all of them have their own special powers and responsibilities. And, of course, not all individuals have the same powers or responsibilities. Their human rights are the same, but their social powers and responsibilities may vary considerably. In drawing up the UDHR, the San Francisco Conference set out to define the absolute limits of these powers, and hence to limit the areas of responsibility for each of these kinds of agents. But where do we go from here. Scanlon’s formula does not seem to be relevant. Presumably, it implies that ‘Every social agent ought to follow the principles that no social agent, of any kind, anywhere in the world, could reasonably reject’. But, personally, this is not a formula that I could use with any confidence. I cannot put myself into the shoes of Israeli military, the US President, the North Korean government or the Bolivian one. What is needed, it seems, is an ultimate court of appeal for claims concerning the socially justified reasonableness of national policies. If such a policy is found to be contrary to the global CSD, then the UN Social, Economic and Cultural Council (ECOSOC) should institute sanctions to ensure that it is not proceeded with. If it passes, then the policy must be judged to be socially morally permissible, and the ECOSOC must be authorized to take whatever steps are most humane and appropriate to prevent this policy from being implemented. Therefore, to climb the mountain that Derek Parfit is talking about, the world must work towards the construction of a global social contract, and take steps to provide the UN with the tools and forces it would need to enforce its rulings.8

8  This problem is discussed at some length in The New Enlightenment: Steven Pinker and Beyond, Part II.

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4.6  States of Mind and Brain In 1956 I was appointed to a Lectureship in the Department of History and Methods of Science at the University of Melbourne. I came to that position with an honours science degree in physics, and an honours arts degree in philosophy obtained at the University of Adelaide. I also had a BPhil from Oxford, which included a study of Kant, and a thesis on Scientific Explanation. J.J.C. (Jack) Smart, who called himself a scientific realist, was my philosophy supervisor in Adelaide, and I owe him a considerable debt of gratitude. Jack argued that all sensations and states of mind are really brain- states or processes. He was, at this time, one of the few people to hold a scientifically realistic view of the nature of these events and states. My inclination at the time was to think that these mental events were merely correlated with their physical causes. Thus, I resisted the identification of my states of mind with things going on in my head. For, like most people, whatever their religion, I had been brought up to think of our minds as distinct from our brains, just as Descartes, and nearly everyone else thought in the seventeenth century. I was not religious when I was studying philosophy in Adelaide. The SCM (Student Christian Movement) turned me into an atheist. But my thinking of sense experiences as mental, rather than physical, events had become part of my Anglo-American culture; so my resistance was natural enough. But, fortunately, I had a science background, and was able to specialize in the philosophy of science in my teaching and supervisory work in the HPS Department.9 And, the main things I worked on included (a) the mind-­ body problem, (b) measurement theory, (c) the Scientific Revolution, (d) scientific explanation, and (e) rationalism and empiricism. And, thus, from the early days of my career, I was involved in questions concerning scientific realism. There were, I thought, two importantly different kinds of theories in the sciences: (a) process theories, which purport to describe the underlying structures of things, and account for their observable behaviour by reference to that of their constituents, and (b) non-process theories that purport to describe only the laws governing the behaviour of things of the kinds being investigated, without reference to their underlying structures. Naturally, these theories exist in hierarchies. The deeper the level of analysis, the more fundamental the theory is. But at the deepest level, the 9  The department was renamed that of History and Philosophy of Science a couple of years after my appointment.

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theory can only be a non-process one, which is, in some ways, a less satisfactory kind of theory. In 1957, I wrote and published a paper on this in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in which I compared two nineteenth-century theories with roughly the same coverage, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, and argued for the superiority of statistical mechanics as a theory. It explained more, and it embedded thermodynamics within the theory of Newtonian mechanics, and thus created a more widely applicable theory. From this point on, my philosophy of mind was a scientifically realistic one. That is, I thought that human perception would eventually have to be subsumed within the theory of the human brain, that consciousness would be identified as any of a range of possible conscious states of the activity of a live human brain, that colour perception would be identified with a certain kind of response that is made to a colour stimulus, which is occurring within a normal (non-colour-blind) human brain, and so on. Like most biologists, I now think that many of our ways of seeing, feeling and understanding our immediate surroundings are genetically determined, at least in the way that any animal must understand it, if it is to survive. And, that understanding, I believe, is quite sophisticated. For, we now know that the world in which we live is, to all intents and purposes, very close to being a Newtonian one in a flat Euclidian space-time framework. So it is not at all surprising that we are genetically adapted to living in such a framework, and have the requisite intuitions of space, time and causality to do so. Presumably, most other animals have such intuitions too, even though they cannot articulate them. So, our intuitive understanding it is not miraculous, and it requires no intervention of a divine being to explain our innate capacity to know—to the extent to which we do evidently know—some basic truths about what is physically possible. My studies in History and Philosophy of Science, have also caused me to re-evaluate the influence of Aristotelian rationalism on the eighteenth-­ century European Enlightenment, and the influence of the Enlightenment in Britain. Descartes and Newton were much more important to the Enlightenment’s development than I had initially thought, and Bacon and Hume were much less so. Descartes’ rationalism had defined what he thought was First Philosophy, and Newton clearly enshrined it with his theory of the causes of motion. The European Enlightenment is often said to have created the age of reason. But, as I now see it, it was essentially the age of Cartesian rationalism that followed. For, it became the age in which the Cartesian

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world-view dominated the intellectual world. But today, we can no longer afford to be rationalists. Rationalism was conquered by scientific realism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the struggle to become the final court of appeal for claims to knowledge. And, the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, led by the British Empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, were its death throes. They did not create the age of reason. But it allowed them to be Baconians rather then Cartesian rationalists. John Locke was the most forward looking of the British Empiricists. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke led the way forward with his belief in causal powers. But Berkeley and Hume, whose radical empiricism led them to deny even the existence of causal powers altogether, were certainly out on a limb of their own making. Descartes’ theory of First Philosophy was widely accepted amongst the Philosophes, and also, surprisingly, by the young Newton himself, whose rationalist theory of motion was used to derive his general theory of gravitation from Kepler’s laws.10 Newton had to develop a version of the calculus to complete his derivation of the Universal Law of Gravity. He called it his theory of fluxions. But the German rationalist philosopher Gottfried Leibniz was, if anything, an even greater mathematician, and is the inventor of the modern differential and integral calculi. Newton’s derivation of the law of gravity required fixing the position of the Sun at a fixed point in an Absolute space, and assuming (a) Newtonian dynamics, (b) his rules of reasoning in philosophy, and (c) Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, Newton was able to prove (using his theory of fluxions) the existence of a centrally directed gravitational force that accounted well for all three of Kepler’s laws. It was an astonishing achievement. But the British did not celebrate Newton, as they did Sir Francis Bacon, who was a philosopher who believed in practical wisdom, and urged that people should study nature, and learn by humbly observing it how it works that we might turn our knowledge to advantage in the management of nature. He appealed to the British as no other philosopher appealed to them. They liked his earthy empiricism, and his practical methodology of studying the things in nature, in order to discover empirically what they can do, and using this knowledge to advance British industry and power.

10  For an account of this influence see my book: Rationalism; a Critique of Pure Theory (2017), Part I.

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Descartes’ role in the developing Enlightenment philosophy was underplayed in Britain, even in the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment was at the summit of its achievement. As discussed, the British were not keen to take part in this movement. Newton, who was at least the equal of Gottfried Leibniz intellectually, did not discuss his dynamical theory directly with him. He left all that to his long-time admirer Samuel Clarke who conducted a very misleading dialogue with Leibniz about what he really meant in the Principia, when he must have had every reason to believe that Descartes and Leibniz would both have been delighted with his real views about motive forces. Samuel Clarke, either (a) did not understand Newton well enough to appreciate the Cartesian origins of Newtonian dynamics, or (b) deliberately concealed Newton’s rationalism for political reasons. Sir Francis Bacon, who was not such an intellectual giant, was greatly admired. And, he was himself the author of a kind of First Philosophy, which had a major impact on the development of the natural, or museum sciences of chemistry, caloric theory, botany, zoology, geography, oceanography and so on. Eighteenth-century philosophy in Britain thus became quite radically empirical. For, Bacon himself had once written a book called Novum Organum, the title of which was an indirect reference to Aristotle’s Organon, or Logical Treatises, in which Aristotle developed his theories (a) of valid arguments, and (b) of scientific knowledge (episteme). Epistemic knowledge, he said, was manifestly superior to that lesser kind of knowledge, which he called ‘accidental knowledge’, which he did not disparage, but elevated as being worth more than all of the learning of the ancients. In his Novum Organum, Bacon outlined his views on what is worth knowing, rather than that of what is better known. He did not reject the a priori model for the latter completely. And, he thought that epistemic knowledge was good in its own way. But really, like a spider’s web, ‘it is admirable for the fineness of its thread, but it is of no substance or profit’. In his view, ‘the discoveries of printing, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder had done more to improve the lot of mankind that all of the learning of the ancients’. It is nowadays that anyone would think that gunpowder was a wonderful discovery. The British naturally preferred Bacon to Aristotle and Descartes, as I have explained. But, as it turned out, the Cartesian conception of First Philosophy, which was much the same as Aristotle’s, led Enlightenment thinkers astray in the social sciences. For these sciences were still only in their infancy, and no one really knew how to tackle them.

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4.7  Rationalism in Political Philosophy A large part of philosophy is concerned with the philosophies of the various fields of study pursued in universities. For, just as every discipline has a history, it also has a philosophy, whether or not that philosophy has ever been articulated. But a philosopher should not be content to accept the processes of thought that are actually undertaken by the practitioners of a given discipline. Their job is to inquire into these practices, and to consider their justness or adequacy, and, if need be, to suggest alternatives. For often there is a mismatch between the stated aims of a discipline and the proposals for achieving them. In the social sciences in particular there is such a mismatch, especially in the fields of morals, economics and politics. But, I did not know this when I set out on my philosophical journey in 2004. What I did know is that philosophy is normally defined not by its projects, but by its problems, and differences in approach in trying to solve them. In his paper ‘Why isn’t there More Progress in Philosophy?’ David Chalmers lists 30 such problems, or preferred ways of trying to solve them, in his survey.11 To judge by his survey, there is not much agreement about what the main problems are, how to go about solving them or what would constitute a satisfactory resolution, which is roughly how Thomas Kuhn characterized non-­ paradigmatic research. But there are some approaches to resolving philosophical problems that are gaining ground. And scientific realism is one of them, as Chalmers notes. Scientific realism is here understood as defining a physically plausible ontology: (a) for the domain of the inquiry, (b) for the kinds of properties and relations that exist, and (c) for the kinds of causal processes that can occur. In other words, there is to be nothing scientifically implausible in any of these domains. Psychology, for example, must (a) be limited in its ontology to what is neurologically plausible (b) have sensations of kinds, which are in reality activated in certain environments, whenever stimuli of certain kinds exist, and the brain is awake, in the sense of being responsive to stimuli of at least these kinds, (c) have experiences of these kinds only when the appropriate kinds of stimuli are present. Jack Smart’s book The Philosophy of Scientific Realism (1963) was based on an analysis of this kind, and I see no good reason to reject it. 11  ‘Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?’, in Being, Freedom and Method (2017) edited by J. Keller, Oxford University Press.

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In writing Eudaimonism and the Welfare State, my first hypothesis was that every state that is ruled by the consent of the governed must have what I call a ‘de facto social contract’. For, by ‘consent] I mean here an overall willingness to obey the laws and customs of that society, with the kinds of institutions it has. And, if this condition is satisfied, then it seems to me that this has important implications for the members of this society. For it gives them a basic framework of laws, customs and institutions within which the members of that society must seek to build their lives. I call this framework the society’s de facto social contract’ (DSC). Now, the beauty of this conception is that it is an empirical question whether a society has such a framework, and, if so, what it is. But this de facto social contract is not, or is very unlikely to be, a genuine agreement. But it is a genuine existent in any society that is ruled by consent, whether or not there was ever mutual agreement reached by negotiation. In contrast, Rawls’ and Nozick’s hypothetical social contracts are not real, but supposedly just and maximally free in ways that everyone can enjoy (or not) the lives they are forced to live. The de facto social contract (DSC) is a description of the basic structure of the society, its mode of governance, its institutions, how all of these things operate, and its laws and customs. If true, such a description would provide a neutral outsider with a pretty good idea of what it would be like to live in that society. But a DSC is not to be thought of as an inducement to anyone. It is presented as an existing state of affairs. And, if one is living in this state, most of it will be common knowledge. But it is important, nevertheless. For, politically, it is better to ask: Where do we go from here? than to ask: Where, ideally, would you like to start, or to be? And, this is true, I believe, wherever you might actually be, and whatever your long-­ term aims might be. For most of us are not in the business of building a new society from scratch, and I see no point in trying to think about an existing society in this way. For what we need to think about is: What would make the existing society a better place overall for everyone living there? and: Can we do this without violating anyone’s human rights, and still play our part as a good global citizen? And, what the DSC does is that it provides a reference point for such a pragmatic approach to political innovation. I know that this is not the tradition in social or political philosophy. The great theories of the past were mostly constructed in the enlightenment manner, from a set of a priori assumptions. Rawls does this. And so does Nozick. But in today’s world, this is not the way we should be thinking at

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all. We should be thinking imaginatively, rationally, empirically and practically, and doing our best to become the fairest and best society in the fairest and best world we can create. And to do this, we need to know where we stand now, nationally, globally and locally, and what we can do to make things better and fairer for everyone. Therefore, we need to know about the DSCs of the town or suburb, city or state, country or region, continent or world in which we live, and how to improve the de DSCs of any, or all of them, that can be said to have such things. Progress in political philosophy would, I think, occur on a grand scale, if we were to try to articulate a theory of social progress that is morally, socially and politically progressive. The Cartesian rationalist theories of the eighteenth century, and the modern rationalist theories of Rawls and Nozick, are not pertinent moral theories, because they are all constructed from a priori premises, as though the object was to begin from scratch, having just emerged from the jungle, or like we have just landed in Botany Bay and never settled on the land before. So, my point is this: Political philosophy is in a mess, because it addresses the wrong problem. The problem is not to create an ideal society from scratch, but how to make our own societies better.

4.8  The New Metaphysics of Morals12 A metaphysics of morals is a theory about the nature of moral judgments. It should tell us what they are, and how and why we should be committed to the moral judgments we make. Historically, the most successful theory of this kind was probably Immanuel Kant’s foundations of the metaphysics of morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysic der Sitten). Kant thought, as Aristotle had once argued, that human beings are essentially rational animals, and, therefore, if human beings are to be true to their natures, they must behave rationally. But, he also thought that human beings are not bound by their natures to act rationally. They are free to choose. Therefore, although human beings are not bound to behave rationally, they are, qua rational agents, necessarily capable of knowing what is required of them. Moral behaviour, Kant argued, must be essentially just rational behaviour. In the eighteenth century, the term ‘rational’ was understood somewhat more broadly than it is today. A thing could be rational or irrational, 12  This section is derived, almost word for word, from an essay I wrote and lectured upon in 2014.

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depending on the calculability, or lawfulness, of its behaviour. Thus, the universe itself was thought to be a rational, because, as Newton had shown, its behaviour is governed by universal laws. Therefore, Kant argued, if human beings are to behave rationally, they must behave according to laws of social behaviour, and these laws must be ones that would be apparent to all perfectly rational beings. Thus, we have Kant’s categorical imperative, which enjoins us to act only on principles that we could simultaneously will to be universal laws of nature, i.e. laws that would hold for all rational beings. In everyday speak, Kant’s categorical imperative was: Act as you think any ideally rational person in your shoes would act in the same circumstances. According to Kant, the guiding principle of all morality is this categorical imperative. But Kant himself soon realized that rationality is not itself enough to guarantee morality, and I think that this is now widely accepted. For, the rational choices that people make may be cruel, sadistic, or otherwise inhumane. Arguably, such actions are not ultimately rational, but no one has yet succeeded in showing that the vicious ones never pay in the long run. Whether they could be rationally willed, and, if so, acceptable to all perfectly rational agents, are other matters. Plausibly, a perfectly rational free agent, whether human or not, would not be willing to endorse a principle that could be used viciously against itself. But why would a perfectly rational being not behave abominably to marginally rational beings like ourselves, or to non-rational beings such as cows or horses? It is said that moral judgments are both synthetic and a priori. They are synthetic, because they are not true just in virtue of the conventions of language. And, they are a priori, because they are supposedly discoverable just by reflection upon what they would commit us to. At least, this is what Kant believed. For, on Kant’s theory of morality, endorsement of a moral proposition would commit us to willing only those actions that would accord with its directions. But why would we make such a commitment? If we were strongly motivated to behave, as we think upon reflection that an ideally rational being would behave, then, I suppose, we might be willing to make this commitment. But it is hard to believe that we should be so passionate about behaving rationally, that we should be willing to impose upon others the duty of acting in this way too, whatever their motivations might be. Is behaving as we believe an ideally rational being would behave in similar circumstances to be elevated to the status of being the supreme principle of human behaviour? If so, why?

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I think that the more we try to rationalize morality, and the more we intellectualize it, the more we denature it. Intuitively, the principal dimensions of morality are those of fairness and unfairness, kindness and cruelty, honesty and dishonesty, caring and uncaring, and perhaps one or two others. These moral dimensions are the basic respects in which the actions of social agents may be judged to be the same or different morally. But their rationality does not seem to come into it. The dimensions of morality are all ordinal quantities. That is, it makes sense to say that one person is fairer, kinder, or more honest or more caring than another, but no obvious sense to say that one is twice as fair, kind, honest or caring. Nor is there any way of deciding which moral dimensions are most important. There is, therefore, no single ordinal scale on which the moral virtues and vices of people can be measured, except perhaps at the extremes. Degrees of excellence in moral character may be like degrees of excellence in universities, which cannot reliably be ranked in the middle ranges (Sawyer et  al., 2013). Virtuous people may excel in the virtues of honesty, fairness and kindness (and in most other dimensions of morality), and become recognized as saints. Vicious people may be notably dishonest, unfair and cruel (and perhaps immoral in other ways as well), and be recognized for what they are. But how does rationality add anything to this? To construct a personal moral theory, as Kant was intent upon doing, we should, plausibly, emphasize the things that matter in character assessment, viz. the moral virtues. So, instead of Kant’s fundamental question, which was: 1. According to what principles would ideally rational beings behave socially? Perhaps the question that we should be asking is: 2. What principles of social behaviour you would most wish to see promoted in every society, and how, personally, would you prioritize them? This would appear to be the basic question we should be asking if our aims are just to develop our own moral positions. But the rationality or otherwise of our actions does not seem to be involved at all. In this paper, it will be argued that the construction of a personal moral theory along these lines is a good start. But, it can only be the beginning of a quest to develop a general moral theory. Because, as I will argue, most important moral principles are social, both in origin and content. First, the discursive agents that have by far the greatest influence on people’s lives in

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every modern society are not individuals, but big and powerful collectives (governments, corporations, armies and so on). Individuals are mostly just bit-players on the national and international stages. Moreover, their choices and actions are limited by their social circumstances, and by all of the advertising and propaganda to which they have been subjected. Indeed, the choices that people are actually capable of making effectively are prioritized and restricted by the courses of action that are psychologically, physically, economically and socially available to them. Hence, no theory of morality can be complete if it is limited just to the promotion and ranking of any merely personal virtues. What is needed is a foundation for morality that has much wider scope, which accords not only with our personal values, but incorporates our social ideals, and focuses upon the moral responsibilities of the specialized and collective social agents through which we must ultimately seek to realize these ideals. I do not undervalue personal morality. A good society needs people who are honest, fair-minded and kind to each other, and good to the animals in their care. But we also need people who have good social consciences, and are willing to participate in social projects that are not exclusively in their own self-interest. But this aim is not likely to be achieved by a rationalist metaphysic of morals, since the aim of acting perfectly rationally is not a strongly motivating one outside of logic classrooms, and does not have any clear moral implications. What is needed, I think, is a compelling conception of the good society that nearly everyone can enthusiastically share a vision of what is possible, and ultimately desirable. The doctrines of ‘natural’ rights, which were drawn up in the eighteenth century by Thomas Paine, the Marquis de Condorcet,13 Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, and others, were blueprints for the societies (the United States and France) that were eventually founded upon them. These doctrines all expressed the aspirations of the peoples for whom they were written, and the social ideals that they held most strongly. But the emphasis of most of these older doctrines was quite different from the modern ones. For their main concern was to secure freedom from 13  I include Condorcet (1793/2013) in this list, although his emphasis on freedom was less pronounced. Condorcet distinguished between natural rights, which apply to all people, and the rights of citizens. The modern doctrines of human rights are more inclusive, as are Condorcet’s rights of citizens, which include women within their scope. I am grateful to Chris Peters for drawing this to my attention.

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oppression. The French sought freedom from aristocratic rule, and a more equitable society. The Americans sought freedom from the British, and a republic of their own. Consequently, the Enlightenment predecessors of the modern doctrines of human rights were fundamentally revolutionary documents. They did not talk about human dignity, or respect for one’s enemies. Nor, with few exceptions, did they attempt to describe in much detail the provisions, opportunities and entitlements that human beings should have, as of right, in any sufficiently prosperous society. That was to look too far ahead. The 1940s doctrines, in contrast, were just as much moral declarations as they were political ones. They were not gearing up to wage wars of independence. They were concerned about the tragedies of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and the terrible Depression from which they had only just emerged. This moral tone was evident in Franklin D Roosevelt’s proposal for a Second Bill of Rights in his State of the Union address of January 1944. Indeed, it is palpable. Here is what he said: … In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:

(a) The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; (b) The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; (c) The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; (d) The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; (e) The right of every family to a decent home; (f) The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; (g) The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; (h) The right to a good education.

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All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

The Preamble to the Constitution of the French Fifth Republic in 1946 was similarly motivated. And so, presumably, was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I think that most people, at this time, were so appalled with the innocent suffering that occurred in the Depression, and the unconscionable treatment that had been meted out to Jewish and other minority groups in Europe in the decades leading up to and including World War II, that they felt strongly the need for a new kind of doctrine of human rights. It was felt that what was done to the Jews in Europe’s concentration camps was much worse than the killing and maiming that had occurred in World War II. For these killings were not just acts of war, where one could still have some respect for one’s enemy. They were brutal acts of extermination. They involved treating the inmates of these camps, not as people, but as vermin. The feeling was widespread that human beings deserved better than this. The social and moral principles that underscore these modern doctrines are all humanistic. But their humanism is not the same as ‘liberal humanism’, which was the supposedly natural foundation of the revolutionary doctrines of the Enlightenment.14 The kind of humanism upon which these charters were developed was a social one. It embraced the full spectrum of modern human rights—ranging from the personal and property rights of the earlier tradition through to the provision, wherever necessary, of adequate health, education and welfare services, not only to satisfy basic human needs, but adequate to allow all people to live with dignity and respect in their own societies. Liberal humanism, on the other hand, sought only to justify the so-called ‘imprescriptible’ rights and entitlements of the earlier doctrines, which were, supposedly, the rights and entitlements that people are born with, and so, presumably, must have existed, even in the original state of nature. 14  The natural rights doctrines of the Enlightenment era were evidently seen as compatible with some of the most inhumane means of punishing social transgressors that have ever been conceived—using gruesome torture and execution by hanging, drawing and quartering.

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Even a cursory glance at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should convince us that human rights are not typical of the moral or political principles that are discussed in Philosophy or Politics departments. The moral principles that dominate discussions in Philosophy are mostly concerned with the outrageous demands of act-utilitarianism (as in ‘trolly problems’), or perhaps with truth-telling, abortion, or promise-keeping, but not with how individuals may be treated by the state. In traditional moral philosophy, the state itself is not even considered to be a morally responsible agent. Moral responsibilities for legislation are normally thought to lie with individual members of Parliament or Congress, not with the collective body of parliamentarians—even though so-called conscience votes occur, they are likely to be allowed only where religious sensitivities are at stake. Yet, this collective body surely does have moral responsibilities—indeed, very great ones—and often the legislation that is enacted today may well be regarded as morally imperative, or morally indefensible, in years to come. The theory of human rights should, clearly, be one of the main issues in political philosophy. But, unfortunately, political philosophy lies in a sort of no man’s land between morals, politics and jurisprudence. Political philosophers have traditionally sought to justify the obligations of individuals to the states in which they live. But rarely do they discuss the human rights doctrines themselves. Questions are asked, such as: whether nation X is in breach of our human rights conventions, or whether nation Y is justified in curtailing some human rights conventions, e.g. freedom of speech, in order to pursue economic development as a priority. But human rights themselves seem to have no natural home in most universities. They are not straightforwardly moral principles, as morality is now conceived. They are not straightforwardly political principles either. Most probably, they would, and probably should, be classified as jurisprudential. But Law faculties seem to have given up on jurisprudence. The main problem, as I see it, with human rights is that no one seems to know what to do with them. They sound like moral principles. And, they seem to stand above the law, as moral principles presumably should. But most philosophers these days are individualists, and find it very difficult to make any sense of them. In the 1790s, Jeremy Bentham said that the natural rights of the French Constitution were nonsense, and that to describe them as ‘imprescriptible’ was ‘nonsense on stilts’. But they are not nonsense. In what follows, I will argue that, properly conceived, they are straightforwardly moral principles referring to the moral obligations of

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states, precisely as the 1946 Preamble to the French Constitution explicitly declares. I call them ‘social moral principles’. Human rights are not the only social moral principles, but they are probably the best-known examples of them. Others are concerned with our obligations to the state (e.g. to pay one’s taxes), our responsibilities to each other in a civilized society (e.g. to keep promises), or with the obligations of firms to their customers (e.g. to ensure product safety), or professionals to their clients or patients (e.g. to exercise due care). There are obviously hundreds of social moral principles, which are widely recognized as such, and treated with the respect by legislators. But, because they involve obligations or responsibilities by, on, or to collective organizations, or apply only to the members of professional or other specialized groups, they are seldom recognized as such. On the contrary, all such social moral principles are normally said to be ones of ‘applied ethics’, and so not the proper subject matter of the pure study. But the relationship between pure and applied ethics is not at all like that between pure and applied mathematics. Pure mathematics has a radically different methodology from applied mathematics. Pure mathematics is the realm of pure theory. Applied mathematics is the methodology of science that evolved in the seventeenth century to create the modern sciences of statics, dynamics, strength of materials, optics and so on. The relationship between so-called pure ethics and applied ethics is quite different. It is more like the relationship between kinematics and dynamics. Kinematics is concerned with how bodies actually move in some specific circumstances (Ellis, 2014b). Dynamics are concerned with how bodies of all kinds would move, in whatever kinds of circumstances they might exist. Pure ethics is, if anything, just the superficial study of personal morality. Applied ethics is concerned with the whole field of morality, personal and social. The specific theory tells us only about the moral responsibilities of a specific class of social agents, viz. those of normal adult individuals. The general theory not only tells us about the moral responsibilities of normal adult individuals, it also includes our basic human rights (which are the moral responsibilities of governments) within its scope, and the moral responsibilities of all of the many other kinds of social agents in all of the various kinds of human societies in the world.

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4.9  Theory of Social Equality ‘Social humanism’, which is the name I give to the underlying philosophy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is largely about achieving social equality, which is just one of a number of species of equality discussed in the literature. For social equality to exist in a given society, the people of that society must normally be disposed to treat all others as their social equals, and so have equal concern for them as people, independently of their social status. There are some broader economic conceptions of equality that are based largely on the idea that people should have more or less equal incomes, wealth or access to resources. But social equality is not to be identified with any of these. It involves equality of concern, treatment and respect, and it provides for real equality of opportunity, which is something that will be discussed presently. Social equality requires that concern and regard for others should be extended to everyone. But it would require a big social movement to create and maintain such an attitude. For it is not a natural one. Human beings are naturally tribal, and therefore inclined to adopt the hierarchical social structures inherent in tribalism, and to limit their concerns for others to those they see as members of their own tribe. To counter our intuitive tribalism, and to create and maintain social cohesion, it is necessary that we should demand attitudes of social egalitarianism, i.e. a commitment to realizing a state of social equality in one’s own society. And this may take some time and effort. According to social egalitarianism, there must not only be equality in and before the law, i.e. no arbitrary discrimination in the law itself, and none in its implementation. There must also be equality in and before the set of all accepted social norms of the society, i.e. no arbitrary discrimination in our socially approved customs, and none in our treatment of people who do not abide by these customs. In other words, we must require a kind of social contractual egalitarianism. Social egalitarianism also involves the cultivation of democratic attitudes. To achieve this end result, I would not advocate adversarial democracy, i.e. the kind of democracy that pits one group of people in a country against another—in a war of invective and propaganda. On the contrary, I would argue that we need a collaborative democracy, in which people are expected to work together to resolve social problems. Adversarial democracy is often counterproductive of social equality, and just promotes tribalism, as the most recent US and Australian elections have shown. And the

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most powerful tribes, with the most resources, and (in Australia) best access to the media, must ultimately become the dominant ones. But a society with dominant social tribes cannot possibly be a socially equal one. Creating and maintaining a socially equal society must essentially be a matter of developing a natural willingness to get behind the kinds of social programmes (e.g. educational ones) that will provide real equality of opportunity to everyone in society, and insisting upon equality of regard, treatment and so on. A society in which socially egalitarian attitudes prevail may include a few millionaires, or even billionaires.15 For what is most important is not wealth or income equality, but that there should be equality of respect and concern for people, independently of their wealth or income. It does matter that no one should be so poor, or so downtrodden, that they cannot take advantage of what is on offer, or otherwise participate fully in social life. So, it is vitally important that everyone should pay his or her fair share of taxation, and then cease to regard this money as ‘their money’, as though the government were a corporation, and they were its shareholders. They are not. Governments are for everyone, not just for taxpayers. And governments have some important moral duties to perform, viz. to maintain our democratic institutions, our human rights, and do all of the sorts of things that Franklin Roosevelt spoke about in his 1944 address. To realize socially egalitarian attitudes in Australia, Great Britain and the USA would certainly require huge cultural changes. Legislation alone cannot do it, because the change required is basically a moral one. And, legislation has to follow morality, not prescribe it. Nor can wealth redistribution succeed in bringing about the required changes. To create social egalitarianism the members of a society must somehow become more humanistic in their attitudes. That is, they must, as Rawls (1971) suggested, be able and willing to abstract from their own positions and interests, and consider social issues from a purely humanistic point of view. That is, they must be able to operate socially from behind a ‘veil of

15  When I wrote this about 10 years ago, there were a few billionaires around, who were filthy rich, but tolerable. But today we have multi-billionaires who have the wealth of nation states the size of Iran, Israel or New Zealand. And these individuals and their heirs and successors are (a) unelected, and (b) unanswerable to the United Nations, and (c) pay very little of their massive incomes to the nations within which they trade. Sooner or later, the world will find themselves hosting trillionaires, with wealth exceeding the most powerful nations on earth.

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ignorance’ concerning their own stations in life, which some people will inevitably find difficult. Obviously, capitalism and individualism do not encourage such perspectives. On the contrary, they undermine them. Free market capitalism requires us to take the viewpoint of the individual in all matters, and this is likely to lead to the gross neglect of what are nowadays disparagingly called ‘entitlements. Socialism requires us to adopt the viewpoint of the producers of goods and services, i.e. the workers and their managements. But, the history of the West since the nineteenth century has demonstrated that the degree of social control required to maintain a socialist regime does not make for a free or democratic society. But we do know, from the examples of Scandinavia and Northern Europe, exactly what is required. A balanced society is one in which people would normally treat each other as social equals, without having to be pressured, or required by law to do so. That is, we need a society with an egalitarian social contract. For all of these reasons, the general theory of morals requires a new more general foundation than Kant ever dreamed of. Specifically, my foundational question is this: 3. According to what principles would you wish the individual or collective agents of every society to behave? This question, I believe, is the one that we really should be asking. It is clearly a foundational question, but it immediately changes the focus of morality from what behaviour is most rational socially to what behaviour is most desirable socially. So, instead of Kant’s rational idealism, my thesis is one of desirable idealism. The consequences of asking the desirability question, instead of Kant’s original one, would be momentous—no less so than were those of Kant’s theory in his day. Here are some of them: 1. Individually, we should have to think of our morals as social behavioural ideals, i.e. laws or customary ways of behaving that we should like to see entrenched in the social contracts of every society. 2. The morality of a society must be seen as the set of laws or customs that most people in that society would wish to see built into every society’s social contract.

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3. All effective decision-makers in a society, whether individual or collective, must be social agents, and hence, in principle, also moral agents. 4. The moral obligations, rights, powers and responsibilities of any individual or collective Z must depend on the morally relevant class of agents to which Z belongs.

(a) In the case of an individual, it would be basically the same for all normal adult citizens, but special obligations, rights, powers, or responsibilities might attach to the citizen’s station in life. (b) In the case of an organization, it would be dependent upon the role of that organization in society, and the powers and responsibilities that are attached to that role. 5. Moral principles never apply only to particular individuals or organizations, but only to individuals or organizations in virtue of their social positions or roles. 6. A society and its morality must be co-evolving systems. 7. To develop our moral system, we must aim to change the society’s social contract to fit our moral preferences.

I cannot argue for any of these consequences here. The arguments for them are set out in my book on social humanism (Ellis, 2012). Kant’s rational idealism, I argued, is radically unsatisfactory. You need more than rationality to found a system of morality. Imagine a society of perfectly rational cats. They are good at geometry, and rational mechanics, and they love torturing mice to death. But how would you go about trying to persuade them that this is wrong? Kant needed humanism to make his own position tenable, as I think he himself later realized, when he supplemented his purely rationalist theory with his humanistic thesis that: Human beings are ends in themselves; and argued that it is always wrong to treat a human being merely as a means to an end. But in my view, the focus should, at the outset, have been on what is socially most desirable, not on what is most rational, given certain objectives, because if you leave the objectives out, you must gloss over the question of what is socially most desirable, which is disastrous. Aristotle, I would argue, was wrong about human nature. We human beings have much more complex natures than Aristotle ever imagined. To live together according to our natures in a social environment, we need to accommodate to each other’s desires and values, not just rationally, but

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also socially, with tolerance and understanding. For, it is not clear that there can ever be a sufficiently broad, fundamentally essentially rational, agreement about what is overall for the best. In any case, it would seem to be clear that the essence of human kind is not their rationality, or any other arbitrarily selected social or mental capacities specific to human beings. If we have an essential nature, it is what is written into our genes. So, in all probability we are, by nature, hunter-gathering tribes-people. But we are not essentially social beings; i.e. our genetic structures are not highly determinative of our social behaviour. Other social animals (such as ants and bees) have evolved their social structures by the slow processes of genetic selection. But human beings appear to have evolved a unique capacity to create and adapt their manner of social organization to their circumstances. Accordingly, we must be willing to accept that most of the principles that we have adopted for regulating social behaviour are really socially generated—not ones that are encoded in our DNA. And, if they are passed on from generation to generation, then mostly they will be passed on as memes, not genes. But, if this is so, then our moral principles cannot all be discoverable a priori, as everyone working in the Kantian tradition of moral philosophy strongly believes. There are undoubtedly some primitive moral character judgments derivable from our natural dispositions to admire certain personal virtues (e.g. compassion, honesty, fairness) in people, which are plausibly a priori, and so more or less universal. But the natural virtues would also include some militant ones (e.g. courage, fighting spirit and loyalty), which are certainly not in need of any encouragement. The problem faced by any nation-wide society, then, is how to break down aggressive tribalism without substituting some other, even more vicious, form of nationalism. In the end, if we want world peace and prosperity, I think we will all have to become cosmopolitans, and see ourselves as members of a global federation of human societies, working collaboratively for the well-being of all. But this end is probably too remote to be a guide to present behaviour. For the present, we must focus on building a good society with good people. And our required moral principles must refer to the kinds of behaviour that we should demand of the social agents in our society, and be disposed to argue for in every society.

CHAPTER 5

Social Democracy and Social Progress

5.1   Basic Capitalism The range from Capitalism to Socialism is not realistically describable as a linear order. But there are two things that the vast majority of states that exist in the world today now have in common:—a monetary system and a market economy. Moreover, the economies are strikingly similar. They all have what I call a basic capitalist structure, but which may be more or less guided or constrained. The independent countries, which have their own currencies, define their money by acts of legal tender, and legislate to control the uses of money, and to guarantee the viability of its normal functions. These processes are similarly defined everywhere, and monetary transactions are legally protected processes. So, there exists, in just about every country, everything that is required for commercial activities, including those of international trade. Moreover, every civilized country has some essentially socialist programmes, i.e. programmes that do not exist just to ensure the possibility of a free and open capitalist market. The US has Obama Care, which is a state sponsored form of medical insurance. And, other basically capitalist states, such as Australia, not only have socialized medicine, they have state run radio and television stations, and other socialist remnants of their old welfare state.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_5

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Let us, however, define a basic capitalist state as any that has just the social institutions required for a well-functioning market economy, and whose government sees itself as having no social obligations other than to maintain, or if possible to improve, these basic institutions. Let us describe such a laissez-faire state as that of ‘basic capitalism’. In the final years of his life, Franklin D Roosevelt spoke about the need for a Second Bill of Rights. If his suggest Bill of Rights been enacted, the USA would have normalized politically. For every other civilized state in the Western World behaves as if it already had such a bill or rights similar to Roosevelt’s. But, sadly, America remains the exception. In his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) the philosopher Robert Nozick described what he called ‘the minimal state’, i.e. a state that guarantees only ‘the individual rights of life, liberty, property and contract’ to its citizens. But, for principled reasons, I would prefer to say that the minimum state is a basic capitalist one, in which the government is seen, and behaves as if, its only functions are (a) to maintain, and if possible improve, the institutions required for a flourishing market economy, and (b) to maintain and defend the state and the public institutions it develops through the activity of its market economy. Given this conception of the basic capitalist state as a theoretical ideal, we can still think of it as the minimal state. For, I do not believe that it is significantly different from the kind of state that Nozick believed to be basic. But my account of the minimal state assumes nothing whatever about the motivation of its citizens. It does not assume that the citizens have, or think they have, natural rights, which the state exists to defend. For citizens have human rights too, including those of life and, in some respects, also liberty. We also have land rights, cultural rights and heritage rights, which are all independently very important. But most importantly, we have a set of human rights, which ultimately define the principle duties of governments everywhere. These are the rights that are defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which are not natural rights, but rights that must be met, if citizens are to live safely, with dignity, and freely chosen moral purpose in their own societies, and participate freely in the social and cultural life of the community. The good life, thus described will generally be possible, it will be argued, if and only if the Articles of the Declaration, which define them in detail, are all adequately provided for in the in the state in which the people live. This charter was sets out to describe the common political, moral, religious, social, economic and cultural rights of human kind.

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My principled reasons for not wishing to endorse Nozick’s conception of a minimal state is that I do not wish to endorse Nozick’s natural rights philosophy. Like Elie Helévy (1972, p. 138), I do not believe in natural rights. Consequently, I do not believe that governments exist to realize the natural rights of citizens. In fact, I agree with Helévy that there are no such things as natural rights (defined as rights that one is born with), unless one is just talking about the rights of newborn infants. But, I do believe strongly in human rights, and in the desirability of legislating for their provision. The search to discover, define and articulate the common human rights of people everywhere, and the question of which rights should be provided for by governments, was the subject of a searching inquiry by the Commission on Human Rights. Its de facto terms of reference were to discover maximum set of demands on governments, concerning the well-­ being of their citizens, which the governments represented would be willing to honour. For the aim of the group quickly became to present a well-considered Bill of Rights to the United Nations General Assembly for their unanimous approval. The committee therefore sought to create a document that all members of the United Nations would be willing to acknowledge. For any endorsement significantly less than one of unanimity would be inadequate for its intended purpose. In the end, they were very successful. In 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, without a dissenting voice. It was an exhaustive inquiry, which took nearly three years to complete. A more authoritative declaration of how the member states of the UN perceived their responsibilities would be hard to come by. So, I was somewhat surprised to see that Robert Nozick did not take the UDHR seriously as his starting point. He was, after all, seeking to define the rights that governments would be prepared to uphold. He may not have been intent on doing precisely this, but if not, I should want to know why. Every government, except for those of Saudi Arabia and South Africa (who both abstained on principle from voting on it) believed that they should be committed to providing adequately for all of these rights. So, in my view, every government is morally obliged to respect them. Why then should one begin a serious inquiry concerning the moral obligations of governments, as Nozick did, with groundless speculations about natural rights.

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In my view, Nozick’s position generates a very impoverished view of citizens’ rights. A better one would surely be a document concerning human rights that most governments in the world considered obligatory in 1948. Perhaps things have changed a bit since then. The Americans have since shown that they do not support the social, economic and cultural rights (Articles 22 to 29) of this document, because they have systematically denied most of them to many of their own residents. If it true that one could not possibly build a society that provided adequately for all of these rights, then I ask: Does Nozick believe that his minimal state would naturally provide for them? If so, then I ask: Why has the USA so manifestly failed to provide for them in the roughly 250 years since the US was founded? Among the leading players on the political stage at the San Francisco Conference there were strong advocates for developing a new charter of human rights—one that could be universally accepted. And the process which led to the UDHR, its drafting, and its eventual passage, marked it out as an essentially moral statement.1 The reason for this course of development, I believe, was that there was a strong desire for a Universal Bill of Rights of impeccable status. Indeed, Franklin D Roosevelt himself, in his later years, was clearly of this opinion.2 At the conclusion of his State of the Union Address in January 1944, the year before he died, Roosevelt announced a Second Bill of Rights. Here are the last words of his address to the nation on that occasion: … In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed. Among these are:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation; • The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

 This point is made abundantly clear by Michael Kirby in his H. V. Evatt lecture of 2008.  The Conference occurred a few months before the end of World War II. But the delegates to the conference were mostly the foreign ministers of governments, and most would surely have known of the horrors of the Holocaust. And, many would also have known of the development of nuclear weapons, and their potential dangers. 1 2

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• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living; • The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; • The right of every family to a decent home; • The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; • The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; • The right to a good education. All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being. America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.

So, the whole idea of a democratic form of social capitalism, which nineteenth-century Marxist theorists mostly thought would be unstable, suddenly came of age. The Roosevelts and Doc Evatt were just three of a rapidly increasing number of people in the early 1940s who thought that basic capitalism was compatible, not only with human rights, but also with democracy. The Canadian, Professor John P. Humphrey, who wrote all of the many drafts of the UDHR must surely have accepted the political neutrality of the doctrine of human rights. For it was his brief to aim for neutrality. I know that in this neoliberal era, this is no longer the received view. The world of 1948 seems a long way away from where we are now. But it was not so far away in 1974, when Robert Nozick was writing. There is no doubt that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was considered to be a politically neutral document in 1948. For, it could not possibly have been accepted as a Universal Bill of Rights, if it were seen as substantially biased. Humphrey’s task in drafting the UDHR was specifically to achieve consensus, for which they needed a document that could be universally accepted. So, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was about as politically neutral as it was possible to be in 1948. And, it was at least acceptable to

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nearly everyone present—except for two outliers—Saudi Arabia, which still had the death penalty for apostasy, and colonial South Africa, which still had its apartheid system. It was politically acceptable, however, to everyone else at this time, whether they were Capitalists, Communists, Nationalists, Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, Jews or Confucians. In 1948, when the UDHR was passed nem con at the General Assembly, this document was thought to be compatible with all of the principal religions and cultures of the world. But it turned out that the USA itself was an outlier, which it did not like to admit. Politically, the US remained anchored in the seventeenth century, founding its theory of government on natural rights, not those of the UDHR. In the seventeenth century, John Locke’s theory of government was certainly a great contribution to human knowledge and understanding. But this fact does not justify assuming, without argument, that this natural rights theory is still viable.

5.2   Basic Socialism A Basic Socialist state is a centrally planned one with a moneyed economy. It is one in which the government owns a controlling interest, or may otherwise exercise such an interest, in some of all of the corporations that control the relevant kinds of commerce, viz. those of production, distribution, IT and trade. It is, therefore, a centrally controlled modern state, which is managed by exercising control over social demand. Since 1978, with the election of Deng Xiao Ping to the position of supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China, China has approximated to this socialist ideal. But the states of Eastern Europe moulded by the Soviet Union after the Second World War, are my preferred examples of basic socialist regimes. For they represent the socialist ideal as it was understood in the USSR in the post-war years. Like the basic capitalist states, the basic socialist ones are not very good. They are ones on which progress is certainly possible. But to make social progress on an East European socialist state, one must move to the right, and ditch the degree of central control exercised by the governments of these countries. Countries that represent social progress on basic capitalism, like Sweden, Denmark and New Zealand, also represent social progress on basic socialism. But they approach the ideal (social welfare) kinds of states from different directions. In the early twentieth century, I would have omitted IT from this list of principal areas of commerce. But digital technology now forms such a

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large part of any modern industrial economy that it cannot reasonably be left out. The difference, therefore, between a Capitalist and a Socialist state is thus central planning. In a modern socialist state, central planning is its dominant feature. In a modern capitalist state, central planning is focused mainly on infrastructure, space technology, medical research and defence. But no one wants central planning for things that do not need to be centrally planned, such as the manufacture of goods or services for home consumption. The contentious issues are usually things like health care, social housing, educational institutions, IT, transport, prisons, firefighting and the provision of basic commodities, such as gas, water and electricity, and public utilities, such as roads, railways and bridges. Natural resource and heritage management is fairly generally agreed to be a collective responsibility, and therefore should be centrally controlled. And goods that can vary in quality, style and appearance, which customers like to choose for themselves, are very widely agreed to be the things that really ought to be marketed, in whatever kind of society one happens to be living. Judicial decisions, on the other hand should be independent of government. For the doctrine of the separation of powers is a cornerstone for social democracy. Let it be agreed then that the basic socialism is a centrally directed version of this kind of state, in which the government may exercise power over judicial decisions. Plausibly, the states of Eastern Europe, are states of this kind. Basic socialism is therefore not a particularly good form of governance. Usually, there is no good reason why the supply of standard commodities, such as water, gas and electricity, should not be centrally controlled. And, in the welfare states of the world they usually are. But, in the 1970s, at the height of the West’s Cold War with the USSR, the so-called capitalist states saw their dominance threatened by Communism. And, when the West lost its so-called war against Communism in Vietnam, Britain and the US, whose ways of managing the economy seemed to them most threatened, turned to reconsider their treatment of the Third World. That Communism should be so fiercely defended in Vietnam seemed to them to be unintelligible. Do the values of freedom and democracy mean so little to them? I think the answer is that the citizens of Third World countries are more concerned with living well, and with national pride, than they are with how they are governed. My father-in-law W. Macmahon Ball argued many years ago that nationalism is more important to the peoples of East Asia

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than communism.3 The Vietnamese, for example, were not ideologically opposed to central planning. They had never known anything else. The colonial powers were central planners, but they were building the country to serve the interests of the French. What they wanted in Vietnam was to replace the French autocracy with one of their own—to serve their interests, not those of the French. So, to them, the idea of fighting a war to do things differently from the way the French did them must have seemed very strange. Ho Chi Min was popular in Vietnam—more so in the North than in the South, no doubt—because he led the Viet Kong, and won the war of independence against the French. Why couldn’t the Americans and her allies understand that? To enable cool and rational discussion of these issues, I will not speak of communism, but of basic capitalism, basic socialism, and the middle ground, which is occupied by the world’s welfare states. For ‘communism’ is the name given to a kind of a revolutionary ideology for the overthrow of the kinds of capitalist regimes that existed in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. ‘Socialism’, on the other hand, is an envisaged social ideal. The ideal, stated briefly, is that the management of the affairs of the nation should be (a) in the hands of the people, and managed centrally by their representatives to deliver them social justice, rather than (b) by hereditary heirs to the throne, (c) by business interests, or (d) people who seek power to keep the people’s demands for social justice at bay. The position is called socialism, because it is founded on the socialist ideal of social justice. In Marx’s time it was widely believed that this option (a) could not be delivered by democratically elected parliaments, because the combined forces protecting the interests of the upper and wealthy middle classes were so great that elected parliaments, which sought to achieve this outcome peacefully, would inevitably be overthrown. So, Marx was of the view that to achieve social justice, it would be necessary, in the first phase of the revolution, to institute a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. This was the pattern, and the justification given, for the Russian Revolution of 1917. And, it would also appear to have been the pattern, and the justification of the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. But the welfare states of the world have never been the outcomes of revolutions. They were created in the wake of wars, but never of ones that were fought with the aim of creating such a state. The welfare states of 3  [W Macmahon Ball was also a member of the Australian delegation to the San Francisco Conference with Dr H V Evatt – Ed].

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Great Britain and the British Commonwealth, for example, were all born in the wake of the Second World War, as were those of Scandinavia and Northern Europe. And all of these welfare states were very successful. So, to evaluate the welfare state rationally, we have to look not at the founding events, but at the founding conception—that of social justice. For, it was always the case that the this concept was the driving force for political change, in the circumstances in which the welfare states were created.

5.3   Natural Rights Robert Nozick was not the only political philosopher, who was celebrated in the USA in the 1970s. The other was John Rawls. Rawls’ theoretical position, and the arguments he put forward, were, in fact, widely endorsed by philosophers everywhere in the Anglophone world. Like Nozick, Rawls was a natural rights theorist. But, unlike Nozick, his methodology was Kantian, and his philosophical position was liberal rather than libertarian. Consequently, Rawls theory proved to be much more attractive to non-­ Americans of British descent. And, Rawls is widely considered to be the inspiration for neoliberalism. Rawls theory was much more influential in the UK and the British Commonwealth, because it made one important concession to modernity. It included a provision of equal opportunity to apply for positions, and a principle of choosing the least advantaged in the case of a tie. Nozick’s preferred nation state is the one I call ‘Basic Capitalism’—i.e. consisting of a society in which the Government’s responsibilities are minimal. It has to maintain its capitalist system of the free market, but leaves everything else for individuals, acting alone, or in corporate structures of some kind, to decide. This is the position that is popularly known as Hardline Neoliberalism. To define his position, Rawls asked his readers to imagine themselves shrouded by a veil of ignorance, which hid them from all knowledge of themselves, their positions in society and all particular facts about the past. From this position, he thought, one would necessarily be cut one off from all sources of personal bias about the consequences of actions. True, one would. But would one not also be cut off from all scientific evidence concerning which policies have worked, or not worked, in the past? I hope not, because such ignorance would be unhelpful for Rawls’ mission. To exclude all knowledge concerning the results of policy trials from the evidence base concerning what is just would be simply to turn one’s back on

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the claims of social empiricism. I can understand why a Kantian might wish to do precisely this. For, Kant believed that, as rationally introspective beings, we have intuitive knowledge of the conditions for the possibility of experience, and can therefore know some important truths about political theory by rational intuition. But is Rawls really arguing that we know intuitively what is fair, and that experience does not come into it? I do not know the answer to this question. But, given Rawls’ Kantian methodology of reasoning a priori from behind a veil of ignorance, the answer is plausibly ‘Yes’. And, if so, then Rawls would have to be committed to arguing that Nicholas Maxwell’s aim-oriented empiricism is, at best, just unnecessary empirical validation of what is a priori knowable—like drawing accurate geometrical figures on paper to illustrate a problem, and then making the appropriate measurements to confirm a theorem one has independently derived from the axioms. But, if the answer is ‘No’, and Rawls is willing to allow empirical considerations (not just personal experience) to influence his judgment, then I can ask the same question of Rawls as I asked of Nozick. Why ignore the evidence of the one objective inquiry into the duties of governments to uphold human rights? Why not start from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to derive the political theory of governmental responsibility. If Rawls had done this, he would have wound up with some version of the welfare state as his preferred political theory. In fact, what Rawls does is speculate from behind his chosen veil of ignorance about the limits of government responsibility. Which brings me to my second concern: Why do the supposed natural rights of human beings limit the duties of governments? Governments certainly have some duties to citizens in view of their natural rights. But the rights that children a born with are not all the duties of governments. Mostly, If governments have moral duties to citizens, then it is not because they have natural rights. Rather, is because they have morally compelling social rights— rights which only governments are in positions to guarantee. The rights to shelter, food, rest, health care, education, old-age care and so on are all essential. For, no one can live with dignity and social moral purpose if they are severely deprived of them. But in the minds of Rawls and Nozick, people have to scramble to survive as best they can, and governments exist only to stop other people, or other nations, from interfering with them. What a terrible view of the responsibilities of governments! For, these are not the attitudes of civilized people. Governments should have the moral duty of upholding, and providing for, the full spectrum of human

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rights, not just those discussed by John Locke. And, I do not believe that those who are born with severe disadvantages should have to beg for living, if they can’t do any better. Why would anyone want to live in a country, where people were so cavalier about human well-being that they were happy that they should suffer, if they have no alternatives, and cannot afford any better. Are the experiences of people living in a land with a substantial minority of Donald Trump supporters honestly be trusted to care for them, if the government is not willing to do so?

5.4  Political Philosophy in the 1970s The 1970s were troubled times in America. It was engaged in a Cold War with the USSR. It saw itself as being at war with Communism, not only in Vietnam, but everywhere. For, they thought, even their allies were adopting socialist measures. And, they could not understand why the people of Vietnam could not see the justice of their cause, and wish to join forces with them to defeat their common enemy. Consequently, many Americans thought that America’s standing as first nation was at stake. If they were to lose their standing in the world, they feared that many Third World nations would choose the socialist path to modernity, rather than the American one. In this troubled time the notable political philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick saw themselves as going back to first principles to argue for their respective positions. And, first principles for them were like the ones that Locke had used in his Two Treatises of Government. This was, for them, the rational way to proceed, as it had been for the founders of the American Republic. But, since the seventeenth century, the methodology of the Two Treatises has become quite anachronistic in the rest of the world. And, the Cartesian methodology of rational intuition and a priori development is no longer considered to be the rational one to take. First philosophy for these areas is now evidence-based reasoning, not Cartesian rationalism. For it is no longer adequate to base a theory of social justice only on judgments of natural rights, as Locke, Rawls and Nozick all did. Human rights, which really should be foundational, do not consist only of natural rights, i.e. rights that one is supposedly born with. Such rights are unfathomable to the modern mind. One can readily make sense of rights that are acquired when one accepts the responsibilities of citizenship in a country. For civil rights are associated with civic responsibilities, and are natural products of social contractual settlements.

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Human rights are different again. For the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was conceived as a Universal Bill of Rights, which, if ratified in any country, would shape the common law to its prescription. Therefore, it is reasonable to think of the UDHR as a proposed international bill of rights, the aim of which is to function at a higher level than any normal civil rights bill. Its aim is to shape all such legislation, so all people, wherever they are, or in whatever country they may live, can exercise these rights. Consequently, the social contracts of all nations should effectively acknowledge the UDHR, or something very like it, and make it a regulatory ideal for the provision and distribution of rights to all those to whom they owe a duty of care. Various kinds of radical disadvantage, which individuals have no defence against (see Article 25 of the UDHR), and freedoms to participate in activities of various kinds (social or cultural rights fairly generally) may be beyond the reach of people because of their lack of education, training or money. Therefore, to guarantee the rights of individuals to live with dignity and social moral purpose in one’s own society, the government may have to provide some special assistance. And, those who participate in Rawls’ thought experiments, had better hope that they do not fall short in this way. The conception of social justice is not presupposed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR itself defines what social justice is, and does so in a way that accords with the philosophies and experiences of people living in the first half of the twentieth century. So, if we made the veil of ignorance a bit thinner, and allowed it to be transparent to universally agreed social moral positions, we could stop the pretence of ignorance of what has been agreed at the UN to be fair. For, if it were so transparent, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would stand out as one to be reckoned with. It was, after all, passed nem con by the General Assembly in 1948, and is therefore about as near as anyone could plausibly get to a comprehensive set of social moral principles. Why then should we not say that a socially just society is one that respects the full spectrum of human rights—not just the ones that the Americans believe in—which, quite evidently, do not include the full spectrum of social, economic and cultural rights of all human kind (Articles 22 to 29). Here is Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. This one Article does not, of course, cover the full spectrum of social rights. Nor does it cover the economic or cultural rights of people. But it is, by itself, sufficient to indicate the tone and content of these articles, and to explain why I find that appeals to early Enlightenment conceptions of natural rights, as opposed to well-considered statements of human rights, are so inadequate. Before the advent of Rawls’ 1971 book, a capitalist state was generally considered to be one in which the driving forces were those of its markets, not the directions or social agendas of its government. The welfare states that existed in Europe and the British Commonwealth in the post–Second World War period, were all capitalist states, according to this definition. But they were not toxic, in the sense of containing the seeds of their own destruction, as Marx thought they inevitably would be. On the contrary, while they maintained full employment,4 in the sense in which it existed in the post-war years, there was no prospect of a large, continuing and apparently ineradicable, pool of unemployment developing. So, in this sense, the welfare state has proven itself to be different from the capitalist states of the 1920s or 1930s. These states were socially much more advanced. They were not only more stable; they were also much more developed socially, providing excellent social services—as Ben Chifley said: ‘all the way from the cradle to the grave’. Thus, capitalism was thought of as a form of government, in which money is a well-defined entity, which is widely used for purchasing goods 4  By full employment I mean ‘really full’, so that everyone who seeks work full time or part time can readily find continuing and suitable employment for as long as it is required. In the 30 years of Australia’s welfare state, which came to an end in 1975, when the Whitlam Government was improperly dismissed, the official unemployment rate averaged just 2.0% for the whole period from 1945 to 1975.

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or services, for paying people to work for them, and (b) these processes were seen and accepted as the primary forces for change, maintenance, and social development in the nation over which the government rules. Consequently, the government of a capitalist state naturally sees itself as having a duty (a) to create and maintain the required monetary system for internal and external use, (b) to define and set limits to the kinds of processes of buying and hiring that are permitted, (c) to establish and protect a right to property, securing the citizens’ lives, limbs and so on, as most other forms of government do, and (d) to build and protect the infrastructure needed manage and administer the affairs of state. Nozick’s book Anarchy, State and Utopia was written in response to John Rawls’ book A Theory of Justice, which sought to define and justify the kind of state that typical Liberal Americans think of as a welfare state, but it does not go very far towards achieving that goal. If the veil could be thinned a bit, then it would be possible to get there in one step. For any society, which, by law, constitution or convention, accepts the full spectrum of Articles of the UDHR must be a welfare state. For, Articles 22 to 29, as they are now understood, already contains everything that any defender of the welfare state could reasonably wish to see included. Thus, the primary moral responsibilities of national governments are: (a) to provide adequately for human rights observance; (b) to maintain peace, security and prosperity as best they can; (c) to manage the affairs of state to enable all people for whom the state is responsible to live as well as they are able, and do so with respect, dignity and social moral purpose; and (d) to ensure that the natural and living environments for which they are primarily responsible are well preserved.

5.5  The Welfare States There is no such thing as a basic welfare state. Like all other states they are driven by the purchasing power of money, and managed and directed to support or develop the economy of the country as the government sees fit. If the government’s planning is good, and its chosen directions of development are welcomed by the people, then it is likely to be a successful one. There is, however, a range of welfare states in which freedom of choice of way of life and social equality are in balance for most people. And these, I would suppose are the optimal ones. Neither of these conditions is sharply definable, and neither is significantly more important than the other. Social equality is understood to mean equality of respect and opportunity,

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and the welfare states occupy a place somewhere within that range. The range for welfare states occupies roughly the space within which citizens are both socially equal and have equal opportunity to pursue their own goals in life. It will come as a surprise to many people that I should, as a philosopher, not be arguing for one of the extremes, basic capitalism or basic socialism. But neither extreme is adapted to human nature. We are not, as a species, individualistic creatures, like trees, crocodiles or giant clams. Nor are we purely social animals, like bees or ants. That is, our lives are neither focused on personal survival and/or development, as most plants, and a few animal species are. Nor are we focused on our forests, hives or nests, and our role in their social development. Biologically, we are intelligent tribal animals, who have managed somehow to develop strategies for living together in super-large tribal groups, or nation states. And our primary task, as the builders of these essentially unstable structures, must be to perfect them, so that they stabilize, and enable us to live safely, and develop engaging and satisfying lives for ourselves within them. For this purpose, we need a state which can change to accommodate new technologies, changing climates or new global or regional political movements. There isn’t a best welfare state for all times or circumstances. And the welfare state is one that can adjust to circumstances, with the government taking the lead to make the required adjustments. The best format for such a government is probably a democratic one. For the social democracies of the twentieth century seem to have adapted well to the digital revolution. But the same cannot be said of the essentially capitalist states, the UK and the USA, which are now basket cases. Australia’s post-war welfare state, established by Ben Chifley, and maintained and developed by Sir Robert Menzies, was a heavily industrialized state, which set out to make Australia an independent, flourishing and multi-national country. In 1948 it established all-Australian car-­ manufacturing in Australia, GM-Holden, bought Qantas to establish a national airline, created the Snowy Mountains scheme for hydro-electric power, founded the Australian National University in Canberra, established a national health-care system, passed the Banking and Commonwealth Bank Acts of 1945, giving the Government control over monetary policy, and managed the huge post-war resettlement and reconstruction programmes, designed by the Chifley Government for the benefit of all. This welfare state changed the face of Australia. From 1945 to 1975, GDP per capita rose steadily (at around 5% per annum), despite the rapid

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increase in population due to its vigorous immigration policy. Hourly wages were kept in lock-step with productivity, and the increases in wages and salaries, when they occurred, did so fairly uniformly across all quintiles of wage and salary earners, as indeed they did elsewhere in the post-war world. Yet unemployment was almost non-existent. In Australia, it averaged just 2.0% for the whole of this very productive era. The actual government was not without its faults, however. It suffered from most of the social ills of other kinds of states did at that time. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was exclusive of some minorities. Indeed, it was technically racist, sexist and protectionist, extravagant in its use of raw materials, utterly dependent upon the United States strategically, and showed no particular concern for our natural environment. But that had nothing much to do with the form of government. It had much more to do with the way that people thought back then. The democracies were not particularly racist, sexist, homophobic and so on. The people of every kind of society were. So there is no reason to fear that any new welfare state that might be created would be similarly tarnished. The people in the early welfare states contributed heavily to polluting the atmosphere with CFCs and CO2. But there is no reason to think that any new welfare state would, necessarily, be incapable of dealing with these problems. On the contrary, welfare states are not ideologically opposed to state direction, as all basically capitalist states are. They should be able to take them in their stride. So, what I think the world needs are just lots of new welfare state—welfare states for the twenty-first century. Australia’s welfare state has never been as well appreciated as it should have been. Most conservatives, I believe, think of the period when the welfare state prevailed in Australia as ‘the Menzies years’, and so, presumably, as basically capitalist. But the Menzies years were not basically capitalist. They just continued in the manner of traditional conservatism with the system that had been established by the Chifley Government, with approximately the same mix of public and private enterprise in the management of its affairs. Menzies was, after all, an Empire Loyalist, and so very conservative in his approach to government. But Menzies was also a great believer in the good of higher education. For he had himself benefited greatly from it, and despite his humble background, he proved himself to be a law graduate of great distinction. It is He would never have dreamed of following the British example of introducing a National Health Service—as Chifley might well have done, if he had won the election of

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1949. For Chifley accepted in principle that governments must be responsible for the overall health of their citizens. His boast was that he would care for people in the emergencies of their lives ‘all the way from the cradle to the grave’. But, Chifley lost the 1949 election. He did so, I believe, because the post-war settlement of returned service men and women, the impressive social services agenda of the Chifley government, and the initial costs of the refugee programme reduced the real value of the Australian pound. This was, I suppose, to be expected. Chifley was making a huge investment in the future of Australia. But many of the projects he initiated had yet to yield great rewards to the people of Australia, and the purchasing power of the pound certainly decreased. In his book Nationalism and Communism in East Asia, William Macmahon Ball argued the case convincingly that nationalism was much more important than communism in East Asia. But the United States were becoming anxious that Communism could become a major threat to the world—not only in South East Asia, but also to the capitalist nations of the West. For Russia had a long history of scholarly achievement and technological development, and, as they recovered from the ravages of war with the Axis powers, its latent potential began to shine through. For Russia quickly developed nuclear weapons in the post-war years, and the missiles required for their inter-continental delivery. Its competitive edge was thus becoming ever more apparent. The Australian Communist Party was known to be very active in the Trade Union movement, and had, from time to time shown that it had the power to interfere with Australian Government anti-communist initiatives in South East Asia. Accordingly, Menzies moved to have the Australian Communist Party banned. And this really threw a spanner into the ALP’s works. Ben Chifley was himself staunchly anti-communist. Indeed, his principal battles within the Labor movement in Australia had been with its Communist wing. But Menzies knew instinctively that the strong communist influence in the Trade Union movement was a weakness that could easily be exploited. And Menzies did just this by passing legislation to have the Australian Communist Party dissolved. For Dr H V Evatt, who was no less distinguished in jurisprudence than Menzies, this was a step too far. Evatt challenged the constitutionality of Menzies’ legislation, and won. But the ALP paid a very heavy price for this victory. Morally, no doubt, Evatt was in the right. But politically it was disastrous. For it put the ALP

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in the position of being the ACP’s most reliable defender. And Menzies went on to exploit this fact, by moving the following year (in 1951) to hold a referendum on this issue. Of course, Menzies lost this referendum too. But, by taking the matter to a referendum, Mr Menzies achieved his main objective—that of keeping the ALP in the role of defending the ACP. And, with the Cold War always getting warmer and more threatening, the doubt about where Labor stood on communism proved to be a serious handicap. Mr Menzies knew that he was on a winner in keeping the controversy alive, and in 1954, he grasped the opportunity of calling for a Royal Commission to investigate an alleged Soviet Spy ring in Australia. This golden opportunity arose, because Vladimir and Edvokia Petrov, who were a pair of diplomats at the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, had asked for asylum in Australia, because they feared punishment if they returned to the USSR. Doc Evatt, naturally, did not believe that the timing of this defection was just a coincidence, and accused Menzies of arranging it to coincide with the election. More disaster for the ALP. For the ALP had been expected to win this election in question, which, of course, they did not. So the unsavoury image of the ALP going out of its way to support their communist friends continued to be on view. And, as far as I know, this was the final sighting of it. But it did seem to haunt the ALP. There were, it is true, some doctrinaire socialists in the ALP, who believed that the party in power in Canberra should ultimately seek to manage all of the means of production, distribution and exchange (which was, after all, in its 1921 statement of the ALP agenda). And, who knows, it may even have been a factor in The Dismissal, in 1975.

5.6  Trumpism To talk about welfare states as I am doing here is to raise the hackles of many people on the Trumpish right of politics. I am too soft on welfare statism, they feel. Even to call a state ‘a welfare state’ is already to reveal oneself as a political ‘girly-man’. For no red-blooded American, or true-­ blue Australian, would ever endorse a position like mine. Normally they think of welfare states as ‘Nanny states’, and of people like me as children who have never grown up. I find this very strange. And, if they are speaking from experience, then it is doubly strange. Because we don’t have nannies in Australia, as far as I know. Nannies are the supposed monsters

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of the nursery who boss little children around. Hilaire Belloc wrote about them in his Collected Cautionary Verses.5 The childishness of these attitudes is unimportant. But Trumpism, which weaponizes such childishness, is a phenomenon of our age, and it cannot be ignored. For Trumpism is the new fascism, and it is very serious. It is serious, because it could destroy our civilization. Ignorance alone will not destroy our civilization. The ignorant have always been with us. But, if the ignorant acquire power, and that power cannot distinguish knowledge from belief, or fact from fiction, then the power is directionless, and can be led in any which way that demagogues, like Donald Trump, choose to lead it in pursuit of his childish ambitions. Ours is a knowledge-based social order. It is one that depends upon the evolving value systems that have governed the search for knowledge and understanding in the past. These value systems have changed over the years, as the power structures of the world have changed. In medieval Europe, the Christian Church dominated, and inconsistency with biblical orthodoxy was widely seen, and generally accepted, as proof of falsity. In the Renaissance, the teachings of the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, became widely respected for their knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world around us—Aristotle as a sage, and Plato for his knowledge of humanity and its ways understanding the world. Knowledge of the ancient Greeks and of their culture was transmitted to the Middle East, where they were studied and translated by Arab scholars. This knowledge and Arab commentaries upon it, were passed on through Spain, and into Europe, in the early Renaissance, The rediscovery of this ancient Greek learning by the West led to the creation of universities throughout Christendom. And these universities began to change the ways in which people saw and understood the world around them. And gradually, the outlook of Christian orthodoxy began to erode. For the Greek writings were very powerful. The sixteenth century was host to the development of the idea that scientific knowledge might one day be seen as the arbiter of truth. Johannes Kepler with his mathematical genius, and magnificent curve-fitting capacities, and Tycho Brahe with his painstaking and precise astronomical 5  I am a bit like James’ father, whose son was eaten by a lion at the Zoo. He—Bade all the children round to attend—To James’ miserable end,—And always keep a-hold of nurse—For fear of finding something worse. [Hilaire Belloc (1907) ‘Jim Poem’ Collected Cautionary Tales].

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observations, broke away from Christian orthodoxy concerning the shape of the Cosmos, and of the Earth’s position within it. And, in consequence, proposed a model of the Cosmos in which the Sun is at the centre, and the Earth and traditional planets revolving around it (in elliptical orbits with the Sun in one focus). And it all fitted together as a realistic model of the universe. Of course, it was only the beginning of things to come. But it was a brilliant beginning, and, for the first time in nearly 2000 years, scholars had a realistic working model of the universe. If I had to name a single event which sparked the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, it would have to be the collaboration between Brahe and Kepler in making, tabulating and analysing the first rate astronomical data on the nightly positions of the planets over a period of several years. The data, gathered by Brahe was impeccable, and the analysis of the results, requiring great knowledge and ability in curve fitting the data on to a three dimensional model of the solar system. This extraordinary combination of empirical and theoretical scientific research broke completely new ground (elliptical orbits), explained precisely and in detail the vicarious motions of the planets in their apparently erratic wanderings. For these two researchers between them set a very high bar for methodical study, observational accuracy, and theoretical competence, and their achievement was monumental. Consequently, when their results were studied and understood by others, they were able to convince them of their findings. And these findings were deeply significant. For, they refuted, not only the biblical accounts of the structure of the planetary system, overcame what seemed to be common sense (that the Earth moves, and is not in the centre of the cosmos, that the motions of all of the planets, including the Earth, are governed by laws, that. the Moon does not revolve around the Sun, but the Earth, and that none of the orbits are circular). No wonder that the Christian church as the time felt obliged to keep a lid on these findings, forced Galileo to repent his error of confusing truth with reality, and burnt Giordano Bruno to death for heresy. My worry about Donald Trump is that he rejects any objective conception of truth, other than his own very idiosyncratic one, in the moral, political and social sciences. My first impulse is the ignore him. But, unfortunately, there is no established first philosophy for truth in social or political theory. And Trump is still a strong force for mindless ambition in the most powerful country on earth. So, it is probable that Trumpism will remain a significant force in the years to come, pushing hard in the

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direction of basic capitalism socially, and in the direction of judicial absolutism, like fascism. It is important, therefore, that the sources of mindlessness and fascism should be eliminated, and the damage done to our knowledge-based social order should be repaired. I have ideas about what might be done about these things. But I think that this would have to be a different book. My colleague Barry Jones has just published a book about this entitled What Is to Be Done? It is, as always, sound and erudite. But I do not wish to discuss this problem here.

5.7  First Philosophy for Deliberate Action First philosophy for deliberate action is the basic philosophical stance required for acting well and wisely in a given society. The question of how to act wisely and well in given circumstances was discussed in Chap. 4 under the heading ‘First Philosophy for Moral Theory. The problem of how to act well and wisely in a social context is complex. And there are many different stories to tell. It is often said that it is easy to be wise after the event, which is obviously true. And, the message of this is clear. We need to keep an eye on the future, learn from our mistakes, make plans, develop the required skills, consult experts, look at the experiences of others working on similar projects, and learn what one can from them. Tabulate, calculate, anticipate, and act on the best and most reliable information available. At the same time we must keep an eye, so to speak, on the skills we will need, the help we will need, and all of the other things that we will need to put our plans into effect. For these are the sorts of skills that planners need. Nicholas Maxwell has a name for the exercise of these complex skills. He calls it ‘aim-oriented empiricism’. There is a rolling pattern for the acquisition of all such knowledge. But, it is not anything that can easily be put down in writing. Rather, it is more like a skill—something that one must learn on the job, or in the context of working on a project. It involves trial and error, which is pragmatic. But it is more than just pragmatism. For it involves the exercise of foresight, and the development of strategies for coping with mishaps. So, the process of acting well and wisely is a complex one. It involves reliable knowledge about social processes, skill in implementing them, cooperation with informed experts, and clear-sighted analyses to determine what is achievable.

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To illustrate, consider the project of eliminating poverty in China, which was developed by Deng Xiaoping. Deng succeeded to the position of Supreme Leader of the CPC in 1978, two years after the death of Chairman Mao. In making this appointment, the leadership of the CPC had endorsed the policy of transforming the nation’s infrastructure from agricultural to industrial. For the CPC had decided that China needed to have an industrial revolution, just as the countries of Europe had had in the nineteenth century. Naturally, they did not want to create a capitalist democracy. For the Chinese had no history of this form of government. And, with their long-term view of the world, they could see no need for any kind of government other than the one that had served them well for over 2000 years. It is true that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they had been humiliated by European military power. But this was due to their lack of scientific knowledge and of modern technological development, not to the way they were governed. If they could succeed as a capitalist state, they thought, they would quickly earn the respect they deserve, and take their rightful place in the world as one of its great powers. In a World Bank report issued in 2017, it was claimed that China had virtually succeeded in eliminating poverty. In 1981, three years after Deng Xiaoping assumed office, 88.3% of the 1.4 billion people in Greater China had been living in poverty (as poverty is normally defined in World Bank documents). By 2013, when Xi Jinping was elected to power, that figure had been reduced to just 1.9%. That is, China had succeeded over 32 years (1981–2013) in lifting some 850 million people out of poverty. And, it had succeeded in achieving this extraordinary result, I believe, by implementing a kind of rolling design process—building designed cities for accommodation, recruiting young men and women from the poverty-­ stricken country-side to work in these cities, and designing, and continuously redesigning, the cities to achieve the goals of accommodation and workplace efficiency. This is the move that really changed the Chinese regime from a medieval fiefdom to a modern kind of state. It still had a long way to go. But, from this point on, there was a coherent programme to build a modern socialist state with a basic capitalist market. And, from this point on, we can meaningfully talk of making, or of failing to make, social progress. From 1978 onwards, China progressed rapidly, with social moral purpose, of overcoming its poverty, and taking its place in the civilized world. True, it has made some epic blunders along the way, but what great power has not done so itself.

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There appears to be no specific order for the occurrence of such progress. Probably, all we can say is that social progress is the process of providing better, and more balanced, packages of social services to the members of the public, either free of charge or at a substantial discount. There is, of course, a legitimate dispute about what changes to the basic capitalist order are the most progressive, or which are more progressive than others. But, surely, the welfare states of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK itself, in the early post-war years, were all good examples of progressive and highly successful social welfare states.

5.8  Social and Cultural Evolution Societies evolve by natural processes formally akin to those of biological evolution. In stable societies, where there is little cause for change, evolution occurs slowly. If there is a widely accepted religious order, for example, then it is likely to continue in its role as keepers of the faith, and thus maintain a sort of moral law that most people naturally feel bound to observe. Typically, the religious order is thought to be ordained by God, and so goes unchallenged and unchanged. But stable societies can come under great threat in many ways, militarily or socially, from within or without, suddenly or gradually, progressively or otherwise, due to any of a number of different kinds of causes and responses. The society of the United States is now under heavy siege—from within. Social theorists are aware of these challenges, and their job is to think carefully and creatively about them. For the moral challenges we face are normally concerned with how to manage things when there are big changes afoot. The responses to such challenges may be met formally by government legislation, or informally by community activists. But we must learn how to deal with any crises that may arise in the best and most progressive way possible, by submitting them to the judgment of experts on social developmental theory. There are, for example, the challenges presented by climate change, which raise a whole set of global issues— issues that cannot be adequately resolved by the actions of any one nation, but can only be dealt with by collaboration between nation states. The effects of climate change will inevitably be extensive and severe, and so require a well-informed response—one that is based on the best scientific evidence available, and judged by the best-informed minds to be optimific. Philosophers, who are experimental thinkers, have a special responsibility to think through the ideas behind proposed solutions to the these

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issues, and to consider their appropriateness. For major changes to our environments can have far-reaching social consequences. But the real problem nowadays would seem to be not how to deal with these changes one at a time, but how to deal with the plethora of changes that are being thrust upon us, not by a dictator, but by an overstimulated market in a volatile environment, and the evolution of a technology (digital), which in its miniature form (IT), has transformed to processes of production beyond recognition, and the processes of communication by several orders of magnitude more than digital technology has transformed industrial production. And these transformations are having disproportionate effects on the environments in which people live. For not only have the speeded­up processes of communication sky-rocketed, and spread throughout the world, so have the pressures on the environment. Our brains are wonderful machines. But they are manifestly not able to keep up with the exponential growth patterns that are developing just about everywhere, and in just about every field of endeavour. I think we have a choice. We must either slow down the pace of change, deal with the damage we are doing to the environment, deal with the gross inequalities of wealth and development that are occurring between individuals nation states everywhere, and decide how best to plan our future. Or, we must develop IT to its next evolutionary stage, viz. that of artificial intelligence (AI). For AI will be needed to manage IT. But to develop AI is for the purpose of managing IT is fraught with dangers. For this next stage is potentially the most revolutionary of all. Because, it will, necessarily, become unfathomable to us in real time. For IT functions billions of times more quickly than the human brain when dealing with deductive processes. So, if or when we start developing machines that are capable of perceiving the realities in their vicinities, and proceeding to analyse their own data as we human beings analyse ours. Well. Then we are in real trouble. For there is no good reason to think that machines will not be able to learn from experience. And if they can do so, then there is no good reason why they should not evolve very much faster than us.

The Philosophy of the Welfare State

CHAPTER 6

The Secular States

6.1   Political Location The welfare state is located politically between the Basic Capitalist states, to which the neoliberal states of the real world are approximations, and the Basic Socialist states of Russia much of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war years, when the Soviet Union imposed its ideal form of governance upon them. These states had monetary economies and mostly free markets in household and personal goods, but centralized controls of most social goods and services, and of some judicial decisions and processes in order to discourage political dissent. The welfare states are secular democracies with independent judicial systems, in which most social goods and services are under central control. These are the kinds of states that existed in the British Commonwealth in the post-war years (1945–1975), and in the protestant countries (mainly Lutheran) of Northern Europe. These countries are well to the left politically of the Basic Capitalist states known simply as the West, and well to the right of the Basic Socialist states of the Old Soviet Union, of Eastern Europe, and the People’s Republic of China. My belief is that Basic Capitalist states will eventually move to the left, and the Basic Socialist states will move to the right, and in every such case these moves will be seen as socially progressive. For the states with Basic structures are the least well balanced, both socially and politically.

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The theocracies of the world, and those that are basically theocratic, do not have the freedoms guaranteed by the separation of powers, and can progress in a direction that is towards secularism. The countries of the Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu worlds can all, in principle, progress in this direction. But this book should be understood to be fundamentally about the social moral theory of the politically secular states of the world. In this and the following chapter, I shall be discussing the Welfare State and its underlying philosophy of Social Humanism, which I have been working on since the early 2000s. And, I shall begin with a paper I wrote in 2004, when I first set out upon this study. I include it here in its original form, and discuss it in the section that follows it (Sect. 6.3).

6.2  The Good Life (2004) People have different preferences, ambitions, capacities, likes and so on. So, there can be no generally valid specification of the good life: a good life for one person may not be good for another. Nevertheless, we can say something that is generally true and important about what makes people happy. This is especially the case if our efforts to do what we most want to do are appreciated by others. For then we can also be happy about trying to do what we are doing, even if we do not succeed, and we are not isolated in our enjoyment. Moreover, if we are successful in our endeavours, then we can reasonably take some pride in our achievements, and feel good about ourselves. The idea of achieving happiness through conscientious endeavour played a major role in Aristotle’s thinking about our well-being. For Aristotle, the question of what makes a person a good human being was not clearly distinct from that of what makes a person flourish as a human being. So, Aristotle’s theory of human well-being, or flourishing, is intimately connected with his theory of human virtue. His term for human well-being was ‘eudaimonia’. It does not mean quite the same as ‘happiness’, although it is often translated in this way. A better translation would be ‘human flourishing’. As Aristotle understood it, one’s true happiness depends on there being a sort of harmony between oneself and one’s social and physical environment. One must, somehow be in tune with nature, work with it, have projects that seem worthwhile, and be engaged in their pursuit. Aristotle is very clear about this. The good life for a human being cannot be a frivolous or wasted life. It is one that actively exploits our human virtues, and depends on and develops our natural talents and

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abilities. Therefore, he argued, while we should all aim to achieve happiness, we should do so through humanly worthwhile activities to which we are willing to devote ourselves. If we are tradesmen, for example, then we should aim to be good tradesmen, and do what we do as skilfully and professionally as we can. Raimond Gaita describes the attitude perfectly in his recent essay ‘Breach of Trust’. Speaking of his father (Romulus), who, as a blacksmith, made wrought-iron furniture, he wrote: But he did not make his furniture for use in our derelict farmhouse. He made it to sell. When he was making a particular piece of furniture, the blacksmithing pleasure he took in making it could not be separated from the pleasure he took in the fact that he was making it for someone who he hoped would appreciate his craftsmanship. That hope was not separable from the responsibility he would take if something he made turned out faulty, or from the fact that he found it unthinkable to charge exorbitantly for what he made, and so on. The idea that one should be honest in business because honesty paid was one he treated with contempt as being unworthy of our humanity. (p. 15)

This is pure Aristotle. It is as if Gaita’s father had an intuitive understanding of eudaimonia. His taking pleasure in his work, hot and stressful as it must sometimes have been, illustrates perfectly the mixture of happiness and pride that normally goes with giving of one’s best, and doing a job well. Romulus’s happiness was clearly not anything that could just be bought. For it was not money he wanted, but a certain kind of satisfaction—the satisfaction of doing and achieving what he had been trained to do as a tradesman, and doing it as well as he could. According to Aristotle, the ultimate good for human beings is not vicarious pleasure, and it has little or nothing to do with the idea of having fun, although such activities are not precluded. Eudaimonia is something much more than just happiness. It is happiness achieved in a way that is proper and fitting for a human being. That is why ‘human flourishing’ is a better translation of ‘eudaimonia’ than ‘happiness’. It is an apt expression, I find, because Gaita’s father was clearly happy, and flourishing as a human being, when he was working at his anvil. Eudaimonia, then, involves living and acting in ways that one believes to be worthwhile, and deriving satisfaction from doing so. Understood in this way, eudaimonia is not an objective quality, but one that depends on our prior judgements about what activities are humanly worthwhile.

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Aristotle’s conception of happiness was, as you would expect, highly elitist. He considered men to be essentially rational beings, and therefore supposed that the best kind of human life must be one in which our rational virtues are dominant. But we can easily abstract from this Classical Greek bias in favour of the rational and contemplative life to derive a more egalitarian one, where people have to make a living, as Romulus Gaita was doing. If we do so, then it is not hard to see the aim of the modern welfare state as having been to promote human flourishing. Its strong support for education at all levels, including technical and other specialist education, universal health care and genuinely full employment all suggest this. It is true that the architects of the welfare states of the 1950s and 1960s had much more limited views of human potentialities than we have today. For example, they generally considered women to have naturally limited and primarily domestic roles in life. Accordingly, they considered their well-­ being to be essentially tied up with that of their husband or family. But the architects of the welfare states of this period were hardly alone in holding such conservative views. They were the culturally correct views of the time, and nearly everyone then shared them, whatever their political inclinations. The concept of eudaimonia is too important philosophically, however, to be jettisoned because of its conservative 1950s’ reading. The Western World’s cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has radically changed our views of human potentialities and possible roles in life. Consequently, no earlier concept of human flourishing can be assumed to be appropriate for our own times. Nevertheless, the ideal of human flourishing remains the basic one for political theory. For, whatever your concept of human flourishing may be, you are bound to think it worthwhile as an end in itself, i.e. as an end that requires no further justification. Plausibly, you might want to develop a broader conception of eudaimonia that is not restricted specifically to human beings, so that we might legitimately consider the well-being of non-human animals to be part of our brief. If so, then we will have a broader conception of happiness as foundational. But this extension of the theory, which is undoubtedly needed for completeness, is beyond the scope of this book. Let us focus for the time being on the narrower humanly limited conception, and consider its implications for social policy. Eudaimonia, I would argue, is the only plausible candidate for the role of ultimate good for human beings. Other suggestions have been made from time to time. But none is satisfactory. The required conception of happiness has to be a humanist one, as eudaimonia is. For

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otherwise it is open to the obvious objection: Would your ultimate goal in life really be satisfied if you had a sufficient supply of happiness pills on hand—ones that really worked? This book is an essay in social humanism. It argues that the primary aim of social policy should be to promote eudaimonia, in the sense of human flourishing, and that, for this to be done, we need a kind of welfare state. Plausibly, it must be a kind of liberal democratic state, with a market economy and a strong public sector devoted to health, educational and welfare services. For there is no other kind of state in existence that even looks promising for this role. The socialist states all lack the individual freedoms that are required for social humanism. The disastrous history of socialism in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and in most other places in the world where socialist theory has been put into practice, strongly suggests that the motive of self-interest is inherently stronger than that of community interest, and that it is economically much more creative. On the other hand, the free market economies that are now coming to dominate the world lack proper social security, and force many people to live a kind of hand to mouth existence, thus defeating the aims of social humanism. A socially humanistic state must be one in which people can plan to do things with their lives, and therefore one in which people can be employed in roughly the ways, and to the extent to which, they want to be employed, and enjoy reasonable security of tenure. It must be a state in which no one who wants to participate in the ongoing work of the society is denied a proper role. To overcome the defects of the two kinds of state on display, we seem to need a social system that is not only committed to individual liberty, and to the levels of prosperity and freedoms of choice offered by the free market economies, but also one that guarantees meaningful and appropriate employment to all who seek it, provides universal access to all of the kinds of utilities that are required for modern living, offers the full range of educational, health and social services to everyone, and seeks to develop workplaces and residential areas that display a strong sense of community. So, what we must aim to achieve looks very like a compromise between two very different forms of social organization—a capitalist one that promotes individualism and liberty, and a democratic socialist one that seeks to create a fairer, more socially responsible, and more socially interactive and compassionate society. Defenders of the welfare state have always argued that there is no strong incompatibility between these two sets of aims, and have pointed to the

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highly successful welfare states of Scandinavia, and Northern Europe to prove their case. But economic liberals1 reject this argument. They believe that the high levels of prosperity that are currently enjoyed in these European states are temporary, and that their economies must eventually collapse under the weight of their social services. They also believe that when the eventual collapses do occur, these economies must either reduce their social services, or else follow the disastrous ‘road to serfdom’ that was presaged by Friedrich von Hayek in his book by that title. Socialists, on the other hand, tend to look upon these welfare states as mere Clayton’s forms of socialism, eventually, and desirably, to be replaced by some more full-blooded variety, when the people there are ready for it. They do not seem to be too upset by the dismal prospect of their demise. To a social humanist like me, however, the fact that some powerful economic forces now threaten the existence of the remaining welfare states is sad. But it does not show that these states are somehow worse than the ones that threaten them. It just shows that socially inhumane states may be economically more powerful than socially humane ones. It may even show that a welfare state might have to adopt the inhumane policies of its most powerful economic competitors if it is to survive economically under the rules of international trade that are now being imposed on the rest of the world by the United States and its close economic allies. If so, then von Hayek might prove to be right after all. The socially humanistic societies that promote human happiness most effectively in the world, i.e. the welfare states, may just not be competitive enough to survive. Therefore, they might have to sacrifice some of their humanity and decency to compete effectively with the free market economies that threaten them. Either that, or erect barriers of some sort to keep these destructive forces at bay. It is a familiar dilemma. If your enemy (in this case, your economic competitor) is more powerful, because it uses methods that you find unconscionable (reduces social services to cut taxes for the rich, uses military force to gain hegemony over resources, forces people into casual and insecure employment to secure greater workforce flexibility, and so on), what are you to do? Must you follow their example, and become as callous and inhumane as they? Or should you attempt to defend your way of life by some alternative strategy? I think the latter. I do not know precisely 1  The position is usually called ‘economic liberalism’ by those who favour it, and ‘economic rationalism’ by those who oppose it. Since there is nothing particularly new or rational about it, I prefer the name ‘economic liberalism’, which more accurately describes it.

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what to do, but in Chap. 8, I shall have some suggestions to make. To plan their response, the welfare states should get together to work out the best strategies they can to protect their common interests. They must not let their more powerful enemies force them into abandoning their basic humanistic values. Remember, it they are more powerful, they are so only because they are less concerned with human well-being. In this book, I will argue the case for social humanism. I will argue that this theory provides a foundation for a social system that sets it well apart from both the economic liberal and the socialist ideals. Economic liberalism, or neo-conservatism, as it is sometimes called, has its theoretical foundations in the writings of John Locke. According to Locke, the modern state exists in virtue of an agreement amongst free people living in a state of nature to pledge themselves to some person, or assembly of people, to keep the peace, defend their lives, liberty and property, and administer the so-called law of nature, i.e. the system of natural justice that was generally thought to be founded in human nature and rationality. Socialism and most other ‘left wing’ theoretical systems have their philosophical foundations in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued for a different kind of social contract. Rousseau envisaged that the free people in the state of nature agreed to assign themselves, and all of their rights, not to any person, or to any assembly of people, but to the whole community, and thereafter to be governed by ‘the general will’. As Rousseau puts it: ‘Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an individual part of the whole’ (The Social Contract, p. 61). The left and right wings of politics are thus both founded philosophically in social creation myths. These social creation myths have very little plausibility, and there is really no good reason to take them seriously. Nevertheless, philosophers and social and political theorists generally, do take them seriously as defining the principal theoretical ideals of social organization. Thus, the conflict between the left and right wings of politics is almost universally seen as one between individualism and collectivism, and political systems are judged by the positions they occupy on the spectrum between these two extremes. The welfare state naturally comes out as being a wishy-washy sort of society that is an uneasy compromise between liberalism and socialism. However, there is another way of thinking about the social contract, viz. realistically. For it is not hard to describe what may be called the ‘de facto social contract’ of a society. This is not a mythical agreement forged

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in a state of nature, but an historical settlement concerning the way that the society works, and who is responsible for what within this structure. It describes what we generally agree is the way we do things, and who should do them. Social humanism, which is the philosophy of the welfare state, takes this as the foundation upon which we must build, and it then looks back to the much older philosophical tradition of Classical Humanism to determine its ultimate goal. If the present-day social contracts define where we must begin to build contemporary welfare states, then we cannot be content with the kind of welfare state that existed a generation ago. The world has changed radically since the 1970s, when the great welfare states of Britain, Australia and New Zealand were all flourishing. There has been a cultural revolution, an economic revolution, and a new world order established in the Western World since then, and a fundamental shift in power from labour to capital has occurred, which poses a new and considerable threat to our way of life. We do not aim to restore the power of labour. That would be a backward step. What is needed is a new realization of the aims of social humanism—one that is appropriate to our times—and a strategy for defending this new welfare state against its corporate and neo-conservative enemies.

6.3  Comments on Sect. 6.2 This essay was written as a preamble to the pamphlet Social Humanism; the Philosophy of the Welfare State, which I wrote in 2004/2005. It is as good as anything I could write today to explain my way of thinking about the Welfare State at this time. I did not think that the welfare state got a fair go in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and this paper was my initial response. It, and the ensuing pamphlet (Chap. 5, on Social Humanism), spell out what I thought political theory should be aiming to achieve. At the time of writing this paper, there was virtually no market for my way of thinking. Neoliberal theory was in the ascendancy, and the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick, who wrote their major works in the 1970s, had come to dominate political thought nearly everywhere in the Anglophone world. So these two academics were riding high. Robert Nozick was seen as the voice of the Democratic Party, and Nozick the voice of the Republicans, although I do not believe that either saw themselves in these ways. They were the backroom boys, not the front-room

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promoters. So, they not only had much of the academic world at their feet, they also had the strong support of much of the political establishment. The works of the these two American academics concerning the role of the state in social theory was widely seen to have established the illegitimacy of centrally directed demand management, and hence of any hint of socialism. Rawls’ difference principle, which was designed to address a basic inadequacy of laissez faire policies, is the only measure of control that was seriously defended. And this is not what I would call a demand-side management measure. It is really just an extension of the demand for equal rights, which would not be expected to influence the market significantly. The right wing of the political spectrum latched on to the theory proposed by Nozick, which justified nothing more than Basic Capitalism. While the left wing aligned itself with John Rawls, who conceded that it would be quite legitimate for the state to play some role in supporting a ‘difference principle’, which is specifically designed to ameliorate the natural tendency of capitalism to generate great inequalities of wealth, and hence of opportunity. To deal with these difficulties, Rawls advocated that any measures to deal with social and economic inequalities should be designed to ensure that: (a) they are of greatest benefit to the least advantaged, and (b) all offices and positions are to be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity. But, to my way of thinking, this was nowhere near enough. As theories designed for US academic consumption, they seem reasonable. But philosophers must be more far-sighted than this. For the a priori arguments used by Rawls and Nozick may turn out to have very little appeal outside of the US and UK. Rawls’ argument was, supposedly, built upon a certain kind of sanitized rational intuition, i.e. a rational intuition, which is experienced while located from behind a veil of ignorance. The point of the veil of ignorance was presumably to eliminate any biases that one might have acquired, which did in fact arise directly from that person’s lived experience. But then one may ask, why would one wish to consider the matter from such an artificial point of view? If there are people who have lived in absolute poverty in our own society, and the question is whether everyone should receive a universal basic

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wage (a UBI) is raised, why would it not be relevant to hear what that person has to say? Would you agree from behind the veil of ignorance to the principle that everyone, whatever their real weekly income may be, should be entitled to a living wage? Would their lived experiences of living in absolute poverty not really be relevant? While it is true that many Americans and most American politicians are very familiar with these arguments, their appeal is really only to the American tradition. Historically, John Locke was one of the greatest political philosophers of all time. But I would argue now, with the full benefit of hindsight, that we are well able to see its flaws. And, to me, this is just seventeenth-century traditional argumentation, based on the kinds of intuitional insights that led to the drafting of the US Constitution. US citizens can naturally be expected to be in awe of this. But, as an Australian, I find it all quaint and unconvincing. The duties of the state to put aside the intuitions of their founding fathers, and to uphold the post-war doctrines of human rights, were (as discussed), the subject of a long and detailed inquiry, beginning at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. This inquiry is an ongoing one, and is of very high status and reputation around the world. Why then, should we be expected to put aside the findings of this ongoing inquiry, and return to the seventeenth-century intuitions of the founding fathers of the US Constitution.2 A serious study of the duties of government should, I would have thought obviously, have been founded on the modern doctrine of human rights, not on the vague and obscure conception ‘natural rights’ which are conceived as being the rights with which we were born. At the time of writing my 2004 paper, I was unaware of the deep connections that exist between the welfare state and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But I now see that there are indeed many such connections, and that I had simply missed them, because I was looking in the wrong direction. For a nation state would be eudemonic, if and only if every member of the community enjoyed the right to seek the good life, as here defined, and do so safely and with the respect of the wider community. For, the concept of eudaimonia is essentially a social conception of happiness. The ‘eu’ in ‘eudaimonia’ means good, and the Greek word 2  I say ‘seventeenth century’ quite advisedly, because the ‘natural rights’ which underpinned the US Constitution, were those of John Locke, rather than of John Paine or the Marquis de Condorcet.

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‘daimon’ means spirit. So, I first read it as meaning ‘in good spirits’. But when I read the manuscript more carefully, I realized that it did not mean this. And the usual translation of the word is ‘flourishing’. Which is better. But I now see that what it means is something more like being a person whose mind or spirit is well developed for living and flourishing in the society in which he or she lives. That is, eudaimonia is a social concept. It means, roughly, having found a good social role for oneself—or as I would say, being able to live with good social moral purpose. But, I can hear a critic saying, what has that got to do with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? The underlying philosophy of the UDHR is something like this: Everyone has the right to live freely, safely, and with dignity in a country governed with the broad consent of the governed;

(a) in a basically capitalist economy for household goods and consumables, (b) do so with freely chosen social moral purpose in one’s own society, and (c) participate, as an equal, in the culture of that society. The UDHR contains a lot more than this, of course, but the whole of the charter can be seen as an elaboration of what is said in this passage. I know that the UDHR, does not express itself in this way. It would not have been diplomatic to express it this way in the 1940s, or at any other time. But this is what is really being said. These principles are enunciated much more cautiously in the 29 Articles of the Charter, and elaborated to explain in more much detail what each involves. The principle of the good life, which is the subject of this section of the book, is contained in clause (b) of this summary. And, if this is right, then there is indeed a very close link between the aim of creating the possibility of a eudemonic state, and human rights. We all have the right to live a good life. And to make such a life available to all, we need only enact the UDHR as our bill of rights. For, of necessity, any state that has the UDHR as its bill of rights must be a welfare state. And, this is so, because the UDHR, and the welfare state have the same underlying philosophy— viz. the philosophy I call ‘social humanism’.

CHAPTER 7

Eudaimonism

7.1   Human Flourishing The welfare state deserves a philosophy of its own. It is not a half-hearted socialist state, or a soft-hearted liberal one, as critics of the left and right wings of politics have often portrayed it, but one that has its own distinctive aims and rationale. Its deep roots appear to be classical humanism, the broad literary, cultural and philosophical movement that occurred during the Renaissance. For the welfare state can readily be seen as the natural political expression of some of the highest ideals of this tradition.1 If this is so, then the welfare state should properly be regarded as a socially humanist one. Yet there have been few attempts to develop philosophies of welfare,2 and no one seems to have thought of the welfare state as

 How this influence could have filtered through to modern times is unclear. I can find nothing in the Beveridge Report to suggest such a connection. But the concentration of highly successful welfare states in Scandinavia, Northern Europe, and in some of the former British dominions, suggests that the Protestantism and/or classical educational systems of these countries may have been relevant factors. 2  Richard Titmuss’s book The Philosophy of Welfare is a notable exception. But the outstanding philosophical work in this area is Wayne Sumner’s book Welfare, Happiness and Ethics. 1

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having a political theory of its own.3 Philosophers, media commentators, politicians, sociologists, and political scientists all see it as an impure political programme, motivated by a desire to increase human welfare, but lacking any sound philosophical justification. Nevertheless, it can certainly be given such a foundation. And this foundation turns out to be on firmer ground, and better motivated, than the founding theories of the political left and right. It is a social contractual theory, as all foundational political theories are, but it is not at all like the social contract theories of John Locke or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which respectively define the right (individualist) and left (collectivist) wings of political theory. For it is not based on a social creation myth, as these earlier theories were, but on the existing social contracts of the societies in which welfare states are evolving, and empirically justifiable strategies for improving these contracts. Stripped of its perfectionist overtones, social humanists accept the Classical Greek ideal of eudaimonia as the primary good for human beings. Accordingly, they accept that the principal aim of social policy is to enable people to live good and flourishing lives. It is not enough, they say, that people should be enjoying themselves, or that they should be well fed and sheltered, or that they should have civil liberties. These may all necessary for the good life, but no one of them is sufficient. What we need is a social system that seeks to bring the best out in people, so that they can not only live well, but flourish as individuals in a flourishing community. This is, of course, easy to say, but very hard to achieve. It requires wealth creation, job opportunities, social, economic and physical security, good health, education and companionship, and a stimulating and congenial environment. And that is just to begin with. No one can fill in all the details. But it is reasonable to assume that the required state must be a kind of welfare state. For there is no other kind of state on earth that guarantees all of the basic conditions necessary for its people to enjoy good and flourishing 3  There is a book by Edward Urwick published in 1927, which describes the Humanist rationale for the welfare state. Urwick was, at one time, Professor Social Philosophy at the University of London, but was a professor at the University of Toronto at the time of writing his book. Urwick links the kind of social programme he advocates to eudaimonia, just as I do. And his approach to social reform is pragmatic, just as mine is. And, like me, he has no time for utopian solutions to social problems, because he thought they always glossed over the real issues, assumed a malleability of society that is quite unrealistic, and were more concerned with redressing grievances than solving problems. Some of Urwick’s ideas will be discussed in Chap. 7 Sect. 7.2.

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lives. Socialist states guarantee universal health care, comprehensive public education and full and meaningful employment. But they lack the kinds of freedoms that are needed for people to flourish, and they are evidently far less creative of wealth and economic well-being. Capitalist states guarantee many of the basic rights and freedoms required for human flourishing, but they make something of a lottery of health care, education and employment. If you have wealth and education, you may well be able to guarantee all of these things for your children in a capitalist state. But if you lack the means to help them, because you are too poor, or belong to a despised ethnic group, your children are likely to follow you into poverty or social exclusion. The welfare state has suffered the fate of all ‘middle-of-the-road’ political positions. Ideologues of both the left and right have, historically, been hostile to it, and when it came under attack in Britain, Australia and New Zealand the late 1970s, there were few willing to defend it. The welfare state should not, however, be considered to be just a compromise between the left and right wings of politics. For this gives far more legitimacy to the theoretical ideals that these extremes represent than they really deserve. Both are founded on mythical social contracts that no one should take seriously. Locke’s and Rousseau’s social contracts are the social creation myths on which their respective visions of society are based. But neither is tenable, or even very plausible. Let us, rather, give them a decent burial and found our society on something more substantial. Let us recognize that every society that is ruled by consent has established ways of doing things, commonly recognized values, and a working social structure. It has, therefore, a kind of agreement about how the society should function, and who should be responsible for doing what. Let us take this agreement, this de facto social contract, as our basic position, and go back to something like the Classical ideal of happiness to set our goal. The primary aim of the welfare state was, historically, more or less as it should have been according to this ideal, viz. to create the social conditions necessary for people to flourish. Although it was never couched in these terms, it was effectively argued that people needed more than just subsistence and adequate shelter to ensure their well-being. They needed also to be socially secure, i.e. not afraid of what might happen, if their health were to fail, or they were to lose their job, or they were to become infirm through old age. Accordingly, it was argued, the state has an

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obvious duty to ensure that everyone has access to decent health care, adequate unemployment benefits, and an old-age pension. The provision of these insurances had nothing to do with questions of state versus private ownership, and nothing directly to do with maximising freedom of choice. It was not poor man’s socialism, or socialism by stealth, as some left or right wing ideologues might say. Take health care. Decent health is undoubtedly a necessary condition for human well-being. One can argue that good health care saves money, or is popular with voters. But the primary reason for the introduction of the National Health System in Britain in 1948, and Medibank in Australia in 1974, was that the public guarantee of good health care for all was seen as a boon, both to individuals, and to society as a whole. Individuals would become healthier, socially more secure, and more able to do what they really wanted to do in life. They would be physically freer, and able to live better and more constructive lives. Or take education. One often hears the argument that education is a sound investment in the future, and therefore economically beneficial. But this gives far too much away. The real argument for the provision of education is, and always has been, that people individually benefit from it. For education gives people the opportunity to develop their talents, and flourish as individuals, in ways that would be impossible without it. If it costs money, then so be it. It is money well spent in the interest of human well-­ being. We sell ourselves short, if we try to justify education economically. Moreover, we are likely to distort the pattern of sound humanistic education by pushing business studies, management courses, and economics into the forefront, rather than courses in the basic humanities and sciences. Economic well-being is, of course, also a good. But it is not the only, or even the primary, good. If an act of parliament would increase our economic well-being, then that would certainly be a strong point in its favour. But there are, at best, only tenuous links between increases in people’s incomes and improvements to their lives, as Michael Pusey (2003), Clive Hamilton (2003) and many others have argued. It depends so much on how the increases of income are distributed, and on what or whose interests had to be sacrificed to achieve this result. For a social humanist, the primary question must always be: Does the proposed measure help people to live better, more rewarding lives? Not: Does it pay?

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7.2  Social Humanism To realize the ideal of human well-being throughout the community, we need a social system that is intrinsically fair, i.e. one that would make it generally possible for people to live as well as they might reasonably expect, given those factors affecting their lives over which neither they, nor the society as a whole, has any effective control. In other words, the social humanist must seek to eliminate factors that might create unfair disadvantages. The social system clearly cannot compensate adequately for all such factors, and social humanists have no interest in handicapping those who are naturally talented. For the Greek ideal of happiness involves bringing out the very best in people: it does not aim at equality of outcomes. Nevertheless, the ideal does require that we should support those who are naturally disadvantaged. For example, we cannot reasonably expect to live a vigorous outdoor life, if we are physically handicapped. But we can offer some assistance to those who are physically disadvantaged. Nor can we expect to flourish as an academic, if we are intellectually disabled. But we can help people to overcome some of their more serious learning difficulties. The overall aim, I say, must be to construct a social system that does not greatly advantage or disadvantage some members of society more than others in areas where they are intrinsically able to compete fairly on more or less equal terms. It must do so, wherever it can, by eliminating or reducing the influence of disadvantageous factors that are beyond individual control, but are socially controllable. Historically, this has always been the aim of the advocates of the welfare state. They aimed initially at neutralizing the effects of inherited wealth and family background in areas such as education and health care, and, since the Western World’s cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, they aimed to neutralize the effects of racial origin, gender, and sexual orientation on people’s prospects in life. At the same time, the architects of the welfare states around the world have encouraged people to use their initiatives to improve their lives as much as possible. Their aim has therefore always been to construct an intrinsically fair society, rather than one that allows extrinsically privileged people to thrive at the expense of others, or extrinsically disadvantaged people to wallow in poverty or social exclusion. In his book The Social Good, Edward Urwick (1927) founded his theory of the social good on the Classical Greek conception of happiness (eudaimonia), more or less as I wish to do. Such happiness, he said, requires:

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. Work: If possible, congenial work; but in any case work. 1 2. Strong interests, and opportunity to develop such interests. 3. The companionship of people whom we like, and who also like us; and therefore constant reciprocity of service. 4. An ideal to live for, in ourselves, if not outside also. 5. Immunity from severe physical hindrances, as well as from too great care or anxiety. This list of essential conditions for eudaimonia (TSG, p. 14) is ordered in importance. So, for Urwick, the primary requirement for eudaimonia is work. The next most important is having strong interests. The third is having good companionship. And so on. I do not propose to rehearse Urwick’s justifications for his claims about what is required, or to go over his arguments for their relative importance to the achievement of happiness. In fact, I think he has got it wrong. Congenial work is highly desirable, and paid work is often necessary as a means to achieving worthwhile things. But neither is obviously more important than good companionship. Nevertheless, what he has to say about work strongly reflects the idea that we should achieve happiness through worthwhile activity, and this is clearly an expression of Classical Humanist attitudes. Urwick is at pains to point out that satisfactory work need not be paid work. The work traditionally done by women in caring for children, washing, cleaning, cooking, sewing, and so on, is all valuable work, he says, even if it is not paid work. There are also many things that are done voluntarily in the community that are good and worthwhile. The important thing, he says, is that the work we do must be something that can be seen by us to be a real contribution to society. It need not be a major contribution, or a highly creative one. It need only involve ‘some form of sustained effort whose aim and effect it is to increase the social well-being’ (p. 19). For it is only through such work, he says, that individuals can express their ‘significance’ as citizens. Urwick’s arguments are sometimes idealistic, and sometimes pragmatic. Decent rewarding work is necessary for human flourishing, Urwick (the idealist) argues. But regretfully, Urwick (the pragmatist) says, the ideal of unalienated work for all is utopian, and well beyond the reach of any rational social policy. Idealistically, he says, work should be done, not primarily for income, but for the self-respect it engenders, and the satisfaction it brings. But realistically, he says, the economic focus of the age (up to the

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time he was writing) has changed the nature of work, and of people’s attitudes to it. If firms exist only to make money for their owners (which they are more and more tending to become), and workers are employed only to satisfy this demand (which seems to be increasingly the case), then service and quality of product cannot be ends in themselves. At best they are just means to ends—readily disposable if clients or customers can be persuaded to buy inferior things for the same price. Likewise, he says, wages and salaries are coming to be regarded as no more than business costs, which have to be reduced to the minimum required to sustain production, if profits are to be maximized. Consequently, there is little security of tenure, or obligation on the part of owners or management to see workers through difficult times, or necessity to employ apprentices. All of these things are disposable in the interest of greater profits. These attitudes naturally spin off into the workforce. As a result, workers come to see their own employment as nothing but the necessary, and often distasteful, means to the end of making the money they need for other things. It ceases to be a means of self-realization or fulfilment, and becomes instead the indispensable means of acquiring the wealth people need to pursue happiness in other ways. Consequently, if work can be avoided, why would you not avoid it? Why put in 100%, if you can get away with 90%? But, having said all this, Urwick is not one to be taken in by his own idealistic rhetoric. … it is very easy to affirm the rejection of the competitive spirit and abolish it by acclamation. But a world struggling on year after year without the competitive spirit would not be a world of human beings. It would also be very easy to start off on our new tasks in a regenerate world, with an eagerness to work lit up and fired by the enthusiasm of service. But what of the dragging hours of monotonous toil, every day for week after week and year after year, unending and unchanging? Will the flow of enthusiasm endure through these? It is an illusion: the idealist is once more misled by his mirage. He has not visualized Smith and me as we are on earth. We may be worthy citizens; we may be industrious workers. But we should dearly like to knock off our daily work an hour or two earlier, take many more days holiday than we get, and ease the strain at every turn. Service of our fellows? Well, our fellows all want to do what we want to do; and they will do it too, unless close watch is kept upon us all. We work because we must. Let us be thankful that this compulsion is also in harmony with our good. (pp. 23–24)

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So, the high value that Urwick puts on work is not just the product of misty humanist idealism. It derives from the self-respect that naturally comes with any serious engagement in humanly worthwhile activities. Therefore, to deprive people of useful work, and force them into idleness, is necessarily to undermine their self-respect, and so inflict unhappiness upon them.

7.3   The Importance of Planning Urwick is right. Constructive work is necessary for human happiness. But there is another reason, and nowadays a much more obvious one, why work, in the sense of paid work, is necessary. Without work of any kind we are likely to be unhappy, as Urwick argues. But without paid work, or independent means, or the support of family or of marriage partners, we cannot legally acquire the resources we need to build satisfactory lives for ourselves. We cannot get a bank loan, or rent a house. And we cannot start a family without being forced on to welfare dependency. Therefore, we may simply lack what is absolutely essential, if we are to participate in the normal life of the community, and associate with friends as equals. If we lack the resources to plan for the future, and are forced to live a hand-to-­ mouth existence, then we are necessarily reduced as human beings. If there is any distinctively human capacity, other than those of rationality and language, it is our ability to make plans, and make decisions in the light of these plans (Bratman, 1999). Yet, governments of the right have consistently played down the problem of underemployment, and their official unemployment figures grossly misrepresent the real position. If you have casual work to occupy you for one hour a week, when what you really need is a permanent full-time job, then you are effectively unemployed, whatever the government says. Forget the official definition of employment.4 What is needed is a concept of functional employment, which takes into account a person’s need for a job, if he or she is to function as a fully and permanently employed person, and measures his or her actual situation with this standard. Living well requires freedom of choice. People living in a traditional society might, plausibly, live contented lives. For, in such a society, people 4  The government’s definition (in 2020) of ‘being employed’ is designed to minimize the problem of making adequate provision for it. It is what philosophers call a ‘nominal definition’.

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generally know their place, and have few expectations that are likely to be denied to them. But such a life would not be a eudemonic one. For it is not a life that expands people’s horizons, develops their talents, or allows them to flourish as human beings. For eudaimonia, people must be able to plan and develop their own futures, and live according to their own lights. It is not enough that they should live contentedly. A cow can live contentedly, and have what everyone would agree is a good life—a good life for a cow that is. But a eudemonic life has to be one that is a good life for a human being. It has to be a flourishing human life, with all of the ingredients of free choice and planning that must go into such a life. The eudemonic state must therefore be one that embraces freedom of choice, and lays down the conditions necessary for people to be able to plan their own futures. It must indeed embrace the strong ideal of practical liberty, which is a concept of liberty that is two steps stronger than von Hayek’s weak negative concept. It is an even stronger concept of liberty than Isiah Berlin’s positive one. These concepts of liberty will be discussed in the following chapter. The idea that a state that is conducive to human happiness must be one in which people are able to plan their lives is particularly important. For, if there is any feature of a human life that clearly distinguishes it from that of other creatures, it is planning. Elephants, dogs and horses can all live happy, contented lives. But only human beings can have plans for the future. This is important, not only because it is uniquely human, but also because our ability to plan for the future is being severely undermined by the economic liberal strategy of maintaining a pool of unemployment in every society in which they dominate. The great welfare states were all characterized by their full employment policies, which were intended to ensure that everyone who wanted to work would have adequate opportunity to do so. Consequently, people living in these welfare states could plan their lives in ways that are now impossible in the economic liberal states that have replaced them. Highly educated young people, and those with wealthy family backgrounds, may still have this privilege. For they are secure enough in their employment to be able to take out a mortgage, buy a house, and start a family while they are still in their 20s. But poorer, or less well-educated, people have to wait at least until they are in their 30s to take such a course, and many never have a chance of building a stable family life in a house of their own.

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7.4  Some Pathologies of Capitalism If having the ability to plan for the medium or long-term future is a uniquely human characteristic, so are rational choice and informed decision-­making. Therefore, human lives cannot flourish if these capacities are threatened or undermined. It is clear, however, that both are now severely under threat in capitalist societies. They are under threat by what are undoubtedly some of the principal driving forces of the capitalist system, viz. those of advertising, spin and promotion. These forces are enormously powerful, yet all depend entirely on techniques of irrational persuasion. If you want to sell a product, service or policy, then you must represent it as sexy or attractive, or else you must represent its alternatives as cold, ugly, or dangerous. That is, you must ensure that your customers, or voters, decide things viscerally, at a sub-cortical level, not rationally, in the light of the best available information. The decision by the Australian Government to turn back the Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, which had answered a distress call from a sinking boat with hundreds of asylum seekers on board, was a case in point. It was made cynically in the knowledge that these ‘boat people’ had already been vilified as law-breakers (illegal immigrants), queue jumpers, and perhaps also terrorists. Consequently, the decision proved to be very popular. It enabled the Government to exploit the instinctive fear that many Australians have of being overrun by such immigrants. Never mind that it was a gross violation of our obligations under the UN convention on refugees. Never mind that the Government’s propaganda campaign in support of its action was riddled with lies (in the ‘children overboard’ incident), and that the independence of the public service and the navy were both severely compromised in the process. It was not a rationally justifiable decision, and public support for it was not based on reason, but on fear. The Government’s actions over Tampa, its subsequent treatment of the asylum seekers, and the propaganda campaign that it then waged, were essentially dehumanizing. It was dehumanizing, not only for the asylum seekers, which it obviously was, but also for the Australian public. For members of the public were manipulated into thinking that the people we had prevented from landing were somehow a threat to us all, and that the Government had heroically saved us from it. But it was all propaganda. There never was any threat. Of course, no one likes to believe that they were duped, and probably most Australians will continue to believe that we were under threat from swarthy, unshaven and uncouth

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Middle-­easterners, and that the Government saved us from it. A social humanist must try to resist the forces that make such depiction and deception possible. One strategy would be to try honesty. If an opposition party has reason to think that a government is appealing to base instincts to gain popular support for a lie, then they have a duty to say so, and to say it loud and clear. If it means losing an election, then so be it. For it also means that the Government will lose its legitimacy when the truth finally does come out. The strategy of going along with a lie to save an election defeat must fail, because it means that both the Government and the Opposition are tainted. But no strategy has been, and probably none can be, entirely effective against the corrupting influences of advertising, promotion and propaganda, which are endemic in a capitalist society. These endemic features of capitalism have, between them, created the nightmare of competitive consumerism, which is one of the two principal pathologies of our desire to live well in a competitive society. It is a social disease of the relatively wealthy, and it is one that is aggravated by the kind of competitiveness that every government in every market economy feels bound to encourage. There is probably very little that can be done to eradicate it, because people are naturally competitive anyway, and want to be seen to be doing better than others. But the fact that the desire to succeed in life is being superseded by the desire to be seen by others to be succeeding is very worrying. For it suggests that there is no core of ambition that is internally driven, succeeding in which would bring its own satisfaction. Why aim to be seen to be successful when one can aim to be successful? And, if one is successful at what one really wants to do, why do you need the accolades of seeming to be successful? Our consumerism is a sign, surely, that we are failing to achieve eudaimonia, i.e. to do successfully what we really want to do in life. Some such failure is inevitable. For we may set our sights too high, and feel that we have to pretend to be more successful than we really are. Or we may fail to make the best of ourselves for any of a thousand other reasons, including many that were really beyond our control. Some would say that the only way of curing competitive consumerism would be to abandon market capitalism. This may well be true. But this way of curing the disease is worse than the disease itself. For command economies, which would seem to be the only viable alternative to market capitalism, have been shown to be highly inefficient at producing the goods and services that people need to flourish in today’s world. Therefore, there is probably no real alternative to the capitalist system, if you want to

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live in a eudemonic society. There is, however, an important difference between the kind of competitiveness required for a free market economy, and the personal competitiveness that inevitably leads to competitive consumerism. Market competitiveness requires efficiency, provision of customer satisfaction, and good follow-up services. A person who aims to be successful in business will therefore want to pursue all of these objectives. But he or she need not do so in order to impress others. For these are all things they need to do, if they are to succeed in what they are trying to do. Striving to achieve them is therefore not symptomatic of competitive consumerism, but part of trying to be a successful trader. Personal competitiveness, on the other hand, is not an integral part of any acceptable life plan, as market competitiveness may well be. It is, rather, just a matter of being seen to be successful in whatever one might be doing. So it can be dealt with independently as a side effect. The best way of doing this, compatibly with the requirement of maintaining a free market, may be to inoculate people against competitive consumerism by making them more self-directed. If you are self-directed, and have a clear idea of what you want in life, then you are bound to aim primarily to be successful by your own lights. You are therefore likely to be more autonomous, and less dependent on public approbation. The second, and more serious, pathology of living in a highly competitive society is deep social division. If nothing is done to correct the tendency, capitalism will lead to huge inequalities of wealth and income, and cruel indifference to the plight of those whose incomes are inadequate for their needs. So the capitalist road is not by itself the road to happiness. It needs to be corrected to guard against a resurgence of the kind of pathological social division that led to class conflict in the nineteenth century, and the rise of Marxist ideology. What are needed are strategies to ensure that: (a) everyone has the opportunity, and is strongly motivated, to create the best lives they can for themselves, and (b) everyone is amply rewarded for the contributions they make to the well-being of society, even if, as is inevitable, some contributions are much less valuable than others. For this is what the ideal of eudaimonia is all about. It is about motivating people to develop their potential as human beings, paying their own way as best they can, and working to create the best lives for themselves of which they are capable. Eudaimonists do not, therefore, endorse the Marxist slogan: ‘From each according to his capacity; to each according to his needs’. For, in a capitalist society, this slogan is a recipe for creating a social split between the welfare providers and welfare recipients, neither of which

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group is likely to be happy with its lot. The welfare providers will see themselves as imposed upon by those on welfare, while those receiving welfare benefits will be resentful that they have no sufficiently rewarding part to play in the ongoing life of the society. The welfare providers will complain incessantly of high taxes, dole bludgers, welfare cheats and so on. Those on welfare will envy the lives of those who have enough wealth or income to be self-supportive, a secure place in the society, and resentful of the resentment that they feel is directed towards them. The greatest challenge that a philosopher of social welfare must face is how to arrest the tendency of capitalism to create callous social division without destroying the vitality of the capitalist system itself. The welfare states of the British Commonwealth and Northern Europe came close to solving this problem. They ensured high levels of personal development through excellent health care and public education systems, guaranteed the opportunity of all to participate in the work of the society by their full-­ employment policies, and undermined the socially divisive tendency of market capitalism by introducing steeply graduated taxation scales. In the last 20 years or so, these positive provisions of the welfare states in Great Britain and Australasia have been heavily under attack by right wing ideologues who are intent upon removing what they see as socialist influences on the structure of society. But they are profoundly mistaken about this. The idealism that moved Sir Robert Menzies to fund public education generously, and to maintain a genuine full employment policy had nothing to do with socialism. It was simply the recognition that this is the way to create a just and fair society. The idealism that moves John Howard to undo all this is that of economic liberalism, which is potentially very divisive socially, and is motivated by class interests. ***** In the following chapters, I will explore various aspects of the search for happiness. I will argue that acceptance of the humanistic ideal as the primary aim of public policy must ultimately result in the construction of a state that is liberal, democratic, intrinsically fair, prosperous, individualistic and socially coherent, i.e. in a modern welfare state. Methodologically, the government of such a state must be pragmatic in implementing its policies, as the governments of welfare states have traditionally been. Social humanists must always reject utopian solutions to social problems, because they have to work from where they are to make things better. There are no

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ideals of freedom, individualism or collectivism to be followed religiously, as though they were somehow sanctioned by the founding social contract of our society. They were not. The welfare state must be seen as being founded, not on any social creation myth, but on the de facto social contract of the society in which we live, and motivated to improve the eudemonic quality of people’s lives, given this contract. But, of course, there is nothing sacrosanct about this social contract either. What is fundamental must be the aim of creating a happier society. One must be prepared, therefore, to make adjustments to the de facto contract of our society, if necessary, by removing existing anomalies, or otherwise making it possible for more and more people to achieve a greater degree of personal satisfaction in their lives.

CHAPTER 8

Liberty

A Social Humanist must be a strong advocate of practical liberty, i.e. the concept of liberty that is related to what people are actually capable of doing. This is the concept employed by Amartya Sen in his 1998 Nobel Prize-winning work on welfare economics. It is a concept that flows directly from the values of social humanism. The more traditional concepts of liberty are those of negative liberty, which is a function of what one is permitted to do, and positive liberty, which is a matter of being able to choose for oneself what to do. The negative concept is used to justify policies of small government and deregulation. The positive concept argues for autonomy, and against the industry that seeks to persuade people irrationally to act as someone else would wish. The practical concept argues for empowering legislation that will provide people with the training and resources necessary to make choices that they cannot now realistically consider.

8.1   Three Concepts of Liberty There are three important concepts of liberty. Two of these, negative and positive liberty, are well known, and are often discussed. The third is Amartya Sen’s concept of capability, which is less well known, but now recognized as an important concept. Of the three, the capability concept, which I shall call ‘practical freedom’, is the most fundamental, and is

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clearly the one that should be most strongly promoted, if our social aim is to maximize human well-being. Isiah Berlin distinguished the first two of these concepts of liberty in his famous essay of this title (Berlin 1969). Negative liberty, he says, ‘is determined by ‘the area within which the subject – a person or group of persons – is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons’ (pp.  121–122). Positive liberty, he says, depends upon ‘what, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that’ (p. 122). He later explains: The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes, which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer  – deciding, not being decided for, self-­ directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. (p. 131)

Sen’s concept of liberty (Sen, 1993) is one that is determined by what we have the will, the resources, and the capacity to do of our own accord, without hindrance or restraint. It depends, he says, on what we are capable of doing. In this sense, we are at liberty to do all and only those things that belong to the range of feasible choice sets, where the feasible choice set for a person at a time includes all and only those things that person could jointly choose. For Sen, these sets of viable choice alternatives define what he calls our ‘well-being freedom’ (p. 39). Rather than persist with Sen’s somewhat inelegant name for it, I propose to speak simply of ‘practical liberty’. For, as far as I can see, my concept of ‘practical liberty’ is the same as Sen’s concept of ‘well-being freedom’. The extent to which we are practically free thus lies somewhere within the range of things that we are positively free to do. But it never covers the whole of this range. For there are inevitably many things or combinations of things that we are positively free to do that we are just not capable of doing, because we lack the means, the capacity or the physical resources to do them, or, at least, to do them all.

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Your practical liberty is determined by what you are physically, economically and psychologically able to do without hindrance or punishment. So, it is necessarily something that you are positively free to do. But if you lack the physical capacity, the resources, the time or the mental agility required, your positive liberty does not translate into a practical liberty. If you have no money, you cannot buy anything. The law does not stop you from buying things. Nor do other people. But your poverty does. A person who cannot read is denied information that is readily available to others. A person with vertigo cannot be exposed to precipitous drops. Yet, these actions are likely to be permitted by the state, or by anyone else who may be in a position of authority over you. Hence, these kinds of impairments do not involve any restrictions on your positive liberty. But they all impose genuine restrictions on your freedom of choice. For they all affect what choices you can realistically make. If a woman lacks the money for a deposit on a house, or a regular source of income sufficient to service the loan that would be needed to buy it, then she is restricted in what she can do. It does not matter that she is allowed by law to buy the house. It is not a realistic option. Practical liberty is thus a practical kind of liberty. It refers to the things that one can realistically choose to do within the range of things that one is positively free to do. If you can do what you really want, and no one will interfere with, or punish, you for doing it, then you are genuinely free to act in this way. If you cannot do what you really want, because you lack the skills or the resources, or someone has brainwashed you into thinking that you really want to do something else, then you are not genuinely free to do it. Yet H. Steiner (1983) argues that this concept confuses liberty with ability. ‘If this is a proper conception of liberty at all’, he says, ‘it is certainly not the one that concerns us as political philosophers. Liberty is a social relation, a relation between persons’ (p. 74). Is it? If I am locked in the shed, it does not matter at all how I got there. I am not free to go outside. There is no law against me doing so. And presumably no one has brainwashed me into thinking that I want to remain locked in the shed. Of course, someone might have locked me in the shed and be keeping me there against my will. On the other hand, I could just have locked myself in the shed by accident. It makes no difference to my position. I am not free to go outside for the simple reason that I cannot open the door. Similarly, if my jailer says that I am free to go now, because my sentence has been quashed, it does not follow that I am really free to go. Someone

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has first to unlock my cell door, and then someone let me out of the prison gate. And I am not really free to go, until these things have been done. Practical freedom is fundamental. For, in our kind of society, the threat to practical freedom is the basis of all law enforcement. It is true that the law can be enforced in other ways, e.g. by threats of corporal or capital punishment. But the law cannot be enforced by threats to other kinds of freedoms. We cannot, for example, enforce the law by making law-­breaking illegal. A law restricting freedom of choice cannot be enforced by threatening to introduce another law restricting freedom of choice. The same with positive freedoms. We cannot force people to do what we want by threatening to make them do what someone else wants, unless the threat is backed by a real threat of punishment somewhere down the line. Therefore, in a society without significant practical freedoms, law enforcement has to depend largely on threats of other kinds than those of incarceration or the imposition of fines. There are many things that I am formally at liberty to do, which are not realistic options for me. I cannot climb a mountain, for example, because I am not fit enough to do so. But no one would try to stop me from trying to do so. I cannot have a penicillin injection, because I am allergic to penicillin. But there is no legal or other prohibition on my having such an injection. Choosing to have a penicillin injection is just not a realistic option for me. On the other hand, there is nothing that I am practically free to do that I am legally debarred from doing. If I were misguidedly to choose to break the law, then I would be likely to incur a fine or other penalty that would substantially reduce my practical freedoms, e.g. to buy things, or move about freely in society. Therefore, the class of one’s practical freedoms is necessarily circumscribed within the class of society’s negative freedoms, which in turn is defined by the socially imposed restrictions on the practical freedoms of its members. Steiner goes on to argue that, if having the practical ability to do something without restraint is to be counted as a practical freedom, then it would follow that the practical freedoms of people in first world countries would normally be substantially greater than those of people in third world countries—however bad their governments may be. Of course, this is true. But this only shows that the liberality of a government cannot be gauged by the degrees of practical freedom enjoyed by citizens. The liberality of a government depends on how it sets the boundaries to the practical freedoms that people may enjoy, and how ruthlessly it imposes the laws to fix these boundaries.

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Fundamentally, liberty requires freedom of choice. Berlin’s negative liberty is the absence of legal or formal constraints on what choices are available to us. His positive liberty requires self-determination in the exercise of choice. We are not free in his positive sense, he says, unless we ourselves choose what to do, without outside interference. Clearly, negative liberty draws a wider circle around what we are at liberty to do than positive liberty. For example, when John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, promised to save those parts of the Tasmanian old growth forests that were in fact too remote, or too unprofitable to log, while allowing the loggers to continue the work that they really wanted to do, he was cheered by the loggers. For he was promising not to restrict their positive liberty, even though he was formally reducing the area available for logging by millions of hectares. Howard’s promise to restrict only the negative liberty of the loggers, and thus reassure the Australian people of his ‘green credentials’, did nothing to save the old growth forests that were then being decimated. It helped him to win the election though. Positive liberty is likely to be confused with practical liberty because both are individually variable. Within any given society people will differ in the amounts of positive and practical liberty they enjoy. Children are not positively free to do many of the things that they would like to do, because they are forbidden by their parents to do them. As they grow older, and gain more independence, their positive freedom generally increases. They come to choose more and more things for themselves. The same holds for practical freedom. But one’s degree of practical freedom increases with age, not only because one becomes more independent of parental authority, but also because one acquires more knowledge, skills, strength and resources. The difference between practical freedom and positive freedom becomes more apparent at the other end of the life cycle. Older people tend to become weaker physically, slower, more dependent on others for assistance, and ultimately poorer. Consequently, they become less and less able to do many of the things that they used to be able to do. But their degree of positive liberty does not decline at the same rate. Until they become very old, they are likely to remain pretty much their own masters. It is just that they cannot do as many things now as they used to be able to do. Our negative liberty, on the other hand, is generally not individually relative in the way that positive liberty is. In a society in which everyone is subject to the same laws, and our negative freedoms are legally defined,

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they are more or less the same for all. Nevertheless, in such a society, the law does provide the basic framework for the development of our practical liberties and is crucial in determining what developments are possible. In some cases, the law not only permits us to act in certain ways, it guarantees our right to do so, and hence prevents any unofficial restraints on our positive freedoms to act in these ways. Legislation, or constitutional provisions, to this effect are of supreme importance. For they are the acts or clauses that enshrine our civil liberties. They are called ‘civil liberties’, because they are the liberties we have in common, in virtue of our membership of society. Our positive and practical liberties are the liberties we have as individuals, in virtue of our particular circumstances or abilities. Philosophers commonly distinguish between ‘freedoms to …’ and ‘freedoms from …’. But the question of liberty is always one of what we are free to do or be. It is the question of what we are free to do or be within the law or social framework (our negative liberty), or what we are capable of deciding for ourselves what to do or be, independently of what anyone else might wish us to do or be (our positive liberty), or of what we are realistically able to do or be, given our health, resources, circumstances and so on (our person liberty). But our freedoms from various things are different from our other freedoms. For these define our basic needs as human beings. Freedoms from want, fear, hunger and so on are fundamental human rights that demand to be satisfied, not problems to be overcome by increasing our freedoms to choose. If they are not satisfied, then the question of what we are at liberty to do or be hardly arises. Certainly, they are not liberties, as this term is understood here, and cannot be directly compared with them. Those who are impoverished, afraid or hungry are suffering. And any government that allows such suffering to continue, when it has the means to do something about it, is guilty of human rights abuses. Those who are impoverished may lack various practical liberties as a result of their condition. They may well be incapable of deciding for themselves what to do, or lack the means or resources to do many of the things that they would need to do to improve their situation. But their condition is not properly described as a lack of freedom to do these things. These people desperately need help, and would need help in any case, whatever they might be capable of doing for themselves. Therefore, their unfortunate position cannot properly be construed as a kind of restriction of what they are able to do.

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8.2  Inner Freedom In his recent paper ‘The Disappointment of Liberalism’, Clive Hamilton (2004) focuses on the existence of a serious threat to our positive liberty posed by market capitalism. The threat derives from the very nature of the market, and so is not an easy one to eliminate. What is under threat, according to Hamilton, is a variety of positive liberty—one that he aptly calls ‘inner freedom’. Inner freedom, he says, is the ability to act according to one’s own considered judgement, and therefore independently of the various market forces that demand one’s attention. These forces are the very powerful, but essentially irrational, means that companies use to control people’s tastes and preferences. Therefore, they must undermine our ability to choose rationally for ourselves. The life of a person who lacks inner freedom cannot be one of deliberation and purpose, as a eudemonic life must be. For it is, essentially, the life of someone who is being pushed around by social or psychological forces that are outside his or her control. The threats to inner freedom are seen as coming from a range of sources, especially the advertising, fashion and promotion industries. For these industries all exist to put social or psychological pressure on people to buy, adopt or believe what their backers want them to. They do not exist just to inform people of their options, so that they can realistically make up their own minds about what they should do or buy. Nor do they just present a good case for buying, adopting or believing something. Rather they deliberately play upon people’s fears, anxieties and sexual fantasies, in order to persuade people irrationally to buy, adopt or believe what the marketers want them to. According to Hamilton (2004): The absence of inner freedom … is the dominant characteristic of modern consumer capitalism, a social system that cultivates behaviour driven by momentary impulse, temporary emotions and moral and intellectual weakness. The very purpose of the marketing society is to make us the slaves of our passions.

In the next paragraph, he says: … if one does not possess inner freedom, but is constantly responding to impulses, whims, expectations and outside pressures, or if one is driven by neurotic fantasies, addictions or felt inadequacies, or if one’s behaviour is dictated by a consuming belief  – all of which induce behaviour which, in

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moments of clarity and reflection, one knows are contrary to one’s interests  – then all of the abundance that surrounds us and the political and personal freedoms we enjoy amount to nothing. If some systematic force conspires to deprive us of inner freedom then we have to ask whether the external freedoms are enough. What does it mean to have personal freedom, if one’s choices are formed and manipulated by powerful external forces?

There is no doubt that Hamilton is right about this. The professional marketers of goods, services and opinions are successful in their aims precisely to the extent that they can motivate us to buy, use or accept the things they are promoting. And, clearly, their most successful strategies are those that play upon our emotions, and so reduce our capacities for reflection and independent thought. Modern market capitalism is therefore the enemy of inner freedom. But inner freedom is clearly necessary for our well-being. Our long-term goals in life cannot plausibly be chosen satisfactorily on impulse, or in response to market forces. Nor can the appropriate steps be taken to achieve our long-term aims, if our choices are fundamentally outside of our control. Therefore, anyone who thinks that increasing our practical freedom should be the ultimate aim of all public policy is right to be alarmed by the intrusion of market forces into everyday decision-­making. It shows that there is a basic incompatibility between the form of market capitalism that now exists, and the aim of promoting well-­ being. Precisely what should be done about this is not clear. The market is evidently irreplaceable as a distributor of goods and services. The only question is, therefore, whether the marketing techniques of modern capitalism can be changed or regulated satisfactorily to make decision-making concerning our purchases, practices and beliefs less impulsive than they are, and more rational. Perhaps the most insidious market influence—the one that does most to threaten our way of life—has been in the field of ideas. In the nineteenth century, ideas were presented, and argued for, primarily in the print media—in books, journals, pamphlets and newspapers. In this form, a wide spectrum of ideas could be presented, studied and rationally assessed. The print media continued to dominate the presentation and discussion of ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, although film and radio began to have a significant influence on what people thought about things. But television, which is radically unsuited to the development or refinement of ideas, is now the dominant medium in our society. It is radically unsuited to this purpose, because

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(a) the visual image, rather than reason or argument, has to carry the message, (b) there are very few independent television stations, even in the largest and richest of countries, (c) commercial advertising is very expensive, and only the very rich, or those with lots of things to sell for profit, can possibly afford to buy it, (d) news and current affairs programmes are more or less confined in their coverage to the major players in the political arena, and even then, they never have time for more than short sound grabs. Consequently, a commercial market place of ideas has developed, and sales techniques, like those used for marketing shampoos, are now being used to sell political agendas. Politicians engage in spin to sell their ideas, and employ spin-doctors to advise them how best to do it. Ideas that are not palatable to the dominant political players, and have no interest to advertisers or media barons, are therefore unlikely to get much exposure on television—unless they are either salacious or outrageous. Therefore, modest ideas—ones that might have some real value in shaping our future—are virtually excluded from the market place. The principal media, and the marketing techniques used to sell ideas to the public, thus present serious problems, not only for social humanism, but also for democracy itself.

8.3  Freedom of Speech The social practices that threaten inner freedom are usually held to be beyond the reach of the law, because any attempt to restrict these practices would be seen at once as an attack on freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is recognized as a basic right in every major democracy. Therefore, it would be argued, we cannot curtail these practices without violating the basic rights of citizens. In most democracies, practices that are considered to be in violation of the right to freedom of speech are forbidden, and, in some cases, laws restricting freedom of speech are regarded as unconstitutional. But a basic right that can be, and has been, so dreadfully abused as the right to freedom of speech urgently needs to be re-examined. The original grounds for accepting freedom of speech as a basic human right were set out by John Stuart Mill in his classic essay On Liberty. Mill argued there that to limit freedom of speech would be to risk perpetuating

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error. For errors in the received opinions of people in society can only be revealed by being exposed. Hence, if opinions contrary to the received ones were to be denied a voice, the errors of the received opinions would never be revealed. He argued that if the received opinions should be false, then it is good that their falsity should be demonstrated; and that if they should be true, then it is good that they should be challenged. For then, the true opinions, which, he thought, must always win in the end, will be all the more firmly and rationally believed. The question is how well this argument stands up to modern criticism. The threats to freedom of speech that existed 150 years ago, when Mill’s essay was written, were mostly religious or political. For these were the areas in which contrary opinions were most unwelcome. Mill did allow that it would sometimes be justified to restrict freedom of speech, e.g. in order to preserve public order, or prevent a riot. So he did not regard freedom of speech as an absolute right, but as one that ought to be insisted upon, only if there were no over-riding reasons for not doing so. Remember, too, that the kinds of speeches that could be made in Mill’s time were fairly restricted in their reach or impact, and relatively cheap and easy to respond to. One could write a letter to a newspaper, publish a book or pamphlet, or, if one were a member of the Commons, make a speech in Parliament. But one could not hope to reach as many people or achieve anything like the impact of a television advertising campaign. Any claims that might then have been made could just as easily have been challenged. So it was reasonable for Mill to think that the truth would be likely to triumph in the ensuing debate. The argument that Mill presented for freedom of speech was a good one, given the context of his time. Of course, it remains a good argument for freedom to speak in public, publish a book or pamphlet, or otherwise express opinions about things in the ways in which one could in the nineteenth century. But modern marketing strategies have very little to do with seeking the truth. For they are, essentially, exercises in irrational persuasion. They aim to present whatever is to be sold, acted upon or believed as irresistibly as possible. They trade freely on people’s fears, vanities and sexual fantasies, and they are able to purvey falsehoods or half-truths with impunity. There is no easy way to respond to these assaults. If one had the resources, then one could mount an alternative advertising campaign to persuade people of something else. But in a battle of marketing campaigns, there is really no reason to think that the winner will be the one that promotes the best product, the best practice, or the most reasonable opinion.

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On the contrary, the winner is overwhelmingly likely to be the promoter that has the best strategists, the biggest budget or the most popular ideas. Nor are the falsehoods and half-truths used in these advertising or propaganda campaigns likely to be exposed promptly by other means. Historians and other rational inquirers will no doubt reach a near consensus about what the truth really is. But the general public is unlikely to hear of it, because they will never read the books or scholarly journals in which their findings will be published. Moreover, by the time the truth does emerge, the issue is unlikely to be one that is still relevant to the decisions that ordinary people have to make about their lives, e.g. whom to vote for at the next election. Therefore, freedom of speech, as it has now come to be understood, is not the guarantor of truth, as it was seen to be in Mill’s day, but a licence to manipulate it. The problem is that freedom of speech has come to imply freedom to influence public sentiments, beliefs and attitudes, using whatever psychological techniques are most effective. Therefore, our right to freedom of speech has to be brought back to something like its original conception, if our right to inner freedom is not to be breached. I do not know how to do this. But I know what we must aim to achieve. We must, at all costs, preserve the nineteenth-century right to freedom of speech. For without such a right, our democracy cannot function. If people cannot say what they think is true, or ought to be done, without fear of persecution or censorship, then rational discussion of issues on which people disagree must become impossible. If they cannot publish, broadcast or present their views in public, and argue for them, then they are effectively silenced. Therefore, freedom of speech must include the right to be heard, if democracy is to survive. If access to the main channels of public communication (the media) is limited to the rich, powerful or outrageous, then those who disagree with the rich and powerful who dominate the media will be forced to behave outrageously to gain attention. Therefore, the right to be heard must include a right to media access, if it is to apply to everyone. Practically, universal access is possible only on the internet. But for the discussion of issues of national importance, there at least needs to be a national forum, presented regularly on prime time radio or television, and published in the daily press, in which representatives of various political parties and interest groups are given adequate time or space to present and argue for their positions. The relevant parties should not have to fight for the attention of the principal media. They should be able to claim it as a right.

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But such freedom of speech, which is vital for democracy, should not be confused with a right to obscure the truth (as happened in the Tampa affair), or to vilify one’s opponents (which is now, regrettably, common practice). Yet, I am reluctant to argue that these activities should be banned. Almost any plausible restriction on freedom of speech, however well intentioned, could easily backfire, and be used by those who care little for either truth or democracy to suppress opposition to what they want to do. I think the better strategy is for the government to subsidize access to the mass media to give those involved in, and are knowledgeable about, important issues a real opportunity to present and argue publicly for their positions. The five-second sound grab is manifestly not enough to do anything more than to express an attitude, and this kind of reporting actively discourages people from thinking rationally about the issues involved. Nor should the length of time given to a position be determined by ratings. For often the most rational and informed position to take on a given issue is not the most newsworthy one. What is most newsworthy is conflict, not conflict resolution, and attitude, not knowledge. So if our primary concern is to promote truth and rationality in public policy, which is what Mill thought freedom of speech would guarantee, we should be encouraging the presentation of balanced non-threatening positions on political issues, rather than unbalanced and threatening ones.

8.4  Negative Liberty The concept of liberty that George Bush wanted to spread around the world is that of negative liberty, which is also known as ‘civil liberty’. Accordingly, it is what nearly everyone understands by the term ‘liberty’, when it is used in an unqualified way. Negative liberty, as Bush conceives it, and Berlin defined it, is just the absence of legal, other restraints. It includes nearly all of the recognized political liberties, and economic liberty as well, i.e. the freedom to use one’s income, wealth and property as one sees fit, without there being any more restraint or interference from government (or anyone else) than is strictly necessary to protect the rights of others. Yet, it is narrow conception of liberty. For a person can be free in the negative sense, and yet starve to death, or die of exposure. For negative liberty is not empowering. It does not create any genuine opportunities. It simply removes any artificial barriers there might be to doing things. Our political liberties are civil liberties of a non-economic kind. They include freedom of speech, of association, of religion, and of movement.

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But in recent years, these political liberties have declined in importance in the eyes of many social commentators, and the basic concept of civil liberty has come to be identified more and more closely with economic liberty. Thus, a society that has a large measure of economic liberty is usually said to be free, even if its political liberties are very restricted. The so-­ called free world, for example, is said to include all of the states of Central and South America (except for Cuba), even though political liberties in these states are often very restricted. But negative liberty, as understood by liberal theorists, is clearly much more than just economic liberty. The concept of liberty that was implicit in Locke’s original social contract involved respect for natural rights, and therefore for many of our basic political liberties. John Stuart Mill’s essay On Liberty is the classic defence of the most important of our civil liberties. But economic liberty barely gets a mention in Mill’s essay. The fact that economic liberty is now stressed as much as it is, is not due, therefore, to the prominence it has received in liberal theory. Rather, it is due to the current dominance of economic issues in political decision-making. Economic liberty is seen in some quarters as the most important of all civil liberties, because without it, free market capitalism could not exist. Hence, economic freedom is naturally attractive to wealthy people. But, far from being the most basic of our civil liberties, and so one that might reasonably be taken to be the hallmark of a free society, it is a liberty that is meaningless to those who have neither the money nor the resources to take advantage of it. The concept of economic liberty derives from a supposed right to property. Locke recognized a limited right to property in his treatise on civil government. The question that needs to be addressed here is whether, and if so what, rights to property should exist in a eudemonic society. Should they be as unlimited as many advocates of free market capitalism would wish, or should they be constrained in various ways for the greater good of people in society? These questions will be taken up in the following chapter.

8.5  Social Humanism and Practical Liberty A social humanist is necessarily one who promotes practical liberty, i.e. increasing people’s capacities and opportunities to do things. If you do not have the ability, resources or training to live the kind of life you want, it matters little that you are not prevented from pursuing it. The guarantee

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of civil liberties is good, but it is not enough. Social humanism requires the creation of genuine opportunities for people, and that we should work to see that as many as possible are able to take advantage of them. To take advantage of any opportunities that might be afforded to us, we need to have appropriate levels of income, health, fitness, security, resources, education, training and so on. It is not enough that these opportunities should exist in principle. We should actually be able to take advantage of them. Realistically, our opportunities are likely to be limited because of money, time or other commitments. The time we are able to spend on the things may also be restricted because of the work we have to do to earn a living. This is likely to be the case, for some people, even in the best of societies. Consequently, if we wish to construct a better society, it is important that our workplaces not be too much more demanding of our time or energy than we want them to be. It is also important that they should be as pleasant and convivial as possible, and that our working arrangements should make it possible for us to identify with what we are doing, and take pride in doing it. Also, we are likely to need a substantial amount of money, unless we happen to choose to seek fulfilment through a life of contemplation. For there are very few things that we can do in life without money, and most of them will cost quite a lot. The good society must therefore be an economically prosperous one, where, preferably, our incomes match our ambitions. It is not necessarily desirable that our incomes should all be the same, or even roughly so. For some people, success in life may depend on achieving a high degree of economic prosperity. For others, it may depend on developing the skills of a painter, sculptor or academic. For some, having and raising a family will be enough to bring fulfilment. Others will want a life of adventure. In a eudemonic society, all of these kinds of lives should be real possibilities for most people. Realistically, the amount of money we have is unlikely to be enough for all of the things that we might reasonably want to do at all stages of our lives. Young people, for example, are likely to need much more money than they actually have to set themselves up for life, with a house, car, family and so on. It is important, therefore, that they should be able to borrow against future earnings, if they are to invest in their own futures. A eudemonic society must therefore be one in which this is possible. Given today’s sorts of financial institutions, it must be a society in which bank loans are readily available to young people, and there is enough permanent work in the community for them to be able to service the loans they take

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out. Old people are also likely to need more money than they can earn, and if their savings are inadequate, or have been depreciated by inflation, then they will need support. In a eudemonic society such people would be looked after, so that they may continue to live well as long as possible. People who are ill, or injured, and cannot afford the medicines or treatments they require will also need to be supported. But there is no need to go on elaborating the consequences of social humanism. For it should be obvious by now that social humanism implies a form of welfare statism. A social humanist is one whose social policy is to maximize the opportunities of people to live happy and worthwhile lives. A welfare state is necessarily one that aims to provide just such opportunities. Hence, any state that has eudaimonia as its primary social objective, must, in due course, evolve into some kind of welfare state. The welfare state is therefore not just an uneasy compromise between socialism and neoliberalism, as it is so often represented as being. It is independently justifiable as a realization of the ideal f social humanism.

8.6   Critique of Practical Liberty Some people are likely to object that practical liberty is not really a form of liberty. Rather, it is just a matter of having the ability, opportunity or independence of mind, to do whatever one wants, and being legally at liberty to do so. Perhaps Steiner is right, then, that this concept of liberty (practical liberty) confuses liberty proper (i.e. negative liberty) with having the ability to really do what one is formally at liberty to do. Your response to this objection will naturally depend on whether you think that being free to do X entails having the ability to do X. For negative liberty, I say that it depends on someone possibly having the ability to do X, and that for practical liberty, it depends on the person in question having this ability. I say this, because the freedom to do what no one could do is necessarily a vacuous sort of liberty. Laws forbidding us to do what cannot be done would be pointless, and the repeal of such laws would do nothing to increase the choices that may realistically be made. Suppose there were a law in our society forbidding men to have babies. The law would clearly be pointless. Suppose now that the government, realizing the pointlessness of this law, were to repeal it, and so make men now vacuously free to have babies. No one would benefit from this repeal. Therefore, if our freedom to do X does not entail that someone has, or might reasonably be expected to have, the ability to do X, we must have many vacuous and pointless freedoms.

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A defender of negative freedom, who thinks that being free to do X does not entail that someone has, or might reasonably be expected to have, the ability to do X, may wish to distinguish between utterly pointless freedoms and relatively pointless ones. The freedom of men to have babies would be an example of an utterly pointless one, because no one could exercise it. But there are many negative freedoms, someone might say, that are only relatively pointless. My negative freedom to buy a yacht is one that means nothing to me personally (because I could not afford it, and could not sail one, anyway), and I should be in no way disadvantaged if this freedom were to be taken away from me. But it is not a freedom that is universally pointless. For there are many people who could buy a yacht if they wanted to, and even enjoy sailing in it. So their negative freedom to buy a yacht is something that they may well value. It is a freedom that really means something to them. In contrast, there are no utterly or relatively pointless practical freedoms. For, if A is practically free to do X, then A must literally be able to do X. Therefore, practical freedoms are always meaningful to those who have them. They can never be utterly pointless, although they may be pointless to others. From the point of view of the individual who has them, practical freedoms represent genuine options. However, practical liberty is not the only, or even the only important, concept of liberty. For the standard concept of negative liberty is required for both planning and legislation. Practical freedoms may change with changing circumstances, since what one can do today may not be the same as what one could do yesterday, or will be able to do tomorrow. But to plan for the future, we must know what the boundaries of practical liberty are, and legislators need to know how to adjust these boundaries. Positive liberty is also important, because, of all the practical freedoms, inner freedom is the one that is most under attack in modern society. Some may think that the loss of some inner freedom is a small price to pay for the increased levels of economic freedom that people now enjoy. But the price is much higher than this. For the demands of the present have come to dominate our decision-making as never before, and long-term planning, and the achievement of eudemonic outcomes, have been sacrificed for the immediate gratifications we are persuaded to seek.

CHAPTER 9

Rights

Every society that is ruled by consent has a kind of social contract that defines the rights and obligations of its members. This social contract is not a mythical agreement made in a state of nature, but a community-wide understanding about how things should be done, and who should be held responsible for doing what. The social contract for our own society is what I call our ‘de facto’ social contract. Some of the elements of this contract are written down in the federal and state constitutions, other parts of it are written into the constitutions or charters of other organizations, and some parts of are written into law. But much of it has never been written, or tested in any court of law. It is just a general understanding that has evolved over the years, presumably, by trial and error, and informal processes of dispute resolution. The question of what rights or obligations should exist in a welfare state must therefore come down to that of the kind of social contract that should exist in such a state. There are some basic human rights that we may reasonably assume should be honoured in any modern state. These are our primary moral values. But to construct a decent humanist society we need more than these. We need to define a whole interlocking structure of social rights and responsibilities that will maximize human well-being. The only plausible procedure, I shall argue, is to start with the existing social structure and seek pragmatically to make it better from a social humanistic point of view.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_9

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9.1   The Social Contract in Locke’s Treatise John Locke’s social contract theory probably did more to shape modern political institutions and practices than any other work in history. It provided the philosophical foundations for the American constitution, and profoundly influenced the theory and practice of politics in Great Britain and the British Commonwealth. Its influence was less direct in Continental Europe, where Rousseau’s theory of the social contract was a major influence. But even Rousseau’s theory was heavily dependent on Locke’s. Yet the social contract that Locke envisaged was really just a social creation myth. For neither he, nor any other major thinker, ever seriously believed that the contract was the outcome of a real historical process. The myth succeeded in circumscribing and justifying political power to the extraordinary extent that it did, because it appealed to widely accepted theories of human nature and natural law, justified the intuitive belief that the people themselves, rather than their royal masters, are ultimately sovereign, and because it had no serious rivals. The older religious justifications of political authority, which defended the divine right of kings, could no longer be accepted. On Locke’s theory, civilized society came into being, when people in a state of nature agreed amongst themselves to cooperate for their mutual protection and benefit under the rule of a government capable of exercising appropriate powers. The state of nature envisaged by Locke was one in which men struggled with nature to provide for themselves and their families and with each other for scarce resources. At the same time, they had to fight to protect themselves and their families from attack by others, and to protect their property from theft or destruction. It was a nasty and threatening world. So security was imagined to be the primary purpose of the agreement to form a government. On the other hand, those living in a state of nature were thought to have enjoyed certain natural rights, including a right to seek justice when any of these natural rights are violated. Some of these, such as our right to life, are inalienable. But others, such as the right to seek justice where it is due, could well be transferred to someone else. According to Locke, our ancestors agreed to transfer some of their transferable rights to the government that they were thereby seeking to establish. Specifically, they agreed to transfer the legislative, executive and judicial powers that they themselves must once have had to a lesser degree in the state of nature to this newly formed government, in the belief that it would provide them with the security and natural justice they sought.

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Locke’s theory is a powerfully attractive one, and most of us would wish that something like this had actually occurred. For it would be nice to think that the social contract that now exists in our country, and so closely resembles the one that Locke envisaged, had such an eminently rational origin. Indeed, such is the power of Locke’s rationale that it has undoubtedly had an enormous influence in shaping our own social contract—as it has had, in fact, throughout the Western World. Nevertheless, our de facto social contract is not what Locke envisaged. Most people think that government has a greater role to play than just to protect life, limb and property, and see that natural justice is done. They also think that the right to property, as property is now understood, is not the sort of inviolable right that Locke’s interpreters have taken it to be.

9.2   De Facto Social Contracts My aim is to show how practically to develop social contracts that facilitate human flourishing. My procedure is not to plump for a theoretically ideal state at the outset, as Locke did, but to begin with the de facto social contracts of existing societies, and seek practical ways of making them more eudemonic. The influence of Locke is already present in the existing contracts of most modern societies in any case, and there is not much point in trying to emulate Locke’s astonishing achievements. I think we just have to start from where we are, and work pragmatically towards achieving our objective. I have no reason to think that there is a uniquely best way of making eudaimonia a reality for most people, or that a solution to this problem that works well in one country will work just as well elsewhere. Different societies have different histories, religions, traditions and ways of doing things, and it is inherently dangerous to think that a social contract that successfully promotes the well-being of the citizens of one country will just as effectively promote the well-being of the citizens of another. Cultures are not so easily transferred. We should therefore reject the idea that there is one solution that fits all to the problem of how to achieve eudaimonia, and proceed pragmatically to work towards achieving our social objective. Indeed, this is how the great welfare states of the British Commonwealth evolved—by degrees, pragmatic measures, and good intentions—not by adherence to any theoretical ideal. The French social historian, Albert Métin, was struck by the non-ideological nature of the labour movements in the Australasian colonies at the beginning of the twentieth century, describing them as being socialist in spirit, but lacking

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in any deep commitment to socialist ideals.1 The colonial Australasians, he said, preferred decent working conditions and a good life to the overall socialist programme so beloved of the Europeans. And this attitude has persisted. The dominant tradition of Australasian social development over the years (until the 1980s) has been one of pragmatic accommodation and piecemeal adjustments and improvements to social programmes. It was not ideologically driven. Yet it worked for the good of society, and it did so much better than any of the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe, and also much better than the current social reform programme in Australia that is motivated by neoliberal ideology. The de facto social contract of a society is the historically generated settlement concerning the nature and structure of that society, the proper distribution of rights and responsibilities within it, the proper ways of doing things (e.g. settling disputes) in the society, and the value system with which it operates. It is not, as it was classically conceived by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to be, an agreement made for self-protection by free agents in a violent state of nature. Nor is it an abstract theoretical construct designed to develop theories of justice or property, as it has been for some more recent social contract theorists (e.g. Rawls, 1971). A de facto social contract is a real, sociologically discoverable, system of accepted rights and responsibilities. Our own social contract must be our starting point. The de facto social contracts that exist in different societies have their roots in various philosophical, religious and cultural traditions. The American social contract is based primarily on the austere libertarianism of John Locke, whose theoretical social contract was concerned with the protection of life, liberty and property. By contrast, many of the European social contracts appear to come from the richer social conception of Rousseau, and to be based on ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity (Hutton, 2002). The traditional Australian social contract was strongly influenced by the thinkers of the Enlightenment at the time of European settlement, and derived from the desire of its essentially working-class people to create a more egalitarian and classless society than the one they left behind in Britain. The de facto social contracts of the Arab nations mostly belong to a tradition where the dominant values are religious rather

1  His 1901 book Le Socialisme sans Doctrines is a classic that deserves to be much better known than it is.

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than social. They are, consequently, very different from the West’s essentially secular social contracts. A de facto social contract is not a written document, although it may include some such documents, e.g. a constitution, bill of rights, charter, or system of laws. Normally, however, it is not fully documented. It may, for example, include norms of behaviour that are legally permitted, but not legally required. So one might, perhaps, think of it as an extended legal system, which includes rights and responsibilities that are not included in black and white law, or even in case law. But really it is not that either. For sometimes the de facto social contract of a society is at odds with its legal system. Generally accepted rights (such as the right to die with dignity) may be legally denied, or widely accepted moral prohibitions (such as corporate plundering) may be legally permitted. It is best to think of the de facto social contract of a society as a comprehensive statement of how the society is expected to work. That is, it should set out, in some detail, what people’s social obligations and expectations are. Specifically, it should describe the social obligations and expectations that people have, either to, or in respect of, its various institutions (including its governments, business corporations, trade unions, universities, hospitals, etc.), its professionals and tradespeople (i.e. its doctors, nurses, plumbers, public servants, etc.), its various classes of individual members (e.g. citizens, children, asylum seekers, pensioners, prisoners, etc.), and its non-human environment (its animals, plants, air quality, water resources, etc.), and it should set out its preferred ways of dealing with conflicts between competing claims, whenever they may arise. Evidently, the de facto social contract of any society must include references to various classes of people or institutions, who (or which) are the primary bearers of social rights and obligations. Let us call these people, organizations or institutions ‘social moral agents’. The social rights and obligations of individuals are not in general grounded in human nature, although, plausibly, those rights that would be generally recognized as human rights, have some such foundation. In general, the rights and obligations of individuals derive from their roles in society, and are therefore held by them only in so far as they happen to have these roles. Thus, an individual may have certain social obligations in virtue of being a resident, citizen, doctor, trade unionist or company director. Or an institution may have a range of social obligations in virtue of its being a national government, bank or university. The general form of a statement of social obligation is, therefore:

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SO1: A social moral agent of the kind X has a prima facie obligation to social moral agents of the kind Y to do A. Alternatively, we may speak of the rights of expectation of the individuals or institutions in society. For we may say that Xs have a prima facie obligation to Ys to do A, if and only if: SO2: A social moral agent of the kind Y has a right to expect a social moral agent of the kind X to do A. Prima facie obligations and rights of expectation are thus correlatives. In what follows, it is often convenient to speak of rights of expectation rather than prima facie obligations, but the two ways of speaking are really interchangeable. The prima facie obligations of members of society, and consequently, the rights of expectation to which these obligations give rise, may differ in ownership (i.e. the class Y in SO1 and SO2), be of wider or narrower scope (i.e. the class X in SO1 and SO2), and be of greater or less strength, depending on the nature and customs of that society. That is, the ownership of a right of expectation is the class of individuals or institutions considered to have this right. A holder of a right of expectation might, for example, be a citizen, a client or a customer, or, on the other hand, it might be a parliament, a hospital or a restaurant. By the scope of a right of expectation, I mean those classes of individuals or institutions that are thought to be bound to honour this right. Thus, a right of expectation might be supposed to be binding on all citizens, all doctors or all professional people, or, on the other hand, it might be considered to be binding on all government departments, law courts or prisons. A right of expectation has individual universal scope if and only if it is considered to be binding on all morally competent individuals, i.e. individuals who are thought to be mature and competent enough to be fully responsible moral agents. By the strength of a right of expectation, I mean the priority that the holders of this right would give to its fulfilment. Those of highest priority are those that would be most firmly insisted upon, or whose failure to be fulfilled would be most forcefully condemned. The rights that we normally consider to be moral rights are the rights of expectation that are held by individuals. The obligations that we normally consider to be moral obligations are those implied by rights of expectation that have individual universal scope, i.e. binding on every

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morally competent individual. However, since our rights and obligations generally have their origins in the customs of the society to which we belong, there is little point in the ‘social/moral’ distinction, unless one happens to be especially interested in the rights and obligations of individuals. It is true that the rights of expectation that we consider to be moral rights are just those of individual universal scope that are held by all morally competent individuals. The system of rights of expectation, and hence prima facie obligations, existing in a community thus includes the community’s individual moral system. But the social moral system is more general than this. For the social system also includes a range of prima facie obligations that are either not universally held, or not universally binding, or are held by, or are binding on, governments, corporations or institutions, rather than individuals. Doctors have certain rights of expectation vis-à-vis the hospitals in which they operate. Patients have certain rights of expectation vis-à-vis their doctors. Hospitals have certain rights of expectation vis-à-vis the states in which they operate. Contractors have certain rights of expectation vis-à-vis the other contracting parties. Workers have certain rights of expectation vis-à-vis their employers, and conversely. Some of these rights are plausibly reducible to moral rights held by individuals. But they exist whether or not this is so, and must be recognized in the appropriate way if society is to function properly. Individual moral rights and obligations are, by their very nature, less dependent on the social structure of the society in which they are embedded than are other rights and obligations, since the same individual rights and obligations could, in principle, exist in any society. Consequently, moral philosophers have tended to focus on individual rights and obligations, and say very little about the social moral systems in which they occur. Indeed, there is a tendency to think of morality as being restricted to the study of individual rights and obligations, and to think of the more general social systems in which they occur as things that belong properly to the realm of political philosophy. But in my view, there is no useful distinction to be drawn in this way between moral and political philosophy. For both must be concerned with the description and evaluation of the de facto social contracts, to which both individual and social moral systems belong. Drawing a distinction between moral and political philosophy on the basis of scope would not matter much if it were just an arbitrary division of intellectual labour. But in fact it matters a great deal, because many

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philosophers consider that moral philosophy is required as a foundation for political philosophy. And this implies that individual moral theory is required as a foundation for social moral theory. However, individual moral theory is best understood as special case of social moral theory, not as a foundation for it.

9.3  Origins of Moral Obligation David Hume makes much of the distinction between what is customarily done or inferred, and what ought to be done or inferred. His theories of moral and empirical reasoning are both founded on this distinction. Moral reasoning cannot be based on any rational inferences from what is done to what ought to be, for there are no rational grounds for any such inferences, he says. Similarly, scientific reasoning cannot be founded on any legitimate inferences from what is the case to what must be, because our knowledge of what does happen in nature does not provide rational grounds for supposing that it has to happen this way. There are no natural necessities, he says, and no natural moral imperatives. Yet, experience is obviously relevant to what we think we ought rationally to believe about the world, and how we think we ought morally to behave. So the question for Hume becomes: How is this possible? How can our experience, which is incapable of legitimating any inferences about what must be the case, or ought to be, be a guide to life? Hume’s answers to the two parts of this question are well known: ‘All inferences from experience are effects of custom, not of reasoning’, he says (Hume, 1777, V, I, 36). And all inferences from experience about what we ought to do depend on our judgements concerning the likely effects of our actions, and which effects we should prefer. However, the inference from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ does not often seem to be as indirect as this. For what we think we ought to do often seems to depend largely on what we think is normally done. It rarely depends on an analysis of the likely consequences. If the action is one of a kind that is generally acceptable, and there is no other kind of action that would also be generally acceptable in the circumstances, then an action of the generally acceptable kind is normally to be preferred. Indeed, most people would say that they have a right to expect an action of this kind to be done in these circumstances. However, if people generally have a right to expect an action of this kind in these circumstances, and you are a person in these circumstances, then it follows that you have a prima facie obligation to perform it. For

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example, if you are a doctor in an emergency situation in which medical help is required, and you are the only doctor in a position to provide that assistance, then you have a prima facie obligation to provide the assistance required, and the people in this situation, indeed in the community generally, have a right to expect you to offer your assistance. So custom, it would seem, is indeed the guide to life, just as Hume says, but not because it is the basis of inductive inference. It is the guide to life, because it defines a system of rights of expectation, and its correlative system of prima facie obligations, by which people are expected to live and work. The argument from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ that is involved in the derivation of prima facie obligations from customs is not, of course, a valid argument. From the fact that X is customarily expected to do A in circumstances C, it does not follow that anyone has a right to expect X to do A in these circumstances. Nevertheless, if X’s doing A is a matter of public concern, then X’s failure to do A would normally be seen as a failure by X to do the right thing. Such failures may be seen as morally serious, not only in themselves, but also because they have the potential to play havoc with the moral decisions of others who are reasonably relying on X doing what is expected of him or her. So customs, which create reasonable expectations, also create rights of expectation, and hence prima facie obligations. However, the prima facie obligations that are created in this way are may not be seen as moral obligations. If others are relying on me doing A, just because A is what it would be customary for me to do in the circumstances, then I may be able to excuse myself from doing A simply by making an announcement to this effect. For, if any moral principle is involved here, it may be only that one ought not morally to frustrate others’ reasonable expectations on matters of public concern. But a customary prima facie obligation may be much stronger than this. If doing A is widely considered to be my personal or professional responsibility, then I would need to do more than just excuse myself. I would need to have sufficient reason for not doing A, or be prepared to take the heat of disapprobation for neglecting my duty to do it. What then is the source of my being held thus accountable for doing A? What leads people to hold me responsible? The short answer is, again, custom. I am responsible for what people make me, or insist on my being, responsible for. As an infant, I have no responsibilities. As a child, I have been assigned some responsibilities to my siblings, parents, pets, etc., but few that extend beyond my family circle. As an adult, I am given a wide range of responsibilities, depending on the kind of society in which I live, and on my ability to function as a citizen of

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that society. As a father, mother, tradesman, professional, politician or prime minister, I have yet other responsibilities, and, again, these are just the things for which members of society hold me responsible. Of course, in a free society, nothing prevents me from holding myself responsible for acting in ways that I believe to be desirable, even if the rest of the community would disagree with me, or be indifferent to my consequent behaviour. In doing so, I impose a greater discipline upon myself than the general community does, and I may even render myself liable to ridicule or prosecution for my eccentric behaviour. Nor does anything prevent me from advocating that others should do what I do, or act on similar principles. In doing so, I would be adopting the position of a moral reformer, and accepting the attendant risks of such a stance. But those who wish to live in a better society than the current one are bound to try to find ways of making it so. Of course, I may be a crank, and my ambitions to reform our social moral system may ultimately be futile, or even harmful. But if I am successful in persuading others to follow me, and the movement gains strength, then I may eventually be instrumental in changing the social moral system of the community—hopefully, for the better. A moral reformer is therefore one who seeks to change the social moral system of his or her community. He or she will normally try to do this by persuading people to behave differently. Therefore, from the point of view of the moral reformer, individual morality precedes social morality. But from the point of view of society, the reverse is the case. For the well-being of people in society depends on the social moral system it contains, and the degree to which it is effective in shaping the lives of its members.

9.4  Individualism in Moral Theory Traditional moral theories seek answers to the question: ‘How morally should I behave?’ They appeal to revelation, reason, human nature or intuition in their efforts to answer it. But they do not attempt to answer it by appeal to any more general theory about how groups of people should behave. For the way that any group of people ought to behave is supposed to be derivable from the theory of how the individuals that comprise that group should behave. In this sense, traditional moral theory is individualistic. It is concerned fundamentally with he personal question rather than with the communal one. This is true of those moral theories in the Christian tradition that are related to questions of individual salvation.

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The moral theories of the Enlightenment that were supposedly founded on reason alone were also individualistic. For example, Kant’s meta-ethical Categorical Imperative: ‘Act only on principles that you could consistently advocate that everyone should act on’, is a maxim for the guidance of individuals, not social groups. The consequences for group behaviour would be those of everyone acting on principles that accord with this meta-rule. The moral theories developed by the empiricist philosophers of the nineteenth century are also individualistic. The principle of act-­ utilitarianism, for example: ‘Act so as to maximize prospective utility’, is an individualistic ethic. For it too is intended as a guide to individual moral choice. Finally, it is true of all natural rights theories. For these theories are all concerned with the rights and duties that individuals are supposed to have, independently of their social setting. This focus of moral theory would not matter much if the systems of morality that individuals live by had no implications for others. But, of course, they do have such implications. For individual morality is essentially about how people should treat each other, or the members of other species. It is not just concerned with any duties that people may have to themselves. Consequently, moral theory does not stand on its own. It is also required to provide foundations for our theories of social interaction. Indeed, it is standardly used to derive our theories of justice, and of civil society. It is to be expected, therefore, that the social and political theories that are derived from moral theory will themselves all be individualistic, i.e. founded upon, and ultimately dominated by, the supposed moral rights and duties of individuals. Indeed, this is true. Political liberalism, a political theory that is based on the supposed natural rights of individuals (i.e. the rights that individuals bound only by natural law would have enjoyed in a state of nature), is the dominant political philosophy of the age. Socialism, which calls for social solutions to political problems, is out of favour. If individualism in moral theory is problematic, it is even more so in social theory. For most people want to say that governments, hospitals, universities, law courts and other organizations, all have social obligations, and that we have obligations to them. If such obligations exist, then the question arises: What is their source? They are not apparently obligations that are derivable from the natural rights of the people who are served by these institutions, or of the individuals who work in them. For no such rights could exist in a state of nature, where there are no institutions.

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Moreover, the same rights and obligations would mostly remain, even if the personnel involved in the institutions were to change. So there would appear to be at least some social rights and obligations that are institutionally created, and thereafter go with the job. But if there are such occupational rights and obligations, the question is: Are these too grounded in our natural rights somehow? If so, how? The standard answer is that the rights and obligations of governments and social institutions are all contractual in nature, and that those who, from time to time, undertake to administer these institutions must, at that time, incur the obligations to uphold the institutional parts of the contracts to which they are parties. That is, they must incur the institutional obligations of these contracts when they take up their appointments, or when they swear the appropriate oaths of office. Thus, they are committed to fulfilling the obligations of the government or institution for which they are responsible, because they have effectively promised to do so. But there are many corporate entities that have no socially approved charters that their management teams are legally committed to upholding, and the CEOs of large companies are not required to swear oaths of office that would effectively define their legal responsibilities. For the most part, corporations are allowed to act with impunity to promote the interests of their institutional shareholders, whatever the consequences for the rest of the community, or for future generations. The focus of moral theory on individual morality thus leads to the neglect of social moral issues. In law, perhaps, corporations are persons. But in any moral theory that is based on natural rights, they are not. For the rights and obligations of corporations cannot be discovered just by reflection on their natures. Many people think of corporations as amoral, i.e. as having neither moral rights nor moral responsibilities. The individual focus of morality simply leaves them out of account. But they are much too important in modern society not to be significantly included in moral community. Indeed, with the possible exception of the government itself, they are the major social moral agents in the community today. Their actions can affect hundreds, thousands or even millions of people adversely. In some communities, even the government is powerless to stand up against them. It is vital, therefore, for the project of social humanism, that corporations be brought into the fold of responsible social moral agents. Their rights and responsibilities need to be carefully defined, presumably in socially approved charters, and their managements held legally responsible for

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upholding the principles of these charters. There is no point in appealing to the moral sensibilities of the managements of these organizations, and imploring them to act responsibly. For, in the absence of a charter to which they and their competitors have sworn allegiance, they will be forced by the markets to cut costs in order to stay afloat. Managements will adhere to their charters only if they are legally forced to do so, and believe that they will be adequately protected from competition from other organizations that are not so legally constrained. Traditional moral philosophy also has no obvious way of recognizing professional (or other occupational) obligations within the domain of moral responsibilities. For, if the bearers of moral rights and obligations are individuals, and these rights and obligations are fundamentally the same for all, then the question of how there can be moral rights or obligations that are role-specific demands an answer. Again, the answer will be forthcoming that these special rights and obligations are contractual in origin, and so, presumably, arise from promises given and accepted. But the contracts are seldom written ones, and the agreements to abide by them, if they exist at all, are often tacit. Consequently, the failure of individualistic moral philosophy to deal adequately with the rights and responsibilities of people in designated roles leaves a great many important ethical questions unanswered, and opens up a huge field for litigation. In my view, these ethical questions are now urgently in need of answers. We need to decide which actions are criminal, and which are merely negligent. And we must institute appropriate procedures for dealing with actions of these two kinds. The present differential treatment of the victims of crime and the victims of non-criminal negligence or incompetence is irrational and unsupportable. If a child is accidentally injured in the course of a forceps delivery, and the injury is sufficiently gruesome, the mother may hope to win a settlement of several million dollars in her favour. But if the child is thrown on the ground by a terrorist, and suffers similar injuries, there is no such generous compensation available. The best that the mother can hope for, in addition to some minimal compensation, is the satisfaction of seeing the terrorist convicted and sentenced to a lengthy term of imprisonment. But why should there be any difference? Why should the victims of violent crime be less well compensated than the victims of error, carelessness or incompetence? There is no plausible justification for this distinction, and I shall not bother to try to invent one for the sake of argument. Either the victims of crime must be compensated as

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they would if they were the victims of negligence, with a sympathetic judge awarding huge damages against the state for its failure to protect its citizens from harm, or the victims of negligence should be treated as though they were the victims of crime or misadventure. Or, if neither extreme is acceptable, the victims should at least be treated similarly. The victims of violent crime and of negligence or incompetence should be compensated for their injuries, or supported in the same kinds of ways, for the same kinds of injuries. What happens to the negligent surgeon, shire council, touring company or property owner is another matter. If the negligence was not criminal, then criminal sanctions are not called for. There might be a case for bringing the surgeon before a medical disciplinary board, or a shire council up before a committee of the relevant minister for local government. For, if the charges are upheld, some kind of disciplinary action is presumably called for. It may be as light as a reprimand, or as heavy as loss of professional status. A shire council might be put into the hands of an administrator, a touring company might be deregistered or a property owner might be fined for lack of care. But surgeons, shire councils, touring companies and property owners should not have to, or indeed be able to, insure against possible claims for damages from injured parties arising from negligence. On the contrary, such suits for damages, and such forms of insurance, should be outlawed. If people are negligent in the performance of their duties, then they should be penalized for negligence, whether or not there are any injured parties, and if they are not negligent, they should not be penalized, even if some people have suffered serious injuries through accident or misadventure. A modern eudemonic state thus requires a very different kind of legal system from any that now exists. For it must recognize and deal appropriately with social agents other than individuals, and with people who have rights and responsibilities that arise from their professional or social roles. To afford this recognition, it is necessary to extend the criminal law to allow the state to pursue criminal charges against corporate entities more easily, and to fine them, or remove privileges from them, where they are found to be guilty. Those individuals most responsible for the criminal behaviour of a corporate entity must also be prepared to face charges of criminal behaviour, which may lead to fines, imprisonment or both. The guiding principle that individuals must not be allowed to profit from their crimes, or crimes committed on their behalf, should be extended to cover

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corporations, and hence, indirectly, the shareholders in these corporations. On the other hand, the practice of filing suit against professionals, shire councils, football teams or other service providers for injuries allegedly due to negligence or incompetence should cease altogether. For it takes an important legal function out of the hands of the state (where it properly belongs), and gives it to privately hired investigators and prosecutors (i.e. barristers). It also removes the presumption of innocence that those who are charged are entitled to, and leads to the treatment of victims of negligence or incompetence very differently from, and very much better than, those of violent crime or misadventure.

CHAPTER 10

Individualism

Social humanism is a political philosophy that neatly sidesteps the issue of individualism v. collectivism in political theory. From the point of view of people living in an established society, it is individualistic. A social humanist believes that we all have a right to choose how we are going to live from the range of alternatives that are plausibly available to us, and plan our lives accordingly. In this sense it is individualistic. But this does not mean that we are free to live as we please, according to our own lights. For our rights and responsibilities as members of society, or as occupants of various social or political positions in society, should be collectively, not individually, determined. Social humanism is therefore politically individualistic, but methodologically collectivist. It is politically individualistic because it supports positive liberty, and therefore individualism, as a political ideal. But it is methodologically collectivist in social and political theory, because it argues that answers to questions of social or political responsibility cannot normally be derived from answers to questions about how the individuals who make up society should behave. In moral and political philosophy, the primary question should always be: How should we (as a group, or as a society) behave in these or those circumstances? Not: How should I behave in these circumstances.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_10

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10.1   Political and Methodological Individualism There are two very different conceptions of individualism, a political one and a methodological one. Politically, an individualist is one who acts with positive liberty, i.e. who thinks and acts autonomously, i.e. as an independent, self-willed agent. One would therefore expect any advocate of political individualism to be one who promoted positive liberty as a primary good. But not every advocate of individualism in politics seeks to promote autonomy. In fact, those who claim most vociferously to be the champions of political individualism are often just the advocates of negative liberty, or deregulation, which is a very poor substitute. The ideal of small government is promoted, evidently in the belief that governments are the main oppressors in society. But governments are not the only oppressors in the world, or even, for many people, the most serious threat to their autonomy. Corporations, and their directors and shareholders, are the main beneficiaries of deregulation. But, for many people, the corporate structures that regulate their lives are their principal oppressors. So, gains in corporate autonomy are unlikely to be matched by gains in individual autonomy. On the contrary, the freer corporations are to manage their workforces, the less free are those who are corporately managed to manage their own lives. So no rational defender of political individualism should see deregulation as the sole answer to government oppression. Governments may indeed be very oppressive. But they may also be necessary to protect people from oppression by others. Everyone who is bullied, pushed around or forced to do things they do not want to do, lacks positive freedom, and government action may well be required to liberate people from their civil oppressors. The ideal of small government, which naturally appeals to those in positions of power, may justly be called ‘negative individualism’. It is negative, because its aim is just to deregulate, and so remove constraints on what individuals may do. Negative individualism is, however, very much weaker than Berlin’s positive version, and has a different rationale. It has its roots in Locke’s idea that human beings are ideally free in a state of nature, where the only law is the ‘law of nature’. But social humanists cannot accept this negative ideal of individualism, or the Lockean theory from which it is derived. On the contrary, a social humanist must be a strong supporter of Berlin’s positive ideal, and should envisage a positive role for the state in promoting it. Indeed, a social humanist must support an even more positive ideal of freedom of choice, viz. Sen’s concept of practical liberty.

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The other conception of individualism that is commonly defended, especially by neoliberal theorists, is a methodological principle concerning the primacy of individuals in social and political theory. F.A. von Hayek calls it ‘methodological individualism’. His thesis was that the individual’s perception of the social world, and his/her beliefs about it, and ways of understanding it, are the sources of all social knowledge, and must therefore be the basis of any sound social theory. But such knowledge, he said, is subjective, in that it depends on our individual concepts and perspectives. Consequently, he said, there can be no general facts about society that require explanation, only theories based on individual perceptions. We may have theories about group behaviour. But any sound theory about such behaviour must always be derived from our knowledge of how the individuals that comprise it would behave. Therefore, the method of the social sciences must always be ‘compositive’ or synthetic, i.e. proceed from the particular cases to the more general theories. This contrasts, he said, with the method of the natural sciences, which is typically analytic. For example, from our knowledge of how gases behave, we may construct a theory of how the individual particles that constitute these gases must behave. That is, we may proceed analytically from our knowledge of the gas laws to the micro-theory required to explain these laws. But, according to Hayek, there is nothing comparable to this in the social sciences. The social scientist must always proceed in the opposite direction, from the individual to the collective. This methodological conception of individualism is obviously very different from the political one. It says nothing about positive freedom, or self-determination, or choice. It is just a thesis about the sources of our knowledge of society—and a very dubious one at that. Nevertheless, methodological individualism is relevant to two areas that are of great concern to us here, namely, moral philosophy and economics. It is relevant to moral philosophy, because the methodology of moral theory has traditionally been individualistic. It is individualistic in the sense that the question of how any given individual should act has nearly always been considered prior to the question of how any social groups, or society as a whole, should act. The question of how a group of people should act, in the circumstances in which they find themselves, is thus assumed to be wholly dependent on how the individuals that comprise this group should act. Methodological individualism is relevant to economics, because the methodology of economics is normally synthetic. One does not start with empirical laws concerning the economic behaviour of markets, firms, or

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other groups of people in society, and then proceed to construct a micro-­ theory concerning the economic behaviour of individuals in order to explain these laws. One starts, rather, with certain assumptions about how a rational economic man or woman would behave in these circumstances, and proceeds then to construct a theory about what the group would be expected to do in the absence of any external forces. This way of proceeding would not matter, if the hypotheses about individual motivations and behaviour were considered to be open to refutation by the empirical facts about the group behaviour. But, in fact, the assumption is always that if the group behaviour is not what it ought to be according to the theory, then something external to the system (e.g. a government, trade union, political movement or something else) is interfering with it. The rational basis of individual choice is thought to be known in advance of any empirical evidence concerning group economic behaviour. In this chapter, I shall discuss methodological individualism in moral theory. I shall not pursue the question of whether methodological individualism is appropriate for economic theory. (See Ellis, 2001, Ch. 5, for my views on this subject.)

10.2   Methodological Individualism As rational creatures, we interpret the world around us, and what other people say and do. The beliefs we form are often false, and our understandings of things are often at odds with the best scientific accounts of them. But, according to Hayek, it is our subjective picture of reality that matters in social theory, not the objective facts. For what happens in society depends on what we do, and what we do depends on how we conceptualize what happens in society, and what beliefs we form about it, not on the objective situation. Hayek therefore advocates a methodology for the social sciences that reflects this subjectivity. The methodological individualist, he says, ‘systematically starts from the concepts which guide individuals in their actions’ (quoted by K.J.  Scott, in J.  O’Neill ed. 1973, p. 215). There are no societal facts, he says, just facts about individuals, and their beliefs and attitudes. If there are facts about groups of people, he says, then they must be reducible to facts about individuals, and how they are related to one another. K.R. Popper, while seeming to agree with Hayek, espouses a somewhat different thesis, which Scott calls ‘epistemological individualism’. Popper’s thesis is about explanations in the social sciences – his claim being that ‘we must try to understand all collective

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phenomena as due to the actions, interactions, aims, hopes and thoughts of individual men, and as due to traditions created and preserved by individual men’ (Scott, ibid. p. 217). The two theses are essentially different, however, because Popper is talking about the long-term aims of social inquiry, whereas Hayek is talking about its evidential base. In my view, Hayek and Popper are both wrong. Hayek is wrong, because there are clearly a great many societal facts with which we are all familiar. They are not the laws of history concerning capitalist societies, class conflicts, free market economies, or whatever, that Hayek and Popper both objected to so strongly. Such historicist generalizations are indeed insupportable. The societal facts that we all know about concern such mundane things as sporting clubs, firms, schools, universities, governments, police forces and so on (Mandelbaum, 1955), some of which are major players in society. They have rights (e.g. to own property, enter into contracts, employ people) and obligations (e.g. to their shareholders, to their workforces, to educate people and to keep order, investigate crime). But significant statements about these organizations are not easily reducible, if they are reducible at all, to statements about the beliefs, attitudes, actions, rights or obligations of individuals. So Popper’s epistemological version of methodological individualism may well be wrong too. It is true that organizations like these are staffed by people, serviced by people, provide goods or services to people and so on. Moreover, these social entities were created by people, or by other organizations that were created by people, or by yet other organizations … that were created by people. So, ontologically, the people are prior to their social institutions, and the organizations they have created. But it is not at all clear that the ontology of institutions has much relevance to either the methodology or the epistemology of our study of them. Human beings are ultimately made up of atoms of various kinds. But this ontological fact about us has very little relevance to the methodologies of anthropology, psychology or human biology. We should keep these ontological facts in mind, perhaps. But that is about all. In rejecting methodological individualism, I am not committed to holism in social theory, or to any particular form of social organization. I do not believe, as Hayek evidently does, that those who reject methodological individualism are on a slippery slope to some form of totalitarianism. This is an example of historicist thinking of the kind that you would expect Hayek, of all people, to condemn as outrageous. My rejection of methodological individualism is based firmly on the fact that there are

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such things as societal facts, on my belief that it is very hard, if not impossible, to reduce such facts to ones about individuals, and on my further belief that such a reduction is pointless anyway. Ontologically, I am in full agreement with both Hayek and Popper about the priority of people in society. But I believe that every society has a structure, and that it is important that we should try to understand what this structure is—at least that of our own society. We must not turn a blind eye to the existence of corporations, and other powerful institutions in society, simply on the ground that their existence must ultimately be due to the creativity of individuals. This is no doubt true. But governments still have to learn how to control them, and how they can be made to work for the benefit of the public. I say that we should study how society works, and seek pragmatically to improve it. The question of whether a satisfactory ontological reduction of social institutions to individuals can be made is philosophically interesting, but politically not urgent. It is not urgent, because we can often know what companies and other organizations are doing, even when we do not know in detail who is really doing what. When a successful company does most of its banking in a remote tax haven, you know very well that the company’s motivation is to avoid having to pay taxes somewhere. But you may not know the motivations of the individual directors of the company, or even understand how the scheme is supposed to work. The decision to use a tax haven could conceivably have been taken inadvertently. It might, for example, not have been marked as a starred item on the agenda, and so passed without anyone other than the chief accountant knowing it was there. It is even possible that no one on the Board would have understood what was being proposed, even if they had known about it. It is certain only that someone understood what was being proposed, knew that if the scheme were implemented, it would reduce the company’s tax liability, and proposed it for just this reason. As I say, we do not necessarily have to be able to identify the individual sources of corporate decisions to know what these decisions are. And if we insist on tracing all such decisions back to their individual sources, as methodological individualism requires, we may make it virtually impossible to prosecute corporate crime. It is politically urgent, therefore, to make designated individuals (presumably the CEOs) legally responsible for the crimes committed by their companies. It should not be possible for a CEO to hide behind his staff, his Board, or his chief advisors, as some well-known politicians evidently do.

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10.3  Social and Moral Agents In moral theory, methodological individualism leads naturally to the view that individuals are the only genuine moral agents. Corporations cannot be genuine moral agents from this this point of view, because they are not morally responsible human beings. Yet corporations are legally individuals in most countries, and so are treated as having many of the rights and responsibilities of ordinary people. They may own property, employ people, sue or be sued for damages, be good or bad corporate citizens, be liable to pay taxes, and are able to commit crimes. On the other hand, they are not really citizens, and do not, indeed, cannot possibly, enjoy ordinary human rights. Nor can they suffer physical abuse, or be sent to prison. There are similar problems concerning the rights and obligations of other kinds of organizations, or people in specific roles, such as doctors or schoolteachers. Universities, finishing schools, hospitals, armies, trade unions, government agencies and governments themselves all have rights and obligations, not only with respect to various classes of people, but also with respect to each other. What, then, are these rights and obligations? How do they arise? And what is their relation to moral rights and obligations? It is clear that the rights and obligations of governments and social institutions must all be contractual in nature, even though we may have had no part in negotiating these contracts, and even though the contracts themselves are mostly understood, rather than written. But then we must ask: What is the nature of the process that creates these contracts, and how do the obligations arising from these contracts differ, if at all, from moral obligations? My answers are: (1) De facto social contracts exist in almost every society. Those involving governments are often constitutionally defined. Those involving government bodies are normally defined by legislation. Those involving non-government organizations are normally just historically generated understandings of the kind that are tested from time to time in the civil courts. Social contracts of this informal nature will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. (2) A social contract, however it may be generated, necessarily creates social contractual obligations, and corresponding rights of expectation. Our social responsibilities, I shall argue, are just our social contractual obligations, and our social rights are the rights of expectation that arise from the social obligations of others to us.

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(3) Our so-called moral rights and responsibilities are then just subcategories of our social rights and responsibilities. In particular, if I have a moral right to anything, then everyone else has a social responsibility to see that my right to it is respected. If I have a moral obligation to do something, then I am socially responsible to everyone to do it. Moral rights and obligations are thus to be distinguished from other rights and responsibilities, not by their nature, but by their generality. If these answers are correct, then all rights and obligations have their origins in social contracts, and are therefore irreducibly social. The rights and obligations that we recognize as moral are a sub-set of these. There is no conceptual barrier, therefore, to constructing a general social/moral theory that includes both individuals and institutions. There is no reason, therefore, why we should seek to construct a political theory on the supposedly individualist premises of a moral theory.

10.4  Social Moral Systems A satisfactory moral framework for a society that includes institutions, or people in responsible roles, cannot be derived simply from a knowledge of the rights and obligations of individuals. For, even if we could say clearly what the rights and obligations of individuals were, independently of the social institutions that exist, or the roles that people have, we should have to supplement this knowledge by describing the social contracts that exist concerning these institutions or roles, and then specify the rights and obligations to which these contracts give rise. A more promising approach to the construction of an adequate moral framework for a modern society would therefore be to start, not with the individual, and the rights that he or she might be supposed to have in a state of nature, or with any other methodologically individualistic premises, but with the de facto social contract for the whole society. That is, we could begin by describing how the society works, who is responsible for what, what institutions exist, for what purposes they exist, who is responsible for what within these institutions, and so on. If the society has an individual moral framework that is effective in shaping people’s lives or actions, then this too would certainly have to be included as part of the overall contract. But the social moral

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framework included in the overall social contract would be much richer than any individualistic moral system, since it would describe the rights and responsibilities of its institutions, professional people, plumbers, soldiers, etc., as well as its individuals—with respect to each other, their workers or servants, their customers or clients, the government, and to the general community. Of course, the only kind of social moral framework that can be derived in this way is purely descriptive. And moral philosophers are unlikely to rest easily with the thought that knowing the details of the de facto social contract of various societies is all there is to moral philosophy. Moral philosophers will naturally want to improve them—to make them better— much better if possible. So the question arises: How are social moral frameworks to be evaluated? My answer is, straightforwardly, by how well they contribute to the well-being of the people they serve. For this is what social humanism is all about. The social contract of a society has to be judged by how well it satisfies the aim of maximizing happiness. But it should be noted that the objects of evaluation are not particular acts, as in act-utilitarianism, nor rules, as in rule-utilitarianism, but whole social systems. Act-utilitarianism, which is the form of utilitarianism favoured by Henry Sidgwick (1907), G.E. Moore (1912), Jack Smart (1963), Peter Singer and other notable moral philosophers, is a methodologically individualistic moral philosophy. It treats the question: ‘What must I do to maximize utility?’ as though it were independent of, and prior to: ‘What must we do, as a group, or as a society, to maximize utility?’ But there are good reasons to think that the group or social question should take priority.1 Sometimes, it is reasonable to say to an individual ‘Do whatever you think is best’. But a society in which this rule prevailed over all others would be one that licensed the exercise of whatever power one thought was necessary to do what one believed to be right. It would, for example, justify the actions of a self-styled benevolent dictator (whose aim is to maximize prospective utility), and thus justify actions that would be manifestly incompatible with the aim of promoting positive liberty. So, as a 1  For a proof that G.E. Moore’s retrospective act-utilitarianism is deeply flawed, see Castañeda, 1969. For a proof that prospective act-utilitarianism is also flawed, although in a different way, see Feldman, 1974, and Ellis, 1981. The case for what I once called ‘strategic’ utilitarianism, which is a precursor to social humanism, is set out in Ellis, 1981.

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social humanist, I must reject act-utilitarianism, however ‘utility’ might be understood. I do not want other people deciding what will make me happy, or help me to achieve eudaimonia, and then, out of the kindness of their hearts, forcing their decisions upon me. I would naturally prefer to live in a society in which I have personal space to move, and seek eudaimonia in my own way. Like Berlin, I put a high value on positive liberty. A sage act-utilitarian could easily reply that these feelings could all in principle be taken into account by a good act-utilitarian in calculating utilities, and that my fears of act-utilitarianism are therefore unwarranted. Yes, but it is the arrogance of thinking that you could do this that really worries me. Defenders of act-utilitarianism usually argue that the maxim: ‘Always act in whatever way will maximize prospective utility’ was never intended to be a practical moral principle. Smart, for example, has insisted that theoretical act-utilitarians would require supplementary utilitarian rules of thumb. Such rules, he said, would needed as practical guides to action, because most of us, including he, himself, would be unable to carry out the required utilitarian calculations, or, at least, do so in real time. But if the act-utilitarian principle is not intended as a practical guide to action, then it is not a practical moral principle either, and therefore cannot be part of the de facto social contract of any real society. It is at best a theoretical ideal for a theoretically ideal society, in which everyone is seeking to maximize utility for everyone, and all are perfectly informed about the probable consequences of all of their actions. On close analysis, the act-utilitarian principle turns out to be is useless, even as a theoretical ideal. For the uncoordinated actions of people, however well intentioned, are likely to produce chaos rather than happiness. Imagine a society made up of act-utilitarians, whose de facto social contract has been reduced to the single rule: Always act so as to maximize prospective utility. Let us suppose that the members of this society know all of the possible consequences of everyone’s actions, and the prospective utilities of all of these consequences. Surely it will be said, this would have to be the best and happiest of all societies. Not so. For it is demonstrable that there can be no individualistic strategy for maximizing value, even if we were all perfectly rational (and known to be so), had a common value system, and had perfect knowledge of the prospective utilities of all possible actions.2

2

 For a proof of this, refer to Social Humanism, ch, 1.7 pp 34–38.

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10.5  Social Humanism and Consequentialism Social humanism is both a moral and a political philosophy. As a moral philosophy, it is consequentialist, but not individualistic. For the primary moral questions should always be: How should we (as a group, or as a society) behave in these or those circumstances? Of course, one is sometimes faced with an individual choice, where one has no responsibility to any larger group. Then one must act as best one can to promote eudaimonia, and, in these circumstances, a social humanist will behave rather like an act-utilitarian. In other circumstances, one will have a responsibility to behave in a certain kind of way, because one has contracted, either formally, or informally, to do so. Then one has a prima facie obligation to act in this way. As a consequentialist, one must acknowledge that this prima facie obligation exists, but could be overridden. If it is clear that great good could be done, or considerable harm avoided, by breaking one’s contract, and acting in a way that the community at large would regard as prima facie immoral, then one should break the contract, and face the consequences of doing so, if these would not themselves be too horrific. One is not required to be a saint. As a political theory, social humanism is practically liberal and politically individualistic. For a social humanist believes that we all have a right to choose how we are going to live from the range of alternatives that are plausibly available to people in the community, and plan our lives accordingly. It is not enough that a large number of options should be legally open to us. It is not even enough that we should all be positively free, in Berlin’s sense, to choose from the range presented what we want to do with our lives. We should all be practically as free as possible to seek fulfilment and happiness in our own way, and so realistically able to choose what we want to do. It follows that a eudemonic society must be as politically individualistic as it is possible for us to make it. For anyone who is practically free in this sense must be as positively free to act according to their individual preferences as it is possible for them to be in our kind of society.

CHAPTER 11

Social Contracts

There is a long tradition of founding states theoretically on mythical social contracts. In the modern era, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin all provided such theories to justify the kinds of states they preferred. Hobbes used his theory to justify a Leviathan—a ruler with absolute powers. Locke provided the foundations for liberalism, more or less as we know it today. Rousseau’s social contract was widely influential in the construction of the French Republic, following the revolution of 1789. Rawls and Nozick built on Locke’s fictional theory to construct their own models. Rawls sought to provide theoretical foundations for a state that was not only liberal, but also socially just. Nozick defended what he called the minimal, or nightwatchman, state, which is the kind of state that is generally preferred by today’s neoliberals. Dworkin used it to construct a theory of social equality. However, none of these theories are tenable. They all begin with imagined states of nature, and ask: What kind of bargain would you make in such a state to protect yourself, your family and your possessions from attack? Or, in Rawls’s case: What kind of state would you consider to be both secure and fair, if you had to choose from behind a ‘veil of ignorance’? But the imagined states of nature are nothing like the real ones. More importantly, the social contracts that were supposedly agreed are not much like the de facto social contracts of any existing societies, since

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_11

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they tell us nothing about the rights or responsibilities of many of the most important agents in such societies. I will argue here that the whole mythological approach is wrong. We should work with the realities of the existing social structures, not with creation myths. We should ask: How could the existing social structures be made more eudemonic, not what would these structures have been if our ancestors in the mythical states of nature had been more rational? The real question is: What kind of political and legal system would be needed to administer or enforce the kinds of social contracts that we have, or want to have? Creation myths are for idealists: de facto social contracts are for realists.

11.1   Natural Rights and Moral Essentialism By defining our natural rights as those that would have existed in a state of nature, Locke effectively enshrined his social creation myth in American culture, and, less directly, in the cultures of many other countries. For Locke’s theory of natural rights was the foundation stone for his theory of civil government, which in turn was to become the underlying philosophy of the American conception of the role of government. Consequently, Americans tend to believe, as Locke once did, that governments should exist only to protect the rights that individuals would have had in a state of nature, i.e. their natural rights. Anything else, they are disposed to say, must be an encroachment on individual liberty. The case for such an individualistic conception of rights, and such a narrow conception of the role of government, is argued forcefully by Robert Nozick (See paragraph 3 below). Locke’s theory of government presupposes that individuals have a range of basic human rights, and that they are morally bound, as rational free agents, to obey what he calls ‘the law of nature’, i.e. the natural law that is concerned with the protection of these rights. The natural rights of individuals were supposed to include those of life, liberty and property1), and also a range of ‘executive powers’ concerning the natural law (D.  Lloyd-Thomas, 1995, pp.  20–21). These executive powers were thought to include the rights of individuals to:

1  Changed to rights to life, liberty and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ in the American Declaration of Independence.

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1. judge for themselves what actions are in accordance with, or violate, the natural law, 2. restrain any attempts to violate the law of nature, using force if necessary, and, 3. judge what punishments are deserved by actions that they deem to violate the natural law, and 4. punish these violations. Locke held that civil society exists for the protection of the natural rights of people, i.e. those that would exist in a state of nature, and that governments are instituted to administer the executive functions of the law of nature on behalf of their citizens. They do so, Locke holds, on a basis of trust, and are entitled to support so long as they honour this trust, and administer these executive functions fairly and efficiently in accordance with the natural law. Natural rights theories, like most other methodologically individualistic political philosophies, are morally essentialist. That is, they suppose that the moral rights and duties of people are essential to their developed natures: so [if anyone] lacks any of the natural rights or obligations of normal adults, then they cannot be fully developed as human beings. Such people are excluded from the category of fully responsible agents— although they may be placed in some lesser category. Children and imbeciles have always been so excluded, as indeed were women in earlier times, and still are in some cultures. Nevertheless, moral essentialism is a highly dubious position. For it entails that moral theory is really about human nature, and has nothing directly to do with how people should live and interact with each other in civil society, or with the members of other societies. It is reasonable enough to assume that how atoms of the same or different kinds of substance interact with each other is a function of the intrinsic natures of these substances. For the various kinds of atoms are all natural kinds, and the kinds of chemical processes in which they may be involved are all natural kinds of processes. But the class of human beings is not strictly speaking a natural kind, and their ways of interacting with each other are not natural kinds of processes (Ellis, 2001, Chap. 2). Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to suppose that human beings have a number of basic needs and desires, which any social theory about how people should live, or interact with each other, should respect. One does not have to be a moral essentialist to believe that human beings have a lot

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of basic attitudes in common. The mistake of most moral essentialists is to assume that some minimal set of these basic desires or needs is sufficient to found a satisfactory moral or political system. Locke’s list of fundamental human rights, for example, is much shorter than it might be. It does not include rights to shelter, health care, education or any of a number of others that would be widely recognized today as basic human rights. The reason is that these rights did not, and presumably could not, have existed in a state of nature. Therefore, whatever else they may be, they cannot, on Locke’s theory, be natural rights. The practical moral theory that I shall be developing here is neither individualistic nor morally essentialist. Practical moral systems, I shall argue, should be founded on political and social realities, not on reasoning based on scripture, or on a priori individualistic assumptions about human beings in a state of nature. Nor are they derivable by pure reason. Practical moral theory proceeds from the opposite assumption that human beings are naturally social creatures, with natural abilities and values that are adapted to the kinds of tribal lives that people led in that vast period of prehistory before civilization began. From a moral point of view, we are not like Adam or Eve in the Garden of Eden—innocent and guiltless. Nor are we like sophisticated seventeenth-century Englishmen on the North American frontier, as Locke seems to have believed. Our intrinsic value-­ system, such as it is, goes back a long way further in history. Moreover, our natural value-system cannot be assumed to be adequate to found an acceptable moral or political theory in the twenty-first century. Indeed, it can be argued that our tribal values, some of which are likely to be genetically encoded, are presently a very great danger to our survival, and that sophisticated strategies must be adopted if we are to avert disaster arising from them (Ellis, 1974). If, from a biological point of view, we are all still basically members of tribes, then we are likely to have precisely the kind of inbuilt value system that is needed for tribal survival. Our men are likely to be warriors at heart, and our women to be their loyal supporters in battle. Consequently, if there is any reason to think that our tribe, whatever we may think it is, is under attack, we are likely to come immediately to its defence, by uniting behind someone whom is perceived to be a strong leader, and who we think will stand up to the challenge. Thus, we have a kind of tribal admiration for strong leadership, and an extraordinary disposition to be led wherever the strong leader cares to take us. Hermann Goering understood this very clearly:

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The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. If Goering was right, and I see no reason to doubt him, then a moral system that is based on human nature is likely to be very dangerous. For our human nature must be one of the major problems we face. To survive in a world that has fearful weapons of mass destruction, we shall need to keep human nature firmly in check. To do this, we shall need a practical moral system that is firmly based in a social framework that is as resistant to this kind of pressure as we can make it. A practical moral system is a set of strategies designed to maximize value for the members of a given society. It must be a practical system in the sense that it can effectively be put into practice, and be internalized by those required to act by it. Consequently, its concepts must be readily intelligible to the members of the society, and its precepts must be simple, reasonable, and not too demanding. It is reasonable to assume that everyone should aim to live a good and worthwhile life, whatever their culture. But it is not to be assumed that there is any unique way of achieving this. Different societies may well have different belief systems, or live together in different circumstances, from the members of most other societies. Consequently, a good strategy for achieving a state of eudaimonia in one society may not be a good strategy for doing so in another. Moreover, there is no guarantee that different successful strategies will result in similar outcomes. But this is as far as my social relativism goes. I do not say that we should not insist upon global standards of human rights, or that we should condone barbaric practices, just because they appear to be acceptable to the majorities in some of the countries in which they occur. On the contrary, we should all condemn them, and let it be known that these countries will never be acceptable as partners in a global community so long as these practices continue. But this does not mean that we must aim for homogeneity in the global social contract. Rather, the aim must be must be to find a universal accommodation. For this is how all social contracts evolve— not by agreement in detail, but by agreement to disagree where full agreement cannot be reached. Consequently, no one can impose a social contract on a society from without or above, and if the Americans think that they can impose their social contract on the rest of the world, as they now seem intent on doing, then they are sadly mistaken. The rest of the

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world will not be willing to accept their cultural and moral domination. What we have to do is work with some degree of humility to try to achieve a global settlement that will be good enough to be respected, and broad enough to embrace all states that seek honestly to promote the good of their people. Practical moral theory is concerned with fundamental questions about how societies of various kinds should structure themselves, given their belief- and value-systems, and what they should do to make their own, or assist others to make theirs, better places (from their respective points of view) in which to live and work. These questions are fundamental in the sense that they must be the starting point for any theoretical study of practical moral theory. Of course, there may be some values that are universal, and so cherished by people in all societies. Indeed, given the level of agreement that now exists around the world about human rights, this is undoubtedly true. Nevertheless, it cannot be assumed that there exists a system of natural human rights that is sufficiently comprehensive to provide satisfactory foundations for all social systems. This, for two reasons: (1) Universal human rights declarations define minimal standards of decency for all societies, not optimal ones; (2) Such declarations can say very little about how societies should be structured, or who should be responsible for what. In principle, claims about the rights and obligations of individuals in a society must be derivative in practical moral theory. For they must depend ultimately on the belief- and value-systems that prevail in the societies of which they are members. These value-systems will, of course, be partly reflected in what are considered to be the basic rights and obligations of individuals. But not entirely. For a system of individual rights and obligations can never be sufficient to found a social or political system. The need for democracy, for example, is not grounded in any individual rights or responsibilities. Democratic rights and responsibilities are predicated on the assumption that a democratic structure for society exists, and is preferable to any other. But they do not underwrite such a structure. In most situations, democratic structures are no doubt preferable to any other kind of structure. But it is not a necessary proposition that this is so; and there must be many societies around the world in which this would be widely disputed. For these reasons, it should not be assumed at the outset that the moral rights and obligations of people are always and everywhere the same, as moral essentialism requires. Some basic human rights must be recognized,

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but beyond this minimal set, there is a good deal of room for manoeuvre. The practical moral rights and obligations of people in different societies are therefore variable. They are not fixed, as they must be in intuitionist and natural law theories, even though they may be fundamental to the theoretical structures in which they are embedded.

11.2   Minimal and Semi-minimal States Robert Nozick’s book Anarchy, State and Utopia (Nozick, 1974) defends what he calls the ‘minimal state’. His thesis is that people band together for one legitimate reason only—protection of their natural rights and property against the use of force by others. Banding together for other purposes, e.g. to promote social goods other than protection from wrongdoers, he argues, is necessarily unjust, since it involves transfers of money or resources from those who have a natural right to them to those who do not. Thus, the state envisaged by John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (Rawls, 1971), which is clearly much more than a minimal state, would be unjust, he says, and therefore immoral. Nozick envisages three sorts of ways of providing protection for those who seek it, by having: (1) a number of private protective agencies competing for business (such as the Chicago mobs in the 1930s), (2) a single private protective agency, to which people may not subscribe, even if it enjoys a monopoly in the protection business within the relevant territory (such as the Sicilian mafia), and (3) a single private protection agency that enjoys a monopoly and has the power to raise revenue through some form of taxation sufficient to cover the cost of protection of all within the territory (Nozick’s ideal). Of these, (2) is what Nozick calls the ‘ultraminimal state’, and (3) is his preferred ‘minimal state’. This is a bit of a caricature, perhaps, but it is not too far removed from what he actually says of the minimal state. Here is how Nozick himself describes the minimal state: The minimal (night-watchman) state is equivalent to the ultraminimal state conjoined with a (clearly redistributive) Friedmanesque voucher plan,

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financed from tax revenues.2 Under this plan all people, or some (for ­example, those in need), are given tax-funded vouchers that can be used only for their purchase of a protection policy from the ultraminimal state. (pp. 26–27)

Nozick is worried about this redistributive element at the very foundation of the minimal state. As he says: If some redistribution is legitimate in order to protect everyone, why is redistribution not legitimate for other attractive and desirable purposes as well? What rationale specifically selects protective services as the sole subject of legitimate redistributive activities? (p. 27)

It is surprising, perhaps, that this is all he is worried about. For it seems to show an appalling callousness towards underprivileged people. The poor in any affluent society may well be more worried about getting food, shelter, medical care and education than being robbed or bashed up. Nevertheless, this is indeed his only worry about the minimal state—that it is too generous to the poor. To allay this worry, he promises to take up the question later of the legitimacy of using taxation revenues to protect everyone in the territory, even those who cannot afford to pay for it. His argument, when it is finally given, is this: 1. All people have a natural right to defend their property and person, and may employ protective agencies to exercise this right on their behalf. 2. All people have a natural right to judge which actions are, or risk being, violations of people’s natural rights, and to employ others to exercise this right on their behalf. 3. All people have a natural right to justly punish people whom they consider to be wrongdoers, i.e. violators of people’s natural rights, and employ agents to exercise this right on their behalf. 4. However, the procedures that may be employed in the exercise of these natural rights, whether by individuals or their agents, may be highly unreliable, and therefore dangerous. 5. So, everyone has a natural right to employ an agent who will discipline all other individuals and their agents. 2  Milton Friedman, 1962, Chap. 6. Friedman’s school vouchers, of course, all allow a choice about who is to supply the product, and so differ from the protection vouchers imagined here.

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As Nozick himself says: Everyone may defend himself against unknown or unreliable procedures and may punish those who use or attempt to use such procedures against him. As the client’s agent, the protective association has the right to do this for its clients. It grants that every individual, including those not affiliated with the association, has this right. (p. 108) 6. However, a monopoly in the protection business that is powerful enough to prevent any individual or agent from acting with impunity contrary to its own determinations would be unjust if it did not act on behalf of everyone. It would be unjust because it would deprive individuals who are not protected by it of their natural rights to judge and punish wrongdoers as they see fit. 7. Therefore, the dominant protection agency must extend its protection to all. The argument is valid. But its premises are at least highly questionable. The supposed natural rights of individuals to judge and punish as they see fit are non-existent. They do not exist in any practical moral system, anywhere. Nor did they ever exist in the practical moral systems of any of our human or anthropoid ancestors. Locke (1690, Second Treatise, §§7 and 8) postulated these natural rights as existing in his state of nature, because he needed them to provide moral foundations for the penal and judicial institutions of civil government. In Locke’s theory, the state’s right to punish is said to derive from the more primitive right of individuals in a state of nature to do so. But this is so implausible that it is hard to see why it was ever taken seriously. For example, it leads automatically to a theory of infinite jeopardy. For if I, in exercising my right to punish, were to deprive you of your natural right to do so, I should be guilty of wrongdoing, and would myself be infinitely liable to punishment. But, even more implausible, is Locke’s claim that the only legitimate powers of the state derive from the natural rights of individuals in his state of nature. For the rights that must be accorded to individuals in such a state say nothing about human desires or satisfactions. It follows that the state has no legitimate power to try to enhance the lives of people in society, to make their lives better, more productive, or more satisfying. It should not, in theory, provide care, or create opportunities, for those who cannot, through ill health, lack of education, or misfortune, manage on their own. For the state’s role is supposed to be restricted to the negative one of protection, and should not be extended in the positive directions of

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enhancement or assistance. Human beings are allegedly on their own in a state of nature, to pursue their own interests as they are able, and as they see fit. So, according to Locke, this is how it must be in society, if the state is not to exceed its legitimate powers. Locke thought of the state of nature as one without a formal code of laws, within which the only effective law is what he calls ‘the law of nature’, which he conceives as consisting simply of the dictates of reason. The law of nature, he argues, obliges everyone to respect the life, health, liberty and possessions of all others (Locke, 1690, Second Treatise, § 6), since if any man were to claim the right to abuse another in any of these respects, he would be obliged to acknowledge that everyone else has this right too. In a state of nature, Locke supposed, people are as free as it is possible for them to be. For it is a state in which people are constrained only by their natural reason, their belief in the equal natural rights of man, and may act: with perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. (Locke, 1690, Second Treatise, § 4)

The ‘perfect freedom’ to which Locke refers is, of course, negative freedom. It is not the positive freedom that Berlin describes, because there is no reason to think coercion would not be used in a state of nature. And it certainly isn’t practical freedom, because practical freedom would be almost non-existent in a state of nature. There would be very little choice, because one would be engaged in a constant struggle for survival, and one’s choices would effectively be limited by necessity. So, if perfect freedom is defined with reference to the law of nature, as it is in Locke’s Second Treatise, it is a very minimal kind of freedom.

11.3  Rousseau’s Social Contract Rousseau’s social contract was an advance in many important ways on Locke’s. Firstly, it introduced the doctrine of the separation of powers, which Baron de Montesquieu had earlier proposed as a solution to the problem of abuse of power. Secondly, it did not limit the role of government to the minimal roles of protecting life, limb and property, and enforcing the natural law, as Locke’s social contract had done. The Legislature in Rousseau’s state was expected to be responsive to the

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‘general will’, and to pass whatever legislation it considered to be in accordance with it, provided that it was deemed to be in the interests of the people. Hobbes and Rousseau both defended versions of the social contract that would give great power to some person, or assembly of people, to do what they thought fit to promote and protect the interests of the commonwealth, both from external forces, and from internal disruption. For neither believed that a ruler with any lesser powers would have the necessary force to restrain people from pursuing their own interests, regardless of the interests of others. Hobbes argued that the required contract must be of every man with every man, … as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. (Leviathan, Pt 2, Ch 17. Hobbes’ italics)

Rousseau argued in apparently similar vein (The) articles of association (in the formation of the state), rightly understood, are reducible to a single one, namely the total alienation by each associate of himself and all his rights to the whole community. (The Social Contract, p. 60)

But the similarity is superficial. In Rousseau, the community has the ultimate authority on what is to be done, whereas in Hobbes, this authority is given to a monarch. According to Rousseau, ‘the legislative power belongs, and can only belong, to the people’ (p. 101). The community may elect an Assembly to interpret and draw up legislation that is thought to be expressive of the ‘general will’. But, although such an Assembly may have legislative powers, he says, it cannot also be given the executive power of government. For the executive power, he argued, must have all the force it needs to carry out the general will of the people, as it is expressed in legislation. It must also have all the force that would be needed to protect the people from outside attack or internal revolt. That is, it must be a body capable of acting with the force of the whole community. This power, he says, is the one that is given to the body of magistrates, kings or governors that is ‘charged with the execution of the laws, and the maintenance of freedom, both civil and political’ (p. 102). In other words, Rousseau

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advocated a system of government not unlike many that are in force today, where there is a separation of powers between the Executive (e.g. President, Queen, Governor General, etc.) and the Legislature (House of Commons, House of Representatives, etc.).3 By making the whole community the body that ultimately must have responsibility for legislation, and separating the power to make legislation from the state’s power to enforce it, Rousseau succeeded, as no one else had done before, in showing us how to construct a viable democratic state. His theory was in fact compatible with many other kinds of states. But at least it solved the crucial problem of how to combine democracy with the exercise of state powers that are sufficient to keep the peace and repel external aggressors. Consequently, Rousseau’s social contract is often hailed as the philosophy of the French Revolution, where the people demanded more than just liberty. They also demanded equality and fraternity, which are not natural rights. Therefore, no government operating strictly in accordance with a Lockean (or Nozickian) social contract could possibly have done anything about them.

11.4  Contract Theories of Justice and Equality If the social contract of Locke was highly restrictive of the powers of government, it was, for this very reason, a plausible agreement. It would have made sense for rational men in a state of nature of the kind that Locke envisaged to agree to the formation of a state with the powers that he would have given to it. The same cannot be said of the covenants that Hobbes and Rousseau envisaged. What rational man would give up his right to govern himself to a prospective tyrant, even if he thought that other people would do the same? Or, can you really imagine anyone being willing to cede ‘himself and all of his rights’ to the whole community, even—indeed, especially—if you thought that everyone else would be willing to do this too? The whole idea is absurd. But Rousseau was, presumably, looking to the end result, not at the plausibility of the process  In most modern democracies, there is, in fact, a three-way separation of powers, between the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary. It is an important protection from the abuse of power, and there is no doubt that its maintenance has served the democracies well. For, if the body that has the legislative power also had the executive power, then that body could, and probably would, rule as a tyrant. 3

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that he thought would lead to it. He was developing a theory for a form of government that would be ‘of the people, for the people and by the people’. The plausibility of his initial contract was, for him, not the fundamental issue. If this was true of Rousseau, it was even more obviously the case with Rawls. For what Rawls set out to do was develop a theory of social justice, not a contractual theory of a socially just state. The fundamental question he asked was: What is justice? It was not: How must rights and responsibilities be distributed to ensure that justice prevails? Yet he always seemed to be arguing as though he were constructing a theory of the state, just as his famous predecessors had done. But this is not really so. For Rawls’s social contract was supposedly negotiated from behind a veil of ignorance, where the negotiators were supposed to know nothing about themselves that would distinguish them from other people. But no one ever imagined that this was the kind of state from which civilization evolved. The postulate of a veil of ignorance was therefore not plausibly part of a social creation myth. It was just part of a strategy for determining what decisions would be fair, in the sense of favouring no particular persons or groups of people. The fair decision, according to Rawls, will always be one that could have been made from behind his veil of ignorance. Good. But the model was not, and was never intended to be, a plausible hypothesis about the state of nature from which we evolved. What Rawls sought to do was define a principle of social justice that every liberal democratic person could reasonably accept. Dworkin’s social contract theory has a similar aim, except that the principle that he seeks to define is that of equality of access to resources, rather than that of justice. The state of nature that he describes is a desert island with limited resources—rather like Locke’s state of nature, really, but much less provident. Dworkin then imagines that the inhabitants of this island are initially given equal numbers of clamshells, or other intrinsically valueless objects, with which to bid for the scarce resources available, and to insure themselves against loss or damage. Dworkin assumes that this would be the just way to proceed, if you had the power to intervene, and he calls his assumption that of ‘the principle of equality of resources’. Given this as your starting point, the question arises: What will happen next? Is a society in which people have more or less equal access to resources likely to remain one with equal access? Dworkin’s answer is: No.

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If you take account of people’s different tastes, physical and mental abilities, and different degrees of inventiveness, industriousness, prudence, wastefulness and so on, it seems inevitable that the initially equal distribution will become unequal, and arguably, progressively more unequal. So, the politically interesting question arises: What, if anything, should then be done to restore equality of access to resources?4 But Dworkin’s theory, like Rawls’s, is not strictly a social contract theory—at least, not in the original meaning of this term. It was not used, as Locke’s theory was, to define the role of government, or the responsibilities of citizens. It was a theoretical example that was used: (a) to argue that equality of access to resources is unlikely to be preserved in any society in which people are not equal in abilities, or have different interests, or are different in any of a host of other ways, (b) to highlight the moral and political issues created by this process, and (c) to suggest ways of dealing with these issues.

11.5  Starting from Where We Are If we already have a social contract, why should we try to invent one? There might be some point if our aim were to build a new society, or reinvent an old one. But why should we look back to a social creation myth to try to justify or change society in any way? The common sense position is to say that there is no need to do anything of this kind. We should just accept the existing de facto social contract of our society as the framework in which we must work for the time being, and use it as a basis for development. We do not have to accept all of the elements of the de facto social contract as good, or worth preserving. But we do have to start somewhere, and our de facto social contract is all we have, if we do not want to return to Lockean framework, as advocated by the political right in this country, or to Rousseauian framework, as advocated by the political left. Moreover, we know what we want to achieve, viz. a eudemonic state, in which everyone has the best opportunity they can be given to flourish as 4  One would have expected, therefore, that most of the book would be concerned with the issue of how to redistribute wealth and power in a free and democratic society (such as the USA or Australia) in which vast differences of wealth and power now exist, and in which there is no existing mechanism for restoring the balance. But in fact Dworkin has very little to say about this important question. For example, there are just four pages in his 500-page book discussing wealth and inheritance taxes (pp. 346–349).

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human beings. If we have this as our aim, it is not hard to think of ways of improving our existing society, without dreaming of a new social contract. Rawls and Dworkin have both made significant contributions to the problem of how to make our society a fairer one. This is our problem too. But it is only one of many problems. If our aim is to build a society in which we can all lead good and satisfying lives, we shall have to make provision for a much more equitable access to resources, as Rawls and Dworkin both believe. But not just short term. There is no point in issuing everyone with clamshells, or whatever the currency is, and hoping that this will solve the problem of distribution. People need much more than money to flourish. They need meaningful and continuing employment, education, good health, access to public utilities, and so on. Above all, they need to have a role or standing in society that they feel good about, and they need to be accepted in society for what they are, and what they do. The de facto social contract of a society must make reference to all of its social and political structures, and detail the social or political roles that have been traditionally assigned to them. It must refer to the courts, police forces, universities, community hospitals, public schools, shire councils, state and federal governments—in short, to all of the public institutions of our society—and describe their rights and responsibilities as these have so far determined by the constitution, statute law, regulation, or civil law. It must also refer to members of the professions, trades, practices, management and employee classes, property owners, and so on, and say specifically what the rights and responsibilities are. This might seem like an impossible task, but in fact much of it has already been done. Many professions have established codes of practice, and many of those in other kinds of positions of responsibility have their rights and responsibilities fully described in the terms and conditions of their employment. And, where these terms or conditions are insufficiently detailed, people’s rights and responsibilities have been further determined by the civil courts. The most obvious gap in our social contract concerns the rights and responsibilities of private companies, multinational corporations, banks, insurance companies and their directors, shareholders, institutional investors, auditors and senior management. The rights and responsibilities of these institutions vis-à-vis their employees were once determined by management/union contracts that were administered and interpreted by the [Australian] Arbitration Commission. Now they are increasingly being

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spelt out in private work-place agreements between powerful companies and relatively powerless workers. With high unemployment and insecurity the norm, such contracts are not likely to be fair, and, with the absence of public adjudication of industrial disputes now on the cards, the likelihood of a fair outcome in the civil courts is small. But private institutions have many social responsibilities besides those concerning their workforces, and in framing legislation, these must be a major concern.

11.6  The De Facto Social Contract and the Criminal Law In discussing issues of crime and punishment, it is important to distinguish between penalties and costs. Penalties include fines and terms of imprisonment. Costs include legal expenses, costs of restoration, settlement of debts, and costs of care and support. I do not include compensation for victims of crime as a cost, because I do not know of any good case for compensating victims of crime, but not victims of household accidents, or victims of professional negligence, but not victims of blameless ignorance. If compensation is ever justified, a good case needs to be made out for it, and the circumstances in which it is justified. I know of no such case. Legally, a corporation is an individual. It can therefore be charged with crimes, or sued for breach of contract, the same as any other individual. But the law has not really come to terms with the problem of how to regulate corporate behaviour. The fiction that a corporation is an individual allows companies to employ people, enter into contracts, sue people, own property and so on. But the criminal law is not well adapted to prosecuting corporate misbehaviour. It is rare for any action, other than a civil one, to be taken against a corporation, even though corporations have almost certainly been guilty of serious crimes against humanity. Nor is the law well adapted to handling civil disputes involving professional people, service providers, property owners, sporting clubs and so on. Lives, reputations and livelihoods can, and have been, ruined to satisfy demands to compensate badly injured people, even though the persons or institutions responsible for these injuries were not criminally negligent. As a result, many sporting clubs, and other groups of service providers, such as obstetricians, are now severely threatened by litigation, and may not be able to survive. The problem, I suggest, is that the civil and criminal laws have different foundations. The criminal law in this, and many other countries,

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is clearly designed to protect people’s natural rights, as these are defined in Locke’s social contract. The civil law is concerned primarily with violations of civil agreements, written or tacit. But if we no longer accept Locke’s social contract as foundational, then perhaps it is time to have another look at the scope of the criminal law. Perhaps a new category or two of criminal offences could be introduced to deal with corporate crime and criminal neglect of duty, thus recognizing that there are rights other than natural ones that should be protected by the criminal law. A new basis of division between civil and criminal law appears to be needed. The rights that need to be protected are our rights of expectation concerning corporate behaviour, and the provision of services. Neither kind of right is a natural right, as defined by Locke, for neither could have existed in a state of nature. But violations of these rights of expectation are sometimes considered to be serious enough to warrant very large settlements in the civil courts. In my view, the most serious kinds of offences against these rights of expectation should be criminalized, and prosecuted by the state. The less serious kinds of offences should be dealt with by organizations that are set up, given appropriate powers, and charged with the responsibility of maintaining the expected standards of conduct of the corporations or service providers that fall within their scope, as this is defined in legislation. There should be a Corporations Commission for overseeing the behaviour of corporations, a Sports Commission for overseeing the behaviour of sports clubs, a Medical Commission for overseeing the behaviour of doctors and medical specialists, and so on. The role of the civil courts should then be reduced to that of settling civil disputes that do not involve any of these defined categories. To protect our rights of expectation concerning corporate behaviour, we must be able to put real pressure on companies be good corporate citizens. Voluntary agreements are not much good for this purpose, because commercial competition inevitably favours the most profitable companies over the most ethical, and so drives the ethical standards down. One mechanism to protect ethical standards might be to require every corporation to have a charter approved by the Corporations Commission that specifies the corporation’s social responsibilities. If all companies likely to be in competition with each other had similar charters, then there would be no pressure on any of them to behave unethically. On the contrary, since the Corporations Commission would have general superintendence over the charters of all the competing companies, those that violated their charters could be fined, or otherwise disadvantaged.

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But, in addition to the Corporations Commission, set up to define and monitor ethical standards, there is clearly a need for something much stronger—a mechanism for dealing with corporate crime. Clearly, there must be legislation that defines the legal rights and responsibilities of corporations. But there also needs to be a corporate section of the Crimes Act that deals specifically with corporations. It is not good enough to say that because corporations are legally persons, the ordinary crimes act applies to them. Take the crime of murder. To prove a case for murder, it needs to be shown that there was malice aforethought. But how do you prove that a corporation acted with malice aforethought? How are other mental concepts, such as knowledge, intent, belief and so on, to be defined for corporations? The criminal law was not originally intended to be applied to corporations, and is not well adapted to this purpose. So, here is one problem for lawyers to consider. Another is that once corporate crimes have been adequately defined, there needs to be a procedure for detecting them. Perhaps the Federal Police should have a corporate criminal detective agency attached to it. Or perhaps it should be an independent body. Corporate crimes should certainly be prosecuted. The ordinary criminal court may not be appropriate, because many corporate crimes are likely to involve highly complex dealings that no jury of ordinary citizens could possibly cope with. Perhaps, then, there needs to be a special court, with specialized jurors. Finally, there is the issue of sentencing. Where a corporation is found to have committed a crime, it must be possible to (a) to deregister the corporation, if it is registered in Australia, or ban it from trading in Australia, if it is not, (b) order the corporation to pay costs, including restoration of the environment, and costs of care and rehabilitation of victims, (c) seize some or all of the company’s assets, if necessary, to cover the fine and the costs awarded against it, and (d) fine or impose a jail sentence on any corporate executive held to be responsible, or to have had any share of responsibility, for the commission of this crime. The issues concerning service providers (doctors, plumbers, sporting clubs, property owners, etc.) are similar. If a crime has been committed, then the provider should be charged with the crime, and, if convicted, fined, jailed, or ordered to pay some or all of the costs involved. But, even if found guilty, the provider should not be ordered to pay compensation as well as costs, since the purpose of the fine or sentence is just to deter, not to compensate. Nor should service providers be able to take out

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insurance against criminal conviction, and so expect an insurance company to pay any fines or costs that may be awarded against them. If no crime has been committed, then the provider should just go free. If there was negligence, but not criminal negligence, involved, then the same should apply. The provider should go free. But the provider may nevertheless have a case to answer before the special commission that is charged with responsibility for maintaining standards of service in the practitioner’s field. If he or she is found to be guilty of negligence or incompetence, but not criminal negligence, then the commission may order that the practitioner be reprimanded, fined, demoted, required to have supervision, or, in the most serious cases.

CHAPTER 12

Humanistic Ethics

Humanistic ethics are concerned ultimately with human well-being. For, if social humanists are right, then human well-being is the primary good, and all social policy should aim to promote this good. Other things may be good in that they contribute to our well-being, or as a means of promoting it. But our promotion of well-being cannot be justified as a means, or a contribution, to any higher good, because, for a humanist, there is no good that stands above it. In ethical jargon, human welfare, or well-being, is the summum bonum. The ethical theory that elevates human well-being to this position is known as ‘welfarism’. Humanistic ethics are therefore welfarist. For a social humanist, there are some absolute limits to morally acceptable behaviour. For there are some kinds of actions that must do harm from this point of view whatever the circumstances. Activities that are cruel or dehumanizing are ruled out tout court. But ethical humanism cannot be adequately defined by these absolute prohibitions. Ethical humanism requires a positive ambition to increase the general level of well-being in the community, not just a negative resolve to do no harm. Precisely how this positive ambition is to be realized is not up to the individual, and cannot be settled a priori. What is needed is a social contract that is properly geared to this objective. And this will require the testing and eventual adoption of strategies for promoting human welfare that manifestly prove to be successful.

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12.1   Welfarism Welfarism is the thesis that human well-being is the one and only thing that really matters when determining what is morally good or bad. Our well-being is, according to this theory, the primary or ultimate good. There are many other things that are morally good or valuable, it is argued, but they are good precisely because they contribute to our well-being. If they did not, or did not normally, contribute to our well-being, then they would not be good. A version of this theory of the good was developed and by Wayne Sumner in his Welfare, Happiness and Ethics (Sumner 1996). Sumner defined welfare as the degree to which one would consider oneself to be satisfied with life, if one were autonomous, and fully informed about the circumstances of one’s life at the time in question (p. 172). As Sumner puts it, one would authentically judge one’s life to be satisfactory to this degree. The requirement of authenticity is made in order to combat serious objections to welfarism that might otherwise arise. One might, for example, think that things are going well, but be labouring under a delusion. For example, you might think that your husband is a good man, who loves you dearly. But you could be mistaken. Perhaps your husband doesn’t love you; he just pretends he does, when all the while he is planning to kill you in order to inherit your fortune. If you found this out, you would presumably be horrified, and realize at once that things had not been going anything like as well with your life as you thought they were. Your judgement that life was good was therefore mistaken, and so not authentic. Or, you might be irrationally persuaded by someone to think that, because you had lots of money, you must really be doing well, when, in fact, you were lacking in most of the things you valued most in life. You lacked friends, and the spirituality that you genuinely craved. But people looked up to you, and admired your beautiful house and garden, and told you again and again that you were the envy of everyone in the neighbourhood. In this imagined case, your expressed satisfaction with life would lack autonomy, and so would not be authentic. Sumner held that authentic satisfaction with life is the one and only thing that is good in itself. As a value, he says, it is agent-neutral, and obviously a strong candidate for the role of primary or ultimate good. It is agent-neutral, he says, because everyone has a reason to promote it. If an action will make someone feel better about themselves and no one feel any worse, then this is clearly a good reason for doing it. It is not clear,

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however, that authentic satisfactions or dissatisfactions with life can be measured, or aggregated, in the manner of utilities, as a utilitarian calculus would require. Nor is it clear that the moral value of an action depends only on its consequences for the authentic quality of people’s lives. So, Sumner does not endorse a welfarist version of utilitarianism, as one might naively expect. Nevertheless, his theory is methodologically individualistic, as act-utilitarian theories always are. For his theory is founded on the authentic subjective judgements of individuals about the effects of their actions on the quality of people’s lives. Sumner’s moral theory must therefore have some of the same defects as act-utilitarianism, since well-­ motivated decisions to act to promote welfare could easily come unstuck, if they are mistaken or not coordinated. It is not always clear, therefore, what individual actions would be justified on welfarist grounds. And the question of how groups of people, or the state, should act to promote welfare is not seriously addressed. I am not, however, strongly opposed to Sumner’s theory of individual welfare. It provides a fair measure of individual welfare for a given social and political environment. If you ask people whether, on the whole, life is good for them, then they will probably reply that it is or is not, depending on the levels of prosperity, success, health, companionship, etc. that people with their occupations, education, social standing, and so on, might reasonably expect. But this judgement of happiness, even if authentic, will have no absolute validity. That is, a life that is authentically satisfactory in one social or political environment may not be in another. When Albert Facey (1981) judged his life to be a fortunate one, he was no doubt sincere, and there is no reason to suppose that his judgement was mistaken or otherwise inauthentic. But, in today’s social environment in Australia, his life would have to be considered to be one of great hardship and deprivation. Amartya Sen makes a similar point: A person who has had a life of misfortune, with very little opportunities, and rather little hope, may be more easily reconciled to deprivations than others reared in more fortunate and affluent circumstances. The metric of happiness may, therefore, distort the extent of deprivation, in a specific and biased way. The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless laborer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the over-exhausted coolie may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continuing survival, but it would be ethically deeply m ­ istaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of this survival strategy. (Quoted by Sumner, p. 162)

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For moral and political theory, Sumner’s measure of welfare is inadequate. For these purposes, one needs a conception of well-being that transcends the circumstances of particular people and cultures. What is needed, I claim, is an ideal of ‘the good life’ to which everyone can aspire, whatever their social and political circumstances. Sumner’s concept of well-­ being is socially and culturally relative, as Sen so forcefully argues. For moral and political philosophy, we need an absolute conception of well-­ being—one that would explain the aptness of Sumner’s culturally relative measure. I believe that the conception of a practically free life that goes well for the person concerned is basically such an absolute conception. It is flexible enough to accommodate people living in very different societies, having widely diverse tastes, abilities, sensitivities, physical features and native intelligences, and attractive enough to motivate people to seek it, whatever their social settings or innate capacities. Moreover, it is a life to which everyone could aspire, in whatever society they might live, or whatever their position might be in that society. The good life, so defined, is close what I initially called the flourishing or eudemonic life. But it is not quite the same. Eudaimonia, as I interpreted it, also requires that the ends we seek, and the manner in which we seek them, should be worthy of us as human beings. So the good life, according to the eudemonic conception, does not allow a completely free choice amongst means and ends. It is more restricted than the one based solely on practical freedom. A high degree of practical freedom is certainly necessary, if we are to live well. But for eudaimonia, we must use this practical freedom well as human agents. A practically free person is one who is able to set his or her own goals, and who has the resources, knowledge, fitness and other requirements for these goals. Anyone who is practically free in this sense, and is successful in his or her own terms, will certainly be highly satisfied with their lives. But unless the life that he or she leads is humanly worthwhile, and so good from a moral point of view, it will not be eudemonic. Welfarism, as defined by Sumner, is clearly not the foundation of the welfare state. The concept lacks the kind of social and cultural neutrality that is required for such a foundation. The good life, defined as the successful life of a practically free person, defines an attractive ideal of human well-being, and has the required cultural neutrality. But it lacks the moral dimension that is required for the development of a welfare state. To motivate a welfare state, one not only has to accept the goal of increasing

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everyone’s practical freedom, and hence satisfaction with life, one has to do this within an acceptable moral framework—one that will effectively define the range of humanly worthwhile activities.

12.2  Acceptable Moral Frameworks The moral framework of a given society is the set of beliefs about individual rights and obligations that is generally accepted in that society. This framework, as I have argued (in Chap. 6), is socially constructed, and is a proper part of the society’s de facto social contract. Despite considerable differences between the de facto social contracts of different societies, there are some widely accepted moral precepts—presumably due to our having a common humanity. There is, for example, the almost universally endorsed United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. On the other hand, the moral frameworks of different societies remain significantly different from one another—due, presumably, to different religious, social and cultural histories. Consequently, there is, and cannot be, any cross-­ cultural agreement in morality that extends over the whole field. But this does not to matter very much. For what is required to define the range of humanly worthwhile activities would be pretty much common ground in the kinds of societies in which welfare states are possible. To define a concept of eudaimonia that is adequate to motivate the development of a welfare state, the task is to make sense of the notion of humanly worthwhile activity. For ‘eudaimonia’, which is the fundamental concept of social humanism, is defined with reference to such activity. What is needed, therefore, is a value ethic that is sufficient for this purpose. Aristotle saw the need for a value ethic to elaborate his own more objective conception of eudaimonia, which he tried to develop in his Nichomachean Ethics. But Aristotle’s objective conception of eudaimonia clearly involved the aim of achieving a kind of perfection in one’s manner of living. The conception that is required for a welfare state, however, is far less ambitious. And so it should be. For an ideal of eudaimonia that embraced the aim of perfection in life would be useless as a political ideal. It would be far too restrictive of choice, and fundamentally incompatible with the kinds of freedom and individualism that social humanists support. What is needed is an ideal of living well that is morally acceptable and much more flexible than Aristotle’s ideal. First, for any ideal to be acceptable to a social humanist, it must be humanistic. That is, it must put a high value on issues concerning our

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common humanity, and our sense of human dignity. Therefore, humanly worthwhile activities must, at the very least, be compatible with the basic tenets of humanism. Activities that are dehumanizing, for example, cannot possibly be regarded as humanly worthwhile. For no social humanist can countenance treating people in cruel or degrading ways, whatever their circumstances. The actions of the guards in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, for example, were clearly incompatible with the ideals of humanism. Humanism and sadism just do not go together. The Australian Government’s treatment of asylum seekers in outback detention centers is likewise inhumane. Incarcerating people, who come to Australia seeking help, is already contrary to basic humanistic attitudes. Locking them up indefinitely behind razor wire in the desert, while making sure that their stories of suffering and persecution cannot be told, is monstrously so. It is deliberately dehumanizing. It is not in the same league as the cruel and degrading treatment of Jews, Gypsies and others in Nazi concentration camps. But it is no less clearly a rejection of fundamental humanistic values. Secondly, humanism, as I understand it, extends decent treatment to non-human animals as well as to other people. The standards are different, because most animals have simpler needs and fewer expectations. But cruelty to animals is no more acceptable to a modern humanist than cruelty to other human beings. Therefore, humanism requires a blanket prohibition of cruelty. Accordingly, I propose the following definition: An activity is humanly worthwhile if and only if it contributes to someone’s authentic well-being, and is neither cruel nor dehumanizing. It is not clear that activities that are, by this definition, humanly worthwhile should all be legally permitted. For some such activities may be damaging to others, although they are neither cruel nor dehumanizing. Moreover, the humanly worthwhile activities of different people might not all be compatible, and, in that case, some of them may have to be banned or restricted in the interests of social harmony. Nor is it clear that activities that are humanly worthwhile in this sense are worthwhile in any way worthy of such endorsement. But these are side issues. What is important is that the conception of human flourishing as the achievement of life satisfaction through humanly worthwhile activities should be a viable conception of the good life, and should not arbitrarily exclude any plausible conception of what is humanly worthwhile. If it is a viable conception, then it must provide a sound basis for social development. For it is flexible enough to accommodate all activities

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compatible with humanism, and it is attractive enough motivate people to seek it in most kinds of societies and most positions within those societies. All that you need then is the practical freedom to pursue the life of your choice.

12.3  The Ethics of Humanism The proposed definition of humanly worthwhile activity is minimal from the standpoint of an ethical humanist. It approves of the activities of people who do absolutely nothing to promote the well-being of people other than themselves. It approves of those who find pleasure in harmless pastimes, but who cause no offence, treat other people with dignity and respect, and are basically inner-directed. They may have little or no interest in the well-being of others. It is also contrary to the spirit of Aristotelianism, because such activities do not actively promote the common good. This conception of humanly worthwhile activity may be acceptable as a foundation for a political philosophy of the welfare state. Any stronger conception of permitted activity would be oppressive. Some people, like Michael Leunig’s Vasco Pyjama, may just want to withdraw from the real world, and be themselves, or at one with nature. As Vasco Pyjama says: ‘It is worthwhile doing nothing, and having a rest’.1 But a humanistic ethic requires a stronger conception of the good than this minimal one. It requires that people should act positively to promote human well-being—not just that they should not seek to undermine it by acting inhumanely or cruelly. That is, they should be actively engaged in making things better for people, where they reasonably can. Nor is it enough that people should actively seek to promote human well-being as individuals. For, if the promotion of well-being is our overall aim, co-­ ordinated activity is an absolute necessity, as has been demonstrated.2 With the best will in the world, people cannot, as eudemonic act-utilitarians naively think, do it on their own. What is needed for social humanism is a moral basis for evaluating the whole social contract of the society. What, we must ask, is the moral good that this contract should promote? According to the philosophy of social humanism, the answer is: ‘Everyone’s well-being’. It would be nice to think that everyone’s well-being could be 1 2

 Leunig (2001) The Curly Pyjama Letters.  Social Humanism, ch, 1.7 pp. 34–38.

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adequately promoted by the minimal requirement that no one should act cruelly or inhumanely. For then everyone would be more or less free to decide for themselves what they wanted to do within these limits. But, in general, people’s well-being cannot be provided for so easily. If the achievement of well-being for all is our aim, then our task is to structure society, and to promote the ideals of social humanism, to make this as near to a reality as possible. Social humanism is founded on our fellow feeling for others, and our innate desire to wish them well. Sometimes this fellow feeling may be lacking, because the others in question may seem to us to be alien, or otherwise unlike us. Politicians sometimes exploit this less admirable human trait to promote their own interests, or to play wedge politics with an opposition party that is split between humanists and political pragmatists, who fear they will lose support if they show too much sympathy for the alien group. But in a socially homogeneous society, which, of course, need not be racially or culturally homogeneous, the fellow feeling that is the basis of social humanism is likely to extend to everyone. So, in such a society, we are likely to wish everyone well, and be inclined to support social humanist programmes. As with most goods, the law of diminishing returns applies in these programmes. The greater your present level of well-being, the harder it is to increase it. If you want to increase the overall well-being in the community, the most effective strategy must normally be to focus on increasing that of the more disadvantaged. Their well-being can be increased considerably, and at not too great a cost to the rest of the community. Moreover, the strategy has a double pay-off. The more well-being is equalized, the more people are able to look upon each other without feelings of superiority or inferiority, i.e. as other people for whom we have fellow feeling. So, everyone benefits from the equalization of welfare. It may be objected that this rationale for social justice is inadequate. For, suppose that increasing the welfare of the least advantaged did not have this effect. Would this mean that it was somehow less urgent to deal with them? I think not. For, if our basic desire to promote well-being is derived from fellow feeling, as I suppose it must be, then inevitably, those who are most disadvantaged will be those for whom we have deepest sympathy. Ethical humanism must, therefore, include a value of social equality, which would motivate us to improve the lot of those who are most disadvantaged more urgently than to do the same for others who are less in need. Similarly, those whose level of well-being is well above average may

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also be targeted. For it is reasonable to argue that those who have more of the good things in life should be required to carry more of the burden of providing assistance to those with less. Social humanists are therefore likely to support progressive taxation scales and other socially equalizing measures as an integral part of their programme to increase the general level of well-being in the community. This humanistic ethic will strike many philosophers as lacking in substance. For it tells us very little about how we should behave as individuals. It tells us what our social aims should be, and therefore puts some constraints on the kind of society we should seek to create. But those who believe that a moral system should be a set of rules or principles governing individual behaviour, will naturally be disappointed. Their disappointment is misplaced, however. For the moral system that operates in a society is an integral part of its social contract, and to discover the rules or principles that we should live by, we have first to complete the task of saying how the society as a whole should be structured, if our aim is to maximally increase human well-being. For the ethic of social humanism is a socially based one. It is not an individualistic ethic of the kind most philosophers are familiar with. But, as I have argued in Chap. 5, individualistic ethics are simplistic, and may well be dangerous. The fact that the moral system is derivative in social humanism is a point in its favour, not a reason to reject it.

CHAPTER 13

The New Welfare State

13.1   Description The new welfare state is a modern version of the welfare states of previous generations. It is different, not because its philosophy is so different, but because the world is different, and so the starting point for its construction is different. There is a greater emphasis on practical freedom as a necessary condition for welfare, perhaps, and a more active conception of welfare than people became accustomed to in the earlier incarnations of social humanism. Moreover, the new welfare state has to be directly concerned with the welfare of all, not just the breadwinners of families (who were then expected to care and provide for their wives and children), single women and neglected children. The prevailing social contract has radically changed all this. It has changed the rights and obligations of men and women vis-à-vis each other and the children in their care. Consequently, full employment cannot mean today what it meant in the 1970s, and practical freedom requires that both men and women have access to adequate resources to plan their lives and seek to live well in their own preferred ways. The new welfare state seeks to promote general well-being by providing everyone with the practical option of choosing how they want to live. But it does not seek to do this just by redistributing wealth or income. The new welfare state is nothing like a socialist state. It is not collectivist, as all socialist states are, and it has no ambition to become more so. Advocates of the new welfare state believe in free enterprise and capitalist endeavour, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_13

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and they also believe in the market as providing the simplest and most effective way of distributing goods and services. In traditional political terms, their position is plainly ‘middle-of-the-road’. But social humanists reject these traditional terms of analysis, because they are almost irrelevant to their basic humanist objectives. The social humanist programme does not aim to move politically to the left or to the right. It is, nevertheless, an active and important programme. Its aim is to forge ahead with social reforms that aim directly to make it practically possible for people to decide for themselves how they want to live. The greatest obstacle to this programme today is the corporate world. Unless corporations can be brought satisfactorily under social control, new welfare states cannot be created, or if created, cannot survive. There are, however, some options for defending welfare states against corporate sabotage that are well worth exploring.

13.2   How the World Has Changed One of the most striking social differences between now and the early seventies is the momentous change that has occurred in the relative powers of capital and labour. For thirty years or so after the end of the Second World War, labour was dominant. Labour parties did not always hold office. But labour concerns, such as full employment, health care, public education, social justice, working conditions and so on, dominated the social agendas of the evolving welfare states. Liberal and conservative governments tended to resist the some of the improvements that were sought. But it was, by and large, pressure from the labour movement that was driving social change. In the late seventies and early eighties, however, the welfare states of Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand all came under siege. They did so, I believe, because of inflation and the threat of more inflation to come. There were rapid surges in costs, due the OPEC oil price rises, and the floating of the US dollar. There were inflationary expectations, which had built up over a prolonged period of gradually rising inflation. There were increasing union demands for better wages and conditions, because of the felt need to keep up in the race against rising prices. And the usual Keynesian remedies for high inflation did not seem to be working, because inflationary expectations continued to be fulfilled, even though the economy was becoming stagnant, and unemployment was rising. Some more drastic economic measures seemed to be called for.

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Whether this is all true or not, I do not know. But this was the story that many people believed. And, when Margaret Thatcher’s government in Britain, and the Labor governments of Australia and New Zealand began to take radical measures to bring the union movement into line with the governments’ programmes of economic reform, there was general acceptance of its necessity. And from this time onwards, the social agendas of the English-speaking welfare states became dominated by the demands for economic reform. These demands were managed, at first, with a view to minimizing the harm they might do to social welfare programmes. But people have now become so accustomed to the processes of economic reform that the social welfare provisions that were so hard fought for at the time no longer seem to matter very much. They now willingly accept trade-offs between wages, job security and working conditions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Today, the union movement poses no threat to economic stability in any of the modern welfare states. The increasing levels of foreign debt, which really do pose a serious threat to some of their economies, have nothing to do with union demands. The continuing efforts of economically liberal governments to destroy the union movements of the countries they govern are not intended to shore up the economies of these countries against the kinds of destabilizing demands that they faced during the 1970s. They are intended simply to weaken the bargaining position of employees, and to strengthen the hands of employers to demand even greater productivity per employee than they have at present. The real threat to economic stability comes, not from the employees in manufacturing industry, but from the increasing levels of private debt that have been used to create the current economic boom. The level of private debt in Australia is already unsustainable, and there exists a genuine threat of severe economic recession as a result. In Australia, these high levels of private debt have been encouraged by the big financial institutions, the multinational corporations and government taxation policies. So, if there is a threat to economic stability in Australia, it does not come from the union movement, as it plausibly did in the 1970s, but from the ‘big end’ of town. These same institutions, and the economically liberal government that unashamedly represents their interests, also pose a serious threat to the continued existence of satisfactory welfare provisions in Australia. The very idea of a welfare state is anathema to them. They accept that some provision has to be made for the poor, and that the Government has a responsibility to provide for

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them. But they want nothing more than a safety net—a minimal provision that will satisfy the public conscience of those who can get by without it. For they, and the Government, want to reduce taxation to a minimum. The corporations and financial institutions want it, so that they can compete more effectively on international markets, and so maximize their earnings. Individuals want to reduce taxation so that they can afford to spend more. The present Australian Government1 has never liked Medicare, for example, which is the universal health insurance scheme that replaced Medibank some time ago. They, and the private health insurance industry, would dearly like to reduce Medicare to a safety net for those who cannot afford private health insurance, and thus ensure that our present universal health care system is effectively split into a two-tier one. This would reduce Government expenditure, and be consonant with the Government’s individualistic political philosophy. The Government would also like to attract more students out of the public education system, and into the private one. Their thought is that students that do not need to be in state schools should not be there. They have, accordingly, spent a great deal of money recently supporting wealthy private schools, while leaving the public system to carry on, as best it can, with their old, inadequate, and often worn out facilities. The inevitable effect of this largesse will be to reinforce the present two-tier education system, and to reduce the status of state schools still further in the eyes of the community. A second major social change that has occurred since the 1970s is the Western World’s cultural revolution. This involved, firstly, a change in the relationships between men and women, and in their social responsibilities vis-à-vis each other. Women were to have equality with men in employment, preferment and managerial roles. Women in marriage relationships were to be regarded as equal partners with their spouses. There were to be no pre-set roles, such as those of homemaker, carer, provider, etc., as there were before. These jobs would be shared as far as possible according to the personal preferences of the marriage partners. Women were not to be treated as sex objects, or in other degrading ways, unless it was their personal choice to play such roles. That is, much more respect was to be shown to women as people, with their own desires, ambitions and welfare needs. Secondly, the cultural revolution involved calls for social equality across the board, independently of racial origin, ethnicity, religion and 1

 This text was written in 2021.

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sexual preference. Blacks and whites, Germans and Russians, Christians, Jews and Muslims, homosexuals and transvestites should all be equal under the law, and shown equal respect for their beliefs, practices and preferences. Therefore, legislation that discriminated against people on any such grounds must be held to be invalid, and practices that effectively discriminated against them should be banned. Thirdly, the cultural revolution involved a major change in people’s attitudes to animals. Practices that involved cruelty or indifference to animal suffering were no longer to be tolerated. We had to learn to treat them with respect due to them as sensitive creatures. Finally, the cultural revolution required us to consider much more carefully the effects of our social practices on the environment, and act to preserve it from damaging changes. A third major change since the seventies is that the Cold War has ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, leaving the United States as the only superpower. This radical change in the balance of political and economic power in the world has stacked the cards heavily against the welfare states. For they are inevitably seen as socialistic relics, which somehow seem to have survived. From the point of view of the dominant power, the sooner they pass into history the better. The welfare states would have come under pressure in any case. The shift of power from labour to capital, and the Western World’s own cultural revolution, had radically transformed the de facto social contracts upon which the welfare states were initially founded. They would, therefore, have to have adjusted their social policies to survive. Britain now has its ‘third way’. New Zealand is trying to develop a ‘third way’ of its own. Australia’s welfare state is being systematically destroyed by a government that is hostile to it, and it will succeed in the end in doing so, if the Labor opposition cannot get its act together and articulate a coherent social philosophy. Because of the changes that have occurred, there would have had to have been significant changes to Australia’s welfare policies. Take the issue of full employment. ‘Full employment’ now has to be understood as something like ‘matching employment’. People need jobs to match their needs and capacities. Therefore, it is important to recognize a number of different categories of mismatch. The most obvious one is a mismatch of level of employment. If a person wants a full-time job, but is required to work 70 hours per week to keep it, then this is probably a mismatch of over-employment. Not many people would want to work such long hours. The obverse of this is underemployment. A person who wants a half-time

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job is underemployed if they have work for just one hour per week. A second kind of mismatch concerns security of employment. A person who wants continuing employment will be unhappy with casual work. A third kind is a mismatch of skills. All of these factors should be taken into account in any present-day employment policy. For the days when there were just two categories—full time and permanent, and causal—are long since gone. For reasons such as these, it is unthinkable that we should go back to the kind of welfare state that existed a generation ago. What is needed today is a welfare state that expresses the values of social humanism in the present social and political context. It must involve measures to our well-­ being that would be acceptable to social humanists today, not those that would have appealed to people back then.

13.3  Public versus Private Ownership So far, I have said nothing about the vexed question of public versus private ownership. The reason is that the issue is not a major one in the social humanist programme. It appears to be an issue only if you envisage the welfare state as a compromise between individualism and collectivism. But this gives much more importance to the question of who should own what than it deserves. From the point of view of a social humanist, the question of whether a business should be publicly or privately owned depends whose responsibility it is to see that the good or service it deals with is properly supplied, and how this responsibility is most effectively exercised. If your answer is that the government is ultimately responsible, i.e. if it would be politically impossible (or suicidal) for the government to wash its hands of the issue and declare it to be responsibility of industry, or of some organization that is not responsible to the government, then this is a good case for saying that the government should retain or acquire ownership of the businesses in question. Otherwise, it would be necessary for the government to regulate the providers, and so effectively control the businesses from a distance. And, distant control is necessarily inefficient, because it requires two levels of management instead of one. Moreover, it could have serious unforeseen consequences, because the government is necessarily in the position of having to regulate businesses to achieve its objectives without having any intimate knowledge of the affairs of the businesses in question.

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On most issues that are currently being debated, the social humanist is likely to be on the side of retaining government ownership and control. For, with the current dominance of capital in public affairs, there are very few proposals for nationalization on the political agenda. The socialists once argued for the nationalization of all of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The forces of capital not only want to privatize all of the means of production, distribution and exchange, they want to privatize most of the social services and public utilities as well. In other words, they want to shrink the public sector to as near zero as they can get it. Needless to say, their zeal for this programme has nothing to do with their beliefs about who should be responsible for what. They just think that if there is a dollar to be made anywhere, the private sector should be in there making it. In another era, when socialist forces were in the ascendancy, you could reasonably expect social humanists to be arguing the case against nationalization. If, for example, industry were generally held to be responsible for the provision of goods or services of some kind, there would normally be no point in nationalizing the industry. Why should a government take on responsibility for supplying goods or services of this kind, when there is no need to do so, and no good reason to suppose that it could do it any better? There would have to be some extraordinary circumstances, such as a war or national emergency, to justify it. Considerations based on present responsibility are by no means conclusive. Take water quality, for example. The government would certainly be held responsible for monitoring water quality, and ensuring that it is adequately maintained. But this responsibility might be adequately exercised by employing an outside firm, with wide experience and expertise in such matters, to do the testing and to implement the measures necessary to achieve the government’s clean water objective. Hence, responsibility for water quality does not require ownership of the means to ensure it. But what about water itself? Could the Victorian government legitimately contract with a huge multinational firm to supply it with water? I think not. Water supply is an enormously complex issue with implications in almost every area of government—involving departments of conservation, environment, primary and secondary industry, health, the economy, urban and rural development, and no doubt many others. To privatize water supply would therefore be an act of sheer madness. It would involve an extraordinary process that would require negotiating a wide range of legitimate affairs of government with a third party, and then effectively trying to govern at one remove from the action. Privatizing telecommunications

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is halfway between sound policy and reckless irresponsibility. It is not as bizarre as the idea of privatizing the water supply. But the provision of an adequate telecommunications service for the nation is a complex essential service in a rapidly expanding and developing area with a great many economic, social and political implications—many of which are unforeseeable. Therefore, for the government to contemplate contracting with a third party to provide this service is for it to consider handing over some of its basic responsibilities to a private contractor. It is foolish, however, for it to think that it could do this successfully, and, in reality, the government would have to try to exercise control over the privatized telecommunications services indirectly. From the point of view of a social humanist, the project of privatizing telecommunications is irresponsible. This is not to say that there are no parts of the telecommunications industry that could not legitimately be privatized. One could sub-contract the construction of relay stations, or telecommunications satellites, or the installation of cables, or any of a number of other things, without acting irresponsibly. But to turn the whole industry over to private contractors is to abrogate some of its most important responsibilities for social and regional development—to say nothing of our defence and international relations obligations. Privatizing prison services and detention centres is wrong for another reason. A privatized telecommunications industry is unlikely to lead to people being treated with inhumanity. But people in prisons and detention centres have few powerful friends outside, and it is not difficult for their jailers to get away with serious abuses. It is important, therefore, that the government of the day, which must have primary responsibility for the health and well-being of prisoners and other detainees, should be directly answerable to the public for their treatment. If, as is manifestly the case, the asylum seekers who are held in our detention centres are not shown the curtesy and respect that is due to them, as people seeking our help, then only the government is to blame, and it ought not to be able to avoid its responsibility by shifting it on to the contractors they have engaged to do their dirty work for them.

13.4  The Social Humanist Programme Imagine now a society of social humanists, i.e. people who believe in human flourishing as the primary good. Assume it to be a democracy, in which the government is committed to promote human flourishing as the

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primary objective of its social policy. What must it do? Here is a short list of the measures for which we have already argued, and which would appear to be necessary: 1. On the economy The government must seek to build a stable and healthy economy. Stability is required, if people are to be able to make long-term plans in their lives, and a growing economy is required to create full employment, and so provide the resources that people will need to build flourishing lives for themselves. 2. On employment Genuinely full employment2 is necessary if everyone is to be able to share in the benefits of the flourishing economy. Without it, some people will inevitably be unable to participate in the general wellbeing, or interact socially with others as their equals. 3. On education Everyone must have the practical freedom to develop their talents, and their knowledge and understanding, to the maximum extent to which they are capable. For such educational development is a necessary condition for human flourishing, and must be practically available to all. 4. On health Everyone must have ready access to good health care. For, like education, good health care is a necessary condition for human flourishing. What is required is not just a safety net for those in desperate need. For life plans are easily threatened by serious illness, and a state committed to the ideals of social humanism should seek to minimize such threats. 5. On injury and disability Everyone must have ready access to adequate treatment and support in case of injury or disability, however it may be caused. Again, what is required is not just a safety net for those in desperate need. Those who suffer injury through accident or misadventure are as much entitled to adequate treatment and support as those who are injured through negligence or incompetence. But only the latter can obtain it by litigation. 6. On choice Freedom of choice must not be allowed to become a euphemism for private ownership of utilities or services. There should be a wide range of choices available to people in most areas of life. But the 2

 Not just full employment according to the current politically chosen measure.

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important thing is that these choices should be practically available to as many people as possible, because, from the point of view of a social humanist, practical freedom is the only freedom that really matters. 7. On freedom of speech Freedom of speech, as this was traditionally understood, must be guaranteed. But some measures must be taken to curb the power of advertising and propaganda on the primary media, and to ensure that there is genuine access of a significant range of considered opinion to such media. This is clearly a government responsibility, and an independent, government television network is needed, if it is to exercise its responsibility properly. (There are, however, many other good social humanist reasons for supporting this policy.) 8. On social responsibility People with social responsibilities arising from their roles in society, such as doctors, teachers, plumbers, builders, property owners, football coaches – in short, anyone who could at present be sued for negligence or incompetence – should have their rights and responsibilities carefully spelt out, and they should be answerable to specially appointed bodies that have general superintendence over their areas. Cases of negligence or incompetence should be heard and adjudged by them, and these bodies should have the power to take any of a specified range of disciplinary actions, whichever they deem to be appropriate. Civil litigation should be ruled out altogether in such cases, and replaced by national injury insurance. (See 5 above.)

13.5  On Corporate Responsibility The biggest danger to the continuing existence of welfare states is corporate power. This power is already immense, and, because of the new international trading rules, is growing rapidly. This would not matter much if corporations had a strong interest in maintaining or developing high levels of social welfare. But, as things stand, they have a much stronger interest in keeping social welfare provisions minimal, and reducing further the power of the trade unions—which is the only significant curb on their rapaciousness. In this project, the corporations have history on their side. The World Trade Organization and the various free trade agreements between countries have enormously increased their influence. The free

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trade agreements ensure that the countries that make the least social demands on corporations will be favoured. For, if the social demands become too high in any one country, they can easily switch their operations to another, more friendly, regime. Moreover, the corporations have some very powerful allies. The political parties they support are in power in many of the world’s richest nations, and these parties invariably work in collaboration with the corporations to reduce the welfare provisions of the countries in which they operate. Also, because of the new technologies, and the changes in work practices that these have wrought, the trade unions are a declining force almost everywhere. So, if the welfare state is to have any hope of surviving, let alone being rebuilt, it is absolutely necessary to find ways and means of bringing the corporations under social control. The unions can no longer do this job for us. It was, in any case, always a messy and inadequate way of controlling corporate power. It was messy, because strike action normally reduced productivity, and often caused considerable distress, not only to workers, but also in the wider community. It was inadequate, because the unions never represented all of the interested parties, or all of the interests of the community. They did not adequately represent the unemployed, the casually employed, the customers, or the individual shareholders, in whose interests the corporations were allegedly acting. Nor did they always pay due heed to the community’s interests in preserving the quality of the environment. Yet the unions were much better than nothing. Indeed, it is plausible to suppose that fear of union power was one of the chief motivating forces in the creation welfare states. But now, with the decline of the unions, we are beginning to see what unfettered corporate power is really like. And it is not a pretty sight. Company directors are not necessarily nasty people, who care nothing for the well-being of their employees. Their morals do not come into it. It is just that if company directors were to try to act as good corporate citizens, and do so just out of the goodness of their hearts, they would quickly be out of a job. In most cases, the company’s institutional shareholders, for whom the bottom line is the only thing that really matters, would see to it. As the law now stands, therefore, company directors cannot afford to act as good corporate citizens. They have to focus on profits if they are to survive. The problem is how to bring corporations under effective social control without destroying their dynamism and productivity. Firstly, corporations need to be cognisant of their social roles. They do not exist just to make

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money for their shareholders. They are a major part of the social contractual system to which we all belong, and they have rights and responsibilities that extend well beyond their obligations to shareholders. They are the largest employers. Consequently, many people’s lives are bound to be dependent on them. If it should prove to be necessary to reduce the size of the workforce, or to make changes that will result in redundancies, then those whose lives will inevitably be affected by these changes have every right to be consulted, and to expect due consideration to be given to their futures. Moreover, corporations are the major providers of the goods and services in society. Therefore, the quality and reliability of the goods and services they provide to the public is basically in their hands. They know, or should know, if the goods or services they are marketing are faulty or dangerous, and they have a clear responsibility to at least warn people of the faults or dangers that they know or believe to exist. Secondly, corporations should never be able to flout their social responsibilities with impunity, and ways and means must be found of making corporate directors personally responsible for such activities. It is not enough that a company should be fined for misbehaviour, if it has knowingly put the lives of many people at risk, or it has embezzled its employees’ superannuation fund. At present, the chances of convicting company directors of crimes like these are very small. Corporations are occasionally convicted of such crimes and are fined. But fining a company is not the answer if the real criminals are those in its boardroom directing operations. To deal with these problems, I suggest the following: There should be one or more Corporations Tribunals appointed by the government to exercise general superintendence over corporate affairs. Every incorporated body operating in the society should have a corporate charter, approved by the appropriate tribunal, defining its rights and responsibilities vis-à-vis shareholders, employees, customers, governments, and the social and physical environment. The boards of directors of companies (or their local branches) should be required to swear to uphold their charters, or face criminal proceedings for failing to do so. Companies found to be acting in violation of their charters, or otherwise illegally, may be fined, or have some or all of their assets seized. The boards of directors of companies found to be acting illegally should also, as a matter of course, be fined, imprisoned, or both.

CHAPTER 14

The New World

14.1   The Growing Movement The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was essentially one in the physical sciences. This led naturally to the creation of formidable armadas, and armed militia, with the firepower to sweep all before them. In 1721, Peter the Great established the Russian Empire. In 1755, Robert Clive won the Battle of Plassey to become the Master of Bengal, and thus began the process of formally taking over control of the Indian subcontinent as part of the British Empire. But the empire building of the British, Dutch, French was not, at first, just an exercise in brute force. It was more enlightened than that. The British of the eighteenth century believed they had a positive duty to bring enlightenment values to the shores of the foreign countries they visited, in which the religious orders present were Eastern or pagan or non-existent. Consequently, the initial settlements abroad were mostly built to establish trading posts, to bring produce from the home country to barter with the indigenous people for the unique spices or other goods they might be willing to trade. And, gradually, these trading posts grew in in size and complexity as they matured, bringing, in the process, a semblance of European-style civilization to these places. Such trading enclaves were established on the shores of the North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and South and South-East Asia—although in the Caribbean the settlers quickly established their ascendancy on the islands they were stationed, and annexed them promptly as British or Dutch or French territories. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9_14

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Thus, in the eyes of the ruling elites of Europe, the Age of Enlightenment morphed into the Age of Empire. For the ambitions of the ruling elites in Europe, were not limited to the pursuit of knowledge or baroque perfections. The leaders of the great powers of Europe began to set their sights on the vast continents that had yet to colonized. A beginning had been made, they thought, with the establishment of ports of call, and all they needed to do was to turn their outposts of empire into colonial possessions. Thus, they began to enlarge the settlements, build the railways, roads, bridges, cities and parks that would be needed to create European-­ like amenities in these countries, and offer luxury and education to the indigenous elders to gain full acceptance. War should not be necessary. But it did not quite work out this way. It was a strategy that was fairly successful in the Caribbean, Canada, the East Indies and on the Indian subcontinent. But it was much less so elsewhere. The British treatment of the Boers and Zulus in South Africa, for example, was ugly and brutal, and showed no respect, let alone consideration, for the humanity or wellbeing of the peoples they were dealing with. The concentration camps set up towards the end of the Boer War were comparable in horror only with those of Nazi Germany. In some ways, they were even worse, as Michael Portillo explained in his documentary series ‘Empire’ (Part 3 of 4) shown on Australian television in 2020.1 So the consequences of the enlightenment were not all good or progressive, as Steven Pinker portrays them as being in his notable book Enlightenment Now; The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress, which I reviewed in 2019.

14.2   Failures of the European Enlightenment The European Enlightenment was mainly a revolution in Western understanding of the physical world. It had little to say about the social world in which we live. It enabled the great powers of Europe to settle, and eventually colonize, most of the rest of the world. But the social sciences require physically realistic theories of human nature, and of the structure of human societies everywhere. So, what needs to be done has not been done before. We need to extend the Enlightenment’s reach to make it possible for people to live positively and well in the social structures that we will all need for the future. The philosophy of the social sciences remains stubbornly 1  Series 1, Episode 4 Empire or Portillo’s Empire Journey, Transparent TV; premiered BBC Channel 5, UK, May 2020.

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dualistic, in a world that is essentially monistic and physical in its composition. Consequently, our attitudes and ways of thinking about social problems have remained more or less as they were in the eighteenth century—as we have seen in our discussions of the major works of Robert Nozick and John Rawls. In 2018, Steven Pinker wrote a book, which became a best-seller, called Enlightenment Now; The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. It is a powerful defence of everything that social humanists like me really stand for. And, what he says is all backed by solid empirical evidence. Social progress is a multi-dimensional concept, and Pinker demonstrates that, great progress has been made in the last 250 years in just about every dimension of the Empire building process. Moreover, the making of such progress would seem to be the natural result of the now global reach of free market capitalism, and of the prevalence of the values of humanism, reason and scientific discovery. Those who would say otherwise, Pinker argues, are just being duped by the common illusions of perception that have been discovered by modern cognitive psychologists. There has, indeed, been such progress, but the Enlightenment itself was not the cause of it all, It made it possible, no doubt, by giving Europe the power and confidence to spread their influence throughout the world. But in the nineteenth century, the expansion of European empires, and the spread of European culture and ways of doing things, would appear to be the driving forces of progress. Trade was evidently paramount. England’s East India Company, Holland’s East India Company (the VOC), and the French East India Company were the principal developers of South and South East Asia, who, backed by the force of arms, set about exploiting the resources, produce, and services of the colonies. Thus, European culture and know-how were introduced into the colonies by the colonists, and used there to increase local production, and to provide the European settlers with the things they needed. The greatest instruments of progress were probably the machines that were operated by multi-purpose power generators, which were developed and used for a wide variety of tasks. First there were the canals and water-­ mills, followed by steam powered locomotives, and, in the nineteenth century, electric motors and internal combustion engines, power lines, gas and electric lights were developed. These changes greatly transformed the ways in which people were able to live. And, of course, these changes also enabled great strides to be made in people’s standards of living. But the benefits of these changes were not all good. For, they also enabled

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increasingly powerful armies and air forces to develop, and, having no social moral compasses to steer by, some societies inevitably became social moral monsters. What we have now to develop is a global equilibrium system that is adequate for the sustainable production of all of the goods and services people need, and the provision of a more or less uniformly high standard of living for all. For most of human history, our needs were the principle the drivers of our activities. So, we hunted and gathered. But this time has now passed. For the last two or three millennia, we have competed with each other to create more and more prosperous societies, at first locally, and then more broadly. But now we are connected globally. And, as far as I can see, competition no longer has a useful role to play. What we must now learn is how to slow down, stabilize the level of our productive activity, and come to peace with each other. In my review of Pinker’s book2 I argued that this is a welcome contribution to the social debate about where we should go from here. For the greatest threats to social achievement are complacency and invisibility. When social collaboration has been successful, the next generation is likely to take those successes for granted. And the success of the Enlightenment project was undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, achievement of human kind. And we must never forget this. But we must also acknowledge that this very achievement has been largely due to the empowerment of the Western World, created by its scientifically inspired Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. For this Industrial Revolution was due to Europe’s almost absolute dominance in the physical and natural sciences, and this was what made it possible for the Europeans to dominate trade in and between nations all over the world. And, in doing so, it has opened up the whole world to substantial social progress—at least on the seventeen fronts that Pinker discusses. But the Enlightenment did not create a rationale for progressive social advancement. On the contrary, it locked the Western world into the politics, morality and economics of the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century witnessed spectacular advances in social theory, but which were lacking in subtlety, and called for the overthrow of the capitalist system— including the dynamics of capitalism. And, naturally, there were few takers of this ideology in the wealthier sections of the community. Moreover, the 2  Ellis, B.  D. (2019b) ‘Enlightenment and Realism’ in Filozofia Nauki 2019/27/1 pp139–143.

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passion that fuelled this movement turned out to be its greatest enemy. For Karl Marx and his followers called, not for managed reform, but for revolution. And this burst of passion, cost the socialist movement very dearly. For the revolution that was called for occurred in Russia and its Asian empire, which then became the object of fear and loathing in the capitalist world. If only the Enlightenment had been a bit more enlightened about the social theory, this blunder might never have occurred. Certainly, it should never have occurred. For I have no doubt that it set back the cause of social progress, which the Enlightenment promoted, and ensured that progressive social theory never got off the ground. What social theory really needed was something much more like what I am writing today, which is moderate, progressive, and socially acceptable. After two world wars and the holocaust, which were the price of these blunders, the sophisticated world leaders at the San Francisco Conference, sought earnestly to draw up a well thought out program of social reform, which would put the world on track to advance socially, politically and morally along a peaceful, but meaningful, path to real social advancement. And it did not spectacularly with a ‘Universal Bill of Rights’ they chose to call Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because this was politically more saleable. It did not substantially change the human rights that were advocated. Because the framers of this charter made no distinction between ‘bills of rights’, which are social moral doctrines binding on all governments, and ‘charters of human rights’, which are capable of being seen as statements binding only of the actions of individuals. In the immediate post-war years, from the mid-1940s to the mid-­1970s, the ‘Bill of Rights’ conception of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights prevailed, and the world was blessed with the development of welfare states, or ‘social democracies’ as they came to be called. And, many of these states still exist in Scandinavia and Northern Europe. But unfortunately, the subtle connection between bills of rights and charters of human rights was not made. The philosophers of the Western world were buried in stillborn doctrines of linguistic philosophy and logical positivism in the English-speaking world, and French philosophy, which sounded profound, but was mostly unintelligible, even in French. Simple ideas, like that of social moral philosophy, which allowed collective organizations, such as state or corporations, to be the bearers of moral responsibilities, were not explored, and consequently, the ‘bill of rights’ conception of the UDHR, was not seriously promoted.

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Consequently, the radically individualist doctrines of the Americans dominated the philosophical debate. And, as the Cold War progressed, the conservative leaders of the so-called free world decided to pull out all stops to defeat the USSR economically, by abandoning the welfare states, and adopting the economic strategy of laissez-faire capitalism. This strategy had worked in the industrial revolution to put the West into the position of absolute economic and military dominance. And, the thought was that it could work again in the circumstances that existed in Russia in the 1980s. Russia was already feeling the strain of keeping its head above water in the Arms Race. So, what did the US and the UK decide to do? They decided to up the ante in the Cold War, and simultaneously introduce Star Wars. It was a bold decision. And it worked. The USSR crumbled under the strain, and by 1989, it was all over. The Cold War was won. The Berlin wall had fallen. And Francis Fukuyama declared the ‘End of History’. Contrary to expectations, these achievements turned out to be catastrophic for many of the working and lower middle-class people in the West.3 I don’t think that many of these people accepted the need for the so-called economic reforms of the 1980s that those in power in the West thought necessary. The developing world, consisting of most of the countries in the so-called Third World, were in desperate need of the boost to their economies that they expected to flow from these reforms. But they were bought, it seems, at the expense of full employment, widespread home ownership, and social justice in the West. This was not done maliciously, I believe. For these things were all taken for granted in the West. The problem of unemployment, it was thought, had already been solved, and well-paid employment was widely regarded as a human right. In Australia, for example, unemployment averaged just 2.0% in the thirty years of the welfare state. Likewise, home ownership had come to be seen as a right by about 1970. And young people thought that they could always exercise this right, if only they applied themselves to their work, and did not live recklessly. Moreover, any sacrifices that the West might make were thought, by comparison, to be trivial. Both sides of the political spectrum thought that the West needed to get behind a program to relieve poverty in the Third World, and to let them enjoy some of the advantages that we have long taken for granted. 3  For details, see my summary of Lanchester’s comments in ‘Enlightenment and Realism’ in Filozofia Nauki 2019/27/1 pp139–143.

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Yet, for those in the First World, whose wages have been frozen at pre-1980 levels, and whose children have been denied useful employment, apparently in order that the people of the Third World may enjoy prosperity, it does not now seem to be such a good deal. These people, as we say, ‘have been dudded’. And, why have they been dudded, we may ask? Because, at the time, almost no one thought that they were at risk of losing the privileges they already enjoyed, Pinker evidently thinks that most of his opponents in the debate, which his book is almost certain to provoke, are likely to be backward-looking conservatives, who yearn for an older, and much more traditional view of human nature. For the first two, and certainly the most carefully argued, parts of the text outweigh the shorter third section, which is directed at more academic opponents, ‘who really care about arguments’. As one who has recently published books on scientific realism as a ‘first philosophy’ (2009), social humanism (2012), and rationalism (2017), I think I can reasonably class myself as belonging to this second category. And, after reading John Lanchester’s article in 2018, I became more convinced than ever that the good fight for sound reasoning, science and humanism is not yet over.

14.3  Philosophy in the European Enlightenment Philosophically, the European Enlightenment was seriously deficient in social theory. For the theories they developed were abstract and rationalistic in character, formally just like systems of geometry and rational mechanics. Economic theories of this kind are very likely not fit for purpose. For the plain fact of the matter is that we have not lived in the kinds of monetary economies that exist today for long enough historically. Consequently, we have not been subjected to the processes of natural selection for long enough for us to know intuitively what is in our own best interests in a monetary economy. Consequently, we cannot rely upon our intuitive beliefs in monetary theory. In developing strategies for economic management, we can, and must. We have ample experience of the role of money in family budgeting. But we do not have such experience of social budgeting. And those who do, have to rely upon the economists who advise them, whose own intuitive judgments are suspect. Therefore, economics is not a field in which we are intuitively well equipped. Dogs and cats all have well-developed intuitive knowledge of space, time, force and motion. All hunter-gatherers do. Consequently, cats and dogs are

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excellent hunters. Human beings are also well equipped intuitively in these areas. Consequently, we too have excellent intuitive understandings of mechanical concepts. Moreover, we can not only understand them intuitively, we have language, and are evidently capable of articulating our understanding of them. And this sophisticated power was manifestly revealed by the great achievements that occurred in the Enlightenment in the science of mechanics. But it cannot be said that we must know intuitively about the dynamics of modern societies. Biologically speaking, we must be just feeling our way around. Therefore, we should not expect to be able to solve the problems of economics, morals or politics simply by appealing to our intuitive understandings of human behaviour in modern societies. What we must do, if we wish properly to understand them, is study empirically how people and organizations are disposed individually or collectively to behave in the societies in which they live. Rationalistic theories normally have axiom systems concerning these realities. So, if a social, political or economic theory fails to predict accurately what happens in reality, then the sensible course would normally be to review the axiom system critically, as John Maynard Keynes did for economics in the 1930s. But, in the social sciences, there is another response. If you like the theorems of your economic theory more than you do its axioms, then you can you can, if you wish, think of the axiom system as a template for the reconstruction of your society. That is, you can engage in what engineers call ‘reverse engineering’. This is, plausibly, what neoliberalism is. Plausibly neoliberals believe that the theorems of neo-­ classical economics are (for them at least) very highly desirable. For, it is well known that this theory predicts the economy of a neo-classical state (if it could be maintained) must eventually settle down to become a free, prosperous, and fully employed society. Thus, neoliberal thinkers clearly believe that a social system, the economy of which is really like this, would naturally be superior to that of any other kind of state, which, as we all know, is not fully employed, and is undermined by people who believe in the welfare state, or, heaven forbid, socialism. It is subject to booms and busts, strikes and disorder, and much unhappiness. Therefore, the neoliberals truly believe that a decent society must be one that focuses on maintaining the neo-classical structure. If these axioms are satisfied, they think, then the state must, of logical necessity, be on track to become the ideal kind of state that neoliberals have always believed in.

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The same trick cannot be played in geometry or Newtonian mechanics. One cannot reverse engineer the universe, and change it to fit one’s physical theory. But one can, in principle, change one’s society to make it a better fit to the economic theory’s axiom system. And, a neoliberal society is, by definition, one that has been reverse engineered to make it fit the neo-classical economic model as well as possible. It is not, of course, possible to do this with much precision, because neo-classical econometricians have no place for governments in their system other than to maintain the conditions necessary for the possibility of a capitalist dynamic economy to function, as it should do, ideally. And, this, necessarily, requires that there be government regulation. Government regulation is also required to guarantee the free market system, and, as every economists knows, some minimal regulation. Moreover, taxes will be needed to maintain law and order, adequate defence from hostile foreign powers, especially those that may be hostile to basic capitalism. Adam Smith’s theory of capitalism was naturally a theory of this kind. For his model of the nation’s markets was clearly that of a village market— one that is attended only by the suppliers of the goods and services for sale, and the general public, who came to buy the goods and services they wanted. To make things calculable, Smith assumed that all of the attendees were ideally rational, self-interested, and perfectly well informed. That is, the participants in this perfect market were, by definition, rationally self-interested beings. The formal theory, which eventually developed out of this model, is the neo-classical one. This was Adam Smith’s basic conception. Versions of this theory were developed as axiom systems in the late nineteenth century. Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall works, late in the nineteenth century, were among the pioneer studies in this development. Léon Walras (1874) was responsible for the equilibrium model of neo-classical theory. Alfred Marshall produced the scholarly magnum opus on economic theory, came to dominate the studies of macroscopic economics throughout the world. It may seem strange that this simplistic, and manifestly unsatisfactory market model of the capitalist system, was invented by Adam Smith in the mid-eighteenth century, and remains today as our model of social reality for nation states. For Smith, the government of the country was a distant body, which had no substantial interest in  local markets. And, as there were no governments in village markets, so there were no such things in Smith’s model. Consequently, the economic model he used, and, which is

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still in use today, had no government, and no need for one, other than to keep things stable. I believe, however, that economic theories should be much more like meteorology than Newtonian dynamics, by which Adam Smith’s theory was probably inspired. It should be developed empirically from anthropologically realistic assumptions about large numbers of human beings living in social groups, and organized in various kinds of ways in many kinds of social structures. One would have expected, therefore, that economics would have become a very complex subject—which would have to deal with the complex patterns of social behaviour observable in the various kinds of nation states—one that deals comprehensively with the various kinds of governments, currencies, banks and other lending institutions, corporations, which trade with each other in a wide range of specified ways. To manage such a complex subject, one would have expected economic institutes to be established in every advanced state to calculate and map the patterns of interaction that might be expected to occur, using the strategies that weather forecasters do to deal with their complex bodies of data. This suggestion is a radical one. It would require the gathering of a great deal of regional data on a very wide range of topics. But with modern technology, I believe, we could take most of the speculation out of our economic planning, and do it all scientifically in suitably equipped research institutes. There should also be a global institute of this kind to consider the issues that affect all of the relevant groups of people. It should be staffed by senior econometricians of the various national and multinational groupings to deal with global economics, and national or regional institutes to deal with the national or regional issues. Instead, the village-market model of Adam Smith is still the preferred one at every level, which is surprising. The weather predictions we need around the world now have excellent scientific backing, and agriculture everywhere has greatly benefited from this. Why then do we not do the same with our economic planning? The reason, I believe, is that the economically most powerful people in the world have much to gain from keeping it simplistic and intuitive, thus disguising the nature of the problem as one of freedom versus tyranny—which, of course, it is not, rather than one of who benefits—which of course it is. Weather forecasting, on the other hand, takes dozens of different factors into account when it is making the maps that graziers and agriculturalists need and rely upon. Ocean temperatures, ocean currents, mountain

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ranges, prevailing winds, arctic melting events, CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and so on are all relevant to the global weather. Long-term patterns have now emerged. There are, for examples, el niños and la niñas, which depend upon the ocean temperatures at various latitudes in the Pacific, and allow some long-term predictions to be made. Why, then, do we not have comparable economic maps, detailing where unemployment, for example, is to be found, how serious it is, and the kinds of workforces that exist in the various localities? We should not be trying to increase demand globally, or even nationally, in order to deal with local problems. Such broad-sweep strategies belong to the eighteenth century. We should now be working specifically, region by region, to generate prosperity everywhere, and to spread the wealth around.

14.4  Scientific Realism Required While I believe that detailed sociological analysis of the kind that goes into weather forecasting should always be available, I do not believe that such information must be the determinant of economic policy. I believe only that information of this kind should be readily available to the independent decision-makers in business, and to the people’s representatives on the local Councils. What information they care to access is up to them and their local electorates. But, to my knowledge, such information is not generally available. And this is what needs to be corrected. In many areas, do doubt, local economic conditions are so generally prosperous that no such detailed information would be likely to affect the decisions that would be made. But such conditions are likely to prevail everywhere. Rationalistic theories certainly have their place in the physical sciences, and in logic and mathematics. I would argue, however, that scientific realism is the required metaphysical framework for any respectable theory in the social sciences4—not abstract theoretical modelling. In his Discourse on Method, René Descartes had argued, implausibly, that ‘all things, to the (scientific) knowledge of which mankind is capable’, must be knowable a priori, and, just as in geometry, derivable from what is thus known by a priori reasoning. And the Principia seemed to show that this was indeed the case in cosmology. As Alexander Pope said: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said: Let Newton be, and all was light.’ But no

 See Sect. 14.4 below.

4

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s­cientific realist today could reasonably accept such an optimistic thesis about our innate capacities. It is true that these attitudes were very influential in the Enlightenment period. They stimulated all of the arts and sciences of the age. And, it is no exaggeration to say that it changed the way that people everywhere understood the world in which they were living. It is also true that continental European mathematicians and natural philosophers made nearly all the running in eighteenth century physical theory. They were, for example largely responsible for the development of the concept of energy, and, by the end of the century, the European scientists were well ahead of their British counterparts in this field. Why this should have been so is not known for certain. But probably it is true that the French loved Descartes’ abstract physical theory, just as much as the British loved the methodology and utility of Sir Francis Bacon’s crude empiricism, and had a strong distaste for Cartesian rationalism. Indeed, they were probably much more admiring of Newcomen and Watt’s steam engines than they were of Newton’s revolution in our basic understanding of nature. Steam engines, after all, do real work. Bishop Berkley thought that the Principia was the work of a talented, but ‘infidel mathematician’. He argued that: ‘to be of service to reasoning and mathematical demonstration is one thing; to set forth the nature of things is another.’ David Hume, also a radical empiricist, was overtly dismissive of Newton’s achievements. At the conclusion of his Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he said, (probably with the Principia in mind):5 Does [this work] contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Given its Newtonian origins, the eighteenth century philosophical revolution would probably be best described as ‘the age of pure reason’, or, alternatively, as the age of ‘rationalism’. For the young Newton, who wrote the Principia in the decade or so before its publication, was surely 5  Hume is well known for his scepticism about the value of Newton’s Principia as a theoretical achievement. And, from the point of view elaborated in his theory of human understanding, such an observation concerning the Principia would certainly have been fully justified. Who else might he have had in mind?

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the main inspiration for the great works of Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith in the fields of morality and social theory. They thought that if the whole world is rational (i.e. law-governed and knowable a priori), then human nature and society must also be. Kant’s theory of human nature was straightforwardly that of Renaissance Europe. He believed, as Aristotle did, that human beings are essentially rational creatures argued that: if people were always to act rationally according to their natures, then they would act only on principles that they could simultaneously will to be universal laws of nature (which, it should be noted, was Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’). Smith thought likewise that morality must ultimately be a matter of rational self-interest, and founded his theory of economics on the market ideal of one attended and serviced only by perfectly well informed, and rationally self-­interested agents. But humans are not just rationally self-interested agents, as Aristotle believed; they are tribal beings, who have both family and tribal loyalties. As every cognitive scientist knows, humans are disposed to take many, not very reliable, shortcuts in their thinking. For human beings to be true to their natures, they must sometimes be disposed to act instinctively, or on their family or tribal values, rather than as rationally self-interested individuals. So a realistic theory of morality, or economics, cannot be founded on the idea that humans are, by nature, rationally self-interested and perfectly well informed. We can pretend to be socially disinterested, perhaps, but ultimately we must find it lonely and inhumane to act only in self-interest. In his Enlightenment Now Steven Pinker does not ask for a new enlightenment. He sees the values of the eighteenth-century writers, who created the cultural revolution known as the European Enlightenment, as adequate to have powered the socially progressive policies that have been so productive ever since. He is right about this, as far as it goes, but to progress from where we are, I say, the Western world now needs to change its ways of thinking about theories of morals, economics and politics. These are essentially social and/or psychological theories, not physical ones for which abstract theoretical models of the kind used in geometry and celestial mechanics are appropriate. In addition, given that the most recent scientific revolution is a digital one, which has affected the social world fundamentally, further progress will inevitably require a fundamental re-­ think of human choices and actions, human nature, and human societies.

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14.5  What Is Now Needed If the eighteenth-century views of human nature and economics are no longer tenable, what we need now are not a priori theories of economics and morality, but pragmatic ones that negotiate the principles and practices that best serve the interests of the people, both generally in the world, and locally at home. It is not that progress is not possible in a capitalist world. We need a new enlightenment now because progress under capitalism has become highly distorted. And, as we can see from the irrational form of capitalism championed by President Trump, raw capitalism has become a threat to democratic governance. To remove these distortions in capitalist development, we need to invent scientifically realistic theories in all of the social sciences. My initial thought was that neo-classical economics should be replaced by Keynes’s theory, which proceeds from a much more realistic set of axioms than any of the earlier axiomatic theories, as Paul Davidson argues. But I now think that even this is not radical enough. What is needed, may well be something much more like the system that Steve Keen has been working on, but even more multi-factored. We must not rely on the neo-classical theories that were in use in the years before the Great Depression, or attempt to change the existing social reality to make it fit the theory, as the neoliberals evidently want us to do. Rather, we must change our theory to fit the facts, as all good scientific theorists must. That is, we must demand greater scientific realism in the social sciences. Abstract theories of morals, economics and politics should have no place in our current world-view. They are simply not scientifically realistic. And this task, I think, is the one that should exercise the world’s best minds; not the futile defence of a manifestly inadequate system.

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Index1

A Act-utilitarianism, 82, 167, 181, 181n1, 182, 207 Africa, 227 American Declaration of Independence, 186n1 Ancient Greeks, 53, 107, 118, 128, 131 Animals, 71, 79, 103, 118, 161, 210, 219 Anthropology, 33 Arab scholars, 107 Aristarchus, 20 Aristotle, 3, 51, 53, 73, 76, 87, 107, 116–118, 209, 239 Artificial intelligence, 40, 112 Asia, 95, 105, 227, 229 Australasia, 3, 139 Australia, v, 3, 7, 10n1, 27, 31n5, 50, 84, 85, 89, 96n3, 101n4, 103–106, 111, 122, 124, 129,

130, 136, 145, 160, 198n4, 202, 207, 210, 216–219, 228, 232 Australian Labor Party (ALP), 105, 106 Austria, 19 B Bacon, Francis, 20, 21, 35, 54, 71–73, 238 Bailey, Greg, 31 Ball, W. Macmahon, 95, 96n3, 105 Bentham, Jeremy, 40, 82 Berkeley, George, 36, 72 Berlin, Isiah, 4, 135, 142, 174 Bilimoria, Purushottama, 42 Brahe, Tycho, 19, 20, 54, 107, 108 Bratman, M.E., 134 British Commonwealth, 97, 101, 115, 139, 158, 159 Buddhism, 94, 116

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Ellis, On Civilizing Capitalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29681-9

249

250 

INDEX

C Capitalism, v, vi, 1–5, 7, 8, 25, 26, 28–30, 30n4, 48–50, 53, 56–59, 65, 86, 89–97, 101–105, 109–111, 115, 119, 123, 125, 129, 136–140, 147, 148, 153, 177, 215, 229–232, 235, 240 Caribbean, 227, 228 Cartesian, 18, 21, 22, 29, 31, 35, 36, 52–54, 59, 71, 73, 76, 99, 238 Castañeda, H. N., 181n1 Causal powers, 8, 32–37, 65, 72 Chalmers, David, 34, 74 Chifley, Ben, 101, 103–105 China, 12, 27, 28, 44, 47, 48, 50, 65, 94, 96, 110, 115 Christianity, 70, 94, 107, 108, 166, 219 Civil law, 200, 201 Clarke, Samuel, 73 Cold War, 3, 95, 99, 106, 219, 232 Collectivism, 5, 121, 140, 173, 220 Commission on Human Rights, 46, 91 Communism, 8, 28, 46, 95, 96, 99, 105, 106 Communist Party of China (CPC), 110 Condorcet, Marquis de, 79, 79n13, 124n2 Confucianism, 94 Contractualism, 67 Coombs, H. C., 50 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 20 Covid 19, 27 Criminal law, 200–203 Cromwell, Oliver, 22 Cupit, Geoffrey, 10n1 D Davidson, Paul, 63, 240 Democracy, v, 1, 5, 28, 47, 48, 50, 60, 61, 84, 93, 95, 110, 149, 151, 152, 190, 196, 222

Deng Xiaoping (Deng Xiao Ping), 94, 110 Denmark, 19, 47, 94 Descartes, René, 21, 22, 52, 54, 55, 58n4, 70–73, 237, 238 Dworkin, Ronald, 6, 185, 197–199, 198n4 Dynamics, 23–25, 56–59, 65, 83 E East India Companies, 229 Economics, 10, 24, 25, 27, 29–32, 35, 39, 52, 53, 55, 56, 60, 63–66, 74, 130, 141, 175, 230, 233–236, 239, 240 Egalitarianism, 84–88 Empire, 12, 104, 227–229, 228n1 Empiricism, 18, 34–36, 53–55 Engels, Friedrich, 3 Enlightenment, The, 7, 8, 10n1, 11–13, 17–21, 25, 31, 31n5, 36, 53, 55, 59, 63, 69n8, 71–73, 80, 81, 81n14, 101, 160, 167, 228–239, 230n2, 232n3 Ergodic Principle, 63 Essentialism, 186–191 Ethics, 9, 39, 83, 205, 213 Euclid, 52, 53, 71 Eudaimonia, 4, 116–119, 124, 128, 128n3, 131, 132, 135, 137, 138, 155, 159, 182, 183, 189, 208, 209 Europe, v, 2, 3, 12, 17–19, 21, 25, 36, 46, 50, 53–55, 71, 81, 86, 94–97, 101, 107, 110, 115, 119, 120, 127n1, 139, 158, 160, 227–239 Evatt, H. V., 46, 49n2, 92n1, 93, 96n3, 105, 106

 INDEX 

F Facey, Albert, 207 Feldman, F., 181n1 First Philosophy, 18, 30, 31, 33–35, 51–53, 59–69, 71–73, 109–111 France, 79, 227 French Constitution, 82 French Republic, 6, 185 Friedman, Milton, 192n2 Fukuyama, Francis, 232 G Gaita, Raimond, 117, 118 Galilei, Galileo, 54, 65, 108 Germany, 19, 25, 72 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), 7, 27n3, 28, 62 Great Depression, The, 27, 27n3, 28, 30, 62, 63, 80, 81, 240 Groff, Ruth, 8 Gross Substitution Thesis, 63 H Hamilton, Clive, 5, 130, 147 Hayek, F.A., 120, 135, 175–178 Helévy, Elie, 91 Helmholtz, Ludwig von, 23, 25 Hinduism, 116 Ho Chi Min, 96 Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 160, 185, 195, 196 Holocaust, The, 50, 80, 92n2 Homophobia, v, 2, 50, 104 Howard, John, 27n3, 139, 145 Humanism, 5, 7, 8, 81, 84, 87, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 141, 149, 154, 155, 168, 173, 181, 181n1, 183, 205, 209–213, 215, 220, 223, 229, 233 Human rights, 83, 99, 100

251

Hume, David, 36, 39, 40, 71, 72, 164, 165, 238, 238n5 Humphrey, John P., 46, 93 Huygens, Christiaan, 21 I India, 12, 229 Indigenous Australians, 2 Individualism, 5, 52, 86, 119, 121, 140, 167, 173–179, 209, 220 Indonesia, 12 Industrial Revolution, 3, 18, 230 Information technology (IT), 112 Islam, 94, 116, 219 Israel, 2, 85n15 J Japan, 12 Jones, Barry, 109 Judaism, 81, 94, 210, 219 Judt, Tony, 10n1 Jurisprudence, 82, 105 K Kant, Immanuel, 8–10, 18, 35, 54, 63, 67, 70, 76–78, 86–88, 97, 98, 167, 239 Keen, Steve, 240 Kepler, Johannes, 19–21, 23, 24, 30, 35, 37, 54, 60n5, 65, 66, 72, 107, 108 Keynesianism, 2, 26–30, 50, 62, 63, 66, 216 Keynes, John Maynard, 27–31, 63, 63n6, 66, 234, 240 Kinematics, 20, 23–25, 29, 30, 35, 60, 62, 65, 66, 83 Kirby, Michael, 46, 49n2, 92n1 Korea, 12 Kuhn, Thomas, 74

252 

INDEX

L Lakatos, Imre, 33 Lanchester, J., 62, 63, 232n3, 233 League of Nations, 45 Leibniz, Gottfried, 21, 22, 35, 57, 58n4, 72, 73 Leunig, Michael, 211 Liberalism, 6, 120n1, 121, 139, 155, 167, 185, 234 Libertarian, 47, 97 Liberty, 4, 6, 90, 119, 121, 135, 141–147, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 173, 174, 181, 186, 186n1, 194, 196 Lloyd-Thomas, D., 186 Locke, John, 6, 36, 72, 94, 99, 121, 124, 124n2, 128, 129, 153, 158–160, 174, 185–188, 193, 194, 196–198, 201 Lombardo, R., 78 Lowe, Jonathan, 8, 10n1 Lucas, Robert E Jr, 62 Lynch, Tony, 10n1, 31 M Magie, W.F., 23 Mandelbaum, M., 177 Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), 47, 110 Marshall, Alfred, 29, 235 Marxist, 8, 93, 138 Marx, Karl, 3, 62, 96, 101, 231 Maxwell, Nicholas, 13, 98, 109 Measurement theory, 70 Medibank, 130, 218 Men, 52, 54, 105, 106, 110, 118, 130, 142, 155, 156, 158, 176, 177, 188, 194–196, 206, 215, 218 Menzies, Robert, 103–106, 139 Métin, Albert, 159 Meyer, Robert, 23

Middle East, 12, 107 Mill, John Stuart, 149–153 Mind-body problem, 70 Monetarism, 28–30, 49, 58, 59, 89, 102, 103, 115, 233 Moore, G. E., 181, 181n1 Moral theory, 7, 40, 42–44, 52, 66, 78, 116, 164, 166–168, 175, 176, 179, 180, 187, 188, 190, 207 N Napoleonic Wars, 62 National Health System, 130 Nationalism, 94 Nationalization, 221 National rights, 13 Natural rights, 46, 79, 91, 97–99, 186–191 Neo-classical economics, 28, 29, 60, 63–65, 234 Neo-conservatism, 121 Neoliberalism, v, 7, 27, 29, 47, 59, 61–63, 93, 97, 115, 160, 175, 185, 234, 235 Netherlands, The, 227 Neutral Money Hypothesis, 29, 60, 63–65 Newton, Isaac, 19, 21–25, 24n2, 27, 29, 30, 35–37, 53, 54, 56–59, 56n2, 58n4, 60n5, 65, 66, 71–73, 77, 235–238, 238n5 New Zealand, 41, 50, 85n15, 94, 111, 122, 129, 216, 217, 219 North America, 227 North Korea, 69 Norway, 136 Nozick, Robert, 6, 75, 76, 90–93, 97–99, 102, 122, 123, 185, 186, 191–193, 229

 INDEX 

O Obama, Barak, 89 Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), 2, 27, 216 P Parfit, Derek, 44, 67–69 Parliament of the World’s Religions, 42 Persia, 12 Philippines, The, 41 Pinker, Steven, 7, 8, 10n1, 11, 31n5, 69n8, 228–230, 233, 239 Plato, 53, 107 Polya, Gideon, 31 Popper, K.P., 176–178 Pusey, Michael, 130 Q Quantum theory, 11, 33, 36, 66 R Racism, v, 2, 50, 104 Rationalism, 7, 10–11, 18, 31, 31n5, 34, 35, 52–55, 72, 72n10, 74–76 Rawls, John, 6, 9, 75, 76, 85, 97–102, 122, 123, 160, 185, 191, 197–199, 229 Reagan, Ronald, 18, 29, 47 Relativity, General Theory of, 36 Renaissance, The, 107, 127, 239 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 46 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 80, 85, 90, 92 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6, 45, 48, 79, 121, 128, 129, 158, 160, 185, 194–197 Rudd, Kevin, 28, 43 Russia, 48, 50, 96, 105, 115, 227, 231, 232

253

S San Francisco Conference, 45, 68, 92, 124, 231 Sankey, H., 78 Saudi Arabia, 46, 91, 94 Sawyer, K, 78 Scandinavia, 3, 50, 86, 97, 120, 127n1, 231 Scientific realism, 3, 8, 18, 30–33, 31n5, 35, 39, 74, 237–239 Scientific Revolution, 19, 70, 108, 227, 239 Scott, K.J., 176 Second Bill of Rights, 80, 90, 92 Second Law of Motion, 21–23, 27, 57 Secular states, 115–125 Sen, Amartya, 5, 141, 207 Sexism, v, 2, 104 Sidgwick, H., 67, 181 Singer, Peter, 181 Smart, J.J.C. (Jack), 70, 74, 181 Smith, Adam, vi, 2, 4, 25, 26, 28, 29, 56, 58, 235, 236, 239 Social contract, 4–7, 41, 42, 44, 68, 69, 75, 86, 87, 121, 128, 129, 140, 153, 157–161, 179–182, 185, 189, 194–203, 205, 209, 211, 213, 215 Social Humanism, 7–10, 31n5, 46, 116, 122, 131–134, 153–155, 182n2, 183, 211n2 Socialism, v, 1, 3, 4, 27, 28, 50, 86, 89, 94–97, 99, 103, 110, 115, 119–121, 123, 127, 129, 130, 139, 155, 159, 160, 167, 215, 221, 231, 234 Social morality, 39, 40, 43, 46 Sociology, 39, 62 South Africa, 46, 91, 94, 228 Spain, 107 Stagflation, 2

254 

INDEX

Steiner, H., 143, 144, 155 Sumner, L.W., 127n2, 206–208 Sweden, 47, 94 T Thatcher, Margaret, 47, 217 Third World, 3, 95, 99, 232, 233 Titmuss, Richard, 127n2 Trump, Donald, 99, 106–109, 240 Turkey, 12 U Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), 3, 47, 94, 95, 99, 106, 115, 232 United Kingdom (UK), 3, 10n1, 24, 31n5, 48, 50, 62, 71, 73, 85, 95, 97, 103, 111, 122, 123, 129, 130, 139, 158, 160, 216, 217, 219, 228n1, 232 United Nations (UN), 4, 12, 13, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 49n2, 69, 85n15, 91, 100, 136, 209 United States of America (USA), 2, 3, 18, 45–48, 50, 62, 65, 69, 79, 84, 85, 89, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 103–106, 111, 120, 123, 124, 124n2, 198n4, 216, 219, 232

Universal Basic Income (UBI), 48, 124 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), 4, 46, 49, 69, 81, 82, 84, 90–94, 98, 100, 102, 124, 125, 231 Urwick, Edward, 128n3, 131–134 V Vietnam, 95, 96, 99 W Walras, Leon, 235 Welfarism, 96, 102–106, 206–209 Western World, 18, 29, 47, 52, 63, 90, 107, 118, 122, 131, 159, 218, 219, 230, 231, 239 Whitlam, Gough, 7, 101n4 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33 Women, 79n13, 105, 110, 118, 132, 187, 188, 215, 218 World Bank, 110 World War II, 27, 45, 49, 80, 81, 92n2, 94, 97, 101, 216 X Xi Jinping, 110