Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Tim Taylor on Moral Conceptions of Economic Life

Article Link

From the Article:

As Rapaczynski discusses, Aristotle laid out the argument along these lines:  

"But to be a citizen, according to Aristotle, a person must already be free, i.e. one whose needs are already satisfied, so he can devote his energy and attention to those things that are not the necessities imposed on us by our nature, but which can be pursued for their own sake and with no other purpose in mind. Freedom, for Aristotle, means freedom from necessity, and thus a citizen is someone who has the leisure needed to devote his life to the higher ends that allow the fulfillment of man’s true vocation. The satisfaction of those necessities, on the other hand, i.e. the process of production, is not something that constitutes a part of public, political life. On the contrary, production is a mere precondition of citizenship and, much as sexual intercourse, which is a precondition of the reproduction of the species, it is entirely excluded from the public domain, and takes place in the privacy of a household – oikos, from which derives our term for “economics.” Economic decisions are thus also not at all something that the state is supposed to be involved with; they are an entirely private matter of the master of the household, whose freedom is sustained by production, and most of the productive process is carried out by people who are themselves not free. Indeed, the very labor, i.e. the physical and mental effort involved in the production of goods and services necessary to satisfy human needs (and enable some men to devote their energies to free action), is the quintessence of unfreedom that immediately identifies those who perform it as slaves."

and

An alternative view of moral virtue, Rapaczynski argues, is due to John Locke, who viewed the jobs of work and production as building blocks of human freedom and moral virtue. Rapaczynski writes: 
"The person responsible for the most fundamental re-orientation of European thinking about the place of production in the constitution of human liberty – in fact of the very concept of labor that Aristotle had seen as the essence of slavery – is John Locke. Arguing quite consciously against the Aristotelian tradition, Locke claims that labor is the most fundamental attribute of humanity because it is the activity that enables human beings to transform the alien natural world around them into a “tamed,” “human” environment, reflecting our own design, serving our needs, and capable of freeing us from the shackles of the mechanical laws of nature. ...
It is this aspect of Locke’s theory that provides the most important moral basis of the nascent modern liberal outlook in which economic activity is no longer seen as geared toward “mere satisfaction” of heteronomously generated needs imposed on us by our physical existence, or as just a precondition of human freedom. On the contrary, economic activity is now seen as the most basic process though which human beings transform the world around them in their own image and initiate a complex interaction between themselves and the natural world that amounts to an activity of human “self-creation”: what labor produces is not just goods or commodities, but the very autonomous human beings who now live the lives they themselves design and determine. Thus, labor, which is at the basis of economic life, far from enslaving those who engage in it, is the prime expression of human creativity, a true production of new reality governed by human intellect and imagination, in which we can recognize and shape ourselves in accordance with our own will. ... 
At its origins, then, the modern liberal worldview is not primarily a political theory, but a moral theory of economic production. It is a theory that views labor as a paradigmatic expression of human freedom and the way in which we interact with the world around us and form ourselves as autonomous self-creations. ... Art, literature, and music, because of the particularly sophisticated nature of their products, may be more clearly recognizable as the primary artifacts of human culture, but their place in human life is not in principle different from the other objects we produce both to consume and to define the fundamental conditions of our own existence. To be sure, economic life can run into its own excesses and generate all kinds of pragmatic and moral problems. Excessive inequality is always a possible outcome of economic activity, and the thoroughgoing transformation of the natural world can wander into ecological and environmental dead-ends. Some collective regulation of economic life is therefore always necessary to set its clear rules, prevent unintended distortions, assure some basic dignity for all the participants, etc. But, unlike for Aristotle, politics and other non-economic forms of self-governance are not, for liberals, the primary locus of human self-realization. ...  On the contrary, it is that the proper discourse of politics is mostly derivative with respect to economic life because the latter is the primary creative activity of the modern man. Political regulation of economic life is thus not an imposition of some external higher norms curtailing the amoral, self-interested pursuits of economic actors, but a process of collective reflection that aims at eliminating contingent distortions of the ethics of production and at bringing out its inherent and defining “spiritual” values."

Source: Timothy Taylor, The Conversable Economist, conversableeconomist.blogspot.com, January 2, 2014

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