Welfare, Justice, and Freedom. by Scott GordonReview by: David GauthierNoûs, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Sep., 1983), pp. 494-497Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2215264 .

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494 NOOS

[9] , "Computation and Cognition: Issues in the Foundation of Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(1980): 111-169.

[10] W. Sellars, "Some Reflections on Language Games," in Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963): ch. 11, 321-358.

[1l] R. N. Shepard, and Metzler, "Mental Rotation of Three-Dimensional Objects," in P. N. Johnson-Laird and P. C. Wason, eds., Thinking(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977): 532-536.

NOTES

1A number of the essays examined here were discussed in an informal discussion group at the University of Cincinnati. I am indebted at many points to my colleagues. This work was initiated and completed under a fellowship from the National Endow- ment for the Humanities. For that support I am also thankful.

Scott Gordon, Welfare, Justice, and Freedom (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. viii + 234.

DAVID GAUTHIER

UNIVERSITY OF PflTSBURGH

The last decade has been marked by the emergence of a dialogue among moral philosophers, political theorists, and economists in which common problems and interests have been identified, and resources have been pooled in order to find, if not solutions, yet fuller understanding. As a contribution to this dialogue, Scott Gordon's study is to be welcomed. An economist who is not afraid of normative issues, Gordon joins philosophers who are not afraid of matters of fact in contributing to the literature of political evaluation.

Politics, for Gordon, is the activity of coping "with those social problems that do not have technical solutions" (12). In the early pages of his essay, Gordon dismisses the varieties of "Edenic thinking" that offer to free us from politics, by supposing that faith, or plenty, or natural harmony, or technology, is all we need. Accepting the view that politics is always with us, he turns to the methodology of the moral evaluation that he takes as central to political activity. Gordon's own preference is for a "pluralist" methodology, although he hesi- tates to accept any label since he wishes neither to advance a theory nor to wave a banner. He supposes that there are several plausible and widely-accepted criteria for the evaluation of the operations of government, and that each criterion has itself differing and not necessarily commensurable aspects. His commitment to pluralism is then a commitment against any moral theory, whether reductive or over-arching, that would bring a false unity and simplifi- cation into the evaluative task. Rather, Gordon seeks to clarify the evaluative criteria entrenched in our moral and political practice, and then to consider, not how they may be fitted into a single ordering, but instead the complemen- tarities and conflicts among them-the extent to which we may jointly satisfy any two criteria, and the extent to which we must trade satisfaction of one for that of another. The result is a study in which fairly basic philosophic and economic tools are employed to develop and support a refined common sense.

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GORDON'S WELFARE, JUSTICE AND FREEDOM 495

Gordon's approach is, by its very nature, embedded in and responsive to existing practice. It clarifies and harmonizes the values of Western democracy.

One of the merits of Grodon's study is that we are spared both excessive abstraction and an uncurbed enthusiasm grounded solely on theoretical ele- gance. He reminds us frequently of what we do. Consider an extended exam- ple, taken from Gordon's discussion of the differing and partially competing criteria of justice:

Observation of what people do rather than what they say provides harder evi- dence [of their beliefs about justice]. This evidence seems strongly to suggest that need is the most important criterion of justice in the common judgment. People donate to charity,. . and they respond to disasters to a degree that evidences their willingness to redistribute voluntarily when need is manifest. No organizations exist that collect widely dispersed contributions for the purpose of rewarding desert or merit, or even for decreasing inequality, to the extent that it is separable from need. [But we might suggest that people suppose that desert and merit are adequately rewarded by the market supplemented by the state.] If we can regard the governmental fisc as reflecting common views, it is significant that little redistribution of income is actually accomplished by taxes; the expenditure side of the state budget does much more, and not by decreasing inequality generally but by raising the low end of the distribution through policies that are clearly need- oriented. (1 13-114)

Gordon goes on to note that individuals insure themselves, not against failure to be rewarded for desert, or merit, or failure to be equal with their fellows, but rather against failure to to able to meet needs.

Gordon's discussion ofjustice also includes brief, but useful, treatment of the adequacy of marginal productivity as a criterion of desert. He reminds us that Wicksteed demonstrated that in a society based on division of labor and exchange, the sum of the marginal products added by each factor of produc- tion must equal the total product (where both marginal products and total product are expressed in terms of value). It is easy to be impressed with this demonstration-as, for example, Robert Nozick would seem to be in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But Gordon provides warnings for the unwary. The demon- stration holds only under static conditions, so that in a dynamic economy there may be residual products after distribution is effected on the basis of marginal productivity-and the residue may even take a negative value. Furthermore, the particular distribution of marginal products depends on the prior distribu- tion of income and of property. Because the marginal product of any factor depends on the availability of complementary or substitutional factors, and the marginal product of a factor in fixed supply varies with demand, Gordon notes that one must not ignore these matters in considering whether distribution in accordance with marginal productivity meets the demands ofjustice. Although these ideas are not pursued in depth, yet the discussion shows the need for clarification, elaboration, and assessment of the normative use of marginal productivity theory.

Gordon's discussion of welfare is also a useful reminder of the com- plexities concealed by a seemingly simple concept. His remarks here are ad- dressed particularly to the over-simplifications common among economists. Thus he considers the relation of welfare to preferences, noting the problems that arise when producers are able to generate the demands they serve. He touches on problems of duration, and especially the vexing issue of inter- generational distribution which, as he notes, is ill-defined in that it is not possible to specify quantitatively what actually is done to provide for future

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496 NOUS

generations. He mentions problems of domain, and notes the widespread interdependence of individual utilities, and especially the extent to which relative status contributes to utility, thus undercutting the attempts of econo- mists to focus solely on the absolute magnitude of the bundles of goods consumed and factor services provided. Gordon's treatment of welfare raises problems rather than resolving them, but it is important that they be raised. It is altogether too easy to sweep awkward issues about welfare under the table if one is in the grip of the view that welfare is simply aggregate preference satisfaction.

Welfare, justice, and freedom are, for Gordon, the three principal criteria for political education. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his economic perspec- tive, freedom seems to receive the least perceptive treatment. On the one hand, Gordon is unduly concerned to relate his account to more metaphysical issues of determinism and necessity. On the other hand, Gordon does not give serious consideration to what we might term the libertarian concern with liberty-the idea, suggested by Nozick among others, that liberty is connected with the meaning of life. To give meaning to one's life, one must be free so that one may shape it in accordance with some overall plan (See Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 50). Although Gordon recognizes that defenders of freedom wish to claim that it is a good in itself, his own treatment of it remains too close to the instrumen- talist level.

The most original chapter in Gordon's study concerns "Complementarity and Conflict among Social Goods." Here he seeks to get out the transformation structure among the goods of welfare, justice, and freedom. Gordon considers it impossible to represent these goods in a single calculus, because we do not know individual preference structures defined over them. Therefore he con- tents himself with the other dimension of rational choice among these goods- that is, the transformational relationships among them. He focusses on "the empirical cause-consequent relationships between pairs of social goods in terms of incremental changes in the causes, and with reference to the state of affairs which seems to pertain in contemporary Western democracies, most particularly the United States" (151).

Although the project is interesting and potentially illuminating, the execution, at least to me, is disappointing. Gordon works with five goods- justice, welfare, and economic, intellectual, and political freedom. He must then examine twenty relationships (each of the five is taken in turn as cause or independent variable and the other four are related to it as consequents or dependent variables). In effect, Gordon is proposing a research program. The thirty-two pages devoted to this program barely enable him to scratch the surface, and most of the particular discussions seem to me to verge on the simplistic. For example, his argument to show that incremental increases in economic freedom have a negative effect on intellectual freedom relies almost entirely on an appeal to "concentration of editorial power and. . . reduction of variety" (155). But one might argue that the forces making for concentration in the media are at least in part the result of governmental policies that encourage the takeover of existing media participants by conglomerates and that inhibit the entry of new participants, and one might claim that these policies are themselves restrictive of economic freedom. Gordon's position may prevail, but one has no good reason, on the basis of the three pages he devoted to the issue, to accept his conclusion.

This type of objection could be repeated for many of the other brief discussions. Whereas in earilier chapters of the book Gordon offers salutary warnings against over-hasty conclusions or excessive simplifications, here it

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1KWIN'S PLAiT1: GUKUJAS 497

seems to me.the he falls victim to these vices-not through a simplistic under- standing of economic theory or a monistic methodology, but rather through failure to explore the complex empirical ramifications of the changes he wishes to examine. The execution of his research program is vitiated because of insufficient data.

In the final chapter, Gordon treats the "Distribution and Control of Power." Here he offers a briefly documented and essentially common-sense warning against the institutional concentration of coercive power and against divorcing the exercise of such power from responsibility for its effects. If in many respects Gordon would find himself strongly opposed to Ronald Reagan, yet in one area they would seem to agree, for Gordon says that "the democratic state that sets out to capture the other centers of power is very likely to become the captive of them, and be destroyed" (210). One could hardly repeat and embellish this dictum too extensively as a reminder to the would-be centralizers and planners who would give all power to "the people."

Gordon's book is an expansion of his introductory lectures in a course offered at Indiana University, in which he continued with an examination of the political philosphies of economists and economic-minded philosophers. As an exercise in clarification and a reminder of complexities, this book would indeed be a useful introduction to more detailed studies. It is unlikely that anyone with formed and considered views on welfarejustice, and freedom will find his or her perspective radically altered by Gordon. But those with un- formed views may well be deterred from reaching premature conclusions. Dogmatists, whether of the left or of the right, will be sure that Gordon has missed the truth of their dogma, but most readers will find him a congenial and civilized companion, able to guide them through the borderlands of economics and philosophy in a clear and jargon-free manner, and altogether exemplify- ing the pluralism he professes in his analysis and clarification of social values.

Plato: Gorgias, tranlated with notes by Terence Irwin, Clarendon Plato Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), ix + 268 pp., $29.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

ALEXANDER NEHAMAS

UNIVERSITY OF PITSBURGH

Plato's Gorgias opens with the question of the definition of rhetoric, a question that soon develops into a quarrel between rhetoric and dialectic. These, at least as Plato saw them, are the ability to persuade an audience of whatever it is that one wants them to believe on the one hand, and the desire to engage them in a cooperative effort to discover the truth on the other. But as the dialogue progresses, more characters disputing more issues enter the quarrel.

For Plato exploits this quarrel and, in particular, the claim that rhetoric is an art technoe: craft, discipline; 447c) and that it is in some manner concerned with justice (454d) in order to raise a variety of questions. These include the nature of art and of power (dunamis: ability), the function of punishment, the structure and the objects of desire, the truth and value of hedonism, the

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