welfare, justice and freedomby scott gordon

Welfare, Justice and Freedom by Scott GordonReview by: Jan NarvesonThe Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Nov.,1981), pp. 732-737Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Canadian Economics AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/134832 .

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en est un de microeconomique appliqu6e. Logiquement, c'est certainement vrai. Mais sa manie d'aborder les relations microeconomiques dans leur forme parametrisee ne peut que lui aliener l'economiste applique qui n'est pas 6conometre de profession (ou n'a pas l'intention immediate de le devenir).

Cette reserve quant a la pr6sentation mise a part, le manuel est non seulement bien fait mais aussi tres vaste. Bien qu'il soit clair que ses preferences aillent au modele de Rotterdam, Theil presente tres bien le modele de depenses lineaires, certaines de ses gen6ralisations et les modeles qu'on peut tirer des fonctions d'utilite indirecte log-additives et transloga- rithmiques. D'une maniere generale, la theorie des indices et celle de la structure des preferences font tellement corps avec l'expose que la synthese avec la theorie traditionnelle est parfaite, c'est-a-dire ne se remarque pas.

Ce manuel bien fait est, quant au fond, conservateur. Theil aborde a la fois la th6orie du consommateur et celle du producteur mais ne semble pas imaginer (sauf cas secondaire) que cette instrumentation puisse servir a l'estimation meme d'un 6quilibre g6neral et d6border d'une maniere ou d'une autre sur la macroeconomique. I1 concoit l'equilibre temporaire du consommateur et du producteur mais consacre un paragraphe a l'epargne et suppose la separabilite ensuite. I1 ignore les effets de d6bordement. Cet ultra-n6o- classicisme provient sans doute de ce que son inspiration est avant tout 6conom6trique.

La bibliographie contient 433 titres.

CAMILLE BRONSARD / Universit6 de Montr6al

Welfare, Justice and Freedom by Scott Gordon. Columbia University Press, 1980. Pp. viii, 229. Index. ISBN 0-231-04976-5

Professor Gordon brings to his subject a rare combination of expertise in both economics, of which he is a professor, and philosophy (besides being professor of economics at Queen's University and Indiana, he is also an associate member of the department of history and philosophy of science at Indiana University). Equally important from the point of view of many potential readers of this book is that he is also endowed with an admirable literary style, at once clear, graceful, and concise. The book is ajoy to read, and since it also has much to offer for most of us, it deserves and should get wide readership.

Gordon's message might well be summarized in this sentence: 'Man has achieved great power over nature through his ability to simplify, but he always commits errors, and sometimes great evil, when he attempts to do likewise in his moral and political philosophy' (82). Philosophers are continually tempted to reduce all problems of political philosophy to a single dimension, in turn managed by some simple formula or some simple device.



Reviews of books / Comptes rendus / 733

He distinguishes three of the latter, three versions of 'Eden': the absolute authoritarian state which hands over 'all the tasks of government to a man-God, a sovereign, who alone ... bears all the responsibilities, as well as the powers, of moral judgment'; Utopia, 'the idyllic state ... that is freed from the curse of scarcity. Where there is unlimited plenty there is no need for choice, and no problem of conflict among men'; and Natural Harmony, the anarchic ideal of a spontaneous order, 'obeying laws of a special sort which required no lawmaker and which, with total detachment and impartiality, enforced themselves' (2-4). There is also the appeal to 'science,' a la Comte or, latterly, Skinner. In this view all political/social problems are reducible to scientific ones, soluble by experts. But Professor Gordon asserts that they suffer from massive irrelevance. The problems of moral choice 'do not have "solutions" in the same sense that empirical and logical problems do, and the task of making choices that involve moral issues or value judgments cannot be performed by a technical contrivance, or handed over to experts.' (8)

How, then, do we conceive these problems and how do we make progress in them? 'The view that underlies this essay is that while the sociology of morals is insufficient to provide evaluational criteria, it is the necessary place to begin. Progress in morals ... means progressing from where we now are, and it consists of making small incremental improvements rather than great leaps' (14). Having appreciated the inadequacy of naturalism - the view that ethical concepts can be exhaustively defined in terms of empirical ones - including the naturalism of 'accepting commonly held moral principles as good simply because they are commonly held' (14), and being averse to what he calls 'rationalism,' which holds that ' Moral criteria are ... deducible a priori because they lie within the structure of logical thought itself (16) and to 'proceduralism,' which holds that there is a single procedure which is 'inherently moral as such ... whatever emerges from such a procedure is moral because it is the result of a moral process' (16) (which would seem to be a species of 'rationalism,' incidentally), Gordon would evidently seem to be in something of a bind, methodologically speaking. And in fact, although Gordon does not adopt this name for it and would surely be unhappy to be so labelled, I am unable to see how his approach differs from what contemporary moral theorists label 'intuitionism.' Not, indeed, the old-fashioned type which holds that some favoured value-term such as 'good' refers to an ultimate and irreducible moral property, but the newer-fangled sort which has it that we must take 'our' widely shared and deeply held moral convictions as they are, subject them to the tests of consistency with each other and with such facts as are internally relevant to them, and accept the results as the best we can do.

This short review is not the place to launch into a general discussion of intuitionism as so understood, but some observations about it are in order, especially because they apply so directly to this book. In the first place, the plausibility of results emerging from treatments of this type is necessarily a



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function of the degree of general perception that they-are plausible. Insofar as there is genuine disagreement among thinking people about the principles of the field, a real lack of consensus, intuitionistic treatments cannot hope to get far off the ground. They can at best achieve a clarification or tightening up of a general viewpoint, one among many others. Second, and by no means unrelated to the first, intuitionism is inherently incapable of offering real illumination about basic matters. 'This,' the intuitionist eventually asserts, 'is simply what we really do think on this matter, and the question "why" is out of order.' Gordon doesn't exactly say that, but he will leave many of us with the feeling that the question 'Why' has been quietly eased under the carpet.

Still, we can learn from intuitionistic treatments - and there remains the possibility, after all, that we really can't do any better - and in the present case, when the treatment is informed by so much good sense and technical competence together, we can't help but feel that we have learned quite a bit. As the title would suggest, Gordon believes that there are three principal values ('primary goods,' he tends to call them, borrowing from Rawls) to employ in socio-political matters: welfare, justice, and freedom. And, as one would expect in view of the above, he is a pluralist: he does not think that we can reduce any of these to any of the others. Nor does he think that they enjoy a natural harmony. Instead, they partly conflict in various ways and are partly complementary, and the thing to do is identify the principal ways in which they do each and be guided in our social choices by our realization of the conflicts and complementarities in question, expecting that in some societies more urgency attaches to one of them, in others to another. But as to what the proper balance among them ought to be when they do conflict, in classic intuitionist fashion Gordon does not offer any general formula - which, given his premises, perhaps one cannot coherently do.

The chapters on each of the three taken separately contain much of interest. For example, in the chapter on welfare he argues that there is no incompatibility between 'material' and 'spiritual' welfare, at least in principle; that the principle of consumer sovereignty is evidently 'not satisfactorily fulfilled when producers are able to generate the demands they serve' (62) although it does not follow that advertising, for instance, is inimical to welfare; that no one can really treat all potential recipients of welfare equally; that if welfare requires exhaustible resources, then if population is in effect infinite through time, persons again cannot be treated equally; and that man is too complex an animal to settle easily for any measure of welfare as want-satisfaction, so that in particular, 'If Eden were created anew and its gates opened to all comers, the number of people who would take up permanent residence there would be small ... Eden would be a nice place to visit, but who would want to live there?' (81). All this is interesting and important. It is advanced as a series of difficulties for viewing welfare as want-satisfaction, a view which, he says, 'has proved to be a powerful instrument of analyses and it is not my intention to denigrate it without offering a superior approach' (54). the superior approach in question is not




offered, in fact, and it is thus rather unclear where Gordon intended to leave us. In effect, I think, we are again left with only our intuitions to guide us.

I single out one of the above for comment. Should we accept the frequently held idea that when demand for a product is created as well as supply, this casts doubt on the principle of consumer sovereignty, or even on the idea that welfare is satisfaction? No. Or rather, it depends on just how the demands are 'created.' In typical cases such as advertising - or, say, reading history, biography, geography, or almost anything - we can point out that the consumer prefers the situation in which he desires and gets the new item to the situation in which he knows nothing about it. This can be taken to imply an increase in that individual's welfare, as viewed by him. And as Gordon observes, woe awaits us if we think that someone else's view is, in principle, superior.

The chapter on justice likewise contains many interesting observations, but I think no really satisfactory theory. All this may be intended to cast doubt on the possibility of a really satisfactory theory; perhaps the frequent rejections of Rawls, Nozick, and others are intended to have that implication. But if, as Gordon says, 'the vernacular speaks a muffled voice on justice' (113), and given the evident difficulties he properly cites with such standards as fair exchange, desert, equality, and need, I would think the proper moral is that we ought to press on in our search for a more satisfactory theory, especially if the pursuit of this very woolly ideal is to be one of the major goals of social policy.

The chapter on freedom opens with a discussion of free will which I fear is no improvement on what has gone before. He rejects 'radical determinism,' saying that it is 'clearly antithetical' to the possibility of autonomous action, and rejects the doctrine of 'radical autonomy' as well. But unfortunately it is not clear that there really is any room in the middle if one genuinely thinks that freedom and determinism are incompatible. It will decidedly not do, for instance, to take refuge in quantum physics: do I save my freedom by supposing that at crucial points, my decisions are due to the utterly unpredictable motions of subatomic particles? No: the purely whimsical are not more free than we sober types. More relevant for social theory, he construes the classic triadic analysis of freedom by MacCallum as 'an attack upon the "positive" and "negative" differentiation' (134); but this it clearly is not. The MacCallumite analysis has it that freedom involves a relationship among an agent, the actions that agent is free or unfree to do, and the constraints which may or may not be interfering. Now the distinction of positive and negative freedom has to do with the type of constraint in question: do only the positive interfering actions of others relevantly constrain me? Or do they also 'constrain' me if they instead fail to provide some condition or other necessary for my action? MacCallum's analysis obviously has no bearing on that vital matter - on which, I fear, Gordon also casts no light.

The chapter on complementarity and conflict is perhaps the most important



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in the book, although in the absence of a clearer analysis of the three principal concepts it can hardly be possible to analyse these matters in a really satisfactory way. Thus, for example, it seems to me fundamentally problematic whether political freedom promotes economic freedom, as is maintained (176). But that is because the idea of political freedom is inherently problematic to start with: if we think of the vote, for instance, as the locus classicus of political freedom, then this evidently gives each person the power to repress and suppress others, if enough of his fellows vote likewise; and if, as is so often the case, the suppression is of economic activity in the (supposed) interests of welfare or public interest, then there would appear to be some fairly substantial conflict. All one can do is argue that in the absence of this power, things would probably be worse still, since the only realistically possible alternative is a maldistribution of political power. The question is whether it is the only realistic alternative; admittedly it is an uphilljob to show that it is not.

That Gordon's table of relationships among the variables of economic, intellectual, and political freedom, justice, and welfare is rough is indicated when we note that while intellectual and political freedom are argued to have a positive causal relationship to all the other variables, economic freedom, for instance, is argued to have a negative causal relation to intellectual freedom. This would seem to mean that A causes B, which in turn causes not-A, in this case. Obviously the relations are not strict, and Gordon would no doubt maintain that such complexities illustrate the difficulty of the political task of attempting to optimize among such unruly variables. But there is not space here to do justice to this interesting chapter, in which there is much food for thought.

The principal message of the last chapter, 'The Distribution and Control of Power,' is that contemporary western nations need especially to be on their guard against two widespread and increasing practices: 'the excessive secrecy of bureaucratic activities and the excessive use of administrative law,' both of which tend to undermine the rule of law, the former by insulating the bureaucrat, thus effectively placing law-making power in his hands, while the latter 'undermines the role of politics' (216-17). But in certain states - Italy and France, for instance - 'a large part of the vernacular vigilance should be directed at the activities of political parties that embrace ideologies that are opposed to liberty,' whereas in Britain concern should be directed at the growth of labour syndicalism 'which threatens to turn the state into a submissive captive of its own oligarchy' (218). Many of us would certainly concur in these judgments, but obviously they are not ideologically neutral. Those very parties in France and Italy, for instance, would no doubt insist that contemporary capitalism is working against the liberty of the ordinary citizen. In order to counter such claims effectively, we need more precise analyses of liberty, and indeed of welfare and justice, than we get in this book,




interesting and incisive though it is. But it is interesting and incisive, and is to be welcomed as such as well as for its considerable literary merits.

JAN NARVESON / University of Waterloo

Energy Policies for the 1980s. Ontario Economic Council, 1980. 2 vol. Pp. 176. + 168. No Index. $5.00. ISBN 0-7743-4758-9

A conference on energy policy organized by the Ontario Economic Council in Toronto in September 1979 developed around nine papers which were presented. Two of the papers served as background material: a short specialized one on financial recycling by P.A. T. Campbell from Wood Gundy and a long comprehensive one on federal-provincial relations by D.G. Hartle of the University of Toronto. Three of the remaining papers were written by Ontario academics (T.A. Wilson who delivered the opening paper, L. Waverman, T.J. Courchene) and three by western academics (T.L. Powrie, B.W. Wilkinson and B.L. Scarfe, J.F. Helliwell) and the concluding one by the rapporteur, A. M. Spence of Harvard University. Significant discussants' comments were made by C. Watkins, S. Dupre, J.F. Helliwell, J.A. Grant, G.D. Quirin. It is impossible to do justice to all the papers in a short review except by pointing out that the average quality was high and the quality variance low; that a high degree of unanimity materialized regarding the direction that policies should take. All papers could be used as material for a course on Canadian public policy on energy. Although eighteen months have elapsed since the conference, and events and policies have changed, the significance of the main issues discussed has not altered. These issues are as follows:

1. Should the price of Canadian oil rise to about OPEC level on efficiency grounds?

2. In the affirmative, how fast should the increase be on efficiency, distributional, and stabilization grounds?

3. Should the price of Canadian oil be allowed to increase without settling at the same time the normative aspects of the distribution of the huge rent thereby created? More specifically. a) should multinationals be allowed to capture a substantial proportion of

this rent? b) given the constitutional constraints, how should the whole tax/transfer

system be overhauled in order to obtain the desired distribution of the rent between industry, the provincial and the federal governments?

All participants were in agreement on the first issue: OPEC price is currently the opportunity cost of Canadian oil since Canada is a net importer. The price



welfare, justice and freedomby scott gordon

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