The Language of Modern Ethics

 

First edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, illustrated by a Picasso painting of a thinking woman. Perhaps, it suggests, too much thinking distorts your features

A review by Julian Baggini is always worth reading, because he has the ability to make philosophy popular; or rather, to remain aware of everyday thinking alongside the sometimes strange paths that academic philosophers take.

 

So I turned with interest to a review article in the TLS where Baggini reviews several books on moral philosophy, and in the course of his review provides what appears to be a very useful summary of recent thinking in this area. Most helpfully, he describes many of the terms used in the current philosophical debate. So here is a mini-dictionary of current ethics. Out of interest, I have compared it with three titles published 25 or more years ago:

• The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (edited by Ted Honderich), first edition, published 1995
• A Dictionary of Philosophy, by A R Lacey, 1976
• The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy, edited by Thomas Mautner, 1996

What can you do with such knowledge? Well, if you are a geek like me, you can attempt to see the trends in a subject over time. You can see if these terms appear in Wikipedia. You can use Google n-grams to track increases or decreases in usage.

• cognitivism – the claim that statements such as “murder is wrong” are either true or false.
• consequentialism – the theory that actions are right or wrong to the extent that they result in good or bad consequences.
• contractarianism – the theory that morality is an implicit acceptance of mutual obligations and prohibitions.
• deontology – the view that morality concerns duties to follow rules or fulfil obligations.
• incommensurability – theory that you cannot compare the value (say) of museums with the value of hospitals; or individualism versus community-based ethics.
• metaethics – thestudy of the nature of morality itself
• moral particularism – theory that there are no general rules that determine if actions are right or wrong.
• moral relativism
• moral sympathy - Enlightenment theory that we should recognized that others have lives worth living. Held by Hume and Adam Smith.
• realism – in ethics, the claim that moral values have a real, mind-independent existence.
• virtue ethics – theory that goodness resides in character and habit.

Leaving aside "moral sympathy", which Baggini states is from 18th-century writers, that leaves us with ten terms. 

term	Oxford (Honderich)	Lacey	Penguin (Mautner)
cognitivism	yes (actually under “non-cognitivism”	no	yes
consequentialism	yes	yes	yes
contractarianism	no	no	yes
deontology	yes	yes (under “ethics”)	yes
incommensurability	yes	no	yes
metaethics	yes	yes (under “ethics”)	yes
moral particularism	no	no	no
moral relativism	yes (under “ethical relativism”)	no	no
moral realism	yes	no	yes (under “realism”)
virtue ethics	yes (under “virtue”)	no	yes
Total	9	3	8

What does this tell us? The Lacey Dictionary of Philosophy is rubbish, perhaps, but to be fair, it is considerably shorter than the Penguin and Oxford volumes. You could say, perhaps, it was incommensurable, because it is the work of one author who clearly does not appear to be very interested in ethics. You can also see how maddening natural language is. Do we describe an idea under “relativism”, “moral relativism”, or “ethical relativism”?

One wonderful value of the Oxford Companion is a detailed index that lists all concepts, as well as all headwords. This makes it easier to find things in a print volume. You could probably say that nobody these days finds things in a print volume; but it is reassuring to think that behind the scenes, the compiler used a list like this inex to identify where entries would be located.

Perhaps the most interesting conclusion for me is how slowly philosophy evolves. If moral philosophy has become of interest to the public and to philosophers, after many years in the wilderness, it seems that not much has changed in the last 20 years.  Perhaps the key term is “moral particularism”. None of the older works includes this. Perhaps this is the great innovation in 21st-century ethical thinking. Or perhaps, if this is the only really new idea, not much changes in the world of ethics.

Free trade and protectionism: the same old arguments

 

The Free Trade Hall, Manchester: built on land donated by Richard Cobden to celebrate the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Today, the building is just a shell: the interior was gutted and replaced by a hotel between 1997 and 2004. It remains perhaps a symbol of the UK's attitude to free trade. [Image by Bernt Rostad, CC BY 2.0] 

Martin Wolf, the FT columnist whose writing is always worth reading, had an article this week under the strident heading “Spurn the false promise of protectionism” (FT 16 June 2021). 

I’m not suggesting I can write a definitive piece about protectionism in a few hundred words. But I can at least ask a few questions in response to some of the current opinion pieces.

The standard view of economists is pretty straightforward on this one: free trade is a good thing, and protectionism is bad. Here is Samuelson, the standard textbook on economics, 19th edition: 

Economists generally believe that free trade promotes a mutually beneficial division of labor among nations; free and open trade allows each nation to expand its production and consumption possibilities, raising the world’s living standard. (Samuelson and Nordhaus, Economics, 19th edition, 2010, p349) 

Martin Wolf largely endorses this view, bringing in the heavy guns of Anne Krueger and Adam Posen to justify his view. Wolf quotes Krueger as stating “trade has been the handmaid of economic growth, across the world, since the second world war.” And it is certainly true that the protectionism celebrated and endorsed by Trump has been continued by Biden – no reversal of policy there. 

But from my position as a innocent bystander, as it were, between the politicians, who see protectionism as politically expedient, and the economists, who are largely for free trade, is there any centre ground? 

Firstly, there are economist who disagree with the whole “comparative advantage” argument – that each state should stick to what they do well. That means that Colombia should stick to producing coffee, while the US sells it high-tech products. Ha-Joon Chang, for example, in his 23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism (2011), links protectionism with immigration policy – many manufacturing jobs in Europe and the US could be done much more cheaply if more immigration were allowed. His level of argument is considerably more sophisticated than the standard economics writers. It appears to me that not much has changed in most economists’ thinking since I was learning about economics in the 1990s.   

Secondly, there are whole areas of the economy where the continuance of protectionism is not questioned. When the UK left the EU, there was no question, once the Common Agricultural Policy was no longer mandatory, of abandoning subsidies to UK farmers. But why are farmers subsidised? It seems a reasonable enough question. And why is manufacturing subsidised, when it represents such a low proportion of GDP in a country such as the UK? There is no mention of agriculture by Wolf or by Posen (I haven’t yet checked in Krueger). 

Thirdly, I don’t believe the economists themselves are serious about ignoring the consequences of free trade in terms of closed factories, especially in deprived areas such as the North of England and states such as Ohio and Michigan in the US. Posen states, in the article praised by Wolf: 

there are precious few examples of a government successfully reviving a community suffering from industrial decline. Geography is not destiny, but it is the embodiment of economic history in many ways, and accumulated history is difficult to overcome. 

Yes, workers in a town with closed factories are largely white and male, but does that mean, as Posen seems to imply, there is nothing to be done? That regional policy is a waste? 

Finally, I thought that economic historians showed many years ago that free trade tends to be adopted by nations when it suits them. In the 19th century, Britain was only too happy to have free trade while its manufacturing costs were (briefly) lower than those of any other nation. It was a competition with only one winner. 

It seems to me that the economists and politicians argue past each other, without any real engagement. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask for a higher level of engagement between politics and economics. Articles such as this one by Wolf are unlikely to result in any policy change in the UK or the US – so why write them?

Imperial Mud: the story of Fenland resistance

 

Imperial Mud, by James Boyce (Icon, 2020)

When I saw this book, I felt it inevitable I would buy it. I was in Waterstone’s Bookshop, for the first time in many months, following the covid-19 lockdown. A book on the Fens, and a scholarly book at that, displayed strategically on the new titles table, seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Having just visited the Fens (see the post on Isleham a few weeks ago), I felt this must be a message from the gods. Or, perhaps, from the Fens themselves.

Even more surprising was the tone of the book. Boyce’s account is not a tale of triumphant engineers combatting the floods to bring civilization to a remote quarter of England. Instead, displayed alongside the memoirs of TV stars and personal growth titles, here is a genuinely radical history book. James Boyce’s thesis is that the Fens represented an area of protest against enclosure, over at least 400 years, and he skilfully links it to the English Civil War (Cromwell was born and grew up in the Fens) to industrialisation, the agricultural crisis during (and after) the Second World War, right up to the environmental movement of the present day. His suggestion is that people lived better (and certainly more equally) in the unenclosed Fens than in the surrounding counties.

Even more remarkably, Boyce shows how the Fennish (his term) did not fit in a simple left/right agenda. While the young Cromwell supported the Fennish in their protests against enclosure, he changed allegiance once in power and aligned himself with the landowners trying to carry out the enclosures. In this instance, the Fennish called on the king to protect their traditional rights. In other disputes, the Fennish battled against the king, who had made deals with local landowners as a partner in the land exploitation. It is not a simple story, in other words; although as a rule the local inhabitants suffered, since frequently the monarch was in partnership (even as an investor) with nobility.

I have a few reservations. James Boyce has written a hybrid, a popular book with pretensions to scholarly standards. But the result, as so often, fulfils neither criterion very well. The book has lots of footnotes, some of which carry useful additional information (so why wasn’t that incorporated in the body of the text)? More seriously, the book is written almost entirely from secondary sources, and some of those rather questionable (how about Maureen James, Cambridgeshire Folk Tales?). Overall, I forgive the author since he has written such a compelling account and has made it relevant.

My other reservation is that he fails to explain how a radical area, with centuries of experience of protest and demonstrations, has become so resolutely Tory. The Fens are the area of the UK with the highest number of uncontested seats in local elections (one-third of the seats in the 2019 election, according to Peterborough Today) – and all of those seats are Conservative.

Boyce describes initiatives to recreate some of the common land lost in the Fen enclosures, including one in Spalding. What makes Spalding such a centre of radicalism? To an outsider, visiting the Fens today, there seems very little sign of radicalism or of environmental concern. There are plenty of horses to be seen, but these are horses for entertainment, not for working.