Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Exactly. Going back to Bentham. I haven’t read a lot of Bentham, but I’m surprised at how little he has to say. He gives you this overarching theory that we can take all of our pains and pleasures. It’s very important to emphasize this. The pleasures aren’t just physical pleasures, not just about gluttony or animal drives. He understands pride, and he understands satisfactions are more ethereal, and other kinds. But he gets into a problem, which is that after a while, when you start adding them all up, you can’t add them up anymore. They can’t really be quantified. He was, as far as I understand — and I’d be curious to get your take on this — he never could solve that problem. He was constantly — we try to solve it as economists through money — not literally money, but by putting a monetary value. In the next five minutes, Tyler, I’m going to say something embarrassing about your past that I’ve discovered. I could ask you — it’s just an example, Tyler; I don’t really know anything. I can’t imagine there’s anything embarrassing. Suppose I knew something about you, and I said “Tyler,” before the show, I said, “I’m thinking of saying this. How much would you pay me not to say it? I’m not going to collect the bribe.” I’m blackmailing you in that story. The way economists use the utilitarian framework is everything’s a form of that calculus. The Grand Canyon, the view of the Grand Canyon, is that a monetary transaction? Of course not, but we can ask the question, how much would you pay to be able to continue to see the Grand Canyon for the rest of your life? How much would you pay for your children to be able to see it? In that way, I can trade that off in theory against other things and create a scale. The problem with that scale, of course, is every good economist knows — and many bad ones don’t — is that the scale depends on how much money you have. It’s not a real scale of pleasure and pain. It’s a scale for me. My ability then to compare my cost and benefits to yours is, I think, zero. As economists, we don’t like that. We want to aggregate. We want to be able to say, “This is good policy because the net gains are positive,” or “This is a bad policy. The net gains are negative.” Do you agree with that? I think it’s horrible. I would put it this way: Insofar as we can aggregate — and to make a choice, a policy choice, you have to aggregate in some manner — but I think we aggregate by making moral judgements about different kinds of well-being. In this sense, utilitarianism is parasitic on nonutilitarian moral theories about which pleasures and pains we count, and for how much, and even how we understand what pleasure is. There’s not a simple physiological definition as a unidimensional measurable variable. It’s all, to me, parasitic on pluralistic moral value theory, which makes me not a Benthamite. That’s well said.…

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