When it comes to the future of our world, we have lost our way in a fundamental manner, and not just on a few details. We must return to principles, but we do not always have good principles to guide us. We have strayed from the ideals of a society based on prosperity and the rights and liberties of the individual, and we do not know how to return to those ideals. It sounds so simple: prosperity and individual liberty. Who could be opposed to that? In the abstract, few people would speak out against those values. But in practice, we turn away from them all the time. We pursue many other ends, ones we should instead ignore or reject. We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom. When you see what this means in practice, you may wince at some of the implications, and you may be put off by the moral absolutism it will require. Yet these goals—strictly rather than loosely pursued—are of historic importance for our civilization, and if we adhere to them, they will bring an enormous amount of good into our world.
I hold pluralism as a core moral intuition. What’s good about an individual human life can’t be boiled down to any single value. It’s not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values, including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy, and the many different and, indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness. Life is complicated! That means no single value is a trump card which overwhelms all other values in all instances, and thus there is a fundamental messiness to the nature of the good. A recognition of this messiness may at first seem inconsistent with an attachment to rigid ideals of prosperity and liberty; that reconciliation will be a central issue in this book.
In short, my philosophical starting points are:
“Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force.
We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind.
Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others.
Wealth makes the world go round
When it comes to making tough decisions, we should try to identify which elements in the choice set resemble a Crusonia plant. If we can identify certain choices or policies that give rise to the equivalent of the Crusonia plant’s unceasing yield, namely ongoing and self-sustaining surges in value, the case for those choices would be compelling. Furthermore, if it turned out that Crusonia plants were more common than we first thought, aggregation problems would be eased more generally. So, in a social setting, what might count as analogous to a Crusonia plant? Look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time. The natural candidate for such a process is economic growth, or some modified version of that concept.
Wealth Plus: The total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.
In this context, maximizing Wealth Plus does not mean that everyone should work as much as possible. A fourteen-hour work day might maximize measured GDP in the short run, but it would be less propitious over time once we take into account the value of leisure, not to mention the potential for burnout. Still, this standard is going to value a strong work ethic. Maximizing Wealth Plus also does not mean destroying the natural environment. It’s now well understood that environmental problems can lower or destroy economic growth through feedback effects. We should therefore protect the environment enough to preserve and indeed extend economic growth into the more distant future. More broadly, the principle of Wealth Plus holds that we should maintain higher growth over time, and not just for a single year or for some other, shorter period of time. Maximizing the sustainable rate of economic growth does not mean pursuing immediate growth at the expense of all other values. Policies that prioritize growth at breakneck speed are frequently unstable, both economically and politically.
We might wonder whether we could maximize the relevant pluralist values by existing at a very modest population size and economic level for a very long time—living in harmony with nature, so to speak. Think of Tolkien’s quaint hobbits. But poorer societies from the past have collapsed repeatedly through military weakness, ecological catastrophe, famine, tyranny, and natural disasters, among other factors. Keep in mind that the wealthier tyrant will conquer or at least disrupt the noble savage. Even if in principle the life of the noble savage were best, no society that follows this path can, on its own, keep its autonomy in the longer run. Given the trajectory of human development, some society will always have tanks and nuclear weapons, whether we like it or not. It is also important to note that the more benevolent societies tend to be both richer and more technologically advanced—further evidence of the importance of sustainable economic growth. Furthermore, primitive warfare appears to have been at least as frequent, as bloody, and as arbitrary in its violence as modern warfare. Earlier societies were neither idyllic nor peaceful. So returning to the past, or attempting to throttle economic growth, does not guarantee the future prospects of a civilization, much less its comfort. In other words, we need to move forward rather than seek a static, quiet existence, yet our path requires a tightrope act, balancing progress and stability along the way.
We can already see that three key questions should be elevated in their political and philosophical importance, namely:
What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth?
What can we do to make our civilization more stable?
How should we deal with environmental problems?
The history of economic growth indicates that, with some qualifications, growth alleviates misery, improves happiness and opportunity, and lengthens lives. Wealthier societies have better living standards, better medicines, and offer greater personal autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. While measured wealth does not exactly correspond to Wealth Plus, these two concepts have come pretty close to one another in the past, especially across the range of outcomes we have observed (as opposed to hypothetical thought experiments and counterfactuals).
The bottom line is this: the more rapidly growing economy will, at some point, bring about much higher levels of human well-being—and other plural values—on a consistent basis. If some set of choices or policies gives us a higher rate of economic growth, those same choices or policies are akin to a Crusonia plant.
Overcoming disagreement
If the gains to the future are significant and ongoing, those gains should eventually outweigh one-time costs by a significant degree, and they will likely carry along other plural values as well. Think about South Korea today vs. sub-Saharan Africa. As argued above, a sustainable increase in economic growth, properly understood, will boost many plural values in the medium and long runs. To be sure, some people will be worse off, and some values, in the short to medium run, will not be favored. In these respects, aggregation problems do not disappear. Nonetheless, the competing options do not generally offer a deadlock of roughly equivalent values and interests on each side of the scale, with one side looking better by some moderate amount. South Korea is much better off than, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo by a considerable margin. The higher growth alternative will eventually offer a clear and ongoing preponderance of plural values in its favor, whether it be living standards, women’s rights, freedom of choice, the fight against poverty, or other important values. So why not choose that option and recognize that we have rational grounds for preferring it? This approach to the aggregation problem coincides with common sense morality. Not everyone can be happy about everything all of the time, but we should nonetheless choose the option that makes a strong preponderance of people much better off. Most important plural values will come along for the ride.
To sum this all up, if we make a broad enough and long enough comparison, we will find that for a lot of choices the aggregation problems are not all that serious, at least not cripplingly so. Given that somewhat cheering reality, I would like to define two principles for practical reasoning.
The Principle of Growth: We should maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth, defined in terms of a concept such as Wealth Plus.
The Principle of Growth Plus Rights: Inviolable human rights, where applicable, should constrain the quest for higher economic growth.
At the end of these arguments, we are led to a surprising conclusion. If the time horizon is sufficiently long, the only non-growth–related values that will bind practical decisions are the absolute side constraints, or the inviolable human rights. In other words, the dual ideals of prosperity and liberty will be central to ethics. I’ll be returning to some arguments for inviolable human rights later, but in the meantime we have a relatively straightforward, exclusive (“worship no other gods”), and practicable formula of “Growth and Human Rights.”
Is time a moral illusion?
Individual time preference usually focuses on the immediate vs. the only somewhat distant. If we can get over our initial impatience for receiving a reward now, our intellect is very often capable of seeing that we should care about the more distant future as much as we should care about the less distant future. For the most part, we’re actually fairly rational about time, except for this fixation on the “now” moment and the “very soon/right away” horizon. We are programmed for the now moment for reasons which are inapplicable to most of our public policy choices and obsolete as a fundamental tool of moral reasoning. Human beings evolved under brutal hunter-gatherer conditions; they had good reason to pay special attention to the now moment. If you didn’t get the “now” right, there might not be a tomorrow. If you let a piece of meat sit, it would spoil or be seized by your neighbor or consumed by marauding animals overnight. It wasn’t like sitting on T-Bills in your Fidelity account. So we may have an innate biological preference for the “now,” but we will do better if we can get past it, if we can tap into the part of ourselves that recognizes that a benefit in twenty years’ time is about as valuable as that same benefit in thirty years’ time.
Economists and other social scientists often speak of a “discount rate.” A discount rate tells us how to compare future benefits to current benefits (or costs) when we make decisions. When the discount rate is high, we are counting future costs and benefits for less. Let’s speak in terms of pleasure (or pain) as a magnitude that corresponds, however roughly, to a real number scale. A five percent discount rate, defined annually, means that 100 units worth of pleasure today is equal to 105 units worth of pleasure a year from now. A ten percent discount rate would set this equality at 110 units worth of pleasure a year from now, and so on. A discount rate of zero means that a future benefit (or cost) counts for as much as a comparable benefit in the present. A person with a zero discount rate would not see any point in putting off going to the dentist. There’s no reason not to get it over with. If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that discount rates matter. In your personal life it affects how hard you work, how much you drink and gamble, and what kind of education you get. At the social level, the discount rate pertains to questions of how hard we should be fighting climate change and how much we should invest in preserving biodiversity. If we dismiss the importance of the distant future, action will not seem imperative. But if we pay heed to the distant future, we will see these as major concerns. Discounting also matters for how hell-bent we are on pursuing a higher rate of economic growth. A higher growth rate means that the future, at some point in time, will be much richer than it would be otherwise, and, as I argued earlier, it also means that human beings will be much better off. How compelled should we feel to bring about this wealthier state of affairs? If you only care about today, you won’t be as motivated to act in favor of higher sustainable growth.
Under any positive discount rate, no matter how low, one life today could be worth more than one million lives in the future. It could even be worth the entire subsequent survival of the human race, if we use a long enough time horizon for the comparison. At the very least, we should be skeptical that positive discount rates apply to every choice before us. Sometimes we should be less impatient and pay the future greater heed.
That said, discounting for risk is justified in a way that discounting for the pure passage of time is not. If a future benefit is uncertain, we should discount that benefit accordingly because it may not arrive. But such a practice does not dent a deep concern for the distant future. It is precisely because we discount for risk that we seek to protect our future against great tragedies, thereby making that future less risky. If we boost the long-term sustainable growth rate, for instance, we are indeed making the future less risky. Rather than ignoring risk, a future-oriented perspective takes long-term risk into account and attempts to lower it. The factor of risk might encourage you to spend your money now, otherwise someone might steal it. But it won’t discourage us from caring a lot about long-term sustainable growth.
For whatever reason, good institutions and a history of prosperity tend to have enduring effects. Wealth can fund and enable better government, and that in turn gives rise to further wealth and better institutions. Institutional memories of economic success and good governance can persist for long periods of time. Cultural practices such as business savvy or an interest in external markets can last for centuries. Therefore, any act which strengthens good institutions today has, in expected value terms, a causal stretch running centuries into the future. Once again, this means that our choice of discount rate is of critical importance.
Rather than opting for a strictly zero discount rate, I suggest a more modest postulate, one to which I already have referred but will now label formally: Deep Concern for the Distant Future. In this view, we should not count catastrophic losses for much less simply because those losses are temporally distant. In the absence of qualifying factors, no amount of temporal distance per se should cause major widespread tragedies to dwindle into insignificance in the present. We should believe that the end of the world is a truly terrible event, even if that collapse comes in the distant future. Similarly, the continued persistence of civilization three hundred years from now is much better than having no further civilization at that point in time. A much wealthier future civilization is much better than a less wealthy future civilization. Those are the implications of a deep concern for the distant future.
What about redistribution?
Under any moral theory which counts the interests of people in a more or less cosmopolitan manner, our personal obligations toward the poor appear strong. For instance, several billion people in the world currently live on less than two dollars a day. Last year millions of children died of preventable diseases such as diarrhea or experienced stunted growth and development. Presented with these examples, it’s easy to feel like we should all be attending to such problems with more resources and more energy than we do now, and indeed we should. The more difficult question, however, is how far such obligations extend and whether such obligations should prevent us from pursuing our own more personal or more individualistic goals. In contrast to utilitarianism, common sense morality typically suggests that we do have the right to pursue our own lives and life plans.
It can be argued very plausibly and, I think, correctly that we are obliged to help the poor more than we are doing now. But the correct approach to our cosmopolitan obligations does not lead to personal enslavement or massive redistribution of our personal wealth. Most of us should work hard, be creative, be loyal to our civilization, build healthy institutions, save for the future, contribute to an atmosphere of social trust, be critical when necessary, and love our families. Our strongest obligations are to contribute to sustainable economic growth and to support the general spread of civilization, rather than to engage in massive charitable redistribution in the narrower sense. In the longer run, greater economic growth and a more stable civilization will help the poor most of all. This point can be expressed as follows: we should redistribute wealth only up to the point that it maximizes the rate of sustainable economic growth. This may mean more redistribution than we currently undertake, and sometimes redistribution of a different kind, namely growth-enhancing redistribution. (By no means do all of today’s government programs actually redistribute wealth to the poor, much less boost economic growth.) It will not, however, suggest that a utilitarian or consequentialist approach obliges us to redistribute most of our nation’s income to the very poor. Nor are productive individuals morally required to spend most of their years serving the very poor.
There nonetheless remains a good case to be made for some degree of redistribution. For instance, a well-constructed welfare state can distribute education and nutrition more widely. The individuals supported by this state are not only better off, but they are more likely to be productive and pay taxes, and they are less likely to overturn public order. Other benefits of redistribution stem from political improvements. Social welfare programs can buy the loyalties of special interest groups and decrease feelings of desperation, both of which can help cement social order. Furthermore, social welfare programs make many citizens feel better about their state, again boosting public order as well as political consensus and stability. These factors rationalize some investments in a welfare state—and yes, we should describe them as investments—and thus support some wealth redistribution. Furthermore, they suggest an appropriate nature and scope for such redistribution, namely that we try to enhance sustainable economic growth.
Past some margin, an overly generous level of wealth transfer harms economic growth. Many people end up working less, or working less hard, and the associated higher tax rates discourage entrepreneurship and can lead to economic stasis. Furthermore, if it is standard procedure to approach government for a handout, that will induce too much rent-seeking, dependency, corruption, and eventually fiscal imbalances and perhaps even insolvency or a financial crisis. Alternatively, excess or poorly conceived welfare expenditures may create urban cultures of dependency and crime, which endanger social order. The empirical literature suggests that non-infrastructure government spending is correlated positively with lower growth rates, with the caveat that those results are measuring traditional GDP rather than an alternative notion such as Wealth Plus. Excess transfers are bad for another reason, namely that they make it harder to absorb high numbers of immigrants from poorer countries. Whether rationally or not, many voters feel that migrants are a burden on the government budget, and they resent it when some immigrants receive government benefits. To be sure, some level of social welfare makes immigration run more smoothly by helping immigrants to become established and self-sufficient. But too high a level of benefits is likely to mean, one way or another, a lower level of migration and a corresponding reduction in the most effective anti-poverty program we have discovered to date. This too should limit our attachment to social welfare programs.
Given the limits on our obligations to the poor, we will have comparable limits on our obligations to the elderly. In fact, we can think of the elderly as individuals who are poor in one particular dimension, namely in their future human capital. The elderly are more likely to die soon than are the young. And while we should do a good deal to help the elderly, the logic of sustainable growth places limits on these obligations, too. We may not know the exact correct valuation of an individual life, but we do know that the possibility of commensurability, the pull of the more distant future, the ongoing replenishment of human civilization, and the value of investing in future lives, when considered as a whole, exert some downward pressure on how much we should invest in extending the lives of the elderly today. My arguments therefore suggest a lower estimate of the value of a life, including an older life, than most other plausible frameworks, because replacement and replenishment of the civilizational flow are considered as one factor among many. Replacement and replenishment should not be taken as the final word, but yes, they do exert downward pressure on our value of life estimates. To put it more concretely, today in the United States we are spending too much on the elderly and not enough on the young. And given that the elderly are the ones who vote with greatest frequency, and the young often do not or cannot, that mistake should hardly come as a surprise.
When we are examining a policy change or an act of redistribution, it is important to know whether it involves an upfront, once-and-for-all benefit (or cost) or a systematic boost (or decline) in the growth rate over time. This somewhat arcane distinction, drawn from the economic literature on growth, is of great importance for adjudicating potential social changes. To consider a simple example, many scientists believe that global warming will increase the number of virulent and persistent storms on our planet. Many of these storms may come only after some time, but a greater concern for the future means that we must pay heed to these consequences. More generally, many environmental problems hurt our prospects for long-run sustained growth. I am suggesting that such problems are especially important. At the same time, a concern for the distant future can, counterintuitively, dissuade us against certain environmental investments. In contrast to the threat of severe and ongoing storms, some of the costs of climate change take the form of one-time adjustments, such as the cost of relocating coastal settlements. The induced relocation might count as a rights violation of some sort, but from a consequentialist point of view, maximizing the growth rate takes priority over avoiding one-time expenditures and one-time adjustments. Even if those expenditures are large, we will earn back that value over time, due to the logic of compounding growth. So, contrary to what other frameworks might suggest, we should pay greater heed to the storms and less heed to the relocation costs. It’s very important to take note of whether or not a specified policy choice will affect the overall growth rate.
In expected value terms, most of our social choices have an impact upon future rates of economic growth. Crusonia plants are everywhere, in expected value terms. We are making decisions about Crusonia plants all the time.
New ideas are the product of human reason; it was Aristotle who defined man as the rational animal. A preoccupation with pursuing growth—or some modified version of the growth ideal—therefore means a preoccupation with ideas, a preoccupation with cultivating human reason, and a preoccupation with the notion that man should realize, perfect, and extend his nature as a generator of powerful ideas that can change the world. Cringe all you wish, but on this point I’ll send another credit along to Ayn Rand, who stresses this point even more than most philosophic rationalists. If we are pursuing self-sustaining and self-generating bundles of plural values, we are in one way or another paying homage to the power of human reason.
Must uncertainty paralyze us?
You might assume that aggregate global outcomes are mostly stable with respect to small perturbations in the basic events of daily life. You might think, for example, that the logic of positive-sum trade and the power of human reason to advance technological progress will win out in the long run, with or without Hitler on Earth. Other offshoots of these butterfly effects may cancel out or offset each other in the longer run; Tolstoy, in his novel War and Peace, argued that the “great men” of history had little impact, as their acts would be reversed by their successors (Napoleon being one case in point). While part of me wishes that this logic were true, the brute reality is that contingency is real and disturbances to the flow of temporal events need not dwindle into insignificance, given that even a small act can reshape the entire future genetic history of humanity. Napoleon’s actions changed the course of life in Germany, which underwent a liberal intellectual revolution as a result of the French invasion and subsequently modernized, as well as Egypt, which received the printing press and a large dose of liberal ideology before starting to resent European interference in local affairs, a feeling that persists to this day. The histories of these regions were changed irrevocably, as were the histories of the Jews who were liberated under Napoleon’s rule. The key point is this: even if you’re not convinced that Napoleon really mattered, you don’t and indeed can’t really know this. There is a real chance that Napoleon being born, rather than a different child from a different act of conception, fundamentally changed world history. So in terms of expected value, it remains the case that small acts can have a big impact on the future, even if they do not always do so. It only has to be the case that some small acts steer the future along a very different path. Following the philosophers, I refer to this as the epistemic problem.
The epistemic critique may indeed be drawing on a different moral principle altogether, a principle that pops up frequently in pluralistic approaches. Let us consider what I call the Principle of roughness:
The Principle of Roughness: Outcomes can differ in complex ways. We might make a reasoned judgment that they are roughly equal in value and we should be roughly indifferent to them. After making a small improvement to one of these outcomes, we still might not be sure which is better.
We often resort to some version of the Principle of Roughness in matters of beauty and aesthetics. Try to figure out whether Rembrandt or Velazquez was the better painter. You might judge the two as being of roughly the same quality and import, or at least decide that neither should be placed above the other. If we then discover one new sketch by Rembrandt, we don’t suddenly have to conclude that he was in fact the better artist. We still can hold the two to be roughly equal in quality and importance. The Principle of Roughness may apply to many judgments of goodness. Imagine, for example, that you are comparing a new vaccination program to a program that would improve the quality of antibiotics for one group of children. These policies may be broadly equivalent in value, at least if their potential impact were sufficiently similar in magnitude. This judgment of rough equality would again survive the realization that one of the two policies was slightly better than previously thought or would cost slightly less than anticipated. The Principle of Roughness, when it applies, implies that we should not discriminate on the basis of relatively small benefits and losses.
Or look at it this way: anything we try to do is floating in a sea of long-run radical uncertainty, so to speak. Only big, important upfront goals will, in reflective equilibrium, stand above the ever-present froth and allow the comparison to be more than a very rough one. Putting too many small goals at stake simply means that our moral intuitions will end up confused, which is in fact the correct and intuitive conclusion. If there is any victim of the epistemic critique, it is the focus on small benefits and costs, but not consequentialism more generally. If we bundle appropriately and “think big” and pursue Crusonia plants, our moral intuitions will rise above the froth of long-run variance. Purveyors of the epistemic critique might suggest that consequences should not matter very much, at least not compared to deontology or virtue ethics, given how hard they are to predict. But the better conclusion is that the froth of uncertainty should induce us to elevate the import of large benefits relative to small benefits, so as to overcome the Principle of Roughness. In other words, yet another aspect of moral theory is directing our attention toward the pursuit of Crusonia plants.
The arguments above have (at least) two practical implications for what we should believe, how we should believe, and how we should act. I will consider agnosticism and individual rights in turn.
We should be skeptical of ideologues who claim to know all of the relevant paths to making ours a better world. How can we be sure that a favored ideology will in fact bring about good consequences? Given the radical uncertainty of the more distant future, we can’t know how to achieve preferred goals with any kind of certainty over longer time horizons. Our attachment to particular means should therefore be highly tentative, highly uncertain, and radically contingent. Our specific policy views, though we may rationally believe them to be the best available, will stand only a slight chance of being correct. They ought to stand the highest chance of being correct of all available views, but this chance will not be very high in absolute terms. Compare the choice of one’s politics to betting on the team most favored to win the World Series at the beginning of the season. That team does indeed have the best chance of winning, but most of the time it does not end up being the champion. Most of the time our sports predictions are wrong, even if we are good forecasters on average. So it is with politics and policy. Our attitudes toward others should therefore be accordingly tolerant.
As a general rule, we should not pat ourselves on the back and feel that we are on the correct side of an issue. We should choose the course that is most likely to be correct, keeping in mind that at the end of the day we are still more likely to be wrong than right. Our particular views, in politics and elsewhere, should be no more certain than our assessments of which team will win the World Series. With this attitude political posturing loses much of its fun, and indeed it ought to be viewed as disreputable or perhaps even as a sign of our own overconfident and delusional nature.
The epistemic critique also helps us understand why we should respect individual rights rather than overturning them in favor of better consequences. They also help us outline the limits of those individual rights.
Rights rarely conflict with consequences in the simple ways set out by philosophical thought experiments. We can therefore shift the way we think about radical uncertainty and consequences. Rather than letting it paralyze us, we can think of radical uncertainty as giving us the freedom to act morally, without the fear that we are engaging in consequentialist destruction. We can also see this radical uncertainty as supporting a new enchantment with human life and choice; we can accept that most or all of our actions will have consequences we cannot possibly predict. On average these consequences will be positive, just as average economic growth is positive, but we will always wonder about the future consequences we have set in motion. We will wonder about our strange and almost magical powers in this regard. For all the confusion we might feel about the marginal product of an individual act, this is also an empowering notion, and it relates to the idea that all fruitful societies are based on some notion of faith. In this case we can hold onto our faith in doing the right thing—and indeed doing the right thing for its own sake—without being brutally beaten back by the fear that we are bringing about some sort of consequentialist disaster.
This leaves us with a rights theory in which rights are indeed absolute, at least provided the examples we consider match some very basic facts about the real world, for instance the existence of Crusonia plants and the froth of consequentialist uncertainty.
Conclusion—where have we landed?
Here is my short, three-point summary of where these arguments have brought us:
First, believing in the overriding importance of sustained economic growth is more than philosophically tenable. Indeed, it may be philosophically imperative. We should pursue large rather than small benefits, and we should have a deep concern for the more distant future rather than discounting it exponentially. Our working standard for evaluating choices should be to increase sustainable economic growth, because those choices overcome aggregation problems and are decisively good. That provides us with a broad quantitative proxy for the long-run development of human civilization, and it constitutes one means of finding and promoting comoving plural values.
Second, there is plenty of room for our morality, including our political morality, to be strict and based in the notion of rules and rights. We should subject ourselves to the constraint of respecting human rights, noting that only semi-absolute human rights will be strong enough to place any constraint on pursuing the benefits of a higher rate of sustainable economic growth. At the end of this tunnel we do not have the “Best Ethical Theory,” as a philosopher might wish to derive, but rather some good decision-making rules to live by, as well as some standards for how we might imagine a much brighter future. To be sure, I have made no attempt to prove the absolute existence of rights. But once we start thinking in terms of big, comprehensive changes, a belief in rights fits in quite naturally. We have some rules for what to do—maximize sustainable growth—and other rules—rights—which place some constraints on those choices. In other words, the lower-order rules exist within the confines of higher-order rules, namely respecting human rights. We should stick to our chosen priorities and our chosen rules rigidly. Rather than rights and consequentialist considerations representing warring or contrasting approaches to philosophy, the door is open for consilience and compatibilism to reign, all within a rules-nested approach to thinking about both the rights-based and the practical, consequentialist sides of the equation. We need not defend such rules-based perspectives on the grounds that they are a highly practical “noble lie.” It is nice to see the practical benefits of rules recognized, but the noble lie approach is too cynical. It assumes that rules are philosophically weak to begin with when they are not. So rather than viewing belief in strict rules as a noble lie, view it as a very important noble truth.
Third, we should be very cautious in our attitudes about specific policies. Even if we succeed in taking true aim at what we think are the best courses of action, the chance that we are right on the specifics—even if the chance is as high as possible—is still not very high. It’s like trying to guess at the origin of the universe. The best you can do is to pick what you think is right at 1.05 percent certainty, rather than siding with what you think is right at 1.03 percent. Most likely you’re wrong, even if others are likely to be even more wrong than you are, and thus your attitude should be correspondingly modest in the epistemic sense.
For some more concrete recommendations, I’ll suggest the following:
Policy should be more forward-looking and more concerned about the more distant future.
Governments should place a much higher priority on investment than is currently the case, in both the private sector and the public sector. Relative to what we should be doing, we are currently living in an investment drought.
Policy should be more concerned with economic growth, properly specified, and policy discussion should pay less heed to other values. And yes, that means your favorite value gets downgraded too. No exceptions, except of course for the semi-absolute human rights.
We should be more concerned with the fragility of our civilization. The possibility of historical pessimism stands as a challenge to this entire approach, because in that view the future is dim no matter what, and there may not be a more distant future we can look toward in order to resolve the aggregation dilemmas involved in making decisions that affect so many human beings.
We should be more charitable on the whole, but we are not obliged to give away all of our wealth. We do have an obligation to work hard, save, invest, and fulfill our human potential, and we should take these obligations very seriously.
We can embrace much of common sense morality with the knowledge that it is not inconsistent with a deeper ethical theory. Common sense morality can also be reconciled with many of the normative recommendations which emerge from a more impersonal and consequentialist framework.
When it comes to most “small” policies affecting the present and the near-present only, we should be agnostic, because we cannot overcome aggregation problems to render a defensible judgment. The main exceptions here are the small number of policies which benefit virtually everybody.
My utopian political vision is a society that follows these principles.
When thinking about policy, I often have a little voice inside my head that says, “Let’s just worry about making some small improvement today. Grand schemes come to naught. What is the future, anyway? Aren’t current improvements, however small, hard enough to implement? Let us be supreme pragmatists and focus only on the here and now. That is the best we can do for the future, in any case. The future can take care of itself. Let us drop our fantasies.” But then I think again, and I realize that I am engaging in a comfortable form of self-deception. I know that we as human beings are biologically programmed to respond to immediate stimuli and the near term at the expense of the future. Many of us do not plan far enough ahead or save enough for our retirements. Sufficiently thirsty individuals will drink salt water out of desperation, even if it lessens their chances of survival. So we cannot always trust our innate programming and response mechanisms. These mechanisms may have been adaptive in hunter-gatherer societies, but they are suddenly more costly in a flourishing civilization with large-scale political institutions, persistent long-run problems, and the ability to generate sustained and compounding economic growth. I would therefore like to be more suspicious of our little voice in favor of supreme short-run pragmatism. I wish to suggest that it is a vice, the thinking man’s equivalent of the savage’s short-run gratification. It is our latest adaptive mechanism for feeling good about ourselves, at the expense of letting Rome burn. I suggest that we should instead turn our political energies to thinking about the long-run fortunes of our civilization. That means focusing on the future of freedom, wealth, science, and healthy, well-functioning institutions governed by rules and rights.
I end this book by reiterating some core claims. Our civilization carries many wonderful plural values. Preserving and extending those values through time should be our priority. Sustainable economic growth elevates living standards and human welfare, and delivers other plural values. The case for a good society, appropriately specified, is sound, and it does not fall prey to the usual problems of utilitarianism or consequentialism. It is permissible to believe in absolute or near-absolute human rights. We can be, and must be, partially utopian in our personal and political commitments. We should not be afraid to think in terms of the big picture, rather than evaluating everything on a case-by-case basis. We should be deeply skeptical of particular instrumental views of what is likely to promote the good. We still do not have the Best Ethical Theory. But we should live our lives to the fullest, knowing that common sense morality has a deep connection to what is truly right.