David Levey directed me to an excellent essay by Agnes Callard, which reviews several books that are critical of meritocracy. While I share many of her criticisms, I’m not persuaded by her recommendations:
The question of who we praise and who we blame is not a scientific question, but an ethical one; there is no way to answer it except by deliberating seriously about the kind of society we want to live in. In that spirit, I want to propose a new candidate for what the “the compassionate, sympathetic, progressive position” should look like. First, we should incline toward crediting people for their achievements as being genuinely their own, the justly earned fruits of hard work and diligence, deserving of pride and a sense of accomplishment. Second, we should incline toward explaining away failures on the basis of genes, socioeconomic obstacles, bad luck, and so on—things beyond their control—in such a way to make clear that the attitude called for in response to failure is sympathy and readiness to assist. The successful should be proud of themselves, and when they see others fail, they should think: there but for the grace of God go I.
I fully accept the philosophical position that we don’t get to choose which person we become. Nonetheless, I wonder if she is too hasty in dismissing the value of “blame”.
Most economic models have a certain degree of symmetry. Thus while it’s not impossible that praise for good behavior makes sense and blame for bad behavior is unwise, a priori I find that claim to be rather unlikely—if only because in that world the withholding of praise becomes a sort of blame.
As a utilitarian, I see two arguments for blaming people. Blame can be justified when bad behavior causes external harm. Thus you might yell at someone in a park who throws trash on the ground instead of putting it into a bin. Fear of being blamed makes people behave better. Second, people might not be fully mature, and thus might not understand that certain behavior is not in their long run interest. This is especially true of children, which is why they get criticized more often than adults. It’s “for their own good.” This is what people mean by “tough love”.
While adults are in many ways (not all) more mature than children, I’m not sure anyone ever fully grows up and becomes 100% mature. Even adults often engage in behavior that we think of as child-like, such as shirking an unpleasant duty or eating a big sweet dessert when we are on a diet.
Most counterproductive behavior, that is behavior that causes external harm or internal harm, is caused by a mixture of genes and environment. This includes behavior that leads to poor outcomes in academics, health, wealth, interpersonal relations, and the violation of laws. Genetics makes some people more predisposed to drop out of school, get diabetes, become poor, cheat on their wife, and rob banks. But behavior is also affected by environment.
The easiest way to see this distinction is to compare a problem cross sectionally and over time. At a point in time, genetics largely determines who is obese and who is not. And yet the rise in obesity in recent decades probably reflects a change in our environment. Ditto for changes in the crime rate, the poverty rate, and other variables.
So far I’ve been arguing that there is a case for engaging in both praise and blame. Nonetheless, I suspect our society engages in too much blaming. For example, while I suspect that “fat shaming” would “work” in the limited sense of slightly reducing obesity, I also believe that it would do more harm than good. Blame imposes psychic costs, which would likely outweigh the small reduction in obesity that would result from fat shaming. For similar reasons, I don’t believe it is wise to criticize others for having “affairs”, unless we are personally affected.
On the other hand, there are lots of cases where blame is appropriate. Crime is the most obvious case, as we are all negatively affected when others engage in stealing and killing. The trickiest case is behavior that reduces productivity in a welfare state. You can argue that we should blame people for not studying, or being lazy, or abandoning their wife, or using illegal drugs that reduce their productivity. It all comes down to the question of whether the direct psychic harm of blaming people for bad behavior is greater or less than the gain from improved behavior that would result as people try to avoid future criticism.
Praise is sort of like eating a healthy food that also tastes great. It has directly positive impact on utility, and an indirectly positive effect as well. Blame is like a medication with nasty side effects. The threshold for engaging in blame is much higher than praise. If that’s what Callard is saying, then she’s right.
To conclude, while I’m not persuaded by the specific argument made by Callard, I end up in roughly the same place—for utilitarian reasons. Our society is probably a happier place if adults don’t frequently blame other people for not meeting their standards of self-control and hard work. But some level of criticism may be appropriate, particular from those with close interpersonal relations, that is, those who might be especially negatively affected by someone’s behavior.
READER COMMENTS
David Henderson
Dec 22 2020 at 4:07pm
You write:
Do you mean “accept” as in “agree with” or just “understand that some people hold?”
If the former, that would imply that people don’t get to choose whether to become thieves, for example. Is that a view you hold?
Scott Sumner
Dec 22 2020 at 9:47pm
I’d put it differently. Most people don’t get to choose that they will become the person who choses to become a thief.
Thus while I don’t believe in free will, I believe in punishing thieves because punishment discourages people from becoming thieves.
David Henderson
Dec 23 2020 at 6:49am
But if punishment deters thieves, that means that people will be less likely to steal. That’s a choice.
KevinDC
Dec 23 2020 at 7:48am
Going to hazard a stab at answering this, mostly because I find this particular topic interesting, and I did spend a couple of years of my life getting pulled into the literature on free will because, again, interesting stuff. Obviously, I’m not answering for Scott – he may or may not agree with what I say here or how I characterize the case for those who don’t believe in free will, but that’s for him to say.
Those who deny free will don’t deny that people make choices. What they deny is that those choices are made contra-causally. As a wildly oversimplified example, think of a Tesla with collision avoidance and other auto-pilot features. In the same way you said “if punishment deters thieves, that makes them less likely to steal, and that’s a choice,” one could say “if the threat of a collision is detected, that makes the auto-pilot more likely to brake, and that’s a choice.” The auto-pilot program does make various choices about braking, swerving, etc, in response to anticipations about its environment – but it clearly isn’t making those choices of its own “free will.” Human thought and behavior is orders of magnitude more complex, but ultimately it comes down to the same thing.
Regarding Scott’s argument that people don’t get to choose what kind of people they will become, it’s usually thought of this way. People have an urge to steal. For some people this urge is barely existent, for others it’s extremely strong. But nobody chooses how strong or weak it this urge will be for them personally. I barely feel such an urge, but that’s not because at any point I ever decided to myself “You know what, I have decided that I’m not going to find theft very tempting.” I never “decided” that. I just don’t find it tempting. Similarly, some people are terrified by the prospect of criminal punishment, and some people are barely fazed by it. This aversion, again, is just a fact about who they are, not a trait they “decided” to have. Putting these two factors together, punishment for theft will cause people on the lower urge to steal and/or the higher aversion to sanction side of things to steal less. They are deciding, but they aren’t deciding of their own “free will.” The decision emerges from the interaction of environment they are in, and personal dispositions they simply have, and didn’t create.
Scott Sumner
Dec 23 2020 at 12:33pm
Very well put Kevin. That’s my view, stated better than I could have done.
Don Geddis
Dec 24 2020 at 1:59pm
Those who deny free will don’t deny that people make choices. What they deny is that those choices are made contra-causally.
Yes, essentially everyone with a science background understands that “libertarian” free will violates physics.
The auto-pilot program does make various choices … but it clearly isn’t making those choices of its own “free will.”
The word “clearly” doesn’t belong here. You already know the difference between the libertarian and compatibilist interpretations of free will. Saying that “people make choices”, and noticing a difference between “voluntary” vs. “involuntary” actions, is already getting at something. Compatibilists say that “free will” is a reasonable term for that “something”. And once you head down that path, then a deterministic chess computer and your Tesla do make choices out of their “free will”.
KevinDC
Jan 2 2021 at 9:36am
Hey Don. You said:
I reflexively dislike statements to this effect. First and foremost, it’s not true. There are many people with impressive scientific credentials who don’t believe that libertarian free will violates or is incompatible with physics. But more fundamentally, as a statement it seems like an attempt to broadcast the message “all the truly educated and informed people think X about this issue,” which in my experience is a move that’s more used for obfuscation than illumination.
It’s true that I didn’t give much attention to the compatiblist view on free will, largely because I don’t find it very interesting. Determinists and libertarians are having a substantive debate, whereas compatiblists seem more focused on a semantic or definitional dispute – and in general, I’m not very interested in arguments of definition. If you take a thousand people and tell them that they have “free will” but you’ve defined that term to mean “your choices are made the same way as Tesla autopilot programs and deterministic computer chess programs,” virtually all of them will take that to mean you’re saying they don’t, in fact, have free will. You can then try to convince them that this new definition of “free will” is actually a good one, but in my experience this is the reaction you’ll get and I’d rather discuss the substance of the claim than argue why we should try to dispute definitions.
KevinDC
Dec 22 2020 at 5:55pm
A couple of musings, and then a question –
Musing one: Scott Sumner’s opinion here reminded me of Scott Alexander’s similar opinion of shaming, at least as it relates to things like obesity:
Musing number two: reading the linked essay reviewing criticisms of meritocracy also reminded me of Scott Alexander’s own criticisms of critics of meritocracy.
Question – Scott, do you have an official position on free will? You have mentioned in previous posts that you’re not too deep into philosophy but I was wondering if you consider your position to be like a hard determinist view or compatiblist or libertarian? Or just no opinion in particular?
Scott Sumner
Dec 23 2020 at 12:37pm
Kevin, I doubt that free will exists, for the reasons you provide in your Tesla example above.
I’d go further and argue that we can make choices precisely because the world is deterministic. If the world were not deterministic, i.e. if it were random, then we’d have no control over our actions. Life would be a series of coin flips.
KevinDC
Dec 23 2020 at 3:42pm
Got it. I personally don’t have an opinion on the issue of free will. I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic and I’m familiar enough with the main arguments on the various side to be able to effectively articulate them, but it’s still an issue where I don’t yet consider myself educated/informed enough to be willing to hold an opinion of my own.
Scott Sumner
Dec 24 2020 at 12:22pm
You said:
“but it’s still an issue where I don’t yet consider myself educated/informed enough to be willing to hold an opinion of my own.”
You are a better man than me. 🙂
nobody.really
Dec 28 2020 at 1:14pm
Ah, then challenges of self-referential statements about freedom and determinism:
What sense does it make to say that you’re not WILLING to hold a given opinion–unless you embrace the idea that you influence your WILL?
In contrast, if determinism obtains, then you currently have no power to believe anything OTHER than that you are not willing to embrace a given opinion. To rephrase, your words would reflect a sincere, if erroneous, belief in free will that circumstances have caused you to embrace.
Winston Churchill claimed to be an optimist–because there is precious little point in being anything else. I don’t necessarily share this reasoning about optimism, but I do regarding free will. In other words, I tend to embrace the idea of free will because any other view would seem to render irrelevant the very idea of embracing a view. I admit that, in adopting this view, I reason from the conclusion to the premise–a famously problematic strategy. Yet it reflects SOME strategy–whereas determinism precludes strategy entirely.
KevinDC
Jan 2 2021 at 8:54am
I don’t see why this should be a head scratcher. You can say “I’m not willing to X” without it entailing that you control or influence your willingness to X. To vaguely paraphrase someone I’m too lazy to look up to quote more accurately and properly attribute – you can do what you will, but this does not mean that you can will what you will. Those who dispute “free will” aren’t disputing the “will” part of that expression. It’s the “free” part that’s being questioned. So on the determinist account, it’s no more problematic to say “I am or am not willing to do X” than it would be to say “I am or am not tall enough to reach the top shelf.”
I can say “I’m not tall enough to reach the top shelf” without needing to believe I must be able to freely choose my height at any given moment for that statement to make sense. For the same reason, a determinist can say “I’m not willing to X” without needing to believe they freely choose their willingness to X at any given point for that statement to make sense.
Mark Z
Dec 22 2020 at 7:36pm
Good post, I think the analogy with children is good. We know children are often dumb and immature for reasons beyond their control. It’d be a very poor parent though who says to their child who chases a ball onto a freeway and causes a pileup, “it’s not your fault, you’re just a child and don’t know any better.” If anything, it may be less important that we praise successful people than that we chastise unsuccessful ones, especially if we care about inequality and are more interested in uplifting poor people than augmenting rich people’s success.
A great way though to pre-emptively avoid the psychic cost of blame is to convince people ahead of time that they’re responsible for their lives, for good or ill, so you don’t need to blame them afterward. The ‘Horatio Alger’ narrative, even if partly incorrect, is still IMO a good mentality to impart on people, even from a deterministic standpoint.
Scott Sumner
Dec 22 2020 at 9:48pm
Yes, even if there is no free will we should talk to people in a way that suggests they have choices, because they do. Our talk becomes part of the “environment” that “determines” their behavior.
Dan
Dec 22 2020 at 9:41pm
Did you have something specific in mind? Smoked salmon? Grapes? Grilled asparagus? A $5 footlong with extra veggies?
Scott Sumner
Dec 22 2020 at 9:50pm
I love salmon. But I think a Poke Bowl is the best combination of tasty and healthy, at least for me.
Phil H
Dec 22 2020 at 10:26pm
Agnes Callard is next-level great. I love almost everything she writes. Of course, loving something is not the same as agreeing with it… I just find her level of honesty and effective introspection to be wildly superior to what most people manage. She’s written great colums for The Point magazine.
On praise and blame… I suspect that what confounds most models here is uncertainty. As you say, the causes of good and bad behaviour are largely unknown, still. And given that we cannot tell what’s gone wrong when someone engages in bad behaviour, there is little hope that our medication will be chosen effectively. Therefore, uncertainty gives us a good reason to choose the “healthy option” over the medication at most junctures.
Having said that, I’m not good at following my own reasoning. I need to go back and learn from Bryan Caplan again how to be positive and sunny.
Thomas Hutcheson
Dec 23 2020 at 9:32am
Something missing in this discussion is what “blaming” or “shaming” is and how it is communicated. It is entirely appropriate to call out behavior that produces external diseconomies (or self-harm in the “immature”), but how that should be done depends on the circumstance of the mis-behavior. Was it done in ignorance (and what obligation did the person to have been better informed)? Was it a momentary slip from otherwise virtuous behavior or was it done in reckless disregard for others welfare? Was it done out of some well founded need greater than the harm produced by the externality?
Scott Sumner
Dec 23 2020 at 12:38pm
Very good points.
John C Stalnaker
Dec 25 2020 at 1:46pm
“I couldn’t have done differently, but I could have been a different person.” Rough paraphrase of something written by Thomas Mann about a hundred years ago, who was paraphrasing Schopenhauer from about one-hundred-fifty years ago. Which in turn illustrates something said by Richard Rorty toward the end of his life to the effect that we haven’t gotten wiser on the fundamentals since, say, Epicurus, we just restate the old chestnuts.
Comments are closed.