I’m just thrilled that Thomas Schelling will share with Robert Aumann a piece of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. I had the opportunity to meet Schelling at a conference on self-deception I helped organize for Mercatus. I believe he may well be the most astonishingly articulate person I’ve ever heard speak. But more important, Schelling is a profound and creative thinker. He deserves to be your intellectual hero. I don’t think I truly understood the idea of coordination until I read Schelling’s elegant, imaginative, and lucid explanations.
Here is Schelling’s 1982 Tanner Lecture, “Ethics, Law, and the Excercise of Self-Command,” which you can also find in his collection of essays Choice and Consequence
It is a great essay. I am going to go read a lot more Schelling. It looks like it won’t be too painful.
But the essay raises an obvious defence of the “more choices=less freedom” position you have been attacking. More choices must always mean more freedom for one of my selves, but if it makes sense to conceive of bodies as occupied by multiple selves, then it could well be that more choices frees one self at the expense of another. And there is no reason, at least in general, to say that the exchange will be distributively fair, allowing, as Schelling does, that interpersonal comparisons of utility are both impossible in principle and often easy in practice.
So, if I have the option of spending money that would otherwise go to my (coerced) disability insurance or pension fund, then that makes my undisabled and youthful self freer, but maybe at the expense of a disabled or older self, who I selfishly don’t care about. And maybe this is distributively unjust between these selves.
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It is a great essay. I am going to go read a lot more Schelling. It looks like it won’t be too painful.
But the essay raises an obvious defence of the “more choices=less freedom” position you have been attacking. More choices must always mean more freedom for one of my selves, but if it makes sense to conceive of bodies as occupied by multiple selves, then it could well be that more choices frees one self at the expense of another. And there is no reason, at least in general, to say that the exchange will be distributively fair, allowing, as Schelling does, that interpersonal comparisons of utility are both impossible in principle and often easy in practice.
So, if I have the option of spending money that would otherwise go to my (coerced) disability insurance or pension fund, then that makes my undisabled and youthful self freer, but maybe at the expense of a disabled or older self, who I selfishly don’t care about. And maybe this is distributively unjust between these selves.