In a characteristically penetrating and insightful post on the question “Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?” Richard Posner concludes:
History teaches that a commercial society is bound to be more prosperous and peaceful than an honor-based traditional society. The commercial culture creates incentives and constraints that, provided that economic activity is effectively regulated, (an important qualification) maximizes the values that are important to most people. This doesn’t mean that people in a commercial society are “better” than people in other types of society. The human race is genetically uniform, and our “moral” genes are not much different from the corresponding genes in chimpanzees. The success of commercial societies just illustrates that different institutional structures produce different human behavior.
I think Posner is off the mark here. He seems to think that moral dispositions are exogenous to institutional structures because humans are genetically uniform. This is wrong. Humans are genetically uniform, but one of those uniformities is a capacity for acquiring and transmitting culture, some of which is moral culture, from which comes variation in moral dispositions. Different institutional structures are possible only because cultural variation is possible. And a configuaration of institutions, once in place, exerts pressure on culture, which in turn exerts pressure on institutional structure, and so on. If more peace and prosperity is better, and the institutions and behavior that produce peace and prosperity are mediated by moral cultured, and moral culture is embodied as emotive and behavioral dispositions by the people within that society, then it seems evasive to deny that those people are “better” in a pretty obvious sense. People who are better at producing moral ends are morally better. It’s not wrong to visit a place rife with corruption, dishonesty, racism and cruelty and remark that “the people are horrible.” It may not be anyone’s fault that they turned out this way, but people do turn out that way, and whole societies, whole peoples, can and do get better. If behavioral dispositions were in fact invariant, and variations in peace and prosperity were entirely due to variations in institutional structure, Posner would be right. There would be no difference in the people. But since variations in institutions are themselves due in large part to variations in people, Posner is wrong. The evidence points to the conclusion that people in commercial societies are better, which is one of the best reasons to prefer commercial societies.
I answered the Templeton question here.
um, people are genetically uniform? taken any genetics lately?
“He seems to think that moral dispositions are exogenous to institutional structures because humans are genetically uniform. This is wrong. Humans are genetically uniform”
Is this written by the same fellow who praises Haidt's work, and the connection between Openness to Experience (with its rather substantial within-culture heritability) and liberal cosmopolitanism?
Genes associated with nonconformism and restlessness are more common among populations founded by recent migrants (those who are more genetically disposed to 'rootless cosmopolitanism' are more likely to leave their native soil):
http://www.pnas.org/content/99/1/10.full
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/ps…
Bones for both the 'nation of immigrants' and 'national biological character' enthusiasts.
Also, cultural institutions can shape selective pressures, e.g. high-intensity Chinese agriculture has consistently stayed closer to Malthusian limits over the last couple thousand years than other regions, and shows lower prevalence of variants predisposing to impulsivity and nonconformism. A society with people just barely getting by and rigid agricultural labor requirements probably was less congenial for people with those dispositions to survive and reproduce. As genetic dispositions change, there can be positive feedback with culture, as customs adapt to temperament, and the new customs further reward those with selected temperament.
Oh, come on. Yes, I am not genetically identical to my sister, and I share more genes with people from England and Norway than people from Japan or Ethiopia. And we all use language, acquire culture, sing, dance, make angry faces and sad faces, etc.
Again, I don't deny population-level variation. Indeed, I believe in gene-culture coevolution. I just meant there are lot of capacities all normal humans in all populations share in virtue of having human genes. That is, people are pretty much the same at a pretty fundamental level, which is just true. One of those uniformities is our cultural capacity. And our cultural capacity explains a lot about psychological and institutional variability.
I agree.
of course, we all share 99.9% of DNA or whatever. but that hardly means there's no heritable variation in personality/behavior with potential for interactions with our environment, cultures, and societies. certain moral judgments are dependent on specific brain structures, making heritable differences in morality perfectly plausible.
you say “variations in institutions are themselves due in large part to variations in people.” so are you saying you don't think *any* of that variation is genetic? that seems like a seriously hardline stance on nature vs nurture.
Are you in other words saying that people are genetically the same, but culturally different, so while it does not make sense to say a society is genetically better than another, it does make sense to say that a society is culturally better? And sometimes we can leave off the adverb and just say “better?”
Everyday-language-wise I'm not too sure I agree with the last part, but semantics is of course the least interesting aspect.
I wonder if you may be pouncing on Posner's use of “better” which he uses without explanation. Maybe he would agree with you.
Maybe this really is just a semantic discussion (or a matter of political correctness) because we are all willing to say things like “that culture is unhealthy” which is more or less like saying “bad” but not as judgemental.
It's tricky with all our history of imperialism to advocate for a use of words which is prone to the wrong connotations. I want to say “you may be right, but we're not ready to talk that way yet.” And does that mean you are wrong today, if you are right only in the future? Is not pragmatics– what the other person hears — a part of defining a word?
Isn't Becker just making a cultural-relativist judgement? People are people and we might like our society better than an honour-based society, but the other guys prefer there's. Seeing women in burkas really sticks in my craw, but I can't make the argument that Western freedom is better without resorting to the proposition that Arabian women would not wear burkas if free to choose. If burkas are freely chosen then I'm just disparaging the other without cause.
Having reread the Posner, I think he is opaquely making two different points about “better”:
In the first point, he admits that different cultures incentivize people to have different character traits, but that each such character trait (e.g. “honesty”) is actually morally neutral.
In the second point, he says that since humans are morally wired the same, people from different societies are not “better” or “worse” than each other (Implicitly, he is saying that “better” or “worse” comes down to a genetic question). Instead a human gets placed into a society that either helps him/her flourish or does not.
He never says that moral dispositions are exogenous to institutions. I read him as admitting that institutions, culture, and character traits all work together in a causal loop.
As Will points out, whether person A is “better” or “worse” than person B is not just a question of genetics. But the common ground here is that both agree that a human starts off “innocent” and then culture works its benign or malign magic, till the character traits are hardened. But actually we can go farther than that and say that some people (maybe even, conceivably, some big groups of co-located people) do have genetic disposition for the “good” traits. And a person with “good” traits is a good person.
Posner doesn't seem to agree that some character traits are good. I think that's a bit silly, but it is true that goodness is context-dependent. To call a trait “good” is a kind of average over all situations.
This is kind of complicated.
Why is everyone obsessed about burkas. pedro? I don't care about the veil, and most Islamic women don't care about the veil. I care more about women being given away like cattle to satisfy “honor” debts and women who are buried alive for asking to choose their own husbands. This stuff actually happens every day, we just don't often hear about it. The burka is the least of the problems those women face.
This is why I am always nattering away about the state here. I need the external state, as a woman, to achieve the class of “citizen,” which will rescue me from my role as “honor plaything” in culture, from the role of “husband's chattel” in the family, and from “second being” in religion.
Then once I am a citizen, I need capitalism – only capitalism values my labor correctly, so the family and civil society realize its worth more to them to educate me and give me access to a profession. Once I am a consumer, capitalism will continue to help me liberate myself in short order. The market is the best thing that ever happened to women. Seriously.
The real problem faced by most Middle Eastern women is the weakness of their external states. If they weren't actually so fragile, they wouldn't need prop themselves up with appeals to religion. Then they would begin to make citizenship demands on women, and the process for women's liberation there would go forward.
We can't rescue these states, so the best we can do is encourage capitalism. Only capitalism is a force disruptive enough to break the most pernicious oppressions, change people's lives, and hopefully creates space for the state to evolve.
Well, I sued the burka because it was an example of something that might be freely chosen, but I doubt many muslim women freely choose to be wrapped in chains and thrown in the pool, or have their clitorus cut off or whatever other barbaric thing happens.
You are completely correct. The state will struggle to reform itself with respect to those issues. look what the suffragettes had to do to get the vote, and not while at risk of aforementioned chain and pool.
Yup, pedro, we agree among our ourselves and with WW. People are better in commercial societies – as the market develops and consumerism entrenches itself, society becomes more and more tolerant. We didn't like those wacky X people until they became our regular customers. Then we loved them. During the coming recession, when various retailers come to see how much high-dollar wedding business they've lost to various gay marriage bans, there will come a sea change, a quiet sea change. . .US$16.8 billion. My.
Well, I sued the burka because it was an example of something that might be freely chosen, but I doubt many muslim women freely choose to be wrapped in chains and thrown in the pool, or have their clitorus cut off or whatever other barbaric thing happens.
You are completely correct. The state will struggle to reform itself with respect to those issues. look what the suffragettes had to do to get the vote, and not while at risk of aforementioned chain and pool.
Yup, pedro, we agree among our ourselves and with WW. People are better in commercial societies – as the market develops and consumerism entrenches itself, society becomes more and more tolerant. We didn't like those wacky X people until they became our regular customers. Then we loved them. During the coming recession, when various retailers come to see how much high-dollar wedding business they've lost to various gay marriage bans, there will come a sea change, a quiet sea change. . .US$16.8 billion. My.