The Kindergarten Ethics We Need

“It is wisely ordained by nature, that private connexions should commonly prevail over univeral views and considerations; otherwise our affections and actions would be dissopated and lost, for want of a proper limited object.

Thus a small benefit done to ourselves, or our near friends, excites more lively sentiments of love and approbation than a great benefit done to a distant commonwealth: But still we know here, as in all the senses, to correct these inequalities by reflection, and retain a general standard of vice and virtue, founded chiefly on a general usefulness”

David Hume

In my experience, there’s even a more fundamental problem with most people’s ability to think rationally & coherently. The frequency on which one encounters just terrible and obvious fallacy ridden arguments (particularly on the right I must say) speaks to this.

This is not usually some kind of clever sophistry where you have to think carefully to spot the trick, but just banal reasoning errors that should have been too embarrassing to the writer to have written them if they knew they were deliberately making dishonest arguments.

I know there’s a good deal of psychology on motivated reasoning and so forth that can account for how people can make and believe transparently flawed arguments, but still, it’s discouraging to see it so rampant in every quarter.

Since people like examples, here’s a regular: A huge percentage of people seem to think that if they can find some way in which someone they don’t like is a hypocrite, they have therefore neutralized some argument that person was making. Following this implied reasoning (it’s never stated explicitly because if it was the flaw becomes too apparent) – that would mean if Charles Manson says “Murder is wrong” this means murder is ok because he’s a hypocrite for saying it.

Excellent piece.

Mandos indirectly raises a good point, which is that Ian’s ‘we are the world’ rhetoric is frequently deployed as a tool of the globalist set and stands at odds with the nation state as one of the only effective defenders of the 99%.

The question is what we owe to people we don’t consider part of our tribe. Do we have a duty to make their lives better (the ethics of duty and community), or simply a duty not to make their lives worse (the ethics of trade).

First, let me confess up front that I have not read Polanyi’s Great Transformation. (Fortunately, I was just looking at how to procure a copy, and the book is available in its entirety online,
http://www2.dse.unibo.it/ardeni/papers_development/KarlPolanyi_The-Great-Transformation_book.pdf)

Ian, once again, I salute your wonderful ability to distill the essence of crucial philosophical issues. But for now, I cannot agree when you write, “It requires a great deal of executive and legislative work to set up capitalism, starting with depriving most people of capital.” My reading of what Alexander Hamilton accomplished is exactly the opposite: he managed to redirect and even create capital to allow the USA economy to begin industrializing. For example, having the new national government assume the debts of the states, then creating the market conditions in which the agglomerated debt could serve the function of capital.

Which, of course, brings up the question: What do you mean by capital? Is it just the paper instruments (or, today, electronic records) of stocks, bonds, debentures, and so on?

Or does capital included the means of production: the physical plant and equipment, the machinery, by which humanity changes and transforms raw materials in usable and/or marketable goods and services? If this latter, then the initial stage of capitalism in USA at least required a wide spread distribution of capital: as Henry Carey phrased it in the 1850s: having the loom and the anvil present at the side of the plow in every region and town of America. If so, then the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands most definitely, in my view, does not begin until after Morgan establishes itself in USA, leading to the trust building of the 1880s onwards.

Or does capital mean the ability of the human mind to create the science and technology on which new machinery and equipment is based? If this is the case, then certainly there is still capital being created today, such as nano-technology and microelectronics. Or, to update Carey, we are now trying to get a high powered personal computer in the hands of every student and worker.

And another question, therefore: when does capitalism begin? As a word, “capitalism” does not come into general use until the middle of the nineteenth century. Marx’s use of the word marks the first real meaningful application of the word, as a word. Which then begs the question: does this mean that capitalism did not really exist in 1787? And if capitalism did not exist at that point, then how does anyone claim that the USA was created as a “free market capitalist country” as conservatives and libertarians like to claim; or as an “exploitative capitalist system: as many leftists like to claim?

Michael Hudson has pointed out that there were three distinct economic philosophies which developed in the West in the nineteenth century: the British system of Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus; the system or systems based on Karl Marx; and what used to be called the American School (of political economy), of which Henry Carey was the best known proponent. Hudson has written a handful of articles explaining how the economics profession has been purged of the American School because of its innate hostility to usury and rent. Largely under, of course, the patronage and promotion of usurers and rentiers.

Given the discussion in this thread, it is striking how often in American School writings appear concepts similar to the Golden Rule, and an embrace of and empathy for the entire world. Some of Carey’s works, in particular, explicitly argued that the American School was the only humane and just alternative to the British system.

Let me end by noting that the historical record regarding the American School is easily muddled because of slavery. But as Hudson explains in a few places, the American School / Hamiltonian impulse was hostile, often openly, to the agrarian slave system of the South. Indeed, one of Carey’s major books is The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign, 1853. Note the subtitle: “Why it exists, and how it may be extinguished.”

Well, two more things: if Polanyi’s argument is indeed that capitalism required depriving most people of capital, it is ironic that he finished The Great Transformation during a two-year grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

And in case anybody is as confused as I did at first: Karl Polanyi was NOT a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society. the major promoter of neo-liberalism after World War Two. It was his brother, Michael Polanyi. Another great irony.

Niceness is a type of courtesy–if social lubrication is the extent of kindness, it means nearly nothing.

Kindness doesn’t require naivete. The best of it is wise.

Apparently ethics needs to be taught, and as thoroughly as we teach reading. Religion used to do it (for good and ill). We did not pick up the ball when religion faded from curricula.

Indeed, yes, all economic and political theories are ethical theories. This is something I think about all the time, being old enough to remember when “good” had a shared definition, no matter how far short of it we fell, and it applied in every cranny.

That changed with Reagan and his merry band of pirates: not only plutocrats, but pastors who worshipped the dollar no less. Now evil has been masquerading as good for decades. Children have been born, grown up and produced children under this greed-is-good regime.

We Americans aren’t alone in it, of course; Thatcher did the same in England (I was there) and now Brussels spreads her signature brutalities through Europe and the world’s banksters and the U.S. military make sure no other spot’s left out.

It seems to me that a public hunger for goodness began intensifying madly in the past few years, as the reality of the surrounding horror show became less possible to ignore. Books like “The Shock Doctrine” caught on in a huge way that wouldn’t have been possible sooner — and now, at last, truth-tellers like Pope Francis, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have muscled onto the biggest stage there is.

After these long, agonizing long years of deliberate deception, more and more people are waking up to what’s real and right, although plenty of confusion remains (as seen in any Republican presidential candidate and his supporters). We still need to go farther, surely MUCH farther than even our truth-tellers are going yet.

When will somebody say that $15 an hour is an insult as long as others will add a fortune to their fortunes in that same hour? When will somebody say that the good things of the earth belong to us all? When will somebody say, “No fortunes until everybody has enough!”

Not everything in the Bible is good. There are those obscene passages in Deuteronomy and Joshua in which God allegedly told the Israelites to slaughter Cannanites, even the children, and steal their land, to name just one example of ethical failure.

I say “allegedly” because I don’t believe for one second that He actually ordered the violation of His own Commandments against murder and theft. While I believe that He inspired the Bible, it is plain to me that He did not edit it.

Conquest is neither murder or theft. The god of Abraham is a war god, in the Old Testament he is often referred to as the Lord of Hosts. Jesus did not come to bring peace either. For Peter Turchin war serves as the uniting mechanism for a society. In the Bible, war is a punishment for sin. For the mystics I read, war serves the great evolutionary principle of life.

Those passages of the Bible to which Tony refers did not truly come from God, or else were misunderstood. Again, He did not edit it.

For example, Jesus meant that He foresaw that His teachings would cause division. He did not like that prospect, but He recognized that it would happen.

Conquest is murder and theft, on a grand scale. Anyone who thinks God would authorize that does not truly know Him, and that includes the Scripture writers who thought that.

The Bible is precious, but it is neither factually nor ethically infallible, and must be read by the “inner light” of conscience, guided by the Holy Spirit.

Well, all this talk of gawd certainly does circle back to the point about politics etc. being about ethics rather neatly. It all begins with assumptions, whether genetic or affected and the lousy logic most people build to rationalize their dearly held emotional hubris is a distinct issue. Actually, most people don’t bother to make their own rationalizations, they just emote their way through existence, taking their beliefs at face value like an ill fitting off-the-rack suit, and hope they escape with their skin intact. A rather futile hope at that.

But what I wanted to point out is that to act morally or ethically means that you cannot act at all given that there is no way to determine the totality of consequence from any action. It is wholly rational to order the scope of ones intent through ever widening circles, starting with me first.

Ian, what I’m curious to know are your thoughts on the idea of agency. While I agree with most of your post, the idea that we as individuals can somehow influence the aggregate behaviors mystifies me. What agency drives the long arc of societal behaviors?

to nihil obstet: ” If slavery muddles a history or theory of American economics, it’s a very bad history/theory, because slavery was basic to the development of the American economy.” Slavery was not basic to the development of industry in the North, most especially the development of metal working machine tools, the impetus for which comes entirely after the War of 1812 from the War Department’s requirement for firearms with interchangeable parts. And, again, there are two different versions of political economy contesting for dominance in the USA during the 1800s: the American School, which basically reflects Hamilton’s program for industrialization, and the British school, which basically reflects Jefferson’s veneration of the agrarian yeomanry. I think it is no coincidence that though the first commercial railroad is built in the south, it is the north where a complete railroad network is built.

The patterns left by the two different versions of political economy are very clear by the time of the Civil War: just compare of the industrial capacity of the Union with that of the Confederacy. In The South Vs. The South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War William W. Freehling summarizes the capacity of the border states, in comparison to the seceded states. Mind you, this is ONLY three border states he is writing about; the rest of the south is much less industrial>

“While the Border South contained an impressive 37 percent of Slave South whites, it harbored a more impressive 50 percent of southern urbanization and industrialization. In 1860, the three largest Border South cities, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville, contained more inhabitants than the fourteen largest Confederate cities. By gaining the border, the rebel nation would have doubled its factory capacity and bridged its most crippling industrial gap: the capacity to make and repair ships and railroads. Baltimore makes the point all by itself, for railroads had created this city’s wild growth almost all by themselves. Flour processing and shipbuilding had helped fuel the city’s 1840-60 boom. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, however, had primarily elevated Baltimore into the heady status of America’s third largest metropolis in 1860, behind only greater New York (including Brooklyn) and Philadelphia. (Baltimore was 25 percent larger than New Orleans, the Confederacy’s biggest city.) Other Atlantic Coast urban centers – New York, Boston, Philadelphia-skimmed more profits from railroad trade and from railroad financing. But Baltimore developed more extensive factories to fashion railroad tracks; trestles, bridges, cars, and locomotives. Baltimore needed more such infrastructure than its Atlantic Coast rivals, for the city had to conquer more miles and tougher geographic obstacles, particularly the western Virginia mountains, to create its railway to the West.

“Baltimore’s railroad industries especially thrived in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad shops around Mount Clare. In this sooty city within a city, the South’s densest center of employment, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad manufactured parts for stations, tracks, and bridges hundreds of miles west. Baltimore’s specialized shops fashioned car wheels, car axles, car bodies, spark catchers, trestles, tracks, especially locomotives. The Baltimore and Ohio also became the prime customer for shops that turned out advanced factory tools. Denmead and Murray and Hazelhurst, for example, supplied castings for Abbott’s rolling mill, which supplied plates for the Monumental Locomotive Works, which used engines crafted by Bartlett-Hayward. Between 1848 and 1852, interlocking Baltimore and Ohio shops built not only 200 locomotives but also sixty bridges to span western Virginia rivers and mountains. Other Baltimore shops fashioned steamships, railroad stations, and engine houses.

“The Confederacy desperately needed this beehive of tools and skills for crafting iron behemoths. Alone in the South, Baltimore had the capital, expertise, and tooling to remake the southern rails as fast as they wore out (or were blown up). So too, alone in the South, Baltimore had the resources to create ironclad vessels up to Yankee standards. Instead, this pivotal slave-holding city boosted the Union’s towering advantage.

“The city became the Civil War hospital for Yankee railroads. Outside the Mount Clare shops, millions of pounds of iron railroad debris were piled as high as the factories, ready to be melted into iron sheets again, then refashioned to remake the latest exploded railroad bridge or ripped-up railroad track or expired locomotive. The Baltimore and Ohio bridge at Harpers Ferry, for example, five times demolished by guerrilla warriors, was five times operative again within a few weeks. Because of Baltimore’s shops, the Baltimore and Ohio constantly functioned as the main east-west supply line for Union armies.

“In contrast, under the crushing Civil War tasks of moving gigantic quantities of food, troops, and military equipment. Confederate railroads succumbed faster than Confederate troops. By midwar, an aide to the Confederacy’s western commander lamented that “locomotives had not been repaired for six months, and many of them lay disabled.” The colonel knew “not one place in the South where a driving-wheel can be made, and not one where a whole locomotive can be constructed.” (Freehling, pp 61-62)”

Second, if capital had to be concentrated to create capitalism, then what in the world was going on before the trusts were built? In his 1904 book, The Truth About the Trusts, financial reporter John Moody (yes, founder of Moody’s securities rating agency) included a graphic for most major industries, listing the smaller, local companies that had been bought up to create the various trusts in steel, sugar, farm equipment, smelting, flour milling, and so on. The book is at https://archive.org/stream/truthabouttrust01moodgoog#page/n84/mode/2up

What is striking is that every major US city and many large towns had a highly diversified industrial economy, that looked. to me at least, pretty much self-sufficient for all but a few things. The industrial capacity to do almost anything existed in every single city, which to me is evidence of wide spread distribution of capital, at least capital in terms of machinery and human talent.

“Without slavery, all the U.S. has to export is lumber and furs” simply is not true. Total exports in 182o were $52 million, of which $3 million was classified as “finished manufactures” and $10 million in “manufactured foodstuffs” (basically, butchered meat). In 1850, of $135 million in exports, $17 million is finished manufactures and $20 million in manufactured foodstuffs. In 1880, $824 million in exports, of which $93 million is finished manufactures and $193 million in manufactured foodstuffs. Those are the numbers in Series U 61-72 “Value of Merchandise Exports and Imports,” Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957.

My view is that it is a misleading simplification to talk about a monolithic “America capitalism” because doing so obscures the never ending struggle between what Veblen called the producer class and the leisure class, as well as between north and south. I would characterize the USA economy today not as capitalism, but as some bastardized variant, “financial capitalism” or “rentier capitalism” perhaps more accurately. But is it even capitalism? What kind of capitalism is it that concentrates financial capital, while dismantling the capital of its industrial base and relocating it in other countries?

And these questions are not mere academic quibbles. They are loaded with weighty implications for whether or not you are going to look for, and identify, specific individuals and institutions as being responsible for perpetuating great wrongs. If there is a monolithic American capitalism which depended entirely on slavery and exploitation for its development over the past two and a half centuries, and its structure and nature was cemented in place by the Constitution, then what exactly is it that the Mont Pelerin Society or the Koch brothers have been hell bent to change these past few decades? Or are their activities and lawsuits and think tanks all just so much smoke and mirrors?

Excellent. I can not emphasize enough the importance of realizing that both politics and economics are moral in nature. Modern economics treats the economy as an autonomous organism susceptible to scientific analysis, like a bacterium or a supernova. Hannah Arendt called such pseudo-scientific appeals scientificality.

It would be tempting to call this false objectivity just a mistake, except that it so clearly benefits those who profess it and even more those whom they work for. The con at the heart of modern economics is that human agency, and in particular human responsibility is eliminated. Billionaires just are and represent particularly successful people. As such, their wealth is legitimate and any attempt to reduce it is theft and social engineering.

When we drop the pretense of natural law and the identification of economics with disciplines like physice, we can return to the questions which really matter. We are not atomized individuals. We live in societies. Without those societies, most of us would not survive, and those who did would be reduced to the level of animals. So the first question is what kind of a society do you want? And in answering that question, you have to take into account that any restrictions you place on others they may turn around, if they are more numerous, and place upon you –in spades. So to restate this question, it comes down to what kind of society do you want and want others to want for you.

We need to understand that each of us is actually two people: one social and one private. If your private beliefs conflict with the social norm, then the social norm prevails. But this does not mean, that you must give up your private beliefs. You can still have them and militate for their wider adoption. You just can’t inflict them on others. At the same time, our social norms should respect our private side and that each of us has a right to privacy. There will always be a tension between the social and the private, and the boundaries will likely change over time. But so what? Living is a dynamic process. We should be used to it.

Once we understand that it is about what kind of a society we want to live in, other questions arise. How much is enough for each of us? How much is too much? At what point does someone’s amassing of what ultimately are our resources represent an unacceptable taking from the rest of us? When the moral and societal elements are given their rightful place in the discussion, it doesn’t take a lot to understand why modern economics and politics go to such lengths to excise any mention of them. Modern economics and politics are tools of the rich and elites whose purpose is to maintain their wealth and position at our expense. If morality is brought up, they have no defense. They lose. So they make sure it is never brought up. Problem solved.

V. Arnold, feel free. It is yours to use as you wish.

@ Tony, I don’t mean to carry on. I admit I am not comfortable with the erasure of injustices from the history of how the country got rich, as though you have a moral issue that has nothing to do with economics, especially in a discussion of “ethics we need.” I do react to the notion that slavery “muddles” American economic philosophy and history rather than being a part of it. I’d suggest more thought on the concepts of what is and isn’t included in the classifications we use to understand our philosophy.