Experiential Economics

What are the laws of economics really about? We know they concern supply and demand, but supply and demand of what? The orthodox answer is “goods and services”—material things in effect. A consumer consumes material things (services also involve material things, including actions). When the demand for certain material things is high prices tend to go up under constancy of supply of those things. But this can’t be right as a formulation of the underlying laws. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain economic behavior. Not necessary because there could be a virtual economy: producers and consumers living under brain-in-a-vat conditions. You do mental work to earn an income that you use to purchase things—but not material things, mental things. Instead of buying a material disc to listen to music you buy musical experience itself fed directly into your brain. In this economy you don’t buy material goods but mental goods—for example, tastes not foods. You may know this or not, but it is what is really going on. Not sufficient either because material goods by themselves are not enough to produce anything you value. No one wants material goods as such but only what they can do for one, and this is ultimately experiential. Suppose everyone went deaf: the demand for musical technology would plummet. Musical instruments would become worthless, as would stereos and the like. The art market would collapse if blindness became widespread, as would the movie and television business. Restaurants would go under if everybody lost their sense of taste. These things have value only in so far as there are experiences corresponding to them, because they are the ultimate things of value. Everything else is instrumental. Thus, supply and demand are experiential not physical: we demand (desire) experiences (states of mind), and producers supply them—sometimes in the form of material goods, but not necessarily. Productivity is productivity of experience—this is what we buy and sell. Saying that economics is about physical goods and services is like saying it is about atoms: the physical things are mere means not ends. Sure, atoms get delivered to me when I buy a TV set, but that was not the point of the transaction. Goods are like drugs: the point is the mental effect not the material composition. The orthodox approach to economics is therefore misguided; it confuses ends and means, the contingent with the necessary. Goods and services are correlated with certain experiential states, but they are not the same as such states—and they are what really matter in the economic world. You are rich if you can buy a lot of good experiences. Wealth is a mental thing.

This has a direct bearing on the nature of economic science. First, it will bring all the vagaries of consciousness into economics. Second, it will require attention to the inner life of economic agents. Third, it will connect economics directly to ethics, since ethics is also about the value attaching to experience. But fourth, and most important, it changes economics from an objective science into a subjective science: it isn’t about actions in a public material world but about events in a private mental world. It is up to its neck in phenomenology. It isn’t like physics. Is it even a science? That depends on your definition of science: no if science must be concerned with objective things, but yes if we can have a science of the experiential. People are motivated to engage in economic transactions by a desire to experience certain things (including the desire to keep on experiencing things—hence healthcare), so we need a science of such desires, which includes a science of experience. Behavioristic science won’t do; it has to be the real subjective thing. Economics is thoroughly mentalistic. Producers must figure out what experiences people want and then stimulate desire for such experiences. Internal goods not external goods. Economists describe and explain these kinds of preferences. A bank is a place where experiences (or the potential for them) are stored. Inflation is when the price of experiences keeps rising. International trade is the exchange of experiences between countries. And so on. Economics is the study of experiential transactions.[1]

[1] What you spend your hard-earned money on is determined by your expectations of the experiential return. If we are hedonists, we will equate this with pleasure; but we could also value knowledge or experiences of beauty (not consisting in pleasure). These questions will impinge on economics.

On Meaning, Mathematics, and Space

It has been held that a good amount of philosophy revolves around a clash or competition between subjective and objective conceptions of things.[1] For present purposes we can understand this contrast as consisting in an opposition between conceptions of things from a personal (first-person) point of view and conceptions of things from an impersonal (third-person) point of view, or no point of view. I want to explore this question in relation to the philosophy of language, particularly the nature of meaning. I will focus on Frege. Frege’s theory of meaning splits meaning into two parts—sense and reference. Reference comprises public objects existing in the external world, not points of view on objects—actual tables, tulips, and tapirs. These are objective entities that would exist irrespective of human minds (not counting objects of reference in minds). So far, the theory is rigorously objective—nothing subjective or psychological at all. But then Frege adds the level of sense, glossed as “mode of presentation”. The visual allusion is clear and reinforced by his analogy with the telescope: a sense is a perspective or point of view on a reference. It may not be officially regarded as something mental in itself, but it functions in the theory as something grasped by the mind—how the mind “sees” the world. There can be many senses corresponding to the same reference, as there can be many points of view on the same object. Sense is separate from the reference and can exist without it. It is subjective; it contains a subject-relative point of view. In this respect it is like the classical notion of an idea. So, according to Frege, meaning has two parts, joined together: an objective part and a subjective part. It isn’t only objective and it isn’t only subjective, but both. We could call this a double aspect theory. We might even say there is something it is like to grasp a particular sense, but there is nothing it is like to pick out a particular reference, or be a particular reference.

This two-tiered theory raises thorny questions. Do we really need two layers of meaning? Why not stick with sense alone—isn’t that enough to get meaning going? On the other hand, can’t we get away with reference alone (save for a couple of peripheral puzzles)? Generally speaking, reference seems to carry the main burden of the semantic work. Thus, we get “direct reference” theories. That is, we can try to get by with purely subjective theories or with purely objective theories (shades of the mind-body problem]. The point I am making is that the subjective-objective dialectic plays out in this case also: meaning might be all subjective (sense) or all objective (reference) or a combination of both (sense and reference). We feel the pull of the subjective and we feel the pull of the objective, so we try to accommodate both pulls. Frege is a kind of semantic dualist while others are hardline semantic subjectivists or objectivists. The terrain has much the same topography as in other areas of philosophy. It is an instance of the same general problem. One can take an “inside” view or an “outside” view, or try to combine the two. The objectivist will discount the internal in favor of the external, while the subjectivist will dispense with the external in favor of the internal. Meaning is subject to these familiar tensions. Image theories represent one side of this divide and stimulus-response theories the other. The result is a kind of endless oscillation.

With that case under our belt, we can turn to mathematics, where a structurally similar dialectic plays out. What are numbers (or geometric figures)? We can view them objectively or subjectively, as in Platonism and intuitionism (or formalism). Either they exist independently of the human subject and don’t vary with variation in the subject, or they are creatures of the human mind and reflect its nature; or possibly they are some sort of combination (there are subjective numbers and objective numbers existing in some sort of correlation). Both types of view run into well-known difficulties: numbers become too mind-dependent and subject-relative (psychologism), or they become too distant from the human mind to be knowable (Platonism). If we locate mathematics in the human mind, we make it too subjective; if we locate it in platonic heaven, we make it too objective, i.e., divorced from human faculties. That, at any rate, is the classical dilemma. Space also displays this dialectic: we can make it subjective or we can make it objective or we can multiply spaces. Either we make it a category of the senses (“visual space”) or we think of it abstractly, thus cutting it off from human knowledge (“absolute space”). Or we posit two spaces—mental space and physical space. We have the counterpart to Frege’s mixed subjective-objective view meaning. Or we have an attempt to assimilate space to the subjective or the objective: there is nothing more to space than perceived space or it is removed from conscious awareness, an I-know-not-what. Thus, meaning, mathematics and space exhibit a similar pattern defined by the subjective-objective contrast. This meta-philosophy includes these three areas.[2]

There is something in common to those areas: they are all curiously impalpable. They are not concrete particulars. Accordingly, they tend to attract subjectivist interpretation; they are regarded as “immaterial”. You can’t put your finger on meaning; you can’t throw a number across the room; you can’t kick space around. Nor can you introspect these things as you can sensations. We therefore tend to recoil at objective accounts of meaning, mathematics and space, because they don’t strike us as like physical substances. Nor are they purely ideational. So, we can apply the subjective-objective distinction to two kinds of reality: the concrete and the not-so-concrete. We have subjective-objective quandaries about mind and matter, but we also have them about things that don’t fall neatly into these categories. Still, the cases are united with respect to subjectivism and objectivism. I would also put ethics and aesthetics on the impalpable-but-not-mental side. Are goodness and beauty in the eye of the beholder (subjective) or do they exist separately from the mind (objective)? The question runs deep in philosophical issues and crops up surprisingly frequently. It appears to be the fly-bottle about which Wittgenstein so disparagingly spoke. What depends on me and what does not depend on me? That is the fundamental question. What exists because points of view exist, and what exists whether or not points of view exist? Is the world the totality of points of view or do points of view carry no ontological weight?[3]

[1] This position is associated with Thomas Nagel (The View from Nowhere), rightly so, but hints of it exist in the philosophical tradition, stemming from the rise of empiricism and idealism, as well as materialism. It is another way of talking about familiar issues.

[2] I mean to be including areas not discussed (but alluded to) in Nagel’s The View from Nowhere, thus enlarging the scope of his meta-philosophy.

[3] When Wittgenstein said that the world is the totality of facts, he presumably meant objective facts not points of view on facts (a fact is not a point of view on itself). Berkeley would appear to be saying that the world is nothing but points of view. Quine wouldn’t quantify over points of view.

Ethical Socialism

I posed the problem of the indispensability of ethics, remarking that no ethical theory I know of has a solution to it.[1] It seems that we prize ethics above even prudence, logic, and sanity; we can’t live without it. This is puzzling—surely, you don’t have to be good to be happy! Acting ethically doesn’t always feel that great (see I. Kant, as in “I can’t help it”). I now think I have a solution to the puzzle, and it puts a particular twist on the basic rationale of ethics. I call it “ethical socialism”. The basic idea is simple and not unfamiliar: ethics is a precondition of society. Without ethics there is no such thing as society. By society I mean any social grouping: from towns and countries to families, friendships, and fleeting encounters. Any form of human association. For without ethics such collectives are impossible, since they need ethical rules in order to exist. You can’t treat someone without regard for right and wrong and expect to stay friends with them. You have to treat them right—no stealing, lying, promise-breaking, betraying, violence, and murder. Such things are not conducive to a functioning society (even of two people). This is self-evident and hardly needs arguing. What is less obvious is the alternative to a life lived with others in harmony: loneliness, isolation, misery, fear, self-sufficiency, humorlessness, poverty, early death. Nasty, brutish, short, and all alone. It sounds like hell—there is no social life in hell. The OED gives for “society”: “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community” (I love that “more or less”). No community, no communing—no chatting, sharing, amusing, informing. No one to talk to, no one to see, no one to interact with. No friend, no spouse, no partner, no helper. This is brutal stuff—the stuff of nightmares. But that’s what you get if you spurn morality. This is why the professional criminal (wrong-doer) is never completely amoral or immoral: because if he is, he has nobody, nothing. His life is barren and empty. Thus, he treats his gang and family well. He isn’t a shit to everybody. So, on pain of total isolation, he maintains a local morality, perhaps even accentuates it. You begin to see why morality matters more than prudence, logic, and sanity—at least you have some company if you lack those qualities. Abandoning morality altogether is choosing to live alone, and human life is a very meagre thing under such conditions; really, not worth living. We are social creatures and our happiness is largely social, perhaps entirely when you take it to the logical extreme. Life without society would be unbearable; no one ever chooses it. We find it difficult to imagine how a totally solitary animal can ever be happy; it merely survives.  Not that any animal is ever truly alone, what with mates and family. Total isolation isn’t biological. Ethics is written into our souls because social existence is; it is as deeply ingrained as our social nature. We implicitly understand from a young age that morality is necessary for social bonds; it is the glue that holds individuals together. It is what makes living together possible. We might thus announce that what is good and right is what enables and preserves society (in the broadest sense). It even includes human-animal societies: these can exist only because we treat animals with a degree of moral respect—they would run away if we didn’t. Animal ethics stems from human-animal societies. You can’t even own a dog unless you stick to moral principles. The very concept of right and wrong is bound up with the need for society. In a sense, it is tribal (but not in the narrow sense). We would all die early and live horribly if society was not possible, and morality is what makes it possible.[2]

A good ethical theory should register the connection between morality and society—and not by supposing that morality is “socially constructed”. It isn’t. But its profound hold on us is bound up with its role in creating social groups. This conception is socialist not individualist: it is a group phenomenon not an individual one. At the level of the individual morality does not exist. If we deny the existence of society, we undermine morality; we rob it of its point. We rob it of its content. The atomistic individual cannot be a moral agent; he can at best be a member of an aggregate. Ethics and community go together, but not ethics and the isolated individual. Thus, we might label the theory under consideration “communist ethics” or “ethical communism”. It is the ethical basis of political socialism and communism (no matter how perverted such ideas have become historically). Ethics must be directed at communities not individuals (here there is only prudence). I think this is why there has always been some disquiet over utilitarian ethics: society is not visible in it. All we get is maximizing the happiness of the greatest number, whether or not this number comprises a society (people “living together”). The beneficiaries of the utilitarian calculation could be isolated individuals. There doesn’t seem to be anything essentially social in this ethical theory. By contrast, deontological theories explicitly record interpersonal relations—don’t lie, don’t break your promises, don’t steal, don’t be ungrateful, don’t kill, clean up after yourself. It is about one’s duties to others not just making everyone feel good. Where is the interpersonal element—the I and thou? Nor should we neglect the spiritual aspect: the meeting of minds, the empathy, the spiritual communing. All this is immensely valuable to us—and it goes beyond supplying goods and services and simply getting along with each other. Our greatest happiness lies here. So, morality exists in the human species because we have interpersonal spiritual needs. In short, we need love—to give it and receive it. We don’t just want to go about our business, lovelessly. We sense that without morality this good would be unavailable to us (we might just get stabbed in the back, betrayed, enslaved). There has to be trust, or else everyone suspects everyone and bonds are never formed. We would hardly exist as human beings unless we had a developed social life, and morality is what makes this possible. Ethics is existential. Human life has no meaning lived alone. Aloneness can lead to suicide in extreme cases. So, ethics is what gives life meaning, because it enables the social dimension. It prevents life being unpleasant, isolated, and brief (what with suicide and everything). Even street-gang life is preferable to that.

We should really divide philosophy into two parts: philosophy of the individual and philosophy of the group. In the first part we deal with such problems as the mind-body problem, the problem of free will, the classical problems of epistemology, etc. In the second part we deal with ethics, political philosophy, the analysis of social facts, and some of the philosophy of language. A theorem of this branch of philosophy might be that there can be no social facts without ethical facts: societies can’t exist without firm ethical foundations (ethical subjectivism won’t cut it). Ethical nihilism produces rampant individualism and the collapse of organized society (just roving gangs and lone assassins). We have the individual-community problem as we have the mind-body problem. Some philosophers specialize in individual philosophy and some specialize in group philosophy (same in psychology). Some suggest that what looks like an individual problem is really a group problem—as with community theories of meaning or mental content. Some maintain that the concept of freedom is individualistic (a matter of causal determination) while others argue that it is a social concept (not being coerced by others). I think this is a useful division, and I place ethics on the group side. It turns out that the reason we are so firmly committed to ethics is that we are essentially and unavoidably social—but not necessarily prudent or logical or sane. We can live without the latter three, but we can’t live without society. Other people may be hell, as Sartre suggested, but it is a hell we would prefer to the heaven of total aloneness.[3]

[1] See my “Ethical Life”. I posed the problem one day and arrived at the present view overnight. Perhaps the solution will help to see what the problem is.

[2] The function of the law is likewise to codify the rules of interpersonal engagement; to regulate societal interactions. This is why it is connected to ethics. We have laws because without them society would disintegrate into amoral individualism—or so it is believed at this stage of human history. If ethics is the social glue, the law is the social hammer (it knocks in the nails). This is the importance of the law, for what it’s worth. The law is what enables to sleep easy at night and speak freely. It is society’s enforcer. A large amount of human effort is devoted to keeping society together, because without it, life becomes meaningless and unbearable. Family law is particularly important.

[3] I can’t refrain from mentioning the song, by Celine Dion and others, entitled “Alone”. The theme is the isolated individual versus the connected lover. The hysterical chorus has the lyrics, “Till now I always got by on my own, I never really cared until I met you”, and the song ends with two long shrieks of “Alone!”. The importance of morality is its capacity to prevent such shrieks.