410. Conditional goods

In what way is the good life not universal but contingent, dependent on conditions, in economies? For at least some actions, goodness is not absolute, universal, but depends on conditions. Consider the sticky issues of environmental protection, world trade, child labour, slave trade, trade in babies, and trade in organs.


This view follows from my Aristotelian stance of finding the good in between extremes, in phronesis, the practical wisdom of judging according to context.  
 

It is easy to say that poor people should not, and should not be allowed to sell their organs. What would you do if that were the only way to save your sick child? It is too easy to simply forbid and prevent it everywhere. One should first create economic conditions where people are no longer forced to do it. A similar point applies to child labour. It does not necessarily improve matters to simply take the children out of work. Again, conditions should first be created to do so, in employment of parents and availability of affordable schooling. Surely, one might say, we would draw the line, as something never to be tolerated, at slave trade, and in particular trade in babies, which do both occur. But even there, what would you do as a single mother who can only feed her several children by selling one?

Is it reasonable to demand that developing countries levy the same taxes on pollution, reducing their opportunities to catch up, while developed countries pollute much more due to a higher level of production?

Is it reasonable that developed countries that became prosperous by protection of home industries now deny the right to emerging economies?

In this vein the good is subject to debate that takes conditions into account, and recognizes the contingency of goods, in a debatable ethics, as I argued in item 118 of this blog. What about the case of the mother selling one baby to save the others? We would see if that really were the only option, rather than taking on some nasty job that would still not be as bad as selling a baby.

In item 79 of this blog I recognized that incommensurability, the condition that not all values can be brought under a common measure, requires debate and that this can become very costly. Therefore we should try to make calculative trade-offs whenever that is warranted, i.e. does not do too much violence to incommensurability.

For economics there is no problem in any of these issues. Whatever people do, within the law, is an expression of their preferences, which they are free to satisfy. Moral constraints are up to laws and regulations that should apply equally to all, to ensure a ‘level playing ground’ for competition, regardless of considerations of justice, history, compassion or any aspect of the good life apart from satisfaction of wants. 

Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum go further, with a capabilities approach that wants to ensure that people have access to the means needed to make a free choice. For the Skidelsky’s, in their book ‘How much is enough’ (2012), this does not go far enough. It is still too much based on a liberal idea of autonomy. The question should not only be what people are capable of but what they actually achieve. What Sen and Nussbaum call capabilities, such as knowledge, access to jobs, to social relations, etc. are not mere instruments for the good life, but constitute the good life. However, the Skidelsky’s do maintain that ‘on any reasonable definition, the good life is an autonomous, self-determined one’ (2013 version of the book, p. 149)[1].

I want to stretch it a little further. In this blog and elsewhere (Nooteboom 2012)[2] I argue that to achieve the highest level of freedom, which includes freedom from one’s own prejudice and errors of thought, one needs opposition from the other, and for this one needs to develop openness and empathy. Autonomy is self-defeating. 

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[1] Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How much is enough?, Penguin, 2013.

[2] B. Nooteboom, Beyond humanism: The flourishing of life, self and other, Palgrave MacMillan, 2012. It can be downloaded from my website www.bartnooteboom.nl