492.
Rationality and morality
Recently,
I was asked to contribute an article to a special issue of a scientific journal,
on the occasion of the decease of the Nobel prize winning economist Oliver
Williamson. I have used his work succesfully, but we disagreed on the role of
trust in markets, on which we had debated several times at conferences. His
claim was that if trust does not go beyond calculative rationality, it does not
add anything new to economics, and if it does go beyond it, it is not viable in
markets, because it cannot survive under competition, where one needs to take
every opportunity at gain, even to the detriment of others. I argued that to survive
in markets one needs to innovate, which necessitates collaboration with others,
to arrive at the ‘novel combinations’ of innovation, that this entails
non-calculative uncertainty, which requires trust as a partially
non-calculative ‘leap of faith’. I discussed that debate in the article, and it
was then rejected because two reviewers had judged my paper ‘unscientific’ for
coming up with that claim of the need for partially non-calculative trust. To a
traditional economist everything has to be explained as individualistic, calculative
rationailty. The possibility that the leap of trust is partially non-calculative,
and is based on a moral instinct of empathy went against that dogma.
I
argued that trust as a partially ingrained , unconscious instinct had arisen in
evolution because it is ‘adaptive’, conducive to the survival and procreation, of
the group (clan, tribe, community). In debates on this, economists have used
the following argument: Since this instinctive drive is conducive to the survival
and evolution of the group, it is rational. My rejoinder is that while the ‘remote’
cause of survival of the group is rational, in the sense of being adaptive, the
‘proximate’ cause of the motivation of people, is instinctive, subconscious, and
cannot be called calculatively rational. rational. If you reject theory that claims
this, you must also deny the ‘behavioral economics’, imported and accepted in
economics from social.psychology, which claims that many decisions are taken
subconsciously, and hence are not or only partially deliberative, let alone
rational. I have not yet received an adequate answer to this.
I
appealed to the verdict of the journal’s editor, saying that I thought the
journal would agree with me. He replied that he agreed with me, but surely I
appreciated that he could not wave aside the verdict of two referees. I replied
that I did not appreciate that, and that an editor should stand by his
conviction. Apparently he had chosen inappropriate reviewers, and in any case
he could have communicated his argument tot hem. He did not reply.
This
case shows that science at times is not as impartial as many people make it out
to be, and is driven by theoretical ideology, with the bias of dogma. The dogma
that economics is driven by rational, individual rationality is ineradicable,
even among enlightened economists
I
grant that sometimes moral judgement and pleas for moral improvement constitute
an easy way out in exolanation. Not leaving it at that, one can analyse
underlying causes, in an analysis of selfish motives, in terms of economic concepts
such as prisoner’s dilemma’s and other games, monopolies, collusion, reputation
and so on, and on how to employ economic notions to find ways of moral improvement,
for example in that it can be in the interest of shareholders to maintain a firm’s
reputation of ecological responsibility or fairness.
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