The Malleability of Preference

In a recent story published on the NPR website, Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich writes about the recent research around the collapse of civilization on Easter Island. In the past, the assumption was that the people of Easter Island did not last long after the last tree was chopped down on the island. For a people who depended on wood to build boats for deep-sea fishing, it seemed unlikely they would have survived long without wood.

New research, however, paints an even more terrifying picture of what happened after the last tree went down on Easter Island. According to anthropologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, the residents of Easter Island likely lived for years and years afterwards, eating resident rats and living in comparative squalor to their previous arrangement.

When Europeans came across this post-wood society, however, the people did not beg for food, they bartered for hats and other trinkets. This suggests that the people of Easter Island did not consider themselves in squalor, but rather adjusted their preferences to cope with their limited resources. As Krulwich says in his story,

It's like the story people used to tell about Tang, a sad, flat synthetic orange juice popularized by NASA. If you know what real orange juice tastes like, Tang is no achievement. But if you are on a 50-year voyage, if you lose the memory of real orange juice, then gradually, you begin to think Tang is delicious. On Easter Island, people learned to live with less and forgot what it was like to have more. Maybe that will happen to us. There's a lesson here. It's not a happy one.

Another example that has been brought up to underscore the ability of people to dial back their preferences is that of concentration camps. People find ways to cope in times of distress, and it usually takes the form of a shift in preferences and priorities.

But we don't have to look to the extreme examples of Easter Islanders, astronauts, and concentration camps to see preferences being dialed back. The boy born into a family with a history of drug and alcohol abuse often sees no way to succeed outside of a life of crime, like Omaha killer Nikko Jenkins. Someone who has never had a family member in college is more likely to want to go to college than someone who has two parents graduate college.

These examples point to a quality of our preferences that is often ignored by economists and free-market dogmatists. This is the malleability of preferences. Preferences are often treated as a metaphysical inevitability. Much of classical liberal economic thought is built around an idea that our preferences are some way natural, fixed, and self-affirming. However, when we look around at examples in the lives of others or engage in honest self-reflection, we realize the fragility and variability of our preferences.

If we want to use economics to improve our lives and the lives of others, we need to drop the fetishized view of preferences and understand them for what they are: malleable manifestations of an interaction with our environments. While many utilitarians thought they could save their line of thought by an appeal to preferences rather than happiness, preference-fulfillment favors those already situated to form preferences that will lead to greater personal fulfillment.

Thus, it becomes incumbent on a society that is committed to the tenant of equal opportunity to provide the ability for individuals from all different backgrounds the equal opportunity to form preferences that will enable them to live meaningful lives. In the words of Amartya Sen,

Social and economic factors such as basic education, elementary health care, and secure employment are important not only on their own, but also for the role they play in giving people the opportunity to approach the world with courage and freedom.

An honest approach to a just society will not only address preference fulfillment, but also preference determination.

Capabilities and Ethical Choice

“I believe that for all of our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.”

-President Barack Obama, January 12, 2011

In his recent essay, my friend Peter Hurford put forth an argument that continued his previous claim that there is no "rationally binding" code of ethics for human beings. His argument hinges on one major claim: that the differences that occur between individuals are too great to result in any clear standard of morality for all individuals. Since we have some aspects of our identities and personalities that are idiosyncratic, we can thus not establish any objective standard for rational moral behavior. This claim is not a new one, but it is one that deserves attention for the sake of showing its flaws.

The claim that people have too much variance to establish a rational morality fails in two main ways: by resting on oversimplification and ignoring the strong empirical evidence available.

To begin with the problem of oversimplification, Hurford himself admits that there are many "shared goals" between human beings, examples of which are "eating and sleeping."¹ Martha Nussbaum puts forth a longer list than this in her book Frontiers of Justice. In her innovative "capabilities approach," Nussbaum puts forth a list: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, sense, imagination, thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, and control over one's environment.

One can argue about what should make list (even Nussbaum does), but to say that there is no such fundamental list of capabilities that every human being needs to flourish denies people of their fundamental humanity. Without such qualities, it is not a stretch to say that we "cease to be human."

This leads nicely into Hurford's claim that knavery and sociopathy provide a challenge to morality derived from man qua man. Knavery, the word I am using here to refer to supposedly "immoral" acts that bring a satisfaction to the actor for their carrying out, seems to fit very well into Nussbaum's capability theory. What is fun about playing the ruthless baron in a game of Monopoly? It carries out man's need for "play," "practical reason," "imagination," "control over one's environment." This can be extended to a certain extent into "troublemaking" of a more serious sort, such as fraternity prank-pulling or April Fools jokes.

A counter to this claim could be that any human action can be drawn back to some capability. But the capabilities cannot be handled in isolation. While a night out for drinks for friends could provide for the human need for affiliation, night after night of drinking can threaten the capability of bodily integrity. It can be generally acknowledged that April Fool's pranks can be had in all good fun while still holding that some pranks would not be appropriate for one reason or another, possibly relating to the damaging of emotional or affiliation ties. This also brings us to the example of the sociopath. The sociopath's crippled emotional capacity and inability to affiliate with others cuts him off from basic human needs, thus holding him back from a moral life and a flourishing existence.

Further, Hurford claims that the diversity of human beings leaves mankind helpless to determine an objective morality. For instance,

Going to the nightclub might be great for one person’s needs and what they ought to do, but definitely not right for another person. One person might accomplish their goal to flourish and self-actualize through community service, whereas it might be a rather miserable experience for another person.

A diversity in the manner by which men exercise their capabilities does not refute the existence of capabilities in the first place. People can be rightly more social or less social, more playful or more serious, but the man who is always alone or always serious shows a distinct lack of humanity and fails to have the opportunity to flourish qua man. This does not mean that every man needs to like baseball rather than hockey or reading rather than gardening in order to flourish. A world in which every man must act exactly the same would not be a world where people were responding to their natures. We must be aware of the differences between people, but not let that obscure the significance of our similarities.

The similarities uncovered by the capabilities approach has some strong empirical footing, as well. An important essay by psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman finds strong empirical data that sociability correlates very highly with happiness. The long-held tabula rasa view of development is unraveling with new studies detecting onset of moral thinking at earlier and earlier ages. On the macro level, control over the political process has provided example after example of better outcomes for democracies, such as the fact that no democracy in human history has ever experienced a famine.

As I have said in previous posts, one does not need to believe morality is a non-natural property to understand that morality is objective and rational. One needs simply to acknowledge that man can only understand the world and thus understand himself qua man. And yes, part of our humanity is our individuality, but our individuality does not eclipse our humanity. That which divides us is certainly not as strong as that which unites us.

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1 It should be noted that there is some ambiguity with the use of the phrase "shared goals." For the sake of this conversation, we are not referring to goals that individuals wish to achieve together, but rather goals that separate individuals happen to have.

My Personal Experience in "Poverty"

For today's reflections, I'm going to go in a slightly more personal direction.

A week ago, I made a move from central Ohio, my home of the past twelve years, to Omaha, Nebraska, a city and state I had never laid my eyes on before and which is the home to my assignment for the next year as an Americorps VISTA. Partly from my change in locale but mostly owing to my lack of a social life here, I have had a lot of time to reflect on my new situation and what I am learning here in Omaha.

The main motivation for my interest in the VISTA program and this assignment in particular was an opportunity to deal with the problems of everyday people on the ground level and to gain an experience of empathy that I would not have had the opportunity to have from a week-long service trip or irregular volunteer visits to soup kitchens. VISTA is a federal program that places year-long volunteers in assignments that are geared specifically toward the goal of poverty alleviation. My assignment in particular is working with an organization called the Neighborhood Center, a nonprofit that helps build capacity for neighborhood associations throughout the greater Omaha area. Little did I anticipate that my experience with poverty would be experiential as well as observational.

As Americorps VISTAs, we commit to a year of service, but are paid a living stipend to cover housing, food, transportation, etc. That living stipend is set at the poverty level for the area we are living in. Thus, my stipend is $928/month before taxes. While this is low, I calculated rent costs for my new apartment in Omaha along with transportation (bus passes are provided through the program for free) and food costs and saw that I would be living on more than I did in college or in the time between graduation and the beginning of my tenure as a VISTA. It didn't seem like it would be a problem at all.

While in college, I spent half of my time on Pell Grant, a program that only the bottom 11% of students at Denison qualified for. Despite being in the bottom 11% of students when it came to wealth, I never felt like I didn't fit in or was limited by that status. For all that students make of class inequality, there is something inherently egalitarian about college life, especially at my school. Everyone lived on campus, so transportation was not much of an inequality issue. Even without a car, I did not feel terribly limited compared to those who owned one. We all ate in the same dining halls for three years. Housing was paid for at the start of the year, so rent payments are not an issue. I was able to get along fairly well with people with "rich" families and those whose families were not so well off.

Though I am only a week into my experience here in Omaha, I am already starting to see that "poverty" has a much bigger impact on your life post-graduation. The biggest place that I am seeing an impact is in transportation. While I could always hitch a ride with someone or use my parents' car in high school and I had three roommates with cars in college, I am now living on my own, a mile from the most frequent-running bus stop, during a winter that is just beginning.

What I am also running into is a lack of people to spend time with. While my landlord and the program have introduced me to a number of people who are friendly and willing to help me out when I need it, I still do not have a circle of friends here to have fun with and to depend on when I need help.

This experience is something that was touched on in our VISTA training a week before our assignments began. I recall our group facilitator leading a session on poverty, explaining that poverty was something that was experienced in a number of different ways. While we tend to emphasize income, poverty manifests not only financially, but also mentally, socially, physically, etc.

This message fits well with one that is put forth by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his book Development as Freedom. In chapter 4, "Poverty as Capability Deprivation," Sen argues that poverty is often narrowly construed as a lack of income. This definition, however, fails to encapsulate the fact that someone can be impoverished even with financial resources. One example he uses to explain this is that of unemployment. Even if someone is able to be recouped the financial loss caused by unemployment, not being able to sustain one's self through employment shows a certain poverty of dignity that most would not want to subject themselves to. This is evidenced by the uneasiness we have when unemployed and being stuck with the question "well, what do you do?" in social situations. Poverty is not only a lack of financial resources, but is more broadly a lack of capabilities to fulfill basic human needs.

Another takeaway from this message for me, though, is that my poverty will never really reach the level of those who find themselves stuck in a multidimensional cycle of poverty. While I may find myself without a sizable income, without adequate transportation, and without a readily available group of friends, I still have a college education and social resources that come from growing up in a wealthy suburban enclave and attending a top-50 liberal arts college. Thus, I have opportunities and possibilities that most in abject poverty are without.

While I will never be able to fully understand what it feels like to be truly trapped in poverty, I can still do what I can to sympathize and empathize with those around me who are. And at least I'm trying.