Stability of the liberal order, moral learning, and constitutional choice: an unresolved tension in James Buchanan’s political economy

Abstract

Buchanan mentions at several points in his oeuvre the necessary role for a constitutional attitude. This attitude is both explanatory and evaluative; it explains why citizens value liberty but also highlights one of the necessary conditions for the stability of a free society. We argue that Buchanan’s idea of a ‘constitutional attitude’ is extremely relevant, though underdeveloped. Firstly, it remains an open question what exactly a constitutional attitude means in practice and it is unclear what kind of institutions would foster it. Secondly, we believe that the success of his constitutional political economy project depends on some account of moral learning. Although Buchanan stresses the individual aspect of the process of self-constitution, he doesn’t take sufficient account of how the institutional environment and our social relationships structure this process. We discuss to what extent a broadly neo-Aristotelian account of moral learning can provide a more robust foundation for Buchanan’s ideas.

KEYWORDS:

• James M. Buchanan
• constitutional attitude
• Virtue Ethics
• institutions

JEL Codes:

• A13
• B25
• B41
• D91

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Notes

1 By ‘constitutional choice’, Buchanan understands a choice situation whereby agents think, discuss, and establish the rules that constrain their own and their peers’ future actions. Buchanan considers the term ‘constitutions’ in a very broad sense. Although he primarily means the rules of the political game, i.e. state constitutions, he wanted the logic of constitutional choice to be also applicable to families, sports games, firms, public institutions, etc.

2 In the moral-justificatory part of Buchanan’s contractarianism, the veil of uncertainty plays an important heuristic function that creates a sense of other-regardingness when individuals think about rules that regulate their future social interactions: individuals do not know where they will end up in the social game so they favor rules that are in line with the principles of fairness or generality (Buchanan & Congleton, 1998). However, this thought experiment presupposes that individuals are already taking part in the constitutional exercise. The point of our paper is more fundamental: if people live in a large-scale society with existing social rules, what will motivate them to take part in the constitutional exercise? In this context, Buchanan (1989) is right to point to the necessity of citizens’ moral motivation – i.e. their constitutional attitude – to engage in rulemaking activities. However, and this is central for our argument, Buchanan does not sufficiently flesh out what this constitutional attitude is and what type of institutional thinking is needed to address the important issues of moral learning and crowding out/in of moral motivation.

3 We are aware of the contrast between this account of the relationship between virtue and reasons for action and a more ‘Humean’ account of this relationship. We will say more about this in Section 3.

4 We are aware that ‘rational choice’ in economics does not presuppose self-interest in the sense of selfishness, but only complete and transitive preferences and maximizing behavior. However, Buchanan himself used a narrow model of rational choice as it was common in the public choice literature of his time. The rationale for this rather narrow account of human behavior is, from Buchanan’s point of view, philosophical. Buchanan doesn’t deny the limitations of this model, and he accepts that for empirical research sometimes it is useful to use a broader account of human motivation. However, Buchanan distinguished between behavioral assumptions used in applied or empirical work (‘positive economics’) and those used in constitutional analysis (see Brennan & Buchanan, 1981, p. 159). Buchanan’s justification for the use of a rather narrow version of rational choice in the latter case is Humean, in the sense that since power will be abused by at least some agents, we should assume that politicians will behave as ‘knaves’. We shall say more on this point in Section 4. For a detailed analysis, see Kirchgässner (2014).

5 Brennan and Buchanan (1985:, p. 148) give the following illustration:

An individual might voluntarily agree to a tax-transfer scheme that imposes a net individual cost of one hundred dollars, if he knows that all other, similarly situated persons will also bear net costs of one hundred dollars each. The same individual, however, may contribute only fifty dollars, or less, to privately organized schemes having the same purpose in the absence of the political program.

6 Whether this was Hayek’s own understanding of this problem is not our concern here. We simply use ‘Hayekian’ to describe the idea Buchanan is referring to, partly because the latter thought this was the case. Brennan and Buchanan (1985, pp. 9–10) note: ‘Some modern social analysts (notably Hayek and his followers) display an apparent faith in the forces of social and cultural “evolution” to generate efficient rules.’

7 For an in-depth discussion of this point, see Dold (2018).

8 Contrary to our own position, Gaus (2012, p. 8) argues that ‘neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is a rejection of modernity rather than a solution to its problems.’ An adequate response to this charge falls beyond the scope of this paper. We think the argument of this paper shows that there is nothing ‘anti-modern’ about neo-Aristotelianism.

9 For an overview of virtue ethics, see Russell (2013a) and Snow (2018).

10 This is not to say that we reject either McCloskey’s or Bruni and Sugden’s arguments. Rather, we are focused on a different question: the development of moral character. And we think that this question is prior to defining the type of character traits needed for the stability of the liberal order.

11 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for raising this potential objection.

12 In a similar vein, see McCann (2002).

13 For some, the term desires is interchangeable with the notion of preferences. For others (ourselves included), preferences are more complex than desires because of their comparative nature. On this point, see Hausman (2011).

14 We are aware that, for many contemporary philosophers, there is a clear distinction between acting well (or according to what is good) and acting rightly (or according to what is right). The political implications of this distinction are also quite fundamental for contemporary political philosophy (see Rawls, 1999, sec. 68). For many neo-Aristotelians the opposition between the right and the good is highly problematic. We cannot explain here the way in which neo-Aristotelians deal with this issue; for such an explanation see, for example, Oderberg (2000, chap. 2). For a ‘rational choice’ account of deliberation about ends, see Schmidtz (1994).

15 This independence is not that of an ‘isolated moral agent’ but that of a socially embedded one.

16 Interestingly, Buchanan states that ‘man does not become less predictable because he uses language’ (1979a, p. 247). Instead, ‘[…] a central difference between my dog and any one of us lies in his lack of any sense of becoming different from what he is’ (1979a). Buchanan does not elaborate on this, as he is engaged in a discussion with his fellow economists, but we think there is an implicit theory of practical reason here.

17 We leave open the question of whether Buchanan was interested specifically in the philosophical problem of moral learning. However, he was keen to emphasize the importance of the constitutional attitude for the stability of the liberal order. Our argument stresses the fact that in order to analyze what makes possible the salience of a constitutional attitude we need an account of moral learning. This allows us to deal (on a more fine-grained level) with individual processes of constitutional attitude development.

18 In this paper, we do not analyze the behavioral disposition of politicians and how to constrain their self-interest. This would be the traditional public choice perspective. In contrast, we want to motivate a slightly different question: how should institutions that regulate interactions among citizens be designed if we are aware of the fact that they can lead to the crowding-out/in of citizens’ constitutional attitude? We think this question becomes particularly important in cases where institutions are built on the assumption that citizens are mainly motivated by their rational self-interest.

19 Referring to Smith, Hayek (1948, p. 11) states a similar view:

There can be little doubt . . . that Smith’s chief concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best, but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst.

20 Traditionally, economists assume that when individuals face material incentives, they do not affect the interaction of the elements in the utility function. For instance, consider the standard function of Section 2: $U_i\left({\pi }_i,R_i\right)=f_i\left({\pi }_i\right)+{\theta }_i{g}_i\left(R_i\right)$. In this case, a variation in the satisfaction of self-regarding utility $f_i\left({\pi }_i\right)$ does not influence the level of other-regardingness ${\theta }_i{g}_i\left(R_i\right)$. The two components are separable and additive. However, empirical evidence indicates that material incentives affect the interaction between self-interested motives and moral motivation. Particularly, incentives can have perverse effects on the salience of moral preferences in that they crowd out intrinsic, non-instrumental motivation (Bowles, 2016, ch. 3).

21 In this and other references to Aristotle we use the standard abbreviations and the Bekker numbers. We follow closely Terence Irwin’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics in this passage.

22 We are aware that Buchanan was sympathetic to the idea of ‘democracy as government by discussion’ and acknowledged that preferences can and do change in the course of the political process (Buchanan, 1954). However, we side with Emmett (2020, p. 305) who claims that Buchanan never systematically incorporated an account of public reasoning into his constitutional economic thinking but ultimately retained the idea of rational, autonomous individuals: ‘Individuals are at the heart of his usage: choosing their values, making up their minds, agreeing, and eventually voting.’ Hence, Buchanan ascribes to a cognitivist model of moral learning; he doesn’t consider public discussion or political participation as key drivers for the inculcation of civic virtues in individuals. For a defense of Buchanan, see Levy and Peart (2017, chaps 2–3).

23 In the context of education, empirical evidence suggests that moderated discussions of current, controversial issues increase students’ interest in politics and their skills at engaging with other people. See, e.g. Kawashima-Ginsberg and Levine (2014) and Sherrod et al. (2010, p. 12).

24 The idea of polycentrism entails that citizens are always part of multiple, overlapping, and nested communities. More generally, Ostrom’s work highlights the crucial role of reciprocity and trustworthiness for the solution of social dilemmas (see, e.g. Ostrom, 2009). While it is true that empirical work suggests the importance of generalized trust in overcoming free rider problems, trust can be seen as the facilitator but not necessarily as the key motivational ingredient of mutual, bottom-up rule-making. For instance, one can live in a society with a high level of generalized trust, but still not feel obliged to engage in any rule-making behavior. For the latter, we argue in this section, it is crucial to develop a constitutional attitude through exposure to public discussion and political participation.

25 This is a point J.S. Mill (1859/2003, pp. 169–170) forcefully makes in On Liberty. Mill recommends for citizens to participate in the political process on an ongoing basis:

as a means to their own mental education – a mode of strengthening their active faculties, exercising their judgment, and giving them a familiar knowledge of the subjects with which they are thus left to deal. This is a principal, though not the sole, recommendation of jury trial (in cases not political); of free and popular local and municipal institutions; of the conduct of industrial and philanthropic enterprises by voluntary associations.

The ‘mental education’ Mill is referring to is

taking [people] out of the narrow circle of personal and family selfishness, and accustoming them to the comprehension of joint interests, the management of joint concerns – habituating them to act from public or semi-public motives, and guide their conduct by aims which unite instead of isolating them from one another. (1859/2003, emphasis added)

26 For an illuminating discussion of the link between De Tocqueville and insights from modern behavioral economics on endogenous preferences, see Hargreaves Heap (2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malte F. Dold

Malte Dold is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Pomona College in California. Previously, he spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow at New York University. He holds a master's degree in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bayreuth, and received his PhD in Economics from the University of Freiburg. His research lies at the intersection of behavioral economics, philosophy of economics, and history of economic thought.

Matías Petersen

Matías Petersen works at the intersection of political philosophy and economic theory. He has published on rational choice theory, institutional design, and the social thought of F.A. Hayek and Alasdair MacIntyre. He holds a master's degree in Philosophy from Los Andes University, and received his PhD in Political Economy from King's College London.