In praise of functional morals and ethics

ABSTRACT

Building on the moral economy of Andrew Sayer and Dave Elder-Vass, this article advocates for a functional (not functionalist) approach to morals and ethics, and consequently to economics. By choosing words responsibly it aims to be an example of the conscientious attitude it advocates. In the first section, I find that Andrew Sayer's approach dovetails with Pierre Macherey's – notably due to Sayer's linking of the biological dependency and vulnerability of humans to realist ethics, via the key word needs. Ditto for Dave Elder-Vass and Macherey for similar reasons. Simplifying, the second section examines the contrary of biological models of norms: juridical models of norms, especially Kant's jurisprudence and Leon Walras's pure economics. The third section, Les valeurs de la vie, showcases Elder-Vass on how to build a functional economy. Then it further supports Macherey's proposals drawing on two of his main sources, Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• morals
• political economy
• Immanuel Kant
• Leon Walras
• Pierre Macherey

Macherey’s immanent biological model of the norm

This essay can be called, if you will, an exercise in choosing which words to use when in our contemporary context. I hope to add something useful to the work being done by Pierre Macherey (Macherey 2009), Andrew Sayer (Sayer 2000; 2011; 2019), and Dave Elder-Vass (Elder-Vass 2016; 2022) and to the legacy of John Dewey (1859–1952). I start by considering a provocative proposal from Macherey.

Macherey calls his approach to the study and practice of what is called in Spanish convivencia humana (human living-together) ‘immanent’. He distinguishes ‘le modèle juridique de la norme’ from ‘le modèle biologique de la norme’ (Macherey 2009, 75). Obviously, norme [norm] is a key word here. I take Macherey to refer to moral, ethical and legal norms, and if there are any other kinds of norm to refer to them too. The book I am quoting from is De Canguilhem a Foucault: La Force des Normes (Macherey 2009).

It is the second choice, ‘le modèle biologique de la norme’, that is immanent. On an immanent, biological view of norms, ‘vivire en société, selon des normes, ce n’est pas substituer un droit rationnel à celui de la nature, bien au contraire; mais c’est gérer et réguler les mêmes rapports de forces qui déterminent, à partir du jeu libre et nécessaire des affects, l’ensemble des relations interindividuelles’ [Living in society, according to norms, is not substituting a rational law for that of nature, but all to the contrary; it is to manage and regulate the same relations of forces that determine, in the free and necessary play of affects, the ensemble of interindividual relationships] (Macherey 2009, 94).

Adopting an immanent viewpoint, one in which human social life is seen as part of nature, not as radically distinct from nature (as Kant makes a radical distinction between ein jedes Ding [any thing] subject to laws, and a rational being capable of forming a concept of law (Kant [1785] 2016, 41)). Macherey takes Kant’s radical separation of rational will from nature to be incompatible with le modèle biologique de la norme. Sayer calls on social scientists and philosophers who reflect on morals to take our nature as embodied social beings seriously (Sayer 2019, 270).

In the previous paragraph, I put seen as in italics inspired by Martin Heidegger’s principle that ‘all simple seeing is seeing as’. Heidegger adds that every description is an interpretation (Heidegger [1926] 1986, 149).

Back to Macherey. I find Macherey, as Macherey finds himself, incompatible with Kant. A key question might be framed thus: Do we think of rationality (also called reason) as coming from outside life and governing it? Or do we think of rationality, along with emotions and customs, as inside life, as useful for adapting to life’s challenges?

Before proceeding to comment further on Macherey’s text, however, I amend it a bit. In contrasting a biological model and a juridical model, he might be taken to say that any form of the rule of law is incompatible with a biological understanding of norms.

Now I cannot go further sorting out the relationship of social laws to biological laws without noticing the elephant in the room. The elephant is this: whatever else Macherey may mean, he clearly does mean – and I agree, phrasing the point in a Delphic form I will have to unpack later – that building a sustainable world where humans and other species flourish requires liberation from an economic order organized by a legal order rooted in an inflexible ethics.

Now back to avoiding reading Macherey as opposed to all law: I believe that it is very important to say that the liberation from inflexible economics, law and ethics, devoutly to be wished (to be unpacked later), should not and would not lead to a world without law. It would not lead to a world without some version, or versions, of rights or without some version, or versions, of property.

That said, it helps me to make the point I just made, and others I regard as important, to rephrase Macherey in a symmetrical form: contrasting an immanent biological model of norms with a transcendental juridical model of norms. This move, my amendment, lends itself to recognizing immediately that only some jurisprudence is grounded in transcendental idealism. For samples of jurisprudence that is not transcendental or metaphysical see Kelsen (1949), Hart (1961), Renner ([1904] 2009) and Douzinas (2000). Nor is all law grounded in any other doctrine with practical consequences similar to those of Kant’s transcendental idealism – this is a second sentence I will have to unpack.

Nevertheless, I have not included functional law along with functional morals and functional ethics in my title: ‘In Praise of Functional Morals and Ethics’. This meaningful silence is not meant to discourage the Kelsens, Harts, Renners and Douzinases of this world. It is meant to encourage the current surge of interest in morals and ethics. To explain my meaningful silence, I need to disclose my take on ‘now’ and on ‘the times when we live’.

Our times are times of ecological catastrophe and social breakdown. They follow four decades of neoliberalism – if not as a full-on Gramscian hegemony (Bates 1975), then at least as a strong trend in that direction. During those four decades, legal obstacles to fundamental change – for example the liberalization made obligatory by the laws that constitute the World Trade Organization – have become principles of international law (Slobodian 2018, 182–261; and see the World Trade Organization website, https://www.wto.org). Following and extending Porpora (1993), one can call such legal obstacles material relations constituted by cultural rules that have been formally enacted in legally binding trade agreements. Joanna Swanger and I have argued elsewhere that even before 1980, a global legal structure favouring what Bowles and Gintis ([1986] 2012) call the exit power of capital was already decisive for the decline of social democracy (Richards and Swanger 2006). Consequently, I favour reframing the issues in terms of morals and ethics as a way to make more progress sooner, including eventual progress toward functional laws.

In Macherey’s terms, his recommended immanent biological approach to norms is contrasted with le modèle juridique de la norme. According to Macherey as amended, a naturalist immanent biological approach is contrasted with un modèle juridique transcendentale de la norme. My amendment intends to make it clear that law itself – regarded as non-transcendental and as immanent – should participate in the process and outcome of social transformation.

Macherey’s approach, featuring an immanent biological model of norms, is similar to Sayer’s. Sayer writes, ‘Our nature as evaluative beings is shown to be rooted in and emergent from this biological normativity’ (Sayer 2019, 258). For Sayer, as for Alasdair MacIntyre, Dave Elder-Vass and others, it is important that humans are dependent animals with a series of deficiencies to be filled and then regularly refilled – deficiencies of water, of food, of safety, of warmth in winter, of companionship and so on. Deficiencies translate to needs. ‘Needs’, starting but not ending with biological needs, becomes a key category in ethics.

The cautionary phrase ‘not ending with biological needs’ is a reminder that while it is true that transformation (Bhaskar would say ‘emancipation’) should be guided, as Macherey and Sayer recommend, by natural science, we should always remember, as Macherey and Sayer also recommend, that we need to address how natural science and sociocultural normativity interrelate (e.g. Macherey 2009, 130; Sayer 2019, 265). For Elder-Vass, the word ‘practices’ helps to relate the natural to the social. Elder-Vass proposes to define the economy as provisioning practices intended to meet human needs (Elder-Vass 2016, 6; For more on his deployment of the idea of ‘practices’ see page 18 and ch. 5).

I find the structure of Abraham Maslow’s (1943) seminal essay on the psychology of motivation instructive. That essay begins as an outline of a theory of motivation in light of the findings of psychology as of the date when it was written. It quickly develops into a theory of needs. What motivates people is what satisfies their needs. In the end, Maslow’s logic leads to an ethic: a good society is a society that meets people’s basic needs, freeing them to pursue their higher needs.

While explicitly praising Macherey’s way of talking about norms, and while offering my own, I am far from claiming that there is only one right way to talk about norms. An example of several different choices of words doing the same work just as well is provided by Charles Darwin. Darwin stated, as a first principle for understanding the expression of emotions, ‘Serviceable actions become habitual in association with certain states of the mind and are performed whether or not they are of service in each particular case’ (Darwin 1899, location 482). A few pages later he substitutes for ‘serviceable’ and ‘of service’ the expression ‘of use’. He could have chosen to write ‘functional’ instead of ‘serviceable’, ‘of service’ or ‘of use’. There is no good reason to object to his choices.

Today we must be especially sensitive to the linguistic options of post-colonial peoples who in the days when Europe, especially Great Britain, dominated most of the world, found their cultures, and hence themselves, defeated and despised. The word ‘solidarity’ provides an opportunity to emphasize that we should be flexible in deciding what words to use when we speak or write. It names an ideal I work to achieve in the sense in which, for example, Roy Bhaskar came to use that word (Bhaskar 2016, passim). Nevertheless, there are places on Planet Earth where the word ‘solidarity’ has been so misused that it is no longer useful. In such a context ‘care ethic’ might be a better choice. Sayer brings care ethics into focus as our ‘need of care’ (Sayer 2011, 232). But ‘solidarity’ is just an example of a potentially misused word. Any normally functional word or phrase, including ‘needs’ and ‘care ethic’, can suffer the same ignominious fate that ‘solidarity’ has suffered at some times and places.

In Dewey I find sympathy with a care ethics vocabulary that did not exist in his day. I deduce his sympathy from the words he chose to use back then (e.g. Dewey and Tufts 1908). In general, I intend my praise for functional morals and ethics to apply to many vocabularies and to many decisions choosing what words to employ in a particular situation. Another good name for functional goals is Frederic Mathieu’s phrase les valeurs de la vie (Mathieu 2014). Regarding such life-talk, compare Sayer (Sayer 2019, 261). For Sayer, values and valuation in an intransitive sense are embedded in the way we are, in life itself.

Swimming against the current, I propose to call caring practices that meet needs, however they might be described, ‘functional’. I resist the general tendency to avoid using the word ‘functional’ in ethics in the light of the dismal failure of functionalism as explanatory science. I come out recommending realist and naturalist versions of a biological model of norms, choosing words that evoke a sense of human flourishing, intended also to evoke human cooperation with other humans to achieve functional results: words like ‘dignity’ as opposed to ‘humiliation’, ‘provision for meeting needs’, ‘beauty’, ‘freedom’, ‘inclusion of the excluded’, ‘love’, ‘solidarity’, ‘care ethics’, ‘peace’, ‘friendship’, ‘virtue’ (see MacIntyre 1999) and ‘les valeurs de la vie’. I call institutions, and features of institutions, that serve such values functional, and institutions and features of institutions that destroy such values dysfunctional (see Bhaskar 2015, 169).

Sources of a transcendental juridical model of norms

Now I move on to what Macherey, before and after my amendment, presents as the powerful other of an immanent biological model of norms: a transcendental juridical model of norms. Moving on to these issues will give me an opportunity to work on unpacking the Delphic sentence above: ‘ … building a sustainable world where humans and other species flourish requires liberation from an economic order organized by a legal order rooted in an inflexible ethics.’

For Macherey, the transcendental juridical model operates as an ‘external constraint’ that imposes rationality from outside (Macherey 2009, 75, 78). I take Macherey to refer, inter alia, to Kant’s pure duty of obedience to non-material duty – that is, obedience to a duty external to anything physical or biological – and also to refer more generally and more literally to cases where an upper class dominates a lower class by a combination of force and bogus rationality or, if you will, ‘ideology’ (Eagleton 1991).

For Macherey, Kant’s a priori commands of reason rationalize enlightened despotism. As Macherey reads Kant, in Kant the universal community of all humans is constituted from beginning to end by the rationality of law, constituted at once morally and legally. That rationality is what is accomplished by the rule of law (Macherey 2009, 81, 82). The human subject is constituted by the law. (I note that in the Grundlagen of 1785 the person, the subject of morals, is contrasted à la Newton with the things of nature that obey the laws of physics without being able to conceive the concept (Vorstellung) of law. Freedom and rationality together are thus inseparably connected to being separate from nature (Kant [1785] 2016, 39).) Back to Macherey: And the law establishes limits inside the subject himself. The production of norms by the community, as envisaged by a biological model, can be only negative and negating. It can be only negative because the one and only criterion for evaluating whatever norms the community might produce is their conformity with the formal principles of the law (Macherey 2009, 82–82; cf. Collier 1999, 9–11).

To read Kant in historical perspective, it is well to keep in mind a point John Rawls makes in his Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. All of the major philosophers who contributed to the social and historical construction of modernity (my phrasing, not Rawls’s) came to the same substantive conclusions. Among those considered by Rawls in his lectures, only Leibniz is a partial exception. They justified property, liberty, fidelity to promises and contracts, limited government (a sharp distinction between the private and the public), truthfulness, charity, benevolence and rights trumping goods (Rawls 2000, 10–11, 230–2 and passim). They differed almost entirely, not about where they were going – they were going to liberal capitalist modernity – but about how to get there.

But that destination, ‘liberal capitalist modernity’, has turned out to be the same place as the place Charles Lindblom names ‘the market as prison’ (Lindblom 1982). For further elaboration, at length and in detail, of the claim that the two places are the same place, see Richards and Swanger (2006) and Bowles and Gintis ([1986] 2012). I believe that such considerations – including the intricate interweaving of the good and the bad, of progress with regress, of moral virtue with physical catastrophe – go some distance toward unpacking the meaning of the claim that ‘building a sustainable world where humans and other species flourish requires liberation from an economic order organized by a legal order rooted in an inflexible ethics.’ ‘Ethics’ must be good if anything is good, but if what a society calls ‘ethics’ (‘morals’ for Kant) cements into place institutions that do not work, either for humans or for the rest of nature, then we should think again – withdrawing the honour of being called ‘ethical’ to institutions that are dysfunctional.

To spell out details of how a bogus and dysfunctional ethics has risen to power and has become, if not dominant, then at least nearly dominant, I will review more elements of what I will call hard-core Kant and then consider ‘hard-core’ economics. In both cases, the hardness in the hard core can be called metaphysical. Kant named his own moral philosophy metaphysics. Since the word ‘metaphysical’ is far from having a single referent, I specify that I am drawing on the strands of its meaning that count as metaphysical truths that are, or claim to be, universal and eternal, as distinct from tentative, subject to change in the light of further experience and changing from place to place and from time to time.

In Why Things Matter to People (Sayer 2011), Andrew Sayer touched on several ways that Kant and the Kantian heritage differ from realist approaches to morals and ethics. Sayer points out that since for Kant a person is defined as a rational will, emotions and the body are marginalized. Kant’s concept of person leads him to tend to neglect commending and constructing institutions that function to meet human emotional and physical needs (Sayer 2011, 215). For Sayer it is crucial to resist the tendency to view emotions as opposed to reason; on the contrary, the two normally serve similar functions, guiding behaviour in adaptive directions (Sayer 2019, 266; citing Nussbaum 2001).

About Kant’s seminal Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant [1785] 2016), I add that the very idea of a metaphysics of morals already takes us away from realism. To explain my point here, I need to make it explicit that (unlike Elder-Vass) I am not one of the writers who usually treat ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ as synonyms. My linguistic option is to treat ‘morals’ as the authoritative customs of a culture, often also described as its rules or its collective habits. Like Dewey, I usually think of ‘ethics’ as the philosophy of morals or the philosophy of customs. On a view like mine it makes no sense to articulate a universally valid metaphysics of morals as if morals were the same everywhere. It also makes no sense to assert that we (whoever ‘we’ might be) already have certain knowledge of morals and then ask what reality must be like to make it possible to know what we know. What does make sense is to regard ascertaining which morals organize or fail to organize life in a given culture or milieu as a research topic.

Acknowledging cultural diversity does not mean anything goes. It means assigning to ethics the task of distinguishing better morals from worse morals. Dewey and Tufts identified some tasks for ethics in their book Ethics (first edition 1908) when they wrote: ‘The “Nautical Almanac” has been scientifically calculated; it is adapted rationally to its end; but the rules which sum up custom are a confused mixture of class interest, irrational sentiment, authoritative pronunciamiento and genuine considerations of welfare’ (Dewey and Tufts 1908, location 5483). Ethics, then, is assigned the task of evaluating morals in the light of reason, reducing the confusion and increasing the genuine considerations of welfare. It is plausible to say that this is what Aristotle did in his Nichomachean Ethics. Dewey and Tufts pose as an ethical question: ‘Does the institution [of private property] in its present form promote the good of those who have no property?’ (Dewey and Tufts 1908, location 8092).

I propose to put Kant in perspective by viewing his labours as part of the social and historical construction of modernity. In what follows I will elaborate on some key points in Kant’s ethical constructions (I call them ethical constructions; he called them metaphysics of morals) as a prelude to claiming that they have contributed, along with similar notions prevalent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European milieux, to the social and historical construction of hard-core orthodox contemporary economics.

Kant asserts that common human reason (gemein Menschenvernunft) correctly believes that to have moral worth an action must be done from duty (aus Pflicht) and not from inclination (aus Neigung). It is clear that Kant does not intend (borrowing some words from Bhaskar) (Bhaskar 2012, 38) to insert, embed or nest norms within the natural and material context in which they alone have meaning. Neigungen belong to nature. Pflicht does not (Kant [1785] 2016, 15–23).

Obedience to pure immaterial reason, an obedience that is inseparably connected to a metaphysical concept of freedom, an obedience that is installed – as Macherey says – inside the human subject and then incorporated into a definition of a person as a ‘rational will’, leads to the first formulation of the categorical imperative ‘I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that the maxim of my action should become a universal law’ (Kant [1785] 2016, 23).

To respect property rights is a categorical imperative and not merely what Kant calls a hypothetical imperative because, logically, it is impossible to conceive of property rights existing in a world where everybody always violates them. Property would, in that case, have no meaning. A hypothetical imperative, in contrast, prescribes what to do on the hypothesis that one has an objective – for example, happiness or the happiness of others. To give a more specific example, to house the homeless. I can choose whether to be an activist for that cause or not. Either way, I can imagine the world still existing and eternally logically possible with any number of homeless people sleeping on sidewalks. But if my maxim is ‘ignore property rights’, a world where everybody obeyed my maxim could not even be imagined. There would be no property rights to ignore (Kant [1785] 2016, 84–6). It follows that property rights trump welfare goals. Respecting the first is a strict imperative. To achieve the second can be only a hypothetical imperative. The difference between strict (categorical) and optional (hypothetical) duty hinges on an eternally valid logical distinction between what cannot be imagined, on one hand, and what, although admittedly undesirable, can be imagined. Meanwhile, in John Dewey’s words, ‘Truth and error, health and disease, good and evil, hope and fear in the concrete, would remain just what and where they now are’ (Dewey 1910, 17).

On the opening page of the second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft; [1788] 1982, 107), Kant advises his readers that the study of causal relationships, central to his first critique in 1781, is now left behind. Now we are in the realm of reine praktische Vernunft [pure practical reason]. It is the realm of Freiheit [freedom]. In the book that then follows, Freiheit will be the Schlusstein [keystone] of the entire edifice of pure practical reason (Kant [1788] 1982, 107). In the Rechtslehre [philosophy of law] ([1797] 1982) Kant deduces the first principles of law from Freiheit. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the evolution of law was treated as a process that made a modern economy possible by, among others, Sir Henry Maine ([1861] 1905), Max Weber ([1921] 1978) and Karl Renner ([1904] 2009). In 1797 Kant deduces the principles of law from universal and eternal reason, and specifically from Freiheit. Kant goes on to treat the jurisprudence of ancient Rome, and specifically the three maxims of Ulpian (170–223? 228?) as examples of universal and eternal jurisprudence (Kant [1797] 1982, 344). Those maxims are listed below:

1. Honeste vive. I suggest that F. H. Bradley’s concept of ‘my station and its duties’ (Bradley [1876] 1927) resembles ‘living honestly’ in ancient Rome. Kant takes this maxim of Roman Law to be equivalent to his second formulation of the categorical imperative, which, like much else, is deduced from the premise that a person is a rational will: ‘Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end’.

2. Neminem laede. Do nobody harm, conspicuously omitting a duty to help others.

3. Suum cuique tribue. Give to each his own, what belongs to him. Once again property rights emerge as transcendental givens. I regard them as necessary in some form in any society, but as taking, in liberal capitalist modernity, the form of what Macherey calls ‘external constraints’. They set transcendental limits, ruling out of bounds questions like the one posed by Dewey and Tufts quoted above. A related consideration – the consideration that a modern society where a great deal of production is motivated and organized by using capital to produce more capital requires stable, enforceable property rights – goes some way toward unpacking the second sentence flagged as requiring unpacking above: ‘Nor is all law grounded in any other doctrine with practical consequences similar to those of Kant’s or anyone else’s transcendental idealism.’ Why make this claim and why is it true? Because, given that stable property rights facilitate production; and given that stable property rights facilitate turning capital into more capital using production to do so; and given that the relationship of ownership to production impacts controversial issues – issues like whether considerations of welfare or considerations of living in harmony with the biosphere justify what some people call ‘infringing or violating’ property rights and others call ‘modifying or redefining’ property rights – then, given all these assumptions, one could make the following argument: One way to argue that property should trump welfare and ecology would be to invoke what I have called, amending Macherey, a transcendental juridical model of norms – that is, metaphysics. Logically, nothing is more stable than something that is universal and eternal. But that would not be the only way. One could choose to say, for example, that Kant was an idealist, but to cope with the realities of this world one must be a realist (Morgenthau 1948). One could still, perhaps more fervently, argue that property trumps all its competitors (Slobodian 2018, 256). That is why, in favouring functional laws and functional legal systems, we must remain aware that there are other legal doctrines with practical consequences similar to Kant’s transcendental idealism. Property can trump in more than one way.

   Back to Kant: Notice that with Kant’s endorsement the logical status of Roman Law changes. One might have thought of the principles of Roman Law as merely codifying the customs of one of Planet Earth’s many long-gone ancient empires. Kant promotes them to the status of commands deduced from universal and eternal Freiheit. During later centuries a fourth principle was added to Ulpian’s three, as European society evolved by paths charted by Sir Henry Maine, ‘from status to contract’.

4. Pacta sunt servanda. Agreements are to be honoured, not violated. John Rawls, in explaining Kant’s moral philosophy, opposing Kant to utilitarianism, articulated what is at stake here. Rawls writes: ‘For by viewing people as subjects of desire and inclinations and assigning value to their satisfaction as such (classical) utilitarianism is at odds with Kant’s doctrine at a fundamental level … . For him [Kant] only permissible desires and inclinations can specify good reasons’ (Rawls 2000, 298). I take this to mean that a desire, including a desire to satisfy a need, is not permissible if it violates a categorical imperative.

Moving on to what I am calling the hard core of orthodox economics and its ethics and jurisprudence, I propose a reading of the Cours d’Économie Politique Pure by Leon Walras, published in 1874 and 1877 and translated into English by William Jaffé as Elements of Pure Economics (Walras [1954] 2003). In the first lesson of the Cours Walras rejects Adam Smith’s definition of political economy. At the beginning of Book IV of The Wealth of Nations, Smith defines it as the science of the statesman or legislator. It has two purposes: the first is ‘to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves’. The second is ‘to provide the state or the commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services’ (Smith [1776/1789] 1930, 395). I find that this definition fits roughly into my definition of ‘functional’ above. It implies making provision for meeting people’s needs successfully, and it implies that the intention of the legislators is or at least should be to enable the achievement of such a result.

Walras fundamentally disagrees with Smith. Walras draws a sharp distinction between pure science – science properly so-called – and its uses. Smith is charged with confusing applications of economic science to practice with economic science itself. Walras offers three examples of pure economic science, independent of its practical applications as the findings of astronomy are independent of their applications to navigation. The shortest example is typical of the three: ‘The rate of interest declines in a progressive economy’ (Walras [1954] 2003, 52).

Today, now that anthropology has come of age as a science (Boggs 2004), claims to universality of Western ideas are suspect (Wallerstein 2001). It is easy for us today to see that when Walras makes economics a pure science like astronomy, he treats law and accountancy as if they were, like the stars in the sky, the same for everyone. We easily understand Karl Polanyi’s point that the laws of economics are relevant only where the institutions of what Polanyi calls ‘market society’ have been established (Polanyi 1944).

One can hardly disagree with Marx and Engels when they write that the first premise of social science is that humans exist, and that their existence implies the körperliche Organization [physical organization] of the production of their means of subsistence. There have been modes of production ever since there have been human beings. One must also agree, however, with Graeber and Wengrow that humans have physically organized the production (including gathering) and distribution of their subsistence in innumerable, varied ways (Marx and Engels [1846] 1974; Graeber and Wengrow 2021).

After finding Smith’s definition of the science that Smith pioneered profoundly unsatisfactory, Walras spends the rest of lesson 1 and the beginning of lesson 2 reviewing the main attempts to define the science of political economy that were on offer in the 1870s. He finds some merit in some. He accepts none. At the end of lesson 1 he regrets the ‘absence of philosophy’ among economists and affirms the ‘primary duty’ of the economist to carefully formulate a philosophy of his science. As his contemporaries were defining it, it was both a natural science and not a natural science. A muddle (Walras [1954] 2003, 56).

In lesson 2, at paragraphs 16 and 17, he launches his own attempt to ground the science of economics ‘rationally, completely and definitively’ (Walras [1954] 2003, 60). Paragraph 17 begins: ‘Now, the first point to notice is that we may divide the facts of our universe into two categories: those that result from the blind and ineluctable forces of nature, and those which result from the exercise of the human will, a force that is free and cognitive’ (Walras [1954] 2003, 61). In paragraph 18, Walras writes, ‘The fact that man’s will is cognitive and free makes it possible to divide every entity in the universe into two great classes: persons and things’ (Walras [1954] 2003, 62). Walras quickly establishes that the former – persons – rightfully exercise dominion over the latter – things, that is, property. ‘This faculty, in all its length and breadth, is invested with a particular character. It is not only a moral power. It is a right. This is the basis of the right of persons over things’ (Walras [1954] 2003, 67).

A few pages later, at paragraph 27 in lesson 3, Walras writes: ‘All of us in our daily life make exchanges by a series of special acts known as purchases and sales.’ He adds that these special acts are carried on in markets (Walras [1954] 2003, 68). He makes it explicit that things – including animals, minerals and plants – have no purposes of their own. Their purposes are the purposes of persons, which the persons assign to the things. Since there is more than one person, the pursuit of ends and aims must be mutually coordinated (Walras [1954] 2003, 62–3; cf. Collier 1999, 63–78 and passim).

From the distinction between persons and things, Walras moves to asserting that persons do and should appropriate things, making of them the properties of persons. The reason he gives for moving from that distinction to this conclusion is this:

Since a thing is not conscious or self-directing, it is not responsible for the pursuit of its ends or for the fulfilment of its destiny. … A person, on the other hand, just because he is conscious of himself and master of himself, is charged with the responsibility for the pursuit of his ends and the fulfilment of his destiny. If he succeeds he has merit; if not, he takes blame. (Walras [1954] 2003, 62)

Among the many ways that it has come about that persons possess property, and among the many ways that it has come about that some possess more than others,¹ one way alone takes centre stage in the ensuing lessons: the ‘special acts known as purchases and sales’ and taking place in markets (Walras [1954] 2003, 68). The closing of a sale by the agreement of a willing buyer and a willing seller is regarded as special, I submit, at least partly because it enjoys the metaphysical status of being caused by two supernatural, that is, non-Newtonian, non-mechanical powers, namely human agents (Walras [1954] 2003, 62). They are two vernünftiger Wille for Kant. They are two of the only kind of entity in the entire universe that is not a thing for Walras.

Kant and Walras both arrive at what I call metaphysical freedom. I see it as a key component of the hard-core economics and of the legal rationale of modern Western, now globally dominant, institutions. (One account of how those institutions got started in Europe is Foucault 1997.) However, the logical problem that metaphysical freedom solves for Kant is not the same as the logical problem it solves for Walras. For Kant it solves the problem of reconciling the moral worth of obeying duty for the sake of duty with the determination of everything in nature – including human emotions and desires – by natural laws. For Walras, it solves the problem of establishing, pace Smith, economics as a pure science distinct from its practical applications. To get to his solution, he had to find a way out of the muddle that saw economics fuzzily both as a natural science and as not a natural science. The way out was to treat human freedom and rationality as a fact. Pure economics could be a science in the same way that astronomy is a science. Astronomy depends on the facts of gravity while remaining pure and distinct from its applications to navigation. Pure Walrasian economics is distinct from applied economics. It can depend on the fact that humans are free and rational and still be pure, provided that the boundaries Walras marks separating science, art and ethics are respected (see Walras [1954] 2003, 76–80).

The metaphysical premises built into the beginnings of pure economics do not disappear when lesson 6 begins and lesson 29 completes the concept of general equilibrium. They reappear in spades. No equilibrium, neither an equilibrium of the prices of two commodities, nor any Marshallian partial equilibrium, nor the general equilibrium championed by Walras, even pretends to be functional (The concept of general equilibrium, and the related concept of Pareto frontier are of great practical importance. They are treated as standards used in evaluating realities, even though no general equilibrium is known to have happened anywhere ever (Richards and Andersson 2022, 327–87).). To be sure, Walras is correct in his own terms when he equates general equilibrium with maximum satisfaction (Walras [1954] 2003, 315). To be sure, the concept of general equilibrium cannot be refuted. That it is maximum satisfaction follows from a chain of a priori reasoning that begins with seeing the special acts of purchases and sales as manifestations of a freedom that only one kind of entity in the universe possesses.

Satisfaction, for Walras and for economic orthodoxy, is not the same as provision for meeting needs in harmony with nature. Walras chooses his words carefully and rules out any interpretation that would imply that the purpose of economics is provisioning to meet needs. He defines a utility curve as a want curve, not a needs curve (Walras [1954] 2003, 126 and passim). His want curves are certainly not needs curves with the constraint of doing whatever it takes to save the biosphere. A market equilibrium does not signify compliance with intended goals designed to meet needs in a sustainable harmony with nature or with any of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals of 2000 or its Sustainable Development Goals of 2016.

A satisfaction is a sale. The proof of the satisfaction’s existence is that the buyer was willing to buy at a price ‘agreed’ with the seller. ‘Agreed’ deserves to be put in inverted commas because it still counts as a satisfaction when failing to pay the heat bill in winter is not a real option, or when someone pays for necessary food with her or his last Euro. Rareté, Walras’s version of an effective utility function, is about free individuals who choose what they want. Their choices are weighted by how much money each chooser has to make her or his choices effective (Walras [1954] 2003, 119). Wants are personal and subjective even when want-satisfaction must be pursued in the light of objective facts (Walras [1954] 2003, 145). Like Keynes’ effective demand, it is about what people with money choose to spend it on. It is not about effective provisioning that mobilizes resources to meet needs because they are needs. Walrasian equilibrium is – by definitions aided by calculations – maximum satisfaction as Walras and today’s orthodoxy define satisfaction. It is not about serving what Sayer regards as the economy’s legitimate purpose: enabling people to live better (Sayer 2000, 9).

Similarly, a Pareto optimum, defined as achieved when there is no way to give anybody more satisfaction without giving someone else less satisfaction, does not even pretend to be functional. To see why economic orthodoxy regarding Pareto optimality is misleading, first consider that, as Ann Cudd put the matter, ‘All that matters for judgments about Pareto optimality are individuals’ own preferences for different social states’ (Cudd 1996, 4). And then consider again Roy Bhaskar’s remark that neo-Kantians are ‘completely lopsided because they never insert, embed, nest the conceptual, symbolic, cultural within the natural and material context in which it alone has meaning’ (Bhaskar 2012, 38). In light of these two considerations, it becomes almost self-evident that, while the satisfaction of the preferences of individuals no doubt is, ceteris paribus, a good to be pursued, the morals, customs and laws of any viable community must pursue as ends provisioning to meet needs, not just wants. They must also defend the biosphere, existing in harmony with nature. Without the biosphere, there is no life and therefore no human life, and consequently there are no human preferences.

Similarly, the moral authority of the ‘revealed preferences’ of Paul Samuelson (Samuelson 1948) and the moral authority of consumer sovereignty (Lerner 1972) have deep historical roots. Their moral authority is rooted – or at least much of their appeal to entrenched common sense is rooted (see Lerner 1972, 258) – in transcendental juridical models of norms and metaphysical doctrines of freedom. The social innovations of contemporary thinkers and activists labouring to create caring and sustainable societies encounter deep rigidities. History has installed a deep rigidity (see once more Lindblom 1982; Richards and Swanger 2006) in what Bhaskar calls the deep structures of modern society (Bhaskar 1986, passim).

In light of the enormous influence of transcendental juridical models of the norm, one might ask why I had to change Macherey’s meaning a bit, and not just clarify it, when I composed the symmetrical contrast ‘immanent biological’ versus ‘transcendental juridical’. I think the answer is that Macherey especially wanted to showcase the point just discussed: sometimes advocates of property trumping welfare and so on rely on transcendental juridical arguments; and sometimes they do not. Hobbes, for example, advocates an ‘external force’ that is at odds with Macherey’s vision of how an immanent biological order works. But Hobbes’s juridical norm is not transcendental idealism (Macherey 2009, 93). I feature the role of metaphysical liberty in history. And I am keen to encourage juridical models of norms (see, for example, the discussions of rules in Hart 1961) that can and sometimes do contribute to building functional societies.

Les Valeurs de la Vie

Although social innovation is functional, some degree of social rigidity is also functional. The latter is called stability. But the reason institutional stability deserves praise is not that a rational will is categorically commanded to act on maxims it can will to be eternal and universal laws. It deserves praise because clarity about the rules of the game helps people to plan their lives and to run their businesses. Economic decisions can be made only if they have somewhat predictable results. Any non-capitalist institutions for provisioning to meet needs would, no doubt, require confidence about the rules of the game just as much as capitalist institutions do.

On a biological model of norms, stability is commended because of the conclusions of deliberations that reconcile necessary stability with necessary flexibility. Both are adaptive. They function to enable people to live better. That said, for better or for worse, we live in a varied and complex world where some institutions and features of institutions are functional while others, and sometimes the same ones at different times and in different respects, are dysfunctional. In terms of intentions, some individual people and some more or less cohesive groups are trying to be good, while others, and sometimes the same ones at different times and in different respects, find pleasure in revenge, violence and destruction. Some blindly destroy when their intention is to improve. Given these complexities, I find in Elder-Vass some useful simplifications regarding how to go about making necessary fundamental changes.

Next, I will showcase a particular simplification of complexity from Elder-Vass that I find especially key. And then a very general point he makes. After that I will return to Macherey and la vie.

A particular point from Elder-Vass:

The neoclassical version of the argument that income should be proportional to one’s contribution to the process of production is no more justifiable than the Marxist version: what is to become, for example, of the young, the old, the disabled, and those who are unemployed through no fault of their own? … Instead we need an explicitly ethical theory that evaluates appropriation on an open basis that is sensitive to a variety of ethical arguments. Without going into detail, I suggest that any broadly acceptable theory must be sensible to both needs and contributions. There are multiple sorts of ethical claims, and in any given circumstance we might expect a number of them to be relevant. Once we recognize this, we can no more have a formal deductive model of fair distribution than we can have a formal deductive model of how the economy works. (Elder-Vass 2016, 81–2)

A very useful, very general point: It is primarily by judging between real, existing economic forms and moving toward a mix that we reduce the more harmful alternatives and support the more beneficial ones that we will achieve a better economy (Elder-Vass 2016, 228, 232; 2022). Among the evaluative words Elder-Vass chooses to use, ‘harmful’ and ‘beneficial’ can be glossed as ‘harmful to life’ and as ‘beneficial for life’. Sayer appeals to ‘life’ as a source of normative criteria more objective than our subjective opinions: ‘Our subjective values are about something that is not reducible to the realm of consciousness, and their fallibility derives from the fact that there is something independent of them about which they may be mistaken’ (Sayer 2019, 262–3).

I return now to some discussions of la vie in Macherey and his sources that, in my view, complement Elder-Vass and Sayer. Macherey comments at length on Michel Foucault and on Georges Canguilhem. He regards both as allies. They are two stalwarts of the immanence of the norm (Macherey 2009, 10). Macherey attributes to Foucault a distinction between a juridical model of the norm and a preferable biological model of the norm. He does not claim to have found a text where Foucault makes this distinction explicitly, but he does claim to have found a formula that expresses something Foucault consistently meant. On Macherey’s reading, what mainly concerns Foucault, ‘c’est de comprendre comment l’action des normes dans la vie des hommes détermine le type de société auquel ceux-ci appartiennent comme sujets [to understand how the action of norms in the life of men (sic) determines the type of society to which they belong as subjects] (Macherey 2009, 71). Given his view of Foucault’s main concern, Macherey reads Foucault as centrally concerned with how to pass from a negative view of norms based on a juridical model that excludes, separating the permitted from the forbidden, to a positive view of norms based on a biological model of norms that emphasizes their biological functions supporting inclusion and regulation (Macherey 2009).

It is indeed possible to read characteristic tendencies of Foucault’s writings – such as his defence of the humanity of patients confined to mental hospitals, his anti-normalization, his critiques of the carceral society and of bio-power, and his esthétique de l’existence (Macherey 2009, 107) – through the lenses provided by Macherey (Macherey 2009, 71–4). I can praise realist and functional tendencies in Foucault’s works, highlighted by Macherey, even though my own overall assessment of Foucault is less sanguine (Richards 2018). On Macherey’s reading, in the astonishingly complex trajectory of Foucault’s intellectual development, he interrogates political and moral philosophy in all its aspects and in doing so unmasks bogus claims characteristic of a juridical model of norms. Canguilhem’s work does not range so widely over so many fields. Canguilhem maintained a focus, from the beginning of his career to the end, on one primordial question: celle de la vie [the question of life]. Both prioritized questions concerning the relationships between nature and culture (Macherey 2009, 12).

I will discuss some possible ways to give meanings and uses to a word, ‘life’ or ‘vie’, that is turning out to be indispensable for establishing a rational basis for morals and ethics. A hypothetical reader influenced by some trends in Anglo Saxon philosophy (see Williams 2006) might suppose that to say Canguilhem spent his career studying la vie is to say that Canguilhem spent his career studying the logic of the uses of the word ‘life’. One might presuppose that, to the extent that Canguilhem achieved his objective, then his correct definition of ‘life’ should govern decisions about good and bad, right and wrong. This outcome, construed as a reflective equilibrium regarding what ‘life’ means in a given linguistic community, would not lie far from Rawls’s reflective equilibrium theory of justice (Rawls 1951), insofar as by ‘justice’ Rawls means ‘justice for us’ – that is, rules that we with our particular traditions and public culture could agree on so that we could live together in peace (Rawls 1980, 517–18).

Another approach might attempt to formulate a real definition of ‘life’, stating what life really is. That could be the starting point for functional ethics whenever a functional ethics is accepted and defined as an ethics that serves life. It is true that whatever else ‘life’ and ‘vie’ may be, they are words. But those words in themselves are not, as we have learned from Bhaskar, the intransitive objects studied by biology. A student learning a science may spend a great deal of time learning the technical terminology of the field, and that terminology may include real definitions that crystallize important degrees of success in understanding objective realities, but the terminology is not what the science is about.

While Bhaskar taught us to distinguish between the intransitive objects of science, the real, and the transitive tools of science, among them the technical vocabularies that scientists use to study the real, Wittgenstein taught us to avoid overemphasizing the relation between a word and what it names, and to focus more on the uses of words in human activities – activities which he often called ‘language games’.

Now what do the words in this language signify? What is supposed to shew what they signify if not the kind of use they have? (Wittgenstein 1958, 6)

Applied to the science of biology, thinking of doing biology as an activity, an emphasis on the uses of words in activities would seem to cast doubt on Martin Heidegger’s assertion that biology needs a regional ontology defining what life is (Heidegger [1926] 1986, 10). One could engage in the activities and play the language games biologists play without a definition. Thomas Kuhn might say that biology needs a paradigm, a shared example of what biologists do, but not an agreement on how to define what life is (Kuhn [1962] 2012, 43–51).

Applied to this essay, I claim to have been using ‘life’, ‘function’ and other words correctly in existing language games established in existing forms of life. I could also describe my orientation as borrowing from the vast sea of usage words that do not belong to me, and whose meanings I do not control (Bakhtin 1993). Simultaneously I have been trying to contribute to the good by choosing – among available options – to use words in ways that are constructive and not destructive.

Applied to the numerous actually existing moralities and cultural identities in the world, and to the uses of ethics in coalition building for social change (Schoppek 2021, 153), these reflections imply an open-minded sensitivity to the diverse purposes and contexts of economics-talk. Similarly, Keynes argued that since nobody really knows how to solve the problems economics addresses, it is wise to allow experimentation by different nations, and unwise to discourage or forbid plural economies and plural-economics-talk (Keynes 1933).

Canguilhem follows none of the trails just mentioned. He pivots on what Macherey terms valeurs negatives. Canguilhem deepened his own and his readers’ understanding of life by doing studies of the history of biology and reflecting on contemporary medical practice, often relating life to what – at least at first – appears to be its contrary, death. Having been a practicing medical doctor, he had first-hand experience of working to save lives from death, and of sometimes failing. Canguilhem’s (and also Foucault’s) accounts of the origins of modern biology featured the discoveries of Xavier Bichat (1766–1811).

Bichat is the central figure in chapter eight of Michel Foucault’s La Naissance de la Clinique. In that chapter Foucault attributes to knowledge of anatomical pathology acquired by dissecting cadavers a decisive role in the historical and social origins of the clinic. The clinic, and hence modern medicine, was founded on pathological anatomy (Foucault [1963] 2003, 154). Bichat is reputed to have at one point in his life dissected 600 cadavers in six months, seeking knowledge useful for improving the health of the living by analysing the bodies of the dead. Bichat and contemporary colleagues took steps in what Foucault called a realist direction. For example, in a disease like pulmonary tuberculosis (phthisis), a live patient may or may not exhibit coughing, difficulty in breathing, marasmus, hectic fever and/or purulent expectoration. Diagnosis based on the symptoms of the living was always uncertain, while dissection of the bodies of the dead revealed that the proximate cause of phthisis was always a lesion of the pulmonary parenchyma (Foucault [1963] 2003, 170). The illumination of the nature of life achieved by the careful study of the bodies of the dead led Bichat to define ‘la vie’ as the totality of the whole set of functions that resist death.² I do not regard Bichat’s definition of life as a decisive move with legislative force authorized to regiment the diversity of all the language games where ‘life’ and its cognates are employed in many cultures around the world. I do regard Bichat’s work as a case of judgemental rationality succeeding in discovering intransitive realities.

Canguilhem’s life-long study of life is the principal source of the normative point of view and ethical vocabulary that Macherey advocates. Canguilhem’s 1943 doctoral thesis in medicine, published as The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem 1991, French original 1943), sought in several ways to distinguish human life and life in general from mechanisms. In medicine the word ‘normal’ does not refer, or does not refer only, to a statistical mean. Even when it coincides with a statistical mean, ‘normal’ refers to health, a normative criterion. The physician, as Canguilhem puts it, has sided with life (Canguilhem 1991, 226).

As is often the case in discourse about ethics, the same features of life that distinguish humans from other animals also provide good (or allegedly good) reasons for distinguishing good from bad, right from wrong. I would submit that Kant’s apparent motivation typifies what I just alleged to be ‘often the case’. Kant was famously awakened from ‘dogmatic slumber’ by the scepticism of David Hume. By doubting any induction predicting the future from knowledge of the past, by finding no rational basis for attributing effects to causes, by finding in himself no self to find and by denying that ought could ever be deduced from is or that there was any rational criterion for judging the destruction of the world to be worse than the pricking of a finger, Hume became, or became liable to being seen as, in Dewey’s words ‘a menace to the integrity of the agent and a threat to social order’ (Dewey and Tufts 1908, location 5247).

For Kant, refuting Hume included proving that not all was mechanism. What was not mechanism, according to Kant, was freedom and rational will. Freedom and rational will were the Grund in the Grundlagen; they were the Freiheit that, as Kant told his readers on the opening page of The Critique of Practical Reason, would be the conceptual foundation of all the other pages. I would also submit that Kant’s response to Hume’s menace and threat has been, coupled with the contributions of other builders of liberal ethics who reach similar results, disastrous. It cements in place the rigidities Macherey identifies with a juridical model of norms.

Jeffrey Winters identified some of those rigidities in his book Power in Motion: when investors choose not to invest, policymakers are powerless to force them (Winters 1996, 3). The logic of markets and of liberal ethics (supporting and supported by de facto power) imply that Joseph Schumpeter was right to argue that a state whose principal income came from taxes could not be a sustainable welfare state (Schumpeter 1918). For case studies confirming this logical point in practice, see Richards and Swanger (2006). For more details concerning the incentives for private investment and the funding of public expenses see ‘The Fiscal Crisis of the State as a Philosophical Problem,’ in Richards and Andersson (2022, 444–562).

Canguilhem was no less ardent than Kant in his determination to defend human dignity. Several decades before, he served as the academic supervisor for Michel Foucault’s doctoral dissertation, in which Foucault set out to rescue mental patients from humiliation, partly by showing that madness was and is a social and historical construction. Canguilhem, as an historian of biology and of medicine (two histories he believed to be inseparable from each other), traced the interaction of biological theory and social history, much as Foucault did in La Naissance de la Clinique. A typical product of Canguilhem’s intellectual labour was this brief manifesto:

When we think of the object of a science, we think of a stable object identical to itself. In this respect, matter and motion, governed by inertia, fulfil every requirement. But life? Isn’t it evolution, variation of forms, invention of behaviours? Isn’t its structure historical as well as histological? (Canguilhem 1991, 203)

Canguilhem, Foucault, Dewey and many others have avoided Kant’s and Walras’s disastrous mistake of construing moral and legal norms as universal and eternal laws set in stone by pure practical reason and by pure economics. They respond to Hume’s challenge without embracing a metaphysics of freedom. For Macherey (1938–), learning from the earlier work of Canguilhem (1904–95), Foucault (1926–84) and other eminences, the force of norms and the guarantees that a biological model of norms need not degenerate into scientism are to be found in the always unfinished dialogue of nature and culture that is history. To that end, he proposes several useful linguistic moves that I have not mentioned. Let me close by mentioning one of them. It is a distinction between pouvoir and puissance; in Latin it is a distinction between potestas and potentia. Pouvoir is associated with a juridical model of norms. Puissance is associated with a biological model of norms. Pouvoir implies transcendence. Puissance is immanent. Applying this distinction to norms, pouvoir is a force that comes from outside and commands. Pouvoir is a force that in itself already has causal power of its own that is then applied to produce effects. Norms animated by puissance, in contrast, act in situ, on and with the life they function to regulate, acting simultaneously as cause and caused, helper and helped (Macherey 2009, 10).

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Howard Richards

Howard Richards is a professor of philosophy retired from Earlham College who retains the title of Research Professor there. He now lives in Chile and teaches a course once a year in the EMBA programme at University of Cape Town. His philosophy teachers included Richard Rorty and Rom Harré.

Notes

1 In other writings Walras made some important proposals for social justice, including the public ownership of land (Cirillo 1984).

2 The Wikipedia article ‘Xavier Bichat’ attributes this quote to his 1800 book Physiological Researches upon Life and Death. Accessed 10 February 2022.