If you are curious about the recent long gap in my posting history, the reason is that I have been trying, with some very professional help, to interest the press in my new book and using material I might otherwise have posted as “bait”. But that phase is over now and for better or worse I am again posting material on this website. Please enjoy!
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Sweet ethics
Suppose you are a senior executive of a company selling sugary drinks. Your company’s profits depend on successfully selling more and more of them into both new and old markets. Your shareholders, your peers, your bosses, your workers and your own livelihood depend on this outcome, on which therefore you quite naturally focus all your efforts.
But then people start saying that sugary drinks are bad for children. You can see around you the evidence of child obesity as a growing problem and the statistics back this up. Of course, the causes of the problem are complex and the links are hard to prove. The responsibility is even harder to pin down – it’s not as if you are forcibly funnelling the drinks into captive children, choices are being made by both children and their parents. So what do you do? The first step is surely to try and find out for yourself. You commission some research into what is going on and whether your product really is causing or contributing to obesity. If it turns out that there is no link, you obviously trumpet this as loudly as possible. But what if the evidence points the other way?
There will still be some ambiguity. In the first place, obesity is not a disease as such. It is a cause of ill health, not an illness in itself. It’s not as if the drinks were dissolving children’s bones, to create a macabre example. In the second place, obesity is about excess so it is possible in principle for dietary adjustments to be made, including of course drinking in moderation although that won’t help your sales figures. But other foods – chips, burgers, donuts – are likely to be contributors. It’s not all down to the fizzy drinks.
But this story cannot be dismissed without confronting the obvious ethical dilemma. Not pushing the drinks means the end of your company and long before that the end of your career. Pushing the drinks means contributing to the ill health of children – not causing, but contributing. It’s not quite like the tobacco industry – we are here assuming there is nothing harmful about the drinks as such, just harm from drinking too many, which could perhaps be said of any food. But of course, even if you stop selling the drinks, who’s to say your competitors will? So there might be no benefit at all to children from you stopping.
So on one side there is profit, the health of a major company and the jobs of many people. On the other there are fat, unhealthy children, partly though not directly or uniquely your responsibility. What should you do? It’s a classic dilemma of our time, almost a defining ethical issue of modern capitalism.
Your first instinct as an executive will almost certainly be to defend your product. It is not harmful in moderation and no doubt you offer sugar free alternatives anyway. You hate to give ground to your competitors and you are willing to comply with any new legal restrictions, even if you consider them unnecessary and ill judged. Does that not exhaust your ethical responsibility?
Not necessarily. It is the difficult kind of question which the ancients called sorites. A man with no hair is clearly bald, as is a man with one, two, three hairs and so on. At some point however there are sufficient hairs and the man is not bald. But there is no clear transition point, no threshold. Not everything has a tipping point. Many ethical dilemmas take this form and this is one.
When does the aggressive marketing of a product which is not harmful in itself or when consumed in moderation become unethical? The bar is surely lower if the consumers are likely to be children, certainly lower if there are any signs that people can become addicted, but still, there is no obvious tipping point. That does not mean however that the point of transition is never reached. Not all men are bald. At some point it must be said that the scale of marketing and sales, if not the product itself, is just wrong because it contributes to harm. There are externalities (hidden costs which others bear) in the form of illnesses which someone has to deal with and pay for, so the company’s profits are based to some extent on exploiting these externalities. The company is not wholly innocent.
But if we accept that healthier children are a good idea, we must accept also that in a case like this the market will not produce this result unaided. If we depend on the conscience of the senior executive (you, remember, in our little fantasy), the decision will be delayed long past the point where outsiders might consider any ethical line to have been crossed. You are after all conflicted by your responsibilities to colleagues and shareholders, not to mention self interest. Worse, in the end the least sensitive and responsible company will enjoy a monopoly as others drop out. So the market fails, or rather, the market does a limited job perfectly well and returns a profit out of externalities and doubtful practices. Probably government has to step in, by a sugar tax or regulation or advertising restrictions or whatever, so that the decision balances the various interests in the interests of the community as a whole.
Not for the first time in our history, sugar may thus again test our understanding of ethical and political issues which pit wealth against human well-being.
Left and right
Oversimplifying only a little, the right in Western politics is generally about individuality, from self reliance at the better end to selfishness and greedy at the worse. The left is about collectivity or concern for others, from solidarity and compassion at the better end to compulsion or subjugation to the common cause. Both ends of the conventional spectrum can result, at their worst, in cruelty, fundamentalism or totalitarianism.
But this suggests that we should classify political positions not in one dimension – the usual left-right spectrum – but in two.
We could thus look at politics derived from human values as superseding the old left-right divisions. In fact, left and right define a dimension which is not the critical dimension for human flourishing at all and arguably never was. Both left and right have their positives but also their negatives, the latter making them almost indistinguishable at the worst extreme. The important dimension lies on another axis entirely.
Merit, or fortune?
I am of a generation who, born into a world in which privilege was hereditary, instinctively thought that society should be ordered on “merit” rather than accident of birth. I remember being shocked when I first went to university to hear an eminent teacher maintain that meritocracy was a terrible idea. But he was right, of course.
The idea of merit or “deserving” is murky at best. For the most part merit, be it academic achievement (which is of course what we young students wanted it to mean), entrepreneurial skill, athletic ability, creativity or anything else is as much an accident of birth as wealth or title. Even hard work, application, dedication to the task and so on are surely impossible without some natural aptitude for such effort.
But if you take merit out of the equation – and still assume that hereditary entitlement is not a great way to organise society – what is left? Raw wealth, however acquired? Celebrity? Those, in effect, are what we have increasingly, perhaps overwhelmingly, tended towards and they have always and will always have an influence. But perhaps their current dominance is an indication that “ordering” is a bad idea anyway. The more hierarchical society becomes, the less just. Ordering is necessary only for certain functions – someone has to take decisions or nothing will get done, for example. But the underlying principle should be moral equality.
Moral equality does not imply an attempt at material equality, any more than it implies that no one may exercise their talents of whatever kind, although it may imply an attempt to restrain the degree of material inequality we can tolerate. It is an assumption that differences are just differences, not indications of underlying or evident merit. The wealthy are not deserving because they are wealthy, as the deep influence of Calvin may have taught us, they are just wealthy. They are fortunate, not superior.
We could not eliminate the effects of good and bad fortune from any society even if we wanted to, nor should we try. But it matters greatly whether we frame our differences in terms of fortune or merit. One leads to compassion and if not justice then less injustice. The other leads to hardening of the heart, arrogance and ultimately suffering and instability.
Greece again
Greece has been brought to heel (or its knees) and the eurozone or EU feels more like the Fourth Reich. If that sounds offensive I am sorry, it is only because the Third was so loathsome. But what else would you call a Europe dominated by Germany in which democratic dissent is punished by draconian reprisals against a whole population?
Having said that, what on earth were Syriza thinking? Their only bargaining chip, it seemed, was that expelling them from the Eurozone would be as damaging to the Eurozone as it would be to Greece. But then it turned out that they would accept anything rather than be expelled, even defying a supportive referendum of the Greek people! What, one can only wonder, happened in the week after the referendum to change their minds? Or were they really just hoping all along that Germany would blink first, without having an alternative strategy? Crazy!
No one comes out of this with honour. There is no doubt that Greece has been profligate and that Greek public expenditure needs to be radically trimmed and brought under control. But some debt relief for Greece was the minimum assistance consistent with the solidarity among nations for which the EU is meant to stand. It is also something from which Germany itself benefited greatly in the past. OK, we understand that some things are done “pour encourager les autres” and that Syriza’s grandstanding annoyed everyone. But what has been done to Greece is shameful. It should make us all suspicious of the real motives behind the European project.
Greek debt
The Greek people have voted against more austerity. Who wouldn’t, given the choice? Politically, it is a strong move by Syriza: economically, well, we shall have to see. Germany is now faced with having to find a face saving formula to help Greece with fewer punitive (or reforming, depending on your point of view) measures – or have Greece leave the monetary union and possibly the EU.
No doubt it is better to be a creditor than a debtor. But there is some symbiosis in every case. As the old adage has it, if you owe and cannot pay the bank £100 you are in trouble. If you owe and cannot pay the bank £100 million the bank is in trouble. On an intergovernmental level the relationship is even more symbiotic than between customer and bank.
Country A has a surplus to lend only because country B has bought country A’s exports on credit, even if the relationship is confused by the parts played by many other countries. So it is not quite right for country A to claim the moral high ground, as Germany is now doing with Greece. Solidarity cuts both ways but the point about sovereign loans is that you cannot send the bailiffs round.
On the other hand, if the repayment of loans is seen as optional, the whole process of international trade could grind to a halt because nobody wants to take the risk. Those with something to sell would insist on cash and just keep the money under the national mattress rather than lending it out. Actually it’s worse: what would “cash” even mean in this context? There would have to be a complicated system of barter, which is perhaps what happened in earlier and considerably poorer times.
So what will now happen? Haven’t got a clue! Germany must choose between two cherished aims, leadership of a United Europe and the maintenance of fiscal propriety. If Greece were the only major debtor my guess is solidarity would disappear and they would decide a United Europe without Greece was better than a loss of power. They would cut Greece loose to take the dire consequences of defiance and incidentally show other countries who runs things. But the calculation has to take into account what happens to the other Southern European debtor countries, who will come under immediate pressure from markets. Merely saying that the ECB supports them will not be nearly enough if Greece has gone. So a face saving formula involving a rescheduling of Greek debts with tough words but easier conditions is more likely. Interesting times.
The four horsemen of the modern world
There are four existential threats to our species.
The best known and most talked about, although still stubbornly disputed, is global warming. It is probably too late to head it off, even if we really knew how. It would help if people could agree it was a threat to life and not see the very idea as a threat to their profits, but there we are. We have absolutely no idea what the consequences will be but they are unlikely to be wholesome.
The second, of which I confess I have only just become aware, is that we are already in the middle of a mass extinction of animal life on the planet, comparable in scale and perhaps effect to the extinction of the dinosaurs. This has nothing to do with global warming as such, although our sheer numbers affect both, for it is simply an effect of the pressure which human life exerts on the rest of the biosphere. Animal species for example are being lost at an alarming rate as they are pushed to the margins of survival. The figure which stands out for me is that we humans and our domestic animals now account for over 95% of animals by mass on the planet. There is no “wild”. See for example this article. Can we continue to flourish without it? Probably, for a while but maybe not indefinitely.
The third is the threat of our own cleverness. Sooner or later and even though it has long been the stuff of science fiction our creations will get the better of us. We are not clever enough to foresee all the consequences of all our actions. We will create a bio-catastrophe through genetic engineering or a machine we cannot control or software than deems us redundant or some other technological oversight – provided of course we don’t just blow ourselves up.
The fourth has always been with us and come close to succeeding in wiping us out on several occasions – nature itself. We think we are in control, but a major volcanic event, for example, could bring us to our knees. Or a change in climate causing drought or famine. Or a naturally occurring disease might arise which we could not defeat in time – it is less than a hundred years since flu claimed more lives than a World War, for example. A compilation, in other words, of the old horsemen.
In my lifetime the human population of the earth has roughly trebled. There are a lot of us and it would take something extraordinary to get all of us. Fewer humans would paradoxically relieve some of the pressures from some of these four causes, perhaps even making the survival of the species more likely. But it would not be a pretty process. Imagine going back in short order even to the global population level of the middle of the twentieth century, or in other words wiping out two thirds – two out of three! – of the people on the planet.
It would be daft to claim that a stronger sense of values will make all these threats go away. A species which thought about what really mattered rather than, or even as well as, how to make a quick profit might have a better chance, though. And they might both live better and behave with more dignity when disaster arrived.
Equality and neoliberalism
We, or at least I, tend to think of social equality as an aspiration of the left in politics, although I have argued in my recent book that it misdirects many efforts and that material sufficiency (lack of poverty across many dimensions) is a better social goal. However, the idea of equality also feeds the right wing of politics, especially the extreme, neoliberal kind.
How can this be when neoliberalism produces and endorses such massive inequality in society, actively championing “private affluence and public squalor”? (How apt incidentally Galbraith’s phrase from the sixties seems today!) It is because equality excuses inaction. If we are all equal, the poor must somehow be to blame for their own plight for if some succeed, why not all? Those who get rich have done so by merit, surely, so why should they help the less meritorious? Why should there be institutions of government to redress imbalances if everyone is equal but some more hard working than others?
Like many ideological positions this one has a grain of truth which makes it hard to dislodge. Many people do of course succeed because they work very hard. That is why the fruits of hard work should be as little disturbed as possible. But the fact is, however unpalatable to left or right, we are not all equal in all respects. Some are talented, some naturally diligent, some favoured by birth circumstances, while others are discriminated against, or broken in their early years, or just lack any talent to succeed at least in the world they know. “Merit” is largely a matter of chance for which if we are favoured we should be grateful rather than thinking it is all our own doing.
That is why we need ways of balancing the effects of chance. Gratitude and compassion demand them. That is also why material (as opposed to moral) equality should not be assumed or striven for, because whatever the intention it feeds nasty parts of the political right.
The Pope and coal
The Pope may (or may not, a draft document was leaked) be about to suggest that global warming has a moral dimension. The fossil fuel industry in the U.S., the coal industry in particular, is outraged and right wing presidential hopefuls are scrambling to condemn this “interference” in secular affairs. The Pope has been told to “stick to his job” – whatever that means.
Is this not passing strange? Has morality no bearing on everyday life? Then what is its point and purpose? Or is the idea rather that business is exempt from morality? By all means argue that the Pope is wrong on a point of morality, although I can see that is tricky for politicians who are also Catholics. By all means argue that he has his facts wrong, if indeed it turns out he has (we don’t know at this point). But to argue that a religious and moral leader can have nothing to say about what is and isn’t a moral problem or then about where he thinks the weight of moral argument comes down is surely just absurd.
It does not leave the impression that these presidential candidates know the difference between a moral issue and a funding opportunity. It does not inspire confidence.
Doubts about the EU
The EU project has at its heart a vision of European integration, a United States of Europe. In the beginning the vision was far off and involved only six countries. It was an abstraction anyway and the statesmen (they were all men) of the time saw the first steps as either safely subject to later modification or justifiable without popular consent as an act of leadership. The most important thing after all was to avoid another major European war.
So the institutions of Europe were made deliberately undemocratic. National governments each had a veto and that was enough of a safeguard. The people of Europe were to be led towards what was considered good for them, a good they might appreciate more and more as it unfolded but which they might foolishly doubt in the abstract, not least because of the then recent history of conflict.
But the vision of integration, not to mention the central concept of politicians as visionaries, survived changes in the structure and extent of the EU which no one envisaged at the start and which have been truly staggering, including the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Soviet Union. In trying to deal with upheavals of such size and scope no one can blame politicians for using whatever tools and structures lay to hand, but the result was a tectonic shift in what made sense for Europe. Nevertheless, too much political capital had by then been invested in the vision, so the wise leaders pressed on.
For politicians had succumbed to their own myth and believed that their wisdom and guidance would lead their unruly peoples to a promised land, like Moses in the desert. Perhaps they were just sanguine about the changes that had occurred or perhaps they chose not to notice that the destination was now unrecognisable. Perhaps, more kindly, they responded to increased complexity with a desire to concentrate power simply to get necessary things done. They might for example have been genuinely torn between their answerability to their own national assemblies and the prospect of conflicting answerability to a pan-European assembly, so the nascent European Parliament was left as a travesty, a show assembly hardly more relevant than a party conference in a communist state.
Even when national vetoes were removed in the interests of easier governance, no balancing increase in democratic accountability took their place. When the wise leaders produced a European constitution to replace the treaties on which the EU rests the people in many countries had to be given the opportunity of a vote and in sufficient countries rejected the idea. But were the wise leaders daunted? No, they called the constitution something else and carried on anyway.
In the UK we are now promised a vote on whether to stay within the European Union. This will in the end be presented as an economic choice – are we collectively better or worse off inside or out? The truth is, nobody can be sure. Either course will be better for some, worse for others and the arithmetic is difficult. Business will weigh in on the side of remaining, because of course an integrated market is good for business, as is a single focus for lobbying. Since most politicians are in awe of business in one way or another that will likely be the political consensus too.
But surely it is not financial arithmetic which should be at the heart of the choice but what has become the arrogance of imposed political and economic integration. A wide European alliance is an excellent thing and a large free trade area is probably very helpful, although much less relevant than in the past because of developments in the world trading order. Without the ability for the people to have some choice in what should happen along the way, however, these benefits are bought at a high price even if GDP is higher.
It’s not that we can or should have referenda at every turn because, after all, nation states are already far too large for direct democracy. We choose leaders to act for us and trust that they will take decisions with which we broadly agree. But in the EU they can’t even do that. All they can do is go off and contend throughout the night with a couple of dozen leaders of other states with the outcome decided by some combination of trade-off, power and tiredness. Even the tenuous link of trust between us and them is broken. Democracy, already pale in the nation state, is bleached to such a ghostly shade in the EU that it no longer exists.
The central vision of a United States of Europe has thus become a crude weapon against democracy. The structures and assumptions of the EU need thorough revision to meet the needs of an organisation which stretches far beyond what its founders would have believed possible.
That process of examination and revision, that wholesale reimagining of the project, will just not happen. It will not be allowed to happen by those who benefit economically from the status quo. Power will move further and further away from the people over whom it is exercised. And that is why the EU, sadly for it has noble aspirations buried there somewhere, should be mistrusted.
Capitalism and Human Values 