Abstract
Using Rational Choice Theory to account for moral agency has always had some uncomfortable aspect to it. Economists’ attempts to include the moral dimension of behaviour either as a preference for moral behaviour or as an external constraint on self-interested choice, have been criticized for relying on tautologies or lacking a realistic picture of motivation. Homo Oeconomicus, even when conceptually enriched by all kinds of motivations, is ultimately still characterized as caring only for what lies in his interest. Amartya Sen has drawn the economists’ attention to a specific blind spot in rational choice theory (henceforth RCT), i.e. the idea of commitment. By starting from the premise that the human capacity to commit is a necessary precondition for moral behaviour, our aim in this paper is twofold: first, we argue that taking the idea of commitment seriously in economics requires an enriched concept of rationality. Second, we reject a Kantian interpretation of Sen’s concept of commitment and argue that Harry Frankfurt’s views about caring can be used to develop the concept of commitment in a direction that is compatible with Rational Choice Theory.
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Notes
- 1.
For example Gary S. Becker in economics, James S. Coleman in sociology and Jon Elster in political science.
- 2.
The term ‘utility’ is mostly taken to represent the individual’s personal welfare or well-being, which amounts to understanding the striving for utility as motivated by self-interest (Sen 2002, p. 27).
- 3.
In this paper we do not distinguish explicitly between certain, risky and uncertain prospects.
- 4.
This is a delicate point that often gets confused and thereby leads to misunderstandings and false interpretations of the concept of rational choice. The agent does not aim at maximizing utility in the first place. He is motivated to act because he wants to satisfy his preferences. And because the agent prefers one option x1 to another x2, the utility of x1 is higher than the utility of x2, not vice versa. And this is why, in choosing x1, the agent also gets the highest utility, namely U1. So utility-maximization is not the reason for his action but a consequence of his individual preference ordering. As preferences cannot be observed, it is assumed that the agent takes the option he prefers most which allows to infer some information about the nature of agent’s preferences from the observed choice. This idea provides the basis for the well-known view of revealed preferences (Samuelson 1938; Sen 1977).
- 5.
In the RCT-literature no difference is made between choosing a course of action or choosing an option and the actual performance of an action. It is assumed either that the choice of the agent based on his preferences necessarily leads to the performance of an action or that the choice is the actual action. This assumption is not obvious but cannot be discussed here.
- 6.
Kahneman et al. for example argue that standards of fairness do in fact influence people’s behaviour and suggest the introduction of a ‘preference for fairness in the objective function’ (1986, p. 115).
- 7.
There is a considerable amount of literature that suggests conceptualizing moral behaviour as rule-following behaviour in economics (e.g. Vanberg 2008; see also Mantzavinos 2001, pp. 106 ff. for a review). While this approach does in fact preserve the normative character or moral behaviour, it does abandon the RCT-framework and suggests the alternative of a theory of rule-following behaviour, which however has not been taken into account by mainstream economists.
- 8.
How much and what kind of ‘realism’ can be expected from economic theories is a vexed question. For our purposes it suffices to define unrealistic behavioural assumptions as a matter of descriptive inaccuracy with regard to the psychological ‘make-up’ of agents. Part of the complication is due to the fact that explanations can always be given on different levels (e.g. micro-level, macro-level). Depending on the level of explanation, RCT can have different degrees of ‘being realistic’; this directly relates to its purpose in the model and the level upon which the explanandum phenomenon occurs (Mäki 2009b). Furthermore, an explanation can have several degrees of generality or specificity (Mantzavinos 2001, p. 4). How detailed the explanation of individual agency has to be in explanations of phenomena that are of interest to the economist solely depends, again, upon the explanandum phenomenon. If we aim at an explanation of the phenomenon ‘mutual exchange’ occurring on the social rather than on the individual level, it is questionable how descriptively accurate the theory of individual choice upon which it relies has to be. In contrast, if we aim at the explanation of a singular instance of an individual’s behaviour (which occurs at the micro-level), then we might want the theory of rational choice to be as descriptively accurate as possible.
- 9.
This identity mainly depends on the underlying understanding of the concept of a preference or the nature of reasons. As claimed before, personal welfare and individual utility are (technically) equated in mainstream economics. This assumption provides the main basis for conclusions about what we understand as a preference and what the nature of reasons is (Sen 1977, 1985).
- 10.
It becomes clear that Sen identifies egoism and internal consistency as the two main constituents of rational choice theory. As he writes: ‘this approach of definitional egoism sometimes goes under the name of rational choice, and it involves nothing other than internal consistency’ (Sen 1977, p. 323).
- 11.
A theory that contains an as-if clause is ‘behaviorally realistic if it allows for describing human behavior in a realistic way’ and it is ‘psychologically (or intentionally) realistic if the mental processes it evokes can be truthfully attributed to the agents’(Lehtinnen and Kuorikoski 2007, p. 124).
- 12.
Frankfurt (1971) compares external desires to spasms of the body, and urges that a person is no more to be identified with everything that goes on in his mind than he is to be identified with everything that goes on in his body.
- 13.
However, it should be noted that most of the time the notion of ‘a desire’ is left unanalysed as well. Philosophers and economists adopting the Humean belief–desire theory of motivation mostly work with desire and belief as folk psychological concepts and they define them simply as dispositional states (e.g. Hausman 2005). As Robert Stalnaker puts it: ‘To desire that P is to be disposed to act in ways that would tend to bring it about that P in a world in which one’s beliefs, whatever they are, were true.’ (1984, p. 15). Neil Sinhababu (2009) defends a Humean theory of motivation on the basis of a thicker notion of desire, as a mental state that involves pleasurable thoughts, but it is unclear what the status of his theory is. It is not backed up by empirical data nor by common sense intuitions.
- 14.
Yet what we care about is not under our volitional control, says Frankfurt. We might try to care about something, or to stop caring about something, but whether we succeed is not under our control. This passive element in a person’s constitution is typical of Frankfurt’s non-voluntaristic picture of care-based identity, but will not concern us so much in this paper. Note though that this characterization of care as a state one is in regardless of one’s own decisions, makes care so different from what Sen means by commitment.
- 15.
Caring about something ordinarily involves feelings and beliefs that express and support a person’s cares. When a person cares about a football team, he desires to watch the game, he feels happy when they are playing well and he believes that this team is the best. These desires, feelings and beliefs are only of secondary importance when characterizing the phenomenon of care, which essentially consists in volitional identification. Frankfurt writes: ‘The heart of the matter, however, is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional. That a person cares about… something has less to do with how things make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and limit his conduct’ (1994, p. 129).
- 16.
Roughly the view of Kantians like Korsgaard is that from the moment that someone takes anything to be a reason (relying on his practical identities), consistency requires him to value his underlying and enabling identity as an agent or a human being, and by extension ‘humanity’ in general.
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Acknowledgment
We would like to thank Malte Doehne, the audience at the conference ‘What makes us moral?’ (Amsterdam, June 2011), and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments and suggestions.
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Herfeld, C., Schaubroeck, K. (2013). The Importance of Commitment for Morality: How Harry Frankfurt’s Concept of Care Contributes to Rational Choice Theory. In: Musschenga, B., van Harskamp, A. (eds) What Makes Us Moral? On the capacities and conditions for being moral. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6343-2_4
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