Philosophical Notes, High and Low

Economists have always been interested in what philosophers -- especially those writing on political philosophy or distributive ethics -- have to say on what our priorities ought to be. This is not just a concern of those living in -- or those who advise those living in -- the White House, or 10 Downing Street, or the Elysee Palace. Anyone with a little bit of cash left over for charity might wonder if there is a sane and systematic way to think about where one's money would do the most good. Any voter heading to the polling booth may worry about the rationale behind the way our government allocates foreign aid in our name.

When faced with humdingers of this kind, economists instinctively reach for three tried and true formulae: Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, John Rawls's liberalism, and Robert Nozick's libertarianism. Rawls, who is often acclaimed as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, argued that any action, whether by an individual or by a group, should be judged by the extent to which it improves the life of the least well-off person (that the individual or group can reach).

Fans of Rawls will be happy to learn that Google.org, the enormously well-endowed philanthropic arm of Google.com, has taken their side. Writing in Slate, Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org has recently endorsed the Rawlsian approach.

What caught my eye, however, was that instead of mentioning Rawls, Brilliant invokes Gandhi:

Gandhi was once asked, "How can I know that the decisions I am making are the best I can make?" He answered: "I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it?"

The Gandhi quote is dated, in Gandhi, Freedom, and Self-Rule by Anthony Parel (Lexington Books, 2000, ISBN 0739101374), to 1947, several years before Rawls completed his dissertation at Princeton, and a decade before his famous paper on "justice as fairness".

So, without knowing it, Rawls was actually a Gandhian!

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In a recent article in The New York Times, the Princeton philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah, discusses the recent spate of experimental work in philosophy that presents philosophical quandaries -- e.g., Would you kill someone if it would save the lives of four other people? -- to randomly chosen people, notes their answers, and even peers into their brains using sophisticated scanning technology to see what actually goes on inside when people are pondering ethical imponderables. (Incidentally, this is also the subject of Appiah's just published book, Experiments in Ethics.)

While reading Appiah's article, I was reminded of an idea for a cartoon that had occured to me many years ago when I was thinking idly about precisely this issue: the need to do empirical research on the ethical choices that people actually make in their daily lives. Here's the cartoon idea: Two philosophers are seated at adjoining tables, in the dining area at a philosophers' conference, with waiters standing by to take their orders. One philosopher turns to the other and says: "I'll order the egg and you order the chicken. We'll find out which comes first!"