A great many classical liberals and libertarians are attracted to methodological individualism because it seems compatible with ethical individualism. Here I will argue there is no particular connection in either direction. As an ethical approach to social life, no form of liberal thought has any need for methodological individualism. By contrast, adopting a position growing from understanding emergent orders provides a far better foundation for social science and policy analysis.
That methodological individualism need not lead to any ethical position at all is easiest to demonstrate, for Thomas Hobbes was perhaps the first rigorous methodological individualist. Yet Hobbes’ concept of a natural right ultimately meant simply that we had the right to do whatever we had the power to do. No one had rights vis-à-vis this Leviathan state nor was the state constrained in its actions. The self-interested argument Hobbes made on its behalf was that no matter how bad the sovereign, the outcome for most would be a regime of social order where most people would gain. All in all this was far preferable to a realm where life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes’ position is closer to nihilism than to any other ethical outlook.
But what about from the other end? Does the individual disappear as an ethical unit when we set methodological individualism aside as a foundational methodology? Not at all. Consider the traditional African proverb: “I am because we are.”
“I am” easily recognizes the reality of the “I.” What it denies is that the “I” is fundamentally independent of the “we.” The proverb says the same for the “we.” Without “Is” there is no “we.” We are looking at the same insight Berger and Luckmann described in terms of social analysis: the individual is best conceived as a “moment” in a system of mutual causality rather than existing at the beginning of a linear causal system (methodological individualism) or at its end (collectivism).
At this point I want to make two ethical observations. If Hayek, and many others, are correct in that individuals in our sense emerged from out of a matrix of relationships and rules that preceded individual consciousness, morality is an emergent phenomenon because moral agents are themselves emergent phenomena. Morality arises and maintains itself within and through particular relationships. Here David Hume and Adam Smith shed some important light, arguing that morality arises when a moral sense exists, and that sense is intimately connected with what they called “sympathy,” and what we today would call “empathy.” See especially Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Neuroscientists have recently discovered what they term “mirror neurons” in the brains of some mammals and later, of humans. These neurons appear connected with the ability of some beings to see others as selves like themselves. In doing so they blur the self/not-self distinction. Those animals possessing mirror neurons have demonstrated the capacity for assisting others of no utility to themselves, resist benefits if they are linked to hurting others, and other behavior that in human beings we would unhesitatingly term “moral.”
This same ability is required for that venerable liberal notion of “rational self-interest.” My future self does not yet exist, and is only a hypothetical construct. For me to take its interests into account when confronted by present temptations requires a kind of empathetic capacity as well, and I suspect mirror neurons will be found to play a role. But so far as I know, that is hypothetical.
Charles Darwin’s argument that morality is the result of evolutionary processes also seems validated. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierece’s Wild Justice, The Moral Lives of Animals was eye-opening for me. Morality or the next thing to it is a natural accompaniment of social species with certain mental capacities, and is found in many mammals, at least. Morality emerges from life as we ourselves have emerged from life. There is no need for a transcendental dimension, be it a divnity or the laws of reason, to impose it from without, upon an unruly world of matter and emotion.
Second, while it is individuals who possess these moral capacities, their environment has an important influence on how these capacities are expressed. The “we” is not a moral unit, but it can be a better or worse context within which individuals develop their moral capacities. This perspective is a far very from collectivist morality, but it is also a far cry from the extreme individuality argument that people have no obligations towards others beyond not physically aggressing on them. They have an obligation to at least preserve the ‘we’ that made themselves possible, and one could at least argue a strong responsibility to seek to improve it. That is, individuals who have strongly developed their empathetic capacities will naturally want to improve the circumstances of others within their “we.”
To return to my cultural ecology metaphor, the environment can be good enough for a species to simply survive, or for it to thrive. The same can be true for a culture and the human beings that exist within it. Cultures that do not enable human beings to survive disappear, but that does not come close to arguing they are all equally good, taken-for-granted stages on which self-sufficient individuals live their lives.
My argument does not claim other approaches to understanding morality are faulty. It only claims that we do not need anything beyond the insights arising out of Berger and Luckmann, and encapsulated in that African proverb, to find a foundation for individual morality, and respect for individuals, immanent within the world and arising out of the nature of human life. So in Part II. I have argued that methodological individualism need not lead to any ethical insights at all, it is compatible with Hobbesian nihilism, and that a better explanation for who we are as social beings, developed by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, can lead to such an insight. The fate of methodological individualism as an analytic approach to understanding human beings is entirely separate from individuals’ moral standing towards others.
My final part III. will argue that not only are the two unconnected, in practice methodological individualism encourages deeply flawed ethical reasoning. An emergent order approach to liberalism enables liberals to address a far wider and deeper range of issues that does one rooted in methodological individualism, and the caricature of individuality that it encourages us to accept as adequate to the job.
(small edits made 2/28/11)
Studies in Emergent Order 
David Emanuel Andersson
February 28, 2011
Gus’s argument seems consistent with an old entry of mine on my personal blog:
Theories in neoclassical microeconomics, Austrian economics, public choice, and new institutional economics tend to be based on the principle of methodological individualism (MI) – the idea that economic phenomena should be explained only in terms of individuals and their preferences, actions etc. I’m quite skeptical about this principle, as it removes the effects of emergent group attributes from theoretical consideration. In effect, exchanges between two isolated individuals are treated as identical with exchanges between two organizations or two socially embedded individuals. True, differences may be accounted for in terms of different values and preferences that arise from social interaction effects. But MI in effect prohibits any further investigation.
Entrepreneurial discovery and judgment reflect individual subjectivity, and in that specific context MI is appropriate. But for the study of institutions, MI requires that institutions are treated as constraints on – rather than shapers of – preferences, which makes the treatment rather static. A multiple-level approach should (I believe) yield greater insight into institutional as opposed to entrepreneurial evolutionary processes.
In my view, one of the most insightful economists of the twentieth century was Ludwig Lachmann. But Lachmann’s explicit commitment to MI seems to be the main cause of why many identify his name with the recognition that market processes are ultimately indeterminate rather than coordinative, which caused some critics to accuse Lachmann of “economic nihilism.” Lachmann himself stressed that institutions may stabilize expectations, thereby promoting coordination, but did not himself develop any explicit institutional theories. In a recently published article entitled “Solving the ‘Lachmann’ Problem: Orientation, Individualism, and the Causal Explanation of Socioeconomic Order” (PDF), Paul Lewis identifies MI as a part of Lachmann’s thought that is incompatible with much of his reasoning concerning institutions. “The Legacy of Max Weber” (Lachmann, 1971) is particularly rich in insights that contradict MI. This is the abstract of Lewis’s paper:
“This article examines the question of whether social institutions should be treated as possessing the sui generis causal power to influence people’s actions. It does so by means of a case study of the work of the Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann. Lachmann’s account of how social institutions facilitate intentional human agency in the face of uncertainty contains significant ambiguities and tensions, stemming from his reluctance to acknowledge the causal efficacy of social institutions. The conceptual resources required to overcome these problems are to be found in realist social philosophy and social theory. The proposed resolution comes at a price, however, for it calls into question Lachmann’s self-avowed commitment to methodological individualism.”
I find Lewis’s arguments quite persuasive, although I don’t think that critical realism is a necessary foundation for the development of a multiple-level version of radical subjectivism. Tony Lawson’s “Economics & Reality” and other such publications contain interesting discussions, but shouldn’t there be at least some attempts to leave meta-economics behind and develop substantive economic theories? But maybe it’s still too early for that. Time will tell.
Paul Lewis
March 3, 2011
Dear Gus,
Your remarks on morality, ‘I’ and ‘we’ make me think of the work of Amartya Sen on morality, and the way in which his ideas have been interpreted by philosophers using notions of collective intentionality. Here’s an account. Apologies for its length. Hope you find it useful.
Sen elaborates on the nature of moral behaviour by drawing a distinction between ‘sympathy’ and ‘commitment’ (1977: 326-29). Sympathy involves one person’s welfare being affected by the welfare of others (as, for example, when one gains pleasure from observing the happiness of others). ‘Commitment’, on the other hand, denotes a person’s willingness to act in a particular way, not because doing so maximises his or her welfare, but simply because the type of action in question is required for conformity with a social (moral) rule or norm that the individual regards as inviolable. Commitment therefore ‘drives a wedge between personal choice and personal welfare’ in the sense that – according to Sen – it leads to a person ‘choosing an act that he believes will yield a lower level of personal welfare to him than an alternative that is also available to him’.
In developing his account of commitment, Sen emphasises that people are reflexive beings who are able to scrutinise themselves and, in particular, to reason about the propriety of their desires and values. On this view, far from reason being the slave of the passions, people are able to use their power of reason to reflect upon, to control, and even to override their desires and their individual goals, so that the latter do not always manifest themselves in people’s actions:
A person is not only an entity that can enjoy one’s own consumption, experience, and appreciate one’s welfare, and have one’s goals, but also an entity that can examine one’s values and objectives and choose in the light of those values and objectives. Our choices need not relentlessly follow our experiences of consumption or welfare, or simply translate perceived goals into action. We can ask what we want to do and how, and in that context also examine what we should want and how.
Indeed, according to Sen, it is precisely this capacity to reflect upon one’s values and actions, and to make commitments to shared social rules and norms, that makes someone a person.
For Sen, therefore, we can do justice to the influence of reason on human action only if we acknowledge that the domain of reason extends beyond the (instrumental) task of assessing the most effective means of satisfying preferences and goals that are not themselves given by reason to embrace the possibility of (deontological) reasoning about the values and goals that people (should) choose to pursue (Sen 2002a: 40, 2006: 20-22; also see Hirschman 1984).
In explaining why people might depart from the instrumentally rational mode of conduct emphasised by rational choice theory, Sen emphasises that, far from being isolated atoms, people are social beings whose values, goals, beliefs and actions are all shaped by the network of social relations within which they are embedded. More specifically, according to Sen, one important reason why a person might refrain from pursuing her individual goals in favour of conforming to social rules and norms is because doing so enables her to form attachments to various groups and thereby to cultivate her identity (that is a sense of who she is). The connection between a person’s commitment to social rules, on the one hand, and his or her identity, on the other, has been fruitfully analysed by philosophers working the notion of collective intentionality (e.g. Robert Sugden, John Davis to name but two).
Briefly, the philosophical literature on collective intentionality suggests that, in addition to having the individual intentions – the individual commitments to (purposive) action – that economists typically attribute to them, people the individual members of a group might also possess ‘shared’ or ‘collective’ intentions that involve them making a commitment to act in concert with one another, as a group. The distinction between individual and collective intentionality often arises in everyday life: people use the language of individual intentionality when they view themselves as acting independently of others (‘I want’, ‘I hope’, etc.); and they invoke collective intentionality when they see themselves as acting as part of a group (‘what we want’, ‘what the Austrian school aspires to do is’, etc.). The theory of collective intentionality suggests that, far from being an insignificant linguistic trifle, the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘we’ intentions signifies an important difference in the type of motivation that drives people’s actions, the recognition of which can enable us to conceptualise the role of commitment, identity and (a broader notion of) the self in reasoned decision-making.
Collective intentions – or we-intentions as they are also known – have two key characteristics. In the first place, an individual who expresses a we-intention believes that the intention in question is widely, though not necessarily universally, held by the other members of the group. Second, the individual believes that the intention is mutually or reciprocally held by members of the group, in the sense that they too believe that it is widely held by their fellow members. Thus, for example, if Ludwig, who is a member of a group of Austrian economists, says that, ‘We believe in the efficacy of the free market’, then Ludwig is really saying that he believes in the efficacy of the free market and that, in addition, he believes that the other members of the group both believe in the efficacy of the market themselves and also attribute that belief to one other. In a nutshell, then, we-intentions involve a structure of mutually reinforcing, reciprocal beliefs, shared by the individual members of the relevant group, such that each believes that the others hold the same belief, and each also believes that the others think the same about their fellow members.
Significantly, and in keeping with Sen’s notion of commitment, behaviour that is driven by we-intentions is not reducible to instrumentally rational behaviour. The reason is as follows. An individual’s we-intention centres on what (s)he thinks the intentions of the other individuals in the group actually are, not what (s)he would like them to be, so that there arises the possibility of a tension between what an individual believes a group’s collective intention to be and what (s)he would prefer it to be. If an individual (sincerely) expresses a we-intention in a situation where that tension has indeed arisen, then (s)he has effectively made a (Senian) commitment to act in accordance with the group’s collectively expressed view that a particular goal should be pursued, or that a particular type of action is required, and so forth, even though that might not be what the individual would have preferred were (s)he not a member of the group in question. On this view, the shared intentions that arise when a person uses we-language involve him imposing upon himself obligations or commitments that qualify the unconstrained pursuit of his own (self-)goals, simply because expressing a we-intention requires an individual to confirm to how other people use that same ‘we’. Hence, people may share a collective goal without each of them also having it as a personal goal.
The notion of collective intentionality is significant for understanding the role of identity and commitment in human action because one way of conceptualising a person’s identity is in terms of the social groups with which (s)he chooses to affiliate herself. Such affiliations can in turn be thought of as involving the use first-person plural speech in order to form collective intentions about what ‘we’ want, believe, and so forth. As Sen has put it:
The nature of our language often underlines the force of our wider identity. “We” demand things; “our” actions reflect “our” concerns; “we” protest at injustice one to “us”. This is, of course, the language of social intercourse and politics, but it is difficult to believe that it represents nothing other than a verbal form, and in particular no sense of identity.
On this view, people’s capacity to identify themselves with others, and thereby to define who they are, is captured by the way their use of we-language requires them to embrace – in Sen’s sense of commitment – the intentions of the other group members (to whom the ‘we’ is meant to apply) about what goals to pursue, about counts as acceptable behaviour, and the like. For the (sincere) use of such language requires a person to adopt the same (joint) standpoint as others in the group, ‘accept[ing] as reasons for action only those considerations that each person would be willing to accept as reasons for everyone to act” (Anderson 2001: 29). We-intentions can thus be seen to involve people transcending the narrow confines of their own self-interest in order to consider what is right or best, not from their own point of view, but from the perspective of the group as a whole. In Sen’s words, ‘the pursuit of private goals may well be compromised by the consideration of the goals of others in the group with whom the person has some sense of identity’ (Sen [1985] 2002: 215; also see p. 214 and Sen 2002a: 40-42).
It is especially noteworthy in this regard that a person’s membership of social groups is often conditional upon his or her faithfully observing various social rules and norms (Sen [1985] 2002: 216-17). The latter can be expressed in terms of collective intentions to the effect that, ‘We believe that members of the group should do x in circumstances z’ (where, in addition to being read literally, the phrase ‘do x’ should be interpreted broadly as a placeholder for a variety of injunctions such as, ‘count as’, ‘take to mean’, ‘refrain from’, ‘donate to’, and so forth) (Davis 2004: 390; cf. Lawson 2003: 36-39). Such rules and norms that specify what types of behaviour the members of a particular group count as ‘correct’, ‘honourable’, ‘just’, etc., and in effect constitute a set of guidelines or script that tell people what they have to do in order to identify themselves with the (other members of the) group and thereby to cultivate and to express publicly their identity as group members (Sen [1985] 2002: 215). Such rules and norms have motivational force, because they furnish people who wish to become, or remain, members of a particular group with reasons for acting in certain ways:
One of the ways in which the sense of identity can operate is through making members of a community accept certain rules of conduct as part of obligatory behaviour towards others in a community. It is not a matter of asking each time, What do I get out of it? How are my own goals furthered in this way?, but of taking for granted the case for certain patterns of behaviour towards others. (Sen [1985] 2002: 216-17.)
More specifically, the motivational force of social norms derives from the fact that group members accept the authority of “us” – of ‘our’ shared view of how ‘we’ should behave – to determine (key features of) their conduct in the domain defined by the norm. As Elizabeth Anderson has put it, ‘To count as a reason for action, a consideration must appeal to a person’s self-understanding, not [necessarily] her self-interest. It must fit into her understanding of her identity’ (2003: 192; also see p. 193).
In this way, the notion of collective intentionality makes it possible to conceptualise how people can have sources of motivation – including, as we shall see, those that enjoin them to engage in philanthropy – above and beyond the instrumental desire to satisfy their preferences. People not only have the capacity to behave in an instrumentally rational fashion, asking what should I do and striving to satisfy their own preferences; they also have the (often countervailing) ability to act in accordance with social rules and collective goals, their commitment to which may involve them stepping back from their individual goals and asking what is the best strategy for us to adopt:
Behaviour is ultimately a social matter as well [as an individual one], and thinking in terms of what “we” should do, or what should be “our” strategy, may reflect a sense of identity involving recognition of other people’s goals and the mutual interdependencies involved (Sen 1987: 85; also see 2002: 41)
The members of a social group think of themselves as a ‘we’, and understand one another to be jointly committed to various goals, including that of upholding shared social rules and norms. In identifying with a group, therefore, an individual understands that (s)he has accepted responsibility for doing her part to advance the group’s goals and to uphold the rules and norms that operate within it, making a commitment that motivates her subsequent actions. Hence, as Sen has put it, ‘the sense of identity takes the form of partly disconnecting a person’s choice of actions from the pursuit of self-goal’.
Overall, then, the vantage point provided by the theory of collective intentionality suggests that Sen can be thought of as advocating a relational theory of (social) identity whereby, through their use of we-language, people express their joint commitment to various goals and social rules and norms, forging links to the groups in which those rules and norms prevail and thereby conferring identity upon themselves.
Hope you find this helpful.
Cheers,
Paul.