British political economist Jan Lester, in the excellent book Escape from Leviathan defends interpersonal utility comparisons (against e.g. Rothbard’s claims of their impossibility). I found his defense convincing in his terms. See any problems? (I should also note that Lester is a libertarian ancap and his book is arguing for the libertarian compatibility thesis: liberty, private property anarchy, and social welfare are all compatible because they all require/imply each other for maximization).
We would never help people for their own sakes for we would only be sure that we were losing but not know whether others were gaining more, gaining at all, or even losing as well.
And we really never know, whether others are gaining more. We help when we prefer, not when the others prefer. That’s why helping out should not be forced upon people.
BTW, I vaguely remember some austrian analysis of why people make gifts - this should be similar to why they help.
We never really know whether others are gaining when we help them? We may never know with absolute certainty and in any normal circumstance, we would not claim to know other people’s values better than they know themselves, but that doesn’t mean such knowledge is impossible. That is akin to extreme behaviorism and most people would consider it insane. Anyway, yes of course under normal circumstances such interpersonal utility knowledge (however limited or extensive, certain or not) is not a logical justification for proactive force.
I don’t see what he’s accomplished. That we act based on our personal IUC judgment doesn’t prove anything. As I understand it, the whole reason that IUCs cannot be conducted scientifically is that they are ultimately based on the subjective preferences of the viewer. We all attempt to gauge other people’s value scales, and we may guess well many times, but these guesses cannot be quantified and still lack “the scientific definiteness that grants Pareto comparisons.” I don’t think I’ve read Rothbard on this, but that’s what I thought is meant by “interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible.”
Do you have a source for this? On the second line of the text you quoted it reads “intrapersonal,” not “interpersonal.”
It is intrapersonal; as in, we can compare our own utilites and disutilities. Lester is saying it is not controversial that you can know what you want.
Do you have a source for this? On the second line of the text you quoted it reads “intrapersonal,” not “interpersonal.”
The source is pages 152-154 of his book Escape from Leviathan: Liberty, Welfare and Anarchy Reconciled published in the UK by the London School of Economics in 2001.
He is talking about intertemporal, intrapersonal utility comparisons as a preliminary note to point out that we all accept that we necessarily can compare (without absolute certainty wrt utility given our ever-dynamic preferences) our own expected utilities for different actions at different times. This involves an intertemporal uncertainty similar to the interpersonal uncertainty in interpersonal utility comparisons which he gets into in the next paragraph. Robert Murphy makes a similar point in his critique of Austrian interest rate theory.
I don’t see what he’s accomplished. That we act based on our personal IUC judgment doesn’t prove anything. As I understand it, the whole reason that IUCs cannot be conducted scientifically is that they are ultimately based on the subjective preferences of the viewer. We all attempt to gauge other people’s value scales, and we may guess well many times, but these guesses cannot be quantified and still lack “the scientific definiteness that grants Pareto comparisons.” I don’t think I’ve read Rothbard on this, but that’s what I thought is meant by “interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible.”
It should be pointed out that Rothbard is hardly the only economist who has said that IUC’s are “impossible” and Lester is not just addressing Rothbard. I think the term “impossibility” of IUC’s alone is misleading and tends to behaviorist silliness if taken literally. Rothbard talked about IUC’s with regards to welfare economics and the social welfare function, which he mostly correctly attacked as impossible. Lester is not trying to argue for the scientific accuracy of a quantitative social welfare function, but rather against the “impossibility” of IUC’s Rothbard used in part to attack the welfare economists. Lester says he wants to do that because IUC’s are explicitly or implicitly necessary in order to make any general argument about social rules (e.g. libertarian ancap) being more likely to promote overall well-being or want-satisfaction or what have you.
Choosing to sustain a scratch rather than have your friend break his leg, is not an interpersonal utility comparison. Preventing the extent of pain and inconvenience your friend would experience with a broken leg is perceived by you to have a certain utility, which is causal relevance for the alleviation of your own felt uneasiness (whether that uneasiness stems from sympathy or principle or anything else). Preventing the scratching of your own leg is also perceived to have a certain causal relevance for the alleviation of your own felt uneasiness. The utility trade-off is still intrapersonal. It is true that the degree of pain and inconvenience the friend would experience has an effect on your own utility that would be associated with saving him from falling. But it is still ultimately, by definition, your own comparative utility that determines how you act. The urges that impel a man to action are always his own, whether they are stimulated by fellow-feeling or not.
I disagree. Most any person with any kind of even somewhat normal set of wants (for himself, for his family, for his friends, and for his unquantifiable sense of general well-being in his city, country, and/or planet) who understands the overwhelming tendencies of the liberal order, and the overwhelming tendencies of abrogations of that order, will plainly see that those wants will be best served in a liberal order. No dubious hedonic calculus is needed.
Choosing to sustain a scratch rather than have your friend break his leg, is not an interpersonal utility comparison. Preventing the extent of pain and inconvenience your friend would experience with a broken leg is perceived by you to have a certain utility, which is causal relevance for the alleviation of your own felt uneasiness (whether that uneasiness stems from sympathy or principle or anything else). Preventing the scratching of your own leg is also perceived to have a certain causal relevance for the alleviation of your own felt uneasiness. The utility trade-off is still intrapersonal. It is true that the degree of pain and inconvenience the friend would experience has an effect on your own utility that would be associated with saving him from falling. But it is still ultimately, by definition, your own comparative utility that determines how you act. The urges that impel a man to action are always his own, whether they are stimulated by fellow-feeling or not.
This is true. Taken absolutistically, though, it would imply radical behaviorism in economic method. Yes, ultimately we only experience directly our own feld uneasiness etc. I can’t know what you value better than you know what you value. You have epistemic primacy with regard to your own feelings. However, you also have epistemic primacy with regard to your own perception and conception. That doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about what you perceive or conceptualize. There are intersubjective markers (e.g. verbal communication, logic, body language, empathy) that give us some knowledge of what you percieve and conceive. Obviously, we still can’t know better than you. There is greater uncertainty since we are not you. However such knowledge is not “impossible” and indeed we rely on it throughout life.
When I decide to scratch my leg to help you, I am not comparing my own expected utilities. I am thinking “I don’t care if I get hurt. You’re in worse trouble. You would suffer more than my little scratch. I’ll help.” This kind of thinking is common in everyday life and ethics and everywhere else. It’s true that we can’t directly know (with the same certainty as the subject himself) a man’s utility to compare it with our own. However such knowledge is still possible.
In a technical sense, any disagreement here may boil down to terminology. You are talking about intrapersonal utility comparisons that necessarily take place for human action. This is not what interpersonal utility comparisons are supposed to be… they are not praxeologically necessary for human action. However they are, with epistemic uncertainty and quantitative imprecision, possible.
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Let’s translate the problem back to its original context… scratched knees are pretty far removed from the origins of IUC. The government passes a law which benefits group A (say, the unemployed) at the expense of group B (say, the politically-unconnected wealthy). When people in group B challenge the law, the government’s argument is invariably some sort of IUC, basically, if we could measure the “satisfaction” of groups A and B together before implementation of the law and after implementation of the law, it would be higher after than before. That is to say, that the dollars lost by the wealthy will not make them as much sadder as those dollars in the hands of the unemployed will make them happier. I’ve even seen leftists try to use marginal analysis to prove this (dollars have marginal utility, so the wealthy man misses $1 less than the bum is glad to have it).
As you can see, however, all of these judgments of interpersonal utility are being performed by a third-party… a judge, the President, the legislature, etc. No one bothers to ask the people in group A or group B how they feel about it because it’s a waste of time to ask… everyone in group B will dislike it and everyone in group A will like it. Democracy is supposed to be the latest, greatest way to deal with the problem… all you have to do is make sure that group A (e.g. voting senior citizens) outnumbers group B (e.g. voting upper-middle class).
The author’s example which you are quoting would be analogous to people in group B voluntarily deciding on their own accord that people in group A would be happier with some of their money than they themselves are (charity). Charity has nothing to do with forcible redistribution.
Clayton -
Would I take a scratch to save someone who murdered one of my family members from getting a broken leg? Nope. My willingness to sacrifice is dependent on who I’m sacrificing for. In other words, it doesn’t automatically follow that the person who suffers the greatest harm must be helped by the person who will suffer less harm. That is, if Alice is about to suffer X (say, full body 3rd degree burns) and Bob would have to suffer 1/1000th of X (say, scratched knee) to prevent Alice from suffering X, it does not automatically follow that the world is a better place if Bob is made to suffer to save Alice. You’re only looking at selective data in this example (bodily harm) when a person’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction (utility) is holistic. If Alice had earlier killed Bob’s brother, why should Bob suffer even a scratched knee to save her from full body 3rd degree burns? Perhaps he has no desire to help her in any way and to force him to do so is not justifiable based on a comparison of the respective bodily harms that each stands to suffer.
Clayton -
We may express it verbally like that (“You would suffer more than my little scratch”), but that is not the way the alternatives are actually weighed in the determination of action. The action of saving the friend is not an outcome of “you would suffer more than me”. It is an outcome of “preventing your broken-leg suffering is more important to me than preventing my scratched-leg suffering”.
This may be effected by a sympathetic comparison of “how much I myself would suffer from a broken leg” versus “how much I expect to suffer from a scratched leg”. But that comparison isn’t interpersonal, and, more importantly, it isn’t what decides the action.
For example, consider a situation where suffering a scratch on the actor’s own leg would save the friend from suffering a sligthly larger scratch on his leg. Then the sympathetic comparison might still have the same ranking (“how much I would suffer from a slightly larger scratch” is greater than “how much I expect to suffer from a slightly smaller scratch”). So speaking very loosely the actor might still express “you would suffer more than me”. But he might then not act to catch the friend, if there is more utility in preventing the “lesser” suffering of his own small scratch than in preventing the “greater” suffering of the friend’s slightly larger scratch. Because that sympathetic comparison does not translate directly into action; it is only important insofar as it effects the actor’s intrapersonal utility comparison, which for every situation and every actor may be different.
This example of taking a scratch to prevent a broken leg seems rathur absurd to me.
How do you know before you act to save your friend that if you don’t help he will break his leg?
A person in such a situation would not have the time to think “Gee, looks like Jones is about to fall and break his leg. If I grab him I will get a scratch on my knee. My scratched knee is better than his broken leg so I will grab him.”
Your friend is falling, you reach to help him on instinct.
It is a reaction, not an action.
I also have an issue with the assertion in the source quote from the OP that such a thing as “no-preference” exists. It may exist in the author’s head, but the moment he acts he has made a preference of one thing over another.
It’s a thought experiment, TANSTAAFL. We’re not interested in how likely it is that it would be an action. We’re assuming it is an action, and reasoning out the implications. That’s how thought experiments work. If the conditions assumed are distracting, then just imagine a more likely, analogous situation.