 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our guest today is Adam Gurry. He works in digital advertising and has an MA in economics from George Mason University. And he's also a columnist at Libertarianism.org. Adam, today I wanted to talk about a pair of essays you recently published on the site about utilitarianism and why it may not be a satisfactory moral theory to ground libertarianism. But maybe we can start by having you just tell us what utilitarianism is. Sure. Really, everyone always starts in the history of utilitarianism with Jeremy Bentham. I mean, there were definitely precursors in David Hume that inspired him. But basically, Jeremy Bentham is the guy you think of when you think of classical utilitarianism. And he had the famous saying, which was, we should seek legislation that maximizes the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. And that's really what it was all about. It was all about utility, which became sort of a catch-all for well-being or happiness and maximizing that. And it was measured pretty discretely, too, wasn't it? Well, yeah. Back in the day, they thought there was actually a unit called a util that you could measure that was like the unit of happiness. And the attraction at this point of view is well-being and material quality of life is sort of an abstract concept. Once you get beyond not starving and having a roof over your head and not dying of disease or something, when you're trying to actually compare beyond some bottom-level baselines, it gets hard to say what progress has actually been made. So Bentham's approach was basically just to lump everything into some abstract, uniform entity called happiness or utility. And prior to Bentham, happiness meant something much broader than it did in his day. And to this day, even though utilitarianism isn't necessarily that popular outside of economics, the conception of happiness that really began with Bentham is still the popular usage of that word in English. Does it seem like that given the time he was writing the early 19th century, late 18th century, and right around the time with people like Adam Smith and, as you mentioned, David Hume, and also about the time when enlightenment thought and some amount of material well-being was increasing, it seemed like an opportune time for someone to start saying what matters is preference, satisfaction, basically? Yeah, you know, that's kind of interesting because to us it looks that way in hindsight. But to the people living then, including Bentham, I'm fairly sure, they weren't necessarily aware that they were at the beginning of this big discontinuity in the growth of wealth, certainly not to the extent that it ended up being, which is why you get things like Thomas Malthus talking about how they were right on the precipice of this mass starvation. They really had no idea the extent of the changes that were going on. But I do think that there is a causal relationship in the sense that there were more people like Bentham, like Smith, who were affluent enough to be thinking about these things, writing about these things. The field of economics and the sort of scholarly field grew as there was a class of people who could afford to participate in it essentially. So a utilitarian then would say, as far as utilitarianism as a moral theory would say, in order to figure out what is the right action, what's the moral thing to do, we somehow add up the utility or the happiness that the alternatives might create and then pick whichever one comes out on top and that's the right thing to do. Right. I mean, it's essentially thinking in terms of net gains and assuming that happiness is a thing that you can quantify. So if I have five utils and you have six utils and there's a policy that increases yours by two and mine by one, then that's the right policy compared to one that just increases yours by one and mine by zero. Of course, from day one, the problem with this is what happens when you have one that increases yours by three and mine by zero versus mine by one and yours by two. Bentham was not really set up to handle that particularly well. So it's a problem of compounding happiness, which does seem kind of strange. Right. Of course, in the end, it's moot because you can't actually quantify happiness that way. And as the conversation around utilitarianism grew more sophisticated in the 19th century, J.S. Mill, who was also a big utilitarianism, by the time he actually wrote his book, Utilitarianism, had sort of distanced himself from this point of view of happiness as being this big lump. And he wrote at length about how the happiness of going out and being a beautiful day is different from the happiness of running into a friend you haven't seen in a long time who is very dear to you. And it's different from the pleasure of eating ice cream on a hot day or something. These are all very incommesurable forms of happiness. They're very different. You can't add them up to a single number because it's like trying to add weight and height. They're two different things. And Mill tried to save utilitarianism, but it couldn't come up with a real clear criteria of how you were going to evaluate things on a system-wide level when the reality was that on the ground. And so this debate sort of carries forward. The big innovation, of course, came towards the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, with Wilfredo Pareto, who said, well, maybe instead of talking about amounts of happiness, we can speak in terms of ranked preferences. You've jumped into economics. And I think because we went from philosophers to, of course, maybe the distinction wasn't that clear back then, but you jumped into economics. Yeah, I wanted to ask just another kind of clarifying question about utilitarianism before we move into economics. And it seems that there's kind of these two interesting characteristics of utilitarian thinking that I think both of them may come up when we start talking about problems with utilitarianism. But I wanted to put them out there right now. And that's the first is this that we're not really judging people, what matters is not people individually, but happiness, which can be seen in this kind of aggregate sense. So we can say like something that helps, you know, as long as it improves overall happiness or we can add people's experiences together. So we're thinking about something that to a great extent is kind of this external characteristic that latches on to people. People are what possess it, but it's this lump sum stuff. And even if we shift it over to preferences, it still is just we're talking about kind of preferences in the abstract and then we add up all the people who are involved, which is different from a lot of the other theories that one might use. And then the other thing that seems kind of odd about utilitarianism is there's nothing about motivations in here. There's nothing about attitudes. So if we're judging an action, the only thing that matters is whether it increases happiness. And then we say, well then you behave morally if you increased happiness more than the alternatives, but it doesn't matter why you did it. So if I help you out because I am motivated by being a nice person and it increases your happiness, there's no moral difference between that and say, if I help you out because I think there's something good in it for me or I'm hoping to set you up to do something else in the future that perhaps might be against your interests, or if I perversely think that I would actually be hurting you by doing this but I screw up and help you, none of that seems to matter in the utilitarian calculus. It's just the effects of the actions and that's it. Right. No, definitely. It's the effects. And if you like, I did jump the gun there a bit. But if you like, I could actually talk about the virtues of utilitarianism, what it is that was so appealing and still is appealing to a lot of people. Sure. So when you're thinking about material well-being and you're thinking about traditional ideas about morality, it gets sort of hard. Well, people are making a lot more money right now, but are they really better off? What does it mean to be better off? What utilitarianism does is provide a very simple, very standardized way of talking about well-being that sort of pushes all traditional moral matters to the side. This is particularly appealing in a time, I would say, less when economic growth was exploding, more that it was the enlightenment and providing a new scientific sounding, quantifiable, you know, mathematical way of looking at evaluating policy and morality was very appealing. And it also, you know, it gave it moral philosophy, the trappings of science. But even if you don't buy into that point of view, just as people who care about other people's well-being, even from an altruistic point of view, it has the virtue of saying, well, we can see in theory that these policies actually increase happiness, you know, immensely. So clearly that's what we should do. It gives you the altruistic, you know, idealistic moral person sort of a tool for approaching policy. And it seems like now we get to policy levels and we see these obvious benefits. And we also see the time, such as when Adam Smith starts writing in 1776 for the wealth of nations, for example. And before that, with theory of moral sentiments, that we have the invention of the individual kind of going on. People are caring more about individual people rather than collectives or communities or the church and individual values and individual preferences. So we start having religious liberty coming into play. And then someone like Adam Smith comes along kind of creating the foundational text of economics saying that what really matters is satisfying individual people's preferences. Because now we start caring more about the individual and that's how we get into the economic realm. Yeah, certainly. And, you know, you sort of lose the transcendental, the idea of the good as being this big sort of platonic or religious thing. And in its place you get, yeah, the sort of individual satisfaction. An individual satisfaction is obviously a lot less tricky to talk about than whether it's the right sort of satisfaction. Though again, from day one, there were people, you know, Kant being one and his followers that came after him. But many others who had trouble with the idea that, you know, the preference to take care of your family and, you know, live what is traditionally conceived of as a pretty good life is morally equivalent to the preference to, you know, go and have a lot of prostitutes or something. There was trouble of, well actually we do believe that you should discern between certain preferences from the beginning, though I think actually less so over time. The preference approach still has a very strong hold, if anything, stronger than it did in Bentham's time. Let's now turn to economics and because it does seem like utilitarianism not only seems to fit in with economic thinking quite well or at least better than a lot of alternative moral theories, but also my sense is a fairly large number of economists would, if pressed, choose something like utilitarianism as the moral theory that they think is correct. So what is it about utilitarianism that seems to make it work so well in economic thinking? Well, so to go back to Pareto and the rank preferences idea, essentially a whole lot of work goes into showing that if you think about people as having rank preferences with a certain amount of stability and a few other axioms, then you can translate their actions in terms of what they purchase into something like Bentham's utility. So like the whole theory behind GDP and similar things can be traced back to the idea that, you know, showing willingness to pay for something translates to how much you value it, which then is analogous to sort of like the happiness of Bentham that you would get from it. Can you maybe give us a concrete example of how that works in practice? Like in your essay you mentioned buying apples versus buying oranges. Right. So let's say that you would be willing to pay $5 for an apple and $3 for an orange. That shows sort of like the relative difference of how much value you would get. Even if we can't say in absolute terms this is how much happiness or pleasure you're getting from it, we can say, okay, you've demonstrated that you prefer this apple $5 and this orange $3. Therefore, acquiring this apple is worth $2 more to you than the oranges. And, you know, economics is obviously a lot more sophisticated. They've got diminishing returns, which means after you buy that apple, maybe the apple after that is only worth $4 to you so that the difference in value between the apples and the oranges might diminish the more apples you get. But yeah, so on the whole then you can aggregate spending and get some idea if the constraints are set up properly, in the right conditions. You can say, okay, this spending actually is roughly equivalent to how much value people are getting in general. So the economy starts to kind of look like in the economists' idea with this sort of movement of goods to their highest and best uses type of idea where the total economy and the quality of that economy should be judged on basically the preferences it's satisfying and the efficiency with which it's satisfying the preferences in terms of whenever people make a trade, you presume that it makes both of them better off. So you want trades to occur and even if that's for heroin and prostitutes and other things like that, it still is optimizing preferences and personal values. Right, exactly. And Pareto has something to say about that in terms of how it's ranked and then also with the marginalists too for changing how to think about that. Right, exactly. The marginalists, well essentially Adam Smith and all of them had a theory of value that was based on how much labor went into it. The marginalists essentially just in terms of their contribution to economics said just as a theory of price, prices reflect people's marginal preferences in the way we describe. So a ton of people are bidding on apples and oranges and in aggregate we say that those prices are reflecting those preferences through that willingness to pay. So this would shift the kind of source of prices from the supply side to the demand side. Because the labor theory of value has, it seems like a lot of people who think there's some plausibility to it and a lot of times when we get incensed about say how little people are getting paid for something, how little artists get paid, it's often based on this implied labor theory of value. They slaved over this, they put in so many hours and they're not getting as much money as this person who just kind of fell into something or has a job that seems pretty easy. Or they're the celebrity who just does the product endorsement for more money than most people make in their lifetime kind of thing. Right and of course the labor theory of value tends to fall down pretty quickly on close scrutiny because obviously the amount of labor one puts in, well in many cases we wouldn't want to correlate with price or wouldn't want to correlate with how much people actually want it. I mean I put in I don't know how many hundreds of hours into writing a novel that did not sell very well and people don't want to pay very much money for it. Although all of you listening should pay a lot of money for it. But the response to that is so what? If people don't think the book is all that good or they have other things they want then that's how much they're willing to pay. So that's what the marginalist said was prices come from basically how much people want this thing as an alternative to other things they might do with that money. Right and the interesting thing is you can think of this just in technical terms as a description of how the price mechanism works. But the marginalists in Pareto sort of form this bridge where we go from just talking about the price of things and how they get priced that way to actually there's this analogy with Bentham's utility. And that was there all along Bentham's influence on economics throughout this period is not to be understated. But there's sort of two perspectives you could look at this from from the perspective of trying to figure out how pricing happens in an open market. Obviously the marginalists and Pareto to an extent tell us a huge amount. I mean they called it the marginal revolution. I think it was a revolution in our way of thinking about this. It was a very profound contribution. But jumping from that to adding sort of utilitarian moral assumptions is a whole other thing. But you could see how that would happen not just because of Bentham's direct influence but because once you have this theory where prices reflect the subjectively evaluated value that consumers are getting. All of a sudden you have a way of quantifying subjective valuation and that can be aggregated. If you're spending with money it's all one unit of measurement so math becomes really easy. And with Pareto sort of background assumptions you can even sort of talk about things going on behind the scenes. So you get this very sophisticated very elaborate theoretical apparatus that sort of combines descriptive theory with normative usually without people really realizing that the latter part is going on. Yeah let's explore that a little bit because on one level we could just say well economics is economics it's not moral philosophy. There are normative things depending on what you want to get out of the world. But in terms of analyzing how people with preferences behave in the world we can just do it. We can look at an economics of the sex trade or the sex worker trade or slavery. People like these things they trade in them. It doesn't mean we're endorsing it but if we're trying to figure out what's going to happen there we can just describe what the economics of slavery what's happening there. Is that a wrong way of doing economics or should we have more normative assumptions in there? I prefer that personally. In terms of investigations I mean I don't think it's possible to have a value neutral point of view. You're always making certain assumptions. As a scholar certainly you have to decide what is important to study for instance that's not a neutral assumption. And I think it's good for scholars to explore what their assumptions are and have a more open discussion about it. But that's pretty different from what economics has done in the last 100 years. What you're describing is more like what Deidre McCloskey does with their economic history or Robert Fogel with his history of the train and the industrial revolution. And that's great and I think that economics should move towards doing more of that and less of what it usually does do. But what happened in the 20th century especially was they did these sort of huge mathematical proof possibility theorems. The most famous of which is the invisible hand theorem which essentially shows that with all these Puritan assumptions and if there's perfect information and no externalities and things like that then we have heaven on earth basically I mean not quite. It's more like we have the most efficient allocation and the most efficient production use of resources conceivable under a given level of productivity. Let's break that down just so we're clear. We've had a couple of podcasts before with Peter Van Dornis stuff where we've talked about it before but so because it's a lot of jargon we're talking about there with Pareto assumptions and other things. So basically the idea that you're expressing is with perfect knowledge so meaning you know there's no blocking you and not knowing where certain transactions can be made and externalities are all priced in. So an externality is to define that for our listeners. Yeah well actually that was sort of where I was going to go next too because that's sort of like where problems start to arise. But an externality so you know we talked about how in a voluntary exchange two people are assumed to mutually benefit because why else would they choose to exchange. But what if they benefit but at the same time along the way they dunked some toxic chemicals into someone else's water or something. Essentially what if someone who is not part of that transaction gets hurt by that transaction that's what's called a negative externality. There are also positive externalities which is when you know if I plant a beautiful garden or something and other people appreciate that and feel like their whole block is made better off. And in fact everyone else having well tended houses makes the houses of their the price the house prices of their neighbors go up or down depending on how good they are at it. So you know it is reflected in prices. But essentially externalities are any effect positive or negative from a transaction that occurs outside the transaction. And if you get if you so if you take care of those and have them like priced into the system or controlled or something like that and have perfect knowledge so people are constantly trading without any barriers then this sort of assumption that comes out of that. Is he said you get like utopia like every trade that could have made anyone better off has been accomplished. No one is being made worse off because of a trade that they got a negative externality from people are paying for positive externalities. All goods are in the places they should be and everyone is just living in a utopian world. Right. Right. And so throughout the 20th century you get economists identifying how reality in various ways deviates from those really strict assumptions. And then coming up with a proposal for how to cram reality back into that model basically. And they don't quite put it in terms of you know well this is this is the moral philosophy we've all accepted it which is why based on this moral philosophy this is the policy we should propose it's treated as though this is a scientific model with scientific recommendations coming out of it. Before we get to the problems with that model and the moral philosophy underneath it I wanted to just tie this back into libertarianism. Because this is often all of this is often used as a justification for a libertarian state or libertarian policies so how do those how do we get from what we've been discussing to libertarianism. Well I think that economics brings a lot of people to libertarianism because of the power it shows of mutual exchange freely done to enrich people. You know the especially I would say you know introductory level econ the exceptions to the invisible hand theorem which I don't think you know they don't even talk about the theorem itself. They just sort of give the outline of you know under certain conditions free trade makes everyone better off and here are a few exceptions. The exceptions are sort of treated like minor side issues that can easily be addressed. So I think this model in this economic model provides for a lot of people who are probably already somewhat sympathetic to liberty in some way. Because I would say even pro regulation people have some idea that therefore liberty of speech or something along those lines. Economics sort of gives you a very concrete model of if people are allowed to pursue profits and trade with one another freely in general it works out for the best for everyone. And it seems like a powerful model it's in both its concreteness and in that it doesn't require what seems like a demanding moral assumptions about the motivations of people. You can assume that people are extremely selfish and the model says but you know you turn private vice into public virtue. You know the butcher is just selling things for his own self interest but as a result people get meat on their table. Yeah I've often said that going off what you were saying about preferences and this assumption that that does seem like the libertarian world the one where people are sort of maximizing their preferences and making trades without as many barriers. And sometimes the complaints about the world the criticisms of the free world often seem to boil down to people having a problem that other people have preferences that they disagree with. So just prohibiting drugs for example we say well people want to do drugs that's a normal good and we should let them do that and there should be exceptional reasons to keep them from doing that. And other people have a problem that people have those preferences. Right. I just to piggyback on what Trevor said as you were saying that you said that this way of thinking doesn't require demanding moral assumptions and that it seems often the case that with libertarians there's a move from this way of thinking in this way of justifying libertarianism doesn't require that we have demanding moral assumptions about the way others behave to we should not have demanding moral assumptions about the way others behave. That so long as people are out there simply maximizing their preferences in a way that doesn't harm say the ability of other people the rights of other people to do the same. That's the end of morality and that there is something wrong there's in fact something wrong with judging the preferences of others with making moral judgments about behavior of others. Yeah you see this every so often when a libertarian asserts that you know well actually I prefer it if we not have you know so many people working in pornography or something like they make it clear that they actually have some fairly conservative values themselves. And then what you know they consider themselves policy wise a libertarian and then this blows up with people saying you know you're shaming people or you you're being paternalistic. Because I agree there's there tends to be this move from this model shows that everyone could be made better off on their own terms to the only terms that matter are people's own terms there are no. You know there's there's no moral ground to stand on other than the sovereignty of preferences. Well maybe that that does seem to be the case often but isn't that the purpose of a baseline such as the non-aggression principle that that there is a baseline for very non-aggression principle centered libertarianism. For example that if it's not hurting someone it's not that anything goes it's not nihilistic it's that if you want to do prostitution polygamy BDSM take drugs all these things they're all OK because they're not. Aggressing on anyone so that's the moral baseline everything above that baseline is allowed. Well I actually think the non-aggression principle is more in an alternative tradition than the utilitarian strain of libertarianism it's much more on the like the strain that you can trace back to Kant which is trying to find universal rules and things. I think it's often you know obviously like intellectual history is not like this sort of like silent thing where you know one group is Kantians and one group is utilitarians. I think that that what you said is correct that a lot of utilitarians look at how economics works out you know the economic model but then there are exceptions to it. So they want to say well here is one universal that will hold to above and beyond just your basic utilitarianism and if you put these two together then yes you do get you know everything that you would want. But the period utilitarian view would say something so this is why so non-aggression view would say this is why there shouldn't be a market and contract killing even though some people have preferences for killing because it violates rights but utilitarian say well that's not why it's because it produces less utility in the outcome so subtle difference there. Right. Taking to an absurd extreme I don't think anyone would actually argue this it would be well the market for contract killing would only be efficient if the person would be willing to pay less. People would be willing to pay less in general to not be have a hit on them then people would be willing to pay to have the hits in aggregate like in order to sort of categorically not allow it. But also obviously the model the Pareto model requires that all the exchanges are voluntary and obviously like having hit put on you is absolutely not voluntary. Isn't that just a negative externality of the two people who are contracting to kill you. Yeah pretty much. Okay so we've articulated I think a pretty decent picture of what utilitarianism is how it relates to economic thinking and how this all relates to libertarianism. So what's wrong with this picture. Why doesn't this work. Well to start with it I mean not to be you know paternalistic I guess but I do think that there are some preferences that are worth another person other preferences. I think that most economists would agree that racism is a bad thing. And the problem is that the Pareto model boils racism down tipping just another preference like you know whether you like Coke or Pepsi which seems problematic to me from a moral perspective. So that's that's one thing there are some preferences that are clearly bad or we do want to we'd want to have some basis for saying they're bad. Another thing is that it's not quite clear why we should accept this this particular standard of aggregation sort of jumping off the some preferences are good some are bad. We can agree that we want everyone to be able to feed their families we want everyone to be able to have a nice home. But do we have to agree that every single preference satisfaction even the ones that aren't obviously immoral like racism do we have to agree that they're all equal in terms of making people better off. Britney Spears just as good as Wagner Britney Spears as good as Wagner and Beethoven and that and that wanting to go and club seals is just as a valid of choices wanting to drink a fine single month scotch. Right well and actually not to bring up an issue that's sort of like a time bomb in a libertarian conversation but intellectual properties where you see this like breaks down which is. You know well it's gotten harder to enforce intellectual property so it would make sense that you would ratchet up enforcement of it. Because you know your basic law and economics model says well if you have a low probability of catching an offender then what you need to do is have a really severe punishment. When you do catch them because then that'll make the expected value of stealing or pirating much lower since even though there's a low probability of getting caught. You know when they catch you they'll cut off your hands or something and that's like such an awful thing to happen that maybe it's not worth the one in 1000 times chances that that's going to happen to download your favorite Britney Spears song. But on the other hand what is it exactly that we're struggling so hard to protect. It's that we were trying to encourage you know studios to invest in musicians and and films. But is that really so important that we need to give the government the right to seize all your assets the way that they did for mega upload for instance without going to trial. They basically destroyed a whole business without you know even having a trial but but the idea of a fair trial the idea that maybe music and movies aren't as important as making sure that people don't get trampled over. Making a choice there or the government's making a choice there. Exactly so trying to make that argument is very hard to do from a utilitarian point of view. You can do it but it seems to me not very easy not very straightforward. You could just as easily make the case that well basically if you were to make a utilitarian case especially a Pareto one. It would have to be completely contingent on this not maximizing revenue essentially you know not maximizing value for everyone. If you could make the case that seizing businesses assets without due process of law in copyright cases would increase the total amount of money in the economy the total amount of real resources in the economy. Then it seems to me that the Pareto case would have to argue that it is OK to do that you couldn't categorically say no that's wrong. So you mentioned the racism in terms of bad preferences. It's part of the two things you were saying is wrong with this regime and in your essay you tell you talk about a play called Raisin in the Sun. Which is I think a particularly evocative sense of what happens if you just sort of have a preference maximization regime regime. Right yeah this is my favorite example when I first learned of externalities. It was the very first thing I thought of. So to as background you know there's there's the guy who came up with the term externalities is AC Pagu and he essentially thought that the way that you internalize externalities is. You tax a negative externality by the amount of cost that it imposes so that that gets included in the price of what's being transacted. And you subsidize the positive externalities so that until the amount of benefit is captured by the producer so that we have the right quantity of these things being produced. Ronald Coase came along and said well it's not nearly as clear cut as that for one thing externalities can be are two sided in nature. It wouldn't be you know the the person who has the noisy machine wouldn't be creating an externality if you hadn't chosen to move right behind him. And in certain circumstances where transaction costs are low and property rights are well specified people can just voluntarily bargain with each other and internalize the externalities. So the person moving behind the the guy with the loud machinery can form a contract to pay him to stop. Or if he has the property right if he has the right to force him to stop the person with the machine can pay him to be allowed to continue and it all gets internalized. But in the raising in the sun example it seems to me that both solutions are problematic. So in a raising in the sun you have an African-American family who moves into a white suburban neighborhood where they do not like black people basically. And the pegoo approach would be well we should tax the African-Americans that want to move into white racist neighborhoods. And it seems to me that it is impossible from a pegoo point of view to avoid that conclusion because this isn't just I'm not just abstractly making the case that this is an externality. We know from history that when these African-American families would start moving into a neighborhood it would create white flight people would leave and prices would go down. So the externality was actually reflected in the prices of the houses at the time. This is a concrete empirical fact. There was basically thought of as pollution to use a horrible analogy but it made the property value go down. Yes. Right. And so from a pegoo point of view if there's no moral distinction between types of externalities then you have to tax the African-Americans that want to move into the white racist neighborhood. Just like taxing a polluter. Right. Exactly. In this model even in the Kosian version of it a cost is a cost is a cost and that's the strength of it. Right. The idea is you can make the math really easy in terms of talking in an aggregate way about the economy as a whole and well being as a whole. But the result of that is putting smoke into the air is equivalent to black people moving into a racist neighborhood. There's no resources in the theory itself for distinguishing between the two. And the amazing thing about a raising in the sun is there actually is a Kosian bargain in it. The neighborhood bands together and actually makes an offer jointly to the to the African-American family to buy them out basically to get them to leave. And you know Eric Crampton sort of critiques my piece and he said well isn't it better to at least make the racists have to pay up pay up versus pegoo which is extremely coercive. And I agree that's better but I don't think it's good. I don't think that's the world we want to live in in terms of not being able to actually categorically say this racism is bad these people's preferences are evil preferences. Right. It does seem typically we think of when things are bought and sold and when you pay for something it's kind of it's I mean it's getting rid of your debts quite literally right. And so the problem with saying well the racists should pay up and then it's OK and they've been kind of punished by buying out the person. Or this is similar I think to the argument that racism would go away say employers who refused to hire blacks would eventually stop doing that because they're going to lose out to employers who are willing to hire blacks and so have access to a larger labor pool. But this putting a price on things does seem to kind of put a stamp of it not necessarily moral approval but but at least like moral neutrality like well OK you've you've paid up and now you're free and clear but the racism remains. Right. So you know as we sort of became less prudish as a culture it became easier for people to say well I'm not really into bondage and say domesticism and prostitution and porn but if that's your bag you know that's your bag. But how the question is how far are you willing to pursue that. If you're if are you really willing to go down the road of you know well I don't really hate black people but if that's your bag then you know that's your bag. I'm not saying that we have to go and you know alternatively you know put people in prison for being racist or something extreme like that. What I'm saying is that this is a framework that by default creates a neutrality between racism as a preference and porn as a preference and going to church as a preference. And you know helping you know going and starting a charity and helping poor people as a preference. It's all just sort of well you pay what you're willing to pay and we just aggregate it in terms of your subjective valuation. So if the big problem with this utilitarianism and this maximizing preferences doesn't allow us to distinguish between the moral quality of different preferences. It doesn't allow us to judge individual preferences as right or wrong. Then what's the alternative. How would we ground a moral theory that would allow us to do these things that would say allow us to support a libertarian worldview or lead us to a libertarian worldview. But at the same time would enable us to judge the preference of racism as morally wrong and shame worthy no matter what the racist might be willing to pay to express it. But would not lead to effectively just a relativism of everyone kind of randomly judging each other's preferences. Or and also how do we avoid the totalitarian of preferences totalitarianism of preferences if we're going to have some of these incorporated in certain ways. I think that libertarians have an a historical tendency unfortunately as anyone coming to more philosophy fresh no doubt will will. There is a long history in the defense of liberty long before Pareto long before Bentham long before even David human Adam Smith. And it starts from the presumption that each of us is an intellectual and moral adult and should be treated as such capable of discerning for ourselves. What is good for ourselves and what is good for our loved ones and working that out among ourselves. That doesn't mean everyone's preferences and everyone's idea is equally right. It just means that we trust in one another to have the intellectual capacity and the moral compass to figure out and discover these things on our own. And there are other arguments as well especially against tyranny. There are obviously knowledge problems with with tyranny. Even even a tyrant even a benevolent tyrant doesn't necessarily know what's good for the far away people whose lives he can't see directly. Even if he has the best possible moral theory. But the bottom line is essentially my own grounding of liberty just draws it draws inspiration from Deutre McCloskey's work who spoke of the industrial revolution being kicked off by a dignifying of the common person and of the common person seeking to make a living through commerce. But also looks just at the wider world of the moral conversation throughout history and in life. I mean before most people come to economics they have certain moral presumptions and these come from the people in their lives up until that point. And the stories that they have heard and read and seen and the different icons that are held up people in American history we have icons held up like Martin Luther King. The bottom line I guess that I'm driving at is I don't think there is a reductive way to approach liberty. You can't have one formula reduced to math especially that's going to tell you exactly why we should have liberty and what the right sort of liberty is what the right policies are what the boundaries are. I prefer to use economics in what Joseph Heath calls sort of economics is critical theory which is it's a powerful tool we talked about how it does go a very long way to telling us how prices are formed. So we can use it as sort of a thought experiment to say well if we have this policy based on this model how will things work out. But then the conversation doesn't need to stop there. We can say even if the model says that's how where we should go is that going to you know trample on some people's dignity or are there going to be other you know as it's going to empower racist in some way. Essentially it has to be a thicker more morally rich conversation. Thank you for listening to Free Thoughts. If you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on Twitter at Free Thoughts Pod that's Free Thoughts POD. Free Thoughts is a project of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute and is produced by Evan Banks. To learn more about Libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.