Money and Morality: A Matter of Misinterpretation.

• Author: Husi, Stan
• Position: Viewpoint essay

This essay advances an analogy in defense of a social account of the nature of morality. Competing metaethical accounts importantly direct our explanatory focus in different directions. Some look toward Plato's heaven; some toward homeostatic clusters controlling moral talk; some toward mental plans expressed in language. The account I defend directs the focus toward social systems of normative governance and regulation (Gibbard 1990, 100). It maintains that morality is a social practice, (1) a complex system of interlocking norms and attitudes in the form of implicit or explicit agreements and reciprocal concessions, expectations we are holding each other to (Wallace 1994), sustained by social pressure, various economies of reactive attitudes, interpersonal sentiments, and esteem (Brennan and Pettit 2004), a system, moreover, with a history, subject to continual evolution and adjustment, being the way it is because it got that way. (2) Call this account "the social thesis." The social thesis enters the contest for explanatory illumination with its competitors, especially various forms of moral realism, aspiring to answer the traditional set of distinctively metaethical questions, not just the questions of traditional sociology, which often have a different explanatory focus. In this contest, the thesis enjoys a key advantage. There are lots of social practices. If morality is a social practice like others in some respects, there should be some other practices morality is like in some respects. And should we already understand those other practices comparatively well, we might be able to carry over some of this understanding to a social practice account of morality.

The reason why it is profitable to compare money and morality in particular is naturally the subject of the endre essay, to fully emerge only at its conclusion. Yet just glancing at the common use of language, there's already much to invite the comparison. Herbert Hart was not alone in finding "the similar notion of a debt latent in the word 'duty'" (1994, 87). As John Stuart Mill famously remarked, "[D]uty is a thing which may be exacted from a person, as one exacts a debt" (2002, 285). In addition to moral debts and financial debts, there are moral obligation and financial obligation; what we owe to each other may be specified in moral terms or financial terms. Kurt Baier speaks of accumulating "a moral debit or credit account" (1958, 204). This is by no means a peculiarity of English. The German term Schuldeve n more immediately denotes both debt and guilt. (3) "In all Indo-European languages," the sociologist Geoffrey Ingham observes, "words for 'debt' are synonymous with those for 'sin' or 'guilt'" (2004, 90). The list could go on. These analogies are not merely linguistic quirks but traces of a common heritage, as documented by a considerable body of historical scholarship (Graeber 2011).

The chief reason for the comparison is strategic, however, and not difficult to state in outline. Money's social ontology is readily acknowledged. (4) Morality's is not. The social thesis encounters grave reservations. Its call for a social research program in metaethics encounters little enthusiasm. Many philosophers remain deeply pessimistic about the program's explanatory potential. To boost confidence in that potential, it helps to demonstrate how many structurally similar reservations fall flat when applied to uncontroversially social practices such as money. If so, it cannot be the social element in social accounts of morality that sustains these reservations, or so the argument of this essay goes. The aim of my argument, therefore, is to provide license for optimism about the prospects of a social research program in ethics and metaethics.

The essay addresses one such fundamental reservation. Morality certainly does not appear social in nature. The origin and status of its prescriptions seem to be of an altogether different character, more robust, less contingent, eternal and immutable, part of the fundamental fabric of reality. This reservation proceeds primarily at the level of appearance or conception, not necessarily reality, because it does not involve the claim yet that this conception has a counterpart in the world. In its most pointed form, the reservation holds that the conception of morality permits only two possibilities, be they realized or not. Either morality exists as a nonsocial phenomenon, or there merely exists a social phenomenon, but morality does not exist. What the very conception of morality supposedly precludes is that morality exists as a social phenomenon. This allegedly third "option" would be as misconceived as the "option" of a scientifically respectable account of miracles. The reservation generalizes to all social accounts of morality, a concern Will Kymlicka pressed against the Hobbesian version in particular as representing "not so much an alternative account of morality as an alternative to morality" (1991, 190). This reservation is most forcefully pressed by those carrying the banner of moral realism, making a big fuss about some stance-independent order of moral truth, charging the social thesis to be entirely off target. Such philosophers will grant that there's morality in the sense of some totality of attitudes, practices, and beliefs, perhaps more aptly called "morals," "positive morality," or "social moral code," but then they claim that this "sociological" phenomenon is surely distinct from the real thing, the true morality. Conceptually, the underlying distinction is duly noted, conjuring up a duality of two distinct phenomena--one supposedly real, another merely social. Such conceptual dualities abound in philosophy. Substantively, the distinction is rejected. The real thing is the social thing.

This essay demonstrates how a similar situation may arise even for a prototypical social practice such as money and thus how systematic misinterpretations that miss the social element in social practices are fully compatible with their social nature. Prior to this argument, I provide a rough outline of the social thesis in the next section and then advance some pertinent observations about money.

The Social Thesis

The social thesis advances a ballpark position with broad ontological, metaethical, methodological, and substantive aspects, having roots in several philosophical traditions. It is foreshadowed by Glaucon in Plato's Republic when he describes a compact that people who are unable to escape injustice, find it profitable to set down, neither to do injustice nor suffer it (Plato 1968, 36-37), thus animating the subsequent social contract tradition from Thomas Hobbes ([1651] 1994) to David Gauthier (1986). The thesis is advanced by leaps and bounds through the British sentimentalist tradition, from David Hume's account of justice as an "artifice or contrivance" arising from "the circumstances and necessities of mankind" ([1751] 2000, 307) and Adam Smith's emphasis on the "concord of the affections" mediated through sympathy as critical for the "harmony of society" ([1759] 2002, 27) to Peter Strawson's restoration of attention to how the "general structure or web of human attitudes" forms "an essential part of moral life" (2008, 24-25). The thesis has affinities with relativism, (5) conventionalism, and, most closely, constructivism in contemporary metaethics, though such labels must be handled with great care, as I argue at the conclusion of this section. Outside philosophy, the thesis informs much of the research of the historical and institutional tradition in economics and other social sciences. (6)

The social thesis finds a beautiful expression in a passage from the late Friedrich Hayek:

While our moral traditions cannot be constructed, justified or demonstrated in the way demanded [by rationalist theories of ethics], their processes of formation can be partially reconstructed, and in doing so we can to some degree understand the needs that they serve. To the extent we succeed in this, we are indeed called upon to improve and revise our moral traditions by remedying recognizable defects by piecemeal improvement based on immanent criticism, that is, by analyzing the compatibility and consistency of their parts, and tinkering with the system accordingly.... What is needed as a preliminary for such analyses includes what is sometimes called a "rational reconstruction" ... of how the system might have come into being. This is in effect an historical, even natural-historical, investigation, not an attempt to construct, justify, or demonstrate the system itself. It would resemble what followers of Hume used to call "conjectural history," which tried to make intelligible why some rules rather than others had prevailed. (1988, 69) As a matter of ontology, the social thesis combines a positive component and a negative component: morality is a social practice, and there are no practice-external points of normative orientation. (7) Normative pressure can always build from within, but never from without, the social system of norms and attitudes that constitutes morality. To speak with Hayek, the social thesis insists criticism must be immanent, for there is no normative without, and there is no view from nowhere, as in the dichotomy famously pioneered by Thomas Nagel (1986). No standards external to our social practices exist that could render final judgment on them. (8) As Peter Strawson writes, "Inside the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings of which I have been speaking, there is endless room for modification, redirection, criticism, and justification. But questions of justification are internal to the structure or relate to modifications internal to it. The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external 'rational' justification" (2008, 25).

Nagel, who...