In this post, I give some limited reasons to think that classical liberals have to integrate a positive and normative conception of duty into an analysis of how to solve coordination problems, based on some conversations I had with economists at GMU.

A few months, I gave a talk at George Mason on the possibility of synthesizing the public reason project in political philosophy initiated by John Rawls and the public choice project in economics. I made two compound claims:

(1a) Rawlsian public reason is indeterminate at the level of principles of justice. Given reasonable pluralism about justice, we must shifting public justification to the justification of constitutional rules rather than principles of justice.

(1b) Buchanan, among others, can help by outlining a contractarian method of selecting constitutional rules.

And then:

(2a) Buchananite contractarianism is an unattractive political philosophical position because it only tells us which rules suitably idealized persons have instrumental reason to endorse, not which rules they have sufficient practical reason to endorse in general.

(2b) But if we thicken Buchanan’s Hobbesian conception of practical reason into a more Kantian form, we can create a more plausible justificatory framework for identifying valid constitutional rules. That’s what Rawlsian public reason provides.

Synthesizing the later Rawls and the later Buchanan, I argue, can solve problems for both of their research programs. After the religion book, my next big project is to work out a philosophical encounter between the later Rawls and the later Buchanan. If you want to read a rough, rough draft of my first paper in this project, you can email me privately. I’m open to comments.

Of course, the GMU audience had no problem with my criticisms of Rawls and resisted my criticisms of Buchanan. People wondered what’s wrong with a purely instrumentalist contract. They also thought it would be pretty cool if we could determine a set of rules that each person in fact had instrumental reason to endorse, my Kantian scruples aside.

Here’s the problem. Many moral philosophers (including me) think a purely instrumental agreement is seriously deficient from a moral point of view. For one thing, instrumentally rational agreements might be subject to gross inequalities of wealth, and worse, inequalities of bargaining power. It might be instrumentally rational, for instance, for a drowning man to give up all of his money to the only person in a position to rescue him. But we think such an agreement would be unjust because the rescuer is exploiting the man who needs rescuing. The result is that instrumentalist contracts are not properly normative. They don’t give us the right reasons to comply with social and political rules.

The GMU audience, in particular Pete Boettke and Pete Leeson (Coordination Problem) were unimpressed. Pete and Pete insisted that they’re interested in which rules work to make us all better off here and now. My concerns, in contrast, were more abstract and philosophical. The deep difference is that I’m interested in a social contract that can explain which political duties we have to abide by the rules. They’re interested in something more concrete, namely a social contract that can help us coordinate. Philosophers are focused on duty, I was told; economists are concerned with coordination. These are different questions.

I’d like to outline a relation between duty and coordination that I think, in retrospect, might get economists like Boettke and Leeson to care about moral duties in determining which constitutional rules to adopt.

(I) Providing Sufficient Motivation for Coordination – lots of people, if not the vast majority of people, have some desire just to do their duty. In other words, they are driven to do the right thing even when it frustrates their self-interest. Of course, people violate what they think their duties are all the time. But we know that in general people want to comply with genuinely moral rules, insofar as they have an adequate grasp of which rules require their compliance. If so, then to achieve coordination, we need to provide people with reason to think that compliance with certain constitutional rules is compatible with their moral convictions. Offering them an instrumentally rational arrangement won’t be enough to get coordination in the first place in many cases where moral duty and individual benefit conflict (this is part of the upshot of Chapter 2 of Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason).

(II) Explaining Why Coordination Matters – One reason to be concerned with how humans coordinate and cooperate is that we want to make others better off. In other words, we care about coordination not just out of scientific interest but also because of our humanitarian interests. Consequently, a commitment to understanding institutions is based not merely on the fact that we feel like making people better off but because in some way we see ourselves as morally required to make others better off, or at least not to make them worse off.

But if this is so, then one of our most vital interests in studying coordination is a concern about doing our duty. Now many economists are inclined to cash out their duties to aid or duties to refrain from harm purely in terms of consequentialism. But if you think consequentialism is problematic because there’s no constraint on, say, sacrificing the few for the many, you might look to contractarianism. And if so, you might think we need a political theory that not only identifies rules that help us to coordinate but that identifies rules that we’re duty-bound to follow.

(III) Distinguishing Coordination from Exploitation – I think that there’s a “folk economist” view that we can distinguish cases of coordination and cases of exploitation purely descriptively. In other words, we need not appeal to any moral theory to determine when a given interaction is exploitative and when it is cooperative. But I’m not sure that’s true. The only way to distinguish between exchange and extortion is with a theory that tells us what people genuinely own. And that ultimately requires a theory of duty (if I legitimately own X, then others have a duty not to interfere with my usage of X). So an account of duty is required to even make sense of the idea of cooperation as opposed to exploitation and oppression.

So for all these reasons I think it won’t do just to focus on coordinating contracts and ignore questions of duty. That’s my (months late) answer to Boettke and Leeson.