Benjamin Geer on Wed, 9 Mar 2005 05:07:57 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Ethics and Social Transformation (part 2) |
(continued from previous post) Proportional Influence ---------------------- What does it mean to be considered a legitimate partner in a political process? It means that your voice carries weight. How much weight? Let's consider these examples given by Michael Albert: Imagine a worker in a large group. He or she wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The one worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case. Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk, and to play it very loud, listening to raucous rock and roll or even heavy metal. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered -- or more benefited -- should have more say. And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-=E0-vis decision making.... What we hope to accomplish when we choose a mode of decision making as well as associated processes of discussion, agenda setting, and so on, is that each actor should have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by them.[20] Let us call this the doctrine of 'proportional influence'. Albert's examples concern highly localised issues. It is worth considering the implications of this doctrine for large-scale problems as well, such as environmental degradation. There is widespread agreement among scientists that if the present worldwide use of fossil fuels is not drastically reduced, the resulting climate change will ruin the environment in which many people live. This is the view expressed by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries.... Warming of a few degrees or more is projected to increase food prices globally, and may increase the risk of hunger in vulnerable populations.... Climate change will exacerbate water shortages in many water-scarce areas of the world... The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water, and other resources.[21] Proportional influence means that those who will be most severely affected -- the poorest, particularly in the regions that stand to be the hardest hit -- should have the greatest influence over the world's use or abandonment of fossil fuels. What sort of decision-making processes are capable of implementing this doctrine? More will be said about this in a future version of this essay, but here I want to point out a few considerations that the construction of any such processes must take into account. I have already mentioned one constraint on decision-making in large groups: the greater the number of participants in a discussion, the longer it takes. Moreover, large meetings where individuals can speak one after the other often resemble a series of unrelated monologues, rather than a discussion progressing towards a collective decision. Decision-making processes for large numbers of people must therefore use heuristics to identify the main points of agreement and disagreement, and craft proposals that are likely to be acceptable to all. Attempts to do this often take the form of some type of delegation. What sorts of delegation are up to the task? Making decisions to promote other people's well-being requires knowing their needs and having the will to champion those needs. This is a risky endeavour at best. Anyone who has tried to make difficult decisions on behalf of a spouse, family member or close friend knows that, even with the best of intentions, it is easy to make mistakes. If making decisions for someone you know well is difficult, making decisions for thousands or millions of complete strangers is an enterprise bordering on madness. But when applied to parliamentary democracy, such a critique is too kind, because it presumes a world in which political candidates are motivated by the best of intentions. In reality, parliaments are an ideal instrument for consolidating the power of a particular class: ...that characteristic bourgeois political system we know as parliamentary democracy [is] the style of regime with which all ambitious, prosperous, and self-confident bourgeoisies feel most comfortable, precisely because it maximizes their power and minimizes that of their competitors.... Money is crucial for sustained electoral success, and money is precisely the resource with which the bourgeoisie is most amply endowed. On the other hand, the prestige of electoral politics, if it can be solidly entrenched, serves to delegitimize extra-parliamentary political activity--especially strikes, demonstrations, and popular movements, which the bourgeoisie is less likely to be able to control and may, on occasion, profoundly fear.[22] Another, more general failing of delegation is worth mentioning. Delegation tends to give priority to problems that affect many people. This is a reasonable heuristic, because many serious problems are like that. But when delegation is used, there must also be ways for small numbers of people with serious problems, and even for individuals, to _escalate_ their issue, bypassing the normal decision-making processes, in order to get society to spend more than the usual amount of resources on examining the problem, determining its gravity, and solving it. A challenge for designers of decision-making systems is to make escalation fair, so that it remains exceptional and excludes frivolous complaints, while responding quickly and effectively to serious ones. In existing forms of government, escalation is typically implemented by judicial systems. But such systems have serious inherent limitations. Courtroom discussions are limited to a small number of participants; a trial is not a broad popular consultation, capable of meeting the requirements for proportional influence. Moreover, judicial power is dependent on the military and political power of the state, which is in turn based on economic power. Returning to the environmental example, in a world in which fossil fuels are one of the main sources of that economic power, no judicial system can produce a ban on fossil fuels. Rather, fossil fuels must be abolished by replacing the economic processes that depend on them, from below rather than from above. Judicial processes are therefore better suited to resolving local problems by making small exceptions to standard practice than to solving large-scale problems by introducing sweeping and innovative reforms. If proportional influence can be implemented on a large scale, it appears to offer a solution to the problem of expensive tastes. If people have the power to obstruct important decisions when they feel their needs have not been met, there are two possible political outcomes: compromise and paralysis. In such situations, survival depends on compromise; that should be a strong incentive. Cooperative Economic Management ------------------------------- What sorts of economic arrangements would enable societies to attain the goal of well-being for all? Within any group of people, standards for well-being will include a constellation of requirements, many of them involving work and the availability of goods and services. How can those requirements be translated into economic processes? There is no single answer: different groups of people, in different times and places, will have different priorities and will be faced with different circumstances. However, I think we can imagine some elements that most answers to this question would probably contain. To satisfy needs, we must use resources, such as land and labour. We will therefore need to set about matching resources to needs. Many resources are scarce. When considering how best to use scarce resources, one must set priorities. A group could begin by attempting first to devise an economic strategy that would meet its highest-priority needs. If such a strategy is found and sufficient resources remain, lower-priority needs can be accommodated in turn. How can priorities be set among different needs? The urgency of well-being can serve as a guide: it will be most important to meet needs that will improve the quality of life of those who are worst off, or protect the well-being of those who are most at risk. The goal of a political system based on proportional influence is indeed to enable those groups of people to have the greatest say in setting society's priorities. To assess the risks and possible adverse effects of a proposed economic strategy, one can examine its inputs and outputs (what is produced and where it goes, what is consumed and where it comes from), and examine the dependencies that these inputs and outputs would create. Some dependencies can be rejected as too risky; others can be rejected as incompatible with the group's own well-being or with that of others. For example, every economic strategy depends on environmental resources. It is self-defeating to depend on the depletion of scarce resources, or to damage aspects of the environment on which well-being depends. Human dependencies include relationships between producers and consumers. A region whose economy depends on the export of a single commodity will find its well-being in danger if the demand for that commodity decreases; this risk may be deemed excessive. As needs and circumstances change, economic processes will have to change to accommodate them. Change introduces risk. One way to reduce the risk of change is to begin with a prototype on a small scale. In addition to testing whether a new process actually works, a prototype can help identify unforeseen dependencies that the process involves. We can broadly imagine a process of periodic collective deliberation in which a people living in a political unit would consider the needs to be met and the available resources, and design a strategy that, in their view, would meet those needs without introducing unacceptable dependencies, using the sort of political system hinted at in the previous section. Participatory Economics[23] is one proposal for such a process. Strategies for Social Transformation ------------------------------------ Certain kinds of strategies for social transformation follow from the preceding discussion. Real strategies, of course, are rooted not only in ethical principles, but also in concrete circumstances, in the histories and opportunities of particular times and places. It is possible, however, to indicate a few ways in which this particular ethical approach can guide strategy. Proportional influence would require political systems very different from nearly all those in existence today. Such systems would need to be invented and tested, and a body of knowledge would need to be developed about their use. I have briefly mentioned the value of a transitional period; now I can better explain what I mean by this. During this period, productive transitional organisations could be created to meet high-priority needs such as food and shelter; these organisations would use, as much as possible, political and economic processes that a transformed society could be based on. The experience of participating in these organisations would enable people to imagine more clearly what life would be like in a transformed society, and what their needs would be in such a society. These organisations would also function as prototypes, to reduce the risk of bringing about a failed social transformation. Inevitably, different organisations would adopt different approaches (e.g. different decision-making processes), and could therefore learn from each other's successes and failures. Transitional organisations would not be able to fully implement proportional influence, which would allow everyone affected by them to have power over them, because this would require the creation of a political system capable of including the entire society, and such a system cannot exist until a large-scale social transformation has taken place. Therefore, in their relations with the rest of society, transitional organisations would need a strategy of heuristics, aimed at approximating as closely as possible the results that they would be able to obtain from true proportional influence. At the outset, transitional organisations would depend heavily on the capitalist economy; this dependency would be a risk (as it is for most of us who depend on that economy). Over time, they would have to decrease this dependency by increasing and diversifying their own productive capacities, so that they could depend more on each other. As a result of this process, society would come to depend increasingly on the these organisations, and less and less on the pre-transitional structures, until the old structures could be abandoned entirely. A Critique of Human Rights -------------------------- It is worth comparing an ethics of well-being with another sort of ethics that is widely accepted: the ethics of human rights. Rights have a clear role to play in contracts. If you and I agree to an exchange of goods, and I don't honour my end of the bargain even though it is well within my ability to do so, you have a legitimate grievance, and would expect a fair judicial system to grant you some sort of remedy. Human rights describe expectations that far exceed this limited sphere of application. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights[24] adopted by the United Nations begins by saying that 'human rights should be protected by the rule of law'. However, it lists many rights that cannot be enforced in this way. For example: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit. Suppose that I do not have access to a reasonable standard of living, or to education, and that I therefore conclude that my rights have been violated. To what judicial body should I bring my grievance? The courts of national judicial systems judge violations of the law, and no law has been broken in this case. Even supposing some national or international court were competent to hear the case, and ruled in my favour, what remedy could they propose? If my country has no public education or health care system, a court ruling will not suffice to create one. It is not obvious what form such a system should take; the Declaration does not, and could not, spell this out in detail. Any such system will inevitably affect many people besides me; they should also have a say in its design. In other words, the creation of public services is a legislative responsibility, not a judicial one. The fulfilment of that responsibility requires a political system that is accountable to all citizens. But if my country had such a political system, citizens would already be able to create the public services they need, and there would be no need to speak of human rights. If there were any doubt that human rights are not the sorts of rights that can be protected by a judicial system, the Declaration adds: Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized. No court could ever be capable of imposing a new social and international order on the world; therefore, such a right cannot be 'protected by the rule of law'. Instead, social transformation will be needed; new political and economic institutions will have to be created. But the concept of rights does not help us to envisage those institutions, still less a transformation that could bring them about. The basic problem is that the concept of rights makes sense only in the context of a judicial process, but the aspirations expressed as human rights cannot possibly be satisfied by any such process. Therefore it seems to me that the concept of a human right is incoherent. The Universal Declaration lists some rights that are very vague: Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. Others are very specific: No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed. We may therefore ask: why were these rights chosen, and not others? This question is especially pertinent since the Declaration purports to enumerate _universal_ rights. On what grounds should we accept these rights as universal? From what do they derive their legitimacy? The Declaration offers no answer to this question. But there is a deeper problem with the claim to universality. Consider the right concerning motherhood and childhood. The human need it refers to may well be universal, but it is described so vaguely that it is impossible to know what it might mean in practice. One could certainly imagine a society that, by means of a suitably devious interpretation of the words 'care' and 'assistance', conformed to this principle by implementing processes that would horrify the mothers and children affected. However, any attempt to make it more specific would risk sacrificing its universality. In different societies, mothers and children will have different ideas about exactly what sort of care and assistance they should receive. In order to get round this problem, we could propose reducing all human rights to a single one, the right to well-being, and leave the definition of well-being up to the people affected. Then, for example, mothers and children could decide for themselves what sort of special care and assistance they require. But then the goal of well-being would be doing all the work; it's not clear what, if anything, the concept of rights would be contributing. Since a human right does not give mothers and children any means of ensuring that their needs are met, their success in reaching that goal will depend on their political power alone. I will mention a final problem with rights: why should anyone care about them at all? Consider this one: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. If I agree that no one should be subjected to torture (as I do), it is surely because I believe that everyone's well-being matters and should always be protected. But in that case, I don't need to be told that torture is wrong. Conversely, if I don't care about people's well-being, why should I care about their rights? In short, human rights are inherently unenforceable and therefore incoherent. Unlike the concept of well-being, they do not help us formulate a strategy for reaching the objectives they describe. Their attempt to be universal forces them to be too vague to provide any practical guidance. And they seem to presume a concern for well-being, without adding anything useful to that concern. It may be that this is, in fact, what human rights are intended to do: express a concern for well-being in a manner that is bound to be ineffective. An effective concern would require the transformation of the existing political and economic order, which most governments are at pains to protect. I am sure that many well-intentioned people believe that caring about well-being and caring about human rights are the same thing; I hope this essay will give them reason to reconsider. Notes ----- 1. P. F. Strawson, 'Freedom and Resentment' (1962), in _Freedom and Resentment_, London: Methuen, 1974. 2. Antonio Gramsci, _Quaderni del carcere_ 10, II, =A731. 3. For a parody of this state of affairs, see 'Tissues in the Profession: Can Bad Men Make Good Brains Do Bad Things?' (http://www.mindspring.com/~mfpatton/Tissues.htm) 4. Theodor Adorno, _Minima Moralia_. London: Verso, 1974, p. 156. 5. Mikayo Yamashita et al., 'The structure of _yutori_ and its functions', _Japanese Psychological Research_, 2001, vol. 43, No. 4, pp. 225-34. 6. Ludwig Wittgenstein, _Philosophical Investigations_, =A71. 7. Immanuel Kant, _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_ (1785), tr. Allen Wood. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002, Ak 4:429. 8. Ibid., Ak 4:428. 9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'A Lecture on Ethics', 1965, _The Philosophical Review_ 74: 3-12. 10. J=FCrgen Habermas, _Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action_ (1983). Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990, p. 67. 11. Anna Wierzbicka, _Semantics, Culture, and Cognition_ (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 183. 12. Ibid., p. 200. 13. Ibid., p. 198. 14. Slavoj Zizek, _The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology_ (London, New York: Verso, 1999), p. 188. 15. Elizabeth S. Anderson, 'What Is the Point of Equality?', _Ethics_ 109, no. 2 (January 1999). 16. Karl Marx, _Capital_, vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), pp. 163-77. 17. Louis Althusser, _Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays_, Monthly Review Press (1971). 18. Karl Polanyi, _The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time_ (1944). Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, pp. 49-50. 19. Ibid., p. 51. 20. http://www.zmag.org/alblacpe.htm 21. Robert T. Watson (ed.), _Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report_ (Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 9-12. 22. Benedict Anderson, _The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World_. London: Verso, 1998, pp. 182-184. 23. http://www.parecon.org 24. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html -- end -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net