The Ruminathans

For most of us, the way we communicate with each other is where we make our true moral choices.

Ink has been spilled, pixels coded, and stone tablets chiseled about the right and wrong of sending signals. Knowingly asserting falsehoods (aka lying) is usually frowned upon. Formulas of courtesy – please, thank you, how are you, have a nice day, etc. – are recommended.

Less has been said about the ethics of receiving. When it comes to my responsibilities as a receiver, I try to live by this rule:

Attribute to others the same motives that you wish others would attribute to you.

This is, of course, similar to the Golden Rule, as well as to the Principles of Charity and Humanity, but this formulation focuses on motives or “intentions” or whatever you prefer to call them.

It goes without saying that, a lot of the time when I assume the best motives in others, I will be fooling myself. And if I know that I am, why should I?

The first reason is humility: recognizing the limits of knowledge. It’s a simple fact I that we rarely know our own motivations. Nor can we figure out which of our many and conflicting motivations provoked us into action. If our own minds are opaque to us, how can we possibly read others’ minds? At the very least, we need to refrain from guessing at people’s motivations. But why not leave it at that? Why go a step beyond and attribute motivations we would endorse, the ones we consider right and proper?

When it comes to sending signals, we can convey truth or falsehood, or something in between. A falsehood can be slander, but it can also be a white lie, or just an empty nothing to signal friendship. On the flipside, a truth can convey helpful information but can also be wielded to belittle or sow discord. How we interpret the sender’s intentions determines how we judge their actions as right or wrong, and ultimately their character as nice/not nice, good/evil, friend/foe.

Foes are people from whom we have to protect ourselves. Self-defense is a motivation that permits actions normally considered unsavory. In the playing-field of the everyday, I’m not talking about actions like physical violence. I’m talking about the ordinary negotiations we call economics and politics. So we’re discourteous to cold-calling salespeople we believe are trying to sell us snake oil. We are cagey to people who we think are purposefully misleading us. We ignore and insult people whose political views we interpret as personal attacks. And of course, our reactions lead to spiraling communicative warfare and a breakdown of trust and civil discourse.

Hand-wringing about the disintegration of civil discourse is easy and trite. What can we do about it? My answer is the Golden Rule of Motivation. It sets a limit on what I will permit myself to say and do. If I recognize my counter-party’s motives as good, I cannot easily appeal to a need to defend myself, and therefore I limit the range of behaviors I permit myself. My charitable interpretation on the receiving end of communication interrupts the spiral of bad communicative behavior.

We don’t need to attribute good motives blindly. If someone tells me he means to harm me, I do him the courtesy of believing him. In fact, that’s actually an application of the principle: Taking what others tell us about their intentions at face value means to assume they have no desire to mislead us.

What does the Golden Rule of Motivation look like in real life? Here are some examples:

• When your favorite tree-hugger collects petitions to block further development in your neighborhood, don’t assume she’s mounted a high horse the better to look down on you. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. Assume it isn’t and that instead she’s trying to maintain local property values. See what conversations that opens up. 
• When your favorite abortion-opponent expresses his position, don’t attribute it to his desire to control women’s bodies. He may have such a desire, but he may not and instead genuinely believe that abortion is the taking of innocent life. So assume the latter, and observe how that shapes your interactions with him.
• When you read a blog whose author strikes you as an insufferable mansplainer, assume instead that he’s just a poor lonely soul desperately trying to find connection, any connection… Well, you get the idea.

Here’s a fun exercise: Read critical public opinion pieces closely and see how often arguments and criticisms are not framed in terms of what the critique’s target said or did, but in terms of motives attributed to her. Energy companies advertising their first steps towards sustainability are accused of greenwashing. Politicians are accused of seeking electoral advantage over pursuit of the public good. Activists are just attention-seekers.

The point isn’t that these judgments of motive are necessarily incorrect. The point is that we cannot know one way or another and that the target of the criticism my not know her own motives just as we rarely fully understand ours. In the face of this uncertainty, the way to pursue win-win solutions and the least awful win-lose solutions is to take a pragmatic leap of faith: Attribute to others the same motives that you wish others would attribute to you.

A lot of moral philosophy is focused on edge cases: where the everyday give-and-take between people has broken down. Classic examples are the Trolley problems or ticking time-bomb scenarios. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. You want to explore the limits of ethical theories just as it makes sense to start a puzzle at the corners and edges.

But I’m more interested in the banal stuff in the middle. The stuff we actually apply in marriage, family, and work. I’m interested in ways to navigate daily life, not only because that’s what I actually do – as opposed to interrogating terrorists – but because I think that’s the useful model for what we do in larger communities that are at peace, when the basic rules of engagement are in place and generally accepted. In politics and in economics, in other words.

Conflict erupts in everyday situations all the time, but we don’t immediately resort to violence to sort it out. We try to find win-win solutions where all parties are happy with the outcome. That’s economics. When we can’t find win-win solutions we sort out who wins and who loses using a pre-defined set of rules. That’s politics.

Finding win-win solutions, finding the least awful win-lose solution… that happens through negotiation. Through communication. So the everyday playing field of right and wrong, good and evil, is how we converse with each other.

The ethics of negotiation is an ongoing preoccupation of mine: I aim to talk about it, but just as much to practice it in how I write. A blog, like any published writing, is part of our social negotiation.

Obviously, there are more ways to communicate than speaking, writing, and body language. Our actions also send signals. But right and wrong behavior is not just about what signals we choose to send and how we choose to send them. It is also about how we choose to receive them. An upcoming post will be about our responsibilities on the receiving end.

Economics is about values, and values are about economics. 

When I say I value something, I mean that it is important to me, more important than something else. When faced with a choice I would choose the valued thing over some other thing. That is equally true of pizzas and ideas. When I’m hungry, I part with a few slips of green paper to get a pizza: the pizza is more valuable to me than the green paper. If I say “I live for my family” that means that, given the opportunity of a high-powered job in a different city, I would turn it down if I believed it would disrupt my family life. 

Economics is the systematic study of what people value: An economist observes the tradeoffs people make and concludes something about what they value, individually or in aggregate. 

But economists don’t just observe from an external, privileged vantage point, like a biologist observing what goes on in a Petri dish. And not only because economists are economic actors themselves. We learn what is valuable from each other. We influence each other’s values. The more aware we are of what tradeoffs other people are making the more we shape our own choices accordingly, whether to conform to social expectations or to rebel against them. As the economist reports out her findings to the world she shapes the world she observes.  

This is all the more true when it comes to the values that govern our choices about the rules of the game, the game of exchanging and sharing resources with each other to achieve our goals. Economists observe the game and its rules, but their observations influence how we perceive the game and what values we bring to it. That reshapes the game.

When economists build a model on the assumption that more of something is always better – that having six scoops of ice cream is always better than having just five, even if only marginally so – then that assumption creeps into our belief system through a thousand different channels. University professors pass that idea on to their students, who become teachers, journalists, legislative aides, parents, who pass that simple idea on in turn. The self-reinforcing loop embeds the idea deeply in our culture. Then behavioral economists can go out into the field and survey what people believe and find confirmation for the model they learned in Econ 101.

Never mind that the eight scoop makes you vomit and the 13th can put you off ice cream for a lifetime.

Do economists make markets? Yes, they do. And their observations shape the values they observe. Economics is world of irony and self-fulfilling prophecy. 

---

“Capitalism” is shorthand for a whole cluster of ideas about how to organize our economic relations. The free market is one of those ideas. But what puts the “capital” in capitalism? What does it mean to own something called capital and why is earning a capital return right and proper? Or bluntly:

Why is it possible to earn money simply by having more than you need in the first place? 

Capitalism’s detractors and its defenders have yet to come up with an answer that I find convincing. I want a clear answer before committing to capitalism as the solution framework for the 21st century’s problems, or kicking it to the curb. 

We’ve hit a global impasse as we muddle through a host of issues, from inequality to the tension between economic development and environmental preservation. These disagreements – not to mention the toxicity with which we express them – have many causes. But one of the biggest problems is that we’re talking past each other. Whether we’re fans or haters of the capitalist status quo, none of us really understands it.  

This blog is for all those who share my desire to understand.