Secrets of Metaethics

SECRETS OF METAETHICS Dmitry A. Chernikov Published by Dmitry Chernikov Creative Commons Attribution © 2021 You are free to: Share – copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. Adapt – remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Under the following terms: Attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions – You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. O Duty, Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie? … Why art thou so different from Venus And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us? – Ogden Nash, “Kind of an Ode to Duty” Within Good and Evil 1 1. Introduction In the 1955 Disney cartoon Beezy Bear, the title character Humphrey the Bear is sneakily trying to steal honey from beekeeper Donald Duck. In order to escape from the bees and to avoid detection from park ranger Wood- lore, Humphrey jumps into nearby ponds. Upon at one point observing Humphrey in a pond who immediately begins to make body-washing gestures, Woodlore says to him, “You take too many baths!” I found this an astonishing statement which is why I have remembered the cartoon. What does it mean, “too many” baths? Too many from whose point of view? Why too many and not too few? What’s the criteria for just the right number of baths? From what authority does Woodlore admonish Humphrey? Who decides, or ought to, how many baths are enough? In one sense, surely, one’s bathing preferences are beyond criticism. We have a case of a subjective and arbitrary desire, something that causes pleasure or more formally is a source of utility. Taking a bath is an economic good or as we will call it to distinguish it from other kinds of goods, a physical good. For such goods, there is no accounting for taste. In choosing how many baths to take there is no objectively right or wrong answer. Nor is the choice absolute for all men – or bears as the case may be: each person’s choice will suit him uniquely. Physical goods are by their essence relative. Humphrey’s bathing activities can be impugned to the extent that they are incorrect means to Humphrey’s own ends. If our bear just wants to be clean, and an extra bath will not make him any cleaner, then we have a reason for advising Humphrey to chill. Taking a bath is presumably somewhat costly; it’s an exertion justified by some expected benefits. If the benefits are zero, then from the Humphrey’s own point of view, taking another bath will result in a psychic loss, and he ought not to do it. The chain of means can be longer: for example, perhaps bathing is pointless if one lives in the woods, since a wild animal will get dirty very quickly. Again it might be that the costs exceed the benefits and make an action unprofitable. In general, however, Woodlore is out of line to disparage Humphrey’s hygiene predilections. In the actual world, there is the difficult problem that individual interests conflict, and physical goods, including both consumer goods and factors of production, are both scarce and rivalrous. Scarcity means that goods do not already exist in some Marxian state of limitless abundance and must be produced; rivalrous consumption means that once a good has been produced, it must be economized, and one can’t normally both have his cake and eat it, too. DmitryChernikov.com Introduction 2 There must be some way to harmonize our projects. The free market is a living process through which the actions of bil- lions of individuals are coordinated, and people’s preferences are satisfied in- creasingly well with time. Its crucial feature is consumer sovereignty: entrepreneurs compete with and seek to outdo each other at satisfying consumer desires. Physical value judgments are then the domain of the buying public. Any consumer is free to buy whatever he wants, to change his tastes, to spurn a product or develop a loyalty to it. But the market “should” be fully responsive to these desires. It should manufacture whatever is being demanded, whether toys for kids, hard liquor for adults who beat their kids, or atomic bombs that vaporize kids. It’s not the job of business to play favorites or to judge which consumer desires are “virtuous” and ought to be satisfied and which are “vi- cious” and ought to be despised. The ideal entrepreneur is value-free, though in a different sense than an ideal economist. He satisfies 1st-order desires or increases narrow happiness and “should” abstain from all judgments of his customers’ characters. He should always ask his customer simply, “What’s your poison?” and promptly deliver the poison to him, not shower him with con- tempt for his choice of a pleasure and refuse service. Everyone’s money is exactly like everyone else’s, green and valuable. It’s “irrational” to discriminate. Moreover, Smith must think pretty badly of Jones if he goes so far as to decline Jones’ money for an ordinary everyday product of Smith’s company. I can un- derstand if Jones would feel like an outcast or loser after such treatment. To see the ultimate power of the consumers, consider the occasional unrest among workers in various fast food joints across the U.S. CNN once reported that “the workers announced the protests outside a McDonald’s in New York City, and delivered a letter that called on the fast food giant to raise wages and respect workers’ rights worldwide.” Such proletarian nonsense surely deserves a sharp rebuke. In the first place, obviously, these workers su- ing for higher wages do not have to work at McDonald’s. They can quit and try to get jobs elsewhere. The very fact that they hold on to their jobs and are not eager to become unemployed indicates that they value them. It is not McDon- ald’s that these unruly workers should blame but the rest of society, that is, other entrepreneurs who are unwilling to offer them more money for their meager skills. If there were such entrepreneurs, then in the process of competing with McDonald’s for labor, they’d bid up the wages and force McDonald’s to raise wages in its own turn, via straightforward market forces, in order to hold on to those workers who would otherwise be leaving in droves to work for those competitors. If McDonald’s couldn’t offer higher wages in that situation, then it’d have to shrink its operations. But why can’t those other businesses offer DmitryChernikov.com Within Good and Evil 3 them higher pay? Because the consumers do not let them. They can’t “pass the costs” to the consumers; if they raise their prices, then the consumers will, according to the current realities of the marketplace, quit patronizing them and go elsewhere. Any deviation from the will of the consumers is destructive for a business. Again, McDonald’s is paying them, say, $10 / hour but not $15. But I, for example, am not paying them anything at all! Why are these “workers” upset at McDonald’s and not at me? Why aren’t they upset at each other for competing with each other and in the process bidding down wages? Let’s or- ganize gladiatorial battles between them to the death in order to cull the herd and raise wages among the survivors! CNN goes on: “Workers from fast food giants… have been walking off their jobs, calling on employers to pay them a minimum wage of $15 an hour and allow them to form unions without retali- ation.” As a consumer, I am king. I decide, even if indirectly, what gets produced, how much, in what quality, by whom, etc. How dare these peons mur- mur against my sovereignty and conspire against my crown? As my servant, McDonald’s should discipline these lowly ungrateful mercenaries up to and including firing the miscreants and hiring more pleasant staff. In short, the protesters are viciously sabotaging production of important physical goods and harming the welfare of the whole people. Physical goods then are the most conspicuous type of good; a great deal of our existence revolves around getting and enjoying them. Physical goods are divided into useful, virtuous, and pleasant. A useful good is a capital good, a “higher-order” factor of production used in order to create “first-order” virtuous consumer goods that have the potential directly to satisfy human desires. The pleasant good is twofold: on the one hand, it is a negative end to the felt dissatisfaction, a desire being fulfilled; on the other, it is positive pleasure or utility being felt by a person upon consuming a virtuous good. All such goods are relative and bound up with specific individuals. For example, there is no such thing as an objective capital good. Capital is anything that participates in a given plan of production of a particular entrepreneur. The same physical item may have multiple purposes, with different entrepreneurs being keen on using it in different ways; this is precisely what makes factors of production partially non-specific and useful in various lines of business. The interplay of competition for each factor affects its price.

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