Value Competition

A Madisonian Model of Individual Choice

A distinctive advantage of human beings over other animals is our capacity for deploying reason to the advantage of ourselves and our communities.   For that capacity to work well, two major problems of brain design must be solved.  The first problem—the “Articles of Confederation” (or Arrovian) problem—is that absent a dominant axis for defining and evaluating decisions, the brain will suffer from ineffectiveness and capture by an array of special interests.  The second—the “tyranny” (or agency costs) problem—is that a dominant executive power in the brain is a potential threat, in that such a power may reduce systemic welfare by pursuing its own interests.   A dominant self-other axis is a possible solution for the problem of disarrayed, unmotivated choice, and a competition between calculative utilitarian reason and pattern-oriented deontological reason is a possible solution for the problem of executive power misaligned with systemic welfare. 

Improvement, Not the Right Answer

An agent who is properly aligned with social welfare by calculative and cultural values that cross-cut self and other values is not necessarily going to get the right answer to business, legal, or ethical issues, assuming that the concept of the right answer in these domains is an intelligible one.   What the agent has instead of the right answer is a better chance of coming up with a twist small or big that makes things better or avoids making things worse.   That twist—the idea that is helped into existence by the cross-cutting values—is not necessarily the perfect twist, either.  But it is likely an improvement on what would result without well-aligned agents.

The Dominance of Interest-Value Groups Over Pure Value Groups

Organizations feature a great variety of subgroups--functional areas, academic departments, etc.--that fuse expertise in a particular area with values associated with that area.  By contrast with these "interest-value groups," organizations do not feature much in the way of pure value groups that advocate norms detached from interests, and feature very little indeed in the way of opposing value groups that advocate opposing norms without a connection to interests.  Intuitively, the reason for the predominance of interest-value groups is that they provide a vehicle for harnessing values to the organization's benefit without creating the divisive conflict between values that pure value groups are vulnerable to. 

Practitioners and Professors

A conjecture: Academics in normative disciplines like law, management, engineering, accounting, pharmacy, applied psychology, etc. are hampered by ambivalence.  is one seeking the truth or trying to promote the good on behalf of one's charges?   One is doing both, and that ambivalence in one's motives makes one less efficacious than one might be in pursuit of either goal, and rightly suspect by academic colleagues with a more single-minded commitment to truth.  On the other hand, practitioners seeking the good may be helped by training in normative disciplines compared to training in disciplines with a single-minded commitment to truth. 

The Role of Repression

One is conscious at least some of the time of a tension between taking a more self-oriented course of action and taking a more other-oriented course of action.  On the other hand, one is not likely to be conscious of a tension between taking a more calculative approach and a more cultural approach to a situation, barring being in a discipline in which one or another approach is called for.  That raises an issue for a model of the brain in which a calculative and a cultural center compete for control.  That competition, if it takes place, does so without feeling like a contest between different principles.  

Double Agents

Agency theory in its standard formulation involves a single agent who needs to be aligned with a single principal.  The theory can also be extended to apply to multiple principals, as Deirdre Collier and I do in treating politicians as agents of both a pro-market elite minority and a security-oriented non-elite majority.   The politicians are what might be called double agents. ("Dual agents" is the legal term for agents with two principals, but "double agents" suggests dual commitments or loyalties better.)

More broadly, agents in general are double agents, in that people can be understood as having a duty to themselves as well as to groups or institutions.  Yet more broadly, groups and institutions are also double agents, given that they can be understood as having duties to themselves and to other groups and individuals.  Making society work well is in large part a matter of whether individuals and groups/institutions work well for one another as double agents.

Agency theory in its original form has the virtue of clarity.  "Double agency theory" would have the virtue of corresponding better to reality, but needs to be clarified if it is to be more than a bromide about the simultaneous value of individualism and communitarianism.

 

Law as a Modern Discipline

What part does law play in the modern disciplinary project of creating human subjects who experience a heightened pull toward both individualism and altruism and who balance between the competing poles with some blend of calculative reason and anti-calculative reason?   As a pre-modern profession, law is not obviously part of the project of creating useful subjectivity in the way that management and applied psychology are.   But law has been usefully modernized.  First, the rights consciousness that is a prominent feature of modern individualism has found its home and its major forum in law, and helps inculcate self-oriented values in lawyers in particular as well as in others.  Given the continued and necessary presence of communitarian elements that have always been present in the discipline, modern law is neither communitarian nor individualist, but rather a combination of the two principles or poles that acts to heighten the intensity of the feelings connected to both sides in those who are trained in the discipline.  Second, calculative utilitarian reason has risen in law as elsewhere from Jeremy Bentham to a present in which Richard Posner and other modern counterparts of Bentham are an important part of the discipline.   Given the continuing and necessary presence of anti-utilitarian, rule-oriented features of law, the result in law as in modernity generally has been a more equal balance between calculative and cultural reason, with the rise of calculation creating useful pressure on cultural reason to pay its way through justifying its practices.

War, Guns, and Votes

Paul Collier's latest book on the travails of the "bottom billion" of the world's population in Africa, Central Asia, and pockets of poverty elsewhere does an excellent job translating high-tech economic studies replete with instrumental variables into lively prose and an imaginative argument for internationally-sponsored coup protection for bottom billion leaders who run fair elections.   The arguments of the book focus pretty much exclusively on incentives for the political elite; my sense, though, was that Collier's limited focus does not reflect a belief on his part that cultural, values-oriented factors are irrelevant or minor to the huge project of improving the lot of the bottom billion.

A value competition take: Making economic development and political democracy work is in large part a long-term cultural project of developing certain character types that blend self-interested and altruistic values.  On the economic side, two types are especially important.  Society needs a class of Weberian businessmen who are not necessarily Calvinists but who are influenced if not always governed by altruistic moral rules such as following the law and keeping promises even when it is to one's disadvantage to do so, who believe in markets rather than government favors, and are willing to work irrationally hard on behalf of their personal gain--and it is even better if society also has a fair part of its work force that adopts similar values, not just its business leaders.  Society also needs a class of civil servants-regulators-lawyers-accountants-professionals who have an egoistic, self-interested belief in their useful role in correcting for market failures, who work irrationally hard in doing their jobs, and who also have an altruistic belief in markets and stepping aside and not controlling the private sector. 

Value Competition and the Dichotomy between the Good and the True

My "Building Better Agents" paper positions value competition as a scientific/scientistic movement; so do a lot of my posts on this blog.  On reflection, though, I wonder whether VC is not better seen as a potential form of self-assertion by normative disciplines like management, law, and applied psychology and ethics.  These disciplines suffer from a persistent sense of inferiority to scientific disciplines, based on the blurriness and arguable incoherence that attends their normative, do-gooding mission.  VC may be understood as a way to stand up for these disciplines--"incoherence is good!"--as well as an effort to give them a more scientifically plausible way to talk about their mission.

Doubly Ambivalent Agents

Unambivalent agents: Agents with a single principal who are in fact aligned with that principal's welfare to the exclusion of other priorities, such as their own welfare.

Ambivalent agents: Agents with two (or more) principals (e.g., the firm and the self) who have ambivalent commitments to the welfare of both (or all) principals (in the example, to the firm's welfare and their own welfare).

Doubly ambivalent agents: Agents with two (or more) principals who, in addition to having ambivalent commitments to the welfare of their multiple principals, have the ability to help one principal as much as possible while harming the other as little as possible through having additional ambivalent commitments to two poles (e.g., calculative reason and cultural reason) along a second, orthogonal or cross-cutting dimension, which compete within the agent for support from both sides/poles/principles/principals of the first dimension (in this case, commitment to the self and to the firm).