14.2.1. The habit theory of morality, moral influence, and moral evolution

Contrasting with all forms of moral realism, the habit theory of morality recognizes no “terminal moral values,” since it holds that transgression of an agent’s principles of integrity is necessary to allow their adjustment to circumstances. By conceiving moral principles as principles of integrity, prosocial habits serving as indispensable self-control devices in a psychological economy where willpower is an exceedingly scarce resource, it uniquely explains—without recourse to group selectionism—how humans could evolve a group-minded morality.

Group selectionism is the minority view among evolutionists that natural selection in humans occurs in the manner of eusocial species, at the level of groups, not just genes. Eusocial species comprise primarily the social insects, whose hives’ genetic commonality permits group selection, which in their case—unlike the human—reduces to the gene level. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his recent book The Righteous Mind (2013) frames the case for human group selection with the aphorism “Humans are 90% chimpanzee and 10% bee.” Haidt observes that most moral arguments are hypocritical, aiming to impress or control others, agents often ignoring standards when they can avoid punishment for transgressions. Yet Haidt acknowledges that humans occasionally behave selflessly, as when a soldier takes huge personal risks for his fellows or zealots lose themselves in moral or political causes. Haidt thinks these phenomena inexplicable at the gene or individual level because it would subject agents to strongly adverse selection pressures, since their altruism fails to serve their individual interests. Group selectionism is subject to a standard objection: inevitable exploitation by free riding, which group-selectionist theory must contain a mechanism to punish. Human societies curtail free riding by social approval and disapproval, including material rewards and punishments.

According to Haidt (and other strict-adaptationist theorists), the proclivity to reward and punish transgression against group interest must arise through group selection because otherwise approval and disapproval meted out in the group interest would be another form of self-sacrifice. The habit theory of morality treats moral approval and disapproval as expressing the same habit set used for self-control, illustrated by the habit theory of civic morality: U.S. citizens practice habits of frugality in their personal lives by demanding the government cut spending. The same equivalence describes moral suasion directed toward individuals.

Ironically, moral hypocrisy provides evidence that self-control and moral suasion practice a unified moral habit. If hypocritical demands are seen as purely deceptive, it’s hard to see how they would serve as a costly signal; carrying no costs, moral hypocrisy would have no value as a signal. Hypocrisy has no point if anyone can be a hypocrite cheaply. But if engaging in moral suasion agents rehearse (practice) principles of integrity that they habitually apply to themselves, the cost of demanding more morality than you want to give is becoming more moral than you wish.

The workings become clearer and more plausible with more concreteness about the structure of the moral habits (or principles of integrity), and Alan P. Fiske’s relationship-regulation theory integrates well with the habit theory. According to Fiske’s model, systems of moral principles are activated when their associated social relationships are “constituted,” where the systems of moral principles are Unity, Hierarchy, Equality, and Proportionality. (T.S. Rai and A.P. Fiske, Moral psychology is relationship regulation (2011) Psychological Review, 118: 57 ‒ 75.) Hierarchical principles, for example, are activated when the appropriate social relations of Authority/Ranking are constituted, so when an agent is involved in an authoritarian relationship, such as between employees and their boss, the corresponding Hierarchical principles of unconditional submission and conditional protection dominate. To restate in habit-theory terms, negotiating hierarchical relationships motivates agents to form habits based on Hierarchical principles. Most importantly, the Hierarchical structure is a coherent whole, including facets involving regulation of both self and others. In the habit theory, other-directed morality is a spandrel deriving from the primary adaptive value of self-control.

18.0 Capitalism and socialism express conflicting reciprocity norms: A reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of capitalist decline

Capitalist stagnation

U.S. workers’ wages stagnated in the last three decades, state-driven China almost alone internationally in substantially improving popular living standards. While other political economists in Marx’s day had observed a tendency for profit rates—driving production under capitalism—to decline, Karl Marx claimed the decline is inevitable, this forming the conclusion of Marx’s three-volume magnum opus, Capital.

Marx’s central argument is counterintuitive but simple. Value consists of labor hours embodied in products. Employers (capitalists) profit by paying laborers for their time, the amount of value paid being less than the amount of socially necessary labor the workers add. With capitalism’s evolution, a declining proportion of the value produced is constituted of labor directly employed, an increasing proportion of labor already concretized in capital goods, since mechanization of production is the fundamental means to increasing economic efficiency, where capital goods contribute to the value of a product to the extent they are consumed in its production. With the increasing organic composition of capital—as proportionately more value is created through capital goods—rate of profit must fall, since it is based on exploiting labor and that already embodied in capital goods has been sold and accounted for.

Despite its centrality to Marx’s analysis of why capitalism eventually comes to retard economic progress, the tendency of the rate of profit to decline is far from universally accepted as true even by Marxian commentators. Marxian academics have even questioned it mathematically, but the real issue isn’t the almost-trivial mathematics but its mapping to reality: does the declining Marxian rate of profit entail a declining actual rate of profit?

Conflicting reciprocity norms

That owners of capital (capitalists) profit from a series of “fair” exchanges could be termed the central premise of Capital. Workers exchange their labor time for its value—that is, the laborers’ own price of reproduction. The arrangement is fair under a reciprocity norm according to which commodities trade at their market value. But it is unfair under a reciprocity norm according to which all receive in proportion to their value-producing labor. Although Marx didn’t stress the point, what’s striking is that each antagonist in the historical drama—the social classes workers and capitalists—frames its interests in terms of a simple coherent reciprocity principle, with the difference that the workers favor a ratio derived from production and the capitalists from distribution. (See Alan Page Fiske, Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms of Human Relations (1991) [“equality matching” and “market pricing,” but Fiske, while discussing Marx, doesn’t link equality matching to the labor theory of value].)

The market’s function

Attacks on the soundness of Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline derive from its seeming impossibility—this, in turn, due to not seeing the connection between “profit” as defined in the theory and in the ledger. We must start from fundamentals. According to Marx, civil society exists to allow human cooperation in the labor process. Civilization is built on accomplishing this by fostering the accumulation of economic resources by few; capitalism was the form economies came to take at the onset of the industrial revolution. Like other economic systems that followed the agricultural revolution, it arose and became ascendant because of its efficiency in extracting value from labor, but it accomplishes this with a progressive enlargement of the value diverted to augmenting industrial machinery rather than directly producing more products for consumption, which gradually changes the tasks presented. As the contribution of machinery grows relative to the direct contribution of laborers, the basic economic tasks besetting society change from producing value from labor to realizing the value embodied in machinery.

But the capitalist market continues to be a system adapted to extracting value from labor. Insofar as profit represents a gain in value accruing to the capitalist class as a whole, it comes from the value contributed by the laborers. As the production process has progressively less proportionate need for laborers, it becomes harder to profit sufficiently at their expense.

Limits of state action under capitalism

It might be thought that this Marxian profit is a reification. Who’s to say it is the proper abstraction for understanding capitalist motivation, rather than, say, the concept of “interest,” favored by the ultracapitalist “Austrian school.” One response that denies the centrality of Marxian profit (technically, surplus value) is that state action can co-opt the market to new ends. Since the market tends to overproduce capital, adroit government spending might redirect it to produce more consumer goods. This is the essence of Keynes’s policies. The most obvious problem is that unprofitable spending is competitively inefficient and is only sustainable in huge nation states with considerable economic autonomy; otherwise, it may cause a nation’s industries to fail against international competitors, who are free-riders on the increased buying power of the local population. International economic competition sets limits on a country’s ability to use Keynesian policies or any policies involving state subsidy. Yet periods aren’t rare when one capitalist power dominates and is subject to diminished international competition. Also, if Keynesian policies are directed to creating positive externalities or “public goods” favoring profitability, their benefit may outweigh their harm to profits.

But insuperable obstacles to using government to redirect the market keep Marxian surplus value a good first approximation to balance-sheet profit. While a government-regulated market is often thought to provide the best of capitalism and socialism, in an important sense, it provides the worst of each in that the state attempts to regulate in ignorance of the facts, a company’s plans a closely guarded commercial secret. But the more fundamental problem with government-directed capitalism is that it amounts to the government’s adding to some capitalists' profits at the expense of other capitalists. Where political power follows economic power, the political unity of the class of capitalists depends on their shared economic interests. Private property is the means of coordinating individuals into a social class sufficiently unified to legitimize government. This unity depends on allocating wealth according to the dominant reciprocity norm, based on market exchange rates.

The result is only limited government intervention can please the capitalist class. Rather than contributing to the profits of the class, government policy must use incentives which advantage parts of the class at the expense of the other parts. To create an incentive sufficient to replace the incentive of Marxian profit with balance-sheet profit, differently constituted, would involve huge wealth transfers within the capitalist class, calling the system’s legitimacy into question by undermining its broad support by the dominant social class.

Corrected on January 2, 2013: the organic composition of capital increases rather than declines. The point is purely terminological and the result of my still not grasping why machinery is termed "organic." Thanks to a correspondent, who corrected me.

21.1. Status inflation and deflation: Prestige, the essence of status, permits broad alliances

Is status a positional good?

As the concept of social status itself attains higher status (through employment in evolutionary psychology), class struggles over the material conditions of life are recognized as impregnated with status aspirations. The conclusion may be drawn or implied that these conflicts are inherently wasteful: we’d be better off if people accepted their lot, because status is a positional good—a zero-sum game—what is won by some is lost by others. (See, for example, Robin Hanson’s Inequality talk is about grabbing.) But it also seems that a society beset with severe status inequality will suffer status deflation.

One approach to the question of whether status is a positional good is whether status is (implicitly) measured using an ordinal scale of measurement or a higher scale, interval or ratio, where ordinal scales express only rank, whereas interval and ratio scales express degrees of difference. An example of an ordinal scale expressing social status is military rank. The status of the rank of major depends on the mass of soldiers a major outranks and the number who outrank the major, so, if half of the captains are promoted to major, the major’s status declines.

Social status can seem similar to military rank, but (I contend) this is a confusion: the social status of an entire population can rise or fall (inflate or deflate), because the main component of social status is prestige, which has ratio properties. The confusion results from conflating prestige with dominance, more primitive and prototypical, but prestige is a ratio scale, not an ordinal scale like dominance, because it results from summing over weighted dominance relations. Consider our major in contrast to a lieutenant under his command. The lieutenant may have received higher grades in the military academy, he may come from a wealthier family, and he may be the president of a nonmilitary club in which the major participates as an ordinary member. Which has more prestige? The point is that the question makes sense; we combine information about position in various separate dominance hierarchies with other information about their potential power to determine their prestige, the information’s additivity implying that prestige is at least an interval scale (probably a ratio scale), not a mere ordinal scale like dominance. Concern with prestige (as distinct from dominance) is a human-specific trait, with few roots other than dominance in our primate psychology.

Why prestige?

Evolutionary psychologists propose that prestige (usually referred to simply as status, a convention I will abide) reflects a person’s value as an ally: a high-status person is a powerful ally. (The person with the highest prestige is God, the most powerful ally.) Other primates appear to have only dominance, which suffices for simian calculations because apes, living in a single hierarchy, don’t need to sum over different hierarchies. Humans live embedded in multiple social hierarchies—at root, dominance relations—which must be weighted and added to appraise an individual’s value in alliances.

If primordial alliances were exclusively alliances pitted against other allied humans, prestige could still be a zero-sum game despite its ratio scaling. But the alliances formed primordially weren’t exclusively competitive alliances: alliances were presumably formed for foraging and child care. Ratio-scaled prestige, a currency spanning dominance hierarchies, allows more and broader alliances.

Two distinct explanatory tasks regarding prestige concern its evolutionary function and its individual motivation. Evolutionary psychologists hypothesize that status derives from the differential value of persons as allies. The quest for prestige aligns the individual’s efforts with adaptation: by pursuing prestige, one becomes a more powerful ally, deriving the corresponding social (and reproductive) advantages. But the mechanism is more complex and itself provides additional clues about function. Prestige is a reaction formation against envy. This agrees with the observation that we accord prestige to those we would otherwise envy. (See Theodor Reik, Love and Lust: On the Psychoanalysis of Romantic and Sexual Emotion regarding the idealization process—rooted in unconscious envy—in romantic love. “Reaction formation” is a psychodynamic mechanism involving experiencing the opposite of certain thoughts, to deny them conscious access.)

Since status is commonly perceived value as ally, status deflation means decreased willingness to rely on—to ally with—others. In 11.3, I discussed opinionation as a pathology of belief-opinion confusion: we are opinionated when we fail to rely sufficiently on the opinions of experts. Status deflation causes irrational opinionation (as well as other adverse societal effects, including some relating to macroeconomics). The modern expression of the tendency toward excessively narrow alliances is lack of regard for the opinions of most others, including experts. At the same time, (one's own) status deflation increases the experienced envy. In societies where status is most deflated (typically, traditional agrarian societies), this two-pronged attack on the sublimation of envy results in the bullheadedness of the peasant.

Countering status deflation and generating inflation.

Economic inequality is a manifestation of status deflation as well as one of its causes (as I maintained in 21.0.) In modern capitalist societies, the main ways of reducing inequality have been restricted immigration (to reduce the supply of labor and increase its price) and progressive taxation. But these policies have been applied sporadically and are only practiced weakly in most advanced countries. Within Europe, the Common Market has opened borders, and in the United States, wealth inequality is so high it rivals some third-world countries. The reason stringent immigration control and progressive taxation are only sporadically applied is that these methods don’t correspond to any humanly valued relational model—which as Alan P. Fiske (Structures of Social Life (1991)) shows, enable the moralization of social practices and, as John Bolender elaborates (The Self-Organizing Social Mind (2010)), correspond to the four scales of measurement. (Communal/Sharing is nominal, Authority/Ranking is ordinal, Equality/Matching is interval, and Market/Pricing is ratio.) A flat tax employs a ratio scale, a fact that helps account for its ideological popularity despite its practical infirmity. To human intuition, progressive tax rates are arbitrary. As to immigration control, absolute restriction would correspond to Communal/Sharing, but like the flat tax rate, mere reduction of immigration rates doesn’t form an intuitively compelling public policy. (This is not to disparage the instrumental use of either immigration control or progressive taxation.)

State socialism, on the other hand, can be grounded in intuitive metrics: equality matching (interval scale) embedded in communal sharing (nominal scale). It has proven not only to provide a greater degree of status equality (thus status inflation) but also to be more durable.