Volitional Pragmatism: The Collective Construction of Rules to Live By

I. Introduction

As an economist, I was raised on the milk of prescriptive consequentialism. The theoretical architecture of rational choice, welfare economics, and its applied version—benefit-cost analysis—was offered up as the definitive answer to a wide range of public policy problems. Welfare economics was alleged to offer value-free solutions to value-laden policy debates. Symbolic of this confidence is the claim by Milton Friedman:

[C]urrently in the Western world, and especially in the United States, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action—differences that in principle can be eliminated by the progress of positive economics—rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight.

(Friedman 5)

In this famous quote from Friedman, we see an admission—no doubt unintended—that the moral (ethical) content of economics is unavoidable. His instrumentalism allows him to celebrate what he assumes to be value-free analysis—“positive economics”—but in doing so, he acknowledges that there are economic issues over which fighting is inevitable. Indeed, if fighting is the only way to resolve such issues, the evidence suggests that those issues must be “worth fighting over.” Since no one believes fighting to be a constructive social activity, Friedman was eager to show that “objective”—to him, “positive”—economics renders fighting not only old-fashioned, but unnecessary.

A more charming aspect of the above quote is Friedman’s allusion to “disinterested” citizens. One can grant Friedman some limited scope for finding truly disinterested citizens in a democratic market economy, but there cannot be very many. Perhaps the purposeful recluse in the mountains of northern Idaho is really disinterested. But then perhaps his exile from the market may actually have been fostered by its indifference to him. The recluse is simply reciprocating that indifference. Friedman’s appeal to disinterested citizens is difficult to reconcile with his insistence that markets make us free to choose. After all, if one is free to choose—and if a market economy is essential to political freedom as Friedman insists—then it follows that all citizens in a democracy have a clear interest in how markets work, whose interests those markets serve, and who is able to finesse particular markets for their own benefit. Where, it must be asked, are we to find a really “disinterested” citizen in a market economy firmly embedded in a thoroughgoing market culture?

Friedman’s manifesto springs from the false promise of welfare economics to become the morally neutral arbiter of what ought to be done. Whatever the problem—GMO foods, climate change, sustainable agriculture, pollution, health policy, food safety—the presumptions of rational choice defined the economic approach to collective thought and action. Economists could study alternative policy choices and report back concerning which choice would maximize social welfare. Economists are sure that economics is the “science of choice.” We rarely consult psychologists or philosophers about that conceit.

But, of course, rational choice has always been intellectually bankrupt—meaning that appeals to welfarist prescriptive consequentialism are therefore incoherent. Prescriptive economics of the consequentialist variety—assertions about efficiency, optimality, socially preferred policies, and Pareto improvements—are central to the modernist project preoccupied with notions of objectivism, rationality, and realism. Pragmatism affirms the intellectual poverty of that holy trinity. Economics is not the science of choice because it cannot be. Economics, properly understood, is limited to clarifying the consequences of choice. Can economics be rescued from the epistemological dead end it has created for itself?

I wish to explore the general outlines of an escape from the prescriptive certitude of economics. I will present an alternative epistemological approach, and a theory of action, that trumps welfarism and prescriptive consequentialism. I call my approach volitional pragmatism (Bromley, Sufficient Reason). Volitional pragmatism rests on five key concepts: (1) the habituated mind, (2) the irritation of surprise and doubt, (3) prospective volition, (4) fixing belief, and (5) truth as settled belief. I will cover each in turn. But first, a brief preliminary stipulation is necessary.

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