The Fiction of Morality as a Consumer/Producer Good

In a previous article, I establish that in the domain of praxeology, consumer and producer goods are not required categories and are arbitrarily, if usefully, superimposed on a deductive framework that does not demand it. This article is going to deal with one of the implications of this view. Namely, because consumer/producer goods are not necessary categories of goods demanded by the concept of action, a praxeologist is not committed to sorting goods in these categories to be consistent. This should seem like a mundane point, but Roderick Long thinks otherwise.

Roderick Long in his essay Why does Justice have Good Consequences? attacks the indirect consequentialist approach to ethics on praxeological grounds, by explicitly invoking the consumer/producer good dichotomy. He quotes himself from his review of Leland Yeager’s Ethics as Social Science: The Moral Philosophy of Social Cooperation as saying the following, emphasis mine:

Reflection on praxeological principles may be useful here in seeing what cookedup cases are meant to show. Whatever I choose, I choose either as a consumer’s good (a first-order good) or as a producer’s good (a higher-order good). Utilitarianism of any sort regards morality as a producer’s good, a means of producing happiness; but indirect utilitarianism maintains, in effect, that the most effective way to promote happiness is to treat morality as if it were a consumer’s good, even though it isn’t one. But is it really possible to adopt the attitude that indirect utilitarianism recommends? When I choose morality “as if” it were a consumer’s good, either it really becomes a consumer’s good for me, or else it remains a producer’s good and I am only pretending. There is no third possibility.

And later:

It has often been claimed that indirect utilitarianism is unstable, and must collapse either into direct utilitarianism on the one hand or into “rules fetishism” on the other. This can be interpreted as a psychological claim about the likely results of trying to maintain a utilitarian attitude, in which case its truth or falsity is an empirical matter. By transposing the familiar stability objection into a praxeological key, however, what I’ve been trying to show is that indirect utilitarianism is not just causally but conceptually unstable. If I treat morality as a consumer’s good, I must reject utilitarianism on pain of inconsistency; if I treat morality as a producer’s good, I thereby exhibit a moral character or disposition that utilitarian considerations themselves condemn. But I must treat morality in one way or the other; hence utilitarianism is praxeologically self-defeating. The praxeologist cannot be a direct utilitarian, since praxeological reasoning itself shows us that the utilitarian’s goal depends on social cooperation, which in turn requires the kind of stable and consistent commitment to principles that a direct utilitarian cannot have. Nor can the praxeologist be an indirect utilitarian, since praxeological considerations force a choice between treating morality as a producer’s good (in which case we’re back with direct utilitarianism) and treating it as a consumer’s good (in which case utilitarianism prescribes its own rejection).

Whether you side with Long or Yeager on the issue of utilitarianism, the mistake here is with a particular argument Long applies. Long here explicitly rules out the possibility of other categories distinct from consumer/producer goods that morality can fit into, by which Yeager could save indirect consequentialism, on the basis that the distinction between consumer and producer goods is fundamental, praxeological, and necessary in application. But suppose we treat it as thymological, as perhaps relevant but not comprehensive categories for the formation, specification, and rank ordering of ends. What does praxeology do to limit the thymological argument here then, if the praxeological deduction doesn’t provide the limiting categories Long’s argument requires?

Let’s use an example here. An indirect consequentialist might assert that the level of indirection required between a set of “moral” or ethical principles implemented, and the consequences it is meant to bring about, can and should vary depending on the type of institution and its specific constraints. A court might necessarily operate under a very high separation between the principles and their consequences, precisely because the consequences of stable dispute resolution are diffuse and hard to measure in individual cases, but perhaps detectable in the aggregate. But this would not be the case for a social worker in a Friendly Society, or an actuary at an insurance company, who is more directly engaged with the people whose decisions they impact. (Even the difference between a regional small claims court and a national level appellate court might operate under these different assumptions about how far removed they are from the outcomes they exist to serve.)

Roderick Long would have us believe that the indirect consequentialist is demanding inconsistency in these cases. But where is the inconsistency in saying that a judge is further removed from the extralegal consequences in his rulings, while the social worker is more directly engaged with the object of her work and its consequences? Neither of these reduces to direct utilitarianism like Long claims, they’re merely varying levels of removed from consequences. The indirect consequentialist, as a praxeologist, is allowing for morality to be treated as a good at varying points on a spectrum of indirection, without ever abandoning their self-stated end of human flourishing denominated in consequential terms. “Rules fetishism” might be a threshold problem, applicable to particular institutional set ups, not a fundamental problem plaguing every institution. How close morality is or isn’t to a consumer good is flexible to the particular concerns the consequentialist has for each institution, on a spectrum of indirection that praxeology tells us little about. Whatever empirical problems this has for the consequentialist, Long’s “conceptual instability” argument doesn’t apply. There is no necessary inconsistency the consequentialist requires, because praxeology never demanded that either the Longian virtue ethicist or the consequentialist/utilitarian fit morality into these categories. This is a conversation that is external to praxeology. Moral conduct as a good would simply sit somewhere unspecified on a scale of indirection, and the praxeologist need not demand it take a fixed point on that scale at all.

An indirect consequentialist can respond more generally that they have the preferential end to avoid destruction and suffering, on account of its consequences to human beings. With this in mind, they organize a rank ordering of ends that happens to use the criteria of morality, but which itself is contingent on the higher order end of consequential outcomes. They’re merely inferring that moral principles tend to yield higher outcomes, so moral principles enter their value scale with that in mind. The interpreted preference in the observations of action, by which Long pretends there’s some inconsistency, are severable from this thymological process of explaining how they got there.

I cannot emphasize enough that this separation is needed because there is no necessary treatment of morality “as if it were a consumer good” for the praxeologist consequentialist, because there’s no necessary need to classify any good that way. The comparative amount of indirection between “moral” conduct and conduct aimed at the consequentialist’s “moral” ends simply isn’t something praxeology tells us about, thymology does. The level of indirection and how we classify using it, is dependent on the thymological source of ends or the psychological organization of ends, not the internal structure of action. At best, the categories of consumer and producer may make sense in a catallactic/economic context for the purposes of explanation, rather than causal inference. But this is not the same as using them as a filter on acceptable roles for morality in a different application. In this way, Long must take the nonprecisive abstractions of praxeology and begin specifying details. These details are not implied by or required for praxeology to reach his conclusion. And yet, he grants to his conclusions the validity of having passed the deductive test of praxeology.

I’ll note in conclusion that this is not the only problem with Long’s argument. For example, there are those who suggest that “goods” are simply not ends. Morality wouldn’t fit into the “goods” or means category at all, morality may simply be an ends or purpose for the moral realist. So even if one were to disagree with me on the consumer/producer good dichotomy’s lack of praxeological origin, Long would still be committing to a category error. My point however is not to defend indirect consequentialism, a position I am not even sure I hold. My point is to show the misapplication of categories that are claimed to come from a framework they don’t, that lead to mass confusions in the Austrian camp. These lead to bad arguments that take focus away from more defensible ones, as it does in Long’s review of Yeager’s book.