Sweet Love vs. Interest

Continuing the occasional series of excerpts from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), I’m posting Chapter Six today.

So-called Samuelsonian economics is the main sort at American universities today. The only way it can acknowledge love is to reduce it to food for the implicitly male and proud lover, on a par with the other “goods” he consumes, such as ice cream cones or apartment space or amusing gadgets from Brookstone. Screwtape in fact is suspicious of the very existence of “love,” and reinterprets it as interest. God’s “love” for human beings “of course, is an impossibility. . . . All his talk about Love must be a disguise for something else—He must have some real motive. . . . What does he stand to make out of them?”[1]

A Samuelsonian economist will say, “It’s easy to include ‘love’ in economics. Just put the beloved’s utility into the lover’s utility function, U_Lover(Stuff_Lover, Utility_Beloved).” Neat. Hobbes, who seems to have had little to do with love, wrote in this economistic way in 1651: “That which men desire they are also said to Love. . . . so that desire and love are the same thing. . . . But whatsever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth Good.” [2] Or, the modern economists say, “goods.” But to adopt such a vocabulary is to absorb the beloved into the psyche of the lover, as so much utility-making motivation. Aquinas called it “concupiscent love”—“as when we love wine, wishing to enjoy its sweetness, or when we love some person for our own purposes of pleasure.”[3] It can be virtuous or not depending on its object. But it is not the highest love unless it ascends: “rare is the love of goods,” David Klemm remarks, “that remains true to the love of God as the final resting place of the heart’s desire.”[4]

The philosopher Michael Stocker notes that a psychological egotist of the sort commended in modern economics could get the pleasure from the thing lovers do, “have absorbing talks, make love, eat delicious meals, see interesting films, and so on, and so on,” but would not love:

For it is essential to the very concept of love to care for the beloved. . . . To the extent that I act. . . towards you with the final goal of getting pleasure. . . I do not act for your sake. . . . What is lacking in these theories is simply—or not so simply—the person. For love, friendship, affection, fellow feeling, and community all require that the other person be an essential part of what is valued.[5]

And the beloved must be a living value in himself. If you love him out of pride or mere vanity he is reduced to a thing, a mirror, no person. Love is therefore not the same thing as mere absorbing altruism. You need to explain this to the economists and other utilitarians.

Your mother loves you, in one restricted sense, for the altruistic pleasure you provide to her. When you graduated from college she got utilitarian pleasure in two ways. First, she got some pleasure directly—that she is the mother of such a brilliant child. It reflected on her own brilliance, you see, or on her own excellence in mothering. It added to her utility-account some points earned, straightforward pleasure, like frequent-flyer mileage.

And, second, she got some pleasure indirectly, because you did so well—for yourself, to be sure, yet as a pleasure to her. It is not for your sake. It is as though you were happy and accomplished for her. Even if no one else knew that you had graduated, she would know, and know the material pleasure and higher satisfactions your education would give you, and would be glad for her sake. It was “on her account,” as the revealingly bourgeois expression says. That is, she absorbs your utility into hers. If you are happy, she is happy, but derivatively. It is a return on her capital investment in motherhood. It’s still a matter of points earned for her utility.

Economists think this is a complete description of your mother’s love. Hallmark could make a card for the economist to send to his mother: “Mom, I maximize your utility.” The great Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, for example, seems to think in this fashion, as do his numerous followers. “We assume that children have the same utility function as their parents,” Becker wrote in a classic paper with Nigel Tomes,

and are produced without mating, or asexually. A given family then maintains its identity indefinitely, and its fortunes can be followed over as many generations as desired. Asexual reproduction could be replaced without any effect on the analysis by perfect assortative mating: each person, in effect, then mates with his own image”[6]

Well. So much for happy and loving families, Tolstoy be damned.

Becker is rather more careful than his followers, actually, noting in an earlier paper that “loving someone usually involves caring about what happens to him or her.” He realizes that love—or as he usually styles it, with embarrassed male scare quotes, “love”—entails more than “caring” in his restricted sense: “If M cares about F, M’s utility would depend on the commodity consumption of F as well as on his own.” This is a attempt to acknowledge the evident truth that much of consumption and income-earning is on behalf of someone not the direct purchaser or income earner. After all, in the average American family with children about 35% of expenditure is directed at the kids.[7] Moms are not buying all those frozen pizzas to feed themselves.

But anyway Becker in this paper is willing to reduce a family to the husband’s—sorry, I mean “M’s”—utility, using a methodological twist characteristic of Chicago economics: “if one member of the household—the `head’—cares enough about other members to transfer resources to them, this household would act as if it maximized the `head’s’ preference function.”[8] That’s nice so long as you not worried about reinventing the common-law doctrine of feme covert in mathematical form.

Believe me, as myself a Chicago-School economist I attest that such a strange view has its uses for science. Really, it does. I’ve written whole books, scores of professional papers, going further, triumphantly concluding that all you need for historical explanation is “maximum utility.”

But I was wrong. The economist’s theory is not complete. For one thing, the behaviorism and positivism that often goes along with utilitarianism is an unnecessary narrowing of the scientific evidence. Whitehead remarked in 1938 that “in such behavioristic doctrines, importance and expression must be banished and can never be intelligently employed.” He added cleverly: “A consistent behaviorist cannot feel it important to refute my statement. He can only behave.”[9] In 1982 Stuart Hampshire declared that our knowledge of our own minds, including ethical intentions, “deserves the title of knowledge no less than the kind of knowledge of past, present and future states of the world we derive from perception, from memory and from inductive inference.”[10]

As the feminist philosopher Virginia Held notes, relationships “are not reducible to the properties of individual entities that can be observed by an outsider and mapped into a causal scientific framework.”[11] She may be giving too much away: the meaning of a relationship, I repeat, is just as “scientific” as is a budget constraint. We do not have to go on for ever and ever accepting the definition of “scientific” that happened to be popular among certain English and Austrian academic philosophers around 1922. Your love for your son is real and scientific and motivational, though in some circumstances a behaviorist psychologist watching you from a great height might have quite a lot of trouble “observing” it.

More important, treating others as “inputs into a self’s utility function,” as Becker and Tomes put it, is to treat the others as means, not as ends. Immanuel Kant said two centuries ago in effect that your mother, if she is truly and fully loving, loves you as an end, for your own sweet sake. You may be a rotten kid, an ax-murderer on death row. You’re not even college graduate. You give her “nothing but grief,” as we say. In all the indirect, derivative ways you are a catastrophe. And yet she goes on loving you, and stands wailing in front of the prison on the night of your execution. Economists need to understand what everyone else already understands, and what the economists themselves understood before they went to graduate school, that such love is of course commonplace. It is common in your own blessed mother, and everywhere in most mothers and fathers and children and friends.

You see it, too, in the doctor’s love for healing, in the engineer’s for building, in the soldier’s for the fatherland, in the economic scientist’s for the advance of economic science, down in the marketplace and up in the cathedral. As the economist Andrew Yuengert puts it, “Without ultimate ends, there is no reason to be an economic researcher: economics is for ethics.”[12] To be sure, there is routine form-filling in being a doctor and insincere uses of statistical significance in being an economics scientist. But without loving and transcendent ends such lives would have no point. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a distinction between goods “internal to a practice,” like being a good scientist, and external, such as getting the Nobel Prize, or getting rich. He notes that utilitarianism, even in so saintly a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill, cannot admit the distinction.[13]

Such loves, or internal goods, defeat the economistic view that all virtues can be collapsed into utility. Utility is the measure of an ends-means logic, what I am calling Prudence Only. Loving an end goes beyond means. Whatever happiness of identity a painter earns may be measured by the income he gives up. But that does not make the happiness the same thing as the income.[14] The happiness is comparable to the happiness of identity a skillful truck driver earns or a skillful tennis player, whether poorly or well paid.

The economist Amartya Sen speaks of a “duality” in ethics between what he calls “Well-being,” which is the utilitarian idea of people as pots into which pleasure is dumped, and “agency.”[15] Agency is “the ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc.” It “can well be geared to considerations not covered—at least not fully covered—by his or her own well-being.” But I would call this “agency” the virtues of faith and hope and justice and, above all, love.

The philosopher David Schmidtz likewise speaks about two separate “rational” sources of altruism. He means “economistic” when he writes “rational.” One source he calls “concern” for others, “which is to say [that the beloved’s] welfare enters the picture through our preference function,” that is, through our tastes for pleasures. It is the Beckerian notion of “caring.” Schmidtz observes that there is quite a different altruism, too, a nobler one on its face, which he calls “respect,” by which we constrain ourselves in regard to the beloved. “We manifest concern for people when we care about how life is treating them (so to speak), whereas we manifest respect for people when we care about how we are treating them, and constrain ourselves accordingly.”[16] An economist would say that one has preferences over bundles of goods to be consumed (”concern”), but also over the constraints to be observed (”respect”).

But to these usefully distinguished sources of caring I would add a third and a glorious one—one Schmidtz would acknowledge, of course, if he were not intent in the article on showing a “selfish” rationale for love. The third is sheer love, appreciation for the beloved, the expression here below of agape/caritas/holy charity. That it is sheer does not make it unanalyzable. Joan Tronto analyzes the ethics of care as politics, seeing in the ethical use of sheer love an attentiveness, a responsibility, a competence, and a responsiveness.[17] Attentiveness is temperance and humility in the face of the plight of others. Competence is a species of prudence. Responsibility arises from human solidarity, keeping faith with who we are. And responsiveness is the justice of attending to others. That is, Love is not reducible to Utility, and is a virtue only when in context with other virtues: temperance, humility, prudence, justice, solidarity, faith.

Of course. Only an economist or an evolutionary psychologists would think otherwise, and put embarrassed quotation marks around the very word “love,” and then reduce it to gain. The most extreme of the evolutionary psychologists claim that love itself is an evolutionary result of Prudence Only, this time of the very genes themselves. Consider Steven Pinker in 1997 on the rationality of friendship: “now that you value the person, they should value you even more . . . because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship.”[18]

No, Steven, it is what we call self-absorption. The cognitive philosopher Jerry Fodor remarks of Pinker’s one-factor theory:

A concern to propagate one’s genes would rationalize one’s acting to promote one’s children’s welfare; but so too would an interest in one’s children’s welfare. Not all of one’s motives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn’t there be quite a few such things? Why shouldn’t one’s children be among them?[19]

He quotes Pinker on the evolutionary explanation for why we humans like stories, namely, that they provide useful tips for life, as for example to someone in Hamlet’s fix: “What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? Good question.” Startlingly, Pinker does not appear to be joking here. It’s unintentionally funny, this “scientific” attempt to get along without sheer love, or sheer courage, or to get along without the aesthetic pleasure of stories reflecting faith and hope.

Even the admirable Robert Nozick falls prey to the reductionism of socio- and psycho- and evolutionary- and brain-science-biology. But characteristically he has wise doubts. “Someone could agree that ethics originates in the function of coordinating activity to mutual benefit, yet hold that ethics now is valuable because of additional functions that it has acquired.”[20] She certainly could.

In the analysis of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt this sheer Love has “four main conceptually necessary features.”[21] It must be “a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved.” That’s the main point, and the way the utility-driven mother imagined by economists is less than perfectly loving. Her utility function reflects precisely, and only, self-interest.

Frankfurt, by the way, equivocates between “love” as love of persons and “love” also of non-persons such as The Revolution or Art or God. Thus he adds that love is “ineluctably personal,” which I believe would be better expressed as “ineluctably particular.“ Anyway, the person [or transcendent thing] “is loved for himself or for herself, and not as an instance of type.” One loves Harriet particularly, not incidentally as a type of “woman” or “Vermonter,” however much one might admire those types. As Nozick puts it, “the love is not transferable to someone else with the same characteristics. . . One loves the particular person one actually encountered. . . . Love is historical.”[22]

And “the lover identifies with his beloved.” The two share so much that the line between their selves is forgotten. A friend, said Aristotle, is another self. And finally “loving entails constraints on the will. It is not simply up to us.” Our love for our children, though involuntary and often enough unreciprocated, is glorious. But it must be a give-and-take, acknowledging the constraints imposed by the children. “No, Ma. We’d better have Thanksgiving this year at my mother-in-law’s house.” The constraining is not simply up to us, observe, though it can and should be self-disciplined, too, if it is to be a virtue rather than merely an unrestrained and animal passion.

So: disinterested, particular, identifying, and constraining. None of these four fits a epicurean, utilitarian, pleasuring definition of love. The economist’s Maximum-Utility Man, Mr. Max U, is above all self-interested. He could care less if the item satisfying his interest is this particular one. He has no identity himself to project onto the beloved. And he regards all constraints on utility maximization as bad. “The hedonistic conception of man,” Thorstein Veblen thundered in 1898,

is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogenous globule of happiness under the influence of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent or consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum.[23]

If the kid cries too much, declares our Max, the isolated, self-interested man, regardless of whether he is the father, let us send him to probable death in an 18^th-century orphanage, since this particular kid is fungible with others. A house “filled with domestic cares and the noise of children” would make a poor place for discoursing on social justice and the raising of children. Thus on five occasions did Jean-Jacques Rousseau act, that great pre-Romantic teacher of good behavior in love and education.

Samuelsonian economics takes need-love, or more narrowly goods-and-services-concupiscence, as all love, and calls it pleasure or utility. But, as has been repeatedly discovered in experimental and observational studies, the argument fails even in its own terms. For example, suppose a Samuelsonian economist says that contributions to public goods—say, the British Lifeboat Service—is utility-based, in the sense that it is motivated altruistically, by a desire to make sure there are enough lifeboats. That is, the economic agent gives to the lifeboat fund not to cover the highly unlikely event that he himself might otherwise drown—pace Steven Pinker—but because many other people will. He is public spirited, altruistic.

Yet he is still a Max-U fellow: he gets utility from contemplating the ample provision of lifeboats. It’s like your mother Maxine U getting pleasure from your graduation. If she could get the graduation without spending a dime on you, all the better, right? Now such an attitude is an ethical improvement over screw-you individualism of a Steinerian or Randian or Pinkerian sort. But it seems to be empirically false. In 1993 Richard Sugden, for example, noted that a plain implication of Max-U altruism is that ₤1 given by Max U would be a perfect substitute for ₤1 given by anyone else, at least in Mr. U’s opinion. So Max U would of course free ride on other people’s contributions to lifeboats. Every time. According to Sugden’s empirical work on the lifeboat fund, however, people in Britain do not so free ride.

Which is evident: there is such a fund, and it does very well in bequests and in coins dropped into collection jars in pubs. Evidently British people feel that free riding in such a case would be bad—which is not a sentiment that would motivate a Max U-er. Sugden and others have shown repeatedly that people do not view the contributions of others as fungible ₤-for-₤ with their own contributions. People take the view that there is something ineluctably particular about their giving. So also in blood donations and in going over the top at the Somme. Altruistic hedonism does not look like a very good explanation of human solidarity and courage.[24]

You could reply that the lifeboat-giver or the blood donor or the voter down at the polling place get utility from the sheer act of giving their money or time without recompense. The love for God, in the altruistic hedonist view, is no different from satisfying an itch or buying a rugby shirt. Therefore economists studying the economics of religion, even if believers themselves, sometimes stop their concerns at explaining church attendance with the same tools one would use for explaining visits to the mall. But that is merely a pointless renaming of love—or justice or faith or some other virtue of steadfastness. As Lewis remarks, “one must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates.”[25]

Lewis offers a ladder of love. The four loves human and divine are, climbing upward: affection, human sexual desiring (eros), human friendship (philia), and finally charity, that is, agape. The lowest is one’s love for non-humans, such as a dog or a thing. The highest includes, Aquinas says, a sacred version of friendship, the astonishing friendship between unequals of humans and God. Agape is God’s gift, notes Lewis, following orthodoxy since Augustine, for God “can awaken in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love.” The proud blasphemy that we are loved for our evident merits dissolves into “a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need. . . . We become `jolly beggars’.”

The other three loves for humans, and I suppose also the best love for non-humans, Lewis would group under “natural loves.” These are not to be disdained. But they need to have that touch of transcendent agape, transcendent “charity,” if love “is to be kept sweet.”[26] “Whatsoever love elects to bless,” says Richard Wilbur, “Brims to a sweet excess/ That can without depletion overflow.”[27] The overflow give a point to a virtuous life, whether medieval or socialist or bourgeois.

---

[1] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. 86.

[2] Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, I, Chp. 6, p. 24.

[3] Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Virtue (section On Hope), c. 1269-1272, quoted in Cessario, “Hope,” 2002, in Pope, Ethics of Aquinas, p. 237. See the similar analysis in Summa theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, q. 26, art. 4, objection 3, “On the contrary.” By the way, the great Summa is sometimes referred to as “Theologica” and sometimes Theologiae.” The professionals, for example those in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, seem these days to prefer “Theologiae.”

[4] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 224.

[5] Stocker, “Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” 1976, pp. 68-69, 71.

[6] Becker and Tomes, “Equilibrium Theory,” 1979, p. 1161.

[7] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 112.

[8] Becker, “Theory of Marriage,” 1974 (1976), pp. 236, 237. A “preference function” is economic jargon for tastes.

[9] Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938 (1968), p.23.

[10] Hampshire, “Postscript,” 1982, to Hampshire, Thought and Action, 1959, p. 274.

[11] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 8.

[12] Yeungert, Boundaries, 2004, p. 12.

[13] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, pp. 185.

[14] Abbing, Why Are Artists So Poor? 2002.

[15] Sen, Ethics and Economics, 1987, p. 41.

[16] Schmidtz, “Reasons for Altruism,” 1993, p. 164f. My italics on “concern” and “respect.”

[17] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, pp. 127-137.

[18] Pinker, 1997, quoted in Fodor, “Trouble with Psychological Darwinism,” 1998.

[19] Fodor, “Trouble with Psychological Darwinism,” 1998.

[20] Nozick, Invariances, 2001, p. 300.

[21] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 79f, italics supplied.

[22] Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, p. 168.

[23] Veblen, “Why Economics is Not an Evolutionary Science,” 1898.

[24] Sugden, “Thinking as a Team,” 1993.

[25] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 168.

[26] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, pp. 191, 180, 168, 163.

[27] Wilbur, “A Wedding Toast,” 1971 (1988), p. 61.

The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.