I Gotta Read This Book!

I happened to run across in the (London) Times Literary Supplement (6.17.05) a review of a new translation of a book by the French sociologist Pierre Boudon entitled "The Poverty of Relativism." It is apparently not yet in print in the US, but I'm about to try to get it from the British publisher. I gotta read it, because it slams simultaneously two of my unfavorite things, welfare economics and moral relativism. It slams them both because it identifies rational choice analysis/welfare economics (which is central to US-style law & economics) as fundamentally relativist. Here is how the TLS reviewer, Stein Ringen (Prof. of Sociology and Social Policy at Oxford) explains Boudon's argument:

"In the final chapter,Boudon returns to the culprit of rational choice. That is a theory of human behavior. Motives are taken to be given: what people want is always to maximize their utility. If that is so, behaviour can be explained as that which may be most useful. Boudon ties this theory to a tradition that goes back to the French positivist August Comte (not a hero) who excluded the subjectivity of actors from scientific consideration. This is the tradition Boudon wants to liberate the human sciences from. In that tradition, most of what is important and interesting in life and society simply does not get considered; it is relegated to assumptions. [MAS here: I think those would usually be called "preferences" or "tastes".] What then remains is a pretty trivial and technical task of calculating what people are likely to do in this or that situation, given the assumption that behaviour is always motivated by one and the same intention. " [MAS again: Ouch! I love the "pretty trivial and technical task" part!]

         "But human behaviour, says Boudon, is not about utility. It is about reasons. Some of the things people do they do because it is useful, for example when we buy washing powder. Other things we do because we have decided that it is the right thing to do with no calculus of utility to ourselves, for example to vote in elections. People think what they think for reasons and do what they do for reasons. The human sciences must therefore embrace... the ambition of understanding not only what people do and think but WHY they do what they do and think what they do.... Rational choice is relativism. It is such in precisely the way that Boudon warns us about, by taking a valid theory to extremes. The classical theory is derived from a theory of reason. Descartes called it 'good sense'. Good sense is not a matter of maximizing utility, it is that tempered by by a sensitivity to decency and propriety. Decency and propriety is not the language of rational choice.... [I]n modern rational choice theory, rationality has collapsed into a macho bravura by which that what is rational is what is useful, no questions asked about what it is useful for."

Those who have read my paper "Utility, the Good and Civic Happiness: A Catholic Critique of Law and Economics: A Catholic Critique of Law and Economics" (forthcoming, J. Cath. Leg. Studies [St. John's Law]) (linked in sidebar) will understand why I like this argument, for mine is quite similar. I wish I had been smart enough, though, to define the problem with rational choice and welfare economics more explicitly as one of relativism.

-Mark