Amia Srinivasan's 4 questions for Free Marketeers

Dr. Srinivasan poses 4 questions for Free Market wallahs.

1. Is any exchange between two people in the absence of direct physical compulsion by one party against the other (or the threat thereof) necessarily free?

No. Free Market theory says people will be better off if they can freely exchange goods and services under the following conditions; there is perfect information & perfect competition, with independent preferences, no non-convexities or externalities or uncertainty. .
If you say yes, then you think that people can never be coerced into action by circumstances that do not involve the direct physical compulsion of another person. Suppose a woman and her children are starving, and the only way she can feed her family, apart from theft, is to prostitute herself or to sell her organs. Since she undertakes these acts of exchange not because of direct physical coercion by another, but only because she is compelled by hunger and a lack of alternatives, they are free.

Question. Can this woman and her children, at some future point, earn enough to repay a loan taken out today? If yes, then they can borrow if there is a free market in credit. If no, then they can either ask for charitable assistance or an arbitrage opportunity for a moral entrepreneur is created. Provided there are some people with means who would prefer to see them fed rather than starving, then their needs will be met in that way. Suppose, the majority of people in the area don't like looking at starving children. They can create a fund to maintain the indigent under a Tiebout model. Furthermore, if people feel prostitution or organ sales are morally repugnant, they can take collective action by making such activities illegal. Alternatively, by stipulating that all organ sale contracts be 'balanced' (i.e. equitably divide gains from trade) and such as would prevent the development of a 'repugnancy market' then that may be a superior alternative.

In any case, the woman in the hypothetical is never really free even if the choices facing her are of the following kind- either buy Chanel and send the kids to Eton while flying round the world as a super model OR teach Eco-Feminist philosophy at Oxford while sending the kids to the local Comp.-quite simply because we might still suspect her of being the prisoner of gender roles or some such shite.

The point about the market is that it increases the number of options from- (starve or get fucked) to (starve or get fucked or get a low paid job)  to (starve or get fucked or get a dead end low paid job or get a low paid job which leads to something) etc, etc.

2. Is any free (not physically compelled) exchange morally permissible?
No. Fraud is not permissible. Actions in restraint of trade are not permissible. Provision of goods or services which change the preferences of the consumer too may be either praiseworthy or punishable- it depends.
If you say yes, then you think that any free exchange can’t be exploitative and thus immoral. Suppose that I inherited from my rich parents a large plot of vacant land, and that you are my poor, landless neighbor. I offer you the following deal. You can work the land, doing all the hard labor of tilling, sowing, irrigating and harvesting. I’ll pay you $1 a day for a year. After that, I’ll sell the crop for $50,000. You decide this is your best available option, and so take the deal. Since you consent to this exchange, there’s nothing morally problematic about it.
You are a local monopsonist- that's restraint of trade plain and simple. Your laborer should hire a lawyer and get a penal settlement out of you. Alternatively, if the legal code in your country is not in line with current Free Market thinking, an arbitrage opportunity for a Social Entrepreneur exists such that the system decreasingly oscillates around the 'repeated game' optimum. 
3. Do people deserve all they are able, and only what they are able, to get through free exchange?
No. What we think people deserve has nothing to do with what they have or what they are able to get. 
If you say yes, you think that what people deserve is largely a matter of luck. Why? First, because only a tiny minority of the population is lucky enough to inherit wealth from their parents. (A fact lost on Mitt Romney, who famously advised America’s youth to “take a shot, go for it, take a risk … borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.”) Since giving money to your kids is just another example of free exchange, there’s nothing wrong with the accumulation of wealth and privilege in the hands of the few. Second, people’s capacities to produce goods and services in demand on the market is largely a function of the lottery of their birth: their genetic predispositions, their parents’ education, the amount of race- and sex-based discrimination to which they’re subjected, their access to health care and good education.

It’s also a function of what the market happens to value at a particular time. Van Gogh, William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Vermeer, Melville and Schubert all died broke. If you’re a good Nozickian, you think that’s what they deserved.
Either you have a theory of what people deserve or you don't. I suppose a person who believes in an Occassionalist God, or a believer in Karma, might say 'whatever people get is what they deserve' but this is independent of the sort of economic system obtaining at the time. Srinivasan may not have a full fledged theory of what people deserve but she does think that some people get more and others less than what they ought to do. She is welcome to do a bit of 'Mechanism Design' such that the outcome she desires arises out of the operation of the market. To persuade us to adopt this Mechanism she might, thanks to her brilliance, throw in some new piece of technology she has invented to sweeten the pot.
4. Are people under no obligation to do anything they don’t freely want to do or freely commit themselves to doing?
Yes! MORAL obligation arise solely by one's free choice and commitment- anything else is Kantian heteronomy.
If you say yes, then you think the only moral requirements are the ones we freely bring on ourselves — say, by making promises or contracts. Suppose I’m walking to the library and see a man drowning in the river. I decide that the pleasure I would get from saving his life wouldn’t exceed the cost of getting wet and the delay. So I walk on by. Since I made no contract with the man, I am under no obligation to save him.
Clearly, you felt no moral obligation to save him because you didn't save him. I might say 'you should have felt a moral obligation' but that judgment is an expression of the Moral code to which I have chosen to subscribe. I might go further. I might say 'I'm going to cut pieces out of your brain till your bad moral code is removed. Then I will insert pieces into your brain till you voluntarily choose a moral code similar to mine'. However, most people would feel that my moral code is just as bad, if not worse, than yours.  The Market Solution is not lobotomies or lectures but Mechanism Design so that Incentives and Penalties line up with the sort of outcomes we value.

As

Mario Rizzo Says:

1. There is a long tradition in the common law that refuses to recognize a legal duty to help strangers in emergency situations: the so-called Good Samaritan duty. It is not because the common law judges were heartless and did not recognize moral duties. It is because they recognized that state compulsion or legal liability should be used sparingly. They also recognized a whole host of practical problems in enforcing Good Samaritan duties.

   Not to recognize a distinction between the moral obligations of individuals and the role of the state is an error of profound consequences.

   The liberal wants a society in which people who do not share the same moral values can live together and prosper.
2. Vivek Iyer Says:

   
   October 23, 2013 at 2:23 pm
   

   Quite right. India has an activist Supreme Court which is stretching constructive due process in precisely this very dangerous manner such that innocent third parties can be jailed simply because they were ignorant of something which the Court decides it was their duty to know about.
   In ancient times, entire communities were held jointly accountable for any thing bad that happened in their locality. Far from preventing crime and destitution and so on, this merely gave rise to a corrupt form of tyranny.

   The philosophical argument Srinivasan presents hinges on an assumption of agent homogeniety.
   Actually, a Positive Duties argument, obeying the rules of what we would recognize to be a deontic logic, which stipulates that there is at least one general duty of benificence binding upon all possible agents is also an argument that either nullifies or forbids its own use.
   This is because a possible agent may interpret the general duty as entailing the making of this very argument. Either this is a legitimate or else an illegitimate entailment. If it is legitimate, then the argument has neither intentional nor intensional content because it is uttered only because it is a binding duty. On the other hand, If it is an illegitimate entailment then deontic logic forbids its use.
   In ordinary life, we recognize that agents are diverse. We expect more from some than others. Positive Duties are enjoined on people we deem ‘respectable’ or ‘virtuous’ or ‘capable’. We expect less of a person of impaired judgment, reputation or character.
   Economic theory explains how and why heterogeneous agents get canalised, some towards ‘repugnancy markets’ others towards ‘merit goods’. The benefit of offering contracts which are ‘balanced’ rather than exploitative- in the sense of equitably sharing the gains from trade- is reputational and dynamic. Some agents gain more by taking this ‘high road’ while others, by reason of entitlement defect or pathological preferences, remain confined to the ghetto of ‘repugnancy markets.’
   Thus, the sort of deontic logic that matches with a sophisticated ‘Whig’ type of theory (like that of Ken Binmore) is not going to suffer the defect of the argument put forward by this lady.

Srinivas's argument boils down to this- 'You, the reader, believe a Positive Moral Duty exists which conflicts with the Negative Rights of the Free Market.' Thus either you are immoral, in ignoring your own moral intuition, or stupid.'
It's basically a 'gotcha' argument of a puerile sort so the proper way to combat it is to accuse her of advocating the use of tax payer dollars to subsidize the environmentally unsustainable sodomisation of ethnic minority fetuses which is what Obamacare ineluctably entails- at least on her premises. This is because everybody has the Positive right to terminate the genetically cloned fetus with high sodomization preference and ethnic minority status, which the State had to provide for them, as part of their Positive right to happiness, and the fetus has the Positive right to be kept alive and regularly sodomized as per its genetically programmed wishes, all at the State's expense. This is clearly environmentally unsustainable because everything is.

Hilary Putnam's Last Tango in Paris

What is happening here? Did Putnam really want the Derrida acolyte to pass him the butter or was his real purpose to signal an intention to bugger with his brains Brando style? Now it is true that Putnam actually ate the butter that the Derridista passed him but was it not to recruit himself for the purpose of buggering with the young fellow's brains? Yet, given that Putnam's life-project can't decompose facts from values might not the reverse be the case- i.e. that Putnam's quest for butter drives his buggering with brains rather than the other way round?
Putnam thinks that a theory which returns the same answer to anything it analyses is not a theory. Yet  nothing else is. The point about paying money to get a Credential as a theorist is that your output is predictable and thus marketable or rent yielding as Bourdieusian capital.
Assuming the fitness landscape changes unpredictably, as must be the case if Life evolved, it does not matter if a particular theory is incoherent and silly so long as it as it always returns the same answer under any perturbation of the Social Information Set. Some Theory will be objectively- i.e. instrumentally- better than every other, irrespective of its incoherence and silliness, so it makes sense for Society to devote a very small amount of its total resources to feeding and clothing Theorists because of a Newcomb or Kavka's toxin type problem facing Society such that strategically simulated belief in an Theorist- i.e. a guy who always says the same thing yet also believes he is a smart oracle- yields better or more stable correlated equlibria.

Deontology's Royal Road to Beenakker's boundary

This is a link to an interesting paper suggesting that any deontology can be collapsed into a Consequentialism by an appropriate weighting of Utilities but not vice versa  thus generating an asymmetry in favour of the latter.
An obvious rejoinder is that you can have a Deontology specified thus
1) first compute all possible Consequentialist solutions be they rule, act or whatever.
2) find something better than any of them.
However, there is one sort of Consequentialism, which I've just this moment invented, which goes something like 'discontinuously assign very high Utility to particular ordinal Utilities which have interesting mathematical properties, like Pi or e, such that what is maximized relates to something to do with  doing the Consequentialist calculus itself. In this case the deontology suggested above fails because something at step 1 encounters a halting problem.

Now as a matter of fact, not theory, it is the case that talk about Consequentialism vs Deontology is only interesting in so far as it drives maths or provides a concrete model for cool axiom systems arising from other fields.

The author of the paper linked to above writes-
 A consequentialiser who cannot account for the difference between act and rule consequentialism has not succeeded to deliver a theory that deserves the label ‘consequentialism’. However,only cardinal consequentialism can account for this distinction. Rule consequentialism presupposes that one is able to calculate averages (or at least sum up the utility of different consequences into a sum total) and this requires that we measure utility on a cardinal scale.
Is it the case that Rule Consequentialism (R.C) is constrained in the manner specified? Who is to say that, so long as R.C. doesn't throw away information, that single valued averages are necessary? Suppose a fractal captures the information rather than an average. It would have been news to many, prior to the Seventies, that fractals were in fact rankable on a cardinal scale on the basis of dimensionality. How do we know that the same thing is not true of other, currently exotic or unknown, mathematical objects which capture information?

I suppose this is just a sort of slapdash prelude to the realization that here as elsewhere what appears to be a Philosophical problem dissolves at Beenakker's boundary.

Nussbaum, Narendra Modi and tolmema

Martha Nussabum has called Modi's election victory a black mark against Gujarat. What does black mark mean? Well, black is the color of niggers and other such filth and the voters of Gujarat by ignoring Nussbaum's views (remember Nussbaum is WASP and blonde, only having converted to Judaism after marriage) have rejected the option to Whiten themselves. Instead they have been dirtied and defiled by a black mark.
Nussbaum herself knows how to whiten things- by using tipp-ex to cover over the truth. What happened was this. Nussbaum had previously testified in an American court that the word 'tolmema' used by Plato to castigate homosexuality carried no pejorative meaning. When taken to task for this obvious lie, she obfuscated the issue by claiming that she personally used an out of date lexicon, that of Liddell & Scott from 1897, rather than the one corrected and updated by Jones. This wasn't true. When she verified her source and found she'd been caught in a lie, she simply tipp-exed out 'Jones' from the affidavit she submitted to prove she hadn't perjured herself.

'In a sworn affidavit dated October 21, Nussbaum stated that her own interpretation of tolmêma, , was borne out by "the authoritative dictionary relied on by all scholars in this area." She then proceeded to give the dictionary entry, which indeed lists no pejorative connotation of the word. But what "authoritative dictionary" did she have in mind? The answer to that question would soon land her in trouble. Nussbaum's affidavit is organized as a series of numbered paragraphs. In paragraph 10, the name of the lexicon in question appears this way:

Liddell, Scott          Lexicon of the Ancient Greek Language.

The possible significance of the blank space--a blob of liquid paper on the original document--leaped out at her opponents, Finnis and George. For the authoritative dictionary that is actually relied on by all Greek scholars is, in fact, customarily listed as "Liddell, Scott & Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon." Without the "& Jones," "Liddell and Scott" necessarily refers to an 1897 edition of this basic lexicographical reference tool--a long-superseded edition that in fact lists no pejorative meaning for the word tolmêma. The Jones edition, on the other hand, published in 1940, includes extensive revisions made under the direction of the scholar Henry Stuart Jones. Among the revisions, as both Finnis and George are quick to point out, is the inclusion of "shameless act" as a possible translation of tolmêma.'

In other words, if not a shuffler and a liar and a fuckwit of Amartya Sen like proportions, it is clear that Nussbaum has little acquaintance with ordinary standards of honesty and truth telling let alone any higher notion of Alethia.

In the case of Narendra Modi- who, within a year of taking office as Chief Minister, put an end to the cycle of politically instrumentalized communal rioting in Gujarat which began in 1969 and was rewarded at the polls for it- Nussbaum simply ignores the facts and wishes the Gujarati voters too had tipp-exed over the them. Not to do so is indeed to earn a 'black mark' in her book. Yet, most Gujaratis can't read her book. What they can do is vote according to their empirical knowledge and political convictions. If the Gujaratis wanted to go in for ethnic cleansing, no force on earth could stop them. They don't want that. They don't like riots. They don't like rape and arson and murderous mobs. There was a Congress Minister of Fisheries back in the 90's who engineered a terrorist attack in Surat so as to set off a round of communal rioting with the bombs being supplied by a prominent gangster with ties to a Karachi based Crime Lord. This gangster then killed an M.P who had blown the whistle on his activities. All three were Muslims. The gangster fled across the border because the killing of the M.P had angered the Union Home Minister. But he fell out with his Godfather there and returned to India. The Police, who had been in his pocket, bumped him off so as to prevent his testifying against them. Such was the rule of the 'Secular' Congress Party in Gujarat. It never cleaned up its act. It specialized in fielding tainted candidates- including Hindus involved in the post-Godhra riots. Congress wasn't interested in Development. That's why it got the boot. Modi had only been in office a few months when the Godhra outrage occurred. This was a couple of months after the attack on the Indian Parliament when India and Pakistan were close to war. Delhi suspected that Godhra had been orchestrated by the ISI so as to set off a chain of pogroms with the intention of paralyzing the transport network in the State by clogging it up with displaced people, thus hampering Indian troop movements. For this reason Modi and Defence Minister Fernandes had to take a strong line from the outset. This should have been enough to destroy Modi's future in the State but something unexpected happened. By lifting curfew early and emphasizing the need to get back to business as usual, Modi sent a signal which the Gujarati entrepreneurial class welcomed. The alacrity with which he got on top of the Akshardam revenge attack- coolly putting all the blame on the Pakistanis- was the final straw which broke the back of politically instrumentalised Communal rioting.
Gujarati's are to be complimented, not condemned, for finding a way to marginalize the lumpen, criminalized, political class and get rid of the periodic riots which empowered those bottom feeders.
I'm not saying Modi completely broke the nexus between the Police and land-sharks and bootleggers and so on. But he showed a way forward and the voters of his state rewarded him for it.
Nussbaum says that the Gujarati's should pay greater heed to the outcome of recent Court trials rather than rely on their own memories and common sense. This is quite foolish. Gujaratis knew how things were done but didn't want things to go on being done in that way. They voted for the man who brought about the change they desired.
Nussbaum learnt nothing from her tolmema debacle. She uses her tipp-ex on inconvenient facts and awards black marks to brown people.
Proof, as if more proof was needed, that Professors who talk Ethics are all worthless scumbags.

Ipseity, Alterity & the conjuration of the Subaltern.

Can Critical  Philosophy, post Godhra, still be considered a Baudelairian exorcism of ipseity, rather than a Baudrillardian ethic of alterity, when answers randomly canvassed, from the most ideologically diverse theorists of the Subaltern, to the question 'where is the toilet?' all so consistently cash out as 'my mouth'?
 Take Sumit Sarkar- outside and shoot him- no, I jest, I jest- that's the job of the Naxalites- but, seriously folks, he was right to point out that Subaltern Studies stopped being about really marginalized folk- tribals and manual scavengers and so on- and turned into Foucaldian whining about Eurocentrism- so his approach to answering the question 'where is the toilet?' begins with a recognition that the disposal of 'number two' is a subaltern form of WORK. Since Subaltern studies gobshiterry should be about genuine subalterns, like manual scavengers (bhangis), the mouth of a Subaltern Studies savant is indeed the nearest toilet.
Ranajit Guha's approach is more 'roundabout' (as the Austrian Economists would say) and Spivak's is more Literary Capital intensive but both reach the same conclusion because Guha lectures in Vienna and  the word toilet comes from the French toilette and Spivak can speak French, so basically, yes, the nearest toilet is her mouth.

No change there then.
Personally, I blame David Cameron.
That boy aint right.

Is Public Justification empty?

Perhaps a truly Private Language is impossible because, as Wittgenstein argued, we would have no way to check we were using a word properly. I suppose one way round the problem is to engage an auditor to maintain a Dictionary and a Grammar and so on for your Private Language and perhaps Relationships and Communities have evolved to provide that 'external audit' function.
What about Public discourse, or what is called 'Public Reason theory'? Is there a way to be sure it will always be meaningful? If so, then it is sensible to speak of a Rawlsian 'Public Justification Principle' - whereby everybody has 'sufficient reason' to back every Law- because absent a 'well-ordering' of Social States 'sufficient reason' faces a halting problem- i.e. Public Reason theory wouldn't be meaningful in any Public sense. Applying Binmore's 'folk theorem' -whereby there is always some game theoretic mechanism to replace the need for external coercion- we can get away from some of the problems in that literature and focus on the basic question of whether, under the most benign possible circumstances, Public signals and Private signifying exhibit a symmetry relationship such that something we can all agree to call 'Meaning' is minimally conserved.
One way to prove that this can be the case is to attempt a General Equilibrium Analysis of  'externally audited' Private language and its aggregation as Public signals.
A naive way of expressing Noether's theorem, for non dissipative systems, is to say that the existence of a conserved property or Law is evidence of a Symmetry or vice versa.
Thus, for Classical or Marxist Economics, 'Labor' and 'Capital' are meaningful terms and 'Laws'- like the Iron Law of Wages- can be derived or, at a higher level of complexity, the project of a Sraffian Economics, or a Hilary Putnam/Amartya Sen type normative Economics can be sustained.
This is of general interest, because, for Neo-Classical Economics, a scandal, in the shape of the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu theorem, has arisen such that its notion of General Equilibrium becomes empty or 'anything goes'- i.e. we have a non-dissipative system, under standard assumptions of individual rationality, or even homothetic preferences, such that no testable hypotheses arise nor is there any way of telling if the Economy is behaving pathologically.
Of course, one way out is simply to say that one wants whatever outcome one is lumbered with. All states of the Universe are gross substitutes for each other. Perhaps, in some mystic or teleological sense this is actually the case for states of the World, but, surely, Discourse isn't exclusively or even mainly about states of the World?
Sir Alfred Sherman once said 'A Bishop who stops believing in God can go in for Socialism or Sodomy but an Economist who renounces faith in his profession is unemployable' Well, we know he was wrong about Economists, they can always toss coins for Big Finance or shill for Micro Finance or  grow fins for an ornamental Think Tank or bottom feed as part of a Credentialist Academic Ponzi scheme, but surely a champion of Public Discourse can't afford a similar agnosticism with respect to whether Language itself breaks public signalling/private signifying symmetries and simply throws away information?

Is there any way forward- perhaps work being done in some discipline I haven't heard of- such that Public Discourse doesn't cash out as pathological memetics which acts as enabler for all the mischievous Preference Falsification Avalability Cascades that have plagued us over the last 20 years?
I don't know- but I'd sure to love to find out.
I wish I could be optimistic about the answer, but given the invidious nature, for Economics, of problems of aggregation- e.g. the Capital controversy between the 2 Cambridges', or the well known problems of Social Choice- the greater likelihood seems to me to be that Public Discourse is doomed to either a Procrustean bed of ideology, such that polysemy is constrained, and symmetries are artificially enforced or else to an 'anything goes' emptiness unable to gauge its own morbidity or seek for its own cure.

Scold the Environment not the Economy

If the Environment is misbehaving is it not because is totally corrupt, materialistic and awards itself huge pay increases when the rest of us are having to tighten our belts? I mean look at the Amazon rain forest- it has these ridiculously tall trees which even have their own micro-climate! Why is the Environment behaving so badly? What is the point of scolding the kids to turn down the thermostat when the Environment is recklessly warming itself on a global level and melting the ice caps? Do you know how much energy the Environment wastes every time it indulges in one of those hurricanes or cyclones? I don't but its the sort of thing you probably have an i-phone app to calculate.

For far  too long we have been taught to say nice things about the Environment- especially seeing as it is constantly getting raped in unlikely places which can't be good for its morale. However, what I say is the Environment is a damned slut! How about it learn Krav Maga, put on an extra set of underwear and take some fucking responsibility for its actions instead of spending so much time out of its gourd in seedy Third World dives or hillbilly country or other such random places? I mean,  how often do you hear about the Environment getting raped in the Home Counties? No doubt the quality of the 'raves' and the drugs and so on aren't up to its usual high standards and maybe it will actually have to work for a living to pay its Council tax but that's what we call being a grown up, dear. Try it sometime.

I'm not saying one shouldn't regularly scold the Economy & whack it on the nose with a rolled up newspaper and definitely revoke its couch privileges. But, fair's fair. How come the Environment gets a pass every time it fouls up but the Economy doesn't?

It is not enough to recover the portion of Adam Smith, actually the greater part, which consisted in saying snide things about the Economy, nor the Ricardian tradition as modified by Marx and Sraffa- which frankly was counter-productive and actually made being bourgeois kinda cool- what we have to do is go back to Aquinas and Aristotle, or even further back to the Ape-people, when scolding the Environment made up the greater part of Public discourse.

I think Kaushik Basu has written a book about this. I don't know if this is true, but next time the Environment gets high and turns into one of those hurricanes or cyclones or tsunamis, just you a toss your Game Theory textbooks into is maw. That will teach it.
Not that it isn't all David Cameron's fault.
That boy aint right.

Ethics, Engineering and Efficiency.

What is Ethics? Essentially it's stuff to do with your ethos- what you are for yourself, what kinds of things you value or want to value, your life project or salutary lack of any such hair up yo' ass, as well as what sort of World you want to inhabit, or want to want to inhabit, who you want to relate to and how you want them to relate to you or each other- so it would be reasonable to say Ethics is about what Economists call 'Preferences' except when it isn't and comes under the rubric of 'Signalling' or 'Mechanism Design' or whatever.

This brings us to the question- what is Economics? Well, its about how to economize- do the same thing but using less resources and from that point of view it is a type of Ethical theory- viz. it's better to do things in the least expensive and least stupid way. Engineers are attracted to this aspect of Economics and good Economics is smart engineering. However, Economics- like Theology or Literary Theory- is also something else- a Careerist Ponzi scheme based on the bankrupt notion of a totalizing 'grand narrative', whose hallmark is its radical heterogeneity with respect to what it claims to study. Thus, Theology explains why Religion and Spirituality and Love of the Creator is totally ungodly and spite ridden in a fucked up way & Literary Theory explains that good writers are really very very evil and bad writers and very very bad writers are actually very very good and saintly. Similarly, Economics is about being very very wasteful and stupid. Herbert Hoover was a truly great Humanitarian when he acted as an Engineer. As President, thinking he had to act the Economist, he fucked up big time.
Why? Well he'd spotted, as an engineer, that a whole industry can come forward when they put a floor under wages- so as to avoid cut-throat price and wage competition such that quality declines or a 'repugnancy' factor is created thus destroying the market long term. But, once President, he didn't get that downward wage rigidity meant that markets couldn't clear without an anti-deflationary monetary policy, a full employment balanced budget Fiscal policy as well as optimal, correlated equilibria (rather than Mercantilist, beggar my neighbour) Tariff policy. In other words, the engineer was seduced by the apparent similarity between Economics and his own profession and didn't do proper due diligence to check that Economists weren't all a bunch of irresponsible fuckwits whose idea of a good time is fiddling while Rome burns in a grand Concerto of 'told you so'.

The pity of the thing is that there was once an Engineer who took up Economics and invented a notion of Efficiency which ought to have got everybody singing from the same hymn sheet.
But, before looking at that story, the question arises- what is Efficiency and why would Economists care about it? Briefly, Efficiency is about waste, cutting it down, and it is the sort of thing you hire Engineers or Managers or Agronomists or other such people with practical skills to do for you. Economists can't do anything themselves except produce hot air, so its useful for them to set up problems such that Engineers can have a crack at them while standing back to take the credit.
That being said, let us now look at the trajectory of Vifredo Pareto, the paradigmatic Engineer who moved into Economics because he was sick and tired of the way the stupid pi-jaw of Economists empowered the Govt. to tie Industry up in knots and create waste. Pareto put forward a theory of 'residues & derivations' such that Moral & Political Entrepreneurs recombine various stupid and vacuous ideas (derivations) because there is a market for something which caters for irrational, or instinctual or thymotic or mimetic or other such Social glue (residues).
The theory of imperfect competition allows us to predict that you are going to get a lot of product differentiation with excess capacity in 'derivations' where there are low barriers to entry (anybody can set up a Think Tank), whereas you are going to get very little real product differentiation as opposed to wasteful advertising and branding if there are high barriers to entry (setting up a Political Party which has a shot at power under first past the Post). In other words the two main parties or sects or whatever will be virtually identical while the lunatic fringe will be all over the place. But, the important thing for Pareto is that 'derivations and residues' obscure the Engineering problem- cracking down on stupidity and waste. In other words, noise ye shall always have with you, so concentrate on the signal,  ignore the Careerist, Credentialist, pi-jaw merchants scoring points about which of them was more diligent at swallowing whatever shite Aristotle or Kant or Gramsci or David Icke bequeathed to posterity, or pretending to be more pro disabled Lesbian Bahishkrit Samaj Smartha Vadadesi Vadama Bloggers wot have been forced to repeatedly commit suttee by Narendra Modi just to suck up to the Tatas.
The concept of Pareto Efficiency was one of Pareto's legacies to Economics as wot she is taught but many Economists never liked it because it got in the way of Classical Economics- which consists in saying really sarky things to the Economy till it sits up straight and stops chewing gum and turns in its homework assignments on time.
This is a link to a paper on 'Ethics & Efficiency' by a Dutch Professor which summarizes the Hilary Putnam/Walsh/Sen approach which seeks to revive old fashioned Pigouvian Welfare Economics as a tremendous engine for whining and pretending to be a great big bleeding heart while quietly climbing every Careerist ladder in sight and living it large on the Conference Circuit.

At the heart of its complaint against Pareto Efficiency is the feeling that if bargaining power, or wealth or something else of value, is not equitably distributed to begin with, then the outcome of trade and exchange might worsen Social Welfare though technically leaving no one worse off.
Indeed, we all at some time or another- either by reason of information asymmetry, lack of endowment, neediness or desperation or some thing else of that sort- feel that we are likely to get the short end of a stick in a negotiation. Hence, middle men evolve who are either stronger or more daring or more in the know than you, and they act as your pimp or dealer or whatever.
The question which naturally arises is do pimps actually make under-age crack whores or elderly Tam Bram gigolos (what? You think this blog pays my dental bills?) significantly better off in the same way that the Feminist Anti Poverty industry (Gender and Development it used to be called) actually makes millions of women living in rural Belgravia significantly better off? The answer is, yes of course they do. Only pimps can make inter-personal comparisons of Utility and tell you which street corner to strut your stuff and decide how  much of your chest hair to expose or what to charge for a Manmohan Singh special (don't ask but at least its shuddh vegetarian unlike the Montek Singh Ahluwalia which Feminist Academics, flush with their bonus money from Big Pharma (what? they make tampons don't they and Feminist Academia is about menstruating all the time) insist upon just to humiliate us elderly Tam Bram prostitutes dressed in our P.Chidambaram style veshtis and untucked white shirt.

Yet, and this is the paradox, though Pimps and Sen-tentious Welfare E- Con Problematization represent a Ethical interessement mechanism they only do by involving all in a lasting impoverishment.
The Pareto efficient solution is to have no interessement mechanisms and everybody voting with their feet for a better Tiebout model- like how's about we just get dinner and maybe a movie and then call it a night. Which isn't to say you shouldn't murli Manohar Joshi. Murli him but good.

John Broome's foolish argument that Economics is essentially Ethical.

Most foolish statement possible on Econ's relationship to Ethics?
Surely this is a contender 'virtually all normative claims in Econ are ethical- for e.g. to claim interest rates ought to go up raises a conflict of interest between lenders and borrowers.'

Why is this nonsense? People who have borrowed did so because they had Credit- it was believed that they could and would repay. People who have lent money are people who believed they would benefit from a future stream of interest plus capital repayments from the borrower. Clearly raising the interest rate today has a redistributional effect only if these are 'floating rate' loans. However, in that case, both borrowers and lenders had a model of the economy, one that includes why and when policy might dictate a change in interest rates, and therefore there is no normative issue here- only one regarding the models used to formulate Expectations. But models aren't normative, they live or die on the basis of their predictive power. To argue otherwise is to believe Natural Selection is normative. Or, more foolish yet, it oughtta be.

Broome gives an example of a normative requirement that isn't ethical- viz.  you ought to clean your car occasionally. He is wrong. The statement is actually either positive- i.e. wash your car iff your Utility function satisfies x, y, z. - or ethical in the sense of altering your ethos- i.e. your preferences. 'It was only when I started washing my car regularly that I finally realized my Dad wasn't a fucking emotional zombie but a deeply gay man who dreamt only of cornholing Jehovah's witnesses the way I will henceforth dedicate my life to doing.'

Broome is a clever clever guy who writes lucidly. But he's a Professor. That's tragic. Like Oedipus- who sets afoot an investigation that will indict him, indict all investigation, as not merely the offender but one rendered thereby so heteronomous as to compound the offence and deprive it of any individuating, and hence instrumental, value- Econ's encounter with Ethics- resonant of that other encounter in a narrow defile between Delphi and Daulis- damningly undoes itself as Project and only blindly persists in haecceity by reason of that dread Deity whose days are delays.

Hilary Putnam on Amartya Sen's Economics

Hilary Putnam thinks logic exists independently of metaphysics- i.e. talk of possible or impossible worlds- as the form of coherent thought. He also thinks Ethics can do without ontology- though Lebenswelts can be  partially ordered only according to purely ontological criteria. This permits him, in his book 'the collapse of the fact/value dichotomy', to abolish the distinction between Values as ends-in themselves and purely  instrumental Epistemic values- e.g. a Physicist thinking he's on the right track because his equation is elegant, or a Chemist who feels  he's onto something because his theory is more parsimonious, or a Mathematician whose confidence in a conjecture arises out of its 'beauty'- even though no Physicist will stick with an equation, no matter how elegant, which doesn't fit the facts; nor will any Chemist stick with a parsimonious theory which leads to his lab blowing up; or any Mathematician stick with a beautiful conjecture which has been proved wrong.
Elegance can be an end in itself- the dandy may persist in wearing a garment unsuitable for the weather though he perish of influenza- Parsimony can be an end in itself- the Miser might starve to death so as to increase his pile of gold coins- Beauty can be an end in itself- I wear a paper bag over my head while crossing the road because...urm... well, my g.f. makes me wear one in bed and I mean a chap likes to look his best...
I suppose one could argue that all values are instrumental. There is some other Value lurking behind them or else some blind Schopenhauerian Will. But, some values are ontologically dysphoric- their instrumentality lies in granting their holder a vantage point from which to devalue and denigrate this world and everything that goes on in it. But this is not Putnam's own belief. For him Values aren't ontologically dysphoric at least not those he holds to be truly valuable. Perhaps his book is a defense against the unconscious realization that the reverse is the case.

Is this why Putnam now abolishes the distinction between instrumental or heuristic 'values' and absolute values? Or has his long life really led him to the conclusion that everybody just synchronically rapping in a coherent way in is a good thing and like mebbe results in Ethics developing super-powers, coz it gets bit by a radio active spider,  and then it like takes over Economics and things  just becomes so much nicer and I needn't get up three times a night to pee and though we can't rule out that we'd all know what to think about abortion and capital punishment and so on,  that still would be swell because we could have a gentleman's agreement not to talk about it in plain terms- at least, y'know, not pas devant les domestiques.

Thus, Putnam's role in Philosophy is now to say only incoherent things like 'Economics is  a 'policy' Science'- i.e. Economists are Scientists of a particular sort whom Govts. and NGO's ought to consult before deciding what to do or even what to want to do.
Are there any circumstances when this could be called a cogent or coherent point of view?
No, unless we adopt a linguistic conventionalism whereby 'Economist' is defined as the guy whom at any moment is most helpful in getting a Govt. or NGO to do something everybody later agrees was the best thing. Thus, in Kipling's story 'Todd's Amendment', Economist means the 5 year old boy whose providential remarks enable the Govt. to make the right decision. The senior Civil Servants holding appointments as Economic Advisers, however, can't be called Economists because what they are saying is not helpful and is in fact counter-productive.

I suppose, in a one period Economy- a momentary kshanikavada Universe- one can coarse grain one's definitions as much as one likes so as to retain the appearance of logical coherence.
This is what Putnam does to collapse the 'is' /'ought' dichotomy and praise up to the Skies, Amartya Sen's brand of Economics.

This raises the question- is Amartya Sen, Putnam's paradigm of a 'good' Economist, a guy Govts. or NGO's should consult before deciding what to do? The answer, for India, is- Fuck, No! He has never given a good Policy prescription, advanced a viable hypothesis, or made a sustainable forecast. Instead, he's muddied the waters and stalemated the reform process in a manner which most harms precisely those he would have us believe are closest to his heart.
             
Putnam may argue that Sen is still a good Economist because he tells Govts about what sorts of things they should want to do- stuff like making life better for everybody including the poor, the disabled, women and so on. But can't anyone do that? In fact, what would be a hundred times more effective than Sen gassing on  would be a You Tube video of a poor disabled woman actually saying 'hey guys, my life is real crappy right now, but guess what, if you do x and stop doing y then I can do z and the Social benefit of z outweighs the cost of x minus y and what's more it will have a demonstration effect and so the dynamic benefits are even greater. So, guys, get off your arses and do x and stop doing y already. '
Clearly the experience of the last decade and a half is that listening to Sen-tentious shite hasn't been good for the clients of Govts or NGOs as opposed to 'Moral Entrepreneurs' & Academic or Bureaucratic Careerists. Paying attention to Sen is a waste of resources. It crowds out genuine research. Sent-tentious nonsense about Famines being about democracy rather than crop failure increased African vulnerability and reduced funding for Norman Borlaug type Green Revolution programs there. He's now telling Indians to ban private tuition- the one thing preventing India lapsing back into mass illiteracy.
Even if Sen didn't always say the stupidest possible thing under the circumstances, even if all he did was say 'hey guys, be nice to the poor' he'd still not be a good Economist in Putnam's sense.
This is because Economics itself tells us that employing an Economist to tell you stuff like - care about the disadvantaged why don't you. Stop being such an almighty dick!- is throwing money out of the window. Plenty of people will do it for free if you will also permit them to slap you silly while doing so.

Now it may be Putnam believes that non Sen-tentious Economists are all very evil and bad and they trip or push the good Economists down in the playground and steal their lunch money and then when the good Economists try to complain they just accuse them of not having properly understood David Hume or Kant or some other dead Racist which makes the good Economists burst into tears and go running home to their Mommies.
If this is what Putnam believes, then his book makes perfect sense. Since good Economists- with the notable exception of Sen and some other guy who was Putnam's best pal at School- are really stupid and don't know from John Dewey and get cowed by the attacks of the bad Economists, which is why the bad Economists are running things and telling Govts. to be really corrupt and to implement really stupid policies. Thus Putnam has written a little book- or had it distilled out of some of his lectures- which will help good Economists to fight back and turn the tables on the bad Economists by getting off snappy comebacks  like- '1950 called. It wants back its 'analytic-synthetic dichotomy' which Quine totally ass-raped in 1951.' at which point the bad Economists  all get like real red in the face and start to sweat through their Brooks Bros. suits and then next thing you know they are blurting out in these like real tight little voices- 'Quine molested me! He touched me on my no no place behind the book stacks when I went to borrow a copy of Ayn Rand or Rice or whatever and he smelt just like my Grandmother and and and why are you being so mean to me? My other car is a Prius.'

Of course this is not what Putnam actually thinks but he's just going to go ahead and say it anyway because he believes by doing so he will be able to breathe new life into Classical Economics- i.e. strident feuilletonism or dyspeptic armchair polemics providing a mask for hypocritical rent-seeking within a game of elite musical chairs.
Putnam isn't an Economist so we mustn't blame him too much. The question is- what theory or theories within Economics itself are relevant to it as a 'Policy Science'? If Putnam addresses these theories in his book then it is worth reading. If he doesn't but just goes after dead-in-the-water Research Programs then his book isn't worth reading.
Obviously different people will have different notions of which theories are alive and which are dead. But, off the top of my head, my guess is everybody would agree that for real Economics, useful stuff, people can agree about 'facts' and have grounds to be suspicious of 'value-judgments' for reasons roughly similar to what I outline below.
1) Economics is a Science which only has a subject matter when preference diversity isn't too great or too small. It may be that Socio-Biology of some sort can tell us when Economics will have a subject matter but, assuming the fitness landscape is unpredictable then it can't tell us why and when genotypal canalisation type choke-points on phenotypal plasticisty will arise. Still, once preference diversity is within the 'Economic' range  , everybody studying it is going to good-faith agree that there are some canonical, or Schelling type, 'fact' demarcators which are the solution to the co-ordination problem. In other words, if a situation is one where Economics has a subject matter, then Economists can good faith agree on what are facts. If they can't, then the field probably isn't Economic at all and other disciplines (except Philosophy because it isn't a discipline) can explain why.
2) Values aren't necessarily subjective- they could be strategic or they could arise by 'preference falsification' or as being in joint supply with 'availability cascades'. In any case, if Values or meta-preferences themselves have Utility then there is going to be
 a) a drive to 100% preference diversity since everybody has an interest in valuing what he himself has or will have
b) some sort of Girardian mimetic desire type dynamic which constrains the bargaining problem re. Values to the neighborhood of a strange attractor such that 'the more things change, the more they remain the same'
In other words, Values are unknown and unknowable. We can show that Evolution might endow us with Rationality re. Choice of Technique, Bargaining, Optimization etc, because Engineering beats intuition in certain fields, but we can't show that Evolution would have given us a faculty for telling us what is really valuable or how to rank states of the World given an unknown future. If the future is going to be really hairy, maybe Thrift is the supreme Value Economists need to inculcate. On the other hand, if the Future is going to be fabulously wonderful, Thrift is the enemy. So long as there is no God constraining Evolution, not only would the Evolutionary Stable Strategy be for Value diversity but agents are going to be doing 180 degree Value reversals pretty often. If unpredictable changes in Values are what generate the 'mixed' (i.e. stochastic) aspect of the E.S.S, then another way of doing the same thing as Value pi-jaw is to say 'Let's randomly reward a certain percentage of crimes and punish a certain percentage of good deeds because that's a mixed strategy which can't be simply dominated so, actually, lets not even bother to do that but just let the current system of hack journalists and publicity hound D.As and corrupt Judges and bat-shit crazy celebrities and senile Professors talking shite, continue to muck things up such that a certain percentage of crimes are rewarded and good deeds punished the way it's always been.'

So far my contention is that Putnam is wrong about Economics. Still, some Economists may be trying to emigrate to Philosophy-land coz they have laxer drug laws there or else to escape alimony payments or something similar. So the question arises, is Putnam right about Philosophy? The short answer is no. He is making the assumption that Pyrrhonism isn't already everybody's default position from which they are momentarily seduced by ephemeral Faustian pacts. Worse, he refuses to see that 'Values' are what we are all most inclined to be skeptical about. If I tell you I suffer from hemorrhoids you are likely to believe me. If I tell you that my experience of hemorrhoids has led me to have a change of heart, I've now quit the Tea Party and support Gay Marriage coz why should the homos have it easy? You may still believe me. What you won't believe is that I've suddenly seen the light and stopped being a nasty little homophobe because 'Suffering is Redemptive' or any such pi-jaw.
Putnam stretches the word 'Values' to breaking point and then some.Maybe this would be okay if he weren't sticking with notions like 'logic is coherence' and 'partial ordering is possible' because new vistas upon the nature and implications of universal ontological dysphoria would be opened up.
One reason to think that logic isn't the 'form of coherent thought' is that imperative statements, though having logical form, gain visceral force by being incoherent- 'be sure to post the check to the Insurance company before Friday' is weaker than 'burn down the house. That will save you the trouble and inconvenience of posting the check by Friday. Go on, what are you waiting for?' This seems incoherent and violates transitivity because it says burning your own house down is better than living with an uninsured house, but it is effective which is why Moms use this strategy all the time.
Indeed, it may be- a subject for a future post- genuine Value Judgments, at least of a sort that give rise to a lexical ordering of preferences, always have this logical form. Rawls stipulates for a 'threshold of prosperity' and Nozick for a catastrophic event loophole for their lexical orderings such that they are lexical only in name. The question raised by the Prophet Amos- do two people walk together except they are agreed?- i.e. does some pre-established harmony obtain such that strategy and tactics are always univocal- can be answered in the affirmative only alongside 'Shall there be Evil in the City and the Lord has not done it?'

The other problem with Putnam's analysis is the notion that people currently believe 'facts' actually exist in such a manner that a Fact/ Value dichotomy can be usefully erased. But, the truth is, we don't believe there are any genuinely factual statements, just stuff that's as factual as we can get given our instruments and understanding and so on. So ' the facts' are just a pragmatics which evolves in one type of game. Do 'Values' arise in exactly the same type of game? Suppose I have a theory of Ethics which says real Value-judgments don't change when the facts change. Suppose, further, that I feel a sense of quiet virtue because I am deliberately failing my exams so as not to become complicit in the frauds of the Power Elite. Consider what happens when  I suddenly learn that the Power Elite only recruit candidates who deliberately fail the Exams by the widest margin- indeed, all the smart kids knew this and adjusted their answers accordingly but the Power Elite were smarter yet- in other words the reason that I'm a failure is not because I was too good for the system but that I was too stupid. Still, I feel my Virtue stands. The important thing is I wasn't tempted by power. I might even say that it is to my credit that, though stupider than other people, prompted by Virtue alone, I nevertheless succeeded where they failed.
In other words, if one says 'Value-judgments are what don't change when the facts change' then one can  also say, fine, in this case, we have a different sort of game than the one about facts. But, is it a game without ontology? I'd say- no. In the case mentioned above, I realize that all stupid people as a class have a sort of virtue similar to mine precisely because the Power Elite don't want to co-opt them. Those stupid people who clamor to be co-opted and try to pass their exams might even be said to be more virtuous than myself because they have an unconscious Faith in their own worthlessness which is certainly better than my own neurotic doubts about my essential idiocy.
I stand upon the threshold of becoming a Tolstoy or a Gandhi- if not a Christ.
But, Putnam has nothing to say about this sort of ontologically inflationary Value-judgement.  Putnam focuses on Sen's 1967 paper on Prescriptivism which shows that, for most types of Utilitarianism, Facts are relevant to value judgments. However, instead of a supervenience relationship of some sort, Putnam thinks this means that facts and values are hopelessly entangled. We can't decompose or 'factorize' them.
But why should this be so? Is it because Putnam wants an Ethics without Ontology but doesn't want to break with 'Classical' Utilitarian Consequentialism?
Before addressing that question, let's see whether decomposing facts from values is really so very difficult.
Let's say we're playing poker. Two different games are going on simultaneously. One is about the cards that have been dealt. The other is about reading 'tells' or strategically simulating such signals. In this case, we could go through a video of the game and construct two totally different narratives- one about probability which has to do only with the cards, and another which has nothing to do with probability but has to do with reading facial expressions and deducing psychological motivations. Is there any reason not to believe 'Facts' and 'Values' aren't similarly decomposable in any actual Economic policy debate? Couldn't we run back the Video of it and perform just such a decomposition? True it would be difficult. We'd have to look at a whole classes of similar videos before we got a sense of what we were actually discussing. We'd also need models, simulations- videos shot on possible worlds, or aesthetically important impossible worlds- and so on before we had finally got an idea about what our different claims actually amount to. From then on there is no reason why the game should not be decomposable with 'Values' turning into Ontological propositions about possible worlds and 'Facts' referring to stuff that can be measured or which has a measurable proxy.

 Because Putnam thinks Ethics without Ontology is possible, and because he endorses Sen's mania for partial ordering- he has no real answer to this objection. His invocation of 'thick concepts' only defines the antechamber to Economics' arena. Thick concepts are like the pre-fight Press Conference where each contender makes a statement mixing descriptive elements with intentional elements- 'I'm in the best shape of my life and I'm damned if I'll go down to a little pussy like him'- stuff like this may determine the outcome of the actual fight- but Economics is not about the fight. Its what what happens when the post-fight analysis starts. There everything is separated out. There can still be strategic differences of opinion- but in the long run, after everybody has retired, there's either a consensus about the facts or a factual question  has been referred on to some other discipline- Biology, Psychology, Game theory  or whatever.
Okay, if we break completely with Consequentialism of any sort, Utilitarian or otherwise, then we might  still have 'entangled statements'- but they would be Ontological in nature- and refer to an ordering of possible or impossible Worlds- and thus not at all part of the sort of 'ethical Econ' Putnam wants which would enable us to get an ought from an is without recourse to Ontology. This is important because every fuckwit can do the other thing- vide my cri de coeur in the Eighties- 'You must pay my air-fare to Calcutta coz my punching Mother Theresa in the face is that supremely Christ- like Act which will cause the Universe to turn into a Golden Syrup which appears exactly like whatever it takes the place of.'

Putnam's chapter on Sen, the Economist, is the weakest thing in his book. He believes Sen said something important about Famine. Sen said something horribly foolish and mischievous about Famine and then defended himself by unfair and stupid means. As for the 'missing millions'- when did Sen raise his voice against abortion? Infanticide was already illegal. Legalizing abortion, essentially as a population control method, with the postivie encouragement of sex selective feticide, went against all preexisting Values, Human or Religious. Yet abortion was supposed to be a very wonderful and good thing- 'pro-Wimmin' donchaknow- so Sen did nothing about this genocide which, unlike the Bengal famine, occurred on his watch.

Putnam misses the point that people pretend to have 'Values' they don't actually have. Even if there was some window of Momus into the heart and Values were known exactly, still unless Evolution had given us a mechanism for acting rationally on the basis of one's Values, then they remain a dead-letter. But anything which can be used to predict our actual behavior is covered by the notion of Revealed Preference already. What Putnam is objecting to is the convention of arbitrarily constraining this to tractable Mathematical shapes. But Sen, as a professional Academic has been pushing nothing else these last fifty years. How does this make him one of the good guys all of a sudden?
Putnam thinks there was something sinister in Lionel Robbins getting rid of interpersonal comparisons of Utility. But what else was he supposed to do? Hitler  had plenty of followers who gave very good reasons why Jews and Blacks and Chinese and Slavs get negative utility from breathing and why, if they weren't too stupid to do 'inter-personal Utility maximization', they'd all have killed themselves or offered themselves as slaves to the Master Race. Similarly, Stalin worshipers were saying the Capitalist Class is yearning to be liquidated. It takes no genuine pleasure in its luxuries. The Capitalist actually wants to be re-educated in the Gulag. He's just too neurotic to do it himself. He's like a drug addict. He can't help himself.

Putnam thinks Sen is one of the angels because Sen made a big deal about men in China and Kerala outliving African American Males . Yet, once prison sentencing got a lot harsher and racially discriminatory, African American Male health and longevity started to improve because those most at risk spent more time locked up- and there was a material incentive for a greedy privatized Justice/Penal System to gravitate to that outcome. In any case, once statistics were adjusted for risk-factors like diet, drug use, gang membership, as well as for reward factors like differential Societal rents to Seniority and Male status, African Americans were back ahead. Any given Chinese of Malyallee would have been better off migrating to America but no African American, ceteris paribus, would have been better off going the other way.

The crux of Putnam's argument is his contention that all 'capabilities approach criteria'- like 'self respect', 'well nourished' 'able to take part in the life of the community'- are 'entangled' terms, i.e. values and facts are hopelessly intermingled. This can't be true in the light of  Putnam's other contention- viz. that Sen on partially ordering isn't foolish- because we can always run the video back on each evaluative occasion and turn every instance of a 'value' into something we can agree about how to better measure. Suppose this weren't the case. Then, there is no partial ordering. No partial ordering means Sen has been talking worthless nonsense for the last forty years.

Putnam's chapter 'on the rationality of preferences', gives the clue to his confusion. He doesn't have a theory of why concurrency deadlock is good and necessary and something our decision making has evolved to mimic because of its inertial or buffering properties. In other words, as Computers got off the drawing board the actual engineering problem of concurrency fixed the lacunae in decision theory which Putnam has returned to so as to talk up his fellow Harvard Prof.

Economics has a good theory for why there is so much bad Economics- it's supply and demand dude. Ethics does not have a good theory why every Ethical theory counsels only the most brutish and foolish thing to do under any circumstances. Putnam is a good guy. He's done great work. Yet he has written a book which will promote Sen-tentious pi-jaw as a substitute for helping poor people. Has Ethics, as a branch of philosophy, gained anything from this book? No- unless you read it in conjunction with 'Ethics without Ontology' as a method of showing why the latter must be crap. But, doing that wouldn't be playing fair.

Joshua Greene & Kant's sick joke

Kant’s Joke—Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumbfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

This is a link to Joshua D. Green's very well written paper 'The secret joke of Kant's soul'.  I don't know if any Economists have commented on it but I imagine the point they'd make is that 'following rules'- i.e. something which looks deontological- may be optimal from the 'Consequentialist' point of view and, equally, that contested, or competition between, rule-sets militates for meta-rules which aim to maximize the information set and subsume all consequentialist calculi under that rubric. In other words, though the Socio-biological considerations Green highlights may indeed be illuminating in their own right, what they don't have any bearing on are the 'distinctions without differences' that constitute Philosophy's realm of discourse.
To see why consider
a) the Trolley problem- you can either let a trolley kill five people or divert it such that only one person dies.
 A moment's reflection will show that both the consequentialist and the deontologist should seek to maximize loss of life by their action because this will
1) prompt the Railway company to spend more on safety thus saving more lives in the long run.  Or if the accident was a one off, then in any case the Investigation is likely to expand the Social Information set in such a way that all Consequentialist decision making is advantaged.
2) Highlight the importance of deontics and prompt a debate that might lead to exciting breakthroughs in the subject etc- for the higher duty is to duty itself & promoting deontics is the most pressing duty incumbent on deontologists.
Since both Consequentialism and Deontology, by always counseling the most reprehensible action possible (thus attracting the interest of the hoi polloi the way Freakanomics does), always arrive at the same conclusion, they can be unified under the rubric of optimal decision theory over some fitness landscape.
More generally, both continue to be central to Ethics- i.e. the project to 'shit higher than your arsehole' (Wittgenstein) in the manner that maximizes public nuisance.

b) The Footbridge problem- ought you to throw a fat man off a footbridge to halt the trolley from killing 5 people?
 Clearly, you have to shove the other guy off the footbridge before he works out that he has to shove you off the footbridge. Which of you actually splatters on the ground is determined in a Darwinian way- which is good for the species.
The objection may be made that, assuming Muth Rational Expectations and equal physical endowment, you and the other guy instantaneously realize that the Nash equilibrium is to shake hands, smoke 'em if you got 'em, and video the carnage on your respective camera phones.
However, Ethics must never counsel a course of action that doesn't maximize avoidable loss. Hence it is enough for there to be some probability, even if everybody has Rational Expectations and perfect information, that a person might suddenly act in line with Ethical thinking for both of you to do your damnedest to grapple with each other such that both of you are likely to go off the bridge either
1)  not in time to avert the carnage but to add gratuitously to the body count.
or else
2) one or both of you go over the bridge but the Railway company is able to avoid implementing Safety procedures because the motivation for your fight is not known- the angle the Press play up is that it was some random fight between two strangers which led to a fatality.
  Thus, assuming the other guy hasn't yet started trying to throw you off the bridge- in which case anything you do is either instinctive self-defense or panicked cowardice and thus outside the scope of Ethics- you can't be certain he will fight you and so you have to try to at least try to throw him off the bridge, assuming you are a moral person. Information asymmetry means you can't be sure he's a moral person, so you don't know for certain if he'll try to throw you off the bridge. This holds true even if he is thin and you are fat. He may not try to throw you off the bridge till you attack him.

The problem with existing Consequentialist and Deontological theories is that either
1) they fail immediately if all agents act upon them. Either someone has sacrificed you before you got a chance to sacrifice someone else or the Human Race died out in a Concurrency deadlock long ago. As the Indian proverb has it- in 'after you', 'no, after you', both missed the train.
2) they don't fail immediately.
But theories which don't fail immediately have two properties
1) they have mischievous consequences because they become availability cascades.
2) they undermine deontics because a duty is not a duty if it is known to have the pleasing property of being logically consistent or sensible in any way.

This yields Iyer's Iron Law- 'A theory only counts as part of Ethics if it robustly counsels good people to do the very worst thing possible under any and all circumstances'.

Ross's paradox & why Ethics Professors are shit

Consider
Ross's Paradox (Ross 1941):
1) It is obligatory that the letter is mailed.
(2) It is obligatory that the letter is mailed or the letter is burned.

From the imperative point of view, (2) adds something to (1), it makes it stronger, more urgent, more memorable. It taps into the essential ambiguity of visceral urges. It adds emotional valency to a choice situation in a manner that de-emphasizes the outcome. 
The problem is that, in the eagerness deontic logics share with alethic logics to find a concrete model, Ethics is too willing to provide 'proofs' for all ad captum vulgi intuitions and to subsume every illogical norm that exists under its own burgeoning idiocy.

The temptation is to 'deduce' more and more bizarre propositions to make your own mark as an Ethical thinker. Solomon Maimon- though a Rabbinical prodigy himself- fled his native Lithuania because he came to equate the 'Golden Liberties' of the riotous Polish aristocracy, which ruined his country, with the license enjoyed by the scholars of Halachah to display their virtuosity by adding more and more burdensome refinements to the Ark of the Law.
Maimon's own ethical degeneration- he became a drunken sponger- sadly can't be correlated with his interaction with, the monster, Kant. But then he wasn't tenured as a Professor of Ethics.

I recall asking an Iranian scholar whether it was really true that Prof.Zaehner had persuaded Teheran University's Professor of Ethics to invite Mossadegh's Security Chief to dinner only to quietly bump him off. Without answering the question, the scholar drew my attention to Nasirudin Tusi, the author of the Akhlaq-e-Nasiri, the most important book on Ethics in Persia, who was a double dyed traitor- betraying his Spiritual Master to the infidel Mongols. In other words, the Spalding Professor of Ethics & Eastern Religion, R.C. Zaehner had sent the Iranian elites a message which was not just witty but erudite.
The puzzling thing is why Ethics Professors display such 'frontal' behavior. After all, it is in their own professional interest to dissimulate their sociopathy or poor impulse control and wear the mask of rectitude.
Perhaps, the answer is that whereas in other fields one needs good (that is critical) students and colleagues to carry forward the Research Program associated with your name, in Ethics the reverse is the case because imperative logic hypertrophies in a bizarre and cancerous manner unless brought firmly under the control of the personality of its Professor. After all, an imperative statement- unlike an alethic statement- gains force entirely by the answer to the question 'who is saying this?'.
In India, though dharma (Eusebia)becomes the central concern, once both Ontology and Epistemology came to be seen as empty, it is interesting to note how any noble character pre-occupied with Ethics- like Lord Rama or King Yuddhishtra- is depicted as ending up breaking all his own rules and inheriting futility and despair.
Krishna, contrary to Matilal, Sen, et al, is actually a dharmic guy because he performs a humble function at the Kurukshetra War. His elder brother, on the other hand, cries fie upon both parties and goes off to get drunk.
Interestingly, the Sufis who spread Islam in the Indian sub=continent, affirm precisely this antinomian 'Malamati' (blame-worthy) theory whereby the price for professing Ethics is an ironic plunge into infamy.