Whose rights? A critique of individual agency as the basis of rights

Politics, Philosophy and Economics

Volumn 8, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 139-171

  Weyl, E Glen ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Behavioral economics; Communitarianism; Group rights; Liberalism; Moral individualism; Social choice theory

Indexed keywords

EID: 64149089133     PISSN: 1470594X     EISSN: 17413060     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1470594X09102235     Document Type: Article

References (145)

1. Otto von Bismarck to Robert von Kedudall, August 18, 1865 in Otto von Bismarck, Die Gessamelten Werke, Vol. 14 (Berlin: Stollberg, 1924-25), pp. 14-15,
2. as cited in (and translated by) Otto Pflanze, 'Toward a Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Bismarck', American Historical Review 77 (1972): 419-44.
3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971);
4. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
5. Allen E. Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', Ethics 99 (1989): 852-5.
6. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
7. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A. Study of Moral Theory (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981);
8. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Another important communitarian critic of liberalism is Charles Taylor, who primarily takes aim at the moral subjectivism he sees inherent in the liberal commitment to pluralism.
9. See Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
10. The radical situation of the self within a political community and social conditions, an idea that (like Taylor and Sandel) he derives from Hegel, is crucial to another early, prominent communitarian challenge - that of Roberto M. Unger, See Roberto M. Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975).
11. Two prominent early defenses of liberalism from the communitarian assault are Amy Gutmann, 'Review: Communitarian Critics of Liberalism', Philosophy and Public Affairs 14 (1985): 308-22
12. and Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism'. A more balanced and extended survey of the early debate is provided by Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
13. A more complete theoretical response to the communitarian critique, one which is perhaps the classic instantiation of the liberal claim to an ethically thin political justification of liberalism, is John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
14. Several authors of basically liberal inclinations take a more synthetic approach to the communitarian challenge. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) turns the communitarian critique on its head, arguing that liberalism can and should be justified within the context of western political culture and vocabulary, rather than in abstracted, universalizing terms. In contrast, Ronald Dworkin, 'Liberalism', in Public and Private Morality, edited by
15. Stuart Hampshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) responds by constructing a far thicker foundation for liberalism, grounded in a comprehensive conception of the good for individuals in the social relationships. A more explicit synthesis of the two views, though a surprisingly individualistic one, is effected by Joseph Raz, who argues that liberalism explicitly seeks to promote the good of its citizens by fashioning for them an autonomous and pluralistic life.
16. See Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
17. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) develops a liberal theory of collective rights for minorities founded on principles of justice as fairness. In contrast, Charles Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', in Multiculturalism and 'The Politics of Recognition ', edited by Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) develops a communitarian view of the proper protections of minority communities in a multicultural society. Chandran Rukathas, who I extensively critique below, in Chandran Rukathas, 'Are There Any Cultural Rights?' Political Theory 20 (1992): 105-39,
18. develops a libertarian liberal, agency-based theory of rights in a cultural context in the tradition of Nozick. Meanwhile, K. Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) surveys and synthesizes many of the views in the debate over cultural and group rights from a broader ethical perspective.
19. Note that for some thinkers, who view choice and preference as being of primary moral significance, the status of individual agency is necessarily closely tied to that of moral individualism, the view that good can only sensibly be thought of as the good of and for individuals. Moral individualism has been a topic of considerable debate within the liberal-communitarian dialogue, but those attentive to choice and preference have tended to be firmly in the individualist camp and therefore conversations about the relative merits of group and individual agency have not been common in the literature on moral individualism.
20. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 178,
21. as cited in Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 83.
22. Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', p. 858.
23. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1951).
24. Kenneth O. May, 'Intransitivity, Utility and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns', Econometrica 22 (1954): 1-13.
25. Kukathas, 'Are There Any Cultural Rights?', p. 110.
26. Ibid., pp. 111-12.
27. Ibid., pp. 110-11.
28. Ibid., p. 113.
29. Ibid., p. 114.
30. Ibid., p. 114.
31. 'Liberal theory is generally concerned to avoid entrenching majorities or creating permanent minorities [within the groups by granting rights].' Ibid., p. 114. 'In the end, liberalism views cultural communities... like .. . electoral majorities. Both are the product of a multitude of factors and neither need be especially enduring, although they can be. The possibility that they might be, however, does not justify entrenching the interests they manifest.'
32. Ibid., p. 115.
33. Allan Gibbard, 'Manipulation of Voting Schemes: A General Result', Econometrica 41 (1973): 587-602;
34. Mark A. Satterthwaite, 'Strategy-Proofness and Arrow's Conditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting Procedures and Social Welfare Functions', Journal of Economic Theory 10 (1975): 187-217.
35. Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, Game Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) provides an excellent overview of the modern literature in game theory.
36. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, p. 13.
37. Ibid., pp. 46-59.
38. Ibid., p. 59.
39. For an exhaustive review of the theory and evidence of Kahneman, Tversky and those that followed their lead in pioneering the field of psychology of decisionmaking, see Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (editors), Choices, Values and Frames (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
40. For a more pedagogical text on the subject, see Jonathan Baron, Thinking and Deciding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
41. For a survey of recent, related work in moral psychology exposing inconsistencies in moral reasoning, see K. Anthony Appiah, Experiments in Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
42. May, 'Intransitivity, Utility and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns', pp. 5-6 shows that in a simple, Arrow-like setting where there are three dimensions along which a choice can be evaluated and ordinal preferences along these dimensions are non-single peaked, individuals exhibit non-transitivities.
43. See Kahneman and Tversky, Choices, Values and Frames, Parts 6, 2, and 3, respectively, or Baron, Thinking and Deciding, Chs 11-15.
44. Most of the prominent work in the psychology of decision-making and judgment implicitly endorses this view. The quote comes from a classic piece which helped establish the dominant view of inconsistency as deviant behavior: Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, 'Rational Choice and the Framing of Decisions', Journal of Business 54 (1986): 5251-78.
45. There are two other classic contributions to this perspective: George Loewenstein and Benjamin Adler, 'A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes', Economic Journal 105 (1995): 929-37;
46. Daniel Kahneman, 'New Challenges to the Rationality Assumption', Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150 (1993): 18-36. Recently, economists have worked on developing comprehensive welfare frameworks for irrational consumers that largely take this perspective.
47. See Botond Köszegi and Matthew Rabin, 'Revealed Preferences and Revealed Mistakes', working paper (Berkeley: University of California, 2007);
48. B. Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel, 'Beyond Revealed Preference: Choice Theoretic Foundations for Behavioral Welfare Analysis', working paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2007).
49. For a text which explicitly endorses and teaches this view, see Baron, Thinking and Deciding.
50. The first model of this sort was proposed, in the context of inter-temporal inconsistency, by Robert H. Strortz, 'Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization', Review of Economic Studies 23 (1956): 165-80.
51. Work on multiple-selves models in economics has exploded in recent years. A particularly influential application to the macroeconomics of savings and consumption is David Laibson, 'Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting', Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 443-77.
52. Inter-self relations also play an important role in the normative analysis of Ted O'Donoghue and Matthew Rabin, 'Doing it Now or Doing it Later', American Economic Review 89 (1999): 103-24.
53. Multiple selves, sometimes referred to as 'multiple systems', is a particularly influential hypothesis in the growing neuro-economics literature surveyed in Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Drajan Prelec, 'Neuroeconomics: How Neuroscience can Inform Economies', Journal of Economic Literature 43 (2005): 9-64.
54. Two influential models, which explicitly incorporate trade-offs and conflicts between selves, are to be found in Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine, 'A Dual Self Model of Impulse Control', American Economic Review (forthcoming) and Ted O'Donoghue and George Loewenstein, 'Animal Spirits: Affective and Deliberative Processes in Economic Behavior', working paper (Pittsburgh, PA and Ithaca, NY: Carnegie Mellon University and Cornell University, 2006).
55. Freudian theory and subsequent work in psychology is explored from a multiple-self perspective in Jon Elster, 'Introduction', in The Multiple Self, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 20-3.
56. Early psychological thinking about multiple selves is reviewed, in a typically whimsical style, by Thomas C. Schelling, 'Mind as Consuming Organ', in The Multiple Self edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
57. The notion of multiple selves plays an important role in the works of Kant, Ricoeur, Plato, and Freud, as discussed by Anthony J.P. Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (London: Humanities Press, 1963).
58. An exhaustive, fascinating, and classic critique of the unity of self is Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). Other philosophers have offered related, relevant perspectives on similar issues.
59. See David F. Pears, 'The Goals and Strategies of Self-Deception', in The Multiple Self, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
60. Donald Davidson, 'Deception and Division', in The Multiple Self, edited by Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986);
61. Bernard Williams, 'The Self and the Future', in Personal Identity, edited by Raymond Martin and John Barresi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003);
62. Galen Strawson, 'The Self, in Personal Identity, edited by Raymond Martin and John Barresi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003).
63. For some of the earlier, pioneering work in this area, a classic collection of essays is Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
64. The neurological evidence for the independent functioning of different parts of the brain in the context of ethical decision-making is a particularly interesting example.
65. See Joshua D. Green, R. Brien Sommerville, Leigh E. Nystrom, John M. Darley and Jonathan D. Cohen, 'An fMRI Study of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgment', Science 293 (2001): 2105-8.
66. The literature on internal conflict in the brain is too extensive to detail here, but an excellent introductory text in neuroscience which extensively treats these issues is Dale Purves, George J. Augustine, David Fitzpatrick, William C. Hall, Anthony-Samuel Lamantia, James O. McNamara and S. Mark Williams (editors), Neuroscience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
67. Neal E. Miller and Judson S. Brown found rats torn between attraction to sex, attraction to food, and repulsion from pain. See Neal E. Miller, 'Experimental Studies of Conflict', in Personality and Behavior Disorders, edited by J. McV. Hunt (New York: Roland, 1944);
68. Judson S. Brown, 'Gradients of Approach and Avoidance Responses and Their Relation to Levels of Motivation', Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 41 (1948): 450-65.
69. Warren S. McCullough, 'A Recapitulation of the Theory, with Forecast of Several Extensions', Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 50 (1948): 258-77 provides an excellent overview of the early literature in biology and comparative psychology on internal conflict. Interestingly, May, 'Intransitivity, Utility and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns', p. 7 cites exactly this evidence in making his original case for the applicability of Arrow's theorem to the individual.
70. Adi Livnat and Nicholas Pippenger, 'An Optimal Brain Can Be Composed of Conflicting Agents', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 3198-202.
71. Under much weaker conditions than Arrow's axioms, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem establishes that game-theoretic conflict among individuals may make implementation of social choice functions impossible. I do not discuss the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem in more detail here for the reasons discussed in the text. However, it is important to reinforce my argument above that the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem (or other game-theoretic considerations) does not constitute a stronger argument for rights individualism than those rebutted here. While it may seem more reasonable for game-theoretic conflict to arise from informational asymmetries or unknown preferences among individuals than within an individual, Livnat and Pippenger's work directly disproves this intuition and shows that not only is such an outcome possible within an individual, but it is computationally optimal under plausible assumptions. Furthermore, many of the most fruitful behavioral economic models in recent years (discussed throughout the text) rely on precisely such strategic interactions among competing selves. While a more detailed discussion of the political-theoretic implications of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem, and game theory more generally, between selves will likely be fruitful, it is beyond the scope of my argument here.
72. The terminology of desires for conflicting preferences within individuals was first coined by Lara M. Buchak, 'Arrow and the Individual', working paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2003).
73. May, 'Intransitivity, Utility and the Aggregation of Preference Patterns', pp. 9-13 provides an alternative set of axioms which chop up the assumptions necessary and sufficient for Arrow's theorem slightly differently than Arrow does; he considers these alterative axioms somewhat more plausible in the context of the individual than Arrow's. I stick with Arrow's axioms for simplicity and transparency.
74. For an excellent examination of the plausibility of Arrow's axioms and perhaps the classic treatment of social choice theory, see Amartya Sen, Collective Choice and Social Welfare (San Francisco, CA: Holden-Day, 1970).
75. Buchak, 'Arrow and the Individual' also provides a philosophical discussion of the applicability of Arrow's axioms to the individual context.
76. An excellent short summary of, and argument for, such policies is given by Cass R. Sunstein and Richard R. Thaler, 'Libertarian Paternalism', American Economic Review 93 (1993): 175-9.
77. Purves et al., Neuroscience, pp. 700-30.
78. Daria Knoch, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Kaspar Meyer, Valerie Treyer and Ernst Fehr, 'Diminishing Reciprocal Fairness by Disrupting the Right Pre-Frontal Cortex', Science 314 (2006): 912-15 finds that suppressing the right pre-frontal cortex facilitates calculating, rational, self-interested actions in experimental economic games. His findings cut against the 'two-systems' view and show that at least some part of social preferences are located separate from the emotive, and the calculating, part of the brain. This provides some extremely preliminary evidence for the sort of tripartite division of 'ego-superego-id' envisioned by Freud or of 'lower passions-higher passions-reason' imagined by Plato. Evidence in the Freudian direction is provided by Manfred Spitzer, Urs Fischbacher, Bärbel Herrnberger, Georg Grön and Ernst Fehr, 'The Neural. Signature of Social Norm. Compliance', Neuron 56 (2007): 185-96. The authors of this article find that social norm compliance takes place in a different system than either simply the emotive limbic system or the rational cortex.
79. Livnat and Pippenger, 'An Optimal Brain Can Be Composed of Conflicting Agents', pp. 3200-1.
80. In fact, to satisfy the axioms under which Arrow's theorem holds, we would need Siamese triplets, but the discussion of twins is more vivid, simpler, and conveys precisely the same intuition, so I will consider this case here. Note that even with the problem of Siamese twins, many of the game-theoretic problems of internal conflict remain; temporal inconsistencies resulting from conflicts between a short-and long-run self, of course, involve only two selves.
81. For a penetrating analysis of the unifying power of political rhetoric in ancient Athens, see Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Ancient Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
82. The classic treatment of group cognition from social psychology, a field often called 'social learning theory', is Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977).
83. The most important experimental work on obedience, which found individuals shockingly willing to submit to authority against their individual consciences, is Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper Collins, 1974).
84. A classic social psychology perspective arguing for the reasonableness of group agency in many contexts is Albert Bandura, 'Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective', Annual Review of Psychology 52 (2001): 1-26.
85. For a standard introduction to social psychology which treats these issues well at a lay level, see Daniel G. Myers, Social Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill, 1990).
86. Christophe Chamley, Rational Herds: Economic Models of Social Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) provides a survey of the literature on rational social learning and the inherent tendencies of social situations that lead even self-interested rational individuals toward herd-like behavior. A survey that comes a bit closer to stepping outside of a pure rational choice perspective is Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch, 'Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Information Cascades', Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (1998): 151-70.
87. The classic economic model of conformity is B. Douglas Bernheim, 'A Theory of Conformity', Journal of Political Economy 102 (1994): 841-77.
88. Finally, two interesting recent contributions that address the strengths and weaknesses of 'rational' approaches to groupthink are Edward L. Glaeser and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Extremism and Social. Learning', working paper (Cambridge, MA and Chicago, IL: Harvard University and University of Chicago, 2007) and Edward L. Glaeser and Cass R. Sunstein, 'Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets', working paper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2008).
89. Perhaps the most famous early modern intellectual treatment of pathologically strong group unity is Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Boston, MA: Page, 1932 [1852]).
90. A literary classic that deals with similar themes is Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, in Four Great Plays by Ibsen (New York: Bantam, 1958 [1882]).
91. An immensely popular recent treatment from the perspective of administrative psychology and intended for the general public is Irving L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
92. For evidence on the importance of commitment, see Laibson, 'Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting'. Laibson argues that a large part of the decline in US savings rates has been due to the erosion of commitment devices caused by financial innovation. A good survey of the importance of default options in savings is James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and Andrew Metrick, 'For Better or Worse: Default Effects and 401(k) Savings Behavior', in Perspectives on the Economics of Aging, edited by David A. Wise (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
93. Buchak, 'Arrow and the Individual', pp. 8-15.
94. In particular, it would allow social preferences over X versus Y to be sensitive to the addition or subtraction from the set of all possible options (though not necessarily those feasible in a particular choice problem) of Z. This, in turn, can undermine a broader sense of consistency of choice than simple transitivity. For a good discussion, see Amartya Sen, Rationality and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
95. See Manimay Sengupta, 'Monotonicity, Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Strategy-Proofness of Social Decision Functions', Review of Economic Studies 47 (1980): 393-407 for a detailed analysis of this connection.
96. For a further articulation of this argument, see Buchak, 'Arrow and the Individual', pp. 5-7.
97. An alternative sufficient condition to avoid Arrow's theorem is that in every set of three choices, one is 'strongly felt' in the sense that every agent ranks this choice either first or last in her preferences. I do not extensively discuss this particular condition, as my views on single-peaknedness are virtually identical to those on strong feeling.
98. Arunava Sen, 'Another Direct Proof of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem', Economic Letters 70 (2001): 381-5.
99. For an excellent exposition of the perspective of 'economic anthropology', see Richard R. WiIk, Economies and Cultures: Foundations of Economic Anthropology (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). Chapters one through three provide a focused critique of economic methodology and assumptions, particularly the fungibility assumption.
100. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, pp. 119-20.
101. Jerry R. Green and Daniel A. Hojman, 'Choice, Rationality and Welfare Measurement', working paper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2007) lays out a theory of welfare bounds using multiple selves. However, this theory could as easily be applied to group choices (though there, direct measurements of the composite individual preferences seem more fruitful).
102. Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', pp. 858-9. Given the symmetry between individuals and groups on this dimension, Buchanan's 'communitarian' case for liberalism might easily be translated into a liberal case for intrapersonal rights which, as I argue below, might plausibly justify group rights in practice. Thus I suspect it is not only Kukathas's extreme rights individualist position which may be susceptible to the sorts of arguments put forward here.
103. Kukathas, 'Are There Any Cultural Rights?', p. 114.
104. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 15-65.
105. MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 204-5,
106. cited in Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 89.
107. Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 36,
108. cited in Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 112.
109. Eric J. Johnson and Daniel Goldstein, 'Do Defaults Save Lives?' Science 302 (2003): 1338-9.
110. I would like to thank Eldar Shafir for pointing me to a variety of resources on this issue that he has personally collected over the past several months. A number of nonacademic articles and websites document this astounding result. See Joshua Sonnefeld, 'Truth and Privacy Opt-In and Opt-Out Campaigns: A Detailed Narration by the Organization' (Resource Center for Non-Violence, 2004), URL (consulted January 2006): http://www.rcnv.org/counterrecruit/ optoutcampaign/. For more notes, slides, letters, and resources in electronic form relating to this issue, contact Eldar Shafir at shafir@princeton.edu.
111. Shafir, in conversation, points out, 'With opt-out, we have the world's strongest military. With opt-in, given the dramatic difference in enrollment rates that have been found, the army would evaporate. How can anyone insist that a school board, or whoever sets this policy, can maintain neutrality?'
112. Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, 'Mimicking Political Debate with Survey Questions: The Case of White Opinion on Affirmative Action for Blacks', Social Cognition 8 (1): 73-103 discusses the effects of framing on affirmative action preferences. Paul M. Sniderman and Sean M. Theriault, 'The Structure of Political Argument and the Logic of Issue Framing', in Studies in Public Opinion: Attitudes, Non-Attitudes, Measurement Error and Change, edited by Willem E. Saris and Paul M. Sniderman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) discusses the effects of framing on preferences about poverty relief.
113. A good, critical survey, and counterpoint, to the framing literature in the context of politics is James N. Druckman, 'On the Limits of Framing Effects: Who can Frame?' Journal of Politics 63 (2001): 1041-63.
114. Philosopher and social scientist Jon Elster extensively catalogues the most important forms of these clashes in Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 1-7.
115. A survey of time discounting and time preference and their role in economic theory is provided by Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein and Ted O'Donoghue, 'Time Discounting and Time Preference: A Critical Review', Journal of Economic Literature 40 (2002): 351-401.
116. Elster, Ulysses Unbound, p. 33.
117. Ibid., pp. 7-24, 57-77.
118. Derek Parfit, 'Later Selves and Moral Principles', in Philosophy and Personal Relations, edited by Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 145, quoted in Elster, Ulysses Unbound, p. 145.
119. Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, 'The Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making', Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 19 (2006): 87-98. Ariely and Loewenstein also interestingly find that subjects fail to anticipate their own sensitivity to arousal, indicating that the problems raised by such sensitivity may be particularly bad as people do not know to avoid them.
120. For another example of the potential of small contextual manipulations to change important decisions, this one in ethical decision-making, see the following survey of psychological literature on this: George Loewenstein and Deborah A. Small, "The Scarecrow and the Tin Man: The Vicissitudes of Human Sympathy and Caring', Review of General Psychology 11 (2007): 112-26.
121. Loewenstein and Small also present a multiple-self model of ethical choice to help rationalize empirical findings. For a more general survey of earlier work on such small, visceral influences on human behavior, see George Loewenstein, 'Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior', Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65 (1996): 272-92.
122. For example, see Taylor, 'The Politics of Recognition', pp. 52-73.
123. Green and Hojman, 'Choice, Rationality and Welfare Measurement' shows that some semblance of welfare of internal agents can be recovered from the individual's choices. However, the bounds on these welfare notions are so vague as to make an implementation of rights impractical.
124. Michael Sandel, 'Introduction', in Liberalism and its Critics, edited by Michael Sandel (New York: New York University Press, 1984).
125. Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett (BCE 360), Books II-V, URL: http://classics.mit .edu/Plato/republic.html. Plato was hardly the only Greek thinker to worry about internal justice. Aeschines denounces Timarchus for being an unfree man not because he was a slave to another man, but because he was a slave to his own passions.
126. See N.R.E. Fisher, Aeschines: Against Timarchus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), I. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Uses of Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985)
127. and Ian Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in iron Age Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 114-19 extensively discuss the importance of self-mastery to citizenship in ancient Athens. More contemporary treatments which particularly emphasize the pervasive connection between interpersonal and intrapersonal justice are James N. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes (London: Fontana Press, 1997), pp. 139-210
128. and Sean Corner, 'Philos and Polites: The Symposion and the Origins of the Greek Polis', dissertation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), pp. 403-55.
129. Walzer, Spheres of Justice.
130. Ibid., p. 6, quoted in Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 127.
131. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 147.
132. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 10-11, quoted in Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 148.
133. Mulhall and Swift, Liberals and Communitarians, p. 153.
134. Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 84-116.
135. For example, Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, p. 63 devotes a paragraph to pointing out that one of the flaws in Rawls's conception of the self is the lack of credence he gives to the possibility of intra-subjective conflict.
136. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 143 n. 14.
137. Camerer et al., 'Neuroeconomics', pp. 43-6 surveys evidence that very different neural systems, which evaluate risky choices in. very different ways, are integral to choice under risk and thus may conflict. As Kenneth J. Arrow, 'Some Ordinalist-Utilitarian Notes on Rawls's Theory of Justice', Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 245-63 persuasively argued and Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 152-5 admitted, risk preferences are crucial to establishing Rawls's maximin principle.
138. Buchanan, 'Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism', p. 864 argues that even such groups or their representatives would settle on the same contract Rawls's individual agents would. I think this argument was dubious at the time of its writing, was substantially weakened by the debates over group rights in the 1990s, and is further called into question by this article.
139. The notion that philosophers are better equipped than economists to answer questions of this sort is commonly accepted in economics and cries for philosophers' help are common. See, for example, from various sides of the behavioral debate, Faruk GuI and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 'Welfare Without Happiness', American Economic Review 97 (2007): 471-6;
140. Green and Hojman, 'Choice, Rationality and Welfare Measurement', p. 11 n. 15;
141. and Robert Sugden, 'The Opportunity Criterion', American Economic Review 94 (2004): 1015-8.
142. Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, pp. x-xi;
143. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, pp. 1-5.
144. A good example of the popular debate on these issues is given by a pair of articles in The Economist. See The Economist, 'The Avuncular State', 6 April 2006;
145. The Economist, 'The State is Looking Out for You', 6 April 2006.