One of the main functions of both the IMF and the World Bank is to lend money to developing countries.  The IMF lends money to countries specifically for addressing balance of payment problems while the World Bank lends money to countries more generally for economic development.  Typically, disbursement of money is contingent on implementing specific economic policies that are meant to address the economic problems that initiated the country’s request for a loan.  And, typically, conditions have tended to include privatization and liberalization of the economy.

In her recent book, Globalization and Global Justice (CUP, 2012), Nicole Hassoun presents an account of what is wrong with loan conditionality.  She writes

many countries’ participation in international institutions is not voluntary . . .  Countries often pay significant penalties if they do not abide by . . . . WB or IMF rules.  Sometimes these countries do not have other decent options and, so, are not free to resist these organization’s conditions.  Highly indebted poor countries facing default, for instance, may have to abide by IMF conditionality.  The consequences of refusing to do so can be devastating (Hassoun, 2012, p. 73).

Highly indebted countries are in significant need of loans.  Without loans many individuals within such countries would go hungry, for example.  Hassoun claims that loan conditionality is problematic because highly indebted states are in need of a loan and they have no “options but to abide by international institutions’ rules” (Hassoun, 2012, p. 74).  This means they are coerced into accepting loan conditions, since, on her view, coercion occurs when there exists no option but to comply with a set of demands or rules.

While Hassoun does not give a detailed explanation as to why she thinks that borrowing states have no other options available to them but to borrow from the IMF and World Bank, an argument can easily be given.

Contrast private borrowing with international borrowing.  If a private individual is in need of a loan, she has opportunities to borrow from a variety of different sources.  She can apply to different banks, seek investments from the private sector, borrow money from family members and friends, or take up an extra job and attempt to save the extra income.  The international sphere is not like this.  If a country is in need of a loan, it does not have options outside of borrowing from the IMF and World Bank.  The kind of borrowing options that exist at the local private level simply do not exist at the international level.  This is because the IMF and the World Bank are “lenders of last resort.”  They lend money to countries when no one else will.  Moreover, the IMF and the World Bank are essentially the same institutions in the sense that they coordinate all of their actions.  A country cannot receive a loan from one without receiving approval from the other.  Furthermore, if they choose not to lend to a country, then no one else will do so either.  Approval from the IMF and the World Bank is the gold standard of international finance; it guarantees loans from other private investors.  So, if the IMF and the World Bank decide that a certain country is not worthy of a loan (say, because it has a bad credit rating), then other lenders such as private banks or investors are unlikely to give that country a loan.  In short, if a highly indebted state is in need of a loan, outside of borrowing from the IMF and World Bank, there are no other realistic options to pursue. So, Hassoun seems right in her claim: borrowing countries and the individuals within them have no option but to accept the conditions that the IMF and the Bank place on their loans, if they hope to secure a loan.  If Hassoun is right and coercion occurs when there exists no option but to comply with a set of demands or rules, then the IMF and World Bank’s loan conditionality is coercive.

Hassoun’s account of coercion, though accepted by many, is not ultimately compelling.  Hassoun argues that if X consents to rule R being imposed on her by Y but X has no other options available to her, then X’s consent is coerced by Y (see Hassoun, 2012, p. 73-75).  It is not clear to me, even if these conditions are met, that X’s consent is coerced rather than genuine.

Imagine that Aalok lives on the streets of Kolkata and is starving.  For a variety of reasons, Aalok has decided that he will convert to Catholicism as soon as the opportunity presents itself.  Unfortunately, due to food shortage, all but one of the local charities is closed.  Aalok happens to walk by this charity, the Mother House of the Missionaries of Charity.  Mother Teresa is standing at the door and states, “I will feed you on the condition that you convert to Catholicism.”  Aalok consents.

In this case, Aalok has no option but to accept Mother Teresa’s conditions.  He is in need of food.  There is nowhere else to go for help.  Yet, I would argue, Aalok’s consent to the conversion is not coerced.  Aalok consents to Mother Teresa’s offer in a way that is consistent with and expressive of his genuine (or authentic) and rational commitments and aims.  He is autonomous in Hassoun’s sense: he consents in a way that is expressive of his ability “to reason about, make, and carry out  significant plans” on the basis of his “commitments” (see Hassoun, 2012, p. 26).

Similar things could be argued, at least in principle, about loan conditionality.  A country’s consent to certain conditions, say, to privatization of the water industry, may not be coerced.  If a country, such as India was already planning to privatize its water industry and then consents to an IMF loan on the condition of privatizing its water industry, it would not be coerced into accepting such conditions.

In short, establishing that someone has a lack of alternative options is not sufficient to establish that her consent is coerced.  If this conclusion is correct, then, even if there are no other options available to borrowing countries, these countries may not be coerced by the IMF and World Bank into accepting loan conditions.  Hassoun has not convincingly established that the IMF and World Bank coerce borrowing countries.

This discussion also suggests that an alternative account of coercion is needed.  A plausible account of coercion must take into consideration both the motivations (the rational plans and commitments) of Aalok, in the case of Mother Teresa, and of those within developing countries’, in the case of the IMF and World Bank.  Without such an account we cannot determine whether either are being genuinely coerced or not.

Cross posted at the new Experimental Philosophy Blog.

At the old Experimental Philosophy blog, I recently asked for people’s thoughts about the prevalence of experimental work in top journals in ethics and political philosophy.   More specifically, I was wondering whether there were any papers with experimental content in Philosophy and Public Affairs and Ethics.

In the comments section at the Leiter reports, Joshua Knobe supports my concern, writing “there has been a surprising lack of experimental philosophy papers in the ethics journals, especially Ethics and PPA.”  Also notable is that while there has been at least one paper in relation to experimental work in PPA, it was a critical paper by Selim Baker (“The Normative Insignificance of Neuroscience” appeared in Philosophy & Public Affairs 37:4 (2009), pp. 293-329).  Thanks to Alex Guerro for the pointer.

While there may be other things behind this phenomenon, I am starting to think that self-selection plays an important role.  I am currently working with a group of people on an experimental piece (for more information click here and scroll all the way down), but I wouldn’t dream of submitting it to PPA or Ethics.  Since there hasn’t yet been much work in experimental philosophy published in PPA or Ethics, I believe that the chances of this paper actually being publishing in either of them are rather small.  So, I am not motivated to submit this work to either of those journals. Of course, if, for similar reasons, very few people send in experimental papers to Ethics and PPA, then the chances of such work appearing in these journals is very small.

There are ways of correcting for this problem.  For example, these journals could host a special issue on experimental philosophy and ethics/political philosophy.   I think this could go a long way toward increasing the number of submissions with experimental content or focus.

What are other ways of correcting this problem?

I am very pleased to welcome Erin Taylor as the first Featured (Political) Philosop-her.   Erin Taylor is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University.  She specializes in ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in the nature of moral conflict and the structure of ethical theory.  In recent work, she defends the claim that non-consequentialist moral theories can consistently allow the possibility that one person’s genuine moral duties can conflict with another’s. Other current research engages with ethical issues in reproductive technology, the nature of the ought-implies-can principle, and the structure of moral obligation.

Her post follows.

–MK

On Rejecting Voluntarism, Willingly and Knowingly

I have always thought that political obligation, if it existed, must be some species of “associative duty,” a duty we have in virtue of some socially-recognized role or relationship. In the case of political obligation, the socially-recognized role would be that of citizen. This is straightforward enough. The problem is that it is really difficult to give a good account of associative duties. The comprehensive accounts represented in the literature can be categorized according to the types of justification they appeal to.  “Voluntarist” accounts justify associative duties as analogs of promissory obligations; we acquire associative duties when we voluntarily enter into a social role to which these duties are attached.

Much has been written about both the obvious appeal and likely shortcomings of voluntarist accounts.  In the literature, the appeal of voluntarist accounts has largely been their ability to avoid what is sometimes referred to as the “voluntarist objection,” viz. that there is something morally problematic about the institutional allocation of moral requirements to those who have not consented or volunteered (in some way) to undertake such requirements. The rhetorical tools employed to make this objection have proven too persuasive to many to ignore. These usually take the form of compelling counter-examples that purport to show that non-voluntary associative duties are unacceptable. And it is hard to argue otherwise in the extreme cases adduced, such as military impressment or social clubs that habitually foist on innocent bystanders perplexing and unwanted requirements to do bizarre or trivial things. The point of these examples is to show that, unless a social institution merely mediates a pre-existing moral duty (like beneficence), associative duties must be voluntarily undertaken in order to be legitimate and binding. This is why voluntarist accounts are modeled on promissory obligation, explaining voluntarily-chosen associative duties as a species of this type of requirement. Just as promissory obligations do not exhaust our moral requirements, voluntarist accounts are not taken by their strongest proponents to be exhaustive of the ways that associative duties are justified.  It will be possible to have non-voluntary associative duties if these are necessary to discharge other non-institutional moral duties. Thus, voluntarist accounts work best to explain associative duties that flow either from some chosen occupation (such as doctor, lawyer, professor, police officer, plumber, etc.), or some voluntarily chosen membership in a social group (neighborhood association, PTA, Little League, religious congregation, and so forth). They “fill in the gap,” so to speak, when we want to affirm the legitimacy of institutionally-generated moral requirements but cannot explain them as a result of some pre-institutional general moral duty. The traditional appeal of voluntarist accounts is that they explain these associative duties in a way that does not run afoul of the voluntarist objection.

But voluntarism itself cannot meet the voluntarist objection.  So if we think that the voluntarist objection is dispositive where applicable (as voluntarists do), then voluntarist accounts will not work even in their aforementioned “gap-filling” role. Consider actual (voluntarily chosen) occupational or social roles. There, the analogy to legitimate promissory obligation begins to create a problem. The problem is not that most chosen occupations or social roles are not signed-on for in some temporally discreet, explicit announcement.  Rather, the problem is that if we construe associative duties as the result of a kind of promise to undertake them, this promise would itself be defeated.  This is because two defeaters of promissory obligation apply straightforwardly to many of the associative duties generated by “chosen” occupational and social roles.

The first defeater is familiar from recent blog posts: people often do not know enough about what the obligations attached to a social role will be at the time it is chosen. Whether or not this ignorance is sufficient to render decisions to undertake them irrational, it is probably sufficient to defeat a promissory obligation to undertake them. This ignorance can take three different forms. First, the duties attached to roles are often not fully known to the occupant ahead of time. Often, both the weight and minutiae of a role’s attendant duties become clear only after a person has entered into it. This is part of normal moral development. Only by becoming a friend, spouse, or parent do we begin to understand what these roles really demand. It is a rare individual who acquires these details a priori or by testimony alone. Second, even those duties that are fully known are often subject to change. This often happens when circumstances change that have a profound effect on a voluntarily chosen role or occupation. Sometimes the changes in the duties attached to it can be life-altering or life-threatening. During the “pax antibiotic,” for example, newly minted doctors entered the profession with expectations of relative safety from infectious disease. This expectation was betrayed by higher risks after the advent of, e.g., AIDS and SARS. And third, social or occupational roles are often transformative. They have the power to change in fundamental ways the basic commitments and moral outlook of those who occupy them. As noted in earlier posts to this blog, this phenomenon is the most apparent in the case of motherhood. Widely documented by social scientists, the phenomenon of “transformative motherhood” plays a role, for example, in voiding some surrogacy contracts. This shows that, independently of whether or not it is irrational to choose to occupy a social role, it is difficult to meet the threshold of informed consent governing promissory obligation.

The second defeater is that occupants of these roles have no power to determine what sorts of things count as entering into or abstaining from these roles, or to determine the contours of the rights and duties that attach to them. So, while certain associations are considered to be voluntary, even these are structured along trajectories outside of the control of role-bearers. We cannot control what kinds of behaviors count as entering into the roles of friend or lover, for example. (And the lack of control in such cases often causes considerable consternation.)  The entire shape and character of our lives is permeated by social rules of various kinds, rules that we had no part in constituting. And this would be true even if none of our associations were foisted upon us in the way that the voluntarist objection alerts us to. This is especially worrisome for a voluntarist if it is relatively difficult or costly to abstain from entering into such roles, or if the types of roles open to an individual is otherwise restricted.  To be sure, a voluntarist may be able to offer separate “fixes” for some of the above concerns. But taken together, I believe the balance of reasons points us away from voluntarism.

The lesson of these defeaters is not that occupational and social roles are morally illegitimate. I suggest that we learn an alternative lesson: associative duties are not proper analogs of promissory obligation. Of course we will always have the option to reduce associative duties to some other explanation (such as promissory obligation), with the consequence of delegitimizing those that resist reduction. But doing so here would be especially foolish. First of all, the moral ground of promissory obligation is no less opaque than that of associative duties. Second, the core and canonical cases of associative duties are often more certain and central to everyday moral life than promissory obligation. Third, resting a theory of associative duties on an analogy to promising substitutes what ought to be a comparatively fundamental theoretical construct with a comparatively derivative one. Theories of promising (and our intuitions about promissory obligation) are heavily influenced by specialization in related fields, most notably theories of contract in law. But not all theories of contract will recognize promissory obligation as their primary philosophical basis, and even those that do will be tailored to the specific requirements of a good legal – rather than moral – theory.

There may be a perfectly good reason to require protection from having certain kinds of moral duties imposed on us, such as the random requirements described as attaching to fictional and far-fetched social groups. But we can honor the kernal of truth in voluntarism without being voluntarists. The underlying motivation of voluntarism is a protection of our autonomy and self-determination. Chosen social or occupational roles can expand and enrich our autonomy.  The expanded opportunities they afford may be even more important than the canonical cases of promising. Where promising often involves an exchange of performances that enhance the parties’ instrumental efficacy, voluntaristic associations afford people an opportunity to carve out a portion of their own social world. To the extent that there are associations that retain elements of voluntarism, they allow a person to create, at least in some way, the social world in which they live. Since the social world in which we live so deeply affects our sense of self and identity, voluntaristic associations can allow us some measure of control over these core elements of who we are. Voluntaristic associations allow us, at least in some non-trivial way, actively and consciously to participate in our own making. They are therefore essential aspects of self-determination. But that is very different from asserting that associations generate no obligations unless they are a species of promissory obligation.

I want to thank everyone for “tuning” in.  I hope you will continue to do so as things develop at Political Philosop-her.  The first Featured Political Philosop-her post – by Erin Taylor – is up.

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Update: Thanks to Marcus Arvan, Samantha Brennan, Tracy Isaacs, S. Matthew Liao, Brian Leiter, Kate Norlock, Eric Schliesser, Dave Sobel, Paul Kelleher, and many others for mentioning the blog.  It is great to have the support of so many Philosop-hims!

Before getting to the relevance of my discussion of Paul’s argument to issues in political philosophy (which will happen today in another post), I would now like to try my hand at a final criticism of Paul’s argument.   Paul argues that the value of choosing to have a child (HC) is determined by “what it is like for you to have your child, including what it is like to have the beliefs, desires, emotions and dispositions that result, directly and indirectly from having your own child” (p. 5).  She refers to these sorts of values as “phenomenal values.”  Since HC is something that happens to you specifically, Paul argues that the phenomenal value (the value of “what is like for you”) is the most important and is likely the solely important factor in determining the value that HC will have for you and, in turn, whether it is rational for you to HC.

This argument moves too quickly.  There are many non-phenomenal values that can play an important role in deciding the value of HC and that can also outweigh any of the personal phenomenal value that you associate with HC.  For example, if you are a member of a dying (or minority) culture that has only one or two members left – say, you are the last of the Mohicans – and you see yourself as having a strong moral duty to prevent the demise of your culture, then you can determine that HC will have positive value for you for non-phenomenal reason.  There are likely many other similar sorts of cases.

In an e-rejoiner, Paul acknowledges that

“if you’re really not basing your decision at all on what being a parent is going to be like for you then you can make a rational decision. But relying only on criteria like that is not the usual way to decide to have kids.”

Her response is that this is not how people typically make rational decisions.  This response is not fully convincing.  First, at least some of the time, this is the way that people typically make decisions to HC.  People do seem to choose to HC for moral reasons.   Second, even if it is not the way that people typically choose to HC, this fact does not in itself make it an irrational way to decide to choose to HC.  Moral values can determine the value that HC (or ~HC) will have for us.  So, it seems that Paul must acknowledge that, even if they constitute only a small number of the decisions that are actually made, it can be rational to choose to HC.

Recall that her original conclusion was that we cannot, on the standard model, make rational decisions to HC or ~HC.  This discussion illustrates that, when properly understood, her arguments support a much weaker conclusion (assuming we accept the rest of her arguments), namely, that we cannot make rational decisions, on the standard model, to HC on the basis of phenomenal values, which still leaves open the possibility of making rational decisions to HC or ~HC on the basis of non-phenomenal values.  Understood in this way, the conclusion of her argument is much less controversial than first appeared.  It does not challenge the possibility of making rational decisions (according to the standard model) to HC.  It just narrows the grounds for such decisions.  It’s not so bad after all!

As a bit of a side note, Paul’s focus on phenomenal knowledge seems somewhat odd to me.  Paul argues that we must know what it is like to HC in order to determine the value that HC will have for us.  There is, however, nothing in the standard model that states that we can only determine the value of X when we know what it is like to X.  This is Paul’s addition and she seems to derive this requirement from her understanding of commonsense rationality.  Even if this is an appropriate conception of commonsense rationality (which I am not entirely convinced of), it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is an appropriate conception of the standard model, since the standard model doesn’t claim to be and certainly doesn’t need to be understood as representing commonsense rationality.   So, why the focus on the necessity of phenomenal knowledge in rationality on the standard model?

This linking of the standard model of rationality and, what she takes to be, common sense rationality may explain why it was unclear to me, earlier, as to whether Paul’s target was commonsense rationality more generally or the standard model specifically (on this issue see my response to Schliesser’s rebuttal).  She seems to see the two as being linked, but, again, I wonder whether this is or has to be the case.