Knowledge And Decisions

Morality as an input into the social process is subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately to negative returns. With no morality at all, force would be more prevelant — a loss both to those subject to it and to the efficiency of the social processes. A modicum of honesty and decency greatly reduces the incessant and desperate efforts otherwise necessary to protect life and belongings from every other human being. Beyond some point, social morality becomes irksome to individual autonomy. Finally, if each individual were to become absolutely committed to moral behavior as he saw it, no society would be possible among diverse individuals or groups. Both Karl Marx and Adam Smith recognized that there were levels of morality whose incompatibilities would destroy a society. Marx in fact looked for these incompatibilities of morality — ideologies — to destroy capitalism. For Marx, those ideologies were ultimately based on class self-interest, but direct self-interest could be compromised and accommodated to avoid mutual destruction, while ideologically reified self-interests become moral imperatives which both sides follow to a fatal showdown. This showdown is, of course, what Marx wanted for capitalism, assuming that it would lead to a socialist victory and the end of the conditions which gave rise to class-based rival ideologies. Obviously, if he had thought that similar ideological confrontations would survive under socialism, leading to the same self-destruction of that — and subsequent — systems, then life would become one interminable turmoil, and the relative merits of any given system would mean little. For Marx, destructive morality was justified only by the prospect of a rational and enduring order at the end of it all. He was merciless in his criticism of those who simply pushed moral principles, without regard to their destructive social costs.²⁶

Smith recognized the same principle of destructive levels of morality, but opposed those who “insist upon establishing, and upon establishing all at once, and in spite of all opposition”²⁷ whatever their moral position requires. He contrasted moral or ideological principles in the abstract — what he called “a certain spirit of system” — with “the love of humanity” and “real fellow feeling,” which should moderate “fanaticism” in which people become “dupes of their own sophistry.”²⁸ In contrast to “the man of system,” the man of “public spirit” will “accommodate” others’ aversions and even prejudices:

When he cannot establish the right, he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong; but, like Solon, when he cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavor to establish the best that the people can bear.²⁹

In very different ways, Smith and Marx both recognized that morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns — meaning, ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.

Morality can be incrementally counterproductive even where it has not yet reached levels that are categorically destructive of the whole society. Policies for “social justice” are often retrospective, while their effects create current and prospective costs. Beyond some point, those costs can exceed the costs of the initial inequity being corrected. If some group suffers a given loss of X — whether measured in financial or other terms — as a result of social events beyond their control or foresight, they might be regarded as victims of a social injustice, which should be corrected. But if the cost of correcting it (again, in either financial or other terms) is some procedure costing 2X to the taxpayers or to other third parties, then those who would have to bear these costs are likewise victims of events beyond their control or foresight — and to a greater extent. The injustice has merely been relocated in space or time — and increased. For example, in order to prevent retrospective injustice to people in the horse and buggy industry (who entered a centuries-old occupation in good faith and with no way of knowing that a Henry Ford was coming along), the government could have somehow inhibited the introduction of the automobile, but millions of other people living in isolated locations would have lost an opportunity to expand their horizons in many ways — and that could amount to a larger loss than the cost of changing occupations from the horse-and-buggy industry to some other part of the economy.