Bryan Caplan Is Right About Common Sense

Common Sense Morality is Universal

Bryan Caplan

recently posted the above image. Scott Alexander had this response:

Caplan is right and Alexander is wrong. The claim that “education doesn’t work” is an empirical claim and Caplan’s meme was about moral questions. Likewise, “parenting doesn’t matter” is Alexander’s paraphrase of the empirical claim that genes have a lot more to do with how adults turn out than upbringing. Caplan would agree that parenting matters because parents can give their kids a pleasant childhood rather than a bad one. I think that open borders is a disastrous policy, but there is a superficially common-sense-sounding argument for it. Caplan and

Michael Huemer

think that closed borders are morally indefensible because it involves the use of force to exclude someone from an area. (I would argue that it is generally morally permissible to exclude a person from property which is not theirs).

There’s a deeper point here. One of the fundamental beliefs of left-liberals like Scott Alexander is that common sense is highly fallible and ought to be treated with suspicion.

There is a common line of thought among left-liberals and centrists which goes something like this: There used to be clear-cut, black-and-white moral issues on which most people were wrong. For example, most people thought that slavery was right, but we now know it to be wrong. Two hundred years ago almost no one thought women should be eligible to vote, now everyone thinks women should be eligible to vote. If people were sincerely morally mistaken about these things, then there might be some things today which I think are right, but which are actually deeply wrong. Therefore, I should have a high degree of skepticism about my own moral instincts.

That line of argument is wrong about both history and psychology. Many of the alleged examples of moral progress were actually not as morally clear-cut as they seem in retrospect. Other cases really were unambiguous cases of injustice, but it is unclear how many people really supported the injustice, rather than merely tolerating it.

There’s no evidence that most people in the past supported past injustices.

Most people today will concede that factory farming is wrong if you show them videos of factory farms and press them on the issue; most people just don’t feel that they have the power to make a difference, or they think that being a vegan or vegetarian would be too personally costly. Maybe that’s an act of moral weakness, but failing to personally take steps to abolish X is very different from endorsing X as a positive good. In the future, factory farming will be seen as one of the tremendous evils of history, and future people will ask “how could people have done that?”. But most people today don’t actually endorse factory farming as a positive good.

The attitude of Europeans in the 1700s towards Caribbean slavery was similar to the attitude of modern people towards factory farming. Few people defended Caribbean slavery on the merits, they just thought that it was the way of the world, especially in the far-off West Indies, on the wild fringe of Civilization. There were Englishmen who altruistically joined anti-slavery civic organizations. The only pro-slavery organizations in England were made up of people who had a financial stake in slavery, i.e. people who had a financial incentive to go against their common sense moral judgment.

It isn’t the case that most people in the past thought that Caribbean slavery was unproblematic. Everyone had a common sense moral judgment that it is wrong to enslave people and work them to death in horrifying conditions. Some people acted on that common sense moral judgment and joined abolitionist organizations. Some people felt powerless or were too apathetic to campaign against Caribbean slavery, or they may have thought there were better uses of their time. Some people had the common sense moral instinct that Caribbean slavery was wrong, but they defied their conscience because they stood to benefit financially from Caribbean slavery. Even the defenders of Caribbean slavery didn’t argue that it was ok to enslave people in horrifying conditions, they argued that the slaves were actually well-treated, contrary to the claims of the abolitionists.

Even in America, where slavery was not nearly as bad as it was on the Caribbean sugar plantations, many planters (most? there was no good public polling back then) saw slavery as a necessary evil. The idea that slavery was a positive good came later (in the 1800s) as a hypertrophic reaction against abolitionist campaigning, which Southerners saw as Northern encroachment.

Here’s a quote from Genesis about slavery:

¹³ There was no food, however, in the whole region because the famine was severe; both Egypt and Canaan wasted away because of the famine. ¹⁴ Joseph collected all the money that was to be found in Egypt and Canaan in payment for the grain they were buying, and he brought it to Pharaoh’s palace. ¹⁵ When the money of the people of Egypt and Canaan was gone, all Egypt came to Joseph and said, “Give us food. Why should we die before your eyes? Our money is all gone.”

¹⁶ “Then bring your livestock,” said Joseph. “I will sell you food in exchange for your livestock, since your money is gone.” ¹⁷ So they brought their livestock to Joseph, and he gave them food in exchange for their horses, their sheep and goats, their cattle and donkeys. And he brought them through that year with food in exchange for all their livestock.

¹⁸ When that year was over, they came to him the following year and said, “We cannot hide from our lord the fact that since our money is gone and our livestock belongs to you, there is nothing left for our lord except our bodies and our land. ¹⁹ Why should we perish before your eyes—we and our land as well? Buy us and our land in exchange for food, and we with our land will be in bondage to Pharaoh. Give us seed so that we may live and not die, and that the land may not become desolate.”

²⁰ So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh’s, ²¹ and Joseph reduced the people to servitude,^[c] from one end of Egypt to the other. ²² However, he did not buy the land of the priests, because they received a regular allotment from Pharaoh and had food enough from the allotment Pharaoh gave them. That is why they did not sell their land.

²³ Joseph said to the people, “Now that I have bought you and your land today for Pharaoh, here is seed for you so you can plant the ground. ²⁴ But when the crop comes in, give a fifth of it to Pharaoh. The other four-fifths you may keep as seed for the fields and as food for yourselves and your households and your children.”

²⁵ “You have saved our lives,” they said. “May we find favor in the eyes of our lord; we will be in bondage to Pharaoh.”

²⁶ So Joseph established it as a law concerning land in Egypt—still in force today—that a fifth of the produce belongs to Pharaoh.

So here in a document thousands of years old we see the idea that slavery could only be justified if people had sold themselves into slavery in a voluntary transaction. We also see the idea that taxation is justified only if the people are the sovereign’s slaves and/or if the sovereign is the rightful owner of all the country’s land. This concept was not made up by modern libertarians.

Scott Alexander’s opinions about these issues are particular to his culture.

Alexander presents the idea that “education doesn’t work” and “parenting doesn’t have a huge long term impact on children” as wildly contrary to common sense. But those two ideas are not far off from what most people throughout history have believed, and I think the reason why Alexander finds them so strange is because they violate that taboos of his culture. In the culture of highly educated secular Westerners, education is sacred and it is taboo to suggest that a person’s path in life is largely determined by their genes. People outside of that culture don’t hold to that taboo.

In Steven Pinker’s book “The Blank Slate” he mentions that discoveries in behavioral genetics might bring back “another pre-scientific concept: Fate”. He quotes a poor woman from the third world who was asked by a Western Journalist what kind of person she would like her baby to grow up to be. She simply replied “It is in his fate.” It’s interesting that Pinker calls the concept of fate “prescientific” in the same paragraph in which he basically says the concept has been vindicated by science.

One of the most influential books in the nature/nurture debate is The Nurture Assumption. It wasn’t written by a professional scholar from the left-liberal bubble of academia, it was written by Judith Rich Harris, a grandmother from New Jersey.