Conclusion

For many years moral skepticism has been a staple of introductory economic textbooks and a dominant view among economists. As a consequence, economists have attempted to minimize the role of ethics in economics or to exclude ethical considerations from economic discussions altogether. I have argued that Keynes had a different understanding of ethics, which gave rise to a dramatically different view of the relationship between ethics and economics than that which currently prevails. Following G.E. Moore and his nineteenth-century predecessors, Keynes rejected moral skepticism and believed goodness to be an objective property of the world rather than a matter of personal subjective preference. On this basis, Keynes saw ethics as the central and most important discipline because it addressed the most fundamental questions that human beings face: What is valuable? How should one live? What should I do? From this perspective, economics is subsidiary. Economic considerations are difficult to avoid, for example, for maintaining biological viability, but they come after the more fundamental questions of life. The rise to dominance of moral skepticism marked a dramatic shift. The prevailing view among his teachers and peers when Keynes was an undergraduate was that goodness is obviously and certainly objective. They believed that in actual ordinary life, people recognize goodness as objective in their speech and in their actions. They believed that people have the capacity to know good and evil and that they base decisions on that knowledge. Moreover, they believed that there was a high level of agreement on moral questions across diverse peoples, cultures, and religions. For the young Keynes and his friends, these were facts about the world that served as overwhelming evidence that moral questions can have factual answers. They differed among themselves on many issues, but the objectivity of goodness was not one of them. Keynes knew that there was disagreement on some moral issues. He knew that a number of people had made strong arguments for skepticism. Nevertheless, he was not persuaded that these were sufficient reasons to give up his belief in the objectivity of goodness. The young Keynes agreed with Moore that goodness is a property only of individual states of minds, a characteristic of direct intellectual, emotional, and physical experiences. Both men believed that the states of mind best in them-

selves are those involving the physical and emotional experience of loving and being loved, the experience of creating and appreciating beauty, and the experience of pursuing and apprehending truth. Moore and Keynes saw the list as descriptive rather than prescriptive. These were not things that Moore and Keynes thought people should find to be good. They were the things that Moore and Keynes believed that people in ordinary life actually do find to be good. As he matured, Keynes came to believe that the range of experiences that were good was broader than Moore originally enunciated but he did not attempt to produce a comprehensive list. Subject to the same Moorean influence, Hawtrey suggested a long list of states of mind classified as good, from low to high. From this perspective, ethics is concerned with goodness as a characteristic of individual human states of mind and not with behavior or action in the world. Behavior and action in the world are questions of duty or, as Moore put it, ethics in relation to conduct. Behavior and action are not independent of good states of mind because behavior can facilitate or hinder the experience of good states of mind. Right action or duty is concerned ultimately, on this view, with increasing the goodness of states of mind. The ideas of goodness and duty, then, are seen as inextricably bound together, but right conduct is subordinate to ethics in the same sense that means are subordinate to ends. It is necessary to know the good ends to judge whether particular means are suitable, but it is not necessary to know the means to judge the ends. In this context, conduct includes all behavior, including political and economic behavior, so politics and economics are subsets of conduct and also subordinate to ethics. Keynes recognized actual differences of opportunity, education, and ability among people in the world and he knew that as a leader in academia, business, and government in Britain in the early to middle years of the twentieth century he belonged to an elite. But following Moore, “utilitarian socialism,” and Christianity, among other moral authorities, Keynes accepted that, morally speaking, duty requires strict egalitarianism, such that people act in a way that places the interests, happiness, and goodness of others on an equal plane with their own interests, happiness, and goodness. On the other hand, Keynes stood up for egoism when he could not find adequate reasons to persuade himself that it is always an absolute moral obligation to sacrifice one’s own good for that of others. His ardent individualism was a necessary consequence of his belief that goodness is a property of states of mind because, in an important sense, states of mind are purely individual. He did not view his commitments to individualism and egalitarianism as contradictory but thought the legitimate claims of both in any society would have to be reconciled according to specific historical circumstances. Keynes also believed that the industrial market economy did not show any tendency, empirically or theoretically, toward reconciling egalitarianism and individualism in a manner that would be both just and efficient. On Keynes’s view, it was the role of political activity to organize that part of life that must be collectively organized. The standard that defined appropriate political action was that provided by ethics, the obligation to increase goodness. Goodness is increased when more people experience better states of mind. There

may be a conflict between the experience of much better states of mind for a few people and the experience of moderately better states of mind for many people and this would have to be reconciled according to specific historical circumstances rather than general rules. Governments cannot directly provide good states of mind, but can only work to establish preconditions such as peace, freedom of expression, and material comfort. As with other aspects of conduct, the best way for the government to promote goodness changes with changing historical circumstances. Thus Keynes believed that there are no political institutions or organizational forms that are ideal or even preferable in their own right. A particular party or institutional structure is preferable only if it is most useful under particular historically specific conditions for progress in the promotion of goodness. So although Keynes expressed his support for the ultimate authority of Parliament, this was not an absolute commitment. Likewise, at any point in time, as the result of historical circumstances, one party may be ahead of the others as a vehicle of progress, and therefore worthy of support, but none has any innate superiority. Similarly, laissez-faire as a policy proposal may be useful under some circumstances but not under others. One of the most important areas in which collective action and thus politics can play a useful role is with respect to the satisfaction of certain needs, that is, in economics or, as is more accurate from Keynes’s perspective, political economy. Like politics and conduct generally, the ends of political economy are derived from ethics. The ends are again those physical and mental experiences that are good. The satisfaction of certain economic needs is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such experience. From this perspective it follows that the economy has a moral purpose and attempts to separate ethics and economics are accordingly thus doomed to failure.