Moral Economies of Wellbeing
Supriya Chaudhuri For reasons still unclear to me, I was asked to speak at a research workshop at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, on ‘Moral Economies of Wellbeing’. Neither a historian nor an economist, I was ill-equipped for the exercise. I undertook it in the belief that every individual, however unpracticed in the disciplines of the social sciences, should be possessed of an opinion as to what constitutes a moral economy and what is implied by well-being. It is a part of morality to think about these issues, though it may not add to general profit or wellbeing for me to hold forth on them. My reflections are partial and open to revision. The phrase ‘moral economy’, in the specific context of ‘the moral economy of the poor’, was put into circulation by E. P. Thompson in a famous essay published in Past and Present in 1971. As we know, it was immediately applied to a quite different, non-European setting by James C. Scott in his 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), and it became one of the principal terms in a still-inconclusive debate about the motives of action in market- and non-market economies, as illustrated in a much-cited article by William Booth, ‘On the Idea of the Moral Economy’ (American Political Science Review, 88 (1994) 653-667). It is worth reminding ourselves, however, that the confidence with which Thompson used the phrase was bred of a conviction both that we would understand what he meant by it in his special historical instance, and what it might mean as a term in ethics. Twenty-one years later, at a conference in the University of Birmingham (1992: see E. P. Thompson in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority, 2000) Thompson was unable to locate the origin of the term from his notes, but felt convinced that he had coined it as the opposite of ‘market economy’. Yet it had appeared long before, in the title of a book by the American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry, The Moral Economy, published in 1909. Perry, who later came to be known for his support of the interest theory of value, offers in this early work a largely Aristotelian account of the moral organization of life, an ideal oikonomia based on ethical principles, and upon an idea of justice arising out of the reconciliation of the widest-possible range of interests. It may indeed be suggested that our theme today, the moral economy of wellbeing, is sited in the space between philosophy and economics, between Perry’s philosophical account of the good life, eudaimonia, and Thompson’s social-historical examination of the rationale for a form of economic action, the food riots of eighteenth-centuryEngland. It may be recalled that the controversy around Thompson’s article largely centred on his presumed hostility to the free-market doctrines of Adam Smith, the most important economic theorist of eighteenth-century England, and in fact it is this opposition, between moral economies and market economies, that has largely sustained the debate till the present day. Booth’s article on ‘The Idea of the Moral Economy’, for example, criticizes the notion of ‘embeddedness’ attributed to pre-market economies by Karl Polanyi (in The Great Transformation, 1944), and argues that the principles of contractual exchange in market economies have an equally embedded and moral character. Polanyi’s notion of embeddedness made much of the presumed network of rights and obligations in an agricultural economy where food production and food entitlement, for example, were linked. Booth argued that market economies also have an inbuilt structure of contractual obligations. What is at stake in much of this debate is a certain notion of distributive justice, of justice as fairness: which is why other sections of Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice than the one in your reading file (for example, the section on equality and liberty) might have been relevant to this problem. In this respect Sen’s idea of justice owes something to Rawls, whose pupil he was, but it is he who of all modern economic philosophers has attempted most consistently to reconcile justice with happiness. Justice requires, one might say, that a moral economy be directed towards, and be capable of achieving, wellbeing. I will begin by briefly considering some points in the discussion of justice in Book V of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1129b 3-5) that may have a bearing upon market economies. Aristotle is at this place talking about particular justice and injustice, that is, justice exercised as one virtue among others by individuals with respect to goods such as honour, money and safety. Aristotle makes it clear that in such cases, injustice (adikia) is rooted in greed, the desire to have more than others (pleonexia). If one knowingly contrives an unjust distribution out of a motive of gain, one is adikos and pleonektes, and a society ruled by greed and competitiveness is therefore likely to be an unjust society. Yet it as Bernard Williams notes (in Moral Luck, Cambridge UP 1981, 92-93), Aristotle does not sufficiently characterize pleonexia here: it is, we can see, not in itself a motive, but a product of desire for specific goods, such as honour or fame on the one hand, and money or property on the other. Williams finds Aristotle’s identification of injustice with pleonexia inadequate and wrong (‘a mistake, one which dogs Aristotle’s account’), but it is worth our asking whether this brief discussion does not point the way to a deeper understanding of justice as fairness, and of the distribution of goods as key to our perception of a just society. The point is relevant to a contrast between moral economies and market economies, though there is, regrettably, no universally accepted definition of the moral economy. If it is a system in which moral predispositions, norms and habits guide economic choices and behaviours, it could be argued (as by Russell Keat and Andrew Sayer) that