Redeeming Economics (7) Altruism

In his book called Redeeming Economics, John D Mueller discusses the nature of altruism.

Modern economists are schooled to explain everything in terms of utility, including human love and hate. For example, when Kenneth Arrow considered the nature of “altruism,” he posed three interpretations, all based on utility... The only difference among these three explanations is what kind of utility is supposed to explain altruism—the satisfaction at perceiving others’ satisfaction, the satisfaction at contributing to others’ satisfaction, or the satisfaction of feeling more secure in one’s own possessions as the result of pursuing “enlightened self-interest.” Arrow added, “This classification is not exhaustive, or even exclusive”; but he did not suggest that there is an explanation based on any principle other than utility.

As we have seen, the notion that calculations of utility explain all human action is also at the heart of Becker’s “economic approach to human behavior.” By reducing all human behavior to utility, Becker ‘s approach requires that each person treat other persons for economic purposes only as objects, much the way the mother regards the milk. He argues that people get married or have children “because they expect to increase their utility.” He says that “if more is voluntarily spent on one child than on another, it is because the parents obtain additional utility from the additional expenditure. . .”

In contrast to Becker’s “economic approach to human behaviour,” the main tradition of economic theory has always been based on Augustine’s “human approach to economic behavior.” The logic of economic theory is quite clear that love cannot be based on utility, for the simple reason that utility is derived from love. To love a person for his or her own sake is precisely to treat him or her as an end; and it is only because there is such an end that the means selected to serve that end (like milk or college tuition) have any value. To say that love is based on utility is therefore incurably circular.

In economic theory, human love is essentially neither an emotion nor a weighing of utilities (though these may also be present) but a weighing of persons. If I weigh another person as equal to myself, and the needs and preferences of that person are similar to mine, then I give him or her the use of half of what I have: it’s that simple. If I weigh several people as equal to myself, I divide my property or income equally among all such persons including myself. (If the needs or preferences of the persons differ from mine, I weight—that is, multiply—the marginal significance of the goods by the relative significance of the person.) In other words, loving someone does not increase one’s utility. Rather, our estimate of other persons’ importance, relative to our own, determines how much we are willing to lower our own utility to love them. The relative weight of the self versus other persons is described in each person’s “distribution function.”

Rather than an exchange, love is best described in economic theory as a gift, or voluntary “transfer payment”—that is, a distribution out of one’s resources not made in compensation for useful services rendered. The size of the transfer payment is determined by the resources of the distributor and the relative importance of the recipient in the eyes of the distributor.

Likewise, mutual love (as it is ideally in marriage) is not essentially an exchange of utilities, though of course a mixture of gift and exchange is possible. Mutual love is best viewed as a simultaneous pair of gifts or voluntary transfer payments, of which there is no reason to believe that any equality in gifts should apply—except in the special case in which the resources of each person and their respective estimates of the importance of the other person happen to be exactly identical. But even in this case, the utility of the two gifts for their recipients cannot be assumed to be equal.

Objectively speaking, love always involves sacrifice, regardless of how the person loving feels about it: she may be happy or sad, willing or resentful, or all of these alternatively. The love is expressed by what she does, not what she feels. And it is probably more often the case than not, that the feelings follow the doing, not vice versa.

Mueller applies this to the Mother's Task.

Rather than increasing her utility, here love determines how much value or utility she is willing to sacrifice. Her ability to sacrifice is inherently limited, since the more she distributes to others, the scarcer and the more valuable each remaining unit becomes to herself. Love always involves sacrifice.