MICHAEL McPHERSON
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similarly confident and complete in its judgments . However tor–
menting or tragic a moral dilemma may appear, utilitarianism–
with its pleasure/pain, cost/benefit analyzing- offers an unam–
biguous method for grinding out an answer to it. Uncertainties and
measurement problems may make the
computation
of the answer doubt–
ful or difficult, but those are seen as technical not moral difficulties.
But the price of this completeness and decisiveness at both personal
and social levels is, as we have seen, to cast out of the reach of theory
those discomfiting features of real conduct and of real moral
deliberations that don't fit.
It
is almost as if neoclassical theorists
worried that analyses that incorporated the real world phenomena of
confusion, ambivalence, and doubt would themselves be infected by
those features - would be confused and dubious analyses.
An economics that incorporated some of these recalcitrant
features of human choice, and that acknowledged the partiality of its
usual view, would indeed be in some ways less sure of itself-more
qualified in its predictions, less absolute in its judgments, more
modest about the social guidance its technical analyses can give. But
much of that self-certainty is, anyway, bluff. As Albert Hirschman
put it in concluding a recent essay: "After so many failed prophecies,
is it not in the interest of social science to embrace complexity, be it
at some sacrifice of its claim to predictive power?"
We are saddened by the death of
MANES SPERBER,
a friend and contributor.
