The Ash Twins Blog

The absence of a theory of the determinants of human preferences (desires) has repeatedly struck me as a gaping oversight of economic science. Ben-Ner and Putterman (2000) offer a framework for filling this gap:

[T]he conjunction of: (a) a postulated genetic basis for human behavioral predispositions, and (b) the demonstrable impact of environment on phenotypic variation in behavior, opens up the possibility of a scientific research program for studying the influence of human environments on human preferences. The research program we envision is one that  endogenizes preferences to economic and social environments. There exist a number of important economic and social problems, including those of cooperation and loyalty in organizations, the provision of nurturing and supportive environments for children and the elderly, the viability of humane social insurance mechanisms, responses to addiction and criminality, and even the creation and preservation of individuals who support the ethical norms sustaining low-cost exchange relations, with respect to which the economic method of analysis involving individual optimization subject to constraints can be more usefully applied if scope is allowed for extended preferences (Aaron, 1994; Bowles, 1998; Rabin, 1998). Understanding of such issue calls for a realization of the mutual impacts of institutions and environments upon preferences, including normative ones, and conversely the influence of such preferences on the performance, viability, and ultimately the very selection of such institutions and environments. . .

The evolutionary approach is rich not only in its allowance for an “extended” model of preferences, but also in its recognition that realized preferences are the result of both inherited receptivities and of the way in which experiences of the individual impact upon those inheritances. The biologists’ distinction between a genotype, the sum of the genetic instructions provided to an organism, and a phenotype, the realized organism dependent on the interaction of those instructions with a particular environment, is especially useful for the study of human preferences. In certain insect species (for instance locusts), the individual is prompted by environmental stimuli (in that example, the degree of crowding with other members of the species under which it matures) to become one or another of two or more radically different types of organisms marked by differing physiology and behavior despite possession of an identical set of genes. In a similar manner, human beings are influenced by the environments of their upbringing and socialization, as well as those in which they live as adults, to develop one or another set of preferences, including ones traditionally associated with moral values. Thus, much as recent cognitive research has shown that the development of specific areas of the brain is influenced by an individual’s exposure to relevant environmental stimulae during a critical period of growth, so future research may show how exposure to different normative  signals in formative periods leads to differing actualizations of the social potentials latent in our genes. . .

While basically alike except in instances of gross genetic error, humans differ in numerous details, including the settings of mechanisms regulating fear and other emotions, and thus conceivably also in receptiveness towards moral exhortation. Genetic differences in receptiveness to particular cultural messages are probably randomly distributed across populations: the genetic make-up of an average individual in Hungary or Peru differs little from that of an average individual in India or Japan (Tooby and Cosmides, 1990), so children with Hungarian genes can be as easily socialized to be culturally Peruvian, Indian, or Japanese, depending on how they are raised. Yet variations across individuals within any given society, and variation of environmental stimuli both within and across societies, lead to substantial differences in behavioral inclinations of specific human beings. . .

Economists are often heard to complain that the attempt to explain some behavior which appears to defy standard neoclassical theory by appeal to additional arguments in the utility function are ad hoc in character. . . To allow for extendedness of preferences is viewed, from this standpoint, as an instance of “cheating by changing the rules of the game.” . . . What the evolutionary sciences are providing is the foundation for a nonarbitrary reformulation of individual choice theory along scientific lines.

Today’s Frank Rich column reports the deeply disturbing finding that Guantanamo detainees were subjected to torture in order to extract false confessions about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which would then be used to justify invasion. After discussing the recently released torture memos, Rich writes:

Meanwhile, we do have evidence for an alternative explanation of what motivated Bybee to write his memo that August, thanks to the comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees released last week.

The report found that Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators of another White House imperative: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections. Bybee’s memo was written the week after the then-secret (and subsequently leaked) “Downing Street memo,” in which the head of British intelligence informed Tony Blair that the Bush White House was so determined to go to war in Iraq that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” A month after Bybee’s memo, on Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney would make his infamous appearance on “Meet the Press,” hyping both Saddam’s W.M.D.s and the “number of contacts over the years” between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If only 9/11 could somehow be pinned on Iraq, the case for war would be a slamdunk.

But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it. Torture may have been the last hope for coercing such bogus “intelligence” from detainees who would be tempted to say anything to stop the waterboarding.

Last week Bush-Cheney defenders, true to form, dismissed the Senate Armed Services Committee report as “partisan.” But as the committee chairman, Carl Levin, told me, the report received unanimous support from its members — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman included.

Levin also emphasized the report’s accounts of military lawyers who dissented from White House doctrine — only to be disregarded. The Bush administration was “driven,” Levin said. By what? “They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.”

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

This is evidence of profound evil; evil that truly shocks the conscience; evil that ruled our country for eight years. Rich continues:

Levin suggests — and I agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of American values.

President Obama can talk all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s commitment to the rule of law.