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A Path Between Philosophy and Political Economy

An interview with
Robert Ehman
Associate Professor

Jennifer Thompson: Can you talk briefly about your background and some of your influences? I know we have talked before about Hayek having a strong early influence on you.

Robert Ehman: That was when I was in high school. I started college as an economics major and then I was moved toward philosophy for two reasons. One was, of course, that economics became at that time econometrics, the mathematization of economics. And I was not interested in building these mathematical models and being a mathematician or a statistician on the one side. On the other side, of course, was the idea that philosophy dealt with more fundamental, brute issues and I was more interested in these fundamental, brute, ethical issues.

I went into philosophy thinking I could do what I wanted there and deal with things that were more fundamental and avoid the limitations of operating in terms of just mathematical models. This was increasingly the case in economics. But in philosophy, once I got into this, I did what I was assigned to do. I was a great student in that respect. I did my assignments, even though I did not see the point of many of the assignments. I did not ask questions, I just did them. I learned what I was taught and that was true throughout college and graduate school. It was not necessarily what I was interested in, but it was philosophy and it was basic stuff and I did it. And I do not think there was any particular influence there. I took each of my courses as something that I had to master because that was part of the program, getting a degree, and going into this field.

I got interested in philosophy for its own sake. I enjoyed being a student. I always had a fundamental interest in ethics and political philosophy but not very much of that was really taught. But I took the standard things: Kant, Plato, Aristotle. I couldn't lose by taking Descartes and others. I did basically classical study: I took some logic, I took some philosophy of science, some metaphysics. I am not necessarily that pleased with all of my graduate and undergraduate courses. It was not what I would have preferred to do if I had known better, but I just did what was there. I did not choose my college on the basis of its philosophy program because I had not planned on studying philosophy. The graduate school was in a sense chosen for me by one of my teachers, and I think that it was probably not the most fortunate choice, but then I did not have the information to make the most fortunate choice.

I just went along with what it was, and I rather enjoyed Yale Graduate School and I gained a very broad background. I think it [Yale] was too limited in analytic philosophy, but it had a broad historical basis. And I did my thesis, of course, on Kant and Hegel.

Thompson: What precipitated your strong interest in philosophy of economics?

Ehman: From the start, I have been interested in political economy. I was excited as a high school student by Hayek's Road to Serfdom and as early as junior high school had an interest in political issues related to economics and an interest in the investment markets. However, when I studied philosophy, political economy took a back seat to becoming acquainted with the philosophical literature.

There was not much attention to political economy on the part of the departments in which I studied; and indeed, it was not until John Rawls published The Theory of Justice in 1971 that there was as much attention to the issues of distributive justice as I would have liked. John Rawls was the first in a series of contemporary contractarian thinkers, including David Gauthier and Thomas Scanlon, who have made significant contributions to the contractarian tradition.

The development of the economic analysis of law began with Ronald Coase in 1960, but it did not become a major line of thought in legal philosophy until the 1970s with Richard Posner's development of the theory. I have been working in this theory for the last decade or so and recently completed an article on the moral significance of the economic analysis of rights. In the 1970s James Buchanan developed the theory of public choice and constitutional political economy. I have been working on his version of contractarian political theory since that time and have recently completed an article defending certain aspects of Buchanan's approach over and against the approaches of Rawls and Gauthier.

Thompson: How important do you think it is for a philosophy student to have some background in something else?

Ehamn: I think I view philosophy now as I always did, in two respects. One, I think, as a professional you should have a specialty and a subspecialty. I do not think the generalist is possible any more in philosophy than he or she is in any other field. Philosophy is a very general field, but not for particular philosophers. They should have a specialty. You cannot be, in some ways, too narrow because philosophy is very hard. I do not believe the idea that somebody is a sort of generalist. I do not believe that is the way to do philosophy any more than it is the way to do any other thing.

I think you should have a specialty as a result of what you are interested in prior to philosophy, or based on your interests in other fields (or maybe you come into something within philosophy). But in order to have that, I think you should have some exposure to other fields for two reasons: first, to give you a context with respect to what other people are doing, and second, in order to confirm and to know whether that is really what you want to do. You might find out in the course of things that you have come in with one interest, and end up finding that was based on ignorance. You want to be sure you cover the field sufficiently to know this is the specialty you want to be in.

Now, I am not big on the idea of somebody having to do a certain kind of thing or have a certain kind of background for philosophy because philosophy is so diverse. You certainly do not have to have a background in economics to do philosophy, or a background in mathematics to do philosophy, or a background in science to do philosophy, or a background in art to do philosophy, or whatever. Although I think that if you do, that would tend to motivate you and it would tend to be natural for you. You would be in a good position to make that philosophy your specialty.

You cannot be in philosophy of mind, for example, without knowing something about the science of language, the science of psychology, and perhaps certain things in artificial languages and computers. You cannot do it. You cannot be in epistemology if you do not have this knowledge. Victoria McGeer is a good example of that. She is doing epistemology and philosophy of language the way you have to do epistemology and philosophy of language. There is no way of doing it by just doing pure philosophy. I think that becomes just history, and that is really not philosophy--it is the history of philosophy. You have to do historical courses in philosophy, but you cannot do any creative work that way.

You would not hire anybody to do philosophy of mind who did not have any knowledge of the sciences that you are dealing with. And that is true of science. If someone does not have any knowledge of any of the sciences, you do not want this person as a philosopher of science. And, you certainly do not want anybody who has no knowledge of anthropology, etc., teaching the philosophy of social science. If you are going to do political economy, you should know something about political science, you should know something about economics, and you should know something about law, I would think.

I do not know if there is any field which is pure philosophy--certainly not philosophy of mind and theory of knowledge, certainly not political philosophy or legal philosophy. Maybe ethics, I do not know. But ethics, I have found, has something to do with psychology or it has something to do with political economy or economics, or it has something to do with game theory, or it has something to do with something. It is not just philosophy.

Thompson: What about current work you are seeing? Whether it is professional or among your students, do you think the work you are seeing now is coming out of that sort of a context or has that sort of background? Or do you think that there is a lack of that in philosophy today?

Ehman: Well, you have got to distinguish graduates from undergraduates. I find it very helpful if undergraduates have done a lot of work in economics or public policy or law. Some of my graduate students have been through law school. I think that is a tremendous thing. I think more of my students should do that. It certainly would be helpful.

And I think one of the problems I have with philosophy students is the fact that they are not prepared in what is required--not only in the philosophical work that I do but in the non-philosophical areas. There are too many people, from my point of view, who do not know anything about economics, law, or political science. I mean, they do not have to go into these fields (and they do not), but if they are going to, they are at a great disadvantage if they do not read the literature (of course, the literature I study tends to be from economics or law, anyway).

Philosophy is not, certainly in my case, a self-enclosed discipline. I think there are lawyers and law students who actually do more of what I do than there are philosophers and philosophy students. I am just not interested in what department somebody is in. I think this is an administrative concern, having to do more with the university than it does with the subject matter. I am not interested in whether these people call themselves members of the philosophy department or the law school or the political science department or the economics department. This is not particularly interesting. Most of the journals I publish in will be in the law school rather than in the main library. Obviously, I think that these other fields are relevant. I am not certain if that is true of all fields in philosophy and I am not an expert in all fields of philosophy. But certainly this is true of something like philosophy of language or philosophy of mind or a theory of knowledge.

Ethics, I think, ultimately becomes philosophy of law and philosophy of economics. Just sitting around talking about what seems true or perfectly clear or right, or saying, from a philosophical point of view, that the poor should be subsidized--well, I do not know what that amounts to. We do not make much in philosophy, but we make too much to come up with that kind of nonsense. You do not want intuitions, especially not moral ones; they are not worth anything.

In my classes, there are no moral intuitions. My moral views about things, as far as I have them, are not why you take my classes--everybody has got those. I have nothing to add to anybody else's moral views except methods of criticism. My intuitions are of no interest to anyone, not even much to me. Obviously, they are not of interest to students, who are not paying me to pontificate. If that is ethics, we should close it down.

I do think we feed off what we know about the world. And we take a critical stance toward this knowledge. But we do not operate in a vacuum. Imagine being an aesthetician who did not have any knowledge of art, art criticism, or of poetry. You do not have to know about every art, but if you do not know something about art, what are you doing in aesthetics? What would you possibly have to say except talking about aesthetic theories and their logical inconsistencies?

It is the same with ethics, though. Talking about logical inconsistencies is not interesting. It does not add anything to our knowledge except to clarify. That is why it is very difficult to do philosophy. You have got to not only learn philosophy, but you have to learn something else.

Thompson: I know you have been interested in political economy from the beginning, but it seems as though you have been publishing in this area more recently. What about your earlier work and your book, The Authentic Self?

Ehman: That was an interesting thing because that book came out of papers in 1966 that I worked on. One was "Personal Love" (an earlier version of what was later published in the Journal of Value Inquiry) and then Heidegger on death. This was related to ethics because it had to do with first, personal love, and second, what it is you lose when someone that you love dies. What is the unique thing--you somehow lose something you cannot replace and what is that? They both deal with the same issue. It is a value theory book. It came out of Scheler and Kant and others: the idea that there is a value in a person which relates to both love and grief which is individual--individual value and individual personality.

Since then, I have become more interested in ethics primarily rather than this business of individual value and aesthetic value. And I do not think that was ever my primary interest, it was just something I worked in. I never taught anything that was in that book except that course after the book was done. The book really had nothing to do with my teaching. It came out of things that I had just happened to find interesting. My teaching earlier was in large part in terms of value theory, and I have been doing the philosophy of law since 1970 or 1972. So I have been doing that for years. It is not anything I started in the last six months.

Thompson: What projects are you currently working on?

Ehman: I have had a long-standing interest in Lockean natural law approaches to political and economic rights. The most important of the contemporary Lockeans is, of course, Robert Nozick. I have published an article on Locke and Nozick, and my current project is to carry forth this work with an examination of the theory of acquisition in Locke and Nozick. I am at present examining contemporary work on Locke to put my own interpretation of Locke into the context of this work.

Thompson: Do you feel that the philosophical questions of economics or political economy receive enough attention in contemporary philosophy or economics?

Ehman: There has been, as I have said, an exciting move forward in this area in the last twenty years. I feel that philosophers have not given the economic analysis of law or Buchanan's constitutional political economy the attention they deserve. On the other hand, they have paid attention to John Locke and Nozick and to contractarian rational choice theories of ethics and political justification. In my recent work I have attempted to redress to some degree the failure to appreciate these neglected lines of thought while at the same time working on those that have come in for considerable attention. I feel that philosophers should pay more attention both to the economic analysis of law and the constitutional contractarianism and public choice theories of those who work in Buchanan's tradition.