NOTE ON ETHICAL SYSTEMS A N D AGRICULTURAL POLICY

CHARLES LElIELIN’

HIS excellent article by G. I. Trant stresses successfully the importance of being conscious of all value judgments, explicit

and implicit, in formulating agricultural policy. Another interest- ing feature of the paper is the use which is made of different philo- sophical approaches to illustrate the nature of the difficulties as- sociated with the choice of appropriate policy and to provide some criteria which can serve as a guide for such political decisions. The paper is also very interesting for its implications for those con- cerned with the methodological aspects of the relation between economic theory and policy recommendations. However, in this respect, the article may be difficult for many readers who have not had t h e chance of investigating systematically the very long and diluted literature dealing specifically or occasionally with t h e nature and limitations of the new welfare economics. Mr. Trant’s allusions to philosophy are still more sketchy than his references to welfare economics, and this adds to the difficulty.

In the section on value scaling, one would like Mr. Trant to refer to Kenneth J. Arrow. If Arrow’s contribution is valid, it is not possible to find scientifically or “to establish empirically” a consistent value scaling which would represent the opinion of all the individuals in the community. To say tha t it is not necessary to establish a value scale “which will serve in all situations” does not resolve the fundamental difficulty.

In the paragraph entitled “Consistency As A Criterion For Policy”, Mr. Trant applies Kant’s ethical principle “of equal treat- ment for all people” to the case of the agricultural industry as op- posed to the non-agricultural industries. On this basis, Mr. R a n t concludes: “By this type of reasoning each and every industry should be granted high fixed prices . . .” In other words, if some pol- icy is good for the agricultural sector i t shoud be good also fo r all the other sectors. Or more exactly, in order to be good for t h e agri- cultural sector a policy must be applicable also to all other sectors. I do not question the philosophical principle involved ; I a m only con- cerned with the example given to illustrate this principle. Whether it is a normative view or not, many readers will agree with me that a special treatment of favor can be conceived and argued in

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economic terms about the agricultural sector. The argument, how- ever, must be based on a set of criteria different from those im- plicit in Mr. Trant’s discussion. In the preceding section entitled “Value Scaling In Conflict Situations”, Mr. Trant suggests the following principle as being above the conflicting questions of free market and of economic security: “That farmers are not to be treated by society solely as a means of producing society’s agri- cultural need.” “As men, he adds, they are ends in themselves and consequently a policy would be judged good or bad as i t treats or fails to treat them as ends not as means alone.” This distinction brought into the analysis by Mr. Trant implies that there may be some situations where economic efficiency and the welfare of a group are in conflict. As mentioned earlier by Mr. Trant, a strict and systematic economic analysis cannot solve such a problem. However, consideration of economic factors can convince that the very nature of the activity within a sector - for example, the in- herent instability of agricultural production, i.e. the lack of entre- preneurial control over the production - is such that this sector calls for special policies, not because the people involved are dif- ferent or superior to the rest of the community, but because the nature of the economic activity is different for this particular sec- tor of the economy. Another sector may be handicapped by some other difficulties also inherent to the economic functioning within the sector rather than on account of some institutional particulari- ties. Such special difficulties call for special policies. In such a per- spective one must not judge the value of each policy separately, but one must consider the total of all policies directed at the dif- ferent sectors as a set of complementary instruments t o provide the common welfare.

In other words, I would have liked Mr. Trant to mention some- where in the article that the question of policy is in the last resort a matter of synthetic approach rather than strictly a subject- matter for the analyst. The illustration given by Mr. Trant a t the end of his article would have provided an excellent occasion to do so. One conclusion which is implicit in Mr. Trant’s analysis, and which he also does not stress enough, is the fact that the problems of welfare and the domain of economic policy are primarily a field where the intelligent politicians must exercise their virtue of prudence. The scientist can only play a subsidiary role in this con- nection. Ai>d this sibuation is due in turn, and this is the important point, to the inherent difficulties which the economic theorists encounter in their efforts to discover the true scientific founda- tions of such an area of problems.