Richard Whately and the Gospel of Transparency

I Introduction IN THE DIVISION OF LABOR, people trade goods and services for ideas from specialists. But if they hire someone to think for them, how do they avoid being exploited? A hundred years before Frank Knight (1935: 304) struggled with this problem, Richard Whately, political economist, logician, and Archbishop of Dublin, asked how to make people better informed. For Whately, the demands of transparency were Gospel. John 3:20 presented a Christian obligation for transparency in intellectual exchange to turn selfish interactions into interactions of fairness. Knight's and Whately's approach to economics follows in a tradition that harks back to Adam Smith's work and continues through F. A. Hayek's. It supposes the social world is composed of relatively small, sympathetically connected groups (Levy and Peart 2009; Peart and Levy 2010). A common theme in this tradition is the thesis that the sympathetic connections that hold small groups together are also central to a willingness to ignore common morality, what Whately would describe as a party spirit that enlists "man's virtues in the cause of his vices." Whately is a difficult thinker, partly because he is competent in so many disciplines. Joseph Schumpeter, who struggled with Whatley's "elusive" greatness, saw a systematic core in him: the force behind Nassau Senior's axiomatics (Schumpeter 1954: 483). Whately's contemporaries did not talk of axiomatics, but they did point out that his work depended upon an unusually small number of authorities, that is, Aristotle, Bacon and Smith (Mill 1865: 497; E. Whately 1866, vol. I: 10). In our interpretation, these foundational sources gave Whately three guiding principles to characterize all human activity: innate sociability, innate self-love, and costly mental activity. Self-love, as Whately understood it, includes as primitive either a "desire to know" (Aristotle) or a desire to satisfy the curiosity occasioned by wonder about the world (Smith). Whately augmented the desire to obtain knowledge with a desire to share knowledge by appealing to the principle of sympathy. These principles, coupled with a normative principle of fairness, constitute the basis for his science of reciprocal exchange, catallactics. Violations of fairness motivate his multidimensional reform proposals. As a Christian theologian, Whately brings to analytical egalitarianism a working interest in the interaction between the human and the Divine. God for Smith seems largely a matter of belief (Levy and Peart 2008). For Whately, by contrast, God and humans interact. God's word is the Truth, and therefore valuable to us, but God doesn't trade. We trade with specialists who offer us the "Truth" so that we can undertake a less onerous activity in pursuit of our happiness. Whately conceptualizes this as a market for infallibility. We begin with Whately's distinction between self-love and selfishness. On his island, Robinson Crusoe can be neither selfish nor fair. Fairness is self-love subject to a reciprocity constraint, and it forms the basis for Whately's distinction between acts that increase productivity and acts that are transfers. Second, we consider four of Whately positions, including his explanation of the demand and supply for the doctrine of infallibility. We close with Whately's celebrated discussion of Judas's betrayal of Christ, an act predicated on a misunderstanding of the Divine: Judas did not understand that God does not trade. II The Gospel of Transparency WHATELY'S ACCOUNT of innately social individuals provides an elegant way of thinking about selfishness. His argument in the annotations of Bacon's Essays begins on the desert. Whately argues that an isolated individual cannot be selfish: It is clear that selfishness exists only in reference to others, and could have no place in one who lived alone on a desert island, though he might have of course every degree of self-love; for selfishness is not an excess of self-love, and consists not in an over-desire of happiness, but in placing your happiness in something which interferes with, or leaves you regardless of, that of others. …