Beyond preference: a response to Daniel Ooi

Daniel’s excellent blog is full of absolutely delightful reads and I can’t recommend them enough. It’s very refreshing to read reflections on economics of religion written by a fellow Christian economist. Daniel and I are on very different pages as far as economics goes, though, and there are a few things in particular on which I want to challenge him.

His recent post ‘Spiritual Shopping’ (https://eternaloptimality.wordpress.com/2020/04/18/spiritual-shopping/) is characteristically provocative and well-written. It is, however, plagued by the same problems faced by all of modern economic utility theory. There is a thread running throughout the article that implies that preferences over churches are meaningful. That is, a person’s ‘choice’ of church betrays information about how they value different aspects of church experience, and how they are best satisfied by things that a church does. I might feel that the preaching at church A is excellent, but I felt so warmly welcome at church B that I was willing to accept its lower preaching quality for the sake of this social boon (or vice versa!). I’m not sure this is quite fair, or even empirically accurate. Why should every relevant dimension of church experience reduce to individual preference? Don’t Christians sometimes decide which church to go to because they want to be able to serve effectively, or partner with specific brothers and sisters? Of course, it is possible in principle to put numbers on these things and include them in a utility function. But it seems to me that they belong in a different category to simple want-satisfaction that Daniel seems to argue is experienced in the way Christians encounter doctrine, music, and church culture.

I am by no means the first economist to question whether these distinctions should not undermine the economic models used to describe and predict human behaviour. Amartya Sen’s fabulous ‘Rational Fools’ essay is the classic text: ‘if you are consistent, whether you are a single-minded egoist or a raving altruist or a class-conscious militant, you will appear to be maximising your own utility in this enchanted world of definitions.’ In the case of church choice, Daniel and all of his fellow mainstream economists of religion are forced to conclude that intrepid missionaries risking life and limb to reach every corner of the globe are just searching for their ideal combination of church and non-church life in the same way as someone who is only there for the music, or goes from time to time to chat up that attractive verger. It seems to me quite obvious that these people are behaving differently – and not just because their preferences are different. Sen’s concept of ‘commitment’ is useful here – he argues that individuals can knowingly sacrifice their welfare in the pursuit of a greater good. In saying this, he is not deviating much from neoclassical utility theorists. But here’s the twist: mainstream economists think that people would only do this in order to satisfy their preference for that greater good they are pursuing. Sen makes no such assumption: if you oppose torture because ‘it makes me sick’, then the economists have a point, but if you do it at great personal cost for no reason other than that is is wrong, and averting it exceeds my own ambitions in importance, then we need completely to reformulate how we understand individual behaviour. To return again to church choice, the economists may still be right if people’s apparently selfless choices over which church they attend, and how they serve it, are intended to make them feel morally superior. But if they are meaningfully selfless, or motivated by things that transcend individual wellbeing, then the economists (including Daniel) are wrong. At least, if they’re not wrong empirically, then they are at least making curious philosophical generalisations which will lead in Sen’s words to ‘a remarkably mute theory’ – mute because it does not distinguish between obviously different kinds of motivation.