Acting on information

In commenting on an earlier version of this account, the editors came to a conclusion I had not seen: when the process of moral reasoning evoked by the Commissioners acted like an internal externality it had the effect of ‘cooling’ a hot situation.

The four framing devices I chose to describe were, we may say, intended to cool but in effect only measured the heat. And here I draw on another of the editors’ comments. The Commission offers a rather peculiar rendering of ethical practice, exaggerated no doubt in my selection of issues, for it is largely non-relational. After all (they point out) persons such as teachers or parents may be ethical in relation to their students or children without having to import ethical principles from the outside; this is indeed one of the points offered by the dissenting opinion. The external character of moral reasoning seen here must be a function not of the nature of ethics as such but of the way that, in this case, the whole problem was being framed. This suggests that we look again at the Report’s emphasis on decision­making, choice-informed individuals.

At least on the information about the Commissioners’ activities I have given here, they appear for all the world to be treating their sources of information as though it were coming from autonomous subjects of the kind found in the law - or

in the market. Indeed the Commission seemed to be moving towards the kinds of calculations that Pottage attributes to a patents regime.

there is a basic incompatibility between ethical and political arguments and the scientific rational character of the patents system, which can [overtly] accommodate ‘ethical’ themes only if they are translated, or betrayed, by some form of risk calculus.

Risk can be treated as criteria by which to calculate, for example, the desirability of information disclosure or to assess how far persons are adequately informed. Pottage observes how both law and science have converged on the notion of ‘informed consent’ as a concept which binds persons - specifically the ‘scientific and economic characterisations’ of persons - to the legal concept of the auto­nomous individual. The Commission was able to approximate its endeavours to a form of risk calculus, and set up its frames to do so. But it was defeated by the fact that it had to treat its sources of information as heterogeneous as the data on which information was being sought.

By invoking externalities, Callon reminds us that part of the economist’s job is that of description. Description has a crucial role in framing and disentanglement. Certainly Euro-Americans are constantly invited to understand the world of description against the ‘real world’ it precipitates. The economists’ position is thus part of - and central to - a more general Euro-American project: to describe the societies in which we live. The interest of economists is that their descriptions are also meant to help us act. That is, even if not predictive, they are drawn into the economy as findings, research outcomes, trends, and so forth, to stimulate future policy/market behaviour.

Pottage’s observations underline a contrast between at least two kinds of descriptions on which Euro-Americans act, two approaches to ethics we might say. The first is information about the world that purifies it; description transforms its dimensions into calculable measurements. Discussion is then all about the instruments of description, how accurate or appropriate a measure, whether the words convey the right impression, and so forth, and the greater the approximation, the greater the power of the instrument.

The normative guideline, the ethical principle, has already jumped from description to action; it pre-empts the connection. The anticipation of action is as

Externalities in comparative guise 79 much a condition of the description, we might say, as a consequence of it. Thus the principle of open information, of the desirability of assessing the degree of ‘informed consent’ (to regulation) that existed across society, which the Canadian Report endorsed, is not there simply to frame understandings: it points to practices which need to be implemented. Action is already implied. In this context, action is not an externality, a contingency or unlooked-for outcome of the promulgation of norms; on the contrary it is inherent to the normative recommendation. Yet action - as an activity - does not belong to the discursive framing of the norm itself. One might describe it as an external internality.