Comments on McClennen's "prudence and constitutional rights": or how do you turn words into action?

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The,  Jan, 2004  by Joseph C. Pitt

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In The Calculus of Consent, Buchanan and Tullock argue, among other things, that institutional safeguards are required to ensure maximal benefit for all members of a community against the potential tyranny of the majority. McClennen extends this idea by introducing prudential concerns and argues that they ought to be factored into the decision making that constructs such safeguards. Specifically, McClennen sees the safeguarding of prudential concerns for all members of society as a matter of distribution that should be secured from the random fate of the political process. McClennen begins by offering some definitions, drawing some distinctions, and generally setting up the framework he needs to make his case.

A prudential concern is a concern about "how to protect against certain kinds of losses." The particular set of losses McClennen focuses on are those that "qualify as disastrous for the individual in question--that involve great harm or damage to that person ... in very general terms, it is a loss that proves ruinous to substantial and important undertakings." To avoid turning the issue into a strictly individual problem and hence removing it from institutional development, McClennen seeks the general nature of such prudential concerns, drawing a distinction between primary and secondary goods. Primary goods "have a value that tends to be conserved in the face of changing interests, for they are instrumental to a significantly wide range of interests ... have a focal value, in virtue of its having a special instrumental place at the intersection of many goals and projects." Thus, he continues, "The securing of such a good can become critical to the success of whole sequences or chains of activity, spreading from the present to the future."

McClennen then proceeds to give us a classification of types of concerns associated with prudential concern for primary goods and a classification of the types of risks to those concerns. There are four areas of basic concern: bodily integrity, mental and emotional integrity, all-purpose resources, and opportunities. The sources of risk to these primary goods are natural events and the actions of other persons. The problem is to maximize the agent's ability to juggle the four areas of prudential concern for primary goods and minimize the two areas of risk. The remainder of McClennen's argument is an attempt to show that to leave this maximin problem to the political process is to doom it. The solution of the problem must be a constitutional one because "[t]o the extent that risks can be controlled by voluntary choices that persons make as individuals, it is plausible to suppose that risk management is appropriately left up to the individual. The focus of concern, then, will be with what can be characterized as involuntary risk," in other words, natural events and the actions of other persons.

McClennen then looks at some proposals for dealing with the problem of involuntary risk. First there is what he calls the social provision of protection, meaning that protection is provided against involuntary risk by social groups. But, he argues, this only happens when groups are stable. In today's mobile society this won't work.

Next he turns to the market provision of protection, arguing against it by noting that "there is nothing in the nature of the market processes that assures that persons will be able to purchase the insurance of services they desire." And it is here that we first get an inkling of the motivation for McClennen's argument. For when he goes on to claim that "[m]oney and social connections buy one protection. Thus there will be no assurance that all will receive the needed protection," we begin to understand that the question before us is not how to factor in prudential concerns per se, but how to do this in order to assure egalitarian access to the social process. In other words, McClennen has recast the classic problem of equal access to the political process in terms of securing equality of access to the economic process. This helps to explain why he does not think that the political process alone will solve the risk management problem. The political process is itself a risk management problem.

Well, if social groups and the market can't protect against risk, surely we can turn to the government and the political process that generates governmental policies. That won't work either, since we can't guarantee high enough levels of protection for the risk-aversive who are unable to supplement government protection with private commercial means. McClennen continues: "[T]he ordinary political process--whether it be democratic, oligarchic, or autocratic--provides no guarantee for citizens in general, since each such process can, in principle, and clearly in practice, benefit some at the expense of others." So what are we to do? McClennen has the answer: "The only way to provide any son of effective guarantee that there are certain basic protections is by putting into place a constitutional principle, expressed in the form of a bill of rights. The constitutional approach is the only one that involves removing a security matter from decision processes that are discretionary with regard to the level of security offered, and the class of participants to whom it will be offered."