Huang - Blog Post "Lucky Number 13"

In Elizabeth Anderson’s essay “Unstrapping the Straightjacket of ‘Preference,’” she adds to Amartya Sen’s argument for raising suspicion against the concept of economic preferences that define rational human choices as ones that advance an individual’s welfare. This stems from a misunderstanding that people’s preferences always align with advancing themselves: “Preference conceived as a choice or motive fails to do so, because people have motives wide than and sometimes even counter to their self-interests, and often choose accordingly” (23). Instead of framing people’s choices as individual, self-interested ones, Anderson proposes the idea of “collective agency.” She maintains that if people can identify a problem that can be resolved by joining forces, then they rationally and morally should, and this “Practical identification with others does not require any prior acquaintance or relationship” (31). In fact, two complete strangers can find an association with one another that “would often be far better if we rejected our parochial ascriptive identities as bases of practical (action-governing) identification…” (31). Throughout her paper, Anderson illustrates her argument through the prisoner’s dilemma, which is often framed between two people. 

However, her argument seems to still run into some collective action problems when we observe its practical implications on a larger scale where we run into the problems Putnam raises with two-level game theory. In this theory, Putnam maintains that international agreements face a problem when domestic and international negotiations do not intersect with the same “win-sets” between countries. “Win-sets” are defined as the possible outcomes that are likely to be accepted by domestic interest groups that must agree to their government’s negotiations at the international table. Making international agreements are difficult to ratify and meet because what might be agreed upon by the international community might be disagreed upon by constituents within a country. As such, even if people can identify, under collective agency for their country, that it is for their greater good to commit to a certain goal, if that goal is can only be met contingent on people in another country also having a desire to meet that same goal and they do not agree, then that goal cannot be met. Collective agency would require an individual to extend empathy far enough on a seemingly abstract global community. As a result, international agreements are difficult for individual countries to ratify and meet their goals, especially when there is no global actor that can impose results. 

Can Anderson’s argument be applied on the international scale where it requires agreement and an identification of association for all of humanity as opposed to individuals? How can Anderson’s argument resolve collective action problems that also require circumventing problems raised by two-level game theory?