Not by Bread Alone

Today is the publication day for one of the most interesting and worthwhile books I’ve read in a long time. It’s called Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us, and its author is Russ Roberts — the economist and host of the EconTalk podcast who is now the president of Shalem College in Israel.

On its face, the book is about how to think about particularly consequential decisions in our lives: decisions about things like whom to marry, whether to have kids, what kind of work to pursue, where to live. But that ambitious self-presentation actually undersells it. In fact, this is a book about the nature of the moral life, intended to guide people who incline to be excessively cold and rationalistic about moral choices — that is, who strive for a more mathematical-style precision than the underlying subject will allow — toward a fuller understanding of the nature of the human person and therefore of the character of the most significant human decisions and judgments.

At the heart of the book is the insight that our most important choices are not answers to the question, “What do I want to do?” but rather to the question of, “What kind of person do I want to be?” These most important choices set us on courses that change who we are and so have to be understood in terms of personal formation rather than utilitarian calculation.

Like most of the best works of popular moral philosophy, the book is basically an extended paraphrase of Aristotle. But Roberts brings to it not only his engaging voice but also his experience of coming to this view from a very different starting point. A real Chicago economist, Roberts is deeply familiar with the various forms of decision theory developed by modern economics. He’s respectful of these, and helps his readers understand and respect them too. But he has come over time to recognize their profound limitations, and their blindness to their own limitations, in ways that have opened his eyes to a deeper understanding of the human experience.

Roberts offers himself as a kind of guide from his old view to his current one, in a way that ought to make the book a valuable resource for youthful libertarians of all ages, but also for more curmudgeonly moral conservatives (like me) who incline to be too dismissive of the utility of utility functions. He charts a path from economics-minded utilitarianism toward a more powerful yet also more humble virtue ethics, and does so with style, generosity, humor, and sympathy that make the book a real pleasure to read.

In the end, Roberts brings his reader to a distinct understanding of the nature of freedom. The human person, he says, is indeed capable of a kind of self-formation in some important respects. We are always building ourselves. But that fact is not an argument for radical liberation but rather for taking real care about moral formation, and therefore also for taking most seriously those sources of formation that seem to take us most seriously in turn.

Roberts’s Orthodox Judaism shines through in this illuminating insight. But it also brought to my mind another modern paraphraser of Aristotle who argued for paying careful attention to the formation of the human person in our social life.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, when considering the challenges involved in making people capable of responsible judgment, Edmund Burke offers this extraordinary observation:

Every sort of moral, every sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than necessary, in order to build up that wonderful structure, Man, whose prerogative it is to be in a great degree a creature of his own making; and who, when made as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place in the creation.

This paradoxical formulation came constantly to mind for me in reading Roberts’s book. There is a way to understand a good life as the function of a series of good decisions. But it is ultimately much more true, I think, that good decisions are functions of a good life, which in turn is a function of habits built up by modes of formation that are not really best understood as discrete decisions at all.

It isn’t easy to make that sort of idea accessible, appealing, even exciting. But Wild Problems does just that. Well worth your while.