Nobel Laureate Jean Tirole speaks at Presidency University, last year..

Jean Tirole spoke on the pervasiveness of the market place; of the invincibility and inevitability of market forces and declared quite unequivocally that for him the market place/market forces had a finality that no philosophical speculation could override or overlook.  His position was that the question of ethics, justice, social and private morality revolved around this central fulcrum of civil society. Tirole posited that it was difficult to speak in terms of Kantian absolutes, like Truth and Justice without speaking of ‘incentives’. He posited that without ‘incentives’ people would not invest in goodness.  It was obvious that he was a staunch materialist; hence his quarrel or rather, discomfort , with Kant. Prof. Amartya Sen in fact, pointed out towards the end, that Tirole had tended to oversimplify and reduce Kant.

Tirole, who came across as a  highly composed and self-assured speaker, said that he was disappointed with the current Pope’s position that the world would become a better place if people sacrificed more. Somewhat wryly Tirole noted, that people did not become ‘good’ or ‘better’ without  ‘incentives’.  ‘Incentives are key,’ he said. There is no denying that  most human beings are selfish and we like ‘goodness’ and  ‘truth’ when they are to our benefit.

The central conflict that his talk tried to address was that between morality or ethics and the market place. It was his position that morality and ethics are not absolute categories; given how the world is constituted today, there can be no realistic, contingent practice of morality without factoring in the profit loss dynamic of the global/local market place. Not only that, it was also a question of ‘whose morality? One often encountered the conflict of ‘my values’, with ‘your values’.  One has to be aware of a number of ‘caveats’ when one speaks  of Truth and Morality.

Tirole referred to Burke who in the 18^th century had said,’ the age of chivalry is dead.  The age of Sophists, economists and calculators has succeeded’.

In rebuttal of M.Sandel’s position that there are ultimate values that lie beyond money (‘what money can’t buy’), Tirole speaks of the benefits that economists bring society:

·         By revealing the power of market energies, they reflect ourselves to ourselves. Expose to us the truth about ourselves. Our selfishness, our deepest values and investments (moral, social, psychological, material, racial). That is why ‘economists brought bad news’.

·         Economists helped to break taboos by exposing how poverty often lay behind the condemned practice of prostitution or the selling of one’s organs for money

·         It brought attention to the ‘invisible victims’ of the market place.

·         It brought us face to face with questions like does one kill one person in order to save five? Or does one go for a ‘driverless car’ where one person loses a job, but five pedestrians benefit from it?

·         Economics brings us face to face with our deepest attachments and fears. It has a strong psychological component.

Tirole was emphatic about CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility and said that business institutions would not take ‘social responsibility’ without ‘incentives’.

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