Building Better Agents: Toward a Science of Value Competition

The aim of this paper is to delineate certain elements of a potential utilitarian science of value competition. I first sketch out four significant dimensions on which I claim that modern societies from the late eighteenth century on have differentiated themselves from their predecessors by fostering a competition of values: 1) the good and the right-Benthamite utility against Kantian rights; 2) calculation and culture in management-Scientific Management and its scions against Human Relations and its scions; 3) democratic politics-the center-left against the center-right; and 4) individual and community welfare-personal self-realization against the good of the whole. This initial part of the paper assesses briefly the extent to which value competition in the four dimensions has contributed to enhanced social welfare in modern societies. In the second section, I argue that competing values can be understood as vehicles to align politicians, managers, professionals, and individuals with social welfare and to reduce the costs of their doing socially valuable work. The third section applies the agency perspective to each of the essay's four dimensions of value competition, analyzing how the alignment and misalignment of agents' incentives with social welfare occurs in the different types of value competition and the particular difficulties of achieving proper alignment in situations in which coercive authority is exercised. The fourth section examines ways in which a philosophy and sciences of value competition may support efforts to make societies and the institutions and people within them better. The fifth section contends that conditions in the early twenty-first century favor the birth and development of a science of value competition by comparison with conditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The final section of the paper reflects upon possible problems of nihilism and demoralization associated with a potential science of value competition.