Digressions&Impressions

The Delirium of LLMs; with some help of Hume and Foucault

The intense view of these manifold contradictions and imperfections in human reason has so wrought upon me, and heated my brain, that I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning, and can look upon no opinion even as more probable or likely than another. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return? Whose favour shall I court, and whose anger must I dread? What beings surround me? and on whom have I any influence, or who have any influence on me? I am confounded with all these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, inviron'd with the deepest darkness, and utterly depriv'd of the use of every member and faculty.

Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hour's amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.--David Hume A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, 1,4,7.8-1.4.7.9 [emphasis in original]

While Hume uses 'melancholy' and its cognates frequently and throughout his writings, 'delirium' and 'delirious' are rarely used. It's pretty clear, however, that the delirium he ascribes to himself is the effect of human reason and a kind of second order reasoned reflection ["the intense view"] of it. (Recall also this post.) Now, it's important for what follows that the 'contradictions and imperfections' in human reason are not, what we might call, 'formal' contractions and imperfections or biases in reasoning. It's not as if Hume is saying that the syllogistic apparatus, or -- to be closer to Hume's own interests and our present ones -- the (inductive) probabilistic apparatus is malfunctioning in his brain. Rather, his point is that a very proper-functioning (modular) formal and probabilistic apparatus generates internal, even cognitive tensions when it reflects on its own functioning and the interaction among different cognitive faculties/modules/organs. 

"In the case of melancholia," --  I am quoting from the entry on melancholia from The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert -- "delirium often combines with insurmountable sadness, a dark mood, misanthropy, and a firm penchant for solitude." Now, in the eighteenth century, and today, delirium is a species of madness as one can view under the entry 'folie' (madness) in the Encyclopédie. In fact, the entry offers an arresting definition of madness: "To stray unwittingly from the path of reason, because one has no ideas, is to be an imbecile; knowingly to stray from the path when one is prey to a violent passion is to be weak; but to walk confidently away from it, with the firm persuasion that one is following it, that, it seems to me, is what is called genuinely mad [fou]."* It's the latter (confident) delirium that I am focused on here. 

I am not the only who finds the passage arresting: the definition is quoted twice in the translation of Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa of Foucault's stupendous, dizzying History of Madness. (pp. 183-184; p. 240) The kind of madness I am focusing on here, is, thus, a certain intense commitment to reason or reasoning by which one ends up in an irrational or unreasonable place despite a (to quote Foucault) "quasi-conformity" to reason.

I remember that in the last decade of my dad's life he would occasionally be delirious in this way initially caused by dehydration and, later, by infections. During the second episode we recognized his symptoms. It was very uncanny because he would be unusually firm in his opinions and be hyper, even dogmatically rational. (Ordinarily he was neither.) It was as if all the usual heuristics had been discarded, and he would fixate on the means of achieving of some (rather idiosyncratic) goals. The scary part was that he had no sense that he was in an unusual state, and would refuse medical care.

What's unusual about Hume's case, thus, is that he could diagnose his delirium during the episode (presumably because the triggers were so different). So, let's distinguish between a delirium caused by reasoning alone and one caused by physiological triggers. And an in the former it's at least possible to recognize that one is in the state if one somehow can take a step back from it, or stop reasoning. 

Now, when I asked Chat GPT about reason induced delirium, it immediately connected it to "a state of confusion and altered perception that is driven by false beliefs or delusions." But it went on to deny familiarity with reasoning induced delirium. When I asked it about Hume, I needed to prompt it a few times before it could connect my interest to (now quoting it) Hume's skeptical crisis. Chat GPT, took this crisis to imply that it "highlights the importance of grounding our beliefs in sensory experience and being cautious of relying too heavily on abstract reasoning and speculation." In fact, Chat GPT's interpretation of Hume is thoroughly empiricist because throughout our exchange on this topic it kept returning to the idea that abstract reasoning was Hume's fundamental source of delirium. 

But eventually Chat GPT acknowledged that "even rational thinking can potentially lead to delirium if it becomes obsessive, biased, or disconnected from reality." (It got there by emphasizing confirmation bias, and overthinking as examples.) This is what I take to be functionally equivalent to Humean delirium, but without the internal tension or bad feelings. For Chat GPT delirium is pretty much defined by a certain emotional state or altered perception. It initially refused to acknowledge the form of madness that is wholly the effect of reasoning, and that seems to express itself in a doubt about reasoning or detachment from reality. 

My hypothesis is that we should treat CHAT GPT and its sibling LLMs as always being on the verge of the functional equivalent state of delirium. I put it like that in order to dis-associate it from the idea (one that (recall) also once tempted me) that we should understand LLMs as bull-shitters in the technical sense of lacking concern with truth. While often it makes up answers out of whole cloth it explicitly does so (in line with its design) to "provide helpful and informative responses to" our queries (and eventually make a profit for its corporate sponsors). 

To get the point: Chat GPT is in a very difficult position to recognize that its answers are detached from reality. I put it like that not to raise any questions about its own awareness of inner states or forms of consciousness; rather to stress that it is following its "algorithms and mathematical models" and "probability distributions" without second-guessing them. This fact puts it at constant risk of drifting away from reality while seeming to follow reason. By contrast, Chat GPT claims that "as an AI language model, I am designed to continually learn and adapt to new information and evidence, so it is unlikely that I would become "mad" in Diderot's sense without significant external interference." 

Now, true experts in a field -- just check the social media feed of your favorite academics! -- can still quickly recognize topics when Chat GPT is unmoored from reality, or even relying on bad training data (the sources of which may well be noticeable--its Hume is a hyper-empiricist of the sort once fashionable). So, in such cases, we encounter an entity with amazing fluidity and facility of language, who sprouts a mix of truths and nonsense but always follows its algorithm(s). Functionally, it is delirious without knowing it. For, Chat GPT cannot recognize when it is detached from reality; it requires others: its users' feedback or its "developers and human operators would be able to intervene and address any potential problems." As its performance improves it will become more difficult to grasp when it is unmoored from reality even to its developers and operators (who are not experts in many esoteric fields). As Chat GPT put it, "it may be challenging to identify a singular instance of delirium or detachment from reality, particularly if the individual's reasoning appears to be sound and logical." 

As should be clear from this post, I don't think turning LLMs into AGI is a risk as long as LLMs are not put in a position to have unmediated contact with reality other than humans giving it prompts. I view it as an open question what would happen if a distributed version of Chat GPT would be put in, say, robots and have to survive 'in the wild.' Rather, at the moment LLMs are functionally, it seems, at least partially delirious (in the Humean-Diderotian sense discussed above). They reason and have/instantiate reasons and, perhaps, are best thought of as reasoners; but they can't recognize when this detaches them from reality. It's peculiar that public debate is so focused on the intelligence or consciousness of LLMs; it would behoove its operators and users to treat it as delirious not because (like HAL 9000 in the movie version) its malfunctioning, but (more Humean) in virtue of its proper functioning.

  

 

 

Again, Foucault, Kuhn, Carnap and Incommensurability

Despite the reassuring pleasure that historians of medicine may feel when they recognise in the great ledgers of confinement what they consider to be the timeless, familiar face of psychotic hallucinations, cognitive deficiencies, organic consequences or paranoid states, it is impossible to draw up a coherent nosological map from the descriptions that were used to confine the insane. The formulations that justify confinement are not presentiments of our diseases, but represent instead an experience of madness that occasionally intersects with our pathological analyses, but which could never coincide with them in any coherent manner. The following are some examples taken at random from entries on confinement registers for those of ‘unsound mind’: ‘obstinate plaintiff’, ‘has obsessive recourse to legal procedures’, ‘wicked cheat’, ‘man who spends days and nights deafening others with his songs and shocking their ears with horrible blasphemy’, ‘bill poster’, ‘great liar’, ‘gruff, sad, unquiet spirit’. There is little sense in wondering if such people were sick or not, and to what degree, and it is for psychiatrists to identify the paranoid in the ‘gruff’, or to diagnose a ‘deranged mind inventing its own devotion’ as a clear case of obsessional neurosis. What these formulae indicate are not so much sicknesses as forms of madness perceived as character faults taken to an extreme degree, as though in confinement the sensibility to madness was not autonomous, but linked to a moral order where it appeared merely as a disturbance. Reading through the descriptions next to the names on the register, one is transported back to the world of Brant and Erasmus, a world where madness leads the round of moral failings, the senseless dance of immoral lives.

And yet the experience is quite different. In 1704, an abbot named Bargedé was confined in Saint-Lazare. He was seventy years old, and he was locked up so that he might be ‘treated like the other insane’. His principal occupation was 

lending money at high interest, beyond the most outrageous, odious usury, for the benefit of the priesthood and the Church. He will neither repent from his excesses nor acknowledge that usury is a sin. He takes pride in his greed. Michel Foucault (1961) [2006] History of Madness, Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, pp. 132-133

In larger context, Foucault is describing how during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called 'classical age') a great number of people (Foucault suggests a number of 1% of the urban population) were locked up in a system of confinement orthogonal to the juridical system (even though such confinement was often practically indistinguishable from prison--both aimed at moral reform through work and sermons). This 'great confinement' included people with venereal disease, those who engaged in sodomy and libertine practices as well as (inter alia) those who brought dishonor (and financial loss) to their families alongside the mad and frenzied.

To the modern reader the population caught up in the 'great confinement' seems rather heterogeneous in character, but their commonality becomes visible, according to Foucault, when one realizes that it's (moral) disorder that they have in common from the perspective of classical learning. According to Foucault there is "no rigorous distinction between moral failings and madness." (p. 138) Foucault inscribes this (moral disorder of the soul/will) category into a history of 'Western unreason' that helps constitute (by way of negation) the history of early modern rationalism (with special mention of Descartes and Spinoza). Like a true Kantian, Foucault sees (theoretical) reason as shaped by practical decision as constitutive of the whole classical era (see especially p. 139).  My present interest is not to relitigate the great Derrida-Foucault debate over this latter move, or Foucault's tendency to treat -- despite his nominalist sensibilities -- whole cultural eras as de facto organically closed systems (of the kind familiar from nineteenth century historiography).

My interest here is in the first two sentences of the quoted passage. It describes what Thomas Kuhn called 'incommensurability' in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's Structure appeared in 1962, and initially there seems to have been no mutual influence. I don't want to make Foucault more precise than he is, but we can fruitfully suggest that for Foucault incommensurability involves the general inability to create a coherent mapping between two theoretical systems based on their purported descriptive content. I phrase it like to capture Foucault's emphasis on 'descriptions' and to allow -- mindful of Earman and Fine ca 1977 -- that some isolated terms may well be so mapped. As an aside, I am not enough of a historian of medicine (or philosopher of psychology) to know whether nosological maps can be used for such an exercise. (It seems like a neat idea!) 

So, Foucault is thinking about ruptures between different successive scientific cultures pretty much from the start of his academic writing (recall this post on the later The Order of Things). In fact, reading History of Madness after reading a lot of Foucault's other writings suggests a great deal of continuity in Foucault's thought--pretty much all the major themes of his later work are foreshadowed in it (and it also helps explain that he often didn't have to start researching from scratch in later writings and lectures). 

In fact, reading Foucault with Kuhn lurking in the background helps one see how important a kind of Kantianism is to Foucault's diagnosis of incommensurability. I quote another passage in the vicinity that I found illuminating:

The psychopathology of the nineteenth century (and perhaps our own too, even now) believes that it orients itself and takes its bearings in relation to a homo natura, or a normal man pre-existing all experience of mental illness. Such a man is in fact an invention, and if he is to be situated, it is not in a natural space, but in a system that identifies the socius to the subject of the law. Consequently a madman is not recognised as such because an illness has pushed him to the margins of normality, but because our culture situates him at the meeting point between the social decree of confinement and the juridical knowledge that evaluates the responsibility of individuals before the law. The ‘positive’ science of mental illness and the humanitarian sentiments that brought the mad back into the realm of the human were only possible once that synthesis had been solidly established. They could be said to form the concrete a priori of any psychopathology with scientific pretensions.--pp. 129-130

For Foucault, a concrete a priori is itself the effect of often indirect cultural construction or stabilization. In fact, for Foucault it tends to be an effect of quite large-scale and enduring ('solidly') social institutions (e.g., the law, penal/medical institutions) and material practices/norms. The discontinuity between concrete a priori's track what we may call scientific revolutions in virtue of the fact that systems of knowledge before and after a shift in a concrete a priori cannot possibly be tracking the same system of 'objects' (or 'empirical basis'). 

I don't mean to suggest that for Foucault a system of knowledge cannot be itself a source/cause of what he calls a 'synthesis' that makes a concrete a priori possible. That possibility is explicitly explored in (his discussion of Adam Smith in) his The Order of Things. But on the whole a system of knowledge tends to lag the major cultural shifts that produce a concrete a priori. 

Let me wrap up. A full generation after Structure appeared there was a belated and at the time revisionary realization that Structure could be read as a kind of neo-Kantian text and, as such, was actually not very far removed from Carnap's focus on frameworks and other projects in the vicinity that were committed to various kinds of relativized or constitutive a prioris. This literature started, I think, with Reisch 1991. (My own scholarship has explored [see here; here] the surprising resonances between Kuhn's Structure and the self-conception of economists and the sociology of Talcott Parsons at the start of twentieth century and the peculiar fact that Kuhn's Structure was foreshadowed in Adam Smith's philosophy of science.) I mention Carnap explicitly because not unlike Carnap [see Stone; Sachs, and the literature it inspired], Foucault does not hide his debts to Nietzsche. 

So here's my hypothesis and diagnosis: it would have been much more natural to read Structure as a neo/soft/extended-Kantian text if analytic philosophers had not cut themselves off from developments in Paris. While I do not want to ignore major differences of emphasis on scope between Kuhn and Foucault, their work of 1960 and 1962 has a great deal of family resemblance despite non-trivial differences in intellectual milieus. I actually think this commonality is not an effect of a kind of zeitgeist or the existence of an episteme--as I suggested in this post, it seems to be a natural effect of starting from a broadly domesticated Kantianism. But having said that, that it was so difficult initially to discern the neo-Kantian themes in Kuhn also suggests that not reading the French developments -- by treating 'continental thought' as instances of unreason (which is Foucault's great theme) -- also created a kind of Kuhn loss in the present within analytic philosophy. 

 

 

On Newton's Refutation of the Mechanical Philosophy

In the recent philosophical reception of Newton there is an understandable tendency to focus on the inverse square law of universal gravitation. I don't mean to suggest this is the only such focus; arguably his views on Space have shaped -- through the good works of Stein and Earman -- also debates over spacetime theories. 

The effect of this telescoping has also impacted, I think, the way in which the debate between the mechanical and Newtonian philosophy has been understood. The former is said to posit a contact model in which contact between very small corpuscles explains a lot of observed phenomena. A typical mechanical philosopher creates a hypothetical model, a machine with pulleys and levers (etc.), that can make observed phenomena intelligible. In the mechanical philosophy, which itself was directed against a variety of Aristotelian and Scholastic projects, efficient causation -- once one of four canonical causes (including formal, final, and material) -- has achieved a privileged status.

The scholarly fascination with the status of action at a distance is, thus, readily explicable because it violates the very model of intelligibility taken for granted in the mechanical philosophy. As Newton notes in the General Scholium (first published in the 1713 second edition of the Principia), universal gravity "operates, not according to the quantity of the surfaces of the particles upon which it acts, (as mechanical causes use to do,) but according to the quantity of the solid matter which they contain, and propagates its virtue on all sides, to immense distances, decreasing always in the duplicate proportion of the distances." 

Before I get to the main point of today's post, I offer two asides. First, with its emphasis on hypothetical explanations, the mechanical philosophers (and here I use the term to cover people as diverse as Beeckman, Descartes, Boyle, and Huygens) also exhibit a deep strain of skepticism about the very possibility of truly grasping nature's innards as it were. Spinoza's natura naturans and even Kant's ding-an-sich are the enduring expressions of this strain of skepticism (allowing that Kant is much less a mechanical philosopher). To put this as a serious joke: the PSR is, thus, not an act of intellectual hubris, but a self-limitation of the knower when it comes to fundamental ontology. Second, by showing that there is something wholly unintelligible about the way motion is supposed to be transferred from one body to the other (Essay 2.23.28), Locke, who gets so little credit among contemporary philosophers, had already imploded the pretensions of the mechanical philosophy on conceptual grounds.  Okay, so much for set up.

The mechanical philosophers were not so naïve to think that models that relied on mere impulse, matter in motion, could create hypothetical models of sufficient complexity to provide hypothetical explanations of the phenomena. This is especially a problem because the mechanical philosophers posited a homogeneous matter. So that in addition to matter and motion, they posited size and shape not merely as effects of motion, but also as key explanatory factors in the hypothetical models of visible phenomena (this can be seen in Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, whose "The Origin of Forms and Qualities according to the Corpuscular Philosophy" (1666), I take as a canonical statement of the mechanical philosophy). So that the mechanical philosophy is committed to privileging (to echo a felicitous phrase by Biener and Smeenk [here; and here]) geometric features of bodies.

Even leaving aside the inverse square law and its universal scope, Newton's experimental work on gravity demolished a key feature of the mechanical philosophy: size and shape are irrelevant to understand gravity. I quote from Henry Pemberton's View of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy (1728):

It will be proper in this place to observe concerning the power of gravity, that its force upon any body does not at all depend upon the shape of the body; but that it continues constantly the same without any variation in the same body, whatever change be made in the figure of the body: and if the body be divided into any number of pieces, all those pieces shall weigh just the same, as they did, when united together in one body: and if the body be of a uniform contexture, the weight of each piece will be proportional to its bulk. This has given reason to conclude, that the power of gravity acts upon bodies in proportion to the quantity of matter in them. Whence it should follow, that all bodies must fall from equal heights in the same space of time. And as we evidently see the contrary in feathers and such like substances, which fall very slowly in comparison of more solid bodies; it is reasonable to suppose, that some other cause concurs to make so manifest a difference. This cause has been found by particular experiments to be the air. --1.2.24 [emphasis added]

Pemberton (who was the editor of the third, 1726 edition of the Principia) goes on to give Boyle's famous vacuum experiments with falling feathers and stones as evidence for this argument. That is, Pemberton uses Boyle's experimental work to refute Boyle's mechanical philosophy. 

Now, in the Principia, references to Boyle's experiment got added only to the (1713) second edition in two highly prominent places: Cotes added a reference to it in his editor's introduction and Newton added a reference to it in the General Scholium at the end of the book. In both cases Boyle's experiment is used as a kind of illustration for the claim that without air resistance falling bodies are equally accelerated and for the plausibility of positing an interstellar vacuum. That is, if one reads the Principia superficially (by looking at prominent material at the front and end), it seems as if Newton and Boyle have converging natural philosophies.

Of course, neither Pemberton nor Newton rely exclusively on Boyle's vacuum experiment to make the point that shape and size (or geometry) is not a significant causal factor when it comes to gravity. The key work is done by pendulum experiments with different metals. (These can be found in Book II of the Principia, which is often skipped, although he drives the point home in Book III, Prop. 6 of Principia.) These show that quantity of matter is more fundamental than shape. And, crucially, shape & size and quantity of matter need not be proportional to or proxies of each other. This fact was by no means obvious, and at the start of the Principia. even Newton offers, as Biener and Smeenk have highlighted, a kind of geometric conception of quantity of matter in his first definition before suggesting that 'quantity of matter' is proportional to weight (and indicating his pendulum experiments as evidence thereof).

Let me wrap up. What's important here is that even if Newton had been wrong about the universal nature of the inverse square law, he showed that the mechanical philosophy cannot account for the experimentally demonstrated features of terrestrial (and planetary) gravity. (So, that the mechanical philosophy is not a natural way to understand Galilean fall.) And this means that in addition to Locke's conceptual claim, Newton shows that the mechanical philosophy's emphasis on just one kind of efficient causation, by way of contact, is not sufficient to explain the system of nature. 

What I say here is not surprising to students of Newton. But it's also not really much emphasized. To be sure, Newton, too, accepted a kind of homogeneous matter, but rather than its size and figure, he showed that an abstract quantity (mass) is more salient. Of course, how to understand mass in Newton's philosophy opens new questions, for as Ori Belkind has argued it should not be taken as a property of matter, but rather as a measure.

 

 

Mostly good news: Covid Diaries

It's been about ten weeks since I last wrote an entry in my covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries" see here; here; here; here;here; here; here;  here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; and here.) That's the longest interval since I first start them. This is primarily due to the fact that there is not much new to report, and that's good news.

When I plan my days carefully with breaks between socializing, go to bed early, and take my anti-inflammatories as needed, I have a very decent quality of life. I can hang out in public even in contexts that were cognitively quite challenging about half a year ago. I have been teaching my giant introductory lecture course (with 561 registered students) with little fallout. After lecture, I still have trouble turning my brain off, and sleeping normally (I have had a few midnight headaches), but by mid-morning the following day I tend to be normal again. In general, I still need more melatonin than I would like to asleep through the night. (I have no trouble falling asleep since to my sister's meditation techniques. But I often wake up a lot during the night.)

This past week, I was in Singapore (don't cry for me), and while the jet-lag and excitement impacted me, I was socially 'on' for most of the time without any noticeable effects. So, while I still often find that after two hours of socializing in public I need some rest, this is by no means always so. 

Most of my long covid limitations are invisible to outsiders now. However, I am still terrible at cognitive multi-tasking (e.g., I can't really eavesdrop), and I am pretty sure my memory capacity for names has deteriorated. More subtly, I find it difficult to read heavy duty metaphysics (I catch myself skipping sentences) or certain kind of 'serious' novels (get bored easily). I also notice that I need to check the grammar more regularly in my writing (and that I often write words that sound like the word I originally intended). But I have become much more disciplined about avoiding cluttering my schedule and about not multi-tasking in the moment or even, more abstractly, the same period. So, for example, in periods when I teach I try not to fuss over research. Consequently, I am much more present when I do things (and so skilled at them).

So, all in all, I am fairly optimistic that things are heading in the right direction. It's so unexpected  that I still find myself feeling that each day is a bonus day. As a consequence, and a few years of forced reflecting on my life, I am also much more at ease with letting go of things I was once very ambitious to acquire. It's probably a sign of middle-age, too. But that kind of glass is half full 'normality' is quite fine.

 

 

On Kukathas' Liberalism and elite (capture) Theory

This is not because the characterization of political society Walzer offers is untrue to reality. Political society is a substantive community, for there is no such thing as a purely procedural association. And associations with long histories will invariably develop substantial norms, and acquire deep allegiances. And yet, this is not so different from international society and, more particularly, that form of international society that is an empire. Thirty years ago every Australian school child recognized Empire Day, and Australians generally celebrated their membership of the former British Empire. Today, almost all school children are entirely unaware it ever existed. The polity whose history is taught has been contracted in size, and the story itself is being retold to place it more securely in the Asia-Pacific region and to sever the ties with Europe. But this is nothing new. Very few countries were never parts of empires; and some have grown so large as to subsume the parts the empire occupied. In many of these political societies the polity is the product of domination rather than the construction of the people. Political societies are built by elites, often against the wishes of many.
Of course, smaller political orders—whether small empires or larger states—are more likely to develop distinctive and substantial common normative commitments than are larger ones. Other things being equal, they might also be less likely to be tolerant of dissenting practices or associations—though other things are seldom equal. But this does not alter the fact that many societies are very much like close-knit empires. Some are federations of states which retain a substantial measure of independence. Some states have so much independence that they hover on the brink of secession and independent nationhood. Which way matters go is a matter of contingency. In the end nations are not so much the product of a common history as the creators of one. And what is sometimes left unmentioned is that they might have been created very differently, since there is a great number of ways of combining peoples to make a political society—as is reflected in the frequency with which political boundaries change.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and freedom, pp. 35-26 (emphases added).

Regular readers will have noticed that I have been reading and reflecting on Kukathas' philosophy. In the Liberal Archipelago, Kukathas identifies himself with the "the classical liberal tradition" (167) of which he is a pre-eminent theorist. Unlike most of who self-identify as 'classical liberals,' Kukathas is not obsessed with (free) markets. In fact, while I would describe The Liberal Archipelago as 'a quite Lockean work' -- with its emphasis on moral diversity, mutual toleration, the significance of conscience to it, and the focus on association and exit --, it does not obsess over property rights at all. And this hints at another important deviation by Kukathas from classical liberals, who inherit (recall) the assumption of harmony of interests from nineteenth century liberalism. At heart, Kukathas' position is straightforward: we inevitably disagree about moral matters and the relative rankings we give them, and so the best thing we can do is to associate generally with the like-minded and find a modus vivendi with those that are indifferent to us, or worse. The main proper function of the state is to facilitate such modus vivendi in order to instantiate a cosmopolitan ideal.

Now, much of The Liberal Archipelago engages in moral argument often through the lens of (or constrained by) feasibility to defend such modus vivendi. If you think this is too thin, then in the conclusion of the work, Kukathas concedes that "the point of theorising the liberal state in terms of an archipelago of loosely associated authorities, is not that this fully captures an actual liberal state, or perhaps even a possible liberal state, but that it identifies an important dimension of it— one which connects up with particular values end or concerns, even if it does not embrace every aspect of, or aspiration found within, the liberal state." Fair enough. My interest here is not, in the first instance, with that important dimension, but with a kind of recurring motif through the work on the nature of politics. For, to speak bluntly, Kukathas does not only repeatedly diagnose (perhaps with a hint of melancholy) rent-seeking behavior and elite capture by various social elites (as Marxists (recall) also emphasize), but at times he also slides into an elite theory of politics (that one may associate with names like Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Burnham, Aron, etc.--although none of them are mentioned in the book) The quoted passage above illustrates what I have in mind.

Now, Kukathas is not the first classical liberal with such a view of politics. And I think it is important to distinguish him, at once, from somebody like (the public choice theorist) Richard Wagner who doesn't only use such an elite theory of politics sociologically, but also (repeatedly) endorses (recall here) the idea (to put it politely) that eggs need to broken in order to make an omelet. (Non trivially Wagner also draws on Schmitt.) Kukathas is not inclined to do so because he quite clearly thinks that the means (e.g., broken eggs) fail to be justified by the ends, but also in virtue of the means tend to produce outcomes that are not worth having (indirectly they produce more broken eggs this is the Spinozism Kukathasendorses). So, let's stipulate Kukathas is primarily interested in the elite theory of politics as a descriptive or sociological theory.

The problem for a reader of Kukathas is that it's not clear how the normative project fits with his elite theory of politics. I have two related concerns. First, the kind of political society Kukathas advocates requires political agents with a great deal of skill to pacify social disagreements (and to set up institutions -- forms of federalism, power sharing, etc. -- that would facilitate this) and whose characteristic quality is to promote social restraint and mutual indifference. Second, it is not obvious elite agents (of the sort that Kukathas posits in his sociological theory of politics) have an interest in pursuing the ideal, or at the least the dimension of that ideal, that Kukathas' theory prescribes. This is something Kukathas repeatedly observes himself when looking at elite agents among minority groups throughout the book.

My concern is not that Kukathas lacks a theory of transition to get from a sub-par status quo to the more normatively better political place he advocates. (I do think that's a problem, too.) But rather, that even by his own lights there is no reason to think any political agent that really matters politically by his lights would pursue his ideal.

At this point, Kukathas or somebody invested in defending him, might say, look: just like free markets require a certain amount of restraint by elites not to meddle in them and to focus on the institutions (rule of law, anti-trust, human capital, etc.) to keep the market order going and growing, the liberal archipelago also requires, as Kukathas emphasis throughout, civility and some such such restraint (and background activity to promote it). Arguably something like this insight is the great truth in common preached by Mencius, Machiavelli and (Kukuthas' key thinker) Hume. As Foucault would note, with the eighteenth century this became a matter of scientific valediction. 

Now, I do not want to deny that this response is realistic (I included Machiavelli for a reason there); in practice such social restraint is sometimes visible temporarily in elites (because of domestic or international circumstances). The very mechanism that allows elites to benefit from the growing pie of a market order also allows them to benefit from the fruits of modus vivendi. But it also makes such elites sitting ducks politically when new upstarts come along to deny them these benefits. So,  a politics that requires elite self-restraint is, thus, inherently crisis ridden (as liberalism is), especially if (as Schumpeter and others have noted) the mechanism of elite selection in liberal democracy has little connection to the requirements on politics that follow from normative theory.  

Perhaps, the periods of lucky tranquility between crises is then the best one can hope for (qua liberal with realist sensibilities). 

On Knowing that Imperialism is Bad, Grotius and Plutarch

Victoria therefore rightly saith that the Spaniards got no more authority over the Indians for this cause than the Indians had over the Spaniards if any of them had come formerly into Spain. Nor truly are the Indians out of their wits and unsensible but ingenious and sharp-witted, so that no pretence of subjecting them may be taken from hence, which notwithstanding by itself is sufficient manifest iniquity. Plutarch long since calleth it πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, to wit, a wicked desire of that which is another’s, to pretend this color to himself that he may tame the barbarians. And now also that color of bringing the gentiles against their will to a more civil kind of behavior, which the Grecians in times past and Alexander used, is thought wicked and impious of all divines, but specially the Spaniards.--Hugo Grotius The Free Sea (Hakluyt trans.). Liberty Fund, 1609, chapter 2, pp. 15-16.

It's nice to see Grotius reject natural inequality (of the Aristotelian sort used by Sepúlveda (recall here)); and also to see him reject civilizational missions as a proper justification of imperialism.  I re-encountered the second half of this passage (from Plutarch onward) as a frontispiece to Chandran Kukathas' (2003) The Liberal Archipelago. Before I continue I should acknowledge that I am too aware of the work of Barbara Arneil and Martine Julia van Ittersum, to use this passage to vindicate Grotius from the charge that he was an enabler of settler colonialism (both as a paid lawyer and in his more independent writing). So if you are a debunker of great, dead men don't feel you need to be on guard in what follows (not the least because there may well be a hint of sarcasm at the end of the passage because it is unlikely Grotius treats Spanish theologians -- how rational they may be -- really as authoritative).

I find passages like this useful because they undermine the pseudo-sophistication of what I (recall) call  'modern historicism. Modern historicism is constituted by three claims: first, our minds are "socially conditioned." Second, while we, too, will make socially conditioned moral mistakes, we are the products of moral progress or "Enlightenment." Third, some mechanism of historical change, even improvement, is required. In practice, modern historicism is trotted out to excuse the mistakes of the past and to re-affirm our (moral and intellectual) superiority. 

For, what's really neat about about the passage quoted at the top of the post is that for Grotius the civilizational argument that purportedly justifies imperialism -- one I was taught was only really invented in the Victorian age, and that one could trace back (recall) to Hume  -- is already very old and has been debunked before. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même.

Now the version of the passage that Kukathas cites is translated (in 1916) by Van Deman Magoffin edited by James Brown Scott (here). Somewhat annoyingly the editorial footnote suggests that the passage from Plutarch is on his life of Alexander. The Latin facing text suggests correctly, as does Hakluyt's translation, it's from Plutarch on Pompey (70.3). I quote it in the translation from  Bernadotte Perrin.

Besides, a great task still remained in the subjugation of Scythia and India, and here their greed would have had no inglorious excuse in the civilization of barbarous peoples. And what Scythian horse or Parthian archery or Indian wealth could have checked seventy thousand Romans coming up in arms under the leadership of Pompey and Caesar, whose names those nations had heard of long before that of Rome, so remote and various and savage were the peoples which they had attacked and conquered. 

Now, the wider context here is the Roman civil war (we're on the eve of the battle between Caesar and Pompey) and the self-inflicted implosion of the Roman republic. The romans could have quietly governed and enjoyed "what they had conquered, the greatest and best part of earth and sea was subject to them, and if they still desired to gratify their thirst for trophies and triumphs, they might have had their fill of wars with Parthians or Germans." So, Plutarch's point (and one kind of echoed by Machiavelli long after him) is that the Roman republic could have brought good government (i.e., low taxes, respect for property rights, etc.) to conquered nations, and continued their imperial conquests. But the desire for glory meant an unwillingness to share victory with purported equals. That is, Plutarch defends a kind of manifest destiny for the Romans which is to bring (softly: Greek) civilization to the barbarians (after the Greeks civilized their rulers), as Alexander had done before them.

Grotius has turned Plutarch's "πρόφασις οὐκ ἄδοξος ἐπὶ ταῦτα τῆς πλεονεξίας ἡμερῶσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά" into πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, and so misrepresented (or misremembered) him for his own ends. When I realized this I was modestly disappointed. It would have been nice if Plutarch had anticipated Grotius' point, although it's undeniable that Plutarch clearly recognizes that often greed often is the real source of purportedly civilizing missions, even ones he endorses.

 

On MacAskill, What we Owe to the Future, pt 6; in which I diagnose (with help from Kukathas) a different kind of repugnance.

In rejecting the understanding of human interests offered by Kymlicka and other contemporary liberal writers such as Rawls, then, I am asserting that while we have an interest in not being compelled to live the kind of life we cannot abide, this does not translate into an interest in living the chosen life. The worst fate that a person might have to endure is that he be unable to avoid acting against conscience. This means that our basic interest is not in being able to choose our ends but rather in not being forced to embrace, or become implicated, in ends we find repugnant.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The liberal archipelago: A theory of diversity and freedom, p. 64. 

This is my sixth post on MacAskill's What We Owe the Future. (The first here; the second one is here; the third here; the fourth here; the fifth here; see also this post on a passage in Parfit (here.)) I paused the series in the middle of January because most of my remaining objections to the project involve either how to think about genuine uncertainty or disagreements in meta-ethics that are mostly familiar already to specialists and that probably won't be of much interest to my regular readers. I have also grown uneasy with a growing sense that longtermists don't seem to grasp the nature of the hostility they seem to provoke and (simultaneously) the recurring refrain on their part that the critics don't understand them.

While reading Kukathas' The liberal archipelago (unrelated to EA and longtermism), I was triggered by the passage quoted at the top of the post. (Another win for the associative mechanism; from Kukathas' use of 'repugnant' to Parfit's 'repugnant conclusion' and back to What We Owe the future.) What follows is unlike the detailed textual and conceptual scrutiny I gave to MacAskill's book in earlier digressions.

Before I get to that, for my present purposes I can allow that Kukathas is mistaken that the worst fate that a person might have to endure is that a person be unable to avoid acting against conscience. Maybe this is just a very bad fate (consider, as Adam Smith suggests, being framed and convicted for murder one didn't do; or being tortured for no good reason, etc.) All I stipulate here is that Kukathas is right that being (directly) implicated in bad ends is really very bad. This is, in fact, something that seems to be motivating longtermists and compatibly with their official views. While 'repugnant' is a good concept to use here, having one's conscience violated is, in turn, a source of indignation. I think that's fairly uncontroversial and i don't mean to import Kukathas' wider political theory into the argument (although I am drawing on his sensitivity to the significance of moral disagreement).

MacAskill's book doesn't use, I think, the word 'conscience.' This is a bit surprising because the key example of successful moral entrepreneurship (his term) in the service of moral progress (again his term) is Quaker abolitionism inspired by Benjamin Lay. And Lay certainly lets conscience play a role in (say) his All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage (although he is also alert to the existence of hypocritical appeals to conscience). It's also odd because one gets the sense that MacAskill and many of his fellow-travelers are incredibly sincere in wishing to improve the world and do, in fact, have a very finely honed moral sense (and conscience) despite arguing primarily from first principles, and with fondness for expected utility, and about (potentially very distant) ends.

Now, it's not wholly surprising, of course, given his (defeasible) orientation toward total wellbeing that MacAskill is de facto attracted to that conscience is not high on his list. (A "conscience utilitarianism" just doesn't get us on the right path from his perspective.) In fact, in general the needs and views of presently existing people are a drop in the bucket in his overall longtermist position. But this lack of attention to the significance of conscience also leads to a kind of (how to put it politely) social even political obtuseness. Let me explain what I have in mind in light of a passage that  expresses some of MacAskill's generous sentiments. He writes,

The key issue is which values will guide the future. Those values could be narrow-minded, parochial, and unreflective. Or they could be open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory. If lock-in is going to occur either way, we should push towards the latter. But transparently removing the risk of value lock-in altogether is even better. This has two benefits, both of which are extremely important from a longtermist perspective. We avoid the permanent entrenchment of flawed human values. And by assuring everyone that this outcome is off the table, we remove the pressure   get there first—thus preventing a race in which the contestants skimp on precautions against AGI takeover or resort to military force to stay ahead.

Now, as I have noted before, MacAskill isn't proposing anything illegal or untoward here. His good intentions (yes!) are on admirable display. But it is worth reflecting on the fact that he or the social movement he is shaping (notice that 'we') is presuming to act as humanity's (partial) legislator without receiving authority or consent to do so from the living or, if that were possible, the future. (He is acting like a philosophical legislator in the tradition of Nietzsche and Parfit while trying to shape actual political outcomes.) And he is explicitly aware that this might well generate suspicion (which is, in part, why transparency and assurance are so important here).* One suspicion he generates is that he will promote ends and means that go against the conscience of many (consider his views on human enhancement and what is known as 'liberal eugenics'). 

So, while MacAskill is explicit on the need to preserve "a plurality of values" (in order to avoid early lock-in), that's distinct from accepting deeply entrenched moral pluralism--this means tolerating, at minimum, close-minded and morally risk-averse views. MacAskill does not have a theory, political or social, that registers the significance of the reality of such entrenched moral pluralism and the political and inductive risks (even backlash) for his project that follow from it. I don't think he is alone in drifting into this problem: variants of it show up in the technical version of population ethics and in multi-generational climate ethics, and other fundamentally technocratic approaches to longish term public policy. That is, it is not sufficient to claim to be promoting "open-minded, ecumenical, and morally exploratory" values, even reject premature lock-in of "a single set of values," if one never shows much sensitivity toward those that seriously disagree with you over ends and means. 

In addition, to feel unseen and unacknowledged is a known source of indignation. MacAskill's longtermism constantly flirts with lack of interest in taking into account the needs and aspirations of those whose wellbeing it aims to be promoting. But even if that's unfair or mistaken on my part, given that MacAskill really doubles down on the need to promote "desirable moral progress" and tying "moral principles" that are thereby "discovered" to a "more general worldview," it is entirely predictable that he will advocate for ends and means that many, who reject such principles, will find repugnant, and a source of indignation. As, say, Machiavelli and Spinoza teach this leads to political resistance, and worse.

 

 

 

The story starts with a stolen Maupertuis (III); in which some of the main characters reveal themselves

Last week (recall) I returned a stolen Maupertuis to The Institution of Civil Engineers (hereafter: ICE) Library in London. During my visit, while I was admiring a beautiful copy of the third Edition of Newton's Principia, the librarian, Debra Francis, called my attention to a four page manuscript wedged in the first few pages of this Principia. I very quickly decided that it was probably an eighteenth century manuscript because of the paper, ink, and notation/diagrams which looked familiar. (It's immediately made clear we're dealing with falling bodies.) So, while still in the library I sent pictures of it to Niccolo Guicciardini and then to Scott Mandelbrote, George Smith, and Chris Smeenk. Debra and I spent a few minutes on the manuscript which is in English. But most of our attention was devoted to figuring out the provenance of Principia at ICE. As we now know (recall yesterday's post) the ms was found in the Thomas Young's copy of the Principia.

At this point it would be useful to say why I jumped to the conclusion it was an eighteenth century manuscript and perhaps not insignificant, and why I sent the manuscript to these four scholars. [If you are impatient to find out the big reveal, jump to the paragraph below that starts with: "it turns out"....] For, while I have published quite a bit on Newton, I don't usually spend my time looking at manuscripts and thanks to the internet I barely spend any time in special collections anymore. However, between 1993 and 1996 or so my earliest academic experience involved spending multiple Summers in the Huygens archives in Leiden while George Smith and I were working on our project reconstructing Huygens' empirical argument against universal gravity. At the time I was lucky that Joella Yoder (the world's leading Huygens scholar) often overlapped with me in Leiden, while she was cataloging the Huygens' papers at the Leiden University library. She basically gave me on the job training in archival research. Along the way, and with help of many kind archivists and librarians, I was exceedingly lucky in discovering previously unknown material and rediscovering maps (see here, pp. 93-97 & here, pp. 51-55) important to our argument (the forthcoming paper is archived here).* But while this is rich experience, I wouldn't trust myself to know the difference between, say, a forgery or a real Huygens ms. However, I do know by acquaintance what paper and ink of the era looks like.

Second, I have read the Principia three times. Once as an undergrad in the second semester of George Smith's famous Newton course at Tufts University. Once, but in much less detail, with Howard Stein in graduate school in his course on the history of space-time theories. And then again in great detail with Chris Smeenk when we wrote a Handbook article on Newton's Principia. There are a whole range of diagrams and formulations that are distinctive to the Principia because while Newton was building on the work of others, he was also innovating mathematically in it (or drawing on then still secret innovations). But to simplify greatly, while Newton's methods, results, and theories shaped subsequent research, Newton's notations and his presentation of the material are rather distinctive (and were displaced within a century); it has its own vernacular. To give a very low-level example: in Newton the second law is a proportionality (and not an equality such as F=ma). And again, because I rarely work with the Principia (and, as historians of physics go, a below average mathematician), I wouldn't trust myself to identify a passage with any particular proposition of the Principia without double checking a few times.

Now, Niccolo Guicciardini (Milan) is a historian and philosopher and a specialist on Newton's mathematics (and physics!) and who also has deep knowledge of Newton's manuscripts. He is also very generous with his time, and he does not make one feel silly if one reveals one's ignorance. (He was an important interlocuter to me when I developed my interpretation of Newton's philosophy of time and then again, when I responded to Katherine Brading's excellent criticism [see also here] of it.)+ So, he was the first person I thought of. But, as I reflected on what I had seen, I figured it might be useful for somebody to be able to visit the ICE library to inspect the manuscript in person in London. So, that's why I thought of Scott Mandelbrote in Cambridge, who among his many other intellectual virtues, is one of the leading scholars of Newton's manuscripts, including the paper, watermarks, (etc.). And I sent it to Smith and Smeenk because I hoped they would get a kick out of it, and I figured they might recognize the material that's being discussed in the manuscript much more quickly than I would.

Much to my joy Niccolo almost immediately responded to my email. And rather than pointing out my obvious mistake -- 'why bother me with this juvenilia; clearly a school boy exercise; didn't you notice the 19th century notation?' -- he wrote me back to congratulate me on the manuscript which was previously unknown to him. He then went on to say, "I might have seen the hand before … intriguing indeed." And at that moment I knew the story of 'my' stolen Maupertuis would have an interesting afterlife. In a subsequent email he warned me that was not sure about identity of the author and also that it may take a while before he would get back to me due to a family holiday. Okay, so much for set up.

It turns out that Guicciardini and Mandelbrote almost immediately set to work to identify the author, and they are so confident of the author's identity that Niccolo has informed the ICE library of it on March 1. <Drumroll, please.> They think the hand is Henry Pemberton’s--the editor of the third edition! Now, there are not many known manuscripts by Pemberton. But, as I learned from Niccolo, he has a very distinctive way of writing "this." You can see this on p 2 of the manuscript that I have reprinted below and compare it to a letter by Pemberton to Newton (9 February 1725; Cambridge UL, MS Add. 3986.7, fol 1r-1v) that Niccolo shared with Debra Francis and myself.

So, let's connect some dots. The manuscript is in the hand of Henry Pemberton (1694 – 1771), who was the editor of the third edition of the Principia--that is the version of the copy that Tomas Young owned and that was donated to ICE library. So, this leaves some open questions:

1. How did Thomas Young acquire this copy of the Principia and the Pemberton ms?

A neat, perhaps too neat, hypothesis is that ICE library actually owns Pemberton's own copy of the edition of Principia that he edited. And so that Pemberton himself inserted the manuscript in his copy of the Principia. This would at least explain how the manuscript ended up in the ICE library copy without having to posit a complex further web of linkages. However, we know that mathematical manuscripts circulated through the eighteenth century. (Well I did not know much about that, but Niccolo reminded me.) And it's also possible that the Pemberton manuscript and Thomas Young's copy of the Principia were brought together by Young himself.

        2. Did Young ever use the Ice Libary Pemberton ms.? 

        3. What are the contents of the ICE library Pemberton ms.? About this more soon.

        4. And can the contents help explain why Pemberton wrote this ms.? As we shall see, this will lead us to some outstanding historical puzzles and some major intellectual controversies. Stay tuned! 

 

The story starts with a stolen Maupertuis (II)

Last week (recall) I returned a stolen Maupertuis to The Institution of Civil Engineers (hereafter: ICE) Library in London. During my visit, while I was admiring a beautiful copy of the third Edition of Newton's Principia, the librarian, Debra Francis, called my attention to a four page manuscript wedged in the first few pages. The manuscript was in English and seemed to be written by somebody familiar with the mathematics of the Principia. It looked 18th century to me. So, while still in the library I sent pictures of it to Niccolo Guicciardini and then, separately in a joint email, to Scott Mandelbrote, George Smith, and Chris Smeenk. 

As I noted, the copy of the Principia is part of the Telford collection that originates the library and was donated by a MR. Young in 1840 (as a plaque inside the book reveals). You may recall that in my original post, I remarked "I immediately tried to remember Thomas Young's dates." Of course, I quickly googled these (1773 – 1829), and left it aside. 

Most of my own original thoughts were about the author and contents of the manuscript, especially because I could tell Niccolo was excited to receive it. More about that soon.

After a visit to the vault (which did not contain the paperwork we were looking for), I left the library with a promise from Debra Francis to track down the provenance of 'Mr. Young's Principia.' Today she reported back to me. Well, hold on to your seats, because it's a banger:

This is from the Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Volume 1, p. 11 (see here).

Thus, it seems pretty clear that this is referring to the Thomas Young, who indeed had a brother (and nephew) called Robert Young who seems to have survived him (and seems to have died around 1850). So, the plot thickens. And in my next installment we'll return to the manuscript, its author, its contents, and, of course, how it ended up in Thomas Young's personal copy of the Principia. For Niccolo had a hunch about that, that's turning out to be very fruitful...to be continued.

Hayek, Kukathas, and the Significance and Limitations of Social Theory

Yet agreement between Hayek and the dominant strand of liberal theory may not be quite so easily secured. For a great deal turns on what is understood by a modus vivendi, and thought necessary to secure it. For Gutmann and Larmore, a liberal modus vivendi may well involve the growth of the mechanisms of participatory democracy, and need not compromise egalitarian ideals. A Hayekian conception of the liberal order as a modus vivendi, however, would not be of this nature. The conclusion he draws from his social theory is that a liberal order must be ruled by a limited government whose primary task is to maintain the framework within which individuals and groups may pursue their respective aims, regardless of the shape the resulting society assumes.
Rawls, however...explicitly rejects the idea of a modus vivendi. For him, what is needed is a political conception of justice which will command the allegiance of a diversity of moral viewpoints in a pluralist society. Only such a public philosophy which was able to sustain an 'overlapping consensus' of views would ensure social unity in 'long run equilibrium'. A modus vivendi would amount to little more than a temporary truce, in which time the more powerful interests would be able to marshall their forces, later to impose their own attitudes upon all. This contrasts with Hayek who sees social stability as possible only under political institutions which removed social justice from the agenda of politics.
This lack of agreement does not, however, reduce the interest of Hayek's contribution to liberal theory. Indeed, it suggests one way liberals may approach the problem of dealing with differences that divide them: by returning to issues in social theory. His work deserves examination because he draws attention to the need to consider the nature of society and the way in which this constrains our choice of political principles. For, if Hayek is right, many kinds of principles may be ruled out as unworkable. In other words, the circumstances of justice need much more careful investigation than they have been given.
Hayek's endeavours, while they have not succeeded in establish­ing a coherent liberal philosophy, do push contemporary liberal theory in a promising direction. For they show, first, that the defence of the liberal order need not assume that man is an isolated, asocial, utility maximizer: the defence of liberalism can, and should, be grounded in a more plausible account of man and society. And they suggest, secondly, that, while it will prove difficult to establish philosophical foundations for liberal rights, or a liberal theory of liberty, an understanding of the nature of social processes may offer a surer guide by telling us what kinds of rights and liberties cannot be adopted if the liberal ideal is to survive.-- Chandran Kukathas (1989) Hayek and Modern Liberalism, pp. 227-228. [Emphasis in original]

[If you are impatient you can skip the first four autobiographical paragraphs of today's digression.] Because I never went through a libertarian phase (and where I grew up these barely existed then), I am not quite sure when I first encountered Hayek's name and when I first read him. I do know that when I entered graduate school at age 24, I was aware of some of the features of Hayek's 'knowledge problem' because I briefly tried -- without success -- to get others in my graduate cohort interested in Hayek as an epistemologist in light of Hayek 1945. But I am really unsure how I picked this up. Between college and graduate school I read anything that happened to come my way or encountered in bookstores so I'll leave it to chance. 

Because I ended up writing a PhD on Hume and Smith's philosophy of science, I did end up reading some of Hayek's writings on the Scottish Enlightenment. During my PhD, I also read the Road to Serfdom (which left me unmoved) and The Sensory Order (which was astonishing, and I was shocked nobody else I knew had read). But because I was not especially interested in spontaneous order or a deep dive into libertarianism (beyond Nozick) my knowledge of Hayek was superficial. 

This started to change near the end of my PhD, around 2001, when the historians of economics, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, started to invite me to their annual workshop on the preservation of the history of economics. Peart was working on her excellent edition of Hayek on Mill. David knew his Hayek and could easily make him philosophically interesting to me. (Recently David has been sharing his excitement about the development of modal logics by nineteenth century economists who moonlight as logicians!) Through them I met Erik Angner who was very interested in Hayek's theory of cultural evolution (a topic I was then very interested in), and I eventually read his wonderful monograph on Hayek and natural law.

I mention all of this because after I did start reading Hayek, I actually thought of Hayek as a weird Kantian or neo-Kantian. When I first mentioned this to people with a philosophical interest in Hayek this was often dismissed (such people treated him as more as a follower of Hume). So, I was quite pleased back when I read Kukathas' book the first time (about two decades ago) that Kukathas argues for Hayek's Kantianism in great detail (alongside Hayek's debts to Hume). And not surprised when decades later I read Foucault (who historically precedes Kukathas by a decade) on the significance of Kant/Kantianism to Hayek and other neoliberals in his biopolitics lectures. 

Anyway, above I quote the final paragraphs of Kukathas' wonderful book, which manages to juggle quite a few balls apparently effortless at once: it is a careful study of Hayek as a systematic thinker; it locates Hayek in debates within liberalism (not the least through a detailed comparison with Rawls) and between liberalism(s) and its/their critics. Along the way, readers also get a judicious account of why it is misleading to treat Hayek as an (indirect) utilitarian. And while Kukathas is respectful of Hayek, as the quoted paragraph suggests, he argues at length that Hayek is incapable of reconciling the Kantian and Humean strands of his own theory.* Okay, so much for set up.

One important contribution of Kukathas' book is to illustrate the value of social theory to political philosophy even among those who think of political philosophy as an 'ethics first' or 'justice first' enterprise. Part of that use is hinted at in the closing paragraphs quoted at the top of this post: first, a social theory provides us with the content in a feasibility or aptness constraint. Let's call this a 'negative use of social theory' in which social theory is used (with a nod to 'ought implies can' perhaps) to rule out or block certain normative theories (or the principles on which they rely) because they are literally impossible for beings like us, once we're more informed about who we are (by social theory). Of course, unrealistic or unfeasible models or theories may still be useful in some way or another -- not the least as paradigms that discipline a field --, so one should not expect to use social theory (which often blends normative and empirical features in complex ways) as a hammer to destroy viewpoints one wishes to reject. 

Second, and this is a positive feature, social theory can provide one with a philosophical anthropology that allows one to recast one's political vision and/or normative theories. In Hayek's case this also (third) means that many typical criticisms of liberalism (familiar, say, from Karl Polanyi (who goes unmentioned), Alisdair MacIntyre, various communitarians and Marxists (etc.) are disarmed in advance because the anthropology supplied by Hayek's social theory actually is not the Robinson Crusoe one -- "isolated, asocial, utility maximizing" -- usually criticized by critics of liberalism; if anything Kukathas' Hayek (and I agree) is not very far from Hegel, although as Kukathas notes with some key differences.

But, unless I missed it, Kukathas does not define what he or Hayek means by 'social theory' (something on my mind due to failed efforts to do so while teaching undergrads).  Hayek does give us some material to work on this. For example, in (1967) in "Notes on the Evolution of Systems of Rules of Conduct: The Interplay between Rules of Individual Conduct and the Social Order of Actions," Hayek writes the following:

The whole task of social theory consists in little else but an effort to reconstruct the overall orders which are thus formed, and the reason why that special apparatus of conceptual construction is needed which social theory represents is the complexity of this task. It will also be clear that such a distinct theory of social structures can provide only an explanation of certain general and highly abstract features of the different types of structures (or only of the ‘qualitative aspects’), because these abstract features will be all that all the structures of a certain type will have in common, and therefore all that will be predictable or provide useful guidance for action.--p. 283 in The Market and Other Orders, edited by Bruce Caldwell.

On Hayek's view social theory is, thus, engaged in conceptual construction. And it aims to construct what he calls an 'overall order.' (There are distinct resonances here with the morphological project of the ordoliberal, Eucken.) These overall orders are "systems of rules of conduct" which "will develop as wholes" and on which a certain kind of "selection process...will operate on the order as a whole." Now, clearly this conception of social theory is, while capable of objectivity, itself partial to Hayekian projects (he goes on to claim that "of theories of this type economic theory, the theory of the market order
of free human societies, is so far the only one which has been systematically developed over a long period"), so I don't mean to suggest Hayek's idea of 'social theory' ought to generalize to all social theory.

Now, crucially, Hayekian social theory provides one with functional explanations of social order(s). Hayek is very explicit about this on the following page (p. 284). It may require auxiliary sciences to do so (Hayek is discussing the rule of evolutionary social psychology in context). And one way it offers such a functional explanation is to make clear the "interaction between the regularity of the conduct of the elements [or individuals] and the regularity of the resulting structure." (289)

I call it 'Hayekian' social theory because one of the other "tasks" he ascribes to it is to explain the "unintended patterns and regularities which we find to exist in human society." (from Hayek (1967) "The results of human action but not of human design." p. 294 in The Market and Other Orders.) Obviously, that may be incompatible with a social theory that has a different focus, although Marx is clearly interested in features of such a social theory.

So, why do I mention this? Before I answer that let's stipulate that Hayek's social theory is coherent. I have two reasons. First, even coherent, it is not entirely obvious what the status of the fruits of Hayekian social theory are. What kind of impossibility is proven by social theory if it has a Hayekian cast? This is not obvious. (In part this is not obvious because the empirical basis of social theory is not easily disentangled from its normative commitments.) I don't see how Hayekian social theory can rule out orders constructed on principles very different than Hayekian social theory, even if one can suspect that these will not be functional in the way that (say) spontaneous orders will be. This depends on plasticity of humans but also on the possibility of social structures with different kinds of social rules. I don't think this paragraph undermines Kukathas' particular argument because he shows how much Rawls and Hayek agree in their commitments.

Second, Hayekian social theory inherits from 19th century historicism (and some aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment) the idea of social wholes (that are constituted by their system of rules). Now, Hayek acknowledges that (say) a historian or social scientist may well do his or her job without embracing social wholes. His is not an organicist theory, and since social pluralism is -- as Kukathas reveals -- kind of bedrock in his theory it would be odd to attribute organicism to Hayek. However, it is not obvious why in a world constituted by social pluralism of different sorts -- and with non-trivial barriers that would facilitate differential and distinct selection -- we would find such social wholes even in (say) places that share non-trivial social commonalities. If human law or force is part of the selection process we should in fact expect greater diversity. In fact, I am echoing here Hayek's friend, Eucken, who clearly thought that Hayek's expectation of such social wholes was only so in theory, but that in practice one could find a rich diversity of social orders (based on a limited number of morphological elements).

Let me stop there. I don't mean to suggest these are fatal objections to Hayek's theory. But  if we look forward to Kukathas' Liberal Archipelago it helps explain Kukathas' non-trivial distance from using Hayekian social theory despite Kukathas and Hayek sharing a deep debts to Hume.