When I am a Dictator

Slactivists often write in terms of what they would do if they were dictator. But the very process of getting and retaining enough power to implement the idea makes it impossible to implement exactly what the slacktivist envisioned for society. This is actually a scheme-content problematic for action (analogous to that posed for belief by Brandom and McDowell)* and I do think that political debate almost constitutively undervalues it.

[*Working thesis, Robert Brandom’s take on scheme-content in Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (viz. his account of Quine’s critique of Carnap’s two-step theory of meaning) ends up connecting Badiouian work on “the event” in continental philosophy with scheme-content issues in analytic philosophy. Our very ability to conceptualize radical novelty when experiencing it shows that reality can’t consist of passive content that either determinately clicks yes or no when put to the question by our conceptual schemes. Something analogous happens with action, the [sic] because the desires, beliefs, and reasons causing action are only able to involve partial knowledge of the causal influences activated upon completion of the action. And of course action adds another layer of characteristic paradoxicality because the type of action in question might systematically alter the very variables one was measuring to determine whether the action was a good one. As a philosopher of economics Schliesser has a very good eye for this kind of thing (consider algorithms for gaming a stock market that can’t take into account the effect of their widespread use).]--Cogburn at Philpercs. [On the meaning of 'slacktivist,' see here.]

Cogburn's is a response to my earlier post on Harman. (See also Harman's response my to post here.) There are, in fact, three distinct issues in Cogburn's analysis worth commenting on.

1. A species of the transition problem: "the very process of getting and retaining enough power to implement the idea makes it impossible to implement exactly what the slacktivist envisioned for society."
2. A species of the incomplete knowledge problem: "the desires, beliefs, and reasons causing action are only able to involve partial knowledge of the causal influences activated upon completion of the action."
3. A species of reflexivity: "the type of action in question might systematically alter the very variables one was measuring to determine whether the action was a good one."

I have written quite a bit on (3), so I'll ignore it here today. (And I have treated (2) as a version of (3), although it is self-standing and I will reflect more on it). I am unsure how useful the analogy with the scheme/content distinction is here, but I am curious to learn more from others.

So, let me just offer a brief note on (1), Inspired by Plato's Laws, I tend to think of the transition problem, that is, how to get from an imperfect situation with imperfect institutions and imperfect human beings to the desirable, perfected end-point, as a problem of building blocks; the seeds of imperfection are ineliminable given one's lousy starting points--this is also true for dictators who wish to construct a better world according to their own lights. 

There are a lot of versions of the transition problem: here's another example: how to work within existing constitutional (and electoral) arrangements, which have considerable status quo bias built into them, in order to improve one's constitution (or electoral scheme). Recognizing the transition problem as a real problem does not entail defeatism; there may be genuinely projectable futures from some status quo base-line that are better than the present while respecting the existing building blocks. Moreover, not all revolutions make all matters worse (so, one may improve along some dimensions while accepting less progress or regression along other dimensions), although a lot do.

Either way, recognizing (1) entails that one needs to envision robust boot-strapping mechanisms that allow one to move beyond the imperfect starting points. One rarely encounters reflection on such mechanisms among would be reformers and revolutionaries, and Cogburn is right to note its absence.