Digressions&Impressions

On JPP, Wiley, Prestige Production, and Game Theoretic Modeling

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As Leiterreports (and here; here) and Dailynous reported, Wiley (a commercial publisher), got rid of Robert Goodin (a prominent political philosopher) as editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP), which is (one of) the leading journals in political philosophy in good part thanks to Goodin's long stewardship.  It is no surprise that most of Goodin's fellow editors and board resigned in protest. There has been a lovely closing of ranks.

Because I am going to be rather (sternly) critical of the ranks, I want to stress that Wiley's explanation was ridiculously and scandalously vague. More important, the manner in which they fired Goodin also suggests unwarranted editorial interference that actually risks endangering academic freedom. So, resignation was the right thing to do.

But as the resigning editorial board members' comments started to appear in public, it seems that folk in the know believe that the cause of Wiley's decision is that it wanted to increase the number of published papers rather rapidly up to a tenfold more (see here; here). Immediately one started to read on social media that pursuit of profit is undermining quality. (This show up in the threads I have already linked to above, but also in discussions elsewhere.)

However, a major reason why Wiley is nudging many presses to expand journal space is that universities, libraries, and grant agencies have contracted with them to do so in the context of expanding open access. From the perspective of grant agencies and universities this makes a lot of sense: they are funding research that, if of sufficient quality, needs an outlet. (For those who work in a grant system the absence of slots often becomes visible only after acceptance when one discovers that a journal has no more slots available in a given year!) I am not a fan of these contracts because they basically show what happens when well-connected corporations take advantage of well-intentioned policy shifts: they capture the financial rents. Yet, it doesn't follow that open access or expanding journal space (and so increasing acceptance rates) is a mistake. And in what follows I focus on the latter.

For, as is well known, academic philosophy has incredibly low acceptance rates in its flagship journals (often under 5% acceptance rates).* I couldn't find a recent number for JPP, but it seems to be around 5% and I wouldn't be surprised if it were lower. A quick count suggests, JPP publishes 24 articles a year (give or take). Another leading journal, P&PA "has historically published 12-16 articles per year." And it does not get much better at a journal like CRISPP (about 20). [I make the relationship between slots and acceptance rates more precise below.] The situation is not much better in most areas of professional philosophy (but see below).

I have noted in the past that these acceptance rates only make sense, epistemically, if philosophical activity had enormous inductive risk to society. Nobody believes that as Tim Crane argued in an important essay in TLS (back in 2018; see here for ungated version). Tim helpfully suggests that the real explanation is that "publication in one of these journals may no longer be that sole decisive achievement that will get you that job or grant." That's clearly true, but not wholly right not just because I would add promotion to his list. As Anna Stilz, whose comments were highlighted by Justin Weinberg, notes, publication in these journals is a "signalling device that validates the importance of someone’s work when they go up for tenure and promotion."

However, as should be well known, compared to other disciplines, including the sciences, professional philosophy's acceptance rates is especially low (recall Justin Weinber's discussion). And other disciplines also hire and promote people. Thus, I suggest the real function of such very low acceptance rates is the felt need for prestige production in professional philosophy among the circle entrusted to run leading journals.+ Before I get to the attempt to conflate such 'prestige' or 'importance' with 'quality' that insiders often make, it is worth noting that the needs of such signaling are not evidently co-extensive with the pursuit of truth (leaving wisdom aside) or progress in the field. In fact, they clearly can come apart.

For, there are some (quite predictable and also widely discussed) side-effects of the very low acceptance rates: very fine papers need to be shopped around to many journals before they find a home. This has overburdened the supply of referees, and it has put tremendous pressure on editorial process at many journals. We are a discipline that is familiar with moratoria on submission and backlogs from acceptance to publication at quite a few journals. There is also often a huge delay between submission and verdict. And consequently overall a huge delay between research and actual publication for too many papers. Thus, as organized, prestige generation slows down whatever rate of progress one might hope for in the field. (Yes, I am a skeptic about philosophical progress, so I use 'progress'  here relative to a research frontier or relative to how competent judges in a field would describe it.)** 

The problem with this state of affair is not merely epistemic. It also generates huge additional anxiety for people who are or expect to be on the job market and who are up for promotion. (This is also true in other fields, of course.) With acceptance rates so low, they basically face a (weighted) lottery whether their papers are accepted in a time frame needed. This state of affairs probably reinforces all kinds of structural injustice, again not only relative to other disciplines. The fact that many leading journals have, sometimes for decades on end, been entrusted to a 'safe pair of hands' (a distinguished, often male, philosopher) probably increases the bottlenecks and the risks of such structural injustice, but -- like the fact that we see so little experimentation with journal form (and kinds of review) [something I strongly advocate] -- I leave that aside here.

Now, I am not claiming editors are gaming acceptance rates directly. But they do clearly view number of issue/volume slots or pages as a hard constraint (perhaps regulated by an implicit willingness to let publication not be delayed for more than a year or two after official acceptance). But notice that restricting supply of slots is not the same as selecting on quality. If one really selected on quality alone one would allow the supply of slots/pages to be flexible. So, in what follows (and above) I use 'low acceptance rates' as a proxy for limiting the number of publication slots, or selectivity.

Above I noted that prestige generation trade-offs with progress at the low rates of acceptance in professional philosophy. We don't need to model that. (It gets more complicated as acceptance rates rise significantly because there may well be an inflection point where too much ease of publication undermines progress.) But we need some modeling to help understand that prestige generation or selectivity and quality can come apart significantly.

Luckily for me (and the quality of discussion) I was sent a pre-print of a paper, "Academic journals, incentives, and the quality of peer review: a model," by K. J. S. Zollman, J. Garcıa, and T. Handfield conditionally accepted at Philosophy of Science that has a game-theoretic model exploring possible trade offs between aiming for quality and (you guessed it) for low acceptance rates, in contexts where selectivity is taken to be a measure or proxy for quality. The paper should be publicly available fairly soon. But my discussion won’t turn on technical details and its possible lack of robustness. (I call incentive-alert philosophy of science, ‘public choice philosophy of science.’) In their model quality is an effect of peer review which is costly. And somewhat worrisome they conclude that "journals incentivized by selectivity have strong incentives to maintain worse peer review than those incentivized by their quality." I claim this nicely describes well what happens in professional philosophy. 

Now, they note that aiming for low acceptance or selectivity creates an incentive among editors to discourage "self-selection because a paper which is not submitted cannot be rejected. This results in a strange process whereby journals make peer review worse in an attempt to induce bad papers to submit, but maintain sufficiently good peer review to ensure that a large proportion of those bad papers will probably be rejected." And somebody may well object that referee quality at our leading journals is -- despite the boorish incivility and rudeness -- actually qualitatively great. Let's assume there is a lot of correct testimony to this effect.

One can explain such testimony in light of Zollman/Garcia/Handfield model, if we pay attention to the role of desk rejects (something they ignore.) Let's return to JPP; it is especially famous for two interrelated features: it offered quick (even helpful) desk-rejects (often/always by Goodin) to the vast-majority of initial submissions and then stellar review process on the papers sent out to reviewers which help improve the final publications. (I know important scholars who almost only review for JPP.) And this creates (now quoting Zollman et al) "the appearance of high standards."

One may think that JPP has, thus, hit on a fine equilibrium between balancing peer review costs and quality; and that it actually is a good way to aim for selectivity and quality at once. And people do like to point to the quality of the papers appearing in JPP. (In 2021 its impact factor was according the journal's website 1.881--quite respectable for philosophy standards, but not especially noteworthy. Something fans of selectivity tend to ignore.) Fair enough.

But, of course, desk-reject even by an impartial and distinguished and unrushed editor is a very coarse-grained (and very cheap) peer review system. And the Zollman et al. model explains that this does reduce quality. Obviously, this presupposes that among the desk-rejects are sufficiently many papers that with (costly) peer review would have been as good as the papers that JPP did publish. That's obviously true, but that's because among the papers published in very selective peers of JPP and even slightly less selective journals there is very little difference in overall quality. But the nice thing about working with a game-theoretic model like Zollman et al.'s is you don't have to trust my judgments, it's a predictable effect of the incentives -- artificially limiting supply! -- shaping decisions. Of course, the model may not be robust so here I have used it solely to help think through the issues. But notice that when multiple journals aim to be selective it becomes much costlier to provide adequate peer review because referees get overworked (and perhaps bored by seeing the same papers multiple times).

Now, I am not against prestige in professional philosophy or higher education (although one does wonder if excessive selectivity in admissions to top colleges actually is conducive to society's needs). But from the perspective of the epistemic (and social) needs of the discipline and profession, it is a mistake to have excessive selectivity in philosophy journal publication help produce or coincide with that prestige. It slows down research and, as the model suggests, plausibly hurts quality. (It probably does so by reducing intellectual diversity and increasing risk aversion.) 

So, from my perspective, while the publishers should respect editorial independence and not use heavy-handed practices, nudging our leading journals to accept more papers is the right thing to do even if the motive -- profit -- or honoring flawed open access contracts need not be so. We need such a regime change.

Of course, the increase should be gradual and not tenfold at once. The critics of Wiley have a point! As should be clear most arguments that conflate incredible selectivity and quality in defense of the status quo seem bogus and, I say this politely (these are my friends, after all), seem generally self-serving not the discipline's interest.

Tom Hurka suggested that such selectivity allows one to "keep abreast of important new developments and contributions in the field without having to wade through dozens or hundreds of published pieces." This was very true before the age of scholar.google and philpapers. But less so now. I do think we need more outlets like (as Ingrid Robeyns suggested in context) Philosophy Compass that (especially with the disappearance of review chapters in dissertations) give opinionated surveys of recent developments, but that's orthogonal to the present discussion.

Finally, I don't want to claim that increasing, even doubling slots or reducing/halving selectivity (to say 10-20% acceptance rates) solves the profession's social problems. Undoubtedly, if journal publication in particular venues is seen as key, then we cannot prevent an arms race among job candidates and tenure seekers to publish in such journals. And maybe the gains to the referee process will be ephemeral or temporary--only time and experience will tell. But my argument for the epistemic gains from increasing slots remain.

Academic disciplines do need high quality signals for quality in publication for institutional and epistemic reasons; excessive selectivity is a bad mechanism to produce such a signal and it perniciously confers prestige that reinforces all the bad effects of the very steep disciplinary prestige hierarchies. I hope the scholars who nobly and correctly resigned in protest also work to change this bad status quo.

• This first appeared at: <On JPP, Wiley, Prestige Production, and Modeling Quality: (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*I am going to ignore the pervasive editorial unaccountability and deviations of best scholarly practices that also show in these journals.

**Of course, the salience of significant work seeps out to well connected insiders, but that just strengthens my argument.

+Some field specific journals within philosophy that actually presuppose considerable technical expertise (in the sciences or ancient languages) have much higher acceptance rates without corresponding loss of prestige. I think this is due to the fact that the prestige is already sufficiently accorded to the expertise (and that editors in these fields can focus more on keeping the discussion going aright).

 

Hobbes and Descartes on the Distribution of Wit, and some Plato

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.--Hobbes (1651) Leviathan, Chapter 13.

As regular readers know I am rather fond of these two paragrahs in Hobbes and I treat them as foundational to my own methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) [recall here; here and originally here]. But recently, during a seminar discussion, I noticed two features that invite reconsideration. First, in the top paragraph, it is striking that when Hobbes justifies that the strength of body is sufficiently equal, he appeals to a political mechanism that has solved what  we may call the original coordination problem (confederacy). This is a bit awkward for two reasons (;) because such fundamental equality is a kind of premise or step in the argment that is supposed to lead to the social contract in the state of nature. But here we are informed that even in nature, political alliance secures such equality. This is not the place to elaborate what this signifies, but the paragraph suggests to me that for Hobbes politics ("secret machination") is constitutive of human co-existence. The state of nature is not, as it sometimes taken to be, pre-political. About that some other time more. But (ii) the capacity to enter into sucessful confederacy with others (or to execute "secret machination" successfully) seems to presuppose non-trivial social intelligence. And while it can provide evidence for bodily equality, it seems to undermine the idea that we are truly equal (intellectually). I return to this in the paragraph below the next one.

It's also worth noting that in that first paragraph, Hobbes here is recalling some key features of Glaucon's version of the social contract in at Republic 358E-359B: that is, "those who lack the power to avoid [being harmed by others] and [unable to impose harms on others] determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another" (translated by Shorey).I don't mean to suggest Hobbes is deliberately evoking Plato here, but I do think it possible that there is a more general moral lurking here: in order to argue for the conceptual possibility for an egalitarian social contract that has normative or political authority, the construct seems to rest on a prior step in which the many collaborate in subdueing the strong.

My second point pertains to the final three sentences of the second quoted paragraph above (and these I will connect to Hobbes below). Here, in line with my remark above, Hobbes does not really affirm equal mental capacity in extensional terms. (The existence of rhetoric and science, and perhaps education more generally undermines it.) But this extensional perspective is not really doing the work there. He switches to an intensional context, and points out that we all tend to believe we're smart (in the way at Lake Wobegon parents think their child above average) and that we do not tend to envy other people their smarts. Hobbes is articulating here an envy-free distributive principle, which is a key criterion for an egalitarian distribution of an item.

He explains the endorsement of one's own sufficient keen intelligence ('wit') in terms of a kind of perspectival bias--we are too close to ourselves to judge this really impartially. But interestingly enough, the fact that we're free of envy of other people's smarts suggests that this kind of perspectival bias is itself equally distributed among us.

Of course, Hobbes is also being very funny here (and kind of implying he is smarter for noticing this), because on the whole wisdom is in short supply. In conversation, some people deny what Hobbes attributes to them--they are modest and genuinely wish they were as smart as others. In my view these putative counterexamples are not very problematic to Hobbes because such people are not a source of the kind of political trouble he worries about (ambition): as he puts it in chapter XI, "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition. " In chapter 13, he is not too worried that people will think they are not sufficiently equal to others and so can be rightfully denied political equality. (A theorist of adaptive preferences or structural injustice may well worry more.)  

It occurred to me,  too, that in these three sentences, Hobbes is trolling Descartes with whom he had an unfruitful, acrimonious exchange, published in 1641 as part of the "Objections and Replies" to/in the Meditations. For Hobbes is here evoking, even adopting for his own ends, the then famous opening lines of Part 1 of Descartes' (1637) Discourse on method. Descartes starts with pretty much the same envy-free criterion to establish the equal distribution of good sense:

Good sense [bon sens] is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.--Descartes (1637) Discourse on Method, part 1.*

The Discourse on Method is not read much in political philosophy/theory, even though it has quite a bit of pertinent material (recall here; and here).

Of course, Hobbes and Descartes may not saying exactly the same thing (wisdom is not often thought identical to good sense/reason). I am unsure what Hobbes' definition of wisdom in Leviathan is, but in the dedication to  his (1651) De Cive, Hobbes writes that "Wisdome properly so call'd is nothing else but this, The perfect knowledge of the Truth in all matters whatsoever." Leaving aside if wisdom is then possible in reality, this definition suggests that wisdom is considerably rarer than we tend to think it.

Whereas Descartes is suggesting that the capacity to distinguish truth from error is available to us all. That we are led into error is fundamentally the effect of the diversity of or developmental paths and our diverging interests (we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects.) Our life's experience corrupts our capacity to distinguish true from false.

Somewhat surprisingly Descartes goes on to deny the natural equality he had just diagnosed with an intentional envy free criterion, by offering the following extentional judgment: "The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations." Descartes here echoes a rather important passage [491D] Plato's Republic that one can naturally read as concerned with the inductive risk of the teaching of philosophy to ambitious and smart types  [like Alcibiades].[Recall also Ibn Rushd's commentary here.]

Descartes treats reason as the capacity to distinguish truth from falsity. It's pretty clear that Hobbes thinks this a mistake (and I suspect that's the trolling). For Hobbes defines reason, in deflationary fashion, as "nothing but Reckoning" and, in particular, of tracking "the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men." (see chapter 5 of Leviathan, emphasis added). What reason really does, for Hobbes, is keep track of our linguistic conventions. 

 

 

Parfit, Long Termism and Existential Risk: and Nietzsche's Fearless ones.

Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life’s work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, few atheists made Ethics their life’s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may be Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life’s work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.

I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:

(1) Peace.
(2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world’s existing population.
(3) A nuclear war that kills 100%.

(2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater.
My view is held by two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain inhabitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.
One of the groups who hold my view are Classical Utilitarians. They would claim, as Sidgwick did, that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness.
Another group would agree, but for very different reasons. These people believe that there is little value in the mere sum of happiness. For these people, what matters are what Sidgwick called the ‘ideal goods’—the Sciences, the Arts, and moral progress, or the continued advance towards a wholly just world-wide community. The destruction of mankind would prevent further achievements of these three kinds. This would be extremely bad because what matters most would be the highest achievements of these kinds, and these highest achievements would come in future centuries.
There could clearly be higher achievements in the struggle for a wholly just world-wide community. And there could be higher achievements in all of the Arts and Sciences. But the progress could be greatest in what is now the least advanced of these Arts or Sciences. This, I have claimed, is Non-Religious Ethics. Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.--Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons, Section, 154. "HOW BOTH HUMAN HISTORY, AND THE HISTORY OF ETHICS, MAY BE JUST BEGINNING"

After my rant went viral this past weekend, Richard Pettigrew reminded me that if I really want to understand the intellectual roots of contemporary long-termism I can't ignore the last two pages of Reasons and Persons, quoted in full above. (Strictly speaking these are not the last two because the appendices are not wholly irrelevant, especially the material on social discounting.) And my hypothesis was that it would help explain, perhaps, something of the evident sectarianism that longtermism generates in its adherents. And when I returned to this material, I was, of course, immediately struck by the choice between 99% vs 100% extinction. And I started to think of objections.

But I hope you will forgive me if I step back first. For, I noticed that the hypothetical extinction scenarios are introduced with, and framed by, an implied contrast between [A] "Non-Religious Ethics" and Religious Ethics. The first oddity here is that the contrast is not drawn in the linguistically more accurate contrast between atheist ethics and theistic ethics (which in turn comes in monotheistic and polytheistic versions). Embedded in this contrast [A] is another explicit contrast (non-trivially indebted to Kant's "What is Enlightenment?") between [B] the "free development of moral reasoning" and the unfree development of moral reasoning (found in so-called 'Religious Ethics). And this, in turn, is connected to the contrast between [C] young ("recent past") and old ("more than a thousand years" etc.), which turns out to track [D] a contrast between the possibility of "greatest progress" and proven failure. And, again, this is connected to the contrast between [E] the "very few" and the very many. In addition, there is an implied contrast between [F] (a pacific) "a world-wide community" and the state of nature among nation-states. This, in turn is linked to the fact, [G] there is a to be hoped for possible consensus which contrasts with our existing cacophony. There are, finally, two further connected contrasts: (i) there is a contrast (again echoing Kant) between [H] irrational hopes (characteristic of superstition) with rational (or at least not irrational) hopes, and (ii) [I] the contrast between knowledge (of the past) and uncertainty (of the future).

As a two-fold aside, first, Parfit explicitly leaves open -- one need not be Straussian about this -- that this last contrast [D] may involve the practice of esoteric speech or dissembling: "A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended." One wonders what grounds this 'in fact.' And second, it is interesting that Parfit treats Buddha and Confucius as possible exemplars of this practice of pretending. To the best of my knowledge (and I know slightly more about the case of Confucius) this idea was popular in the wake of Bayle's linking of Spinoza to both Confucius and Buddha. (I have no idea if Parfit gets it directly or indirectly from Bayle, but in Bayle, too, we find the linking of these matters to esotericism.) And my guess is that Bayle shaped some of the orientalist tropes that helped found the study of comparative civilizations in the late nineteenth century.

I don't mean to suggests that nine-fold contrast [A-I] is exhaustive. Nearly all of these contrasts are not argued for in Parfit's book. (Please feel free  to correct me!) Such a list of contrasts is characteristic of what I call 'philosophic prophecy' by which I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers is aided by rhetorical or literary imagery that shapes the reception of (more rational) arguments and thereby can shape possible futures. And I would have given you a more detailed explanation of this claim in light of the typical nature of philosophic prophecy.

But then I noticed something remarkable. In the quoted paragraphs, Parfit is treating the 'death of God' as a world-historical thesis which gives ground to the greatest possible (non-irrational) hopes. This is a feature and not a bug because it also informs the very plausibility of Parfit's rather dramatic claim that the gulf between (2) and (3) is larger than the gulf between (1) and (2). (For a certain kind of theist this would be question begging.)

That the death of God is a world historical event -- in part for its effect on morality -- is a thesis associated with Nietzsche. And one of its canonical formulations is in Nietzsche's Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343. So, it is no surprise -- although it shocked me -- that this very aphorism supplies Parfit with the epigraph to his book:

At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘Open sea.

Parfit's epigraph also evokes the end of Book I of Hume Treatise as well as a famous passage of Socrates in Phaedo 99c–d, and all three cases (just like in Parfit) the very nature of philosophy, and its future, can be said to be at stake. Parfit himself reminds of his affinity with them in a passage in the book, "I would far prefer to have lived through the previous two and a half centuries, having had among my friends Hume, Byron, Chekhov, Nietzsche, and Sidgwick." As it happens Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343 also is one of the texts that gave me idea of the existence of philosophical prophecy (since in it Nietzsche describes two kinds of such prophecy).

Crucially for present purpose is Nietzsche's attitude toward the rather grim immediate future: "This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realised it sufficiently today to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth before?" Nietzsche feels not "sympathy" with the victims of history, "but rather like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment, encouragement, and dawning day? ... In fact, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the "old God is dead"; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation." (If you are shocked by this God is not dead for you.) In Nietzsche the price of progress is destruction of the old order so that we can breed (either culturally or genetically, i leave that aside) higher kind of men.

Now, notice that Parfit gives a classical utilitarian and elitist (that is, Nietzschean) argument for why 3 is worse than 2.* But that's not sufficient for his argument. He also needs to offer an argument for why 3 being worse than 2 is itself worse than 2 being worse than 1. But no such argument against "most people" is given. (I have some sympathy for the idea that philosophy is not a democracy.) We only receive an explanation for why total extinction (3) is worse than (2). And I do not think Parfit has an argument that is non-question begging because it presupposes the unfolding (as of yet "uncompleted") Death of God, that is, a kind of rational faith or hope that once completed will become self-evident. Among the fruits of this hope are the captains of longtermism.+

 

Hobbes on Natural Equality

[1] Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

[2] And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.--Hobbes Leviathan, Chapter XIII.

It's natural to read a Spinozism before Spinoza into the first sentence quoted above. While I do not want to reject that out of hand, it's worth recalling that in the first sentence of the "Introduction" of the Leviathan, we learn that nature just is "the art whereby God hath made and governes the world." So, we are equal in virtue of God's art which both creates and governs the world. To what degree this government is providential I leave to discussion of chapter XXXI.

Such cosmocraft is the theological, or natural, counterpart to the statecraft (or art of governing people) that Hobbes teaches. The term 'statecraft' does not appear, I think, in the Leviathan, but we are informed in chapter XIX that the absence of "the art of making fit Laws" is one of the main conditions of the dissolution of states. And in that very sentence (of chapter XIX) laws are treated as coordination devices of human action. In fact, Hobbes is explicit that only fit laws can make a state last. 

That there is an art of government, Hobbes explicitly defends -- against a kind of Thrasymachian objection "some say, that Justice is but a word, without substance; and that whatsoever a man can by force, or art, acquire to himselfe, (not onely in the condition of warre, but also in a Common-wealth,) is his own" -- in chapter XXX. And he explicitly goes on to say that "time, and Industry, produce every day new knowledge" of  commonwealths. And "so, long time after men have begun to constitute Commonwealths, imperfect, and apt to relapse into disorder, there may, Principles of Reason be found out, by industrious meditation, to make use of them." And while "industrious meditation" gives the suggestion that these principles are rationalistic or Cartesian in character (as thinkers as different as Hume and Hazony imply), the wider context suggests he thinks these principles are empirical in character, even subject to trial and error. For these principles are "observed by industrious men, that had long studied the nature of materials, and the divers effects of figure, and proportion, long after mankind began (though poorly) to build."* That Hobbes thinks that the longevity and well-structured-ness of a state is a kind of practical response to the Thrasymachian objection is worth further exploration, but I leave it aside for now.

As regular readers know (recall here), I am rather fond of Leviathan's account of natural equality. Even so, Hobbes' defense that we are naturally bodily equal is a bit peculiar. Leaving aside the Spinozistic way of expressing things, in effect, in the first quoted paragraph (13.1) Hobbes re-tells the story of Glaucon's account of the origin of the social contract in Book 2 of the Republic at 358e/359a, where the not so powerful gang up against the powerful in order to restrain them. I call it 'peculiar' not just because Hobbes appeals to our political nature (confederacy, secret cabals) to explain we're naturally equal, but also because if Glaucon's social contract is apparently just as possible in the state of nature (and later in 13, we're reminded about the brutish and short lives there) as Hobbes' own version of the contract; then why do we need Hobbes' (different) version of the social contract?+ 

In XIII.2, Hobbes articulates a kind of natural ignorance. Science is historically late on the scene, and by Hobbes' light it is something "which very few have, and but in few things." Those that deny our equal natural ignorance tend to be our elitist vanity. As regular readers know, I think XIII.2 is significant because Hobbes shifts here from a kind of extensional perspective (in XIII.1) to a more intentional perspective in what we believe. And he appeals to a kind of no-envy-principle to suggest that we often seem satisfied with our own capacities or natural wisdom. And by 'wisdom,' Hobbes means here a kind of superior prudence in human/social affairs. 

It is worth noting that Hobbes here rejects what Hume would call the monkish virtue associated with (say) Christian humility and epistemic deference to superiors as somehow unnatural. By this I mean that Hobbes thinks these are acquired perspectives on ourselves and can't be used in the escape from the state of nature. We don't really have easy epistemic access to the practical wisdom of others, while, on his view, we can relatively easily discover that others are funnier, and more eloquent and learned than we are. Since Hobbes is, in fact, very funny in XIII.2, I take it he means this claim to be proven or illustrated by example.

There is, of course, a peculiar fact that in defending our mental equality, Hobbes presupposes a distinction of rank between the gentlemen (who are, in fact, a mere subset of "all men") and the "vulgar."  It's a nice example of a rhetorical maneuver that appeals to the prejudices of one's audience to simultaneously undermine it. That is to say, in XIII.2, he also illustrates superior eloquence by example. In fact, I am inclined to say that in 13.2 Hobbes improves rhetorically on (say) Romans 12:16, which also presupposes the distinction of ranks: "Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits." That Hobbes has this in mind is plausible because in chapter XV he writes, "For there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others: nor when the wise, in their own conceit, contend by force with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory."

Be that as it may, Hobbes goes on to say (in XIII.3) that each of us think ourselves wise is a political problem in a world of material scarcity because it generates dangerous (because mutually incompatible) hopes. Hope had been defines as a passion or "Appetite with an opinion of attaining." That is to say, how we view ourselves is, alongside our desires, action guiding. And, in fact, earlier (at chapter XI.13) Hobbes had already alerted the reader to the political problem of our satisfaction with our own wisdom: "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition." And for this to be true, one need not assume that satisfaction in one's own wisdom is equally distributed. The political problem Hobbes is pointing to is generated if even only a few are really excessively self-satisfied in their own capacities, and these few are not in a position to hope to rule. Of course, making room for them to rule can cause its own problems. But I have gone on long enough.

 

 

Machery on Science and Philosophy

How can we be responsible and savvy consumers of science, particularly when it gives us morally and politically pleasing narratives? Philosophers’ fascination with the psychology of attitudes is an object lesson.

Some of the most exciting philosophy in the 21^st century has been done with an eye towards philosophically significant developments in science. Social psychology has been a reliable source of insights: consider only how much ink has been spilled on situationism and virtue ethics or on Greene’s dual-process model of moral judgment and deontology.

...

Hindsight is of course 20/20, and it would be ill-advised to blame philosophers (including my former self) for taking seriously science in the making. On the other hand, philosophers failed to even listen and a fortiori to give a fair hearing to the dissenting voices challenging the relentless hype by implicit-attitudes cheerleaders. The lesson is not limited to implicit attitudes: the neuroscience of meditation, the neuroscience of oxytocin, the so-called love molecule, the experimental research on epigenetics in humans, and the research on gene x environment interaction in human genetics also come to mind.

Philosophers, including myself, have for decades been too credulous about science, being misled by scientists’ marketing and ignoring the unavoidable uncertainties that affect the scientific process: the frontier of science is replete with unreplicable results, it is affected by hype and exaggeration (COVID researchers, I am looking at you!), and its course is shaped by deeply rooted cognitive and motivational biases. In fact, we should be particularly mindful of the uncertainty of science when it appears to provide a simple explanation for, and promises a simple solution to, the moral, social, and political ills that we find repugnant such as the underrepresentation of women in philosophy and elsewhere and enduring racial inequalities in the broader society.--Edouard Machery "Implicit Attitudes, Science, and Philosophy" @Daily Nous

A few years ago (2014), Merel Lefevere and I coined “The-Everybody-Did-It” (TEDI) Syndrome, to discuss symptoms of collective negligence in science and other epistemic communities. We were, of course, not the first to identify group-think nor the first to note that an appeal to TEDI was used by participating individuals as kind of blanket get out of jail card (viz. Machery's claim it would be "ill-advised to blame philosophers"). I mention the date on that paper because it was published before the first study of the The Reproducibility Project was published. In our paper, we draw, en passant, on (1993) Feigenbaum and Levy to alert the reader that different scientific fields have very diverging practices when it comes to replicating results or sharing data and that there are well-known incentives and other formal and informal barriers against publishing replications or dis-conformations.* Our main epistemic point was that one cannot assume that scientific fields are perfectly functioning communicative communities (with a perfect market in ideas). 

This point was not a sudden revelation for me. In my very first (2005) article in the philosophy of economics a decade earlier, I drew on work by Deirdre McCloskey, who had been warning against the cult of statistical significance for a long time, to point out that often, in the absence of robust background theory, the use of statistical significance created the illusion of scientific rigor. I also argued that much of social science, including elite reaches of economics, had a confirmatory bias rather than (with a nod to Popper) what I called a 'stress-testing' attitude.**

In his piece, Machery simultaneously presents himself (and other philosophers) as victims ("misled by scientists’ marketing"), as naïve ("too credulous"), and wishful thinking ("motivational bias") amongst other ills. While I applaud his willingness to take stock and derive lessons from the past, I would argue, by contrast, that Machery and his peers could have done better if he hadn't viewed himself as a "consumer" of science, but as a responsible [since we're in the realm of economic metaphors] co-producer of knowledge. My interest is not to score-keep, but to ensure that we learn the right lessons (some of which Machery also advocates). What do I have in mind?

The consumer model posits a deferential asymmetry between the expert specialist scientist and the philosopher. That's not altogether surprising because the expert is (ahh) an expert whereas the philosopher is not. And so lurking in Machery's narrative is a strict cognitive division of labor in which all philosophers need to do -- when they want to use some bit of social science for their own end -- is sample (say) abstracts and conclusions and then choose the right one that will satisfy their needs. The consumer on this (tacit) model is not or barely responsible for the quality control of the science she selects.

And that's because in the consumer model there is generally a commitment to the proposition that scientific communities have what we might call an efficient market in ideas. And this proposition tends to entail that quality control within science is thorough and rapidly arbitrages away any serious epistemic problems. Machery recognizes that this can't be quite right ("the frontier of science is replete with unreplicable results"), but his main solution (in the post), is to be suspicious of simple solutions for social ills, while undoubted salutary, leaves the consumer model in place.

Now, the previous paragraphs are a bit of caricature (not the least about Machery who has the skillset to engage on quite technical details of science), but treat the consumer model as a provisional ideal type. Here's another norm of science associated with a different ideal type (it's associated with Michael Polanyi's ideas about the republic of science and the role of adjoining disciplines in maintaining quality control in the whole chain of disciplines): when you use science in non-trivial fashion for your own epistemic ends, you re-do the calculations, learn to use the relevant models, and where possible check the evidence and arguments, etc.+ Obviously, that falls short of replicating experiments and being authoritative in the field. (But someone like Hasok Chang may well suggest, go replicate!) If philosophers had done their own forensic job in the uptake of (say) social psychology, the fragility of much of the work would have been transparent to them (or at least noticeable) and could have played a fruitful role in their discussions (and arguably in social psychology). Yes, that's very easy to say after the fact, but as I noted above I was saying some such stuff before the fact.***

Obviously, the kind of work I mention in the previous paragraph is time-consuming and also transforms the nature of expertise of those who use social science for their own ends. On this model philosophers who want to deploy social science for their own ends move from being consumers, who rely on external markers of quality control, to being co-responsible for the 'scientific' supply chain. Of course, there are some epistemic short-cuts (say by teaming up with others, getting advanced degrees in an adjoining field) each with their own risk and rewards, but there are no magic bullets. 

Obviously, there are fields (e.g., climate science, bits of neuroscience, epidemiology, etc.) where the underlying science draws itself on so many kinds of expertise and different kinds of evidence, that a lone philosopher is in a very bad position to do any forensic work. In my view, in such areas to be a responsible co-producer of knowledge requires joining either a research team, an interdisciplinary center with active research meetings, or to cultivate a wide area of diverging scientific 'informants' so that you familiarize yourself with the working discussions of such teams when they evaluate the evidence that the composite parts create and how they evaluate claims of other teams (etc.). 

One way to mitigate the possibility of TEDI, Lefevere and I argue, is to make sure that in epistemic communities dissenting voices are heard and credited. (We think that facilitating this, even seeking out and amplifying critics, is a special role of aggregators [Polanyi calls these (recall) 'influentials']--prominent figures in the field that also interface with other fields and policy areas.) So, I am pleased to learn that Machery agrees (although a bit sad he did not credit us, or Polanyi!) As Machery notes, another way to mitigate the possibility of TEDI, is to seek out directly critics of one's views. 

In a zero-sum (funding and jobs) contest it's not so easy to ensure that the dissenters are heard. I mentioned the Feigenbaum and Levy paper because I also learned (from Levy) that back in the day, they had trouble obtaining grants for follow up research. Unsurprisingly they switched research focus. 

Often nay-sayers and critics are shut up by demanding that they offer an alternative theory or alternative approach to solve some problem. (If one is shaped by Kuhnian ideas or cost-benefit analysis ignoring critics may well be thought rational.) This norm  asymmetrically rewards the most confident voices. But the burden of proof ought to be on the producers of knowledge not on the critics. 

But if we philosophers are also knowledge producers, as I claim we are when we use science for our own ends, then we, too, must be willing to listen and seek out the critics of particular sciences within philosophy. In fact, lots of philosophy of special sciences house folk with critical attitudes toward reigning orthodoxy in a field they study without in any sense being anti-scientific (here are some examples, feel free to add your own): think of Stegenga's work on medical evidence, Femke Truijens (a former student) on clinical validity of clinical research in therapy, Jay Oldenburg and Anna Alexandrova on robustness analysis, Joel Katzav (and his colleagues) on the role of probabilistic assessment in climate science, and a whole range of philosophers of physics who helped develop challenges to 'Copenhagen.'

Even so, I suspects lots of professional philosophers worry that criticisms of particular ruling orthodoxy in science, slides into a kind of anti-science (familiar of now relatively dormant strains in continental/STS or in America's religious right), or might be co-opted by politically noxious forces. As Eric Winsberg, Neil Levy, and I warned, we saw this play out in the recent covid crisis.

In fact, riding on the coat-tails of hyped new science to tenure has been a rewarding rite of passage within analytic philosophy for a long time now. (No, I am not going to name names.) As Machery notes, it is kind of constitutive of "some of the most exciting philosophy" to do so.

We need to have more tools to think about the forensic role of philosophers as responsible co-producers of knowledge (when we are doing so), and the inductive risks involved. In my experience philosophers tend to resist wanting to internalize the inductive risk of our own work because we tend to model/understand ourselves as pure truth-seekers. The moment you critically introduce the incentive structure of the scientists or of the philosophers deploying that science, you are quickly accused of 'doing sociology' and somehow ignoring evidence or epistemic issues (it's an interesting fact that within philosophy and economics 'sociology' can still be used as a pejorative). About that some other time more (or just google 'methodological analytic egalitarianism'). But if we leave the consumer model in place, and the incentives for how we evaluate some of the most exciting philosophy, it is a means of making future generations of philosophers as credulous as ours. Perhaps, that's the human condition, but it would be nice if we could try to do better.

 

Riker on The Calculus of Consent; some Rawls and Strauss and the confused and unproductive state of Political Theory

As numerous writers have pointed out, political theory as a field of academic concentration has been in a confused and unproductive state for at least the last generation. Most of the academicians who have written about it have been either historians of ideas who speculated about the influence of writer A on writer B or literary critics who simply explicated and criticized the texts of A and B. Very few academicians have had the intellectual courage to play the role of A and B themselves; so that, in consequence, most contemporary political theory has been produced by politicians and journalists. Refusing thus to theorize themselves, most academicians have been limited to a consideration of intellectual primitives or of, what amounts to the same thing, the rantings and ideological tergiversations of half-educated modern pamphleteers. In almost no other field of study do the professionals thus abase themselves before the ancients and the amateurs.

    Not unsurprisingly, there has been much dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and in the last decade or so a number of writers have tried to reorient the study of political theory. Some, like Leo Strauss, have urged a return to the great tradition; but unfortunately the process of return, as it appears in the work of both master and students, has turned out to be an even more sterile historicism than that against which they revolted. Others, like T. D. Weldon and Carl Friedrich, have urged a close and systematic study of words; but again unfortunately, word-study, while a useful preliminary to theorizing, has produced no more than literary criticism and is not properly theory at all. Still others, the political behaviorists, have turned to the theories of contemporary psychology and sociology for a new start in theorizing about politics; and, while these writers have undoubtedly succeeded in generating descriptive theories that can actually be tested empirically, still their theories seem to have more in common with social psychology than with the traditional subject matter of politics. Furthermore, their positivistic character, wholly appropriate for descriptive theories, is far from satisfying to those who believe political theory should be at least partially normative. These three attempts at re-orientation have been useful in the study of history, philosophy, and behavioral science; but they have not added much to political theory itself. Indeed, if these three schools were all we had, it would be fair to say that political theory was no better off than before.

    There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.

Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.

I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.

About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation. 

So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)

Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*

I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)

No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)

These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:

If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)

Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]

Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).

After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)

From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:

The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)

In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them,  Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and  more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)

Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++  And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.

 

 

The Virginia School and Carl Schmitt: Wagner's Entangled Political Economy (pt 1)

    The second type of tension points to some challenging issues of dialectical theorizing. Perhaps most significantly, it appears in Buchanan’s distinction between constitutional and post-constitutional politics. This distinction was central both to The Calculus of Consent and The Limits of Liberty, and it was the dominant theme within his body of work. This tension appears clearly in the Calculus of Consent, and continues in his various subsequent efforts to use the playing of parlor games as serving as a useful framework for thinking about problems pertaining to the organization of human affairs. This scheme of thought is closed and deterministic and not open and creative. Yet there can surely be no doubt that despite his flirtations with closed schemes of thought, the Buchanan (1982) who asserted that order could be defined only through some emergent process was someone who necessarily embraced open schemes of thought that is not reducible to a few people deciding what kind of parlor game to play.
   This tension within Buchanan’s scheme of thought points toward a distinction between sentimental and muscular versions of liberalism. Perhaps nowhere is this distinction illustrated in sharper relieve than in comparing John Stuart Mill’s (1859) On Liberty with James Fitzjames Stephen’s (1873) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. For Mill, a liberal order was easy to achieve and maintain because personal liberty, equality before the law, and humanity were universal values, so human nature provided a bedding ground within which liberalism could flourish. Stephen agreed with Mill about liberty and equality, but not about the fraternal imperative being resident within human nature. Hence, Stephen thought that force would always be part of a well-ordered society, though he recognized that force could be used to subvert a liberal order as well as to support it. For the sentimental version of liberalism conveyed by Mill and later John Rawls (1971), human governance could be reduced to ethics, law, and commerce, leaving no room for the political insertion of force into society. For the muscular version of liberalism, free societies are not self-sustaining, and can degenerate without the proper use of force. While Stephen illustrated the muscular version of liberalism luminously, James Burnham (1943) traced that muscular version back to Machiavelli, and also associated it with such figures from the early 20th century as Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels. Burnham could very well have added Carl Schmitt (1932) and his recognition of the autonomy of the political to his menagerie of thinkers in the spirit of muscular liberalism.

    Buchanan’s position relative to the divide between sentimental and muscular liberalism is ambiguous. Much of this thinking reflected an “end of history” style of thinking whereby political force could be abolished through the creation of the proper constitutional rules. Yet, Buchanan never fully embraced this style of thinking. Sentimental liberalism treats liberty as a universal value. If so, people should readily embrace the challenge of living as free persons. But if a good part of the population is thought to be afraid of living freely (Buchanan 2005), either sentimental expressions of liberalism will transform liberty into servility (Belloc 1912) or political power will be
marshaled to lead protesters into accepting the liberal order. --Richard E. Wagner (2017)) James Buchanan’s "Liberal Theory of Political Economy: A Valiant but Failed Effort to Square the Circle" [published in Buchanan's Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of James M. Buchanan Edited by Peter J. Boettke and Solomon Stein , 2018.]

There is persistent strain of scholarship that aims to link important theorists of neo-liberalism -- Hayek, Eucken, Buchanan, Milton Friedman, etc. -- to Carl Schmitt's legal theory in order to unmask or show the true character of neo-liberalism. This is often illustrated with some references to their entanglement with Pinochet's dictatorship. While I do not want to dismiss such scholarship out of hand -- in some neoliberals, especially in Hayek, there is a strain of accommodation with temporary benevolent dictatorship --, but it is often not very illuminating. Sometimes, more rarely really, the point of the exercise is self-consciously to rehabilitate Schmitt as a kind of liberal, although one "free from democratic contamination." The quote is from a fascinating (1984) article in the Canadian Journal of Political Science by F.R. Cristi, a philosopher then at Wilfred Laurier.

I became aware of Cristi because I have been recently reading Richard E. ('Dick') Wagner's late works (at the urging of some of his students and admirers). Wagner is James Buchanan's first PhD student (or among the first), and also among his most prominent ones who played an important role in the development of 'Virginia school' public choice (alongside Buchanan, Tullock, and Nutter). More recently, Wagner has been developing an approach within public choice -- entangled political economy -- which draws on network theory, systems theory, polycentrism, and the Italian elite school (especially Pareto, Mosca, Michel, etc.) as well as the left strain of Austrian economics (associated with Wieser). Wagner also has a fondness for the sociologist, Elias. Wagner is widely read in social theory, and unusually for an economist, does not hide it. One reason to be interested in Wagner's entangled political economy is in its sober analysis of political life. For if corrosive rent-seeking by the powerful and connected is one of the Achilles-heels of liberal democracy then liberalism, or at least a realist liberalism (say of the sort defended by Matt Sleat) needs to come to terms with it. 

Much to my surprise, in Wagner's late works, Schmitt repeatedly shows up as an 'authoritarian liberal' and he cites Cristi's work repeatedly as source for this. (To be sure not the 1984 article I quoted above, but Cristi's 1998, book Carl Schmitt and Authoritarian Liberalism. But judging by Wagner's description of the latter the view is close to the 1984 article.) My own view -- which I share with Perry Anderson (no friend of liberalism) is -- that (recall) "Schmitt...never had any truck with liberalism." Leaving aside Cristi's motives and project, the question that I wish to pursue here is to what degree Wagner's position -- with its advocacy for a 'muscular' species of liberalism -- remains broadly liberal. 

The problem is that Wagner inserts his analysis in a historical set of contrasts attached to familiar names in the liberal tradition. On one side are Mill, Rawls, and much of Buchanan. These are sentimental liberals. And they are so called because and now I re-quote Wagner "human governance could be reduced to ethics, law, and commerce, leaving no room for the political insertion of force into society." I suspect that strictly speaking this claim is false about all three purported sentimentalists. But it's also a sufficiently familiar (realist) criticism of the latter two that I will accept something like it for the sake of argument.* In another work, Wagner explains this point (about the reduction of human governance to ethics, law, and commerce) as follows:

To assert the autonomy of the political seems superficially to clash with the traditional or classical notion of a society of free and independent individuals, perhaps still associated most strongly with John Stuart Mill (1863). This notion of liberalism appears to seek to reduce the political to some combination of economics, law, and ethics. The reduction to economics reflects the autonomy of economizing action. The reduction to law reflects the idea of a rule of law as replacing a rule of men, about which Rajagopalan and Wagner (2013) voice skepticism. The reduction to ethics reflects a presumption that humanity can will itself to be governed along the principles of one of those peaceable kingdom paintings where lions are lying with lambs. "The logic of economizing action: Universal form and particular practice" in (2016) Politics as a Peculiar Business: Insights from a Theory of Entangled Political Economy.

Before I get to this, I have to admit I find the way Wagner draws a contrast (in the material quoted at the top of this post) between Mill and Stephen a bit puzzling. While Stephen had many perceptive criticisms of the kind of hypocrisy and ideological blinders required to call Victorian England in any sense 'equal', his own underlying commitment was (as was clear to then contemporary commentators like Morley) un-egalitarian. To quote a key line from Stephen: "Men are fundamentally unequal, and this inequality will show itself arrange society as you like." See Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (LF ed.). Liberty Fund, 1874, pp. 152-153. (This is from the chapter 5, on the 'modern creed' of equality.) I return to Stephen's position below. I also found it odd to see Mill characterized as holding that "a liberal order was easy to achieve and maintain because personal liberty, equality before the law, and humanity were universal values." After all, Mill thought, to simplify, that many societies required English tutelage to be prepared for a liberal order.

Burnham was not confused about these matters during the phase when he was most enamored by Machiavelli and the Italian elite thinkers. In that period he did not think of himself as a liberal (either in the progressive twentieth century sense or the more nineteenth century classical sense that Buchanan ended up identifying himself with). After all, Burnham (a philosophically trained ex-Trotskyite) thought that managerialism would make liberalism (and Marxism) obsolete. One reason why his writings from the 1940s [recall The Managerial Revolution (1941) and The Machiavellians: the Defenders of Freedom (1943)] are so fascinating is that he is extremely insightful on the implosion of early twentieth century liberalism and the contours of the post WWII settlement, while completely missing the possibility of a neo-liberal revival.

I don't mean to suggest that there are no liberal ideas in Burnham. Burnham is explicitly not laissez-faire, and he denies that respect for private property is the end all or be all to defend what he calls 'freedom.' Rather he thinks that what's required for freedom is the possibility to provide criticism of the government, which must be constrained by law. And he thinks (in Madisonian fashion, and certainly this picks up a strain in Machiavelli) that it is competing powers/forces that maintain this freedom (beyond mores/norms). For Burnham the lesson is that concentrated power is dangerous. So, here Burnham is an accord with the ordoliberals of his own age, and trustbusters of the progressive era. But he argues this without much interest in much of what characterizes liberalism. (Burnham's rejection of equality slides into outright racism and sexism in his later work see (e.g. Suicide of the West)).

As an aside, I don't mean to suggest that there is no route into liberalism from Pareto (who was a liberal for most of  his life) and Italian Elite theory (as mediated by Burnham). The French political sociologist, Raymond Aron, read Burnham carefully and did develop a species of liberalism in which responsible elites play an important role.+

If we turn to Wagner's own use of Burnham and Schmitt, we see that what's crucial for him within his development of entangled political economy is what Wagner calls the 'autonomy of the political.' By this he means I think three distinct (but mutually supporting) claims: (i) politics is not reducible to economics or the economy (and so also has a proper form of activity of its own [and that analytically must be captured by its own methods])--sometimes there is an added claim that politics is 'parasitic' on the economy; (ii) the use of force is intrinsic to the political and, ultimately, unavoidable in political life. (The "parlor games" tend to obscure this fact.) Liberals who take liberal values for granted, and democrats who take democratic commitments of the people for granted, ultimately miss this point. (iii) Left to their own devices, the liberal economic order and civil society are not self-sustaining (hence the recurring crises within liberalism). What's needed is political will and force to save the liberal economic order from its own impotence (or crises).

In my view the great significance of Wagner's entangled political economy is its willingness to address the possibility (and dangers accompanying) the fact that liberalism may not be self-sustaining. And I hope to return to it before long. But I do want to register that Wagner's purported realism has slid into illiberalism in two characteristic ways. First, it's bedrock in liberalism, and anachronistically or not, Locke is the godfather of the idea, that force has to be backed by (legitimate) law and that if such law is unavailable, but the survival of individual members of society requires discretion, the use of force can be made accountable after the fact. (I owe this way of formulating it (recall) to Hume and Nomi Claire Lazar's States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies.)

It is by no means obvious that Wagner embraces this bedrock idea because his repeated invocations of Schmitt are meant to convey the idea "that the autonomy of the political within society is bound up in the ability of those who hold political power to act on and grant exceptions to rules and to act on and reinforce distinctions between friends and enemies." (from "Parasitical political calculation" in (2016) Politics as a Peculiar Business.) And accountability is never paired with this principle. 

Second, I have a sneaky suspicion that Wagner agrees with Stephen's rejection of egalitarianism. This is clear from another passage in Politics as a Peculiar Business that I will quote at length:

The autonomy of the political reflects recognition that power is ever present in society, along with recognition that people differ among themselves in both abilities and interests as these pertain to the relative attractiveness of comparatively introversive and extroversive lines of activity. In this respect, participation in political activity seems likely to hold generally stronger appeal for relatively extroversive types who find public interaction to be a source of energy rather than draining it away. While the autonomy of the political appears in the surface impression that a small number of rulers dominate large masses of citizens, that surface impression hides the sub-surface recognition that power is latent in human nature, and which manifests itself in numerous particular ways historically. That latency and its particular manifestation starts from recognition that humans could potentially be studied within the rubric of ethology as the study of the higher mammals, as against being studied as an independent species....While there may be little difference between a street porter and a philosopher (Levy and Peart, eds. 2008) when operating alone in Crusoe-like fashion, differences arise in societal settings, increasingly so as societal complexity increases as represented by an increasingly stratified division of labor, and with those differences both promoting hierarchy and intensifying the autonomy of the political.
To refer to human sociality is not necessarily to refer to something pleasant. Sociality might be pleasant, but often it is not. Sociality refers simply to orientations and activities that involve a multiple of people, and so are not phenomena recognizable to a Robinson Crusoe. The social mammals mostly exist in cooperative packs. A pack of wolves can bring down a moose even though the aggregate weight of those wolves is less than that of the moose. From time to time, quarrels will arise among the wolves in a pack, and with one of the quarreling wolves emerging as the leader of the pack. The social mammals display cooperation, conflict, and hierarchy as inseparable or entangled qualities, and human societies are no different in this regard.

It is possible that Wagner here is merely making a descriptive claim about the inevitability of social hierarchy in societies characterized by an advanced division of labor. But it is notable that he does so while stipulating that Levy & Peart's analytic egalitarianism only holds in small societies. For it is central to their analytic egalitarianism (which I tend to defend) -- which treats humans as broadly equal [in the way that Hobbes does] -- that any observed differences are due to social causes (not necessarily reducible to innate human differences). And so it looks like Wagner wishes to emphasize those features of elite theory that emphasize innate differences and social hierarchies and so implies that the elite that rules (with calibrated force), does so by nature (not law).

 

Fear is the Cause of Hatred: Joshua Child on economic growth and Jewish naturalization

Those that are for the admission of the Jews, say in answer to the aforesaid Reasons, viz .
1st, The subtler the Jews are, and the more Trades they pry into while they live here, the more they are like to increase Trade; and the more they do that, the better it is for the Kingdom in general, though the worse for the English Merchant, who comparatively to the rest of the People of England is not one of a thousand.
2dly, The thriftier they live, the better Example to our People; there being nothing in the World more conducing to enrich a Kingdom than thriftiness.
3dly, it is denied that they bring over nothing with them; for many have brought hither very good Estates, and hundreds more would do the like, and settle here for their Lives, and their Posterities after them, if they had the same freedom and Security here as they have in Holland and Italy, where the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and other Princes allow them not only perfect Liberty and Security, but give them the privilege of making Laws among themselves'; and that they would reside with us, is proved from the known  Principles of Nature, vz.
Principle 1. All Men by Nature are alike, as I have before demonstrated, and Mr. Hobbs hath truly asserted, how Erroneous soever he may be in other things.
Principle 2. Fear is the cause of Hatred, and hatred of separation from, as well as evil Deeds to, the Parties or Government hated, when opportunity is offered: This by the way shews the difference between a bare connivance at Dissenters in matters of Religion, and a toleration by Law; the former keeps them continually in Fear, and consequently apt to Sedition and Rebellion, when any probable occasion of success presents: The latter disarms cunning, ambitious minded Men, who, wanting a popular discontented Party to work upon, can effect little or nothing to the prejudice of the Government. And this methinks discovers clearly the cause why the Lutherans in Germany, Protestants in France, Greeks in Turkey, and Sectaries in Holland, are such quiet peaceable-minded-men, while our Non-conformists in England are said to be inclined to strife, War, and Bloodshed; Take away the cause and the Effect will cease.
While the Laws are in Force against Men, they think the Sword hangs over their Heads, and are always in fear (though the Execution be suspended) not knowing how soon Councils, or Counselors, Times or Persons, may change, it is only only Perfect Love that casts out fear; and all Men are in love with Liberty and security: It cannot be denied that the Industrious Bees have Stings (though Drones have not) yet Bees sting not, except those that hurt them, or disturb their Hives.

    It is said, the Jews cannot Intermarry with us, and therefore it cannot be supposed they will reside long amongst us, although they were treated never so kindly: Why not reside here as well as in Italy, Poland, and Holland? They have now no Country of their own to go to, and therefore that is their Country, and must needs so esteemed by them, where they are best used, and have the greatest Security.--Sir Josiah Child (1698) A new discourse of trade: wherein is recommended several weighty points relating to companies of merchants, the Act of Navigation, naturalization of strangers, and our woolen manufactures, the balance of trade, and the nature of plantations, p. 142-144 [I modestly modernized spelling--ES]

As I noted in a piece I contributed to The Reading Room, Josiah Child's writings on the naturalization of the Jews, which he developed in successive editions of his works, and his mercantile thought more generally were influential through the intercession of Vincent de Gournay in the political economy circles associated with the Encyclopédie. Child (1630/31–1699) was a MP, and governor of the East India Company, and had not trivial importance for its expansion in India. He is generally treated as a Mercantilist. As can be gleaned from the quoted passage (and larger context), he is advocating for policies that are meant to fundamentally copy Dutch success in trade and economics, and thereby displace their power. He has some claim to being the source of the very idea of economic progress.

Child frankly acknowledges that Jewish immigration and naturalization, which will bring in stock and trade-connections, may have zero-sum effects for relatively small number of English traders. But the overall effect will be good for the English economy due to the expansion of exports and change in culture they will bring. Child clearly thinks that, alongside trade, savings are essential to economic growth. The underlying idea is that once one opens borders to people and capital, a rising population and capital will facilitate trade and enhance competitiveness, and so allow the English to compete more successfully with the Dutch. Child does not suggest here that one should open borders to goods and commodities. People and capital are de facto treated as inputs with the goal (or output) being export of goods and a competitive trade balance.

That immigration may harm some locals was, as regular readers know (recall this post), tackled by John Toland in his (1714) Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland, Chapter XVI, by explicitly drawing on Locke’s political economy. But unlike Child, Toland addresses the displacement concerns of what one may call the working poor. Yes, they will have to compete with new workers. But these new workers will also ensure a larger internal market with an improved cost of living (due to "cheaper wrought" goods). And the goods will be cheaper not just because the division of labor can be more specialized, but also because the newcomers will bring technological improvements. The newcomer’s ‘stock’ is also a human capital. This build's on Child's own claim about the Jews ("subtler").  That is to say, Toland grasps and fully articulates the more liberal win-win logic that is essential to Locke's more liberal arguments, and later generalized by Hume and Smith. 

I can't prove that Toland read Child (although it would be surprising if he had not), but I would be amazed if Mandeville hadn't. For Child's "thrifty bees,' are clearly Mandeville's target in the Fable. In Mandeville's hive, they will indulge in luxury spending. 

Child inscribes his argument in what I (following Levy and Peart) call methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE): the positing of homogeneous human nature such that we're equal for theoretical (including moral and political) purposes. Observed differences are due to cultural, educational, institutional factors. This is developed (as I have argued) by Mandeville, but, as Child also notes, first articulated by Hobbes (recall here). 

That there is an important difference between mere toleration and formal legal recognition/protection is explained by Child in terms of its effect on one's expectations. The underlying logic is Hobbes', but I don't think Hobbes (who emphasizes the positive impact of the rule of law on stabilizing expectations and reducing uncertainty) actually makes this point. The security afforded by the rule of law is conducive to liberty and economic growth.

That "fear is the cause of hatred" does not, I think, have a Hobbesian provenance (although I would be delighted to learn otherwise).* It does have a Shakespearian ring: "In time we hate that which we often fear." And I suspect that lurking behind Shakespeare and Child is Machiavelli's Prince, Chapters 17&19. (There are other Machiavellian allusions in Child.) To be sure  Machiavelli is clear that part of political skill is to be feared without causing hatred. 

In fact, Child clearly recognizes that the benefit of an impartial rule of law, which does not discriminate against some groups, is not in the first instance economic but to reduce civil unrest greatly. And for him this is compatible with a thoroughgoing multiculturalism because he sees no problem in allowing the Jews self-government ("the privilege of making Laws among themselves') so they can maintain their identity.

On Orphaned Papers: Haldane and the Fate of Scientific Eugenics

This paper was submitted to the Annals with an accompanying letter to the Editor, Professor Lionel Penrose, dated 17 February 1960. It has lain as item 136 of the Penrose Papers in the Manuscripts and Rare Books section of University College Library until recently brought to our notice by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, to whom we wish to express our thanks. We would also like to thank Naomi Mitchison for permission to publish this interesting manuscript of her brother’s. Lastly we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms G. M. Furlong, curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books in the library of University College London. J.B.S. HALDANE (1996), "The negative heritability of neonatal jaundice,"Annals of Human Genetics, 60: 3-5. [HT: David Haig]

By an 'orphaned paper' I mean to refer to a paper accepted for publication in a volume quietly abandoned by the editor and, after years of ambiguity, it becomes unseemly to ask about its fate. Often there is no malice involved in such cases. Editors are humans, after all, and their professional activities may be interrupted for all kinds of (generally sad) reasons. Sometimes journals or presses fold or transition away from existing projects. A recent discussion on social media suggests that having some papers orphaned like this is not altogether unfamiliar to senior scholars.

My advice to younger scholars is not to show infinite patience and to pull your paper and resubmit it with an eye toward tenure clocks (and to archive it at a relevant site). And, this is why I use the language of 'orphan'; because orphans need not die still-born, and may get adopted and find all kinds of lovely homes and have lives that enrich us all. 

Haldane's paper was never orphaned in the technical sense.  For, there is no evidence it was accepted for publication when it was received by Penrose initially. (I return to this below.) Even so, I understand why Prof. Haig thought it a nice example of the phenomenon given the clear family resemblance to it. 

J.B.S. Haldane (1892 –1964), was a famous scientist and public intellectual in his day. For example, as I noted a few months ago, he was one of Ernest Nagel's targets as an anti-exemplar of "malicious" (Marxist) philosophy of science. The quoted passage at the top of  this post is, as should be clear, an editorial note attached to the paper. The paper was submitted while Haldane was at the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta (for background see here). Perhaps he thought the paper got lost in the mail or he moved on to other topics. 

The paper itself has been noticed after publication including by philosophers. So, for example, Peter Godfrey-Smith (65) cites it the make the important point that parents and off-spring may be "anti-correlated." (See also Sober, who credits learning about it from Godfrey-Smith.) More about this below.

An interesting fact about the recipient of the paper, Lionel Penrose, is that he changed the title of his chair from "Professor of Eugenics" (1945-1963) to "Professor of Human Heredity." The wikipedia entry also notes that "the "long delay" in changing this name was due to "legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored the "eugenics" element of his job title." This raises interesting questions about whether Penrose (who is the father of Roger Penrose) should have accepted the Chair in the first place (although he surely deserves our gratitude for his stance and the name change).* Be that as it may, it also tells us that UCL could have confronted its own entanglement with eugenics more forcefully already over half a century ago (rather than being shamed into incomplete and imperfect action (recall) by Dr. Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, and others recently). 

Haldane himself clearly remained interested in eugenics. I won't attempt here to summarize seriously his views, in part because they seem to have shifted over time. He was a critic of racial eugenics of his age, because he clearly thought much of it unscientific. It is not entirely clear to me if he would have welcomed a scientifically sound racial eugenics.

And at the core of the posthumously published paper, he makes clear the connection between eugenics and his own paper:

This example will, I hope, act as a warning against the assumption that where a character is mainly determined genetically it will be more frequent in the progeny of those who manifest it than in the progeny of those who do not. This assumption is taken for granted in popular expositions of Darwinism and of eugenics. It is doubtless more often true than false. But the case here considered is not trivial. (5)

This made me wonder whether Penrose prevented publication because he wanted to downplay the association between Darwinism, human genetics, and eugenics in the mid 1960s. (One interesting fact is that no referee reports are mentioned; this makes me suspect the paper was not sent out to referees.)

So, I checked some of the works on Haldane by Dr K. R. Dronamraju, who found the paper in the archives (for more on him see here). According to him "Haldane and Penrose enjoyed a lifelong friendship that was both cordial and mutually beneficial" (Popularizing Science: The Life and Work of JBS Haldane (2017) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 249). He also emphasizes that they agreed on eugenics, "They were opposed to the sterilization of mentally defective individuals that was advocated by some eugenic groups. Both shared the belief that the science of human genetics was still in its infancy and could not justify such far-reaching decisions." (250) Oddly, he does not offer any evidence for this claim, so it is hard to say if this was always the case. Unfortunately, after an imperfect search, I have been unable to find discussion of the 1996 paper by Dronamraju anywhere. So, I view my speculation as ungrounded in evidence. 

Haldane's warning that such cases of anti-correlation are not trivial has not, as Hirsch notes by quoting the same posthumously published passage by Haldane I have just quoted, been heard by those who wish to turn eugenics into a mature science. Hirsch is scathing about the inability to confront the limitations of heritability analysis by even the most scientifically serious (and not racist) eugenicists. Hirsch's heart seems to be in the right place, but I have to admit that I feel decidedly ambivalent about the very project of improving scientific eugenics even when purged from its racialist tendencies.+

I wonder, not for the first time, if everything that advances science should be published while recognizing, with a shudder, that apparently I am willing to contemplate not treating the 'rights' of all 'orphans' alike.

 

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of  an esoteric capacity 
for grasping  the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require 
modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of thought, 
identifiable and effective in the ordinary affairs of human life. The achievements 
of science are the products of a cooperative social enterprise, which has refined 
and extended skills encountered in the meanest employments of the human 
intellect. The principles of human reason, far from representing the immutable 
traits of all possible being, are socially cultivated standards of competent 
intellectual workmanship. The life of reason as embodied in the community of 
scientific effort is thus a pattern of life that generates an autonomous yet 
controlling ideal. That  ideal requires disciplined dedication without servitude to
 any ultimate authority, imposes responsibility for performance upon individual 
judgment but demands  responsiveness to the criticism of others, and calls for  
adherence to a tradition of workmanship without commitment to any system of 
dogma. To many commentators, the ideals realized in the enterprise of science are
 also the ideals  which areindispensable to the successful operation of any society 
of free men. Many thinkers, indeed, like John Dewey in America, have based their 
hopes for the future of mankind upon the extension of the habits of scientific 
intelligence to every stratum  of communal life and to every  form of social 
organization. --Ernest Nagel (1954), "The Perspectives of Science and the Projects 
of Man," in Sovereign Reason 306

In analytic philosophy fame is transient. For example, Ernest Nagel is now largely forgotten; a few contemporary philosophers of science are familiar with his writings on reductionism and a few others are familiar with his work on function statements. But I doubt he is the subject of many graduate seminars, and I suspect almost none of his papers are taught regularly. That Nagel was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation, influential supervisor, prolific author across many philosophical topics, introducing countless students and their teachers to Gödel’s Proof, and an intellectual polemicist of the first order is now merely a historical footnote.

So, for example, Misak calls "Nagel, perhaps Dewey’s best graduate student" (116) in her influential, The American Pragmatists. She discusses  him as "the paradigm of an analytic, logically inclined, philosopher of science in America," (150). But while she uses some of Nagel's writings throughout her work in discussing other thinkers, and hints that he may be responsible for the synthesis between logical positivism and pragmatism, (163) at bottom she devotes little space to him. 

This neglect is a shame because in addition to being technically among the more competent philosophers of his generation, Nagel was widely read, fiercely sought out opposing views, and always makes clear that philosophical disagreement may matter to the fate of civilization. As regular readers know I think Nagel decisively shaped the character of contemporary analytic philosophy, including its orientation on puzzle solving (even though in some senses we have not been as ambitious as he hoped as we'll show below). But today I assume that in the background. Here I focus on his own sense that in the wake of Einstein the "classical conception of scientific knowledge" (302)* had to be replaced with something new.

For Nagel, science shapes the broader culture in two distinct ways: first, as the fount of technologies and medicines. Second, by challenging established beliefs and intellectual habits (297). And while the former is more emphasized, not the least by scientists in their appeals for resources (296), the latter can also help re-shape (amongst others) our "basic aspirations," our "moral commitments," and "the principles" by which "actions" are evaluated (297).

These facts generate a "threefold task" for philosophy: (i) clarifying the bearing of trends in scientific inquiry upon pervasive conceptions of our place in nature; (ii) of making explicit the intellectual methods by which responsibly held beliefs are achieved; and (iii) of interpreting inherited beliefs and institutions in the light of current additions to knowledge. (297-298) This has an interest implication. For all three involve philosophy of science. And while we tend to think of philosophy of science as a fairly focused enterprise (characterized by (ii)) -- e.g., "the clarification of scientific procedures" (307) and the stress testing of concepts (306) --, for Nagel, philosophy of science becomes first philosophy: "the boundaries of the philosophy of science are in fact the boundaries of philosophy itself." (298) And while (i) speaks to what we may call the existentialist call to philosophy, the third (iii) involves, more dangerously, philosophical activity with the life of her (imagined) community. 

The quoted passage at the top of this post leaves it unclear to what degree Nagel agrees with his mentor, Dewey, that society needs to be modelled on the post-classical conception of science (which is fallabilist, embraces the significance of what is now known as Duhem-Quine, and which is aware of possible incommensurabilities). Nagel rejects the cult of genius and thinks that science is a collaborative enterprise, which involves the systematic and socially sustained refinement of ordinary cognitive processes. So, rather than seeing a scientific society as a means toward a technocratic elite, the idea that society needs to be modeled on science is thought be democratic in a non-trivial sense.

Crucially, on this model science is not a method of silencing others behind an authoritative consensus, but a mechanism by which one becomes responsive to reasons and participates in a social division of labor that is in some sense self-legislating. And so, this helps generate (through its spokesperson in philosophy of science, and in lived experience) an "attitude, at once critical and experimental, toward the perennial as well as the current issues of human life." (307)

And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that philosophy of science so understood, is "a champion of the central values of liberal civilization." And while in the early 1950s the survival of liberal civilization was more secure than it had been in a generation, it is clear that securing such a civilization is one of Nagel's main aims in all his polemics (recall; and here). And, of course, by providing freedom of thought, liberal civilization is conducive to a humane philosophy of science (understood as first philosophy):

The basis for a general outlook on the place of man in nature is supplied by detailed knowledge of the structure of things supplied by the special sciences— an outlook that contemporary philosophy of science has helped to articulate and defend. In the perspective of that outlook, the human creature is not an autonomous empire in the vast entanglement of events and forces constituting the human environment. Nevertheless, no antecedent limits can be set to the power of scientific reason to acquire theoretical mastery over natural and social processes. Every doctrine which pretends to set such limits contains within itself the seeds of intolerance and repression. Moreover, in the perspective of that scientifically grounded outlook, human aspirations are expressions of impulses and needs which, whether these be native or acquired, constitute the ultimate point of reference for every justifiable moral judgment. The adequacy of such aspirations must therefore be evaluated in terms of the structures of human capacities and the order of human preferences. Accordingly, though the forces of nature may one day extinguish the human scene, those forces do not define valid human ideals, and they do not provide the measure of human achievement. But an indispensable condition for the just definition and the realization of those ideals is the employment and extension of the method of intelligence embodied in the scientific enterprise. A judicious confidence in the power of reason to ennoble the human estate may seem shallow to an age in which, despite the dominant position in it of scientific technology, there is a growing and pervasive distrust of the operations of free intelligence. It may indeed be the case that the temper of mind essential to the exercise of such intelligence has no immediate social future. But the cultivation of that intellectual temper is a fundamental condition for every liberal civilization. By making manifest the nature of scientific reason and the grounds for a continued confidence in it, contemporary philosophy of science has been a servant of men’s noblest and most relevant ideals. (307-8)

It would be tempting to give Nagel the last word. But it is notable that he assigns to philosophy of science also (iv) the task of making manifest "the grounds for...continued confidence" in the nature of scientific reason. The future orientation of this task is quite striking. What could merit that?** So, lurking in Nagel's "naturalist" program is the presupposition that either skepticism can be defeated or, well, that we can be persuaded to it ignore its challenge.