Digressions&Impressions

Le Bon vs Condorcet

If the individuals of a crowd confined themselves to putting in common the ordinary qualities of which each of them has his share, there would merely result the striking of an average, and not, as we have said is actually the case, the creation of new characteristics. How is it that these new characteristics are created? This is what we are now to investigate.
    Different causes determine the appearance of these characteristics peculiar to crowds, and not possessed by isolated individuals. The first is that the individual forming part of a crowd acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration that, a crowd being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which always controls individuals disappears entirely.
   The second cause, which is contagion, also intervenes to determine the manifestation in crowds of their special characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude very contrary to his nature, and of which a man is scarcely capable, except when he makes part of a crowd.
   A third cause, and by far the most important, determines in the individuals of a crowd special characteristics which are quite contrary at times to those presented by the isolated individual. I allude to that suggestibility of which, moreover, the contagion mentioned above is neither more nor less than an effect.
   To understand this phenomenon it is necessary to bear in mind certain recent physiological discoveries. We know to-day that by various processes an individual may be brought into such a condition that, having entirely lost his conscious personality, he obeys all the suggestions of the operator who has deprived him of it, and commits acts in utter contradiction with his character and habits. The most careful observations seem to prove that an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd in action soon finds himself—either in consequence of the magnetic influence given out by the crowd, or from some other cause of which we are ignorant—in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser. The activity of the brain being paralysed in the case of the hypnotised subject, the latter becomes the slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord, which the hypnotiser directs at will. The conscious personality has entirely vanished; will and discernment are lost. All feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser.
   Such also is approximately the state of the individual forming part of a psychological crowd. He is no longer conscious of his acts. In his case, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, at the same time that certain faculties are destroyed, others may be brought to a high degree of exaltation. Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity. This impetuosity is the more irresistible in the case of crowds than in that of the hypnotised subject, from the fact that, the suggestion being the same for all the individuals of the crowd, it gains in strength by reciprocity.
The individualities in the crowd who might possess a personality sufficiently strong to resist the suggestion are too few in number to struggle against the current. At the utmost, they may be able to attempt a diversion by means of different suggestions. It is in this way, for instance, that a happy expression, an image opportunely evoked, have occasionally deterred crowds from the most bloodthirsty acts.
   We see, then, that the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning of feelings and ideas in an identical direction by means of suggestion and contagion, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into acts; these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a crowd. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.
   Moreover, by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd—and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
   It is for these reasons that juries are seen to deliver verdicts of which each individual juror would disapprove, that parliamentary assemblies adopt laws and measures of which each of their members would disapprove in his own person.--Gustave Le Bon (1986 [1895] [Psychologie des Foules] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pp. 6-8 (translation of second edition published by Dover)

The (1785) Condorcet Jury theorem tells us that with modest assumptions, the rule of more is better and, thereby, vindicates democracy from the verdict of history by all the learned. A century later, near the end of his book, Le Bon  admits that "the parliamentary system represents the ideal of all modern civilised peoples. The system is the expression of the idea, psychologically erroneous, but generally admitted, that a large gathering of men is much more capable than a small number of coming to a wise and independent decision on a given subject." (123) While the official theme of Le Bon's book is to offer an explanation of the functioning of crowds qua crowds, there are two sub-themes in his argument: first, how come the psychologically erroneous idea persists as a civilizational dogma (that is, Le Bon gives us a theory of the rise and fall of civilizations and institutions)?; second, why does the Jury Theorem fail so often in practice, despite the fact that it should function as a self-fulling prophecy given that people widely expect it to succeed?+ Lurking in the second sub-theme is an account of why institutions fail in different places despite the pull of incentives, and why demagogues may succeed.

Le Bon is no friend of democracy. But in this book he has little interest in offering a replacement for democracy because he accepts Tocqueville's claim that in an era of equality men have "an almost limitless confidence in the judgments of the public." In fact, he quite clearly argues that limiting the franchise to a meritocratic sub-set (a la Mill or Brennan) won't improve matters. Because for him once in a crowd, even widely diverging people behave similarly and lose a lot of the characteristics that give them their individuality.* In a crowd "men always tend to the same [low] level.....with regard to social problems... mean are substantially, equally ignorant."

Before I confront the announced subject of this post, I need to be clear about some of his population assumptions. Le Bon works with a contrast between barbarism and civilization. And once in a crowd otherwise civilized people are likely to become barbaric. Despite Le Bon's racism, all kinds of people can become civilized. (Throughout the book, he treats Islam as one of the great civilizations.) Le Bon also works with a racial theory. And it does important work for him because for him races have deep-seated commitments that help explain how people qua people respond differently to stimuli and incentives.

I actually think that what Le Bon calls a 'race,' is (for students) better translated by 'nation.' For, while Le Bon is undoubtedly casually racist (and sexist) in our modern sense (and clearly admires Anglo-Saxons over his own Latins), his race theory turns out to be primarily sociological: that is, a race is constituted by shared history, shared dogmatic commitments, and shared practices (including language). So, Le Bon's 'race' is not far removed from Renan's 'nation.' And crucially the biological stock of a race is never pure according to Le Bon. (This is because for him barbarism, which is always prior to civilization, is always a period of mixing.) And somewhat surprisingly -- given his reactionary mindset -- when explaining crowds no race escapes being barbaric in the crowd.

The brilliance of Condorcet's proof resides, in part, in the fact that (a) he assumes very modest voter competence. All that is needed (recall) is better than chance odds for getting things right. Let's call this average intelligence. Unlike modern students of Condorcet, who recognize that the conditions of (b) independence and (c) lack of communication, may often be violated, Le Bon thinks this (a) is the weak part of Condorcet's proof. For  while Le Bon accepts Condorcet's assumption that in a crowd we are (d) sincere, Le Bon thinks that once we become part of a crowd (and for him juries are also crowds) in our sincerity our competence reduces below such average. We become as it were for him hypnotized automatons. 

To be sure, Le bon thinks that in a crowd we stop acting independently in large part because through the mechanism of contagious sympathy, we end up being suggestible by the same influences. Group diversity, which might give a crowd intellectual strength, evaporates for Le Bon and we become homogeneous, hypnotized automatons in a crowd.  And while the Stoic sage is homogeneous with other Stoic sage in his philosophical virtue, crowds act like one in pursuit of one idol or another.

One may well wonder if the shared feeling of invincibility is really the triggering cause of crowd-like phenomena, and to what degree hypnosis is really the best physiological explanation and explanatory analogy for crowd behavior. I am here not to defend Le Bon. But I do note it is no objection to Le Bon's theory that some crowds get it right or produced fine political outcomes. Le Bon explicitly admits that crowds may well be heroic or help found great civilizations (etc.). If you are fond of great strikes or mass protests, Le Bon is happy to admit that these shape history.

Rather the key point is that friends of Condorcet's jury theorem assume methodological individualism: that being within a jury/crowd baseline competence is not reduced or at least not so reduced as to fall under average. And Le Bon points out this commitment (a) needs to be earned if, as is not wholly implausible, cognitive characteristics are changed when in large company (subject to polarization, group loyalty, sense of justice, etc.).

One way to put this is that in practice, the assumptions of independence and lack of communication secure the modest competence the Jury Theorem relies on. Le Bon's point is recognized by many procedural interventions/norms that prevent a group of deciding individuals to act as crowds.** That is to say, deliberative democrats are, in a way, Le Bon's true heirs. 

 

 

 

On Weatherson on Political Principles

When senator John McCain died last year, there was an outpouring of appreciation for his career from across the political spectrum. The praise was just as strong, if not stronger, from those who had been on the opposite side of politics from McCain as from those on his own.

There is a superficial puzzle about this. Why should people who put so much effort into preventing McCain from achieving various political goals now praise his wonderful and admirable career?

But that’s an easy puzzle. Democracy isn’t war. Though it can be shot through with martial language and metaphors, democracy ultimately requires a high level of respect between the “warring” sides. Without that, the peaceful exchange of power that characterises democracy becomes impossible. In fact, if one’s view of democracy doesn’t distinguish between electoral campaigns and artillery campaigns, that democracy will be an inherently fragile project.

I’m not sure whether John McCain was principled. For that matter, I’m not sure if there is any good explanation of why he deserved this kind of cross-party praise. But some people do, and it is good to think about what makes them deserving. And the suggestion that we should admire our principled opponents is interesting.

At first glance, this looks like a plausible solution to the puzzle over when we should admire an opponent. An opponent may be admirable because they are principled, because they work hard to advance their sincerely held moral principles. But they are nevertheless an opponent, because we don’t share their principles, and we do not think their principles should be advanced.

But at second glance, this story can’t be right. It is too easy to be principled. Fanatics, terrorists and racists can all have sincerely and deeply held moral principles, and they can make enormous sacrifices to advance those principles. Yet that doesn’t make them worthy of admiration and respect...

So, if we admire our opponents, it shouldn’t be because they are principled. They may well be principled, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too easy to be principled. And since being principled is neither a redeeming feature among the wicked nor what we admire in the virtuous, we have to ask again: what makes some of our adversaries more admirable?

A better answer is that we have many different values that we try to promote through political action. We want our fellow humans to be free from oppression and also free from hunger. We want them to flourish and be free to choose how to live their lives, but also to be restricted from harming others.

Some political fights come about because others do not share our values, or because they value things that we think lack value. Perhaps they in fact positively value racial segregation, or they positively value having power concentrated in the hands of rich, white men. Few people nowadays would express such values this bluntly, or even acknowledge to themselves that this is what they value, but still their actions can reveal such disrespectable values. And there are certainly people fighting against such actions and values today.

But, crucially, not all fights are like that. Other fights arise when a plurality of values come into conflict. And in those cases, very different trade-offs can occur. Some people who really share our values make very different choices about which to prioritise, and to what degree, when those values come into conflict. And these choices might not be one-off; the people in question might systematically make different choices when there is a trade-off to be made.

That’s where you find the really admirable, really respect-worthy, opponents. There are people in politics who are promoting truly valuable ends. Or, at least, they are promoting ends we agree are valuable. They might disagree with us, perhaps dramatically, on questions of everyday policy. But their disagreements are grounded in a shared appreciation of the many and varied interests of the people affected by a policy.

...

Ultimately, what matters is not whether someone is principled, but whether they have been promoting genuinely good things. There are many ends worth pursuing, and politics is about trade-offs between values as well as clashes between people with incompatible values. When we acknowledge this, we begin to see how someone pursuing an important aspect of what is good can end up an opponent. Ideally, we’d talk them over to our side, or at least meet in the middle after listening to what the other has to say. But that won’t always happen. And when it doesn’t, we shouldn’t forget the values they are fighting for, and admire their fight.--Brian Weatherson "How to get on with your political enemies" @ NewStatesman [HT Dailynous]

Weatherson's interesting essay raises issues that I have reflected on, prompted by an important essay by Jason Brennan, obliquely while struggling to articulate the idea that terrorists have genuine courage (and, perhaps, can  be heroes). Before I get to that, three quick comments: first, the outpouring for the  senator John McCain was primarily due to him not being Donald Trump (and an occasional critic of Trump, even denying Trump crucial legislative victory on his deathbed). That's compatible with people also admiring and liking other features of McCain's character. Second, I assume Weatherson was not responsible for the headline above his piece--after all, he denies one could get on with one's real political enemies (the ones he would call "fanatics, terrorists" etc.) Third, his piece tacitly assumes a distinction, familiar (recall) from Chantal Mouffe's work, between a political adversary (or in Weatherson's terminology an "opponent") -- one that, if Weatherson is right, one is capable of praising -- and a political enemy ("fanatics, terrorism," etc.) that one that one could never praise. In what follows I assume the distinction, but what follows does not require it (because I don't want to be unfair to Weatherson).

I mention Mouffe's distinction because I want to note that the potential adversary is, on Weatherson's account, somebody whose ends one can endorse even if one cannot endorse the priority one gives to them. (This is reminiscent of, but distinct from, (recall) the twentieth century technocratic fiction that the only genuinely political disagreements were over means not ends.) I think it is undoubtedly true that it is psychologically easier to admire somebody whose ends one can endorse than somebody whose ends one must disagree with. So far so good.

But Weatherson makes things a bit easy for himself by leaving a conceptual gap between those (enemies) whose ends one cannot endorse and those (adversaries) whose ends one can endorse. I think there are political adversaries whose ends one rejects, but who one does not come to see as an enemy. For, there can be a huge difference between a fanatic and a terrorist, who, let's stipulate, is willing to blow up innocent people for a cause. By contrast, a fanatic can respect innocent lives, etc. My view is that most moral struggles require some fanatics to get off the ground and to be sustained against great adversity. These are people who go against public opinion, are unwilling to accept election or legal outcomes as a final word, and keep up mobilizing and struggling. A democracy worth having -- Thoreau is, I think, the first to make this point, but it also resonates with thoughts in J.S. Mill  --  needs to find a place for the moral fanatics. 

Weatherson could agree with this last point, by suggesting that the moral fanatics whose ends we endorse are not really enemies (nor really fanatics) but adversaries. Surely such moral fanatics exist. But there are plenty of political struggles informed by visions he/we may find immoral (Weatherson helpfully suggests 'racists').

Now, to get to my major disagreements with Weatherson: I think democracy will be an inherently fragile project if one treats those whose moral ends one disagrees with as (Mouffian) enemies or fanatics (or irrational).* This does turn any major moral disagreement over ends into possible war, indeed. 

As regular readers know I think the institutions of the states we call liberal democracies make best sense because they presuppose that a reliably moral citizenry is impossible;+ that the conditions under which political leaders will act reliable on the demand of morality are fragile; and that (recall) when citizens vote they are quite likely to favor interest over morality (in cases where these conflict). Note that the previous sentence is compatible with plenty of leaders and citizens being moral most of the time. When I write that "a moral citizenry is impossible," I mean to entail also that citizens can disagree over moral ends, fanatically so.

Now moral fanatics may accept some democratic values (e.g., non-violence, etc.), but reject others (e.g., compromise). But it does not follow they need to be treated as enemies even if one finds their ends truly misguided. Democracy as a whole benefits from the non-conforming moral fanatics. They hold sometimes very unpleasant mirrors to our lives and make us confront what values we may embrace and come to embrace. That is to say, democracy does not presuppose agreement over moral ends, but it may well come to be a means to teach us (some of) our moral ends. For this function to work it has to be possible, genuinely possible, for the would-be-moral-fanatic to be in genuine moral error and that what we take to be the bounds of acceptable opinion can shift. Obviously there are some tough cases, but where to draw the line is not my present concern.

If it is possible that the unity of  virtues does not hold -- and (recall) it very likely does not -- then one can express many virtues, steadfastness, courage in following one's conscience, in the service of what may turn out to be bad ends. From the perspective of a democratic society, such steadfastness may well be a major irritant even a contribution to making the wold worse off, but it can still be admirable in some respects, including providing a contribution to our political life (by undermining lazy conformism, ensuring vibrant exchange of ideas, etc).

I think Weatherson and I disagree here. But there is a way to reconcile our differences: I treat the indirect promotion of a  vibrant political community -- as potentially immoral fanatics are capable of doing -- as a genuine good thing. And even if the would-be-immoral fanatic has no desire to promote a vibrant political community, I can admire her contribution to it, and even praise her principled stand (while rejecting her principles). Perhaps, Weatherson will agree that one can praise the unintended, but foreseaable promotion of good things?

 

 

Mill's Argument against Benevolent/epistemic Dictatorships

The supposition is, that absolute power, in the hands of an eminent individual, would insure a virtuous and intelligent performance of all the duties of government. Good laws would be established and enforced, bad laws would be reformed; the best men would be placed in all situations of trust; justice would be as well administered, the public burdens would be as light and as judiciously imposed, every branch of administration would be as purely and as intelligently conducted as the circumstances of the country and its degree of intellectual and moral cultivation would admit. I am willing, for the sake of the argument, to concede all this, but I must point out how great the concession is, how much more is needed to produce even an approximation to these results than is conveyed in the simple expression, a good despot. Their realization would in fact imply, not merely a good monarch, but an all-seeing one. He must be at all times informed correctly, in considerable detail, of the conduct and working of every branch of administration, in every district of the country, and must be able, in the twenty-four hours per day, which are all that is granted to a king as to the humblest laborer, to give an effective share of attention and superintendence to all parts of this vast field; or he must at least be capable of discerning and choosing out, from among the mass of his subjects, not only a large abundance of honest and able men, fit to conduct every branch of public administration under supervision and control, but also the small number of men of eminent virtues and talents who can be trusted not only to do without that supervision, but to exercise it themselves over others. So extraordinary are the faculties and energies required for performing this task in any supportable manner, that the good despot whom we are supposing can hardly be imagined as consenting to undertake it unless as a refuge from intolerable evils, and a transitional preparation for something beyond. But the argument can do without even this immense item in the account. Suppose the difficulty vanquished. What should we then have? One man of superhuman mental activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people. Their passivity is implied in the very idea of absolute power. The nation as a whole, and every individual composing it, are without any potential voice in their own destiny. They exercise no will in respect to their collective interests. All is decided for them by a will not their own, which it is legally a crime for them to disobey. What sort of human beings can be formed under such a regimen?... 

A good despotism means a government in which, so far as depends on the despot, there is no positive oppression by officers of state, but in which all the collective interests of the people are managed for them, all the thinking that has relation to collective interests done for them, and in which their minds are formed by, and consenting to, this abdication of their own energies. Leaving things to the government, like leaving them to Providence, is synonymous with caring nothing about them, and accepting their results, when disagreeable, as visitations of Nature.-- J.S. Mill (1861) Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter 3.

In Against Democracy, Jason Brennan suggests that Mill's argument for representative democracy is based on the idea that democratic participation would make people smarter, more concerned with the public good, and nobler. In Brennan's memorable words, Mill hoped to turn Hooligan/Hobbit-like people into Vulcans by widening the franchise. That is, one way to understand this interpretation of Mill, is to see in democratic participation a potentially politically transformative experience (PTE recall). Reflecting on the reality of partisanship, Brennan finds Mill's argument wanting empirically. Let's grant, for the sake of argument, Brennan's interpretation of the empirical facts here. Let's also grant that sometimes Mill has some such hopes for the effects of democracy.

As Brennan correctly observes, Mill's actual (plural) voting design reflects an elitist strain--it lets the aristocratic (in the  intellectual sense) elite have more weight. This suggests that Mill was not especially optimistic about the transformative effects.  This is no surprise: Mill has a healthy distrusts of crowds, and especially the effects of public opinion (which, recall, he thinks is conformist and homogenizing). As he notes, in reflecting on these, "that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity." (On Liberty, Chapter III). Unlike contemporary democrats, Mill does not expect public reason to be developed in mass democratic society. That is, he shares with Brennan a skepticism about any public reason project (if that project is not guided by experts.) Mill's distrust of public opinion, which also informs his analysis of free speech -- he is extremely alert to the fact how majorities silence minorities -- should alert us that Brennan may be missing something about the underlying sensibility of Mill's position. 

Now, Mill has lots of arguments for widening the democratic franchise as much as possible, and the present post only reflects what I take to be ones that may engage with premises that Brennan would share. I see in the quoted passage two kinds of arguments against epistemocratic, benevolent dictatorship. To be sure, that's not Jason's position because he wants voting by the informed (a position that is, in fact, Mill-ian in spirit), but it's useful to reflect on these anyway (in part, this is not required for the rest of the post, but  I say it anyway, because it's easy to see how Jason's arguments would slide into abolishing elections altogether). 

First, Mill articulates the proto-Hayekian argument that benevolent/epistemocratic rule faces a calculation problem. (I think the argument is indebted to Smith.) The problem is really two-fold: one is purely epistemic -- 'the conduct and working of every branch of administration, in every district of the country, and must be able, in the twenty-four hours per day, which are all that is granted to a king as to the humblest laborer, to give an effective share of attention and superintendence to all parts of this vast field" --, but the other is more moral: namely the ruling elite(s) must be able to judge character ("honest and able"). The first of these arguments, Brennan is happy to concede -- for Brennan, I suspect, markets > experts > government --, but the second is a real problem for any elite rule. 

There are two versions of the moral version of the proto-Hayekian argument. Both are explicitly recognized by Brennan (although I am unsure he recognizes these are Mill's arguments): in the real world people with power can't be trusted to use the means of exclusion in fair and impartial ways. This is true both at the level of procedure, but also at the level of what will count as the relevant knowledge to be selected for--this will be essentially contested. (Brennan recognizes this, but shrugs it off.) The second is that to be a responsible elite does not just require epistemic skills, but also the right moral dispositions (this falls under what Brennan calls the competence principle). And according to Mill, a self-selecting epistemocratic elite lacks access to the relevant information about the moral competence of their peers. I think we can strengthen Mill's argument, again on grounds that Brennan would accept, that cognitive elites will neglect the relevant information about the lack of moral fitness of their peers due to familiar group biases (reinforced by their self-interest). That is, once knowledge is a means to rule, knowledge becomes a source of faction (with all the dangers attending it).

The upshot of the proto-Hayekian argument by Mill is an argument against elite rule and for small government (and, as Mill noted, lots of worker managed cooperatives). But it's also meant to be an argument for a wider franchise, because it suggests that when all things are equal, wider participation by the ignorant is better than narrow participation of the smart because the narrow participation will always lead to expert overconfidence and to self-reinforcing biases. Note that this is essentially negative argument: Mill completely allows that wider participation is going to be oppressive (because anything the masses will do is oppressive).

The second argument in the quoted passage suggests that elite rule will make the people passive (in the way that certain forms of Christianity make folk quietist). That is to say, Brennan is right to be alert to the fact that many forms of political participation makes things objectively worse; Mill grants that. But creating a form of government in which mobilization and participation is not encouraged also makes things worse: it reinforces human passivity.

Notice, again, that the argument is a negative one. Mill knows that active human beings are capable of very bad things. (His cult of genius allows that genius-gone-bad -- Alcibiades -- is very bad.)  But we may say that Mill has high tolerance for risk here. For he thinks that active human beings are an intrinsic good worth aiming at. And we should never opt for a social structure that reinforces passivity in the population as such. (Mill thinks that not just boring, but (a) ultimately not dynamic economically, and (b) intrinsically oppressive--because a passive population will be homogeneous, etc.)

One can grant, thus, Brennan that political mobilization does not turn us into enlightened folk (I really doubt Mill expected that), but Brennan seems to overlook Mill's (secularized Christian) point that freedom involves the freedom to make one's own mistakes. This is not ad hoc in Mill: for Mill political freedom involves an "experiment of living" for each of us. Brennan thinks allowing such experiments means, in practice, to have the unjust create bad effects for all of us. Mill does not deny this; he thinks that just is a consequence of any political life. (His is not Bentham's technocratic hope of getting it right.) But in Brennan's risk aversion and noble outrage at injustice, he misses (and so does not account for) the unexpected goods that come from allowing folk to mess up, even mess up big time.*

 

On Philosophical Expertise, Systematicity, and Coherence

...The puzzle presupposes that we ought to defer to experts.  But that only makes sense if we've reason to expect that expertise in a domain sufficiently increases epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs.  That's certainly the case for many domains -- it's why we should defer to scientific experts, for example.  But it arguably isn't so for philosophy in general.

Philosophical expertise seems compatible with being completely off the rails when it comes to the substantive content of one's philosophical views.  And this is to be expected once we appreciate that (i) there are many possible internally coherent worldviews, (ii) philosophical argumentation proceeds through a mixture of ironing out incoherence and making us aware of possibilities we had previously neglected, and so (iii) even the greatest expertise in these skills will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place.  Increasing the coherence of someone who is totally wrong (i.e. closer to one of the many internally coherent worldviews that is objectively incorrect) won't necessarily bring them any closer to the truth.

Publish

To put a more subjective spin on it: One's only hope of reaching the truth via rational means is to trust that your starting points are in the right vicinity, such that an ideally coherent version of your worldview would be getting things right.  So we've only got reason to defer to others if their verdicts are indicative of what our idealized selves would conclude.  Often, we can reasonably judge that other philosophers have views so alien to our own that it's unlikely that procedurally ideal reflection (increasing internal coherence) would lead us to share those views.  In such cases, we've no reason to defer to those philosophers, however 'expert' they may be.

(Terminological variant: If you want to build into the definition of a subject-area 'expert' that deference to expert judgement is mandatory, then you should restrict attributions of expertise to those whose starting points are sufficiently similar to your own.)

tl;dr: We should only be epistemically moved by peer disagreement (and related phenomena) when we take the other person's views to be evidence of what we ourselves would conclude upon ideal reflection.  Philosophical intransigence is thus often justified, insofar as we can justifiably believe that an improved version of our view could be developed that is at least as internally coherent as the opposing views. This remains true even if we judge that the defenders of the opposing views are (in purely procedural terms) smarter / better philosophers than we are ourselves.--Richard Yetter Chappell@Philosophy, et cetera, "Philosophical Expertise, Deference, and Intransigence" [HT: Liam Kofi Bright & Dailynous.]

I like that in his post, Yetter Chappell does not simply assume that philosophical expertise is like scientific expertise in all the relevant ways.* In particular, he claims that the are very important differences between science and philosophy when it comes to "epistemic reliability, i.e. the likelihood of true beliefs." Drawing on work of Jason Brennan, he assumes that philosophical methods are not sufficient for generating true beliefs (recall also Katzav's skepticism). Let's spot him the thought, for the sake of argument, that scientific communities have methods that generate true beliefs in some specialist domain. (It is not un-problematic as the history of scientific revolutions and belief change suggests.) So, Yetter Chappell rejects (i) the post-Quine-ian (naturalist) tendency to assume that philosophy and science are continuous, and (ii) the popular move that we can use Kuhnian ideas about mature science as the exemplary ideal in our (arm-chair sociology of philosophy and) meta-philosophy. (So, if Kuhn is relevant at all, it's his views on immature, non-paradigmatic science.)

Before one objects that he does not mention Kuhn at all, it is worth noting that Yetter Chappell conceives philosophy as being involved in the generation of "coherent worldviews." (And the idea of a worldview is very Kuhnian.) That philosophers aim at the generation of coherent worldviews is not silly--it is a ruling ideal in the early modern period and in post-Kantian philosophy in the nineteenth century. This way of understanding philosophy finds its most beautiful (soft-Hegelian) expression in Alexandre Koyré's From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. But while Koyré undoubtedly influenced Kuhn his impact on analytic philosophy is negligible.

For, analytic philosophy is (with a few notable exceptions) fundamentally anti-systematic. (To be sure: by this I do not mean it embraces incoherence!) Rather it embraces an ideal of philosophy (depending on one's sensibility) that is focused on arguments, solving (carefully circumscribed) puzzles, or dissolves apparent paradoxes. This is no surprise: since Russell embraced decomposition or analysis this is part of the disciplinary ethos. (Even philosophers who wish to avoid conceptual confusion tend to do so by way of conceptual distinctions and decomposition.) Of course, there are more ambitious projects (such as L.A. Paul's conception of philosophy as modeling), but few embrace what we may call a kind of synthetic ideal.** There is a lot to be said for the virtues that are consequent of the analytic self-conception and practice. [Even if in another context (recall my series of posts on Nagel's Mind & Cosmos) I have tried to exhibit the costs of such lack of practice in systematicity.]

As an aside, I hinted there are exceptions to the rule. For example, it's true that David Lewis does have a systematic philosophy; but his is unusually modular. (Another exception is Jody Azzouni, who also is systematic, but his approach has little uptake so far and routinely receives hostile reviews.) In his cost-benefit analysis, Lewis does explicitly suggest, in fact, that "making a theory more systematic" is on the benefit side. But if it is not ignored altogether, in metaphysical practice among Lewisians, this condition/virtue/benefit is reduced to considerations of scope.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. It's clear that even Yetter Chappell is not really describing systematicity. This is clear from his diagnosis that philosophical expertise "will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place." That's obviously true if it's okay if one's axioms or foundational concepts are treated as primitive (the favored move these past few decades) or spotted for the sake of argument. But otherwise that's really not true.

What makes systematic philosophy more than mere coherent-ism is that a systematic philosophy has the further burden of having to anchor or ground (etc.) those starting points in bits of reality. This is also why for systematic philosophies more systematicity is (defeasible) evidence that they are getting closer to the truth.

That is to say, I agree with Yetter Chappell that philosophical intransigence is often justified; but I do so in virtue of the fact that so much contemporary philosophy relies either on unquestioned primitives (and/or shared background commitments) or abduction/inference to the best explanation. For in the popular philosophical methodologies today the starting points and conclusions are not themselves really being stress tested (even if one allows that the method of counterexamples does some of that).+

Now one may object that I have said nothing about explaining what the concept of 'conceptual stress testing' means here. Due to constraints on time and space in this post, I will acknowledge that that it is a fair objection and that I have left it very vague. But note that there are bits of science where it is the norm to only accept, say, 'five-sigma results;' this corresponds to a probability of 1 in 3.5 million that it is the result of chance. If one were permitted to transfer this kind of talk to philosophy, one can say that no philosophical abduction has this kind of probability; no argument with (by philosophical standards) modestly contestable premises can aspire to it.

 

On Graeber, Bubble Politics, and the bursting of the "Blair-Clinton bubble"

[A]lmost no one is asking about the concept of “unelectability” itself. How did we get to the point where the candidate of a major party was judged not by his political vision, programme or sensibilities, but by an estimation of how different classes of imagined voters were likely to respond to him?

How is it that this has become our basic standard for judging politicians? And by “we” I am referring not just to political junkies, professional or otherwise, but to the electorate as a whole....

Back in 1936, John Maynard Keynes suggested that financial markets were organised a little like a beauty contest – except, he emphasised, a beauty contest with one important twist. Imagine newspaper readers were shown a hundred portraits, then asked to judge not which face was the prettiest, but which face everyone else would think was the prettiest.

In that case, everyone would not only be trying to imagine everyone else's preference, they'd really be trying to guess what everyone else guessed everyone else's preference would be. And so on, ad infinitum. This, Keynes argued, is basically how the financial sector works. Second-guessing of this sort can lead to crazy bubbles when people bid up, say, tulip bulbs in 17^th century Amsterdam, or housing in London today, just because they think others want them.

In between Keynes and the latest general election, the financial sector itself has come to dominate the world economy – and British and American economies in particular.

This rise has been accompanied by a profound cultural shift. Starting in the Eighties, when news feeds began to provide stock quotes moving along the bottom of the screen, everyone in rich countries has, in a thousand subtle ways, been encouraged to look at the world through the eyes of an investor.

The same period saw the rise of punditocracy. Even in Keynes's day, newspapermen were notorious for their cynicism (think of the movie The Front Page). But in recent decades, that particular strain of cynicism – the assumption that politics is really just a game of personalities, showmanship and manipulation, and in no sense a battle over values or ideals – has migrated from the Fleet Street pubs to newspaper comment pages, and from there to news stories, and from there to anywhere anyone argued about politics. 

...

For the rich and powerful, popular cynicism is extraordinarily convenient. It's no longer necessary to convince people that the political or economic system is fair. All you have to do is convince them everyone else thinks it is.

......

 

All this recalls the South Sea Bubble of 1711, where “every fool aspired to be a knave”, buying up worthless financial instruments for extravagant prices hoping to pass them off to the next sucker at a profit before the inevitable collapse.

When bubbles burst, the results tend to be dramatic. Corbyn's sudden rise can be seen as another's sudden fall. What we have just witnessed can, I think, be legitimately referred to as the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble. That is, the ending of the assumption that a tepid, compromised, market-friendly, bureaucratic centrism that nobody actually liked was the only form left-of-centre politics could take, because everyone was convinced that everyone else thought so.

The moment a credible player appeared on the scene who rejected the underlying assumption, everyone realised no one really much liked it to begin with – which is, is of course, why the entire political-journalistic class united for two years to try to convince us that the player in question was not credible.

The only remaining question is: has the bubble fully collapsed? How far will it go? Will this spell the end of the financialisation of politics? If so, what does it tell us about the ultimate fate of the financial bubbles on which it is founded?--David Graeber "The 2017 general election marked the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble," The New Statesman.

l very much like (with qualifications noted below) Graeber's two-fold idea that (i) much recent political commentary focuses on an estimation of how different classes of imagined voters are likely to respond to a candidate, that is, it tries to imagine everyone else's preferences; and (ii) that this is akin to how financial markets operate, especially in bubble territory. This may well have displaced discussion of "political vision, programme or sensibilities" and of the extent, if any, whether the "political or economic system is fair." Underlying Graeber's two-fold idea is (iii) a kind of  ideological trickle-down (recall this post on Hume and Berkeley) image in which a way of conceiving the world moves from "Fleet Street pubs to newspaper comment pages, and from there to news stories, and from there to anywhere anyone argued about politics." This trickle down is reinforced, perhaps even driven by, a larger cultural shift in which finance and financial reporting has become extremely important (by historical standards). Inspired by Graeber, I call (i-iii) bubble-politics.

Moreover, Graeber also explains who benefits from this status quo (the two-fold idea and its trickle down): "the rich and powerful." For their privilege goes unquestioned now because the very issues of fairness go un-discussed. The previous sentence is, I think, what Graeber intends to say, although not what he says. He suggests that what happens is a kind of mass ideological manipulation in which "All you have to do is convince [the people that] everyone else thinks the political or economic world is [fair]." I am not denying that it is possible that such mass ideological manipulation takes place [plenty of rhetoric about meritocracy to go around], but (a) it does not fit the logic of his particular argument; (b) it also goes against media culture which promotes unfulfilled desire not satisfaction with the status quo.

Before I got to my modest criticisms of Graeber a non-trivial aside. Modern financial markets are a peculiar kind of markets in a way that Keynes could not appreciate. (I would argue that Keynes's model is basically inspired by Adam Smith's treatment of bubbles in financial products, but that's for another time.) The prices of many financial instruments (especially derivatives) follow not so much the law of supply and demand, but rather rational pricing formulas* (most famously associated with names like Black, Merton, Scholes) and which rely at their core, on the idea that there is no-arbitrage. (The formulas presuppose, in practice that some traders instantaneously take advantage of arbitrage opportunities in the market-place.)** So, in financial markets people can imagine everyone else's preferences -- all other things being equal, and of course that's not always the case -- because everybody is using pretty much the same formulas (this gets discussed in the sociology of finance literature as an element of 'performativity').

No such pricing formula exists in politics. But everyone else's preferences are measured by way of opinion polls. It is no surprise, then, that the Bayesian aggregation models of opinion polls have provided a means at systematically imagining everyone else's preferences. (Recall my analysis of the weaknesses of these models here.) And so these have reinforced the mechanisms that Graeber is sketching.

So far so good. It is worth noting, however, that there are structural, institutional reasons why the United States and the United Kingdom, are especially susceptible to bubble politics. For in a first-past-the-post-system [FPTPS] it really matters what everyone else's preferences in one's district are, and so it matters how everyone else's preferences are imagined to be. Strategic and tactical voting in light of such imaginings is, in fact, quite rational whereas in a reasonably functioning proportional representation system one can rationally vote one's preferences without, on the whole, much concern to tactics. (Even small parties can have leverage in a coalition.) While I do not claim that bubble politics is intrinsic to a FPTPS, it is a non-accidental feature of it. That is to say, even even when one political bubble is burst one can expect another to develop in a FPTPS. In fairness to Graeber his focus is resolutely on the UK/USA because he speaks of the "Blair-Clinton bubble" and ignores other places where what he describes as tepid centrism seems to thrive (e.g., Macron, Trudeau Jr. etc.).

There is a further reason for this last point that one can expect another political bubble to develop in a FPTPS. As Jason Brennan never tires of saying, many markets generate direct and focused feedback mechanisms (through the price system; profits/losses, etc.) at fairly rapid time scales. (The collapse of Long-Term Capital twenty yeas ago is a nice case in point.) By contrast elections do not occur very often and the feedback mechanism are rather diffuse, slow, and coarse-grained. Meanwhile, participation in opinion polls has almost no feedback at all--this is a nice instance of cheap talk. Because of the lack of regular feedback the bubbles can, once developed, thrive for a long time (the term of a parliament, a US President, etc.).

 I said I had some modest criticism of Graeber. That's because I am struck by the fact that his post can be read as trying -- forgive  the language -- to call the top of the market ["Corbyn's sudden rise can be seen as another's sudden fall... the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble"] in a bubble polity rather than discussing a "political vision, programme or sensibilities."+ That is, Graeber contributes to the genre of punditry that is most apt for a bubble politics: prophecy. Now he does so quite elegantly by simultaneously and artfully deconstructing -- like a magician who shows his tricks while performing them -- the practice he is, if I am right, contributing to. ***

 

 

Why Not?* In defense of Utopian Thought

Another reason for engaging in ideal theory is that what today seems like a fantasy may one day become quite realistic. It therefore makes sense to aim high. As Brennan observes, throughout most of human history, deaths due to violence were vastly more common than they are today. If someone a thousand years ago described a society like ours, they would likely have been dismissed as utopian. Perhaps similar dramatic advances, that today appear overly utopian, will be made in the future.
I share Brennan’s optimism: we will one day live much better than we do now. Nevertheless, I think utopian theorizing is largely useless.

Compare Ida’s hypothesis, in the flat tire story, that we may one day develop antigravity technology. This might be true, but this possibility has no practical bearing on Ida and Nora’s trip. Antigravity technology is not available to them presently, and they do not know how to make it available. You might think that their present behavior might nevertheless affect their prospects for attaining antigravity technology at some distant future time. But Ida and Nora have no idea whether antigravity will ever be available, nor do they know even in broad outline how it would work. In that context, the speculation that something they do today might somehow help or hinder future antigravity efforts is idle. Discussion of such a possibility does not help them solve any problem or pursue any goal that they have any rational way of pursuing.
The same is true of G. A. Cohen’s speculations about a future society in which everyone interacts like people on a friendly camping trip. We do not have such an option available to us now, we have no idea whether it will ever be available, nor do we know even in broad outline how it would come about. In that context, discussion of this possibility is idle. It does not help us solve any problem or rationally pursue any goal.
I think the future holds great promise: our distant descendants will live much better than we, due not only to technological and economic advancements, but probably to institutional and cultural advancements as well. But we have no way of predicting these developments and no rational way of trying to either help or hinder them. Imagine the position of someone in 1500 A.D., trying to plan for the world of 2016. There is no reasonable way that they could have guessed even roughly what our society would be like. As a result, if anyone in 1500 A.D. made plans for the twenty-first century, those plans are surely worthless. Because the pace of change has dramatically advanced in the past few centuries, the future is even less predictable to us than our world was to the denizens of 1500 A.D. Thus, any plans we might make for the next age are almost surely worthless. The point here is that Brennan’s general observation about the likelihood of progress — even if true — does not give us good reason for engaging in utopian theorizing.
There is no sharp dividing line between possibilities that are too remote to be usefully entertained and those that are close enough to be worthwhile. My claim that Cohen’s utopia is idle speculation is thus a judgment call: in my judgment, a society in which socialism would work would have to be so far from our society that we cannot now productively discuss that society or plan for its arrival.--Michael Huemer "Confessions of a Utopophobe." Social Philosophy and Policy  (2016), 223-224. [HT Hanno Sauer]

This seeems to be Michael Huemer week in the philosophical blogosphere (see Dailynous). The quoted passage is from a larger essay, which defends the methodological use of intuitions in political philosophy. Let me stipulate here, that in this Digression, I am agnostic about the fruitfulness and soundness of methodological use of intuitions in political philosophy. The section I quote is also part of a larger argument against so-called 'ideal theory.' (In fact, the paper is quite helpful in distinguishing between "perfection theory" and strict compliance theory" within ideal theory.)

The oddity of the section is that while it purports to criticize aiming high, it never actually confronts its target. Nobody would deny that at many decision moments ideas about the  distant future are "useless." But it does not follow that ideas about the remote future are inert; it never gets around to discussing how utopian ideas and words about ideals connect to the future. For example, between 1815 and 1940 (say, from Mazzini to Hayek) many different kind of authors articulated different visions for a united Europe in which independent or federated nation-states would no longer be at war with each other. This required both a willingness to imagine the disintegration of the most powerful empires in existence and a leap into speculation about how, say, future republics could be allied in (say) a republican confederation. While some of these texts took the form of a prediction, the point of even the predictions was not scientific prediction, but, rather, to change the beliefs and  commitment of readers and a wider public and, thereby, change future possibilities (not the least by generating a call to action). 

Now, to be sure, Huemer is going after ideal theories that themselves (often) assume without compelling argument that they are required as a "necessary fundational part of normative social theory" (219) and that normative theory "must pursue perfection." (219) Even if one thinks there is space for such foundational and perfectionist inquiry it does not follow, as Huemer correctly argues, that these are needed for all normative purposes.** But it also does not follow that it cannot serve any useful purposes (even if one grants it is pretty useless in some very concrete choice situations).

I have already suggested that ideas can connect the present to the future. And that they can do that in ways distinct from (scientific) prediction in the context of deep uncertainty about how to future will be--I fully agree with Huemer's sense that we have no access to reliable means of long range forecasting about as-of-yet-non-existent technologies (e.g., antigravity). But it does not mean we can't have access to information about its feasibility. For, another obvious way in which the present shapes future possibilities is debt (recall this post). In fact, one annoying feature of Huemer's argument is that he simply assumes that "trying to plan for the world in 2016" is a hopeless task in 1500. It's true that (as Keynes argued) one really cannot make such long range predictions in the same way that buying insurance in 1500 for an event in 2016 is silly (although some versions of portfolio theory can suggest buying some such option as a hedge). Yet, many states did sell perpetual bonds (recall my piece on Stasavage, Machiavelli and Hume). One such (slightly younger) bond is still in existence: "The oldest known bond in the world that still produces interest is the perpetual 2.5% loan worth 1200 guilders, issued in 1624, of the Lekdijk Bovendams water board....it still pays interest." Once ideas and debt start reinforcing each other the shape of the future is much constrained. 

Clearly, the previous paragraph is itself no defense of (Rawlsian) ideal theory nor helpful in taking sides in the debate between Cohen and Brennan. But it is a defense of the potency of certain kinds of "speculations about a future society." While it is, perhaps, quixotic to expect that books are still the medium by which the future is shaped, these speculations (and that can include ideal theory!) may shape the generation of the future they are speculating about (or some alternatives to those speculations) in non-mysterious ways . (I have explored the nature of the genre in terms of philosophical prophecy.) We know, as a historical fact, that, for example, Bacon's imaginative speculations about how to organize a scientific society influenced the deeds of several generations of readers and, somewhat uncannily, he also foresaw many of the problematic social and political byproducts of such a society. (While it is true "there is no reasonable way that they could have guessed even roughly what our society would be like," it is surprising how many crucial fundamental relations of our society were foreseen.) We know that Hume's "Of a Perfect Commonwealth" (recall here and here) influenced an American revolution and its Constitution, etc..

Of course,  it's true that no author ca 1500-1650 guessed the role of YouTube in contemporary education. But it is also true that our conceptual-social-legal-political possibility space is, in part, constituted by speculations in the past that were self-consciously written for the future we inhabit now (and determined by ordinary social forces like the institutions of debt, inheritance law, etc.). This is, in fact, the conceit behind Socratic political philosophy from the start.

Finally, it is especially peculiar to see a university professor write, "any plans we might make for the next age are almost surely worthless." By now we there are many universities that are many hundreds year old! (Even UC Boulder dates back to 1876.) There is no doubt that these corporations have changed in light of many circumstances due to local, contingent decisions. But it is also true that they have generated corporate spirits that have provided continuous stewardship and a willingness to plan for future ages (recall this post, itself a response to Jacob Levy's). This is no coincidence: the whole enterprise of learning and science has long been constituted by the thought that each of us inherits the accomplishments and insights (etc.) of the past and we will do our best to pass these on enriched and transformed by our labors without having a clue about the details to be added by later generations.***

 

Don't judge the Trump Voters

Some 59 million people chose to enact horror and obscenity, and they’re agents in the world. They acted wrongly and are blameworthy. Whatever mistakes other people made in persuading them don’t lift the moral responsibility from their own shoulders.

I’ve got arguments aplenty with other people who rejected Trump, and there are of course prudential reasons to care intensely about how best to persuade those who chose him not to choose horror and obscenity in the future. But I’m going to try to avoid the temptation to be angrier at the people who seem closer to me—because they’re smart and could have chosen differently!—than at the directly responsible actors.--Jacob Levy "They Make Choices, Too" @Dailynous.

There are few people I admire more professionally and personally than Jacob Levy (who was on faculty when I was a PhD student at Chicago and whose writings I often engage with), so I was startled by his anger and by his treating electoral agency primarily as the occasion for moral judgments. Levy and I share a scholarly and emotional fondness for the complexities of classical liberalism as a living tradition -- and the Constitutional order of the U.S. is, warts and all, one of its central legacies. The tradition recognizes human imperfection and emphasizes that our knowledge of social reality tends to be occluded to agents at a given time. (The preceding sentence explains some of the tradition's warmth toward markets.) Even so, I do not share his perspective on the Trump voters.

In particular, voters qua being voters should not be judged in moral terms (on the whole); whatever the responsibility of voters is, it is not primarily a moral one. Levy's remarks share here a tendency, also notably present in recent just war theory and often on display in Jason Brennan's anti-democratic theory, to moralize exactly bits of social reality where morality is out of place (and also likely to lead to permanent and increasingly harsh conflict).

For, first, voting is not primarily a moral act. It is an opportunity to express one's choice for a political representative or a political leader. There are lots of a-moral and even immoral considerations that enter into such a choice. To be sure, I am not denying that a voter can legitimately chose to let morality guide her vote or that she can choose to be concerned primarily with morality in her vote. But it is not reasonable to demand that other voters be guided wholly by (your sense of) morality. Let me elaborate.

Voting is the wrong sort of behavior to evaluate morally. Because of secret balloting we have no access to the intentions and characters of particular voters, so there are no deontic or virtue-theoretic grounds to judge voters qua voters. The outcome of a vote is a merely a winning candidate (or party in some countries); that is, the main effect of voting is, on the whole, fundamentally a-moral. So, there is no easy consequentialist ground to judge a voter morally. It's only the behavior of the elected representatives and leaders that can be judged morally. But crucially voters do not control that behavior. In addition, due to the division of labor and lack of government transparency, voters often know very little about what their representatives do. (How little and to what degree this matters in judging the nature of democracy is subject to controversy [recall].)

Moreover, any voter's individual responsibility for the outcome is trivially small. (This is analogous to a kind of argument rational choice theorists love to trot out to claim that voting is irrational--I don't accept that interpretation of voting.) This suggests that the blameworthiness that attaches to their action, if any, is rather thin.

Levy may suggest that it is a foreseeable consequence of this election that as President Trump will enact horrible things, and so his voters have a collective moral responsibility for these outcomes. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Levy is right about the future President Trump and that the horrors to be produced by him are worse than what the alternative candidates would have offered. (Bill Clinton's execution of Ricky Ray Rector remains, I think, the most horrid thing done by an American politician while running for office in my adult life-time, and I say that without wishing to justify any of Trump's awful things.) Liberals ought to  be cautious about going for collective moral responsibility. In part because it prepares the way for the very illiberal collective punishment. (We learned that lesson in our reflections on the war-crime firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and than the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) This is not to deny such a thing as collective complicity in the horrors perpetrated by others; but this complicity is not a feature of voting, but rather a feature of the silences and passivity during hate crimes and other horrors.

In his post, Levy explicitly rejects the idea we should criticize others for the rise of Trump. This is a bit odd because the media and several other politicians enabled the rise of Trump through their actions and in-actions. The media's role is especially important because it raises challenging questions for liberalism more generally--both for the nature of free speech as well as about the role of profit in the media-landscape. In addition, the anti-intellectual celebrity culture of a wealthy, capitalist society played some role in generating Trump's fame (not to mention the absence of serious estate taxes). If we are going to continue and revive our tradition, we will have to face these challenges (and --to briefly mention my own interests -- the foreseeable byproducts of technocracy and meritocracy, and here) unflinchingly. The political class seems to have been entirely oblivious to the existential threat to and fragility of the body politic until rather late in the day--again stipulating Levy is right about this (for some of my views on Trump see here). By contrast, I claim (to paraphrase Spiderman), with greater power comes greater moral responsibility.

Levy's post instantiates a peculiar and recent reversal of understanding of liberal democracy. Rather than requiring moral voters, it is an institutional response to human imperfection (including immorality). It is designed to mitigate the dangers of civil war and to ensure peaceful transfer of power. It is designed to empower people's tribal feelings and other aspirations; when the institutions and political class function properly, these are channeled to slightly better ends. It is undeniable that we're living through a period in which liberal institutions are malfunctioning; the voters' decisions are a symptom of this.

Finally, assigning moral responsibility to (other) voters is also futile.+ It is unlikely to change behavior and if it is heard at all, it is likely to be interpreted as a kind of sanctimoniousness that only entrenches positions in ongoing cultural conflicts.* I doubt it will invite the kind of conversations that are needed to have people recognize and acknowledge each others fears and aspirations.

 

On How to Write about Democracy

Perhaps recent events should make us rethink how philosophers write about democracy. There’s a disconnection between how democracy actually works and what philosophers say, between what researchers say in empirical political science and the implicit empirical models philosophers work with in democratic theory.

 

I don’t think this just shows us that democracy falls short of an ideal. It may be that our ways of theorizing are largely irrelevant. We’re talking about how awesome hammers would be if only they worked like screwdrivers.

...

 

Ideal theory democratic theory is in a way incoherent. Some of it is the equivalent of “Hey, I came up with a solution to the problem of drunk driving, but it turns out my solution only works in a world where alcohol had never been invented”.

 

I’m hopeful that this will push political philosophy to a philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) turn. On that point, though, I suspect few democratic theorists or political philosophers could teach Poli Sci 101 or Econ 101 off the cuff, or even pass the final exams, and that’s a problem. We’re spending too much time writing philosophy that assumes institutions work differently from how they actually do, will, or could.--Jason Brennan'@DailyNous.

In principle, there is no problem with there being a (i) "disconnection between how democracy actually works and what philosophers say" [about democracy]. After all, many philosophers happily (too happily, really) accept a distinction between their task as normative theorists aiming to improve the world or, more often, to provide standards by which we can judge the world, and the real world (which is described by empirical social scientists). That is to say, many of our peers happily go along with the idea that we are experts on values while others are the experts on facts [see here for a genealogy of this]. I don't think Brennan rejects this way of thinking (that's important--I'll return to it), but the rest of the sentence makes clear what he has in mind: "[there is a disconnection] between what researchers say in empirical political science and the implicit empirical models philosophers work with in democratic theory." In context, Brennan strongly suggests that philosophers, especially those who are ideal theorists, work with possibly false or outdated and naive implicit empirical models philosophers that fundamentally reflect their normative commitments not our best knowledge of the world.* In particular, he thinks we need to be better educated in politics and economics.

 

As somebody who works in a political science department -- I even recently co-taught a course that included an introduction to comparative politics -- and as a self-described philosopher of economics, I warmly welcomed the drift of Brennan's remarks. But I would not leave out, as he does, sociology, social psychology, media studies, and anthropology (to name just a few and not to ignore our sister disciplines in the Humanities). More subtly, I note three further reservations: first, most purportedly (non-naive, true-ish) empirical theories have non-trivial normative commitments built into them at various levels. So, good philosophers do not merely uncritically adopt recent social science (and humanities) in their theorizing. In addition, second, some such theories also can have conceptual confusions/conflations--the kinds of things philosophical training is likely to spot. Third, a lot of fantastic social science has various kinds of status quo bias built into its results (and, as I note regularly, this has gotten worse in data-mining social sciences)--such status quo bias may well be very problematic in context of policy and in context of theorizing about democracy.

 

When folk complain about so-called ideal theory, they have in mind the Rawls industry. But it is worth noting, that as regular readers of this blog know, that (a) Rawls was incredibly knowledgeable about economics of his own age (I am not alone in thinking this). It is, in fact, one of the great mysteries of Rawls-qua-teacher that he did not do more to pass on his knowledge of it. In addition, Rawls was (b) not an uncritical consumer of economics. In fact, regular readers are familiar with my argument that Rawls was right to resist the interpretations of Knightian uncertainy by his colleague, the famous mathematical economist, K. Arrow (recall).

In his post, Brennan offers a more focused charge: political philosophers assume "institutions work differently from how they actually do." I think I recognize what he means: a lot of ideal theory assumes (with Weber) that institutions are populated with solid and honest rule followers and that they are neither subject to regulatory capture nor advised by experts subject to various perverse incentives or biases. (Undoubtedly this is not the extent of Brennan's complaint--he has a special fondness for markets that is rarely shared even by his fellow (Liberal/Libertarian) travelers.) But even if Brennan is right here, it does not follow social science today really understands how institutions work and, in particular, how various institutions and leadership within them facilitate desirable normative and moral ends in practice and in light of other background-commitments. This is a great, open research topic (recall Lisa Herzog on moral phenomenology in institutions, my post on affective nudging, and my post on (bad) leadership within crony capitalism inspired by Levy & Peart). So, rather than drawing on pre-existing social science, this is an area in which we can collaborate with social scientists.

 

Finally, and this is where I probably diverge most sharply from Brennan, "rethink how philosophers write about democracy" involves rethinking not just the purpose of democratic theory, but also the nature of public speech in light of so-called inductive risk; in particular, a lot of democratic theory when converted to public speech generates downside risks for those whose views are not well represented among fellow philosophers and our would-be (mostly technocratic) interlocutors among the public (and publics) [recall]. One wishes for a democratic theory that does not confuse the seminar room for public speech, and that is neither futile (in the way described by Brennan) nor the dangerous, romantic decisionism of the political realist. But about exemplars of that some other time, more.

 

Against the APA's Code of Conduct

First, I am not a member of the American Philosophical Association (APA). I write about its new Code of Conduct because the APA is the wealthiest and most influential professional association in the discipline. Its views will ramify out toward many corners of the profession as a purported gold standard. In addition, my blogging career started with and has been animated by, in large part, a concern with professional mores. I have also written regularly about the need of such a Code in philosophy (and economics) [for a few examples, see here and here].

Second, I have no doubt that the committee that produced this code was of good will and animated by the noblest aspirations. Some of the members I have known and admired most of my career. The code evinces a concern with fairness and its guidelines represent a response to the ways in which formal and informal power are used and abused. I thought it especially important that it mentions and articulates some of the duties of faculty toward students.

Even so, I want to register my disappointment in and concern over this code. I will largely ignore but just explicitly note the oddity that the whole section on electronic communications seems to be restricted to work done on "institutional equipment, servers, websites, and email;" this does raise concerns (ht Stefan Hessbrüggen) over those faculty that challenge their own institutional practices on "institutional equipment." The code's flaws are three-fold: (i) it is silent on existing abuses and conflicts of interest in the profession; (ii) it has a misguided view on teaching philosophy; (iii) it is a predictable consequence that, as stated, this code will be used to silence and remove folk (from positions) who challenge local or professional abuses. It is especially notable that this code seems to have been written without addressing the widely read and discussed concerns over the abuses of 'civility' and 'collegiality (neither is mentioned much in the code, but there is an emphasis on being a good colleague) articulated by Leigh Johnson and Ed Kazarian at NewAPPS.  I discuss these flaws in turn. First, there are striking omissions:

• Many of the most obvious existing ethical problems in the profession occur in the context of professional ethics. These are cases in which professional ethicists use their status qua ethicist to become company-men who fail to exercise their professional duties to care for (say) animals [recall Lori Gruen's post]; or that advocate/condone torture (and get rewarded with grants, board membership, etc.); in addition, professional (applied) ethicists have been implicated in (recall) not being reflexive about conflict of interest rules and trading sometimes indirectly and occasionally directly their professional status for inappropriate financial and sexual benefits (name your favorite examples or go read the back issues of  my posts at NewApps). 
• In the previous bullet point I hint at a problem with a particular  journal. But professional philosophy has journal practices that can be best described as journal capture, and, more politely, as not conforming (with honorable exception to Ergo) to existing best practices in the academy (recall) this post. Connected to this is that,
• Professional philosophy has citation practices that are primarily about (aspirational) status signaling and club-joining; they do not exhibit much concern with giving credit to other people's contributions or priority. (Strikingly the APA code corrects this imbalance for one's students, but not others.) It is no surprise that professional philosophy exhibits various gendered, racial, and other patterns of exclusion.

These omissions are especially notable because the APA's Code explicitly notes that Given the varying public perceptions of philosophy, and the contributions of philosophy to the field of ethics as a domain of philosophical inquiry, the APA encourages its members to consider the connections between the public perception of philosophy and professional conduct as it relates to the values identified here. Philosophers have duties toward representing other people's and cultures' thoughts [see Bruce Janz's facebook post] and also responsibilities given the way our products enter the world of policy and practice. (For example, I have long been surprised that philosophers do not think it problematic when the predictable downside risks of their policy prescription fall on vulnerable and less powerful others.) Not to put too fine point on it, but there is a sense in which this Code does not take philosophical impact on the world serious enough.

To be sure, I am not suggesting that addressing these omissions is always easy and that my perception on these problems is beyond reproach. In effect, APA guidelines on how to think about likely conflicts of interests in the context of our professional and public activities may be useful precisely to generate discussion and awareness of the complexities involved. Some of the issues noted here are hinted at in the APA's code, in part by its appeal to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Professional Ethics (but the AAUP is primarily interested in academic freedom not professional integrity). For example, the AAUP insists that "professors acknowledge academic debt," but professional philosophers have a very curious way of interpreting this duty. So, this is not just a big missed opportunity, it also means that through its silence the APA seems to appear to condone some of the worst problems in our profession.

Second, the Code's understanding of teaching is flawed and also generates serious intellectual problems (I thank Ed Kazarian for discussion). Here are some examples:

• The report suggests that  teachers present "materials in an informed and balanced way, incorporating competing viewpoints in the spirit of fairness and with intellectual honesty." Pedagogically, it can be very useful to make mistakes in one's presentation and then allow oneself to be corrected by one of the students. (I use this trick so that my students learn that I let myself be corrected in public; that was a big deal in an environment in which teachers are never wrong in their lectures.) Also, some syllabi are intentionally biased because (and this is not uncommon in seminars) they wish to develop a particular viewpoint. In addition, in contemporary American culture 'balance' has become a way to correct perceived Liberal bias in a Conservative direction. But, as I learned from Mark Lance, it's rarely used to argue for the incorporation of other viewpoints (anarchist, libertarian, socialist, etc.). Remember, lots of analytical philosophers today have no patience for pomo views, but also (as distinct from their elders) other anti-realist or idealist views. (Full disclosure: I HAVE taught David Lewis alongside Deleuze; it was great fun, but why demand balance.) The APA here has over-reached.
• All of us sometimes encounter (it even made The Onion) overconfident students (often guys) who, perhaps without fully realizing it, monopolize class discussion and fail to acknowledge other students' perspectives even if they have not done the reading (or evince other signs of lack of preparation). Sometimes, it is very important for our pedagogical aims (i.e., "to teach...students how to think, write, and speak clearly; how to read, understand, and critique philosophical texts; and how to develop their own philosophies in conversation with other people") to prevent some such students from intimidating and silencing other students. While I would not always advocate "intentionally embarrassing or belittling them," it can be very useful both for the student in question and for others, that they come to recognize their own blabbering for what it is. How to do this in ways that promotes a healthy and constructive class room requires skill and experience, but the way the Code is worded may well be used to harass the most creative and serious of our teachers. 
• Sometimes what look like no-brainers ("Teachers should assess the academic performance of each student on its merits") turn out to require considerable contextual judgment. I have used teacher discretion strategically in grading to encourage more work or reward achievement of particular individuals (etc.).

Finally, let me discuss some preliminary concerns with the section on bullying and harassment.*

• It is odd and disappointing that the document does not reflect on the obvious ways such statements can be abused to silence and remove folk that question or challenge the professional and institutional status quo. In particular, it seems predictable that if you are vulnerable and try to call out various forms of oppression in a way that others find even mildly unpleasant, you will be accused of bullying and harassment. This is not some naive thought experiment, but lived experience for many of our peers.
• In particular, a certain (let me use a stereotype, sincere apologies to all members involved) Waspy politeness in the service of keeping a shop closed gets a pass in these guidelines, whereas emotive expressions of displeasure can be easily treated as species of bullying and harassment. This Code simply pretends as if this is not a known effect of such policies. For example, I can say very politely (I learned the following point from Amia Srinivasan and Daniela Dover) that you are begging the question and insist that you accept my premises and thereby assert situational power and structure over a conversation and, thus, "diminishes the capacity" of my interlocutor "to function effectively as a teacher, worker, or scholar."
• The problem here is that the guidelines are not treated in context sensitive way in which power differentials and context can make a big difference. For example nobody (least of all me) thinks that Jason Brennan's repeated public ridicule and parody of me (he can't even get my name right here) is problematic. Even my friends call me a ballooner now. (While my name sometimes come up in the blogopshere, I have never seen any complaint about the ridicule of my persona.) There are good reasons for this lack of concern; I am not especially professionally vulnerable. 
• Thus, the blanket ban on and prejudice against professional ridicule is (ahh) ridiculous. It is, after all, no surprise that dictators and tyrants dislike ridicule and satire--it's among the most effective weapons in equalizing power-differences. It is also a very effective way to undermine pretentiousness and visibly challenge professional privilege that cannot be defended on its merits, but hangs on anyway.

Let me stop here (for now). I hope this post generates respectful, wise, and inclusive discussion.:)

 

"Read the book!" (On The Norms of Public Philosophy (II))

Again, all covered in the new book. Nothing new here. Schliesser and van der Meer aren’t saying my response to this objection fails, but, rather, they just aren’t aware that I’ve acknowledged it. Again, I’d be curious to know what their response to the argument in the book is.--Jason Brennan @BHL

To the extent that electoral input institutions affect political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and other such pro-democratic attitudes, the literature finds quite consistently that it is inclusiveness that boosts trust, particularly among the more marginalized groups that are already less likely to trust. Reducing the electorate and/or making weighted subsets of first vs second class (more vs less included) voters is at the very least unlikely to boost public support.--Tom van der Meer.

My colleague, Tom van der Meer, and I published an editorial critical of Sortition (rule by lot) and Epistemocracy (rule by experts) at the Washington Post's Monkey Cage. The piece is about 1100 words and was, in fact, edited for style and content by very professional editors at the Washington Post. Tom and I happily signed off on these changes, but these changes all involved (further) simplifications and introducing 'newsy-ness' and snappiness into the article. As it happens earlier drafts of this piece had been submitted at two other places, which considered it, demanded changes, and then rejected it. It's worth mentioning that Tom, a political scientist who works on electoral politics, issues of trust and legitimacy, (amongst other things), and I are both regular bloggers, and have a string of editorializing and public writing under our collective belts--we know that writing for the even highly educated and savvy readers of the Washington Post requires different style and argumentative content than writing for referees, the seminar room hand-out, or even our own academic blogs.

Because the piece responded to two distinct reform proposals, we did not do full justice to either, as several proponents of these proposals quickly argued (on Facebook and blogs). That is, in fact, to be expected in writing for the public. In fact, we focused primarily on the common flaws of both proposals and less on their unique selling points (more on this below)--our critics ignored this fact. Rather, they claim that we did not address the philosophically most sophisticated advocate(s) of sortition nor did we get into all the fine-grained arguments offered by Jason Brennan in his many publications. I want to use the occasion to reflect on the norms of public philosophy (and I do so by responding to some, but not all, of Brennan's kvetching).

In fact, as is clear from the hyperlinking in our editorial, Tom and I responded explicitly to public philosophy in the service of changing public opinion. While we drew on scholarly research and linked to it, we were not acting as referees or as book reviewers. Rather, we noticed that some highly specific views associated with sortition and with epistemocracy were receiving favorable publicity in the (mass) media without these views receiving critical push back in the media and so we took it upon ourselves to criticize views already in the public domain (e.g., The Guardian and the Washington Post). Now, to be sure, just because this is a debate in public philosophy, it does not follow that anything goes (even if I personally have  some sympathy for the idea -- in modern times associated with Hannah Arendt, but certainly also ably articulated by Madison-- that public life is governed by opinion not truth). So, if Tom and I had deliberately misrepresented the views we were explicitly discussing that would be problematic.

As as an aside, Jason, complains that "In a piece at the Monkey Cage today, Schliesser and co-author van der Meer argue against the “rule of experts,” a position they attribute to me. I’m not quite sure if what I’ve argued for in Against Democracy or “The Right to a Competent Electorate” could properly be called that. I’m talking about doing things like only allowing the top 30% of voters to vote." It's a bit odd to see our view of him so misrepresented. Indeed, when Tom and I first introduce Jason's views in our piece, we say that "Philosopher Jason Brennan at Georgetown University suggests disenfranchising the ignorant to slant political rule toward experts." Now it's true we don't discuss all the tricky details of Jason's proposals, but ahhh...we do get the gist right here.

The charge is, rather, that we did not discuss the best versions of the views we were criticizing because these views can be found in journal articles and books (sometimes by the very same authors and sometimes by others). If we were trying to publish a journal article, this would be a cause for some concern. In addition, if we were introducing a topic for public debate in an editorial but did so by preemptively ridiculing opposing views, this would certainly be a reason to cry foul. We would be falling short of our duty to educate the public in alternatives or down-sides to our own view--in my view adhering to some such norm is the bare minimum for being a public philosopher rather than being a philosophical partisan or public hack (recall and here). Because I am a methodological analytical egalitarian, such a duty is especially important if the down-side risks of one's stance fall largely on less powerful/influential others (recall). But rather than introducing the topic we were responding to particular pieces and calling attention to limitations in them.*

As an aside, the case is different if one ignores published stuff on Topic Y that represents the consensus view of an expert community on Topic Y and then pretends that such a consensus does not exist and peddles not just known simplifications -- to be sure not all public philosophy is a simplification -- but known falsehoods (in contradistinction to the consensus on Topic Y). That's not what's happening here; all kinds of views are being developed in the expert literature and seminar room and, while some of these involve recovery of once popular/influential views, the state of play is very much in flux (as one should expect). It is true that one reason why I teamed up with Tom is that Tom is a leading expert on the empirical literature and because I had the sense that Jason sometimes subtly misrepresents the state of play in social science, and I wanted to make sure that I would not fall into the same trap. (I would  not say that Tetlock is  a "more sophisticated version of Schattschneider’s argument"--they are making very different points.) I am, for example, surprised that Jason refers, in passing, approvingly to Hong-Page theorem (okay a few days earlier he had discussed it at greater length calling it "The best epistemic argument for the rule of the many,") without even so much as remarking that this 'theorem' is itself the subject of considerable criticism (here)--I didn't ask Tom about that, by the way.**  In the spirit of charity, I note that Jason does call attention to the criticism in his recent book Against Democracy, p. 181-2 (Jason himself treats Hong-Page as a best case for a view he opposes.) Either way, it's not obvious that when one is discussing in the public sphere the nature of that public sphere and the institutions within it, that deference to the expert community is the right stance. Given that at least some of the experts' interests and status are at stake there is some reason to suspend such deference.

Now, one may still object that if I criticize particular authors, I should try to distill from their writings the best versions of their position and then criticize it, rather than the views they put forward in public. This is, in effect, what Jason Brennan claims, I should have done. At first sight there is no prohibition against doing this, and one can imagine scenarios where this would be useful and even noble exercise. But it is worth noting that it would be unfair to criticize Jason in the public sphere for ideas he is clearly trying out amongst his peers. [While allowing that both BHL & D&I are neither quite the seminar room nor the public.] In the seminar room, the search for truth is the ruling norm without much regard to political and social consequences. [One can, of course, re-conceive how one should think of the truth in the seminar room as requiring one to internalize the political and social consequences of policy--as a methodological analytical egalitarian, I am not unsympathetic to such a position.] Given this, focusing one's public criticism on public positions (as promoted in editorials, policy proposals aimed at policy-makers, peddled on radio, etc.) seems the right thing to do. If Jason wants public criticism (as opposed to in papers and book reviews) of the best versions of his arguments, he needs to present them to the public.

As noted above, Tom and I focused primarily on the common flaws of both proposals and less on their unique selling points. That may well have caused us not to address better versions of the views we are criticizing (including, perhaps, better views that are in the public eye). We diagnosed that the public interest (at least among educated, elite-ish readers of the sort that read the Washington Post) in and the receptivity toward these proposals springs from recent concerns about "demagoguery and mob rule." If Liberal Democracy produces President Trump there may be many reasons for changing liberal democracy. We pointed out that the rise of demagoguery may itself be a consequence of too much political influence of the educated and credentialed and so that Jason's proposals are a recipe for further harms. And this is, in fact one of the features that made our editorial newsworthy. Now Tom and I may be wrong about this claim (maybe it's mostly a consequence of bad public education or too much influence by moneyed interests, or media manipulation, etc.), but Jason's response just misunderstands what is at stake. Jason wants to protect democracy by partial disenfranchisement and one way to interpret what Tom and I are saying is that, if his views as promoted in the public sphere are implemented, it is likely that the democratic edifice will not be protected from the real harms it generates but destroyed. Obviously, that's compatible with better versions of Jason's views doing less harm as well as other proposals being better than Jason's best proposals.