Digressions&Impressions

A rant on FTX, William MacAskill, and Utilitarianism

Philosophy goes through self-conscious, periodic bouts of historical forgetting.* These are moments when philosophical revolutionaries castigate the reading of books and the scholastic jargon to be found in there, and invite us to think for ourselves and start anew with a new method or new techniques, or new ways of formulating questions (and so on). When successful, what follows tends to be beautiful, audacious conceptual and even material world-building (in which sometimes old material is quietly recycled or reinterpreted). Hobbes, Descartes, Bentham, Frege, and Carnap are some paradigmatic exemplars of the phenomenon (that has something in common with, of course, religious reformations and scientific revolutions). There is a clear utility in not looking back.

What’s unusual about utilitarianism is not that it’s a nearly continuous intellectual tradition that is more than two centuries rich. Even if we start the clock with the pre-Socratics that’s not yet a very old tradition by the standards of the field. But rather that it has become so cavalier about curating and reflecting on its own tradition. In one sense that’s totally understandable from within the tradition: the present just is the baseline from which we act or design institutions or govern society (etc.). Spending time on the past just is opportunity costs foregone or, worse, a sunk-cost fallacy. Worrying about path dependencies and endowment effects prevents one from the decisive path forward.

Of course, the previous paragraph is too crude: some active utilitarians write with sensitivity and care about the less savory parts of tradition’s past (I think of Bart Schultz); And certainly Julia Driver has shown that moral complexity can be fruifully discussed in the tradition. Yet, most of what’s produced about the past from within the tradition is either very narrowly focused or the product of people who don’t really develop the tradition forward. (This claim becomes more evident if you look at the practice of Kantianism, Humeanism, and the variety of virtue ethics out there. Even within formal philosophy there is better curating of their own past.) Nothing has matched Halevy’s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism in the century since it has appeared in richness and insight (and philosophically it is by no means without problems). Obviously, too much looking back stalls progress (one may think that this what happened say, within, phenomenology or Austrian economics at one point or another), but never checking the rearview mirror also generates certain known risks.

In fact, there is a clear recruiting advantage to this march-forward stance. The barriers to entry are very low, the fundamental principles are well developed and clear enough, and one can start making progress within utilitarianism or applying it to sets of problems rather quickly. And while that’s a gross simplification for areas where there has been lots of existing utilitarian activity, it remains true in the large. If you are earnest and want to improve the world, utilitarianism gives you ready-made tools to think about doing so!  And what tools–elegant, systematizing, and action-guiding! That they risk flattening things is a virtue not a bug. And because the baseline is given, a side effect has been that working within existing institutions is seen as more efficient and more promising to contribute to improving the world –say by making lots of money trading in crypto-currency — than by tackling some of the opaque, entrenched structural injustices through the political processes that got us here.

That’s to say, within utilitarianism there is a curious, organic forgetting built into the way it’s practiced, especially by the leading lights who shape it as an intellectual movement within philosophy (and economics, of course), and as a social movement. And this is remarkable because utilitarianism for all its nobility and good effects has been involved in significant moral and political disasters involving not just, say, coercive negative eugenics and – while Bentham rejected this — imperialism (based on civilizational superiority commitments in Mill and others), but a whole range of bread and butter social debacles that are the effect of once popular economics or well-meaning government policy gone awry. But in so far as autopsies are done by insiders they never question that it is something about the character of utilitarian thought, when applied outside the study, that may be the cause of the trouble (it’s always misguided practitioners, the circulation of false beliefs, the wrong sort of utilitarianism, etc.).

In my view there is no serious study within the utilitarian mainstream that takes the inductive risk of itself seriously and – and this is the key part – has figured out how to make it endogenous to the practice. This is actually peculiar because tracking inductive risk just is tracking consequences and (if you wish) utils. It is especially odd because there is, within utilitarianism, a continuous return to the question — which in a way is crying out for an inductive risk analysis — of how much lying and deception of the public is permissible, or to be precise, “the possibility of esoteric morality.” (I also find it odd that this literature is part of the public, credit economy rather than an oral tradition. But what do I know about esotericism?)

For example, the best example I am familiar with that has really started to do something like what I propose within philosophy (within economics I warmly recommend work by David M. Levy, Sandra Peart, and Thomas C. Leonard), from someone who at least gives utilitarianism all the benefits of the doubt, Allen Buchanan’s (2007) “Institutions, Beliefs and Ethics:  Eugenics as a Case Study” ends up arguing that “ethics must incorporate social moral epistemology, the systematic comparative evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of social institutions in producing, transmitting and sustaining the beliefs upon which our moral motivation, judgment and reasoning depend.” This paper has received fewer citations that some of my papers on long dead figures, so it is fair to say it has not generated a major discussion fifteen years on. UPDATE: It has received little scholarly attention.** The most serious response I found suggests (by De Volder, who I admire greatly) basically that ‘this time is different’ (because liberal eugenics does not involve coercion—a claim that is not scrutinized). Maybe I have missed the utilitarian that has taken it seriously, but if it’s out there it has not generated a real debate or uptake.

Notice that Buchanan simply denies the autonomy of ethics. But even if one accepts that diagnosis (and this helps say, guard, against expert over-confidence and misplaced trust in other experts) this does not exhaust the inductive risk. And while in some philosophical theories downstream consequences are shrugged off within utilitarianism today long distance, downstream consequences are the opiate of several projects (including, of course, longtermism). In wider historical context, this unwillingness to take seriously inductive risk of philosophy, in a project that aims to reshape the world, is also odd because the father figure of philosophy, Socrates, was executed, in part, in virtue of the perceived negative effect he had on his students.

Don’t get me wrong utilitarianism is a beautiful, systematic theory, a lovely tool to help navigate acting in the world in a consistent and transparent matter. When used prudently it’s a good way to keep track of one’s assumptions and the relationship between means and ends. But like all tools it has limitations. And my claim is that the tradition refuses to do systematic post-mortems on when the tool is implicated in moral and political debacles. Yes, somewhat ironically, the effective altruism community (in which there is plenty to admire) tried to address this in terms of, I  think, project failure. But that falls short in willing to learn when utilitarianism is likely to make one a danger to innocent others.

This present rant — feel free to check out my more judicious scholarship and blogging about this topic — is obviously triggered by the failure of FTX and the subsequent public comments by William MacAskill, who quite naturally seems angry that he was lied to (although how sincere he is in light of the possibility of esoteric morality I leave to others), and correctly outraged on behalf of the victims that the benefactor of his movement probably committed significant fraud and theft. And if you do not believe me that massive historical forgetting is at play here, at one point in his twitter thread MacAskill writes, “I know that others from inside and outside of the community have worried about the misuse of EA ideas in ways that could cause harm. I used to think these worries, though worth taking seriously, seemed speculative and unlikely.”  As if to think such harms had not already occurred in the past!

I close with one final criticism of MacAskill (who in some ways is a victim of the stories utilitarians tell themselves). When it comes to his own role in the FTX debacle — and the story has been told in many media (in the context of his book launch) — about how he encouraged  Bankman-Fried to embrace “earning to give” over a by now mythical lunch in Cambridge, about that no word in his thread. (Just to be sure, I am actually a fan of effective altruism, albeit a critic of long-termism.)

By framing the problem as Mr. Bankman-Fried’s “integrity” and not the underlying tool, MacAskill will undoubtedly manage to learn no serious lesson at all. I am not implicating utilitarianism in the apparent ponzi scheme. But Bankman-Fried’s own description back in April of his what he was up to should have set off alarm bells among those who associated with him–commentators noticed it bore a clear resemblance to a Ponzi.+ (My regular readers know I am no enemy of markets.) Of course, and I say this especially to my friends who are utilitarians; I have not just discussed a problem only within utilitarianism; philosophy as a professional discipline always assumes its own clean hands, or finds ways to sanitize the existing dirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

On the Social Workers of Um-Helat (pt II)

So the social workers of Um-Helat stand, talking now, over the body of a man. He is dead—early, unwilling, with a beautifully crafted pike jammed through his spine and heart. (The spine to make it painless. The heart to make it quick.) This is only one of the weapons carried by the social workers, and they prefer it because the pike is silent. Because there was no shot or ricochet, no crackle or sizzle, no scream, no one else will come to investigate. The disease has taken one poor victim, but it need not claim more. In this manner is the contagion contained . . . in a moment. In a moment.

Beside the man’s body crouches a little girl. She’s curly-haired, plump, blind, brown, tall for her age. Normally a boisterous child, she weeps now over her father’s death, and her tears run hot with the injustice of it all. She heard him say, “I’m sorry.” She saw the social workers show the only mercy possible. But she isn’t old enough to have been warned of the consequences of breaking the law, or to understand that her father knew those consequences and accepted them—so to her, what has happened has no purpose or reason. It is a senseless, monstrous, and impossible thing, called murder.

“I’ll get back at you,” she says between sobs. “I’ll make you die the way you made him die.” This is an unthinkable thing to say. Something is very wrong here. She snarls, “How dare you. How dare you.”

The social workers exchange looks of concern. They are contaminated themselves, of course; it’s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work. Impossible to dam a flood without getting wet. (There are measures in place. The studs on their scalps—well. In our own world, those who volunteered to work in leper colonies were once venerated, and imprisoned with them.) The social workers know, therefore, that for incomprehensible reasons, this girl’s father has shared the poison knowledge of our world with her. An uncontaminated citizen of Um-Helat would have asked “Why?” after the initial shock and horror, because they would expect a reason. There would be a reason. But this girl has already decided that the social workers are less important than her father, and therefore the reason doesn’t matter. She believes that the entire city is less important than one man’s selfishness. Poor child. She is nearly septic with the taint of our world.

Nearly. But then our social worker, the tall brown one who got a hundred strangers to smile at a handmade ladybug, crouches and offers a hand to the child.

What? What surprises you? Did you think this would end with the cold-eyed slaughter of a child? There are other options—and this is Um-Helat, friend, where even a pitiful, diseased child matters. They will keep her in quarantine, and reach out to her for several days. If the girl accepts the hand, listens to them, they will try to explain why her father had to die. She’s early for the knowledge, but something must be done, do you see? Then together they will bury him, with their own hands if they must, in the beautiful garden that they tend between caseloads. This garden holds all the Um-Helatians who broke the law. Just because they have to die as deterrence doesn’t mean they can’t be honored for the sacrifice.

But there is only one treatment for this toxin once it gets into the blood: fighting it. Tooth and nail, spear and claw, up close and brutal; no quarter can be given, no parole, no debate. The child must grow, and learn, and become another social worker fighting an endless war against an idea . . . but she will live, and help others, and find meaning in that. If she takes the woman’s hand.--N.K. Jemisin (2018) "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" in How Long the Black Future Month?, pp. 10-11.

Last week (recall), I focused on the pecularities of the coming of age ritual in Um-Helat (a "postcolonial utopia" (p. 12)). The ritual alluded to, again, near the end of the story (quoted above). Because the daughter of the man executed by the social workers of Um-Helat has not undergone the ritual yet. She is, hence, unaware of her father's crime and the reasons for his sudden death. 

Presumably, this lack of awareness has also spared her life: there is in her no mens rea. Because she did not undergo the coming of ritual, she had no knowledge of the taboo on Earthly (social) media consumption, and the effects that may follow from the violation of it. This despite the fact that she is also infected with the Earthly ideas her father pursued and shared secretly. These ideas involve the denial of equal respect, the advocacy of social hierarchy. But also directed, or exclusive love like the intense love the child feels for her late dad. To be sure, it's okay to love one's children and parents in Um-Helat, but not at the expense of others--so in the ideals of Um-Helat, one should be aunties to many children (p. 1).

Um-Helat is governed by the ideal of mutual, egalitarian respect. But also by a kind of principle of sufficient reason (PSR) because, as the passage quoted above implies, all actions in Um-Helat can be explained (and so justified) to each other. This suggests that Um-Helat does not lack philosophy. The mutual respect ideal and the PSR are defended violently against those that seek out and circulate ideals of social subordination associated with our world. If capital punishment were not shocking enough, Um-Helat's 'social workers' act as secret prosecutors, juries/judges, and executioners at once in defense of certain kind of social taboos. 

The lack of separation in the juridical functions of social workers is presumably rationalized by their commitment to keep the fact of contagion as quiet as possible, and to weed it out as quick as possible. The law and its severe consequences are known to adults, and there is even a kind of consent to it in Um-Helat.* And so, one may think this meets minimal ideals of public reasons. But the execution of the law is not. There is a clear denial of publicity in Kant's sense (e.g., "all actions relating to the right of other human beings are wrong if their maxim is incompatible with publicity"). In addition, the law of Um-Helat does not build into its execution any safeguards against false accusation or mistakes. So, the social workers of Um-Helat are more akin to the guardians of a Government House utilitarian society (than a Kantian one).

The language of 'contagion' reminds us that the social taboo on forbidden knowledge is medicalized. Violation of the taboo on consumption of Earthly (social) media is treated as a disease. And the 'social workers' are Um-Helat's immune system. Strikingly enough, the 'social workers' of Um-Helat are themselves partially infected or "contaminated themselves" (..."it’s permitted, and frankly unavoidable in their line of work") with the very thing they are tasked to fight.

That the angry child is a potential recruit to what we may call the 'guild of social workers' makes a lot of sense upon reflection. She is spirited and loves too-partially, which are, in fact, two key qualifications for the guardians of Plato's Republic (375). So, part of the implied (invisible to us) education of such contaminated young kids into would be 'social workers' of Um-Helat is the redirection, the turning of this angry, powerful directed love into a love capable of serving the common good ferociously. 

In fact, the un-deviant, and unquestioning healthy citizens of Um-Helat are not suitable to the task of social worker. They are basically too happy and too dutiful for the task of defending the psychic health of Um-Helat with extreme measures.+ So, it makes sense that 'social workers' who are central to the survival of the ideology/ideals of Um-Helat are recruited from those like the child, spirited and with intense love. We learn that these social workers can otherwise be anyone (including (recall) a gethen).

The reason I have adopted the language of the Republic, is that the social workers themselves are both an elite of Um-Helat and, simultaneously, may also be controlled by somehow. That they are a kind of elite becomes clear early in the story, when one of them is seen to promote common mutual acknowledgment publicly (see p. 3). And, in fact, the official task of these 'social workers' is "to ensure the happiness and prosperity of their fellow citizens." (p. 7) Those that are entrusted with this noble task are those that have experienced a secret grief and kind of loss of a sort unknown (and unknowable) to the rest of Um-Helat.  

We get a hint about the function of "the studs on their scalps;" at an earlier point in the (very brief) text we were told that these are "implanted." (p. 3.) And it is also implied that all social workers have them (p. 7). Presumably to allow control from afar, a safe-guard. This is a city known for its great technological innovations, so such distant control is not beyond the possible for them. What's left unclear is who controls, who can be entrusted with power over those studs in a city in which every question is supposed to have an answer. 

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

On Quentin Skinner's neo-roman criticism of classical liberalism; or Hume vs Skinner (IV)

I...concentrate...on the other and more knock-down objection commonly levelled against the theory I have been laying out. According to a number of eminent critics, the analysis of the concept of liberty underlying the claim that it is only possible to live freely in a free state is itself misleading and confused. Those who have raised this objection commonly mount their attack in two waves. First they reaffirm the Hobbesian principle that the extent of your individual liberty depends on the extent to which the performance of actions within your powers is or is not physically or legally constrained. As Paley, for example, puts it, 'the degree of actual liberty' will always bear 'a reversed proportion to the number and severity of the restrictions' placed on your ability to pursue your chosen ends. But the neo-roman theorists, according to Paley, are not talking about this situation. They are talking about the extent to which the performance of such actions may or may not be free from the possible danger of being constrained. But this, Paley goes on, is to confuse the idea of liberty with a wholly different value, that of enjoying security for your liberty and the exercise of your rights. So the neo-roman writers 'do not so much describe liberty itself, as the safeguards and preservatives of liberty: for example, a man's being governed by no laws, but those to which he has given his consent, were it practicable, is no otherwise necessary to the enjoyment of civil liberty, than as it affords a probable security against the dictation of laws, imposing arbitrary and superfluous restrictions upon his private will'
The second wave of the attack then follows at once. As soon as this confusion is uncovered, we can see that the basic claim made by the neo-roman theorists to the effect that you can only be free in a free state is simply a mistake. The extent of your freedom as a citizen depends on the extent to which you are left unconstrained by the coercive apparatus of the law from exercising your powers at will. But this means that what matters for civic liberty is not who makes the laws, but simply how many laws are made, and thus how many of your actions are in fact constrained. This in turn shows that there is no necessary connection between the preservation of individual liberty and the maintenance of any particular form of government. As Paley concludes, there is no reason in principle why 'an absolute form of government' might not leave you no less free than the purest democracy'.

...It seems to me, however, that Paley's line of criticism fails to come to terms with the most basic and distinctive claim that the neo-roman theorists are labouring to make about the concept of civil liberty. The claim is implicit in the analysis I have already given, but it is now time to spell it out.
The neo-roman writers fully accept that the extent of your freedom as a citizen should be measured by the extent to which you are or are not constrained from acting at will in pursuit of your chosen ends. They have no quarrel, that is, with the liberal tenet that, as Jeremy Bentham was later to formulate it, the concept of liberty 'is merely a negative one' in the sense that its presence is always marked by the absence of something, and specifically by the absence of some measure of restraint or constraint. Nor have they any wish to deny that the exercise of force or the coercive threat of it must be listed among the forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty. Despite what a number of recent commentators have implied, they are far from merely wishing to put forward an alternative account of unfreedom according to which it is held to be the product not of coercion but only of dependence.

What, then, divides the neo-roman from the liberal understanding of freedom? What the neoroman writers repudiate avant la lettre is the key assumption of classical liberalism to the effect that force or the coercive threat of it constitute the only forms of constraint that interfere with individual liberty. The neo-roman writers insist, by contrast, that to live in a condition of dependence is in itself a source and a form of constraint. As soon as you recognise that you are living in such a condition, this will serve in itself to constrain you from exercising a number of your civil rights. This is why they insist, pace Paley, that to live in such a condition is to suffer a diminution not merely of security for your liberty but of liberty itself.

The issue, in short, is how to interpret the underlying idea of constraint...

If you are a subject of the sultan, you will be less free than a citizen of Lucca, simply because your freedom in Constantinople, however great in extent, will remain wholly dependent on the sultan's goodwill. But this means that in Constantinople you will suffer from a form of constraint unknown even to the humblest citizen of Lucca. You will find yourself constrained in what you can say and do by the reflection that, as Harrington brutally puts it, even the greatest bashaw in Constantinople is merely a tenant of his head, liable to lose it as soon as he speaks or acts in such a way as to cause the sultan offence. The very fact, in other words, that the law and the will of the sultan are one and the same has the effect of limiting your liberty. Whether the commonwealth be monarchical or popular, the freedom is not still the same...
...

By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Sidgwick felt able to declare in his great summation of classical liberalism that the errors underlying the neoroman theory of liberty are beyond dispute. To speak of individual liberty, Sidgwick first reminds us in his Elements of Politics, is to speak of an absence of external impediments to action, either in the form of 'physical coercion or confinement', or else of coercive threats that inhibit us by 'the fear of painful consequences'. Once this is understood, we can see that to think of the freedom of citizens as possible only within free states is simply to fall into 'the confusion which the common use of the word "Freedom" is apt to cause'. The truth is that individual freedom has no necessary connection with forms of government, since it is perfectly possible for a representative legislature to 'interfere with the free action of individuals more than an absolute monarch With this reiteration of the classical utilitarian case, Sidgwick dearly felt that the neoroman theory had finally been laid to rest.--Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, 79-99.

This is the concluding post ((recall here; here; here; here; here) in my series on Skinner's Liberty before Liberalism , and the one in which I disagree with him. One important feature of Skinner's treatment of the debate between the "neoroman theory" and the "liberal," even "classical liberal" response to it is that the main representatives of the latter he discusses, from Paley to Sidgwick, are all utilitarians. And of these, Mill goes entirely unmentioned (except for in Skinner's "preface"). This subtly skews the terms of the debate. 

For in Skinner's hands the neoroman litmus test for freedom is the ability to speak one's mind at court by those"devoted to public service by acting as advisers and counsellors to the rulers and governments." (87ff) Since utilitarians often conceive of their own science in terms of such (philanthropic) service -- they model their own activity in terms of social planner or philanthropy -- this is entirely fair. And, indeed, in their public service, in so far as policy-advisors become dependent on the whims of the prince, and, as Machiavelli (recall) already noted, incentivized to flatter the prince and disagree among themselves, the neoromans are right to regard it as a mistake to treat them as paradigmatically free in such an unstable political environment. 

Why then do I say that the debate is skewed? First that there is nothing distinctively liberal about these utilitarian responses to the neoromans. By this I do not mean to imply that the utilitarians are hostile to liberalism. I agree with, say, Foucault (recall) that they constitute the epitome of the "radical" tradition within liberalism. But it doesn't mean that in all things utilitarians are constitutive of liberalism or especially liberal in their sensibility. When in  Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter 3. Mill, who himself has a tendency toward paternalism, warns against the attractions of "good despotism" he is attacking the fondness for Enlightened dictatorship to be found in (other) utilitarians (and earlier the physiocrats). Again, I do not mean to deny that within otherwise eminently liberal thinkers there is a recurring lapse toward the attractions of the wise legislator who resolves political problems by fiat.

My point is that so-called negative liberty by itself is not especially liberal. For, one thing notably missing in the presentation of the liberal response to the neoroman account of freedom, as presented by Skinner, is the significance of the rule of law.+ The classical liberals granted the neoromans that one was not free under despots. For, example the sultan's mastery "of the life and fortune of any individual" is treated as a danger to and restriction of freedom by Hume. This despite the fact that the sultan was, according to Hume, constrained in his ability to impose taxes. 

But informed by Machiavelli on the significance of mechanism design, the classical liberals also claimed that the rule of law was compatible with a variety of constitutional and political formats. What's needed, in addition to the rule of law, is a separation of powers capable of resisting the executive so that impartial and general rule of law is secured. As Hume, who is by no means the greatest friend of liberty among the classical liberals, writes in remarking on the "struggle" between "authority and liberty:"

The government, which, in common appellation, receives the appellation of free, is that which admits of a partition of power among several members, whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater than that of any monarch; but who, in the usual course of administration, must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all the members and to all their subjects. In this sense, it must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society;

Notice that in the quoted passage, Hume accepts the neoroman claim that you can only be free in a free state. The problem with the neoroman position for Hume is not that the neoromans confuse freedom with constraints on freedom (and should adopt the Hobbesian, negative conception of freedom). Skinner is entirely right that this line of argument that is ground in the idea that "individual liberty is basically a matter of non-interference" (116, in context this is a criticism of Isaiah Berlin) begs the question against the neoroman account of liberty. Hume does not beg the question in that way.*

Rather, the neoroman theorists call the wrong kind of states free. This needs to be corrected. For Hume, the problem with the neoroman account is that, as (recall Constant) any reader of Rousseau's Social Contract will have recognized, the neoroman theory facilitates what one may call democratic despotism. (This was noted in Berlin's Two Concepts.") And in so far as republican theorists recognize this, and introduce  institutional safeguards against it, they move toward the liberal position articulated by Hume (and Montesquieu, etc.), and, indeed, Livy.++

I do not mean to deny that lurking here is an important disagreement over the best form of life. Classical liberals do not sign up for the neoroman idea that devoted public servant is the paradigmatic citizen,  although Hume and Smith felt the pull of it. And from a neoroman perspective this is indeed troubling. But the liberal rejoinder is that in their kind of free state, which is compatible with a whole range of constitutional forms (but not despotism/tyranny, etc.), the public servant is no more dependent or unfree on the ruler than any other citizen is. But that's because the liberal espouses the idea when, in a free state (in the corrected sense), the citizen exercises her judgment in order to make meaningful choices, she can express her personal freedom in a diversity of ways in the pursuit of many valuable ends.

 

 

Quine, Spencer, Neurath, Regimentation & Imperialism

Each elimination of obscure constructions or notions that we manage to achieve, by paraphrase into more lucid elements, is a clarification of the conceptual scheme of science. The same motives that impel scientists to seek ever simpler and clearer theories adequate to the subject matter of their special sciences are motives for simplification and clarification of the broader framework shared by all the sciences. Here the objective is called philosophical, because of the breadth of the framework concerned; but the motivation is the same. The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality.--Quine Word and Object, 146-147

Quine's philosophy of science is now primarily understood in terms of his naturalism which makes the distinction between science and philosophy, or metaphysics, blurry. But as is, I assume, well known, he also embraced a distinct task for the philosopher: to paraphrase and thereby regiment scientific language into a simpler and clarified language. This task turns philosophy into a mopping up operation behind the research frontiers of science, but better a job than no job. And while Quine keeps his distance from Neurath's preference for orchestration of the unified language of science, it is notable that Quine thinks there is a possible regimented language of the broader framework shared by all the sciences. This part of Quine   ("ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality") is beloved by post-Lewisian metaphysicians with their fondness for fundamental languages at the end of scientific development.

Quine devotes the whole of chapter 5 of Word and Object to regimentation, so I do not mean to suggest my previous paragraph is suitable paraphrase for the idea. In particular, there are interesting questions to be asked about the nature of the regimented (logical) language, the relationship between the regimented languages of the special sciences and the broader framework language, and what the further point of a regimented language is. Later in the book, Quine casually notes that regimentation in the way he understands it has already a glorious history: "how powerful this combination is has been borne out by extensive logical regimentations of parts of science, especially mathematics, at the hands of Frege, Peano, and their successors."* (208) Quine's use of 'successors' is a bit cheeky, because back in 1936, in a little known essay, "A theory of classes presupposing no canons of type," Quine himself had deployed a "principle of regimentation" he had contributed to this glorious history.

My interest today is  in the word, ''regimentation,' used to describe this philosophical task. In 1957, Quine had used 'regimentation' in the sense intended here in "The scope and language of science," (BJPS, 8:29: 10). And as Peter Hylton and Gary Kemp note, he gives a nice sense of the point of regimentation there: "To some degree…the scientist can enhance objectivity and diminish the interference of language, by his very choice of language. And we concerned to distill the essence of scientific discourse, can profitably purify the language of science beyond what might reasonably be urged upon the practicing scientist." (7) In so far it is profitable, I leave aside here to what degree the return on investment is worth the opportunity costs.

But Quine does not comment on his choice for using this word. An unscientific search in scholar.google, suggested that the idea of regimenting language was not altogether uncommon in the half century before Quine (as the reference to his 1936 paper suggests). To the best of knowledge, however, Quine invented the coinage of regimentation in the sense under discussion.

I was reminded to reflect on this by a late essay by Herbert Spencer, "Regimentation," which appeared in his collection Facts and Comments (1902).+ Spencer himself knew that the "volume herewith issued I can say with certainty will be my last," and so it can be understood as a kind of literary last testament. As Davies notes, the tenor of the collection is fiercely anti-imperialist. (For an excellent treatment of Spencer's views, which dispels many common myths about him.) And the main argument of the essays I have read so far involves the ways in which imperialism corrupts and infects all of social life, including language, which takes on militaristic tropes and metaphors.** For, Spencer "regimentation is another aspect of that general retrogression shown in growing imperialism and accompanying re-barbarization. "

And like a contemporary cultural critic, Spencer notes that the widespread use of 'regimentation,' and not just it,  indicates the "graduated subordination which we see in an army, characterizes a militant society at large more and more as militancy increases." One of the subtexts of the essay is the co-constitution of imperialism, militancy, and social planning. And echoing Mill, Spencer deplores the way homogeneous society is the product of nation-building at home: "we see that even in a single generation great strides have been taken towards a regimental organization for moulding children after an approved pattern." In particular, regimentation involves the subordination of spiritual ends toward society's directed use of our bodies.++ One of Spencer most striking claims is that such regimentation is directed and developed by city governments in their provision of public goods and services: "each of these is, as we see, like a military administration is having ranks subordinate one to another."

As an aside, the broader thrust of Spencer's essays serve as a record of the retreat of liberalism even in Victorian England at the end of the nineteenth century. This was echoed by a later generation of liberals confronted by its near collapse in the 1930s. I think Spencer's essays can also help explain why liberalisms' ideas lost their vitality in this period. But that's for another occasion.

Let me tie the two threads together. First, Quine's use of 'regimentation' is associated with concepts like purification, clarification, and distillation. These, we may say, chemical metaphors of refinement tend to avoid the militant network of associations that Spencer had diagnosed. This alone is peculiar. 

Here's a speculative thought. There had been a brief, polemical debate about the tendency of the tropes and metaphors used within (let's call it) scientific philosophy. Neurath, when (in 1946) explaining his fondness for, and responding to Kallen's criticism of, his "pet word," 'orchestration,' had gone out of the way to distance it from various totalitarian and programmatic connotations. Instead, for Neurath, orchestration should be understood as a "democracy of cooperation." Kallen had charged the unity of science movement with "imperialistic" designs. The whole exchange is worth reading.*** My present point is that there was self-conscious reflection on the way the network of words used for specialized terminology within scientific philosophy may be associated with wider political trends. 

I have already reflected with the help of Greg Frost-Arnold on Quine's understanding of clarity. So, let me leave that aside here. Regimentation is a form of disciplining (a word notably absent from Quine's idiolect). And, it is worth asking who is, thereby, disciplined. It turns out both science and philosophy. The main benefit of regimentation is more disciplined metaphysics which can take place, as it were, in the regimented language. So, regimentation is a kind of self-disciplining of philosophical activity.

But Quine-ian regimentation is also, a species of disciplining of science; not, I hasten to add, to pursue "practical language reform," (as a Marxist might) or to tell scientists how to do science. Quine thinks, however, that no language is fully "neutral" and that language shapes scientific activity. And a purified language may well improve actual science, indirectly, by avoiding ambiguity and other sources of interferences within science. One important effect of this is that scientists do not have (ahh) the last word on their own output. (Quine here echoes Toland, Berkeley, Hume, in response to Newton.) Their authority is, thus, partially subordinated to philosophy.+++ And, while I would hesitate to call this an 'imperial philosophy,' in this sense, 'regimentation,' seems an apt choice.

On Foucault on 24 January 1979: On The Influence of IR on Political Economy (VI)

You remember that when last year we talked about raison d’État, I tried to show you that there was a kind of equilibrium, a system of counterweights between what could be called unlimited objectives within the state, on the one hand, and limited external objectives, on the other. The unlimited objectives within the state were pursued through the mechanism of the police state, that is to say, an always more emphatic, accentuated, fine, and subtle governmentality of regimentation with no predetermined limits. So, internally there were unlimited objectives, and then limited objectives externally inasmuch as at the same time as the formation of raison d’État and the organization of the police state was taking place there was also the pursuit and real organization of what is called European balance, the principle of which is the following: to see to it that no state prevails over the others so as to reconstitute imperial unity in Europe; to see to it, consequently, that no state dominates all the others, or prevails over its neighbors to such an extent that it can dominate them, etcetera. It is quite easy to see and understand the connection between these two mechanisms of unlimited objectives with the police state, and limited objectives with European balance, inasmuch as if the raison d’être, purpose, and objective of the police state, or of the internal mechanisms which endlessly organize and develop the police state, is the strengthening of the state itself, then the target of each state is to strengthen itself endlessly, that is to say its aim is an unlimited increase of its power in relation to the others. In clear terms, competition to be the best in this competitive game will introduce into Europe a number of inequalities, which will increase, which will be sanctioned by an imbalance in the population, and consequently in military strength, and you will end up with the well-known imperial situation from which European balance, since the Treaty of Westphalia, wished to free Europe. The balance was established to avoid this situation.
More precisely, in mercantilist calculation and in the way in which mercantilism organizes the economic-political calculation of forces, it is clear that a European equilibrium is actually unavoidable if you want to prevent the realization of a new imperial configuration. For mercantilism, competition between states assumes that everything by which one state is enriched can, and in truth must, be deducted from the wealth of other states. What one state acquires must be taken from the other; one can only enrich itself at the cost of the others. In other words, what I think is important is that for the mercantilists the economic game is a zero sum game. It is a zero sum game quite simply because of the monetarist conception and practice of mercantilism. There is a certain amount of gold in the world. Since gold defines, measures, and constitutes the wealth of each state, it is understood that whenever one state gets richer it will take from the common stock of gold and consequently impoverish the others. The monetarist character of mercantilist policy and calculation consequently entails that competition can only be conceived in the form of a zero sum game and so of the enrichment of some at the expense of others. To avoid the phenomenon of having one and only one winner in this zero sum game, to avoid this political consequence of competition thus defined, strict economic logic requires the establishment of something like an equilibrium which will allow the game to be interrupted, as it were, at a given moment. That is to say, the game will be halted when there is a danger of the difference between the players becoming too great, and it is precisely in this that European equilibrium consists. This is exactly—well, up to a point—Pascal’s problem: in a zero sum game, what happens when you interrupt the game and divide out the winnings between the players? Interrupting the game of competition with the diplomacy of European equilibrium is necessarily entailed by the monetarist conception and practice of the mercantilists. This is the starting point.--Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979, lecture 3 The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell,  51-53

One major key theme of the Birth of Biopolitics lecture is introduced here at the start of the lecture: that within the art of governance, there are a subtle set of interactions between domestic and foreign affairs. And, as I have already noted before, Foucault shows that he can play that complex chess game no less than the great grandmasters Kautilya, Plato. and Kant.  In addition, he  explicitly adopts the liberal interpretation of mercantilism, which is crucial to liberalism's self-conception, that it is a zero-sum game. This is (recall) one of the main points of the second lecture. But today, I want to focus on a minor key, which is Foucault's more mundane, lesser mortal contribution to the history of ideas. 

To simplify: [thesis] Foucault implies that the very idea of a liberal market economy is formally derived from the balance of power structure of European politics during the mercantile age. This notion of derived is not intended in the logical sense, but more akin (in structure, and, as it happens, in content) to the way in which Darwinian ideas are derived from Malthus' political economy.

That is to say, in its ideal form, intra-European politics is characterized by a competitive balance of power in which no power can dominate the rest. In structure this anticipates the ideal form of the market in which no participant is a monopolist or even price-setter and, thereby, tends toward equilibrium. And it also anticipates the normative role of Ordo-liberal anti-trust regulation* which halts "the game....when there is a danger of the difference between the players becoming too great." 

You may worry I am being to clever by half here because Foucault does not assert [thesis]. But he hints at [thesis] in a truly marvelous way. For, Pascal's problem is central to the development of mathematical probability theory and, in particular, the development of the idea of an expected value.  And, in particular, that in order to understand the fair application of probability, we should not look to the past of the game, but to the outcomes in its possible futures.** 

And, Foucault's insinituation, which is historically creative, is that the shape of Pascal's problem, or to stay reflexively in the spirit of the solution to it, its solution was derived not from the gambling common among the nobility, but also from reflection on international diplomacy. And, of course, hidden here is the question -- where do the constellation of ideas that define utilitarianism come from, including why the past plays no role in decision problems, and why does it resonate so much in liberal thought, this despite the fact that utilitarianism lends itself to many illiberal ideas? And it turns out that a certain stylized image of mercantile balance of power can be taken to be some such source. 

Now, you may say, look: this can't be right because mercantilism is a theory of zero-sum (as Foucault and the liberals agree), but the liberal conception of the market is not supposed to be zero-sum . And it is true, as Foucault emphasizes down the page (53), that transactions within the market are not zero sum according to liberalism. That's true, of course. But at the level of a market, the liberal does expect that some fail (or lose) relative to others. And that is very much like the balance of power (of which David Hume was one of the great theorists). And the equilibrium state itself is when the collective gain is greatest.

I could stop here. But it is worth noting that Hume thought, that ""however generally known and acknowledged among speculative reasoners, [the balance of power] has not, in practice, an authority much more extensive among those who govern the world."+ I mention it not because it undermines [thesis], it clearly supports it. But rather that, perhaps, the picture of mercantilism sketched by Foucault (which echoes that of liberliams) is more consistent in theory, than, as Hume notes, in practice.

 

 

Effective Altruism and Gary Becker

The conclusion is that firms making cash transfers because of their altruism obtain greater utility than other firms with the same preferences and market opportunities who subsidize customers, workers or suppliers. Consequently, firms making cash transfers are more likely to "survive" because they do better than firms using market transactions to convey their altruism. Although participants in market transactions may be highly altruistic, they act as if they are selfish and maximize their money incomes. They express their altruism through cash transfers not tied to market transactions, as dramatically illustrated by the enormous charitable contributions by allegedly selfish captains of industry in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.'--Gary Becker (1981) Altruism in the Family and Selfishness in the Market Place, Economica, New Series, Vol. 48, No. 189 (Feb., 1981), 11

As regular readers know (recall), because of Melinda Cooper's excellent Family Values, I have been re-reading neoliberal texts in light of their analysis of the family. Gary Becker's work on the role of the family of making the division of labor possible is crucial to her argument (see p. 10 in linked piece), and something I wish to discuss in the future. But the passage above caught my eye because it is a quasi-Darwinian style of argument (indebted to Alchian and Milton Friedman in the early 1950s) that shows, in context, why cash transfers are more "efficient." And while the official point is not to make the normative argument that we ought to prefer expressing our "altruism through cash transfers not tied to market transactions," the rhetoric of the passage leaves no doubt that's implied. It turns out that the "captains of industry" are worth emulating for  their altruism!

Now, this idea is a core feature (see here) of the so-called effective altruism movement which ordinarily is traced back to Peter Singer's writings, especially his (1972) "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."  When the efficiency of cash transfers is connected to the idea one can give most and so generate highest utility if one makes a lot of money in market economy, one can obtain the result that a successful mergers & acquisition consultant who annually donates 70% of her salary to Give Well does more good than most aid workers in crisis areas. Critics dislike this feature of effective altruism not because it violates our intuitions but because it may well be that market transactions actually generate the structural causes that do -- or the political forces that reinforce -- real damage to people's lives.*

As it happens, Becker's argument is articulated in terms of "effective altruism" and "effective altruist." A google-scholar search (1900-1981) shows nobody used the term "effective altruist" in a scholarly context before Becker's influential article. (This surprised me!) And if we search on "effective altruism," the term gets used extremely rarely (see especially Quinton's (1973) Utilitarian Ethics) and never in this specific context. For example, granting Bradley that "it is, no doubt, true that a consequentialist manner of reasoning in morals leaves more scope for self-regarding distortion," Quinton writes, "on the other hand it also leaves more room for apt and effective altruism than a set of rigidly unconditional specific principles." (96; I thank Neil Levy for locating this passage.) This foreshadows the ruling idea of the movement, but it is underdeveloped in Quinton.

Now, by linking these ideas to Becker I mean to suggest that the effective altruism movement has clear neoliberal features, in particular, the technocratic wing of neoliberalism. Of course, I do not mean to deny that elements of the effective altruism movement are developed independently from Chicago economics and its cultural influence. But I got thinking about the links because of the following passage in Becker's article: 

The effect of a little altruism on cooperative and efficient behaviour can be illustrated by Good Samaritan situations (see the analysis in Landes and Posner, 1978). A selfish person encountering someone drowning, being assaulted or in other dire circumstances would refuse to help without the expectation of monetary or psychic compensation. An altruist, however, might help even if he became exposed to danger, and even if his altruism were sufficiently weak that he did not help in any way prior to the misfortune. Although the marginal utility from helping might have been small prior to the misfortune, the total increase in utility to the altruist from helping could exceed the disutility of the effort or risk involved because of the large imminent decline in the victim's welfare. Note that this example shows not only how altruism can induce efficient behaviour where selfishness fails, but also how altruism can significantly change behaviour even when the altruism is weak. (10)

Landes and Posner (1978) is "Salvors, finders, good samaritans, and other rescuers: an economic study of law and altruism," which is a famous article in Chicago law and economics. It discusses rescuing drowning people cases in terms of "the economics of altruism." (Altruism is understood in terms of lack of expectation of compensation.) And they offer a utilitarian model to do so that clearly anticipates Becker. But their interest is really in to what degree the law should require compensation for failures to rescue. (Their prototypical case is: "A drowning man cries for help, a strong swimmer ignores his cries, and the man drowns. Is the decedent's estate entitled to damages from the swimmer?"

Now Landes and Posner do not cite any philosophers. As regular readers know (recall) drowning child/adult cases have a long history in philosophy, from Mencius to Sophie de Grouchy, to motivate (the existence of) natural compassion. But the central example for our present purposes is Peter Singer's own famous drowning man case:

 If I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. Singer (1972) "Famine, Affluence, and Morality."  (231)

Here the case is used to motivate the idea that, "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it." This duty itself does not require commitment to utilitarianism, but in Singer's hands it is a key step toward the idea that "we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility-that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift."

Now, in his main line of argument, Becker is thinking about altruism in terms of a kind of intra-family insurance scheme. And so I don't want to suggest that he and Singer agree on all important issues. And I don't think Becker ought to accept Singer's strong version of his intuition. After, all Becker wants to explain why altruism, even at considerable cost to oneself, can be genuinely utility enhancing even efficient. (And, in fact, he can explain why all things equal altruists tend to be more responsive to disaster relief than prevention.) I don't want to claim that Singer influenced Becker. 

Okay, let me wrap up. It is conventional wisdom to think that in the nineteenth century, the economic, normative, and psychological branches of utilitarianism were tightly bound up with each other. And that in the twentieth century, as economists moved to revealed preference, these connections weakened if not dissolved. Much (PPE style) research in policy relevant philosophy on, say, inter-generational justice and climate policy, shows that utilitarianism is not exhausted as a living tradition in which the different branches influence each other.

And, if we look at the history of the effective altruism movement, it is undeniable that some of its most important ideas were developed, perhaps independently, within Chicago economics and law & economics. And so when critics say that effective altruism is neoliberal in character, they have a point. Some other time I'll explore if effective altruism also inherits the problems (and benefits) I associate with Chicago.

 

On Taboos and Brutal Honesty; on the 'ídeals of academic liberalism' [long read, alas]

Are some ideas so offensive that they shouldn’t be engaged with? That question occupies scholars a lot these days, and tends to generate a predictably polarized set of responses — from those who opine that snowflake millennials are destroying free speech to those who call for the retraction of journal articles for ideological (among other) reasons. Meanwhile, I find myself lost somewhere in the middle, attempting to understand my own decisions...

An idealistic model of academic liberalism says that we should engage with all ideas, no matter what. Truth is its own defense! We have
nothing to fear from ideas, even those we find offensive! And so on. I would love it if this were true, but it has always seemed like nonsense to me.

Saying why, though, is tricky. It’s not merely that I’m confident the conclusion is false. I’m a philosopher — I spend lots of time entertaining ideas I’m pretty sure are false, and it’s part of the ethos of my discipline that this is a worthwhile activity. It’s also not that I think the conclusion is morally wrong or  could have morally bad consequences. That’s true of many ideas that are obviously  worth engaging with...
The pro-rape argument is different because I can’t see how the benefits of discussing it outweigh the harms. Perhaps the argument is clever or original, but let’s be honest — there’s a  limited amount of intellectual value in any one argument. If I want to take up a challenging and interesting argument, I can pick one of the thousands of other challenging, interesting arguments out there. So the benefits of engaging with a pro-rape argument are minimal. The harms, though, are not. Taking seriously an argument that justifies rape has the potential to cause intense pain to victims of rape, not to mention the potential to promote rape. Citing ideas, discussing them, responding to them is a type of scholarly currency. It’s academic signal-boosting...

Most people would, of course, be far too polite to say what Singer says. But Singer’s claims about  the comparative value of disabled lives follow naturally from the casual remarks that disabled people and caregivers hear all the time...
I seriously doubt that the well-intentioned people who say these things would endorse Singer’s conclusions. But Singer is right that his conclusions flow straightforwardly from these sorts of common claims. For this reason, I find myself strangely grateful for the brutal honesty of Peter Singer. He says explicitly what others only gesture at implicitly.
People worry that grappling with offensive views gives them undue legitimacy. But in the case of someone like Singer, those views have legitimacy whether or not I choose to engage with them. To state the obvious, the arguments of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University are going to matter whether or not I pay attention to them. But more importantly, Singer’s views already have legitimacy because people will continue to think about disability in ways directly relevant to Singer’s arguments regardless of whether progressive academics decide those arguments are simply too offensive to be discussed. (After all, as Singer himself wryly notes, the sales of Practical Ethics tend to increase whenever there are calls to “no platform” his talks.) Even Singer’s views on infant euthanasia aren’t a dystopian  thought experiment. At least one major European country (The Netherlands) openly practices infanticide in some cases of disability.
...
As a full professor, I have an incredible amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line)...Given all this, it’s hard for me to  justify the idea that I shouldn’t engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer’s views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spinabifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands’ policy on infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer’s are real. But if I’m unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I’m not sure I’m using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.
The value of struggling with Singer’s ideas doesn’t negate the real and material costs, but it does offset them. And in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that Singer himself would approve of, to me the trade off seems worth it. Prejudice is often held subtly, implicitly, or without much  reflection. By giving us clear and well-defined arguments, thinkers like Singer lay bare the case  for views which many people hold. Once that case is laid out, it’s much easier to begin the work of pointing out its flaws.--Elizabeth Barnes "Arguments That Harm — and Why We Need Them" The Chronicle Review. [HT Liam Kofi Bright & Justin Weinberg @Dailynous.]

While there is a lot more to Barnes's article, the underlying argument has a few key components:

• (i) there is a cost-benefit analysis of both (a) engaging with particular position/speech and (b) the consequences of leaving some speech/idea unchallenged. Barnes notes (c) that the harms and benefits can fall unequally on society, on vulnerable populations, and individual academics. Conjoined with such cost-benefit analysis is the idea that
• (ii) there are opportunity costs in engaging with a project. Time and attention are scarce resources. So not all ideas can be engaged with it and engaging with some means that other perhaps worthier projects are potentially slowed down or prevented.
• (iii) There is path-dependency/historical legacy: some views are already in the culture and/or have legitimacy regardless of what philosophers do/say.
• (iv) Status plays a role in who puts a particular idea forth and who is worth responding to.
• (v) Professional philosophy is (in part) grappling with difficult (and false) ideas.
• (vi) Privilege or noblesse oblige creates a duty of taking on unpleasant tasks on behalf of (more vulnerable, less secure, etc.) others.
• (vii) Brutal honesty & clarity in arguments are taken as intellectual virtues such that flaws can be exposed.

Each of these steps is cashed out in subtle ways, so that there are a lot of moving but also mutually reinforcing parts in the argument. (That's not meant as a criticism.) It means one can accept Barnes’s conclusions without agreeing with all the moving parts, or demur from some of the conclusions and still accept most of the moving parts. (Again, that’s not a criticism.) There is also another principle which Barnes rejects (as ‘nonsense’):

• (viii) An ‘idealistic model of academic liberalism,’ which says that ‘we should engage with all ideas, no matter what.’

I also reject (viii; which to repeat, Barnes rejects). But I do so because it misrepresents liberalism and also academic liberalism. What I'd like to do here (and, perhaps another post) is ground my response to Barnes in our shared rejection of (viii) and embrace of (i) & (ii). But I will do so on liberal (even classically liberal) grounds and along the way say something about (v; vi; viii). What follows is not meant as a criticism of Barnes's engagement with Singer, but I wish to show that there is something to be said for non-engagement with offensive ideas, even the acceptance of taboos; undoubtedly that will not persuade many, but along the way I would also like to argue for shifting the burdens of who ought to respond to who around a bit (again on liberal grounds).

Liberalism, it’s true, has always been a theory that has been suspicious of government regulation of speech; but it also has been accommodating of exceptions to this (including ones relating to public health, the content of advertising, public safety, incitement to violence, etc.). Of course, the exceptions are contested and differ among broadly liberal jurisdictions and situated liberal political thought. But the exceptions are often motivated by other liberal commitments (including the harm principle (recall), commitments to equality and freedom, and public welfare).

More important, for present purposes, liberalism has also always been welcoming of non-governmental restrictions on speech. This is grounded in prudence, kindness, the harm principle, and the benefits of cooperation. This is so obvious that it is kind of weird philosophers keep forgetting it. For example, even in my famously forthright home-country of the Netherlands, brutal honesty is, in fact, not always encouraged say among business partners, friends, married couples, or teachers and students (more about that below). In ordinary life people everywhere routinely and completely un-problematically engage in self-censorship in all kinds of ways without thereby promoting falsehood or violating any tenet of liberalism. In fact, liberalism assumes that in pluralistic societies, we kind of adopt a live-and-let-live attitude in which we do not confront each other all the time with our sincerely held views. (That's also compatible with rejecting or embracing demands of public reason.) This means that we are expected to self-censor all the time in complex, liberal societies--it is no surprise that the weather, sports, and vapid celebrities are safe conversation starters.

Critics of liberalism, inspired by Foucault and Marcuse, have derogatory names – ‘disciplining,’ ‘bio-politics’ ‘repressive tolerance’ (etc.) -- for such self-censoring practices. And undoubtedly sometimes, perhaps often, the monitoring effects of public opinion, locally and nationally, can be stifling in ways that Mill already diagnosed and alerted us to. But at the same time, norms that restrict speech deemed imprudent or offensive have many positive effects, including reducing coordination costs, facilitating reliable expectations (crucial to justice), and facilitating exchange of ideas and goods. This is not a bug in liberalism, but a core feature of it. For liberalism does not treat speech as harmless or epi-phenomenal to social order—on the liberal view speech is constitutive of our political life (see Levy). But that also means that its impact on others is to be taken seriously; the harm principle is as deeply entrenched in liberalism as the suspicion of government regulation of speech. This is why liberals find nothing silly about concern over, say, systematic micro-aggression (recall here and here). From a liberal's perspective: just because one has a right to offend others does not mean one ought to be offensive.

It does not mean, of course, that such norms (including ones that regulate sexual affairs, dress-codes, civility etc.) can’t be interrogated or challenged [regular readers know (recall here and here) that, inspired by work of Ed Kazarian and Leigh Johnson, I am no friend of civility when it is imposed by institutions], but it does not follow that norms restricting speech are de facto illiberal. In fact, the liberal spirit encourages experimentation with different norms alongside a strong norm of individual responsibility. Obviously, that’s not the end of the matter; it’s quite clear that liberal political economy, and the profit motive (alongside political aspirations) in particular, have encouraged the media to promote all kinds of valuable forms of self-expression as well as irresponsible speech by individuals on social media and internet. This raises important and uncomfortable questions for liberalism and liberal democracy; but the response is not limited to faith in providence that in the long run speech works out fine.

As an aside, it's important that Barnes reminds the reader of the real world consequences of philosophical ideas. It's undoubtedly true that public policy in the Netherlands has a pro-eugenic bias*--one promoted, in fact, not so much by ethicists but by the medical community of OBGYN practitioners and pediatricians (although there is always an ethicists available to lend a hand) -- and that Dutch public policy on disability is problematic--in Holland disability is made invisible in lots of ways. But it's also the case that due to cheap and easy access to various forms of screening and abortion, "infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida" (which is indeed allowed under the so-called Groningen protocol) is now de facto non-existent in the Netherlands because parents choose not to bring such infants to term.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. I have noted above that liberalism does not embrace (viii). The same is true for academic liberalism. Building on work by Jacob Levy (recall), I have argue that the mission of academic life and education is compatible with a whole range of limitations of speech. These limitations need not be uniform; they can be varied in the classroom, seminar settings, public debates, commencement addresses (etc.) and the particular local missions of the academic institutions. In fact, even universities that pride themselves on their freedom of thought are careful not to be seen as places where, say, astrology or Cartesian vortex theory and a whole bunch of other discarded or wacky ideas are discussed and debated in all seriousness. (That’s compatible with promoting scholarship about them!) Universities self-censor in the curriculum and are very attentive to reputational costs. The same is true of all kinds of noxious political ideas—a cranky professor with insipid views can be tolerated, of course, but colleagues and administrators are careful to avoid amplifying their platforms all the time. People exercise good judgment in these matters all the time. This – restraint and good judgment -- are not just compatible with academic liberalism; the whole point of liberalism is to promote institutions where individuals and communities can exercise good judgment. (Of course, one generation’s good judgment may well be the next generation’s discarded dogma.)

In fact, and this gets me to (v) academics of all disciplines recognize that (academic) taboos make progress possible (recall here; here, and here).+ Journals and disciplines often treat some issues as closed or not worth engaging with. Graduate advisors steer people away from unpromising projects all the time. As Kuhn taught philosophy, a paradigm may well include commitments that are only challenged in  extreme circumstances but otherwise ignored (and legitimately ignored according to standard Kuhnianism); I have expressed reservations about the legitimacy of ignoring objections or treating some heterodox views as worth excluding. But the practice exists widely. Professional philosophers ignore objections all the time (often based on considerations of status or of perceived signficance of the objection) including in Q&A. In fact, I have come to suspect that one way one becomes a high status professional philosopher is to learn to ignore smoothly objections from lower status peers rather than to try make sure that the best objection to one's views is jointly articulated. If you have never witnessed this, you probably engage in it yourself.:)

What does this amount to? Academic liberalism embraces the legitimacy of taboos and norms of responsible speech. More recent liberalism (thanks to work by Fricker, Dotson, etc.) is increasingly attentive to how the benefits and costs of speech are distributed; we frown on punching down and victim blaming; we worry about speech that puts further (social, political, and economic) burdens or opportunity costs on those that lack resources or skills; thanks to Heather Douglas we worry again about social consequences of even truthful scientific speech.

Let me now turn to (vii). Professional philosophy has been rather self-indulgent during the last century: leading journals have allowed and even rewarded (perhaps sincere) debate on infanticide, disenfranchisement, torture, etc.; our profession has lionized conceptions of international justice, technocratic solutions to environmental problems, and humanitarian interventions where the down-side risks of implementation are always put on (poorer, darker-skinned, etc.) folk who do not have a seat at the table (recall). When one complains about this, a philosopher's instinct is to claim that she has no responsibility for the application of her ideas--that entirely predictable misapplications of ideas are irrelevant to (core) philosophy. Cui Bono?

Our pedagogic practices have embraced the value of presenting carefully argued papers for morally shocking conclusions as a means to ‘stimulate conversation’ in the class room. Not unlike the media we often prefer to teach by way of polarized debate. It's such a pedagogic culture that welcomes the class room discussion of powerful arguments for awful conclusions. I could see why this is good training for future lawyers and top 20 philosophers; but it really is not a good training for citizenship or the art of living (even if it can be instrumentally useful at times); we learned from Eric Schwitzgebel it does not promote ethical behavior.   

We constantly forget it is not a virtue but a deformation of professional philosophy that it often accords so much respect to arguments and clarity that if one argues carefully one's views are taken seriously regardless of the social consequences of these views or, for that matter, the moral truth of these views. (Of course, if one thinks -- as I do not -- that only argument can establish a moral truth, so much the worse for you!) To note this is not to be a critic of argument (or a friend of Heidegger or poetic philosophy). But as Barnes notes often the only benefit of taking an argument seriously is one internal to the credit economy of the profession or the academy (iv). But no profession is self-justifying in that way. (That's to say I distinguish between the profession and philosophy.)

Barnes seems to think that because (recall (iii) & (vii)) Singer systematizes and articulates clearly what people already think in our culture (and that he has high status (iv)) his views on disability should be taken seriously. This I find very peculiar. Lots of ordinary views do not merit systematization or articulation. There is nothing wrong with ignoring ordinary folk's commitment to various forms of astrology and soothsaying; some of these have a great impact on people's moral lives. [And, yes, I am aware that Singer has been very important in teaching all of us the significance of animal welfare.] Lots of people are racists in various ways. What's the benefit of articulating the view in clear steps? Why should we grapple with racial eugenics (outside of its history and political economy)? There is no obligation to continue every debate with, say, Charles Murray, especially because he has never really responded to the important technical criticism of his work. Singer is, of course, a much better and more honest thinker than Murray. But given the distribution of power and resources, the responsibility to engage with critics and to prevent dangerous uptake of his ideas is clearly on Singer's side not the more vulnerable populations.

Let me close (for today). Barnes has every right to engage with Singer and she may well be right that good will come out of it. I wouldn't be surprised it will make her views (which, recall I admire)** more subtle and fine-grained. But I wonder why we really need to engage in intellectual activities that will continue to entrench his views on disability as central and worth grappling with when there is so much constructive and policy work to do.

 

A Note on a Bad Defense of Utilitarian Moral Blunders

Although far too many contemporary academic philosophers take an excessively narrow approach, focusing solely on writings rather than persons and dismissing as ad hominem argument a central element of much of the philosophical tradition, there are always powerful critics around ready to challenge that prejudice . . . Current academic opinion on what is or is not "philosophy" might be more reflective of the institutional imperatives and limits of academe than of the larger historical practices of philosophy. This book reflects the belief that one needs the works and the lives, the words and the deeds, in order fully to harvest the contributions of the great philosophers (4-5, italics in original)--[Bart Schultz]

I do not find this line of thought as exemplified here persuasive. When Schultz writes about standard philosophical criticisms of the utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick, he typically draws on and summarizes (very nicely) the work of contemporary academic philosophers. [A] The problem with the utilitarians to which he devotes much more attention than standard philosophical treatments is their attitudes to colonialism (on which Bentham does strikingly well, Mill much less so, Sidgwick perhaps in the middle). But if the problem is supposed to be that J.S. Mill, as a matter of biographical fact, was insufficiently critical of imperialism and colonialism, it is surely all too easy to argue that this is not a problem with utilitarianism but with Mill himself. [B] Utilitarianism as a first principle can only be applied if it is supplemented with empirical facts. Get those wrong and you will get the wrong results, but that's no problem for the theory....Are we, for instance, supposed to decide whether Moore or Ross is right about consequentialism by biographical evaluation, or by examining their political attitudes?--David Phillips @NDPR, reviewing Bart Schultz, The Happiness Philosophers: The Lives and Works of the Great Utilitarians, Princeton University Press, 2017, 437pp., $39.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780691154770. [I have addede [A] & [B] for ease of exposition--ES]

I have not read Schultz’s book yet, but regular readers know (recall) I am sympathetic to two notions of integrity: to simplify, (i) professional integrity, which is about the coherence between one’s professional comportment and philosophical views/arguments; (ii) philosophical integrity, that is, the coherence among one’s philosophical views and arguments, professional credit, and one’s character cohere. In addition, while I have reservations about the cult of genius/greatness and the attention to boy-wonders (recall), I am sympathetic to the idea that philosophical exemplars can play a fruitful role in shaping our philosophical life (recall this post). Of course, it does not follow that I agree with Schultz’s stance on such matters; I would have to read the book (and I just admitted that I didn’t). What follow is largely (but not wholly) agnostic on the nature of integrity.

Rather, if it is “surely all too easy to argue” some X, maybe you should ask yourself what problem you are skipping in your embrace of X? In fact, as a rule of thumb, it’s generally the case when somebody uses ‘surely’ there is no there, there. Here I have in mind the two arguments labeled [A-B] above. Phillips thinks he can exculpate utilitarianism of its contribution to some of the great evils it helped promote – let’s stipulate that these evils are not intrinsic to utilitarianism – by blaming, recall [A], those that adopt utilitarianism and, recall [B], the empirical facts. But Phillips does not explain why he – or rather -- utilitarianism is entitled to this move. To get clear on this we need to introduce some distinctions. In what follows, I’ll focus on [B], but once you see what I am up to, I’ll think you’ll be able to do the same exercise for [A].

Let’s call a (moral) theory that delivers the right practical results in most empirical circumstances robust. Let’s call a (moral) theory that delivers the right practical results in  only a few empirical circumstances delicate. Let’s call a (moral) theory that in most empirical circumstances delivers the right practical results, but disastrous results sometimes, fragile. (By contrast, a robust theory has fairly insignificant misses.) Let’s call a (moral) theory that in most empirical circumstances rarely delivers the right practical results, and often disastrous results, flimsy. Obviously, this taxonomy is not exhaustive. (If you like probabilities and utilities, you can introduce formulas if you want here and develop a very fine-grained approach.)

Now, even if we blame the “empirical facts,” utilitarianism is not robust (in the sense used here). If fact, in addition to colonialism, it also has been used to support eugenics by very able practioners (see Edgeworth; recall also the racialized version in Galton and here). So, while further study, perhaps, would be needed before one could call it flimsy or delicate theory, it is certainly a fragile theory. What's notable is that a utilitarian, especially, has ample resources to reflect on the significance of such fragility. For example, we might say (with a nod to Minimax) that (say) a (satisficing) moral theory,* other than utilitarianism (which is fragile), that can avoid the disasters may well be preferable to a utilitarianism if it delivers decent enough practical results all of the time (so if it is context invariant). [One may even be tempted to make this argument on utilitarian grounds.] This is especially preferable, if utilitarianism itself offers no guidance when one is likely to get the "empirical facts" on which it relies in application wrong.

As an aside, it is peculiar that Phillips does not stop to pause to reflect on what the differences in the great nineteenth century utilitarian attitudes to colonialism (recall “on which Bentham does strikingly well, Mill much less so, Sidgwick”) reveals about the nature of utilitarianism and its relationship to [A]. For if three competent users of the theory can deliver such different verdicts (and relying on broadly similar empirical facts) about a major issue (colonialism), it is not so easy to decouple theory from the personality of the particular utilitarian that deploys it. [This is yet another kind of lack of robustness.] In particular, if it is agreed that Bentham reached the right verdict and Mill/Sidgwick, who are both understood as better, even first rate philosophers (while poor Bentham is treated (uncharitably) as “no philosopher”… “Or, more charitably and in a more modern idiom, Bentham emerges as the first great utilitarian applied ethicist,”) not, one may well wonder if utilitarianism does not naturally generate expert-overconfidence in its best users. (Some other time I’ll discuss why utilitarianism, especially, is prone to such expert-confidence.)

Okay let me get back to the main argument. Because of the work of Heather Douglas, philosophers of science are familiar with the idea of inductive risk—delicate, fragile, and flimsy (in the sense used here) theories all instantiate species of inductive risk. Now, the inductive  risk may not be known in the early stages of a theoretical development of utilitarianism, but once it has been revealed that a theory is not robust it is (willfully) negligent to ignore it. It is especially important not to ignore it because the down-side risks of error (colonialism, racialized eugenics) are shifted on vulnerable others. (That is the say, if a theory is not robust, but the mistakes it generates are only born by the users, then the rest of us may wish to ignore  the problem.) Of course, a negligent theory may well be better than its rivals, so I have not offered here a refutation of utilitarianism.

It is worth noting, that eighteenth century moral theory – the theories that utilitarianism displaced – took the likely effects of moral theory very seriously (or so I argue in my book [and recall here]). Either way, Phillips is just wrong that the inductive risk (and expert over-confidence) that utilitarianism generates is “no problem for the theory;” it is, and Schultz is to be commended for taking the problem seriously from within the tradition and, thereby, showing the possibility of reflective and responsible utilitarianism worth having. In so doing he does his tradition a great service. I’ll be read his book with interest.