Some Early Thoughts on The Machinery of Government

I'm enjoying Joseph Heath's latest book, The Machinery of Government. It has particular relevance to me at present, as a UK civil servant currently working on implementation of the NI Protocol, where the UK Government is currently taking what we might describe as a "high legal risk" approach.

At present I've read the first three chapters ("Taking Public administration Seriously", "A General Framework for the Ethics of Public Administration", "Liberalism: From Classical to Modern"), skipped the fourth and fifth on the welfare state and cost-benefit analysis, and am half-way through the sixth on administrative discretion. I assume that chapters four and five are more developed versions of his previous papers on these topics, but may have missed things which would rebut my criticisms below.

Some things I've enjoyed:

• Heath makes a convincing case that the topic is under-studied: state officials wield vast vast power which really doesn't have a good democratic justification. He also, I think, provides a solid explanation of where this justification does come from.
• I have serious disagreements with his interpretation of liberalism, but it's a very clear statement of why he believes it.
• It's also by far the best defence I've read of the Communitarian/Habermasian idea that moral philosophy is about uncovering the principles implicit in our practices, rather than trying to divine an eternal moral law. He compares it to his business ethics, collected in the earlier volume Morality, Competition, and the Firm: "One of the major problems with traditional business ethics is that it treats morality as something entirely external to the practice of business. As a result, the pronouncements of ethicists tend to arrive like an alien imposition, which in turn gives businesspeople license to ignore them, on the grounds that the expectations are simply incompatible with the demands of running a successful business. My approach, therefore, has been to focus on the moral obligations that are already implicit in market relations, and that are advanced through commercial and competition law, as well as regulation." (page x)
• To this end, he talks largely about an existing ethos, various written and unwritten norms which exist around civil service practice. I have been thoroughly convinced that this is the correct approach, as opposed to attempting to derive morality separately and then apply it in this case - despite my utilitarian inclinations.

Some things I've thought less of:

• Every one of Heath's books contains a long history of the topic at hand. His defence of this is that, as a student of Habermas, he believes you can only understand our moral practices through understanding the journey by which we arrived at them. Fair enough - but do you really need 60 pages to do this in a 400 page book?
• Moreover - it's striking that for all that he talks about the history of liberalism, he does not any attempt to give the history of Westminster-style civil services, despite the obvious relevance of this. If one is aiming to defend a particular view of the principles inherent in civil service, it's fair enough to think that John Locke is more important than the Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms, but I'd expect you to at least make the case. For example, I am not aware of any mention of the latter in The Machinery of Government. Nor is there analysis of actually-existing civil service codes beyond the (admittedly, in my experience accurate) statements that they are often vague and give little to no guidance on how to weigh different values like objectivity, neutrality, etc.
• Going deep into history inevitably involves a great deal of historical interpretation. There are some glaringly "controversial" examples - to take one which clearly doesn't affect the main thesis, his claim that "Napoleon was able to conquer most of Europe, not because of any technological or tactical superiority, but rather because of the superior organisation capacity of the French state, not least its power to impose universal male conscription upon the population, which made it possible for Napoleon to field massive armies." (p120). He attributes this to liberalism. Conscription was clearly a boon but:
• (a) logistical innovations which allowed French armies to travel faster, enabling things like the Ulm Maneuvre, were clearly much more important;
• (b) Napoleon didn't exactly outnumber the Russian and Austrian armies he faced, conscription was at most an equalising force;
• (c) this really needs a comparison to the Revolutionary Government which preceded Napoleon;
• (d) why would you use this as your example of liberalism boosting military capacity rather than the well-known example of the UK being able to borrow at lower rates of interest?
• That example merely raises questions of attention to detail. One which I'll admit to not exactly being expert in, but which frankly seems fatal to his thesis if my understanding is correct - the Wars of Religion were ended not by agreement for states to stay out of religion - to follow liberal neutrality - but agreeing, at the Peace of Westphalia, that each ruler would control religion in his own land, and they would not try to force religion on each others' lands. This did not prevent wars, of course, but it prevented the religious wars which Heath claims liberalism arrived to prevent.
• Maybe Hath would say "That's in Germany, I'm talking about the Westminster model; religious wars continued well past 1648 in England." True, but (a) we were also oppressing Catholics much longer than that - the Test Acts were repealed in 1828 - and (b) many of the key things which Heath would attribute to liberalism preceded this.
• His advocacy of a purely political liberalism is fine so far as it goes, but does rather take a lot of the force out of his claims that we don't recognise liberalism for the same reason fish don't recognise water.

Stability and Equality

A lot of political theorists talk about equality as a requirement for social stability, without having an explicit theory of mobs. This strikes me as a significant absence.

Social stability is not just about avoiding mobs, of course - it's also about keeping crime down, ensuring that pressure for change happens through peaceful channels, etc. But the sight of mobs rampaging through the streets is perhaps the most visible failure of states to maintain public order, and is surely a significant piece of what we ordinarily mean and care about under the banner of "stability".

(This is particularly true for theorists at the more cynical end of constructivism, who may regard society as an implicit compact between the proletariat and bourgeousie, in which the proletariat are granted certain rights and privileges in order to stave off revolution.)

I intend this not as a criticism of egalitarians, but as a debating point within egalitarianism. There are a wide range of factors which may plausibly reduce or exacerbate the risk of social disorder, and which have implications for the kind of egalitarianism one would endorse:

• The perception that the masses have little to lose from rioting (suggesting a need for broad-based prosperity)
• The perception that social elite possess large quantities of goods worth taking (suggesting a need for levelling down)
• The perception that social elites acquired their wealth unfairly (suggesting a need for equality before the law, and possibly more besides)
• The presence of intelligent and hard-working people who are unable to succeed within established institutions (suggesting a need for equality of opportunity, but not for equality of income)
• The perception that public authorities are biased against particular groups within society (which could point in a number of directions)

...and so on. Moreover, it matters how these interact. For example, one very simple (and highly dubious) model might suggest that all five of the above factors are individually necessary for riots to start. (An uncontroversial case of this is fire, where fuel, energy, and oxygen are all individually necessary for a fire to start.) In this case, we could focus on abolishing only one of the causes - perhaps whichever was cheapest to treat, or whichever cause we find most distasteful for other reasons.

A more realistic model would seek to quantify inequality of various types, and would give them different weights for their contribution to the frequency of riots starting and to the damage caused by riots. It seems likely, then, that if the achievement of social stability requires state action this is likely to require action against multiple different notions of inequality - we cannot focus on a single form of inequality.

I think this is far more a critique of egalitarian theory rather than of practice. John Rawls may have attempted to reduce equality to "sufficient and equal civil and political liberties, and maximisation of the primary social goods available to the worst-off class within society", but actually-existing democratic states are concerned to reduce economic equality, racial inequality, inequality of access to political institutions, ensure equal treatment before the law...

Speculatively, we might also take this an argument against the idea that inequality is intrinsically bad. Theories of the importance-in-itself of equality tend to end up focussing upon one particular conception of inequality. I think we have here a strong argument that no one conception of inequality is likely to satisfy all of our intuitions about the importance of equality, and ultimately the best evidence for egalitarianism - as with all moral theories - is derived from our intuitions.

The Rhetoric of Desert

There are two ways in which a person can fail to deserve what they have. The first is that they are actually undeserving of it: the prodigal son does not deserve his father’s welcome, Job did not deserve to be tormented with destruction and agony. The second is that the concept of desert fails to apply: thus neither James Potter nor Lily Evans deserved the love of Lily Evans, because in the decision of who she should marry desert is simply not a relevant factor.

These two situations are very different, yet we use the same phrase of “not deserving” to describe them both. This is liable to create dangerous confusion: when a good (or bad) is appropriate for distribution by deservingness, someone’s lack of desert generally provides a reason for taking that good away from them (and typically giving to them). Physical property is, in most naive views of the world, taken to be appropriate for distribution according to desert: thus a simple argument for economic redistribution would be that the poor are no less deserving than are the rich of worldly goods.

When a good is not appropriate for distribution according to desert - for example, love - the fact that someone is undeserving is no reason to remove the good from them. While most people naively think of private property as something to be distributed according to desert, this view is exceedingly rare among philosophers. The most obvious example of an anti-desert theorist is John Rawls, who argued that we cannot deserve anything at all: any good traits we possess are the results either of our environment or of our genes, neither of which we chose and therefore neither of which we can be credited for.

This anti-realism about desert does not - cannot - provide an argument for redistribution of goods. If desert is not real, then no goods can be appropriately distributed according to desert, and so the fact that the rich are no more deserving than the poor is no argument for redistribution. One may, of course, favour redistribution on other grounds, and this was Rawls’ purpose: to disarm desert-based arguments against redistribution! But if one only takes the conclusion of his argument - that the rich do not deserve their wealth - and puts it not into the context of Rawls’ wider theory, but rather the naive view that desert is real and is a moral basis for property, then one arrives at a rhetorically effective, but subtly self-contradictory, agument for redistribution. I suspect that many people who dabble in political philosophy without studying it in depth, including many politics undergrads ae liable to fall into this trap.

The Metaethics of the Harry Potter universe

The field of metaethics is broadly concerned with the following questions: are there any true moral facts? And if so, how can we come to know them?

As an example of what this would mean: take natural-rights libertarianism, as espoused by Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and legions of spotty teenagers. According to this theory, there exist certain facts along the lines of the following:

(a) The copy of Anarchy, State, and Utopia upstairs is my property.
(b) For any entity X, if X is my property then others ought not to interfere with my usage of X unless my usage of X interferes with their usage of an entity Y which is their property.

Of course, a lot of attention in this kind of theory will be devoted to exactly what it means to say that an entity is someone's property. A standard response made by a non-libertarian philosopher would be to observe that the notion of property is entirely socially constructed. To bring out the difference between socially-constructed and non-socially-constructed features of things, compare the properties of belonging to a person and of being less dense than water. Whether something belongs to me or my neighbour is determined entirely by the beliefs of society: if everyone believes the copy of ASU upstairs belongs to my neighbour, it's not that everyone is wrong - it's that the book actually is my neighbours, and I will be obliged to return it to him at the next opportunity. If something is less dense than water, however, it matters not one jot what any of us believes - it will float, and all the assertions in the world will not change that.

Since property is socially constructed, then, perhaps we ought to construct it strategically so that it operates to the greatest advantage of all. Thus we might decide to agree that notions such as taxation are baked into the very notion of property: taxation is not theft, but simply the proper functioning of the property system. (There's a more ambitious version of this argument which holds that no property would exist without a state and so submission to the state in general is part of what it means to own property, but this is silly because (a) property has existed throughout history without the existence of states and (b) even if that were not the case, it's not at all clear how the move from an is to an ought is supposed to be occurring here).

One thing that would support natural rights libertarianism, then, would be if facts about property somehow turned out not to be socially constructed but to be intrinsic features of the world in the same way as density. It turns out that there is a well-known fictional universe in which this is the case: the Harry Potter novels, in which a key reveal towards the end of the last book is that the Elder Wand, a weapon of deadly power, never truly recognised Voldemort as its possessor - despite him having wielded it for much of the last book, ever since he ransacked the tomb of Dumbledore, a previous owner of the Wand. Instead, the wand recognised first Draco Malfoy and then Harry Potter as its true owner, despite neither of them having prior to this point even touched the wand. In the Harry Potter universe, ownership is not a social construct but a real and tangible feature of the universe - and so it may well be impossible, even if desirable, to move to a more socially beneficial meaning of the notion of "property".

Libertarians should not rejoice too quickly, however: the way the wand passes between owners almost always involves violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Grindelwald stole it from Gregorovitch, Dumbledore kept it after defeating Grindelwald, Malfoy ambushed and disarmed Dumbledore, Harry burgled and overpowered Malfoy. While there are substantial facts about property, which stand in addition to the facts which are known through science and empiricism, they are surely different from the facts which libertarians would have us believe. Perhaps not entirely different - wands aside, most objects seem to behave much as they do in the actual universe with regard to owners - but not the same either.

As a final aside, it is interesting to note that this universe also contains one of the more notable examples of a society with markedly different but non-utopian rules concerning property. I refer, of course, to the goblins, who believe all objects to truly belong to their makers: one cannot purchase an object, only rent it for life. To pass on to one's heirs something that one did not produce oneself is regarded by goblins as theft. Unless the original maker of the Elder Wand is still alive (and according to tradition, the wand was in fact made by Death Himself), this theory must surely remain live as a possible metaethical truth about property in the Harry Potter universe.

Two brief thoughts

Some thoughts that I really ought to write up properly, but don't presently have the time for:

-Many people appear to think either that (P) all social constructions are bad, or (P*) that belief in (P) is central to SJWism. Hence much mockery has aimed not to point to clearly beneficial social constructs (e.g. respect, love, money) but to suggest that almost anything can be a social construct (e.g. the penis).

A more sophisticated view is that something's being a social construct points not to it being bad, but to it being replaceable or at least malleable. But even this is perhaps too simplistic. Musical harmony is a social construct - while in the West we use a 12-tone scale, many other cultures (or composers within the West, e.g. Harry Partch) use different scales with greater or smaller intervals between notes - it is hard to see how we could overturn many aspects of harmony. (Though we could of course tweak it in particular ways, e.g. moving from equal temperament to just intonation).

(edited to add: this is probably old hat to anyone who reads my blog. I'm not trying to say anything especially original here, but it occurs to me that it would be useful to have something to point to, making this point, which isn't the length of a Slate Star Codex post or three)

-In a liberal society, we want both a principle of exclusion and a principle of inclusion. Thus our society can take in and integrate outsiders, but need not roll over in the face of those who threaten it. A "Propositional Nation" goes much of the way towards this - anyone who affirms the key propositions can become a citizen, people who do not affirm those principles cannot. Contrast this with historical or blood-and-soil nationhood, as exists e.g. in UK and Scandinavia. (France is a weird case - it ought to be a kind of propositional nation given the way French nationhood developed after the revolution, but it's still more of a blood-and-soil nation). Blood-and-soil has practical advantages - among other things, a country can hardly expel native-born citizens for their political views - but lacks such an easy criterion of inclusion. Should places like the UK aim to become more "propositional" in terms of their national spirit? Can they do so without abandoning their present identities? (Can "loyalty to the queen" function as the kind of proposition that would bind a nation?)

Eugenics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Eugenics is the attempt to improve the genetic quality of the human population. Some people might object to the notion that we can talk of "genetic quality", insisting that all people are fundamentally equal and that this rules out the possibility that some genes are better than others. I say this is nonsense. A gene that predisposes you to be unhappy, violent, or stupid, with no other effects, is clearly bad. No parent should want their child to inherit such a gene. If this is contrary to human equality, then so much the worse for human equality.

With that out of the way, I wish to suggest a division of our notion of "eugenics" into three categories: pro-natal eugenics, which aims to increase the number of people being born with preferable genes; anti-natal eugenics, which aims to reduce the number of people being born with less-preferable genes; and improvement eugenics, which aims to improve the genetic quality of people who are going to be born anyway. An example of pro-natal eugenics would be providing financial subsidies for high-IQ couples to have children; an example of anti-natal eugenics would be compulsory sterilisation of people judged to be defective in certain ways; an example of improvement eugenics would be screening embryos for disease among people undergoing IVF treatment.

These different kinds of eugenics ought to be assessed differently. My key thesis here is that improvement eugenics is clearly desirable, pro-natal eugenics is likely to be anti-egalitarian but that the good consequences may well outweigh this, and that confusing these with anti-natal eugenics is responsible for most of our worries about eugenics. (I'm not going to take a strong position on whether anti-natal eugenics might be overall justified, but it seems far more problematic than either of the other kinds).

There is a risk with any of these programs that policy-makers will seek to promote not good traits but traits which they personally like - for example, particular colours of skin. We should acknowledge this danger, should fight against all such misapplications of eugenics, and may find that the risk of abuse is to high to practice any eugenics. But I maintain that these practical issues are irrelevant to the in-principle-acceptability of certain kinds of eugenics.

Improvement Eugenics

When we talk about ways to improve outcomes for people who will exist anyway in ways which don't involve genetics, no-one bats an eyelid. Controls on lead emissions are obviously desirable. Education, insofar as it represents real improvements in people's capabilities rather than just a form of signalling, is similarly desirable. The only question, then, is whether the fact of these changes being genetic rather than through other mechanisms makes a moral difference.

It does introduce some extra reasons to be concerned, to be sure. Genetic changes are rather harder to reverse than many other kinds of change: if it had turned out that we were wrong about lead and that it was in fact vital to children's development, we could start pumping it into the air and would within a few years fix much of the damage caused; if it turned out that an incident of gene editing had significant negative consequences, this would take longer to correct and would require significantly greater resources, if it was even possible. But this does not affect the case, on the level of pure principle, for improvement eugenics.

Some people object that by meddling with genes, we are "playing God". Given that I don't believe in any kind of God, at least in the conventional sense, I'm not inclined to take this kind of argument seriously. Besides which, such arguments seem woefully underspecified. What is that makes fixing people's genes blasphemous, but throwing a ball not blasphemous? Both involve meddling with the world in certain ways which might happen to be either in accordance with or contrary to God's will. I'd be happy to have this discussion with a serious religious thinker willing to supply such a condition, but in the absence of such an interlocutor I feel the attempt would be a waste of time.

Perhaps changing someone's genes involves some kind of interference with their autonomy. OK, but it can also improve their autonomy if it leads to higher intelligence, conscientiousness, or similar. Moreover, it's highly unclear why we should take their natural set of genes as the moral default from which any deviation must be justified.

Ultimately, it's hard to see why we shouldn't edit out things like hereditary diseases from the human genome, unless there are significant side-effects of doing so. Is it right to save life, or to kill?

Pro-natal eugenics

This is more problematic than improvement eugenics. Most obviously, it's likely to involve anti-egalitarian transfers of resources and welfare, since the people we would be attempting to incentivise to have more children would in many cases be those who already have plenty. (Perhaps the solution would be, rather than rewarding high-IQ types for having more children, punishing them for having fewer children? But even if this is judged worthwhile when intelligence we wish to encourage, it becomes rather less palatable when trying to encourage greater procreation by people with genes that lead them to be more pro-social than average, or other things we view as virtuous).

That said, I think in general this ought not to be much more controversial than improvement eugenics. If you accept my arguments that people benefit from existing, and you think that certain people create net positive externalities for the rest of society (and would continue to do so on the margin if there were more of them), then why would you not want more of those people? Yes it has certain inegalitarian aspects, but any good Rawlsian should recognise than in the end we all benefit.

Anti-natal eugenics

This is the bad boy. This is the kind of eugenics responsible for giving eugenics in general a bad name, the kind of eugenics used to justify forced sterilisation of despised minorities.

When considering any kind of anti-natal eugenics aimed at abolishing a condition X, there are two questions to be asked: (1) what does X mean for the quality of life of the person who possesses it? (2) Do people with X tend to make the rest of society worse off?

If the answer to (1) is that X usually makes people's lives not worth living, as with certain medical conditions, then we do not need any kind of eugenic principle to justify preventing people with condition X from coming into existence: we need only a sense of mercy.

If the answer to (2) is no, that they simply end up in a worse condition than the average member of society - so what? Let these people live, let their parents have full reproductive freedom!

The complicated cases come when a person is fully capable of having a life worth living, but would impose costs on society in doing so. Sometimes these costs will be concrete, such as those who are in important ways disabled at a young age and so require another person to act as a full-time carer. Sometimes they will be harder to detect, such as the stuff Garett Jones writes about. My tentative inclination is to think that some anti-natal eugenics may be permissible in such cases, but I cannot claim to have thought this through in any great detail. Moreover, any interests society may have in avoiding these costs must be weighed against various interests - in particular procreative interests and bodily autonomy - of the would-be parents of children with condition X. Paying criminals to be sterilised is probably acceptable, mandatory sterilisation is probably not.

Conclusion

Eugenics gets a bad rap due to the genuinely reprehensible things which it has been used to justify. However, eugenic interventions aimed at improving the genetic quality of people who will be born in any case and/or at increasing the fertility of people with desirable traits are in principle morally acceptable - though we might nevertheless have justified worries about the practicalities of such programs.

A Plea For Bullshit

I've been toying with the idea of creating a new academic discipline or field of study. The purely evil (or at best selfish) reasons for this are:

• it would sound impressive to be "the world's leading authority on X", particularly if X can be made to sound impressive in itself.
• it would be fun to try to relate all kinds of other debates to this, claim that opponents are unfit to comment on those questions if they don't have at least a working knowledge of my own field.

The basic plan is pretty simple: come up with a new field that is not immediately obviously bullshit (in Cohen's sense). Write a bunch of essays advocating different perspectives on it. Publish these online as a "journal", with most of the essays attributed to pseudonyms. Publicise it, inviting submissions to a second volume of the journal. Occasionally actually produce another volume.

Here, then, are some ideas for what this new discipline could be. I have not checked to see whether or not these are already being studied. Some of them I know to be discussed in places, but are not (so far as I am aware) fully fledged disciplines.

Numerical Mereology

Philosophers have devoted great energy to whether or not numbers exist, but relatively little to their internal structure. Russell and Whitehead defined numbers in terms of sets, but one can imagine a whole range of answers. Perhaps numbers consist of smaller numbers - but which smaller numbers? All of them? Their factors? Their prime factors? Perhaps they just exist, and have no parts. And does the same number exist in one way that is instantiated in many places, or should we adopt a "trope theory" of numbers according to which each number exists separately in each of its instantiations?

Example arguments: "Any account of numbers ought to shed light on what it means for one thing to be 'more than' or 'larger than' another. The best explanation is that numbers contain all smaller numbers; without this presumption, there is no way to explain the fact that 7 is strictly bigger than 5."

"If numbers consist of all smaller numbers plus the successor relation, it is hard to see what most of the numbers are doing. Allowing numbers to consist of their prime factors clearly explains why each component is crucial to the identity of the greater number."

Epistemology and Metaphysics of the Paranormal

Some people claim that ghosts don't exist. I would suggest we need to have a firm handle on exactly what ghosts are before we can make that kind of judgement. One might argue for:

  (a) reductionism: the paranormal is misnamed, and many paraphenomena can be explained in the terms of ordinary physics

  (b) the paranormal stands in contradiction to ordinary physics, and therefore

     (b1) there are no paraphenomena

     (b2) we should revise our beliefs about physics

     (b3) the laws of the universe are dialethic and contradictions are realised in the actual world

  (c) paraphenomena and physics are neither complementary nor in contradiction, they describe different aspects of the universe

Normative Architecture of Cosmology

Cosmology studies how the universe works. NAC studies the considerations going into the design of new universes.

Study of Autoethnography

Autoethnography has come in for a lot of stick, but very little in formal venues or in a clearly argued format. We would invite practitioners, defenders, and critics of autoethnology to engage on the ethical and methodological issues surrounding both the production of and the response to autoethnographies. In what ways does one's location within a situation give one special insights into that situation? If these insights can only be directly perceived from within a situation, how far can they be communicated to and understood by people outside the situation?

Normology

What makes something normal? Is there a property of "normalness" in which normal things participate? Or is normalness to be reduced to other properties? Why indeed should we suppose that "normality" is the default, rather than taking heterogeneity as the default and normality as something to be explained? Studying this would hopefully grant important insights into related issues, such as what makes something "transgressive".

Metaology

The study of studying. What is to study something? What makes a particular enquiry legitimate? (Should we study things with potentially harmful implications?) Is there a unity between the "correct" methods of inquiry in different fields of study, or is the correct method of study relative to a particular discipline?

Christiano's Renewed Defence of Democracy; or, Rule By The People For The People, Except Without The People

These are interesting times at CEU, but that did not prevent a public lecture by the famous political philosopher Thomas Christiano from going ahead. Christiano is perhaps the world's leading democratic theorist, having put more sustained thought and brainpower than anyone else alive into the defence of this ideal. His talk was specifically responding to a series of critiques made in recent years by Bryan Caplan, Jason Brennan, and Ilya Somin, all of whom argue that democracy is undermined by the poor quality of voters.

Christiano began by briefly setting out a key claim, difficult to dispute, that on a variety of metrics - economic growth, protection of human rights, avoidance of war - democratic nations have tended to enjoy greater success than alternative regimes. This is something that our social scientific theories ought to be able to explain.

He followed this by introducing Caplan's theory of the "rational irrationality" of voters. This theory emerged as a response to the "rational choice" theory of voting behaviour, which held that voters behave in their own interest - that is, voting for the parties and policies which stand to benefit them, as individuals, to the greatest extent. Caplan noted that this assumes voters already know which parties and policies best serve their interests, and pointed out that due to the vanishingly small chance that one's vote could ever change the outcome of a national election, the expected benefit of voting wisely could never exceed or even equal the costs of acquiring such knowledge. Indeed, from a rational choice standpoint, it is difficult to explain why one even takes the ten minutes to walk or drive to and from the polling station. So we have a morass of deeply uninformed voters, who are in no way suited to the task of choosing a government and its priorities. Caplan's argument is borne out by multiple surveys which find the average member of the public to be comically ignorant of fairly basic facts of day-to-day politics. If one cannot name the chancellor of the exchequer, what hope does one have when trying to assess complicated macroeconomic theories which do not even command agreement among experts?

Next, Christiano discussed Brennan's argument for how ideology corrupts our political judgements. Brennan provides three models of individual voters: "Hobbits", "Hooligans", and "Vulcans". Hobbits correspond largely to Caplan's picture of people with no clue of even the most trivial facts of politics; Hooligans are arguably worse, possessing some degree of political knowledge but also being highly ideological and more interested in ensuring the victory of their team than in seeking the best outcome overall. Vulcans, by comparison, consider all available evidence in a relatively impartial way, and contribute honest and valuable information to democratic decisions. A democracy of Vulcans might very well be a good system, Brennan says - but the world in which we live is one in which most people are hobbits, the overwhelming majority of the rest are hooligans, and Vulcans - if they even exist - are a microscopic minority. This is all backed up with social science to demonstrate that most people are as Brennan claims them to be. So while it might be nice to live in a world of Vulcans, Brennan says, that fact is that we do not - and our institutions ought to reflect this, in a way that universal democracy simply does not.

From here, Christiano said, Brennan, Caplan, and Somin - libertarians all - conclude that we ought to adopt alternative systems, with Brennan and Caplan suggesting the rule of experts and Somin suggesting a sharp reduction in the role the government is allowed to play in our lives. In particular, all three advocate a greater role for markets in decision-making.

I don't think this is really a fair characterisation of their positions. In fact, I would say it is an outright misrepresentation of Brennan's position. It is unfair on several counts:
-By "epistocracy" Brennan doesn't mean confining politics to the elites with no-one else able to break in. Rather, he has in mind tests of political knowledge, which one would be required to pass in order to vote.
-More fundamentally, Brennan does not actually advocate epistocracy! Rather, he suggests that it is a potentially-viable alternative to democracy, and that our institutions should not be built on the assumption that all citizens will behave as Vulcans. This is an understandable mistake, given Brennan's other writings; on the other hand, both he and Caplan are avowed anarcho-capitalists, so the only sense in which they can possibly be seen as supporting epistocracy is as an improvement over what we have rather than as an end goal.
-While they indeed believe that markets should play a greater role in our society, and believe (in line with the evidence showing that both social and economic liberalism correlate positively with both intelligence and with being politically informed) that the effects of a higher-quality voting population would be to give markets such a role, this is not (at least for Brennan) a core claim. The argument is that better voters would give a better set of political institutions, without any claims about what those institutions would necessarily be except as illustrations of how our current institutions are ludicrously sub-optimal.

Christiano then boils the debate to the following argument:

(1) Voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases.
(2) If voters are subject to rational irrationality, ideology, and other such biases, then democracy will fail to work well.
(3) Democracy will not work well.

This, then, is the anti-democratic theorists' view in its simplest form, as a simple modus ponens. But, as he said at the beginning, the conclusion is false! Therefore, since the argument is valid, we know that something must be awry with at least one of the premises. Christiano suggests that Brennan et al overplay the evidence for (1), but does not wish to challenge it too much. The problem, he suggests, is therefore with the assumption that these various biases preclude voters from making good choices about who to vote for.

How can this be? To point towards a solution, Christiano attempts to turn his opponents own arguments against their views, by suggesting that the same problems which they attribute to democratic choice apply in the same way to ordinary decisions made within markets. There is then a dilemma for the anti-democratic theorists: either they admit that markets are just as flawed and so democracy may nevertheless be the best system we can get, or we identify some mechanisms by which individual ignorance can be translated into rational decisions.

There is undoubtedly some small truth to this. I have no idea how to repair a car, but this lack of knowledge on my part does not prevent me from hiring a mechanic - that is to say, from outsourcing the relevant expertise. I do not have the time to form opinions on an especially wide range of books, but I can outsource this to people whose comparative advantage lies in quickly reading and accurately assessing the merits of books.

So, Christiano suggests, such sources of information exist for politics. Moreover, they are often available at little or no cost, and include the following:
-newspapers and television
-political parties.
-friends and colleagues.
-many educated people need to understand political events for their work, and so understanding it for voting purposes comes at no marginal cost
-labour unions
-churches

One worry he admitted to this is that these institutions for informing people need "warning lights" for when they are failing to accurately transmit information. When one goes to a mechanic, it is usually quite clear whether the mechanic genuinely has their claimed skills, due to the success condition in which your car starts moving again (or passes its MOT, or whatever). It is not clear exactly what these are intended to be with regard to politics - The Guardian criticises Theresa May but as a left-wing paper they would say that, wouldn't they? And if one takes the criticism seriously, then without becoming something of an expert oneself, how can one establish whether or not the criticism is accurate?

One possibility, which I'm reading into him though not, I think, unreasonably, is for there to be legal requirements of neutrality or truthfulness applying to political broadcasters, as exist in the UK and Canada but not, infamously, the USA. The big worry with this, as Christiano notes, is that in principle democracy is rule by the people made on their own terms. Is it not contrary to this spirit to compel certain terms of discourse upon them?

OK, so that's Christiano's perspective, presented in what I think is a fairly reasonable and sympathetic way. I have a fair few criticisms, and will work up form smallest to largest.

First, his admittedly-only-a-hypothesis about the role of unions seems highly dubious. He suggested that the decline of unions made working-class populations vulnerable to demagoguery and so is responsible for the current malaise of "the US, the UK and France." But this just seems empirically ridiculous: first, demagoguery was just as potent a force in the days when union bosses would trip into Number Ten for beer and sandwiches. Second, Thatcher gutted the unions in the 80s: why did it then take more than thirty years for demagogues to come along for the working class vote? And finally, France suffering from not enough unions? Are you joking, or are you merely unaware that their transport systems are routinely shut down by disgruntled farmers, taxi-drivers, or whoever else is the angry industry of the day?

Second, I think Christiano overestimates the extent to which even intellectually demanding jobs require one to know about politics, and the extent to which such knowledge represents a very thin and impoverished of the infinitely complex reality. As an example: my dad works in estate and property management for the University of Birmingham, and had a great grievance with the EU that whenever he wished to outsource some work, anti-corruption legislation originating in Brussels required him - as an employee of an organisation recieving significant EU funding - to put it out to tender (including, of course, an expensive advert in a Brussels-based EU-approved journal) and placed certain restrictions upon who he could hire. As a result of this, such outsourcing decisions became vastly slower and vastly more expensive, since in the absence of such regulations he would simply have called up a handful of small local firms, asked for quotes, and gone with the cheapest who he thought could actually deliver at the price they gave. (Of course, the regulations require that he hire the cheapest firm, with the result than from time to time they will not manage to keep to the agreed price, and it is rare that this situation does not end up costing the university further money).

My dad has a deep knowledge of one particular aspect of the way the EU affects Britain. Does this equate to a knowledge, or even a reasonable idea, of what the EU is like as a whole? Of course not. (Incidentally, my dad was turned off by xenophobic messaging of the Leave campaign during the last few days before the referendum, and ended up abstaining; since the referendum, he has been quite enthusiastic about its result).

Third, and moving on to more serious criticisms: Christiano appears to go straight from the uncontroversial claim that democracy correlates with various desirable outcomes to the highly dubious claim that democracy works well, i.e. that it is causally responsible for these outcomes. I've seen a plausible case that democracies can enjoy lower borrowing costs, but otherwise this seems entirely to get the causal direction the wrong way round: countries liberalise economically, this creates a growing middle class, and so a demand for democracy. The economic success of the Asian Tigers is not to be explained in terms of their (anaemic) democracy but in terms of their liberal economic institutions. (And before one tries to argue that they have failed to respect human rights, (1) be careful you're not assuming your conclusion by taking democracy to be a human right, and (2) economic growth is highly underrated as a means to securing people's vital rights to food and shelter).

Fourth, Christiano seems to me to ignore, in an utterly irresponsible way, the quality of information being received. To quote him almost word-for-word: "In the US, I find that I agree with the values of the Democrat party... and this means that they can act as a way to distill complicated information to me." If I had not heard this from his own mouth, I would have assumed anyone attributing these words to him to be creating a strawman. Yet on the grounds that they share his goal of helping the poor more explicitly than their opponents, he is apparently willing on precious little further authority to commit to controversial views on a wide range of topics - the optimal minimum wage, the optimal response to global warming, the optimal level of US involvement in the Middle East...

Fifth, and to the extent that it succeeds most damningly, how different is what Christiano proposes from that which he opposes? If all were to vote the party line, we would have an esoteric epistocracy in which the relevant measure of knowledge would be "Are you a party leader?" It will not be this extreme, of course, with hopefully a range of alternative media sources. But insofar as his vision of democracy is parties telling voters what to think, and the voters consequently choosing parties to implement their policies - why not cut out the middleman, and let the social elites get on with ruling the country untrammelled by the inconvenience of needing to face election? (This, I should note, is the criticism in which I have least confidence).

Perhaps an argument could be made that voters don't really need the knowledge that Brennan thinks they do. More information is not always good, after all.  Apart from this, there are plausible cases for democracy which do not rely at all upon claims about its ability to make decisions. But Christiano's case for this is thoroughly unconvincing, to the point where I was inclined to wonder if his claims to know little of day-to-day politics were not, in fact, just modesty.

Why Benatar is (Trivially) Wrong

David Benatar is a philosopher who appears to delight in controversy, and in that sense is a man after my own heart. Unfortunately, his arguments for the thesis his most celebrated work, Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, are not only sufficient to establish his conclusion but in fact do not even provide support for it. Much of my forthcoming MA dissertation will be showing problems with his arguments; this post discusses one central issue, of whether or not it is conceptually possible to benefit from coming into existence.


I: What does Benatar believe, and what is his argument for this?

Benatar argues for an "asymmetry of pleasure and pain" such that "existence has no advantage over, but does have disadvantages relative to, non-existence". I understand this to mean the following set of claims:
(a) When one comes into existence, one inevitably suffers some bad things (e.g. pain) and in most cases enjoys some good things (e.g. pleasure).
(b) Pains are harmful relative to the alternative of non-existence.
(c) Pleasures are not beneficial relative to the alternative of non-existence.
(d) The combination of (a), (b), and (c) entails that coming into existence is in all cases overall harmful.

He thinks that we should accept this on the grounds that it provides the best explanation for several other asymmetries which he takes to be rather more intuitive. (I do not share all of these intuitions). These are:
(1) That there can be a duty to avoid bringing someone into existence if their life would be characterised by suffering; there is no duty to bring someone into existence merely because their life would be a good one, nor would there be even if doing so came at no cost to oneself.
(2) One might decide not to bring a child into existence on the grounds that the child would suffer certain harms; it would be strange to cite, as a reason for bringing some child into existence, that the child would enjoy certain benefits.
(3) One can regret bringing a person into existence for that person's sake; while one can regret failing to bring a person into existence, one cannot do so for the sake of the person who would have existed.
(4) We feel sad when thinking about people living far away whose lives are characterised by suffering; we do not feel sad that various uninhabited places are not full of people enjoying happy lives.

If one accepts Benatar's asymmetry, then one will believe that so long as one's life contains anything at all that is bad for you (which it will, since someday you will die) you are harmed by being brought into existence.


II: Being more precise about Asymmetry

In the dissertation I draw several distinctions between different types of asymmetry, but here I will look at only one distinction: between "strong" and "weak" asymmetries. Benatar defends what I call a "strong" asymmetry, according to which coming into existence is always bad. A "weak" asymmetry would agree that coming into existence is never good, but would deny that it needs to be bad. If the good in one's life outweighs the bad, then one is neither benefited nor harmed by being brought into existence.

In other words: while pleasures are not independently good relative to non-existence, they can cancel out pains that would otherwise render existence harmful.

I do not defend weak asymmetry either: my view is that one can be either benefits or harmed by being brought into existence. The point here is that Benatar's arguments, as we will see, support only weak asymmetry.


III: Problems for Strong Asymmetry

Benatar's conclusion that coming into existence is always harmful is already pretty weird and extreme. A further problem, which I don't think anyone else has previously picked up on, is that it gives very strange judgments about how bad it is to come into existence. Compare two lives: one is a long and generally happy existence, while the other is very short and very painful with almost no pleasure at all. Due to their longer life, the first person undergoes greater total suffering; however, if asked they would confidently say that the good in their life vastly outweighed the bad. Intuitively, the second person was harmed by being brought into existence whereas, if the first person was harmed at all, the harm was fairly trivial.

This is not what Benatar's view implies, however. According to Benatar we count only the pains and ignore the pleasures, with the result that the person with a happy life suffers greater harm in existing than the person with a miserable life.

Both of these problems go away if one rejects strong asymmetry in favour of weak asymmetry.


IV: Why Benatar's arguments only support Weak Asymmetry

There are two important things to note about the intuitions from section I: firstly, that they are all explained just as well by weak asymmetry as by strong asymmetry. Second: they concern the existence of people whose life are characterised by suffering, not merely by people who suffer at some point in their lives.

There is probably a duty not to bring into existence someone whose life would be generally unhappy; there is no intuitive duty to avoid bringing someone into existence merely because they would experience suffering at some point in their life. Perhaps it would be strange to bring someone into existence so that they could enjoy life (though Benatar merely asserts this without defending it in the slightest), but it would be just as strange to avoid bringing someone into existence merely because in some moment of their life they would be unhappy. One would not regret bringing someone into existence merely because that person was briefly sad. And we are not sad about far away people whose lives are generally happy but include moments of sadness.

All this suggests that strong asymmetry does not really explain our intuitions in these cases. Benatar elides the difference between strong and weak asymmetry, providing arguments for weak asymmetry and then mistakenly claiming that this constitutes support for strong asymmetry.


V: Why this is a problem for Benatar

What does this mean? Well, Benatar goes on to mount a general defence of anti-natalism, the view that we ought not to reproduce. He defends a "pro-death" view of abortion, according to which abortions are not merely permissible but in fact mandatory. He argues that humans should attempt to extinguish ourselves. But neither of these conclusions follows from weak asymmetry.

Weak asymmetry still concedes far too much to the anti-natalist, in my opinion. But the fact that strong asymmetry is unsupported by his arguments, and has highly counter-intuitive implications which weak asymmetry does not, is sufficient to refute the argument that Benatar actually makes.

A (Relatively) Brief Note on Animal Suffering

Despite discussing animal welfare, Singer doesn't really go into wild animal suffering much in Practical Ethics, so I didn't really go into it in yesterday's review. However, in the EA memes group it is one of the main topics of discussion, and it's potentially a genuinely very important consideration in how we ought to behave towards the natural environment. While writing this, it occurred to me that much of it probably applies to domesticated animals as well.

There is a long tradition of people arguing that human life is universally terrible. The most famous person to have argued this is probably Arthur Schopenhauer, although David Benatar has also made an argument of this sort as part of his general case against child-bearing. (At some point I will write a post going into detail on why Benatar is wrong, for he is and it's quite obvious that he is once you see the problem. But enough about my MA dissertation...)

Sometimes they appeal to the great sufferings that we endure in life. Sometimes they start with an axiological approach to "what the good life consists in" and argue that it is rarely met. Either way, the fact is that plenty of people have made these arguments, and yet the fact is that the vast majority of us are glad to be living.

I think a large problem with these kinds of arguments is that while they may allow us to come up with a rough ordinal ranking of lives, there is no cardinal value of a life - and therefore no objective "zero point" at which one should be indifferent between existing and not existing. That's not to say there is no such point, indeed I think there clearly is: rather, it is to say that where this point lies is a subjective issue. A life which I consider worth living may not be one that anyone else would consider worth living, even if there is no disagreement either upon what that life involves or on the value of the life and its components.

(The obvious response to this claim is to ask whether it is really plausible that one could rationally prefer an existence of utter misery to non-existence? I would say two things in response: first, I would be inclined to revise to the slightly weaker claim that the extent to which pleasure balances out pain is subjective, hence a life must include at least some pleasure to outweigh the inevitable sufferings. Second, quoth Hume: "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the wntire world to the scratching of my finger. 'Tis not contrary to reason for me to choose my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. 'Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledged lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter." - A Treatise of Human Nature, book II, part iii, section 3. To say someone ought not to consider a life of almost complete suffering to non-existence is to accuse them of irrationality, but rationality is at least primarily, if not entirely, concerned not with what one takes as goals but rather how one seeks to achieve them. Such a preference ranking would be strange, but not irrational).

Arguments for the importance of animal suffering tend to presuppose a roughly hedonic view of the good life - which is fair enough, given that most animals lack the requisite cognitive resources to have a conception of whether their lives are happy overall, rather than merely whether they are happy in any given moment. They then proceed to detail the many sufferings undergone by animals: cold, starvation, being eaten alive, etc. What we have, then, are two challenges to this kind of argument:

(1) it is impossible to simply compare pleasure with pain. These two phenomena may occur in the same subject, but unless that subject is sufficiently advanced to see itself as persisting over time and have opinions on this, there is simply no fact of the matter as to whether the pleasure outweighs the pain or vice versa. Hence while we might think that the improvement of animal conditions is a morally good thing, and the worsening of their conditions a morally bad thing, one cannot say that an animal life containing both pleasure and pain is either good or bad as a whole.

(2) philosophers have tended to make a particular kind of argument to the effect that humans generally suffer by existing, yet we know empirically that these philosophers are wrong. We should therefore be highly skeptical of such arguments when made in relation to animals.

How to be Practically Perfect in Every Way

Practical Ethics (3rd Edition)
Peter Singer

There is a great danger when reviewing a book on a contentious subject that one ends up concluding "the bits I agreed with were good, the bits I disagreed with were bad". This review won't quite say that, but comes closer to this sentiment than I am really comfortable with.

I came to Practical Ethics with mixed expectations. On the one hand, it came highly recommended by people whose opinions I take very seriously, and after all there's a reason why Peter Singer is widely considered one of the greatest philosophers of our time. That said, I've been disappointed by some of his writings in the past, and had kind of got the impression that while he has great and original ideas his attention to detail was not always the greatest.

Well, that's a highly unfair characterisation of him. The first half of Practical Ethics, at least, is a masterpiece of clarity. He discusses the possibility of racial differences in cognitive abilities dispassionately, demonstrating that belief in it is utterly consistent with a liberal worldview. I didn't really learn much from that discussion, having thought about it plenty beforehand, but it was remarkable to see it discussed with such courage by an important, politically-left-of-centre public intellectual.

Similarly, his discussion of abortion demonstrates the problems with the main arguments advanced by both sides of the debate. Ultimately I disagree with Singer - he really ought to give moral weight to benefits enjoyed by individuals whose existence is dependent upon the decision we make - but he demolishes thinkers regardless of which side they are, and while the position he arrives at (support for post-natal abortions) ought to be a reductio of his premises we are left in no doubt either of his sincerity in advocating it, nor of his understanding the issue on a very deep level. (Personally, I'm in favour of something slightly stricter than the UK system - abortions being available on demand up to about 20 weeks of pregnancy, and after that in cases of medical emergency only).

One passage I found particularly illuminating of his discussion of what is particularly wrong with murder. Prior to reading Practical Ethics I had a vague sense that we ought to take the interests of non-human beings into account (i.e. concern for animal welfare) but that actually holding rights was something to do with being human and a full agent. I'm now much more persuaded by Singer's view, which is similar but attributes the possession of rights to those beings which conceive of themselves as existing through time. I can't say I'm 100% convinced, but Singer acknowledges the weak points of his view - e.g. the implication that murder is not so much a wrong to the person murdered but rather to the other people around - and, unlike many philosophers who paper over the holes in their arguments and hope we won't notice, draws attention to this problem.

With all that said in defence of the book, it's worth noting some issues I had. The first is in his discussion of equality: Singer defends his utilitarianism as "equal consideration of interests". That's one form of equality, to be sure, and it sounds a lot nobler than "equal marginal utility of consumption" (as Amartya Sen amusingly describes utilitarianism). But does it really come close to our ordinary notions of a worthwhile conception of equality? Utility monsters are one problem for this view - Singer ends up committed to the view that we really ought to give them all of our resources and debase ourselves before them - but more fundamentally, equality talk is at least somewhat about grabbing. It's about preventing one member or group within society from coming to dominate the rest of us. The union gangmen may not represent an admirable form of "equality", with their happiness (for example) to beat up anyone who dares vote against the party line, but ultimately that's what our equality instinct developed to achieve. Singer should either accept this, or he should find a genuinely noble ideal (like pure happiness! It's not difficult) upon which to base his utilitarianism.

Second, his discussion of the social discount rate - while drawing attention to a severely neglected issue, and not so far from the truth on the issue - failed to mention the absolutely crucial difference between what Tyler Cowen calls the "pure preference rate" and differences in the marginal utility of consumption across time. One cannot simply compare £50 now to £1000 in 100 years, observe that the one is a much greater number, and conclude from this that it is to be preferred. If we replace pounds with utils, then of course such a comparison is appropriate - but this is not what Singer did, and his chapter on the environment suffers in clarity for it. (My discussion here is much less exact than I would like, relying upon vague memories of a Cass Sunstein paper that my google-fu skills have failed to turn up).

Overall, though, the book is very much worth reading - both as an introduction to the subject of applied ethics, and as a contribution to the ongoing debate. I note also that there are several sections which are very much of use to my thoughts, but which (unlike e.g. his argument for post-natal abortions) I would not have picked up just from reading reviews. So this is at least one data point in favour of reading whole books rather than just review of them, even on relatively-easily-summarised subjects such as philosophy.

Gettier on knowledge

In order to count as a Hungarian student, I have to pass exams as part of my degree. The format of these exams is that we have been given five possible questions for each subject, and will be randomly given one from each subject in the actual exams. For working towards these I am preparing answers to the questions, and this seems as good a place as any to store them. The answers I give in the exam will be largely the bog-standard-but-mildly-original replies necessary to score an A; however, when writing here I will express some of my more controversial philosophical beliefs.

What are the main points of Gettier's famous paper on justified belief and knowledge?

Edmund Gettier's 1963 paper Is Justified True Belief Knowledge begins by showing that there has historically been general agreement over what it means to know that P. The classical definition, beginning with Plato, holds that an agent X knows that P if and only if:

1. X believes that P
2. P is true
3. X is justified in believing that P

Gettier's concern in his paper is to demonstrate that this definition of knowledge is inadequate, and in particular that there are cases of justified true belief which are not cases of knowledge. He provides two counterexamples to the standard account. In the first of these, two men - Smith and Jones - are both applying for a job. Smith believes that he has messed up his interview and that Jones will get the job; furthermore, he happens to know that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. From these he draws the conclusion that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Smith has in fact done far better than he thought, and gets the job. As it so happens, he also has ten coins in his pocket. This means that:

1. Smith believed that the man who would get the job had ten coins in his pocket
2. It was true that the man who got the job had ten coins in his pocket
3. Smith was justified in believing that the man who would get the job had ten coins in his pocket

All of the conditions of the classical definition of knowledge are met- yet intuitively this does not seem like a case of knowledge. This shows that justified true belief is not adequate to define our intuitive sense of what knowledge is.

There has been a great deal of work attempting to tighten up the definition of knowledge - requiring that one's belief be "not easily wrong" or "truth-tracking" or some similar. Personally I think we should just accept that "knowledge" is not a well-defined term, and while it serves purposes in everyday conversation these are less like "I have a JTB that P" but rather closer to "I strongly believe that P" or "I am indeed aware that P". The search for a definition of truth is part and parcel of the mistaken project of trying to obtain genuine certainty. This is an unrealistic and indeed impossible standard.

Raz on the Value of Democracy

Over the weekend CEU hosted a conference on "The Values of Liberal Democracies: Themes from the Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz". The keynote speech, given by Raz himself, was an attempt to articulate why he thinks democracy is such a good system. His answer? Because people think it is.

That's an oversimplified way of putting it. To slightly flesh out the argument:

• People tend to believe that democracy is both necessary and sufficient for democracy.
• Clearly democracy is not inherently just and legitimate: actual democracies contain and indeed rely upon many anti-democratic elements (e.g. independent, unelected judiciaries)
• However, the combination of democracy and a belief in democracy's legitimacy allows us to achieve certain benefits, in particular relating to the stability of political institutions and the peacefulness of political transitions.

Although Raz did not draw out the political implications explicitly, he hinted at some and there are others which I think one can reasonably read into the argument:

• Monarchy is not necessarily contrary to the values of democracy. (One might even argue that constitutional monarchies tend to be more stable than presidential democracies, although you might have trouble establishing the direction of causation there).
• What I believe he was getting at: it doesn't really matter if supra-national institutions such as the EU and the UN aren't really very democratic. Most of the benefits of democracy are to be achieved at the national level, and in any case what we fundamentally want out of political institutions is not that they are democratic (though this may well be desirable) but that they work.

On Political Authority and Civil Disobedience

Political theorists have spent a lot of ink trying to justify a general duty to obey the law. Other political theorists have shown that these theories are for the most part very good. Furthermore, the first set of theorists then tend to spend a whole lot more ink explaining why this duty to obey the law commonly ceases to apply if you call what you are doing "civil disobedience".

I'm with the philosophical anarchists - there is no general duty to obey the law. The fact that something is a law does not by itself give moral force to the command. That is not to say, however, that we are no obligated to obey many individual laws. In general, however, the laws we must obey are simply that codify either pre-existing rules of basic morality ("Thou shalt not kill") or certain social conventions where such conventions are necessary ("Thou shalt drive on the left", "if thou pollutest, shalt thou pay a fine of £80 for each tonne of CO2 that thou releasest into yon atmosphere.")

This isn't quite a natural law theory - I would argue that there are significant ways in which the moral conventions may vary without losing authority. And yes, some sets of conventions are better than others, but that doesn't mean that people living under inferior conventions can automatically behave as though the preferred conventions were in place.

To the extent that the law as enforced reflects the actual moral law, then, it will be reasonable to expect those who challenge it through civil disobedience to be willing to defend their actions. The moral justifiability of civil disobedience will, pace Raz, depend to a considerable degree upon whether or not the law they challenge is a just one. That said, if someone is wrong but was acting from good intentions, then it may be reasonable to punish them less harshly than if they were simply disregarding the moral law.

An argument for the subjectivity of reasons

Suppose a man enjoys shooting. In particular, he is into "blind-shooting", in which he shoots in conditions of limited visibility: he sets up a target, along with a mechanism to wave a rattle directly in front of the target, and he aims based upon his judgement of where the sound is coming from.

He is unable to afford an area of private land in which to practice this sport. Instead, he goes out into a public right-of-way area at night to shoot. This is of course a grossly irresponsible sport. We might like to say that, given the risk of hitting someone, there is a strong reason for him not to shoot. Of course, if he could be utterly sure that no-one was in the vicinity, then this reason would go away.

It is simply false to say that if there is a person who could be hit, he has a reason, and if there is not, then he lacks a reason. The reason for not shooting comes from his personal, subjective inability to confirm that no-one is in any danger of being shot.

A Bold Thesis

Informal logic is stuck in a quagmire, and has been since Aristotle. It relies upon an aspiration to certainty, but this is unrealistic and is in fact harmful for the way we think about logic. We reject as “fallacies” various argumentative forms merely because they fail to guarantee the truth of their conclusions, even though from a Bayesian perspective they provide evidence for these conclusions. Consequently, many of these are perfectly valid argumentative forms and in some cases are unavoidable. Examples include affirming the consequent, the appeal to authority (to which ad hominem may be a perfectly good response), slippery slopes, etc. It is simply false to say that use of a fallacy will undermine the logic of one’s argument.

Your Argument is Bad (and Dangerous) and You Should Feel Bad

The CEU Philosophy department recently held a conference for graduate students. That is, most of the talks were by graduate students from across Europe, there were responses given by CEU students, and the keynote speeches were given by the professors involved in organising it. I wasn't at much of the conference, but one talk I heard was so appalling that I feel the need to make a public record of this.

To be clear, this was not a talk by a graduate student. This was by a professor from elsewhere who came here in order to help run the conference. The reason for my strenuous objection is not that it is merely wrong (lots of philosophical ideas and arguments are wrong) or even that it was a bad argument (although even by the low standards of academic philosophy it was). This argument is dangerous.

The conclusion of the argument is that "holding different values from a person constitutes an epistemically sound reason to regard them as unreliable in fields in which they are expert". That is to say, if you disagree with them about politics then you are justified in ignoring whatever they have to say - even in fields you know very little about.

How does one justify such a remarkable position? We begin with the question of how far one ought to defer to experts. Clearly experts are not always reliable, but we would like to be able to assess whether or not to believe them without going through the long and difficult process of gaining all the same knowledge that they have. The speaker therefore distinguished the cases where there is general agreement and where there is widespread disagreement between experts. In cases where there is general agreement, we should go with expert consensus. In cases where there is disagreement, we need some way of establishing which to trust.

This is about as far as I am willing to agree with the speaker. There is as yet no draft of the paper - this was, the speaker remarked, the first time she had discussed these thoughts publicly - so you will have to trust from this point onwards that I am presenting her views faithfully and accurately.

Before moving on, I think she might have benefited from drawing a distinction between consensus of experts and consensus of papers. If all the experts in a field conclude that X, then I'm going to be strongly inclined to believe X. If all the papers on the subject conclude that X, then while I will probably still accept X I'm going to also be heavily suspicious that there is some bias in the publication procedure. The speaker's example of consensus was global warming, and she quoted some meta-analysis which looked at more than 900 papers and found that they all pointed towards the existence of AGW. Sure, AGW is definitely a thing, but is it really plausible than in 900 studies, none of them would by chance fail to detect it? There's something fishy going on either with that meta-analysis or with the way the speaker reported it.

That said, how did the argument continue? The speaker claimed that deciding when a risk is worth taking will require a kind of judgement. Her example involved some ecological risk relating to bees. Suppose the downside of this risk has a 5% chance of occurring. Is that a big enough risk that we ought to consider action?

Ultimately, she claimed, this is a value judgement. So if one ecologist tells us we should beware of this risk and another says we don't need to, in order to decide which one to trust we need to know which shares our values where risk-taking is concerned. So if an expert has significantly different values from you, this constitutes a reason to give less weight to their testimony relative to those experts with whom you have shared values.

There are, so far as I can see, four gaping holes in her argument. The first is a simple failure to apply Bayesian epistemology. When we say "there is a 5% chance that a large comet will strike earth in the next 10,000 years", this does not mean that the universe is indeterminate and has a 5% chance of resolving into a situation where a large comet strikes the earth: rather, we mean that we lack the information necessary to establish definitively whether or not earth will be hit by a comet, but based on the information which is available we attribute a 5% probability to it happening in the next 10,000 years. Furthermore, it is fine to act based upon this kind of partial information. Indeed, it is all that we can do.

So there is no need for some "critical point" at which a risk becomes worth considering. We can simply do a standard cost-benefit analysis in which the ethical weights given to events are multiplied by our best guesses at the probability of those events.

The second is that even if there were some "critical point" of this sort, or even a Sorites-paradox-type thing where really tiny risks should be ignored and we're never quite certain when they become important to think about, and it were subjectively determined in the way our speaker took it to be - this would be a far cry from what we ordinarily refer to as "values". It would be something much more contained and precise - call it "risk tolerance". I'm sure the speaker would recognise this if pointed to it - but the fact remains that she chose to use the word "values" in a very loose and careless way.

Third, we already have an approximation of this "critical point". It's called statistical significance.

Finally, she leaves aside the extent to which our values are determined by other things, which may be the very things whose truth we aim to question. There are experts on the philosophy of religion who believe in God, and there are those who do not. If we privilege the testimony of those with whom we share values, then when considering the existence of deities Christians will have a good reason to privilege the testimony of fellow Christians, Hindus to privilege the testimony of fellow Hindus, and atheists to privilege the testimony of fellow neckbeards. But this is blatantly bad epistemic practice!

The thesis of this talk, if accepted by mainstream society, would destroy the ability to have sensible political and scientific discourse. Being dangerous does not automatically that philosophy is bad or wrong - if democracy is the only way to avoid either feudal warlords or tyrannical dictators then Jason Brennan's work is dangerous, but that doesn't mean his work is low quality. But when you are pushing a potentially dangerous thesis, you have not only prudential reasons but also a moral requirement to make the best argument you can. This speaker flagrantly failed to do so.

Has Rawls Shown that Rewards for Natural Talents are Arbitrary?

A common (mis)understanding of John Rawls is that he thinks it is entirely arbitrary who is born with which talents. We do not in any sense "deserve" our natural intelligence, charm, or good looks, and so there is no particular moral reason why these traits ought to be rewarded.

My reaction to this line of argument is to complain that this threatens to entirely strip away our moral agency. No-one "deserves" their moral character; does this mean we should abandon anything beyond the most unambitious conceptions of free will and moral responsibility? If so, then what is the point of doing moral theory at all?

But in fact Rawls' critique is more subtle than that. The idea is not that our talents are arbitrary, but rather the value which society places on those talents is arbitrary. It may be a necessary fact about me that I have an aptitude for political philosophy; it surely isn't a necessary fact about me, about Hungary, or about anything else that as a result of that talent there is a university willing to provide me with free education and accommodation.

The question, then, is what would render non-arbitrary the value placed by society upon a particular ability? If every society in existence values something, is that sufficient to show that the value is non-arbitrary? If societies which value a particular trait tend to provide better lives for their members, is that sufficient to show that the value is non-arbitrary?

If either of these cases is met, then we can empirically rebut Rawls. Intelligence - which is admittedly more a suite of skills than a single skill, but they're all strongly correlated - is useful across a very wide variety of contexts. (Fluid intelligence even predicts people's reaction times, so being intelligent would even be useful in a warrior society with status determined by fighting ability). Maybe it's arbitrary that I get paid to do Philosophy rather than Physics, Poetry or Philology, but thanks to the magic of the g-factor we know that someone who is much-better-than-average at one of these will probably also be better than average at the best.

What about looks? Surely the social preference for good-looking people is arbitrary? Well, I think that's a poor framing. Is it arbitrary that societies particularly benefit men if they are tall with highly symmetrical faces? Is it arbitrary that societies particularly benefit women if they have long hair, symmetrical faces, large breasts, a thin waist and wide hips? Those would describe people considered good-looking in every society we have encountered, with good evolutionary reasons - typically these features indicate good health and nutrition over an extended period of time, combined with low mutational load. What's more, our undue propensity to benefit these people is caused primarily by unconscious biases. You could have a society which was not unequal in these people's favour, but the inhabitants of such a society would not be human.

The Non-Problems of Philosophy

A lot of the supposed questions of philosophy appear because we have weird ways of speaking. In other languages these problems disappear entirely. As an example, there is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of language over "what words mean", which exists entirely because the English language confuses the notions of the speaker's intention (what Germans call Meinung) and the thing that words are ordinarily understood to mean by the listener or reader (correspondingly the Bedeutung).

This all looks very silly from the outside. For example, here is a short excerpt from Heidegger's What is Metaphysics?:

In anxiety, we say, "one feels ill at ease." What is "it" that makes "one" feel ill at ease?

Heidegger uses this as part of a long spiel about how humans are greatly affected by a curious entity called "nothing". To those of us who are accustomed to thinking in English, however, his question makes no sense.

The issue is that Germans do not literally say "I am ill at ease"; rather they say "it is unsettling to me" (Es ist mir einem unheimlich). So there is a hanging "it" which is taken by a naive reading of German to be an actual thing.

Apologies if this is a poor attempt at exposition of Heidegger. In my defence, Heidegger's own exposition is even worse.

Some Thoughts on Cohen and Rawls

Political Philosophy is the study of ethics as it applies to political action. This means it asks questions about which political institutions ought to exist and how they ought to act, but also about how individuals ought to act under political institutions. One important question of the latter kind is how far the force of egalitarianism, which is typically taken to bind state actions, should influence the actions of individuals.

Rawls thought that the principles of justice should apply to "the basic institutions of society", and was always slightly ambiguous about what this meant. Was it intended to mean coercive institutions - such as the state and particular distributions of property rights - or rule-giving institutions in general, such as marriage and religious authorities? The basic intuition in favour of the former view is that we usually want to avoid placing especially demanding political duties upon people beyond compliance with the basic laws and rules of society. If someone pays their taxes, drives on the correct side of the road, and avoids trespassing on the Royal Navy's battleships, then isn't that enough?

On the other hand, this seems to deny that considerations of justice might apply within the family. A hundred years ago this might have been seen as a virtue of the theory, but now that more-or-less everyone accepts that second-wave feminism was basically correct this view is hard to sustain. So if justice applies to individual actions in the context of family, why shouldn't it apply in a whole range of contexts?


One way of thinking about this is to consider what the origin of our moral duties is. (NB This need not be the same for all duties). I would broadly categorise the theories as such:

1. Moral duties are pre-institutional. Political institutions, insofar as they are justified at all, exist as a mechanism to enforce the carrying out of these duties. Nozick can be seen as a paradigm case of this view, although it is consistent with a stronger conception of distributive justice: for example, I assume that Peter Singer would hold a view of this kind.
2. Moral duties in some sense exist prior to institutions, but only become binding upon individuals when there exists a political community. Thomas Nagel holds a view of this sort, suggesting that it is unreasonable to expect individuals to deliberate as though their own interests are no more important than those of other people but that politics can act to achieve some form of equal consideration of interests.
3. Moral duties come into existence only when there exists a political community. Hobbes would be the classical advocate of this view.

I would venture to suggest that (2) represents the mainstream view among political philosophers, at least with regard to issues of distributive justice. It has the advantage compared to (1) of explaining the particularity of our political obligations - of why individuals are attached to particular political institutions and not others. If you take (1) to be the case, it is hard to see how one can legitimise redistribution of income and wealth within the community without also legitimising global redistribution on the same scale - an implication that citizens of rich countries, including most political philosophers, are keen to avoid.

The disadvantage of (3) is that it is hard to explain why there are principles that all political institutions must follow. Whereas (2) suggests that political community simply activates pre-existing principles, (3) implies that the principles to be followed by a community are made anew each time a political community comes into being. This view fell out of fashion as communitarianism became less popular.

Nevertheless, all three views are somewhat popular within the discipline.

If you accept a view of type (1), then you will presumably think that the failure of a state to enforce a duty has no bearing upon whether or not one is morally obliged to comply with the duty. To take a duty where I think the truth of (1) is uncontroversial: one is obliged not to murder others, and this holds whether or not one will be punished for doing so.

If you accept a version of (3), then there is simply no way to say, outside of a particular context, what the duties of individuals are. This is not to say that there is no answer; rather, it means that this answer is one to be answered not through philosophical reflection upon the nature of morality, but through interpretation of a particular culture's practices.

But what about (2)? In this case we still do not know what the duties of individuals are, but in a different way from in (3). If (3) is true then it may be the case that members of a particular community have extensive moral duties, but this has little to no bearing upon what the duties of people in different societies are. If (2) is true, however, then people's duties should be more-or-less the same regardless of which society they inhabit.

This doesn't really answer the question, but I think it has helped to clarify my thinking on the topic. In particular, I am now aware of a couple of tensions in my beliefs. Firstly, I am attracted simultaneously to the views that there are limits to our duties, that there are some (admittedly small - I'm a sufficientarian, not an egalitarian) requirements of distributive justice, and the type (1) theory - that states should exist only to enforce pre-existing duties, and cannot create new duties. The joint coherence of these views is doubtful.

Second, in a part of this essay which I have deleted, I suggested that this might have to do with whether or not we conceive of justice as a substantive property or merely as the absence of injustice. I tend to believe the latter view, since surely injustice requires an actual victim rather than merely the potential to create victims? I thought that this might have some effect on which duties we still ought to respond to as individuals, but it is now not at all clear to me that this is the case.