Language requires what?

by Chris Bertram on December 10, 2008

Samuel Freeman’s _Rawls_ has received considerable praise on this blog. Indeed Harry “described it”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/10/rawls-by-samuel-freeman/#more-6491 exactly a year ago as “A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work.” Well Harry may well be right about the book as a whole, but I’m afraid I found the pages where Freeman states his and Rawls’s objections to “liberal cosmopolitanism” somewhat objectionably arresting. Details are below the fold, but I was taken aback by the linked claims that “language itself” would not be possible without “social co-operation” which, in turn, would not be possible without the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power. That just seems rather obviously historically and ethnographically false unless Freeman intends by “social cooperation” and “coercive power” rather looser arrangements for coooperation and constraint than he needs for the conclusion he wants to reach, namely, that there is a qualitative difference between the domestic order and the international one, such as would justify restricting strong distributive justice duties to co-members of societies. Given that he has to reject, then, a looser conception of those terms, it looks like he’s committed to the claim that “language itself” would not be possible without the state. Which is nuts.

Here’s the context. Freeman imagines cosmopolitans objecting as follows:

bq. Why doesn’t Rawls have a “global original position” among all the world’s individual inhabitants instead to an international one among representatives of nations? After all, Rawls proceeds from the Kantian idea of mutual respect for persons regarded as free and equal persons. If equal respect for persons is the basis for social justice, why should it not also provide the basis for relations among everyone in the world? Rawls’s “state-centric” view of global justice belies his commitment to equal respect for persons. (p.419)

There follows a certain amount of rumination and clarification, culminating the in charge that

bq. The liberal cosmopolitan objection challenges Rawls’s initial focus on social cooperation and the basic structure of society …. One reason Rawls gives for the basic structure of society as the “first subject” of justice is the profound effects of social cooperation and its basic institutions on people’s present and future prospects, their characters, relationships, plans and self-conceptions …. (p.420)

Freeman then tells us that cosmpolitans might respond that there a lot of such life-shaping that results from global social relations too but he responds it turn that “there is a fundamental qualitative difference, not simply one of degree, between the effects of social cooperation cooperation with people from other societies.” (421) So what is this fundamental qualitative difference?

bq. … social relations, unlike global relations, are coercively enforced. Social cooperation for Rawls invariably involves political cooperation, and with it the political enforcement of basic social rules and institutions necessary to society …. By contrast, economic and cultural relations between societies are normally voluntary ….(421)

So there you have it. Social cooperation, properly speaking, can only take place (“invariably involves”) the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power. Or, to put it more succinctly (and perhaps tendentiously), social cooperation is made possible by the state. Well that just sounds false to me, right off the bat. There is, rather obviously it seems, social cooperation in stateless societies of various kind, and there was extensive cooperation before the rise of the modern state. Of course there a bit of semantic wiggle-room here, though not perhaps that much, concerning what counts as “the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power”, but it sounds very much as if something closely resembling the modern state is required and certainly (given Freeman’s contrast with relations between societies) that, by Rawls-according-to-Freeman’s lights, a community of anarchists that operated by voluntary compliance with a customary code would not count as engaging in social cooperation.

Now that all seems pretty implausible already, but Freeman is caught in a dilemma: if he allowed piecemeal retaliation and shunning to among anarchist co-operators to count as “the enforcement of social rules by a coercive power”, then he’d have to allow the liberal cosmpolitan claim that a global basic strucure (and its concomitant distributive duties) already exists; but if this doesn’t count as such enforcement, then it looks like a good deal of bona fide social cooperation has gone on in history without a coercive power such as he envisages.

Things get worse. Having made the claim that a coercive power (aka, “a state”) is necessary for social cooperation, Freeman then goes on to claim that social cooperation “is necessary to our development as persons”. And here’s what he means:

bq. An individual may be able to survive without ever having experienced the benefits of social cooperation, alone in the wild or in herds not governed by social norms. [Are stateless societies “herds not governed by social norms”? CB] But their lives would be primitive — as Rousseau says, the lives of “stupid limited animals.” There would be no system of property and contracts, and no economic system with division of labor, cooperative productive activity, and trade. Production, if any, would be primitive, and without the recognition of property, it is questionable whether agriculture would be possible. People would be without culture, scientific knowledge, technology, and formal and most informal associations (including the social institution of the family). Morality and justice would be absent, as would even language itself. (422)

So there you have it: language itself would not be possible without social cooperation which, in turn, requires social rules enforced by a coercive power. Just to ram the obvious home, Rawls-Freeman are claiming that language is only possible with social rules enforced by a coercive power. Statism gone mad?

{ 56 comments }

1

Kieran 12.10.08 at 6:10 pm

alone in the wild or in herds not governed by social norms

What he says here is right for people living “alone in the wild”, though hardly any such people have ever existed. Small-scale, acephalous societies have not typically had a highly developed division of labor, usually lack systems of contract and law, and aren’t organized to produce a surplus — hence they are short on the two main classes of people that come along with a surplus, Thugs and Humbugs (in Gellner’s phrase). But they’re certainly not “herds”! Of course they have economic systems, cooperative productive activity, exchange, technology, culture and so on. It’s one thing to say that the Wild Boy of Aveyron barely survived without experiencing the benefits of social cooperation, but no human society is like that. In any case it seems there are some very odd conceptions of social cooperation, norms and institutions being used here.

By the by, it’s much more plausible to claim that without the modern state you wouldn’t have a global basic structure.

2

The Raven 12.10.08 at 6:19 pm

Anything but admit that you’re apes, or even animals. People in the “wild” don’t live alone, mostly–like all social apes, they live in tribes. Which do after all have a social order, sometimes coercively enforced. (And herd animals have social orders, too. Freeman is speciesist.)

Caw!

3

Russell Arben Fox 12.10.08 at 6:28 pm

Chris, I think I can kind of appreciate what Freeman’s point here (as you present it anyway) really is, though plainly his word choice doesn’t help him. “Social cooperation,” under his definition, is the sort of thing which involves a publicly defined civic space, an agora, a public sphere in which information is shared and views are exchanged and people are enlarged as a result. It is participatory, but not utterly open-ended or unstructured; it needs boundaries, so people can say that “this” is properly a matter for social concern, and “that” is not. Whereas Freeman presents cultural and economic exchanges and interactions happening without that kind of discipline or demarcation; they are carried forward by individual interest (bartering in the marketplace) and traditional associations whose membership is not open for discussion (kinship ties, etc.). There’s a host of things wrong with this distinction, but I can somewhat see what point he’s making, the sense that justice may arguably be a characteristic of certain kinds of regulated ties, whereas unregulated or inherited ones may not be open to considerations of justice.

Unfortunately, he completely makes a hash out of it by throwing language in there. Is he supposing that cultural and economic relations can happen without language? Or that regulated societies of some form always preceded the development of economies and cultures? Either what he meant to say is deeply confused, or he didn’t mean what he tosses out there at the end of the passage you quote.

4

Matt 12.10.08 at 6:37 pm

I don’t have time to give this as close a look as I’d like (and my copy of the book is at home) but in general, when an interpretation leads you to attribute a crazy claim to an otherwise non-crazy person, might we not worry that the interpretation is wrong? (The crazy claim being that language requires the state in something like its modern sense.) Now, there may well be some slipping here. But, my understanding of the argument is that it runs something like this:
1) W/o social cooperation we would not be human in the ways we think are most important. Even language would not be possible. (This seems plausible to me though others might not agree.) Therefore, social cooperation is very important.
2) Social cooperation inevitably involves the enforcement of norms. (Again, this seems plausible to me.)
3) The enforcement of norms requires the use of coercive power of some sort. (That’s probably less obvious but still seems plausible to me if we allow a broad enough version of “coercive power”.
4) A particularly important sort of social cooperation is political cooperation- we, again, wouldn’t be the sorts of beings we are w/o political society. (Obviously a much more contentious claim, but not a crazy one, I think.)
5) Political cooperation requires organizations that in some ways are state-like. Obviously, many forms of political cooperation are possible, but many are ruled out by life in the modern world or history or considerations of justice. Those that are left are in some ways like modern states, though of course a lot of variety is possible.
6) State-like entities (I believe Freeman mostly uses the term “societies” in turn require political cooperation and the coercive enforcement of norms, or at least the assurance that this will happen if some try to prey on those who do cooperate. (A semi-Hobbesian point that seems right to me.)
7) Justice is possible both within and between states (Obviously many will disagree, but there’s a couple of long books on the point to look at here.)
8) But, cooperation of the same sort, with coercive enforcement of norms of the same sort and degree, isn’t necessary and probably isn’t desirable at the international level. (Again, many will disagree, but there are arguments that fill in the gaps here.) International law is voluntary in a way that domestic law is not, and usually this is right. (This is correct as a factual statement and I think it’s right normatively, too, when we move beyond the law covered by the “law of peoples”, as Freeman obviously is here.)
9) Therefore, the norms governing international relations and justice are likely to be different from those governing domestic justice. (Follows from the above.)

This all seems to me to be fairly straight-forward from the text, when given a modestly charitable reading. Given that the other reading leads to absurdity I’d suggest it’s not right. Now, there is obviously a lot to disagree with at each step here, but the point is that the absurd claim Chris attributes isn’t implied by the text, at least on a minimally plausible reading, as far as I can see. *
* I should note that Freeman is both a teacher and friend of mine, and hence that I’m not totally impartial here. However, I really do think this is a deeply uncharitable and implausible reading. There’s enough to disagree on in this area w/o attributing implausible readings, and one that would require the state in order to make language possible is clearly implausible enough that a fair reader will seek to find another reading if it’s possible. It seems to me that another reading, even if you don’t agree with the conclusion or all the steps in the argument (or think it’s a good argument, even!) is clearly possible here.

5

a different matt 12.10.08 at 6:46 pm

Could you clarify the terms of the debate for me? ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is in fact the term Kant uses for the international order, and Freeman seems to be defending (though maybe for different reasons) the Kantian conclusion that this order ought to be a non-coercive network of nation states.

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rea 12.10.08 at 7:00 pm

Well, the strong claim, that language is impossible without a state, is obviously nonsense. However, if you reject the weaker claim–that language inherently involves some sort of coercive inforcement of norms, I invite you to explain my grandson’s poor grade on his last spelling test . . .

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Chris Bertram 12.10.08 at 7:07 pm

Yes Matt, but if you allow a ‘broad enough notion of “coercive power”‘ (your 3), that is, sufficient broad to encompass even acephalous societies, then just the same kind of “enforcement” goes on in the international arena. If something narrower is required, then the claim about its necessity for “social co-operation” goes out the window.

As for the absurd claim, it simply follows by transitivity (if x is necessary for y and y is necessary for z, then x is necessary for z). I’m sure Freeman doesn’t believe it when made explicit.

8

Righteous Bubba 12.10.08 at 7:10 pm

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David Moles 12.10.08 at 7:37 pm

I thought it was well established that before Enki and Ninhursag founded Eridu, humans were eusocial hive creatures that communicated through pheromones and by rubbing their incisors against roots to make squeaky noises.

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John Emerson 12.10.08 at 7:42 pm

I’m always astonished when political theorists speculate about pre-state, pre-literate, and pre-urban societies as if we knew nothing about them. They’re usually careful to bracket out history, archeology, and anthropology in order to give their original societies some kind of technical, formal, non-empirical status, but why not give some consideration to what equally happened?

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John Emerson 12.10.08 at 8:03 pm

“actually”

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Chris Bertram 12.10.08 at 8:39 pm

#3 Russell – I think an “agora” version of the claim is even less plausible. All kinds of reason-exchange spaces (for want of a better term) existed before the rise of the modern territorial state (it even destroyed plenty of them), and here we are arguing internationally across the interwebs.

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Lisa 12.10.08 at 8:51 pm

Sometimes I wonder if there is this tendency to conflate the lives people live in smaller groups with absence of order and complexity when there is an absence of technology. That is, people who lack governments also tend to depend much more on shared knowledge and skill to survive and to the person who depends on technology to survive, it looks as if they must be living like animals.

This is an extremely absurd mistake. But you have to wonder why it is so similar to other mistakes made by enlightenment philosophers. The idea that there were these ‘primitive people,’ as Kant and Locke and Rousseau and so many others supposed could just be flat out racism. I might be too charitable to try to reconstruct how they arrived at their views. But it also seems like they imagined themselves in the place of this person (who in fact lives a social life equally or more complex to anyone living in Konigsberg in 1781) and sort of extrapolate. Because they can’t see the social complexity, they mistake the absence of technological complexity for an absence of society at all.

Witness the amazement of people when they find out about the Iroquois Confederation or the fact that someone no one thinks of the Aztecs or the Maya as Indian–I think that we have a category of the primitive. We know (or some people do) that the primitive doesn’t exist, never existed. But he keeps re-appearing.

I’m probably being too charitable. since it’s racism that makes it possible to look at a group of people and assume that the fact you can’t see what’s in their heads means that not much of interest really is. But I like the charitable readings given above since think there is certainly a point to be made about the fact that language depends on the existence of a social order. But if you manage this reading, you still have to wonder where the ‘herds not given by social norms’ come from. Why do you even need that? I think it is this peculiar philosophical inheritance–these imagined people are inherited from earlier philosophers.

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Lisa 12.10.08 at 8:53 pm

Sorry for the typos. Clarification–When I said I like the charitable readings given above, I mean Matt’s charitable reading. But what I’m wondering about why we ever need to imagine these herds, these primitives. Why did we ever imagine these people when there are no such people? That’s what I was trying to explain.

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lemuel pitkin 12.10.08 at 9:20 pm

Why can’t the claim simply be that all human societies, even stateless ones, invovle significantly more coercive enforcement of norms than exists internationally? And itsn’t that claim correct? Having just read Hierarchy in the Forest I feel pretty confident that it is empirically true that all known human societies (including the “simplest”) are far more rules-governed than the international system is today.

Seems like it’s the equation of coercive norm enforcement with a state that’s the problem here. And that equation — AFAICT — is Chris B.’s, not Freeman’s.

16

J Thomas 12.10.08 at 9:28 pm

When I was in high school I heard about General Semantics and I looked for all the reading material I could find about it. It flourished mostly in the early 1950’s though it sputtered along into the 1970’s and hasn’t completely died out yet.

And I vividly remember Wendell Johnson describing the fundamental difference between humans and apes. He had the doctrinal belief that good general semanticists did a “cortical-thalamic pause” where instead of reacting by sheer instinct they got a sort of gestalt sense of the whole thing. And so he said that was the fundamental difference. If you taught an ape to drive a car, it could learn the rule that you go through stop lights on green and stop on red. But it would inevitably follow the rule even if there was another car in the intersection. Because apes didn’t do the cortico-thalamic pause. But human beings would check the whole situation and not just go when the light changed regardless.

I inferred that Johnson, in the early 1950’s University of Iowa, had a need to explain the fundamental difference between humans and apes. And he didn’t want to say that it was that humans had souls while apes didn’t. So he made the minimal doctrinal change required, he switched to GS doctrines and used the most fundamental GS idea — CTP — instead of the fundamental christian idea — soul.

People make these sterile arguments a lot. Probably better for a good general semanticist to just ignore it. Nothing to see here, just move along.

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Chris Bertram 12.10.08 at 9:29 pm

#15 _Seems like it’s the equation of coercive norm enforcement with a state that’s the problem here. And that equation—AFAICT —is Chris B.’s, not Freeman’s._

True, that is my attribution to him, Lemuel. But I think it is a reasonable one, given what he says. You claim that it is a matter of degree here –“significantly more”–but Freeman claims a difference in kind. So he’s cutting pretty sharply between the intra-societal and the inter-societal cases. Can he (or you) come up with a satisfactory account of what “coercive enforcement” amounts to which applies to all the intra-societal cases (including the acepalous ones) but doesn’t have the global order coming out as coercive? I doubt it.

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notsneaky 12.10.08 at 9:34 pm

I’d also question the need for coercive power to enforce norms. Clearly there’s plenty of norms that are self enforcing unless your definition of coercive power makes the whole argument tautological. We live in a multi equilibrium world, where norms choose the equilibriums or allow us to coordinate on focal points without any meaningful coercion. Outright coercion of norms is generally only required when you’re in a prisoner dilemma situation in order to get out of it, but in fact most situations of social interaction are probably coordination games rather than the PD. Then whatever norms arise can be self enforcing. And I’d argue that ‘language’ falls into the coordination game category (we all agree that the person who gave birth to us is referred to by a ‘mah’ sound. Once we all agree then there’s no benefit from deviating from this norm by using some other sound. Hence, coordination game, not a prisoner’s dilemma).

The lack of need for coercion is of course true even in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma (is “don’t trade with someone who ripped you off in the past” a form of coercion?).

19

mpowell 12.10.08 at 9:40 pm

I don’t know if the fault is Freeman’s or Bertran’s, but I think you are trying to make Freeman’s argument do to much work here. Freeman starts down this path because he is trying to explain why Rawls claims that justice is much more concerned with your relation towards fellow citizens than towards all the people in the world. His answer seems to be that since a nation-state has a significantly better handle on the exclusive use of coercive force within it’s domain, the norms that we can develop for appropriate forms of social cooperation within a nation are fundamentally different than the ones we can develop without. And this tracks very well with my understanding of the difference in Rawls view of what we should aim for within our own borders versus the international community we participate in. I think Freeman gets a little off track by apparently defining social relations as being amongst members of a single nation and ‘global relations’ as being their interaction with others. Maybe Freeman thinks this distinction is important and that would be a little weird, but I think he just gets a little careless in his attempt to emphasize the poor prospects for justice without an entity capable of exercising something close to a monopoly on the use of coercive force.

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novakant 12.10.08 at 9:57 pm

I think the other matt’s point about Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” is very important in this context, because Kant claims that:

– peace is not a natural human state and therefor has to be created and maintained through a framework of rules that need to be enforced, while bearing in mind that the purpose of such rules and their enforcement is not upholding some sort of mindless statism, but rather guaranteeing that every citizen can live a free and dignified life

– societies in which such a framework is not upheld are the epitome of human depravity, as Kant regards humans in a state of nature as violent and vicious, their lives determined by arbitrariness rather than freedom

– even though we are all bound by the same moral law and we as individuals have rights that should be guaranteed worldwide, this doesn’t mean that a world government is practical or even desirable; rather Kant prefers a league of of free and sovereign nations bound by a multilateral framework

Now one might not agree with all of this, but I think if one reads the text in question through this lens, one will reach a conclusion that adheres a little more to the principle of charity.

21

novakant 12.10.08 at 10:02 pm

I think the other matt’s point about Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” is very important in this context, because Kant claims that:

– peace is not a natural human state and therefor has to be created and maintained through a framework of rules that need to be enforced, while bearing in mind that the purpose of such rules and their enforcement is not upholding some sort of mindless statism, but rather guaranteeing that every citizen can live a free and dignified life –

-societies in which such a framework is not upheld are the epitome of human depravity, as Kant regards humans in a state of nature as violent and vicious, their lives determined by arbitrariness rather than freedom

– even though we are all bound by the same moral law and we as individuals have rights that should be guaranteed worldwide, this doesn’t mean that a world government is practical or even desirable; rather Kant prefers a league of of free and sovereign nations bound by a multilateral framework

Now one might not agree with all of this, but I think if one reads the text in question through this lens, one will reach a conclusion that adheres a little more to the principle of charity.

[something strange going on with the html – that’s why I posted this again]

22

Chris Bertram 12.10.08 at 10:11 pm

Thanks all.

Novakant: I don’t doubt that those views of Kant are lurking in the background. Presented as truths of reason, of course, but actually empirical claims about human societies that are not well supported.

The other point, that I forgot to make above in reply to Lemuel, is that if the enforcement of social norms by social disapproval, shunning, bar-room violence etc counts as coercive in the relevant sense, then Freeman/Rawls is going to have a hard time (in another context) maintain the kind of structure/ethos distinction that he/they need to fend off Jerry Cohen’s critique.

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lemuel pitkin 12.10.08 at 10:59 pm

You claim that it is a matter of degree here—”significantly more”—but Freeman claims a difference in kind.

I reckon an insistence of differences in kind is one of the best diagnostics for distinguishing professional philosophers from the rest of us. In the social world as I look at it, differences of degree are pretty much all there are.

Anyway, it seems unquestionable that norms bind far more weakly in the international realm than in any human society. There is literally no minimal requirement for a state to remain a memebr of the international community, for most purposes, except to exist — every regime in control of its territory (and many that aren’t), no matter how heinous, bellicose or revolutionary, maintains embassies, participates in international bodies, engages in trade, etc.* Whereas every human society that has ever existed, as far as one can tell from the anthropologists, regularly punishes violators of social norms with penalties including social (or actual) death. So yes, this looks like a pretty clear distinction to me.

Do you really think otherwise?

[* Of course this is a historical fact about the modern state system that developed with capitalism, not an a priori truth about states as such.]

24

Matt 12.10.08 at 11:03 pm

I more or less agree w/ Lemuel, and think your reading is still implausible and uncharitable, Chris. And, it doesn’t seem at all plausible to me to think that different types of social organizations require different types of rules and regulation, and that these might not be just different in degree but different in kind. That might be wrong, but nothing you’ve said here shows that at all. But if this point is right (I’m not arguing for it here, just noting that it’s argued for a lot of places) then Cohen’s argument doesn’t get off the ground, I think.

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trane 12.10.08 at 11:14 pm

Very interesting discussion.

Notsneaky:
“We live in a multi equilibrium world, where norms choose the equilibriums or allow us to coordinate on focal points without any meaningful coercion. Outright coercion of norms is generally only required when you’re in a prisoner dilemma situation in order to get out of it, but in fact most situations of social interaction are probably coordination games rather than the PD”

Hm, I pretty much completely disagree with your thought here. I would write something like:

”We live in a multi-equilibrium world, where norms allow us to have more clear mutual expectations of each others’ likely actions and reactions, mutual and conflicting interests, payoffs and sanctions. This does not mean that all benefit equally from a norm, quite the contrary. While outright coercion of norms does not take place in all situations, differences in power wielded by actors certainly affect what norms are followed, how they are enforced, and who benefits from them. In fact most situations of social interaction, at least those very important ones that are relevant for normative political theory, are most probably PD rather than coordination games.

26

djw 12.10.08 at 11:19 pm

I reckon an insistence of differences in kind is one of the best diagnostics for distinguishing professional philosophers from the rest of us. In the social world as I look at it, differences of degree are pretty much all there are.

Right. Rawls, Freeman, and a bunch of others (David Miller, Mathias Risse, Nagel, Michael Blake…) have responded to the cosmopolitans with clever arguments about “What is special about the state.” Smart fellows that they are, they identify lots of things that appear to be somewhat “special” about states, and draw out some implications for thinking about justice, domestic and global, from that. However (perhaps to fit their argument into disciplinary norms) they take it too far and attempt to identify something existentially, qualitatively special about states–special about the state-form, rather than actually existing states. This leads to, charitable interpretations aside, the kind of strange, implausible argument Chris flags here.

Your subsequent paragraph draws too sharp a line, I think. Punishment for norm violation can and does occur, and norm enforcement takes on a number of other forms in international relations that your sketch skips over.

27

Anderson 12.10.08 at 11:28 pm

From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power.

Surely there’s something on this in Lacan ….

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lemuel pitkin 12.10.08 at 11:37 pm

Your subsequent paragraph draws too sharp a line, I think. Punishment for norm violation can and does occur, and norm enforcement takes on a number of other forms in international relations that your sketch skips over.

Fair enough. The whole thing should really be preceded by “Insofar as…” I still think the distinction between strongly-normed human socieities and a weakly-normed interstate system is valid at a very general level — but I agree with you that the interesting questions aren’t at that level, they’re more concrete and historical.

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matt 12.10.08 at 11:51 pm

Just checking:

1) Rawls doesn’t make this argument that the state is a condition of the possibility of language, or at least doesn’t rely on it, right?

2) Is Freeman just overreaching (‘hmm– maybe the state is necessary for maintaining the continuity of space-time!’), or does he think less nutty, more traditionally contractarian justifications of the state fail?

30

novakant 12.11.08 at 12:02 am

Presented as truths of reason, of course, but actually empirical claims about human societies that are not well supported.

Ohh, I don’t know about that. Compared to the pipe dreams of anarchists and the sentimentalism of those praising the noble savage, I think Kant’s views are pretty lucid. Also, we would need to discuss his essay “On the common saying …”.

31

Barry Freed 12.11.08 at 12:34 am

This all reminds me of John Zerzan’s Anarcho-Primitivism.

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andthenyoufall 12.11.08 at 1:04 am

While coercion at the micro-level (either organized coercion or anarchic coercion) is necessary for social cooperation and even for language itself, coercion at the macro-level (either a world government or the quasi-anarchic state system) is not necessary for social cooperation.

Freedman doesn’t claim that macro-level violence doesn’t occur, just that it isn’t necessary for social cooperation. And by social cooperation I don’t think he has in mind bilateral trade flows and tourist visas. Concerning anarchists – I take it that the position is not “whatever happens between anarchists, it isn’t social cooperation,” but rather “if a completely anarchistic society was possible and exhibited a satisfactory level of social cooperation, we wouldn’t need a theory of justice in the first place.”

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Doctor Science 12.11.08 at 4:59 am

empirical claims about human societies that are not well supported

What a civilized way of saying “completely whacko”. I agree. I have long felt that the defining characteristic of libertarians is that they don’t believe humans are social animals, and most of the philosophers we’re discussing seem to me to have strongly libertarian premises.

When trane, for instance, says:

In fact most situations of social interaction, at least those very important ones that are relevant for normative political theory, are most probably PD rather than coordination games.

I boggle. Most important human social interactions are with people we see time and time again: family, friends, co-workers. In anything approaching a “state of nature” (=gatherer/hunter society) a person would have very few interactions in their entire life with strangers; PD would essentially never occur, and coordination games would be the norm. Putting on my Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat, coordination games are the “primitive” or originally-expected type of social interaction; PD is an “advanced” or “derived” interaction. Philosophers who look for a way to derive human social norms starting with PD are IMO putting the horse before the Eohippus. I’m not saying humans are by nature “noble savages”, but we can be expected to act like *social animals*, to live in groups without being forced to.

IMHO, the job of political and moral philosophy is to find ways for humans to live with strangers, to live in societies where people who’ve never met have to constantly interact.

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djw 12.11.08 at 5:09 am

most of the philosophers we’re discussing seem to me to have strongly libertarian premises.

No. Rawls is a social democrat; Freeman as a very interesting paper arguing that libertarians aren’t actually liberals at all (and he self-identifies as a liberal Rawlsian).

IMHO, the job of political and moral philosophy is to find ways for humans to live with strangers, to live in societies where people who’ve never met have to constantly interact.

I’m very sympathetic to this; that’s how I see my own work. I can’t call it “the” job of political philosophy, although it is a part of the job that’s unduly ignored by too many political theorists, especially those who accept a bit too quickly and uncritically the state- and society-centric framing of the central problems that have dominated for the last couple of centuries.

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djw 12.11.08 at 5:15 am

as=has

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notsneaky 12.11.08 at 5:55 am

“While outright coercion of norms does not take place in all situations, differences in power wielded by actors certainly affect what norms are followed, how they are enforced, and who benefits from them. In fact most situations of social interaction, at least those very important ones that are relevant for normative political theory, are most probably PD rather than coordination games.”

I don’t see how the second sentence is supposed to follow from the first. The fact that there are differences in powers across actors doesn’t all of sudden imply that most social interactions are of the PD rather than coordination game type. And this is also pretty much irrelevant to whether language involves PD or coordination norms.

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notsneaky 12.11.08 at 6:06 am

And I don’t think this is a liberterian position at all:

“From which it follows, of course, that language itself is not possible in the absence of such a coercive power.”

In other words coercive power by somebody, somewhere, is necessary for language and for other forms of social interaction because somebody, somewhere needs to enforce the social rules that underline these. The more liberterian position (actually, just plain ol’ liberal position) is that many social rules are self enforcing and so coercive power is unnecessary, if not harmful, to many forms of social cooperation. Language is probably a pretty good example of social cooperation which does not need enforcement of arbitrary rules to develop.

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Chris Bertram 12.11.08 at 6:31 am

_And by social cooperation I don’t think he has in mind bilateral trade flows and tourist visas._

Actually, I think there’s something a bit odd here also. The thought seems to be that trade is the kind of thing we, as whole societies, have a permission to engage in with other whole societies, more or less as blocs. But what actually happens is much more of a regular division of labour wrt to the production of some good, that occurs across state borders. The people co-operating in the production of that good are, typically, individuals and firms. To deny that such co-operators are engaged in “social co-operation” properly speaking is just a bit weird.

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notsneaky 12.11.08 at 6:35 am

“”We live in a multi-equilibrium world … In fact most situations of social interaction …are most probably PD rather than coordination games”

Also, if we live in a multi-equilibrium world then most social interactions are NOT PD, since that’s the one (bad) equilibrium world. So either/or.

In PD the role of social norms is to “break” the (bad) equilibrium and get people to cooperate by changing the payoffs and creating a new equilibrium. In that case some form of coercion is necessary because otherwise, net of costs associated with breaking the social norm, people always have an incentive to deviate from that norm (towards the action of the bad equilibrium). The norm is not self enforcing.

In a COORD game there are multiple equilibria and the role of the social norm is to basically pick among those equilibria. There’s nothing about this that says that the norm must choose the most ‘efficient’ equilbria (that’s sort of going one step farther, which is what some libertarians do) – and in fact ‘power’ can choose the social norm which will choose the equilibrium which is most beneficial to those with most power. But here the social norms are consistent with (some) equilibrium and once in place, nobody has an incentive to choose actions which deviate from the social norm. The norm is self enforcing and no coercion is needed (Perhaps another way of saying this is that coercion MIGHT (i.e. is not necessary) play a role in establishing the norm, but in not needed in sustaining the norm once it’s in place.

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Chris Bertram 12.11.08 at 6:46 am

Lemuel, you write

_I reckon an insistence of differences in kind is one of the best diagnostics for distinguishing professional philosophers from the rest of us. In the social world as I look at it, differences of degree are pretty much all there are._

Yes, but anti-cosmopolitans like Freeman need differences of kind to justify the claim that over here strong redistributive norms ought to hold, but over there they need not. If the idea were simply that the coercive shaping of life chances happens somewhat more strongly in one context than another, that would be an argument, perhaps, for correlative changes in the degree of redistributive obligation. It wouldn’t be an argument for a sharp cut-off: difference principle here; duty of assistance there.

(By the way, tell Malian cotton producers that their lives aren’t seriously affected by the coercive actions of wealthy states!)

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Tracy W 12.11.08 at 9:11 am

State-like entities (I believe Freeman mostly uses the term “societies” in turn require political cooperation and the coercive enforcement of norms, or at least the assurance that this will happen if some try to prey on those who do cooperate. (A semi-Hobbesian point that seems right to me.)

Actually, mysteriously (to me at least) the NZ government appears to have managed since 1840 without any coercive enforcement of norms on the government (there are of course police, and there was the land wars in the 1860s, but that was/is the government enforcing its norms on non-government actors), or any assurance that force will be used, but still elections happen and Governments lose elections sometimes and leave office – sulking perhaps – but still leaving. When NZ had a constitutional crisis, in 1984 when the old Prime Minister of the National Party refused to follow the instructions of the Government-elect, it was resolved by some senior members of the National party persuading the PM to back down, not by any intervention of the army or the police.

Of course this may all fall apart tomorrow, but then states that do rely on coercive enforcement of norms very often fall apart. For example the involvement of the Pakistani army in Pakistan’s politics does not appear to have led to massive stability in Pakistan.

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Chris Armstrong 12.11.08 at 10:06 am

I agree with the more important of Chris’s conclusions. The discussions above reaffirm that what we mean by social cooperation, and also by coercion, are very slippery and many differences of degree apply between different contexts. But Chris’s conclusion, which seems to me right, is that none of this helps Freeman because he NEEDS to be able to draw a bright line around the kind of coercion the state exercises to support his rejection of global distributive justice. And this just seems to be implausible, despite the arguments of Blake, Risse et al (if I read him correctly, at the same time as presenting a sophisticated account of the distinctive nature of state coercion, Risse admits this himself). And even if the kind of coercion the state exercised WAS in some way truly distinctive, the simple fact remains that that coercion affects, and is exercised against, non-citizens too. I don’t think Freeman ever gets to grips with this last point, which is why I also agree with Chris that the brief critique of cosmopolitanism is not a high point of an otherwise excellent book.

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novakant 12.11.08 at 11:22 am

anti-cosmopolitans like Freeman

I haven’t read Freeman, but from what has been excerpted here, I don’t think it’s correct to call him “anti-cosmopolitan”. If that label was justified, then we would have to call Kant “anti-cosmopolitan” too, yet he was one of the founders of modern cosmopolitanism. He had a sophisticated view on the matter, weighing the pros and cons of different approaches – you get that with Kant and indeed with all good philosophers – and he ultimately roots for an implementation that might not be in tune with some of the current thinking on this subject, but there is no doubt that he was a cosmopolitan and Freeman simply seems to follow in his footsteps.

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Sam C 12.11.08 at 12:13 pm

Terminological point: cosmopolitanism, as used in these post-Rawlsian debates, is the position that obligations of justice hold between all the individuals in the world, and that nation-state boundaries are morally irrelevant. The Rawlsian anti-cosmopolitan position is that those boundaries mark a real break in our obligations: we have demanding individual-to-individual redistributive obligations to fellow-citizens, but much less demanding state-to-state obligations globally. The exact relation of either of these positions to Kant is unclear to me.

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Matt 12.11.08 at 12:26 pm

Chris,
Have you changed your position as to cosmopolitanism a large degree since your wrote your paper for the Brighouse and Brock volume? I ask because in several posts lately you say things like “anti-cosmopolitans like Freeman…”, but your position in that volume wasn’t, as far as I could see, really that different from the Rawlsian view that Freeman here supports. If you’ve changed your mind, have you done it somewhere in print we can see? I’d be curious to see the reasoning.

As for trade, international trade works, as far as regulation goes, in a way that’s quite different from intra-national trade between countries. The sorts of laws one must deal with are very different, as the the people and types of things one must deal with. All of this is heavily mediated through state governments in a way that makes it quite different from intra-national trade. That’s often not clear to people who don’t much deal with the law in this area, but if you do you soon see that they are really importantly different actions, and it’s the mediation via state governments that’s important. (This goes back to Kieran’s point, one I wished to highlight, that w/o the modern state there wouldn’t be an international basic structure, such as it is.)

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Chris Bertram 12.11.08 at 12:45 pm

Matt, my position in that volume was that the realization of a single value – capability for democratic citizenship – has a different distributive upshot in different contexts such that inequalities matter more among co-citizens than then do between citizens of different states. To that extent, my position there resembles Blake’s focus on rational autonomy (though not his claims about coercion). My view wasn’t that collective self-subjection to coercive structures is the decisive consideration.

Have I changed my views? Well in one sense yes (all the time!). But in another sense no, I still think that distinct subglobal political entities in which people exercise distributively fateful choices are important for the realization of certain values.

However, I don’t see why I should accept bad arguments (if that’s what they are) just because they purport to support conclusions a bit like mine. Would Freeman jump into bed with Richard Miller or Richard Rorty just because they (like him) think that borders are morally significant?

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Matt 12.11.08 at 1:07 pm

Thanks for the clarification, Chris. Since I still think you’ve got the argument wrong on any charitable reading I’ll skip that part. But, I was just curious about the way that in this post, and some others recently, you’ve seemed to put the “anti-cosmopolitans” on one side with you on the other. (I think the “anti-cosmopolitan” tag is also a bit wrong here, and that the debate here is better seen, in Jon Mandle’s terms, as between modest and strong cosmopolitanism, and that a truly anti-cosmopolitan position would be much more nationalist or realist than anyone we’re talking about here is, but that’s a different argument.)

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novakant 12.11.08 at 2:50 pm

Thanks for the clarification SamC, I’m only able to follow these debates from the sidelines. Still, this terminology seems rather counter-intuitive to me, since one has to label a lot of people anti-cosmopolitans, who would commonly be called cosmopolitans, as opposed to, say, FP realists, nationalists or jingoists.

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Doctor Science 12.11.08 at 5:13 pm

djw:

It’s not only libertarians who have libertarian premises. IMHO any time you start by assuming that people are primarily atomistic, independent actors with largely voluntary associations, that’s a libertarian premise, whether you think of yourself as a libertarian or not.

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djw 12.11.08 at 6:13 pm

Well, that would redefine a great many philosophical liberals who come to social democratic conclusions as libertarian. It’s a premise libertarians are going to have to share. (I have problems with it, too, but it’s just not correct to argue it’s fundamentally libertarian in some existential way).

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engels 12.11.08 at 6:59 pm

people are primarily atomistic, independent actors with largely voluntary associations, that’s a libertarian premise

Most people, I think, would call that a liberal premise, especially, eg., some Marxists for whom the term ‘liberal’ is a pretty serious insult. I think your idea that ‘liberals’ must emphasise the socially embedded nature of humans, etc, comes from using the term ‘liberal’ to mean roughly ‘social democrat’, which is a rather idiosyncratic North American usage.

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andthenyoufall 12.11.08 at 7:35 pm

To deny that such co-operators are engaged in “social co-operation” properly speaking is just a bit weird.

Well, they are certainly cooperating, just like we would be cooperating if I held down someone we don’t like while you punched him in the face. But could it be that there’s a distinction between activities which are cooperative simply, and activities which are cooperative in a special way (perhaps their indispensability to life in society) that creates obligations of justice? I agree that this is a slippery distinction, but it isn’t weird, illogical, or dishonest.

(In my previous comment I very cleverly put “melodrama” tags around the phrase “language itself,” but the formatting vanished them. The intent was ironic.)

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engels 12.11.08 at 9:16 pm

DS: sorry, I see you didn’t say anything about ‘liberals’ so that part of my comment was misdirected. However, I do think you are labelling a certain set of ideas ‘libertarian’ that most people would call ‘liberal’, and perhaps this is because of the American tendency to use ‘liberal’ to mean roughly ‘social democrat’.

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bianca steele 12.11.08 at 9:26 pm

I know this is an academic blog, but it’s hard to keep practical politics from slipping in between the cracks, even though it degrades the debate. I think it might be useful to distinguish between how “liberal” is used by academics and how it’s used by citizens. When we’re talking about libertarians, however, this distinction gets fuzzier, because libertarians and academic philosophers both tend to be ultra-rationalistic. Hence the debate over which side of the line the premises rightfully reside on: the idea is that you really can start with a single premise and everything follows from that. (Saves time anyway.)

Whereas I’d be happy to define a liberal as someone who accepts the traditional definition of liberalism but refuses to accept the conclusions that antiliberals insist must follow from those.

Rather than saying libertarians are those who believe what matters is that people are individualistic, etc., I’d start by saying libertarians believe what matters can be most usefully thought of by starting from the idea that people are individualistic, etc., and also believe this starting place requires them (in order to be consistent) to hold to a thoroughgoing libertarianism.

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Doctor Science 12.13.08 at 4:34 am

engels:

Perhaps fittingly given your screenname, your definitions seem a trifle 19th-century-European to me.*g* From a USan POV, liberals and conservatives both “emphasize* the socially embedded nature of humans”, while libertarians strongly reject social embeddedness as a premise. I mean “libertarians” in the sense of “people who call themselves libertarians”, not just philosophers.

I agree that what USans call “liberals” are what Europeans call “social democrats”, but the latter term unfortunately has no resonance on this side of the Pond. I don’t know if USan conservatives are mostly what Europeans call “Christian democrats”, nor do I understand the nuances of the implied social/Christian contrast in the two groups of “democrats”.

*spelling changed to stress that I’m talking about USans

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Samuel Freeman 12.16.08 at 2:44 am

Chris Bertram construes certain selected paragraphs in my book Rawls, as implying that the coercive power of the State is necessary for language, a conclusion which he rightfully says is absurd. I believe that a careful reading of the paragraphs in question does not lead to his conclusion. First, like Rawls, I do not rely upon the loaded term ‘State’ (commonly used among global cosmopolitans to criticize socially-based conceptions of justice), but instead use the term ‘society,’ ‘political society,’ ‘people’ and so on. (“States,” or better governments, are but the political representatives of society and its members.) Second, Chris Bertram says, “As for the absurd claim, it simply follows by transitivity (if x is necessary for y and y is necessary for z, then x is necessary for z).” But I do not say that political authority is necessarily coercive, which is needed to infer the “absurd claim”; instead I used the word ‘invariably,’ which applies to normally unchanging but potentially changeable factual contingencies. (I say, (as quoted above) “social relations, unlike global relations, are coercively enforced. Social cooperation…invariably involves political cooperation, and with it the political enforcement of basic social rules…” Rawls, p. 421) Third, for what it’s worth, I have argued elsewhere that coercive enforcement is not the reason that distributive justice is socially based: “My position (which is also Rawls’s I believe) differs from Nagel’s in that it does not hinge on coercive legal enforcement, but rather on the need for cooperative social and political institutions that legislate and sustain (whether coercively or not) the cooperative institutions of distributive justice.” (‘Distributive Justice and the Law of Peoples,’ p. 314 of my Justice and the Social Contract)
Roughly, my position is that central to society, or social cooperation (in Rawls’s sense), is a framework of social and economic institutions, normally legally specified (including rules of property, sales, gifts and other transfers, contracts and agreements of all kinds, etc.) that secure possessions and make economic production, distribution, and consumption possible, as well as political institutions that enable a society to change existing rules and legislate new ones, and adjudicate disputes. Whether or not a coercive mechanism is needed to enforce these rules depends on peoples’ willingness to abide by legislative and adjudicative decisions—thus, as Chris Bertram notes, coercive enforcement may not be required for social cooperation. In either case, compliance with the rules of basic social institutions, even if generally voluntary, is unavoidable for the members of a society, since these rules are inescapable and structure their daily lives in innumerable ways (unlike members of other societies, whose lives are structured by their own system of basic institutions). Next, I see distributive justice in terms of the principles that are needed to specify, regulate and/or critically assess the complicated system of rules that makes the institutions of property and economic production, trade, distribution and consumption possible. Since these institutions are for the most part cooperative social institutions I see distributive justice as largely socially based as well. The argument relies in large part on the role of reciprocity in social cooperation and citizens doing their part to maintain cooperative institutions. It also relies to some degree on the profound influence of society and social cooperation (which I discuss in the other paragraph Chris Bertram quotes from my book above), though that is perhaps a separate argument, and I’m not as convinced now that it plays as central a role in arguing for the social bases of distributive justice.
I hope this note clarifies somewhat my position. I appreciate Chris Bertram’s and others’ remarks, and regret that I do not have more time to reply.

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