Philosophical consistency about politics – what is it good for?

Consistency about politics is coalitional. It’s impossible to communicate a large number of values and positions (or, really, to say why anyone else should hold the same batch of values and positions if they are unconnected), so having a consistent politics means that it’s based on a smaller number of principles that can be communicated and that in some sense predict your future positions. That is generally necessary in order to bring a large number of people together if your politics is at all related to ideas rather than, say, social or geographic position.

Consistency has three political meanings, and they’re in tension.

The first is Rich’s meaning – that my politics boils down to a small number of easily communicable principles. This form of consistency is useful for coalition-building and communicating in a large democracy with problems of rational political ignorance. This form of consistency is pernicious when it leads to meaningless pablum, where my communicated principles are actually evasions that are intended to mean different things to different people (c.f. the EdStone).

The second is about predictability – that my politics doesn’t change too much over time. Demanding this form of consistency is useful for holding politicians to account. This form of consistency is pernicious when it prevents us from responding to new information – “A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.”

The third is John’s broad philosophical consistency – that my politics somehow “makes sense” in broad terms. This is useful for coalition-building, to try and persuade others that I am not simply engaged in special pleading. This is pernicious when it leads into endless theology.

A moment’s thought shows that these forms of consistency can be dramatically at odds, but I suspect John is most interested in (3). Well, the point about (3) is that you are trying to show that your politics makes sense to (potential) members of your own coalition, not to the embittered enemy – it really doesn’t matter at all if they think you’re wildly inconsistent. It is therefore unsurprising that “no-one” switches from being a die-hard partisan of A to a die-hard partisan of ~A for reasons of consistency, but I strongly disagree that this isn’t a factor for the more loosely attached. For example, conservatives love saying to libertarians – “I’m just like you, but more consistent – we both respect the unplanned order of the market, but I also respect the unplanned order of social norms.” This doesn’t necessarily make the libertarian a conservative, but it does help attach the two in political alliance.

” I think John Rawls, for example, is a more consistent political thinker than Donald Trump.”

Trump has more popular policies.

Consistency in politics is like consistency in any other realm of life. When you see inconsistency, or contradiction, it is normally a sign that you may be off base somewhere. I was raised in a right-wing household with what I thought were baseline “conservative” principles–that the basic American political idea was “no aristocracies” and that it was important to restrain your personal desires and indulgences in light of future consequences, both for yourself and others. As I got older I realized that these principles, which I have retained, were incompatible with the actual policies of right wing politics. So my voting preferences evolved away from those of my youth in my, well, search for consistency. I’m not saying any of this makes me look particularly quick on the uptake, but within my limitations I keep seeking a way of life that has less jarring internal contradictions. It feels more right to me to live that way.

Inconsistency is a relative evil. When my opponents are inconsistent, they’re bad. When I’m inconsistent, it’s a good thing; I recognize the complexity of the situation, that it’s not all black and white. It’s a semantic game chiefly used to beat up our political enemies.

Let me plug paraconsistent logics here. If logic is supposed to model how we think, maybe consistency isn’t as vital as we’ve always assumed.

Plato’s Cave doesn’t represent the condition of some depraved or contrived situation in which we are intentionally deceived by some flawed system and its architects. It’s the real world we live in.

There may be actual ground truths somewhere beneath our feet, but they are not present in the world we live in to be mapped out and defined. Ground truths don’t matter in politics, what matters is what people think ground truth is, and their thoughts on that subject are the shadows of shadows of things we have no way of verifying are real vs simulacra.

There is no Ring of Gyges. The political situation we find ourselves in is not something to be mastered. There is nothing we can establish on firm and unchangeable ground, that could convince everybody of good will that this is the one right path.

All we can do is use patterns in the parade of shadows to help understand this reality, that even the principles that seem the least subject to challenge are just constructs built on air. The only right choice is to refuse to choose, and the only thinking that is helpful is thinking that leads to a refusal to predetermine one rigid path.

TheSophist: “When I first started teaching, a couple of decades ago, I was a firm believer in universal high-stakes testing. Now I am very definitely not. Inconsistent?”

This is a political problem, right? Because you don’t get to choose whether to individually use “universal high-stakes testing” or not. If you actually want to not use it, you have to convince other people to not support it. So saying that you have a consistent belief in “providing a high-quality education to all” is a way of making a political argument that universal high-stakes testing should be dropped. It says that you have a consistent goal or value that other teachers are supposed to share as their basic value, and that consistent support of this value overrides merely programmatic consistency.

Consistency doesn’t have to be based on ideas. Donald Trump, for example, is fairly consistent in some ways: people expect him to act like “Donald Trump”.

I left the house after reading only the title of your post, and “Possibly this has something to do with pluralism about value.” was the second thing that occurred to me.

The first was more like “possibly this has something to do with the difference between analytic and continental philosophy,” but then I remembered that you specialize in Wittgenstein, who’s a continental philosopher. But then again W. seems to be the continental philosopher that analytic philosophers love best (William Barrett assures me that poor W. is “pro-technology” in a Heideggerian sense, which is apparently a Very Bad Thing). So I’m not sure.

Anyway, that’s probably linguistic and not conceptual, which gets you into another set of hairy problems.

My hunch is that any system that’s 100% self-consistent is likely to be a fantasy, or else pure math with no direction connection to the real world.

Probably the most salient form of ‘consistency’ in politics is one that Salem doesn’t mention, having to do with lack of hypocrisy – in other words, consistency between the standards applied to one’s opponents and oneself, ‘mote and beam’ consistency. Accusations of inconsistency in this sense are routine, despite (or because of) its universality – anyone who did live and work by all the same standards they apply to their opponents wouldn’t have any opponents, because they’d be a monk.

This is an excellent post.

As to “No one switches partisan sides because the other side seems to have assembled a more internally coherent match of policies and principles.”, I don’t think that’s right. Maybe nobody switch sides but at least some abandon theirs.

For example, some commentators usually associated with the republican party have come to criticize the GOP, probably also in response to fair and grounded criticism from the center-left. Andrew Sullivan and Bruce Bartlett come to mind.

Perhaps I’m going off the deep end, but in my view the reason philosophical consistency breaks down when you get to politics is real life doesn’t work like philosophy. Real life is a complex, emergent system. Philosophy as practised is largely mechanistic and formed in mono-issue discussions, without a convincing framework for addressing contradictions between the implications of different principles.

Salem: “He’s clearly consistent-1, he’s clearly not consistent-2, and who can say whether he’s consistent-3?”

I don’t see how these are “in tension” with each other. “In tension” generally means that if you have more of one, you have to in some sense have less of another. I can imagine scenarios where different people had widely different amounts of -1,-2, and -3 without them really being in tension, since I don’t see why you can’t also have someone with a lot of all three. But in any case I think that all of these variations have the same basic purpose within politics.

What consistency as a whole is in tension with is responding to change, although not really in the way that most people think. If you have boiled down your views into some basic values and consistent ways of thinking about them, you can switch from favoring universal testing to not (to use the example above) without any difficulty at all, because that wasn’t your core value to begin with and your consistent way of operating is to evaluate plans against how well they operate in terms of your core value. If your communication of the grounds of your consistency has worked, then people will understand why you did this. No, the real problem that consistent people tend to have is when societal values change or means of evaluating plans against them change, and suddenly they are losing their coalition because they are identified so well with the old.

Does it make sense to favor a view that suffers from five fatal contradictions over a view that suffers from 500 on grounds of consistency, per se?

Here you go

I don’t remember who I first saw questioning whether hypocrisy is problematic, but I’ve gone in completely for the idea that hypocrisy is never the problem – it’s just a symptom of some other problem. If a person does X but says you shouldn’t do X, then either X is actually a permissible thing to do (in which case their speech is problematic) or X is not permissible (in which case their action is problematic). The hypocrisy itself isn’t the problem – the person should fix whichever one of their things is wrong, and not “fix” the one they got right so that it also points in the agreeably wrong direction.

I’ve thought about this in some of my professional work on epistemology. Niko Kolodny makes this point about consistency itself not being a virtue for belief, and Branden Fitelson and I have tried to draw some related morals for a notion of “coherence” for belief that doesn’t even make inconsistency by itself into a problem. If you’re aiming at the truth in a difficult area, you may have a set of beliefs that all have moderate (or even high) degree of support, but that are together inconsistent.

The classic philosophical example is the preface paradox – you have strong evidence for every claim you make in the body of your book, but you also have strong evidence for an additional claim that you put in the preface, that “this book still surely contains some errors, despite my best efforts”. Either some body claim in the book is wrong, or this preface claim is – they are inconsistent. I think this is a perfectly reasonable situation to be in if you’re aiming at the truth (and not willing to settle for agnosticism about a wide range of things just because you’re sure that there’s one falsehood somewhere in there).

Any complex philosophical or political set of views is going to have this sort of problem – they may well be inconsistent, even if you’ve got good evidence for each one individually. (This won’t happen with a set of just two beliefs, and it will be hard for just three or four, but very easy once we’re talking about dozens or hundreds of them.)

I can answer the question in the title of the post in one word:

“Policy.”

Politics is prone to chaos and consistency is a heuristic remedy. Without endorsing any particular view or value, consistency can be employed rhetorically to aid clustering of opinion within coalitions and to favor persistence in policy, but above all to narrow attention.

@28 But you can fix the thing you got right and no longer be a hypocrite. So freeing oneself of hypocrisy need not be a good thing. If it’s by fixing the thing that you got right that you relieve yourself of hypocrisy, it would be better to remain a hypocrite until you can fix the thing that is wrong, no? If we condone hypocrisy too harshly, we may in fact only encourage people to fix the thing that they have right.

The point was that the absence of hypocrisy is not a moral good in itself; it can be achieved by fixing what is right. So we should guard against that possibility.
Second point we should criticize hypocrisy in such a way that it leads to fixing what is wrong, not correcting what is right. We should not be so consumed with hypocrisy as a wrong in itself that we lose sight of this.
Possibly two other ways of dealing with the inconsistency between what we say (our stated moral commitments and values) and what we do is remove either pole: amoralism or inaction. The philosophers who know the history of global ethical thought would have much to teach us. I think here of Nietzsche and Mahavir. By removing either pole, we can’t be inconsistent because we can’t be consistent.

hypocrisy is never the problem

What about a guy who scolds me for talking in the cinema, then starts talking himself later. I can be agnostic about whether talking in the cinema is okay or not but certain that he is an arsehole.

Thanks.

we don’t know whether talking or not talking is better,

I’d also be interested to know what Kenny thinks but I think that’s one interpretation; another is that there’s no fact of the matter which consistent course of action is better but it is a fact that the guy is a hypocrite.

(I agree we don’t want consistency over hypocrisy if that makes us bad but I don’t think that means consistency isn’t a good, it just means it isn’t the only good. We don’t want in a sentence if that makes it false but brevity is still a virtue.)

Let´s not confuse argumentative consistency with ideological inflexiblity. And let´s not confuse inconsistency (analytical and/or historical) with correction-improvement-perfectionism.

Kenny says: if you say X and do Y the problem is figuring out which is right, X or Y

So again take someone who, say, cycles along the pavement when she has bike and shouts at cyclists for cycling on pavement when she’s walking. In order to censure her, I need to determine whether cycling on the pavement is ‘right’ or not and then either censure her for doing it or for falsely censuring others for doing it? That does not seem right to me.

It seems to me I can reasonably (a) not disapprove of people cycling on pavements (b) not disapprove of people who disapprove of others cycling on pavements (c) disapprove of this person.

Just gonna leave this here:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-particularism/

“I heartily concur with ‘hypocrisy is never the problem’, per se. But I would alter Kenny’s account of what it is typically symptomatic of. Kenny says: if you say X and do Y the problem is figuring out which is right, X or Y. True enough, but I think hypocrisy and inconsistency is/are usually a function of motivated reasoning doing usual mischief. Why do you both WANT to say X and yet WANT to do Y (as you evidently do)? Politics is full of recipes for having your cake and eating it, too. Hypocrisy lives, hence must be managed, at the level of desire.”

Oh, I see what you mean now.

I thought this OP was about consistency in political/philosophical arguments and policy — but it is about consistency between ideas/principles and actions.

I think it depends on the issue maybe. Various things could cause inconsistency: if acting in line with principles you hold involves behaviour change, then behaviour change can be difficult, due to habits, forgetfulness, slipping up etc; it may depend on what choices are practically available to you; or you may waver in your adherence to ideas or principles; or you may hold principles that come into conflict or interact messily rather than neatly.

But I think if you turned this into a book — Hypocrisy Lives, Hence Must Be Managed, At The Level Of Desire — I think the hook to get people to buy it would maybe be not so much the discussion of hypocrisy, or inconsistency, living, but how to manage it at the level of desire.

>OP: Philosophical consistency about politics – what is it good for? … And why?

What’s good good for? And why?
More specifically, if there is no consistent idea of good, what is politics good for? And why?

Rich Puchalsky,

“The comment includes things like “the person should fix whichever one of their things is wrong” but politics is not about individual people fixing things.”

I think politics ends up being about what individual people do, whether by themselves or in groups. It is just you are looking at whatever you see the problem as being from the level of legislation or policy, rather than the level of putting a post-it note on your fridge to remind you to do something, which I guess is the level of inconsistency I was looking at before.

So John Holbo’s problem of consistency between idea/principle and action, becomes one of consistency between principle-law and policy-implementation-outcome.

I actually think this is a lot more messy because it involves many more people.

Say everyone in the party who controls the government all share the principle that a good education should be available to everyone. This general principle is undisputed.

Then when it comes to the question of law and policy this becomes more complex.

The 50 people in the party holding government share a similar principle which is why they are in the same party, but they have different ideas of exactly what makes a good education. Some people think a good education involves X, some people think a good education involves Y, some people think a good education involves Z. Some people have more clout than others. There are discussions and compromises. People have to give up some consistency of their own principles to accommodate those of others. People have to think about what the general public would think of the law and policy — would it be accepted and embraced? People have to think about what principles and teachers would think of the law and policy. People have to think about what is feasible and a reasonable budget allocation. People have to think about what would happen if they lose the next election, would all their work be lost if the opposition opposed the new laws and policy…. etc etc

Then when it comes to implementation this becomes more complex again. The law and policy that was finally decided on and passed through Parliament has to have an implementation plan. This involves getting 1000s of schools to implement the law and policy. Numerous staff have to undergo professional development. Any happiness with the change has to be managed. Parents need to be informed about the changes and engaged to make the policy work out.

Then you have the outcome. You need to have ways to get feedback on how the laws and policy are working out. You need to monitor the performance some how. You need to be able to respond to any problems that arise.

This is all a very messy process, and very few people are going to be thinking at the end that everything went along perfectly consistently with their ideas and principles. But hopefully what you get is an improvement in key educational outcomes.

One procedural observation: the question of consistency seems to come up more often in reference top political systems with fewer, larger parties (often Anglo-American, and the USAian system a fortiori), than to more diverse parliamentary systems.

A parliamentary party can adopt a smaller number of views, and be more broadly consistent about them, because they are competing for the votes of people for whom being part of the Green Party, say, is not just a political commitment, but the central one that voter wants to make. This means that they deal with less conflicted voters, because some of the tradeoffs have been dealt with before the voting.

And then the Green Party (or whomever) has to join a coalition, if in government, or to cast rocks as the opposition, but in power, they can always claim more consistency about the issues they care about, and the necessary compromises are less often thought by voters to be internal to the Party itself. (When this condition fails, as it did famously for the LibDems with their near-immediate reversal on school fees in the UK, the results can be devastating.)

In two-party systems, by contrast, the parties have to spell out at least some of the likely future tradeoffs during the period of campaigning. The effect is much the same — democracy is, after all, designed to defeat takeover by a single, coherent ideology, of whatever stripe — but two-party systems have to deliver the bad news about inconsistent adoption of principle during the campaign phase, not just the governing phase.

Kiwanda’s first paragraph doesn’t really prove Repubs have inconsistent beliefs. They might have very consistent beliefs about the best government, which isn’t contradicted by a belief that they’re allowed to do anything they want to get to that goal, including lie about their beliefs.

So Trump may have a smaller, but more consistent set of political beliefs than Rawls, about which he’s more certain than Rawls is. Rawls agnostic certainty about his more extensive theory, with more consequences that the rest of us can consider, would then (if this is so) be a virtue. This has nothing to do with whether Rawls is better at thinking consistently than Trump is, or whether he starts from a place that’s preferable,

The inconsistency of Mr. Trump calling for no more gun free zones during a speech to the NRA in a gun free zone is perhaps an illustration of the foundational level of inconsistency

This is a perfect example of what I mean by theology. There’s nothing necessarily inconsistent about calling for no more gun free zones while speaking in a gun free zone. Was it inconsistent for Macmillan to deliver a speech against apartheid in 1960 South Africa?

The only way to make this inconsistent is to erect a scaffolding around the position, which you imply to the speaker although he doesn’t share it. Then you allege hypocrisy. Obviously, if you truly oppose apartheid, you should never go to a country that practices it (???), and so Macmillan was being inconsistent. Except of course he wasn’t inconsistent, he just didn’t share the suppressed premise. Similarly, Trump.

99% of the charges of political inconsistency I hear (liberals are inconsistent because they pretend to be anti-racist but support affirmative action, pro-lifers are inconsistent because they pretend to care about foetuses but don’t care about them after they’re born, etc) simply reveal that either the accuser doesn’t understand his opponent’s position, or doesn’t care to describe it honestly.

The framework implicit in

The coalitional quality of politic […] is one of many exhibits in the gallery of arguments that consistency can’t much matter since it’s unobtainable

and

I assume that consistency is a feature of sets of propositions.

is I think precisely the one Rich rejects. I think that Rich argues that political consistency is a feature of sets of core values and principles, not propositions and especially not logical propositions with definite truth value. For clarity let us call your position logical consistency, his (if I understood correctly) value consistency. The coalitional quality of politics all but precludes logical consistency, but it requires value consistency. That’s what I understand him to be saying (though Rich can certainly correct me).

Personally, I believe that political forces are shaped by value consistency much more than by logical consistency with a lot of the confusions and conundrums of political philosophy following from an ill-fated attempt to reason about the former with the analytical tools of the latter. Didn’t Nietzsche had something to say about that, by the way “only that which has no history can be defined” (and therefore be logically consistent) or something?

JH: “I assume that consistency is a feature of sets of propositions”

Oh no, not in politics. In a sense any kind of consistency can be represented as a preposition — “if you vote for Donald Trump and he wins then you will get someone who will consistently act like Donald Trump” — but this is not an especially useful way of looking at it.

I basically agree with Z’s comments above but there’s an additional thing that I’m going to have to write about which you’re going to say is obvious, but which I have to write about since if it is obvious people don’t seem to be taking it into account.

1. Politics is about groups of people doing something. Individuals can of course do political activity, but all political activity as such is based on the need to get a group of people to do something. As BW @ 48 writes, communication can be political.

2. Politics is not about an individual’s beliefs or thought, except insofar as these are represented to other people as a basis for coalition. Some people may talk about the benefits or otherwise of having consistent individual thought or belief, and that’s fine, but it has nothing to do with politics.. A political leader’s thought may lead to better political judgements if it is consistent in some sense, but that’s a different idea entirely and would have to be argued against obvious counterarguments such as the fact that one can be consistently wrong.

3. So politics involves coordination problems and consistency in politics is a way of solving coordination problems. When someone describes their thought/values/ways of solving problems/etc. and stresses its consistency, they are trying to give other people something to come together around. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually logically consistent as long as other people think that they can consistently understand it and predict what kinds of judgements it will lead to.

4. Consistency arguments in politics are all about this. If you effectively attack someone as inconsistent, you destroy people’s felt ability to understand/predict and therefore destroy their coalition. If you effectively advertise how consistent you are, you give people the opportunity to join your coalition.

Well, that is why your post can not really address the questions that it asks.

I’m going to make another point about rhetoric, in case anyone cares, because the relationship between rhetoric and philosophy is one I’ve only recently started thinking about.

I’ve been reading an interesting book on economics by James K. Galbraith. (I started reading this BEFORE LFC mentioned James Galbraith on his blog. Honest! Isn’t it funny?!) So he’s talking about how postwar economics ignored resources and mentions someone named Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen as someone who, early, bucked that trend. Galbraith talks about fixed costs and variable costs as ideas Georgescu-Roegen apparently introduced, or at least worked within this context.

Now, rhetorically, if I were to say this, someone might think, ideas about fixed costs and so on are on the left (functionally, at least–I’ll have to check Wikipedia to know whether this is actually the case, at least relatively, within the range for economists).

But probably a standard Econ 101 textbook, fixed costs are discussed. If I quoted Mankiw’s textbook on this point, everyone would say, “Oh, fixed costs are such a rightwing concept!”

If I discussed G-R and then quoted the textbook, what would people think? Maybe that part of the book isn’t intended by Mankiw to be taken seriously, because of the source of the ideas.

If I quoted the textbook and then discussed G-R, people might think G-R is really to be taken as on the right in some important sense.

Philosophically speaking, all these can’t be true (and choosing between them has nothing to do with partisanship). But people will have different beliefs depending on what order they read things in. One solution to making politics consistent (if that’s what you want) would be then to say people’s beliefs about economics don’t matter. Another might be to find a way for everyone to believe the truth, even though they don’t all have time to work out the true Platonic meaning behind the texts, one that holds no matter what order you read them in. Another might be to declare one set of beliefs the truth, and say everyone ought to believe them, even if it’s impossible for everyone to believe them all (because there’s no plausible way for all the people to figure out what all the truth beliefs are).

Hi bianca — thks for the free advertising ;)

Or, in higher philosophical mode, expecting consistency1 from political thought would be a typical example of “wish[ing] to have in one way what can only be had in another” and therein lies tyranny (or so says Pascal at least).

I wouldn’t quite phrase it as “does not exist”, but it’s a question of what kind of purpose is the defining purpose of the activity. Let’s imagine that a visual artist asked “what is visual art in politics good for?” Well, within politics it’s good for getting politicians recognized, giving people a visual image that encourages them to think about politics in a certain way, and so on. That doesn’t mean that esthetic quality doesn’t exist, or that visual images used in politics can’t be more or less esthetically worthwhile or in different visual styles. It does mean that if you’re going to allow politics to be its own field of activity and not treat it as a subset of visual art, you have to allow that it has its own defining considerations.

This hardly ever happens with visual art because visual artists hardly ever start to think that their field is the defining ground of knowledge, but philosophers do tend to.

What kind(s) of inconsistency: https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/yale-ethics-professor?utm_term=.ltzlJdMADj#.xiP9v1KA3Y

given that consistency2 […] is obviously paramount in politics, what is the proper role, if any, for consistency1?

Thanks for your patient clarification. Well, then I am tempted to go full Pascalian meditations on you.

If following Pascal-and you apparently agree-consistency2 is all we can expect from politics, then should we expect consistency1 and the concern therewith to be anything more than an epiphenomenon of importance only to those who, by their ongoing interactions with the relevant social structures, have been socialized to care about it-typically a tiny segment of the population with a very specific mix of social, financial and intellectual capital to mobilize (shorter version: you and me)-and differing in that respect from the visual artists of Rich’s comment only by their privileged access to universal reason as a rhetorical weapon of domination (though even in that respect, the facilité of visual artists with visual artistry might be a more potent rhetorical weapon in this day and age)?

Cue the obligatory difference between universalizing the modes of access to universal reason and deploying universal reason as a rhetorical weapon of domination (and Rawls is far from exempt from this critic, it seems to me).

Of course, I am theoretically open to the idea that there might be more, i.e that there exists a genuine space for consistency1 in politics (by contrast with theoretical discourse about politics, as the basic distinction between Rawls and Trump should be maintained, all jokes aside) and would be interested in hearing what you would consider basic examples, but I fear that the net effect of couching properly political values in a logical form minimally amenable to consistency1 evaluation would be obscuring the real determinants of the political positions under examination.