More On Gaus’ The Tyranny of the Ideal

Mesotopia is the place between here and there, and maybe sets up some ‘excluded middle’ jokes?

I take Wilkinson to be saying that it’s not just that C is over the horizon, but that really there’s just one mountain after all. Is that in the original Gaus too?

My one reference to Rawls here (other than this) was the time that I suggested that people should debate behind the veil of ignorance as if they could turn out to be forests, species, ecosystems etc. in addition to humans. This seemed perfectly reasonable to me but not so much to people who knew a lot about Rawls. At any rate, this suggests that people try the thought experiment of imagining themselves as possibly turning out to be mountains A, B, or C and having an interest in not being strip mined for philosophical points.

Holbo:
it is not ideal to say, as Rawls does, that inequality is ok, so long as it benefits the least well off.

As various people have pointed out on CT in the past, Rawls (at least in TJ) does *not* say that any inequalities are permissible if they benefit the least well off. Inequalities that benefit the least well off can still be impermissible, on R’s theory, if, for example, they undermine the bases of self-respect or make the social solidarity implicit in his vision of ‘a social union of social unions’ impossible. Thus if it cd be shown that v. large inequalities benefit the worst off, they would nonetheless be impermissible on R’s view b.c, psychologically, v. large inequalities likely undermine the bases of self-respect, the most imp. primary good. Also, large inequalities might undermine what R calls, if memory serves, the fair value of the political liberties. So inequalities that allow the wealthy to dominate the political system are ruled out on R’s view, even if those inequalities might work to the ec. benefit of the least well off.

Thus Holbo’s summary of Rawls is inaccurate, and for that reason this statement

Rawls is too concessive for pure value clarification purposes

is questionable.

The mountain analogy corresponds with the problem in numerical analysis of finding a global rather than a local maximum. E.g., Newton’s Method will quickly find a local maximum but will stop at the first one it finds. The No Free Lunch Theorem goes on to say that, averaged over all landscapes, no possible analytical search algorithm can out-perform a random search (which never gets stuck forever at the same local maximum).

Biological evolution is not a purely random search in this sense. Where you can go next in evolution depends on where you are. Humans will never evolve a knee joint that is mechanically much better, although much better joints exist theoretically. The same is probably true for the types of society that have evolved.

JimV:

“Humans will never evolve a knee joint that is mechanically much better, although much better joints exist theoretically.”

Evolve is a fluid word here, isn’t it? Sure, we know how to design a far better knee. we lack the ability to genetically engineer one. That deficit probably won’t last forever, I’m sure.

It’s like saying that nature will never evolve a rocket capable of delivering humans to the moon and back.

What’s going on here. Is this political philosophy? Isn’t this stuff about scaling mountains, local vs. global optima, and not being able to survive in the valley between a shorter to a taller mountain–isn’t this Sewall Wright’s biology of adaptive landscapes? About 15 years ago I read a history of these adaptive landscapes in Jean Gayon’s book on Darwinism.
Applying this to social dynamics and political philosophy is….really cool! Am reading with interest.
Here’s a weird thought. What happens if what appears to be scaling a mountain usually ends up like a Escher staircase?
OK will read the post and the Will Wilkinson link.

Wilkinson: “This is by no means a theoretical worry. Revolutionary communists understood the implications of aspiring to a “global optimum” and didn’t flinch. They fought the incremental reforms that led to European social democracy precisely because they knew these local improvements in justice did make things better. And they worried, reasonably enough, that this would leave workers obliviously satisfied with a less bad but still profoundly wicked system of structural inequality.”

Good point. But what if the mountain you’re climbing is on a fault line, and the iron laws of seismology mean that it will collapse imminently in an earthquake (Popper’s historicism), then shouldn’t you exchange your climbing gear (which in the case would be Eduard Bernstein’s parliamentary socialism) for the equipment (the revolutionary party) you’ll need to survive in the valley on the way to the putatively more stable, taller peak (socialism)?

In short, Gaus’ argument from this summary seems to me predicated on Popper’s critique of historicism.

At any rate, the Wilkinson piece is quite interesting, and seems to be eerily connected to discussions being had here.

I guess the problem is not with “ideal” as such but ideology, the ability to create thought-systems which blind you to horrible things. Take the reviewer:

“I used to think that justice requires a society of maximum individual liberty and entirely non-coercive social relations, which means there can’t be a state. My vision of the maximally free, anarcho-capitalist society seemed to me an indispensable guiding light, a compass by which to steer a course through the rugged landscape of real-world politics toward the promised land — the ideally good and morally well-ordered society.”

Except in a capitalist society — marked as it is with inequalities of property and wealth — you cannot have “maximum individual liberty” for the many because they have to sell their labour (and so liberty) to those who do own. I can see why the property owners who have all the property would like to see “non-coercive” as an ideal — it means they get to keep their wealth and power. So while it may see “non-coercive social relationships” these would not be libertarian (or non-authoritarian) social relationships — they would be hierarchical and deeply authoritarian.

Yet “anarcho-“-capitalists claim not to see this — in spite of it being a foundational insight of anarchism since 1840 and Proudhon’s “What is Property?” It gets them into massive contradictions:

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/an-anarchist-critique-of-anarcho-statism

He also states:

“Did I really know that competing private defense agencies wouldn’t just collude and establish a new state more oppressive and coercive than the one we’ve got? I did not.”

Which, while an issue, does not address the fundamental issue that these “private defense agencies” would be employed by capitalists and landlords to enforce their power over their workers and tenants. The collusion issue only matters to the owning class — not the proletariat — as it may lead to the capitalist class paying more than the going rate (the horror!) for the private goons breaking union heads.

(organising a union, you understand, is a coercive act against the boss — and Henry Ford, for example, had his own private secret police to stop that).

As I wrote elsewhere (
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/anarchist-organisation-practice-theory-actualised ):

Ignoring Rothbard’s immaculate conception of property as being as unrelated to reality as Locke’s social contract theory of the state, the question arises why current and future generations should be dispossessed from liberty by the private hierarchies associated with property. Rothbard helps us answer that question by a hypothetical example of a country whose King, threatened by a rising “libertarian” movement, responses by “employ[ing] a cunning stratagem,” namely he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can “regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on” his property as he sees fit. Rothbard then admits people would be “living under a regime no less despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps, indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for themselves the libertarians’ very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before.”

While Rothbard rejects this “cunning stratagem” he failed to note how this argument undermines his own claims. As he himself argues, not only does the property owner have the same monopoly of power over a given area as the state, this is more despotic. He fails to notice that if the state owning its territory makes it (“as well as the King in the Middle Ages”) “a feudal overlord” then this makes the capitalist or landlord a feudal overlord within “libertarianism.” It is a strange ideology that proclaims itself liberty-loving yet embraces factory feudalism and office oligarchy.

The one remaining defence of “libertarianism” is that these absolutist social relationships are fine because they are voluntary in nature for there is no such a thing as economic power under capitalism. It is easy to refute such claims with Rothbard’s words on the abolition of slavery and serfdom in the 19th century:

“The bodies of the oppressed were freed, but the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm labourers. The serfs and slaves had tasted freedom, but had been cruelly derived of its fruits.”

So if “market forces” (“voluntary exchanges”) result in the few owning most of the property then this is unproblematic and raises no questions about the (lack of) liberty of the working class but if people are placed in exactly the same situation as a result of coercion then it is a case of “economic power” and “masters”.

Such is the danger of ideology that it allows someone to write a book that actually refutes his own arguments.

Can one “clarify values” by imagining impossible worlds (mountain C)? Sure. Can one also “clarify values” by imagining worlds whose realization seems unlikely but is not impossible by definition (mountain B)? Yes.

Holbo doesn’t like mountain B because he says it’s ambiguous, it falls between two stools. On the one hand we’ll never get there; on the other hand it makes concessions to human frailties. But because it makes concessions to human frailties, it can provide a reasonable goal to work toward and a motivation for continuing to climb the mountain you’re on. You don’t have to climb down mountain A, the mountain you’re on, to start ascending B. You can stay on A, climbing, putting one foot in front of the other, while having the idea of B in mind. And once you get to the top of A you will be able to see B — Holbo thinks you won’t be able to see B, but it seems to me he’s wrong — and you can measure the distance between the two peaks. And maybe you then discover that A’s peak is actually a little bit higher than you first thought and you take one or two more steps and when you actually are at the summit of A you may find it’s not that far from B after all. The vision of B did not make you turn back down and descend A; rather, the vision of B gave you a motivation to get to the top of A. So mountain B’s very “ambiguity,” its mixture of the ideal and the realistic, is what it made useful in terms of motivating action.

I wonder if Gaus or anyone else involved in these discussions cites John Herz’s 60-year-old book Political Realism and Political Idealism.

Could be worth distinguishing between an “ideal” (a standard of perfection which might not have ever been and might not not ever be realized- like Socrates’ kallipolis) and a “utopia” (where some ineliminable but unwanted factors are assumed away- like material scarcity, or human selfishness). Since ought implies can, I don’t think any ideal can be utopian in this sense.

Wilkinson’s review I think founders on this point: “Do you really need a theory of justice to know that the boot on your neck is unjust? You don’t.” But how do you know, not just that you want the boot off your neck, but that it is unjust? Reliably identifying injustice is pretty much the same thing as framing an ideal of perfect justice, understood as that condition in which no boots are on no necks.

One obvious problem (that I saw no solution for at all) in the Sen version of this is that certain “local peaks” can be very low indeed. from the valley of slavery, Jim Crow seems like a fine “local peak” to climb. Other examples are easy. Now, the first reply to this is that these are not peaks at all – that the real local peak is somewhere higher. But now we’ve already had to invoke some sort of impartial ideal to solve this dispute. What would work for that? Some sort of mechanism that is at least similar to the veil of ignorance is the most likely choice. Now, this reasoning alone doesn’t get you all the way to Rawls, but I think it shows that there’s something wrong with the general view found in Sen and Gaus. (I haven’t read the new book yet, but have heard some talks and the basic idea is found in his earlier _The Order of Public Reason_, which I had reviewed here

(The general idea goes back at least to Hume, too. In both his version and Hayek’s, as well as Popper’s, it seems pretty clearly empirically refuted to me as well – either that, or else close to vapid, since we can say in any case that seemed to lead to significant moral improvement that the people were, in _that_ case, just climbing a “local peak”, even if the changes seemed radical at the time. )

The mountain metaphor is misleading and redundant.

The basic point, that political philosophy proposals must be largely or fully evaluated it terms of actual wellbeing outcomes, can be made without mountain talk.

For all we know there may be ways ahead to some not merely marginally better social orders that do not involve harmfully dismantling most of present society first. The mountain metaphor excludes that possibility for no good reason.

I really like Bring it Home to Me.
Sorry, wrong Rawls.

Man, I was ranting to Yglesias on this yesterday when I read that essay…

I totally thought it besides the point, because ideals and ideal worlds don’t act in the real world as some sketched up abstraction everyone makes real. Ideal worlds define social groups, and ideals measures the individual’s commitment to social norms to all others in the group. Utopias sketched out on pen and paper, or sung to the crowd, or whatever, are merely the detritus of the thing, not the thing itself.

Defining what is good, defines what you/your social group is willing to do for it, and how determined/cohesive you/your social group are. If you don’t like Conan/Nazi SS/Soviet Commissar ideals, then of course, of course you’ll see this as a tyranny. So what we’re talking about is the legitimacy of political opposition without actually talking about opposition. Simply by talking about ideals with a level of detail and complexity that insures disagreement. Which, to me, is sort of weird.

John Holbo #32: “You are welcome to your own basic point, ccc, but I don’t think you’ve grasped the basic point of the post, or of Gaus’ book.”

Right, the basic point WORTH MAKING HERE is that political philosophy proposals must be largely or fully evaluated it terms of actual wellbeing outcomes, and that point can be made without mountain talk. The rest of your, Wilkinson’s and (judging only from your/Wilkinson’s descriptions) Gaus’ mountain talk appear misleading and redundant.

Libertarian utopias are pie in the sky because the theory detach from wellbeing outcomes, instead devising perfect-on-paper institutional schemes and dogmatic notions of non-coercion and liberty. Marxian non-exploitation institutional utopias share the same flaw. Both take a big leap of faith that life within those institutions will be great. A political philosophy grounded in wellbeing outcomes curbs such institutional leaps of faith since the ideal is always *constituted* by wellbeing outcomes.

Wilkinson metaphorically uses the real mountain feature that you have to go down the mountain you’re on to go up another higher mountain. Transferred to political philosophy: attempting to get to more ideal justice necessitates an intermediate period of (some? substantial? severe?) injustice. That is misleading because it simply assumes there are no ways ahead to some not merely marginally better social orders that do not involve harmfully dismantling most of present society first. So far no argument by you, Wilkinson or any Gaus argument either of you describe has supported that assumption. Perhaps Gaus has some such argument not yet presented here. Then I’d like to hear it straight, not in mountain metaphors.

Your Rawls ABC mountain metaphor has the same flaw. Why assume that a move from the present A towards Rawls B must go through a period of injustice? If you reply that *your* mountain metaphor wasn’t meant to have *that* feature then why are you engaging in mountain talk at all, seeing that you’ve just removed one of the most prominent real mountain features from your metaphor? Why not simply say “Rawls view isn’t fully realistic but also not fully ideal and such an intermediary theory is not useful”? Why the detour to bizarro mountain metaphor land?

“Sorry, are you assuming that, necessarily (?), there must be a path to a (relatively) ideal world that proceeds through stages, all of which are marginally better than the world we are in?”

No, I’m merely saying that the claim (built in to the mountain metaphor) to know that there is *not* such a path need to be supported by argument if we are to accept it.

Note also that the mountain metaphor easily invites the thought of not only a small intermediate setback but the more extreme thought of a necessarily very long move downwards before any move up the higher mountain is possible.

With bizarro I meant (pace Superman!) only discarding mountain metaphor features in a way that makes no sense and is misleading.

This is all too restrictive in thinking about a single society.

In numerical optimization, there’s an alternative to hill climbing called “beam search” – sending multiple independent probes that do a combination of random moves and hill climbing. In practice, this works better at avoiding local optima. You could also use evolutionary algorithms, which try to combine features of various probes and mive non-locally on the optimization landscape.

Neither of these ideas are new in policy. (“The states are laboratories of democracy!”) But once you accept that you can learn about what works other than through direct experience, it undermines his whole thesis. At least, it sounds like it – does anyone who has read the book know what his reply would be?

I swear I closed that block quote.

John Finkbiner @40

[Rawls] does assert … that living in a just society will tend to bend human behavior toward justice

Yes, specifically it will tend to bend behavior in ways that ensure the just society’s perpetuation. One of G.A. Cohen’s criticisms of Rawls is, roughly, that R. doesn’t demand enough of individuals at the level of day-to-day behavior — R’s principles apply to the ‘basic structure’ of society not to the rules and norms that govern the granularity of daily life and daily decisions. While that’s true, it must be the case that R thinks people can act in ways that either encourage or discourage the just society’s perpetuation. In a just society, he thinks people will develop a desire to act in accordance w what the principles demand — this is (part of) the ‘full compliance’ or ‘strict compliance’ view that J Holbo says is unrealistic. (But as I suggested above, there’s a decent argument that we don’t know whether this part of the strict compliance view is unrealistic or not. But I don’t have time to repeat it now.)

but that is a conclusion based on the observation that people tend to adapt to the expectations of the surrounding society.

Maybe partly, but that is not the main ground for the conclusion that R gives in TJ. The main ground is his view of moral psychology and moral development, which posits that people can get attached to abstract principles in much the same way they can get attached to their friends and associates, once they see that those abstract principles in operation are working to everyone’s benefit. (See Pt 3 where his view of moral psychology is laid out.)

I think it’s useful to think about how for Kant virtue is both ideal and habitus. If you think in proper Aristotelian terms, it’s very weird for something to be both. (Right?) So Kant is doing something weird where something can be a “habit”, or a dispositionally stable mode of acting, but an unachievable ideal at the same time. (It’s the tiniest bit less weird than I’m making it sound. I promise.) I think this is useful when thinking about how Rawls thinks about compliance.

Wait, wait, when I was focused on a specific injustice against a Christian couple who ran a bakery, Holbo was telling me to focus more on abstract hypotheticals about an ideal libertarian society. Has Gaus changed Holbo’s mind on this?