Category: Uncategorized

Brennan vs. a Bad Argument for Democracy

Jason Brennan has a post up criticizing a bad argument for democracy:

  1. “People disagree about the facts, about principles of justice, about the principles of political economy, and so on.
  2. Therefore, it is illegitimate to make reference to an external, objective standard by which to judge political outcomes.
  3. Therefore, in order to resolve this disagreements in a fair way, we must have democracy.”

He has two main reasons for thinking that this is a bad argument. First, if we only cared about fairness, we could flip coins (Estlund), since that would give everyone exactly the same share of authority (none), but randomization isn’t democratic (since it’s not responsive), and it could be very unwise (if some of the options on the agenda are obviously disastrous – I’m embellishing a bit here).

Second, the argument involves an unstable combination of confidence about procedural fairness with diffidence about the evaluation of outcomes – a “half-assed form of moral relativism” because it holds that “there are objective moral standards about how to resolve disagreements, but no standards about what we should decide when we disagree.”

(He also makes a third point, which I won’t discuss: It’s not because they disagree that real voters have conflict; rather, they disagree because they identify with groups that have conflicts, and then engage in after-the-fact rationalization to justify the beliefs associated with those groups. This criticism raises bigger issues about the relevance of ideals to reality, when the gap between the two is great. I think it’s going to undermine or at least sideline a lot of different normative arguments about democracy, not just this one).

So can we make the argument better?

Here’s an argument that’s a bit better, though I think still not satisfactory:

  1. People disagree about facts, principles of justice, etc., hence they disagree about what the right public policies are, e.g. what rights and duties we should recognize in law, and enforce.
  2. But for a fairly wide range of policies, on a fairly wide range of issues, it’s clearly better to have some common policy than none at all, i.e. better than leaving each individual free to follow their own conscience about which rights are and aren’t valid, and therefore about who can defend which rights by force when.
  3. ‘Having a common policy’ involves some sizeable share of the population accepting as legitimate, and binding, policies that they think are not optimal, perhaps even unjust.
  4. To have common policies, we need a decision-procedure – one whose results will be fairly obvious even to people who disagree about what the rights policies are. The crucial function of this procedure is to legitimate controversial policy choices in the eyes of those that disagree with them.
  5. A decision-procedure won’t have this capacity to confer legitimacy on policies (with respect to those who disagree with them) if all that can be said in the procedure’s favour is that it maximizes the chances of selecting the policies one group deems optimal. For example, if a good Rawlsian like me is trying to persuade a Nozickian that she should pay the taxes she thinks too high, it will be no help for me to say “these tax rates were selected by a procedure that maximized our chances of picking Rawlsian policies.”
  6. It would not be self-defeating, however, for me to say “you should pay your taxes because they were decided upon by a procedure that gave equal authority to everyone, whatever their opinion on tax policy.”

That’s how I understand Jeremy Waldron’s arguments against the instrumental assessment of decision-procedures, from the 1990s.

The problem I see with this argument is that in steps 5 and 6 there is a confounding of two variables: intrinsic vs. instrumental modes of assessment, and degree of (reasonable?) controversy. Instrumentally-justified procedures can be legitimacy-conferring when the values and principles appealed to in assessing outcomes are uncontroversial, or at least less controversial than the values and principles at stake in the specific disputes in question (cf. Aileen Kavanagh’s critique of Waldron). Conversely, intrinsically-justified procedures can fail to be legitimacy-conferring if the values appealed to are controversial / more controversial. Imagine debating an aristocrat in a fledgling democracy in the 19th C. One couldn’t persuade the aristocrat to obey some new law the aristocrat disagrees with by pointing out that democratic procedures respect everyone’s fundamental equality. The mode of justification is intrinsic, but the value appealed to is disputed by the argument’s target audience, in this case.

The goal of legitimizing controversial policies in the eyes of those who disagree with them comes at a cost, if it requires that we appeal to a narrower range of values and principles in assessing / justifying our political decision-procedures. Should we really care what the aristocrat or racist thinks? So the arguments gets run in terms of reasonable disagreement; grounds for assessing our political system should be acceptable to all but only reasonable moral points of view. Thus the argument that Waldron at one point saw as being crucial to the defence of democracy against judicial review actually supports a principle of public reason.

More on Neoliberalism

The Guardian had a ‘long read’ a couple weeks ago on “neoliberalism” by Stephen Metcalfe. I want to comment on the piece’s interpretation of Hayek. Although I don’t share Hayek’s politics, I think it important not to misrepresent what he said. (See also this earlier post on neoliberalism, and this post on the issue of the fairness of reward by contribution).

Continue reading More on Neoliberalism

Worries about the Stability of Meritocracy

In §17 of A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempted “to forestall the objection to the principle of fair equality of opportunity that it leads to a meritocratic society” (86, emphasis added; see also 73). This statement is surprising, at least at first glance; isn’t meritocracy a good thing? Continue reading Worries about the Stability of Meritocracy

Talk on Frank Knight and John Rawls

This past weekend I attended the inaugural conference of the PPE Society in New Orleans – an excellent event, with lots of interesting papers on related themes. My presentation was based on my paper ‘Markets, Desert, and Reciprocity,’ Politics, Philosophy & Economics, 16, (2017): 47-69. It was called The Free Market Critique of Desert, and its Relation with Justice as Fairness; the text of the talk (lightly revised) is available on my academia.edu site, via the link above. “Free-market critique of desert” is misleading; it should really be “the free-market critique of the desert-based justification of capitalism” but that’s too long. Another possible title for the talk would be “the neoliberal foundations of liberal egalitarianism,” but that would generate too much confusion.

Neoliberalism

The Guardian has an article by George Monbiot on “Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems“, an excerpt from a forthcoming book.  He cites von Mises, Hayek and Friedman as the original neoliberals, which is fair enough given their roles in organizations such as the Mont Pelerin Society. What struck me is his account of the role of ideas of deservingness, or merit, in neoliberalism.

“The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve. We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.”

As a description of a popular belief system, this account of neoliberalism may be accurate.  But since Monbiot cites Capitalism and Freedom, let’s take a look at what Friedman says. Continue reading Neoliberalism

Friedman on Capitalism vs. Poverty

In a previous post, I wrote about Hayek’s claim that capitalism reduces economic inequality. Milton Friedman makes the same claim about capitalism and inequality in “Free to Choose.”  This claim was quite plausible in the early 70s, less so today.  There’s an irony here, which is that the data upon which Friedman and Hayek relied to show that capitalism reduced or didn’t exacerbate inequality were taken primarily from the post-war period of strong unions and active government, the very economic phenomena they were trying to curtail.

Anyway, even if they’re wrong about inequality, Hayek and Friedman can still claim that capitalism benefits the poor – the claim taken up recently by so-callled bleeding-heart libertarians such as John Tomasi and Jason Brennan.  Here’s Friedman, from Free to Choose:

The main bit:

“I do not know any exception to the proposition, that if you compare like with like, the freer the system, the better off the ordinary poor people have been.”

Is that true? Continue reading Friedman on Capitalism vs. Poverty

Friedman vs. Knight

This week in my course on liberalism we’re reading Milton Friedman. I’m really enjoying watching the PBS documentary “Free to Choose.” Here is a bit where Friedman discusses gambling, and the benefits of risk-taking:

The corresponding text from the book Free to Choose:

“Still another facet of this complex issue of fairness can be illustrated by considering a game of chance, for example, an evening at baccarat. The people who choose to play may start the evening with equal piles of chips, but as the play progresses, those piles will become unequal. By the end of the evening, some will be big winners, others big losers. In the name of the ideal of equality, should the winners be required to repay the losers? That would take all the fun out of the game. Not even the losers would like that. They might like it for the one evening, but would they come back again to play if they knew that whatever happened, they’d end up exactly where they started?”

Of course one issue is that people choose to visit Las Vegas and play Baccarat; they don’t have a similar choice about whether to play the economic game, in daily life. Also they don’t necessarily start out with equal piles of chips, if children are being raised in private families. In addition, however, people may object to competition itself, to economic life being organized so that they have to compete against others in order to flourish. Milton Friedman’s teacher Frank Knight captured this sentiment in a very nice passage from his essay “The Ethics of Competition”:

“Turning to look for motives attached to production as an activity rather than to the product, the most obvious is its appeal as a competitive game. The desire for wealth takes on more or less of the character of the desire to capture an opponent’s pieces or cards in a game. An ethical criticism of the industrial order must therefore consider it from this point of view. In so far as it is a game, what kind of game is it? There is no doubt that a large amount of radical opposition to the system arises in this connection. The propertyless and ill-paid masses protest not merely against the privations of a low scale of living, but against the terms of what they feel to be an unfair contest in which being defeated by the stacking of the cards against them is perhaps as important to their feelings as the physical significance of the stakes which they lose. In a higher social class, resentment is aroused in the hearts of persons who do not like the game at all, and rebel against being compelled to play it and against being estimated socially and personally on the basis of their successor failure at it.”

That’s from pp.603-4 of the version that’s in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 37, No.4, 1923.

Knight was no fan of socialism, but he showed a keen understanding of the sources of opposition to capitalism.

Grad course on “Social Justice and Desert”

Here is the draft course description for a course I’m teaching in Winter 2016:

Social Justice and Desert

One of the standard criticisms of the welfare state is that social provision of income, housing, etc. rewards the imprudent, the irresponsible, the feckless, the lazy – in short, the undeserving. Recent increases in high-end inequality have raised similar questions about whether the market system itself rewards the undeserving; what have the top 1% done to deserve their enormous share of total income and wealth? Are CEOs today really so much more deserving than they were in the 1970s? The association between justice and desert has a long history, and is an important part of common sense thinking. However, the main political theories of the 20th century assign little or no fundamental importance to desert. The classical liberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, the libertarianism of Robert Nozick, and the egalitarian liberalism of John Rawls – none of these views hold that in order to be just institutions must match shares with individual merit. The purpose of this course is to get a better understanding of this disconnect between theory and common sense. The first part of the course covers the free market critique of the “just deserts” interpretation of marginal productivity, Rawls’s rejection of the common sense position on desert, and the criticisms this rejection led to on the part of people such as Miller, Nozick, and Sandel. The second part of the course examines theories that attempt to accommodate the intuitions about desert that motivated the critique of Rawls and the welfare state without explicitly appealing to desert. So-called luck egalitarians emphasize the importance of responsibility, and of people “paying the costs” of their choices. An interesting alternative is to appeal to the idea of reciprocity, connecting liberal egalitarianism with social democratic thinking from the first part of the twentieth century. The final part of the course will focus on specific issues that present challenges for a theory of justice-as-reciprocity: disability, global justice, and economic incentives.

Reading that over, I see that it might suggest that Rawls was a welfare-state liberal, as if his theory would be satisfied by the formula ‘laissez-faire + enough social provision so that the poor don’t starve and the system remains stable’. Will have to work on that.