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.

Self-defeat, anarchy, unfair exclusion

I have a new paper forthcoming on public reason, in The Journal of Moral Philosophy. The paper ties together three objections that are central to David Enoch’s recent critique: that theories of public reason are self-defeating, that they lead to libertarianism / minimal-statism / anarchy, and that they unfairly exclude people deemed unreasonable.  Here is the abstract:

Theories of public reason are alleged to be self-defeating, to lead to anarchy, and to treat those classified as unreasonable with unequal respect, suggesting that public reason is incoherent rather than simply outweighed by competing considerations. To avoid anarchy and self-defeat, advocates of public reason can idealize heavily, adopting a strict standard of reasonableness. Yet the more they restrict the justificatory constituency, the more the resulting exclusion of putatively unreasonable views seems unfair. This paper shows how to avoid this dilemma. The paper focuses on David Enoch’s recent critique of public reason, which marshalls the worries about self-defeat, anarchy, and unfairness of exclusion to undermine the very idea of public reason. Although he doesn’t explicitly identify the dilemma sketched above, it is consistent with his view to recognize that the solution to the first two problems exacerbates the third. My suggestion about how to avoid the dilemma depends on a distinction between two models of public reason. The first frames the principle as a constraint on coercive state action, with a default of inaction; the second sees the principle as a constraint on reasons for decisions, with a default of exclusion from consideration. The coercion model is vulnerable to the worry about anarchy but not self-defeat, I argue, the reasons model to the worry about self-defeat but not anarchy. The coercion model does not apply to itself, and so cannot be self-defeating, and there are plausible ways of avoiding anarchy without idealizing heavily. As a result, this model is less vulnerable to the charge of unfair exclusion. The reasons for decisions model is not subject to the anarchy objection, but does apply to itself. The only way to avoid self-defeat is to idealize heavily, making the reasons model is thus particularly susceptible to the worry about unfair exclusion. My response is to appeal to reciprocity, in order to justify making acceptance of public reason one of the conditions of reasonableness. Those who exclude everyone but themselves from the constituency of justification can’t object that others draw the boundaries of this constituency too narrowly, since they themselves draw its boundaries more narrowly still.

Forthcoming Paper on Frank Knight and John Rawls

A few years ago I wrote a paper on Hayek and Rawls (ungated early version here). This, plus teaching a course on libertarianism, led me to the early 20th century University of Chicago economist Frank Knight. One of the points of commonality between Hayek and Rawls is their scepticism about desert as the basis for social institutions. This scepticism owes much to Frank Knight. Rawls cited Knight’s 1923 essay “The Ethics of Competition” in the discussion of desert from A Theory of Justice, and in an earlier essay cited Hayek, who in turn cited Knight. Knight is remembered as one of the founders of Chicago economics, and thus indirectly one of the fathers of free market fundamentalism. He was indeed a teacher / colleague of both Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet Knight was a fierce critic of what he took to be bad, simplistic arguments for laissez-faire, chief among them the view that by distributing income according to marginal product the competitive system rewards the deserving. Knight didn’t deny that marginal productivity explained the distribution of income, he just denied that reward according to marginal product was ethically important, in itself. Hayek and Friedman had essentially the same view. The virtue of reward by marginal product is efficiency, not fairness. It’s surprising, then, to read that neoliberalism teaches that markets reward the deserving. I posted about this earlier, but now I have a paper on the topic forthcoming in PPE. It’s called “Markets, Desert, and Reciprocity,” but its subtitle could be “Knight, Hayek, Friedman, and Rawls (vs. Bell, Nozick, Sandel, etc.)” The final section includes some discussion of the reciprocity objection to proposals for an unconditional basic income.

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.