Articles by Peter Stone

Overview of §23

I’m going to structure my discussion of this section a little differently. I’m also going to be a bit polemical about it. Perhaps this treatment will galvanize some discussion about this section, which I believe is rather significant for Gaus’ argument.

In the preface to the book, Gaus decries the tendency of political philosophers to turn into hedgehogs, each championing one among many potential political creeds (liberal egalitarianism, libertarianism, Marxism, communitarianism, etc.). Gaus then announces his attention to take a different, “foxier” path, one that does not endorse a particular political philosophy, but asks how we should think about the moral order—including the political order—in a world lacking reasonable agreement about many basic moral questions. In doing so, he eschews any desire to champion, hedgehog-style, any single political philosophy—including libertarianism, a philosophy with which he is prominently associated (p. xv). I distinctly remember reading this passage months ago and saying to myself, the philosopher doth protest too much. And lo and behold, many months later, I am not surprised to see that Gaus’ in-depth examination of the nature of morality is yielding libertarian political conclusions.

I should be clear here—I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Gaus attempting to defend libertarianism in this book. If something like reflective equilibrium is a legitimate method for producing valid moral claims, one would expect Gaus, a libertarian, to endorse a libertarian political system, and to argue that the moral situation in which we find ourselves today calls for libertarian principles. If his analysis of morality had yielded the conclusion that communism was the only acceptable economic system, one would expect Gaus to go over the argument seven or eight hundred times until he had found the problem with it. Again, let me repeat—there is nothing illegitimate about this as a method of argument. But it is a little disingenuous of Gaus to act as though he is merely following the argument where it goes, and the fact that it leads to pro-libertarian conclusions is just some sort of happy accident.

Technically, of course, Gaus’ argument does not unambiguously endorse any particular political order. But Gaus’ analysis of morality most definitely tilts in a libertarian-friendly direction. Reasonable people who aim to settle upon a political order, says Gaus, will consider which principles they could reasonably accept as the basis for such an order. They will do so on a principle-by-principle basis; they can do this, because Gaus eschews any efforts at evaluating competing political orders as a whole. Of course, Gaus says, they will endorse all the standard things that libertarians like to endorse—basic rights to life, liberty, and property. But will they endorse anything else? It should be clear that there will be a very serious obstacle to their doing so. Endowing the political order with any further powers will only be morally legitimate if every reasonable moral citizen would agree to such endowment. And there is an important class of people—libertarians like Gaus himself—who can be expected to object to any such expansions of state authority. In effect, libertarians can reasonably count upon other citizens endorsing a set of principles which, considered all by themselves, constitute the libertarian ideal point. Not surprisingly, libertarians will be reluctant to endorse any move away from this ideal point, and their endorsement is necessary in order for any such move to be legitimate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Overview of §22

Chapter VIII of Gaus’ book is entitled “The Moral and Political Orders.” Appropriately enough, it takes up the topic of the relationship between the moral and the political order. Section 22 deals with the place of political authority in a broader story about moral authority. Section 23 discusses coercion in relation to moral and political authority.

Section 22 (“The Authority of the State”) begins by contrasting Gaus’ position with that of the social contract tradition. The latter, Gaus argues, holds that “There is no role for social morality as a distinct and independent source of moral authority” (p. 450). In order to reject this position, Gaus examines what he calls the “Comparative Procedural Justification Principle,” which states that “If the Members of the Public have available two procedures for selecting from the optimal eligible set, O and P, and P is itself publicly justifiable, while O is not, P should be employed” (p. 450). This principle is weaker than the Procedural Justification Requirement, which he discusses earlier. The former, unlike the latter, does not demand a uniquely justified optimal principle; it just demands a publicly justifiable principle be used. Gaus agrees that certain institutional arrangements (basically, those of modern representative democracies) may be good ways to protect basic individual rights (p. 452). This is why “Constant included political rights among the rights of the moderns” (p. 452). But this is “insufficient to yield the justification of a system of governance,” because there are many possible institutional arrangements that might accomplish this goal (p. 455). Hence the Comparative Procedural Justification Principle “does not support political authority over informal social authority, for political authority too relies on informal social-moral authority—an evolution of a political-moral culture leading to the selection of one of a wide range of acceptable political systems” (p. 455).

Gaus then investigates the nature of political authority. Following Thomas Christiano, he distinguishes between three different ideas of political authority. The first, which Gaus endorses, recognizes that states have a blameless liberty to coerce people into obeying its rules. There are good reasons why reasonable people would endorse such rules. Any society will possess people who simply do not respond to moral rules (e.g., psychopaths). Such people can respond to strategic incentives, however, and so if the harms that violations of moral rules can produce are to be avoided, then the state ought to have permission to align incentives appropriately (through threats and, presumably, offers; p. 463). Second, the state has the ability to push people (i.e, through incentive alignment) to participate in a particular moral equilibrium. Gaus holds that in doing so, the state is doing more than just providing a focal point upon which people can coordinate. For “the authority of the state allows us to make the implicit claim that should there be controversy or uncertainty about our claim, there is an authoritative answer that we all have reason to endorse”—the answer provided by the state (p. 466). I’m not really clear on what Gaus is driving at here, but it seems to be a second-order claim that the dictates of the state in resolving conflicts about moral equilibria creates a distinct moral reason for endorsing the resolution. It’s not just that the equilibria would in fact be an equilibria, and that it seems to be the one everyone is moving (thanks to the state) to accept. In addition, there is a moral obligation to do what the state says when it tries to do this. Without this additional moral obligation, the state is serving merely as a focal point, for everyone except psychopaths unable to respond to moral reasons. The third notion of authority is the idea that states have a “right to rule” (p. 468). Gaus takes this idea to mean that when states create rules, people have obligations to the states themselves to obey them. Gaus rejects this idea, and claims that whatever obligations people have to obey moral rules is owed to their fellow citizens. This is compatible with my interpretation of Gaus’ second notion of political authority; one can believe both that it is morally wrong not to accept the moral equilibria generated by states, and that if I commit this moral wrong, I am wronging my fellow citizens, not the state itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

In chapter 15 of The Idea of Justice, “Democracy as Public Reason,” Sen defends the idea that democracy is a universal value. Can democracy flourish outside the west? One reason for thinking it can’t is that it (supposedly) has never done so before. To answer this charge, Sen distinguishes between the “institutional structure of the contemporary practice of democracy,” which is “largely the product of European and American experience over the last few centuries” (pp. 322-323), and the political ideals that underlie it. By the former, Sen seems to have in mind the institutions of electoral conflict (competitive elections, secret ballots, political parties, etc.). But these institutions, Sen argues, are simply the latest effort to institutionalize certain fundamental ideals, ideals of “political participation, dialogue and public interaction” (p. 326). These ideals, Sen suggests, are well-nigh universal in their appeal. But once one sees that the institutions are of use primarily as means to the realization of deeper ideals, then one has reason to avoid running the former and the latter together. In particular, one should not assume that because a certain type of institutional structure is up and running (i.e., there are elections, the votes are counted properly, the loser concedes power to the winner) that a satisfactory level of democracy has been achieved. This has been done by many comparativists, such as Sam Huntington. To do this is to focus (once again) on niti to the exclusion of nyaya.

Sen believes that an overly-institutional focus on democracy has caused particular trouble at the global level. John Rawls and Thomas Nagel may be right that there are no democratic global institutions–indeed, no institutions at all comparable to states. But this need not mean that there is no way to realize democratic ideals such as public discussion internationally. There already exist tentative practices of global deliberation, and they are worthy of support and encouragement, whatever the proper scope and limits of international institutions.

Of course, globalized public deliberation is only conceivable if the ideal of public dialogue has universal appeal. Sen believes that this ideal does have deep roots all around the world, including in areas that have little experience with popular elections. Of course, Sen also suggests that the divide between western and nonwestern experiences with democratic institutions is not as clearcut as the democracy-is-a-western-value story would have it. India was inspired by ancient Greece to experiment with formal democratic institutions (at least on a local level) long before the barbarian tribes of northern Europe. But societies have undeniably assigned value to public reason–the ideal underlying these institutions–for a very long time, and virtually everywhere. Sen illustrates this point using the Indian experience. He also discusses the Middle East in this context.

Sen concludes the chapter with a few words about the role of the media in a democratic society. (The transition to this topic is a bit abrupt.) Obviously, to the extent that the idea of public reason underlies and democratic practice, the media matters quite a lot. Sen argues that a well-functioning free press 1) enables the free expression of ideas, which is intrinsically valuable; 2) spreads information and subjects it to critical scrutiny; 3) protects the weak by subjecting the strong to the gaze of the public eye; 4) facilitates the formation of common values by the public; and 5) contributes to the pursuit of justice (though this last contribution is not clearly specified).

Read the rest of this entry »