Books

Hello Public Reasoners!

I write to announce a new podcast, New Books in Philosophy. Carrie Figdor (U of Iowa) and I co-host the podcast, and each episode features an in-depth interview with an author of a newly-published philosophy book. Interviews will be posted on the 1st and 15th of each month. The inaugural interview, posted today, is with Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside), author of Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press). An interview with Jerry Gaus (Arizona), author of The Order of Public Reason (Cambridge University Press), will be posted on July 1st. Upcoming podcasts include interviews with Robert Pasnau, Sandy Goldberg, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Fabienne Peter, Jason Brennan, Allen Buchanan, Elizabeth Anderson, and others. Please click over to the NBiP site, and check out what we’re doing.

Here’s a link to the interview with Eric Schwitzgebel.

Cheers,
–Robert Talisse

This summer, the Association for Political Theory will host its first virtual reading group (VRG). The purpose of the virtual reading group is to create a space for a profession-wide discussion on topics of shared interest to political theorists and philosophers, a discussion that will culminate in a round-table discussion during the meeting itself.  All members of APT are invited to participate, including those who will not be able to participate in the conference this year.  Part of the purpose of the virtual reading group is to expand the reach of the high quality conversations among APT members beyond the physical space of the conference.

The 2011 APT Program Committee has selected Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities as the subject of discussion.  We believe that the themes of the book connect to the professional, pedagogical, and political concerns that are of interest to many members of the organization, and we hope that Not for Profit will serve as a launching pad for a broader discussion in the profession.

APT members can participate in the VRG at http://aptvrg2011.blogspot.com/ , by submitting comments to the blog (please note that comments cannot be anonymous). Each week, from June 6-August 5, 2011, participants will discuss a new chapter of the book.  All members of APT are invited to participate in virtual discussion.  The VRG will culminate in a round-table session at the annual conference in October featuring Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame) and Arlene Saxonhouse (University of Michigan).  Both the virtual reading group and the round-table session will be co-chaired by Lisa Ellis and Peyton Wofford of Texas A&M University.

Our conversations will get started each week by a guest commentator who will post some reflections and provocations about the chapter.  Then, APT members are invited to participate in the reading group by reading the relevant chapters and posting on the blog.

[APT membership is free; to join, please click this link.]

The schedule is below the fold:

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We reach the end of the book. It has been a long-haul and I am grateful to everyone who has been involved. I’m going to use this post to achieve two aims: (a) to summarize the main themes of the book in light of Jerry’s emphases in the conclusion and (b) to discuss the novelties explored in Appendix A.

Discussion and Review

The very first sentence of the Conclusion is illustrative: “The philosopher’s stone that transforms individual goal pursuit into social restraints on goal pursuit is, like other alchemical projects, enticing but misguided” (547). Let’s reflect for a moment on why Gaus begins the conclusion of this 550-page book in this way. Wasn’t this point merely one of many made along the way? Isn’t this just part of the point of the book?

I. Hayek and the Social Contract Tradition

I suggest that if we take Jerry at his word, we can shed light on the deepest themes in the book. First, note that this claim in effect rejects the entire basis of the social contract tradition, a tradition one might easily think that Jerry is defending and extending rather than rejecting. In some sense, Jerry rejects the contract metaphor. The idea that our interest in social morality can ground our reasons to follow social-moral rules (the idea that arguably lies at the heart of the contractarian tradition) must be rejected; and Jerry has tried to show why at great length. Instead, we must adopt an entirely distinct philosophical anthropology, one that is at root deeply Hayekian, for as Jerry says, “Our reason did not produce social order - we did not reason ourselves into being followers of social rules. Rather, the requirements of social order shaped our reason.” This just is Hayek, who wrote:

Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one. And he is successful not because he knows why he ought to observe the rules which he does observe, or is even capable of stating all these rules in words, but because his thinking and acting are governed by rules which have by a process of selection been evolved in a society in which he lives, and which are thus the product of the experience of generations (LLL, 11).

Many of you know Hayek the classical liberal, but Jerry is following Hayek the social theorist, who attempted to integrate the rationality of rule-following into his philosophical anthropology at the deepest level. Jerry has argued throughout the book that the conception of the person employed within public reason liberalism and liberalism broadly speaking must move in this Hayekian direction. If public reason liberals follow Jerry’s lead, the fundamental structure of public reason and even the nature of the social contract theorists’ project must substantially change. In short, political justification must not begin with deriving the rationality of rule-following from a teleological conception of practical reason. Instead, it must begin with an understanding of the nature of human beings who are already rule-followers and the nature of the moral emotions and cooperative activities that accompany such rule-following. It is in this way that Jerry moves most forcefully away from Hobbesian conceptions of public reason. He goes further by arguing that even the Kantian conception of the person he endorses cannot be constructed out of practical reason alone. Instead, human nature contains Kantian elements for thoroughly Humean-Hayekian-evolution reasons. Our rule-following nature is contingent on our social development (though no less contingent than our goal-seeking nature).

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This section is very interesting, though it might be less exciting than the others in this chapter. It focuses on the question of state provision of public goods and addressing negative externalities. The last section takes up forms of “practical paretianism”, some very influential today. One of the things distinctive about Jerry’s liberalism is his attitude to a state function that is widely accepted, namely, provision of public goods.

In 25.1 Jerry comments on the quotation from Green that opens the chapter. At the end of the rich passage, Green says “That, however, is the beginning, not the end, of the state. When once it has come into being, new rights arise in it and further purposes are served by it.” Green was not as adverse about the further purposes as we might be. Jerry wishes to examine what further purposes states may serve after it has assumed the role “as interpreter and protector of social morality”. Might there be a function of states as “providers of services and goods that are not morally required”? In our time, ever since the rise in the influence of economics or what used to be called political economy, the first task that comes to mind is the provision of public goods or, more colloquially, the remedying of “market failures” (i.e., externalities). With what are known technically as public goods, the benefits accrue to people independently of their contribution to their production. They thus create what is called a “collective action problem”, which often approximates an n-person PD. The two defining features of a public good are indivisibility (once produced it is available at no additional cost to anyone) and nonexcludability (it is not feasible or efficient to exclude people from enjoying the good). The thought is that states may or should step in and facilitate the production of the good, taxing people for the costs. If all goes well, the result will be mutually beneficial for all or, more colorfully, progress towards the Pareto frontier.

Jerry rightly points out that there are alternative institutions and communities capable of addressing many public goods problems. Given how dangerous state action can be — and I would add, clumsy — Jerry argues that we should seek assistance first in non-statist approaches. But he concedes that there are “times when the state and its coercive power appear to be the only viable way to cope with some problems. In these cases, the provision of public goods is, at least in principle, capable of publicly justifying state coercion” (533). He rightly points out that the costs of providing the good in question must considered when raising the question.

25.2 considers a problem with this abstract case for the state provision of public goods, namely, “that few goods are purely public”. If some Members of the Public prefer no good to particular packages of goods and costs, then no proposal for producing the good will pass. The result is constraining, “a severe restriction on the range of justifiable public policy.”

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I apologize for my tardiness. I have fallen behind in my readings, but I was also ill this week and am only today rising (from bed). I expect there will be a number of corrections to be made in what I say. [Lesser points and asides are often bracketed.]

Sects 24 and 25 are likely to be as controversial as the others in this chapter. In 24, “Private Property and the Redistributive State”, Jerry defends a three basic propositions:

- Private property rights are justified in Jerry’s theory at a relatively early stage, and this constrains what is to follow.

- Socialism will not figure in the eligible set.

- A variety of redistributive frameworks will also be rejected.

I’ll start with the first (subsect. 24.1). Jerry starts by reminding us that in 18.3 he established private property when considering public justification in conditions of evaluative diversity. There, following a suggestion of an early John Gray, Jerry argues that a jurisdictional conception of private property rights are what “deeply pluralistic social order[s]” need to handle their disagreements. A jurisdictional conception of private property rights understands property as “a sphere in which one’s evaluative standards have great authority for others” (374). [Small point: The name of this account, used by Eric Mack in his interesting account of rights, can mislead if one comes to think that the authority of the property owner rivals the state’s jurisdictional rights. If one wanders onto the land of the US federal government, that is, the land it owns, then one is subject to its authority (in the sense above). But even on one’s own land in the US one is subject to the jurisdictional authority of American government (at different levels), or so the latter claim. US law is supposed to determine what counts as ownership, etc. The state’s authority is jurisdictional in a more elementary sense, I think, than the Mack-Gaus one.]

Jerry grants that property rights depend more on the state than other rights. “… the right to private property must be interpreted and developed, but to a far greater extent than other abstract rights, is definition depends on the state” (509). This is largely true, though Jerry could have used a less misleading word than ‘definition’. And it is always worth remembering that there was a great deal of property prior to the rise of modern states. [The political conditions of medieval life typically defy being categorized as either “states” or “states of nature”.] Again, on the next page: “Thus, far more than other basic rights, the political order determines our rights of property.”

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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.

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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.

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Overview of §21

The Deliberative Model, as is now familiar, is indifferent between the various rules in the socially optimal eligible set as possible bases of equilibrium.  It doesn’t select one of the rules as the favoured basis of an equilibrium.  The lesson of §19-20 is that it does select one of the rules as the favoured basis of an equilibrium once it is in actual fact the basis of an equilibrium.  Since the Deliberative Model, according to Gaus, “explicates the moral point of view” (425), that raises questions about the power of the moral point of view to ground criticism of moral orders.  In §21, Gaus explains the extent to which the moral point of view does have that power, and why, to the extent that it doesn’t, that isn’t an objection to it.  Read the rest of this entry »

Overview of §20

In §20, Gaus explores the idea—foreshadowed in §19—that not only can a selection from the socially optimal eligible set of rules be justified as a result of convergence in a ‘Kantian Coordination Game’ (see §19.2), so that “[c]oordination on a morality can occur even though no procedure of coordination has itself been publicly justified” (410), but “the process of arriving at a publicly justified morality may well be a social evolutionary one, in which people gradually come to coordinate on a common set of moral rules” (410).   Read the rest of this entry »

On Gaus section 19
I should preface these remarks with the proviso that I am simply a guest blogger for this section, filling in for someone who dropped out, and have been unable to follow the earlier discussion in the online reading group. For that reason, I am not as intimately familiar with the rest of the book as most of the other participants, so I fear that my remarks will reflect my poor grasp of the overall architecture of this most intriguing, but often forbidding, book. I also apologize in advance if I raise any issues that have already been thoroughly hashed out in earlier discussion.

Overview:
As I read it, section 19 attempts to lay down one of the foundation stones for GG’s larger effort to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the authority of moral rules:

(1) the ‘instrumentalist’ (Hobbesian, Humean, Gauthierian) view that ‘social morality is necessary for human cooperation and social life’ and
(2) the ‘deontological’ (Rousseau, Kant, Strawson, Rawls, Darwall) view that moral requirements are irreducibly constituted by relations among agents who recognize their mutual standing as free and equal persons.

Earlier in the book, GG has said that ‘both are correct’ (193): social morality is both a ‘device’ of social coordination and a body of rules deriving its authority from its consistency with respect for the freedom and equality of all agents. In this section, GG starts to explain how they are integrated and, moreover, why both are necessary. According to GG, taking (1) more seriously than contemporary Kantians often do is the key to overcoming the threat of ‘indeterminacy’ that hangs over the public reason idea.

The ‘indeterminacy’ involved arises because there are, in principle, many alternative sets of moral rules that are consistent with the ‘rights of agency’ and the ‘abstract’ idea of ‘jurisdictional rights’ GG has defended in earlier chapters. Even if these general entitlements can be publicly justified, agents must still settle on a scheme of rules that all can regard as having requisite moral authority. Without such a settlement, it will be impossible to reach agreement on how exactly the more general entitlements of ‘free and equal’ persons should be interpreted in particular cases. Each of these more specific schemes of moral expectations is publicly justified, yet so far no one has sufficient reason to accept any of them as uniquely publicly justified.

One is tempted to suggest here that a uniquely publicly justified scheme can be identified only if it is selected by a collective decision rule that is itself publicly justified. The main point of this section is to deny that this ‘Procedural Justification Requirement’ (392) is necessary. This is good news, according to GG, because he appears to believe that that requirement is impossible to satisfy without resorting to highly artificial – and hence reasonably rejectable – redescriptions of the choice situation (as with Rawls’s Original Position).

In the body of the section, GG attempts to explain how it is possible for a uniquely justified set of social/moral rules to emerge automatically through interaction between agents who are at all times acting only on reasons that reflect their own commitments. To establish the possibility of such a solution, GG relies on a series of game-theoretic coordination models. These are intended to illustrate how the bare, even random, fact of convergence (within iterated interaction) on one of a pair of alternative moral schemes can be (1) an equilibrium solution and (2) in large N-person cases generate a bandwagon effect. As a result of iterated interaction, players in these games find themselves in situations in which they acquire sufficient reason to accept schemes of rules just because others have already opted for them; as more and more do so, we reach a point at which everyone has sufficient reason to go along with the option around which convergence is occurring.

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As part of a project to assess the relative impact of different works of political theory I ran a google scholar citation search on the authors listed below.  Works had to be at least 10 years old, and with a minimum of 100 citations.  I’ve listed them in order of citations/year.

Arendt, Rawls and Habermas are special cases and I’ve listed their top two cited works.  Google lists Arendt’s and Habermas’ works multiple times so I suspect they are undercounts. Obviously works with appeal outside of political theory and philosophy get a good deal more traction.

The list is simply based on people who came to mind as I was doing this.  I stopped when I realized how much time I was spending, so  this is hardly complete.  If you have additions and wish to contact me (or post) I’d be grateful. (rehfeld [@] wustl.edu)

Special cases (see note above):

John Rawls (see note above):

• A Theory of Justice, 33,386 total citations, 856/yr   
• Political Liberalism, 7974, 443/yr

Hannah Arendt (see note above)   

• The Human Condition (1958): 7595, 143/yr   
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951):  4584, 74/yr

Jurgen Habermas (see note above)   

• Structural Transformation (1991/1962):  3743, 187/yr   
• The Theory of Communicative Action (1984):  4933, 133/yr

The list in order of citations per year (total citations, citations per year)

1. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990): 5841 total citations, 278/yr
2. Martha C Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2001): 2440, 244/yr.
3. HLA Hart, The Concept of Law (1961): 7733, 155/yr
4. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982): 4330, 150/yr
5. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract: (1988): 3261, 142/yr
6. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (1996): 2052, 137/yr
7. Susan Okin, Justice Gender and the Family: 1868, 85/yr
8. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (1983): 2327, 83/yr
9. Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (1999): 959, 80/yr
10. Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the State (1981): 2260, 75/yr
11. Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (1992): 1542, 75/yr
12. Hanna Pitkin’s The Concept of Representation: 3255, 74/yr
13. Cass Sunstein, The Partial Constitution (1994): 1168, 69/yr
14. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (1995): 1062, 66/yr
15. Mark Warren, Democracy and Association (2001): 507, 51/yr
16. Robert Dahl’s Preface to Democratic Theory (1956): 2538, 47/yr
17. James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation, (1993): 795, 44/yr
18. William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse (1993): 783, 44/yr
19. Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (1993): 1067, 38/yr
20. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (1953): 1695, 25/yr
21. Jacob Levy, The Multiculturalism of Fear, (2000): 193, 18/yr
22. Brian Barry, Political Argument (1965 and 1990 reissue combined): 797, 17/yr
23. Nancy Rosenblum, Membership and Morals, (2000): 190, 17/yr
24. Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (1991): 323, 16/yr

At the end of Chapter 17 we saw that the argument from abstraction cannot provide the determinate moral rules that are needed for social coordination.  Members of the public are left with a set of optimal eligible interpretations of the abstract rights presented in Chapter 17.  In Chapter 18 we see how that set can be further narrowed.

Gaus begins with a discussion of the function of rights and an attack on the common taxonomy of choice vs. interest theories of rights.  Rather than give a theory of the necessary conditions of something being a right, Gaus is concerned with what he calls the jurisdictional function of rights.  Gaus’ concern with rights is practical; he is concerned with what rights do, not with giving a theory that specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions of rights.

In so many places in OPR, we have seen Gaus put aside the traditional metaphysical and epistemological concerns with reasons, morality, and responsibility to focus on the practical problems that arise from an attempt to make sense of individual reason and social morality.  The distinctiveness of Baier-Strawson view (which should really be just called the Gaus view) is primarily this focus on the essentially practical nature of the philosophical enterprise.

Gaus sees rights as a solution to the practical problem of the incommensurability of values.  How is it possible to find a collective choice or social agreement between persons when their fundamental values so often conflict?  In the last section we saw that one solution may be to abstract or idealize to find out what common standards we share, but as we have seen, this solution only has limited usefulness.  Another solution is to “partition the moral space” (372) so that each individual is the rightful decision maker in his or her own defined sphere.  In effect, why not privatize social morality in a publicly justified way so that not all value questions are open to social choice?  In each individual’s sphere, they are sovereign and others may not  override their decisions.

The contrast to what might be called the devolution of moral authority is what Gaus calls the centralizing response.  The centralizing response hold that when faced with evaluative diversity, the proper response is look to commonalities in values to try to regulate and organize social morality with an overarching standard.  The problem with this solution to the problem of diversity is that, as we saw in the last section, it is indeterminate.  In contrast, by devolving moral authority each individual has a determinate authority over a determinate sphere.  This solves the problem of seeking a common standard for the basis of public moral authority by relocating that authority in the rules of devolution rather than in the substantive claims of public moral authority itself.

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Hi everyone,

I’m pleased to announce my book The Ethics of Voting (Princeton University Press) is now published. You can read the introduction here.

(I get about $3.00 in royalties if you buy it, so here are links to Amazon, which has sold out its initial batch, and Barnes and Noble.)

The main positions I defend in the book are:

1. There’s generally no duty to vote.

2. People can exercise exemplary civic virtue and pay whatever debts they have to society (if there are such things) without participating in politics. Political participation (and knowledge) is nothing special when it comes to civic virtue.

3. If people do vote, they have strong obligations to vote for what they justifiedly believe will serve the right ends of government, or otherwise they must abstain. This holds true even though individual votes are inconsequential. (I expanded and revised my argument from”Polluting the Polls”, as, for example, I realized that it didn’t cover cases of people voting for the right things for the wrong reasons, and it didn’t handle bad fringe voting very well.)

4. It’s okay to buy, trade, or sell votes, provided you don’t violate #3.

5. If social scientific work on voter behavior is correct, then most voters probably qualify as bad voters per my theory.

I’m going to be on CBC radio (I think on Sunday Edition) this weekend discussing some of these topics in light of the likely elections in Canada.

Summary of OPR.VI.17

Chapter VI begins by reminding us of an important conclusion from the previous chapter, namely, that the Members of the Public (MoP) will be confronted with a large set of rules of social morality, and that with respect to these rules, the MoP (as a group) is indifferent (they prefer any member of the set to no rule at all, but do not converge on any particular member of that set).

The goal of this chapter is to advance to two partial solutions to this ‘problem of indeterminacy.’  They both concern individual rights, specifically, those rights commonly known (from Benjamin Constant’s famous essay) as the ‘liberty of the moderns.’  These solutions are only ‘partial’ because they serve only to narrow somewhat the set of eligible rules of social morality, but do not pick out any particular rules.

Section 17 presents the first of these two partial solutions.  In this section, drawing on the work of Benn, Gewirth, and Rawls, Gaus employs an ‘argument from abstraction’ to show that all reasonable Members of the Public would be committed to endorsing, at least in an abstract form, certain fundamental individual rights (the ‘liberty of the moderns’), as such rights are essential for effective agency.

Gaus begins the section by reminding us of the ‘Kantian-Rawlsian two-step procedure’ for arriving at justified principles under circumstances of reasonable pluralism (diversity of ends and values among the reasonable MoP). Roughly, this procedure involves ‘bracketing’ our disagreements, adopting a shared perspective, and reasoning on the basis of this shared perspective (the perspective of pure practical reason for Kant, the perspective of the original position for Rawls).

Gaus advances his own ‘argument from abstraction’ in this section in order to show that the MoP would support certain individual rights for all persons.  However, specific interpretations of individual rights, that is, specific rules, acceptable to all MoP in accordance with the ‘deliberative model,’ will need to be formulated at a later stage.  Nonetheless, showing that all reasonable MoP endorse such rights can serve to narrow the set of eligible rules of social morality (rules that deny such rights to some persons or deny them altogether are ruled out).

Gaus claims that the success of any argument from abstraction (whether Rawls’s original position argument, or the argument that Gaus advances in this section) depends on three claims:(a) the successful identification of a shared perspective (the original position for Rawls; the perspective of abstract agency for Gaus); (b) the importance or weightiness of the evaluative standards identified by the shared perspective (why the conclusions of the shared perspective should be taken seriously by the MoP for the purposes of evaluating rules of social morality); and (c) the ability of the conclusions generated via the shared perspective to survive the return of the Members of the Public to their ‘full set of evaluative standards’ (i.e., the ability of the conclusions of ‘pro tanto justification’ to survive ‘full justification’).

Gaus asserts that it was a concern with (c), the compatibility of the conclusions of the shared perspective (the conception of ‘justice as fairness’ endorsed by the parties in the original position) with reasonable persons’ various ‘comprehensive doctrines,’ that prompted Rawls’s move to political liberalism.  Rawls’s commitment to the original position device as the appropriate perspective for ascertaining principles of political justice remains constant from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism (p. 336).  As we’ll see, Gaus thinks that while the first principle of justice as fairness (the basic liberties principle), or some version of it, survives (c), the difference principle cannot.

The “second abstraction characteristic of Rawls’s original position,” Gaus explains, is that it focuses on the justification of abstract principles rather than rules.  Gaus restates his claim (from 14.3) that “principles are too vague and too subjective to interpretive controversy to provide an effective framework for cooperation” (p. 337).  Nonetheless, identifying principles shared by the MoP can be useful, since such stably shared principles would at least eliminate many proposed rules for social morality.

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After specifying formal constraints on proposals (V.15), this section focuses on how to evaluate them, especially under conditions of indeterminacy. As with the previous section, I provide a summary of the major arguments and then raise some preliminary questions. I should note that, in various places, I have tried to simplify technical aspects of Gaus’s discussion.

Summary

This section begins with the problem of how to rank qualified proposals offered by Members of the Public (MoPs) in the Deliberative Model. One option would be to consider all proposals simultaneously, but Gaus rejects this possibility as unrealistic given our cognitive limitations. He argues instead for pairwise comparisons of proposals to construct ordinal rankings that satisfy modest conditions of social choice, including “asymmetry of preferences, symmetry of indifference, reflexivity of preference, and transitivity of strict preference” (305). Read the rest of this entry »

This post provides a summary of Section V.15 and then raises some preliminary questions.

Summary

In the last section (V.14), Gaus advanced the Basic Principle of Public Justification and developed a Deliberative Model for determining whether social morality satisfies that principle. Andrew Lister summarized the parameters of the model here. Most of section V.15 is devoted to specifying the model further by constraining the set of rules that may qualify as proposals within it.

Before discussing particular contraints, however, Gaus describes the Deliberative Model as reflecting the Kantian idea of “legislation in the realm of ends” (292). Every person represented in the model is both subject to the law and the legislator of it. But, as Gaus notes, this is a fairly sophisticated idea. What if normal moral agents (NMAs) can’t understand or appreciate it? We can’t expect most people to grasp the complex philosophical arguments offered for reasoning from within the Deliberative Model. As Gaus says, not everyone is a stage 6 Kohlbergian reasoner. The question, then, is how to develop the Deliberative Model so that justifications for proposed rules of social morality (or “proposals”) are accessible to all NMAs. The answer is that the model itself need not be accessible to all NMAs; only the reasons offered for proposals must be accessible (and acceptable) to them. You don’t have to be able to read (or understand) the Order of Public Reason to have sufficient reasons for endorsing rules of social morality, but you do have to be able to understand the reasons that justify those rules.

Having addressed this concern about the accessibility of the Deliberative Model, Gaus next specifies and defends a number of formal constraints that qualify proposals as moral rules, rather than rules of some other kind. These constraints are as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Hi folks,

Just wanted to make a shameless plug for my new book, which may be of interest to some of you. Here’s a link to the book’s PSUP website (which has further links to Amazon, etc.) and a synopsis.

With the publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971, John Rawls not only rejuvenated contemporary political philosophy but also defended a Kantian form of Enlightenment liberalism called “justice as fairness.”  Enlightenment liberalism stresses the development and exercise of our capacity for autonomy, while Reformation liberalism emphasizes diversity and the toleration that encourages it. These two strands of liberalism are often mutually supporting, but they conflict in a surprising number of cases, whether over the accommodation of group difference, the design of civic education, or the promotion of liberal values internationally.  During the 1980’s, however, Rawls began to jettison key Kantian characteristics of his theory, a process culminating in the 1993 release of Political Liberalism and completing the transformation of justice as fairness into a Reformation liberalism.

Reconstructing Rawls argues that this transformation was a tragic mistake because it jeopardized the most important features of his theory, viz. the lexical priorities of right, liberty, and fair equality of opportunity as well as the difference principle.  Controversially, this book contends that Rawls’s so-called “political turn,” motivated by a newfound interest in diversity and the accommodation of difference, has been unhealthy for autonomy-based liberalism and has pushed liberalism more broadly towards cultural relativism, be it in the guise of liberal multiculturalism or critiques of cosmopolitan distributive-justice theories. The book then demonstrates that the central elements of justice as fairness can only be defended within the context of a Kantian Enlightenment liberalism and that Rawls’s hope for a more pluralistic grounding for his theory, endorsed by a wide variety of belief systems present in modern democratic societies, is illusory.

Reconstructing Rawls is the first book to compare Rawls’s and Kant’s theories systematically and the first to offer an internal critique and reconstruction of justice as fairness, reconceiving it as a comprehensive, universalistic Kantian liberalism. By doing so, it gives us both the vision of a liberal world order–”a republicanism of all states, together and separately,” as Kant put it–and a mode of justification addressed to all men and women, not as members of particular nations, races, and faiths, but as human beings, as citizens of the world. In short, it reclaims Rawls for the Enlightenment.

I summarized Section 14 in a previous post; here I raise some critical points about the question of whether public justifiability should include a shared reasons requirement, and how this relates to sincerity in public deliberation.

Gaus rejects the requirement that deliberators deliberate in terms of shared reasons. To be a bona fide moral rule, a rule must be endorsed by each and every member of the appropriately (i.e. partly) idealized public, each based on the total set of reasons he or she accepts. “Mutual intelligibility” requires only that these personal evaluative standards pass some threshold of plausibility such that they can be generally recognized as genuine moral perspectives. But members of the public will still think that many of the reasons their fellows appeal to are bad reasons. They also think that this use of bad reasons for the assessment of moral rules is appropriate. In intellectual argument each will criticize the other for accepting bad reasons, and argue that others ought to change their views. When it comes to determining what count as valid moral rules, however, everyone accepts that each will assess proposed rules based on his or her own evaluative standards, and that rules will count as valid only if they meet with the unanimous approval from these diverse perspectives.

An alternate view would be that deliberators accept that they are to deliberate only on the basis of the reasons they share. What is wrong with the shared reasons view? Gaus’s answer in Section 14.4 (d) comes in the form of a response to Jon Quong’s argument for the shared reasons view.¹ Quong’s argument is based on the requirement that public reasoning be sincere. I will explain the dispute, then briefly argue that the underlying issue isn’t really about sincerity.

Insincere deliberation may be justified in some circumstances, but it is pro tanto morally bad because it makes public reasoning into a form of manipulation. If I argue that your beliefs commit you to supporting a particular proposal even when I don’t think they do, then I am not respecting your capacity for rational moral agency; I am treating you as a thing to be moved, not a person to be reasoned with. Conversely, sincerity in public reasoning expresses respect, helping to sustain civic friendship. Quong formulates the idea of sincerity in public justification in terms of three conditions, involving persons A(lf) and B(etty) and a proposal X.

1. A reasonably believes he is justified in endorsing X,
2. A reasonably believes that B is justified in endorsing X (…)
3. A may only… offer arguments in favour of X to B that he reasonably believes B would be justified in accepting.²

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1. Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection, OUP 2010, Chapter 9 “The Scope and Structure of Public Reason” [↩]
2. Gaus cites the first two of these conditions on 288. All my quotes from Quong are from Chapter 9 of from Liberalism Without Perfection [↩]

This post provides an overview of Section 14 and explains the relationship of this section with previous sections; I make some critical comments in separate posts linked below. I hope I haven’t gone overboard, in terms of the total length of the posts, but section 14 is important because it lays the groundwork for Jerry’s conception of public justification. At the same time, it is the conclusion of the previous 100 or so pages of argument about the moral emotions. So I want to summarize the main claims of section 14, but also explain how they follow from earlier sections. And of course I have some questions and criticisms.

Overview

Section 14 defines the “Basic Principle of Public Justification” (BPPJ) and lays out “the deliberative model” that specifies the principle. The BPPJ provides a necessary condition for a moral imperative to be authoritative. The assumption is that an imperative “?” is made in a particular context C based on a rule L. The condition is (1) that each normal moral agent has sufficient reasons to internalize L and hold that L requires ? in circumstances C, and (2) that moral agents do generally conform to L.

The BPPJ provides a rule-based standard for assessing particular moral demands in context, and so has as one of its components a criterion for determining when a rule counts as a bona fide moral rule; each and every normal moral agent must have sufficient reasons to internalize the rule. The idea of a normal moral agent (NMA) has figured in Gaus’s earlier discussions of moral psychology. A person is a moral agent if they have the capacity to understand and care about following social rules for its own sake; such an agent is normal if they have the cognitive capacities of a fully-functioning but still boundedly-rational human being. Thus some people do not qualify as NMAs, either due to lack of cognitive capacity (young children, severe mental disabilities) or lack of ability to internalize rules (young children, psychopaths). The reasons an NMA “has” are not the reasons there truly are, nor simply the reasons that agent thinks she has. On the one hand, Gaus argues that there is no point in saying that I “have” a reason if it is completely inaccessible to me, given my epistemic situation. On the other hand, he accepts that I have a reason not to cross the bridge in front of me even if I don’t think I have such a reason, if a reasonable amount of investigation and reflection would reveal the bridge to be unsafe (234-6). The reasons a NMA has are thus the reasons she would have if she engaged in a respectable amount of good reasoning based on what she currently believes (summarizing 250).¹

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1. For doubts about the idea that we have reasons that we would recognize if we deliberated more, see Alexander Moon’s comment to the previous installment of the discussion group [↩]

As we saw on Monday, Gaus believes that the externalist view of having a reason carries with it serious problems.  Furthermore, the attempt to decrease the diversity of reasons that one has through idealization is beset by the twin problems of indeterminacy and path-dependence. Even with radical idealization of our cognitive faculties, we would still not necessarily, or even likely, end up sharing all of our reasons.  This leads Gaus to give up on the idea of full rationality as a possibility.

Once we give up on the idea of full rationality, we are led, Gaus argues, to theorize from the point of view of what John Pollock called real rationality.  Pollock distinguishes, helpfully, between justified and warranted choices.  Justified choices are the products of epistemically valid procedures of reasoning; warranted choices are the product of all possible relevant reasoning.  Gaus argues “in a world of less than perfect information and cognitive capacities, we need some concept to indicate when a person’s reasoning about the world is up to acceptable standards and when it is not.” (247)

This conception of justification cannot be equated with truth, however.  The fact that there is a reason does not necessarily mean that anyone actual person will necessarily be justified in acting on that reason.  One can be justified in having a reason, but what ultimately matters in terms of interpersonal justification is whether or not that reason is warranted.  One can be reasonably said to have a reason, however, if they do not have any defeaters that are accessible to them.  This standard is importantly not that there are no defeaters, there may be, but they are not accessible to a person that has done a reasonable amount of reflection and investigation.  Gaus argues that “the reasons you have must be accessible to you, and as a real rational agent in a world in which cognitive activity has significant costs, rationality does not demand one keep on with the quest to discover less and less accessible reasons.”  (253)

What counts as a respectable amount of deliberation is often vague and will vary with context.  Gaus compares what counts as a respectable amount of deliberation in a physics seminar to what counts for a baseball umpire.  Baseball umpires need to make calls quickly and, hence, deliberation must be very quick, understanding that there will be a certain amount of error.  Not so in a physics seminar.

Morality, after all, is not meant to be the esoteric doctrine of the epistemic elite.  We expect normal adults to be able to grasp and follow the rules of social morality.  Gaus claims that “normal moral agents have accessible undefeated reasons to affirm” the rules of social morality. (255) The idea that normal adults should be able to recognize their moral reasons sets a maximum limit on the epistemic demands of normal moral reasoning. But, we must be careful not to set the bar too low.  People do wrong and we often think it is because they did not take sufficient care or deliberation before they acted.  The thing to do is not always glaringly obvious.  After all, our conceptions of social morality are not static, we genuinely learn both from our own actions and from what others tell us.  The possibility of moral change, both progressive and regressive, occurs because finding out what reasons we have is often a social and collaborative venture.

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As Keith pointed out in his last post, Section 13 is one of the most important, and likely to be one of the most controversial, sections of The Order of Public Reason.  Although there have been a lot of controversial points made in earlier sections, much of the last several sections may have seemed more descriptive than normative and, therefore, less threatening.  This, however, is the section where the normative rubber hits the descriptive road.  The account that Gaus develops here represents a continuity that goes all the way back to at least Value and Justification and is continued in Justificatory Liberalism, those that are familiar with these earlier works will find much that is familiar here, though often in a different or expanded form.  There is a lot in this section so I won’t necessarily be discussing everything, only the most important points.  If there is something that I leave out that is important, we can definitely expand on those points in the comments.  I will spend most of my post today presenting Gaus’ view and save my critical remarks for Wednesday’s post, but feel free to bring up any critical issues that you may have in the comments.

Gaus begins this section by noting that the idea of social morality that he has been advancing seems to rely on an internalist conception of reasons.  As he claims, the debate between internal and external reasons has become a kind of obsession.   Gaus’ conception of reasons stakes out a position in that debate in opposition to what Joseph Raz has called the Classical View of external reasons as facts about properties of action.  On the Classical View, internal reasons are merely beliefs about facts, not reasons themselves.  The internalist, however, argues that reasons for action must be connected to the motivational set of an agent, that is, to her beliefs and desires about the action in question.   The debate between internal and external reasons has, according to Gaus, become confused.  The debate is really about what reasons there are or what reasons exist.  It is, therefore, really a question about the ontology of reasons.  But, as we have seen throughout the Order of Public Reason, social morality in a world of constrained and embodied reasoners is about what reasons we have, not with what reasons there are.  Gaus’ theory then is only inconsistent with externalism if the externalist also holds an externalist theory of what it means to have a reason, basically that to have a reason is for there to be an external reason that applies to that person.  Gaus rejects this form of externalism, the externalist view of having a reason, as implausible.

Externalism about having reasons is implausible because “it misconstrues the relation between having a reason and being a rational agent.” (233) Consider Aristotle, for instance.  The externalist is committed to saying that Aristotle had a reason to accept the truth of particle physics; but surely, Gaus argues, to think that Aristotle had a reason to embrace particle physics is to make a serious mistake.   Reasons are justificatory, but there is no way that Aristotle could be justified in believing particle physics.  Similarly, to claim that a person or a group have a certain moral reason even though that reason is totally inaccessible to them, in the same way that Aristotle’s reason to accept particle physics is inaccessible, is to not only misuse the language of reasons but, more importantly, to misunderstand and “undermine the point of discourse about reasons and rationality.”(235) We use the idea of having a reason, according to Gaus, to make the actions and intentions of other people intelligible.  The externalist view of having a reason severs the idea of a reason from its role in explaining and justifying action.

Rejecting the externalist view of having a reason does not, however, commit Gaus to, what he calls, the Reason Affirmation Thesis that to have a reason is to affirm that one has that reason.  Affirming a reason is neither necessary nor sufficient to having a reason.   The neurotic may affirm reasons that they do not, in fact, have–crazy beliefs, that the world will end if one blinks for instance, do not provide reasons.  Affirmation is also not necessary to have a reason, all that is required is that there be, in the words of Bernard Williams, “a sound deliberative route” from the subjective motivational set that one has to the reason.  We might think of the Reason Affirmation Thesis as the idea that only the reasons that an agent actually claims to have at any time can justify action.  The rejection of the Reason Affirmation Thesis means that Gaus is committed to some amount of idealization of rational agents.  If we notice that we need to go beyond the actual reasons that agents claim to have, we need another standard of what counts as a reason.  The problem is that once we begin to idealize, we move closer and closer to the externalist view of having a reason.  Gaus cites Steve Wall who argues that once we begin to idealize we realize that “a fully rational person will affirm all, and only, the (external) reasons that apply to her.” (237) If Wall is correct; we will have backed into the externalist view of having a reason merely by idealizing.

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My apologies for posting this a little bit late. I came down with something and couldn’t get the comments put together as quickly as I had hoped and then ran into some compatibility issues with Word Press and my browser. Anyway, on to section 12.

If sections 4 - 11 have been primarily descriptive, section 12 is where the book begins to take a distinctly normative turn. Having sketched over the last three sections an account of how his positive and normative projects relate to one another, in section 12 Gaus expands the discussion he left us with at the end of section 11 in order to bring his descriptive work to bear on some of the questions he set out at the beginning of the book.

As I pointed out in my earlier comments, Gaus concludes section 11 with a brief discussion of the relationship between guilt, moral authority, and moral autonomy and as I said above, section 12 is primarily dedicated to developing this discussion further. Gaus emphasizes that guilt is part of the mechanism through which we internalize moral rules and on his view this is important for two closely related reasons:

(i) When an individual feels guilty for violating a moral rule, that guilt carries with it an implicit recognition of the authority of those who make demands on her that she comply with the rules of social morality. In this way, guilt complements resentment and indignation in Gaus’s Strawsonian account of how the moral emotions constitute the practice of social morality; guilt being the mechanism that gives standing to others to make demands on us, whereas resentment and indignation are (among) the mechanisms through which we make the actions of others our business. This is Gaus’s focus in 11.4.

(ii) By facilitating and ultimately manifesting our internalization of moral rules, guilt expresses our moral autonomy. When it is directed at a moral rule (and not simply a taboo), guilt typically indicates that an individual accepts the authority of the rule over her and is capable of appreciating the reasons why the rule applies to her. This, as opposed to (i), is Gaus’s focus in section 12.

Although Gaus spends a lot of time discussing the importance of guilt, he begins section 12 by discussing the moral emotions more generally. In particular he emphasizes that the moral emotions have built in appropriateness conditions, meaning that they typically require (or at least entail) that the person subject to a moral emotion has certain beliefs about the person towards whom her reactive attitude is directed (12.1). As we saw in section 11, on Gaus’s view the moral emotions are a constitutive part of our social morality and in this section he argues that this insight, combined with evidence from moral psychology undermines the rationalistic picture of morality on which reason allows us to overcome our passions. Gaus’s emphasis on the appropriateness conditions of the moral emotions though distinguishes him from ‘the new sentimentalists’ who argue that our moral judgments and practices are grounded primarily in our affect and that our moral emotions do not (and more importantly, need not) carry a substantial amount of cognitive content. On Gaus’s view, both reason and affect are important, and more important still is that our emotions engage our reason in the right sort of way. Ultimately Gaus will argue that it is only when this is true, that our practice of social morality can be consistent with our nature as free and equal moral persons.

In emphasizing the importance of our emotions engaging our reasons, Gaus’s point is not that beliefs about those whom our emotions are directed towards are always prerequisites of the moral emotions, but rather that they are typically required in order for our emotions to be sustained. To illustrate this Gaus directs us towards the concept of responsibility, asking what sorts of beliefs and emotions are required to sustain our practice of holding one another accountable to the demands of social morality. Gaus argues that responsibility requires more than just the ability to identify that a moral rule has been broken and the capacity to blame others for violating those rules. Specifically it requires that the individual being held responsible has certain beliefs and that we know her to have these beliefs. It is hard to sustain blame (and similarly hard to maintain resentment) if we come to doubt that the person we are blaming lacked either the requisite knowledge of the moral rule in question, recognition that the rule applies to her, or an understanding that her actions in fact violated that rule.

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Now that we’re moving into the fourth chapter of the book (and the second month of the reading group) I thought that it would be helpful to begin my comments by briefly summarizing the ground that we’ve already covered. Doing so will hopefully make it clearer how Gaus’s arguments in Chapter 4 fit into the rest of the book, remind us of what Gaus has done so far, and orient us towards where we still have to go.

Gaus’s big question is: what sort of social order is appropriate for a society comprised of free and equal persons? The goal of the book then is to provide a framework for gaining critical leverage on our idea of social morality and its attendant practices. Gaus spends the Preface and Chapter 1 laying out the idea of social morality and making the case that social morality is both critically necessary, but at the same time, not an entirely rosy affair. As a result, he argues that our practices call for both normative justification and positive explanation. Chapter 2 began that task by looking at instrumentalist accounts of morality which, Gaus tells us, provide a promising framework for justifying and explaining social morality. Unfortunately, Gaus argues, instrumentalism fails, meaning that we can’t simply reason our way into morality. Chapter 2 leaves us with an explanatory project then that Gaus takes up in chapter 3. There he asks us to look at our actual practices, psychologies, and commitments and, drawing on work in evolutionary game theory, anthropology, and psychology, among other things, he directs our attention to the importance of deontic reasoning, the need for moral/social rules, and the necessity of having a community in which individuals are not merely disposed to follow the rules, but to enforce them as well.

As J. Brennan pointed out in his comments two weeks ago, Gaus’s discussion in sections 7 and 8 of Chapter 3 of how and why something that looks like social morality might develop left us with a number of questions about the normative significance of the descriptive account Gaus offers. I think it’s now clear though that, having left us with these questions, the latter half of chapter 3 is where Gaus begins to offer answers. In sections 9 and 10 Gaus provides us with an account of the rationality of rules and draws our attention to the relationship between positive and true social morality. As Ian Ward emphasized in his comments last week, a core part of Gaus’s story is the idea that an account of true or appropriate social morality must necessarily be constrained by a society’s positive social morality. On Gaus’s view we can gain critical leverage on our practices (in part through employing “transcendent moral concepts”), but that criticism must always proceed from within our existing practices.

In chapter 4 Gaus continues to develop the normative/explanatory project that he began in chapter 3 focusing on how our emotions (sections 11 and 12) and our reasons (section 13) respectively fit into our moral practices. In the rest of these comments I’ll focus on section 11 where Gaus discusses the relationship between our emotions, the concept of moral standing, and our practices of enforcing morality. Later this week I’ll turn my attention to section 12 where Gaus discusses the relationship between our emotions and our concepts of moral autonomy and moral personhood.

Comments on Section 11:

We’ve now seen in several places that an important feature of social morality is that it makes one’s actions the business of others. Section 7’s discussion of the importance of rule-following punishers gave us an account of why this is an important part of social morality, but in section 11 Gaus returns to this important feature of morality, reminding us that we still need an explanation of where the authority to make demands on others comes from. In order to provide this explanation Gaus directs us to two fundamental features of a system of rules populated by rule-following punishers: (i) that we normally display a concern with the conformity of others, and with enforcing this conformity and (ii) a recognition on the part of individuals that the rules normally override one’s own goals, values, and ends (p. 187). Gaus then point us towards our psychology and in particular our emotions in order to explain both (i) and (ii).

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Chapter 9 concluded with the requirement that an adequate account of social rules must be able explain how rule-based reasons can generally override, and yet be somehow responsive to, the other kinds of normative reasons we consider in our deliberations.  If this is required of an account purporting to explain how social rules can be rational, what is required of an account that purports to explain their specifically moral character?

The key concern here is what the normative authority of moral rules consists in.  Gaus identifies two conditions that such rules must satisfy:

1) The justification condition: the rule must pass justificatory muster from the perspective of free and equal persons addressing each other; and
2) The minimal effectiveness condition: the rule must already command some degree of compliance among a significant number of members of the group to which it is taken to apply.

The requirement that a moral rule satisfy both conditions, in turn, places certain constraints on the business of moral theorizing.  Gaus has already claimed that especially austere and rigorist forms of deontolotical ethics that neglect what we might call the holistic character of moral deliberation – the ways in which deontic (rule-based) reasons interact with other species of normative reasons (here Gauss focuses primarily on reasons of the instrumentalist/consequentialist variety; a full account would presumably specify the role of aretaic reasons as well) in context of our reasoning on ethical and political matters.  At the same time, his account of the “strong” character of the relevant rules signals a concern about ethical theories that reduce certain moral concepts to how they are understood within the concept of a particular conceptual scheme, cultural order, or set of social conventions.

Moral rules, and the deontic reasons they generate, must be exhibit some degree of responsiveness to the traditions and practices of a given group:

Unless our analysis of “true morality” connects up with what actual agents see as morality, our philosophical reflections will not address our pretheoretical worries. We come to philosophy worried about the nature of morality, moral relations between free and equal people, and the justification of moral claims. If we develop a philosophical account of morality that tells us what is “right and wrong” that treats moral and conventional rules the same, or sees morality as just another form of prudence, or insists that morality is entirely a matter of reason and so emotion is simply a threat to sound moral judgment – then our account is too far distant from our actual moral concepts to enlighten us about our initial concerns (OPR 174).

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Human beings are social and rule-following creatures.  Gaus has been arguing that our status as rule-followers is central to explaining our social character - that the development of cheater detection and punishment was necessary for the evolution of complex social orders.

The preceding chapter closed with the claim that the relevant evolutionary and psychological literatures have disclosed a kind of pluralism to our rule-following: we operate with many kinds of rules, acquired at different points in our ethical and social formation, which interact with our affective and cognitive equipment in different ways.  This is something which, he claimed, philosophy must take into account.

This accounting begins with how we understand the rationality of rule-following behavior.  Here Gaus puts a new spin on an old philosophical problem, that of the insight of Hobbes’ Fool: “that reason can only tell us how to achieve our own goals and, so, reason can never instruct us to set aside our concerns to conform to social rules” (OPR, 132).  The family of responses to this problem with which Gaus takes issue are those that explain the rationality of social rules through reference to their modally instrumental and morally consequentialist character: the rationality of rules inheres in their instrumentality to the achievement of our preferred outcomes.  Gaus’ concern is that such strategies cannot account for specifically deontic forms of rule-following that are both necessary for social cooperation and resistant to explication in instrumentalist and consequentialist terms.  Hobbes’ old problem now serves as the starting point for a new one: how we can understand a plurality of moral rule-following behaviors (comprising both instrumental/consequentialist and deontic forms) as rational.

Gaus approaches the problem in four steps:

First, an argument that specifically deontic rules are indeed resistant to explanation in insturmentalist and consequentialist terms;

Second, an argument that deontic rules provide us, in nonmysterious ways, with reasons to act;

Third, an argument that the rationality of both instrumental/consequentialist and deontic/nonconsequentialist rules can be encompassed within one over-arching account of rule-following (although this is not Gaus’ preferred view); and

Fourth, a claim that (I thru III) tell us something important about the social character of morality.

(I) Here Gaus considers three strategies that seek to explain deontic rules in instrumental terms, i.e. in terms of their relationship to an individual’s goals, ends and purposes.  The first casts rules as rational conditional policies that agents might adopt as a means to goal pursuit over the long-term.  For Gaus, such policies are “weak rules” that can override short-term goals within the context of an agent’s deliberations.  But they do not require an agent to abandon an agent’s best, long-term, all-things-considered reasons to do what one thinks best.  The “weak” status of such conditional policies, he claims, fail to capture the roles played by social rules in a “stronger” sense that demand compliance even when this does not promote an agent’s goals.

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Society depends upon rules—we cannot live together successfully without some shared set of social rules. But what exactly is a rule, and how do people act upon them?Quoting Gaus, “Rules…identify certain general characteristics or properties, and issue directives for actions with these properties. A fully specified social rule identifies (i) a set of persons to whom the prescription is addressed, (ii) a property of actions, (iii) a deontic operator such that actions with that property may, must, or must not be performed and (iv) a statement of the conditions under which the connection between (ii) and (iii) is relevant.” (123)

To illustrate the import of (iv), Gaus brings up two different rules:

1.     In our school, you will not speak without first raising your hand and being called upon.

2.     In our school, you will not pull another student’s hair.

Gaus says that psychological studies indicate that though the surface grammar of these rules is the same, children understand them differently. They understand 1 as merely a conventional rule, which may or may not hold in other schools or other places. Though 2 also begins with “In our school”, they understand 2 as a moral rule, which applies in all places. So they see factor (iv)—the conditions under which the property and deontic operator are relevant—as different between these two rules.

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Social cooperation is good—we do better with it than without. But social cooperation depends upon trust—we need to be able to count on others being cooperative and disinclined to cheat, break the rules, take advantage of us, and so on. In the kinds of game-theoretic situations that best model society, cooperation and conformity to useful social rules will form a stable equilibrium provided people possess a strong enough conditional preference for following such rules, i.e., provided they prefer to cooperate with cooperators for its own sake, and provided they prefer for its own sake to follow rules when others follow rules.

Gaus asks, “But how could rational individuals develop an independent ‘preference’ or reason to follow a rule?” (103)  He claims to have shown that individual cannot reason themselves into being devoted to such rules, because such devotion might cause them to follow rules even when doing so does not best promote their values. (I am not convinced by Gaus’s arguments; I’ll say more on this below).  We could just posit that people have a preference for following generally-followed rules, but this is unsatisfying, even if it turns out to be true. (Cf: Some economists explain voter turnout—which seems irrational—by positing that voters just have a preference for voting, much like some people have a preference for playing golf. This is unsatisfying, even if true.)  The preference for conditional rule-following is widespread, so a satisfying account would explain why this is so, rather than leave this as a happy accident of human psychology. To explain this preference, Gaus turns to sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and related fields.

People do not simply have a preference to cooperate and follow generally-followed social rules. They also have a preference for punishing defectors, even at their personal expense. For an instance, consider the ultimatum game (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game). If the second player in the ultimatum game had entirely non-tuistic preferences and were indifferent to social rules, we’d expect her to accept whatever money she gets. But, in fact, the second player tends to reject low offers from the first player, thus losing a potential monetary gain. One common explanation for this behavior, and similar behaviors in related games, is that players prefer to punish bad behavior from other players, even at personal expense. (Some economists might be inclined to say that if a player prefers to punish defectors, then by definition punishing defectors is part of that player’s self-interest. I am assuming everyone here understands why that’s a mistake.) When Gaus turns to evolution to explain our preferences for cooperation, he will also explain why the preference to punish is widespread.

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Summary

We saw in section 2.5 that Gaus gives his refutations of attempts to derive principles of morality with revisionist accounts of rational choice in interactive contexts (again, game theoretic contexts). In section 2.6 Gaus considers what he takes to be the remaining option for the instrumentalist program. Here Gaus starts by claiming that if the instrumentalist employs the orthodox account of rational choice in games, then in order to try to explain moral norms as the product of instrumental rationality she needs to consider repeated interactions. In game theoretic parlance, the instrumentalist needs to employ the folk theorem.

The folk theorem, or folk theorems (some authors use the singular, other the plural), is actually a body of results in game theory. What these theorems tells us is that in a game repeated indefinitely often, if the players’ probabilities of continued play are sufficiently high (probabilities known as discount factors), then any outcome where their payoffs are all at least as great as their payoffs at a minimax point can be sustained in equilibrium. The minimax point is an outcome where all try to keep their partners’ payoffs as low as possible, and one can think of this as an outcome of “mutual punishment”. If, for example, the base game is the 2-player Prisoners’ Dilemma (and C is cooperate and D is defect) with appropriately bounded payoffs, then all outcomes where the players’ payoffs are at least as great as the payoffs of the outcome (D,D) can be part of an equilibrium of the indefinitely repeated game. A special and particularly famous case is the outcome where a pair of fixed partners in a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma follow the “tit for tat” strategy. (A “tit for tat” player follows C on the first round of play and then always follows the choice the partner made at the previous round.) Given appropriate discount factors, if both follow “tit for tat” then they are at an equilibrium of the repeated game where each follows C at each round, although of course of course C is never part of an equilibrium of the one shot Prisoners’ Dilemma.

The folk theorem gets its name because game theorists discussed a number of these results informally before the first relevant theorems were published. As a historical tidbit, John Nash appears to have been the first to discover a folk theorem that shows that cooperation can be sustained in equilibrium in a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. Nash shared this result in an unpublished 1950 correspondence. Several authors, including Sugden (Evolution of Rights, Cooperation and Welfare 1986), Skyrms (‘The Shadow of the Future’ 1998) and Binmore (Natural Justice 2005) attribute proto-folk theorem reasoning to Hobbes in his response to the Foole in Leviathan 15 and to Hume in his analysis of promises in Treatise 3.2.5. (This may make it more apparent why I connected sections 2.5 and 2.6 to the so-called reconciliation project in the post on section 2.5.) The folk theorems look like exceptionally powerful results for the instrumentalist program, and in a certain sense they are. They tell us that the members of a community can follow an equilibrium in their repeated interactions where each must follow a cooperative strategy (like C in Prisoners’ Dilemma) with those who are in “good standing” and follow a punishing strategy (like D in Prisoners’ Dilemma) with those in “bad standing”, and this appears to vindicate the instrumentalist claim that norms of social morality really are the product of instrumental rationality. Indeed, some authors even claim that Hobbes’ system of natural law is at bottom a set of rules for following equilibria of the appropriate repeated games!

However, the folk theorems are only existence theorems. They tell us that in repeated games there are equilibria of mutual cooperation, but they tell us nothing regarding how we might start to follow these equilibria. Moreover, in a sense the folk theorems prove “too much”, because they also show that in repeated interactions there are a host of other equilibria besides equilibria of mutual cooperation, and at many of these equilibria some actually exploit others a significant amount of the time. Why should rational agents settle into “nice” equilibria of mutual cooperation rather than more “nasty” equilibria where some take advantage of others or even “state of nature” equilibria where no one cooperates with anyone else?

The instrumentalists who appeal to the folk theorem turn to evolution, and more specifically cultural evolution, as a means of explaining the appropriate equilibrium selection in the repeated games. As Gaus notes, Axelrod brought this idea to prominence in his pioneering study Evolution of Cooperation (1984). As Gaus also notes, many mistakenly concluded from Axelrod’s findings that “tit for tat” is the “correct” strategy for playing repeated Prisoners’ Dilemmas. In fact, no one strategy can be the uniquely rational strategy for playing repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. There is not even a unique strategy for following a cooperative equilibrium of repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma. Gaus notes that the “grim” strategy also characterizes a cooperative equilibrium. In fact, there are many other strategies besides “tot for tat” and “grim” that characterize cooperative equilibria.

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Summary

Sections 2.5 and 2.6 form the core argument of this chapter. These sections can be studied independently of each other, but I think it worthwhile to first take a look at how they work together to support Gaus’ main conclusion of Chapter 2, which is that the instrumentalist program fails. Gaus constructs a dilemma for the instrumentalist: In order to complete the instrumentalist project, one must either (1) adopt some reformed account of rational decisions in interactive contexts (formally, game theoretic contexts), or (2) show that societies will settle into following rules for guiding conduct in repeated interactions that coincide with moral rules, and neither (1) nor (2) is a viable option. Gaus argues that (1) and (2) are both nonviable options in sections 2.5 and 2.6, respectively.

I like to relate the instrumentalist program to the so-called reconciliation project, the attempt to show that acting morally is compatible with rational prudence. There are at least three nonexclusive ways one can try to complete the reconciliation project, which can be illustrated with alternative responses to a moral skeptic like Hobbes’ Foole (Leviathan 15) who claims that at least some of the time rational prudence requires one to violate moral requirements. In response, one can argue either that:

(a) The skeptic overlooks certain goods intrinsic to the practice of morality (a response in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas), or:

(b) The skeptic overlooks some of the options available both to her and to those with whom she interacts (a response in the tradition of Hobbes, Hume, and in our time Sugden, Skyrms and Binmore), or:

(c) The skeptic adopts the wrong account of rational choice in interactive contexts (a response in the new tradition initiated by McClennen and Gauthier)

Responses (b) and (c) obviously dovetail with Gaus’ sections 2.5 and 2.6. Of course, Gaus is discussing the instrumentalist program and not the reconciliation project, but it might be worth noting here that Gaus says little in Chapter 2 regarding supposed intrinsic goods of moral practice, and of course many including skeptics like the Foole deny there are any such goods. In any event, while I think it’s conceivable that an instrumentalist could believe in some goods intrinsic to moral practice (say, if one believes that following moral requirements is a necessary means towards achieving the desired end of reaching Heaven in the afterlife), Gaus keeps his focus in these sections on external goods like others’ labor that one could in principle obtain by means other than following moral requirements, and are more commonly associated with economic analysis.

In Section 2.5 Gaus gives his specific arguments against revisionist theories of game theoretic rationality, and he makes it clear that these arguments resemble some that have appeared before. (Perhaps I should add that I agree with pretty much all of Gaus’ discussion in this section.) Interestingly, Gaus considers only two specific proposals for a revisionist theory, namely, the evidential decision theory of Richard Jeffrey and the past-formed-disposition rule of Gauthier that I regard as a special case of Gauthier’s constrained maximization (Morals By Agreement 1986, Chapter V). I think Gaus believes that the two specific proposals considered here suffice to illustrate a moral general argument: Proposals for a reformed account of game theoretic rationality require us to give up certain fundamental dogmas of instrumental rationality (discussed in section 4.3) we really should not give up, so the revisionist program should be rejected.

Evidential decision theory recommends following C (cooperate) rather than D (defect) in Prisoners’ Dilemma when one believes one’s own choice is sufficiently correlated with her partner’s choice, same as evidential decision theory recommends choosing only the opaque box in Newcomb’s problem. This is tantamount to treating one’s own choice as if this choice is not causally independent of the choices of one’s partners. But Gaus, following Skyrms, reminds us that the players’ choices in a Prisoners’ Dilemma are causally independent (p. 76). Here is another way to another way to make the point (though Gaus does not explicitly make the point this way): To claim that one should choose a strategy on the grounds that this strategy is probabilistically correlated with the strategy one’s partner chooses is to in effect deny that the Prisoners’ Dilemma is a game in strategic form. (By definition, in a strategic form game the players must select their strategies without being able to observe the selections of their partners.) In this context, evidential decision theory would recommend that we don’t follow strictly dominant strategies, but we really have no good reason to give up on dominance reasoning. (Perhaps I should add that Jeffery himself did not think evidential decision theory recommends cooperation in the one-shot Prisoners’ Dilemma, though some evidential decision theorists do think this.)

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Summary
Gaus begins this section by describing a Kantian proposal for how to reconcile the freedom and equality of persons with the authority of morality. First, we bracket our private ends-those things that divide us. Second, we focus on those common considerations that can serve as the basis for justifications of moral requirements. Rawls famously formalized this two-step procedure with the veil of ignorance and the idea of a list of primary goods essential to the exercise and development of the two moral powers. But because the Kant-Rawls solution involves bracketing everything that divides us–most importantly, our different comprehensive doctrines–there is no real evaluative diversity in the original position. The original position, as many critics have pointed out, is not a problem of collective choice, but a problem of individual choice since there is only a single perspective that remains after the veil of ignorance has been imposed. For Gaus, this creates two big problems.

First, how do we know that we have sufficient reason to follow the rules of morality if those rules have been determined only by abstracting away from those values (i.e. our comprehensive doctrines) that we care deeply about? Merely showing that we can get a set of justified moral rules by bracketing what divides us doesn’t establish that we have good reasons to follow these rules when we consider our full set of reasons. This is the problem of stability. Gaus argues the later Rawls recognized this problem, and this explains Rawls’s claim in Political Liberalism that the rules generating by the freestanding argument in the original position provide only a pro tanto justification–the full justification of those rules is not achieved until each person sees that he or she has reasons from within his or her wider doctrine to endorse the rules. When everyone achieves this reconciliation, we famously have an overlapping consensus on a public conception of justice.

But Rawls’s solution appears to ignore (or at least downplay) a second problem: indeterminacy. Rawls gets a unique set of principles out of the original position by eliminating all the evaluative diversity from that choice procedure. But once we let the evaluative diversity back in, either via the overlapping consensus, or in some other way, Gaus argues we are bound to get quite a bit of indeterminacy regarding the publicly justifiable rules. There just isn’t enough common ground, Gaus believes, to derive anything like a uniquely justified list of moral rules. Rawls saw indeterminacy as a potentially fatal problem, but Gaus encourages us to embrace it as the inevitable result of respecting evaluative diversity while searching for publicly justifiable moral rules. If we consider what could be justified to members of the public, Gaus suggests that what we will get is a non-empty and non-singular set of optimal eligible proposals, and of course there will be disagreement regarding the ranking of these different proposals.

So how do we solve this problem of indeterminacy? Here is where Hume provides a helping hand. Instead of following Kant or Rawls and looking for ways to exclude evaluative diversity and thereby avoid indeterminacy, Gaus urges us to draw on the resources of a more Humean approach to social morality. In particular, Gaus says we can draw on the idea that moral norms evolve and become stable as a solution to the large-scale coordination problem of how to live together cooperatively in a way that can benefit everyone. Without this kind of convergence–for example, convergence on rules over property rights and how they are to be respected–social life would be filled with costly and inefficient conflicts. So even if idealized members of the public will not converge on a unique set of moral rules due to evaluative diversity, real people will inevitably do so as a result of evolutionary pressures to reach an equilibrium. This evolutionary perspective also helps to dissolve the puzzle of mutual authority mentioned in the previous sections. Social morality is a form of decentralized social authority between many people, and not some puzzling form of mutual authority between two agents.

Gaus’s brilliant solution to the puzzle of how morality’s authority can be reconciled with our freedom and equality is thus a reconciliation of Kantian and Humean perspectives. A publicly justified morality is a set of moral rules that is both: (1) an equilibrium solution that has evolved to help individuals solve their large-scale coordination problem of social cooperation, and (2) is among the members of the optimal eligible set that could be justified to idealized members of the public. As Gaus puts it, without the evolutionary story, the Kantian approach is hopelessly controversial or indeterminate. But without the emphasis on public justification, evolved moral rules are merely authoritarian.

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OPR attempts to show how moral authority can is possible despite disagreement among free and equal persons about the nature of morality. To do so, we must determine what moral authority is and the challenges it raises.

Section 2 might be read as an explanation of the various notions of freedom at work in the book. The first idea that Gaus analyzes is the “presumptive” or “natural” freedom in the state of nature. On this “negative” conception of freedom, X is free when X is free from requirements to comply with the judgments of others about morality. Notice that this is not freedom from morality but freedom that obtains when one is free from the others’ varying interpretations of morality.

Gaus ties his conception of freedom to the Kantian notion of autonomy and to what Susan Wolf calls Kant’s “Reason View” where one is autonomous when she has the option to act in accord with reason. For Gaus, “a free moral person is one who acts according to her own reasoning about the demands of morality.” (15).

A justified moral order rejects the claims of natural or self-appointed authority of some over others. When citizens make unjustified demands, those that do not appeal to the reason of citizens, they are “authoritarian”. (16). For Gaus, authoritarianism is the original sin of political philosophy. The authoritarian is not only morally suspect but fails to establish authoritative claims over her compatriots, since she appeals only to her own reasons, not to others’. For Gaus, for John to treat Reba as a free and equal moral person means that he must “acknowledge a fundamental constraint on the justification of claims to moral authority over her.” (17). The political philosopher must dispel the suspicion that morality is a form of illegitimate social control to explain how such moral authority can be justified.

Gaus next introduces a contrast between two conceptions of free and equal moral persons and their connection to social morality. Gaus ascribes to prominent Kantians Tim Scanlon and Stephen Darwall what he calls the “Expansive View” where we recognize others as free and equal means by “act[ing] toward others according to principles they could not reasonably reject.” Gaus takes Darwall and Scanlon to hold that “recognizing others as free and equal immediately implies [emphasis mine] a formula for what actions are morally permissible.” Yet the Expansive View is unattractive because it loads too much of the content of morality into a conceptual claim about the nature of recognizing others as free and equal. The Expansive View is therefore too controversial to form the foundation of a justification for social morality under conditions of reasonable pluralism.

The “Restrictive View” is an alternative to the Expansive View. It holds that moral personhood “consists in the capacity to care for moral rules in such a way that one recognizes a compelling reason to abide by the rule even when such conformity does not promote one’s wants, ends, or goals.” (19). Gaus believe that he can demonstrate that the Restrictive View is an implicit part of our social practices and so is presupposed by participation in any extended system of social cooperation. Notice that Gaus endorses the Expansive View (p. 20) but that he thinks it is vital to publicly justify the Expansive View in light of the Restrictive View.

Gaus introduces two puzzles about morality authority in Section 2.3. The ideas of freedom from judgment, natural moral personhood and equality among persons raise the Puzzle of the Assertion of Authority over an Equal. The puzzle concerns not speech acts but “claims to authority over another.” The puzzle is this: How can moral equals show that they have the authority to demand that others conform to certain social rules? The second puzzle is the Puzzle of Mutual Authority which arises because all persons have the ability to acquire authority over each other despite their equality. Gaus thinks that Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant all thought the puzzles could be solved. On their view, authority among equals must be possible in order to resolve conflicts of private judgment.

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Section 1 has a simple aim: to introduce Gaus’s distinctive concept of “social morality” and to describe its central features. Social morality is “the basic framework for a cooperative and mutually beneficial social life” and “provides rules that we are required to act upon and which provide the basis for authoritative demands of one person addressed to another.” The authority relation is fleshed out in detail in Section 2. In this post, I will proceed by enumerating the core features of Gausian social morality.

Social Morality, the Definition:

Social morality is “the set of social-moral rules that require or prohibit action, and so grounds moral imperatives that we direct to each other to engage in, or refrain from, certain lines of conduct” (2).

Notice that Gaus emphasizes that he is not talking about the whole domain of the normative. Instead, his focus is on a particular kind of normativity, one that involves socially practiced demands and imperatives.

Social Morality, Feature #1: Coordination and Cooperation

An essential feature of social morality is that it serves a social function; it “has its roots in this requirement of social life.” The rules of social morality “structure social interaction.” Gaus emphasizes that social morality must have the practical function of making us better off: “certainly one of the things morality must do is allow us to live together in cooperative, mutually beneficial, social relations.” (4).

Social Morality, Feature #2: Extension and Restraint of Our Aims

The “Baier-Strawson” view of social morality is that social morality is a set of rules that allow us to live well together and that require our obedience. Social morality is contrasted with personal values or “individual ideals.” Social morality is comprised of rules that both “provide the conditions for the successful pursuit of these ideals” but also “simultaneously constrain our choices about how to pursue them.” (6).

Social Morality, Feature #3: Not Instrumental

Gaus will focus on this feature in Chapter 2 but he notes here that if we admit that social morality “has a job to perform” that we must ask whether it is merely a tool that we use for our benefit. Gaus thinks not. Instead, he will argue that we have independent reason to follow moral rules other than its coordinating function.

Social Morality, Feature #4: Imperatival

Social morality provides “the basis for issuing demands on others that they must perform certain actions.” Gaus contrasts this view of modern social morality with an ancient, Aristotelian teleological account of morality that understands moral rules in terms of the ends they promote. Setting aside the matter of whether Larmore and Sidgwick (mentioned in the book) have the history right (I suspect they don’t), the contrast is still useful: Gaus will argue that our reasons to follow social morality are not to promote our ends. This is the point of Chapter 2 and it crucial for the argument of the book.

Social Morality, Feature #5: Prescriptive (Though also Descriptive)

For Gaus, social-moral rules have a prescriptive function. They have their home in our social practices. Gaus is clear to emphasize that he rejects the simple contrast between descriptivist and prescriptivist accounts of the semantics of moral statements. Instead, following R.M. Hare, he claims that many moral statements have both elements. This key feature of social morality makes social morality a social phenomenon. In other words, part (though not all) of the essence of social-moral rules is that they are used to control others. We use moral rules to tell each other what to do. Morality, furthermore, makes “my action your business” because it assigns standing to you to make demands of me.

A critic might reply that the authority of morality is distinct from the authority of those who interpret it. But Gaus follows Hobbes and Kant in pointing out the fact that morality does not “fax its demands from above” but is instead often unclear. People disagree about what absolute or True morality consists in. As will become clear, social morality is a method of resolving disputes about what the True morality is. However, social morality’s claims must have authority that all can recognize despite their disagreements about what Morality-with-a-capital-M is. If social morality cannot ground authority despite disagreement about ultimate normativity then our social practices cannot be authoritative despite disagreement. The authority of social morality in a diverse world becomes impossible. But surely, Gaus suggests, this cannot be true.

Social Morality, Feature #6: Deference in Private Judgment

The sixth feature of social morality is that it is constituted by claims of moral authority, but moral authority understood as “a claim to deference in judgment.” In its most fundamental mode, moral authority is the authority to demand that others follow your interpretation of Morality-with-a-capital-M. Moral authority “qua moral power” (the Hohfeldian incident of a power-right) is important but this form authority is downstream from moral authority as a claim to deference in judgment.

Social Morality, Feature #7: Non-Ontological

Gaus throws away a brief line that he follows Hare in “putting aside ontological issues about the nature of morality.” It is interesting to speculate on what this might mean. In short, I think Gaus thinks that his hybrid view of social-moral statements is compatible with a range of plausible views of the metaphysics of social morality. In other words, it is compatible with a range of views about truth-makers for moral claims (or something close to this).

In sum: social morality is the set of moral rules that:

(1) Coordinate our actions and help us to cooperate;
(2) Extend and restrain our aims;
(3) Are followed for non-instrumental reasons;
(4) Consist of imperatives issued in social interaction;
(5) Are essentially prescriptive;
(6) Command deference in private judgment;
(7) Can be characterized somewhat independently of claims about moral metaphysics;

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The Order of Public Reason opens with concerns about how contemporary political philosophy is practiced. Gaus argues that political philosophers artificially divide up core questions in order to make their jobs easier. Instead, they miss vital connections between these questions. When Gaus says he is a “fox” in the fox-and-hedgehog-sense, you may want to laugh (I chuckled) but I take Gaus to mean that his method is highly eclectic in contrast to the methods of most political philosophers. One point of OPR is to show how a more holistic and comprehensive method pays off.Despite his foxy method, Gaus is explicit that OPR aims to answer a single, hedgehog’s question:

Can the authority of social morality be reconciled with our status as free and equal moral persons in a world characterized by deep and pervasive yet reasonable disagreements about the standards by which to evaluate the justifiability of claims to moral authority? (xv)

This question seems clear on its face, but in fact as we make our way through the book, it will become clear that the question refers to ideas that Gaus develops in great detail, including “authority”, “social morality”, “free and equal moral persons”, “reasonable disagreements” and “the justifiability of claims”. Nonetheless, it should be clear to the reader that Gaus intends to use a “Foxy” method to answer a Hedgehog’s question. And in fact, this is arguably the central question of political philosophy from the perspective of the social contract tradition. Gaus conceives of his project as an attempt to answer the classical asked by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant and Rawls, and yet he thinks their questions cannot be answered without reference to philosophers and social theorists from very different traditions, like David Hume, Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek.

The preface provides us with a clear statement of how Gaus understands morality as a set of distinct domains of normative analysis. It is crucial to see at the outset that Gaus is focused on what he calls social morality. It is a bit like Tim Scanlon’s “what we owe to each other” morality, the set of social rules and practices by which we make moral demands of one another. Gaus sees social morality as essentially constituted by prescriptions about what others to do. He worries that morality can be authoritarian, that is, social morality can consist in an unjustified set of social practices of ostracism, arbitrary domination, and the like. A social order cleansed of authoritarianism, whose social morality is justified to all, is “an order of public reason.” Remember Gaus’s words: “Morality does not directly speak to us; it is other people who speak to us, asserting their views of morality as demands that we act as they see fit.”

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This post is intended to serve as a reference point for all posts relating to our reading group on Jerry Gaus’s The Order of Public Reason. Below you will find our reading schedule and discussant list. We are going to cover two sections a week for thirteen weeks. The book is long, but at this pace, you’ll only have about thirty to fifty pages of reading each week. Each discussant will cover one or two sections.

I propose that we structure the posts in the following way, though others are free to diverge from my recommendations. First, each section should have its own post that will be linked through this one as a reference point. I suggest that each post be neatly divided into an expository part and a critical part. My own preference is to summarize the section in under 1000 words and then raise 500 words of criticisms. It would also be good to structure the criticism in ways that make the section amenable to discussion. Think of questions that not only concern you but that might concern others. In constructing my own contributions, I’ve found the book so rich and deep that an adequate exposition takes long enough and suggests enough of its own questions to where exposition may be sufficient to get good discussion off the ground, so I think it is fine to simply raise your own questions and criticisms in the comments.

Discussions in the comments should be largely focused on the topics raised by that particular section, though of course the sections are all deeply interwoven. If the discussion branches off into several topics, I suggest either placing a brief heading on your comment or, if the subject warrants further discussion, creating your own post on the matter.

I’m going to title my posts “OPR: Ch.I, The Fundamental Problem, Sec.1, Social Morality” and then “OPR: Ch.I.2, Moral Authority among Free and Equal Persons”. Posts title should err on the side of brevity. Jerry has not made this easy on us, but by using abbreviations for repeated text, I think we can make due.

I think we should post the first section of each week on Monday morning and the second on Wednesday morning in order to give us time to focus in on one particular section. There is so much going on in each section that we will have plenty to talk about.

Please note that if you still need a sample copy, email me at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com.

Ok, with that, we’re off. Here’s the schedule:

OPR Reading Group

Chapter I: The Fundamental Problem

January 17th: Preface and Section 1, Social Morality (Kevin Vallier)
January 19th: Section 2, Moral Authority among Free and Equal Persons (Kevin Vallier)
January 24th: Section 3, Evaluative Diversity and the Problem of Indeterminacy (Jonathan Quong)

Part One: Social Order and Social Morality

Chapter II: The Failure of Instrumentalism

January 26th: Section 4, The Instrumentalist Approach to Social Order (Jonathan Quong)
January 31st: Section 5, Revisionist Theories (Peter Vanderschraaf)
February 2nd: Section 6, Orthodox Instrumentalism (Peter Vanderschraaf)

Chapter III: Social Morality as the Sphere of Rules

February 7th: Section 7, The Evolution of Rule-Following Punishers (Jason Brennan)
February 9th, Section 8, Deontic Reasoning (Jason Brennan)
February 14th, Section 9, The Rationality of Following Rules (Ian Ward)
February 16th, Section 10, Moral Rules as Social Rules (Ian Ward)

Chapter IV: Emotion and Reason in Social Morality

February 21st: Section 11, Moral Demands and Moral Emotions (Keith Hankins)
February 23rd: Section 12, Moral Emotions and Moral Autonomy (Keith Hankins)
February 28th: Section 13, The Reasons One Has (John Thrasher) (Part 2)

Part Two: Real Public Reason

Chapter V: The Justificatory Problem and the Deliberative Model

March 7th: Section 14, On Modeling Public Justification (Andrew Lister) (Part 2) (Part 3)
March 14th: Section 15, Proposals (Micah Schwartzman)
March 16th: Section 16, Evaluating Proposals and the Problem of Indeterminacy (Micah Schwartzman)

Chapter VI: The Rights of the Moderns

March 21st: Section 17, Arguments from Abstraction and the Claims of Agency (Blain Neufeld)
March 28th: Section 18, Jurisdictional Rights (John Thrasher)

Chapter VII: Moral Equilibrium and Moral Freedom

March 30th: Section 19, Coordinating on a Morality (Colin Bird)
April 4th: Section 20, The Evolution of Morality (Thomas Porter)
April 6th: Section 21, The Testing Conception (Thomas Porter)

Chapter VIII: The Moral and Political Orders

April 11th: Section 22, The Authority of the State (Peter Stone)
April 13th: Section 23, The Justification of Coercive Laws (Peter Stone)
April 18th: Section 24, Private Property and the Redistributive State (Christopher Morris)
April 20th: Section 25, Further Functions of the State and Practical Paretianism (Christopher Morris)
April 25th: Concluding Remarks on Moral Freedom and Moral Theory (Kevin Vallier)
April 27th: Appendix A, The Plurality of Morality (Kevin Vallier)

This post is an announcement that our spring reading group on Gerald Gaus’s new The Order of Public Reason reading group begins a week from today on January 17th. We have a number of fabulous contributors who will take on various sections of the book, not only providing a brief summary of the reading, but their own thoughts and criticisms of the text. Among our committed contributors (those who have spoken with me since the new year about the reading group) are Christopher Morris, Micah Schwartzman, Jonathan Quong, Jason Brennan, Thomas Porter, Blain Neufeld, Kevin Gray, and Ian Ward. Others who have expressed interest should contact me soon.

Cambridge University Press summarizes The Order of Public Reason (OPR) as follows: “Gerald Gaus shows how we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyses social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.”

We welcome all contributors to the Public Reason blog as discussants. For those of you who have not joined up, let this reading group be a reason for you to do so. We’re also happy to have as many readers as we can. I want to state here that you will find that OPR is quite expensive. You can compare prices for the book here. However, if you cannot afford to buy the book, do not let this discourage you from participating. Sample copies are available. Just email me at kevinvallier-at-gmail-dot-com and I will be more than happy to provide you with a sample until you can purchase the book for yourself.

I will post the first entry next Monday. We will be reading the preface, and the first two sections of Chapter 1. The first two sections are a total of 36 pages. The text is quite engaging and provocative. I am sure you will enjoy it.

You can find the schedule and links to the posts on each section here.

I am delighted to announce a new book series in moral philosophy:

Studies in Moral Philosophy is a new book series affiliated with the Journal of Moral Philosophy. This new series will publish books in all areas of normative philosophy, including applied ethics and metaethics, as well as moral, legal, and political theory. Research book proposals exploring non-Western traditions are also welcome. The series seeks to promote lively discussions and debates among the wider philosophical community by publishing work that avoids unnecessary jargon without sacrificing academic rigour.

Prospective authors interested in contributing to this series should contact the Series Editor, Thom Brooks, in the first instance.

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!

For those of you who do not know, Cambridge is about to publish Jerry Gaus’s new book, The Order of Public Reason. It will be out in hardback by the first of next year. Here’s a general description of the book:

In this innovative and important work, Gerald Gaus advances a revised, and more realistic, account of public reason liberalism, showing how, in the midst of fundamental disagreement about values and moral beliefs, we can achieve a moral and political order that treats all as free and equal moral persons. The first part of this work analyzes social morality as a system of authoritative moral rules. Drawing on an earlier generation of moral philosophers such as Kurt Baier and Peter Strawson as well as current work in the social sciences, Gaus argues that our social morality is an evolved social fact, which is the necessary foundation of a mutually beneficial social order. The second part considers how this system of social moral authority can be justified to all moral persons. Drawing on the tools of game theory, social choice theory, experimental psychology, and evolutionary theory, Gaus shows how a free society can secure a moral equilibrium that is endorsed by all, and how a just state respects, and develops, such an equilibrium.

Given the orientation of the blog, I suspect the book will be of interest. Would anyone be interested in running a reading group here?

Sen returns to many of the themes of The Idea of Justice in the final chapter. He begins by noting that people respond to injustice with anger and indignation, but that justice requires reasoned scrutiny of these sentiments (Chapter 1). Public reasoning is central to justice, since “there is a clear connection between the objectivity of a judgment and its ability to withstand public scrutiny” (394; c.f., Chapter 5, 15-17). Decisions need to be seen as just not only for instrumental reasons, but because those that cannot be made public are likely unsound. (388-94)Justice involves the comparison of a plurality of impartial reasons which may conflict (Chapter 9). There is a tendency in moral and political thought to search for a single value that encompasses all others (e.g., pleasure), but reason doesn’t support this reduction. Happily, non-commensurability and incompleteness don’t inhibit our ability to reason objectively about justice. Though we may need to accept “an unresolvable diversity of views,” this is usually “a last resort”. (397, footnote) In many cases, we can identity shared partial rankings to guide our decisions even if our personal reasons behind these rankings are different. (394-401; c.f., Chapter 4)

According to Sen, reasoning about justice should not be confined to a single state or community, but rather be global and cosmopolitan. Justice requires “open impartiality” (Chapters 5-9). Non-compatriots’ interests are relevant to justice, as are their perspectives; these may help correct our parochial biases. Our actions at the level of the state affect people outside its boundaries, so we should consider their interests before acting. For example, the US reaction to the global recession has far reaching consequences to the global and hence most local economies. Also, our values may have their basis in ignorance and exposure to people outside of our circle may give use more adequate information for assessing them. Sen cites Adam Smith’s discussion of infanticide here. (404)

Sen refers loosely to “global democracy”. Unlike many cosmopolitans, he doesn’t reject a global state outright, but rather points to its current infeasibility. He connects the rejection of cosmopolitan accounts of justice with Rawls and Nagel’s view that justice primarily concerns institutional arrangements. If global institutions are necessary for justice, this may support justice’s limited scope. Instead, Sen relies on his conception of democracy as public reasoning and the role of governmental bodies (e.g., the United Nations and its different bodies), citizens’ organizations, “many NGOs, and parts of the news media”. (409) Instead of working toward a global state, we should work to strengthen global public reason. (401-9)

Fourth, Sen’s theory of justice has its roots in social choice theory, not on the social contract. (Chapters 2-6, 9) His theory of justice “concentrates, as the discipline of social choice does, on making evaluative comparisons over distinct social realizations.” (410) This leads to a concern with comparative justice and a focus on actual outcomes, rather than “perfect justice” that primarily examines institutions. (410-2) Sen returns to the distinction between niti and nyaya and reiterates the importance of taking into account actual outcomes instead of concentrating on just institutions or principles. (413)

The role of philosophy in justice is to “play a part in bringing more discipline and greater reach to reflections on values and priorities as well as on the denials, subjugations and humiliations from which human beings suffer across the world.” (413)

Questions and thoughts:

1) Since this is the final chapter, I think it’s worth asking what Sen hoped to accomplish in The Idea of Justice. Is The Idea of Justice a culmination of Sen’s work in political philosophy the way Theory of Justice incorporates and refines the papers that led up to it or is it a summary where the reader must consult Sen’s references to journal publications to fully evaluate his considered views?
I’m inclined to think that The Idea of Justice is not a definitive statement of Sen’s views. (Blaine mentioned that chapter 1 is not really aimed at professional philosophers or political theorists; the same could be said of the book.) First, most of the chapters are far too short on detail and discussion of the literature to satisfy a philosophical audience. Second, most of the discussion is non-technical and accessible in its general outlines to a non-philosophical audience (as the mainly favorable reviews in the mainstream press suggest). Third, Sen gives many references to his journal publications, suggesting that they are relevant to evaluating his fully formed position.

2) If I am right here, then it’s worth asking about the value of Sen’s approach. Who ought a theory of justice to address? One possibility is that it ought to speak to political philosophers and theorists immersed in the most recent scholarly discussions. My impression is that most of the people who have participated in this reading group find Sen’s book unsatisfactory on this account.

Another possibility is that a theory of justice ought to be accessible to a wide range of academics, including economists, sociologists, law, geography, education etc. I suspect that it may be better received by people who aren’t immersed in philosophy, particularly economists. One reason is that if we follow Sen, we can largely bypass the philosophical literature on justice, a plus for people in other disciplines who work on the topic. A third is that the theory should seem relevant to academics in general, politicians, and the reflective public.

Obviously, different work can engage each of these three audiences, but I think we need to ask this question for two reasons. First, how do we fairly evaluate a work? For example, should we assess Sen’s book based on how well it engages recent philosophical literature on justice? Second, the choice of audience is central to political philosophy’s ends. Presumably, political philosophy should have some indirect influence on policy. If Sen had tried to satisfy his philosophical critics, his book would need to be at least twice as long and would have a much smaller audience.

3) Social choice perspective plays a central role in Sen’s theory. In fact, it may be fair to claim that his theory of justice treats political philosophy as a sophisticated branch of normative economics. I believe a fair assessment of Sen’s book would require delving into his work on rationality and social choice. Social choice theory grounds his pluralism and informs his basic “comparative” framework. Sen starts with individual preferences, but subjects them to standards of rationality and public reason and asks how they can be aggregated in a morally salient way. The result is that quite a bit of substantial political theorizing is outside of the hands of political philosophers and left to public reasoning (where political philosophers can weigh in but have no special authority).

Political philosophers have reason to worry on two fronts: economics and the general public have a greater role in determining the just society. Should they accept this?

In chapter 17, Sen outlines a theory of human rights. He acknowledges that many human rights activists have little patience for philosophical discussions on the nature (and indeed existence) of human rights. He also discusses Jeremy Bentham’s quip that the natural rights are “nonsense on stilts”. Sen insists that if “the idea of human rights … is to command reasoned and sustained loyalty” (356), we must address the skeptics and cynics.

Sen analyzes human rights in terms of their content and their justification (their “viability”) (358). With regard to their content, human rights are moral rights that protect important freedoms and entail social obligations that people promote these freedoms. First, Sen stresses that human rights are moral rights - “really strong ethical pronouncements as to what should be done”. (357) They are not legal rights, though they are often enshrined in legal documents and institutions. (363) Law plays a central role in guaranteeing human rights, but other activities such as education, public monitoring, debate, and protest are also crucial. Indeed, there are cases under which giving human rights legal status may be counterproductive. Fining or jailing men who deny their wives an effective voice in family decisions is probably not the best way to promote women’s equality. (365)

Second, the purpose of human rights is to protect important freedoms. (376-9) As we have seen, Sen’s analysis of freedom includes an “opportunity aspect” and a “process aspect”. The capabilities approach captures the opportunity aspect (capabilities are real opportunities to achieve valuable functionings). (371) But human rights go beyond the capabilities approach in protecting the process according to which achieve these functionings. Two people with access to an identical set of functionings may be in a quite different situation with regard to human rights. For example, the rule of law may guarantee person A’s access valuable functionings, whereas person B may rely on the whim of a benevolent dictator. Leaving aside the fact that dictators generally do a poor job of guaranteeing human rights, many of us also care about how rights are guaranteed.

Sen objects to interest-based accounts of human rights because he thinks they interfere with our intuitions about the importance of freedom. His objection rests on the distinction between people’s “real” interests and the interests they perceive themselves as having. For example, we generally want to protect the human right to free political association, even if people choose to associate with political parties that do not promote their real interests. Sen admits that some interpretations of “interest” incorporate freedom, so some freedom-based and interest-based accounts of human rights converge.

Third, human rights do not protect all freedoms. Rather, they must meet “threshold conditions” of “sufficient social importance to be included as a part of the human rights of that person and correspondingly to generate obligations for others to see how they can help the person to realize those freedoms…” (367) Impartial discussion is needed to determine which rights meet this threshold.

Fourth, human rights entail social obligations. (360) Human rights impose universal ethical reasons for people to prevent their violation, but these reasons do not automatically entail specific actions. Obligations may be perfect, but they are often imperfect and diffuse. We need to ask about the agents’ other obligations, their ability to effectively prevent the violation of the human right, their agent-relative prerogatives, etc.

How does Sen justify a list of human rights and identify the obligations that they entail? On his account, human rights are justified like other ethical claims. To assert a human right is to presume that these claims will meet the standard of “open impartiality” discussed in Chapter 6. Human rights claims that “survive open and informed scrutiny” (385) and “unobstructed discussion” (386) deserve their status - at least until contrary arguments surface. Even if there is widespread agreement about which rights count as human rights, people are bound to disagree about their comparative weight, how they mesh with other ethical considerations, and the structure of the obligations they impose.

Sen is particularly concerned about the justification of second-generation economic and social rights such as the right to subsistence, medical care, and education. (379-85) He discusses two philosophical criticisms of human rights, the “institutionalization critique” and the “feasibility critique”. Onora O’Neill has argued that social, economic, and cultural rights must be institutionalized in a way that clearly identifies obligation-bearers. Human rights without obligation-bearers are not human rights at all. In response, Sen argues that first-generation rights also impose imperfect obligations. For example, citizens have obligations to notify the police when witnessing a crime and the international community has an obligation to act to prevent genocide. Furthermore, O’Neill’s condition that human rights economic, social, and cultural rights must be institutionalized undermines their ability to motivate institutional change.

Similarly, Maurice Cranston argues in his “feasibility” critique that economic and social rights require considerable government action for their realization, something that often cannot be achieved with some countries’ infrastructure and resources. Sen responds by noting that Cranston is mistaken in thinking that first-generation rights simply require that governments and people “leave a man alone.” (384) Maintaining rule of law and social stability is also beyond the means of quite a few governments, but few hold that this discredits their moral force. The proper response to the inability to meet the requirements imposed by a human right is social action.

Like most of the preceding chapters, there are many issues that could be raised, including whether Sen adequately addresses interest-based human rights accounts, fairly rebuts O’Neill and Cranston (and other critics), etc. I’ll conclude with two general questions.

1) Will Sen’s account of human rights satisfy either skeptics or activists? Skeptics are unlikely to be moved by the appeal to reasoned scrutiny and discussion and will still decry the impotence of human rights in the face of realpolitik. Moreover, Sen’s broad treatment of human rights is deflationary, arguably reducing them to important moral rights that have special rhetorical force. His metaphysical modesty and non-committal approach to the actual list of rights may play into the skeptics’ hands who will deny that there is anything particularly special about human rights that lack the sanction of positive law. Sen is a long way from the natural law tradition he discusses in the first part of the chapter. He holds not only that there is a trade-off between human rights - sometimes human rights conflict - but that sometimes other ethical prerogatives or obligations can take precedent over obligations stemming from them.

Similarly, activists will ask how his account supplements their work. We can return to the Preface and ask how the Parisians storming the Bastille, Gandhi or Martin Luther King would view Sen’s account of human rights. Does it help with “the identification of redressable injustice”? (vii) Does it “clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice”? (ix) Sen’s account of human rights is in many ways refined common sense. Activists may complain that this doesn’t add much moral clarification or force to their causes.

2) There is a tension between Sen’s pluralism and “assertive incompleteness” and his account of human rights. Recall that Sen argues that impartial discussion may not lead to agreement about just social arrangements, including agreement on the list of human rights and their content. Human rights are moral claims of sufficient social importance that their guarantee entails social duties. Presumably, they should be subject to “plural grounding”. (2) If a human right is sufficiently disputed by reasonable people from a perspective of “open impartiality”, then it should be (tentatively) struck from the pantheon.

My worry is that Sen’s theory of justice may commit him to minimalism about human rights. For example, in the example of the children deciding who receives the flute, Sen seems to consider a libertarian distribution of property reasonable. This would cast doubt on the status of the second-generation rights he defends.

This chapter covers three empirical issues relating to democracy: 1) the connection between democracy (or public reasoning—Sen seems to use these terms interchangeably) and famine, 2) the connection between democracy and economic development and 3) the promotion of tolerance toward minorities. In what follows, I will first restate Sen’s account of democracy (given in the previous chapter), as this is relevant to his interpretation of the data he provides in chapter 16. Second, I will outline his discussions of each of the three topics he takes up, and, third, I will raise a few questions about the causal connections he proposes in the discussion of famine.

Democracy

Sen views democracy as not merely the presence of elections and ballots, but as “government by discussion,” which includes “political participation, dialogue and public interaction (326).” He believes that an unrestrained media is especially important to the functioning of democratic societies, for a number of reasons, one of which plays a central role in his discussion of famines: a free press, Sen tells us, contributes to human security by giving a voice to the vulnerable and disadvantaged and by subjecting the government to criticism. (More on this
below.)

Democracy and Famine

In 1982, in an article in The New York Review of Books, Sen made the observation that “no major famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy with regular elections, opposition parties, basic freedom of speech and a relatively free media (even when the country is very poor and in a seriously adverse food situation) (342).” Further, while India was under autocratic British rule, famines were regular occurrences; once India achieved democratic self-rule famines ceased. (Apparently, Sen’s observation about democracy and absence of famine was initially met with a fair amount of skepticism. Now it is widely accepted.) Sen infers from the observed correlation that democracy prevents famine. He offers two reasons in support of this inference. First, democratic governments are accountable to their citizens and subject to uncensored criticism from the media. So, in order to maintain power, democratic governments have a strong incentive to eradicate famines. (Indeed Sen argues later in the chapter that the famine case is really an instance of a broader phenomenon whereby democracy advances human security by giving political incentive to rulers to respond to vulnerable citizens.) Second, because of the informational role of the free press, democratic governments are likely to know about the plight of citizens and therefore about the need for amelioration. By contrast, authoritarian regimes, which suppress public discussion, may be simply uninformed about the severity or extent of a famine and fail to provide assistance for that reason.

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