chenr@tilt.FUN (Ray Chen) (03/09/85)
The point has been made that in debating political systems, people invariably debate until they get down to the basic principles or axioms that form the foundation of the systems they are championing. There they arrive at an impasse since they have no way to debate axioms in a rational manner as an axiom is by definition assumed or taken on faith. Some have taken the approach to attempting to derive their axioms from a historical perspective. Although this may be a better approach then simply assuming axioms on faith, many people still regard this method with suspicion as historical "truths" can not be guaranteed to be so and even if they were, the set of historical truths must be a subset of the set of political truths. Thus, limiting oneself to historical truths would be an unnecessarily restrictive step when constructing a political theory. Axioms in political theories are usually assumed because the consequences of applying the axioms to a society produce results that are regarded as just. The problem to me, then, seems to be a matter of defining justice. The Libertarians offer a formulation of justice which might be interpreted as "justice as non-coercion". I happen to hold another view of justice: "justice as fairness". In a system that is fair, the principles of justice governing that system are produced by a fair procedure. The advantages of such a system is that the principles of justice are not decided a priori, nor are they set in concrete once they are decided on. If new developments in political theory unearth new facts or theories, the procedure can be run again to generate new principles that take into account the new developments. This procedure also provides a framework in which to debate various axioms. The question, then, is what is a fair procedure? Answer: A fair procedure is one in which a one would be willing to live with the outcome no matter which person you actually ended up being in that procedure. In other words, take the example of a labor arbritration. A fair arbitration would be a arbitration whose consequences you would be willing to abide by if you were a member of the union or part of the management of the company. A final note about justice and fairness. Most people do this anyway when deciding whether or not something is fair/right/just, but it should be formalized, just so we know what we're all talking about. The process is called "Reflective Equilibrium". Basically, each person has a set of general principles that governs what he/she thinks is right, and is constantly running across more and more situations to which those principles apply. Reflective equilibrium simply states that there should be no contradictions between the general principles and the examples. So, if you run across an example that you think is X and some principle(s) say it's Y, then either the principle(s) has to be thrown out or adjusted, or you have to revise your conclusion about the example. (These conclusions often come about as a "gut feeling" or some such thing.) When there are NO internal inconsistencies, then your value system is in a state of reflective equilibrium. Reflective equilibrium is a good tool to use when looking at political systems, as often people are tempted to overlook little inconsistencies. I claim that any set of beliefs you hold to be true should be in full reflective equilibrium with your other beliefs. Ray Chen princeton!tilt!chenr P.S. -- This discussion will continue if people decide it's worth their time and mine. (i.e. I see or get some intelligent, non-flaming, responses.) Being busy these days, I'm trying to refrain from posting stuff, but given the NCP discussion (Paul Torek and Barry Fagin), I thought people might be interested in this.
tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch) (03/16/85)
Ray Chen's problem -- so many political axiom sets with no standards for judging between them -- is a good one. Let me reexpress his analysis to motivate mine (then Ray can tell us if I understood him right). (1) Axiom sets should be judged by the purposes they fulfill. Put more exactly, by the conclusions which follow from them. One way I've found of expressing this maxim is to say that good axiom sets are "proof-generating definitions". They prove the theorems one wants to see proven. (2) Theorems which should be proven by political axiom sets are theorems of (consistent, most, optimal ...) justice. Justice is the vague idea that the theorems we want should be aiming towards. A more asymtotic way of putting this is that the telos (direction, goals) of a political system should be to satisfy some conception of justice. (3) We can hope to compare political axiom sets by judging whether the social systems which follow from them satisfy criteria of justice which could be generated by this discussion. (4) "Reflective equilibrium" is a way of testing consistency under the premise that justice should be fair. Implicitly, it suggests that if criteria of justice can be agreed upon, then a decision procedure for judging between different political axiom sets will be available. So the judgment implied in (3) is possible. (5) (implied by 4) Good criteria of justice should make judgment between political axiom sets easier by the application of these criteria to the sets under comparison than judgment in the absence of these criteria. (6?) In accordance with these points, Ray argues that to reduce arguments between political axiom sets to arguments between sets of applyable criteria of justice would be a profitable strategy for success (success being agreement on a good political axiom set or sets). I don't agree with (6). The problem of deciding between sets of applyable criteria of justice is just as irresolvable (unresolvable?) as the problem of deciding between sets of political axioms. So even if the discussion shifted to justice, I see no reason to expect better results. Of course, this is a judgment call; judge for yourself. Just because a problem is smaller doesn't necessarily make it either easier to solve or even more interesting. I'll go even further. The set of political axiom sets is just a subset of the set of moral axiom sets. The problem of interminable argument between political axiom sets is the same as the problem of interminable argument between moral axiom sets. The reduction Ray thinks he is making is just a shift from one suffering subset to another. The problem is not one of political philosophy but rather one of moral philosophy. Ray's "reduced" problem is not even smaller. Just transforming or shifting this problem of civil wars between incompatible axiom sets can't further the cause of peace. Peace can come only from abandoning this struggle and redirecting our efforts to constructing a coherent alternative where civil war between premise systems is not permissible as a strategy for dominance. This means ignoring and avoiding the fight, except to illustrate what we don't want the future to hold for us. These thoughts aren't entirely my own. They're inspired by what has become my favorite "book for future generations" -- After Virtue, by Alisdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre suggests that the moral terms we use in everyday life and political rhetoric are almost extinct carryovers from a period when they represented parts of a coherent moral view intrinsically linked to the structure of society and its historical development. MacIntyre labels the best parts of that coherent moral viewpoint "Aristotelean" after Aristotle's analysis of the virtues which underlay that moral world view. Once there were many virtues, interdependently referring to each other and subject to moderating virtues which balanced their proportion in society. These virtues included justice, friendship, wisdom, excellence, beauty, and others. An Aristotelean polis was supposed to cultivate and preserve the virtues, particularly the public virtues of justice, wisdom, and excellence. Good judgment possessed by the citizenry and leaders substituted for modern day law. An individual was a zoon politikon, an animal of the polis, who treated the polis as a natural environment filled with varied forms of moral life and beauty. The virtues of the polis would be internalized by the individual as laws of moral nature. In a public sphere filled with contending virtues, tragedy -- situations where one virtue must be violated to fulfill another -- might occur. However, unlike the modern point of view which says that conflicting moral obligations are Gordian knots to be cut by swords of arbitrary choice, MacIntyre suggests that in an environment which preserves the virtues, tragedies must remain tragic, so that the violation of a virtue is still a violation even if it could not be avoided. Call this the Sophoclean side of the polis. Aristotle thought tragedy was avoidable by planning; MacIntyre suggests that some conflict could not be avoided even in his virtuous polis. The mechanisms of tragedy and art exist in part to help understand and teach about these characteristic conflicts. Of course, a tragic understanding goes against Ray's "reflective equilibrium", if his standard for one virtue, justice, is extended to more than one virtue. MacIntyre suggests that the Enlightenment project abandoned Aristoteleanism on a piece-by-piece basis, but created no organic alternative in its place, while retaining the words it had turned hollow by depriving them of a context involving virtues. Most of the rules of this project he labels "liberal individualism", a point of view which imagines that individuals can invent premises to moral philosophies out of nothing but their own imaginations, such that competition between these premises can be papered over into pluralist "consensuses". Of course, no such consensus takes place, and the battle of premises leaves chaos and incoherence in all remaining moral views, shorn of their societal protection, reduced to ghosts. MacIntyre proves convincingly, I think, that all of these so-called axioms are just creatures of their confused historical periods. They're almost all ludicrous and practically vacuous outside their original place and time of birth. Much of his persuasive power comes from outlining the moral philosophy of the best of Britain's golden age of philosophy and social science -- Moore, Keynes, and the Bloomsbury group. If their view of good moral philosophy (a so-called revolution in its time) looks so stupid today, how could we do better if we remain tied to their kind of subjective individualism? A brief quote (ah, I hate to do this): "What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that *either* one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic *or* one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative and more particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume, Kant, and Mill. It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught." (p. 118, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)) (apologies to Europeans here; MacIntyre refers to an Anglo-American conventional curriculum) Marxists may believe they slip through the noose here, but MacIntyre thinks not: "Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being accumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermensch: Lukacs's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies. A Marxist who took Trotsky's last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. For I too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a *political* tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners -- this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society -- but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture." (p. 262, After Virtue) We should abandon the project of rationally constructing whole moral and political systems by deduction from axioms put forth by historically bound, subjective wills. That was the Enlightenment project which has failed. Tony Wuersch {amd,amdcad}!cae780!ubvax!tonyw
chenr@tilt.FUN (Ray Chen) (03/25/85)
> Ray Chen's problem -- so many political axiom sets with no standards > for judging between them -- is a good one. Let me reexpress his analysis > to motivate mine (then Ray can tell us if I understood him right). > > (4) "Reflective equilibrium" is a way of testing consistency under > the premise that justice should be fair. Implicitly, it suggests > that if criteria of justice can be agreed upon, then a decision > procedure for judging between different political axiom sets will > be available. So the judgment implied in (3) is possible. This isn't quite what I meant. Reflective Equilibrium is a way of testing consistency, yes, but not based on anything in particular. It's a way of testing whether or not the political axioms are consistent with judgements of what is just. Thus, given a situation that would be considered just by the political axioms but that you consider unjust, then either the decision to consider the situation unjust or some of the political axioms would be revised. This is primarily a technique for weeding out inconsistencies in a person's political views. And yes, I am aiming not for a reduction, but for a transformation. I see the problem of setting political axioms as a question of defining justice. After defining a conception of justice, then the question is can you offer a set of political axioms or a method for arriving at them that is consistent with or an embodiment of the conception of justice? I claim that when people argue about axioms that that is what they're really arguing about: conceptions of justice compatible with the political axioms. I just wanted to make people aware of this and to formalize it a little. I also think it helps if people think about what conceptions of justice certain political systems embody or whether or not the system embodies any consistent conception of justice at all. I offer a possible definition, "justice as fairness". If you disagree with this definition of justice, can you offer an alternative definition of justice? Ray Chen princeton!tilt!chenr