[net.politics.theory] Judging political axioms

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