Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 9
November 29, 2022
On the Aristocracy of Manchester: Richard Bellamy and Cobden on Work Place Relations,
In a typical piece of culture critique, Smiles observed how 'in their pursuit of riches, the English are gradually losing sight of their higher characteristics.' The growth of cities, increased factory size, greater mobility of labour with the new railway system, even improved prosperity, all seemed to be destroying the environment necessary for the Victorian virtues to flourish. As early as 1857, the free trader campaigner Richard Cobden remarked "the social and political state of [Birmingham] is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers...whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy.' Only competition could provide the necessary antidote for it placed the 'lazy man...under the necessity of exerting itself,' It disciplined businessman and worker alike, rewarding merit and effort and punishing the indolent.--Richard Bellamy (1992) Liberalism and Modern Society, pp. 11-12
Ever since I read Hobson's (1919) Richard Cobden: the international man, I have been alert to the fact that contemporary discussions of Cobden, if he is mentioned all, treat him primarily, as Bellamy introduces him in the passage quoted above, "the free trader campaigner." Cobden was a gifted political organizer and orator, a critic of slavery, anti-mercantile spirit of war, and arguably one of the key architects of developing international, functional integration as a means toward peace (something now part of the DNA of the EU). I consider him one of the great Smithians of the nineteenth century (which I will illustrate below). As it happens, I have grown very fond of the letter by Cobden (to Palmer) that Bellamy quotes.
Bellamy's work is an important, somewhat neglected milestone in the development of a more realist sensibility in discussions of liberalism before that became a popular niche in recent political theory/philosophy. I hope to engage with his book more constructively in the future. But sometimes nitpicking can be illustrative, too. I want to suggest Bellamy mispresents Cobden's point, and that Cobden's analysis is a point worth tracking. First, let me quote the full paragraph of the letter as Hobson presents it:
Cobden's key point is that what we might call 'work-place structure' or if you are more Marxist, the 'organization of capitalism,' permeates social, moral, and political relations. In fact, his bottom line that a steep hierarchy at work is inimical to democratic life has not lost its salience yet. According to Cobden, hierarchy creates a social distance -- it generates the conditions of antipathy -- that undermines social interaction. So, when later liberals treat democracy in terms of "government by discussion," they are not merely making an anodyne point about the significance of talk to civilization, but they are also calling attention to the material pre-conditions of such a practice.
This is especially so when a particular location has uniform work conditions. Anticipating Max Weber's insight, it is such local homogeneity that creates contrasting political perspective with other geographic locations (where work is organized differently). The social clash of values is an effect of different organization of work, and so different material interests and social practices. Of course, in the quoted passage, Cobden does not hide his own preference for more egalitarian work-place relations. And while his phrasing is gendered, Cobden was hugely influential on the so-called 'first wave feminism' in the UK (including his daughter Jane Cobden).
Notice, too, that Cobden is not averse to talk in the language of 'class.' And, in fact, his understanding of class is not merely economic or based on economic self-interest. He notes that the support for the Anti-Corn-Law movement was not just financial, but also in terms of their collective social status (their "pride"). The problem with Manchester is not the laziness of workers or capitalists, or their ability to avoid the discipline of the market, it is rather the economies of scale enjoyed in Manchester that creates a social hierarchy and, thereby, a political problem. How to deal with the economic and political fruits of economies of scale is, in fact, one of the more enduring challenges in liberal political theory. (This fits one of Bellamy's larger arguments in the book, so it is a bit sad he missed the point.)
Now, Bellamy's source of this material is Ian C. Bradley's (1980) The Optimists : Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism, p. 59. Bradley does not mention that Palmer is the addressee, and it is natural to read Bradley as suggesting that this is a letter to the other great Liberal politician of the era, Bright. Bradley quotes the paragraph as follows:
social and political state of that town is far more healthy than that of Manchester; and it arises from the fact that the industry of the hardware district is carried on by small manufacturers, employing a few men and boys each, sometimes only an apprentice or two; whilst the great capitalists of Manchester form an aristocracy, individual members of which wield an influence over sometimes two thousand persons. The former state of society is more natural and healthy in a moral and political sense. There is a freer intercourse between all classes than in the Lancashire town...The great capitalist class formed an excellent basis for the Anti-Corn-Law movement, for they had inexhaustible purses, which they opened freely in a contest where not only their pecuniary interests but their pride as 'an order' was at stake. But I very much doubt whether such a state of society is favourable to a democratic political movement.
In Bradley (whose book is on the Liberal party), this letter is introduced in the context of the Liberal party's effort to expand the franchise, and Bright's (1857) election as MP in Birmingham after he lost his seat in Manchester (also in 1857) due to his opposition to the Crimean war (something Bradley does not mention in context, but I think becomes clear later in the book).
When I looked up Bradley I kind of expected that he would be the source of Bellamy's interpretive mistake. In fact, I don't think there is anything in Bradley's argument that supports Bellamy's use of this material. Bradley's decision to remove "where a great and impassable gulf separates the workman from his employer" from his presentation does change the meaning of the material. And perhaps it was sufficient to mislead Bellamy about Cobden's underlying argument.
Hobson (1918), Richard Cobden: The International Man, p. 194
November 28, 2022
Montesquieu, Spinoza, Federalism, and Political Hebraism
IF a republic be small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it be large, it is ruined by an internal imperfection.
It is fairly well-established that these paragraphs inspired in various ways Madison and Kant's Perpetual Peace. I seems to be less well known that Montesquieu is echoing Spinoza's Political Treatise (3.15-16 [recall here; here]),* where Spinoza explains how one can use conventions by which several small states agree to become members of a larger voluntary confederation.
That we're in the ambit of Spinoza (and Machiavelli) is clear from Montesquieu's concern with corruption (which is a major theme of Spinoza's political writings, or so I argue here) and also by Montesquieu political reading of the Biblical narrative in the quoted paragraph (which also has Machiavellian roots). For, rather than emphasizing the Caananites' idolatry or Jewish providential election, Montesquieu remarks that the conquest of land of Canaan was due to institutional weakness of the Canaanites and, de facto, institutional strength of the Biblical Jews. Montesquieu echoes here, and offers a gloss, on chapter 17 [paragraphs 44-55] of the Theological Political treatise. There Spinoza had emphasized the confederate nature of the conquering Biblical Jews and compared them explicitly to the Dutch in his own day [III/210]. (Spinoza notes that the Dutch lack a common temple.)
While I don't mean to suggest that Montesquieu is slavishly echoing Spinoza here, there are further hints of Montesquieu's debts to Spinoza's chapter 17 of the TTP. For, in the quoted passage from Montesquieu I read six terse arguments in favor of confederate republics:
Common protection against foreign enemies. This is the defensive character of a confederacy.
Protection against usurpation by an individual citizen of one of the confederate states.
Protection against insurrection by the masses of one of the confederate states.
Ability to combat local rent-seeking
Ability to reform local institutions.
Ability to survive implosion of member units.
Except for the first argument, the other five all involve the capacity to notice problems in a member unit of the confederacy and for the remaining units to act on this diagnosis. And what these five arguments presuppose, thus, is that the confederacy lacks a central power that can over-awe the member units, so that the member units can be self-correcting with each other. And, in fact, near the end of chapter 17 of TTP, Spinoza notes that by turning the confederacy into a monarchy (which does have such a central power), the first Hebrew state became vulnerable to usurpation [see paragraphs 83-111], insurrection [107-108], corrupt/rent-seeking [106], and the inability to reform the institutions piecemeal [111].** (See also, the treatment of Benjamin by the other tribes at 17.57. And while Spinoza does not explicitly anticipate the sixth it's logically presupposed in his argument (including the survival of Judah after Israel was destroyed).
*George Gross (1996) does note the connection, but has a tendency to emphasize the differences and so overlooks some important commonalities.
**In fact, Spinoza treats the fall of the Canaanites as an effect of the malformed institutions of which corruption is a sympton [TTP III.49].
November 25, 2022
On What we Owe the Future, Part 2 (some polemic)
A full account of abolition would require a book in its own right and would cover the countless acts of resistance, subversion, and bravery by enslaved people throughout history. It would also cover efforts from formerly enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman in the United States and Lu��s Gama in Brazil, who shed light on the horrors of slavery, fostered public opposition, and pushed for legislative action.
Here, though, I look at just one part of this narrative. Because I���m interested in whether or not abolition was contingent, I���m interested in those parts of the history that seem unexpected or difficult to explain. And, as leading historian of abolition Professor Christopher Leslie Brown puts it, ���The causes of slave resistance do not seem particularly mysterious.��� What is surprising, he notes, is that slavery was attacked by those who benefited from it. Moreover, enslaved people have very often throughout history powerfully resisted their oppression. So why was there a successful abolitionist campaign in Britain in the early 1800s and not in any of history���s previous slave societies?
I think that the activism of a fairly small group of Quakers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries provides part of the answer. Their efforts were hugely important in one of the most surprising moral about-faces in history. There were many important figures in this story, but among the early Quaker activists, the most striking was Benjamin Lay....
The abolitionists demonstrate the importance of making moral change, but we can look to them as inspiration for how to make moral change, too. Earlier, I mentioned that in the late eighteenth century, abolitionist Quakers would keep a print of Benjamin Lay in their house as a source of continued moral inspiration. I have followed their lead; a print of Lay sits next to my monitor, and he watches me as I write this book.
Lay was the paradigm of a moral entrepreneur: someone who thought deeply about morality, took it very seriously, was utterly willing to act in accordance with his convictions, and was regarded as an eccentric, a weirdo, for that reason. We should aspire to be weirdos like him. Others may mock you for being concerned about people who live on the other side of the planet, or about pigs and chickens, or about people who will be born in thousands of years��� time. But many at the time mocked the abolitionists. We are very far from creating the perfect society, and until then, in order to drive forward moral progress, we need morally motivated heretics who are able to endure ridicule from those who wish to preserve the status quo.---William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, "Chapter 3: Moral Change," pp. 49 & 71-72
This is the second post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here; it lists some qualities about the book that I admire.)
Two ground-rules about what follows:
I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It's mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
I ignore MacAskill's association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.
Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?
Once you have read What We Owe The Future, it is no surprise that MacAskill singles out Lay and does not even mention Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, John Brown, or Lincoln. (Equiano, Cugoano, and Wilberforce receive a passing comment each.) MacAskill prefers to think about moral entrepreneurs, who generate moral change, not about political violence or politicians. In MacAskill's narrative moral change ended slavery not revolution, war, or the buying off of slaveowners. In his account, the significance of slave revolt is primarily to trigger moral change, or prevent it. (277 n. 17; p. 69) The Haitian revolution gets mentioned (especially in the endnotes), but if you don't know what it's about MacAskill doesn't inform you. I don't recall seeing the US Civil War mentioned at all. As he puts it in a slogan (in the context of praising the admirable, Leah Garc��s, and Mercy for Animals), "Revolutionary beliefs; cooperative behaviour." (73)
Because MacAskill relies heavily on Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism, who is relatively dismissive of Baxter and not very interested in Tryon (who was greatly admired by Lay), he also ends up systematically downplaying the significance of non Quaker and non utilitarian British abolitionist ideas pre-Lay, and, subsequently, ignoring influential philosophers like Beattie, Priestley, and Adam Smith (who almost certainly influenced Wilberforce). In fact, while some endnotes exhibit much more nuance, in the main body of the text MacAskill promotes a rather one-sided narrative about the historical ubiquity of slavery to imply that moral progress is something distinctly late modern, and the effect of moral entrepreneurship working on/in a small movement (with the Quakers as model). He shows no interest in the ancient cynics (who clearly influenced Lay's behavior and provided a model for him through the writings of the historian of philosophy, Thomas Stanley), the , or -- as Graeber and Wengrow explore in The Dawn of Everything -- the many cultures that did without slavery. (Catholic anti-slavery is shunted to an endnote.)
As I noted in my first post on his book, MacAskill has remarkably little theoretical interest in social institutions and the role of violence in them, and ending them when necessary. If I were a Marxist, I would accuse him of the bad, right-Hegelian idealism. Even when he promotes "political experimentalism," he cashes this out in terms of "increasing cultural and intellectual diversity." (p. 99) The one political experiment he mentions approvingly is local: Deng Xioping's charter cities in China. (p. 100; the massacre at Tianamen Square is passed over.)
It's not that political violence is absent in the book (Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and Pope Innocent III [of the Albigensian crusade] are all mentioned), but uniformly it is represented as something negative. Of course, I don't mean to deny that the world needs peace-loving (Schumpeterian) moral entrepreneurs, who are disruptive of existing social norms. But it doesn't only need them. MacAskill explicitly cites J.S. Mill approvingly (but no nod to Thoreau, Dewey or Elizabeth Anderson) to suggest that political and social experimentation can be a source for good (p. 99). He also falsely (recall this post and follow the citation to Jill Gordon 1997) goes on to attribute to Mill the idea "of a marketplace of ideas, where different ideas can compete and the best ideas win." (p. 99)
In fact, his concern over the effects of moral homogeneity leads him to be rather critical of the possibility of "world government." (158)+ Now, I share his suspicion that a world government might suppress certain valuable practices, but it is odd that MacAskill does not confront the tension in his own argument. For, in the context of criticizing the possibility of world government, he *praises military* rivalry for its innovative technological side-effects (p. 158) in one chapter, but only two chapters earlier he worried that great power war -- another foreseeable effect of such military rivalry -- might lead to human extinction (pp. 114-116). Again, while one should never be cynical about moral change MacAskill exhibits, as also I noted in my first post, a cavalier attitude toward thinking about social theory and social institutions; his near total disregard of the significance of political even violent contestation reflects a kind of infantilization of philosophy.
And while like him, I would welcome more social experimentation, I was a bit taken aback when he noted that "homogeneity in the global response to Covid-19...was responsible for millions of deaths." (p. 97) Strikingly, in a book with about 800 official endnotes, this claim is offered ex cathedra. MacAskill is a big fan of human challenge trials and selling vaccines, and so I followed the only citation in the previous paragraph to the end-note and then the website in order to realize it was a citation to a 2020 Blog post by the well-known economist John Cochrane. But even Cochrane doesn't make this point (about millions of deaths), or even advocates for challenge trials in it. (Cochrane does think vaccines should be sold "to the highest bidder.") Neither MacAskill nor Cochrane addresses the obvious objection that not all purported vaccines offered to the public will work (and so somehow these don't enter the deaths/cost ledger). I am not against all challenge trials in all contexts, but the idea that they are unproblematic is dangerous, too. Maybe he is right that the global response to Covid-19 was responsible for millions of deaths, but like I intimated in my first post, when I observed the frequently opaque nature and sources of the probabilities mentioned by MacAskill, some of the data he mentions seems to materialize out of thin air.
Let me close with a final thought. One person's moral entrepreneurship is another person's dude with a savior complex on steroids. And while this may seem harsh in light of MacAskill's non trivial contributions to helping actual others, it is notable that MacAskill insists repeatedly that our age is special: "At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes." (6, emphasis added.) And he regularly returns to this point, especially in the context of technological and moral stagnation, suggesting that "the glass is cooling, and at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, it might set. Whether it sets into a sculpture that is beautiful and crystalline or mangled and misshapen is, in significant part, up to us." (p. 102) Even if this were true (and I'll return to his arguments in a future post), he never explains what gives him (and here he echoes (recall) his much more socially cautious hero, Parfit), and his fellow self-elect, the authority to act as the philosophical legislators of much of the future.*
To be continued.
+In fact, running through his argument one might well detect a strain of anti-Americanism that his American reviewers have been too polite to mention or, perhaps missed, because MacAskill phrases his argument in terms of "cultural convergence," "homogeneity" (p.96) and the effects of "modern secular culture" or a "single global culture." (158)
*It is undeniable that his intentions are noble, but that's irrelevant in a consequentialist framework like his.
November 23, 2022
On What we Owe the Future [no, not on SBF/FTX!], Part 1
The effect of such extreme climate change is difficult to predict. We just do not know what the world would be like if it were more than seven degrees warmer; most research has focused on the impact of less than five degrees. Warming of seven to ten degrees would do enormous harm to countries in the tropics, with many poor agrarian countries being hit by severe heat stress and drought. Since these countries have contributed the least to climate change, this would be a colossal injustice.
But it���s hard to see how even this could lead directly to civilisational collapse. For example, one pressing concern about climate change is the effect it might have on agriculture. Although climate change would be bad for agriculture in the tropics, there is scope for adaptation, temperate regions would not be as badly damaged, and frozen land would be freed up at higher latitudes. There is a similar picture for heat stress. Outdoor labour would become increasingly difficult in the tropics because of heat stress, which would be disastrous for hotter and poorer countries with limited adaptive capacity. But richer countries would be able to adapt, and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, "chapter 6: collapse" p 136
Two ground-rules about what follows:
I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It's mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
I ignore MacAskill's association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.
Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?
Anyway, after my post on MacAskill's twitter thread (here) and my post on the concluding pages of Parfit's Reasons and Persons (here), I was told by numerous people that I ought to read MacAskill's What we Owe the Future. And while I am going to be rather critical in what follows (and subsequent posts), I want to note a few important caveats: first, MacAskill is asking very interesting social questions, and draws on a wide range of examples (also historically far apart). I am happy this is a possible future for philosophy today. Second, he is an engaging writer. Third, What we Owe the Future is -- as the first and last chapter make clear -- quite explicitly intended as a contribution to movement building, and that means that the standards of evaluation cannot be (say) identical to what one might expect in a journal article. In a future post, I'll have something to say about the relationship between public philosophy and movement building, but in this post I will be silent on it. Fourth, if you are looking for a philosophically stimulating review of What we Owe the Future, I warmly recommend Peter Wolfendale's essay here for a general overview (here). If you are especially interested in objections to the axiology, I warmly recommend Kierin Setiya's piece in Boston Review (here). It's also worth re-reading Amia Srinivasan's high profile, prescient critique of MacAskill's earlier work (here).*
In today���s post, I offer two (kinds) of criticisms of What We Owe the Future. First, I discuss its cavalier attitude toward injustice. This criticism will be extrinsic to MacAskill's own project. Second, I argue it treats a whole number of existential risks as uncorrelated which are, almost certainly correlated. (This I consider an intrinsic problem.) And this exhibits two kinds of lacunae at the heart of his approach: (a) his lack of theoretical interest in political institutions and the nature of international political coordination; (b) the absence of a disciplining social theory (or models) that can help evaluate the empirical data and integrate them. (That is, lurking in this second criticism is the charge of cherry-picking data and relentless privileging of some measures/inputs rather than being transparent about these being one of many such measures/inputs--a charge I will develop over subsequent posts.) I have argued elsewhere all integrative or synthetic philosophy requires such models, so here I illustrate what happens absent such a synthetic glue.
So much for set up.
The quoted paragraph is literally the only time MacAskill confronts injustice in the book. To his credit, he notices that climate change is generating what he rightly calls a "colossal injustice." The countries and peoples least responsible for climate change shoulder most of its downside risks and burdens. I would emphasize more than he would that this will have foreseeable consequences in such places of civil war, famine, flooding, and emigration of the population, including skilled labor who may find refuge elsewhere.
While MacAskill treats the possibility of colossal injustice as something in the future, these unjust effects of climate change are already visible in the world today, often exacerbated by imperfect political institutions and/or irresponsible social elites (arguably the case in Sri Lanka and Pakistan). Elsewhere in the book, MacAskill notes that 15% of the world's adult population (!) wants to move, but he does not connect it to the unfolding climate crisis (see p. 101, which, while descriptive, I read the implicature as a defense of the "quality of life" in "rich liberal democracies." These are the VERY countries responsible for the colossal injustice he diagnoses two chapters later!)+
Now, one would think that the diagnosis of colossal injustice would motivate, say, discussion of reparations, or less ambitiously, mitigation and prevention. But as the quoted paragraph shows, that's not MacAskill's route. In fact, because he is so concerned with evaluating the risk of civilizational collapse, the significance of this colossal injustice never quite gets internalized in or further developed in his approach. In fact, while climate change is by no means ignored in the book (MacAskill is, for example, a proponent of decarbonization���a topic that recurs regularly), climate justice is except in this quoted passage.
The lack of further focus on this colossal injustice is due to three features of his longtermist population ethics approach (two of which are philosophical in character): first, the nearly infinite number of possible future people simply dwarf the interests of the living, as Srinivasan already noted ("the expected value of preventing an x-risk dwarfs the value of, say, curing cancer or preventing genocide.") To be sure, this is not MacAskill's intent -- in the book one can find plenty of statements that one should not sacrifice the interests of present generations to an uncertain future --; but there is a clear distinction between actively sacrificing present interests, and actively undoing harms to present generations. On his approach there is simply no reason to privilege attention to (say) intersectionally vulnerable populations. Second, the relentlessly forward looking longtermism of MacAskill doesn't really know what to do with the past (and the possible colossal injustice he diagnoses is, in part, the effect of imperialism, colonialism; and in part the effect of industrialization). From the vantage point of maximizing effective value, compensation or reparations for developing injustices among relatively poor or unskilled populations is simply an inefficient use of money. (Again, this point is not original with me; it echoes the complaints of those who worried about the effects of, say, trading emission rights on the poor without a seat at the technocratic negotiating table.) Third, MacAskill's implied 'we,' -- and I would bet 'we' is the most used word in the book -- which often seems like it's speaking for all of humanity, clearly does not include the victims of this injustice (this is made explicit when he addresses who his likely readers are on p. 194).
Okay, let me turn to the second issue I promised to discuss in this post. On the very same page that I have quoted above, MacAskill writes,
There is a substantial chance that our decarbonisation efforts will get stuck. First, limited progress on decarbonisation is exacerbated by the risk of a breakdown in international coordination, which could happen because of rising military tensions between the major economies in the world���.Decarbonisation is a truly global problem: even if most regions stop emitting, emissions could continue for a long time if one region decides not to cooperate. Second, the risk of prolonged technological stagnation, which I discuss in the next chapter, would increase the risk that we do not develop the technology needed to fully decarbonise. These are not outlandish risks; I would put both risks at around one in three. (136)
The underlying concerns strike me as very apt (even if I would like to see more transparency about how MacAskill arrives at his probabilities--the endnotes often send you to a website, and the calculations are then burried in cited papers). But it is odd to treat the risk of a breakdown in international coordination and the risk of technological stagnation as independent from each other. In fact, if the breakdown of international coordination would lead to world war, then decarbonization is off the table not just because war is truly a great source of carbon emissions, but also because it (de facto) ends international coordination.
In fact, it is odd that MacAskill misses this point because earlier he recognizes ���that great power war also increases the risk of a host of other risks to civilization.��� (p. 116) He reports ���a chance of a third world war by 2050 at 23%��� and add that ���annual risk stayed the same for the following fifty years, this would mean another world war before the end of the century is more likely than not.��� (p. 116) If that���s right then the numbers reported for ���engineered pandemics��� (risk 1% [p. 113]) and technological stagnation (as well fossil fuel depletion [which MacAskill wants to prevent] all seem rather optimistic because in reality they represent correlated or systemic risks.
While MacAskill is highly interested in great power war (pp. 114-116), he is curiously uninterested in how to theorize explicitly about great power politics in the context of international institutions despite these being the causal source of the main factor in the probabilities he bandies about throughout the book. Throughout his argument, he tacitly black-boxes what he calls ���the international system,��� ���international cooperation,��� ���international coordination��� and ���international norms.��� (Obviously, he could claim that great power politics is independent from international institutions and shaped by the interactions of small number of elite actors���something he hints at in his historical examples; but it is not developed in his future oriented chapters.) And so, somewhat curiously, a book devoted to building a social movement and changing values, leaves under-theorized the main social factor that will determine (by its own lights) the possibility of that movement having a future at all.**
To be continued.
*And after reading What We Owe to the Future and re-reading Srinivasan's review it generates the unsettling feeling that MacAskill simply ignores objections that he can't turn into a feature of his approach.
+As regular readers know, I can't be accused of excessive criticism of liberal democracy.
** In my next post, I���ll suggest that a related problem also shows up in non-trivial ways in MacAskill���s potted history of abolitionism (which is the social movement that is the main rhetorical model or template for longtermism).
November 18, 2022
Why is Hume important to foucault?
It is here that knowledge breaks off its old kinship with divinatio. The latter always presupposed signs anterior to it: so that knowledge always resided entirely in the opening up of a discovered, affirmed, or secretly transmitted, sign. Its task was to uncover a language which God had previously distributed across the face of the earth; it is in this sense that it was the divination of an essential implication, and that the object of its divination was divine. From now on, however, it is within knowledge itself that the sign is to perform its signifying function; it is from knowledge that it will borrow its certainty or its probability. And though God still employs signs to speak to us through nature, he is making use of our knowledge, and of the relations that are set up between our impressions, in order to establish in our minds a relation of signification. Such is the role of feeling in Malebranche or of sensation in Berkeley; in natural judgement, in feeling, in visual impressions, and in the perception of the third dimension, what we are dealing with are hasty and confused, but pressing, inevitable, and obligatory kinds of knowledge serving as signs for discursive kinds of knowledge which we humans, because we are not pure intelligences, no longer have the time or the permission to attain to ourselves and by the unaided strength of our own minds. In Malebranche and Berkeley, the sign arranged by God is the cunning and thoughtful superimposition of two kinds of knowledge. There is no longer any divinatio involved - no insertion of knowledge in the enigmatic, open, and sacred area of signs - but a brief and concentrated kind of knowledge: the contraction of a long sequence of judgements into the rapidly assimilated form of the sign. And it will also be seen how, by a reversal of direction, knowledge, having enclosed the signs within its own space, is now able to accommodate probability: between one impression and another the relation will be that of sign to signified, in other words, a relation which, like that of succession, will progress from the weakest probability towards the greatest certainty.
The connection of ideas does not imply the relation of cause and effect, but only of a mark or sign with the thing signified. The fire which I sec is not the cause of the pain I suffer upon my approaching it, but the mark that forewarns me of it.
The knowledge that divined, at random, signs that were absolute and older than itself has been replaced by a network of signs built up step by step in accordance with a knowledge of what is probable. Hume has become possible.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), 59-60 [Emphases in original]
When confronted by Foucault's argument here it is natural to scrutinize each of the steps and try to figure out how they correspond to, say, the underlying material in Malebranche and Berkeley. But here I won't ask a different question: why does Foucault want to emphasize that [the philosophy of] a certain definite individual has become possible? This is peculiar because the strength of Foucault's general argument does not rest in the analysis of individual philosophers, but rather in showing a kind of higher order similarity, a style of thought, or a set of structural and conceptual constraints on an era's production of knowledge in, and that only becomes visible by the study of, different fields (including a kind of linguistics and a kind of political economy and so on) alongside each other. And these constraints make all the folk in an era possible (in Foucault's sense). This is why, for example, in context, he uses the language of a "single network of necessities" and gives us a string of individuals "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (63; see also, p. 117, where this list returns, and p. 65, where Condillac seems to be key figure in the network, and p. 70, where Hume has equal billing with Condillac. Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume" -- at p. 162.)
So, why single out Hume on p. 60 Now part of the answer is clear from one of my posts earlier in the week (here). Hume becomes exemplary, for Foucault, to show that while similitude/resemblance loses its central significance in its characterization of the nature of a sign, resemblance does not disappear but resides, as Foucault puts it in Humean terms, mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind (see p. 68). In that post, I argued that Foucault ends up misreading Hume (and suggested that Foucault ends up misrepresenting what he calls the classical age.) I don't mean to relitigate that claim. Rather, to restate my question: why is Hume exemplary for this argument (since it is by no means obvious Foucault went back to Hume to analyze him carefully, yet simultaenously offers numerous examples that draw on Hume)?
Part of the answer is that Hume plays a role in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, (Husserlian) phenomenology, that Foucault is reacting to. In this self-understanding Hume's critique is the source of the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (325) So, in this narrative Hume is a kind of steppingstone. Familiarity with this narrative and this Hume is often presupposed in Foucault's narrative in The Order of Things (see especially, the role of Hume in representing "radical doubt" (162)).*
It is worth noting that Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology and also how it fits in the West.+ He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault has diagnosed (in the book) in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (325) As it happens Foucault's analysis of Hume's friend, Adam Smith, is central to understanding the nature of that hiatus (see pp. 224-225). In Foucault's account Smith articulates a principle of order that is not reducible to the analysis of representation that Foucault thinks characteristic of the classical era. (225) How to make sense of this is a topic of interest to me, but about that some other time more.
So, let me sum up. Hume plays a triple role in The Order of Things. First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers his works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the classical episteme. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume (and these other thinkers) among his implied audience. That Foucault can do so is explained by the second role Hume has, that is, of being a familiar steppingstone in a narrative that undergirds the self-understanding of phenomenology (which is treated as the ruling philosophical status quo by Foucault). This narrative is Foucault's target.
The main argument against this self-understanding of the past does not turn on a single philosopher -- although Adam Smith is central to the argument but on a more general reconfiguration of what the human sciences (and philosophy) were (recall this post that tries to illuminate by comparing Kuhn and Foucault).
However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume. And this is so because he can both assume familiarity with Hume (given the familiarity of Foucault's audience with Hume as a steppingstone in their standard narrative) as well as render Hume unfamiliar in virtue of his retelling of the story of early modern philosophy. As my post earlier in the week suggests, Foucault's analysis of Hume cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem, if I am right, raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project [since the leading representative of the classical age by Foucault's lights does not conform to his template), although it goes beyond my remit (even pay-grade) to adjudicate the significance of this to his debate with phenomenology. But as should be clear, when Foucault revisits Hume in his lecture of 28 March 1979 in The Birth of Biopolitics his understanding of Hume is (recall here); and here) much more text-sensitive than it was in the earlier book.
*See this passage:
In natural history, however, which is a well-constructed language, these analogies of the imagination cannot have the value of guarantees; and since natural history is threatened, like all language, by the radical doubt that Hume brought to bear upon the necessity for repetition in experience, it must find a way of avoiding that threat. (162)
+How to think of the eurocentrism in all these remarks is a bit complicated. It's pretty clear he does not endorse phenomenology's self-understanding. But Foucault himself also doesn't problematize the category of 'the West' and 'Western philosophy' (which he also uses) elsewhere in the book.
November 17, 2022
Foucault on Humean Criticism and Habit, and Beccaria
Where was I wanting to go? I wanted to analyze a certain system of power: disciplinary power. It seemed to me, in fact, that we live in a society of disciplinary power, that is to say a society equipped with apparatuses whose form is sequestration, whose purpose is the formation of a labor force, and whose instrument is the acquisition of disciplines or habits. It seems to me that since the eighteenth century there has been a constant multiplication, refinement, and specification of apparatuses for manufacturing disciplines, for imposing coercions, and for instilling habits. This year I wanted to do the very first history of the power of habits, the archeology of those apparatuses of power that serve as the base for the acquisition of habits as social norms.
Let���s consider this notion of habit. If we look at it in eighteenth century political philosophy, habit has a primarily critical use. This notion makes it possible to analyze law, institutions, and authority. The notion of habit is used for knowing the extent to which something that appears as an institution or authority can be founded. To everything appearing thus founded, the following question is put: You claim to be founded by the divine word or by the sovereign���s authority, but are you not [quite simply] a habit? This is how Humean criticism works, using the notion of habit as a critical, reductive instrument, because habit, on the one hand, is only ever a result and not an original datum���there is something irreducibly artificial in it���and, on the other hand, while unable to lay claim to originality, it is not founded by something like a transcendence: habit always comes from nature, since in human nature there is the habit of contracting habits. Habit is both nature and artifice. And if this notion was used in the political and moral philosophy of the eighteenth century, it was in order to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit.
Now it seems to me that the use of the term habit in the nineteenth century is different. In political literature, it ceases being regularly used in a critical way. On the other hand, it is used prescriptively: habit is what people must submit to. There is a whole ethics founded on habit. Far from habit limiting the sphere of morality, of ethics, a whole politics of habit is formed that is transmitted by very different sorts of writing���writings of popular moralization or tracts of social economy.--Michel Foucault The Punitive Society: Lectures at the College de France 1972-1973, translated by Graham Burchell, 28 March 1973, pp. 237-238. [Emphasis in original.]
The first quoted paragraph above is about as lucid a description of the political significance of Foucault's projects throughout the 1970s. We can describe Foucault's project as the exploration of the social mechanisms that make us unselfconscious rule followers not the least that make us productive agents. (Notice that he is not interested in individual habits; just the habits that instantiate or effectuate social norms.)
But in the next paragraph he inscribes this project, which could easily have been the start of an ethnographic or sociological project (with social psychology mixed in), into what we might call a 'natural history' of the development of the conceptualization of habit. It could be instructive to try to connect this natural history of habit with Foucault's more famous natural history of homo economicus in his Birth of Biopolitics lectures. And the ground-zero of this project is Hume's philosophy which generates "Humean criticism" in political philosophy.
In their footnotes, the editors of The Punitive Society usefully refer to some key passages in Hume's philosophy to explain what Foucault may have in mind. But they don't venture any suggestions on who these Humean critics in political philosophy might be. This is a shame. Because Foucault explicitly mentions the analysis of "law, institutions, and authority," I suspect Foucault is thinking of Beccaria, who is a Humean in several ways (albeit not only Humean): for example, "the power of habit," Beccaria writes, "is universal over every sensible being. As it is by that we learn to speak, to walk, and to satisfy our necessities, so the ideas of morality are stamped on our minds by repeated impressions." (Crimes and Punisments, Chapter 28) Since Beccaria plays a very prominent role in The Punitive Society, this would be my best guess. However, I have been unable to find any other use of 'Humean criticism' in Foucault's thought so this is quite speculative.
However, it is not purely speculative because thinking of Humean criticism in terms of Beccaria can explain something otherwise deeply puzzling, interconnected features about Foucault's claim. As is well known Hume was a critic of the social contract. And, in fact, many have read Hume's philosophy and (especially) history as friendly to the conservative principles of the Tories and critical of the Whig and Lockean social contract theory. Something accentuated by Hume's argument in his (1752) essay "Of the Original Contract." So, it is odd to see Foucault attribute to the Humean a desire "to get away from anything of the order of traditional obligations founded on a transcendence, and to replace these obligations with the pure and simple obligation of the contract; in order to replace these traditional obligations, which are shown to be only the effects of habit, with a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract. To criticize tradition through habit in order to contractualize social bonds, such is the essence of this use of the notion of habit."
To be sure, one can read Hume as undermining the grounds of many (if not all) "traditional obligations founded on a transcendence" (and certainly the suspicion he does so cost him the Chair at Edinburgh). But there is no reason to attribute to Hume (the stereotypical liberal view) of ascribing to "a game of obligations in which the will of each will be voluntarily bound and actualized in the contract." It's also not obvious Hume is really criticizing tradition through habit (as opposed to diagnosing habit as the source of tradition).
But Beccaria does combine a Humean moral psychology and social theory with a social contract theory! Beccaria introduces it in chapter 3 as follows:
The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes; and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact...If every individual be bound to society, society is equally bound to him by a contract, which, from its nature, equally binds both parties. This obligation, which descends from the throne to the cottage, and equally binds the highest and lowest of mankind, signifies nothing more, than that it is the interest of all, that conventions, which are useful to the greatest number, should be punctually observed. The violation of this compact by any individual, is an introduction to anarchy.
What's interesting about Beccaria's social contract theory is not just its incipient utilitarianism, which alongside the social compact is not really analyzed in any great depth (and probably is in tension with the Humean elements in his social theory), but rather that the contract itself is between the individual and society. (Beccaria has moved quite a bit a way from Locke's account of society and is anticipating a more Smithian/Fergusonian approach.) And as the final sentence of the quoted passage already reveals, the purpose of law, then, is, as Beccaria makes explicit in chapter 35, "only intended to maintain the social compact, and not to punish the intrinsic malignity of actions." (This feature Foucault comes to admire in Bentham and in Becker and Stigler.)
And, indeed, as Foucault has noticed, the obligation that is generated by the (implied) social contract is to follow social norms, especially those social that serve the majority. And, as Beccaria argues at much greater length in Crimes and Punishments, if the institutions of society are properly designed, or function well (and, as he notes in chapter 40, the laws don't incentivize norm violation), than citizens can be counted on doing so from habit.
November 16, 2022
Foucault, Similitude, and Hume & Newton
Let the philosopher pride himself on his precision as much as he will... I nevertheless dare defy him to make a single step in his progress without the aid of resemblance. Throw but one glance upon the metaphysical aspect of the sciences, even the least abstract of them, and then tell me whether the general inductions that are derived from particular facts, or rather the kinds themselves, the species and all abstract notions, can be formed otherwise than by means of resemblance. [20]
At the border of knowledge, similitude is that barely sketched form, that rudimentary relation which knowledge must overlay to its full extent, but which continues, indefinitely, to reside below knowledge in the manner of a mute and ineffaceable necessity.--Michel Foucault The Order of Things (1970) {1994, Vintage Books Edition} Translated by Alan Sheridan* (original Les Mots et les Choses, 1966), pp. 67-68
The position attributed to Hume by Foucault in the first paragraph above recalls Hume's claim (in the first Enquiry) that "it seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects." (EHU 5.8) Even so the view being attributed to Hume is also a bit awkward as an interpretation of Hume's accounts of natural and philosophical relations (a distinction articulated in the Treatise), and the role of resemblance and identity among them. I want to highlight three problems.
First, in his own voice, Foucault distinguishes natural and philosophical relations as follows: philosophical relations presuppose reflection. Now, in Hume reflection is a mechanism of the mind that turns ideas into new impressions. That is, "impressions of reflexion are only antecedent to their correspondent ideas; but posterior to those of sensation, and deriv'd from them." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) The paradigmatic examples of impressions of reflexion are "desire and aversion, hope and fear." (Treatise 1.1.2.1.) That is to say, the passions and emotions. I mention this explicitly because on Foucault's interpretation, the elements or relata or building blocks of philosophical relations are impressions of reflection or the ideas derived from them. (And it would be surprising if the passions played a role in them.)
For, Hume does not explicitly claim that reflection is presupposed in any philosophical relation including identity (which is the one singled out by Foucault). After all he claims, "we extend it to mean any particular subject of comparison, without a connecting principle." (Treatise 1.1.5.1) So, it is strictly speaking false to suggest that in Hume philosophical relations require the operation of reflection.
But one may well think this is not the end of the matter. After all, Hume lists seven sources of comparison that can be "considered the sources of all philosophical relations. (Treatise 1.1.5.1, emphasis added.) These turn out to be viz. "resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety, and causation." (Treatise 1.3.1.1,) If reflexion is crucial to these (especially identity) than the spirit of Foucault's account can be saved. But none of them presuppose reflexion. In addition, Hume divides this list "into two classes; [first] into such as depend entirely on the ideas, which we compare together, and [second] such as may be chang'd without any change in the ideas." Crucially, again, reflexion is irrelevant to this. So, Foucault misrepresents Hume here on philosophical relations.*
To be sure, I don't mean to deny Foucault's claim that "no equality or relation of order can be established between two things unless their resemblance has at least occasioned their comparison." This is Hume's position, too:
The first [philosophical relation] is resemblance: And this is a relation, without which no philosophical relation can exist; since no objects will admit of comparison, but what have some degree of resemblance. (Treatise 1.1.5.3; emphasis in original)
But while it is true that for Hume identity is only a philosophical relation this is not true for resemblance in Hume. For, second, Hume recognizes two kinds or sites of resemblance, one is a philosophical relation and when it functions in a philosophical relation, although resemblance "be necessary to all philosophical relation, it does not follow, that it always produces a connexion or association of ideas." (Treatise 1.1.5.3) Only natural relations generate an association of ideas. And for Hume there are three such natural relations of which resemblance is one. (Treatise 1.1.4.1.) Which he does treat, as Foucault suggests, as a "gentle force." (Treatise 1.1.4.1) [As an aside, Foucault's 'calm' force is almost certainly the effect of translation either from Hume's English to Foucault's French Hume or from Foucault's text to my translation, etc. For this reason, I am treating resemblance and similitude as synonyms here even though Hume does not really use 'similitude' in the Treatise.]
This, matters because, third, thus, in Hume's Treatise similitude/resemblance doesn't just reside mutely 'below knowledge' acting as a natural relation behind the scenes as it were constraining our mind, but it is also the content of knowledge (and so made explicit). So, here, too, Foucault is misrepresenting Hume's position.
Now, so far, I have skipped the material Foucault quotes and references with endnote [20] in the material I have quoted above. It's natural to read Foucault here as quoting Hume as evidence for his position. But Hume scholars may well wonder what the source of the quoted passage is. (It's not Hume after all.) In fact, the passage quoted by Foucault that starts with "Let the philosopher pride..." is not, first impressions notwithstanding by Hume, but rather is as endnote [20] indicates, a quote from Merian's (1767) Reflexions philosophiques sur la ressemblance, a book I had never looked at before.
Merian is a translator of Hume's first Enquiry and an important critic of Hume, which gave the world the term 'phenomenalism' in order to describe Hume (in 1793). See this (1997) paper by Laursen and Popkin for details (here). Sadly, their paper does not mention the Reflexions philosophiques. With help from Profs. Sophie Roux and Charles T. Wolfe, I located an online copy of the work, which is not very long. Merian does not seem to mention Hume or natural & philosophical relations in his Reflexions! So, Foucault's reading of Hume is not indebted to this work by Merian! (In fact, Merian merely seems here to be capturing Hume's insight of the first Enquiry 5.8 -- a work he had translated just a few years before -- that I quoted above.)
We can conclude then that here on Hume, Merian is not a source for Foucault, but that Merian is used by Foucault to articulate Hume's position (that Foucault recognizes in Merian's 1767 text). At this point one may well wonder if in the quoted passage above, Foucault is relying primary on the first Enquiry, but that would be curious here because he does directly refer to the Treatise (1.3.3 & 1.4.4--the latter a bit odd because it is Hume's account of the modern philosophy) in a endnote in a later chapter on the relationship between Hume's account of causation and its relationship to similarity.
To be sure I don't mean to suggest that you need to follow my interpretation of Hume's account of natural and philosophical relations. That's notoriously contested terrain. But rather that Foucault gets rather basic features of Hume's position wrong. Given that all the other references to Hume in The Order of Things are actually rather formulaic (and the kind of shorthand one may find in post-Kantian philosophy) one may well wonder how carefully Foucault read his Hume. (Oddly he never cites Merian again in the book.)
You may think that this is just scholarly book-keeping. That would be fine actually. However, the significance of this is that it undercuts Foucault's larger claim (which concludes the section) that "from the seventeenth century, resemblance was pushed out of the boundaries of knowledge, toward the humblest and basest of its frontiers." (71) This is, as we have seen, not true for Hume. I also would deny this is true of, say, of Newton's natural philosophy. If anything, one of the key issues in Newton's account of space and time is that Newton cane give a clear account of what Newton calls the 'species and magnitude' of the measure of space, but that he has a difficulty to do so for the measure of time. (See the postscript to my seventh chapter in my Newton's Metaphysics: Essays.) So the resemblance of spaces is much easier secured by Newton (and can do all kinds of work for him through geometric reasoning) than the putative resemblance of time. (This is no trivial matter if we look ahead to Einstein.)
I actually suspect that in the background early modern empiricism (here meaning Locke, Newton, and Hume) in all their variety are tacitly assimilated by Foucault to 20th century (Carnapian) empiricism where resemblance is indeed foundational (although problematized by Goodman and Quine). But that's just a hunch.
*It's possible, for example, that reflection gets assimilated to philosophical relations if one wrongly assumes that reflection is characteristic of philosophical activity.
November 15, 2022
Hobbes and Descartes on the Distribution of Wit, and some Plato
As regular readers know I am rather fond of these two paragrahs in Hobbes and I treat them as foundational to my own methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) [recall here; here and originally here]. But recently, during a seminar discussion, I noticed two features that invite reconsideration. First, in the top paragraph, it is striking that when Hobbes justifies that the strength of body is sufficiently equal, he appeals to a political mechanism that has solved what we may call the original coordination problem (confederacy). This is a bit awkward for two reasons (;) because such fundamental equality is a kind of premise or step in the argment that is supposed to lead to the social contract in the state of nature. But here we are informed that even in nature, political alliance secures such equality. This is not the place to elaborate what this signifies, but the paragraph suggests to me that for Hobbes politics ("secret machination") is constitutive of human co-existence. The state of nature is not, as it sometimes taken to be, pre-political. About that some other time more. But (ii) the capacity to enter into sucessful confederacy with others (or to execute "secret machination" successfully) seems to presuppose non-trivial social intelligence. And while it can provide evidence for bodily equality, it seems to undermine the idea that we are truly equal (intellectually). I return to this in the paragraph below the next one.
It's also worth noting that in that first paragraph, Hobbes here is recalling some key features of Glaucon's version of the social contract in at Republic 358E-359B: that is, "those who lack the power to avoid [being harmed by others] and [unable to impose harms on others] determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another" (translated by Shorey).I don't mean to suggest Hobbes is deliberately evoking Plato here, but I do think it possible that there is a more general moral lurking here: in order to argue for the conceptual possibility for an egalitarian social contract that has normative or political authority, the construct seems to rest on a prior step in which the many collaborate in subdueing the strong.
My second point pertains to the final three sentences of the second quoted paragraph above (and these I will connect to Hobbes below). Here, in line with my remark above, Hobbes does not really affirm equal mental capacity in extensional terms. (The existence of rhetoric and science, and perhaps education more generally undermines it.) But this extensional perspective is not really doing the work there. He switches to an intensional context, and points out that we all tend to believe we're smart (in the way at Lake Wobegon parents think their child above average) and that we do not tend to envy other people their smarts. Hobbes is articulating here an envy-free distributive principle, which is a key criterion for an egalitarian distribution of an item.
He explains the endorsement of one's own sufficient keen intelligence ('wit') in terms of a kind of perspectival bias--we are too close to ourselves to judge this really impartially. But interestingly enough, the fact that we're free of envy of other people's smarts suggests that this kind of perspectival bias is itself equally distributed among us.
Of course, Hobbes is also being very funny here (and kind of implying he is smarter for noticing this), because on the whole wisdom is in short supply. In conversation, some people deny what Hobbes attributes to them--they are modest and genuinely wish they were as smart as others. In my view these putative counterexamples are not very problematic to Hobbes because such people are not a source of the kind of political trouble he worries about (ambition): as he puts it in chapter XI, "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition. " In chapter 13, he is not too worried that people will think they are not sufficiently equal to others and so can be rightfully denied political equality. (A theorist of adaptive preferences or structural injustice may well worry more.)
It occurred to me, too, that in these three sentences, Hobbes is trolling Descartes with whom he had an unfruitful, acrimonious exchange, published in 1641 as part of the "Objections and Replies" to/in the Meditations. For Hobbes is here evoking, even adopting for his own ends, the then famous opening lines of Part 1 of Descartes' (1637) Discourse on method. Descartes starts with pretty much the same envy-free criterion to establish the equal distribution of good sense:
The Discourse on Method is not read much in political philosophy/theory, even though it has quite a bit of pertinent material (recall here; and here).
Of course, Hobbes and Descartes may not saying exactly the same thing (wisdom is not often thought identical to good sense/reason). I am unsure what Hobbes' definition of wisdom in Leviathan is, but in the dedication to his (1651) De Cive, Hobbes writes that "Wisdome properly so call'd is nothing else but this, The perfect knowledge of the Truth in all matters whatsoever." Leaving aside if wisdom is then possible in reality, this definition suggests that wisdom is considerably rarer than we tend to think it.
Whereas Descartes is suggesting that the capacity to distinguish truth from error is available to us all. That we are led into error is fundamentally the effect of the diversity of or developmental paths and our diverging interests (we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects.) Our life's experience corrupts our capacity to distinguish true from false.
Somewhat surprisingly Descartes goes on to deny the natural equality he had just diagnosed with an intentional envy free criterion, by offering the following extentional judgment: "The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations." Descartes here echoes a rather important passage [491D] Plato's Republic that one can naturally read as concerned with the inductive risk of the teaching of philosophy to ambitious and smart types [like Alcibiades].[Recall also Ibn Rushd's commentary here.]
Descartes treats reason as the capacity to distinguish truth from falsity. It's pretty clear that Hobbes thinks this a mistake (and I suspect that's the trolling). For Hobbes defines reason, in deflationary fashion, as "nothing but Reckoning" and, in particular, of tracking "the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men." (see chapter 5 of Leviathan, emphasis added). What reason really does, for Hobbes, is keep track of our linguistic conventions.
*I am unsure who the translator of this edition is.
November 14, 2022
Parfit, Long Termism and Existential Risk: and Nietzsche's Fearless ones.
Some people believe that there cannot be progress in Ethics, since everything has been already said. Like Rawls and Nagel, I believe the opposite. How many people have made Non-Religious Ethics their life���s work? Before the recent past, very few. In most civilizations, most people have believed in the existence of a God, or of several gods. A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended. But, before the recent past, few atheists made Ethics their life���s work. Buddha may be among this few, as may be Confucius, and a few Ancient Greeks and Romans. After more than a thousand years, there were a few more between the Sixteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Hume was an atheist who made Ethics part of his life���s work. Sidgwick was another. After Sidgwick, there were several atheists who were professional moral philosophers. But most of these did not do Ethics. They did Meta-Ethics. They did not ask which outcomes would be good or bad, or which acts would be right or wrong. They asked, and wrote about, only the meaning of moral language, and the question of objectivity. Non-Religious Ethics has been systematically studied, by many people, only since the 1960s. Compared with the other sciences, Non-Religious Ethics is the youngest and the least advanced.
I believe that if we destroy mankind, as we now can, this outcome will be much worse than most people think. Compare three outcomes:
(1) Peace.
(2) A nuclear war that kills 99% of the world���s existing population.
(3) A nuclear war that kills 100%.
(2) would be worse than (1), and (3) would be worse than (2). Which is the greater of these two differences? Most people believe that the greater difference is between (1) and (2). I believe that the difference between (2) and (3) is very much greater.
My view is held by two very different groups of people. Both groups would appeal to the same fact. The Earth will remain inhabitable for at least another billion years. Civilization began only a few thousand years ago. If we do not destroy mankind, these few thousand years may be only a tiny fraction of the whole of civilized human history. The difference between (2) and (3) may thus be the difference between this tiny fraction and all of the rest of this history. If we compare this possible history to a day, what has occurred so far is only a fraction of a second.
One of the groups who hold my view are Classical Utilitarians. They would claim, as Sidgwick did, that the destruction of mankind would be by far the greatest of all conceivable crimes. The badness of this crime would lie in the vast reduction of the possible sum of happiness.
Another group would agree, but for very different reasons. These people believe that there is little value in the mere sum of happiness. For these people, what matters are what Sidgwick called the ���ideal goods������the Sciences, the Arts, and moral progress, or the continued advance towards a wholly just world-wide community. The destruction of mankind would prevent further achievements of these three kinds. This would be extremely bad because what matters most would be the highest achievements of these kinds, and these highest achievements would come in future centuries.
There could clearly be higher achievements in the struggle for a wholly just world-wide community. And there could be higher achievements in all of the Arts and Sciences. But the progress could be greatest in what is now the least advanced of these Arts or Sciences. This, I have claimed, is Non-Religious Ethics. Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.--Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons, Section, 154. "HOW BOTH HUMAN HISTORY, AND THE HISTORY OF ETHICS, MAY BE JUST BEGINNING"
After my rant went viral this past weekend, Richard Pettigrew reminded me that if I really want to understand the intellectual roots of contemporary long-termism I can't ignore the last two pages of Reasons and Persons, quoted in full above. (Strictly speaking these are not the last two because the appendices are not wholly irrelevant, especially the material on social discounting.) And my hypothesis was that it would help explain, perhaps, something of the evident sectarianism that longtermism generates in its adherents. And when I returned to this material, I was, of course, immediately struck by the choice between 99% vs 100% extinction. And I started to think of objections.
But I hope you will forgive me if I step back first. For, I noticed that the hypothetical extinction scenarios are introduced with, and framed by, an implied contrast between [A] "Non-Religious Ethics" and Religious Ethics. The first oddity here is that the contrast is not drawn in the linguistically more accurate contrast between atheist ethics and theistic ethics (which in turn comes in monotheistic and polytheistic versions). Embedded in this contrast [A] is another explicit contrast (non-trivially indebted to Kant's "What is Enlightenment?") between [B] the "free development of moral reasoning" and the unfree development of moral reasoning (found in so-called 'Religious Ethics). And this, in turn, is connected to the contrast between [C] young ("recent past") and old ("more than a thousand years" etc.), which turns out to track [D] a contrast between the possibility of "greatest progress" and proven failure. And, again, this is connected to the contrast between [E] the "very few" and the very many. In addition, there is an implied contrast between [F] (a pacific) "a world-wide community" and the state of nature among nation-states. This, in turn is linked to the fact, [G] there is a to be hoped for possible consensus which contrasts with our existing cacophony. There are, finally, two further connected contrasts: (i) there is a contrast (again echoing Kant) between [H] irrational hopes (characteristic of superstition) with rational (or at least not irrational) hopes, and (ii) [I] the contrast between knowledge (of the past) and uncertainty (of the future).
As a two-fold aside, first, Parfit explicitly leaves open -- one need not be Straussian about this -- that this last contrast [D] may involve the practice of esoteric speech or dissembling: "A large minority were in fact atheists, whatever they pretended." One wonders what grounds this 'in fact.' And second, it is interesting that Parfit treats Buddha and Confucius as possible exemplars of this practice of pretending. To the best of my knowledge (and I know slightly more about the case of Confucius) this idea was popular in the wake of Bayle's linking of Spinoza to both Confucius and Buddha. (I have no idea if Parfit gets it directly or indirectly from Bayle, but in Bayle, too, we find the linking of these matters to esotericism.) And my guess is that Bayle shaped some of the orientalist tropes that helped found the study of comparative civilizations in the late nineteenth century.
I don't mean to suggests that nine-fold contrast [A-I] is exhaustive. Nearly all of these contrasts are not argued for in Parfit's book. (Please feel free to correct me!) Such a list of contrasts is characteristic of what I call 'philosophic prophecy' by which I mean the structured ways in which concept formation by philosophers is aided by rhetorical or literary imagery that shapes the reception of (more rational) arguments and thereby can shape possible futures. And I would have given you a more detailed explanation of this claim in light of the typical nature of philosophic prophecy.
But then I noticed something remarkable. In the quoted paragraphs, Parfit is treating the 'death of God' as a world-historical thesis which gives ground to the greatest possible (non-irrational) hopes. This is a feature and not a bug because it also informs the very plausibility of Parfit's rather dramatic claim that the gulf between (2) and (3) is larger than the gulf between (1) and (2). (For a certain kind of theist this would be question begging.)
That the death of God is a world historical event -- in part for its effect on morality -- is a thesis associated with Nietzsche. And one of its canonical formulations is in Nietzsche's Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343. So, it is no surprise -- although it shocked me -- that this very aphorism supplies Parfit with the epigraph to his book:
At last the horizon appears free to us again, even granted that it is not bright; at last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ���Open sea.
Parfit's epigraph also evokes the end of Book I of Hume Treatise as well as a famous passage of Socrates in Phaedo 99c���d, and all three cases (just like in Parfit) the very nature of philosophy, and its future, can be said to be at stake. Parfit himself reminds of his affinity with them in a passage in the book, "I would far prefer to have lived through the previous two and a half centuries, having had among my friends Hume, Byron, Chekhov, Nietzsche, and Sidgwick." As it happens Gay Science, Book V, section/aphorism 343 also is one of the texts that gave me idea of the existence of philosophical prophecy (since in it Nietzsche describes two kinds of such prophecy).
Crucially for present purpose is Nietzsche's attitude toward the rather grim immediate future: "This lengthy, vast and uninterrupted process of crumbling, destruction, ruin and overthrow which is now imminent: who has realised it sufficiently today to have to stand up as the teacher and herald of such a tremendous logic of terror, as the prophet of a period of gloom and eclipse, the like of which has probably never taken place on earth before?" Nietzsche feels not "sympathy" with the victims of history, "but rather like a new and indescribable variety of light, happiness, relief, enlivenment, encouragement, and dawning day? ... In fact, we philosophers and "free spirits" feel ourselves irradiated as by a new dawn by the report that the "old God is dead"; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment and expectation." (If you are shocked by this God is not dead for you.) In Nietzsche the price of progress is destruction of the old order so that we can breed (either culturally or genetically, i leave that aside) higher kind of men.
Now, notice that Parfit gives a classical utilitarian and elitist (that is, Nietzschean) argument for why 3 is worse than 2.* But that's not sufficient for his argument. He also needs to offer an argument for why 3 being worse than 2 is itself worse than 2 being worse than 1. But no such argument against "most people" is given. (I have some sympathy for the idea that philosophy is not a democracy.) We only receive an explanation for why total extinction (3) is worse than (2). And I do not think Parfit has an argument that is non-question begging because it presupposes the unfolding (as of yet "uncompleted") Death of God, that is, a kind of rational faith or hope that once completed will become self-evident. Among the fruits of this hope are the captains of longtermism.+
*I am not so sure he is right. Imagine being the last person on Earth. (Or the last 1% spread thinly accross the globe.) I suspect that it would be a lot worse than surviving extinction. (I have long thought that this held true for most of my family members that survived the Holocaust, so maybe I can't think clearly about this.)
+After I posted this Nickolas Delon called my attention to an essay by Richard Y Chapell that anticipates my conclusion albeit with a very different argument.
November 12, 2022
A rant on FTX, William MacAskill, and Utilitarianism
Philosophy goes through self-conscious, periodic bouts of historical forgetting.* These are moments when philosophical revolutionaries castigate the reading of books and the scholastic jargon to be found in there, and invite us to think for ourselves and start anew with a new method or new techniques, or new ways of formulating questions (and so on). When successful, what follows tends to be beautiful, audacious conceptual and even material world-building (in which sometimes old material is quietly recycled or reinterpreted). Hobbes, Descartes, Bentham, Frege, and Carnap are some paradigmatic exemplars of the phenomenon (that has something in common with, of course, religious reformations and scientific revolutions). There is a clear utility in not looking back.
What���s unusual about utilitarianism is not that it���s a nearly continuous intellectual tradition that is more than two centuries rich. Even if we start the clock with the pre-Socratics that���s not yet a very old tradition by the standards of the field. But rather that it has become so cavalier about curating and reflecting on its own tradition. In one sense that���s totally understandable from within the tradition: the present just is the baseline from which we act or design institutions or govern society (etc.). Spending time on the past just is opportunity costs foregone or, worse, a sunk-cost fallacy. Worrying about path dependencies and endowment effects prevents one from the decisive path forward.
Of course, the previous paragraph is too crude: some active utilitarians write with sensitivity and care about the less savory parts of tradition���s past (I think of Bart Schultz); And certainly Julia Driver has shown that moral complexity can be fruifully discussed in the tradition. Yet, most of what���s produced about the past from within the tradition is either very narrowly focused or the product of people who don���t really develop the tradition forward. (This claim becomes more evident if you look at the practice of Kantianism, Humeanism, and the variety of virtue ethics out there. Even within formal philosophy there is better curating of their own past.) Nothing has matched Halevy���s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism in the century since it has appeared in richness and insight (and philosophically it is by no means without problems). Obviously, too much looking back stalls progress (one may think that this what happened say, within, phenomenology or Austrian economics at one point or another), but never checking the rearview mirror also generates certain known risks.
In fact, there is a clear recruiting advantage to this march-forward stance. The barriers to entry are very low, the fundamental principles are well developed and clear enough, and one can start making progress within utilitarianism or applying it to sets of problems rather quickly. And while that���s a gross simplification for areas where there has been lots of existing utilitarian activity, it remains true in the large. If you are earnest and want to improve the world, utilitarianism gives you ready-made tools to think about doing so! And what tools���elegant, systematizing, and action-guiding! That they risk flattening things is a virtue not a bug. And because the baseline is given, a side effect has been that working within existing institutions is seen as more efficient and more promising to contribute to improving the world ���say by making lots of money trading in crypto-currency ��� than by tackling some of the opaque, entrenched structural injustices through the political processes that got us here.
That���s to say, within utilitarianism there is a curious, organic forgetting built into the way it���s practiced, especially by the leading lights who shape it as an intellectual movement within philosophy (and economics, of course), and as a social movement. And this is remarkable because utilitarianism for all its nobility and good effects has been involved in significant moral and political disasters involving not just, say, coercive negative eugenics and ��� while Bentham rejected this ��� imperialism (based on civilizational superiority commitments in Mill and others), but a whole range of bread and butter social debacles that are the effect of once popular economics or well-meaning government policy gone awry. But in so far as autopsies are done by insiders they never question that it is something about the character of utilitarian thought, when applied outside the study, that may be the cause of the trouble (it���s always misguided practitioners, the circulation of false beliefs, the wrong sort of utilitarianism, etc.).
In my view there is no serious study within the utilitarian mainstream that takes the inductive risk of itself seriously and ��� and this is the key part ��� has figured out how to make it endogenous to the practice. This is actually peculiar because tracking inductive risk just is tracking consequences and (if you wish) utils. It is especially odd because there is, within utilitarianism, a continuous return to the question ��� which in a way is crying out for an inductive risk analysis ��� of how much lying and deception of the public is permissible, or to be precise, ���the possibility of esoteric morality.��� (I also find it odd that this literature is part of the public, credit economy rather than an oral tradition. But what do I know about esotericism?)
For example, the best example I am familiar with that has really started to do something like what I propose within philosophy (within economics I warmly recommend work by David M. Levy, Sandra Peart, and Thomas C. Leonard), from someone who at least gives utilitarianism all the benefits of the doubt, Allen Buchanan���s (2007) ���Institutions, Beliefs and Ethics: Eugenics as a Case Study��� ends up arguing that ���ethics must incorporate social moral epistemology, the systematic comparative evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of social institutions in producing, transmitting and sustaining the beliefs upon which our moral motivation, judgment and reasoning depend.��� This paper has received fewer citations that some of my papers on long dead figures, so it is fair to say it has not generated a major discussion fifteen years on. And rather than engaging with this relatively modest proposal, the argument gets dismissed in a footnote as (I am not making this up) ���moral grandstanding and motivated reasoning.��� A more serious response suggests (by De Volder, who I admire greatly) basically that ���this time is different��� (because liberal eugenics does not involve coercion���a claim that is not scrutinized). Maybe I have missed the utilitarian that has taken it seriously, but if it���s out there it has not generated a real debate or uptake.
Notice that Buchanan simply denies the autonomy of ethics. But even if one accepts that diagnosis (and this helps say, guard, against expert over-confidence and misplaced trust in other experts) this does not exhaust the inductive risk. And while in some philosophical theories downstream consequences are shrugged off within utilitarianism today long distance, downstream consequences are the opiate of several projects (including, of course, longtermism). In wider historical context, this unwillingness to take seriously inductive risk of philosophy, in a project that aims to reshape the world, is also odd because the father figure of philosophy, Socrates, was executed, in part, in virtue of the perceived negative effect he had on his students.
Don���t get me wrong utilitarianism is a beautiful, systematic theory, a lovely tool to help navigate acting in the world in a consistent and transparent matter. When used prudently it���s a good way to keep track of one���s assumptions and the relationship between means and ends. But like all tools it has limitations. And my claim is that the tradition refuses to do systematic post-mortems on when the tool is implicated in moral and political debacles. Yes, somewhat ironically, the effective altruism community (in which there is plenty to admire) tried to address this in terms of, I think, project failure. But that falls short in willing to learn when utilitarianism is likely to make one a danger to innocent others.
This present rant ��� feel free to check out my more judicious scholarship and blogging about this topic ��� is obviously triggered by the failure of FTX and the subsequent public comments by William MacAskill, who quite naturally seems angry that he was lied to (although how sincere he is in light of the possibility of esoteric morality I leave to others), and correctly outraged on behalf of the victims that the benefactor of his movement probably committed significant fraud and theft. And if you do not believe me that massive historical forgetting is at play here, at one point in his twitter thread MacAskill writes, ���I know that others from inside and outside of the community have worried about the misuse of EA ideas in ways that could cause harm. I used to think these worries, though worth taking seriously, seemed speculative and unlikely.��� As if to think such harms had not already occurred in the past!
I close with one final criticism of MacAskill (who in some ways is a victim of the stories utilitarians tell themselves). When it comes to his own role in the FTX debacle ��� and the story has been told in many media (in the context of his book launch) ��� about how he encouraged Bankman-Fried to embrace ���earning to give��� over a by now mythical lunch in Cambridge, about that no word in his thread. (Just to be sure, I am actually a fan of effective altruism, albeit a critic of long-termism.)
By framing the problem as Mr. Bankman-Fried���s ���integrity��� and not the underlying tool, MacAskill will undoubtedly manage to learn no serious lesson at all. I am not implicating utilitarianism in the apparent ponzi scheme. But Bankman-Fried���s own description back in April of his what he was up to should have set off alarm bells among those who associated with him���commentators noticed it bore a clear resemblance to a Ponzi.+ (My regular readers know I am no enemy of markets.) Of course, and I say this especially to my friends who are utilitarians; I have not just discussed a problem only within utilitarianism; philosophy as a professional discipline always assumes its own clean hands, or finds ways to sanitize the existing dirt.
*This post was originally published at D&I and has been republished with minor modifications at Crooked Timber. And then I updated this post accordingly.
+It���s possible that in the end it wasn���t a ponzi, just simple theft or gambling with other people���s money.
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