Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World

by Ryan Muldoon

Very diverse societies pose real problems for Rawlsian models of public reason. This is for two first, public reason is unable accommodate diverse perspectives in determining a regulative ideal. Second, regulative ideals are unable to respond to social change. While models based on public reason focus on the justification of principles, this book suggests that we need to orient our normative theories more toward discovery and experimentation. The book develops a unique approach to social contract theory that focuses on diverse perspectives. It offers a new moral stance that author Ryan Muldoon calls, "The View From Everywhere," which allows for substantive, fundamental moral disagreement. This stance is used to develop a bargaining model in which agents can cooperate despite seeing different perspectives. Rather than arguing for an ideal contract or particular principles of justice, Muldoon outlines a procedure for iterated revisions to the rules of a social contract. It expands Mill's conception of experiments in living to help form a foundational principle for social contract theory. By embracing this kind of experimentation, we move away from a conception of justice as an end state, and toward a conception of justice as a trajectory. Listen to Robert Talisse interview Ryan Muldoon about Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World on the podcast, New Books in Philosophy : Also, read Ryan Muldoon’s related Niskanen Center article, "Diversity and Disagreement are the Solution, Not the Problem," published Jan. 10, 2017:

Genres: Philosophy

144 pages, Paperback

Published March 31, 2021

Reviews

[Erika RS · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably would have given this book a 5/5 for being thought provoking if I'd read it before Gerald Gaus's The Tyranny of the Ideal: Justice in a Diverse Society. However, since Gaus's book integrated the most critical of these ideas, it was less impactful.

That said, this book, while dense, was fairly short and, in my opinion, captured what I considered the most critical takeaway from The Tyranny of the Ideal (although less formally): society is not homogenous and yet much of social contract theory (in particular, those of a Rawlsian bent), assumes that there is a normalized perspective from which we can reason about justice. That idealized perspective generally tries to take the perspective of a neutral citizen that does not identify with any particular life.

The problem with this approach is two-fold. First, it's not really realistic. People are not actually capable of leaving their individual perspective behind. Instead, they just end up translating the views that they derive from their perspective into the language of the acceptable perspective. As this translation becomes more and more strained, the social contract derived from such a reasoning process becomes increasingly tenuous.

More critically, a common normalized perspective ends up being a least common denominator perspective which forces people to leave out information that may be critical to moral reasoning. Since we are not privileging one perspective, we don't know which of those left out bits bits are useful (race? gender? religion? blue/black vs white/gold dress?). However, it seems unlikely that just because we do not understand which bits are useful that none of them are.

So instead, we have to take as central that we cannot abstractly reason our way to justice. If we take that as a starting point, having a diversity of perspectives goes from being a liability to being the engine for generating social progress.

Because of our individual agency, we each deserve a voice in determining the social contract. Furthermore, those voices should be our true voices, not translated through some lens of an artificial common perspective -- this is what Muldoon calls the View from Everywhere. But in this world, not only will we disagree on the outcomes -- the details of the social contract -- we will disagree at a more fundamental level of our worldviews. We will not agree on the objects we are reasoning about. Muldoon gives the example of the debate over abortion: are we debating about a person, a potential person, tissue, etc.?

Since we cannot agree on what we are reasoning about, we can only agree about the outcomes: the rules and norms that we will abide by. Determining these norms becomes a negotiation about what is minimally acceptable to the perspectives involved in the negotiations. (The discussion of this negotiation is one of the areas where Gaus's more rigorous presentation is more valuable. Gaus frames minimal acceptability as being any rule which is better than not having any rule at all from the point of view of that perspective. E.g., in the abortion example, pro-life advocates might vastly prefer that abortions are illegal, but if they knew that they absolutely could not get they, they might prefer a rule that they are done by qualified medical practitioners over no rule at all.)

This is not a process we do once and then declare done. Instead, this is an iterative process where we identify the common ground, identify the areas of disagreement and negotiate on the norms and rules that apply, and then allow people to arrange their lives in any way that is compatible with those norms. These experiments in living become the basis of the next round of the social contract.

This iterative process of discovery is important for two reasons. First, we do not know what true justice looks like. This is something we must discover. Allowing people flexibility in domains where there is not consensus helps discover what does and does not work in practice. Note the important assumption here: justice works in practice with real humans living real lives. If a standard of justice doesn't work when applied to real humans, it is the standard that is wrong, not the humans who need fixing.

The second reason is that the right social contract may change as the perspectives that compose a society change. Muldoon hypothesizes that while there are likely factors that will emerge in all social contracts that integrate diverse views -- he has a strong suspicion about the importance of at least some freedom of expression -- he also hypothesizes that there is not a one-size-fits-all social contract. The best social contract for a society is one that derives from the mix of perspectives in that society.

Muldoon has some good discussion about the details of what this might look like. It's reasonably concrete for political philosophy -- which is pretty abstract by normal standards. The most important part of this is that we cannot assume that people will allow others a voice in determining the social contract because they believe that those with alternate perspectives have something to add to the conversation. (They might agree in principle, but in practice "those people" are the exception.) Instead, Muldoon appeals to the idea that diversity often yields opportunity for non-zero-sum economic interactions, and that it is this potential for gain that incentivizes people to allow those different than them to participate in society. (This was a good connection to the book I read just after -- Nonzero -- which frames it as being less willing to go to war to someone who is a valuable trading partner.) This economic tolerance might eventually yield a deeper belief in the equality of others -- but that's not necessary as long as each perspective gets a seat at the negotiating table.

That same discussion, however, reveals the main weakness of this model of the social contract. A negotiation model is only as powerful as the ability of negotiators to walk away with no deal. However, in today's interdependent society, opting out is not really a realistic option. So while, overall, I think that the idea of the social contract evolving is a critical part of dealing with a diverse, changing society, I think that the ideal of getting a social contract that is fully agreed upon by everyone who is constrained by it is unrealistic. But as a directional goal, I think it is a fine one.

[Justus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know this before reading both of them but it turns out that Justice and the Politics of Difference and Muldoon's book have a ton of overlap in their concerns and even their solutions. So much so that I'm a bit surprised that Muldoon doesn't list Iris Marion Young as a reference. But where Iris Marion Young is writing from the context of feminist philosophy, Muldoon is writing from the more traditional context of analytic philosophy and social contract theory.

I think that Muldoon is tackling a genuinely exciting and vexing problem: how to build a stable, diverse society. So far the answer is "tolerance". But Muldoon makes a great case that this framing is fatally and fundamentally flawed. It is the "eat vegetables because they are good for you, not because they actually taste good" approach.

Tolerance indicates a certain antagonism, focusing only on the difficulties that are introduced by diversity. It “solves” the problems created by diversity by telling us to ignore them, or to find some abstract value in leaving them alone. But if societies become more diverse, or even just more socially and economically integrated, the strategy of tolerance breaks down. The strains of commitment grow as societies become more diverse, as nothing within the notion of tolerance provides a countervailing force to the increased demandingness of tolerance in more diverse populations. Eventually tolerance becomes too difficult, and we cease to tolerate.

The two pretty cool things that Muldoon does are: one, he wants to give us a process and not a solution; and two, he leans heavily on insights from market economics where agents of limited time, knowledge, and intellect still work in a weird competitive-collaborative hybrid to "discover" prices.

Muldoon presents us with a three-step process for figuring out our social contract. And he envisions this as being a dynamic contract. We periodically iterate on it as our knowledge changes, as our values change, and as the constituents of our society change.

Step 1 is to figure out what everybody agrees on, what your "fixed points" are in society. But his approach for this has echoes of Iris Marion Young's focus on group-identity. He proposes something like Condorcet Jury Voting. The twist is that each "perspective" gets a vote not each person. He's pretty weak on exactly how the set of "perspectives" would be determined in the real world, unfortunately.

A moral belief supported by a single perspective is only as strong as the weakest assumption in the perspective. A moral belief supported by multiple perspectives is stronger than the status of any individual perspective. A robust moral belief, then, remains stable against the introduction of novel perspectives, and the elimination of faulty perspectives

Step 2 is the different perspectives then engage in bargaining on rights, constrained by the "fixed points" above. He makes two nifty moves here. First, rights as we talk about them are actually bundles of things, so we need to decompose them when we engage in bargaining. We talk about "right to free speech" but there is really thousands of specific kinds of speech -- depending on the precise content and location -- and many of them we've decided are not actually allowed.

So the concept of a right must shift away from being an absolute, and more toward a bundle of many affliated allowances for action or guarantees that may be considered at least somewhat independently of each other

The second nifty thing he does is show that, just as in the marketplace, people can come to an agreement even if they don't even agree what they are bargaining about. When I sell you a shirt, I don't need to understand what value you get from the shirt. This allows us to "bootstrap" a society. But, just as in the marketplace, if I do empathize with your needs, desires, and worldview, I'm going to be in a better position to bargain. This is Muldoon's ultimate goal: that bargaining over rights forces us to develop empathy, and not just tolerance, for diverse perspectives.

This price mechanism, unlike the Rawlsian public reason model of social contracts, allows agents with different perspectives to engage with each other in a way that doesn’t privilege any given perspective

Step 3 is that -- once you've agreed on the distribution of benefits and costs of rights -- you then engage in relatively small-scale experiments to learn what kind of social rules work and which don't.

Rather than try and resolve these differences with a priori debates and the imposition of a universal solution, this bias allows actual experience to dictate what approaches should win the debate

All in all, Muldoon's approach has a lot to like. He's tackling a hard problem: is there a better solution to a diverse world than the current liberal "tolerance" approach (which seems increasingly rickety)? Should we experiment with solutions and iterate on our findings? (What Agile-loving software developer can say no to that?)

Yet I ended up being somewhat disappointed in several respects -- that's why this isn't a 5-star book that I enthusiastically recommend to everyone. As mentioned above, how exactly do "perspectives" get determined for this fancy Condorcet Jury Voting? We all have an intuition that it means something like "people who think mostly the same". But in practice how does that possibly work, especially when you consider intersectionality. Is "Farmer" a perspective? Or is "Minnesota Farmer" a perspective? Or is "Minnesota cash-crop farmer" a perspective?

A bigger issue is that Muldoon relies heavily on a fairly simplistic version of economic theory and I feel like the last few decades of things like behavioural finance have complicated that picture substantially and it makes me wonder how much those complications undermine his entire enterprise. How the heck would this "bargaining" for rights even work???

But I think my biggest disappointment is that, fairly late in the game, Muldoon slides in some things that make it clear his entire project is fairly unrealistic and has no chance of actually happening in the real world.

First, during the bargaining over rights he says that, just as when we're bargaining in the marketplace, we can walk away from any deal we think isn't fair. But is that really an option in the real world? Muldoon assumes a level of social fission that seems completely implausible given the historical experience of the American Civil War, China's attitudes toward Taiwan, the fate of separatist movements in Scotland, Quebec, and the Basque region.

Second, Muldoon suddenly makes clear that a consequence of his bargaining model is that groups can end up with very different sets of rights. (Because Group A may have decided that strong free speech rights aren't that important and bargained them away in exchange for, say, strong religious protections for their group.)

This will result in different people having different rights, but as discussed before, this is not an indication of discrimination or inequality. Instead it is recognition of equality in the context of diversity

Again, it just seems implausible that a society could cohere into a Society with different groups having different rights. Notions of "fairness" seem to be pretty deeply genetically ingrained but Muldoon's results seem like they would be seen as "unfair" by a lot of people.

If we focus not on identical rights, but instead on balancing the benefits and burdens of rights distributions, we are in a much better position to offer a way to embody political equality. As we saw in Chapter 1, taking diversity seriously means that equality and sameness will often pull apart

I'm not certain it is an insurmountable problem -- because I think he makes good points about not focusing on identical rights -- but he glosses over it far too quickly for my tastes. Despite those flaws and shortcomings, Muldoon made me think in a different way -- which is what the best books do. And I think his ideas have a lot of potential that merit more exploration.

Even more basically, however, I have argued against the idea that social contract theory’s focus should be on developing a single account of the ideal social contract.Instead, we should reorient what we are doing toward an approach designed around experimentation, discovery, and dynamism

[Otto Lehto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not every social contract theory book needs to have the length and weight of the Holy Writ. What I most appreciate about Ryan Muldoon's book is how it leverages its density and brevity. In just under 130 pages, it manages to present at least one revolutionary idea per chapter, sometimes more. None of the ideas overstays their welcome. This often leaves me wanting more. Indeed, many of the sections are crying out for further elaboration to be fully convincing. But equally often I feel nourished by the condensed superfood. Furthermore, I feel like the author is treating me with respect since he is not wasting my time. While some philosophers are so obscure and trippy that reading them makes you feel like you have just taken a heroic dose of Ayahuasca (I am looking at you, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia!), others, like Muldoon, are more comparable to microdosing on LSD: clearheaded, focused, and inspirational.

In short, the book argues that diversity should not only be tolerated (as a cost we have to bear) but embraced (as something we can all benefit from). Each chapter coalesces around a key argument. I will not summarize the whole book here. The early chapters focus on criticizing the Rawlsian public reason position as excessively static, equilibrating, hypothetical, and homogenizing. Perhaps there is an element of straw-manning going on here but for the most part I found the critique convincing. In a world of costant change, characterized by rapid technological, cultural, and demographic shifts, Muldoon's emphasis on a dynamic, disequilibrating, process-oriented contractarianism is very welcome. This approach also resonates with the recent work of Gerald Gaus although they reach slightly different conclusions. The important dynamic insight is that we should focus on developing a perspectival moral theory that takes seriously the fact that people not only have different beliefs but also different perspectives (or lenses onto the world) that shape the way they organize their ontology, ethical views, and politics. These perspectives, moreover, are constantly shifting and subject to mutations. The middle sections of the book focus on developing a "View from Everywhere" that takes these perspectives, alongside beliefs and values, as the raw material of social theory. Muldoon presents it as a midway point that reconciles the neutrality of the "View from Nowhere" (objective moral theory) with the epistemic feasibility of the "View from Somewhere" (subjective moral theory). Whether it wholly succeeds is debatable but the enterprise is very bold and exciting. This kind of societal perspectivism suggests an uneven societal collision of visions that resonates with Nietzsche, hermeneutics, and Shackle's "kaleidic" economics.

How can perspectivism be combined with a vision of social justice or any stable institutional design? It seems impossible. Ingeniously, Muldoon argues that a social contract is possible even in the absence of fundamental agreement on the terms of the agreement or even what people are arguing about. This suggests that Rawls was wrong when he suggested that citizens need to have some basic shared standards to cooperate. The book climaxes into a liberal defence of weaponized social diversity in a "dynamic political philosophy" that calls for Millian "experiments in living" in almost everything. The institutional target of this dynamic philosophy is an evolving social contract that embraces continual complex adaptation through a process of never-ending bargaining over rights, duties, and public goods. I find some of the discussion (e.g. on the Bargaining Nash Equilibrium or the Proportionality Principle in redistribution) too short to be fully convincing, and some of the conclusions are little more than suggestions. I hope we get elaborations in later works.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book despite of (and sometimes because of) its brevity and density. It is probably one of the best works in political philosophy of the last few decades. Like Gaus, Muldoon represents the new wave of thinkers who take complexity, evolution, and liberalism seriously. In this regard, he has all of the right questions and at least some, if not all, of the right answers. And like Nozick, his work is not self-contained and conclusive but rather more like an open-ended stream of suggestions and discoveries that are calling out to be developed further. (This "germinative" approach to philosophy is also shared by the 19th century perspectivist, Niezsche, although the latter went even further down the perspectival rabbit hole.) In this regard, Muldoon's methodology is self-similar to his subject matter: the generation of new perspectives, the exploration of diverse pathways, and the creation of new experiments in living.