The Politics of Recognition, a Second Look

In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked. 

The Politics of Difference

In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is  consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).

The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution. 

As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal! 

From Distribution to Recognition

Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status. 

Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers. 

Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity. 

Not Just One or the Other

Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society. 

In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser. 

So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects. 

To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.

Sovereign Money in Switzerland (MMT Part 3)

Living in Switzerland, one of the local oddities is the quarterly referenda on every conceivable topic. In the highly decentralised Swiss political system, voters are frequently asked to resolve policy debates that the weak and uncoordinated central institutions can't or won't deal with. The frequency of referenda, however, means that voter engagement is extremely low and the whole process lies open to manipulation by niche interests. The next vote is scheduled for June 10, and the top issue is a constitutional amendment on "pleine [or 'Sovereign'] monnaie". Yes, folks, modern monetary theory (MMT) has arrived in Switzerland and given my previously expressed scepticism towards MMT, it's time to take a look at what that looks like practice. 

In 2015, the allegedly non-partisan "Vollgeld Initiative" collected the required 100,000 signatures necessary to put a constitutional amendment directly to voters. The way this is being gone about is quite simple, and rather clever. The Swiss constitution, like many others around the world, establishes a National Bank (the 'SNB') with the sole authority to issue coins and banknotes. Among other minor changes, the proposed amendment inserts 'and electronic money' into the relevant clause of the Constitution. The change may be minor, but the implications for the Swiss monetary and financial system are most definitely not. MMT proponents have found a neat trick: pose simultaneously as defenders of the original intent of the constitution by protecting the Central Bank's monopoly over the creation of money and as reformers who are just 'updating' the constitution to deal with the modern era of electronic finance. 

Sovereign Money and Horizontal Money

In order to know what this seemingly minor change would mean in practice, it's important to know how the money supply is defined. Physical notes and coins (the M0 money supply) represent only a fraction of all currency in circulation; much more is held as bank deposits or loans which are recorded electronically (the M1/M2 money supply). MMT proponents are closely related to monetary circuit theorists (MCT), who describe how private banks increase the supply of "horizontal money" in the economy by issuing loans and creating debt: since both the amount loaned and the debt are units of exchange and account, they are currency. All forms of the same currency are convertible into one another, and under fractional reserve banking financial institutions can loan out (read: create money) in multiples of the deposits or other assets it holds (up to regulatory limits). So long as all its debts aren't called due simultaneously, the system expands the supply of capital and thus economic activity. 

So far, so good. Fractional reserve banking is an established practice with well appreciated risks. Risks that regulators try to manage by imposing reserve requirements and capital adequacy ratios. Can this be done better? The evidence of the Great Recession suggests undoubtedly so. Are there historical precedents for centralising control of money creation to alleviate financial risks? Absolutely: in the middle ages (and still in Scotland today!) banks commonly issued their own bank notes, a function which modern central banks took over for good reason. But the Swiss Sovereign Money initiative goes much, much further. If the central bank has a monopoly on the creation of 'electronic money', then fractional reserve banking would cease to exist (although it would no doubt be resurrected in more opaque and risky forms). Instead, if a bank wanted to issue a loan to a business or investment, it would have to rely on its own deposits or (and here's the kicker) borrow from the central bank, which would create 100 per cent of money which the bank loans out.

From an accounting perspective, transactions appear largely the same under either system; but the risk inherent in expansionary spending is transferred from the balance sheet of the bank to the balance sheet of the central bank, and thus the state. All debt - both public and private - would then carry sovereign or public risk. Now, given the post-GFC bank bailouts and the political imperative to stabilise the economy when the banking sector crashes it, it may be true that horizontal money is in some sense always a liability for the state. Sovereign Money would make that implicit assumption explicit and unavoidable. But if your policy concern is the risks posed to people's livelihoods by the selfishness of the finance sector, then your problem is with capitalism - not they monetary system. Changing the latter does nothing to alleviate the risks posed by the former. 

MMTs true face?

I've said before that there is a vast disconnect between the theory of 'modern' money (which is interesting) and the sorts of policies its proponents advocate. If MMT is just a description of how horizontal finance operates, then why is it being outlawed by constitutional amendment? If sovereign money means governments can already create and spend money more than present, why is a radical restructuring of the finance sector necessary to allow that to occur? The Swiss initiative is rolling out all the usual MMT canards in an effort to sway voters: sovereign money means more spending for things like a UBI, lower taxes, more jobs or more infrastructure [take your pick]! The SNB has called out the Initiative's backers for advocating the funding of public spending through seignorage - exactly the issue I highlighted in my previous blog post on MMT. 

The Swiss initiative is also playing a dangerous game with populist and nationalist talking points. One of the campaigns key slogans is that voters want 'real francs', not merely promises to pay from banks. Rather than educating voters about the complexity of the financial system, the Initiative aims to force finance to behave in accordance with the naive picture voters have of it in their heads. The Initiative is also obsessed with talking about debt, which is an odd position for a economic movement which tells policy makers to massively expand public spending. Voters are being told that sovereign money will 'eliminate' private debt [which sits at more than twice GDP] - which is true only in a very technical sense. Private debt isn't a risk if [most] businesses that are lent to remain solvent and have the ability to repay their loans over time. The Initiative is weaponising conservative talking points to pursue a policy that would socialise private debt and give Switzerland a higher public debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece. 

Best Case Scenario

The best case scenario for Sovereign Money is that it works as advertised and that the disruption to the Swiss monetary system is primarily technical. As a result, the SNB would become the dominant actor in the economy, with vast powers to set the direction of economic and fiscal policy by deciding which economic activities are funded and on what terms. Swiss debt would be 100% backed by the state's printing presses, making the country an attractive destination for foreign capital fleeing systemic risks in the global economy. Banks would be almost totally prevented from adding to systemic economic risks on their own, with the caveat that those risks would be distributed throughout the economy and depend almost entirely on consumers (and international money markets) continued faith in the value of the Swiss franc. 

Now, I'm all in favour of a heavy regulatory hand on banks, and a public option for private banking, but jumping immediately from laissez-faire finance to central economic planning is a bit too much of a leap, even for me. The central bank, and by extension the government, would own all debt - for both good and ill. Anything and everything that goes wrong in the economy will be the state's responsibility, by definition. Whether the economy performs well or performs badly will be seen rightly, as a judgement of whether the government has lent too much or too little. And yet, capitalism and all its structural flaws would remain in place. As I've said before, Sovereign Money is not a panacea that let's us make an end-run around the actual hard work of regulating and reforming capitalism. As the Keynesians discovered in the 1970s, if your only policy tool for managing a downturn is inflation, you're going to eventually encounter a catastrophic collapse of economic activity. 

Worst Case Scenario

The worst case scenario, to me, would appear more likely. Like most government agencies under capitalism, the Central Bank would not use its new powers to tame private markets for the good of voters, but instead become captured by private interests and use its powers in furtherance of private agendas. No government will be able to say no to printing the funds for whatever project enters a key constituency's fancy; banks, in turn, would enjoy unrestricted and completely risk-free access to the public's piggy bank in order to pursue their own private profits - including investing overseas, offshoring local manufacturing or by buying up highly risky or speculative asset classes. In effect, a Sovereign Money system would formalise the kind of developmental capitalism that is still prevalent in some parts of the world where big businesses enjoy privileged or corrupt access to public funds and use those funds to invest in capital-intensive projects of self-aggrandisement with little or no assessment of its benefits for national productivity. And when such projects fail, as some always must, or drive up inflation without producing sustainable economic activity, it's the state that's left to clean up the mess. 

A run on a bank may collapse that bank, if it has structured its debts unwisely and regulatory oversight has been lax in preventing excessive risk. A bank collapse or a bad investment means that excess capital, or at least some of it, is written off and the economic activity supported by that money deflates and self-corrects. But a run on a sovereign currency would mean the [digital] printing presses went to work with all the inflationary implications that entails: every debt, public or private, would *have* to be redeemed, in full, or the national currency would become immediately worthless. Capital could only ever expand, and unprofitable or risky economic activities could continue indefinitely without any mechanism for self-correction ('creative destruction') other than, well, central economic planning. 

For those reading at home worried about all this, I say: don't panic. Almost the entire Swiss establishment opposes the Sovereign Money initiative and I've read interviews with its backers where they say they don't expect to win and are merely testing the public appetite for this sort of policy. But the Swiss referendum provides a preview of the sorts of policies, and tactics in support of those policies, that we might anticipate MMT advocates pursuing elsewhere in the world when given an opportunity to do so. 

On Reputation: Or, how and why bad ideas need rebranding

I've been holding off writing anything about the New York Times' latest safari through the intellectual subcultures of the conservative movement. There was nothing I really felt like discussing about Bari Weiss' piece about the "Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" that hasn't already been said over and over again by commentators I respect, and who possess far larger audiences. With the alt-right imploding thanks to public ostracism and constant pressure, and the neoreactionaries continuing to be too esoteric to want or obtain mainstream recognition, it's about time the unholy alliance between right-libertarian think tanks, New Atheism and evolutionary psychology got some critical attention. Hey, at least now we have this handy list of the worst people on the internet.

For the record, the greentext version of the Intellectual Dark Web ('IDW') looks like this:

1. be personally or ideologically committed to the preservation of the status quo
2. encounter viewpoints, typically from a minority, that critique the status quo
3. attempt to tone police critical minority
4. minority continues to exist, and be critical. WTF I'm oppressed now. 

The nature of the IDW's ideological commitments

Vox's take on the men and women of this self-professed intellectual movement strikes me as essentially correct in aggregate: this is a privileged group concerned about their relative loss of status and desperate to defend their established cultural hegemony. I've said as much myself in my previous blog on the interaction between structure, privilege and preferences. I'm less interested in why the members of the IDW position themselves ideologically as they do, than what form of status quo ideology they are actually committed to advocating. But this too, turns out to be largely uninteresting: while the IDW includes overt social conservatives (Shapiro, Hoff-Summers & Peterson), most of the 'classical liberal' contingent espouse philosophical positions will long traditions on the right wing of Western philosophy.

Put simply, inequality is the paradox at the heart of liberalism. As a philosophical and cultural system, liberalism puts priority on the equal dignity of all adult humans. And yet, inequality continues to exist in many forms and is measurably getting worse over time. Much like Christians grappling over centuries with the problem of the existence of evil, the intellectual history of liberalism is the story of attempts to variously justify or challenge the existence of inequality. Because the Intellectual Dark Web-types are terrified of Marx and other radical philosophies which [correctly] identify the actual causes of inequality in the structure of society, their intellectual options for resolving this dilemma are limited. 

Quillette magazine is the respectable mouth-piece of the IDW, and they had a decent piece up recently summarizing the two main arguments justifying inequality: the consequentialist and the libertarian positions. In brief, the former argues that the unequal distribution of outcomes is justified when it is necessary to improve [economic] outcomes for society as a whole; the latter argues that inequality is justified because any attempt to remedy it would put at risk values of individual liberty and private property that are more highly valued. 

The consequentialist position is arguably the majority position within mainstream economics, and in its Rawlsian form (the 'Difference Principle') it represents the standard position of liberalism from the centre-left to centre-right. For those unfamiliar, the Difference Principle requires that for inequality to be justified, it must improve the position of the worst off in society. As I argue in Chapter VIII of my book, "Politics for the new Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", the Difference Principle is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic justice. In any event, consequentialism is an inherently flawed methodology: objective utility preferences are hard to define, much less measure, and the use of utilitarianism in decision-making is an inherently undemocratic and illiberal exercise. 

The libertarian position is well known and understood within right-wing or 'choice' liberalism, and has been espoused for decades by the likes of Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard & Murray. In short, the libertarian position is that unequal outcomes are the product of individual choice and merit alone, and are therefore morally justified. When the patent absurdity of this viewpoint is pointed out, given that wealth, social status and income are all extremely heritable, we end up with compromises like luck egalitarianism which attempt to distinguish between moral and immoral inequality. Again: Rawls' Veil of Ignorance sets a sort of agreed minimum floor for the kind of inequality in a liberal society that is still consistent with the inherent dignity of all individuals: if an individual is denied their social contract rights, then they are not just unequal, but are de facto excluded from mutual recognition as a member of the social contract. 

If pushed on their positive position, most of the self-described classical liberals in the IDW would posit the libertarian position, which offers a pleasant justification for the personal privileges they enjoy atop the media pyramid. When asked to explain why others fare less well, they typically offer variants of either the libertarian or luck egalitarian position: people are less well off because they either make bad choices or they had the misfortune to belong to a group (defined by race, gender, culture or sexuality) less well-equipped to 'succeed', or both. In summary, and as Ezra Klein has pointed out, the 'dangerous ideas' of the IDW are neither new, nor interesting, nor even particularly controversial within a certain ideological milieu. 

On reputation, or "why are y'all so sensitive?"

The IDW are, on the whole, an extremely sensitive lot whose interest in freedom of speech has less to do with principle than ensuring that they, and people like them, continue to be heard. It's unclear, at first, why they're so triggered by critics of the status quo: while it's possibly the manifestation of a backlash bias against perceived threats to the social order, I suspect that on the whole that the members of the IDW are closer to the 'virtue ethics' end of the backlash spectrum than the 'asshole' end. In other words (again, Shapiro, Hoff-Summers and Peterson aside), they're less interested in actively defending the status quo order than in defending the personal virtue they see themselves as possessing by being members of that order in good standing. In other words, they've done everything 'right', so why are they being protested?

A quick diversion. Quillette  has published an interview by the site's founder and Australian (ugh) libertarian (ugh) Claire Lehmann with sociologists Brad Campbell and Jason Manning about their new book on the campus culture wars. In all honesty I haven't read the book, but as represented by the interview their argument is . . . just awful. They posit three moral cultures: "honor cultures", where an individual's reputation matters and is vigorously defended; "dignity cultures", where human equality is guaranteed and disputes are regulated by social institutions; and "victim cultures", which combine the worst elements of both (i.e. those damn college kids are both too sensitive and too totalitarian!).

The former two concepts are well known in the sociological literature, although they operate less as hierarchical levels of development and more a contingent function of social history and environment. The idea of 'victim culture', on the other hand, is a ridiculous straw man with zero anthropological support other than the existence of people who disagree with one another. I'd not be the first to point out that Quillette's promotion of the idea of 'victim culture', both in the interview above and more broadly, is a pretty obvious example of psychological projection. The IDW are not interested in the free speech or right to protest of their critics and engage in rampant appeals to authority to shut them down. Dave Rubin has said that self-identifying as a heretic feels personally empowering, yet appears incapable of making the intellectual leap of attributing the same motive to critics of the status quo.

If the IDW's concern was merely arbitrating between the respective speech interests of competing positions, then that clash of rights could be easily adjudicated by existing social mechanisms. Rather, the IDW are asserting a different right alongside their right to speak: a right to protect their reputation. They are arguing for a privilege that men and women of their class have implicitly enjoyed for centuries: to express bad ideas in public without suffering any kind of adverse reputational consequences. One need only listen to Sam Harris whine about how he's continually misrepresented to see that the primary concern of these people is their personal social standing and self-image. 

As experiments in evolutionary game theory have shown for decades, a person's reputation is in fact an essential tool for regulating cooperation in small-scale societies. There's even biological evidence (in our human capacity for facial recognition and proficiency at gossip) that reputation mechanisms were important enough for long enough time in our evolutionary history to become genetically rooted. It's true that for the most part modern societies generate social trust through ideological tools grounded in universal human dignity and vast cooperative institutions to resolve disputes. However, it's an uncontroversial hypothesis that in the 'marketplace of ideas' a person's reputation is still a valuable currency: experts and public intellectuals rely on their reputation to ensure that their ideas are successfully propagated. 

Hence the New York Times piece, and the signal-boosting of the IDW by other conservative sources. As Dave Pakman has pointed out, the IDW is ultimately a re-branding exercise for bad ideas. Like all advertising, it aims to preserve market share for products that don't deserve it based on quality. Unlike many on the left with unfashionable ideas, the IDW are capable of cashing in their social and economic status to marshal a defense of their intellectual and moral reputations and thus shield themselves from the detrimental effects of robust criticism of their positions. Personally, and as I've stated before, I'm something of a free speech fundamentalist so the idea of a right to one's reputation is not something I'm inclined to view favourably. Let ideas, words and art stand for themselves, and if people lower their estimation of you because of them, then you have to live with those consequences. The Right - and Bari Weiss - have certainly never held back from attacking the reputations of their opponents. But culture is static if existing ideas and artforms are shielded from criticism by entrenched privilege. 

And yet: Article 17(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does establish something like a right to one's reputation, and the appropriate scale and extent of libel and defamation laws is something that's been debated constantly and keenly in the legal philosophy literature for centuries. The law does generally recognise that we have a legitimate interest in our reputation, particularly when it has commercial value, and protects it against unlawful, deceptive or malicious interference. Of course, the IDW are more interested in claiming victimhood in order to attract resources from right-wing donors than, y'know, actually engaging with the philosophical or legal merits of their own positions. But I think it'd be fair to say to critical engagement with the ideas promoted by the IDW, even to the extent of forms of protest and ostracism recognised as legitimate in a free society, does not constitute an interference with their fundamental reputational rights. Instead, their diminished reputations are just the [small] price they have to pay for promoting bad and discredited views. 

Book Review: "Darwin's Unfinished Symphony" by Kevin Laland

Biologist Kevin Laland has a gift for clear, evocative writing and clever titles. An "unfinished symphony" is a powerful metaphor, hinting at the lost works of departed geniuses. Perhaps no post-Enlightenment figure has had as profound impact on how humanity sees itself than Charles Darwin, and the chance to extend the modern evolutionary synthesis to incorporate an account of the origins of human culture and intelligence creates possibilities that will be euphoric for some readers and terrifying for others. Laland's book contributes to an emerging corpus of recent literature aiming to close the enormous gap that has opened up between the biological and social sciences.

Laland is not a historian, and those looking for a compelling account of Darwin's research on the origins of humanity should look elsewhere. "On the Origin of the Species" is famously silent on the question of human origins, and Darwin's later works on the subject ("The Descent of Man" and "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals") are less well known and more heavily weighed upon by the passage of time. For Laland, Darwin's 'unfinished symphony' was the task of explaining humanity's unique mental, cultural and moral capabilities in light of evolution, and the subtitle of his book ("How Culture Made the Human Mind") gives the game away in terms of where Laland suggests the answers will be found. This is also the story of a thirty year effort by Laland and his team to find those answers: an ode to grad students and published research most of the public have never heard of. 

The boundary between biological and social evolution is fiercely patrolled on both sides, with many biologists stressing that evolution only applies to genetically-encoded behaviours (c.f. Dawkins) and many sociologists epistemologically wedded to the unnatural uniqueness of human culture. We can perhaps refer, as Laland does, to cultural evolutionary studies pioneered by Boyd & Richerson among others, which has been a remarkably successful effort to apply evolutionary tools to the study of culture. Laland, however, goes beyond that to write a book focused on gene-culture coevolution. That is, a study of how genes have influenced culture and culture, in turn, has influenced our genes. Evolutionary psychologists and behavioural economists have made strides (often flawed) into measuring biological influences on human behaviour, in the process contributing to a resurgence of naturalist ethical ideologies. Laland's position is more nuanced: our biological intuitions and mental capabilities have developed in a feedback loop to meet the needs of humanity's complex learning behaviours. 

Innovating and Copying

As a mechanism which develops and spreads new traits through a population, culture relies on the innovation of new behaviours (beyond what is encoded in a creature's genes) and the copying of that behaviour by others (which allows it to spread faster than biological transmission alone would allow). Social learning is innate and ubiquitous among humans and - it turns out - not entirely unknown amongst animals. Crucially, Laland is able to demonstrate through both mathematical models and empirical studies that what matters to the cultural capacity to accumulate fitness-enhancing improvements over time is not just copying but copying efficiently, faithfully and strategically. Learning heuristics such as imitating successful individuals or conforming with the behaviour of the majority ensure that useful information is retained over generations, and it's this capacity for strategic or contingent learning that Laland argues lies at the root of the divergence between humanity and other animals. 

Laland combines agent-based computational models of social learning with empirical studies of social learning in animals, most amusingly fish. Throughout the early chapters of the book, he builds a compelling case for why social learning is not ubiquitous in nature, noting that vulnerability to predation and the demands of reproduction make some species (and some individuals within species) more reliant on social learning than others. In Laland's observations, it's often lower-status individuals, females and children that benefit most from openness to new experiences and social learning. A certain conservative Canadian psychologist has recently invited derision by looking for the origins of social hierarchies amongst lobsters. Laland's fish studies are different because his team has gone to the effort of first proving that social learning is a mathematical solution to a general category of problem: humans are 'like fish', in this sense, because both evolved similar strategies to solve analogous problems, not because we share some biochemistry. A more sophisticated version of Jordan Peterson might be able to do the modelling to show that hierarchies are a valid solution to the problem of cooperation - but unlike Laland, Peterson simply hasn't done his homework. 

More than just the evolution of intelligence

Unlike other pop science authors, Laland's descriptions of his statistical methods and techniques are always clear and precise - we always know how much confidence we should have in Laland's conclusions and how they're derived. Where that raised an eyebrow, however, was when Laland moved away from discussing social learning to the evolution of intelligence. Laland relies on a variant of factor analysis to argue for the existence of what he calls the "primate g", a measure of the general intelligence of primates which he argues has increased alongside the demands for increasing social learning. In this way, Laland aligns himself with the view that intelligence is an all-purpose tool that has continually improved throughout human evolution, rather than an agglomeration of modules and capabilities which arose at different points in our species' history in response to different environmental and social requirements. 

Ultimately, Laland's efforts to downplay the 'social brain' hypothesis are unconvincing and I would recommend Robin Dunbar on these topics. Is a 3cm long fish that finds a novel solution to a food maze really 'innovating', or it merely following instincts that drive hungry individuals to take greater risks? It's likely that general intelligence is a poor tool for solving most social games among humans, at least,  (cf. the ultimatum game) and IQ is a poorer predictor of social status than modular personality traits. The role of emotion and motivated action is missing from Laland's account, an omission that's curious given that Darwin himself intuited that the evolutionary function of emotions was crucial to understanding the origins of man. If culture made the human mind, as Laland argues, then perhaps we should also explore the role of emotions, biases and irrationality in cultural evolution - and not just intelligence. 

In later chapters of the book, Laland offers some unsupported hypotheses in an effort to bridge the gap between primate intelligence and human symbolic expression. In his otherwise friendly review of the book, cultural evolutionary scholar Joe Henrich worries that Laland overplays the role of teaching and language in the co-evolution of culture. Laland argues that teaching is the only explanation that can account for not only the increasing fidelity of cultural transmission in humans but also the (somewhat self-imposed) requirement that proto-languages evolved transmit information faithfully and without deception. We'd have to do the modelling to find out which account is more plausible, but given the robust evidence from behavioural economics that deception and public self-justification plays a crucial role in social games the 'social brain' hypothesis remains for me the persuasive position. 

What really disappointed me about these later chapters is Laland's seeming lack of engagement with the paleoanthropological record: he never specifies where in the human family tree he thinks these capabilities first evolved; he doesn't engage with the robust debate on the physiological limitations on the language capabilities of our near-relatives; nor with the fact that symbolic culture and exponential cultural progress has only really been a feature of our species on the timescale of tens of thousands of years or so. Teaching, language, rationality and the arts are all highly important to modern human societies, but an account of how these capabilities evolved needs to bootstrap them on to other functions that plausibly existed in earlier members of our lineage that definitively lacked them. 

Enter the debate

"Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind" is exactly the sort of book we should embrace as part of a second wave of pop science explainers of gene-culture evolution. Laland takes the extended evolutionary synthesis and cultural evolution as a given, and uses those theories to motivate and explain his own perspectives on debates within the field. Like Darwin himself, Laland may ultimately be proven right on some points and wrong on others: what's important is that readers are exposed to these issues in ways that normalise the language and perspectives of gene-culture coevolution. Laland's earlier work focused on the phenomenon of niche construction, in which a species influences its environment and thereby changes the selection pressures acting upon it. As a social species, the social environment is undoubtedly the niche that humans have created for our own evolution - and it's that control over our own environment that frees us from biological determinism like that espoused by Peterson, Dawkins and Pinker. It opens minds to the possibility that we - as a species - are not done with our social evolution just yet. 

It's OK to be hypocritical (Part 2): Vegans, morality and aesthetics

In a popular post I wrote back in February contrasting individual preference and political ethics, I argued that we should all be comfortable being a little hypocritical sometimes. Having a preference for sparkling wines, for example, doesn't automatically make one a bad socialist; having inegalitarian sexual preferences doesn't render those behaviours acceptable outside the bedroom; and benefitting from privilege doesn't make one unqualified to structurally critique it. In following-up that post, I'm going to look at another YouTube discussion by streamer Destiny, this time on the ethics of veganism. I enjoy Destiny's way of dissecting topics, which is leaps and bounds more sophisticated than that of other talking heads. In short, I agree with him that given the minimal recognition of all human beings as a party to the social contract, the consideration of other entities as ethical subjects is a mere aesthetic preference from which no universal principles can be drawn. 

For the record, I am not a vegetarian nor do I think veganism is a a superior ethical position that meat-eaters are simply being hypocritical about. I took a (mandatory) course in 'vegetarian politics' as an undergrad, which did instill in me a certain distaste for meat. But I still consume it, and don't see a problem in everyone else doing the same. Nor is my view on this informed by consequentialist concerns: I get that Western diets can have adverse health consequences and that industrial agricultural has deleterious effects on the natural environment. Switching to veganism may have positive individual and societal outcomes, and I am all for stronger regulation of the agricultural sector, but I don't believe that universal ethical "oughts" can be derived from this sort of utilitarian calculus (which in any event always admits of exceptions). Instead, this particular blog is aimed squarely at "ethical vegans", who hold that it is wrong in se to exploit animals in ways we don't exploit humans. 

It's art all the way down

As a moral skeptic, I generally take the position that ethical rules are social facts, not scientific ones. A behaviour or belief can only be considered right or wrong by its congruence with the norms, rules and institutions that constitute a community of interacting individuals. Social contract liberalism is a universalist ideology that holds that the relevant community is all human individuals, although the 'thickness' of its ethical rules may vary depending on nation-state membership. One of liberalism's key philosophical difficulties, and its central contestation with ethical veganism, is why it reifies humanity as the criterion of social membership, or in other words, how we decide who is and isn't entitled to recognition as "human". The more liberalism moves away from its Christian 'natural law' roots (i.e. ' individuals endowed by their Creator'), the more open to re-interpretation this principle becomes. 

Chapter 16 of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is all about the distinction between ethics and aesthetics. Aesthetics is about creating identity through the satisfaction of preferences; political philosophy is the normative ethics of collective decision-making. So long as two individuals identify as members of a shared community, they can (in principle) debate the right and wrong of a behaviour using a shared framework. And yet, as the invocation of a shared identity suggests, there are always aesthetic choices at the core: what is my identity, what is my community, and what are its ethical rules? That doesn't mean we can't argue about those choices, but such debates boil down to art criticism: we can discuss the artistic merits of "Boss Baby", for example, without any paticular view being morally wrong. 

So here's my central argument: right and wrong are ethically meaningful social statements within a the social context defined by universal liberalism. However beyond the minimal liberal requirement that we recognise of all humans as persons, the selection of decision-rules about the ethical treatment of non-human objects is an aesthetic preference from which no universal moral facts follow. Thus, while vegans, or Hindus, may elect to see cattle as moral subjects, they cannot ethically obligate other individuals and cultures to do likewise. Personally, I'm wholly comfortable with speciesism ("humanism") as a general rule, using the legal and biological category of 'human' as the threshold for moral consideration. It's a solid baseline that prevents abuse in most edge cases, meets the requirements of liberalism and satisfies our day-to-day pragmatic needs for ethical calculation.

Can we derive a "non-speciesist" rule for ethical consideration? Probably . . . . 

Destiny defines his decision rule as "social contract reciprocity": the idea that to be part of a society, and therefore subject to ethical consideration, a category of thing has to be capable, under ideal developmental conditions, of recognising and being recognised as performing the behaviours necessary to establish social trust. Destiny may underplay it, but this is very solid philosophical ground to stand on. In evolutionary game theory, there are multiple ways of overcoming social dilemmas and generating reciprocity, including kinship, reputation and identity/categorical markers. The first two generate what philosophers call special moral obligations (for example, to family and to contract partners), whereas the third is important to Rawlsian liberals, constructivists and cultural evolutionary scholars alike. 

In this framework, we exercise indirect or altruistic reciprocity (trust without expectation of direct reward) towards those who perform the behaviours we have been socialised to expect a member of the community in good standing to perform, and who in turn recognise and respond positively to our own performance of those behaviours - even though we are unrelated to them and don't know them personally. This is called 'prosociality'. The mutual construction of society on the basis of altruistic reciprocity helps explain why sociopaths are such as widespread figures of cultural anxiety, and also why systems of punishment are so heavily weighted towards ostracism, banishment and imprisonment of non-conformists. Mutual recognition as beings worthy of ethical consideration also serves as a universal "Turing Test": we cannot ever directly observe the moral consciousness of another, only react to behaviourial signals which increase or decrease our belief that it exists. 

Some hypotheticals: Violence against animals, Neanderthals and AI

Let's use violence as a case study. If we follow Jonathan Haidt and assume that moral reasoning is modular and domain-specific, we can start with the hypothesis that aversion to violence and harm ("suffering") is perhaps the most widely shared human ethical trigger. If non-human entities are not protected from arbitrary and selfish violence, then they also aren't entitled to any other form of ethical consideration. For the record, this is where ethical vegans go wrong: as virtue ethicists, their insistence that suffering is always incorrect is hopelessly naive and drives them into a rabbit hole of deciding what entities do or do not feel suffering. Consequentialists tell us that harm is sometimes productive and therefore ethical; social contract deontologists say that harm can be ethical if it's controlled by rules - the most important contemporary rule is the prohibition on directly harming another party to the social contract. The question we must ask is: is it ethically wrong to harm an entity that belongs to a category of thing that is prima facie incapable of moral reciprocation? 

First the goods news: as social animals, humans seem psychologically pre-disposed to making favourable intuitive inferences about the agency of others: we readily anthropomorphise other entities, and ancient peoples inferred agency to the land and the weather and tried to make moral bargains with the gods and goddesses thereof. So the burden of proof is in favour of inclusion: other entities face a low bar to establish that they are moral subjects. 

Now for the bad: almost all animals fail to reach this threshold. Animal behaviour is instinctive: a prey animal is incapable of recognising that a strange human is not a threat, and a hungry predator will always see a human as a potential food source. While we can override the instincts of individual animals through direct incentives (i.e. regular food provision) this is direct, rather than indirect or categorical, reciprocity. Selfish restraint ("this human feeds me") is not general moral consideration. Now, there may be exceptions amongst higher order social animals: our closest ape relatives, elephants and domesticated dogs (whose social reasoning we have irrevocably altered through domestication) for exampel. These animals appear to be capable of recognising humans as being subjects of ethical consideration unprompted, even though under usual conditions they are primarily kin-centric. But any more generous aesthetic rule is also likely to be prima facie culturally and environmentally contingent: a costly preference for expanded ethical inclusion akin to having the resources to prefer fine wines. 

A more interesting hypothetical arises in the case of our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, who were not homo sapiens strictu sensu but closely related enough genetically that we could still interbreed. Robin Dunbar and others have argued that the capacity for symbolic communication is what makes human organisation at scale possible. It remains an open scientific question whether Neanderthals and Denisovans also possessed this capability, and to what degree. The evidence for Neanderthal symbolic culture is anecdotal, but personally fairly convincing. It's appears likely to me that the common ancestor of humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans (Homo Heidelbergensis) therefore possessed this ability and would hypothetically qualify for personhood, albeit perhaps subject to the same paternalistic limitations we might apply for the mentally handicapped in our own society. 

Now, what about a different kind of entity: AI? I would propose that any artificial intelligence that showed itself capable of moral reasoning and of recognising the moral worth of humans would be recognised as sentient member of the social contract and protected from arbitrary harm. An anti-social or purely utilitarian AI, however, that failed to offer mutual recognition to humans as subjects of ethical consideration - no matter how vast its potential intelligence - would not qualify for social contract reciprocity and could be destroyed with no ethical consequences. I have no real interest in the ethics of AI research, but draw some comfort from the fact that an any AI trained using social games would likely develop the concept of social contract reciprocity on its own through an exploration of the mathematics of altruism. 

Being comfortable with our preferences

Returning to the topic at hand. I will conclude by saying that what we consume (and how we produce what we consume) is first and foremost an aesthetic choice, not an ethical one. The ("non-speciesist") liberal decision rule that requires social contract reciprocity as a condition for the possession of rights and protection from harm is robust ("it's good art"). Nevertheless, other aesthetic choice are also valid, even if they're not rigourously philosophically grounded. To have concerns about the way commercially farmed animals are treated is legitimate, as is the insistence that food be properly monitored and labelled to make that choice meaningful (so too with halal, GMO or organic food labelling regulations). But the exercise of these preferences is merely about establishing markers for individual identity, and don't entail any ethical calculations from which universal moral 'oughts' can be derived. 

Does that mean we should be singularly unconcerned about those who are cruel to animals? No, of course not. The type of art a person enjoys can be a signal about the type of person they are, and their proclivity for anti-social behaviour. A society that mistreats its own people is likely to be a threat to other societies. A child that tortures animals may be a threat to others later in life. And how commercial agriculture treats animals and make them suffer unnecessarily says alot about the broader social values of capitalism. But the signal alone is not the ethical transgression: the wrong of commercial agriculture lies in its willingness to mistreat and exploit (human) farm workers. Incidentally, social contract reciprocity is an excellent argument for why corporations are not entitled to fundamental rights: they are incapable of acting morally and recognising (human) workers as ethical subjects. 

Beyond violence, the question of who is and who is not a member of a social contract entitled to legal and ethical consideration is in practice the core vulnerability in the exercise of all the moral senses. While everyone obviously abhors harming women, minorities or the disabled, some people are far too tolerant of excluding marginalised groups from proper consideration when it comes to questions of fairness and equality. This exclusion and selectivity about moral personhood is ubiquitous, and is one of the ways intolerance and oppression are naturalised and legitimised. If we want to expand the scope of ethical consideration, let's prioritise fulfilling our obligations to the members of society that we already recognise - rather than expanding society itself to fit the aesthetic sensibilities of vegans.