Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (Part 1)

As readers will find out, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is a robust defense of a socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, which posits the shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their interaction. In particular, I reference liberalism in its modern form, attributable to philosopher John Rawl’s 1971 opus, ‘A Theory of Justice’. Rawls made two important refinements to the social contract theory of Locke: first, that the state of nature (the no-society state) consists of a (hypothetical) original position of equality, from whence individuals give their consent to enter into a society; and secondly, the veil of ignorance, the argument that for social rules to be universally just, the (hypothetical) designers of those rules would need to be blind to their own social status, capabilities and preferences in the new society.

The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. Every other social and religious systems is based on similar fictions, but that does not stop them from serving valuable public purposes. What matters in evolutionary game theory for the success or failure of a given strategy is whether it is effective, not whether it is strictly speaking true. In case there is any doubt, the position I take is that liberal social contract story is the most effective political framework for the organisation of human societies yet devised.

The veil of ignorance is particularly important to Rawlsian liberalism. Without it, it is much more difficult to justify universal democracy, much less material egalitarianism. Although human equality is implicit in Kant, Locke and Rousseau, Rawls himself is remarkably cavalier in justifying his particular innovation. He states outright in Theory of Justice that the purpose of the principle is to get the desired solution, to correct for the ‘arbitrariness of the world’. Given discoveries in game theory and psychology over the last fifty years, I think we can do better. This series of blogs will thus present my best defences of the veil of ignorance.

The Psychological Veil

Rawls recognised that just as important to constructing the veil as an individual's ignorance of their place in the social and economic hierarchy was their ignorance of their own conception of ‘the good’ and other psychological preferences. As I argue in Chapter I of Politics, because individual preferences make ‘the good’ fundamentally subjective, it is impossible to justify universal rules based on them. So Rawls' insight is correct. But this blog will further ask whether we can justify this approach using recent discoveries in cognitive psychology about the types or families of human moral thinking. In this, I draw upon Johnathan Haidt’s Theory of Moral Foundations, which he lays out for a lay audience in his book, ‘The Righteous Mind’. Haidt is increasingly conservative, and I differ with both the specifics of his psychological model and his philosophical conclusions, but his Theory is a useful device with which to discuss the issues.

Haidt posits that individuals have multiple moral system, some of which progressives and conservatives share (care, or the prevention of harm, and fairness), and some of which they don’t (loyalty, sanctity and respect for authority). Haidt argues that progressives’ weak preferences for loyalty and authority are the result of the corrosive influence of modernity, what he and other researchers have called ‘WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic)’ culture. But what Haidt sees as a growing moral crisis, I see as just another pendulum swing of normal human cognitive diversity. And inasmuch as our culture is shaping human minds to be less hierarchical and authoritarian, that's a win for progressives.

For his part, Joshua Greene (see my previous post, on his book "Moral Tribes") argues that when it comes to ‘meta-morality’, or the quest for universal moral principles for a diverse society, less may be more. If small-l liberalism really is blind or less sensitive to certain moral problems, as Haidt argues, then that makes it more, not less, suited as a rule system applicable for everyone. Or to put it another way, since progressives and conservatives share values of care and fairness, then care and fairness alone are a proper basis on which to construct a universal meta-morality. My own model of political personality contains only two relevant degrees of freedom, not four or five, but if everyone largely agrees on some foundations (care and fairness) then those foundations are thus not politically contested. Authoritarianism and conservatism are politically relevant precisely because they are values systems that are not universally shared.

So let’s put this in Rawlsian terms. Rawls insists that the (hypothetical) designers of the social contract be blind to their own psychological preferences, but perhaps what he should have said is that they are blind to their psychological differences. A person with no innate morality would be a pure utility-maximising rationalist – but real human beings aren’t like that and nor should they be. We come pre-equipped by genes, culture and upbringing with certain in-built systems for ethical decision-making in groups, and to the degree that those systems are universal across the species, they should be used to derive universal moral rules. Brian Skyrms lays out the game theory argument for the universal evolution of fairness in our species in his opus, ‘The Evolution of the Social Contract’, which we’ll get into next time. But for now, it suffices to conclude that inasmuch as political opinions show a range of preferences, such diversity should consequently be ignored in the formulation of foundational social norms that are equally binding on all.

Book Response: “Moral Tribes” by Joshua Greene

The central conceit of Politics for the New Dark Age is the rejection of a universal understanding of human nature. I posit that societies exist in evolutionary stable equilibria consisting of a mix of different personalities and preferences, and that politics can largely be understood as a social mechanism that generates dynamism and new knowledge from the conflict between them. The rejection of universal rationality makes some uncomfortable; nowadays, I tend to point people with concerns towards Joshua Greene’s “Moral Tribes”, and Johnathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind”, both of which do a great job of introducing these concepts to a general audience.

This particular blog entry will provide a brief overview and response to Greene’s “Moral Tribes”; my criticisms of Haidt will be interwoven into other blog entries. Most readers should be familiar with Garret Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”, an economic parable that describes the dilemma facing hypothetical farmers trying to manage common land without being exploited by one another. The neoclassical economic response is to divide the land into private property, and thus causing the society of farmers to cease to exist. But Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 by showing that the tragedy was avoidable and that societies have opportunities to cooperatively manage public goods. This is the position taken in Politics, and it is one shared by Greene.

Greene, however, goes on to introduce a new tragedy: “The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality”. Different groups of people will arrive at different cultural and governmental solutions to the tragedy of the commons, either by chance, as a result of their particular history, or in response to their ecosystem. Either way, each group’s solution will appear as ‘common sense’ to members of that group, and irrational or even immoral to members of other groups. The Tragedy of Common Sense Morality arises when different groups are brought together to form a single society and therefore disagree among themselves about how public goods should be managed.

So far, so good. I endorse Greene’s analogy as a way to introduce people to these concepts. But I part ways with Greene when he devotes the second part of his book to setting out a philosophical solution to this second tragedy he has discovered. Greene is a utilitarian, and it’s thus unsurprising that his conclusion is that utilitarianism is the philosophical system best suited to provide a ‘metamorality’ for diverse societies. Anyone who reads Politics knows I am highly critical of utilitarianism, which I consider the philosophy of would-be autocrats. In fact, an early working title for the book was “Against Utilitarianism”.

Politics begins with an epigraph, attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that ‘Justice is Strife’. What that means is that morality is generated though the dynamic conflict of opposites: diversity keeps extremes in check and also generates new thoughts, beliefs and practices. Greene criticises this Kantian strand of the Western philosophical tradition, which seeks progress as the result of the conflict of ideas, and much prefers the static hyper-rationality of Bentham and Mill. As a good socialist, my own outlook is closer to Marx and Kant, informed by the new fields of mathematical biology, game theory and evolutionary political science that are putting the cultural dialectical process on a firm scientific foundation. Societies are not unmoving, reason does not lead to utopia, and social circumstances change over time.

Greene describes himself first-and-foremost as a ‘trolleyologist’: a psychologist dedicated to studying, in experimental settings, people’s decision-making in the context of the Trolley Problem. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes on Facebook over the last decade will be familiar with the Trolley Problem’s central conceit: a runaway tram is going to hit a certain number of innocent victims if it isn’t stopped. An agent (the experimental participant) has an option to take an action that may save those people, but will predictably have negative consequences, usually involving the deaths of other innocent people. By making a series of modifications to the problem, a ‘trolleyologist’ like Greene can probe the drivers of his subjects’ moral decision-making.

Greene concludes that utilitarian decision-making, predicated on the equal value of all human lives, is the correct or ‘moral’ solution to the Trolley Problem. Like many others working in the area, he draws on (another Nobel Prize in Economics winner) Daniel Kahneman’s work showing that humans have [at least] two modes of thinking: ‘System 1’, which is fast and instinctive, and ‘System 2’ which is slower, more energy intensive and deliberative. Again, this is uncontroversial. Evolutionary theory would expect that all human beings would come 'pre-loaded' with some neural machinery adapted or co-opted for rapid moral problem-solving in groups. My own book, Politics, is in fact predicated on other research showing that this moral machinery shows variation across individuals and that this neural diversity is the source of political conflict in society.

Greene errs, however, when he argues that since System 2 thinking represents a ‘higher’ or more evolved form of consciousness and, in his view, reproduces the key philosophical tenets of Bentham and Mill, utilitarianism is thus the superior moral system. But none of the logical precepts of utilitarianism are necessarily true for all people. Putting the good of the many above the good of the one may be the instinctive response for some, and evaluating the moral consequences of taking an individual’s life may require more deliberative thinking for others. You’d have to look at their reaction times to find out.

The serious flaw of the Trolley Problem, when employed as a utilitarian parable, is that the experimental design disguises a number of immense philosophical assumptions. Not least, that all human lives are instinctively valued equally by all people. How would people react in the real world to the Trolley Problem if the potential victims were of a different race or religion? What if the one potential victim was a member of an authority group, such as a police officer? How about sacrificing a friendly soldier for the soldiers of an enemy state? What would happen if people were given information (or just superficial signals) about the economic role of the victims?

Rather than judging moral behaviour by the standard of an abstract philosophical system, and finding our ‘System 1’ instincts lacking, the better view is to see instinctive emotional responses as ‘meta-rational’ in the context of human evolution. That is, they deliver decision-making that has been proven effective in the real, material context of thousands of human generations. System 2 thinking is adaptive too, of course: we clearly need to resolve conflicts between our moral instincts and those of other people in the context of complex, diverse societies. But it would be ahistorical to see our instincts as inherently maladaptive. Building bigger and better societies based on sometimes abstract and inscrutable norms is what we humans do.

Our mental machinery did not evolve by accident. All of us have innate moral and ideological beliefs because those beliefs provide efficient solutions to the sorts of complex social decision-making that we as a species are most likely to confront. Moreover, it’s highly likely that Darwinian selection would favour a mixed evolutionary strategy, where different moral machineries are maintained in equilibria proportions, to provide a society with behaviourial flexibility in response to unpredictable environmental circumstances. In other words, and contrary to Greene's parable, the natural variation within social and cultural groups is likely to be greater than the variation between them.

It is clear to me that such a dynamic system is potentially wiser and more just than utilitarian reasoning where the ends produced always justify the means. That belief, I would argue, has produced more injustice and tyranny in the world than democratic systems in which decision-making is contested and extreme outcomes are kept in check by countervailing forces. Overriding our base instincts can lead people to commit acts they would otherwise find monstrous: in fact many social constructs and rituals (not least modern military culture) exist for this very purpose. Even as applied to the Tragedy of Common Sense Morality, people’s [culturally conditioned] views on the legitimacy of a decision-making framework are more likely to influence their net happiness than measuring the outcomes in terms of some common currency. 

Greene is particularly critical of the role rights place in liberal philosophy, a position that readers will know is at odds with the position I take in Chapters 5-8 of Politics. Since rights serve to trump utilitarian arguments about the net consequences of decision-making, Greene sees their invocation as abhorrent to the purely rational solution to the tragedy of common sense morality. While he exults System 2 thinking when it leads to utilitarian outcomes, he dismisses reasoned arguments in support of rights as the mere ‘rationalisation’ of moral instincts (a view Haidt also shares).

Greene is correct when he states that rights are both a shield to defend individuals against oppression and a sword with which to oppress others. But if we see ourselves engaged in perpetual ideological conflict with competing and mutant beliefs, then why unilaterally disarm? Over the last several centuries and after much conflict, the liberal world has largely settled on a list of universal human rights with immense utility both for governing our own societies and converting other societies into ones that look more like ours. There’s still details to be worked out, political and judicial disputes about the proper scope of universal rights. But the liberal framework means that conflict takes place within set boundaries that are to the shared advantage of all the participants.

In summary, then, while I’d highly recommend Greene’s book, I would caution readers to approach his philosophical claims about utilitarianism with a note of scepticism. Greene is a scientist and an experimenter, and his research should be taken seriously. But he is also a human being, endowed with innate decision-making preferences, and no less seeking to rationalise than any other philosopher.