So-cons and libertarians: the inalterable divide

I've been participating in this discussion over on The Shotgun.

At issue is the degree to which libertarianism and social conservatism are compatible. At this time, I have two answers: (a) in principle, they're not compatible; (b) in practice, they're probably not compatible, under the most plausible assumptions.

Now, to be clear, I think you can be a libertarian and agree with social conservatives about certain deeper matters of morality. For example, you can think potheads and other drug-users live terrible lives.

However, to take up such a position, your deeper moral view has to meet one of two conditions:

(a) When it comes to the state, the right has to trump the good. The state should never violate rights, even if that means sacrificing a lot of value.

Or:

(b) The good cannot be achieved without the right. That is, it's impossible to make the world a better place (with respect to values) by violating peoples' rights.

These conditions are explained as follows: suppose I think potheads tend to lead objectively poor lives. A libertarian has to agree that potheads should be allowed to smoke pot (assumption.) Now, if I think potheads live poor lives -- and, worse, encourage others to live poor lives -- I might think that the law ought to prohibit people from smoking pot. In fact, a lot of social conservatives do believe this.

In principle, to block the move from "X is a poor way to live" to "The state ought to prohibit people from living that way," you have to accept either (a) or (b.) Either you have to believe that a person's right to smoke pot trumps all, including whatever value would be achieved or protected through an anti-pot law. Or you have to believe that you can't actually promote value through the violation of rights.

It's true that there are many ways to get to libertarianism as a principle of political morality. But for your moral view to lead to that principle, it has to accept either (a) or (b.)

Kantians, Objectivists, some social liberals, Lockeans, etc. all accept one or the other. Social conservatives, on the whole, do not.

Yes, you can invent a straw social conservative who does accept one or the other. But then you've given up the contention that social conservatism is, in general, compatible with libertarianism.

My friend Peter Jaworski seems to agree with me, up to a point. He's argued that while social conservatives might not accept libertarianism in principle, they might endorse it in practice.

The so-con is involved in a dangerous liaison with the state. Empower it to take Emery's pot, and it'll be powerful enough to -- to take an example that would have been absurd just 10 years ago -- force churches to perform weddings that they morally object to, or force doctors to choose between either performing abortions or not being doctors at all.

As I understand it, the argument is that so-cons who accept drug prohibition are making a bad bet. They think that they can use the power of the state to achieve certain values. But they're risking the chance that other groups will use that power against them, to diminish those values.

In order to evaluate the argument, we have to know if the bet is really as bad as it is made out to be. And I don't think it is.

Call the option of forgoing the use of the state to achieve one's values "setting aside the hammer." A person sets aside the hammer when he decides not to use the law to force people to live the way he thinks is best. The claim is that, all things considered, it is rational for social conservatives to set aside the hammer, in order to avoid the risk that the hammer will be used against them.

I'll attack the claim from two directions. First, it is only rational to set aside the hammer if you can guarantee that opposing groups will also set down the hammer. This is true even if everyone would be better off if everyone agreed to set aside the hammer. But if I set down the hammer and my ideological opponent does not, I'm in an even worse position than when we were both groping for the hammer.

Second, it is only rational to set aside the hammer if there is really some risk that my ideological opponents will get the chance to use it against me. That is by no means something we can just assume. It is not the case that every interest group has an equal chance of taking possession of the hammer. Social conservatives happen to have a pretty good handle on it right now. Atheists who wish to ban churches (are there any of those?) do not.

The general problem with this argument is that it makes sense only at the point before the hammer is invented/distributed. If we were inventing society from scratch, we might all agree to set aside the hammer permanently. But once some group has control of the hammer, there is little reason for it to set the thing aside.

While some so-cons may come to see that they're making a bad bet, we shouldn't be surprised if most of them don't. And if we, as libertarians, tell them the bet is a bad one, with no redeeming features, then we're lying.

For the fact remains, it's not necessarily a bad bet. Why should powerful factions agree to give up their power?

Against Democracy

I don't talk a lot about democracy on this blog. Frankly, that's because I do not much care about democracy. Let me explain why.

Ideally, democracy is a way of aggregating preferences. It is a way of combining the preferences of a bunch of people into one group preference: Democrat over Republican, or vice versa.

(There are many theoretical problems that arise when you try to combine preferences this way. While these problems are important, my concerns here are more practical in nature.)

Group preferences are thought to have normative significance, above and beyond the significance of the preferences of an individual. It is supposed to matter that more of the people (who voted) prefer candidate X over candidate Y. The will of the people -- as it is called -- is supposed to tell us something about "the way things ought to be."

Now, I find this way of thinking to be completely absurd; not just wrong, but ridiculously wrong. A person prefers X to Y. This may tell us something about the way things ought to be for his own life. Suppose he prefers to eat peaches over bananas. We might say: then he ought to eat a peach and not a banana. His preference for one alternative over another provides him with reasons to pursue some courses of action over others.

One might think that democracy simply extends this reasoning. Surely, if 60% of the people prefer eating peaches, that ought to have some significance. And it does: it provides sellers of fruit with reasons to stock more peaches than bananas (perhaps.) But ought it to have any significance for the way the other 40% of people live their lives? Not obviously. For the minority has its own preferences, and it ought to pursue them. Why should the minority care that the majority prefers peaches to bananas?

The point I am trying to make is the fact that 60% of people prefer peaches does not make peaches better than bananas, in any objective sense. It does not provide anyone with a reason to eat peaches he did not have before. The will of the majority is normatively impotent.

There are two kinds of responses to the criticism I have raised. One response is that, yes, sometimes, the fact the majorty prefers X over Y does make X better than Y. The other response is that, while majority preference doesn't make X better than Y, it does provide evidence that X is better than Y. I will deal with these responses in order.

1. Does majority preference for X over Y make X better than Y?

Answer: no. One consideration in support of this answer is that X's properties do not change just because 50%+1 find X preferable to Y. If X is truly better than Y, it should have something to do with the nature of X and Y. But majority approval is an exogenous factor with respect to X and Y. If there really is good reason to support X instead of Y, that reason exists independently of majority preference.

Another consideration in support of a negative answer to the question: democracy aggregates preferences. But it says nothing about the basis of those preferences. The democratic process is blind to the reasons why people prefer X over Y. Indeed, in principle, people could prefer X over Y for no reason whatsoever, or for reasons that are (again) exogenous with respect to X and Y.

Bottom line: in itself, the democratic process cannot make X better than Y, if the former isn't already better (and thus, more desirable) than the latter.

2. Does majority preference provide evidence that X is better than Y?

Answer: no. In this context, democrats usually cite Condorcet's jury theorem. But the jury theorem has little application to this issue for several interelated reasons, including:

(a) The jury theorem requires that the people on the jury have a better chance of being right than being wrong. If the reverse is true -- if they're more likely to get it wrong than get it right -- then the theorem works in reverse, and the group as a whole will almost certainly make the wrong decision.

(b) Informational cascades: people don't make up their minds independently of one another in a democracy. Bad information gets spread and the usual methods of filtering it out do not function adequately (more on this below.) For example, in the last election, rumors about Obama being a Muslim were widely spread and believed through email. While this didn't tip the election the other way, it is an instance of bad information poisoning the deliberative process.

(c) Rational ignorance: normally, people have good incentives to filter out bad information. False beliefs can quickly ruin lives and reduce a person's welfare. However, in a democracy, these incentives either don't exist or don't exist to the same degree. If X is inferior to Y, and people choose X over Y, the costs of X will be spread around even to those who didn't choose X over Y. When the costs of making a bad decision are dispersed and transfered in this way, most individuals will have little incentive to gather the information necessary to make the right decision. Taking the steps necessary to filter out bad information would cost more to most individuals than making the wrong decision would, so why would they do it?

(d) Ideological considerations: here I mean ideology in the Marxist sense, i.e. a set of ideas (usually false) promulgated by the ruling classes to keep the hoi polloi under their control. Liberal democracies are not immune to this kind of ideology, and politicians have done a good job instilling in people the ideas necessary to perpetuate their own power. But if the people are voting based on ideological considerations, they aren't voting based on the intrinsic merits of the alternatives. That's another reason to suspect that democratic decision-making provides no evidence for the superiority of one alternative over another.

Incidentally, Jan Narveson wrote a great paper on the role of ideology in liberal democracies...

Thus, I submit: the fact that a majority of voters (not even a majority of "the people") prefer X over Y tells us little or nothing about whether X is better than Y.

3. So what use is democracy? Or: democracy versus liberalism.

Democracy is instrumentally valuable, in that holding an election is one way of preserving liberal institutions. But I do not think this works the way most people seem to. It isn't that, given the choice, the majority will support liberalism over the alternatives. It's that, giving people a choice (or the illusion of choice) keeps them from overturning liberal institutions and imposing their own view of the good on everyone else.

Democracy is like icing on the cake of liberalism. It makes the cake taste better to those who are going to eat it, and prevents them from tossing aside the cake in favor of some less savory alternative.

However, this is a minor benefit, and conditional on the existence of strong institutions to keep the majority in check, e.g. courts, constitutions, etc. I would take liberalism over democracy any day.

And, no, I don't think voting is rational. Make sandwiches for homeless people if you truly desire to make the world a better place.

Secularism and Political Justification

This Newsweek piece caught my eye:

The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades...the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent.

Interestingly, the drop in religious affiliation is spread across the U.S. to some degree. While the northwest has always been less religious, the northeast has become "the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified."

That's an odd phrase: how can you have a stronghold of the unidentified? It's kind of like imagining a cabal of people unaffiliated with any other cabal.

Anyway, this is a philosophical blog, so I'm not going to try to explain why the number of self-identified Christians is dropping in the United States. Rather, I want to focus on the significance, especially the significance to liberalism.

John Rawls, some may recall, set out to meet what he saw as one of the most important challenges contemporary liberal democracies now face: liberal societies guarantee freedom of thought and expression. These freedoms lead to great diversity in moral and religious doctrines. How do you keep a society politically unified amidst an ever-expanding, irreconcilable diversity?

Rawls problem, I've become to believe, is quite similar to the same problem Madison tackles in Federalist 10. Madison saw that freedom leads to factionalism. When factions gain political power, they tend to use it to suppress other factions and to advance their own, narrow interests, which quickly becomes destructive to a political community.

It's impossible or at least undesirable to remove the causes of faction and diversity: the very freedoms we want to protect. The only solution is to mitigate their impact. For Madison, this meant setting up institutions that were, by design, highly resistant to the will of the people. For Rawls, this means articulating a freestanding, political conception of justice that everyone can support, despite their deeper disagreements about religion and morality.

I think both solutions are compatible. In the short run, we should support the institutions that tend to thwart the majority, like courts. In the long run, as political philosophers, we should try to find what I've called fixed points in the public culture, and build our ideas upon the edifice they provide. A fixed point is nothing more than some aspect of morality around which one can rally a consensus. Such fixed points are always fixed relative to some public culture, and are rooted in the history of the community.

For example, in the United States, the wrongness of discrimination against blacks is a highly potent fixed point. It would not have that standing if not for the American experience with slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath. This is not to say that this point is accepted by everyone; rather, it is a point around which we can rally a consensus. Those who accept the fixed point -- and there are many of them -- find racism so evil that they are motivated to set aside class and racial privilege to support policies justified on the basis of that point.

So we should be careful: I am not claiming that there are no racists in the United States. I am claiming that (a) There are many, many people who do find racism evil, and (b) Those who see racism this way genuinely see racial discrimination as an injustice, so they are motivated to act against the evil even when their own interests are not directly implicated by it.

By this definition, fixed points get around the factionalism problem Madison envisages. They do so by providing enough people with enough motivation to set aside the interests of their relevant faction to do the right thing, or some facsimile of it.

Nothing I've said necessitates that everyone who accepts a fixed point does so for the same reason. Some people have rejected racism because they see it as contrary to the Christian idea that all are equal in the eyes of God. Some reject it because they see it as contrary to a certain version of Kant's categorical imperative, as I do. Some undoubtedly reject it for other reasons.

Fixed points do not require a consensus all the way down. That's the point.

Now, back to the collapse of Christianity in America: we might say, this is the inevitable outcome of the freedom liberal democracies guarantee to their citizens. Monolithic religious groups will splinter into sects and sub-sects. One might think this could lead to the abandonment of fixed points: after all, if those in group X accept that racism is evil because the doctrine of group X says it is evil, what happens when people leave group X? Are we destined to lose all our fixed points, and to stumble into the factionalism that so concerned Madison?

My answer at this time is: no. The funny thing about fixed points is that, by their nature, they can be justified in several different ways. Arguably, even to become a fixed point, a belief has to be broadly compatible with the diversity from which it arises. What will happen as people leave group X is that the things group X condemns that are not fixed points in the wider culture will likely be abandoned. What kind of things do I have in mind?

Well, the condemnation of same-sex marriage is such an issue. No, I'm not claiming that there is a shortage of religious groups now condemning same-sex marriage. Nor am I claiming that same-sex marriage is a fixed point in the sense I've used the term. It's not, although I think its permissibility can be derived from principles of equal protection that are fixed points.

Rather, what I'm claiming is this: same-sex marriage has only recently become a controversial issue. Of course, it would have been controversial, prior to the 20th century. But since the issue wasn't even raised, it never became controversial -- unlike slavery, which was controversial in the United States from the very beginning. The absence of controversy meant no consensus emerged with regard to same-sex marriage one way or the other, and with no consensus there can be no fixed points.

If the absence of fixed points leads to factionalism, then -- with regard to same-sex marriage -- what we have is factionalism. I happen to believe one faction has the better side of the argument. But the religious groups that condemn same-sex marriage are also factions. Their condemnation does not represent a fixed point; it is not justified on the basis of a fixed point. Thus, those who abandon those factions will not likely retain this belief, because it is justified solely in terms of doctrines endogenous to the factions.

Thus, I see the situation like this: if people abandon Christianity, they will retain a belief in issues clustering around certain fixed points. People will not start believing in the permissibility of slavery because their version of Christianity condemned it. They will continue to believe it is impermissible, because the wrongness of slavery is a fixed point. However, they will either stop believing in the wrongness of same-sex marriage, or else be far less motivated to impose this belief on others through law.

Actually, I think something is even more likely than this: same-sex marriage, while not a fixed point itself, is closely aligned with a belief that all are entitled to equal protection of the law. This belief is a fixed point, or close to it. Thus, history really is on the side of same-sex marriage advocates. The war between the factions will be resolved in favor of the side that can best call upon these fixed cultural points to justify itself.

That will be the side in favor of marriage equality. Count on it.