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.

Some sanity in North Dakota

Link

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — North Dakota's Senate has rejected legislation to bestow human rights on fertilized human eggs, whether they be in the womb or in a laboratory.

Senators voted 29-16 Friday to reject legislation that sought to define as a human being "any organism with the genome of homo sapiens." The "personhood" status would include a developing embryo from the moment of conception, whether inside or outside the womb.

Just to remind everyone, Ron Paul sponsored a bill in Congress to define fetuses as persons under the law, a similar bit of madness that would have had similar ripple effects (except multiplied times fifty, since it would have applied to all the states.)

I'm almost surprised the North Dakota legislation fell flat on its face.

What's a "fusionist libertarian"?

Fusionism was a movement to unify libertarians and social conservatives. Like Will Wilkinson, I believe this alliance mainly grew out of opposition to Communism during the Cold War. Libertarians hate communism. Social conservatives hate communism. That shared dislike provided a motive for libertarians and conservatives to work together during the Cold War, and, to some extent, afterwards.

But the "alliance" was a marriage of convenience. Many libertarians watched with dismay as George W. Bush and the Republicans spent money like drunken sailors. With equal dismay, we have watched as social conservatives continue to support the unending, wasteful, and immoral "war on drugs." We have watched as social conservatives support state laws prohibiting consensual sexual activity between adults in the privacy of the home. We have watched; and we have grown tired.

What is a fusionist libertarian, then, at this time? It's too easy to say "a liberaltarian" -- as if a fusionism from the left would work any better than a fusionism from the right. To some degree, the popular left is infected with a stubborn but inconsistent moral relativism that, at the edges, begins to look like nihilism. Conservatives are many things, but they are not nihilists.

We should not be nihilists, either. In this, I agree with conservatives: morality matters. Sometimes, maybe often, morality should guide the law. Libertarians agree with this sentiment -- wholeheartedly, even. They tend to start from a foundation of individual rights. These rights limit what the state can legitimately do. When the state goes beyond these boundaries, when it interferes in the lives of its citizens, it acts wrongly, and it should be opposed.

But here, again, I agree with conservatives: morality matters. Rights are not the whole of morality. Rights, I have come to see, cannot even be at the foundation of morality. Values are important, too. Laws prohibiting employers from discriminating on the basis of race in their hiring practices violate rights, as libertarians commonly understand them. But I support these laws. Why?

The answer is that I don't see rights as a mysterious, freestanding feature of morality, trumping all other considerations by virtue of their vast, but assumed and unexplained, moral weight. Rights -- or at least some rights -- do not stand in opposition to values. Rather, rights -- properly understood -- provide the conditions for the successful pursuit of value. Their shape and scope is determined, to some extent, by values: a state that protected rights perfectly might be very admirable in that respect, but I would not want to live in it until I knew whether the way those rights were understood and enforced in that society were conducive to the living of a good life.

Values and rights go together. Sometimes, they conflict. Protecting the right of the racist employer to hire only white people conflicts with certain values, makes certain genuine values harder to achieve for blacks (and probably others.) To resolve this conflict, judgment is necessary (what Aristotle referred to as phronesis: don't do morality without it!)

My way of resolving the conflict is as follows: the right of the employer should be limited only to the extent necessary to ensure that blacks and other minorities have a fair shot at living a good life. This does not mean that values should obliterate rights; it does mean that rights, as abstract principles, can and should be adjusted, if it is necessary to give long-oppressed people a shot at living a good life in a racist society.

I know this resolution will not satisfy libertarians who like clear, easy answers to moral problems. So be it. Intellectual conservatives know that such answers are almost always wrong. Again, in this, I am more conservative than libertarian.

So what is it that a fusionist libertarian is trying to fuse? The answer is simple: the right and the good. By what principles does he try to fuse these two moral elements? Through phronesis, judgment informed by experience and a healthy dose of humility. Fusionism, understood in this way, brings that humility, as well as a certain amount of charity toward those with different views. Fusionism makes it possible to understand reasonable disagreement: that those with different moral views are not evil or stupid (or not always.)

Rather, they have brought to bear their own experiences and judgments and are trying to navigate through the world as best they can. As such, those with opposing views deserve a certain amount of respect. The principle of charity is not your enemy here.

Iowa court makes right decision

Today, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down that state's ban on same-sex marriage.

From what I can tell, the ruling was made on equal protection grounds:

“We have a constitutional duty to ensure equal protection of the law,” the Iowa justices wrote in their opinion. “If gay and lesbian people must submit to different treatment without an exceedingly persuasive justification, they are deprived of the benefits of the principle of equal protection upon which the rule of law is founded.”

As I wrote some place in the past, the argument in favor of same-sex marriage through equal protection is fairly simple. The law gives some people the right to marry the consenting adult partner of their choice. Unless there is some "exceedingly persuasive justification" against it, everyone should have that right. There is no reason to restrict the right only to those who wish to marry someone of the opposite sex.

Simple. Conservative arguments against gay marriage often rely on dubious assumptions about the consequences that would follow from the legal recognition of same-sex marriage. For example, it has been argued that the legal recognition of same-sex marriage will somehow incentivize hetereosexuals against getting married -- despite the tax and other social benefits that go along with marriage.

These arguments are so transparent, it is no wonder the Iowa decision was unanimous.

There are other conservative arguments that could be called "formalist." These arguments rest on the assumption that marriage is and always has been defined in a certain way, and that -- for some reason -- the law ought to track that definition, to the exclusion of all other considerations.

These are silly arguments, for several reasons. One reason is that it is not clear how the person making the argument thinks normative content can and should be derived solely from a dictionary definition. I'm not claiming that a commonly accepted definition of a term should _never_ inform the law. But it is hardly the only consideration that matters.

Another formalist argument involves denying that same-sex couples have unequal rights, since they have exactly the same right to marry as opposite-sex couples: that is, they can marry someone of the opposite sex.

This argument piggy backs on the first. There is no way to rebut it directly -- not because it is that powerful of an argument, but because it is barely an argument at all. Marriage has certain essential features. We rely on these features when we distinguish "good" marriages from "bad" ones. A loveless show marriage, for example, qualifies as a "bad" marriage (or, better: it is a bad example of a marriage.)

Why is this? Well, we tend to think that the presence of a loving, committed relationship is an important, if not essential, feature of marriage. Same-sex relationships can exhibit this feature. That value -- which can be present in same-sex relationships to the same degree as opposite-sex ones -- is important, and the law ought to recognize it without prejudice.

But notice, the value -- which we can call the essential value of marriage -- depends in no way on the people in the relationship being of the opposite sex. When the law restricts marriage to opposite-sex couples, it is not protecting the value of marriage; instead, it is diminishing it, because it is placing what is an inessential part of the value of marriage -- the opposite sex part -- on the same level as a feature that is part of the essential value of marriage.

What is important is that we recognize committed, loving relationships; not that we recognize committed, loving relationships between people who happen to be of the opposite sex.

This is a good day for Iowa.

Why Kant is more Libertarian than Locke

This is all a work in progress.

Broadly, justification usually focuses on the giving of reasons. The belief that p is justified if and only if there is sufficient reason to believe that p. Similarly, political justification typically involves advancing reasons to support (a) certain aspects of the political, e.g. instititions or policy proposals, or (b) the political order as a whole.

In epistemology, "justification" is what separates mere belief from knowledge (Gettier type issues shall be set aside, for the moment.) Political justification is what separates right political action from the mere exercise of force. If a given law is justified, then the government is entitled to enforce that law. Whether citizens are morally obligated to obey a justified law is something I doubt, but we can distinguish -- surely -- between a law that meets certain moral criteria, or that is intended to promote a just end, and the raw force the mugger uses to subdue his victim.

(Some libertarians are unwilling to make this distinction. But I think they do make it regardless: Take two possible worlds, both containing governments. In World 1, the government uses its power to educate citizens who could not otherwise afford an education. In World 2, the government uses its power to kill minorities. Obviously, there is something better about World 1, even if neither world is morally ideal. This shows we can distinguish between morally better and worse uses of government power.)

Justification depends on the existence of reasons. A common theme in liberal thought is that those who exercise political power must offer reasons to those against whom that power is to be exercised. These must not only be valid reasons (as justification always requires) but reasons that the subjects of political power will recognize as valid reasons.

Thus, liberal political justification proceeds from a restricted set of reasons. Not every valid reason will be recognized as such by the subjects of political power. Reasonable people can disagree about what counts as a valid reason. This restriction on reasons, rather than weakening the liberal view, gives it its strength and character, at least according to some. The laws liberals tend to worry about the most -- laws infringing on religious worship, freedom of expression, association, and so on -- are exactly the kinds of laws that can only be justified by moving outside the restricted set of reasons. Or so the argument will go.

Liberal justification, by restricting the reason set, limits what government can justifiably do. This limit carves out a domain in which individuals can govern their own lives according to the reasons they accept as valid. When government steps into that domain, it steps into it without warrant, as its justification will be unacceptable at least to those whose lives are subject to such interference.

It should be clear from this sketch that liberal justification puts limits on government precisely through its universalist aspirations. It is because the political order has to be justified to each and every person subject to its power that the result is a drastically limited government. Why this is a requirement of political justification is something of an open question.

The most direct route to this requirement, in my opinion, is through the second version of Kant's categorical imperative: we fail to treat others as ends in themselves if we exercise force against them without seeking justification; and this justification must be addressed to each and every person, since each has dignity that cannot be sacrificed in the pursuit of other ends.

Without such justification, the law simply treats some as means to the ends of others.

In my view, there is a line between Locke and Kant on this issue. For Locke, political justification requires the free consent of the governed. For Kant, political justification requires the rational consent of the governed. Since, for Kant, rational consent is always free (reason being the free part of us, the self-in-itself), one might think that there is complete convergence between the two thinkers. This is not so, for one reason: for Locke, consent can and probably will be motivated by many factors. An inept, intolerant government will fail to get the consent of the governed because it will fail to serve the interests of the governed. Government must actually serve the interests of all to be justified.

Kant accepts a dichotomy between interests and reason. But because reason by its nature demands freedom, it is the fact -- and only the fact -- that a government supports freedom that can establish rational consent. An unfree government that was very good at serving the interests of the governed might gain actual consent, but it would never gain rational consent. Reason seeks the freedom to govern itself; nothing less than this -- no matter how efficient, or good-promoting -- will be rationally acceptable.

The dignity of the person requires that the political order be justified to each and every subject. But, for each and every subject, reason speaks with one voice: more freedom rather than less.

On this point, I think Kant is more libertarian than Locke. Kant's view can explain why it is wrong to sacrifice liberty for greater welfare, for example. Locke's view allows for greater restrictions on liberty as long as they are, in some sense, Pareto-improvements on a freer baseline. Granted, there are some restrictions on what we can consent to, derived from natural law. But there is much space between the moral baseline and totalitarianism for government to restrict freedom. Kant's view doesn't have that problem because, for him, the moral baseline is identical with the moral ideal: freedom.

Kant's view also begins to allow us to rank liberties. The most vital liberties will be those most closely connected to the development and maintenance of free, autonomous reason. Freedom of speech and conscience will rank very high on such a list.

U.S. government to bring back slavery

Ah, hell.

...To begin with, the legislation threatens the voluntary nature of Americorps by calling for consideration of "a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people." It anticipates the possibility of requiring "all individuals in the United States" to perform such service -- including elementary school students.

The bill also summons up unsettling memories of World War II-era paramilitary groups by saying the new program should "combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service," while establishing "campuses" that serve as "operational headquarters," complete with "superintendents" and "uniforms" for all participants. It allows for the elimination of all age restrictions in order to involve Americans at all stages of life. And it calls for creation of "a permanent cadre" in a "National Community Civilian Corps."

This was what worried me the most about an Obama presidency: forced service to the state. And uniforms? UNIFORMS!? I have an idea: the uniforms can have a giant O on the chest and "volunteers" can wear armbands emblazoned with words like "hope" and "change".

Different versions of the bill have passed the House and Senate. They need to be reconciled before the final version goes to Obama for signing. And he's said he'll sign it; indeed, it's not unfair to say that this plan is his idea.

It's kind of ironic that a black guy is poised to bring back slavery. But shouldn't he move to repeal the 13th Amendment first?

Maybe he could get some help from Ron Paul with that.

H/T: Sandefur