Principles vs. Judgment, or, Steve Landsburg vs. Gene Callahan
I used to be a hardcore materialist, and it was ultimately Gene Callahan who set me straight. (It’s not that he convinced me in the course of our argument, but rather that when I was ready to change my mind, all of his analysis was there for me to fall back upon. That’s why it’s useful to debate people, even though it never seems to work at the time.)
Well Gene has fundamentally altered my worldview yet again. Don’t worry, I’m not in favor of dictatorship. But lately Gene has been arguing that only a fool blindly follows his “principles” when they conflict with his judgment and common sense.
After much resistance, now I think Gene is right. I haven’t fully worked this out, but here’s how I’m thinking about it now: We have moral intuitions. We just know certain things are bad, like making babies cry just for sport, or robbing banks. If someone proposes a moral system that leads to the outcome that these things are actually good, then we throw out the system and go back to the drawing board.
But our intuitions are not enough. For one thing, we might not all agree with each other on what’s good or bad, once we move beyond obvious stuff like tormenting babies or robbing banks. So that’s why we develop principles. We try to come up with a general framework that matches our intuitions on the really obvious cases where we “already know the answer,” so that we can then figure out what the answer probably is on a hard case where our intuitions fail us.
Now the problem is, we have many different moral or ethical systems going at once. Each one is finely tuned in its own domain. For example, when discussing the commercial operations of a market economy, the standard libertarian view works great. But when it comes to how you should act at a family picnic, then the sermons of Jesus are fantastic.
The problem occurs when you try to apply the principles from one area in a domain that you often don’t use it. For example, it’s not so obvious how you apply some of the lessons from the Sermon on the Mount to Wall Street traders. As we all know, many Christians have thought that Jesus’ lessons “obviously” imply socialism.
On the other hand, when you apply standard libertarian analysis to things like children, you get some pretty horrifying results. I actually was arguing in my online class about whether parents would have the legal right to eat their children in a Rothbardian world. Note, I’m not saying the people who were holding this position were moral monsters, I’m just saying you can go easily astray if you focus exclusively on one set of principles to the exclusion of others.
So I believe this is what Gene has been harping on lo these many months. (I’m not all about praise here. Gene seems to have focused narrow-mindedly on the principle of, “I must remove error from the blogosphere!” to the exclusion of, “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.”)
Now all of this isn’t to deny the importance of principles. And I certainly respect people who are willing to endure great hardship for the sake of their principles. But I think the broader lesson is that there are times when you will hit upon a situation where your cherished systems will give conflicting answers, and then you will have to decide which principle is more important. And in fact, maybe in light of this decision, you will revise your frameworks to come up with a more robust set of rules that can handle the previously unexpected scenario.
(For Christian readers who think I’m being blasphemous, over email Gene gave me a great example from the Bible: The case of Abraham and Isaac. When God told Abraham he had to sacrifice his son, Abraham faced a dilemma. After all, he knew “It’s right to obey God.” But he also knew, “It’s wrong to murder my son.” So this episode must have totally blown his mind.)
OK so where does Steve Landsburg come in? Look at how proud he is that his economic arguments defy moral intuitions:
All of which brings me to why I wrote this post. Last week we had a discussion about the efficiency criterion. A few days ago, I followed up by applying the criterion to the hardest of cases — Bill Gates walking through the desert and refusing water to a dying man….The point of that post…is that this is one of the rare cases in which the efficiency criterion doesn’t work very well, owing to the big discrepancy between Willingness to Pay and Willingness to Accept.
But today’s point is a different one: Even if the efficiency criterion did unambiguously recommend that Bill keep his water (which in fact it does not), that’s not actually so horrible by the standards we apply to ourselves every day. The only difference is that we kill the distant, whereas in this scenario, Bill kills the nearby. That might quite reasonably make us want to stay out of Bill’s way, and tell ourselves we want nothing to do with him. But at the level of policy, where we really ought to care about everyone, it’s just not sign[i]ficantly more horrible than what we accept all the time.
As I said, the efficiency criterion doesn’t really apply to Bill in the desert. But it does tell us to abandon the miner. We instinctively recoil from that recommendation, which is exactly why we need the efficiency criterion. Our strongest instincts are not always our best instincts. I like the efficiency criterion because it insists that we face the hard choices. [Bold in original.]
Just to be clear, Landsburg isn’t talking about the Chilean miners. Fortunately for them, Landsburg has run the numbers and thinks it’s OK to save them: “The miners currently trapped in Chile are, most thankfully, not a good example of miners who ought to be abandoned. As far as I can estimate, the cost of getting them out is quite entirely reasonable and well within the bounds that an amnesiac would approve.” Instead, Landsburg is talking about a hypothetical miner who is trapped such that it would cost $30 million to get him out. Because that same $30 million could be spent installing guard rails that would save three lives, it is obvious to Landsburg that we should let the miner die.
One last point: Notice in the shorter quote above that Landsburg said, “The miners currently trapped in Chile are, most thankfully, not a good example…” This puzzles me.
First of all, to whom is Landsburg thankful? The great pi in the sky? (If you haven’t read Landsburg’s book, just move on; inside joke.)
But more important, why is Landsburg thankful? There are two things I can think of, one fine and the other horrifying. The first is that Landsburg feels for the miners, and is glad that his intellectual system recommends that we save them, rather than sending down the message, “Send back those iPods you free-loaders. Nice knowing you. Here’s a tip: start digging.”
The second option is that Landsburg sees that resources are being devoted to rescuing the miners, and is thankful that this is an efficient use. If that’s what he means, it is horrifying.
Incidentally, although I am trying to be cute here, there is a serious point: Why should we care about efficiency in the abstract? I can understand why I would want my resources not to be wasted, but what do I care about other people wasting their resources? I think Landsburg and others like him think they are being quite objective and scientific, yet they are smuggling in a moral principle that is completely arbitrary.
Bob, your position looks remarkably similar to Roderick Long’s “reflective equilibrium” theory.
“On the other hand, when you apply standard libertarian analysis to things like children, you get some pretty horrifying results.”
Could you explain why? What do you take to be “standard libertarian analysis” with respect to children, and in which respects does it lead to “horrifying results” (parents’ right not to feed their children? children’s right to run away?)? (Note that neither Rothbard nor Hoppe, Kinsella, Block etc. think that children should be treated exactly the same way as adults under libertarian law.)
“I actually was arguing in my online class about whether parents would have the legal right to eat their children in a Rothbardian world.”
Obviously not. Rothbard doesn’t hold the view that parents are the absolute owners of their children.
“Obviously not. Rothbard doesn’t hold the view that parents are the absolute owners of their children.”
Rothbard’s criteria for rights are taken to their logical implication and extended from animals to children. Then it becomes a matter of “you either own your property in the fullest or you do not” in these propertarian reductionist discussions. If you’re confused, then take a stroll down the Mises forum memory lane.
I’m not certain of Garrot’s position here, but I think he said what my point was. So David K., you’re right, Rothbard never wrote anywhere, “Parents can microwave their kids,” but I think that’s because he had the good sense to shrink back from the implications of his system (or principles).
I have never seen a non-arbitrary way that the standard libertarian evades parents owning their children. Or, going the other way, if parents don’t own their children, then how do we know they own their cats and dogs and apes?
I have seen really ad hoc stuff like, “Because the child has the capacity for rational thought.” OK, so then people who are brain dead lose their rights? Etc.
I’m not certain of Garrot’s position here
I think Rothbardians are dogmatic scryers that refuse to stay in touch with social reality for their rigid world views.
I have seen really ad hoc stuff like, “Because the child has the capacity for rational thought.” OK, so then people who are brain dead lose their rights? Etc.
Here’s another example:
You buy a kid from Bob Murphy’s adoption company just like you would buy a dog from an philanthropic animal organization. They’re your property and you have full right to utilize or dispose of it as you please.
“I have never seen a non-arbitrary way that the standard libertarian evades parents owning their children. Or, going the other way, if parents don’t own their children, then how do we know they own their cats and dogs and apes?”
Since Rothbard was an Aristotelean-Thomist natural-law theorist, he might have responded that an entitiy’s rights are determined by its nature. A baby is by nature a rational being (whose rational capacities happen not to be fully developed yet). Comatose people are by nature rational beings (who happen to be unable to exercise their rational capacities due to accidents). Cats, dogs and apes are by nature devoid of reason. This is based on fundamental concepts of Aristotelean metaphysics like essence, act, potency – surely not “ad hoc stuff.” (See this blog by neo-Scholastic philosopher Edward Feser.)
Wow, lots to talk about on this one. Let me first try to give a defense of Landsburg’s “thankfully”. (Me defending Landsburg? Eek! Pigs to fly soon…) What I think he meant was, “Thankfully the logical outcome matches my readers intuition so I don’t have to give a longer explanation about why those intuitions are wrong.”
An analogous case for you would be if you said:
“The role of prisons in a free society would only be to protect everyone else from them, so really the only determinant of whether you’d be imprisoned is if you couldn’t get a liability insurance policy. Thankfully, this wouldn’t mean a round-up of young black males and unpopular groups, because they’d surely be able to meet this minimum threshold.”
As for the general issue of principles: my main disagreement is that, almost universally, people who can’t (“reductionistly”) explain their “judgment” either aren’t really trying, or only have a trivial understanding of the subject themselves. In too many times to count, I’ve been in a situation where someone has told me something “can’t be explained” or summarized, but then, once I understand it, I show them how they were missing a simple explanation. See the top row of this xkcd for how I feel most of the time. (With me in the position of the woman on the left.)
(And let’s not even get into Gene’s canonical Buddhist story about “deep” understanding.)
It’s for this reason that I created the 4 levels of understanding classification system, to separate trivial from deep understandings.
Gene writes:
“[E]ither you correctly recognize that principals [sic] can and do conflict and need to be prudently balanced, or you delusively think that ‘purity’ trumps prudence.”
It is true that propositions that look like correct moral principles can sometimes conflict. But doesn’t this simply mean that at least one of those alleged principles is false (i.e., not a true moral principle at all) and must be modified and refined? True moral principles are true statements, and true statements are consistent, right?
In my view, the proper role of “prudence” and “judgment” consists not in deciding between conflicting moral principles, but in modifying and refining conflicting (and hence partially false) moral intuitions in order to arrive at true (and hence non-conflicting) moral principles and then applying those principles (which are probably somewhat ambiguous) to concrete situations.
(This seems to be similar to Roderick Long’s Aristotelean “unity of virtue” theory: The content of each virtue is partially determined by the content of all the other virtues, such that virtues can’t conflict.)
“I can understand why I would want my resources not to be wasted, but what do I care about other people wasting their resources? I think Landsburg and others like him think they are being quite objective and scientific, yet they are smuggling in a moral principle that is completely arbitrary.”
People care about whether others are being wasteful because, at an instinctive level, people are generally still collectivists. In a prehistoric setting, all resources belonged to all or at least could be called upon to support those potentially in need. Individual waste threatened everyone on the group.
This is why most economists are enthusiaists of government intervention and just love the whole externality story – their intuition is governed mostly by their instinct and not so much by their intellect..
Most principles conflict at some time. All principles aren’t created equal. That’s why we need a hierarchy of principles. Take the rights to life, liberty and property. If property conflicts with the right to life, the right to life is a higher principle in the hierarchy and gets preference. In the natural law tradition, a man has the right to steal in order to keep him and his family from starving, but it must be a last resort and he must make restitution when possible.
Fundamentalist, you have merely shown that values can conflict (e.g., the value of respecting other people’s property rights and the value of avoiding starvation). But this doesn’t entail that moral principles can conflict. There is no moral principle that tells you never to give up (an increment of) one value in favor of (an increment of) another value. (For example, “always respect other people’s property rights” is not a correct moral principle.)
“In the natural law tradition, a man has the right to steal in order to keep him and his family from starving, but it must be a last resort and he must make restitution when possible.”
Note that this implies that the starving man has violated the rights of the other person. (Otherwise, he wouldn’t owe him restitution; I define rights as claims that ought to be enforced to some degree by the legal system, e.g., by forcing those who violate them to make restitution.) This in turn implies that the starving man had no right to steal from the other person. (Rights can never conflict, since they are meant to solve conflicts over scarce resources, not to create them.) But as I said, in this case it was morally permissible to violate rights.
“Rights can never conflict, since they are meant to solve conflicts over scarce resources, not to create them.”
If we merely looked around, it would seem obvious that rights do conflict all the time. But since that’s not what David means for them to do, we really ought to stop looking around!
“But since that’s not what David means for them to do, […]”
I mean for the legal system (courts, police etc.) to solve conflicts over scarce resources, and I define rights as claims that ought to be enforced by the legal system. I don’t find it that obvious that the legal system ought to enforce contradictory claims, even without my assumption about the proper role of the legal system. (I hereby sentence Mr. X to death for the murder of Mr. Y. However, I hereby also sentence Mr. Z to life imprisonment for falsely accusing Mr. X of murdering Mr. Y.”)
Things might look different if one uses a different definition of “right.”
There is quite a difference between “rights can never conflict” to “the legal system ought [not] to enforce contradictory claims.”
Of course, you may define rights as inherently incapable of conflict, but then your definition will lack applicability to the real world.
“There is quite a difference between ‘rights can never conflict’ to ‘the legal system ought [not] to enforce contradictory claims.'”
If rights are defined as “claims that ought to be enforced by the legal system,” I can’t see the difference. Is there supposed to be a difference between “conflicting” claims and “contradictory” ones?
“Of course, you may define rights as inherently incapable of conflict […]”
I don’t. I might be wrong in thinking that the legal system ought not to enforce conflicting claims, but that is not a definition. (I think it follows from my opinion that the function of the legal system is to solve conflicts. This opinion may be wrong, but it is not meant to be a definition.)
When your principles run afoul of moral judments, one or both are wrong.
Bob,
Is there a dollar amount high enough that you would say that spending it to save one miner’s life is not worthwhile? If so, what is that amount?
Of Bob’s own money or someone else’s?
David (R. Henderson), see the other David’s question. This gets to the heart of my problem with Landsburg’s analysis. What exactly is the scenario? Are you asking me how much I think the Chilean government should take (using force) from Chilean people to spend on saving miners? Then my answer is $0. Are you asking me how much a private mine company should spend? Well, it would depend on a lot of things, like what the labor contracts had to say about it, industry precedent, etc.
Let me turn it back on you: Is there a dollar amount high enough that you would say that spending it to play a round of golf is not worthwhile? If so, what is that amount?
Worthwhile to whom? Presumably each individual and each group may value the miner differently. It’s probably safe to say that Bob isn’t going to fork over his entire net worth to save a miner he doesn’t know half a world away – if he did things like that he’d be penniless already. But that doesn’t preclude some possibility that Bill Gates might want to put up $200 billion to save a certain individual The only price that’s too high is one that individuals are not willing to pay.
“For example, when discussing the commercial operations of a market economy, the standard libertarian view works great. But when it comes to how you should act at a family picnic, then the sermons of Jesus are fantastic.”
I think market anarchy works fine for picnics and I’d be surprised if you thought the sermons weren’t intended to encompass commercial operations. Don’t you think they apply to all facets of life?
According to Ecclesiastes there is a time for war and a time to kill, and I don’t recall any of Jesus’ sermons touching on that matter. In this sense, not all of Jesus’ sermons apply to all facets of life.
A counter argument might be that Jesus’ teachings establish that there is never a time for war or a time to kill, but such would invalidate much of the Judeo-Christean heritage.
Samson killing Philistines is but one example.
I think Landsberg is roughly restating the classic utilitarian question of the doctor considering whether to kill and donate organs of a patient with a minor ailment. Kill one to save 5. The point is rule vs act utility.
Because he is focused on the act, Landsberg equates two very different rules; his first is that we ought to donate everything above survival until nobody in the world is arbitrarily poor. The second is we ought to help people with whom we have (or could have) some sort of relationship with.
Now, Landsberg approaches it from act utility, and concludes his two examples are similar. I’d argue that the rules behind them are so different, that his paradox is resolved if he considers the efficiency of the rule at issue. So the first rule gives no incentive to work, impossibility to accumulate capital, so abject (long-run) poverty, while the second rule probably reduces conflict and increases cooperation between individuals.
Thus you can unite materialism and principle by considering the efficiency at rules at the highest level of abstraction. Examples would be the non-aggression principle, property rights with common law allowances for breach, and so on.
You end up with efficient and moral rules. Win-win.
Have you read Robyn Dawes? Our intuitions are quite lousy, and even extremely simplistic statistical forumulae do better at predicting. People’s confidence in their own intuitions is part of what gives rise to the pervasive irrational/dishonest disagreement that Robin Hanson writes about. Of course, I’m a hardcore metarialist who doesn’t believe in objective moral truth, so perhaps you won’t find me very trustworthy.
JTK, when are you going restore the No Treason content?
“JTK, when are you going restore the No Treason content?”
I miss that blog, and all of Kinsella’s buffoonery that went along with it.
In Catholic theology, the human “conscience” is held in much higher esteem than in most Protestant theology, and I suspect that is where Gene Callahan may be coming from
The reason is that Roman Catholics hold that Man maintains a kernal of spiritual life which continues to seek after God, despite original sin, and that this trusty moral compass continues to operate more or less even after the commission of mortal sin. This “seeking after God” is said to have its expression in the human concience. Obviously in most ordinary cases the conscience is bound by the traditions and teachings of the Church and sacred scripture, but to those living in areas outside the coverage of the church, a human being’s sense of right and wrong is the basis upon which he is said to be judged by God.
The Swiss Protestant Reformers were much more skeptical of the utility of the conscience prior to one’s regeneration by God’s grace. Due to the perditious effects of the fall, they held that one’s unregenerate mind or conscience is highly deceptive, and dulled by sin. The Swiss Protestant Reformers held to the view that the trustworthiness of one’s conscience must be measured against the teaching of sacred scripture alone, and not mearly some inate sense of right and wrong. In other words, the principles taught in Holy Scripture should always “bind” the Christian’s conscience.
In Luther, you see kind of a middle ground, where his Roman Catholic theololgy gives heavy weight to the conscience, but a conscience that is informed not by one’s own inate sense of right and wrong, nor even the traditions of the Church alone, but rather by evident reason and sacred scripture. Here Luther expresses that his conscience is bound by principle, yet he still gives high priority to the value of the conscience, when he says it is not safe to go against one’s conscience.
Consider Luther’s famous quote:
“Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason-for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves-I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. God help me. Amen.” – Martin Luther 1521
It’s true, K Sralla, that the Protestant Reformation was a major step on the disastrous road to modern rationalism.
But more important, why is Landsburg thankful?
I am thankful that it’s going to be possible to get these guys out at a (relatively) low cost. I’d be even more thankful if the cost were lower and more thankful still if the mine hadn’t collapsed in the first place.
I am stunned that this could have been unclear. It is good when costs are low. It is good when there is less scarcity. These things are good they improve the quality of people’s lives, and we ought to care about that. If we didn’t, there’d be little point in thinking about policy analysis.
I am 100% sure you share this sentiment, and I’m kind of shocked that you entertained the notion that I might not.
Steve Landsburg wrote:
I am thankful that it’s going to be possible to get these guys out at a (relatively) low cost. I’d be even more thankful if the cost were lower and more thankful still if the mine hadn’t collapsed in the first place.
I am stunned that this could have been unclear.
Hang on a second, Steve. Either way, the Chilean government is spending resources to get those guys out. So “going to be possible to get those guys out” is not the issue here.
The issue is, is the cost going to be higher than the benefits. And so that’s why it seemed to me that you were possibly thankful that there wasn’t an inefficient usage of resources happening. Since the miners being rescued is a done deal, regardless of your calculation, I didn’t think that was entering the equation.
For example, if a teenager announces at the dinner table, “Hey everyone! I just bought a laptop!” and the dad says, “How much did you spend?!” Then the kid says, “Only $500,” and the dad says, “Oh thank goodness.” In that scenario, isn’t it reasonable to suppose that the dad was worried that the kid had overpaid?
So that’s how I was interpreting your discussion of the Chilean miners. You start out with an example of when it would be wasteful to rescue a miner, then talk about a case where a government IS RESCUING miners, and then you say that thankfully, the effort is justified. So it sounds like what you were worried about was a waste of resources, not the miners per se.
More generally, I don’t think you should be surprised when people are unsure of your personal value system. If you go out of your way to shock people’s sensibilities–with essays on sleeping around being the way to fight STDs, or blog posts saying that genocide gets a bad rap–then you really ought not to be shocked.
For what it’s worth, I think you are a “nice guy.” In particular, I get the sense that you really care about your daughter. But I think that you are trying to justify your praiseworthy moral intuitions with a technocratic framework that doesn’t actually work.
The issue is, is the cost going to be higher than the benefits. And so that’s why it seemed to me that you were possibly thankful that there wasn’t an inefficient usage of resources happening.
Whether or not the resources are being used inefficiencly, I think we can all easily be thankful that the resource cost is smaller than it could have been, and regretful that it;s not smaller yet.
The issue is, is the cost going to be higher than the benefits.
That’s <b.an issue (and the appropriate one to focus on when you’re deciding whether to mount a rescue attempt.). Another issue is: How high is the cost? That’s a good one to focus on when you’re deciding whether to be thankful.
I agree that if you decide not to mount a rescue effort, then the cost becomes irrelevant. But as long as you’re mounting rescue — or even considering it — a discovery that the cost is low is a good thing. And again, this seems to me to be so obvious and so noncontroversial that I’m amazed we’re spending bandwidth on it.
OK I’ll do one more pass at this, Steve. It doesn’t mean I’ve been right all this time and you’re wrong, it just means I don’t think you’re seeing where I’m coming from.
I got the sense that you were thankful, because we could save those miners. Like, if we had heard of the mine collapse, and then news came back that they were alive, and you had written, “Thankfully, they survived the collapse.” So I thought that was your natural human altruism shining through.
But, in the context of your blog post, the only way I could make sense of the statement was to assume you were making a point about efficiency, not about saving people from suffocating or starving to death.
Switch contexts: Suppose you hadn’t been talking about saving lives, but instead about space exploration. And that you picked an example of a space station being a dumb use of resources. But then you said, “Note that I’m not talking about the actual space station in orbit right now. Thankfully, according to my estimates, the positive externalities of building it more than compensate for the money governments have spent on the project.”
I don’t think you would have written that, because it would have seemed weird to be “thankful” about a mere matter of efficiency.
So anyway, the whole point of all this, is that I was trying to show that your natural sympathy and altruism for others is creeping out, even though you use your reason to try to club away at them all the time.
Bob,
I have to echo David K.’s first comment. You really should read more of Roderick Long’s work on this idea. In this article he describes the method of reflective equilibrium as one that “proceeds by starting with all the moral judgments one initially finds intuitively compelling, and then working through mutual adjustment to reach a maximally coherent belief system—sometimes revising judgments about general principles to fit judgments about particular cases, sometimes revising judgments about particular cases to fit judgments about general principles.”
‘Gene seems to have focused narrow-mindedly on the principle of, “I must remove error from the blogosphere!” to the exclusion of, “Don’t be a jerk to people you disagree with.”’
By the way, Bob is right here — I get too worked up over trolls (I think it’s not merely disagreement, but rude disagreement, but maybe I’m wrong). That’s why I turned on comment moderating at Crash Landing and hardly post at Think Markets, where there is no moderation. That way, before I lose it, I can just stop the trolls posts.
David K: “It is true that propositions that look like correct moral principles can sometimes conflict. But doesn’t this simply mean that at least one of those alleged principles is false (i.e., not a true moral principle at all) and must be modified and refined? True moral principles are true statements, and true statements are consistent, right?”
No, propositions are true or false. But moral principles are not propositions, but maxims. They are more or less applicable in a given situation, not true or false. This is all in Aristotle, btw.
Could you outline the main argument for this position? E.g., why isn’t “You should never torture someone just for fun” a true statement?
Forgive me for butting in, but I have to ask why do you think it is wrong to torture someone just for fun? I’m sure it’s more than that you think such behavior is disgusting.
I think if you read Feser’s “The Last Superstition” you’ll find that Hume screwed up moral philosophy beyond repair. If you follow Hume, as most moral philosopher today do, then you’ll never get anywhere. We have to go back to pre-Hume and pick up the right tools in order to solve moral problems.
Aristotle on Practice Versus Theory
Given our recent encounter with Oakeshott’s reading of the allegory of the cave from The Republic, this seems an opportune place to leave our historical survey of Oakeshott’s works and consider the similarity of his critique to that of Aristotle. Now, there is an interesting critical debate about the extent to which Aristotle “broke” with Plato rather than merely continued to develop his teacher’s thoughts in a direction in which they had already been moving. MacIntyre, for instance, argues that many of Aristotle’s supposed disagreements with Plato are already implicit in the latter’s later work. There is also a debate as to what extent Plato intended The Republic as a serious political proposal. But neither of these debates need concern us here; for our purposes, it is enough that Plato wrote a political tract that contains at least an element of rationalism, and that Aristotle criticized that position. So let us look at Aristotle’s critique of Plato and see how it compares to Oakeshott’s.
Unlike Plato, who, at least in The Republic, holds forth theoretical knowledge as the only form of real knowledge and denigrates practice as ‘nescience’, as Oakeshott puts it, Aristotle regards both theoretical and practical understanding as valid: the former is about universals and gives us necessary truths, while the latter has more to do with particulars than universals, and its truths are less certain: ‘Scientific knowledge is supposition about universals, things that are by necessity… Prudence [practical understanding], by contrast, is about human concerns, about things open to deliberation’ (1999: 90-91). Furthermore, practical understanding is especially concerned with the concrete, rather than the abstract:
Nor is prudence about universals only. It must also acquire knowledge of particulars, since it is concerned with action and action is about particulars. That is why in other areas also some people who lack knowledge but have experience are better in action than others who have knowledge. (1999: 92)
This difference in focus is made apparent in terms of the greater life experience required to become proficient at a practical versus a theoretical skill:
Indeed [to understand the difficulty and importance of experience] we might consider why a child can become accomplished in mathematics, but not in wisdom or natural science. Surely it is because mathematical objects are reached through abstraction, whereas in these other cases the principles are reached from experience. (1999: 93)
The above, in fact, points to a good definition of what constitutes rationalism in politics: A rationalist tries, by creating an abstract world of political ‘principles’ (e.g., the libertarian ‘nonaggression principle’) to make politics, a practical activity requiring experience, into a theoretical activity that even a bright child can become adept at through textbook learning. As Oakeshott would have it, a rationalist ideology provides a ‘cheat sheet’ for those lacking political experience. However, this creation of an ideology rests on a confusion:
It is apparent that prudence is not scientific knowledge; for, as we said, it concerns the last thing [i.e., the particular], since this is what is achievable in action. Hence it is opposite to understanding. For understanding is about the [first] terms, [those] that have no account of them; but prudence is about the last thing, an object of perception, not of scientific knowledge. (1999: 93)
By mistakenly equating political prudence with scientific knowledge, the rationalist has made a crippling error. Not that he can actually conduct politics as a sort of theoretical activity: in fact, he will again and again fall back upon disguised practical reasoning in forming his supposedly theoretical conclusions.
Deveroux’s commentary on the relation of theory to practice in Aristotle reveals its relationship to Oakeshott’s ideas on rationalism quite clearly. Deveroux notes, ‘Practical wisdom, as Aristotle understands it, is analogous not to medicine but to medical skill; it is practical both in aim and in efficacy, and it is self-sufficient in the same way as medical skill: the practically wise person has what he needs to achieve his aims’ (1986: 494). While abstractions can certainly enter helpfully into the deliberations of the skilled practitioner, they do so not as ‘laws’ or ‘theorems’, as they would in a theoretical discipline, but as rules of thumb:
Matters of health and conduct [and, by extension from conduct, politics as well] ‘have no fixity’, and therefore it would be futile to attempt to formulate precise statements about how we should act in various situations. One must speak ‘in outline’ and ‘not precisely’… Such statements will at best be useful as rules of thumb; the experienced agent or doctor will be guided not so much by them as by his judgment of what is ‘appropriate to the occasion.’ (1986: 494-495)
So, another formulation of rationalism we might draw from Aristotle is: The rationalist is someone who, lacking in experience, tries to turn such rules of thumb into hard-and-fast ‘rules’ that will provide him with an unambiguous guide to proceeding in politics that will compensate for the uncertainty caused by his lack of experience in the area.
@ fundamentalist: Your question is ambiguous. You might be asking about (1) the nature of moral wrongness or (2) the justification of moral knowledge.
(1) I currently think that the moral wrongness of an action consists in contradicting the actor’s natural end. E.g., having a certain kind of respect for other people’s well-being is part of our natural end, and desiring others’ misery for its own sake is incompatible with this respect.
Moral wrongness is not the tendency to evoke disgust (or any other mental state, emotion etc.). (E.g., surgery is disgusting, but not necessarily immoral.)
(2) “One should never torture someone just for fun” is self-evident. (There might also be other justifications.) The fact that the thought of a particular type of action tends to be accompanied by certain emotions (such as contempt for the actor) counts as defeasible evidence that this type of action is immoral. (Moral) intuitions also count as evidence for (moral) facts, but they are not the same as emotions. (I have the intuition that true propositions cannot be contradictory, but this is not an emotion.)
@ Gene Callahan: Thank you!
I agree that it is practically impossible “to make politics […] into a theoretical activity that even a bright child can become adept at through textbook learning.” (I am not sure whether there is a set of rules that determines the best course of action in any conceivable situation, but certainly it is practically impossible to write down such rules, not to speak of consciously following them.) However, this is not what everyone who attempts to find absolutely true moral principles is trying to do. “There are some general principles that a politician must always follow” does not entail “Politics is nothing but a matter of knowing and follwing certain principles.” Someone who subscribes to the former view might well think that political skill is mainly (or even almost entirely) a matter of experience and prudence; he merely needs to maintain that there is at least one general rule that a good politician would never violate. And this one rule might well be negative, precluding only one course of action while leaving open the question of what to do instead. Coming up with this rule might also require much life experience.
E.g., I think that a husband never ought to pour acid on his wive’s face as a punishment for nagging. But this doesn’t mean that being a good husband is mainly or entirely a theoretical skill (like solving a system of linear equations by mechanically applying the Gauss algorithm).
Deveroux points out that practical wisdom is analogous to medical skill. But note that even in this area, one can find absolutely true general principles (at least negative ones) that are not merely rules of thumb: “You can’t heal your patient by cutting his head off.”
By the same token, a libertarian can say, “It is never permissible to execute homosexuals simply on account of their homosexuality” without being guilty of rationalism (as you define it).
In short, you position might be a bit too ideological and dogmatic. I agree more with Aquinas who thought “that one needs one’s reason to be perfected by the virtues, especially prudence, in order to discover precepts of the Natural Law that are more proximate to the choices that one has to make on a day to day basis” but also believed that certain things are intrinsically evil (in his opinion even lying, see here – a view that I don’t endorse).
OK, David, our positions may be closer than they appeared to be at first. Aristotle handles cases like the ones you cite above by noting that such principles, while we may lack exceptions, aren’t going to be particularly helpful: no decent doctor ever considered cutting off a patient’s head to save him, and no human being actually thinking of the good ever threw acid in his wife’s face for nagging. It’s when we really have a moral quandry, principles are likely to conflict, e.g., “I ought not support an unjust war” and “I ought to be loyal to my place of birth and friends and family,” but, by staying around, I AM supporting an unjust war with my taxes.
“It’s true, K Sralla, that the Protestant Reformation was a major step on the disastrous road to modern rationalism.”
Gene ,
I have to admit that you have a good point here. The Reformers (especially Luther) knew they were opening a can of worms (and discuss openly in places), but ironically made the strategic decision “so be it”, let conscience trump competing principles. In Luther’s famous statement that I quoted, you can almost feel him wrestling with the teachings of the Church and his own Augustinian order on this issue, and that is why it is a facinating quote from this perspective.
In Calvinism, you see a stronger (more dogmatic) strand of Augustinianism and hence neo-Platonism in some forms of the theology. These were some of the areas where Aquinas parted most strongly with Augustine. You know this, so I’m not trying to lecture, only to clarify these thoughts in my own mind. Again, it really goes back to the Greek influence on the practical ethical formulations of the great Doctors, and as you rightly point out, we might skip right back to Plato and Aristotle for their origins.