As readers will find out, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is a robust defense of a socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, which posits the shared myth that the members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their interaction. In particular, I reference liberalism in its modern form, attributable to philosopher John Rawl’s 1971 opus, ‘A Theory of Justice’. Rawls made two important refinements to the social contract theory of Locke: first, that the state of nature (the no-society state) consists of a (hypothetical) original position of equality, from whence individuals give their consent to enter into a society; and secondly, the veil of ignorance, the argument that for social rules to be universally just, the (hypothetical) designers of those rules would need to be blind to their own social status, capabilities and preferences in the new society.
The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it is merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful. Every other social and religious systems is based on similar fictions, but that does not stop them from serving valuable public purposes. What matters in evolutionary game theory for the success or failure of a given strategy is whether it is effective, not whether it is strictly speaking true. In case there is any doubt, the position I take is that liberal social contract story is the most effective political framework for the organisation of human societies yet devised.
The veil of ignorance is particularly important to Rawlsian liberalism. Without it, it is much more difficult to justify universal democracy, much less material egalitarianism. Although human equality is implicit in Kant, Locke and Rousseau, Rawls himself is remarkably cavalier in justifying his particular innovation. He states outright in Theory of Justice that the purpose of the principle is to get the desired solution, to correct for the ‘arbitrariness of the world’. Given discoveries in game theory and psychology over the last fifty years, I think we can do better. This series of blogs will thus present my best defences of the veil of ignorance.
The Psychological Veil
Rawls recognised that just as important to constructing the veil as an individual's ignorance of their place in the social and economic hierarchy was their ignorance of their own conception of ‘the good’ and other psychological preferences. As I argue in Chapter I of Politics, because individual preferences make ‘the good’ fundamentally subjective, it is impossible to justify universal rules based on them. So Rawls' insight is correct. But this blog will further ask whether we can justify this approach using recent discoveries in cognitive psychology about the types or families of human moral thinking. In this, I draw upon Johnathan Haidt’s Theory of Moral Foundations, which he lays out for a lay audience in his book, ‘The Righteous Mind’. Haidt is increasingly conservative, and I differ with both the specifics of his psychological model and his philosophical conclusions, but his Theory is a useful device with which to discuss the issues.
Haidt posits that individuals have multiple moral system, some of which progressives and conservatives share (care, or the prevention of harm, and fairness), and some of which they don’t (loyalty, sanctity and respect for authority). Haidt argues that progressives’ weak preferences for loyalty and authority are the result of the corrosive influence of modernity, what he and other researchers have called ‘WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic)’ culture. But what Haidt sees as a growing moral crisis, I see as just another pendulum swing of normal human cognitive diversity. And inasmuch as our culture is shaping human minds to be less hierarchical and authoritarian, that's a win for progressives.
For his part, Joshua Greene (see my previous post, on his book "Moral Tribes") argues that when it comes to ‘meta-morality’, or the quest for universal moral principles for a diverse society, less may be more. If small-l liberalism really is blind or less sensitive to certain moral problems, as Haidt argues, then that makes it more, not less, suited as a rule system applicable for everyone. Or to put it another way, since progressives and conservatives share values of care and fairness, then care and fairness alone are a proper basis on which to construct a universal meta-morality. My own model of political personality contains only two relevant degrees of freedom, not four or five, but if everyone largely agrees on some foundations (care and fairness) then those foundations are thus not politically contested. Authoritarianism and conservatism are politically relevant precisely because they are values systems that are not universally shared.
So let’s put this in Rawlsian terms. Rawls insists that the (hypothetical) designers of the social contract be blind to their own psychological preferences, but perhaps what he should have said is that they are blind to their psychological differences. A person with no innate morality would be a pure utility-maximising rationalist – but real human beings aren’t like that and nor should they be. We come pre-equipped by genes, culture and upbringing with certain in-built systems for ethical decision-making in groups, and to the degree that those systems are universal across the species, they should be used to derive universal moral rules. Brian Skyrms lays out the game theory argument for the universal evolution of fairness in our species in his opus, ‘The Evolution of the Social Contract’, which we’ll get into next time. But for now, it suffices to conclude that inasmuch as political opinions show a range of preferences, such diversity should consequently be ignored in the formulation of foundational social norms that are equally binding on all.