Myths of the Old Order: The Tyranny of the Majority

Chapter VI of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder" puts forward the leftist case for the central and radical importance of democracy. Democratic socialism is neither a reforming variety of socialist, nor merely a particularly progressive-minded liberal, but rather an ideology that treats both democracy and socialism as equally serious modes of analysis. "Liberal democracy", I write, "is the best set of institutions we've yet created to facilitate cooperative solutions to social problems. . . . If they didn't exist, the left would have to invent them." Liberal democracy represents a stable, if far from ideal, quasi-equilibrium which has proven successful in delivering growth, basic egalitarianism and military security in a diverse range of cultural and strategic environments. 

Yet the association between the philosophy of liberalism and democracy, as a form and structure of government, is neither unproblematic nor automatic. Democracies pre-date liberalism by several millennia, and have employed diverse legitimising belief systems (c.f. for example, the Islamic Republic of Iran). Totalitarian autocracies, including Nazi Germany, the USSR and North Korea, hold elections and elect parliaments. And even if we enforce a stricter definition of democracy focusing on the peaceful transfer of power between competing elites, then the slave-holding and imperialist European limited monarchies of the 18th and 19th century would qualify as democracies despite restricting the franchise to a tiny fraction of property-holding males. The People's Republic of China is no democracy, but upholds the rule of law and market institutions with a fervour that would make American conservatives blush. 

As the 19th century oligarchies (and the hypocrisy of the liberal philosophers who supported them) demonstrate, there is an underlying tension between liberals and the expectations of universal, participatory democracy. I've written before about elites' irrational fear of 'populism', unleashed by the rising tide of right-wring authoritarians and the return of socialists who seek to roll fascism back. Across the world, self-identified liberal centrists are more sceptical of democracy, less likely to support elections, and more supportive of authoritarianism than either the self-identified left or right. Centrist politics - often self-avowedly liberal - has an underlying distrust of public opinion in a way that is only being amplified by the ever-increasing popularity of behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology and social media. This blog is about the myth(s) which undergirds that scepticism: the 'tyranny of the majority'. Why do liberals mistrust democracy, what does it lead to, and should we be concerned?

Two origins, two myths

There are essentially two variants of the 'tyranny of the majority' myth (one individualist, one group-centred or utilitarian), which serve different purposes in the overall canon of liberalism depending on the outlook of the audience. Each represents a point where liberals limit their enthusiasm for popular, nationalist or revolutionary projects: yes, emancipation from feudalism and empire is great, but popular democracy cannot be allowed to go too far, else we end up in Revolutionary France or the Soviet Union. The mythological tyranny of the majority *is* for all intents and purposes the Terror: the repression of individuals and minorities by 'democratic' governments that embody the will of the people. This potential for abuse existed in classical liberalism because neither Hobbes' Leviathan state, Locke's universal 'human nature', nor Rousseau's 'general will' conceived of the diversity of the modern democratic electorate. 

For John Stuart Mill, the tyranny of the majority was "tendency of society to impose  . . . its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own." In order to limit this threat, it is necessary that the only "the only purpose for which [democratic] power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." Mill, in other words, was advancing a social theory of individual rights (rather than a natural or divine law theory like many of his predecessors): liberal rights are necessary when individuals contract with a democratic government because that government poses a threat to their interests which does not exist in a state of nature. In order to protect the freedom of individuals, the entire liberal democratic apparatus of the separations of powers, the independence of the judiciary and human rights necessarily follows.

Chapter VII of my book essentially endorses Mills' individualist viewpoint. But there is a second (chronologically older) take on the tyranny of majority, which is more utilitarian and consequentialist in character. In Federalist No. 10, future US President James Madison wrote about the origins of inequality as arising "[f]rom the  . . .different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, [such that] the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results." Since inequality is the "most common and durable" driver of class conflict, a democratic majority might give in to the temptations of a "a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project." Liberal institutions, therefore, are a necessary check on democracy in order to preserve the 'exacting impartiality' required of proper economic governance, the priorities of which are [obviously?] the solvency of the national debt and the protection of private wealth. 

The pro-market consequentialism inherent in Madison's argument - that the contentious nature of democracy impairs good governance and that liberal institutions are a necessary check on the passion and self-interest of the mob - is found in almost all utilitarian and capitalist screeds against democracy. It underlies the appeal of authoritarian governance to centrist politicians and big business alike. Democracy, in this view, is unnecessary in a liberal society so long as it's well governed and protects property rights. It is this Madisonian fear of majority rule, particularly influential among the American right, that lies at the faultline between liberals and democracy. It is why independent, technocratic institutions - at both the national and international level - are seen as an ideal bulwark in defense of the status quo order. 

Illiberal Democracies and Liberal Undemocracies

The partnership between liberalism and democracy, therefore, is dynamic and potentially vulnerable to changing environmental circumstances. Under pressure from anaemic global growth and authoritarian challenger states, we start to see slippage, the tectonic plates on which our governments rest sliding past one another. Whereas we’re used to thinking of liberal democracy as a unitary concept, now there are mutations: illiberal democracy and liberal undemocracy (which we'll just call liberal oligarchy for the sake of clarity). As the inheritor of the Madisonian argument, neoliberalism served as the handmaiden of the current crisis of democracy: self-avowedly apolitical and technocratic, liberal oligarchy aimed to place the levers of economic and social power beyond the reach of the mob. Expanding the reach and privilege of property rights was seen as the keystone unlocking economic growth. 

The neoliberals were wrong. Not only were they incapable of sustaining economic growth for more than a few years at a time without recurrent financial crises, but their indifference towards the interests of those in the electorate who missed out on the boom times bred a crisis of legitimacy in government itself that we are now seeing play out all over the capitalist world. In response, social movements on both the right and left are arguing that a more democracy would be a necessary corrective: more accountability, more responsiveness and a greater willingness to get our hands dirty to bring the market back into line. These movements differ *vastly* and significantly in what democracy means to them: for the left, democracy means fulfilment of the liberal promise of the equal dignity of all humanity, for the right, more democracy means satisfaction of conservative and nationalist grievances. But both are committed to the position that liberal oligarchy is neither desirable nor sustainable. 

Left-wing populism demonstrates that there is no necessary conflict between liberalism and more democracy - depending, of course, on what variant of liberalism we want. But Cas Mudde, amongst others, has made the argument that more populism means a society *must* move in an illiberal direction. But this oppositional understanding is only true if either a) liberalism means, in the strictly Madisonian sense, capitalist economic governance, or b) more democracy threatens individual rights and the corrosion of liberal institutions that protect those rights. All 'populisms' are not the same: it is right-wing populism that threatens the rights of individuals and minorities, that seeks to weaken the independence of the judiciary and other checks on the power of the executive (sense (b)). Anyone (right or left) who supports of Mills' account of individual liberty can see how right wing populism can lead to illiberal politics. However, in order to see an equivalent threat from the left, your understanding of liberalism must be strictly (sense (a)) Madisonian, pro-capitalist and utilitarian. 

Fascism - right-wing populism - is a form of cancer that preys on the body of liberal oligarchies which face a crisis of legitimacy and loss of faith in democratic institutions. In seeking a more authentic nationalist democracy, fascists are more than happy to sweep away the 'decadent' liberal order; all too often, liberal oligarchies facilitate this process by deliberately courting illiberal politics in order to enhance their legitimacy and stave off decline. Elites falsely believe that in order to make their rule more democratic, it needs to become more illiberal. It's straightforward to indulge in the chauvinistic tyrannies of the majority for an election cycle or two, particularly if those tyrannies can be directed at migrants, non-citizens, minorities and other marginalised groups. Why not pay that price in order to preserve the liberal economic order? 

Looking to the future by working with the past

As a democratic or libertarian socialist, I see no fatal conflict between the institutions of liberal governance and the quest for a more just social and economic order. But historically, I must admit, left wing populism is not immune to an illiberal impulse. Marx & Engels were famously dismissive of 'bourgeois' democracy, and the temptation to 'cheat' the system and press for faster, more radical change is always present. Modern monetary theory, I suspect, gains much of its appeal from seeming like an end-run around the existing economic order. But the revolutionary appeal of doing away with liberal institutions at will is illusory and dangerous: change must be made, and rules and norms can be bent to do so. But we would break them at our peril. Globally, the Left has been down that road and did not like where it took us. I would encourage, therefore, populists of the left-wing variety to be willing and able to argue the case why more equality and more democracy is consistent with (and in fact, reinforces and defends) a free and open liberal society. That, more than any other, is the central theme of my book. 

The Politics of Recognition, a Second Look

In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked. 

The Politics of Difference

In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is  consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).

The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution. 

As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal! 

From Distribution to Recognition

Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status. 

Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers. 

Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity. 

Not Just One or the Other

Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society. 

In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser. 

So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects. 

To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.

It's OK to be hypocritical (Part 2): Vegans, morality and aesthetics

In a popular post I wrote back in February contrasting individual preference and political ethics, I argued that we should all be comfortable being a little hypocritical sometimes. Having a preference for sparkling wines, for example, doesn't automatically make one a bad socialist; having inegalitarian sexual preferences doesn't render those behaviours acceptable outside the bedroom; and benefitting from privilege doesn't make one unqualified to structurally critique it. In following-up that post, I'm going to look at another YouTube discussion by streamer Destiny, this time on the ethics of veganism. I enjoy Destiny's way of dissecting topics, which is leaps and bounds more sophisticated than that of other talking heads. In short, I agree with him that given the minimal recognition of all human beings as a party to the social contract, the consideration of other entities as ethical subjects is a mere aesthetic preference from which no universal principles can be drawn. 

For the record, I am not a vegetarian nor do I think veganism is a a superior ethical position that meat-eaters are simply being hypocritical about. I took a (mandatory) course in 'vegetarian politics' as an undergrad, which did instill in me a certain distaste for meat. But I still consume it, and don't see a problem in everyone else doing the same. Nor is my view on this informed by consequentialist concerns: I get that Western diets can have adverse health consequences and that industrial agricultural has deleterious effects on the natural environment. Switching to veganism may have positive individual and societal outcomes, and I am all for stronger regulation of the agricultural sector, but I don't believe that universal ethical "oughts" can be derived from this sort of utilitarian calculus (which in any event always admits of exceptions). Instead, this particular blog is aimed squarely at "ethical vegans", who hold that it is wrong in se to exploit animals in ways we don't exploit humans. 

It's art all the way down

As a moral skeptic, I generally take the position that ethical rules are social facts, not scientific ones. A behaviour or belief can only be considered right or wrong by its congruence with the norms, rules and institutions that constitute a community of interacting individuals. Social contract liberalism is a universalist ideology that holds that the relevant community is all human individuals, although the 'thickness' of its ethical rules may vary depending on nation-state membership. One of liberalism's key philosophical difficulties, and its central contestation with ethical veganism, is why it reifies humanity as the criterion of social membership, or in other words, how we decide who is and isn't entitled to recognition as "human". The more liberalism moves away from its Christian 'natural law' roots (i.e. ' individuals endowed by their Creator'), the more open to re-interpretation this principle becomes. 

Chapter 16 of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" is all about the distinction between ethics and aesthetics. Aesthetics is about creating identity through the satisfaction of preferences; political philosophy is the normative ethics of collective decision-making. So long as two individuals identify as members of a shared community, they can (in principle) debate the right and wrong of a behaviour using a shared framework. And yet, as the invocation of a shared identity suggests, there are always aesthetic choices at the core: what is my identity, what is my community, and what are its ethical rules? That doesn't mean we can't argue about those choices, but such debates boil down to art criticism: we can discuss the artistic merits of "Boss Baby", for example, without any paticular view being morally wrong. 

So here's my central argument: right and wrong are ethically meaningful social statements within a the social context defined by universal liberalism. However beyond the minimal liberal requirement that we recognise of all humans as persons, the selection of decision-rules about the ethical treatment of non-human objects is an aesthetic preference from which no universal moral facts follow. Thus, while vegans, or Hindus, may elect to see cattle as moral subjects, they cannot ethically obligate other individuals and cultures to do likewise. Personally, I'm wholly comfortable with speciesism ("humanism") as a general rule, using the legal and biological category of 'human' as the threshold for moral consideration. It's a solid baseline that prevents abuse in most edge cases, meets the requirements of liberalism and satisfies our day-to-day pragmatic needs for ethical calculation.

Can we derive a "non-speciesist" rule for ethical consideration? Probably . . . . 

Destiny defines his decision rule as "social contract reciprocity": the idea that to be part of a society, and therefore subject to ethical consideration, a category of thing has to be capable, under ideal developmental conditions, of recognising and being recognised as performing the behaviours necessary to establish social trust. Destiny may underplay it, but this is very solid philosophical ground to stand on. In evolutionary game theory, there are multiple ways of overcoming social dilemmas and generating reciprocity, including kinship, reputation and identity/categorical markers. The first two generate what philosophers call special moral obligations (for example, to family and to contract partners), whereas the third is important to Rawlsian liberals, constructivists and cultural evolutionary scholars alike. 

In this framework, we exercise indirect or altruistic reciprocity (trust without expectation of direct reward) towards those who perform the behaviours we have been socialised to expect a member of the community in good standing to perform, and who in turn recognise and respond positively to our own performance of those behaviours - even though we are unrelated to them and don't know them personally. This is called 'prosociality'. The mutual construction of society on the basis of altruistic reciprocity helps explain why sociopaths are such as widespread figures of cultural anxiety, and also why systems of punishment are so heavily weighted towards ostracism, banishment and imprisonment of non-conformists. Mutual recognition as beings worthy of ethical consideration also serves as a universal "Turing Test": we cannot ever directly observe the moral consciousness of another, only react to behaviourial signals which increase or decrease our belief that it exists. 

Some hypotheticals: Violence against animals, Neanderthals and AI

Let's use violence as a case study. If we follow Jonathan Haidt and assume that moral reasoning is modular and domain-specific, we can start with the hypothesis that aversion to violence and harm ("suffering") is perhaps the most widely shared human ethical trigger. If non-human entities are not protected from arbitrary and selfish violence, then they also aren't entitled to any other form of ethical consideration. For the record, this is where ethical vegans go wrong: as virtue ethicists, their insistence that suffering is always incorrect is hopelessly naive and drives them into a rabbit hole of deciding what entities do or do not feel suffering. Consequentialists tell us that harm is sometimes productive and therefore ethical; social contract deontologists say that harm can be ethical if it's controlled by rules - the most important contemporary rule is the prohibition on directly harming another party to the social contract. The question we must ask is: is it ethically wrong to harm an entity that belongs to a category of thing that is prima facie incapable of moral reciprocation? 

First the goods news: as social animals, humans seem psychologically pre-disposed to making favourable intuitive inferences about the agency of others: we readily anthropomorphise other entities, and ancient peoples inferred agency to the land and the weather and tried to make moral bargains with the gods and goddesses thereof. So the burden of proof is in favour of inclusion: other entities face a low bar to establish that they are moral subjects. 

Now for the bad: almost all animals fail to reach this threshold. Animal behaviour is instinctive: a prey animal is incapable of recognising that a strange human is not a threat, and a hungry predator will always see a human as a potential food source. While we can override the instincts of individual animals through direct incentives (i.e. regular food provision) this is direct, rather than indirect or categorical, reciprocity. Selfish restraint ("this human feeds me") is not general moral consideration. Now, there may be exceptions amongst higher order social animals: our closest ape relatives, elephants and domesticated dogs (whose social reasoning we have irrevocably altered through domestication) for exampel. These animals appear to be capable of recognising humans as being subjects of ethical consideration unprompted, even though under usual conditions they are primarily kin-centric. But any more generous aesthetic rule is also likely to be prima facie culturally and environmentally contingent: a costly preference for expanded ethical inclusion akin to having the resources to prefer fine wines. 

A more interesting hypothetical arises in the case of our Neanderthal and Denisovan cousins, who were not homo sapiens strictu sensu but closely related enough genetically that we could still interbreed. Robin Dunbar and others have argued that the capacity for symbolic communication is what makes human organisation at scale possible. It remains an open scientific question whether Neanderthals and Denisovans also possessed this capability, and to what degree. The evidence for Neanderthal symbolic culture is anecdotal, but personally fairly convincing. It's appears likely to me that the common ancestor of humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans (Homo Heidelbergensis) therefore possessed this ability and would hypothetically qualify for personhood, albeit perhaps subject to the same paternalistic limitations we might apply for the mentally handicapped in our own society. 

Now, what about a different kind of entity: AI? I would propose that any artificial intelligence that showed itself capable of moral reasoning and of recognising the moral worth of humans would be recognised as sentient member of the social contract and protected from arbitrary harm. An anti-social or purely utilitarian AI, however, that failed to offer mutual recognition to humans as subjects of ethical consideration - no matter how vast its potential intelligence - would not qualify for social contract reciprocity and could be destroyed with no ethical consequences. I have no real interest in the ethics of AI research, but draw some comfort from the fact that an any AI trained using social games would likely develop the concept of social contract reciprocity on its own through an exploration of the mathematics of altruism. 

Being comfortable with our preferences

Returning to the topic at hand. I will conclude by saying that what we consume (and how we produce what we consume) is first and foremost an aesthetic choice, not an ethical one. The ("non-speciesist") liberal decision rule that requires social contract reciprocity as a condition for the possession of rights and protection from harm is robust ("it's good art"). Nevertheless, other aesthetic choice are also valid, even if they're not rigourously philosophically grounded. To have concerns about the way commercially farmed animals are treated is legitimate, as is the insistence that food be properly monitored and labelled to make that choice meaningful (so too with halal, GMO or organic food labelling regulations). But the exercise of these preferences is merely about establishing markers for individual identity, and don't entail any ethical calculations from which universal moral 'oughts' can be derived. 

Does that mean we should be singularly unconcerned about those who are cruel to animals? No, of course not. The type of art a person enjoys can be a signal about the type of person they are, and their proclivity for anti-social behaviour. A society that mistreats its own people is likely to be a threat to other societies. A child that tortures animals may be a threat to others later in life. And how commercial agriculture treats animals and make them suffer unnecessarily says alot about the broader social values of capitalism. But the signal alone is not the ethical transgression: the wrong of commercial agriculture lies in its willingness to mistreat and exploit (human) farm workers. Incidentally, social contract reciprocity is an excellent argument for why corporations are not entitled to fundamental rights: they are incapable of acting morally and recognising (human) workers as ethical subjects. 

Beyond violence, the question of who is and who is not a member of a social contract entitled to legal and ethical consideration is in practice the core vulnerability in the exercise of all the moral senses. While everyone obviously abhors harming women, minorities or the disabled, some people are far too tolerant of excluding marginalised groups from proper consideration when it comes to questions of fairness and equality. This exclusion and selectivity about moral personhood is ubiquitous, and is one of the ways intolerance and oppression are naturalised and legitimised. If we want to expand the scope of ethical consideration, let's prioritise fulfilling our obligations to the members of society that we already recognise - rather than expanding society itself to fit the aesthetic sensibilities of vegans. 

Three Duties

Liberalism does not primarily concern itself with duties. As an individual-centric philosophy, it's mostly interested in specifying the rights which individuals may claim from society. Other than respecting the rights and freedoms of others (which exhausts the psychological duties to prevent harm and respect others' equality), the liberal individual ordinarily owes no ethical duties to his or her fellow citizens other than as prescribed by law.

We possess rights claims by virtue of our social membership, regardless of whether those rights are currently adequately guaranteed. Rights claims provide legitimacy for actions seeking social reform: they set standards to aspire to and by which institutions can be judged. While philosophers have occasionally grappled with defining liberal duties, in a liberal society there are prima facie no obligations on the individual which provide legitimate cause for social activism. This distinguishes liberalism from more authoritarian-attuned philosophies such as Confucianism or Legalism, nationalism or most religions, which specify universal moral duties of individuals. 

Evolutionary thinking complicates this picture somwhat. Evolution is value-neutral but does establish the parameters by which ethical beliefs and culture change over time and thus limits the categories of variations that are possible (or stable) in a given environment. In this view, liberalism (as a cultural equilibrium) is simply the most widespread and flexible of possible solution sets to the problem or organising human societies at scale. While liberalism may contain cultural spandrels as a result of its particular evolutionary history (in Europe), it can be considered adaptive for a variety of social environments. Liberalism is much like the human species itself: behaviourially flexible, adaptive and relentlessly expansionist.

I think it's imperative that my colleagues at the Cultural Evolution Society give due attention to the consequences of their research for political and ethical philosophy. While almost all members I've met are genuine humanists and progressives, there are some truly nasty right-wingers who follow this material (and related subfields such as sociobiology) closely and are employing it to refine and strengthen their own ideas. As a socialist, I see it as my role to make cultural evolution and progressivism mutually intelligible: we can both agree that Foucault is full of shit without rejecting, as the right does, the critical insights of Marxism and feminism. 

A late-arriving idea

The remainder of this blog is a first draft of an effort to discern if an evolutionary approach implies any ethical duties on individuals prior to liberalism, which is an adaptive product of that approach. This is an idea that crystallized for me very late in the drafting process of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder". In Chapter XVIII, discussing foreign policy, I write:

"The sole concern of the international relations policy-maker . . . is to maximise the outcomes (security) for their own state while minimising the risks arising from systemic instability. This is analogous to the task of the domestic political actor: seeking to maximise social change (or resist it, if conservative) without creating a systemic risk of revolution."

As this was a late addition to the text, I had not in fact discussed this alleged duty in a domestic context earlier in the book, although the section in Chapter IV on the undesirability of revolution is a natural precursor to it. To understand this persective, we have to think about cultures in terms of equilibria (or quasi-equilibria): every society consists of a mix of permitted behaviourial strategies. Cultural variants that stray too far from this adaptive equilibrium will be removed  by natural selection, in the same way as a genetic mutation that confers no biological advanatage will be selected out of a species. As social environments (given by economic development, population and natural constraints) change, cultures change too - in much the same way that selection permits a species to adapt to natural environments. 

Variation is allowed by this view of life and culture: in fact it is required to explain why cultures change and adapt over time. But structural forces act as selectors, reducing the frequency of maladaptive behaviour and encouraging the spread of adaptive innovations. In political and economic terms, ideologies and policies that increase the general welfare are more likely to spread and be widely employed than policies that are rigid, unstable or destructive. Of course, we have no way of knowing in advance whether a policy idea that we favour is adaptive or maladaptive: we can only try them out and see if evolution favours then. So far, so good. 

Three Duties

Evolution is blind. Species and cultures both can go extinct if their environment changes faster than they can adapt, or if their behaviour sets are too inflexible, or if destructive mutations spread through their population unchecked. Cultural evolution is a marvellous system for generating social and economic progress: it has made humanity the dominant species at a planetary scale. Democracy, which permits and channels this variation with astonishing flexibillity and resilience, is the best system yet devised to harness this process for the common good. But there is no guarantee that cultural evolution will continue indefinitely: it's a minor miracle (only truly cosmic time scales) that our species possesses this capability at all, and a historical accident that we've evolved a political belief system suited to managing it. 

Given the existence of human agency, however, I argue that cultural evolution imposes three ethical duties on individual behaviour. These ethical duties necessarily limit the range of legitimate political action and belief; nevertheless, they ensure that human societies remains dynamic and adaptive. Moreover, these duties override whatever cultural considerations have evolved in particular contexts and are ontologically prior to particular philosophical systems. In other words, they impose duties on individuals regardless of their own or their culture's belief system. These are not 'conservative' duties to respect existing institutions: they are duties which ensure that the evolution of cultural institutions is possible at all. These duties arise from the requirement that 'creative destruction' occurs in the context of a physical and cultural ecosystem which is sustainable. In that sense, they could be considered intergenerational duties, or measures to counteract short-term time discounting of political payoffs.

1) Firstly, individuals have a duty to pursue political and economic change only in those ways which guarantees the ongoing viability of the social environment for future generations. If one were so inclined, one could read into this duties to utilise the natural environment sustainably. I'm more of a humanist than an environmentalist, however, so for me this means that the pursuit of change must occur through actions which preserve the ongoing fabric of democratic society. In other words, even if we were in a position to do so, political actors must not undermine democratic norms and institutions, and must not seek to divide or separate themselves from the rest of society in the pursuit of their preferred political goals. Sorry kids, but revolution is out (regardless of its consequences), and so is dictatorship and separatism. Social systems must allow for the peaceful transfer of power between competing value sets. 

2) Secondly, individuals have a duty to defend liberal democratic society against other actors that would seek to undermine or overthrow it. Guess what? Some actors are always going to cheat on their ethical duties for selfish advantage. Social cancers like fascism must be fought by society's 'immune system', or they will grow and consume the social organism until it dies. In game-theoretic terms, cooperative social behaviour is sustained by the potential punishment of deviance. Not everyone has to be a punisher, but enough people have to be willing to bear the costs of doing so in order to maintain equilibrium. This also applies internationally: the left cannot sit idly by while authoritarians states rip up international norms and must be willing to use coercion to ostracise and punish deviance. 

3) Finally: in the event that a cohesive democratic society is destroyed, split or ceases to exist, individuals have a duty to fight to restore democratic society. Say there's been a  revolution or civil war in your country, and a cohesive society has ceased to exist. Does victory (or partial victory) in that conflict mean that one is entitled to impose permanent decision-dominance over the parts of society one controls? Of course not. Revolt by one class over another, or conquest by one ethnic group over another, does not permit the extermination of the culture of the defeated. Autocracies can survive for a time of course - the Soviet Union was famously successful in rapidly industrialising and defeating Nazi Germany (at tremendous cost). But they are far less likely to be able to adapt to changing social and environmental circumstances, and will fall in time to societies that are more flexible. Only by restoring democracy as rapidly as possible can we ensure that ongoing viability of a society. 

Liberalism: New Arguments for the Original Position (part 3)

Politics for the New Dark Age offers a robust defense of a libertarian socialist approach to politics and governance, embedded in a liberal political and social framework. It explicitly makes use of social contract theory, a shared myth that all members of a society have an implicit agreement that establishes the ground rules for their future interaction. The social contract is of course only a thought experiment, but the fact that it's merely a convenient fiction is irrelevant if it is useful for ordering society. The 'veil of ignorance' is a particularly important element of Rawlsian liberalism. The veil provides a selective structure for social contract-based ideologies by specifying the process through which social rules can be considered just. 

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I showed that recent developments in both evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory offered new ways to justify the veil of ignorance story. Today's blog post will offer a third approach, borrowed from the related field of cultural evolution. 

The Imitation Game

In many evolutionary models, individual actors do not calculate their optimal strategies on the basis of observations about their surroundings, but instead employ heuristics by which they imitate the strategy of other agents. When individual learning is costly or error-prone, and the strategic environment is unpredictable, imitation offers an efficient, reliable way for individuals to do no worse than their contemporaries. Those interested in a fulsome (albeit lengthy) digression on the topic should read Richerson & Boyd's "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution." While heuristically imitating others may not seem like it should lead to optimal social organisation, the discipline of cultural evolution argues that natural selection operates on strategies to increase the frequency of adaptive variants and decrease the prevalence of maladaptive ones, creating social equilibria which we call 'culture'.

But which heuristics do actual human beings employ? Game theory makes predictions about the general categories of decision-rule which produce cooperative equilibria, and fortunately we know from several decades of work in behaviourial economics and evolutionary psychology that humans do in fact possess biological biases which implement these rules. The simplest are kinship- and proximity- biases, through which an individual copies the behaviours of those genetically related to themselves or in close physical proximity. These rules are clearly important for animals and children, but aren't the whole story. If cultural evolution was restricted to tight kin-groups, behaviourial variation over time would be minimal: culture would be reliably replicated, but not very adaptive to changing circumstances or useful in organising large-scale societies.

Cultural transmission may also demonstrate two other biases: payoff-dependent bias (i.e: imitate the most successful strategy) and conformist bias (i.e: imitate the most frequent strategy). Frequency-dependent imitation, or "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" is a useful heuristic for most human societies: not only is conforming with the traditions of the majority likely to be adaptive in terms of environmental fitness, but non-conforming may signal belonging to an out-group and invite ostracism and punishment. Well known experiments by Stanley Milligram and Solomon Asch have demonstrated that we are a conformist species, although the conformist propensities of individuals of course vary and some of us are preferentially drawn to imitate less-frequent behaviour and desire non-conformity. 

Imitating more successful actors is also a useful learning heuristic, albeit a more complex one. On first blush, preferentially imitating strategies with the highest payoff is likely to lead those strategies to spread throughout a population, increasing the general welfare. But gathering information on payoffs is more difficult than one might think, particularly when it creates incentives for actors to provide false information about their payoffs. Do we imitate actors who were successful in the immediate past, or those whose ancestors have been succesful for generations?  Can we reliably remember and compare the reputations of thousands of people simultaneously (Dunbar's number suggest we can't), or should we rely on symbolic representations of success and status, such as ostentatious consumption or wealth? For this reason, payoff-biases are often conflated with prestige-biases: i.e. it's not objective measures of fitness which matter, but socially-constructed measures of prestige. 

Back to Rawls: The "Imitative Veil"

And that brings us back to our new formulation of Rawl's veil of ignorance: legitimate social rules, norms and institutions are those to which individuals would give their consent as if they did not know their own learning rule, or how possible learning rules are distributed in society once the veil is lifted. In other words, in designing the rules, norms and institutions of a liberal society, we must be blind to whether individuals preferentially copy the behaviours of their kin; or to what extent they demonstrate conformity with social rules; or the extent to which they prioritise individual learning over the instructions of those with a higher place in the social hierarchy. Social norms must be robust against the possibility of a population employing a different mixture of imitative rules, and should not privilege one set of rules over any other.

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that traits that were universally shared by all humans (such as the abhorrence of physical harm and the fairness bias) could be made subject to universal rules, but where individuals differ, Rawlsian rules must take those differences (such as regarding loyalty and respect for authority) into consideration. For for instance, if it turns out that we all preferentially copy the strategies of our close family, we might adopt universal norms that limit social intervention in early childhood but which counteract its potentially negative long-term effects, such as through universal public pre-school and primary education. 

Those who are familiar with Chapter I of my book, might now be able to see the shape of where I'm going with this. People may employ frequency-biases with varying levels of strength (either due to genetic, developmental of cultural variation): some might preferentially conform with the the prior behaviour of the majority (conservatives), others might be relatively more open to new cultural variants (progressives). People may also employ prestige biases in different ways: some will preferentially comply with the behaviours of high-status individuals (authoritarians), others will prefer self-discovery and individual learning (libertarians). Because the progressive-conservative and authoritarian-libertarian axes encompass normal individual variation in how individuals learn and adapt their behaviour, these axes are subject to political contestation in a democracy and not governed by universal philosophical principles. 

Built for speed, not for comfort

Boyd & Richerson make a further observation about the implications of imitative transmission for cultural evolution: there is a necessary trade-off between the efficiency of imitation and the vulnerability of a social system to exploitation by maladaptive or parasitic behaviourial variants. In other words, the less discerning we are about where we copy from, the more we are prone to error. The less information individuals collect about the relative fitness of potential strategies, the more likely it is that they will imitate a strategy that is not fitness-enhancing. Dawkins and the "new atheists" tend to see a great deal of culture, especially religion, as maladaptive variations that are parasites on our cultural capabilities. But this is an gross oversimplification. Firstly, it is extremely difficult to determine whether behaviour sets are actually adaptive or maladaptive. Secondly, the possibility of exploitation is a necessary trade-off for a cultural system that is capable of learning and adapting over human timescales. 

In Chapter IV of my book, I argue that there is a third important component of political personality: an individual's willingness to change and adapt their beliefs in light of changing circumstances. Although essentially speculative, I believe that an evolved capacity for cultural evolution might have created a psychological toolkit to make judgements about when to critically examine beliefs, and that that there is almost certainly likely to be (for biological, developmental and cultural reasons) a distribution of valid values that psychological trigger can be tuned to. To bring the discussion back to Rawls again, political systems (but especially democracies) should be blind to the possibility of variation in individual's willingness to compromise: they must be robust to the possibility of both centrist preferences and polarised politics. The corrollary of this, since I do so enjoy undermining centrists, is that techncratic centrism cannot be utilised as a universal principle of governance.