Some slapdash notes on making Analytic Political Philosophy relevant

The other day I was sitting and talking with a political philosopher, discussing practical interpretations of the work of various thinkers, and whether they’d been taken up more by the forces of progress or reaction. The depressing conclusion we came to was, in most cases, neither. The problem with Analytic Political Philosophy is not so much in giving aid and comfort to neoliberal reaction as it is a tendency to not have any friction or contact with the real world at all. I want to give some (rather inchoate) ideas I have about how this might be remedied.

Democratic experimental philosophy (DEP)

Why not apply experimental philosophy to political questions, in order to show the undemocracy of unfair structures? Let me explain.

Philosophers have intuitions on many questions. Consider, for example, an axe-murderer at the door. The axe murderer asks whether or not there is a certain person in the house. It seems, to many people at least, that you should lie so your guest won’t die. This gives intuitive support for the position that it is not always wrong to lie.

Not all intuitions are about right or wrong. Consider a man who grew up on Twin Earth. On Twin Earth there is a substance that looks like water, tastes like water and by all appearances does all the same things water does. It’s also called water. However, its chemical composition is XYZ instead of H20. Now suppose that Twin Earth is currently in the medieval period, and so is normal Earth, so no one has access to electron microscopes or anything like that. Don on Twin Earth says “I sure would like a glass of water”. Nod on Earth says the same thing. At least the reference of their words, and probably also in some sense their meaning, appears to be different. This intuition suggests to us that meanings, at least in some sense, aren’t in the head (but c.f. two dimensionalism in semantics for caveats).

Paradigmatically, experimental philosophy involves asking ordinary people questions and getting their answers. This is often construed as getting their intuitions on various topics, but in some cases the views elicited might not be well described as intuitions- I suppose it depends on where you draw the line around ‘intuition’.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives definitions of some programs in experimental philosophy:

“There is a diverse range of projects in experimental philosophy. Some use experimental evidence to support a “negative program” that challenges more traditional methods in analytic philosophy, others use experimental data to support positive claims about traditional questions, and still others explore questions about how people ordinarily think and feel insofar as these questions are important in themselves.”

So we have:

The positive program: Exploring what ordinary people think in order to support philosophical claims.

The negative program: Exploring how what people think can be unstable between contexts, vulnerable to framing, variant between groups and so on, so as to undermine traditional appeals to intuition in Analytic Philosophy by destabilizing the idea that there is a singular “intuition” that applies to a particularly situation.

A third, unnamed program: Exploring what people think because it’s interesting and matters in itself, separately from claims about philosophical truth and falsity.

I consider a fourth reason to do experimental philosophy in my thesis: democratic legitimacy. I call this the democratic program in experimental philosophy. Its purpose is to find out what ordinary people think of philosophically loaded things done “in their name” as democratic sovereigns. It’s purpose is fundamentally critical, showing ways in which existing governance structures, for want of a better term, fail to represent the people.

Cost-benefit Analysis

Let me give an example. In theory, many decisions around the world are made through cost-benefit analysis. Cost-benefit analysis is not, as some people assume, a kind of informal tallying of pluses and minuses, it is a very specific mathematical and economic apparatus.

Suppose that we are considering building a new bridge. There are two possible locations, A & B. At location A, there is a hamlet of 50 people who want the bridge built there. They are all desperately poor and want the bridge built there so that they can visit their ailing mothers on the other side of the river. Each of them would be willing to pay 1000 dollars to have the bridge built where they live- it’s not much but it’s all they can afford. The total aggregate willingness to pay is thus 50,000.

At location B there is a billionaire, who wants the bridge built near his house so he can visit his golfing chateau without having to take the helicopter. He is willing to pay 100,000 dollars.

Roughly speaking, cost-benefit analysis would have us tally total willingness to pay for each option, tally the costs for each option (assume they’re zero) and, assuming we can only take one option, pick the one with higher:

(Willingness to pay)-(costs)

And in this case, the billionaire is going to win out.

But what would ordinary people think of this? Doesn’t that matter if we live in a democracy?

Applying Democratic Experimental philosophy to CBA

Now I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely central cost-benefit analysis is to basically every country on earth’s decision-making processes. I also cannot emphasize enough that, for the most part, even very educated people know nothing about cost-benefit analysis, and if they have heard of the term, do not know the details of how it works.

My sense is that, because we (theoretically) live in a democracy the people have a right to have their voices heard on this. It’s not so much that I think what the people think is necessarily right, it’s that it is undemocratic for all of these governments to be using a super-specific, not at all ethically neutral decision-making rule, and for us to not even know what the public would think of it, if they understood it.

So I think we need to do a bit of experimental political philosophy and ask the people what they think. It’s not the negative program (we’re not aiming to debunk the coherence of ordinary people’s views). It’s not the positive program (we’re not assuming that what the people think has automatic credence). It’s not the third unnamed program, because we are attaching weight to it as a guide to what the government should do, but it’s democratic weight rather than alethic weight if that makes sense.

This isn’t just a continuation about my gripe with standard CBA. I think similar issues comes up in a lot of areas. Governments around the world work using normatively drenched rules and guidelines- rules that are ultimately rules about justice, fairness and their balance with efficiency-, don’t the people deserve their voices be heard on the subject of these rules? It is surely absurd for a supposedly democratic state to have its decision-making apparatus neither reviewed nor understood by the public.

So I’m suggesting we need to create a new branch of experimental philosophy based around asking the public what they think of various philosophically loaded things the government does in their name- stuff that ordinarily wouldn’t make it into the opinion polls. I think that cost-benefit analysis would be a great place to start.

Ignorance, ideology and other factors

My proposal is not simply to put ordinary people in a room, give them a rudimentary description of CBA and then ask them what they think. That might be a good start, but it’s not the whole project. The ideal is a deeper engagement. We should provide access to expertise, and information through open-ended questioning of subject-matter experts, perhaps using a citizens’ juries approach:

https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/what-is-a-citizens-jury/

The kind of social experiment I am describing under the banner of experimental democratic philosophy is perhaps an unusual use of the term experiment, in that it does not simply prod people and see how they react, it gives them agency.

I see a hierarchy of different possible studies in experimental democratic philosophy, going from lower to greater levels of engagement:

1. Opinion polling about what people think of various philosophically charged practices.

2. Giving people information on various practices, having them read it, and then gathering data- ideally both qualitative and quantitative- on what they think of those practices.

3. Citizens juries convened on philosophically loaded practices

But I don’t think our experiment should stop with just informing our participants, I think we should give participants an opportunity to empathically put themselves in the place of the people who will be effected by a decision by talking to them. For example, we could have them evaluate CBA by looking at a case study, and talking with some people who were affected by the decision about how they felt represented or unrepresented by CBA based decision-making processes.

Ideally then, our aim is to model deliberative democracy as a critique of existing democracy.

This is not new. There have been numerous attempts to “simulate” deliberative democracy, sometimes as a critique of actually existing democracy. What is new, as far as I’m aware, is the suggestion that we treat this as experimental philosophy, as an exploration of the philosophical views of ordinary people, held up in the light against the promises of democracy. More specifically, I’m recommending political philosophers get in on the act as a way of increasing the potential of their ideas to make a kinder, juster world. Philosophical ideas get power, after all, by giving voice to existing forces.

Maybe I’m idealistic, but I really believe that if you give ordinary people an opportunity to think about and discuss things, they’ll have a better instinct for justice and kindness than existing institutions.

An aside on facing up to the contradiction between the market and democracy

What inspired this call for Democratic Experimental Philosophy is the idea of drawing out the contradiction between democracy and cost-benefit analysis. There’s an even deeper contradiction here, underlying. Cost-benefit analysis is intended to be a simulation of the market for goods- like public goods- for which there cannot be an ordinary sort of market. A critique of cost-benefit analysis on democratic grounds is a critique of the idea that putatively democratic bodies should try to run themselves by a simulated market- with all the inequality and individualism that entails.

But this is an occasion to ask some very obvious questions which, nonetheless, are somewhat neglected in Analytic Political Philosophy. If unweighted cost-benefit analysis- the logic of the market bought to the governance of the state, should be rejected because it’s undemocratic, what does this say about the relation between the market and democracy generally? The market appears as a limitation on democracy, a boundary condition- an area organized by an oligarchic rather than democratic logic- but of necessity, it is not just a boundary condition. A variety of factors from the possibility of a capital strike to money in politics means that even the ideal of two separate spheres- market and democracy- is probably not feasible.

Imagine an intelligent alien that understood concepts but nothing else. Imagine telling that alien that you live in a democratic society, a society organized by the will of the people. Once the alien had the full picture, it seems to me that it would insist this is just not true. There is a democratic political sphere maybe (with well known limitations)! But the majority of coordinated activity is done through a decentralized oligarchic mechanism called the market. This includes a great deal of activity that is, objectively related to matters of common interest. It also includes activities that, when we remove our propertarian blinkers, ought to be regarded as matters of common interest. Take land- no one made the land, but certain individuals are seen as holding nearly every bit of it, and able to pass it around to each. People holding huge swathes of land, excluding everyone else from it, even though they in no sense made that land- prima facie, or taking the alien’s point of view, that’s a matter of public interest. Yet we’ve largely excluded decision-making about that from the public sphere.

Of course, this gets talked about in Analytic Political Philosophy, but my view is that it should be one of the big questions, along with current big topics (to which it is related!) like legitimacy, distributive justice, and so on. Democracy and markets are two of the great ruling premises of our society, shouldn’t we make more of the encounter? The implications are more than distributive, they’re also about the right way to make decisions. Yet even the SEP article on democracy scarcely mentions markets, and barely at all in the context of a conflict of governing systems.

Could a society wholly organize its common affairs, including production, through democracy? That’s a difficult questions, not least of all because no one has ever succeeded in making a large society wholly free of the market. However, whether it is or isn’t possible a sharper understanding of the tension is needed, either so they can be split, or so their best possible compromise can be reached.

Bridging heaven and earth- the methodology of pulling threads

There’s a larger program that Democratic political philosophy fits well in the context of. That is a methodology of philosophy as pulling at threads- trying to ask perfectly reasonable questions that nonetheless interfere with injustice. The question that most interested me above was “Hey, shouldn’t we care about what the public thinks of the primary decision-making tools in contemporary states, why does no one know about this”? But there are other questions, and other threads to pull at.

My sense is that a methodology of pulling at strings works best when it bridges the gap between the world of principles and the world of means and ends and says something interesting about both of them. When it tugs at the earthly weave of government and in drawing out snarls shows how it has failed to live up to its own heavenly promises. Maybe this is a trite way to think of it but, a kind of marriage between ideal and non-ideal theory?

Human rights negative and positive

Okay, this is kind of tacked onto the rest of the essay and a little off-topic, but oh well

Negative and positive rights

This section of the essay is particularly indebted to discussions with Lilia Anderson, who very kindly explained a lot about the topic to me. Errors are mine.

There’s a debate in the literature on human rights about what is sometimes called human rights inflationism- a supposed tendency to call too many things human rights. I think there may be some truth to accusations of human rights inflation, but generally I find the idea pretty silly.

Particularly on the political right, a common claim is that human rights inflation is associated with the demand for positive rights. I don’t know how common such complaints are from philosophers, but I do see it a fair bit from right wing intellectuals.

The good old Alabama policy institute defines negative and positive rights thus:

A negative right restrains other persons or governments by limiting their actions toward or against the right holder. Positive rights provide the right holder with a claim against another person or the state for some good, service, or treatment.

In the context of these discussions about human rights, negative rights refer to restraints upon the government. Positive rights refer to obligations on the government.

It is often held that ‘classical’ human rights were largely negative, whereas in this new era of human rights ‘inflation’ there is a superfluity of positive rights, endless claims on the government.

I want to suggest that there is no sensible distinction between positive or negative rights in the context of human rights, or at least that most paradigmatic rights claims involve commitments that are both negative and positive.

What is the most immediate sense in which the state relates to hunger? Is it the state’s refusal to provide food? No, it’s the states prevention of me acquiring food. Suppose I am walking down the street, starving, what prevents me from taking what I need to survive? For the most part, the state. I can’t take food from the shops because it’s illegal. The state takes positive action the foreseeable effect of which is that some people will starve to death. This is not hypothetical, even in rich countries:

I find it very dubious then to call the right to subsistence a positive right, because, except perhaps sometimes in the very poorest of countries, where there is starvation it happens because the government prevents people from taking what they need. (Even in the poorest countries, see Sen on Famines)

One attempt to get around this I’ve seen is people arguing that if the government allowed the starving to take what they need, the whole economy would collapse, meaning the same number would still starve to death plus more, hence the government can’t prevent starvation merely by abstaining from action. I could try to refute this in a sophisticated philosophical way, but it gets very tangled for a blogpost, so I’ll just say we know this isn’t true empirically at least in a variety of fairly wealthy countries. There are countries where necessity is a defense to theft, and the sky hasn’t collapsed.

Of course, we could attempt, somewhat painfully to distinguish between two rights:

1. The right not to be prevented from appropriating the means of subsistence.

2. The right to be provided with the means of subsistence.

But I think we’re better off saying that there is one right with both positive and negative aspects. Lilia Anderson, a philosopher of human rights, suggested to me that perhaps all rights have both positive and negative aspects. Consider, for example, the right to a fair trial. This is not an easy thing for the state to provide- even this apparently paradigmatic negative right requires a considerable investment of resources by the state. By the same token, the right not to be killed by agents of the state is not something the state can simply achieve by snapping its fingers, as police around the world have sadly shown (which is not to suggest the state is innocent of their excesses, merely that they often go beyond what even the more brutal parliamentarians and bureaucrats would prefer).

Could we save the distinction if we were reimagine discussion of negative and positive rights not on the basis of whether upholding the rights requires action or inaction by the government, but on the basis of whether or not it upholds positive or negative liberty? The SEP has the negative/positive liberty distinction as follows:

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

But in this context we could take away the “realize one’s fundamental purposes” and just leave “the possibility of acting”. E.g., in this rough sense, positive liberty is the capacity to do things- no judgements on what our fundamental purposes are is required. A starving person does not have liberty in a positive sense- they are having trouble even keeping on living, let alone exercising meaningful autonomy, but they might have liberty in a negative sense, because no one is preventing them from acting.

But this doesn’t change things. Just by not stopping people from taking food they need - e.g., granting a negative liberty, the right to food could be established in many commonwealths. Ergo, even by this standard, the right to food is, at least in part, a negative right.

So I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction between positive and negative human rights. To the extent that there is a distinction, many rights fall on both sides, and do not line up as is often imagined.

How I think about human rights

I want to give a conception of human rights. It’s not an original conception- even though I’ve never found a source that says exactly the same thing, it’s far too obvious idea to be original. The basic idea is political realism warmed over but it helps me thinks about things.

Rights are concessions that have been won by the mass of people, the oppressed and the exploited, from elites, or they are attempts to demand such concessions. This is not to say human rights claims are made by ordinary people- regardless of whether or not they originate with ordinary people, members of the elite like politicians generally make the claims for a variety of reasons including:

1. Pressure from below

2. Geostrategic reasons

3. The want of a political project

But traced back far enough, all rights have been won through struggle and are thus concessions. They are made proximally by elites, but distally (to differing degrees) by the oppressed.

Unlike other concessions, they have a number of features, viz:

They are claimed for all times and places, and from all ruling classes, not just the ruling class of one country.

Like all concessions, they have a double aspect, they are both attempts to defuse and appease that can defuse action and foretastes of a better world

We should also not view them purely instrumentally. Rights matter because our lives matter now, our lives are not just attempting to secure a better world “come the revolution”.

This gives us an account of the origins of rights and of their political usefulness as well as their dangers. It is not an inherently negative or positive conception of rights, and does not envisage the project of rights as inherently neoliberal, even if current instantiation of human rights discourse are neoliberal. Like Moyn (who I am reading at the moment) it aims at a middle path between pro and anti-rights discourses.

But it is also a view of rights that strips them of (fundamentally normative) significance. There is no need, on this view, that rights “carve morality at the joints”. The question of what rights we should demand becomes a question of what we can get, what we need and what the strategic implications of different rights concessions are. This does not imply that rights discourse should have no moral dimension, the question of which rights to seek and to seek to uphold is a question of:

1. Moral priorities.

2. Strategic instrumentalities.

Now it may be that there is a list of ways a person or a state must relate to people in order to behave ethically, and perhaps these forms of relation would be listed in Utopia- the true human rights- but it is unclear to me that the possibility of such a list should affect how we relate to human rights claims here and now.

On this view, worrying about human rights inflation is, for the most part, absurd. Overreach is possible, and perhaps truly absurd claims might debase the whole business, but this seems like a distant threat, and “inflation” not really the right language to think about it in.