Moral reputations and politics

[This is an extract from my latest post at The Electric Agora.]



Ethics or morality is not private in the sense that it is social and mainly about how we treat one another as human beings; but, in another sense, it is private. It is private in the sense that it is not just about the way we act and treat others; it is also about the way we see others and ourselves. (‘Opaque’ might be a better word than ‘private’ here.)

Moreover, I would suggest that, on the whole, the reputational side of things is taken too seriously. Simply put, reputations – which are by definition public and subject to rhetorical interventions, both positive and negative – typically bear little relationship to the (private, or opaque as I am calling it) reality of the person in question. And I believe that reputation as it pertains to the moral qualities of a person is something that we can – and should – remain agnostic about, under normal circumstances at least.

If there is a thing which we cannot know, the proper response is agnosticism; and we cannot know another person’s self-perception. We can see a small part of what they do. We can hear a small part of what they say. But – with a few possible exceptions (life-long friends, spouses, certain confessional writers perhaps) – we cannot know the details or nuances of the value systems of other people, nor how they see their own actions as relating to these value systems.

Of course, we can judge the actions and statements of others against our own value systems and/or against a legal framework. In fact, we need to do this. Anarchism is not a realistic option. But we need to be clear about what it is we are doing here, what it is we are judging. And what it is that we are not doing, not judging.

Even in its more mundane applications (relating to accomplishment, expertise or practical reliability, say) we often get things wrong when it comes to a person’s reputed qualities. The implication of the common idiom, “So-and-so has a well-deserved reputation for …”, is that reputations are often (usually?) not well-deserved.

Given the above points, it seems to me that there has been far too much emphasis on moral reputation in recent times, both on the positive side (in respect of certain historical figures, but also some contemporary figures) and – especially – on the negative side. Given the infinite possibilities for spin and communicational distraction and deception, this obsession is arguably having a serious adverse effect on our politics.

Monarchical systems of government were effective for long periods of history. Maybe they got certain things right that we get wrong. The monarch was not in the position he or she was in on account of his or her virtue or accomplishment but rather by an accident of birth. There were some advantages to this state of affairs which could be seen to have contributed to political stability, social harmony and continuity. “The King is dead. Long live the King!”

There is a moving scene in the film La Nuit de Varennes in which the ceremonial cape of the fleeing Louis XVI is displayed and the woman responsible for looking after it talks about having once watched the king address a large crowd. It was not the man that she saw in the distance but the red cape. In other words, it is not the person of the king but the role and the symbols of kingship which really count and which constitute the true focus one’s loyalty.

Truth and justice

This is an abridged version of an essay of mine which appeared recently at The Electric Agora. My Twitter profile: @mark_english1.

It seems from a slew of documents that have made their way into the public domain over the last year or so that the FBI and the Department of Justice have become unacceptably politicized, allowing political considerations to affect internal decision-making. No doubt there always has been and always will be a degree of politicization within such agencies and departments, but this tendency does seem to have got out of hand in recent years, and it is no surprise that matters are coming to a head. Juridical and law enforcement systems need to be seen to maintain a certain degree of integrity and independence from politics if they are to operate in anything like an effective way.

Certainly, one doesn’t expect a lot of truth and justice in the broader political sphere. Politics is essentially a power game and often a very dirty one at that. So, naturally, to the extent that the legal system finds itself influenced or infiltrated by political players, it loses credibility.

Lawyers I have known have, on the whole, been pretty cynical about the law and sometimes cynical in other ways too. I was shocked as an idealistic young man by the attitude of a highly-regarded progressive lawyer I once consulted. He was not much older than me, but he confided to me in a dismissive kind of way that he had given up entirely on the sort of sincere idealism that he saw (rightly) as lying behind my preoccupations of the time. His public reputation and profile belied his real views and continued to do so as he rose to national prominence.

Idealists and well-meaning intellectuals who might seek to engage with, or who happen to find themselves caught up in, the alien world of politics – or the law, for that matter – tend not to thrive. On the other hand, though, ideologues will often find a lucrative niche in today's think-tank-infested world.

Rather than talking directly about politics, however, I just want to make a few remarks and observations about the two concepts – both fundamental to an understanding of social and political questions – which I alluded to above: truth and justice. The notions of truth and truthfulness happen to be central to my own view of things; justice not so much. Let me try to explain why.

Life, it seems to me, is deeply and irredeemably unjust, from the womb. Our attempts to “make things right” are worthy, even inspiring. But it is wishful thinking to believe that political or judicial actions can ever have more than a very modest positive effect on the scheme of things; that they can ever right more than a minuscule fraction of the countless wrongs and injustices that surround us on every side. Putting the matter less emotively, I would say that the domain of predicates such as ‘just’ or ‘fair’ is quite constrained and that related or cognate terms like ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ have very limited applicability.

High-minded intellectuals – who, along with less high-minded intellectuals, were until a century or so ago sponsored almost exclusively by churches or religious organizations – have over the centuries worked out various schemes in which justice does prevail in very significant ways. The only trouble is, these systems – whether one is thinking of the politically-charged apocalyptic literature of Judaism and early Christianity, more sober accounts of divine judgment focused on an individual’s moral choices, or Eastern ideas of karma and reincarnation – do not correspond with reality. As I see it, unless you are committed to such or similar religious notions or at least to the implicit metaphysics of the Natural Law tradition, justice is a problematic concept. Too grand, too ambitious and (in many cases at any rate) not altogether clear.

We have certain instincts that we share with some non-human animals which entail reactions and behaviors that give the appearance of involving a basic, inbuilt sense of fairness or justice, but our developed ideas of justice are heavily mediated by culture and subject to cultural variation.

The current notion of social justice, for example, is clearly culturally determined. It has a peculiar and fascinating history which I may discuss in a future piece. It is also notoriously controversial. Friedrich Hayek rejected the concept of social justice as nonsense. Justice, as he saw it, is essentially a process and not about engineering some predetermined outcome. In general terms I go along with this but will not attempt to defend a Hayekian view here.

Of course, in cases where there is common agreement, I’m for justice rather than against it. Who wouldn’t be? But in many cases it is either impossible to clearly and uncontroversially define or, if it can be clearly defined, it is unattainable.

Truth does not have things stacked against it in quite the same way. Sure, it’s philosophically contentious. But so long as it is understood in an ordinary, everyday, lowercase kind of way, it is quite within reach and attainable much of the time.

I will try to spell this out a little. We often get things right in everyday life in the sense that the claims we make are in accordance with the relevant facts. The cat is in the kitchen. Dinner is served. The coffee is cold. You lied about where you were last night. Such claims, if they are in accordance with the relevant facts, are deemed to be correct or true (it doesn’t really matter which word we use) rather than incorrect/untrue/false. I am just talking about ordinary usage here. Someone accused of lying might deny it by saying: “That’s not true! I was at my grandma’s as I claimed.”

Truthfulness is quite distinct from truth, of course. It is synonymous with honesty and relates to one’s communicative intentions. One is being truthful if one tells it as one sees it, without trying to deceive one’s interlocutor in any way. The facts may be wrong, but it is the intention that counts here. Truthfulness and fallibility are quite compatible.

Truthfulness is inextricably bound up with intellectual integrity. The scientist or historian who fudges her data or distorts the facts is not a real scientist or a real historian. The intellectual or writer who presents the work of others as his own is a fraud and is rightly ostracized.

I have argued that it certainly does make sense to talk of the truth or otherwise of specific claims in the course of everyday life. But truth in its grander or more scientific or scholarly manifestations may be something of an illusion.

Although facts of various kinds may be verified by observation, experimentation, documentation or plausible testimony, how we conceive of facts in the context of scientific research is often determined to a greater or lesser extent by the theoretical framework. Cats and kitchens and coffee and grandmothers are givens within the framework of ordinary natural-language-based conversations. We are using ordinary words in ordinary ways. But when the framework is, say, a scientific theory, and we are moving beyond the normal social framework for which natural language evolved, we need to be more circumspect both in our claims and how we express them. The facts in the context of a scientific theory may be expressed in terms of the theory itself, and so become dependent on that particular conceptual framework (more or less as ordinary facts are dependent on the framework of natural language, social interaction and ordinary life). Do the English words ‘true’ and ‘truth’ carry over into a scientific context? Perhaps. But I don’t think it ever really makes sense to talk of a complex theory as true.

There is a website with the unfortunate name, Why Evolution is True. This just sounds wrong to me, a poor use of English. If ‘evolution’ is taken to refer to a process, then obviously the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’ cannot apply. They can only apply to claims, beliefs, etc.. Even if the term ‘evolution’ is taken as shorthand for ‘the theory of evolution’ we still have problems. A theory is not a claim; nor is it merely a set of claims. It is a framework within which various claims are made and tested. Can a theory be true? This sort of statement doesn’t really make sense to me. A theory can be good or sound or well-established. Scientific theories are complex objects and they are not set in stone. There will always be modifications in the offing, of one kind or another.

Just as scientific theories are open to being shown to be incomplete or inadequate, so complex narratives purporting to be true accounts may be rejected as such if they are shown to be fictions, i.e. not in accord with certain known facts. But I think it is appropriate to be skeptical about all complex narratives. Inevitably, many quite different stories can be told which fit the known facts, and many more which fit some of the facts.

Much of our social and personal lives is driven by justificatory narratives of one kind or another. Political narratives could be seen as a subset of these: specifically as those justificatory, secular narratives which are shared (or which are designed to be shared) by large numbers of people.

I want to finish up with a few random observations on how antonyms and negation play into this discussion of justice and truth.

Just as the positive rights implicit in social justice are more controversial and contested than negative rights (like liberty), so the concept of justice is (I would suggest) more problematic than the concept of injustice or of a miscarriage of justice. You could argue about whether a person guilty of a crime, for example, ought to be punished in this way or that or punished at all or even blamed. (There might have been extenuating circumstances.) But there would be no disagreement at all about the wrongness of a miscarriage of justice, where a person innocent of a particular crime was convicted for it; or with respect to cases of a broadly similar kind but which do not involve the court system (so that the term miscarriage of justice would not apply). With respect to the latter, I am thinking of situations – not hard to find, it must be said – in which a person is disadvantaged or penalized in some significant way for what is generally accepted as honest and exemplary behavior.

Note that the two concepts, truth and justice, are not symmetrically related. Truth relates directly to justice. The legal process is designed to uncover the truth of what happened, and perjury is a serious offense. One talks of someone being falsely accused. But justice doesn’t relate directly to questions of truth and falsity. Claims are true or false according entirely to non-justice-related criteria. Justice (or injustice) just doesn’t come into it.

[...]

One example I have come across of truth being presented as being more problematic than its opposite is a literary one. No doubt there are countless possible examples one could give. This just happens to be one which stuck in my memory.

It comes from the author’s preface to a very controversial book by the literary academic and cinema historian, Maurice Bardèche, Nuremberg ou La terre promise. The book was published in 1948. The épuration légale was still underway. The execution of his friend and brother-in-law, the journalist Robert Brasillach, had politicized Bardèche. But my point here is logical and rhetorical and any discussion of the politics involved will be left for another time.

“I do not know if truth exists,” Bardèche wrote. “Many people have tried by subtle arguments to prove to me that it doesn’t. But I know that lies exist. I know that the systematic distortion of facts is a reality."

The spectre of nihilism

It might seem from some of my previous posts that I see philosophical thinking as outmoded and impotent. This is not my view, however, as I have consistently argued that there is and will remain an important place for philosophical thinking within – and on the margins of – the various sciences.

But I do – as I have most recently discussed here – have misgivings about pursuing areas like ethics and metaphysics independently of scientific investigations.

At the risk of boring those who don't have a vital interest in these matters and aggravating those who do, I want to air here a couple of my doubts about ethics.

I acknowledge that I am making very general and sweeping claims that reflect a personal – and also, in a sense, a conservative – perspective. But I wouldn't be making them if I didn't think they were objectively plausible.

Philosophical ethics, as I see it, is fatally incomplete because it carries within itself an implicit promise to provide fundamental justifications which it cannot fulfil.

Even if foundationalism is out of favor amongst philosophers, it seems to me that the very existence of a discipline of normative ethics inevitably raises expectations that philosophical reason can provide a basis for morality. But, of course, it can't. (And nor can science, I hasten to add.)

Moral philosophers have done some valuable work over the years clarifying ethical questions and elaborating ethical systems or frameworks of various kinds. But, more often than not, they have brought to their work strongly formed but unacknowledged convictions.

Most have been aligned with traditional religious and/or humanistic schools of thought, while some have operated within radical traditions of various kinds.

My point is that, loosed from the constraints of such implicit, culturally-formed convictions and beliefs, reason can all too readily become a destroyer of values, a kind of universal acid.

Our values are bio-cultural products, and there is every reason to see some of them as quite delicate and vulnerable.

In fact, the spectre of nihilism (which Nietzsche grappled with) has been a very real one in the West for at least the last century-and-a-half.

Writers in the Western tradition, from the Greek tragedians on, but especially within the last two centuries, have often written of a realm of chaos that lies behind or beneath the veneer of civilization. And many non-Western religious traditions also give credence or recognition to dark forces. (Think of the Hindu goddess Kali, for example.)

But philosophical ethics generally bears the stamp of two very optimistic (overly optimistic, in my view) traditions of thought: Western humanism, deriving from the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance, and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Both of these traditions looked beneath the surface of life and found, not darkness and chaos, but a reassuring order.

And yet the darkness and chaos is there – as a psychological reality, and maybe as more than that.

The view of the world which modern science is revealing has, in my view, a lot more in common with our darker religious and literary intuitions than with Platonistic humanism or with the cheerful deism of the 18th century.

Science is also throwing light on how our brains work, and the picture that is emerging seems, in general terms, to vindicate thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud (who emphasized the role of unconscious elements over conscious rationality) rather than the rationalists.

Increasingly, I am coming to see ethics in terms of what is conducive to mental well-being and the social integration of the individual.

And certain forms of rationality-based introspection and discourse can actually work against these goals.

Ethics and philosophy

I recently tried to sum up my general approach to moral questions in a few hundred words. (See Ethics in a nutshell.) I see myself as just stating what most non-religious people would generally see as obvious, really. The aim – given a secular and science-friendly outlook – is just clarity and certainly not originality.

Here I want to begin to extrapolate on what I said there, bringing out some ideological points which were not explicit in the original post. (I will have something to say another time about the specifically conservative thrust of my position.)

Philosophical discussions of ethics all too often get pushed off course into unproductive disputes which are sometimes reflective of fundamental metaphysical disagreements between the antagonists, and sometimes a result simply of competitive argumentation.

I have reservations about such discussions, which inevitably involve labeling one's own and others' positions, attacking the positions of others, refining and defending one's own position, and further attacking and refining and defending ad infinitum.

I suppose I would find myself labeled as some kind of (moral) anti-realist. The last time I looked, moral anti-realism was not particularly well-regarded in the philosophical community.

Why is this, I wonder, when I (and, I would have thought, most non-religious non-philosophers) would take it as relatively uncontroversial that, as I claimed in the linked post, there is no absolute or objective ethical authority, and no objective method for determining 'moral truths'?*

My explanation is as follows.

The philosophical community is not a random sample of intelligent people. Quite obviously, it is largely self-selected, and, although it comprises a wide cross-section of people with widely diverging views, those with certain general orientations are over-represented (by comparison with the general educated population).

Specifically, people are drawn to graduate studies in philosophy (and especially ethics) who wish not only to explore but also to promote certain ideas.

Clearly, the philosophical arena is attractive to religious people as it gives them an opportunity to promote, not so much their particular religious view (that would be unprofessional), but at least a view of the world which is in accord with their beliefs.

Similar considerations apply to non-religious people who have a prior commitment to certain moral, social or political views. Feminists, for example, have generally found academic philosophy to be a particularly receptive and protective environment, and very useful for the propagation of their ideas. Likewise those with liberal and left-wing political views. (Conservatives are not well-represented amongst contemporary philosophers.)**

No one is going to bother funding significant research into this kind of thing. (And why should they? Besides, such ideological issues are very hard to pin down scientifically.) But I am confident there is a lot of truth in what I am saying.

Anecdotes are not evidence, but this one will at least make my claims clearer. More than once, I have asked graduate students in philosophy why they chose philosophy. Needless to say, not all responses were the same. But one sticks in my memory as being both typical and emblematic.

And it wasn't just what he said but how he said it. With quiet passion.

'I strongly believe,' said the earnest, bespectacled young man with the wispy dark brown beard, 'that ideas matter; that, despite appearances to the contrary, ideas can prevail over self-interest. Might is not right…'



* And, if we can't reliably identify them, what sense is there in saying that these 'moral truths' exist? Actually, I'm uneasy about the term 'moral truths'.

Of course, there are moral facts, in the sense of facts about our systems of morality, 'moral instincts', etc.. But prescriptive ethics is all about choosing and urging and acting – about living – not about describing and theorizing.

Ethics is clearly not an intellectual discipline like mathematics and the sciences (including the historical and social sciences), all of which, to a greater or lesser extent, generate what one could call objective knowledge. [See also the comments attached to the linked post.]


** Many major philosophical thinkers of the past were, by contrast, politically conservative. I may do another piece on this, but a few big names that come immediately to mind are Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hobbes, Descartes, Maistre, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bradley, Frege, Santayana, Heidegger, Ryle and Quine.

Ethics, emotion and ideology

As I was writing an earlier post (bearing on the relationship between personal ethics and business), I found myself confronting the fact that the application of certain modes of ethical thinking to business and investment, etc. leads naturally to left-wing and even totalitarian conclusions.

Specifically, if one applies standard Christian-like ethics to these areas, one ends up feeling one should care for and protect consumers and the general public as one would one's loved ones, not only from 'market forces' but also from themselves. The result is inevitably going to be a form of socialism, or at least a nanny state.

Tweak the ethical starting-point (by rejecting universalism for nationalism, for example) and you may get something like fascism.

But, at any rate, you will be committed to trying to create an extended economic, political and social community modelled on the family or tribe. Something warm and human and emotion-based, but on a large scale.

It is a potent and alluring idea, but, as history shows, it just doesn't work. Or, at least, it doesn't work for long. The consequences, in fact, are generally disastrous.

European-style social democracy could be seen as an attempt to realize this idea of an extended human community without resorting to totalitarian methods. Social democratic systems never really managed, however, to create a true, extended sense of community, remaining cold and bureaucratic (as well as being economically unsustainable).

Paradoxically, one of the cruelest totalitarian regimes of the 20th century had more success (for a limited time and not for the whole population) on the affective front. I am thinking of Hitler's rallies, and the stories told by (non-Jewish) Germans about growing up in the early days of National Socialism (the state-sponsored camping trips, the sense of community and belonging).

I don't have a neat conclusion; only the sense that an emotional approach to broad social questions can be dangerous, and perhaps the best kind of general ethical framework for business and politics will be unemotional and rule-based.

Of course, emotions are part of being human, and all of us are emotionally engaged as individuals in our professional and business lives. The main dangers seem to lie in trying to impose one's own emotionally-charged vision on the broader community.

Sellers of dreams

Lawrence Ho, who with James Packer set up the City of Dreams casino complex in Macau, made some revealing comments recently.

"Chinese people are very superstitious and they believe, one, that they are luckier than the casino themselves and, two, they are probably luckier than the other casino patrons and that's why they can win."

Of course, the tendency to overrate one's own luck or ability is a universal human trait. But the Chinese cultural heritage is particularly rich in beliefs and customs relating to luck and fortune, and there is no doubt that Chinese people are often strongly drawn to gambling in general, and casino gambling in particular.

Many Chinese are suspicious of the stock market and the big investment banks, and Ho suggests they see the casino as a fairer option. In baccarat, for example, you have a 50-50 chance of winning.

Well, it's not quite as simple as that! But Ho and his fellow casino entrepreneurs are quite happy to exploit the naive ideas of the new Chinese middle class.

In fact, growth in the VIP or 'high roller' sector is flat, whereas the mass market for what casinos have to offer is currently growing at 30% per annum. The focus is now squarely on the new middle class rather than on professional gamblers or the super rich.

I wonder how the likes of Lawrence Ho and James Packer, respected and admired as they are, justify to themselves their exploitation of human weakness and irrationality. Are they hard and cynical Social Darwinists at heart? Or do they believe that they are providing a real service to the community?

I am reminded of a childhood friend whose family ran a corner store which made a significant proportion of its money from cigarettes, many of which were purchased by young people.

My friend's trite observation that it was a dream they were buying, 'not just a packet of fags,' was true enough, but not particularly convincing as a moral defense.

The way I see it is that we humans do all sorts of stupid and self-destructive things. The relatively good business person may exploit some of these activities but provides an honest (and legal) product and refrains from outright deception.

The real reprobate is the purveyor of contaminated goods, counterfeit medical drugs, that sort of thing.

Or am I setting the bar too low?

Schrödinger and friends

I am revisiting some of Erwin Schrödinger's beautifully-written essays in which he reflects on science, life and religion. (The Canto paperback published by Cambridge University Press incorporates What is Life? and Mind and Matter as well as Autobiographical Sketches.)

Schrödinger was profoundly influenced by Vedantic thought and, when I read him previously, I was more interested in and respectful of mysticism than I am now. It will be interesting to see whether I still feel I can endorse his view of the world.

He was not a paragon of virtue. An only child, he had a very happy childhood, though he admits that as a young man he neglected his ailing parents. I know that he fell out with Albert Einstein, and, though I don't know the circumstances, I believe that Schrödinger was at fault.

And here is a paragraph from Autobiographical Sketches (1960). It strikes a rather odd - and disturbing - note. But it should be noted that the Schrödingers stayed only a brief time in Jena, and Hitler's rise to power was well over a decade away.

In March/April 1920 Annemarie and I got married. We moved soon after to Jena, where we took furnished lodgings. I was expected to add some up-to-date theoretical physics to Professor Auerbach's set lectures. We enjoyed the friendship and cordiality of both the Auerbachs, who were Jews, and of my boss Max Wien and his wife (they were anti-Semites by tradition, but bore no personal malice). Being on such good terms with them all was a great help to me. In 1933, the Auerbachs, I am told, saw no means of escape from the oppression and humiliation which Hitler's taking over ... held in store for them but suicide. Eberhard Buchwald, a young physicist who had just lost his wife, and a couple called Eller with their two little sons were also amongst our friends in Jena. Mrs. Eller came to see me here in Alpbach last summer (1959), a poor bereaved woman whose three men-folk had lost their lives fighting for a cause they did not believe in.

Cats are people too

F.H. Bradley, the idealist philosopher, used to shoot cats (at night, in the grounds of Merton College, Oxford). Bradley was a dog man.

In a footnote in chapter XXVI of his magnum opus, Appearance and reality, in a section dealing with the human desire for life after death and the inconsistencies of the standard (Christian) view, he writes:

No one can have been so fortunate as never to have felt the grief of parting, or so inhuman as not to have longed for another meeting after death... One feels that a personal immortality would not be very personal, if it implied a mutilation of our affections. There are those too who would not sit down among the angels, till they had recovered their dog.

The only pet I've ever owned (apart from animals that were family responsibilities) was a cat, and I know the strange chemistry which sometimes links humans and animals of other species. I wouldn't want to make too much of it, but there was a kind of recognition there, a kind of bond, albeit tenuous and uncertain. Intimate may not be too strong a word.

A while ago, I saw on a lamppost a small, monochrome poster. Just a stylized cat's face and the sentence: Cats are people too. I have some sympathy with the people who bothered to design and print and paste up these posters, with their quirky and lighthearted campaign in defense of a currently very unpopular animal.

But I don't believe that animals have rights, or that we humans should be seen as more or less on a par with chimpanzees. The attempt by intellectuals and activists to raise the status and moral profile of animals has succeeded only in distorting reality and weakening moral thinking in general. By virtue of language and our relatively advanced brains we inhabit a vast new world from which all other animals are excluded.

The burdens of this world of human consciousness are such, however, that the pre-human world of our distant ancestors - of which we remain obscurely aware - can be seen as a kind of paradise from which we have been cast out. This may explain in part the mystique that animals have for many.

What animals see in us is an altogether more difficult question.

Hayek and Hobbes

I recently expressed an affinity for the social views of F.A. Hayek, noting that this position might appear to be difficult to reconcile with my fondness for the writings of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679).

Hobbes is most famous for his contention that without a strong central authority societies disintegrate into conflict:

[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war, as is of every man against everyman ... In such condition, there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. [Leviathan (Basil Blackwell, 1960), p. 82.]

The common power of which Hobbes speaks is conceived as a sovereign individual or group of individuals which is granted supreme power to act 'in those things which concern the common peace and safety.' The sovereign - so conceived - is the source of all law, and rights are a matter of legal definition.

There are obviously conflicts here with the views of Hayek. Hobbes had a major influence on the 19th and 20th-century tradition of legal positivism and the command theory of law, a tradition of thought to which Hayek was steadfastly opposed. Hayek accepted that the idea of law as a command is appropriate in systems of regulation applied to administrators and government officials, but if it is applied to the population at large then everyone is reduced to the status of unpaid servant of the state.

Hayek felt that healthy ideas of the rule of law were undermined in the later 19th century by proponents of legal positivism. The dangerous idea that whatever the government does is right and legal led to the perversion of the Rechtsstaat into the Kulturstaat and to various forms of totalitarianism. It also led to the acceptance of ideas of 'social justice' (involving, amongst other things, the redistribution of private wealth). Hayek believed that laws should not involve arbitrary elements and should be process-based and not directed at particular individuals or towards particular ends. His purpose was to delineate a private sphere where individuals are free to act without fear of coercion by government.

Fundamental to Hayek's position is his rejection of the view that order needs to be created by a sovereign authority. For order arises spontaneously, and any imposed order will - because no central orderer can ever have or process the required information - necessarily be inefficient and oppressive. But I think it's fair to say that Hayek also had a strong belief in individual freedom as a value in itself.

The major threats to individual freedom in Hayek's day were secular totalitarian ideologies (and social democracy which had - as he saw it - a tendency to drift in a totalitarian direction). For Hobbes, however, the main threat was social chaos, but also religious ideologies. Hobbes' sovereign (unlike religious authorities) was not concerned with the private lives of its subjects. Secular totalitarian threats were just not there in 17th-century England, and it is a mistake to see Hobbes as some kind of proto-fascist. Arguably he was just as concerned to protect human freedom as Hayek - and he was certainly opposed to totalitarianism.

Strangely, the tenor of Hobbes' thinking seems quite close to that which led to the development of game theory, one of the most significant new tools of 20th-century economics (and pioneered by Hayek's friend Oskar Morgenstern). Hobbes' suggestion that the individual should first seek peace, but, if betrayed and attacked, is justified in availing himself of 'all helps and advantages of war' to defend himself, approximates to the famous 'tit-for-tat' strategy which generally outperforms other strategies in the 'prisoner's dilemma' game. In one-off versions of the game, the outcome Hobbes predicted occurs and everybody loses (though tit-for-tatters lose less badly than others). But in iterated versions of the game, where artificial agents interact (in what could be seen as a model of society), pockets of spontaneous order and cooperation develop and thrive (providing evidence to support a Hayekian view).

I recognize the reality of spontaneous social order, though I suspect it is not quite so robust as Hayek assumes. As Hobbes (and Hayek in fact) knew from first-hand experience, civil disorder and war are real dangers, and something like Hobbes' sovereign, with strong and undisputed power, may be a necessary condition for peace in many contexts. Certain societies, especially highly cohesive ones with strong systems of morality in place, may be able to exist for long periods without the need for such an authority but history shows that civil conflict can erupt unexpectedly.

Both Hobbes and Hayek saw themselves as men of science, but appreciated also the other dimensions of human culture and the contingency of history. Both men were responding in their work to what they saw as the key social problems of their times in a rational, unsentimental and entirely secular manner. Hobbes' outlook is less colored by religious or metaphysical ideas than that of most of his contemporaries; and, of all the European neo-liberals, Hayek was probably the closest in spirit to logical empiricism, the anti-metaphysical and rigorously secular movement - exemplified in the Vienna Circle - which sought to replace obscurantist philosophies and religions with a view of the world based on science and a new understanding of logic and language.

Who cares about the compatibility or incompatibility of the thought of these two men? Why is the issue even worth raising? Because, I suggest, their differences bring to the fore very important questions about might and right, pragmatism and morality, ends and means.

I have the sense that - for better or for worse - Hayek's thinking retained traces of philosophical idealism, and this may have been what drove him to attempt to justify (certain types of) law on non-legal grounds and to place such an emphasis on human freedom. But the important questions are not what Hayek (or Hobbes) thought about this or that, but rather about what is, and what is not, the case.

Facts and values are intertwined in all discussions of social philosophy, and, if any progress is to be made, they must - no easy task! - be disentangled. The factual questions may be resolved through empirical research and reason, but questions of value will, I suspect, always remain contentious.

Deeper than language

Polonius: ... What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

I suspect that the strings of words we use to explain and justify our behavior may be insignificant froth compared to the deep neural sources of our convictions and our actions. As split-brain and similar experiments have shown, we have a natural tendency to confabulate, to rationalize behavior after the event - and the stories we tell (and believe!) are often utter fictions.

Arguably, most of our decision-making occurs below the level of conscious awareness. As a schoolboy, I was taught to make important decisions by creating lists of fors and againsts, and weighing them up rationally. This never worked, and I thought the fault was with me. But the recommended technique was based on an utterly false view of the human brain, one that saw consciousness as all.

Intuition is an important element in certain types of complex, real-world decision-making, especially in relation to pattern-recognition and also in relation to judgements about other people. The trouble is that, though intuitions can usefully draw on sub-conscious processing of complex data, they also incorporate input from primitive, value-related systems of the brain which were appropriate to the sorts of quick, rough-and-ready judgements required by our ancestors, but are inappropriate to people living in technologically-advanced societies.

Of course, language affects cognitive processing (conscious and unconscious) in complex and subtle ways. But it is a mistake to think that the structure of language - its concepts and categories and so on - reflects the underlying nature of reality. The most one could claim in this regard is that it enhanced our ancestors' ability to deal with their environment in a practical way. And language itself is a key component in the social environment which makes human intelligence possible.

Natural language is good for many things - for sharing knowledge and enabling complex group operations, for inspiring and encouraging, for misleading and discouraging, for cementing social bonds, for fomenting rebellion, etc. But one thing it is not good for (except as an adjunct to scientific methods) is discovering new truths.

Metaphysics was the ultimate armchair discipline. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries metaphysicians in Europe and America created vast linguistic and conceptual structures which purported to explain the underlying nature of reality and much else besides. But they were blinded by the structure of language and their own rhetorical flights, and their prolix works now gather dust in library basements and warehouses.

Of course, there have always been those, of an empirical cast of mind, who saw little value in metaphysics, but perhaps the most formidable attack on this style of thinking was mounted in the 1920s and 1930s by the so-called logical positivists. They sought to discredit metaphysics entirely and had a huge impact in the middle decades of the 20th century.

In the latter part of the century, however, certain philosophers tried - with some success - not only to attack logical positivism but also to rehabilitate metaphysics. They claimed, for example, that the logical positivists' anti-metaphysics campaign was flawed and indeed ultimately metaphysical itself.

In general terms, though, I think the logical positivists were right - science (broadly understood so as to incorporate the historical disciplines) is the only way to push back the frontiers of knowledge. Not only do metaphysics and philosophy lack the empirical dimension of science, they are generally pursued via the medium of natural language, whereas the underlying structure of the world is amenable only to approaches which are heavily reliant on quantitative and mathematical methods.

But science has little or nothing to say about right and wrong, or about political and social ideals. By contrast, natural language might be seen to be ideally suited to deal with such issues. Perhaps, but caution should be exercised in this area. The trouble (as I see it) is that value-based political and ethical theories proliferate, not unlike the metaphysical theories of the 19th century, without any way to test them and weed out the rubbish.

I am inclined to think (like Wittgenstein) that value-related issues are real, and they can of course be discussed, but they are not the sorts of things one needs to have theories about.

Value systems are real and inescapable aspects of social relations, built into the manners and customs and expectations of any society. And, of course, individuals and groups may and do challenge certain conventions, but always within the context of a complex network incorporating many other conventions. (Such a view seems to me compatible with virtue-based approaches to ethics, by the way.)

This process of review and revision happens. Conservatives may prefer that it happen more slowly, liberals may prefer that it happen more quickly, but it is an inevitable part of the life of society.

And though language constitutes a key element in the social environment and so profoundly affects cognition, and though words may inspire, instruct, clarify, warn and all the rest, the ultimate driving forces of human existence will always be wider and deeper than language, in the still obscure dynamics of social and somatic processes.

Inciting hatred?

This witty little piece is worth pondering for the light it throws on changes that have occurred in the social, cultural and legal environment over recent decades. The song (as the text on the video notes) ruffled a few feathers when it was released more than 30 years ago.

But would such a song have been written today? And, if it had, would it have been given a mainstream release? I doubt it.

Individual ethics and manners once bore a far greater load and played a more central role in the functioning of society. But now, as Western governments seek to modify behavior through 'education programs' and a progressive legislative agenda, the role of private judgement in morality, manners and professional life has been downgraded.

Legal systems, once perceived as staid but respected, have become pro-active players in an intra-societal struggle, as an ever-expanding inventory of groups and sub-groups and categories of individual seek to benefit from their minority or 'oppressed' status.

I have the strong sense that Western societies were not only considerably freer, but also considerably saner in previous decades.

Normative shmormative

In the light of some recent discussions on this site (here and here), I thought it might be appropriate for me to make a short statement about my general attitude to science and philosophy. I am not as convinced as some of my interlocutors are about the coherence and value of philosophy as a discipline, but I know this is a personal thing, and I certainly don't presume to tell others what they should do or be interested in!

I tend to think historically, and I see a grand tradition of thinkers who were called philosophers, but many (most?) of the great names (e.g. Descartes, Leibniz) were also scientists and/or mathematicians. What is left of philosophy after all the sciences have been peeled off from it does not attract me - unless it can be reconnected in some way with the sciences. I am not unsympathetic to the Quinean view that philosophy of science is philosophy enough. But there are very different ways of seeing the philosophy of science.

As I have the view that philosophy is not an independent discipline, I tend to see any authority to set epistemic norms and make definite judgements on factual matters as residing within specific scientific traditions, and the role of philosophical thinking as essentially clarificatory; but also speculative in the sense that it may suggest new conjectures to be considered or new ways of conceptualizing or interpreting data.

From what I have said it may seem that my worldview is rather impoverished, but let me hasten to say that my view of the world embraces lots of non-scientific things (e.g. pleasure in language and literature). I see morality and manners as being of central importance, but I am reluctant to accept the need for experts in ethics and similar areas (except in limited pedagogical contexts).