Rolling Political Philosophy Thread

idg technocratic as a bad word. I mean it's used to describe mcnamara types, but in a strict sense, why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

I'd say anyone approaching this subject without realizing how much of it is political-economic is being reductionist.

Well, if we assume that reducing death, illness, homelessness etc. are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic: Does our current course of action help us achieve these goals. Free markets do help in this process, to a point, but a stage is reached (a long time ago) when it becomes an obstacle to these goals. Either way, we always have to first decide what we want from life, what a society or government is for. Then it's just statistics.

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine. the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

i feel as if iatee you are saying that all political or economic arguments are founded on a fully-examined set of ethical beliefs? is that correct or what am i misunderstanding?

euler do you think there's a religious argument for the welfare state?

no, not always full-examined! but it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

why is a technocratic view of things reductionist?

Here's why. Take the following passage:

if, changing nothing else, we decided it was illegal to charge more than $1 for a prescription in america, the immediate effect would be very, very good socio-economically, as millions of people would have cheap access to medicine.

Being "good socio-economically" ≠ being good. That's the reduction I'm trying to avoid.

I was responding to "are worthy goals then the question becomes socio-economic"

max: yeah, I think so, in classical Catholic writing on social justice for instance.

it makes more sense to examine the morality *behind the system* than a specific concept within it.

is that a kind of abstract morality belonging to or residing in the system itself then?

Euler, are you looking for a non-utilitarian argument for the welfare state?

NV: that would be great! A secular non-utilitarian argument.

the long-term effect would not be entirely good. you can't isolate these actions from their effect on markets.

No, I agree with you. I think we're making the same point. So the decision to immediately charge $1 for meds would end up not fulfilling our criteria for a good economic policy.

(because if we're going to have any impact on the current austerity programs in the West, we're going to need arguments that don't simply have sectarian appeal.

basically, I think this is a great question: is 'clearly defined form of keynesianism xyz' moral? y/n

moral analysis of a welfare state will be an inherent part of that discussion. and 'how should a welfare state operate' is included in that model.

I agree, iatee.

i have real difficulties with secular, deontological ethics. where do you begin to draw the authority for your "ought" from?

so maybe we don't disagree much!

but until you pick and very clearly define your keynesian economics xyz / whatever else - which involves economic logic of some sort - I don't think you can approach the welfare state. it doesn't exist as an approachable concept without that context.

xp

Sure, iatee: but I don't think that's the end of the task. Transfers of wealth within such an economic system is what needs to be judged as moral or not. I'm happy to fix such systems & ask for each one, if that transfer is moral, & then vary the systems & ask those questions again. We could treat those systems as a parameter & see how the morality of the welfare state varies for each such value.

xp to NV: Kant says that "oughts" derive from the nature of rationality. That's pretty wacky too.

yeah i get what Kant says

okay I gtg but I will try and make this point quick:

I don't think you can construct an overarching economic logic from the bottom up - from judging the morality of a billion individual acts. the economic logic ultimately has to be overarching and so while you can maybe 'judge' the individual acts moral or not moral, the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important.

xp to NV: yeah; my impression of the "state of the art" today is that no one really gets why rationality itself should be the ground of morality & so neo-Kantians like Korsgaard are working on grounding morality on autonomy, which Kant mentions in accord with the categorical imperative ("treat people as ends not means to ends") but whose connection in the texts is not especially.

what i'm getting at seems to relate to your idea that states can't be "moral" in themselves. i agree to the point where i wd argue that systems of economic organisation aren't "moral" and that an individual's political beliefs have to be founded on something other than morality.

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

ok, NV: the hard thing for me is to see where an individual's beliefs about what she ought to do are "political" & where they are "moral".

a big part of the problem is that we can probably agree on a very broad deontological morality that is pragmatically true for the vast majority of people. eg. it is wrong to kill another human being (except in defence of yourself or a third party). as soon as i apply that kind of ethics to the political sphere, i get into a hugely difficult argument about how my actions contribute to the state, whether states' actions contribute to killing people, what would be the best kind of state to avoid killing people etc.

the sheer multiplication of individual contributions to the functioning of a state makes an uncomputable system of consequences based on individuals' ethical choices, it seems?

and i'd argue that the same near-chaotic system works to exclude utilitarian moral decisions too.

Wondering why utilitarianism is out of the equation here, and if you're similarly down on other forms of consequentialism eg Rawls' theory of justice. Deontology is a non starter imo.

xp to euler

xp to NV: yeah, those are in particular problems of representative democracy, since my main political act in such a system is my vote for/against people who will make the decisions of the state.

your main political act in a representative democracy needn't be your vote tho. you could have a moral imperative to become actively involved in a party for example.

xp to ledge: I accept the usual objections to utilitarianism, but more importantly I think it distorts what we're doing when we reason morally into a type of calculation, which closes off lots of considerations that ought to be part of moral deliberation: what particular people mean to us, for instance.

xp to NV: sure, you could choose to become a representative yourself. I've been thinking a lot about that recently, kinda thinking we all here should run for office (no idea how reasonable that is to do in the UK; in the USA it's totally doable)

xp to iatee: not sure what you mean by "the morality of the bigger system itself is far more important" but I think we're just failing to communicate properly a bit here.

even given the constraints I gave earlier (we start ot w/ "let's assume political-economic system x"), if we put 'the welfare state' in a glass box, look at it and conclude 'this is a morally good thing' and then put 'lower taxes' in a glass box, look at it, conclude 'this is a morally good thing' - well, I'm not sure what the usefulness of that exercise was. they don't operate in glass boxes, they operate as parts of the same system.

bigger picture: I don't think you can analyze an economic object that operates in a utilitarian system from a non-economic, non-utilitarian POV. non-utilitarian economic systems and economic logic exists. in theory and in history and in the world today. but 'the welfare state' as we understand it, and as matters to america in 2011 can't exist without that framework.

so if you're gonna say 'okay, I'm gonna accept utilitarian ethics as a framework for how the economic world operates because it's pretty hard to build a comparably sophisticated model - *however* - after accepting that, I'd like to make future decisions using 'ethical system XYZ'.

sure, then you can pick your overarching (utilitarian...) political-economic logic based on 'ethical system XYZ' and if that includes some sort of welfare state, then you can manage cost-benefit decisions of that welfare state using 'ethical system XYZ'. I think there is some room for that...

I've got a question I wanna throw at you guys. It's a rhetoric question. There's this rhetoric move where you are explaining why somebody did something bad. For example, "he killed that woman bc of his deprivation + impoverishment" or, "they flew the planes into the twin towers bc of united states support for israel and military bases in saudi arabia" or "they conduct terror attacks because of settlements in the western bank." You've probably heard many examples of this - basically a cause is assigned to a particular condemned action. Now when you use this trope, you tend to say (to disavow condoning the action): "I'm not justifying [attack/murder/whatever], I'm just explaining the context for it. But the distinction between contextualization and justified has never been properly unpacked for me. In a real rhetorical sense, what is the difference between a justification and a contextualization? Doesn't context provide justification?

Which is to say: If X caused Y (which is the contextualization assertion) how can you simultaneously assert that Y is independently worthy of condemnation and also that X is a cause for it? If X caused Y, then X is entirely to blame. Y is just the consequence. Justification is inherently packed in. Now you could argue that X provides a space for Y to occur in, but that Y is independently caused. But lots of things provide spaces for other things to happen in and you wouldn't say that have any culpability at all in those things happening. For instance, packed subways can give cover for perverts to rub themselves on victims, but packed subways have no culpability for that action. If you said, "let's understand why this person was victimized -- it was because the subways were allowed to become packed," people would rightly protest because we understand that action Y has to be individually fueled and context X cannot explain it. However with this hot topic political discussions, we do talk in this way. We simultaneously try to assert that X can explain Y, but that Y is also at fault on its own merits. How do we reconcile this (apparent?) rhetorical paradox?

depends on who's making the rhetorical move - at its basest, this argument totally is "X caused Y" and the "i'm not justifying" is made in bad faith. but i think most people don't believe in a hard causality of human action. in that case, the argument is closer to "without X, no Y, but X is not sufficient cause" i.e. the arguer is suggesting that altho moral culpability resides in the perpetrators of Y that culpability is diminished, not disappeared, by event X. and this applies in lots of legal areas i think, when we talk about "mitigating circumstances". those circumstances tend not to excuse a crime but to diminish the severity of punishment because they claim a partiallly causal trigger.

(in yr subway argument nobody sensibly wd claim that conditions which allowed the crime to take place where also partially causative)

(incidentally i think i do believe in hard causality but i have no choice)

It's interesting bc the claim X caused Y is never accompanied by the explicit claim that Y's culpability is diminished, and in fact I will often see that rhetorical move made w/ the simultaneous claim that Y's culpability is in no way diminished, which, I think you're agreeing, is paradoxical.

My philo friend I'm talking to says that the question is the divisibility of explicability and excusability and is inherent in the question of PSR. So for Spinoza where you could reconstruct everything if you understood all the causes, there is no divisibility at all between them but for, say, Kant where there's a moment of choice, that can divide them in that moment.

causality is tricky here- I don't get that it's a X caused Y claim exactly, it seems more like it's a "without which, not" claim, a counterfactual move: if the US didn't have a military presence in Saudia Arabia, then the militants wouldn't have been so pissed off and risen up in anger about this, etc. What is hard is that all the agents in the scenario that we do live in are in the world where there was an X, so talking about those actors but subtracting the supposedly necessary but insufficient factor forces us to mutate our agents into a-US-that-didn't-militarize and Saudi-youth-who-weren't-pissed-off etc. and we don't have those ready to hand

But here we would need to unpack what we mean by cause anyway. You could talk about material, formal, final and efficient causes ala Aristotle if you wanted to get technical about it. The "guilty party" is the efficient cause, and the people bringing up the backstory are selling a retributive story about preceding events as the final cause, from which it sounds like you just demur.

To be clear, I'm not really making a claim about whether a final cause can be held responsible or not. I'm just asking whether it's paradoxical to both evoke the final cause and assert that that has no affect on the actor's culpability here and now. For example, isn't it paradoxical to say that 1. US actions in Saudi Arabia caused Osama Bin Ladin's attack on the World Trade Center and 2. OSL is entirely culpable for those actions?

I guess the trouble is that the word "entirely" would suggest that causality could inhere in a way that, in Aristotle's account, it can't, because lots of different conditions have to be met in order for an action to be able to occur, and nobody could be "entirely" responsible for the state of affairs in which one thing causes another in such a way, so the splitting of responsibility between the material or substantial conditions and the efficient conditions is such that "entirely" isn't going to be technically possible within the frame of this theory- maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"? I'm no Aristotle expert here, by the way, just a fan. As far as ethics goes, you can be responsible enough, but "entirely" loses some force when it really is short hard for "responsible enough to be described as the primary/principal actor or agent".

I think there is a difference between motivation and justification. We could take a hypothetical situation where 4 people, A,B,C, and D, are all starving. A goes to his kitchen and makes a sandwich, B sells his labour and buys a sandwich, C steals a sandwich, and D kills someone and takes their sandwich. In all cases are entitled to say, when asked to explain their actions, that 'they were starving'. But their levels of justification is different. And I think we would tend to think C was more justified than, say, E, who stole a sandwich from B just because he wanted to watch B starve. So here the 'X' stays the same but the 'Y' that results is different.

It's the formulation X caused Y that causes the problem. Hunger didn't 'cause' D to kill someone, but it motivated the act. Israel and the USA didn't 'cause' the 9-11 hijackers to do what they did, but they seem to have motivated their actions. So Y can be worthy of condemnation, and be motivated by X, without the strict x causes y formulation. Assuming we believe that what motivates an act goes some way towards justifying it then people are entitled to use background information to alter the justifiability of an action.

In fact, to use the 9-11 example, we can imagine motivations which radically alter the justifiability of the act. So in the X caused Y formulation, the nature of X shifts the nature of the act. To jump into irritating hypothetical mode: If Bin Ladin had a nuclear weapon in NY, and threatened to detonate it if the attackers did not carry out their mission (and, for some reason, they had good reason to trust him), then you might conceivably consider the attacks to be moral. If the situation in X caused Y is a women killing her husband, then it makes a great deal of difference if she did it for his life insurance or to protect herself from her husbands violent rages. The action could still be wrong (i.e. if her husband lost his job and started drinking and she irrationally assumed that she was under threat because of greater spousal violence amongst alcoholics. X) but the nature of X does alter the moral nature of Y.

Basically, I could be one of those people who might say that people attack Israel because of the occupied territories (not to have a political discussion, and It's oversimplified), but I wouldn't like someone to say that the occupation 'explains' the attacks on Israel, nor that it justifies the attacks, but I could say that the occupation motivates the attacks.

I'm sure plenty of people do say X caused Y (no idea how much they mean it), but as far as agents go, I think 'X motivates Y' makes much more sense and clears some of this up.

Assuming I understand the problem at all, and I'm not sure I do.

trying to think of a situation where the X in this is really taken to be THE cause of Y rather than one of many causal factors of Y, but i dont think that is ever the case in these constructions

the other kinda tricksy thing here is that by getting into distinctions re:contextualization vs justification, we are stepping outside of str8 formal logic so that sort of question of rhetoric is a lot harder to engage i guess

also i have a O_O level sinus headache so i make no claims to making any sort of sense at all here so

xpost

at the risk of sinking myself further there also seems to be a missing intermediary step, sort of a X caused Y caused Z, where X is a situation, Y is a mental/physical state, Z is an action taken because of/thanks to that mental/physical state - in which case there could be other Y's (just to use 9/11 other Y's could be things as lofty as choice of faith and as pedestrian as able-bodied or capable of getting to NYC on said date) and X could be more truly causal in the intended way w/o the messy distinction between justified/contextual.

oh man i just reread that and confused myself, fucking cold medicine man

Haha, sleeping pills and alcohol for me. I would definitely watch a TV show where famous philosophers debate issues under various levels and kinds of intoxication. There could be a random drug machine, the audience could vote on who it gets administered to, etc. Would be cool.

could we say that context provides partial justification? I think several posters allude to that above.

like maybe rhetorically they're not treating the cause as a strictly binary proposition (all or nothing) but suggesting that it's just a factor among many. or am I missing the point here? (it's been a long day!)

maybe accounts of causality that grow out of a physics of matter or claims about action just aren't helpful if you're going to talk about "responsibility" in an ethical register rather than "causal"?

i think this is key here. a physical model of causality as related to human actions wd be based at a molecular level, i.e. the concept of causality in science is not the same as the concept of causality in ethics even tho they're often used in a fuzzy, interchangeable way. one is part of the debate re. determinism, and yet i don't feel that anybody making the assertion "action Y was caused by situation X" is ever really making the claim that the actors had no choice.

yeah I think that's right. and it's a good thing we don't treat ethics like physics, too.