Jehu on
desacralizing. Vallier @ BHL on objective vs. subjective
justification for authority. I think they go nicely together. As a libertarian, I love that the reactionaries are on my side, in desacralizing instruments of authority. I hope they don't realize they won't be able to bring them back if they've ever got power...and what they're ultimately doing is desacralizing (government) authority itself. But, sign me up for desacralizing authority in general, and government authority in particular. I don't think Vallier's objective justification for authority is epistemically sound.
And besides, I think that Vallier is playing fast and loose with the definition of obey around contractualists. If I make a contract, and I know that...
- my reputation is on the line, and
- there are enforcement mechanisms built into the contract/society,
- the contract has penalty clauses, and
- the contract has (negative) consequences if I continue to follow it....
...then I don't see where obedience enters the picture at all. Prudence enters the picture...and if a+b+c+d nets out negative...I should bail on the contract. Of course, in small communities I probably underestimate the costs of (a), given my wimpy little monkeybrain, and self-serving-bias...but in anonymous societies I may overstate the extent to which (a) matters.
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29 comments:
Your equation shows how little you understand how economic interactions work in society, and what assumptions underly them.
a) my reputation is on the line,
b) there are enforcement mechanisms built into the contract/society,
c) the contract has penalty clauses, and
d) contract has (negative) consequences if I continue to follow it....
A) There are ways around reputation risk in large societies, you already understand this. Out monkeybrains are not set up to function in the world we've built.
B) "Enforcement mechanisms built into society" is a strange phrase for a libertarian. Anyway, what if the contract breaker controls the enforcement mechanisms, or can more easily manipulate them.
C&D) No contract can cover any and all situations. Penalty clauses will be insufficient for fairness, especially when there are asymetries between the parties. Contract rely on an immense reserve of implied fairness and goodwill that you simply wish away. Libertarians shit on the social trust necessary for economic transactions, and want to tear down every institution that acknowledges there is an implicit side to every explicit contract that needs to be enforced.
Anon,
You consider a very limited point of view. You have assumed 30 different personal issues that weren't discussed in my initial phrasing into the discussion. Please remove your assumptions.
If I have a contract to deliver brownies to the Fukushima power plant every Monday...and there's a meltdown at the plant...what should I do?
I should break the f'ing contract, and pay the penalty that's written into the contract. Full stop.
Contract is not a claim that you have to suicide...it's an agreement about behavior in the assumed future, which is uncertain at some level. The agreement should contain the expected costs of violation...if I break the contract, I should reimburse you (hopefully written into the contract) the (rough) costs to you of my failing to deliver. I should not suffer $3M of costs, in order to fulfill a contract that has a benefit to you of $300. If my breaking a contract has a cost to you of $500, we should write into the contract a payment from me to you of $600 if I fail to deliver.
I am steamed right now, because you used your lack of context to accuse me of lack of understanding. So I'll stop.
Also, Anon,
I personally work (and have worked for almost my entire working life) as a independent in a small industry, where my reputation holds my entire present and future income stream.
I do what I say I'll do...in a contract free sense, with handshake agreements over the phone. 75+% of the time, I operate thoroughly without contract, and do what I said, when I said, how I said, or better. Word, bond, etc.
I would argue that I have a better direct experience of the value of contract, and keeping your word than do any non-self-employed around.
Aretae,
Let me give you a simple example from my own life.
We have an IPO. I do research on the company in question. I find that there are accounting irregularities, I suspect fraud. I tell me boss. He says fuck it, just talk up the stock and hide that issue. If we get these peoples money it doesn't matter.
I could go into why there is no good feedback mechanism to punish us for committing fraud here if you want, but suffice it to say there isn't. We can committ fraud with impunity, with almost no effect on our ability to do business going forward. I saw it time and time again. This is the way interactions between large organizations often work. They are loaded with asymetric information, principle agent problems, barriers to entry, inherit inefficiencies, etc.
I just don't believe in contracts and feedback mechanisms the way you do. They are so easy to game, on massive scales, over and over again for all to see. There really are genuine market inefficies out there.
The firm in question is now wildly regarded as evil and out to get its clients, and its business INCREASED. They've been doing this shit for 100+ years now. The world you describe is so far away from the world I've experienced its like being on two different planets.
Aretae,
There seems to be almost a law of conservation of sacral authority. As a reactionary, I'd prefer that this scarce resource be applied to institutions and concepts that are actually worthy of it.
Jehu,
Interesting line. I model respect for authority roughly as a single quantity that rises and falls, like the tide...with institutions as the figurative boats.
Anon,
That's half a picture. Here's a different side:
Jose makes a deal with the bank to pay for his new home. He's assured that it's going to be easy to handle, and he'll make money on the deal because house prices have been going up for 30 years now...they won't stop (which the seller and lender both honestly believe). Jose isn't smart enough to understand risk well, and ends up trusting the bank officer, who delivers the standard contract.
3 years later, Jose owes $300K on a house that's worth $120K.
Follow the contract? Or don't? As far as I can tell, following the contract is not in general, the best choice here. And any time someone tries to disagree with my line (a)-(d) above...it ends up pushing Jose in the wrong direction.
You can't reduce the issue you're trying to talk about to one of contract.
We left-libertarians don't disagree with you much. We just think that the only thing worse than how large legally protected organizations screw the populace is how the government screws the populace.
J & A, I find very intriguing the question of whether authority (or respect for it) is variable or fixed. Jehu says fixed; Aretae says variable.
My immediate reaction (after the inevitable, "define these terms"), is that authority is more or less constant. My intuition here works as follows:
(1) almost everything that everyone believes (99%?) is accepted via authority: that of parents initially, then teachers and preachers, then professors, and finally the dictats of "the government" and what "scientists" say in the media.
(2) a person generally does not believe obviously conflicting things, nor do people refrain from believing anything.
(3) the amount that the average person knows can vary, but not that much.
from (2) and (3):
(4) the average person's worldview-info is more or less constant in size
from (1) and (4)
(5) the total amount of worldview-info taken on authority is more or less constant.
(6) people tend to respect whatever authority they have taken beliefs from, and they disrespect other would-be authority which asserts otherwise
from (5) and (6),
(7) authority is more or less constant.
This gets back to the old Chesterton quote: When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything. Some authority will fill the void. It must, for no man can invent even a tiny fraction of what he believes from scratch.
Aretae,
I'm not advocating Jose stay in his mortgage. I'm advocating that the mortgage company should have been allowed to issue the mortgage, and to the extent they were allowed the ones that did should go to jail. But your not going to get either of those from just allowing people to enter into contracts and not interfering.
I'm just not sure what your thesis is here?
leonard,
I like your last quote. I don't think many libertarians understand that when you break down traditional authorities (church, family, community, etc) in the name of "freedom" it sends them running into the arms of some other authority (the state, the Cathedral, MSM fads, etc).
People want authority figures to lead them so badly.
leonard,
Also, I agree that faith in God is the only answer I've ever found to all this. Christian theology is an amazing thing, I really do think we are only beginning to see the results of God being dead on our society. People underestimate just how much society has come from faith.
Anon1,
My thesis was simply that one cannot explain contract-libertarianism as a case of obedience. In the case of individuals...contracts obedience is properly evaluated across the 4 aspects I just showed.
Jehu, Leonard,
The "constant authority" thing appears to make sense...but then I push it against real world tests...and...I don't see it holding up fabulously. I'm watching situations like the Greeks, though...and I'd be hard pressed to identify ANY authority that they trust. Ditto the american Frontiersman. Authority per se is the issue...and what is suspect.
Leonard 2, Anon,
At a deep level, I am primarily an educator and an epistemologist. I care about truth, and methods for knowing truth, and methods for learning.
The problem with God is that it's epistemologically unjustifiable. And besides that...it basically devolves (see: Europe 400-1400, Aztecs, etc.) into trust in God's spokesman, whether or not that spokesman has any connection to some God or not.
That model sucks for iterativity growth of learning. The model that appears to work is the disintermediated God model of semi-modern anti-catholic protestantism...which boils down to (as a rationalist): listen to your subconscious, with all it's wisdom and neuroses.
I will agree that the needle is very difficult to thread. I ahve personal experience watching "rationalist" communities fail epistemologically. But that isn't necessarily impossible...just we haven't found it yet.
For at least some people, the correct approach is to abandon the model that asserts the existence of truth...recognize that truth itself is a term primarily used to trick folks...and instead play a different ballgame -- see my epistemological explorations.
However, I'm not sure that most 2-3 sigma folks can play in that space... But it's so contrary the goals of authority that I don't know that we should assert that we can't either.
Anon,
Also important on Mortgage companies...fundamentally, they didn't know. Hindsight is 20/40, but foresight is a bitch. The mortgage company, saying the same exact thing in 2002 would have made a big bundle of money for Jose, and themselves, and EVERYONE would have walked away happy. Jail them for that? Hindsight bias...completely unreasonable.
Aretae (going in reverse order here),
I completely buy into the idea that Joe Schmoe the mortgage broker cog may not be able to put the pieces togethor. But plenty of big players committed plenty of what we would consider fraud. I was there. I saw it. People knew what was going on and did it anyway. Its not all hindsight bias, there is plenty of real wrongdoing going unpunished.
Aretae,
I don't really think this is the forum to get theological, or at least I'm not in the mood at the moment and it would take way to much reference material.
As for whether it takes a true 4 sigma to get atheism, I think we ought to just drop that. Plenty of really smart folks have believed in God. The worlds smartest man believes in God:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
Let's just drop appeals to authority (in our authority discussion nontheless). They are vulgar.
Nony, you write that "People want authority figures to lead them so badly", and that is true. It is true in both senses of the word "want". I have the feeling you meant mere "desire", and that is quite true. But I would also suggest the truth of "need". People need authority because there is so very much to know; this is almost as true of a simple hunter-gatherer society as it is of our highly complex socio-capitalism.
This is something that libertarians do tend to have a hard time understanding: that no man constructs himself. A man is a boy before a man, and the boy is constructed by his genes and the memes he mostly receives passively. The man may be able to learn many things on his own, but if his mind may be compared to a sponge in soaking up the water of knowledge, the mind of a child is something like storm drain.
BTW I have no faith in God, so I think you misread me on that. I appreciate many theists, and I have no atheistic animus towards God as too many do. And there are times when I would like to be a believer because it would nice to have something positive and transcendent to root philosophy in. But I was raised as I was, atheistically -- there's authority again.
Anon,
1. I wasn't making an appeal to authority. I was making a reference to the dozens of pages on this blog that I've written over the past 4 years making that argument. One cannot, starting from sane epistemology, reach God in a form that is recognizeable to Theists. Only path to God is to (a) choose the conclusion, or (b) bail on rational epistemology.
2. Roughly...as soon as you even ask the questions of Descartes and Hume, it's over.
3. Intelligence is a tool for reaching the conclusions you want to reach...not a tool for discovering truth. IQ has no effect on finding reasons contrary to what you already believe. Smartest guy? Irrelevant. Let's talk epistemology instead. How do you decide how strongly (probably the most important point in epistemology -- the question is NEVER whether to believe, it's always what you're willing to bet on it) to believe something? Consider the question seriously, and game over.
Leonard,
I was raised with such a child's version of religion that I abandoned early I might as well have been raised aethiestically. However, it's never to late to keep evolving your thinking. There are lots of authors that come from an aetheistic approach because they were converts themselves.
If you want a nice not to taxing easing in to the idea, I recommend some of C.S. Lewis's work.
Aretae,
Not prepared to read four years of blog posts today. Will have to table discussion for some time.
Anon,
I've read CS Lewis. Unimpressive epistemology. But beautiful writing.
Aretae,
Meh, the guys gotta start somewhere. Lewis says as much in his work that its only a stepping stone and knows his own limitations.
Aretae,
History would suggest that the Greeks will have a military government soon enough---how much it shares with their existing military apparatus is an open question. Said government will have plenty of authority 10 years or so down the line. If they're lucky, they'll get a Franco.
Anon,
My primary interests, as before, are epistemology and education. How do brains work, how do minds acquire justified belief? That question is hard. It's also boot-strappable from nothing, given the structure of the human mind.
If you stop thinking somewhere along the way...you can make some reasonable social-epistemological arguments for belief in God. Indeed, I've made them myself. The only folks I've seen making serious pro-God intellectual arguments these days are running Aristotelian/Thomistic essentialist epistemology, which is nuts in the face of Descartes and Hume (and then Wittgenstein, etc.).
Jehu,
Then maybe we're talking the wrong topic. Legitimacy?
The soviets had lots of authority. They had relatively little (according to my Russian visits) legitimacy...were recognized largely as thugs...but you should do what they say or they'll shoot you.
I'm concerned with mindspace, and getting folks to recognize that governments are thugs, full stop. You should treat them with all the reverence you treat your nearest street gang...worthy of avoidance, but never of respect.
Aretae, I think I am using "authority" more broadly than you. You seem to be looking for some existing intellectual authority, like a person or press or government or whatever that Greeks trust. That, I have no information on (I don't know what Greeks think). But I think it misses the point somewhat.
My point is even in the absence of voices we can hear telling them what to do, that Greeks continue to act. Stuff still happens; life goes on. That people continue to do things shows that they are still believing in something -- i.e. that they'll get paid (Euros) if they work, and that the Euro will continue to hold value. Well, why do they think that? The Euro has authority. So perhaps we might say that Greeks still believe in the German productivity, or something like that. Ultimately, most action gets back to authority of some kind, even if it is ancient parental authority of people who are now long dead.
Leonard,
You may use "believe" differently as well. I don't know what the Greeks believe about the future, but the Greeks don't appear to have any other choices.
Aretae, Leonard,
The Greeks will experience a complete collapse of confidence in their existing system, probably go through a period of serious anarchy (i.e. worse than now), and come out the other end with a military government. I suspect that most Greeks believe this as well.
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