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Where Can We Find Knowledge?
During one of Ricochet’s big Same Sex Marriage debates during the run-up to Obergefell, @jamesofengland said this:
I think I’ve been clear that I don’t share Augustine’s confidence in specific bad outcomes […] I tend to think of Burke and Hayek as telling basically the same story, a story that I’ve been boringly obsessive about for decades now (before law, I took theology up to a Master’s degree, spending quite a lot of that time dealing with Derrida and Pseudodionysus, who I also believe to be in the same epistemically humble tradition). […] It’d be good to shift the conversation in that direction, because if the subject isn’t [Same Sex Marriage], but Hayek, I’ll have [another Ricochet gentleman] on my side, along with [a Ricochet lady] and [a third Ricochet gentleman]. I don’t know how much Augustine really backs that side, but I think [another Ricochet lady] has a higher epistemology (a sense that we can know more about the world than Hayek thought), meaning that we could pretty completely reshuffle the teams.
Ever since then, I’ve wanted to start a conversation on the subject. Initially, I wanted to write a long essay explaining and defending my own views, but, frankly, I don’t want to put much time into it. Maybe it’ll be a better conversation anyway if I keep it short! So short it is.
My View
Roughly, my view is that it’s easier to know things about family and the structure of human society than it is to know about economic productivity and the structure of the economy.
In other words, it makes sense to be a Hayekian on macroeconomics, but something else (a Thomist or Augustinian, perhaps) on family and community and friendship. And perhaps a third thing (say, a Calvinist or a Pseudodionysian) on theology, and an as-yet-unnamed thing on something else.
One Reason It Matters
This is one of the reasons I (and, no doubt, others) are SoCons and FiCons but not exactly libertarians: We fear action taken on the inevitable human ignorance of economic matters even as we also fear inaction on social matters where knowledge is possible.
Explanation
I’m not giving a proper argument and haven’t properly thought this through, so I’ll offer just this brief explanation in hopes of starting a conversation from which proper arguments may emerge.
Let’s contrast the production of a human and of a pencil. (Any old widget would do, but let’s stick with the classics!) No individual knows how to make a pencil. But most people know how to make a baby. (And many who don’t . . . find out before the second trimester.)
Now expand this a bit. Pencils are one thing. The healthcare system of a -hundred-million-person country is another. At that level, the knowledge of how to achieve economic productivity moves even deeper into the realm of impossibility for the individual.
What about human relationships? Well, some relationships have an aspect that becomes more complex in the aggregate. (National networks of churches or of chess clubs, for example.) But some things don’t change a bit. For any particular pairing of citizens, how to make a baby is the same, no matter how big the economy gets. For any particular romantic pairing of citizens, things are pretty much the same, again, no matter how big the economy gets. The basics of parenthood aren’t changed by the size of the economy, though though how birthday presents are procured for the kids gets more complex, along with some other details. Friendship is basically the same in a big country, and the same things make it work, things like humility, respect, honesty, and forgiveness. (Internet friendships, if they are friendships at all, might be an exception here.)
I also tend to think individual knowledge in one sphere tends to get easier over time, the other harder. Long ago, the Torah told us “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and Aristotle noted that there is no right way to commit adultery. Even now, I suspect (I admit I haven’t done the homework), careful social science would only confirm that adultery causes a lot of harm. Not to mention fatherlessness and other social ills.
But the process by which a widget is made gets more complex every day. It’s getting harder all the time to know how to efficiently make one and accurately price it.
A Disclaimer or Two
I mentioned above that this has something to do with being a SoCon rather than a libertarian. And so it does. But there are a lot of other details to consider and I’m only addressing one of the fundamental ideas that many SoCon-FiCon types probably have lurking in their brains.
Some SoCon-FiCon types probably don’t have it lurking there at all. And, after you work out what social situations are worthy of governmental interest, you might still be a libertarian!
And after you work out whether things that do merit governmental interest merit at from the states or the feds, and whether they’re Constitutional or not, there’s a lot of room to be be a libertarian of one sort or another — or something similar — if you think that kind of economic knowledge is a delusion for the individual but other kinds of knowledge aren’t.
So, I’m talking about knowledge here: not attacking libertarianism or saying anything about same-sex marriage.
So I’ll stop the opening post now. Hope to hear from you in comments!
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Aristotle, in Rhetoric, says that something can be true in the general without being true in the particulars and still be considered true. I get the idea that James of England values precision at the expense of general truth.
Adultery, single parent homes, beatings… these are generally harmful. While the details of level of harm, recovery, and withall to deal with them is as varied as the individuals involved, the general is still true.
We can agree it is not beneficial for a child to sit in his own stool for a significant period of time without being bogged down by the details of diaper brands, cloth diapering, or elimination communication.
Your comment is duly noted and my thinking is thereby corrected. I did understand what you were saying about the family and managing the economy but I articulated that poorly.
So to develop this a bit further. If our knowledge of family life and social ethics can be quite firm than it would be just for society and societies institutions to act in accord with knowledge to encourage positive family formation and living and discourage malformation?
Do you then also think that if government, institutions and people in general know what is best that they then should act on that knowledge? Is in incumbent on the body politic to act on this knowledge? Would you say that acting on this knowledge is the moral thing to do?
So in social policy would you say that the best way forward is to aggressively support what we know to be true in general while showing great tolerance for the particular circumstances where the general good does not hold?
Because I think that is the heart of Conservative social policy. We can and do know what is best in general for families and children and since is the basic unit of society healthy families make a healthy wealthy society much easier to achieve. At the same time we should be very tolerant of particular circumstances that do not conform to these general truths.
I’ve read this a bit quickly, so I apologize if I’ve missed a comment that’s relevant to what I’m about to ask.
This isn’t the right comparison to make, is it?
I mean, it seems like the argument not-really-put-forward-but-begging-to-be is that “I don’t understand the economy, because it’s complicated, I can’t regulate it, but I understand a marriage, because it has two people and I’ve seen a bunch of them, so I can regulate society.”
Well, if you believe that, then what is the difference between that and saying “I can’t regulate society, because it’s complicated and I don’t understand it, but I can tell Smith and Jones whether their deal is fair because there are two people and I have seen enough deals between two people to know whether their deal should be allowed or not. So I can regulate the economy.”
Or to put it another way: isn’t the fallacy here that there is some magic transubstantiation of human behavior that happens when that behavior is “economic”? Behavior is what it is whether it is “economic” or not, so I don’t see how you can find yourself fit to regulate some but not all.
Exactly.
I see. And why should I have any cause to complain if my neighbor took my car? Ah, it’s because my relationship with my car is not a private relationship. No, rather property is an institution, which binds not only me, but everyone else. Therefore, government can and should regulate The Institution of Property. Not I, but Barrack Obama will decide how I use my car. As I said in the first place, nonsense.
Well, Coase and de Soto and the like might point out that it’s not the job of government to regulate the institution of property, but simply to recognize the institution. Property and marriage seem to be two institutions that civilized people gravitate toward in order to peacefully and happily arrange their affairs.
The fight over SSM seems to have been about whether marriage could be recognized as an institution if people of the same sex had government approval to call themselves married, with some claiming that such government approval would be an obfuscation rendering the institution unrecognizable, while others thought the institution of marriage would remain recognizable even if states did register same-sex couples as married. I don’t mean to reopen that fight here, just point out that “good law recognizes the not-obviously-evil ways in which humans wish to arrange their affairs anyhow” is a libertarian law-and-economics idea, and not, by itself, an excuse for government regulation.
We can’t always tell the difference between legal recognition and regulation, but there does seem to be a broad difference.
If this is about the place of government in legislating social policies, a small government should be interested in encouraging sound social behaviors with as little amount of government involvement as possible.
We can acknowledge a stable family unit is beneficial to society and place measures of incentive without forcing people into that behavior. From the theological point, God gave free will, who are we to remove it? If it harms them, let it. But to incentivize is not to legislate away alternatives. Since the AA comunity was brought up, even they acknowledge a stable family is good. However, the governmet incentivizes instability.
For the libertarian, a chaotic people demands more government. It is within the interest of small governments to encourage stability while the big government gains power from chaos.
oh, boy.
Yeah… I’m half-inclined to elaborate, and since I give these sorts of speeches in court every day, it might not be a big deal to have my views out on the internet.
No objections.
I don’t think we disagree there. Do you think I want to appoint a board of pastors to write the marriage laws? Heaven protect us from central planning authorities!
I want the people, using the democratic-republican process wisely given us by the Founders, to be able to make those decisions. If we disagree, I think it’s over the matters on which we think they ought to decide.
Yes, that would be a circular argument. Fortunately for KC, I don’t think he’s making it. I don’t think anyone is.
We marriage traditionalists don’t think marriage is “a legal and social covenant with the rest of society” because the government issues a marriage license. We think marriage is such a covenant quite independently of government involvement–prior to it, in fact.
I’m having trouble understanding how much of that was sarcasm.
But we may have a ghost of a chance of understanding each other here! Larry, do you think property is an institution independently of government involvement–that government protects property because property is a real institution, never vice versa?
And Locke! Yay for the philosopher-economists!
Hear, hear!
Indeed.
Indeed. Much like medical science. Broccoli is a good source of fiber (unless you’re allergic to it).
I do not concur. However, folks like him (and me) may appear to value precision over the truth when they’re just trying to be precise. (And, I suppose, they may accidentally sacrifice truth to precision from time to time.)
Sounds about right. That’s the general idea.
Yes, that’s the next step, it seems to me.
There are, of course, a zillion questions about what, in each case, is best done by people voting, by legislatures legislating, bureaucrats legislating, or judges judging; what’s best done by cities, States, or feds; what’s Constitutional; and what’s best done by institutions other than government.
That seems right on to me!
Right on.
I’m still wading through the comments, but allow me to drop a bomb regarding something in your OP. Burke, I believe, was a traditional sort of Christian. Hayek was not.
One of my favorite and simultaneously least-favorite things about “The Fatal Conceit” is Hayek’s use of the evolution analogy. Personally, I don’t believe in evolution. Not on a macro-scale, at any rate. I believe that man was created by God; and if I believe in God at all, it is hardly nonsense that I should find him capable of doing such a thing. I don’t have a solid opinion on the age of the earth, or on God’s methods… but I do not believe that man exists as the end result of a series of accidents, or that he is continually evolving, or that he ever was anything less than fully man.
Yet, in all of his amazingly insightful commentary about economics, Hayek flatly takes this for granted. In my opinion, he shows us that he is willing to break his own logic at times – or, perhaps, he simply doesn’t see the contradiction.
Something similar happens with conservatives (I won’t even mention liberals) when we find ourselves arguing on principle against certain things that liberals do, but then we are willing to toss that aside when we believe that conservatives might do the same thing better. That lies at the heart of the current debate over the 2016 election.
I don’t think so.
My only point is that, in principle, arguments that rely on knowledge of social and familial ethics don’t have the same knowledge problem as (Leftist-style) arguments that rely on knowledge of immeasurably complex macroeconomic activity.
It seems to me that the argument you describe would presume a much higher degree of knowledge than I alone could possess.
Maybe there is no difference. They’re actually both pretty terrible arguments, and I’m not making either.
Maybe we have a misunderstanding here. I’m not suggesting that I am fit to regulate anything. I’m suggesting that some knowledge of family and social ethics is possible, precisely because it lacks the immeasurable higher-level complexity of macroeconomic activity. (There’s plenty of lower-lever complexity, which James of England helpfully emphasized.)
That only means someone could be fit to promote in some way some principles of familial and social ethics.
There are worlds of differences between a pastor saying “We know adultery is harmful, so you should stop” and me saying, “Let me write the marriage laws because I’m a great ethicist!”
Someone could be fit to promote in some way some principles of familial and social ethics.
But there are a myriad possible combinations of someones, some ways, and some principles. I’m not arguing for any particular combination–hence the disclaimers in the opening post. (But maybe another day, and probably in another post; and it’s possible that I would support some combinations that involve more government involvement than you approve of.)
What a neat comment! Thanks!
Your last sentence references the big-government YayForTrump!ers, right? (Not the ReluctantTrumperBecauseEvenTheSeventeenthBestRepublicanIsBetterThanHillary types.)
Things were getting too boring with Trump so we decided to dredge up the SSM debate, huh?
Actually, my last comment refers to many things that seem to come from all sides. There are lots of arguments that we will point out as illogical when they’re used against us, but which prove to be tempting when they score a point for our side.
Or evolution, possibly. Maybe it’s for the best if some are willing to act as rodeo protection athletes.
If we can someone shoehorn Trump into this thread we might actually destroy the entire site.
Crap nevermind.
May I ask a question, SA, regarding your OP? I’ve skipped much of page 2, so I apologize if this has already been addressed.
As a Christian, I am inclined to agree with the basic premise behind what you say. The economy is unknowable, and we often think of the invisible hand – certainly, Hayek does a fantastic job of explaining the role of emergent order. We might say the same about morality, except that the invisible hand is made visible through direct biblical revelation. Many of us would claim to know God, in a sense.
But I’m not sure where else you’re headed with that argument. I would disagree with any assertion that this distinction renders it any more appropriate to have government intervention in matters of morality vs. matters of economics. The issue of government intervention does not lie exclusively with the fact that things are unknowable and therefore cannot be managed or planned. It is also a matter of scale; it is also a matter of liberty; it is a matter of trust; it is a matter of power. We willingly cede many of our freedoms when it comes to taxation, or laws, or even property rights, because we see that as the only means to ensure the greatest amount of liberty. But even with those things we can know, or those things we do know (here, of course, we might mention the fact that just because something is knowable, doesn’t mean everyone agrees)
(continued…) … I would still argue that it is improper to implement these things through the use of force, which, whether we like it or not, is the only avenue through which our government can act.
I think that with the SSM debate, I am far more likely to come down with the libertarians – it is not the role of government to implement societal change, even if it is a change that I agree with. I say the same about civil rights or any other sort of “social-justice” type issue. Many of them I disagree with, and that is the clincher. These are “wars” of ideas, and the government has no role in that.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are divorcing. Personally, I blame gay marriage.
I blame gravity, age, and the tendency to prove one’s morality by stockpiling children.
:) Didn’t you think it was clever how I slipped evolution into there? AND Trump?
ok – but I didn’t really open those things up for debate. The evolution thing is used only as an illustration of where Hayek seems to implement conflicting standards. That is true whether you believe in evolution or not (in fact, whether it is true is irrelevant). As for Trump, I started observing that same tendency long before Trump appeared. It is human nature, and hardly exclusive to any one group.