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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
That reads really Hobbesian. Are you intending to support a small Leviathan? (Man are we off topic at this point…) I’m not sure Locke would cop to a natural right not to incriminate yourself (he might consider it merely prophylactic) but if he did, I can’t imagine he would say that the right’s content was determined by legislature. How the legislature was going to protect that right, yes -determined by the legislature. But not the content of the right itself. Oh dear, Substantive Due Process Ahoy!
I think that’s where custom comes in. I think we all rightfully envision an armature or skeleton which all just allocations of rights should share. It is reasonable for custom to flesh the skeleton out somewhat differently, though. For example, the details of water rights need not be the same in desert regions as they are in rainy regions. It is reasonable for desert people and non-desert people to have different customs regarding water, and reasonable for the law to reflect these customs. Now, we want equitable customs and equitable law, and we can think of many ways for customs and laws to fail to be equitable. But reasonably equitable water customs in a desert really could differ from reasonably equitable water customs in a non-desert, without either custom being more unjust than the other.
The job of law is to discover and reflect equitable customs, not create equitable customs. But while equitable customs have a lot in common, they needn’t be identical from one group of people to another, so it makes sense that equitable law would also discover these differences.
Because copyrights protect only a particular expression of an idea, and patents protect an idea in many expressions, copyrights are a narrower, better-defined right than patents are. That leads to a cogent argument for copyrights lasting somewhat longer than patents. But how much longer? Perpetual copyrights seem absurd. 100 years also sounds too long to most people. We don’t need to have an optimum precisely identified to intuit that some lengths of time are unreasonable.
Now, some would argue that IP rights shouldn’t exist at all, or that because patents protect useful creativity and copyrights only useless creativity, that copyright should be shorter than patents (or that only patents but not copyrights should exist). I believe there are sound arguments against these claims, even if I don’t claim to know the optimal time periods, and even if I believe that the optimal time periods might depend somewhat on customs and technology. I think there’s a skeleton under IP practices that all reasonable people could (or should) agree to. But how IP practices are fleshed out could differ without the difference screaming “injustice!” at me.
I don’t think that a legislature could have created the institution of marriage. I do think that the state gets to define it to include and exclude pairings from the category. SSM goes beyond the bounds of older definitions, although it did not go further than mainstream theological, political, and legal opinion in the US at the time that Kennedy mistakenly endorsed it. This isn’t to say that there was a consensus in support of it, but there was certainly no strong consensus against it. Again, I don’t think that Kennedy was correct, but simply claiming that he was axiomatically wrong appears to me to assume a clearer case that he was wrong than exists. Because there was genuine disagreement on the correct position as a matter of theoretical rights, some consequentialist analysis seems like a meaningful part of the analysis.
I feel like we’re on the same page in this line; Kennedy decided the case wrongly, but it was not wrong of him to address the case. In the case where they actually decided whether they should keep out, Hollingsworth v. Perry, Kennedy argued that the Court should have taken the case (restoring prop. 8), and I suspect that you agree with him.
I agree that there’s a core meaning that is not susceptible to legitimate government interference; some kind of murder is wrong, for example. How broad or narrow the definitions are, though, seems like an area where the legislature has considerable flexibility; prosecutors, similarly, have a good deal of discretion. My recollection is that at least some of the Founders thought that a right against tortured confessions being used in court was a fundamental right, but I’m not wedded to that idea being theirs.
As of this afternoon, I got BIG travel responsibilities to work on. (I’m returning to the foreign planet I came from. Could ya’ll tell I wasn’t from around here?)
If I have any sense, I’ll try to word towards disengagement from this and other threads.
But one comment: There’s a difference between saying “If you want to find out what our rights are you have to find out from the government” and saying “Our rights aren’t empty platitudes, but they have practical content, and if you want to find out what are the practical content is it’s helpful to consult legal precedent, statutory law, the Constitution, Locke, Blackstone, English history, etc.”
I thought Mr. of England was saying the latter. That’s not so Hobbesian.
This. To put it another way, I think that we should treat rights like Burke, not Paine. This isn’t year zero and we ought not to generally derive our understanding of fundamental rights in a purely abstract manner.
This is why I asked the question. I suspected James was being imprecise, but wanted to be sure.
I’m only interested in the ones that are pet projects of the left.
Silly example.
No reversal here.
Not due to the Republicans help in legislation. But, reality set in. And now the government unions are growing and in a place that is worse.
Debt.
No. Don’t do anything stupid. But, later make it clear that it was brought about by the left’s chicanery and it needs to be put through the legislative process. But, the DOMA experience shows us they don’t have the courage to do this kind of hard work. They have already accepted it whole hog and probably weren’t against it to begin with.
How about abortion? It won’t be the present slate of Republicans who will reverse this. They can’t and won’t and don’t want to.
Why is it silly? The bipartisan embrace of market economics seems like a pretty big deal to me. Even Sanders thinks that most people should work in the private sector, a consensus that was not always nearly so strong.
I’m not sure I follow. Do you think that we never had one or that we have one now?
I don’t know if you’re intending to give Elaine Chao all the credit (she was pretty wonderful) but legislatures have helped, too.
Could you expand on that?
I’m not sure I follow. Are you saying that Republicans in the states aren’t keen to pass pro-life laws, that Trump isn’t keen to nominate pro-life judges, or that you feel like Republicans in Congress should pass an outright Federal abortion ban?
I feel like we’re departing from each other at a pretty early stage, since the abortion numbers look to me like Republicans have reversed Democratic gains; we’re down to pre-Roe numbers. Still, I’m game; what is it that you think you’re not getting?
Respectfully, KC, that is just mistaken. The question is whether (and from where) the government (not “the Court”) gets the authority to decide whether a marriage is between one man and one woman. To be sure, once you answer that question in the affirmative, there are procedural questions about which branch of government gets to weigh in, and when. But those procedural aspects do not seem to be the basis for your objection.
I think it would be helpful to keep in mind that Obergefell decided one thing and only one thing: That statutes by which the government claimed to decide that marriage was between one man and one woman were unconstitutional. You have said repeatedly that “the Court” had no authority to define marriage. But it was not the Court that tried to define marriage; it was the legislature (or, in some cases, the voters). The Court only said that if the government was going to define marriage, it had to do so without discriminating against certain people.
That is not to say that there aren’t good arguments against what the Court did. I happen to oppose what the Court did, although for reasons very different from yours. But the reason that you have given here (several times) does not withstand logical examination.
Auggie, I don’t read Locke the same way you do, but far be it from me to argue the meaning of any particular philosopher with you. Personally, I have always understood Locke’s “state of nature” as being a hypothetical thought experiment, rather than a historical narrative. In the hypothetical thought experiment, the right of property arose as soon as the first man (or perhaps even animal) went out and gathered some nuts and berries. Long before there was, or could have been, any “institution” of property, that fellow considered those particular nuts and berries to be “his” and was morally entitled to assert a right to ownership of the fruits of his labor.
On the other hand, I have never felt the need to justify the concept of property rights in such terms. I am perfectly happy with the Founders’ axiom that it is self-evident that all men have certain rights, and that among these are property. You may choose to believe that men are endowed with these rights by their creator, or by natural law, or by (my preference) the outcome of a utilitarian calculus, but whatever their derivation, it is irrelevant whether these rights are recognized as an “institution,” and it is equally irrelevant how that institution relates (causally or temporally) to whatever government is in power. Even if there were only two people in the world, with no government and no institutions, the guy who went out and gathered the nuts would “own” them.
Well, it is a thought experiment. (But he says it’s an ongoing reality, if I recall, in America and in certain circumstances. I think he thinks it’s also a historical event, but doesn’t hang any of his doctrines on that.)
Actually, as soon as I read that, I instantly regretted restricting myself to The Court. Anthony Kennedy just pisses me off that much, I guess.
It may be worth remembering that it wasn’t just Justice Kennedy. Every federal circuit court except one reached the same conclusion, and if I’m not mistaken even a majority of Republican-appointed federal judges who considered the issue also reached that conclusion.
While looking over this thread occasionally a homunculus in my brain has told me that @jamesofengland is probably right, and I’m probably wrong.
A second homunculus has occasionally told me that James of England is obviously wrong, and I’m right.
A third has piped in from time to time to ask, “Wait, what are we disagreeing with him over anyway?”
Sometimes these big ideas about epistemology get confusing, and communication gets hard. But a lot of what we’re talking about seems to devolve to this topic: What is the criterion for saying “Yeah, we can know that about the economy” or “Yeah, we can know that about families”?
The criterion, presumably, will have something to do with the complexity of the things we’re trying to know.
Were I not very tired and facing some upcoming travel, I think I’d like to track down the criteria we have in mind to see how much we really disagree–approaching the criterion Chisholm’s way by looking at particular cases. E.g., what do James and I think we can know about a few sample statements concerning marriage, divorce, taxes, health insurance, and so on?
Alas, I am too tired. And Mrs. Augustine and I have daunting offline responsibilities.
So tired, in fact, that a fourth homunculs says, “Talk about something less serious! It’s time to launch the Star Trek vs. Star Wars thread!”
There’s really no contest is there? Star Trek at its worst is infinitely preferable to Star Wars at its best.
It is known.
-Continued, only a Thatcher not a Reagan-
Good heavens, no. The one where Paris breaks the warp barrier and mutates into a lizard or whatever . . . better than Empire Strikes Back?
I hope to launch that new thread someday. We should have a big fight over it then. If it comes up anywhere else in the meantime, feel free to tag me!
The federal government won’t even give the states succor with their simplest legislation. The states get all the credit here.
Regarding a ban, why go to extremes immediately.
Being down to pre-Roe numbers isn’t because of actions by the congress. It’s because of the revulsion that people have been feeling and also the studies that show how many women have been psychologically damaged by being talked into abortions.
My position is that the top tier of Republicans are the problem with the party. Trump and the tea parties taught them very little. They still think they know everything. They are second tier people who think because they revere Reagan that they are part of his team. Not many are, I’m afraid.
James, do you think Trump is an anomaly or a sign of a badly run party? That will tell why we see things differently. I like that you defend the party and there are some real gains but they aren’t long lasting and they aren’t from a position of strength. Newt thinks the country is a 70-30 right of center country and that the left has gamed the system against us. I think — as you know — that the media is the single biggest problem in the country. We are told by the GOP elites not to fight the media — my question is why do they refuse to formulate a way to fight both enemies in the field?