Justice Lectures 7 and 8: Locke and the state of nature

Justice Lectures 7 and 8: Locke and the State of Nature
Locke’s idea that we choose to leave the state of nature by signing a social contract to submit to a majoritarian government is a powerful one, albeit ultimately flawed. There is no law in the state of nature. And there is no choice that you get to make about ruled by a government. You’re stuck with it.

As to the first point, the state of nature shows us that life is cruel, brutish, and short. Most organisms die without ever having offspring. Many organisms are killed directly by another organism. We, like all other living creatures, are in a struggle to survive. There is no law or morality or source of ethics in nature. Replicators, i.e., genes, are trying to propagate themselves, and will choose strategies that maximize their success.

Hopefully life in a governed society that provides for collective security and protection of private property and persecution of criminals is much more preferable than living in the state of nature where anyone can kill you or steal from you. This is a low threshold to require a government to meet. However, even if a person wishes he could be back in the state of nature—free from any government control—he can’t get there. He’s stuck. That’s just how it goes. There are some places where you can effectively rejoin the state of nature: Canada’s Northern Territories, Siberia, Somalia, to name a few. But those tend to be places you probably wouldn’t want to visit for very long.

The central question
This leads me to a deeper question, one that I would argue is the central question of political and ethical philosophy. On an issue-by-issue basis, political philosophy is trying to answer the question:

Is X justified? (1)

X may be many things: progressive taxation, military conscription, a ban on abortion laws, or an environmental protection law.

Note that (1) is a much harder question than some other related questions:

Does X occur in the real world? (2)
Is X something that you want? (3)

We would not want to use (2) or (3) to answer the question of (1).

As to (2), lots of terrible things occur in the real world. Dictators slaughter millions; people rape, steal, pillage; civilizations go extinct. Certainly we don’t want to use that as a criterion for our morality.

As to (3), this is also a question that will not suffice to answer question (1). There are lots of things that I want—more money for myself, or a high-speed train from my house to my work, or a grocery store right next to where I live—that are not generally justifiable.

Questions (2) and (3) can be answered with little disagreement. All we need is to look at the historical record, or ask a person what she wants to answer these. By contrast, we know that different people are going to disagree about the answer to (1). Maybe we’ll mostly agree how to answer (1) for some issues (slavery, murder, free expression). But there will certainly be others (gay marriage, abortion, rates of taxation) on which we will disagree. So we know that we will disagree on the question of (1).

But what about a deeper question. That is:

What standard do we use to answer question (N)? (A.N)

Question (A) is one level deeper than questions (1-3). Note that (A.2) (=check the historical record) and (A.3) (=ask the person) have already been answered. Also, question (2) need not be limited to political questions, but may also include scientific questions such as “Does time progress slower for a moving body?” or “Does a proton consist of constituent particles?” The standard for answering these questions is also definitive: it is experiment.

By contrast, there are many possible answers to (A.1): utilitarianism, libertarianism, contractualism, religious code, etc. Even if we can’t agree on the answer to (1), maybe we could agree on the answer to question (A.1). For example, maybe we could all agree that utilitarian principles are the prime standard for justification, even if we can’t agree whether gay marriage would satisfy the utilitarian standard.

However, we know that in fact, people disagree on the answer to (A.1). So let’s try to find consensus by going one step deeper:

How do we choose the standard (A.1) for answering questions of justice? (I.A.1)

Here we still fail to find common agreement. There is no conclusive answer to (I.A.1). There is no standard for evaluation in political philosophy the way there is in science (i.e., experiment). We will at times agree about some questions of justice (1), but when we disagree, we will approach them from different perspectives (A.1) and without any common criteria for evaluating those standards. In other words, we will spend a lot of time arguing with each other without any final arbiter like an experiment to answer the question. This all results from the fact that nature on its own is devoid of morality. There is no law in nature; all laws are man-made. Since we invent our own laws, different people will come up with different laws. There is no absolute way to determine which standard for evaluating laws is superior to another.

I still think there is a lot of value in looking at different political philosophies, i.e., answers to (A.1). From my limited study of these different political philosophies, my view is that utility (i.e., the quality of life of sentient beings) is the fundamental quantity that we care about and want to maximize. There are many different ways of doing this (libertarianism, rule-based utilitarianism, contractualism, etc.), all of which hold some good ideas, but rule-based utilitarianism is the one that is most straightforward and persuasive. Although I am pretty firmly committed to this view, there is no way that I can prove that I am right. I can give lots of reasons for my view, but they may not be persuasive to anyone.

Without any gold standard for judgment (like experiment)—i.e., since there is no commonly accepted answer to (I.A.1)—we will never be able to resolve the question of (A.1) (or of (1) for that matter). The central project of political philosophy ultimately leads to a dead end. We can still use different political frameworks to try to argue for one approach or another, but ultimately they may prove to be unsuccessful.

An alternative approach to political philosophy
There is an alternative approach to political philosophy that may be fruitful to explore. That is to answer the following question:

What is the most persuasive way to convince free and reasonable people to change their position on question (1)? (B.1)

[Note that I require “reasonable people” because I want to exclude the possibility of brainwash or any means of coercion. I can make you believe almost anything by putting a gun to your head, or by raising you in a cult from a young age.]

Now, we may disagree about the answers to (B.1), but we will very likely agree on at least some of the answers for the standard for evaluating (B.1):

What standard can evaluate the most persuasive way to convince free and reasonable people to change their position on question (1)? (I.B.1)

One answer to (I.B.1) would be to do focus groups and try several persuasive approaches and see which one changes the most people’s minds. We may imagine other ways of testing various methods of persuasion. The standard for evaluating these methods should be relatively uncontroversial.

So now let us focus on finding the answer to (B.N). Though I have no experimental data to back it up, my hunch is that one of the leading contenders will be Rawls’s original position. It is one of the most powerful ways of stimulating empathy that I know of. Furthermore, it is asymmetric. The original position rarely persuades people to be more closed-minded or intolerant. For example, many free and reasonable people changed their minds with respect to segregated schools and bans on interracial marriage in the course of a few decades. People can be persuaded to be more open-minded and more accepting of differences, but rarely can they be persuaded to go the other way.

So my two hypotheses are that Rawls’s original position would be the most effective technique to change people’s view of an issue, and that it would be more effective in moving them toward the superior view (which out of laziness I define to be my own personal view) than in the other direction. For example, the OP might have convinced some whites in South Africa to advocate an end of apartheid, or some Israeli’s to advocate a two-state solution, or some white Southerners to advocate an end to segregation. However, I don’t think that the OP would convince many of those people to change their views in the opposite direction.

I don’t want to advocate an end to debates over the answer to (A.1), but I just want to highlight that without a firm criterion from (I.A.1), there is no final standard in those debates. That is not to say that all views are equally valid; it’s just that I can only demonstrate that my view is superior once you and I have accepted a common (or at least overlapping) standard for justice, and until we do that then we will argue across each other.

By contrast, the question (B.1) of how to persuade people to change their views is one that can be empirically tested. So that may lead to more productive discussion and debate.