What Compassionate Conservatism Could Be

The old conservative ideology held that low taxes on the rich were essential for economic growth, the benefits would "trickle down" to help everyone, and private charity could step in to help should any of the "deserving poor" somehow be left by the wayside.  But trickle-down economics is now widely discredited, and the extraordinary levels of inequality found in the US are becoming harder to defend. One option for economic conservatives is to just change the subject: ramp up racial animus and other cultural tensions to distract from one's continued attempts to rework the economy in ways that serve only the wealthiest individuals.  That seems pretty evil to me, but it sadly seems to be the way that many are going these days.  Sad realities aside, though, I'm interested in whether there's logical space for a more intellectually and morally ambitious form of conservatism that could provide a worthwhile counterpoint to (e.g.) Elizabeth Warren's ambitious liberalism.

I think there could be, though it would look very different from what conservatives defend today.  I think there could be a worthwhile form of (genuinely) compassionate conservatism that began by appreciating liberal critiques of radical wealth inequality, and the need for redistributive taxation, but that responds by offering an alternative -- "small government" -- solution of what to do with the raised funds. Rather than tasking untrustworthy politicians with solving society's problems, and creating high-stakes political conflicts over the form taken by the big-government "solution", compassionate conservatives could decentralize public spending by disbursing philanthropic vouchers back to voters, who then each direct their own share of the public purse to whatever non-profit organization(s) they deemed best.

Philanthropy Vouchers and Public Debate: Political vs Civic Advocacy

It's interesting to compare the ways we talk and think about political vs non-political (civic/philanthropic or market) agents, advocacy, and organization.  Consider the common objection to Effective Altruism, that it allegedly "neglects the need for systemic change."  I've rebutted this objection before, but a different aspect of it that I want to focus on today is that the criticism seems to presuppose that only politics can be systemic.  But why assume that?

Universalizing Tactical Voting

I regularly come across two objections to tactical voting, i.e. voting for Lesser Evil rather than Good in hopes of defeating the Greater Evil candidate.  One objection is just the standard worry that individual votes lack instrumental value, debunked here.  More interestingly, some worry that tactical voting is positively problematic, morally speaking, on grounds of its putative non-universalizability.

On one version of the worry, tactical voting involves (something approaching) a contradiction in the will, insofar as even if those who most prefer Good constituted a majority, they could get stuck in the inferior equilibrium point of all (unnecessarily, and contrary to their collective preference) supporting Lesser Evil.  On another version of the worry, tactical voting involves (something like) a contradiction in conception, insofar as it involves responding to how others plan to vote, which might seem to depend upon those others voting non-tactically, i.e. not waiting to first learn how you plan to vote.

The Instrumental Value of One Vote

Over in this Leiter thread, some philosophers seem to be dismissing the instrumental value of voting (for Clinton over Trump) for misguided reasons:

(1) That a marginal vote is "astronomically unlikely to change the outcome."

This is not true,* at least for those who are able to vote in a swing state. According to Gelman, Silver and Edlin (p.325), the chance of a marginal vote altering the election outcome is as high as 1 in 10 million, depending on the state.  Given that the outcome will in turn affect hundreds of millions (or even billions) of people, voting for Clinton in a swing state arguably has significant expected value.

(2) That the system is not sensitive to a single vote, and anything close to even will be decided by the courts or the like.

The claim that insensitivity undermines marginal impact is generally fallacious.

Basic Needs and Basic Rights

Occasionally I see people being outraged about the idea of putting a market price on everyday water usage (see here for background on a perennial example involving Nestle).  The idea seems to be that since water is a basic need, so we should have a basic right to its free provision.  This seems a pretty bad inference in general -- food is also a basic need, after all, and it seems unlikely that its centralized provision would do better than current food markets.  The heart of the problem, I think, rests on a misunderstanding of the proper relation between basic needs and rights. (Well, that and economic illiteracy.)

Compare two alternatives:

(1) A direct right to the (free) provision of some good (e.g. water) for all.

(2) A right to an institutional framework that secures, as well as possible, reliable access for all to the good in question.

The Cosmopolitan Civilian Test for Proportionality in War

Jeff McMahan has a nice article clarifying the notion of 'proportionality' and applying it to the current Gaza conflict.

I just want to add a quick supplementary thought, which we might call the Cosmopolitan Civilian Test. Begin from the cosmopolitan idea that the moral status of an innocent civilian does not depend on their nationality. Alas, actual human beings have a psychological tendency towards various forms of nationalism and tribalism, counting some innocent people for more than others.  In particular, many responding to the current conflict seem relatively unconcerned by the Palestinian civilian casualties.  One obvious way to correct for this bias is to imagine that these killed civilians were not Palestianians, but some other nationality -- Israelis, say.

Hence the Cosmpolitan Civilian Test: Would these civilian casualties be considered "proportionate" if the civilians in question were of a different nationality?  Suppose Hamas somehow managed to use Israeli rather than Palestinian civilians as human shields.  Would it be "proportionate", or worth the cost, to blow through a human shield of innocent Israelis in order to get at Hamas?  Are Israel's military goals in the current conflict worth killing 1000+ of their own civilians for?  If not, that seems to indicate that they are not worth killing innocent Palestinians for either.

(And if you reject Cosmopolitanism, it's worth bearing in mind Bob Goodin's observation -- from 'What is so special about our fellow countrymen?' -- that nations often have even stronger negative duties to innocent foreigners than to their own citizens, constraining what they can do to them.)

Individual vs. Political Feasibility

Matt Zwolinksi thinks there's something odd about philanthropists like Warren Buffett calling for higher taxes when their own philanthropic efforts are instead directed towards funding non-governmental organizations. But there's nothing remotely odd about this. It is exactly what we should expect if what's politically feasible is more constrained than what's individually feasible, such that:

(i) It is individually, but not politically, feasible to direct funds to one's favoured NGO. That is, you can do it with your own money, but you don't expect to be able to redistribute (much) taxpayers' money to this end.

Why We Needn't Hold Politics Hostage to Metaphysics

Oh dear -- Reason Online has just (re)published a morass of philosophical confusion:

The brain is a physical organ. As such, it follows the laws of biology, chemistry, physics, quantum physics, and of any other hard science we have yet to discover. The brain cannot make choices. It is not free. So when someone says that mind is nothing but brain, he is saying that the things we associate with mind—choosing, preferring, thinking—aren’t real.

In philosophy this is called epiphenomenalism.

Collective Harms from Bad Voting or Abstaining

Jason Brennan argues that it's impermissible to vote 'badly' (i.e., voting without sufficient reason for harmful or unjust policies -- but misleading evidence may be exculpatory here). As he puts it in the abstract for his 'Polluting the Polls' paper, "This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low." (Basing the duty on the collective harm done is necessary for Jason, as he takes the expected impact of an individual vote to be negligible -- easily outweighed by any warm fuzzies the bad voter might get from voting.) But I wonder whether this principle might "prove too much", by equally establishing a duty to vote well rather than abstain (whereas Jason considers the latter to be perfectly permissible).

Chancy Elections

What is the best electoral process? Universal suffrage and 'one person, one vote' seems like a good start. But granting that, there's a further question, namely, what to do with all those votes. Our present 'majoritarian' system simply tallies the votes, and awards the election to whoever receives the most. Consider an alternative that Jack and I have been thinking about: use the votes as the basis of a lottery. A randomly chosen vote then determines the outcome of the election.

As stated, this sounds too risky. (If 1% of the population votes for fringe nutters, we wouldn't want to be landed with a 1% chance of a fringe nutter becoming president.) But, as Jack pointed out to me, there's an easy solution: let each vote transform into n lottery tickets, and keep randomly drawing tickets until we have n for a single candidate, who is thereby declared the winner. As n increases, this exponentially reduces the risk of any single voter's (or small minority's) preferences deciding the outcome. That is, for large n, this lottery system comes to approximate our present system of guaranteeing the election to whoever receives more votes. Of course, that would defeat the whole purpose of the proposal. But we can ask what an appropriate balance of randomness would be. Let me now argue the case for introducing some degree of chance (and so perhaps preferring a low-to-moderate n -- maybe just n=2, even).

The current system exhibits a sharp 'critical level' (e.g. "50% +1", for a two-party race). Everything hangs on increasing one's vote share to this critical level, e.g. from 49.9 to 50.1. Further increases -- e.g. from 50.1% to 60% -- don't matter in the slightest for determining the election's outcome. Nor do increases that fall short of this mark: third party candidates have no real chance, and even if they increase their vote share from 1% to 10%, this doesn't do them any good. This system thus gives candidates a strong incentive to gamble: 30% of the vote share is worthless (in a 2-way race), so if an irresponsible gimmick offers some non-zero chance of doubling their popularity, this may well be worth it for them, even if they're far more likely to end up (deservedly) losing their base of support. This seems undesirable: better to have risky elections than risky candidates, we may think.

Chancy elections would mean that every vote makes a difference. Even if a candidate is way ahead (or behind) in the polls, a mere majority is no guarantee: each extra vote would contribute to making their victory more likely still. Incumbents and popular politicians could no longer risk complacency, but would instead have an incentive to pursue every single extra vote that they possibly can (without writing off those that they already have). Third party candidates could no longer be written off. A major source of voter apathy and low turnout would be averted. In sum, elections would be made more competitive.

The risk, of course, is that misfortune may deliver an election to a less popular candidate. But it may be worth tolerating some (slight) risk of this in order to obtain the benefits listed above. What do you think? (Any political theorists out there know whether this has been discussed much before?)

'Democracy' draft

I've just finished a very rough draft of my short paper: 'What is Democracy?' Here's the concluding summary:

This paper has explored the conditions under which a state might be described as truly 'ruled by the people'. We saw that the institution of majoritarian voting, even with universal suffrage, is insufficient, for this leaves open the possibility of rule by a sectarian majority faction. So we must move beyond formal institutions and consider also the informal political culture. Here I suggested two possible routes to fully-fledged democracy. The individualist route understands democracy as 'rule by (all) the people', which I argued may be realized in a deliberative-democratic society wherein citizens are receptive to being persuaded by each other as they trade arguments and opinions in the marketplace of ideas. The collectivist route, on the other hand, understands democracy as rule by 'the people' taken as a unified collective or 'public person'. Drawing on reductionist and constructivist understandings of personal identity, I suggested that this may be given a plausible, metaphysically non-extravagant reading, which merely requires a shareable and indeed widely-shared civic perspective to be driving the government. In either case, one ends up with a society that is 'ruled by the people' in a deeper and more philosophically interesting sense than could be achieved by looking at the formal institutions alone.

It could bear to be improved, so if you have time to read the whole thing, any feedback would be most welcome!

Confusing 'Collectivism'

Some further thoughts on Boaz's op-ed:

Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss.

(1) It's actually not clear from the proffered quotes that both candidates really are 'collectivists' as opposed to anti-egoists who think that we should care about other individuals' interests besides our own. Only McCain speaks of "a national purpose that is greater than our individual interests [plural]." I don't see anything in Obama's remarks that is inconsistent with a utilitarian's concern for all individuals as such. (He says, "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation." I'm not entirely sure what this means, but a common theme of Obama's is how people's interests are interrelated -- e.g. racism makes everyone worse off, not just blacks -- so I'd guess what he means is simply that our self-interest is aligned with making others in society better off too.)

(2) "Every human life counts." What ridiculous rhetoric. Does Boaz seriously believe that Obama disagrees? Indeed, wouldn't this support his anti-egoism, if anything? (It's not just oneself that matters, but everyone else too.)

(3) How is it that so many libertarians seem incapable of recognizing the basic conceptual distinction between individualism and egoism?

Inverting Democracy

In 'What is Democracy?', I argued that majority rule may, in certain circumstances, constitute a form of oligarchy rather than democracy. To truly qualify as rule by the people -- rather than some (however large) subset thereof -- it must be the case that anyone has the opportunity to significantly affect the outcome. One vote alone cannot do this, but if each voter is receptive to being persuaded by any other, then we each have the potential to persuade a large number of people (if we come up with a sufficiently powerful argument, say) and thus to exert significant political influence. I thus concluded that 'democracy' in the fullest sense is realizable in the form of deliberative democracy.

But it's worth noting that this is not to conflate 'democracy' and 'good governance' (as emerged in comments). Although deliberative democracy would ideally involve citizens being responsive to (good) reasons, it's possible to invert the normative substance whilst maintaining the democratic form. That is, we might have a citizenry that is receptive and reliably responsive to bad reasons. All you've got to do is come up with a sufficiently atrocious argument, and you can exert significant influence. This anti-rational society is surely democratic in the strongest sense, being formally identical to the ideal deliberative democracy. But it is a (substantively) terrible government nonetheless!

Another possibility is that a democratic society may be responsive to some other universal capacity besides reason: perhaps rhetoric, or humour, say. Again, these needn't be good political orders, but -- so long as each citizen had the opportunity to exert significant influence in this way -- such a state would presumably qualify as "ruled by the people" in the strongest sense.

These examples suggest that democracy is not strictly sufficient for political legitimacy. There's no reason to accept or abide by the rules of a reliably wrong, anti-rational system, and it's at least logically possible that a democracy might be unreliable (or reliably atrocious) in this way. I'd suggest that whether a government is legitimate is more a matter of whether it is sufficiently reliable and responsive to good reasons.

In short: democracy requires that citizens be receptive to each other's persuasion (somehow or other). Legitimate democracy further requires that what the citizens are receptive to being persuaded by is good reasons.

Meritocracy vs. Solidarity

This is quite a topic. To begin with, compare and contrast the following five quotes.

(1) Bryan Caplan quotes Harford on peer sanctions/ostracism for "acting white":

[A]s long as African Americans remain disadvantaged and clustered together in ghettos, a black student who studies hard is acquiring the ability to escape from poverty, crime, and deprivation - and from those around him. That may not be popular. People don't like to see their friends developing escape plans; even the option to escape makes us nervous.

[There are] analogues of "acting white" in communities as diverse as the British working class (that certainly matches my experience at school), Italian immigrants in Boston's West End, the Maori of New Zealand, and... Japan's lowest caste.

(2) Caplan adds:

This all sounds great, until you realize that there are plenty of cultures that don't work this way! Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe were part of the working class when they arrived. But almost all of the social pressure in Jewish culture was to do well in school and make a better life, not remain in the working class. The same goes for earlier waves of Asian immigration. Japanese-American gardeners of the sixties encouraged the next generation to do well in school and move up; that's why I've haven't heard anyone talk about a "Japanese gardener" for twenty years, even though they were ubiquitous when I was a kid.

(3) Cf. Russell Arben Fox's communitarian perspective:

Read the church's "Black Value System" that Rev. Wright and TUCC uses, and see how he connects the disavowal of middleclassness to a disavowal of the meritocratic (and thus always at least potentially elitist and nonparticipatory and undemocratic) values which hold sway in a capitalist state like our, a state determined above all to discover the most talented individuals out there, and enable (and encourage) them to professionally and socially make lifestyle choices so as to seal themselves off from the rest of their community.

(4) From the linked PDF:

The highest level of achievement for any Black person must be a contribution of substance to the strength and continuity of the Black Community.

(5) Cf. H.E. Baber's The Multicultural Mystique:

White privilege is the privilege of self-invention. Immigrants and members of ethnic minorities do not have that luxury. Even when they are not locked out of the mainstream by discrimination and economic disadvantage, multiculturalist notions of authenticity, role obligation and group loyalty dog them.

Communitarianism creeps me out. It's so oppressive to discourage people from developing their own talents or pursuing their own dreams; to bind them forever to whatever local "community" they happened to be born into -- however parochial, intolerant, and limiting.

I'm so incredibly grateful to be where I am now, to have the opportunity to dedicate my life to the discipline of philosophy; I can't even begin to imagine being nearly so happy doing anything else. The academic philosophical community is the first to which I've felt that I truly belong. But if I had been born a Maori, if my skin were a darker shade, then suddenly I would have been obliged to remain with my ethnic community instead? *shudder*

That's not to defend any kind of egoism, of course. I certainly think we ought to care about more than just our own self-interest, and strive to make the world a better place. But there are any number of ways to do that, some of which may be better or worse suited to our individual talents and temperaments. The world is a big place, and we needn't limit our attention to the little corner of it that we're born into. Utilitarian benevolence sits better with liberalism than communitarianism, it seems to me.

Moreover, I'm not even a pure individualist. I think that self-chosen communities can matter a great deal, and their collective achievements may even outweigh the individual interests of their members. But this only holds insofar as the members endorse it; unchosen communities are not automatically trumps.

So, count me in favour of meritocracy and the upward-mobility (though not the crass materialism) of "middleclassness". Count me in favour of "elitism", understood as the claim that some ways of life are better than others, tempered by the cosmopolitan insistence that the best forms of life not be closed to anyone merely due to the circumstances of their birth. (Sadly, this demand is yet to be met. Much more still needs to be done to enable humanity. But entrenching class divisions in the name of "solidarity" is not the place to start. We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes -- to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.) Count me in favour of liberalism.

Human Sovereignty

Here's another discussion I've long been meaning to return to. I point out a simple objection to the Free Will Defense against the Problem of Evil:

No-one thinks it impedes free will problematically when humans -- e.g. the police -- prevent acts of intentional evil. Why would it be any worse for God to do the exact same thing?

It doesn't seem that the mere source (human or divine) of an obstruction should make any difference to whether it impedes the criminal's free will. In response, Brandon acknowledged as much, but pointed the issue in a new direction:

[The FWD] can't work on individual autonomy alone; rather, it requires us to say that not only is individual autonomy a good to be valued, but the autonomy of the human race as a whole is a good to be valued.

Is it, though? Is collective self-determination or 'sovereignty' an intrinsic good so important that it could outweigh all the other goods that could result from the perfect enforcement of individual human rights? At the level of the nation, most of us think not. Indeed, we think it morally incumbent upon outside powers to step in to prevent genocide when they are able, to protect innocent individuals -- even those with the misfortune of living in the wrong 'sovereign' nation, under the wrong rulers. (Humanitarian intervention may be questioned on pragmatic grounds, of course. We're not omniscient, so the interference of fallible human actors may do more harm than good. But the principle seems clear enough.) Is there a difference at the level of the human species as a whole? Brandon offers the following thought experiment:

A powerful and very advanced alien species comes to Earth and begins intervening in human affairs, not by interacting with us as equals, but by, effectively, policing us. Even granted that the policing was entirely benevolent and beneficial, I think a great many people would feel, perhaps in virtue of a fellow-feeling with other humans that they don't share with non-humans, that something precious to human life had been exchanged for that benefit. Some, no doubt, would think the exchange worth it; some would forcefully reject it. I suppose how people would react in general would tend to depend on the precise details of the interference. But, regardless of how exactly the demographics would go, I think the scenario does suggest that we tend to assume that human affairs are human affairs, to be determined by human choices. And that suggests that, to the degree we treat the whole human race as an object of value, we treat as valuable the autonomy of the human race as a whole.

Again, as in the standard humanitarian intervention case, I would be worried on pragmatic (indirect utilitarian) grounds. Alien or foreign powers are not generally known for being 'entirely benevolent and beneficial'. So in practice we should be suspicious, and a preference for self-determination may be for the best. But if we may stipulate that the outcomes here are, in fact, most beneficial for people, then that strikes me as a very desirable state of affairs. I would rather have a perfect police force than a local police force. Wouldn't you?

Free Collective Speech

Peter Levine has a very interesting post on 'free speech for the public as a whole', in which he argues that courts should "require states to offer all the traditional benefits of marriage to gay and straight couples, but allow states to reserve the word 'marriage' for heterosexuals." Why?

I'm not keen on courts' dictating what governments must say (as opposed to what they may do).

For one thing, we should avoid abridging the collective speech rights of the people or their legislatures. In my view, not only individual people, but also "the people," should be able to say what they want (even if it's wrong). The remedy to bad public speech is to rebut or criticize the majority's view, not to ask a court to strike it down. One can also simply ignore what the government says by, for example, calling gay people "married" even if the state won't.

Further, I think we should be careful about striking down state language or expression that treats citizens differently, even when the differences are invidious. That opens the door to all kinds of litigation about governmental expression. Do we want courts to decide the content of textbooks in public schools, the meaning of public statues and monuments, or statements made on the job by teachers and police officers? The state can do wrong by speaking offensively, but lawsuits are not the best remedy.

It's an interesting question in political philosophy whether states should be in the business of "speech" and symbolism. Staunch individualists (e.g. classical liberals) are more likely to suggest that the government should remain neutral on such symbolic/moral issues, offering civil unions to all and no official mention of "marriage" at all. Those of a more communitarian bent, on the other hand, hope that the state might give voice to 'the people' (as Peter puts it).

I lean more towards the liberal end of the spectrum. On a contentious issue like this, what right has a mere majority to claim the moral mantle of "the people" as a whole? Especially given the increasing ease of group formation, I would sooner see civil society, not government, as the platform for collective expression. Churches and other groups in civil society may bestow their blessings, and the label 'marriage', as they please. There's no need to co-opt the apparatus of the State to give voice to such groups. On the other hand, perhaps it could have good consequences -- encouraging deliberation and the formation of civic identity? (I'm skeptical, though. These emotional symbolic issues do not seem to bring out the best in people.)

What do you think?

What is Democracy?

I think it is possible for majority rule to be, in an important sense, undemocratic. Imagine a society split 60/40 into two comprehensive factions, such that people in the same faction always vote together, and against the other faction. In such a situation, I think it would be misleading to describe a system of majority rule as 'democratic'. It is not the people (generally) who rule here; what we have instead is a mere oligarchy, however large: 'rule by the majority faction'.

What more is required for democracy, then? Total consensus is an unrealistic ideal, and democracy still ought to be possible in the face of robust disagreement. I'd suggest that we instead understand 'rule by the people' to mean that everyone is able to make a meaningful contribution to the collective decision-making process, over time. The votes of a permanent minority are pointless, as they never have a chance of making a difference. But in a more flexible political culture, "the majority" is constantly in flux. Each person will be in the majority on some issues (and in the minority for others), so their will is at least sometimes heeded. In this sense, they all contribute to the state's decision-making. Even if they do not always get their way, there is still a meaningful sense in which we can describe this as a polity ruled by all (diachronically).

However, it is consistent with such 'diachronic democracy' that everyone be completely dogmatic. At least there are no stable factions, and thus no consistently oppressed (or effectively disenfranchised) subclass of the citizenry. But it would still be the case that for each particular decision, those in the minority were simply disregarded, their "contributions" effectively nullified. The system is effectively a rotating oligarchy, where everyone gets to take a turn.

This raises the question: is synchronic democracy - rule by all at once - possible? I want to suggest that it is possible, so long as the political system is sensitive to and responsive to reasons that any may put forward. In the absence of faction and dogmatism -- better, in the presence of civic respect -- even those who are initially in the minority have a real chance of affecting the outcome, by convincing others of the virtues of their position. Since the outcome is influenced (ideally: determined) by the strength of reasons, and these reasons may be contributed by anyone, it follows that any can make a meaningful contribution. 'Democracy' in the fullest sense is thus realizable in the form of deliberative democracy.

Democracy, Setup and Control

In our political philosophy seminar we've recently been looking at the question of how 'democracy', understood as a kind of popular control, might be realized through representation. One obvious possibility involves the use of (e.g. election) incentives, sanctions, etc., to encourage political representatives to track the popular will. But this won't extend to citizen's juries or statistically representative assemblies, where the participants are ordinary people selected by lot and so not subject to any such incentives. In Pettit's terms, they act as 'proxies' rather than 'deputies', indicating rather than responding to the will of the general population.

Pettit argues that this still constitutes a form of popular control. After all, the assembly was set up in this way (i.e. by lot) precisely because it may be expected to accurately reflect what the population wants. If it didn't, they would've set things up differently. Still, we need to be clear about the scope of the control implied here.

I think it's not really the case that the population controls the assembly's decision in any strict sense. After setting things up, they have no further influence on the assembly, and so (a fortiori) cannot raise the causal probability of this assembly's decision going as they prefer (as per Pettit's analysis of control). Rather, stepping back to before the assembly was chosen, we see there is some popular control over the decision-making process in the abstract. For, by instituting the assembly, the people may raise the probability that the subsequent decision is made as they would wish (in contrast to, say, letting the richest person decide). At this level of abstraction, the possibility of alternative setups (decision procedures) is part of the comparison class. But this is no longer the case once we start talking more specifically about the assembly's decision. Popular control does not extend to this local specification of the event. It is merely general: control over the initial setup, not over the decision reached by the particular procedure.

Indeed, as I objected in class, it isn't clear that the status of the agent (assembly) as "indicative" of the principal (broader population) is playing any essential role here at all. Instead, I think all the work is being done by the principal's control over the setup, i.e. their ability to select the agent. Although it makes most sense to choose an agent that you expect to mirror your own preferences, there are other options. A perverse principal might select an "anti-indicator" agent who is expected to choose precisely the opposite of what they want! The control exercised by the principal over the ultimate outcome is exactly the same in either case. So, as came out in further discussion, what matters here is not that the agent is an accurate indicator of oneself (as principal), but just that they exhibit some systematic predictability, which the principal can aim at (perhaps perversely) in empowering them.

See also: Jane Mansbridge on selection vs. control.

Implicit Interference

Does economic redistribution score badly in terms of negative liberty? A good friend recently suggested that I was advocating increased "interference" in people's lives on this basis. But this strikes me as mistaken (an incredibly common - almost universal - mistake, but no less wrong for that). As I explain in 'Wealth and Liberty', the institution of property is inherently coercive:

[I]n a wealthy society like ours, no individual lacks the physical or material capacity to meet their needs. There are plenty of resources nearby, sitting in shop windows. Anyone is capable of taking those resources. Their problem is that other people in society won't let them. Security guards will interfere, using force to block the individual's access, or to reclaim what they now call "stolen" goods.

(That's not to say we should do away with property, or anything silly like that. Some forms of interference are justified, after all. But we shouldn't let that blind us to its coercive elements, which - upon appreciating - we may seek to mitigate.)

Now, my friend objected that theft is relatively rare, and thus taxation licenses far more interference than do exclusive property rights. But this is irrelevant. Imagine a tyrant whose totalitarian control is so ubiquitous that nobody ever dares step out of line. He thus never actually has to actively exercise his power by interfering with people. That doesn't mean the people are free, of course. The violation of negative liberty instead comes from the threat of interference.

Contrary to my friend's suggestion, then, a relative lack of theft does not mean that property rights are less of an imposition against our negative liberty. Quite the opposite: the imposition is so complete that most of us would not dream of acting against it. We fully internalize the fact that we are not at liberty to take goods that are deemed to be "owned" by another. This societal ordering closes off to us actions that we could otherwise have performed. (Again, it's probably for the best, but one shouldn't pretend it's not a form of ubiquitous interference that has a huge impact on the options available to us every day of our lives.)

It's worth noting that this sort of implicit interference is distinct from Pettit's notion of domination (the modal capacity of one person to interfere with another). If Nora can do whatever she wants, but it is by her husband Torvald's leave - a general permission he could, but let us suppose won't actually, withdraw - then she has negative liberty but suffers domination. Pettit argues for the importance of domination by asking us to imagine that Nora learns of Torvald's power over her, and thus becomes servile, making extra efforts to please him and ensure that he never feels any need to exercise his power by interfering with her. Clearly, as Pettit says, Nora's freedom has not thus increased, even if active interference is now even less likely than before. But my earlier remarks show that this is no argument for non-domination. What Nora suffers here is an increase of implicit interference: the threat of potential interference shapes her behaviour, obstructing her from behaving the way she might prefer or freely choose to, were it not for the shadow of the tyrant.

The difference between negative liberty and non-domination is instead seen in cases where actual non-interference is guaranteed, e.g. by the potential dominator's reliable preference not to interfere. It may be that Torvald could interfere if he wanted, but so long as he actually doesn't want to (and this is certain not to change), who cares? David Braddon-Mitchell asks us to imagine a fantastic neuroscience which allows us to prove to Nora that there is zero probability of Torvald actually interfering with what she wants in life. Why, then, should she care about merely counterfactual coercion? (In practice, of course, there are no such guarantees. So we have very good practical reasons for fearing and opposing domination. But these thought experiments show that the value is instrumental.) Pettit responds that insofar as we think of each other as agents, such deterministic guarantees are ruled out. But that just shows the value of non-domination to be ineliminable, not non-derivative.

Aggregate Impacts Matter

No Right Turn writes:

Demographers at Waikato University's Population Studies Centre say that unless New Zealanders start breeding more, New Zealand's fertility rate will slip below replacement level. And? I don't actually see why this would be a Bad Thing. Or why a growing population would be a Good Thing. Or indeed, why this should be any concern of government (or indeed anyone) at all.

Our fertility rate is an aggregate of people's individual reproductive choices. And those choices are fundamentally personal and the sole domain of the individuals concerned. It is no business of government how many kids I or anyone else has. It is no business of government whether any of us breed or not. Government simply has no legitimate interest in what goes on in our bedrooms, or in whether those activities result in children or not. It is simply None of Their Fucking Business.

That can't be right. It would clearly be a bad thing if the entire human race died out, for example. It's logically possible that the aggregate impact of individually permissible personal choices would have disastrous consequences for the world at large. If so, we have a legitimate interest in taking collective action to avert disaster or create a better world, and that's what politics is for. We all might reasonably agree to structure the general institutions of society so as to incentivize socially beneficial choices, e.g. to replenish the dwindling ranks of humanity. This can't plausibly be denied in principle.

In practice, of course, there are plenty of grounds for objection. For one, world population does not appear to be excessively low. So if some nations want to increase their local population, they should allow more immigration. (Cf. adoption.) And I assume NRT is worried about setting a bad precedent or 'slippery slope' for social conservatives to start meddling in personal lives in a more intrusive way. My point is just that as a matter of principle, our liberal individualism should not be so extreme as NRT's above. It's not really true that state interest in the individual sphere is absolutely illegitimate. Despite NRT's fears, we can draw a principled distinction between, say, saving the human race and persecuting gays. (Really.) The hard work is discerning the precise borderline. The absolutist can avoid this hard work, but only at the cost of being, well, you know, wrong.