prior probability

Nota bene: this is the sixth of a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”; footnotes are below the fold.

We saw David Hume’s devastating take-down of social contract theories in my previous post — governments and property rights did not originate in some fictitious or fanciful social contract; they are founded on force or fraud — but how does Hume resolve the tension between law and liberty? In a word (two words, actually), Hume’s solution to the paradox of politics is public opinion or “the common sentiments of mankind”:

“We shall only observe, before we conclude, that though an appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard to morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard by which any controversy can ever be decided.”[1]

But does political philosophy fall under “the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy, or astronomy” or is it more like “all questions with regard to morals, as well as criticism”? Or more simply put, is the paradox of politics a science question or a moral/aesthetic one? For Hume, law and politics are practical matters rooted in human nature and social utility. [2] As a result, Hume’s standard for resolving high-level legal and political disputes is not some objective, universal truth grounded in a hypothetical contract; his standard is purely subjective: public opinion.

Hume’s public-opinion approach to political philosophy is not for the feint of heart; after all, public opinion can not only change over time; the public might also prefer a dictatorship over democracy or racial segregation over racial mixing or whatever. [3] Nevertheless, for my part, I find myself in agreement with Hume’s approach to law and politics: there are no universal or objective “right answers” to contentious legal, moral, and political questions, including the ultimate question of how to balance law and liberty. Instead, it is public opinion (“the common sentiments of mankind”) that is the final arbiter of all moral and political questions. For Hume and me, it is public opinion that ultimately decides how much liberty we are willing to give up in exchange for safety and security.

But Hume’s public opinion approach to politics poses two new open practical questions. One is the measurement question: how do we measure public opinion? Is it even possible to measure such a thing in a reliable and accurate manner? The other open question is the problem of conflicting or diametrically-opposed public opinions (plural): what happens when the public is split or polarized over any given matter? (Also, even if an overwhelming majority of the public agrees on X, what about the rights of the minority?) Stay tuned, I will discuss what I consider to be the most compelling and original reply to these questions in my next post. (To be continued …)

Nota bene: this is the fifth of a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”; footnotes are below the fold.

“In vain, are we asked in what records this charter of our liberties is registered.” –David Hume, Of the Original Contract (p. 263) [1]

Last week, I began a new series of blog posts on the paradox of politics, starting with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke (see here and here). In brief, both Hobbes and Locke attempt to solve this perennial paradox by positing two imaginary constructs: a world without law or government (the state of nature) and a hypothetical agreement (the social contract). [2] Alas, to quote Jake’s reply to Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises, isn’t it pretty to think so?

As it happens, it was the great philosopher-skeptic David Hume (1711–1776) who was the first to point out an embarrassing flaw in Hobbes and Locke’s elegant theoretical solution. [3] Simply put, if the social contract is the foundation of government and law, where do we go to look up the actual “terms and conditions” of this fictitious user agreement?

More specifically, in his Enlightenment-era essay “Of the Original Contract” (reprinted in Cohen 2018, pp. 262-269), Hume explains why the social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke (and Rousseau, for that matter) are “not justified by history or experience, in any age or country of the world.” (p. 264) For Hume, government and laws cannot be traced back to some hypothetical or fanciful agreement among illiterate savages; instead, history teaches us that government and laws are almost always the result of conquest and coercion:

“Almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or conquest or both, without any presence of a fair consent or voluntary subjection of the people.” (p. 265)

To this Humean historical objection, Hobbes and Locke attempt to salvage their social contract theories with yet another make-believe fantasy, the fiction of tacit consent — or in the case of Rousseau, “the general will” or volonté générale. [4] For Hobbes, for example, “The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, that the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them” (quoted in Cohen 2018, p. 201), while Locke writes: “If a man owns or enjoys some part of the land under a given government, while that enjoyment lasts he gives his tacit consent to the laws of that government and is obliged to obey them.” (quoted in ibid., p. 228, Locke’s emphasis)

Really? Hume’s take-down of the fiction of tacit consent is so devastating and logically irrefutable that it deserves to be quoted in full:

“Should it be said that, by living under the dominion of a prince which one might leave, every individual has given a tacit consent to his authority and promised him obedience; it may be answered that such an implied consent can only have place where a man imagines that the matter depends on his choice. But where he thinks (as all mankind do who are born under established governments) that, by his birth, he owes allegiance to a certain prince or certain form of government; it would be absurd to infer a consent or choice, which he expressly, in this case, renounces and disclaims.

“Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives, from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean and perish, the moment he leaves her. . . .” (p. 266, Hume’s emphasis)

In other words, Hume calls bullshit! But where does this leave us? Does the paradox of politics have no solution, after all? If it takes a theory to beat a theory, what is Hume’s solution to the law-liberty dilemma? (To be continued …)

I will resume my series on the “paradox of politics” with David Hume in my next post. In the meantime, I am sharing the song “Goodbye Stranger” by the British rock band Supertramp. One of the ironies of this all-time classic is that it met with only limited success in the UK and did not even break the “top ten” in the US!

Nota bene: this is the fourth of a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”; footnotes are below the fold.

“… where there is no law there is no freedom.” –John Locke, Second Treatise (quoted in Strauss & Cropsey 1987, p. 477)

In my previous post, we saw Thomas Hobbes’s elegant “social contract” solution to the paradox of politics: although men have the natural liberty to do whatever they please in a state of nature, they agree to transfer their liberty and other natural rights to a sovereign in exchange for protection. No mention of Hobbes, however, would be complete without John Locke (1632–1704), for Locke, building on Hobbesian foundations, presents a new and improved social contract solution.

For starters, although Locke’s picture of human nature appears to be more benign and pleasant than Hobbes’s, he ultimately agrees with Hobbes that the state of nature will often resemble a state of war. [1] Why? Because, as Locke himself concedes, “there is no common superior … to appeal to for relief” when one’s natural rights are violated in the state of nature. (p. 217) [2] In addition, Locke agrees with Hobbes that men will replace the state of nature with a sovereign or civil government: “I [Locke] easily grant, that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature, which must certainly be great, where men may be judges in their own case ….” (p. 216, Locke’s emphasis)

So, how is Locke’s social contract theory any different from Hobbes’s. Simply put, Locke turns the logic of Hobbes’s social contract on its head. For Hobbes, we transfer our natural rights when we agree to the social contract for our mutual protection. Hobbes’s sovereign is not only our benefactor and protector; he is also our ultimate master. For Locke, it’s the other way around: we enter into a social contract to preserve our natural rights; the people are the ultimate masters!

There is another crucial difference between Hobbes and Locke: their definitions of natural liberty are totally different. Hobbes, for example, defines natural liberty as the right to do as one pleases: “The right of nature … is the liberty each man hath to use his own power as he will himself for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing anything which, in his own judgement and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.” (p. 180) Locke, by contrast, imposes a limitation on our natural liberty: the harm principle. According to Locke, even when we are in the state of nature, we have a moral or natural law obligation not to harm others:

“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” (p. 214, Locke’s emphasis)

Locke’s harm principle sounds a lot like John Stuart Mill’s, but Locke’s conception of the harm principle is grounded in God-given natural law, whereas Mill’s is grounded in the principle of utility. But regardless of its source (God versus utility), Locke’s harm principle is crucial because it not only explains the ultimate purpose of civil government and law (harm prevention); it also appears to solve the paradox of politics by imposing an outer limit on government power, a red line that neither law nor politics may not cross. But does Locke’s solution (or Mill’s, for that matter) really work? Alas, it does not. (To be continued …)

Nota bene: this is the third of a series of blog posts on “the paradox of politics”; footnotes are below the fold.

Is the paradox of politics, the central tension between law and liberty, soluble? Alas, the most popular solutions generally consist of empty clichés or trite rhetorical devices, such as the oxymoronic idea of “ordered liberty” [1] or the well-worn distinction between liberty (good) and license (bad). [2] Why are these incantations utterly useless? Because they are way too fuzzy in scope to be of much help. Simply put, they fail to spell out where, precisely, we should draw the line between law and liberty.

In place of these tired platitudes, let’s turn to some of the greatest Anglo-American minds in modern political philosophy, beginning with Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). His elegant but extreme solution to the law-liberty dilemma has two stages. (See especially chapters 13 to 30 of Hobbes’s 1651 treatise Leviathan, available here or here.) First, Hobbes imagines what life would be like in a pre-political state of nature, i.e. a world without any laws or government. Although men in this hypothetical condition enjoy absolute autonomy — what Hobbes’s calls “natural liberty”[3] — this freedom, to put it mildly, is a precarious one. In one of the most famous sentences of all time, Hobbes writes:

“In such condition [the state of nature] there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (p. 179)

Next, Hobbes postulates a fictional covenant or “social contract” in which men agree to transfer their natural liberty to an absolute sovereign in exchange for protection:

“… men agree amongst themselves to submit to some man, or assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others. This latter may be called a political Commonwealth, or Commonwealth by Institution ….” (p. 190)

For Hobbes, we must collectively surrender our natural liberty to a strong central authority. Why? Because without an absolute sovereign or “Leviathan” with unlimited and indivisible power to punish wrongdoers, social life would soon descend into a brutish “war of every man, against every man” (p. 179). In short, we exchange liberty for safety.

Hobbes’s dark view of man — and his drawing of the law-liberty line in such a lopsided fashion — appears harsh, if not extreme. It is even tempting to dismiss this 17th-century political theorist as a proto-fascist, since his theory of politics can be used to justify dictatorships. But in fairness to Hobbes, he lived through some very tough and turbulent times: the English civil wars from 1642 to 1651, one of the most bloody and brutal periods in British history. According to Britain’s National Army Museum (see here or here), a larger proportion of the population in England, Wales, and Ireland were killed or maimed during the Civil Wars than in the First World War!

Yet, be that as it may, Hobbes’s approach to politics has a fatal flaw, one that is even more troubling than the law-liberty dilemma with which we began this series: the sovereign is supposed to protect us from each other, but who protects us from the sovereign? [4] Does this second-order Hobbesian paradox have a solution, or does the ghost of Thomas Hobbes continue to haunt us? Are all governments doomed to end in tyranny? (To be continued …)

The paradox is this: people rightfully value liberty, but what is the optimal amount? If we have too much freedom to pursue our private interests, some individuals may end up harming others, making social life unstable and intolerable. So, we need laws to punish and deter harms, but which harms and however the concept of “harm” is defined, what is the optimal level of legal restraints? With too many restraints, our personal liberties might be crushed, defeating the purpose of a free society. The perennial question of political philosophy, then, is where should we draw the line between law and liberty? Different political theorists have drawn this crucial line in different ways, so how do we decide who is right? (To be continued …)

“The common understanding of politics, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, has taken the balancing of liberty and authority as the central issue.” (Strauss & Cropsey 1987, p. 717)

Thomas S. Kuhn wrote about the “essential tension” between tradition and innovation in scientific research (see here, for example). Starting tomorrow, I will begin a new series of blog posts on what I like to call the “paradox of politics”: the fundamental tension between authority (the power of the collective to compel actions or enforce rules) and liberty (the freedom of the individual to act without external constraint).

Last week (see links below), I surveyed a new paper in Econ Journal Watch by Daniel Klein, Nicholas Swanson, and Jeffrey Young on Adam Smith’s impartial spectator. Today, I want to conclude this series of blog posts with a question for my three Smithian colleagues. To paraphrase the ancient Greek gadfly Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro, are our actions pious or morally good when our impartial spectator approves of them, or does our impartial spectator approve of our actions when they are pious or morally good? For further reference, below are my previous musings (in thematic order) on this matter:

1. Introduction (who is the impartial spectator?)
2. Klein, Swanson, and Young’s theory (a theistic interpretation of the impartial spectator)
3. Evidence in support of Klein et al.’s theory (three key passages in TMS)
4. A “smoking-gun” passage? (TMS, VI.i.11)
5. Additional questions for Klein, Swanson, and Young (replies to their nine theses)
6. A second-order question about the impartial spectator (why wasn’t Adam Smith more clear in TMS?)