In this post I argued that what bothers about stepping into Nozick’s experience machine is that everything is planned. I suggested that living in such a planned virtual world would bother us, but that even if we were in the “real” world and everything was planned out, something we would be missing. The issue would be that we have too much control over our lives.

However, there is still the question about whether there is something that is still worse about the experience machine compared to reality. Imagine that you can live out a full and spontaneous life, meeting what challenges arise, in the real world, or, you can do the same thing in the experience machine. Neither one is planned and program has been created that be completely spontaneous in what challenges and situations are thrown at you. Is there something missing from the experience machine compared to life outside of it?

I’m not particularly disturbed by the experience machine on this view, but here’s one argument: it’s valuable to be in contact with real people and real things (the people part I find much more convincing). But then some people retort: “well there’s no way to know that the ‘real’ world is the way we think it is. What evidence do you have that other people even exist.” On this view, skepticism about our current world suggests that our world may be no different than an experience machine of sorts.

Here’s the problem with this retort. In the real world, I may not know one way or the other if external objects exist, or if there are other minds or not. But in the experience machine, I know that I will not interact with other things and people. It seems that it’s at least reasonable to opt for the real world, even if one could never know in principle whether things were the way we thought they were. At least there would be a chance.

So maybe, we should opt for the real world after all, to at least come into contact with other people. Of course, this works only until the scientists discover a way to link people in different experience machines to each other….o wait, what about the internet…

In Anarchy State and Utopia, Nozick argues that we should be careful to condemn anarchy on the grounds that it might be terrible without first acknowledging that some states can be terrible as well. His is a meta point about decisions between types of political organization:

Which anarchic situation should we investigate to answer the question of why not anarchy? Perhaps the one that would exist if the actual political situation didn’t, while no other possible political one did. But apart from the gratuitous assumption that everyone everywhere would be in the same nonstate boat and the enormous unmanageability of pursuing that counterfactual to arrive a particular situation, that situation would lack fundamental theoretical interest. To be sure, if that nonstate situation were sufficiently awful, there would be a reason to refrain from dismantling or destroying a particular state and replacing it with none, now. It would be more promising to focus upon a fundamental abstract description that would encompass all situations of interest, including “where we would now be if.” Were this description awful enough, the state would come out as a preferred alternative, viewed as affectionately as a trip to the dentist. Such awful descriptions rarely convince, and not merely because they fail to cheer. The subjects of psychology and sociology are far too feeble to support generalizing so pessimistically across all societies and persons, especially since the argument depends upon not making such pessimistic assumptions about how the state operates. Of course, people know something of how actual states have operated and they differ in their views. Given the enormous importance of the choice between the state and anarchy, caution might suggest one use the “minimax” criterion, and focus upon a pessimistic estimate of the nonstate situation: the state would be compared with the most pessimistically described Hobbesian state of nature. But in using the minimax criterion, this Hobbesian situation should be compared with the most pessimistically described possible state, including future ones. Such a comparison, surely,the worst state of nature would win.

I don’t think this section convinces. First, as I understand it, minimax usually refers to a game involving two players, and not to a decision procedure for making a choice under uncertainty.

Of course, Rawls famously did extend the idea of minimax to situations involving choice under uncertainty, but he carefully points out that such a procedure is plausible only if we do not know the probabilities of various circumstances obtaining. However, it seems that in comparing anarchy with states, we do have a probability distribution of states. Some are really bad, but not that many, and a good number of them are at least alright (or not?). So it seems that we might choose to maximize expected utility even if the worst state is worse than the worst state of nature.

Maybe Nozick’s point is just that the state has the possibility of doing so much damage that we shouldn’t risk it and opt for anarchy, since no matter how bad it gets, it can’t be as bad as a renegade state (think Nazi germany).  But again, this is a different thesis, and it seems that if on average states are better than anarchy, than the difference in utility might justify gambling that a very bad state comes up.

Also, it’s very hard for Nozick to ask us to think of the range of possible anarchies since no one really agrees about a case of anarchy that we could look at, much less a range of them.

A lot has been written about Robert Nozick’s experiment involving the experience machine. Here’s my take.

The question is: if you could program a life full of the choicest experiences, would you leave the real world behind and live in your self-created sensory utopia?

Nozick says that one reason the experience machine would be a defective way to live is that “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” This strikes me as not quite correct, and not really consistent with some other things Nozick says a little later, namely his creation of other “machines.”

What I mean is that it seems that nothing about the experience machine rides on whether we are in touch with reality or not. The concern about the experience machine is all about the ability to program our future. Imagine: we boot up a program to climb Mt. Everest. The experiences are all there: frost bite, exhaustion, and dehydration, all followed by our triumphant ascent to the summit. How would this be any different than if we, standing outside of the experience machine, set up a series of events to befall us on our trip to the top of the real Mt. Everest (pretend we are a type of God who can choose the future). In one case, we are standing on a simulated Mt. Everest after the program runs and in the other, we are standing on the real Mt. Everest after we adjusted reality to our whims. Both seem empty, it’s just that one is inside our technical proficiency as a species where the other one requires imagining us with power over time and space. What really bothers us about both of these cases is that we took all the chance out the climb. Climbing Everest isn’t a challenge unless there are genuinely factors which we cannot control; the world must resist our attempt to make it the way that we want.

I think this insight is powerful and powerfully ignored by a lot of theorizing about what makes a life go well. What this tells us, I think, is that life loses it’s meaning without genuine difficulty and at times even suffering. And, it won’t due to say that life need only have the possibilty of suffering for it to have meaning, there must actually be suffering at some points, otherwise, what would it mean that life could have it? The fact that we can control the results of our actions only up to a point is what makes them worth doing and what gives accomplishments their value: they come about only in spite of opposition by fate.

When we climb Everest, we don’t want to only feel what it’s like to reach the top after hardship. We want to reach the top after knowing that it might not have been so and that we might have been defeated along the way. This is the possibility of failure that the experience machine denies us.

Note: The song that best gets one in the mood to appreciate this argument is “No Quarter” by Led Zeppelin.

Robert Nozick wrote, a while back, an article with this title. It’s an odd piece, and its essential answer to the titular question is, I think,something like this:

“Intellectuals – those whose job is to move words around a lot, whether academics, media-types, novelists, etc. – are usually people who did relatively well in school and relatively less well in wider society. This makes them resent market-society for frustrating the expectations they had built up; they want to make all of society like a school, where professor Lenin gives out gold stars not to the industrialists and bankers but to the best intellectuals.”

The primary problem with this piece is, of course, that it poses a question and then studiously ignores the most obvious possible answer. The most obvious answer to ‘why do intellectuals oppose capitalism?’ is ‘because capitalism is intellectually bankrupt’.

That’s not necessarily to attribute to intellectuals a superior ability to ’see the truth’ of matters. It might alternatively be a matter of how that ‘truth’ is expressed. Loads of people, after all, are pissed off with how society works, frustrated, angry, insubordinate.

But that could be expressed in a range of ways: one way would be to direct hostility away from the essential parameters of the system and towards more specific scapegoats, whether that’s some minority blamed for ’stealing our jobs’ or a hidden conspiracy of US government agents that orchestrated the world trade centre attacks. Or it could involve joining a ‘rebellious’ subculture and swearing a lot. Or just not working very hard. Or trying to find personal safety by cutting out food additives. Or – formulating a political rejection of capitalism itself. It hardly seems odd that intellectuals would pick that last one more often.

Note, the intellectual response need not always be very ‘correct’: arguably many or most intellectual rejections of capitalism have done so on the basis of some more-or-less silly alternative, which combined good and bad elements. Supporting the USSR in the 50s is hardly a less foolish expression of discontent than is the 9/11-truth movement. But it might explain the datum Nozick focuses on – that it’s often among ‘intellectuals’ that one finds the most explicit support from the abolition of private property.

But that’s only the first problem with Nozick’s writing. It also expresses the one-sided ‘free-market’ understanding of capitalism. He writes:

“The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway” (note for clarity: the earlier italicised passage was my paraphrase, while this one is a quote)

This is an interesting idea. The classroom – a hierarchical situation, where one person, with hugely greater power, directs the boring and often resented activities of the mass of others, who come in every day at specified times, have their day organised into discrete blocks, and must follow the arbitrary rules of the petty tyrants around them – this, we are told, is what socialism would be like, and is the polar opposite of our capitalism.

Isn’t it fortunate that no-where in capitalist society do huge groups of people resentfully trudge into a single place, where, according to a schedule handed down to them alongside a collection of rules made by someone else, they grind away their lives on activities that don’t interest them, under the supervision of a piddling authority figure? Indeed, we should forget about the intellectuals – we have a much bigger problem! The structure of schooling is raising all of our children in precisely the wrong way – training them to be obedient work-drones, and not self-propelling entrepreneurs!

The idea that anti-capitalism (or at least, socialism) is actually about seeking greater opportunity for creativity, less hierarchy, less compulsion and discipline, does not fit into this analysis at all.

Similarly, Nozick implicitly presents his explanation of intellectual anti-capitalism as one that separates it from rational validity. Which would work – if the post-school environment were one where, rather than the smartest, it was the most cunning, most productive, or most determined who succeeded. But is this really the case?

Another quote:

“Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards.

The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?”

Nozick studiously avoids mentioning who the greatest rewards do go to in ‘market-society’? But what if – let’s just suppose – they often went to people born into fortunate circumstances? Or to people who demonstrated a ruthlessness or skill for manipulation that let them grow rich, even while actually harming the rest of society? Or to people who could get easily accepted by the foregoing groups, due their ability to parrot the right buzzwords and present the right image?

What if the virtues that Nozick implicitly counterposes to intellectual ones – such as working really hard to provide others with much-needed services, for instance – were very often unrecognised, and rewarded only with low wages and unpaid overtime?

Because then the same phenomenon that Nozick holds up – that, supposedly, intellectuals are pissed off when they leave school and find themselves not at the top of the pecking order – acquires a very different appearance. Now, even if the key motivation is still a certain egotism, a certain superiority complex, that egotism serves merely to ‘unmask’ the fact that the distribution of rewards under capitalism is largely irrational and unfair, by any standard.

That is, perhaps out of three groups, those who do well in capitalism, those who do badly in both capitalism and school, and those (Nozick’s “intellectuals”) who do well in school and badly in capitalism, the third is best-placed to notice the irrationality of capitalism, because the first has a self-seeking motive to accept self-justifying ideology (the poor are lazy, the rich are ‘wealth-creators’, etc.), and the second lacks the confidence to condemn their own exploitation, because their experience in school taught them from an early age that they deserve no better.

So in summary: Nozick poses a question to which a certain answer naturally suggests itself (intellectuals oppose capitalism because capitalism is intellectually bankrupt); he assumes the wrongness of this answer, and then offers an alternative – which, whether explicit or not, has the function of de-legitimising intellectual anti-capitalism, by painting it as a matter of petty jealousy.

But his answer involves assuming some grossly unrealistic things about the workings of actual capitalist society – that is, it treats every part of that society other than the ideological picture of hard-working entrepreneurs and efficient free markets (parts such as the authoritarian schooling structure and the also authoritarian state, or the formation of monopolies) as something alien, rather than as an integral part, the flipside of that entrepreneurial market.

As a result, two things emerge. Firstly, his explanation is quite weak, and deals with only one segment of the data (authoritarian anti-capitalists, who undoubtedly exist). This means that it doesn’t compare favourably with the more obvious explanation (capitalism sucks) except for those who have already rejected that. Secondly, it means that even to the extent that his account is true, this doesn’t undermine the validity of intellectual anti-capitalism, because it just means that the petty jealousy of intellectuals allows them to recognise facts that the petty smugness or petty timidity of others might not.

After my display of Robert Nozick’s “Wilt Chamberlain example”, Carson expressed how he finds the argument to not be completely convincing. Now, in yet another piece of commentary on social justice, I respond to Carson’s post.

Unlike Carson, where I disagree with Nozick is his most primary premise: that people undeniably have rights. The first paragraph of the preface to Anarchy, States and Utopia reads:

Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them.

Such a fact is necessary to accept Nozick’s arguments. But do rights actually exist? I’m not saying that I think people should be censored, raped, have their entire wealth confiscated by the government, or have no protection of their property. It’s not the end-state of “rights” that I disagree with. It’s the connotation that rights carry that says there are certain things inherently given and protected by nature. Most arguments for “Natural Rights” come from an idea that rights are something granted by God to man and no one or government can take them away from us. But who says God even exists?

Also, if all humans are really granted rights by nature doesn’t that mean that there is a sort of objective list of rights that we can come up with? If rights are so inherent, doesn’t that mean that they don’t change with time, culture, or context? If so, aren’t the things that we consider rights today – freedom of speech, freedom to choose one’s direction in life, or freedom to own property – recent successes of humanity (and mostly in the developed world)? Slavery existed for the vast majority of the world’s history. Women suffrage has been the exception, not the norm. Serfdom, feudalism, and monarchy have defined civilizations much more than any sort of citizen ownership. Does this mean that the rights always existed but no one ever knew them or respected them? If they were always there but couldn’t be enforced, doesn’t that make them essentially worthless?

Right now, we set 18 as the age of consent for most things in the United States. But in the middle ages, because of short life expectancy I presume, the age of consent for most things was instead 13 years old, which made sense at the time. Does this mean that rights change with context or, more specifically, the life expectancy of certain societies? It sure makes it hard to defend a case that rights are objective and inherent wherever you are.

Instead, I agree with Jeremy Bentham’s belief that rights are mere “nonsense upon stilts”, a social construct of sorts that have come about from our recognition that respecting such privileges of all citizens are to the benefit of everyone. But NOT because they are God-given or objective. Like Bentham said,

Right…is the child of law: from real laws come real rights.

In other words, “rights” are only as good as the laws that protect them.

Carson is right, no really would argue for absolute rights and the idea of them is absurdity. But equally extreme utilitarian arguments are just as nonsensical. Example: If the organs of one living person could be used to save ten dying people who needed transplants, society would have better utility. But I don’t think many people would argue that doing such a thing would be justified. Arguing against taking the organs for utilitarian arguments like “well, we shouldn’t do that because actually society will overall be worse off if they know the state could take their organs” are pretty weak. With that logic, one could argue for anything based on the idea that it’s better for society, based on completely subjective and inconclusive premises.

Again, I’m not saying that what we conceive as rights should be ignored just because I don’t agree with the justification for their existence. I am, however, skeptical to design society based on a faulty premise.

Nonetheless, I do think that my point from my original post on the Chamberlain example stands true: we cannot have a society designed on end-state principles without constant interference of people’s personal lives. Liberty does upset patterns.

I recently got back from a vacation in South Haven, Michigan, where I was re-reading Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. I won’t go over the extensive philosophical framework Nozick formulates for social justice (aka distributive justice), but let me just describe one excerpt that, though imperfect and ripe for valid criticisms, is extremely interesting and at the very least worth pondering. It also is worth mentioning that the name of this blog comes from this part of Nozick’s book (though the authors of this blog do not agree with all of Nozick’s premises or conclusions).

Nozick, after formulating his theory social justice, mostly in rebuttal to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, proves through an interesting analogy deemed “The Wilt Chamberlain example” why any “patterned” form of justice will be upset as long as people are free. A “patterned” form of justice, how I like to briefly sum it up, is a conception of justice that is based on end-state principles that come from natural dimensions. In other words, a patterned distribution is ‘just’ based on the way things end up and the way things end up should be based on things like talent, intelligence or moral worth. Essentially, people who follow this train of thought usually argue it is an injustice for people to be in poverty or for any intelligent child to not have a good education just because their parents are poor.

So, the beginning of the Wilt Chamberlain example: let’s say there’s a distribution (of resources, wealth, etc.) that you believe is just. It’s irrelevant whether it is logical or how you justify it. Let’s just say it’s your favorite and I’ll accept it to be just. Call it D1.

Now, add on to this the caveat that under this fair distribution D1 (your favorite one that is just) that people are able to exchange their respective holdings/property in any manner they see fit, as long as it’s voluntary. This doesn’t seem too controversial.

Suppose Wilt Chamberlain decides he wants to play some basketball and some people want to see him play basketball. He decides to charge 25 cents to each person who wants to see him play. We’ll say that 1,000 people show up. All of those people pay Wilt 25 cents to watch him play. Wilt is now $2,500 richer. Those 1,000 people all have 25 cents less. Call this distribution D2.

D1 was just (given, since it was decided by you that it was just). D2 has a higher degree of wealth inequality than D1. But how could one argue that D2 is not just if D1 is just? Where was the injustice in the transition between D1 and D2? Wilt wouldn’t complain; he played basketball voluntarily and has more money. The spectators wouldn’t complain; they could have spent their money on candy bars, a movie, or some other form of entertainment. Their seeing him was voluntary. The people who are neither Wilt nor the spectators have no right to complain, since their resources under D1 were not altered.

The point here is simple. If we are to evaluate how just a distribution is based on how things end up, we must constantly interfere with people’s liberties. In this case, we’d have to stop some people from seeing Wilt Chamberlain, or disallow Wilt from playing basketball. Both of these violate the liberties of the parties involved. Hence, to arrive at a purely end-state principle of social justice, we’d need to constantly interfere in people’s lives in order to prevent injustice.

One can argue against Nozick’s assumptions regarding property rights and other things he believes are so. The authors of this blog also support, at the very least, somewhat of a social safety net including government-funded education which is not incompatible with a limited government perspective. Nonetheless, the Wilt Chamberlain example is, I believe, an excellent mind exercise.

In conclusion, liberty upsets patterns.

One argument for wealth redistribution is utilitarian in nature. Due to the decreasing marginal utility of wealth — the argument goes — we can make people happier by shuffling around the total resources in society. There are some losses due to the shifted labor incentives and the transaction costs of moving money, but these are outweighed when the people receiving the money are destitute enough because their gains in utility are really big.

There is another argument for wealth redistribution though. This argument, often advanced (usually by Marxists of some sort), is that capitalism is exploitative. There are many ways to interpret this claim, but here is an analogy that helps show one way that capitalism might be exploitative. Imagine you are in the ocean with no way to reach land. You will die of thirst or drowning. A ship comes up to you and the captain says to you “I will save your life if you give me all of your money and work for me as my indentured servant.” It’s true that this offer makes you better off, but its exploitative. It takes advantage of the fact that your current option (death) is so bad, that anything looks better by comparison, even offers that you would never accept in any other situation.

According to Marxists, capitalism works the same way for someone with no skills. If the alternatives are starving or working many hours at a low paying job, most people choose the latter, but only because the former is so bad. Of course there is the question of whether capitalism’s offers are so bad that they should be deemed exploitative. I think in at least some cases, they are.

Minimal wealth redistribution avoids this problem by guaranteeing at least one tolerable (though not great) fall back option: government support. The question of where to set this level of government support is an open one, but the point is just that at some level, a person will not be forced to accept exploitative offers if they can instead up to accept government money.

Notice though that this has nothing to do with who controls the means of production. Laborers can be exploited by owners of capital if they have no skills, but owners of capital can be exploited as well. If I own a steel mill, but all the steel laborers refuse to work for me except for exorbitant wages, then I am exploited since I cannot eat my steel mill. I will starve without workers to produce steel, who take advantage of me by saying that they will only work for outrageous wages, leaving with almost no profit. In principle, labor as well as capital can make exploitative offers.

(source)

Obviously, we all run the risk of having our rights violated. Depending on where you live in the world, this risk may be big or small. For some, the risk always remains a risk, and their rights are always respected. But that’s the exception. Many people live with a more or less permanent fear that their rights will be violated. This fear is based on their previous experiences with rights violations, and/or on what they see happening around them.

I see at least two interesting questions regarding this kind of risk:

• Is, as Nozick argued, the risk or probability of a rights violation a rights violation in itself? Do people have a right not to fear possible rights violations?
• And, to what extent does this risk of rights violations lead to rights violations?

Robert Nozick

(source)

The first question is the hardest one, I think. It seems that the risk of suffering rights violations is there all of the time, although it may be very small for some of us. If there is a right not to live with this risk, then this right would be violated all of the time. What good is a right that is perpetually violated?

However, it would seem that in some circumstances, where the probability that rights are violated is very high, people do indeed suffer. Imagine that you live in a society in which there is a high probability that you are arbitrarily arrested by the police. Even if you are not actually arrested – and your rights are therefore not violated – you are living in fear. It would seem that a right not to live in fear of rights violations does have some use in these high-risk environments.

But if we limit the right not to risk rights violations to situations in which there is a high probability of rights violations, we will have to decide on a threshold: when, at what level of high probability of rights violations, does the right not to risk rights violations become effective? This means introducing arbitrariness.

And another problem: what if you don’t know about the risk? There may be at certain moments a high probability that your rights will be violated, but you don’t have to be aware of this. In that case, you don’t fear the rights violations, and hence there is no harm done to you. It’s difficult to conceive of a right when its violation doesn’t (always) cause harm of some kind, and hence the right not to risk rights violations seems impossible in this case.

The second question is more straightforward. Everyday we see how the risk of rights violations leads to actual rights violations. The perception of risk, and people’s counter-strategies designed to limit the risk of rights violations, makes them violate other rights. The war on terror is a classic example. Ticking bomb torture is another.

The objective of avoiding risk creates risks, namely the risks that our actions designed to avoid risk cause harm. We may have to learn (again) how to live with risk.

Halfway through this paper, I came across the following quote, which primarily appeared prima facie sound, but on reflection has some problems I can’t help extrapolating

If I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery

William Clifford (p70)

Recently reading Belshaw’s What’s Wrong With The Experience Machine is what shone light on a few spanners in Clifford’s argument. Belshaw’s argument is, extremely briefly, that sometimes, plugging ourselves into Nozick’s experience machine is something we can, and indeed, ought to do. This angle is defended by Belshaw’s hedonistic view, in turn backed up by his skepticism of intrinsic value. Counter to Nozick, Belshaw tells us of situations in which there can be no reason for justifiably refusing to plug into the virtual world of the experience machine. The only true defence of Nozick will have to explain exactly what we gain from the real world, and how it positively affects us, that simply cannot in any hypothetical situation be achieved by the experience machine.

Clifford’s argument, in light of this, is somewhat cloudy. In the experience machine, all of our beliefs are false, or at least partly mistaken, and it is our choice that we should be in such a situation. Clifford would say this is morally wrong, as it runs the risk of society becoming ‘credulous’ (I’m taking it he was viewing this from quite a Kantian stance in light of the Categorical Imperative). However, Belshaw’s paper shows that even though this might be the case, what exactly is the value we can ascribe to society’s not being credulous? A full explanation of this value in something other than evolutionary or sociological terms is needed, as this in no way leads us from an is to an ought. Until Clifford shows us in what way such things are truly, objectively valuable (in a Kantian sense), then the water seems to be seeping out of the holes in his argument.

As an illustration, consider one is dying a terribly painful, slow death. One knows one will die after 6 months of this excruciating pain, and is given the option to plug into the experience machine and experience all of those things one wishes one could have done when younger, full of life and enshadowed by feelings of invincibility. Suppose also that one had no family or friends to keep one company. Callously, Clifford says that even in this situation, one cannot plug into the machine and willingly expose ourselves to false beliefs.

It could easily be the case that Clifford would simply say that one should endure the pain, because we can’t universalize the holding of false beliefs. To do so would be wrong. But to me, this seems even more of an immoral position. It is inhumane, and in a word, cruel, which can hardly be the trademarks of a moral theory.

A theory that condones such results and acts seems to be a moral theory that fails, and it is for this reason that I believe that Clifford’s idea that false beliefs are morally speaking, wrong, is wrong in itself.

Anarchy, Groups, and Conflict: An Experiment on the Emergence of Protective Associations

Adam C. Smith, David B. Skarbek, Bart J. Wilson

Abstract: This paper examines group formation in a setting in which participants are endowed with a commodity that can be used to either generate earnings, plunder others, or protect against plunder. In our primary treatment, participants are allowed to form groups for the purpose of pooling resources. We also conduct a baseline comparison treatment that does not allow group formation. We find that allowing subjects to form groups endogenously does not lead to more cooperation and may in fact exacerbate tendencies for conflict.

Eis um experimento, para mim, contra-intuitivo (exceto se você disser que o aumento do número de membros em um grupo, em um mundo com vários grupos, aumenta o custo de transação de comunicação entre eles e, assim, pode haver menos cooperação). Mesmo com este longo parênteses, eu ainda me sinto desconfortável com o resultado.

Interessante trabalho, não?

Sen’s Impossibility Theorem

We want, but can only have 2 of 3 of the following:

1. Pareto efficiency. The socially favored outcome is as good as or better than any alternative for the aggregated social preferences.
2. Transitivity of preferences. If I like A > B and B > C, then I like A > C.
3. Minimal liberalism. There are some preferences that fall outside of the social domain. Only I get to say whether or not I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover or paint my walls pink or white.

Why? Intuitively, we can rewrite these conditions broadly as:

1. Best for society, including the individual choosing whether or not to read the racy novel.
2. The preferences are consistent; if not, we could arbitrarily get them to align however fits.
3. People have a say over some things that no one else does.

A way to seeing the contradiction is to notice that (3) what one person wants to choose within his/her domain may be in conflict with (1) what’s best for society [which is not controversial],  but that this conflict may come from a contradiction that emerges when one person’s preferences over his or her domain come into the aggregated formulation  [despite the preferences (2) being consistent].

Sen’s example involving Lady Chatterley involves two people Prude and Lewd who each have a vote in deciding what will be done with the book. The three options that could be put into place by society are (P) Prude reads – Lewd doesn’t, (L) Lewd reads – Prude doesn’t, and (N) no one reads. [Note: there is no (B) both read in this example].

Prude prefers that (N) no one reads, but if someone has to read, he’d rather bear the burden (P), than subject poor Lewd to such filth (L). Lewd revels in schadenfreude so he wants most for Prude to read it (P), but would prefer to read it himself (L) to no one (N). To recap: for Prude, N > P > L and for Lewd, P > L > N.

If the choice is between Prude reading this or not, he should not be forced to, since N > P. This is what is meant by minimal liberalism. And if the choice is between Lewd reading or not, he should be able to, since L > N. In terms of liberal values – the freedom to do what one wants to do in her own domain, L > N > P. But this contradicts individual’s preferences themselves on the whole. For if we decided to give the book to Lewd, both people would have preferred giving the book to Prude instead.

Because the criteria are so broad, it is hard to see what this impossibility theorem doesn’t touch upon. Nozick’s response is the most intuitive: drop Pareto efficiency, keep transitivity of preferences and minimal liberalism.

What do Condorcet, Arrow, and Sen mean for democracy as an institution?

1. Democracy will not, merely by design, give the majority the most preferred outcome if there at least three possibilities to choose from.
2. Democracy is suggestible by agenda setting. Notice in the original Condorcet example (previous post) that if binary votes were taken between any two choices, and then done again against the third choice, that any outcome could be engineered to be the winner. An example, suppose persons 1, 2, and 3 had preferences: (1) A > B > C, (2) B > C > A, (3) C > A > B -same as previous post. Suppose we wanted C to be the final outcome. First have an election between A and B: both 1 and 2, a majority, prefer A to B. Now vote between A and C: both 2 and 3, a majority, prefer C to A. How we decide to vote can be as important as the outcomes we decide between. Consider the Congressional system whereby bills are amended and then finalized and then the ultimate comparison is between that and the status quo. Democratically decided options may not carry the legitimacy we give them.
3. Democracy may reveal people’s inconsistent preferences. Transitivity, in practice, is rare. People are not consistent and may adamantly defend preferences which hypocritically reject other preferences. Everything else on the table can stay if people have irrational preferences. That being said, over the long-run and to arrive at truly desired outcomes must at least mean that we decide what it is that we actually want.
4. Democracy, in order to genuinely preserve minimal liberalism – and broader liberalism, must take some things off the table, that is, make illegitimate in the social realm some preference relations involving private relations whatever the costs might be, whatever might be otherwise be preferred by the individuals themselves. This point is briefly discussed in Anarchy, State, and Utopia and adds to Nozick’s theory regarding individual rights as paramount over conceptions of the good and social preferences (the combination of which leads towards socialism and towards constant interference with personal affairs).

simply Capitalism writes about the “Oracle of Omaha” – Warren Buffett – and his preference for the “mixed economy” plus his attributing his success to an “ovarian lottery.”

O&M writes about why politicians and economists “heart Keynes”. This part is very interesting-

Third, the Keynesian delusion afflicts not only policymakers, but professional economists as well. I’ve long suspected that the appeal of Keynes to people like Krugman and DeLong is ultimately based on aesthetic, not scientific, grounds. Deep in their hearts, they just don’t like private property, markets, and individual choice. They don’t think ordinary people are capable of making wise decisions and think they, the elites, should be in charge. They resent the fact that most people don’t want their lives controlled by liberal intellectuals. Technical arguments about the effectiveness of monetary and fiscal policy, the relationship between aggregate demand and output, the experience of the 1930s, and the like are really beside the point. For Keynesian economists, the belief that markets are naturally unstable in the absence of government planning is a matter of faith.

I think Nozick’s hypothesis on intellectuals vs. capitalism is relevant here; he takes them back to school. From “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”-

Central Planning in the Classroom
There is a further point to be added. The (future) wordsmith intellectuals are successful within the formal, official social system of the schools, wherein the relevant rewards are distributed by the central authority of the teacher. The schools contain another informal social system within classrooms, hallways, and schoolyards, wherein rewards are distributed not by central direction but spontaneously at the pleasure and whim of schoolmates. Here the intellectuals do less well.

It is not surprising, therefore, that distribution of goods and rewards via a centrally organized distributional mechanism later strikes intellectuals as more appropriate than the “anarchy and chaos” of the marketplace. For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

The late libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized about the anti-capitalistic mindset of a set of intellectuals – the “wordsmiths.” He said it was all about schools and schooling. Read “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?”

L'arte della scienza

Nell’opinione comune ci si aspetta che la scienza offra ricette universali, certezze matematiche. Oibò, non sembra essere così, parola di scienziato! Eccoci spiegata la scienza come arte della conoscenza ovvero i linguaggi scientifici non hanno nulla di intrinsecamente “oggettivo”. Una riflessione sulle caratteristiche cognitive dell’arte e della scienza che esplora i confini sottili fra oggetto e soggetto, rivelando alcuni aspetti cruciali dell’“arte della scienza”, intesa come “eresia del fare” contro ogni visione ideologica del “metodo”. [...]

Chi conosce? L’importanza di essere “osservatore”

Nell’attuale spettro dei saperi, e nella percezione comune, scienze ed arte vengono collocate ad estremi opposti delle nostre visioni del mondo. La scienza viene vista come il regno delle certezze “oggettive” e l’arte come il luogo della radicale singolarità soggettiva del sentire umano.

La scienza come puntuale applicazione del metodo, l’arte come pura creatività. Questa concezione ha…

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Creatori di linguaggi

Consideriamo adesso una seconda “opera”:

Diagramma di Feynman

Com’è noto si tratta di un “diagramma di Feynman”, dal nome del geniale fisico americano che costruì questa particolarissima “stenografia” dei processi d’interazione, il linguaggio fondamentale della più raffinata teoria fisica esistente, la teoria quantistica dei campi. Ognuno di questi grafi corrisponde ad una formula che diventa sempre più elaborata con il numero di vertici e linee.

Cosa possiamo dire dell’elegante forma del diagramma se lo confrontiamo, ad esempio, con la “composizione VII” di Kandinskij? Entrambi sono linguaggi simbolici, ma nonostante la raffinata simbologia delle forme e dei colori elaborata dall’artista russo, l’aspetto soggettivo della recezione dell’opera e del suo significato è dominante, mentre il diagramma, pur con tutta la sua suggestione “visiva”, acquista un pieno significato condiviso all’interno della “sintassi” quantistica. I linguaggi scientifici fanno parte di una categoria che qui chiameremo dei “linguaggi vincolati”, in cui ogni termine della sintassi ha un preciso significato matematico in relazione ad una precisa disposizione sperimentale.

Ma come si crea il linguaggio vincolato delle …

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Immersi nel mondo: apertura logica e modelli

E’ ben noto il teorema di incompletezza sintattica di Kurt Gödel , che ricorderemo qui brevemente. Esso afferma, più o meno, che se proviamo a “zippare” in un unico sistema di proposizioni finito- gli assiomi, che possiamo pensare come un programma che “girando produce tutte le proposizioni del sistema formale – un qualunque ramo della matematica, per poi ricavarla da questi applicando le regole deduttive dell’inferenza logica, falliremo. Se proviamo infatti ad organizzare la conoscenza matematica in questo modo, qualcosa resterà sempre fuori dal sistema assiomatico scelto, comunque sia costruito.

Questo teorema ci rivela alcuni …

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Cosa c’è là fuori?

Attualmente le nostre conoscenze scientifiche costituiscono un arcipelago non troppo compatto ma ricco di collegamenti, ponti, connessioni. L’idea neo-positivista di un linguaggio universale della scienza fallisce davanti alla complessità dei fenomeni e dei livelli e dunque delle scelte teoriche possibili. Nella nostra riflessione abbiamo volutamente utilizzato le espressioni “mondo” e “ambiente” sempre in relazione alle scelte descrittive dell’osservatore, tralasciando il termine “realtà” ed ogni implicazione ontologica. Ma dal punto di vista dell’eredità culturale e cognitiva è difficile eludere la domanda “cosa c’è là fuori?”. Esiste una realtà organizzata secondo leggi precise, strutturata in livelli, indipendente dall’osservatore? La “mappa” che i nostri modelli riflettono a quale “territorio” corrisponde? Questa domanda esula dalle possibilità dell’artigianato metodologico della scienza. Non diversamente dall’artista, lo scienziato costruisce “teatri mobili della conoscenza, pensando con l’errore” (B. Antomarini), ma nulla possiamo dire del mondo al di fuori delle nostre rappresentazioni, anche se “qualcosa” che risponde alle nostre domande c’è. Diceva Robert Nozick che la realtà è quella cosa che fa “resistenza” ai miei desideri e, aggiungiamo noi, ai nostri modelli.

L’autore ha …

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Di Ignazio Licata.

Fonte: http://www.scienzaeconoscenza.it

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Im Kapitalismus sind auch die Intellektuellen den Gesetzen von Angebot und Nachfrage unterworfen. Deshalb ist die Marktwirtschaft bei ihnen besonders unbeliebt.

Mehr gibts hier (von Michael Miersch). Zusätzlich auch noch: hier (von Friedrich Hayek) oder hier (von Robert Nozick).

Aber ich würde noch einen Schritt weitergehen als Michael Miersch:

Es ist verständlich, dass es schwerfällt, den Markt zu mögen. Aber man könnte sich ab und zu daran erinnern, welche Vorteile er bietet.

Es fällt gar nicht so schwer, “den Markt” zu mögen. Kapitalismus ist das einzige System, das es jedem Menschen, egal ob männlich oder weiblich, schwarz oder weiß ermöglicht, mit seinem Leben zu machen, was er möchte, so lange er nicht andere Leute rechtswiedrig daran hindert, das gleiche zu tun. So etwas kann in einem sozialistisch-planwirtschaftlichem System gar nicht funktionieren.

Kant kritiserade de metafyska luftslotten genom att peka på att empirin är beroende av vårt förnuft och sinnen. Det vi uppfattar av världen är begränsat för vad vi kan uppfatta med våra sinnen och vad vi kan förstå med förnuftet vilket innebär att vi inte kan veta något bortom detta. Nozick utgår från denna kantianska tanke men vänder på det hela och menar på att våra sinnen och förnuftet är beroende av världen. För Kant är den förstådda världen så att säga en beroende variabel förklarad av sinnen och förnuft medan för Nozick förhåller sig så att världen (som om man är lagd åt det hållet skulle kunna vara Gud) är den förklarande variabeln och sinnen och förnuft är den beroende variabeln.

Alltså så besämmer världen i sig vad vi kan förstå av den. Utifrån detta uppfattar vi delar av världen och ordnar den efter bästa förmåga och försöker kommunicera det vår världsbild till omgivningen. Denna världsbild blir allt mer komplicerad och olika diskurser eller paradigm om hur världen ska förstås uppstår och olika kulturer växer fram där världen för människan är olika trots att världen i sig självt är den samma. Dock är varje världsbild en verklig värld för varje subjekt.

När detta är klarlagt kan man undra om man ska försöka jämka samman dessa världsbilder eller om det är en ny sannare (som alltså stämmer bättre med världen i sig själv) som ska sökas. Varför skulle en sådan sann värld vara bättre för människan än hennes egna egenhändigt skapade världar? Varför vill jag leva så nära verkligheten som möjligt?

Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” occupies a cherished place on my bookshelf.  In this Forbes.com editorial, Cato’s Richard Epstein cites Congress’ lame-brained and ultimately doomed push to manufacture increased rates of home ownership as an example of what Nozick calls “patterned principles of justice.”  Here’s Epstein:

Believers in patterned principles hold that there is some preordained social order that is more just than others. Accordingly, the function of the state is to use the levers of powers to manipulate behavior to achieve the desired outcomes. These patterned principles stand in opposition to historical principles of justice, which are content to establish the rules of the game and then let the legal moves by individual players determine the social outcomes. For Nozick, the key rules were rules of justice in acquisition (to set up the initial property rights) and justice in transfer, whereby those rights (and others derived from them) could be exchanged or combined through voluntary transactions.

Further down:

Congress, alas, is a pattern junkie. In his perceptive Wall Street Journal op-ed, How Government Stoked the Mania, Russell Roberts noted that the current congressional fixation called for a relentless increase in homeownership relative to renting, with certain minimum fractions allocated to low-income families. Pray tell, what patterned principle dictates that we should have 12% of all mortgages made to low-income borrowers in 1996, 20% in 2000, 22% in 2005 and 28% by 2008?

And finally:

The grand objectives articulated by Congress–and to be fair, by Republicans who preach the virtues of the “ownership society”–are not freebies that can be satisfied at no real cost. Quite the contrary. Once Congress set in place a destructive lending policy, we could count on private parties to issue bad loans from which they profited, knowing that dear old Fannie and Freddie would happily pay face value for paper that everyone knew was worth a whole lot less.

But Congress lived in a dream world. It forgot that the quality of the paper would deteriorate as its ambitious social objectives let its underwriting go south. So, too late in the game, we learn from yet another case where Congress should have done good by doing nothing at all. Let people rent or buy in unsubsidized markets and then watch with supreme indifference what residential patterns emerge. That distribution would have been a lot less toxic than the brew generated by our fevered political leaders. So says our frustrated libertarian.

And so says this one.  This echoes my point in this earlier post.  Why is “ownership society” a good thing?

Wait, this is a democracy, and a “good thing” is what the majority says it is, you say?  Democracy is a sheep and two wolves voting on what to have for dinner.  We live, by the grace of God, not in a democracy, but a constitutional republic…

…if we can keep it.  Color me skeptical.