Generality & the Boundary Conditions of Liberalism














4 thoughts on “Generality & the Boundary Conditions of Liberalism

  1. Coming back to this subject again. Why do you connect analytical egalitarianism with utilitarianism? I understand that the latter is a version of the former (in assuming every individual to matter as much as every other individual) but there are other moral traditions which fit the bill. The rights-tradition you mention is one, the Stoics are another.

    1. I was arguing that normative theories are distinct but compatible if you think of them as being mainly about fitting different pragmatic constraints.

      For example, public policy decisions there is an attenuation from a policy cause to an individual effect. Moreover, due to the sheer scale, both perceiving discrete differences and demanding perfect unanimity between all individual becomes impossible. This guarantees there will always be winners and losers. It’s in this sense that the “far mode” forces us to be “analytically” egalitarian. From a top a mountain the masses below look homogeneous. Given that we *must* have a far-policy (from monetary policy up to the political system) we are forced by circumstance to be utilitarians or take on some other similarly conducive theory.

      Violations of rights on the other hand depend greatly on how human psychology perceive discrete acts of intention within “near” network of casual relationships. Consider the classic thought experiment of a Dr who has 3 patients dying of organ failure, and you come in for checkup. He could murder you to harvest your organs and save the 3 – a perfect utilitarian outcome. But people surveyed find this outcome repugnant. In the book Moral Minds Marc Hauser reports on a number of similar thought experiments to map out how people assess intention based on perceptions of act vs omission and degree of attenuation. The contours of this repugnance end up forming a primitive psychology of “rights”.

      However, I agree that the modern conception of human rights is egalitarian. But analytically, when rights based logic is applied, it tends to evoke heterogeneity or matters around consents. Conversely, deciding how to design a healthcare system abstracts from that particularity for pragmatic reasons, and so you end up making assessments based on maximizing, say, organ transplants, because the causal link from your choice to any particular patient failing to get an organ is extremely attenuated.

      The organ system we have right now is sub-optimal precisely because near-mode repugnance has crept into a utilitarian design problem. The meta-problem is designing a system that satisfies both levels of construal. Alan Roth’s organ matching system is one example. Capitalism is another.

  2. Pingback: The Specter of Pluralism’s Bloodstained History | The Ümlaut

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