I think an advantage of the way of thinking about the concepts I discussed in this post is that it might allow us to find ways to improve societies without implying that the members of the society are to blame, or should feel ashamed for, their society's problems. At the same time, they may see it as their responsibility to act to change things.
This is a little idealistic. There clearly is a deep tribalist impulse, which often prevents people from looking at their own group clearly. But maybe one way of addressing this is to get use a conceptual framework that separates social failure from collective guilt. In my perfect world, people wouldn't feel pride based on group status, but that's really a long way off.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
People don't know what their own traditions are
One phenomenon I've noticed recently in China is that people have many inaccurate beliefs about what Chinese tradition actually is. For example, most Chinese people see it as the most Chinese thing ever to eat rice with every meal. But it this could not have been possible for the mass of Chinese people until perhaps 50 years ago, as white rice, without industrial husking and polishing techniques, was extremely labor-intensive, and would have been too expensive for most people to consume every day. People are slightly more aware that industrial seed oil is not a traditional Chinese thing, as its introduction is far more recent. Yet most people use it every day, partially because the false notion that these oils are healthy, and that animal fat is bad, has trickled in from the United States. (Melissa McEwen has noticed similar things among immigrant populations in Queens.)
In other cases, there seems to be blind adherence to traditions that seem to make very little sense, while embracing potentially harmful aspects of modernity. For example, women in China, after giving birth, typically spend a month at home, during which time they are not supposed to go outside, wash their hair, or brush their teeth. Meanwhile, the majority of births in China occur by C section, and there is increasing evidence that this can be harmful to both mother and child.
All of this leads me to suspect that there is a big problem with traditionalism as commonly practiced. Common practices seem to change without people even noticing. Even the most vehement followers of tradition always adopt some new things, and these small changes can make a big difference.
In the case of food, to be a traditionalist now requires one to actively avoid all kinds of foods, and seeking out the tiny quantities of foods that are produced in the traditional way. In some cases, you have to go back to find out what the traditions actually were. Basically, you have to be a scholar and researcher. It has to be a passion. I think, as innovation continues to accelerate, and the costs of new technologies accumulates*, we're going to see more and more people specializing in the re-remembering of lost traditions. The paleo movement is, perhaps, an example of this.
*I think the benefits of new technologies mostly outway the costs. But the costs they impose are new, and one way we make progress is by learning to deal with the problems that new technologies create. I owe this insight to Kevin Kelly.
In other cases, there seems to be blind adherence to traditions that seem to make very little sense, while embracing potentially harmful aspects of modernity. For example, women in China, after giving birth, typically spend a month at home, during which time they are not supposed to go outside, wash their hair, or brush their teeth. Meanwhile, the majority of births in China occur by C section, and there is increasing evidence that this can be harmful to both mother and child.
All of this leads me to suspect that there is a big problem with traditionalism as commonly practiced. Common practices seem to change without people even noticing. Even the most vehement followers of tradition always adopt some new things, and these small changes can make a big difference.
In the case of food, to be a traditionalist now requires one to actively avoid all kinds of foods, and seeking out the tiny quantities of foods that are produced in the traditional way. In some cases, you have to go back to find out what the traditions actually were. Basically, you have to be a scholar and researcher. It has to be a passion. I think, as innovation continues to accelerate, and the costs of new technologies accumulates*, we're going to see more and more people specializing in the re-remembering of lost traditions. The paleo movement is, perhaps, an example of this.
*I think the benefits of new technologies mostly outway the costs. But the costs they impose are new, and one way we make progress is by learning to deal with the problems that new technologies create. I owe this insight to Kevin Kelly.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Some initial thoughts on collective failure, responsibility, and guilt
I'm sure the ideas I've been juggling in my head for a while are not new. It seems like an issue some philosopher must have grappled with. But at any rate it's something that itches at me often when I encounter arguments about the issues I list in the title of this post. I want to make this fairly quick, and build on it in the future, so I'm gonna keep it short and punchy.
Some definitions:
Collective failure
I understand collective failure as an outcome within a given group where all/most members of the group are made worse off (could we call that a Pareto decline?), and the outcome cannot be fully attributed to some exogenous forces, and each member of the group did something that was a necessary (but not, in itself, sufficient) to allow the outcome to happen. (That's too wordy!)
Collective failure may effect people outside the group. For example, if we imagine that the policies of communist China under Mao where responsible for suffering among all Chinese people, we may say this was the result of a collective failure- but not among ALL Chinese, but among, say, the political class, or the educated class, or whatever.
Collective responsibility
Most ethical theories, along with most folk's ethical intuitions, hold that a person is morally responsible for an action iff she could have done otherwise. While I see the usefulness of this way of thinking, I think it comes loaded with some metaphysical baggage; I don't think we ever really know if someone could have done otherwise from what he/she actually did do. OK, but let's say we can imagine, in some cases, that someone could have done otherwise. The role of this way of thinking may be to change future incentives in order to shift behavior at the margin in order to decrease socially costly behavior.
But in the case of collective responsibility, we seem to run into a problem: this way of thinking doesn't apply easily to groups. If you say a group could have done otherwise, it seems like you need a way to translate that into individual action. And here we have the real problem: it's obvious that many individual actions are only possible if others act a certain way. That is, someone could only have also differently if others had also acted differently. Now, there are cases where an individual could plausibly have been able to induce others to behave in this way, but there are also many cases where this isn't the case. In such cases, how can we attribute responsibility in a way that can be sensibly applied to all individuals in a group?
I think a plausible answer to this question goes something like this:
When we attribute responsibility for some outcome to some group, one thing we want to do is to induce that group to develop social practices that will make this outcome less likely in the future. Such practices may only be possible with widespread changes in behavior among all, or a sufficient number of members of the group. I think social norms that guide a lot of behavior are like this: they require most members to opt in. And I think perception of collective responsibility within a group may induce a change of behavior that can change social norms and, thus, social outcomes.
Collective guilt
In some usages, 'guilt' and 'responsibility' may be used interchangeably, but I want to argue that, in cases dealing with social outcomes, it is more useful to make a distinction. I think 'guilt' ought to be used only to apply to those we actually punish. Part of the reason for this is rhetorical and pragmatic. People seem to recoil at most suggestions of collective guilt, and probably rightly so. For one thing, guilt also has a connotation of exclusion; once we ascribe guilt, the common understanding is that those who aren't guilty are off the hook. It also has a connotation of finality; once we've found out who is guilty, we punish them, or make them give compensation, and then we're finished. With many social problems, however, thing are more complicated than this kind of thinking allows for.
Application and conclusion
Let me try to apply this thinking to a concrete case to make it clearer. Suppose we attribute the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and occupying authorities from 1932-1946 to a collective failure among the Japanese people at the time to curb the highly nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Japanese society at that time.
We may say that those people who committed the atrocities, and those who ordered them, or even knowingly allowed them to occur, are clearly guilty in some sense. We may even hold guilty all Japanese who were of a certain age at that time- though in a different sense; we're not going to throw all of them in prison, but we may, say, want them to feel guilty in order to change their behavior in the future.
But it seems pretty absurd to hold most Japanese people alive today to be guilty for those crimes. After all, they weren't even alive at the time, or they were children.And assigning guilt in this way may fuel resentment among Japanese people, or bigotry against Japanese people.
But we may want to attribute some kind of collective responsibility- not for what happened then, but to do better in the future- to develop better social norms, institutions, and practices so that the Japanese military will never again act in such a way. After all, norms and institutions are sticky- they don't change overnight, and they depend on many bottom-up social phenomena- not only on policy or actions by leaders, but also on the actions of all people within the group.
Of course, we do a lot more than this. We also encourage policies, act in international diplomacy, etc. But this kind of assigning of responsibility is one of the things we may do.
I hope these ideas are useful in helping us understand some important problems we face in our society, and in addressing these problems. In the future, I plan to elaborate on these ideas.
Some definitions:
Collective failure
I understand collective failure as an outcome within a given group where all/most members of the group are made worse off (could we call that a Pareto decline?), and the outcome cannot be fully attributed to some exogenous forces, and each member of the group did something that was a necessary (but not, in itself, sufficient) to allow the outcome to happen. (That's too wordy!)
Collective failure may effect people outside the group. For example, if we imagine that the policies of communist China under Mao where responsible for suffering among all Chinese people, we may say this was the result of a collective failure- but not among ALL Chinese, but among, say, the political class, or the educated class, or whatever.
Collective responsibility
Most ethical theories, along with most folk's ethical intuitions, hold that a person is morally responsible for an action iff she could have done otherwise. While I see the usefulness of this way of thinking, I think it comes loaded with some metaphysical baggage; I don't think we ever really know if someone could have done otherwise from what he/she actually did do. OK, but let's say we can imagine, in some cases, that someone could have done otherwise. The role of this way of thinking may be to change future incentives in order to shift behavior at the margin in order to decrease socially costly behavior.
But in the case of collective responsibility, we seem to run into a problem: this way of thinking doesn't apply easily to groups. If you say a group could have done otherwise, it seems like you need a way to translate that into individual action. And here we have the real problem: it's obvious that many individual actions are only possible if others act a certain way. That is, someone could only have also differently if others had also acted differently. Now, there are cases where an individual could plausibly have been able to induce others to behave in this way, but there are also many cases where this isn't the case. In such cases, how can we attribute responsibility in a way that can be sensibly applied to all individuals in a group?
I think a plausible answer to this question goes something like this:
When we attribute responsibility for some outcome to some group, one thing we want to do is to induce that group to develop social practices that will make this outcome less likely in the future. Such practices may only be possible with widespread changes in behavior among all, or a sufficient number of members of the group. I think social norms that guide a lot of behavior are like this: they require most members to opt in. And I think perception of collective responsibility within a group may induce a change of behavior that can change social norms and, thus, social outcomes.
Collective guilt
In some usages, 'guilt' and 'responsibility' may be used interchangeably, but I want to argue that, in cases dealing with social outcomes, it is more useful to make a distinction. I think 'guilt' ought to be used only to apply to those we actually punish. Part of the reason for this is rhetorical and pragmatic. People seem to recoil at most suggestions of collective guilt, and probably rightly so. For one thing, guilt also has a connotation of exclusion; once we ascribe guilt, the common understanding is that those who aren't guilty are off the hook. It also has a connotation of finality; once we've found out who is guilty, we punish them, or make them give compensation, and then we're finished. With many social problems, however, thing are more complicated than this kind of thinking allows for.
Application and conclusion
Let me try to apply this thinking to a concrete case to make it clearer. Suppose we attribute the atrocities committed by the Japanese military and occupying authorities from 1932-1946 to a collective failure among the Japanese people at the time to curb the highly nationalistic and militaristic tendencies in Japanese society at that time.
We may say that those people who committed the atrocities, and those who ordered them, or even knowingly allowed them to occur, are clearly guilty in some sense. We may even hold guilty all Japanese who were of a certain age at that time- though in a different sense; we're not going to throw all of them in prison, but we may, say, want them to feel guilty in order to change their behavior in the future.
But it seems pretty absurd to hold most Japanese people alive today to be guilty for those crimes. After all, they weren't even alive at the time, or they were children.And assigning guilt in this way may fuel resentment among Japanese people, or bigotry against Japanese people.
But we may want to attribute some kind of collective responsibility- not for what happened then, but to do better in the future- to develop better social norms, institutions, and practices so that the Japanese military will never again act in such a way. After all, norms and institutions are sticky- they don't change overnight, and they depend on many bottom-up social phenomena- not only on policy or actions by leaders, but also on the actions of all people within the group.
Of course, we do a lot more than this. We also encourage policies, act in international diplomacy, etc. But this kind of assigning of responsibility is one of the things we may do.
I hope these ideas are useful in helping us understand some important problems we face in our society, and in addressing these problems. In the future, I plan to elaborate on these ideas.
Monday, March 21, 2011
Update
Once again, a long time since I bothered to do a post here. My wireless router at home broke, and since then my VPN at home doesn't work. I got up early this morning, and I'm now at Starbucks sipping a cup of tea, so here I am.
My reading lately has been pointing my thinking increasingly toward a convergence of various ideas- Nassim Taleb, Richard Rorty, Seth Roberts and the various writers of paleo diet related blogs. It's all been getting me to think about the relationship between dynamism, coping with limited knowledge, the open society, and living well.
It's exciting to see the emergence of a strain of thought that seems to me so necessary for "our times". Let me try to lay out what I see going on here:
A distrust of theorizing, and an embracing of epistemological openness and tinkering
Both Rorty and Taleb offer convincing arguments against any theory as the final arbiter of Truth. Taleb suggests tinkering as a better paradigm. The smartest paleo writers seem to get this idea. Scientific evidence matters, but individuals need to be able to tinker around, see what works, and make new discoveries.
Embracing social dynamism
This follows to some extent from the latter. The smartest paleo writers understand that society flourishes when it allows a bottom-up discovery process to be the driver of social progress. It's refreshing to see more and more libertarians also fully embrace the implications of Hayek- there is never perfect knowledge, competition- indeed, perfect ANYTHING. The reason to embrace markets is because they allow for discovery, and keep the many failures that will occur along the way small. Government tends to push for one-size-fits-all solutions, and failures are massively damaging. But the smart libertarians understand that big business is often completely dependent on big government; social orders are dependent on each other.
Imperfect knowledge
The Chicago version of libertarianism is misleading. You don't need to believe in perfect competition, or perfect rationality, to support a greater role for markets. Indeed, the concept of the market, broadly understood, is just another way of saying something like 'a decentralized, bottom-up process of discovery'. We should also include in this what one might call 'the marketplace of ideas', and indeed most human interaction. We lack a good word for all of this. Ideas are just as important as production, even in 'the market' more narrowly construed.
The human body, like society, is a complex system, and we understand it very poorly. Overarching theories are very likely to miss something. We should proceed cautiously. Avoid the most clearly damaging things, and go with what works- don't worry too much about why. The convergence of evolutionary logic and scientific evidence can point us in the right direction, but don't wed yourself to any conclusion.
Never completely trust large institutions
The American government and it's corporate clients are not in the business of guarding the common good. I don't think there is deliberate intention to harm, but the net effect often is to harm the mass of people.
In the case of health, they continue to forward a hypothesis that appears weaker than ever. They have helped to destroy the knowledge embedded in traditional foodways- how many Americans know how to render lard?- and pushed deeply damaging alternatives.
The internet is empowering people to create social networks to help rebuild this knowledge. It's going to take some time, but many have already rebuilt their health.
This is all very scattered. If I ever get around to it, I'll try to better organize it and elaborate on some of these ideas.
My reading lately has been pointing my thinking increasingly toward a convergence of various ideas- Nassim Taleb, Richard Rorty, Seth Roberts and the various writers of paleo diet related blogs. It's all been getting me to think about the relationship between dynamism, coping with limited knowledge, the open society, and living well.
It's exciting to see the emergence of a strain of thought that seems to me so necessary for "our times". Let me try to lay out what I see going on here:
A distrust of theorizing, and an embracing of epistemological openness and tinkering
Both Rorty and Taleb offer convincing arguments against any theory as the final arbiter of Truth. Taleb suggests tinkering as a better paradigm. The smartest paleo writers seem to get this idea. Scientific evidence matters, but individuals need to be able to tinker around, see what works, and make new discoveries.
Embracing social dynamism
This follows to some extent from the latter. The smartest paleo writers understand that society flourishes when it allows a bottom-up discovery process to be the driver of social progress. It's refreshing to see more and more libertarians also fully embrace the implications of Hayek- there is never perfect knowledge, competition- indeed, perfect ANYTHING. The reason to embrace markets is because they allow for discovery, and keep the many failures that will occur along the way small. Government tends to push for one-size-fits-all solutions, and failures are massively damaging. But the smart libertarians understand that big business is often completely dependent on big government; social orders are dependent on each other.
Imperfect knowledge
The Chicago version of libertarianism is misleading. You don't need to believe in perfect competition, or perfect rationality, to support a greater role for markets. Indeed, the concept of the market, broadly understood, is just another way of saying something like 'a decentralized, bottom-up process of discovery'. We should also include in this what one might call 'the marketplace of ideas', and indeed most human interaction. We lack a good word for all of this. Ideas are just as important as production, even in 'the market' more narrowly construed.
The human body, like society, is a complex system, and we understand it very poorly. Overarching theories are very likely to miss something. We should proceed cautiously. Avoid the most clearly damaging things, and go with what works- don't worry too much about why. The convergence of evolutionary logic and scientific evidence can point us in the right direction, but don't wed yourself to any conclusion.
Never completely trust large institutions
The American government and it's corporate clients are not in the business of guarding the common good. I don't think there is deliberate intention to harm, but the net effect often is to harm the mass of people.
In the case of health, they continue to forward a hypothesis that appears weaker than ever. They have helped to destroy the knowledge embedded in traditional foodways- how many Americans know how to render lard?- and pushed deeply damaging alternatives.
The internet is empowering people to create social networks to help rebuild this knowledge. It's going to take some time, but many have already rebuilt their health.
This is all very scattered. If I ever get around to it, I'll try to better organize it and elaborate on some of these ideas.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Race, collective failure, and collective responsibility
It was really hard to listen to this Bloggingheads episode, because the tone of the argument was pretty charged, and because this is an issue that goes down into the traumatized core of the American collective psyche. That sounds a bit too pseudo-literary and clichéd, but I think there's some truth to it; almost every American seems to have a strong opinion on this issue, and most seem to get pretty emotional when they talk about it.
I have thoughts about various aspects of Lowry and Wax's argument, and about their arguments.
I had a similar reaction to the tone and basic approach of both. Wax struck me as a bit overly eager to arrive at her conclusion, which is pretty typical for a lot of conservatives. This is, I'm speculating, why Lowry seemed to have a bit of adverse emotional reaction, which was both understandable and counterproductive.
Lowry's objection to Wax's analytical framework struck me as a little vague, but also pointing to something important- perhaps a fruitful line of inquiry. But as it stood I think it was hard for Wax to substantially respond to it, especially in an hour long dialog.
Lowry mentions that Wax's approach of diagnosing a cultural problem among blacks has political consequences- ones that, he intones, are problematic. I think it's not unfair to say that he suggests that this way of thinking leads to something like a racist political outcome. Lowry says that we should only be willing to go down that road if we're on very solid analytical footing, which, he suggests, Wax is not.
Wax defends against this attack mainly by saying that (1), cultural analysis is just hard to make analytically solid, at least given our current knowledge, and that (2) the data seem to overwhelmingly point to a black problem- that is, there are statistics, like crime rates, among blacks that can not be accounted for by any other variable. This is were a different tone would have been helpful, by the way. She seemed a bit too eager to push this point, and at some points seemed to suggest the ridiculous posture often taken by conservatives that being willing to talk about this stuff is in itself somehow courageous.
Anyway, this all got me thinking about about some conceptual (dare I say- philosophical?) issues I've thought about in the past about the nature of social or cultural failure, collective responsibility, and collective guilt.
It seems to me that there's a lot of conceptual blurring that happens in discussions involving these topics, perhaps because these discussions are often around emotionally charged topics, but also, I suspect, because something about the way we've evolved to think about moral responsibility tends to lead us into confusion when we get to this level of talking about it.
UPDATE: This post languished for about a month- I want to finish it, but I may write less than I had initially planned:
The confusion I mentioned above comes, I think, from ascribing responsibility to groups in the same way we do to individuals, and from the conflation of collective responsibility and collective guilt.
The problem is that we've developed the concept of individual guilt/responsibility because it incentivizes people to behave in a more pro-social way (I think most evolutionary psychologists would agree with this hypothesis, but I'm open to being corrected). This same concept has gotten applied to groups because it's easy for us to think of groups the same way we think as individuals. But the incentive effect doesn't work here and, worse, it ends up getting mixed up with intergroup conflict and goes against our intuitions of justice. (Does that make sense?)
In the case of the debate about blacks in America, people like Wax suggest that blacks have some kind of responsibility as a group to improve their situation. This gets interpreted as a kind of accusation of guilt, and as alleviating whites of any responsibility. And Wax's tone does nothing to assuage the concerns of anyone skeptical of her motives.
If I was going to make the kind of argument that Wax was making, I would put it something like this: There is such a thing as cultural failure. Culture is a pattern of behavior among individuals is any group that separates itself from others enough to be able to create and enforce internal norms. These patterns can be conducive to, or destructive of, individual flourishing. They develop through internal and external influences.
In the case of blacks, a culture destructive of individual flourishing has developed. We don't really know why. It's likely that the unique exploitation and oppression of blacks in America is one reason.
Whether or not that's true, it is simply a fact that improving the situation of blacks will require individuals within the black community to engage with the culture and change it. This says nothing about the ultimate moral responsibility for the current situation. It is probably true in some sense that there is broader moral responsibility to be assigned to American society, American politicians, etc.
I don't have much confidence in this argument. If I were making it, I would also add that I do think government policy has a role to play, especially abolishing the War on Drugs and taking steps to improve education. I think my preferred policy for the latter would be to abolish public education and provide financial resources to those who need them, but that isn't going to happen, and there are probably ways to make marginal improvements in the meantime.
I don't know if any of this makes much sense, but I wanted to get it out there. I appreciate any feedback!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Tim Lee on Liberaltarianism
I want to associate myself with this post by fellow Minnesotan Tim Lee, on which I posted the following comment:
Sign me up for the emerging Lindsey-Lee-Sanchez-Wilkinson School of Libertarianism!My vision for the future is a worldwide coalition of pragmatic, bottom-up focused epistemologically cautious liberals who understand that markets are a force for progress.
Will Wilkinson has it right that the liberaltarianism thing is best understood as a longer-term project- an effort to convince people with liberal impulses that a lot of libertarian insights are genuinely liberal, and to build a broader liberal coalition in years ahead. I think some progress has been made in this direction, insofar as people like Matt Yglesias seem to at least take libertarian arguments seriously. Remember, 40 years ago libertarians were MUCH MORE of a crazy fringe group.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
What's a libertarian to do?
Reason has an interesting debate on the topic "Where do libertarians belong?" featuring Brink Lindsey, Jonah Goldberg, and Matt Kibbe. I have a few thoughts (again, scattered):
Lindsey is seems to be making two arguments: one about political strategy and one about ideological affinity. These arguments overlap a bit, but I think they ought to be handled separately. I'll put it as a Q and A:
Will libertarians achieve more if we disassociate ourselves from the right?
I've never felt a particular affinity for the right. But Lindsey is probably addressing politically active/ influential libertarians, of which I am neither. I imagine he's also trying to push Cato a bit away from it's association with the Republican Party as well.
Anyway, I would answer "Yes", because I don't really see the point in blanket political alliances Lindsey's suggestion that libertarians should make alliances on a case-by-case basis seems obviously right. Associating yourself with a political party for it's own sake is stupid.
Are libertarians more ideologically affiliated with modern American liberals?
Depends on the libertarian and the liberal in question. Many libertarians are basically, to use Will Wilkinson's phrase, "liberals who like markets". But then there are the Randian leave me alone types, who, though I may agree with them on many specific policy issues, don't seem to care a lot about promoting human welfare (that's probably an overstatement).
But both of these put together represent maybe 5% of the American population. There are a lot of Americans with libertarian beliefs, but, in my experience, they have plenty other very non-libertarian beliefs.
I guess where this is leading me is that ideology as a way of categorizing a large group of people is a pretty big abstraction from reality. My feeling is that it would be enough for Lindsey to point out that republicans, and the Tea Partiers, have a lot of beliefs that libertarians probably disagree with. From there, individuals can make up their own minds. Isn't that the libertarian solution?
Not really related to the above, but I see this kind of debate as being largely about identity. A lot of libertarians may feel the need to associate themselves with other, larger movements or subcultures.
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