I just read Joseph Heath’s Enlightenment 2.0 (reviewed here by Alex). Heath is a philosopher who is a big fan of “reason,” which he sees as an accidentally-created uniquely-human mental capacity offering great gains in generality and accuracy over our other mental capacities. However, reason comes at the costs of being slow and difficult, requiring fragile social and environmental supports, and going against our nature.
It seems like the judicial system is the closest thing we have to this today. For important decisions, judges (and their clerks) make extensive written arguments explaining their reasoning. So, maybe the question is why the government as a whole isn't more like the judicial system?
Maybe it's because the judicial system is often very slow and expensive?
The argumentative style of philosophers is well suited to quarterly journals that debate topics in philosophy. But if you swap out the topic, you have no reason to expect the style keep working. I say this as someone who's attended philosophy department faculty meetings. One doesn't come away wishing these professors were kings. Slowing everything down (even more) by requiring essays and peer review won't fix the core problem, which is that good leaders understand which problems merit detailed analysis and which don't. Philosophers are happy to devote a whole prolific career to problems that they know don't really matter - not even inside the discipline of philosophy. And that's the outcome we should expect if we foist the methods of philosophy on a profession that needs to make real decisions: We get endless debates and cycles of replies about a detail of a detail of an argument about a problem.
Monty Python did a philosophers' soccer match where the ball was ignored as the players paced broodingly and thought. That's kinda funny, but not really fair to the philosophers. Now imagine if a debate broke out, and at the opening whistle, all the "players" wanted to first "get clear on certain conceptual points" before they got around to kicking the ball. Yeah, I can imagine that taking 90 minutes.
I don't think a philosophy journal approach to government would be very interesting, even just as an experiment. That might be the case if people were legislating based on value systems, but as Robin is well-aware, all too-often legislation is based on belief systems. Academic philosophy is not notable for being good at arriving at objective truths, even if it's arguable that it is good for arriving at superior value systems.
No, thank you. I think William F. Buckley, Jr. said it best:"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
This obviously doesn't happen in large part due to the different incentives. But the artificial incentives in academia are perverse in specific ways caused by attempts to manage it, as a recent blog post, "Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse" by Mike Taylor - https://twitter.com/MikeTaylor - lays out; https://svpow.com/2017/03/1... . It concludes that "… could it possibly be … that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?" (ellipses in original)
So to be fair to academics, perhaps the asked-for analysis could consider what politics would look like if academia weren't so subject to the vicissitudes of, well, politics.
Of course, if we had a system to hire politicians that let us identify the "good people," or better, let us choose policies by somehow accurately predicting how they would perform *cough* futarchy *cough* then this wouldn't be a problem...
I was struck by this quote from the book, as detailed in the linked review:
The three major institutional features of our society—the market, representative democracy, and human rights—were all innovations that, at the time they were adopted, struck people as being completely crazy, absolutely contrary to human nature (which is why they were rejected throughout most of human history).
The idea that these ideas were resisted due to running contrary to human nature, specifically, is quite interesting. It's interesting because, according to the understanding of hunter-gatherer societies you've conveyed here in the past (which does seem to be the standard consensus view), democracy, and perhaps human rights too, are very intuitive concepts. Markets are easy to see as alien to human nature, but democracy certainly isn't - so the resistance to it would have come from learned ideas, etched into us over many millenia of society ruled by farming culture, rather than coming from innate human psychology.
This would give a larger role to culture in developing those 'automatic' parts of our minds than Heath seems to suggest. (And separately, it does seem like our minds are able to convert repeatedly-performed 'reasoned' actions into 'automatic' actions we are able to do without thinking.)
fixed; thanks
Seems to be a typo: "so obviously deceptive that it is difficult to relive they are legal" relive -> believe
And the unelected guardians in black robes consistently enjoy higher public approval ratings than either Congress or the President.
True, and yet, litigation is expensive. Using the court system to resolve disputes is often avoided.
The judicial system actually makes a lot MORE publicly visible decisions than do the other branches.
It seems like the judicial system is the closest thing we have to this today. For important decisions, judges (and their clerks) make extensive written arguments explaining their reasoning. So, maybe the question is why the government as a whole isn't more like the judicial system?
Maybe it's because the judicial system is often very slow and expensive?
The argumentative style of philosophers is well suited to quarterly journals that debate topics in philosophy. But if you swap out the topic, you have no reason to expect the style keep working. I say this as someone who's attended philosophy department faculty meetings. One doesn't come away wishing these professors were kings. Slowing everything down (even more) by requiring essays and peer review won't fix the core problem, which is that good leaders understand which problems merit detailed analysis and which don't. Philosophers are happy to devote a whole prolific career to problems that they know don't really matter - not even inside the discipline of philosophy. And that's the outcome we should expect if we foist the methods of philosophy on a profession that needs to make real decisions: We get endless debates and cycles of replies about a detail of a detail of an argument about a problem.
Monty Python did a philosophers' soccer match where the ball was ignored as the players paced broodingly and thought. That's kinda funny, but not really fair to the philosophers. Now imagine if a debate broke out, and at the opening whistle, all the "players" wanted to first "get clear on certain conceptual points" before they got around to kicking the ball. Yeah, I can imagine that taking 90 minutes.
I don't think a philosophy journal approach to government would be very interesting, even just as an experiment. That might be the case if people were legislating based on value systems, but as Robin is well-aware, all too-often legislation is based on belief systems. Academic philosophy is not notable for being good at arriving at objective truths, even if it's arguable that it is good for arriving at superior value systems.
No, thank you. I think William F. Buckley, Jr. said it best:"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
This obviously doesn't happen in large part due to the different incentives. But the artificial incentives in academia are perverse in specific ways caused by attempts to manage it, as a recent blog post, "Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse" by Mike Taylor - https://twitter.com/MikeTaylor - lays out; https://svpow.com/2017/03/1... . It concludes that "… could it possibly be … that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?" (ellipses in original)
So to be fair to academics, perhaps the asked-for analysis could consider what politics would look like if academia weren't so subject to the vicissitudes of, well, politics.
Of course, if we had a system to hire politicians that let us identify the "good people," or better, let us choose policies by somehow accurately predicting how they would perform *cough* futarchy *cough* then this wouldn't be a problem...
I was struck by this quote from the book, as detailed in the linked review:
The three major institutional features of our society—the market, representative democracy, and human rights—were all innovations that, at the time they were adopted, struck people as being completely crazy, absolutely contrary to human nature (which is why they were rejected throughout most of human history).
The idea that these ideas were resisted due to running contrary to human nature, specifically, is quite interesting. It's interesting because, according to the understanding of hunter-gatherer societies you've conveyed here in the past (which does seem to be the standard consensus view), democracy, and perhaps human rights too, are very intuitive concepts. Markets are easy to see as alien to human nature, but democracy certainly isn't - so the resistance to it would have come from learned ideas, etched into us over many millenia of society ruled by farming culture, rather than coming from innate human psychology.
This would give a larger role to culture in developing those 'automatic' parts of our minds than Heath seems to suggest. (And separately, it does seem like our minds are able to convert repeatedly-performed 'reasoned' actions into 'automatic' actions we are able to do without thinking.)