Jean-Jacques Rousseau – a complicated and irritating man, but one of the enlightenment philosophers who helped justify the state’s authority. Nowadays, he’s mostly known for the social contract, which was his work that established a basis for a possibly legitimate government.
I trust you noticed the “possibly” I slipped in there. Rousseau’s standard for what constitutes a legitimate government is pretty stringent and one can argue (as I will) that it’s impossible to achieve. All of that might be a problem for someone who wishes to assert that the state governs with the consent of the governed.
If you enjoy playing with questions about the legitimacy of the state, I welcome you as a fellow anarchist. It has always seemed puzzling to me that so many people can be fobbed off with “the state is legitimate because of social contract, duh!” and it seems as though their curiousity ends there. Monty Python explored the question of legitimacy brilliantly, in the scene in Holy Grail where Eric, the anarcho-syndicalist peasant, questions King Arthur’s legitimacy and Arthur has to resort to the ultimate argument of kings: an ass-kicking.
It’s tempting to think that the founding fathers of the USA were a cynical bunch of political hacks (as I do) but they may have been serious about the whole “political legitimacy through consent of the governed” thing – except you can’t both talk about consent and own slaves and expect anyone to take you seriously. My view is that the founding fathers talked a good game but were, ultimately authoritarians who established the framework of a constitutional oligarchy because they didn’t trust eachother; that was a bigger concern than achieving popular consent. But the appeal to the consent of the governed is a crucial thread running through the declaration of independence, which was a sort of amalgam of popular political blog-postings of its time.
The obvious refutation to a government’s claim to legitimacy following Rousseau’s principles is that one of the salient facts of government is that it does not exist at all, unless it is prepared at any time to do violence to the people. It’s really unsubtle hypocrisy to have armed spearmen standing around King Thag when he issues his decrees; if Thag governed through consent, the people would be throwing roses at him, but usually they’d throw something nastier if the spearmen weren’t there. In the Monty Python scene we see how, as soon as Eric makes an irrefutable challenge to the authority of the king, the only response the king can make is violence. So, it has always been. The second and less obvious refutation to Rousseau is that he appeals to a nebulous concept “the general will.” That’s the same dodge as the consequentialists use, only they call it “the greater good.” In both cases, the idea is that it’s possible to get a population of size greater than one to agree, or to understand anything well enough to be able to reason about the benefits of possible likely outcomes. Rousseau is scamming us; it always seemed obvious to me that he was a pernicious anarchist who wanted to destroy the legitimacy of all government by setting it a plausible-sounding standard that was actually impossible to achieve. [I think the consequentialists are just not very at thinky stuff]
For example, one could argue that there are plenty of opinion polls that show that 80% or so of Americans think that we should not spend so much on the military. If the poll stands in for a sampling of the general will, then the US government is illegitimate because it is ignoring the general will and merrily autocrating along. That also refutes “representative democracy” by the way; you cannot represent the people’s will by saying “but I know better” – that’s precisely missing the point.
What I do think Rousseau got right is the idea that the government exists to serve the people and that’s it: nobody wakes up one morning and says “I wish I had a king to order me around!” Plenty of people have woken up and thought “I hope our king shows up with his army and dislodges King Thag from my field before it’s completely destroyed.” That’s the reason that the founding fathers leaned on that “… establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” thing. It’s Rousseau’s idea, they are trying to enumerate the properties of the common good. When Rousseau dropped this load of philosophy, there were perceptive people at the time who decried it as a recipe for revolution because the monarchs of Europe who held sway at that time rather obviously did not give a shit about the common good; they were concerned with their personal comfort and aggrandizement, and having enough cash left over to pay off their spearmen and attract a good crowd of toadies.
Now, let me shift gears and discuss a different work by Rousseau, namely the Discourse on Inequality. I think this piece is given less emphasis than it deserves, probably because it did not serve as a tool for politicians to justify their power. And, need I mention that inequality and political power tend to be connected? King Thag is the embodiment of inequality; as Eric the anarcho-syndicalist peasant asks King Arthur, “‘oo made you king, then, eh?” What is the justification for the inequality of the situation in which Arthur is king and has a fine horse and armor, and Eric is hauling filth?
Rousseau’s analysis of inequality keeps its hands off political inequality, sort of, by keeping it abstract. There are two kinds of inequality, he says:
- natural inequality
- moral inequality
handicapped ballerina
I usually translate Rousseau’s “moral inequality” to “unfairness” or “social inequality”; let’s stick with “social inequality” for today. Natural inequality is when you’ve got an inequality that is a consequence of the situation we find ourselves in – suppose I am born four feet tall; if I want to be a basketball player, I am probably out of luck. We can point to the situation of the short basketball player and say “it’s unfortunate but it’s not unfair” There’s inequality but seeking a remedy is going to create more inequality somewhere else: you can’t reasonably overcome a natural inequality by hampering everyone to the same level. Kurt Vonnegut trolled that issue famously in his story Harrison Bergeron – a world in which everyone was brought to a level playing field through official handicapping. Vonnegut was being sarcastic but a lot of people appear to fall for Vonnegut’s troll: “you can’t get equality by holding people back!”
Harrison Bergeron brings into view social inequality: if a civilization adopted Vonnegut’s hypothetical approach to resolving natural inequality, then it would be creating social inequality in order to do it. Social inequality is things like: why is Thag king and Eric a peasant? Why does Arthur have a fine horse and a sword and Eric wears rags? Clearly, the situation is unequal – if only because Eric did not choose that situation. Neither did Arthur, but we notice that Arthur makes no attempt to remedy the social inequality by giving Eric his horse and some money.
Don’t conclude that I am holding Rousseau’s analysis up as some kind of brilliant panacea – far from it. I think the dilemma that he sets up between natural inequality and social inequality is very clarifying, but you should know that a lot of the rest of the treatise is packed with what can generously be called “bullshit.” Rousseau also launches an attack against modernity in general by asserting that men once lived in a “state of nature” free of social inequality, until civilization and money came along and made things unequal. Rousseau didn’t understand how early tribes of proto-humans probably co-evolved with “civilization” or his “state of nature” would have had King Thag in the middle of it: what if humans have always been socially unequal? Voltaire famously mocked Rousseau’s Treatise in a letter to Rousseau:
I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. […] No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours. However, as I have lost that habit for more than sixty years, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to resume it…
Both philosophers were circling around this issue of society’s role in inequality, but they never thought to ask King Thag, who was standing there watching the whole time. Thag would have said, “I like inequality because I am the king! If That were a peasant, he would want equality.” King Thag is a self-actualized, selfish, nihilist. I don’t know if it’s escaped your attention, but we live in a world that is full of them. America’s founding fathers were either honest enough with themselves that they saw and chuckled about their fine worlds about freedom, or they were seriously deluded by their own bullshit – it doesn’t matter. But when you sort through the rubble of all this, there’s a useful framework left in Rousseau, namely that regardless of whether your inequality is natural or social, inequality runs contrary to the greater good, which is the purpose for which society exists. A government/society that promotes inequality is illegitimate. It is a “failed state” because the purpose of the state is to help its weaker members, whether their weakness was a result of decisions of the state, or a result of the luck of the draw.
JJR
Where a lot of people, mostly of the “conservative” bent, get this wrong is they stop partway through: they conclude that the purpose of the state is to help preserve the status quo and to help (a bit) its members who experience a natural inequality. Those who are experiencing social inequality, well, let’s blame them for their condition and heap shit on them because they did not shovel so much filth so successfully that Eric the peasant is socially equal to King Arthur, somehow. If you think about it that way, it ought to be pretty obvious that such thinking actually only benefits King Thag and his toadies, who are drawn from the ranks of those same “conservatives.” Yes, I am drawing a direct line between the desire of some people to maintain social and natural inequality with their hope of eventually getting to serve as abject subordinates of authority. The mistake they are making, in their minds, is that they can be oligarchs – people who are comfortable and stand high, and who are not subject to the whims of the king or fate. But they are wrong: no matter how tightly they imagine they have constrained the power of the king, they are still subjects and can be summoned to kiss the royal ass on a whim.
“Conservatives” seem to like to go on about “entitlements” – how their social inferiors who participated in and consented to obey the system – expect the system to make good on its promises in return. When a wealthy man puts his money in the stock market, they expect a “return on investment” not an “entitlement” but it’s the same thing – there’s a presupposition that society is going to function the way that it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, it’s a failed state. A failed state is one which has reneged on its part of the social contract and when it decided to waive its debts to its members, it also waived its members’ debts to it.
I can’t help thinking about this stuff, as I wander around the US nowadays and see the assholes in Washington trying to figure out how to cancel hundreds of thousands of people’s “entitlements.” Those are not “entitlements” they are the government’s debt to fulfill its side of the social contract. Governments exist only for mutual protection and support of the citizens but sometimes the creepy authoritarians in power mistake them for a giant cookie jar that they can take from, but anyone else who wants a crumb of cookie is an entitled loser who’s not working hard enough. They don’t realize who the entitled losers really are. Governments that are not purely authoritarian devolve to a system for discussing the sharing of goods and services; it’s as simple as that. The degree to which the government does things like – oh, say, – spend $1tn on offensive nuclear weaponry that the citizens really, really were not clamoring for – that’s the degree to which that government is a failed state that is not concerned with the “general will.” Rousseau and I stop at the same place: we declare the government illegitimate and, then what? Even if I don’t believe it’s legitimate, King Thag hired those spearmen for a reason, and they don’t seem to understand that they are instruments of oppression, or they don’t care.
The fact of the matter is that if you swapped King Arthur and Eric the peasant’s roles, Eric would make as good a king as Arthur did, and Arthur would pick up the trick of hauling filth fairly quickly. And the “conservatives” would praise King Eric and rain shit on peasant Arthur, who might attain some small measure of enlightenment, eventually.
If you find yourself discussing the state’s legitimacy with a “conservative” you should deploy the points from this ramble, namely, that a government that fosters inequality cannot be legitimate because it does not concern itself with the general good of the people. There are a lot of people who seem to think that saying “social contract” means they’ve won the argument, but they seldom realize that Rousseau’s social contract (and I think we can safely say he owns the idea) was a double-edged sword: you owe the state loyalty only when it is pursuing the general good. A snappier formulation would be that the people owe the state loyalty reciprocally; the state doesn’t get to demand loyalty from the people while showing loyalty only to the stock market.
Naturally, a state cannot be legitimate if it resorts to compulsion. Rousseau might say that the very fact that the state needs to have spearmen around to keep the people in line is a sign it is not a legitimate state. That is another fun argument to deploy at “conservatives.”
Rousseau’s approach to power is applicable outside of politics. An employer/employee relationship can be seen through the lens of a social contract. You agree to do certain things and they agree in return to provide a safe workplace and pay a certain amount. If either side breaks that agreement, the relationship has ended and needs to be re-negotiated. That’s another way in which Rousseau was threatening to the establishment: he exposes how management also has a debt to labor, it’s not uni-directional.
For any contract to be valid, both sides should have the right to negotiate the exact terms of the contract, and signing said contact shouldn’t be mandatory, namely both sides should have alternative choices. This is never the case with the supposed social contract. The terms are singlehandedly decided by the rulers, and the population are forced to obey at the gunpoint. For example, I personally never consented to living in a transphobic society that won’t allow me to live as my preferred gender. Nonetheless, the state insists that they get to decide what is my gender, because the law says so. And no, I don’t really have alternatives, because all the land on this planet is already divided by countries all of which are deeply flawed. Moving to a different country wouldn’t be a solution for me, because I dislike all of them.
In debate tournaments, the terms of the social contract always just happened to be whatever the hell the debater wanted to advocate. For example, “People have a duty to serve in the military, because of the social contract,” basically meant, “People have a duty to serve in the military, because I just pulled out of my ass the idea that this should be one of the clauses in the social contract.” As you can imagine, I hated this argument back when I participated in debate tournaments.
Yeah, especially among new members of university debate clubs.
These days, I’ve started to use a very different lens to look at this, one a little more down-the-line when it comes to working from theoretical setup to practical application.
From a long (long) argument, I get to the following:
“Members of the community may hold leadership positions in which they act and advocate for the public good. All other members of the community must be provided with participation on an equal basis.”
It sounds like a lot of policy doublespeak, and to be fair it’s a much weaker set of rules for thinking of what is logically and legally allowable (Spend lots on something that is unpopular? It’s in the public good! Thag kill you? Thag did it for the public good, Thag swears!).
Indeed, all the lines that it draws are very vague and ambiguous: Whether or not someone is a member of the community, what the public good really is, what the heck is participation on an equal basis anyway….. it’s actually been entirely made around concepts that have ambiguous logical borders but strong interiors, and honestly that lack of definite lines means you really can’t use it setup legal systems or the like.
That said, I didn’t switch to it for nothing, it has some very good strong points. Let’s have a look:
– It puts the view that government people are the same as the rest of us at the front and center. They aren’t different, especially not in a permanent way.
– It places no obligations on citizens and allows no disqualification.
– It removes logical tests or exchanges, meaning that certain things, once clearly bullshit, can not become un-bullshit (see below).
– It contextualises equality so that it has a definite, if ambiguously bordered, concept attached.
– It runs parallel to the way we actually experience groups of people.
In case you are wondering, I built it to allow as many people as possible reliable access what a government is supposed to mean.
So, for a more concrete example of what I mean, think about this:
Say I was talking to you for a while, and we went through this statement and what it means, just generally, piece by piece.
Then I ask you “have you ever met someone who participates on an equal basis with a party donor?”
This is where the ambiguous logical borders but strong interiors of the ideas come into play.
Because it tests well-defined concepts against masses of personal experience (your whole life), both of which are massive in the mind.
Once you are there, it’s kind of the end of the argument. The supermajority of people will not argue against the idea that members of the community should be able to participate on an equal basis, you can’t argue against your entire life, and you can’t argue that those who do get equal participation with party donors are drawn from the wider community.
So, either equality is wrong, your life is wrong (or a freakish exception), or the government is not a government.
To finally bring it full-circle, the reason I switched to this kind of idea is that the way you described is something that one person can argue (much like a legal defense), the way I describe is something that you can talk to a lot of people about and get a clear consensus.
P.S. I’m a “right tools for the right job” kind of person, I view both my view and the social contract view as different tools for accessing what government means, to be used in different circumstances.
At this point (not later on), you seem to be thinking mainly in terms of the governments we do actually have (and did have, in Rousseau’s time). On the one hand, that’s an important thing to worry about, obviously. On the other hand, that is a very tiny piece in the space of all of the possible governments that we could have (some of which could be legitimate).
It doesn’t seem like you’d disagree with any of this, but just riffing a little more on this point…. Consider taxes. Glibertarians don’t want to pay them, because they hate people other than themselves and the tax-funded services which are provided to said people. So, they whine a lot about this purported theft by the government, about it busting down their doors and busting in their heads and so on. (Whether this often happens in reality is being put off to the side. We’re dealing now in only what people believe, not what’s real, because the focus was already put on getting their consent in regard to some kind of unspecified contract.)
Whose property is it? Well, the Glibs think it should be theirs and that nobody should take it from them. What they’ve very transparently left out of their bullshit analysis is how much violence is done to the people who would be aided by those very same government services the Glibertarian refuses to support.
So, there is that: they’ve got bullshit ideas, so what do we do about it? Notice how the other people in this little story, the ones who would benefit from such programs, have beliefs too. If all we’re doing is asking most people what they believe about what is good for them (so we can correctly claim to have their consent when we do it), then in fact there is a large majority of people who think this, who are in or near poverty, who do benefit from welfare programs and so forth.
So where is the Glib argument about “state violence” supposed to lead? And worse than that, how does it even get off the ground? If there is something about it that is illegitimate, it’s hard to understand what that could possibly be. A small minority of the wealthy want violence and oppression for their lessers, and we’re supposed to accept that state of affairs as “legitimate” by default, because no matter what, we’re supposed to do everything in our power to cater to them and remain helpless. I hear that kind of thing, and all I can think is just “huh?” I don’t get why anybody should have to take that shit seriously at all.
You’re confusing it with something like utilitarianism, which deals in amounts of utility. Generally, the thought is that we should do “the most” good possible, so the goal (ideally) is to represent this with a measure of what is more or less good, if it’s possible to do that.
Many apparent “alternatives” to utilitarianism seem to implicitly rely on the same sort of idea, that certain things are better or worse, that some valuable things ought to have priority over others, and so forth. Utilitarians can at least be credited for being totally upfront about it. (Whatever it is, I would not call it a “dodge.”)
Sometimes, the formulation is basically that we (always) should act “for the greater good,” which may mean a lot of different things of course, but even that isn’t necessarily what a utilitarian thinks. Since you approve of and use the “greater good” talk later in your post, I admit I’m pretty confused about your position here.
Anyway, you could combine all sort of theories if you like. But consequentialism in its broadest form is the idea that whether an action is good depends (only or typically or primarily) on that action’s consequences (as the name itself suggests, much like Uism). You should care about and want to know what the outcome will be or what it’s likely to be. This idea also seems fairly uncontroversial, at least at first glance. But it doesn’t depend on the same type of commitments as utilitarianism does.
I always thought that “see the violence inherent in the system!” scene mocked lefto-anarchist rhetoric more than validating it.
Pierce: Me too. The king was an asshole, yes, but the peasant was also overreacting to the king simply grabbing his arm.
“you cannot represent the people’s will by saying “but I know better””
They’re not supposed to represent our WILL – they’re supposed to represent our INTERESTS. That’s what I want : some pencil neck policy wonk working out the best e.g. Central Bank interest rate. I actively want them to know better. I didn’t do a degree in chemical engineering so I could tile my own bathroom. I pay someone who’s good at that shit to do it for me. Leave the designing chemical plants to me, you politicians get on with making my (and everyone else’s) life better.
See that bit in brackets? That bit, the Republicans leave out. So do the Democrats.
Another reason for not enacting the will of the people is that the people are demonstrably dumb as a box of rocks and vicious with it. Their will usually includes capital punishment (as long as its OTHER PEOPLE, and if a surprising number of them are brown, so much the better).
Never serve the will of the people – few people are idiots.
Bloody autocorrect – “few” should read “the”!
Absolutely not.
Right now the state (here) has been saying for some time “stay home”. Then, for a bit, “stay THE FUCK HOME!”. And it is saying these things for excellent reasons to do with protecting the citizenry. And those people are absolute fucking idiots who swarmed to the beaches and hills and pickernick spots and generally gave every impression of not giving a flying fuck, so now, finally, actually probably significantly too late, the government is finally giving the spearmen the authority to fine people or even lock them up if they don’t STAY THE FUCK HOME for their own and everyone else’s good. I see this as a perfectly legitimate use of said spearmen.
It’s going to be interesting watching when exactly those powers get repealed…
I’ve played a lot of Civ and civ-type games, and that has largely informed my take on the whole Social Contract. Which is this: People put up with autocratic states as long as being a peon in a culture they are invested in is a better alternative to being an even worse peon after being conquered by a culture they aren’t invested in. Or to put it a different way: The reason feudalism took over most of Eurasia for so long was that any culture that didn’t adopt it got conquered and absorbed by one of the ones that did.
Cultures are like species in the natural world. Asking why they tend to be armed and repressive is like asking why animals have sharp horns and hooves: because if they didn’t they’d get eaten, duh. Since the invention of the first club in 2001 Space Odyssey, our species’ solution to the problem of limited resources has been that whichever culture is best at applied violence gets to flourish, and the ones that don’t get to be their slaves. The laws of evolution apply to cultures exactly the same way they apply to species.
For most of history, stuff like tactics and technological weaponry didn’t matter long-term in warfare because they’d just get copied. What made the most difference was just whichever side showed up with the most warm bodies on the battlefield. THAT was why feudalism worked so well for so long: it was great with the whole warm bodies thing. People would put up with King Thag or King Henry because he could say “I want 10,000 soldiers and enough food to feed them for three months at Whitby by the end of March, so we can go conquer the French before they come and conquer us” and it would happen. Countries whose peasants tried to rise up against their feudal overlords would get invaded in short order and the old feudal overlords replaced by new foreign feudal overlords, so they evolved systems to prevent that – both through King Thag’s spearmen and more subtle memes like religion and nationalism.
But then technological advances made feudalism stop working so well. With firearms, a small well-trained standing army could make mincemeat out of a bunch of poorly armed peasants led by tanks. The aristocracy that had evolved as the defense mechanism of feudal cultures was suddenly useless, so they began to flail around looking for means to justify themselves. Fortunately for them, all the meme mechanisms that had supported them back when they were necessary were still intact, so they tried to enlist them to argue that they were a better, smarter, higher breed of human who deserved to be in charge. But it wasn’t long before folks like Rousseau saw right through them.
Anyway, that’s my general take on history. Whenever I see a social custom that was widespread throughout many cultures – slavery, subjugation of women, aristocracy, poetry, religion – my working assumption is that at least at first, it must have provided some evolutionary advantage in real-world Civ.
But as things change and new technologies are discovered, net positives can quickly become negatives. Liberals are the people who notice this and try to clear away the deadwood; conservatives are the ones who fail to figure this out. And that’s my sermon.
Oh, also “Harrison Bergeron” also bugged the heck out of me. Who, exactly, is the Handicapper General supposed to be attacking? Who is actually out there trying to make things harder for the naturally gifted in the name of equality? Just about nobody, that’s who. The real world seems to do just fine with allowing the graceful to be dancers, the strong to be athletes, the mathy to be engineers, etc.
But whenever you try make things a bit better for the folks at the bottom, you get accused of being a Handicapper General. It’s an argument straight out of Ayn Rand: in order to allow the talented to rise, you’ve got to make sure the talentless fall. What, you want to take some of the money away from my child’s gifted program to try to prepare the special ed kids for a place in society? What kind of anti-elitist Diana Moon Glampers are you?
brucegee1962 @ #8:
conservatives are the ones who fail to figure this out.
I’m sure a few figure it out and are fine with it because it’s still a positive to them, and want to keep it this way thankyouverymuch.
@ #9:
It doesn’t even work to point out that it makes economic sense to help the less fortunate, because they have a better chance of becoming productive, and/or need less help later. It’s as if the conservatives actually care less about cold cash and return on investment, and more about who does and who does not deserve stuff.
brucegee1962@#9:
Oh, also “Harrison Bergeron” also bugged the heck out of me. Who, exactly, is the Handicapper General supposed to be attacking? Who is actually out there trying to make things harder for the naturally gifted in the name of equality? Just about nobody, that’s who. The real world seems to do just fine with allowing the graceful to be dancers, the strong to be athletes, the mathy to be engineers, etc.
I think it’s one of Vonnegut’s worst pieces. Normally, I think his cynicism is very well thought-out, but that time was a definite miss.
To me, the problem is that not enough social resources are expended on trying to overcome natural inequality and social inequality. If someone is born without a leg, it’s not unreasonable to say “we acknowledge you may have trouble playing basketball” but it makes no sense at all to tell them “sucks being you, you need to work your ass off and maybe one day you can buy a wooden leg.” The conditions in which most people find themself has very little to do with their choices and creating, so blaming them for it is just irrational.
But whenever you try make things a bit better for the folks at the bottom, you get accused of being a Handicapper General. It’s an argument straight out of Ayn Rand: in order to allow the talented to rise, you’ve got to make sure the talentless fall. What, you want to take some of the money away from my child’s gifted program to try to prepare the special ed kids for a place in society?
It seems to me that one of the big errors “conservatives” make is that life is a great big zero-sum game. If the state helps educate your kids, it does not damage the quality of my kids’ education – civilization is big enough that those offsets have little effect or average out (pace the “rising tide floats all boats” argument) I have had discussions with real, live, conservatives, who have said something like that – that they want every chance for their kids, even if it means holding other peoples’ kids back to reduce competition.
Usually, from there, the moves look like:
Conservative: “It’s a dog eat dog world out there and I want my kids to have every possible chance.”
Me: “So you don’t favor doing anything to help anyone, because they don’t deserve any kind of opportunity?”
Conservative: “Like I said, it’s a dog eat dog world.”
Me: “Then aren’t you raising your child to be weak and stupid by trying to help them? Shouldn’t you raise them as Spartans did? You’re not being a proper sociopath, here, explain to me what’s so special about your kids. And, have you had them DNA checked?”
Pierce R. Butler and consciousness razor@#4 #5:
I always thought that “see the violence inherent in the system!” scene mocked lefto-anarchist rhetoric more than validating it.
Yeah, and it’s also demonstrating the futility of having a bunch of ideology when you’re hauling filth. It’s a very abstract scene, you can read a lot into it. As you can see, I tend to see it literally – as a parable for how quickly authority reaches for its ultimate rationalization and starts kicking peasants’ asses.
Andreas Avester@#1:
For any contract to be valid, both sides should have the right to negotiate the exact terms of the contract, and signing said contact shouldn’t be mandatory, namely both sides should have alternative choices. This is never the case with the supposed social contract. The terms are singlehandedly decided by the rulers, and the population are forced to obey at the gunpoint.
I think it’s unfortunate that Rousseau used the word “contract” because it focuses our minds on contract law – which I do not believe he was referring to. Rousseau’s idea of the “contract” seems more like “debt” and “duty”; it’s an interlocking web of relationships that come with trades of duty for benefits. I would have called it “membership” instead of “contract” but obviously it’s Rousseau’s ball to play.
In debate tournaments, the terms of the social contract always just happened to be whatever the hell the debater wanted to advocate. For example, “People have a duty to serve in the military, because of the social contract,” basically meant, “People have a duty to serve in the military, because I just pulled out of my ass the idea that this should be one of the clauses in the social contract.” As you can imagine, I hated this argument back when I participated in debate tournaments.
That is also an important point: it’s unspecified. Rousseau is appealing to a “general good” that we almost certainly do not agree about. That’s the same dodge that the utilitarians pull: “the greatest good for the greatest number” has never been demonstrated or calculated or arrived at without a great deal of fist-waving and disagreement. You need a political system to fix the political system (e.g.: democracy as a way of arriving at agreement regarding the “greatest good” or the “general will”) Well, it isn’t much of a bloody political system if the only way to make it work is to bootstrap another political system on top of it.
consciousness razor@#3:
At this point (not later on), you seem to be thinking mainly in terms of the governments we do actually have (and did have, in Rousseau’s time). On the one hand, that’s an important thing to worry about, obviously. On the other hand, that is a very tiny piece in the space of all of the possible governments that we could have (some of which could be legitimate).
That is true. Good point.
I tend to agree with Robert Paul Wollf that the only way to have a government in which the will of some number of the people is not being overruled is to have a democracy based on complete agreement. That’s a possibility but it’s so remote that I am willing to ignore it.
There are probably many forms of government and details that can be added to make existing forms more palatable (a constitutional dictatorship, anyone?) but they never seem to be an option, because the existing forms of government are resistant to change – a sign of their illegitimacy, fwiw.
So where is the Glib argument about “state violence” supposed to lead? And worse than that, how does it even get off the ground? If there is something about it that is illegitimate, it’s hard to understand what that could possibly be. A small minority of the wealthy want violence and oppression for their lessers, and we’re supposed to accept that state of affairs as “legitimate” by default, because no matter what, we’re supposed to do everything in our power to cater to them and remain helpless. I hear that kind of thing, and all I can think is just “huh?” I don’t get why anybody should have to take that shit seriously at all.
The Glib view, as you describe it, is a constant violation of the “sauce for the goose” equation. There ought to be some rule of political philosophy that says that if you’re ignoring that, you’re just being an authoritarian/autocrat (authoritarians being a form of exceptionalism, and exceptionalism being ratified inequality)
You’re confusing it with something like utilitarianism, which deals in amounts of utility. Generally, the thought is that we should do “the most” good possible, so the goal (ideally) is to represent this with a measure of what is more or less good, if it’s possible to do that.
Yes. I am often sloppy and glom utilitarianism and consequentialism together which, I understand, one is a subset of the other. Utilitarians are consequentialists. Consequentialists imagine that the moral consequences of an action can be accurately-enough inferred that an a priori judgement can be made. That’s a fantastical proposition but if I understand, that is what they are proposing. Utilitarians pull the same maneuver, hypothetizing that the greatest good for the greatest number is actually something that can be accurately predicted and agreed upon by the parties that have a stake in the matter. In my mind both of those approaches fail on the question of the degree to which an outcome can be predicted. Of course a utilitarian would say “we accept that we may be wrong sometimes, we’re trying.” Well, “sometimes” is the problem, there.
Sometimes, the formulation is basically that we (always) should act “for the greater good,” which may mean a lot of different things of course, but even that isn’t necessarily what a utilitarian thinks. Since you approve of and use the “greater good” talk later in your post, I admit I’m pretty confused about your position here.
Sorry about that. For the record: I do not think there is a greater good or a general will. But since Rousseau’s argument depends on it, I was using that language. We can wrap it in waffles and say “our understanding of the general will” or “our estimate of the greater good” but that doesn’t carry the same weight (which I would argue is because when people talk about “the greater good” they are basically lying and are trying to reify their opinion).
But consequentialism in its broadest form is the idea that whether an action is good depends (only or typically or primarily) on that action’s consequences (as the name itself suggests, much like Uism). You should care about and want to know what the outcome will be or what it’s likely to be. This idea also seems fairly uncontroversial, at least at first glance. But it doesn’t depend on the same type of commitments as utilitarianism does.
I think that’s right, to the degree to which we can know about what the outcome will be – which is generally pretty minimal. For example, we might all agree that the greater good would be to get rid of Trump, but Pence might turn around and start a nuclear war. We have no way of knowing the future. If we did, moral conundrums would vanish because we’d always know what was going to happen in every trolley car problem.
sonofrojblake@#6:
Another reason for not enacting the will of the people is that the people are demonstrably dumb as a box of rocks and vicious with it. Their will usually includes capital punishment (as long as its OTHER PEOPLE, and if a surprising number of them are brown, so much the better).
That’s why we have (in principle) constitutional democracies: there’s an idea that the general will of the people may be fucking horrible and something needs to reel them in. Now, where that gets interesting is that in theory we are agreeing to set up a system that stops us from doing what we want to do. To me, that seems as likely to work as “new years’ resolutions.”
According to Wikipedia, “[Harrison Bergeron] received the 2019 Hall of Fame Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society.” This does not surprise me; it seems tailor-made for their philosophy.
The article also says that The Sirens of Titan has a similar society. I’ve never been much of a Vonnegut reader — does he show libertarian sympathies in other works?
I mean, the only other place I’ve been asked to take pity on the sorrowful, unhappy lot of the beautiful, the strong, and the intelligent is in Galt’s Gulch.
Marcus @#13
What word you use doesn’t change my main point. If I agree to become a member of some kind of organization, I want to be able to negotiate the rules for my membership. I also want to have a choice about it.
The same goes for any debts and duties I agree to fulfill. I don’t want anybody else to unilaterally force some debt or duty upon me, instead I want a mutual agreement and an ability to negotiate the terms and what kind of obligations each side has.
With states, the rulers (either kings or oligarchs) one-sidedly decide the terms of how members of some society will cooperate. They decide what kind of obligations, duties, and benefits everybody gets. They generally decide that they get golden thrones while I get a shitty job for a ridiculously low minimum wage. They also decide that I must pay taxes, while they get contracts for building overpriced military planes. I never consented to any of this. What kind of stupid membership is that!
brucegee1962@#17:
The article also says that The Sirens of Titan has a similar society. I’ve never been much of a Vonnegut reader — does he show libertarian sympathies in other works?
I don’t think so. Generally, he was pretty liberal. I’d describe him as “mostly puzzled by life” – he was severely traumatized in WW2 and his politics since then always amounted to a kind of “why do we do these things to eachother?” A libertarian would be less questioning.
I’m sorry, but I don’t get why Harrison Bergeron has anything to do with libertarians. Unless they see themselves as the repressed talents, and not as the natural mediocrities? … No. That would take too much ego, and industrial-grade self-delusion of the kind not even Dunning and Kruger have seen.
brucegee1962 @ #9:
Who is actually out there trying to make things harder for the naturally gifted in the name of equality?
I missed that at first read. Clearly, for us non-libertarians, the opposite of handicapping the talented is not lassez-faire everyone-for-themselves, but helping the gifted develop and fly, while also helping those less gifted, if not fly, then at least walk on their own. Your question assumes the handicapping is done in the name of equality. I reject that: equality is only the fig leaf. It’s done out of fear and envy and resentment. That much is clear to me from the story. Do smart kids get punched in the face by jocks in the name of equality?
While I find interesting and agree with a lot of the arguments being made here, in both the post and the comments, there’s also this:
Sadly, this appears not to be true. Bob Altemeyer, an academic psychologist, has been doing research into authoritarianism for decades now and it’s pretty clear from his work and others’ that the real problem is not authoritarian leaders but authoritarian followers: people who generally prefer to take their opinions from others and get satisfaction from being part of a certain kind of group, as opposed to being more independent. Those are the people that make authoritarianism work.
(No, they’re not looking for people to “order them around,” but they are looking for someone to follow, someone with an appearance of strength who is being followed by others.)
If you’ve not read his book, The Authoritarians, it’s well worth reading. And it’s available for free.
Marcus Ranum:
In practice, that’s probably true in general. But it’s not logically necessary to believe that the right way to measure utility is to measure the utility of an actions consequences. You could, hypothetically, put some value on a person’s intentions, for example. That is, you could think that it might (possibly) be morally correct to structure a utilitarian calculation in such a way that an intention has some weight, without regard to what the consequences actually are.
It sounds like a weird approach to me, and many wouldn’t subscribe that. But in any case, that’s a reason why one isn’t a subset of the other.
Also, as weird as it may seem, it’s not entirely clear what you yourself are doing when you express a certain kind of skepticism about our ability to predict consequences. That ability is of course limited, but no consequentialist worth their salt would claim otherwise.
But there’s a question of relevance here … Do you believe that we could have some other valid way to understand the right way to act? It’s granted and duly noted that we can have a difficult time with a (presumably valid) approach like considering what the consequences are likely to be. But does that difficulty mean (to you) that it isn’t a valid option at all, or that we need to consider supplementing it with others perhaps? That line of thought may just be a string of fallacies — not suggesting it isn’t — but even so, it’s not too hard to see how some may be tempted to cook up different forms of non-consequentialist utilitarianism.
You could do similar thing, going in the other direction, by noting that our ability to quantitatively represent “utility” is limited. All you have to do, as a consequentialist, is get yourself worked up about the logical possibility that there might be moral consequences that shouldn’t be understood in that way. (The situation here is again that we may not know something or not know how to analyze it properly — the usual line of attack for “skeptics” of all sorts — but of course you may eventually realize this still doesn’t count as a coherent statement about what’s really going on independently of our knowledge or abilities.)
An inferential prediction, one that’s based on evidence associated with relevant events in the past, is not an “a priori judgement.” That’s why this is no more fantastical than any prediction made in the natural sciences. Do you want to know where planets will be, when/where the next solar eclipse occurs, etc.? Form the beginning, physics has predicted exactly those kinds of things about the future — it’s not driven by dogmatism, prophesy, etc., and it’s the least fantastical approach to the world that there is. If it needs to come probabilities or a range of likely values or error bars or what have you, then so be it, because that’s what we’ve got to work with.
Every natural science has sometimes been wrong. I don’t want to repeat what I just said…. But where are these standards coming from (are they a priori?) and are you being consistent about them? Sure, you can say that this is a problem. But which kind of problem do you think it is? You don’t go around rejecting plate tectonics or the germ theory of disease, much less the whole scientific project in general, because “the problem is that scientists are sometimes wrong.” Because it’s not that kind of problem, and that’s not an appropriate or reasonable reaction to have about it.