Scott Scheall
Scott Scheall is Associate Professor of Philosophy & Economics in the Center for Economics, Politics & History. Prior to joining the University of Austin, he taught for fourteen years at Arizona State University. Scott’s research considers the significance of human ignorance for decision-making, particularly in the political realm. He is the author of two books, F. A. Hayek and the Epistemology of Politics: The Curious Task of Economics and Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance, a unique textbook freely available for use in courses in political philosophy, political science, economics, and political economy. His work has appeared in journals in philosophy, political economy, history of economics, bioethics, and cognitive psychology. Scott is co-editor of Review of the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, and founder, producer, and former co-host of the long-running podcast Smith and Marx Walk into a Bar: A History of Economics Podcast. He occasionally posts and podcasts at his Substack page, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance.
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Papers by Scott Scheall
Such questions are typically posed and debates around such questions emerge with little, if any, prior consideration of a question that is, logically speaking, more fundamental: “What can we effectively achieve through political action? What goals are within and without the scope of political action?”
Because we pose and argue about normative political questions without first getting the descriptive facts straight, we often embark on political projects that have little hope of success.
Anyone who accepts a principle like ought implies can is committed to rejecting “ought” claims that assert obligations to do things that cannot be done. Given that most, if not all, people accept some such principle, most, if not all, people are implicitly committed to rejecting the traditional – purely normative – form of political discussion. That they nevertheless engage in such discussion reveals a significant inconsistency in how many people think about and assign obligations to policymakers.
If the question “Liberalism and / or Socialism?” is the normative question “Should we be liberals or socialists, or should we (somehow) combine liberalism and socialism?” then it is the wrong – or, more exactly, a premature – question to ask.
Such questions are typically posed and debates around such questions emerge with little, if any, prior consideration of a question that is, logically speaking, more fundamental: “What can we effectively achieve through political action? What goals are within and without the scope of political action?”
Because we pose and argue about normative political questions without first getting the descriptive facts straight, we often embark on political projects that have little hope of success.
Anyone who accepts a principle like ought implies can is committed to rejecting “ought” claims that assert obligations to do things that cannot be done. Given that most, if not all, people accept some such principle, most, if not all, people are implicitly committed to rejecting the traditional – purely normative – form of political discussion. That they nevertheless engage in such discussion reveals a significant inconsistency in how many people think about and assign obligations to policymakers.
If the question “Liberalism and / or Socialism?” is the normative question “Should we be liberals or socialists, or should we (somehow) combine liberalism and socialism?” then it is the wrong – or, more exactly, a premature – question to ask.
It is always an open question whether policymakers possess the knowledge required to realize some policy objective. It should never be assumed a priori that policymaker knowledge is adequate to the policy tasks with which policymakers are charged. Politicians need knowledge concerning the causes of social phenomena adequate to control events sufficiently well to ensure the success of their policies. No argument has ever been offered for the standard, if only implicit, assumption that policymakers, somehow automatically, possess this knowledge. In many contexts, there is no reason to believe that policymakers possess or can acquire this knowledge. Indeed, a bit of reflection reveals how unlikely it is that and how rare the circumstances must be in which policymakers meet this condition, which political philosophers, theorists, economists, and other political thinkers have traditionally assumed as a matter of course.
The main purpose of the book is to encourage a conversation among scholars and students of political inquiry (in philosophy and political theory, political science, economics and political economy) concerning the best way to conceive of policymakers for the purposes of such inquiry.
The book defends an alternative, more realistic, method of political analysis. The book argues against the false assumption that policymakers are epistemically privileged. The book presents and defends the alternative assumption that, with respect to the knowledge required to discharge their political tasks effectively, policymakers are at least as ignorant as constituents.
The book further argues that whether policymakers are altruistic or knavish is, in the first instance, a function of the nature and extent of their ignorance with regard to constituent-minded policy goals. Policymakers who possess the knowledge required to be effectively altruistic are more likely to be altruistic, other things the same, than policymakers who are ignorant of the knowledge that successful altruism requires.
This being said, my goal is more to leave readers thinking about and inclined to debate these profound issues than to prescribe a particular methodological conclusion (even less to advocate a particular political conclusion). The book is a heuristic for spurring further conversation. It makes of readers fellow interlocutors partnered with the characters (and the author!) of the dialogue.
The vehicle for this analysis is a conversation between four friends, philosophy graduate students, with different interests, different levels and kinds of experience, and different political preferences. The four friends consider how politicians should be conceived for the purposes of analyzing political decision-making and its consequences.
In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics does for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books undermine the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena.