Reasoned Politics

Reasoned Politics

Ratio Ethica

Copyright © 2022 Magnus Vinding

Contents

Introduction

Part I: A General Framework

1. The Two-Step Ideal of Reasoned Politics

Part II: Descriptive Groundwork and Its Implications

2. Political Psychology

3. Political Biases

4. Implications of Our Political Psychology and Biases

5. The Importance of Culture

6. Implications of the Importance of Culture

Part III: Reducing Suffering in Politics

7. Suffering Reduction as a Core Value in Politics

8. Notes on Consequentialist Politics

9. Identifying Plausible Proxies

Part IV: Policy Issues

10. Non-Human Beings and Politics

11. Liberty

12. Equality

13. Justice

14. Democracy

Part V: Summary

15. An Early Step in a Larger Project

16. Party Example: Alliance of Reason and Compassion

Appendices

Appendix A: Does Voting Make Sense?

Appendix B: Hidden Challenges to the Two-Step Ideal

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Introduction

Politics is broken. To say that this is a cliché has itself become a cliché. But it is true nonetheless. Empty rhetoric, deceptive spin, and appeals to the lowest common denominator. These are standard premises in politics that we seem stuck with, and which many of us shake our heads at in disappointment.

Yet it is not only our politicians who fail to live up to their potential. The truth is that we all do. Our reasoning about politics tends to be biased by an unconscious commitment to tribalism and loyalty signaling — yay our team, boo their team (Hannon, 2021, p. 308). That is, our political behavior is often less about promoting good policies than it is about the desire to see our own team win, and to signal our loyalty to that team. As a result, our conversations about politics often go nowhere, and they frequently go worse than that.

The good news is that we have compelling reasons to think that we can do better. And it is critical that we do so, as our political decisions arguably represent the most consequential decisions of all, serving like a linchpin of human decision-making that constrains and influences just about every choice we make. This renders it uniquely important that we get our political decisions right, and that we advance our political discourse in general.

0.1 Problem: Unreasoned Politics

A dire problem with our political views and attitudes is that they not only fail to be carefully reasoned, but they are often positively unreasoned. As we shall see, our political behavior is commonly dictated by a mix of crude intuitions, motivated reasoning, and partisan loyalties — a mix that hampers our ability to think clearly about politics, and thus prevents good sense precisely at the level where it is most needed. We have a dysfunctional marriage between unusually biased reasoning and unusually important decisions.

Most of us can probably recognize this picture of biased reasoning without reviewing the relevant science, at least if we focus on the political behavior of the other side. Their primitive failings are all too transparent; they take unreasonable positions that are at odds with the evidence. But our own failings are much less visible to us, which is a large part of the problem. We are self-deceived about just how tendentious and unreasoned we ourselves are in the realm of politics (Tuschman, 2013, ch. 22; Simler & Hanson, 2018, ch. 5, ch. 16).

A related problem is that we rarely base our politics on clear values and well-grounded empirical views. As Richard Ryder puts it, contemporary politics often lacks two crucial ingredients: a moral theory and a respect for the facts (Ryder, 2006, p. 1). Indeed, we frequently fail to even distinguish moral and empirical views, let alone develop sophisticated views at these respective levels to help guide our policy decisions. Our tendency to settle for opinions announced by our most immediate intuitions precludes us from building our political views in a systematic way, and prevents us from engaging with arguments and evidence in a truly open-ended manner. We have yet to develop the kind of cultural operating system that can help us move beyond the politics of immediate intuitions and tribal loyalties, and toward a more systematic and reasoned approach.

In sum, while it must be acknowledged that modern political systems work well in a number of ways, especially compared to those systems that wholly suppress civil liberties, it is also true that our political culture and ways of thinking about politics remain starkly underdeveloped and suboptimal in many ways. At the level of our individual thinking, collective norms, and the overarching cultural frameworks with which we tackle politics, there is great potential to do better.

0.2 Remedy: Realistic Steps in a Better Direction

So what can we do to improve in these respects? And what reasons do we have for believing that we can do better? Answering these questions is among the key aims of this book, but the following hints at some of the main points.

An important step we can take, I argue, is to bring a more systematic and thoroughly reflected set of values into politics. More generally, we can seek to draw a clearer distinction between ethical views and empirical views in our political discourse, develop more advanced views at these respective levels, and let our policy decisions be guided by such views to a greater extent. An outline and defense of these ideals is found in Chapter 1.

In relation to our political biases and self-deception, we can seek to promote a greater awareness of these shared psychological pitfalls of ours. To clarify, the remedy here is not primarily a matter of increasing mere individual awareness, which is unlikely to be effective, but rather to increase our collective awareness of these devious tendencies, and in effect to foster norms that help limit rather than exacerbate the crude dynamics of our political psychology (Simler, 2016). One reason to be cautiously optimistic in this regard is that an advanced understanding of the mechanics of our biased political minds has only been acquired quite recently, and the most basic implications of this understanding have barely even begun to be explored. In other words, this newly gained understanding and its most basic implications have yet to percolate into our social norms. More on this in Chapter 4.

Taken together, the points above suggest a twin project of limiting the influence of biased intuitions, motivated reasoning, and dogmatic partisan loyalty, and then replacing this unholy trinity with something better — raising the standards of our discourse, and increasing the degree to which our politics is based on carefully reflected values and sound empirical evidence.

To be sure, this project is unlikely to be pursued on a large scale any time soon. It is not realistic to expect that most people will change their political behavior in significant ways upon simply being presented with certain findings and ideals. Any such expectation would be profoundly naive. But what does seem realistic is to improve things on the margin, by engendering a slow, gradual change that occurs disproportionally in certain communities open to such change — communities whose social incentives already to some degree reward open-minded reflection and efforts to reduce biases.

Having such communities develop and internalize better political norms (such as those outlined in Chapter 4) might already be a significant improvement with wide-ranging benefits. And if these communities have a certain level of repute, it is quite possible that such improved political norms would in turn spread further, and eventually come to have considerable force among a wider range of people. That is how norms can realistically change, and how they mostly seem to have changed so far (cf. Zaller, 1992; Taylor, 2015).

In short, I argue that we need (more) reasoned politics, pursued in gradual and realistic steps.

0.3 What Is Reasoned Politics?

I should clarify what I mean by the terms politics, reason, and reasoned politics in this context.

My definition of politics is rather broad and colloquial. I roughly use the term to refer to the realm of our large-scale collective decisions and decision-making, including the associated discussions, norms, and conventions. This definition goes beyond the practices of professional politicians, and indeed includes all activities, by everyone, that relate to large-scale collective decisions. The more directly certain views and activities relate to such collective decisions, the more political they are in this sense.

As for the term reason, it is worth being clear that this term is commonly used in two rather different senses (Popper, 1945, ch. 24, I). The first is a narrow sense that contrasts reason with empiricism. This conception of reason represents the rationalist side of the rationalist-empiricist dispute, the side that sees sensory experience as having less of a dominant role in the creation of knowledge. Second, there is reason in a broader sense that encompasses both systematic reasoning and experience, what Karl Popper defined as an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience (Popper, 1945, ch. 24, I).

What I mean by reason in this book is decidedly the latter. Hence, when I advocate for reasoned politics, I am by no means advocating for reason divorced from experience, but in fact quite the opposite. I am advocating for an approach based thoroughly on experience in the widest sense, an approach that also acknowledges the limits of our faculties of reason themselves, such as the limits to our ability to predict future outcomes, as well as the social pitfalls and biases of these faculties (cf. Kahneman, 2011; Mercier & Sperber, 2017). After all, these limits and pitfalls are themselves facts that we can explore and come to (better) understand, and it would be most unreasonable to ignore these critical facts.

In a nutshell, one could say that I use the term reasoned politics to refer to reflection-based and evidence-based politics, in broad senses of the terms reflection and evidence — politics that embodies an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience (Popper, 1945, ch. 24, I). The rest of the book will hopefully provide a fuller sense of what I mean by reasoned politics.

0.4 Outline

The book consists of four main parts followed by a fifth part that provides an overall summary.

Part I outlines a general framework for reasoned politics. This framework asks us to clarify our political views, to justify them with arguments, and to be willing to change our minds. These ideals are not at all original, and they probably sound agreeable to most people. Yet putting them into practice is nonetheless exceptionally rare, which underscores the need to spell out these ideals and explicitly commit to them.

Part II consists of descriptive groundwork, reviewing some key findings related to our political psychology and biases, as well as the influence of culture. These findings have universal relevance for how we think about and practice politics, and thus internalizing such empirical insights is a necessary step toward any reasonable approach to politics.

The rest of the book then seeks to apply the general framework and the descriptive groundwork laid out in the previous parts, and is thereby an attempt to apply the ideals of reasoned politics.

Part III presents an ethical view centered on the reduction of suffering that I and others have defended more elaborately elsewhere (see e.g. Mayerfeld, 1999; Vinding, 2020a). I argue that the reduction of suffering ought to be a central aim of politics, and hence that political policies should be evaluated strongly on this basis. That is, how conducive are they to reducing suffering?

Part IV adopts this ethical view as its starting point, and explores which policies seem optimal in light of relevant empirical evidence and theoretical considerations. The goal of this examination is not to uncover definitive solutions, but rather to take a first step that provides some tentative answers, in turn hopefully motivating further discussions and investigations that will lead us to more mature answers.

Part V contextualizes and clarifies the aims of the foregoing policy analysis, and proceeds to summarize the book’s main conclusions in the form of a party manifesto belonging to a hypothetical political party, the Alliance of Reason and Compassion.

Part I

A General Framework

1. The Two-Step Ideal of Reasoned Politics

Political policy should be based, not upon mere opinion, nor upon a set of knee-jerk reflexes, but upon a scientific concern for the facts and an intelligent and open moral argument.

— Richard Ryder (Ryder, 2006, p. 1)

A problem with mainstream political discourse is that there is a striking lack of distinction between normative and empirical matters. That is, we fail to distinguish ethical values on the one hand, and factual questions about how we can best realize such values on the other, which in turn causes great confusion. And predictably so. After all, the distinction between normative and empirical issues is standard within moral and political philosophy, where it is considered indispensable for clear thinking. (Note that a meaningful distinction between facts and values does not imply a strict dichotomy between the two, Putnam, 2002.)

The framework I present below essentially amounts to applying this standard distinction to political practice, in turn yielding a simple yet, in my view, sorely needed ideal for how we should discuss and do politics. It is an open-ended ideal that entails a normative step followed by an empirical one.

1.1 The Normative Step

The first step is to clarify our values: what should be the moral aims of our policies? For example, should our policies generally aim to reduce suffering, or to maximize total happiness minus suffering, or to protect certain fundamental rights?

The point here is not just to state our values, but also to argue for them, as well as to discuss and refine them through charitable and open-minded conversation. In other words, we should consider the strongest arguments for and against a variety of value systems so as to decide, provisionally, which values seem the most plausible basis for our policies. And this process is never fully finalized, as we should continue to be open to new arguments and further revisions of our views, even when we have considered them at length.

Unfortunately, our political discourse tends to proceed as though our values must be a given that cannot be evaluated or fruitfully discussed. But this is not the case. While it may be rare for people to completely change their minds about their values, it is nonetheless quite common for people’s views and behavior to undergo at least some significant changes when they reflect on alternative moral views and novel arguments (Huang et al., 2019; Lindauer et al., 2020; Mercier, 2020, ch. 4).

1.2 The Empirical Step

Once we have identified a set of carefully reflected values or moral aims, it next becomes an open empirical question which policies are most likely to realize those values or aims. This holds true regardless of the nature of the values in question. For example, whether the values are centered purely on bringing about the best consequences (consequentialism), or on following ironclad rules (deontology), or some combination thereof, it is still a factual question which policies and institutions best accommodate these values.

For some values, ascertaining the optimal policy will be quite easy, such as in the case of deontological values that deem certain policies intrinsically right or wrong (e.g. some have argued that taxation is inherently wrong, cf. Rothbard, 1973). But for most values, the question of optimal policy is bound to be extremely complicated, dependent on myriad empirical factors. Yet these factors are nevertheless amenable to scientific investigation and discussion.

Thus, the aim of the second step is to assess which policies are most likely, given the available evidence, to realize the values identified in the first step. And it is crucial that we remain dispassionate and open-minded at this stage as well, continually being willing to look at new evidence and to have our minds changed.

1.3 Openness as a Foundational Value

A key value that undergirds both the normative and the empirical step is intellectual openness. Karl Popper famously defended such openness at the level of our empirical convictions. Specifically, he argued that we can never be absolutely certain that our theories are correct, as they may always be overridden by further evidence, and hence we must remain open to such evidence (Popper, 1963, p. xi). What is less known is that Popper also defended openness at the normative level, essentially for the same reason: though we should seek for absolutely right or valid [normative] proposals, we should never persuade ourselves that we have definitely found them (Popper, 1945, Addenda to Volume II, 13; see also Popper, 1963, ch. 18).

I think Popper was right on this point. Intellectual openness is justified, indeed necessitated, by the fact that we are limited and fallible creatures. Nobody knows all the relevant empirical data and theories that bear on our decisions. Nor has anyone considered all the arguments that could be given for or against a given moral position. Therefore, we should be keen to have others inform us about the relevant facts, theories, and arguments about which we are currently ignorant, and which could potentially change our minds.

1.4 Who Should Engage in This Process?

The two steps outlined above do not provide much concrete detail as they stand, so it is fair to wonder how this two-step ideal is supposed to be realized. Specifically, who is supposed to engage in this practice of moral reflection and empirical investigation?

Ideally, everybody should reflect on their values, and then make empirically informed judgments about which policies seem optimal relative to these values. But it is, of course, not realistic for everyone to become an expert on moral philosophy or on the effects of various policies, let alone an expert on both. What is realistic, however, is that we have experts within these respective fields — moral philosophers specializing in normative issues and scientists specializing in empirical issues — who, beyond advancing the cutting edge of our understanding, can help inform the broader public.

Such experts will, of course, have their biases and blind spots like everyone else (cf. Tetlock, 2005). But that does not mean they cannot help advance the public understanding of complicated issues, especially if we listen to a variety of experts with opposing biases. So while the broader public may never realistically attain expert-level knowledge on these matters, they can at least still become considerably better informed, and thus come to adhere to the two-step ideal to a significantly greater extent.

It is especially important that politicians engage in this two-step process. That is, politicians should ideally state their underlying values in clear terms, along with explicit moral arguments supporting these values, and then justify their preferred policies with reference to relevant evidence that supports these policies as the best way to satisfy the values in question. To be clear, the point is not that politicians should elaborate on their values and provide detailed empirical arguments every time they engage in a political discussion, but rather that their values and arguments should be laid out somewhere, and serve as an underlying foundation for their policy decisions.

1.5 Is This Unrealistic?

One may object that the ideal I have outlined above is a complete pipe dream. Open and critical reflection, especially on values and policies, is just too far removed from human nature to have a chance of ever being realized. It is like saying that everyone should study advanced mathematics. (See Appendix B for some additional challenges to the two-step ideal.)

I agree that following this ideal is indeed quite far removed from our nature (see Section 6.6). But then it is also true that much, if not most of what we humans do cannot be said to lie in our nature in any straightforward sense (Henrich, 2015). For example, learning to read and write is not something humans just do naturally. On the contrary, acquiring these skills takes a vast repository of cultural knowledge and instructions, as well as persistent practice. The same can be said about democracy of any kind: creating and living within such a system is not something we just do by instinct, but is instead the product of (quite recent) cultural evolution through which we have domesticated our feral nature to a considerable extent (Henrich, 2020).

Note that it also used to seem unrealistic to have a society in which virtually everyone can read and write, or to create a democratic society. In fact, these aims probably seemed significantly more far-fetched hundreds of years ago than does a markedly greater adherence to the above-stated ideals today. But some people nonetheless dared to set out ambitious ideals for a literate and educated population, as well as for a democratic society.

By contrast, we appear to see little ambition for a better approach to political reasoning and discourse today. We mostly seem to have resigned ourselves to a fatalism of shallow and dumbed-down mainstream discourse. Yet the fact that a large number of people crave and consume deeper content, such as in the form of hour-long podcasts that do dive into fundamental issues, suggests that this resignation is unwarranted. Our mainstream political discourse could have significantly higher standards.

Regarding the comparison to advanced mathematics, it is worth noting that the mathematics we now teach teenagers and even young children was itself considered advanced mathematics at one point, and indeed beyond humanity’s most advanced mathematics just a few thousand years ago. While it may have taken a Leibniz or a Newton to discover the fundamentals of calculus, it does not take a genius to teach it, let alone to learn it, especially given gradually improved techniques for formalizing and conveying these ideas. Such cultural progress means that a large fraction of the population can come to learn quite complicated ideas eventually. And the core ideas involved in the two-step ideal outlined above are arguably far simpler than the basics of calculus, or even the basics of fractions.

Moreover, one can argue that we in some sense already find ourselves more than halfway toward realizing this two-step ideal compared to hundreds of years ago, when there was no freedom of expression nor widespread literacy. After all, we now have at least some sensible discussions of ethical values that are accessible to many people, and we have at least some knowledge of the likely effects of various policies. We simply need to advance our discussions and knowledge further in these respects, and perhaps most importantly to combine these two levels — the normative and the empirical — in more sophisticated ways.

Of course, the tendency of university faculties and experts to specialize almost exclusively in just one of these two areas is not exactly helping us move toward more refined integrations of normative and empirical views. An obvious suggestion for remedying our shortage of such integrations would be to include ethics to a much greater extent in our schooling and education. After all, it is standard for education programs to include various empirical fields, such as history, biology, and physics, yet many such programs still do not include even a single school subject covering normative and evaluative fields, i.e. ethics and value theory. This absence of even the most basic of introductions renders it unsurprising that we see such a neglect of the normative side of things, and that we rarely see refined integrations of the normative and the empirical level.

Finally, it is important to stress that the two-step ideal can be worth striving for even if we can never fully adhere to it. Just as imperfect democracies are better than totalitarian dictatorships, an imperfect realization of the ideal of basing policies on carefully reflected values and empirical evidence still seems better than the alternative. For what, after all, is the alternative? That we base policies on poorly reflected values and mostly ignore empirical evidence? That we continue the current paradigm of failing to distinguish normative and empirical issues, with the consequent lack of reasonable discussion at either level? Those options seem worse.

Hence, even a slightly greater adherence to this two-step ideal would, I submit, still be a significant improvement, whether in the form of a relatively small number of people adhering strongly to it (e.g. certain political or altruistic movements), or a large number of people adhering to it just a bit more than they otherwise would. And nobody says that such improvements must be realizable overnight in order to be worth pursuing. Perhaps it would take decades to move us just marginally toward these ideals. But if this is what it takes to increase our adherence to these ideals, it seems worth taking the gradual steps required, starting with a clear statement of these ideals as a guidepost to aim for.

1.6 How the Two-Step Ideal Changes Things

To summarize, the framework outlined above divides our political reasoning and practice into two steps, one in which we clarify our values through moral argument and reflection, and one in which we identify which policies are most likely to realize those values in light of the empirical evidence. So how, in more specific terms, is this framework supposed to improve things?

For one, it brings greater clarity, both at the level of our individual thinking as well as in political disagreements. At the individual level, it gives us a method for assessing policies. Rather than trusting our immediate opinions on a given policy issue, we can instead split our appraisal into two steps that provide some structure, and in which we seek to adopt different mindsets — first the mindset of the ideal moral philosopher, then that of the ideal scientist. And while these ideal mindsets may be impossible to fully realize, the practice of actual moral philosophers and scientists shows that adherence to these ideals is possible at least to some extent, and certainly to a far greater extent than what we see in politics today.

Note too that if we have internalized this framework and identified a set of values that we find plausible, then we should have an interest in evaluating the empirical evidence regarding optimal policies in a fair and unbiased manner, since our biases will tend to be inimical to our values at this stage. We will, of course, still be biased in many ways, but the point is that we will have a self-directed incentive to be less biased, especially compared to a situation in which we simply follow our gut or the preferred policies of our ingroup. Questions of optimal policy are to be approached as open questions, which ought to close the door to political dogmatism. This would represent a significant improvement relative to the current condition in which our values and group loyalties all too often distort our empirical views, which in turn can fuel political polarization.

At the level of political disagreements, the two-step ideal brings greater clarity by enabling us to identify where exactly our disagreements lie. It is often unclear whether politically diverging parties disagree about aims or about the facts on the ground. If we presented transparent moral and empirical arguments in support of our preferred policies, it would be easier to pinpoint the cruxes of our disagreements, which could in turn enable more fruitful political conversations and compromises. It would bring greater precision and rigor into our political discourse, and experts would be better able to identify flaws in our reasoning, whether they be fallacies in our moral arguments or false empirical premises.

The two-step ideal also has the potential to highlight widely shared values that are neglected in our current political climate. The importance of reducing intense suffering is perhaps the most obvious example of such a value. Yet the way we think and do politics today tends to obscure the extent to which this value is shared, and often prevents us from acting on its most basic implications (cf. Hannon, 2021, pp. 307-308). If we adhered to a norm of explicitly spelling out our core values, our most widely shared values would likely become more visible and prominent, as would our common interest in realizing these values.

Lastly, by breaking our political thinking into these two steps, we may also become (at least somewhat) better able to change our minds and refine our views. Rather than being stuck in a condition where we each state our preferred policies and then, by assumption, reach an antagonistic impasse due to a difference of opinion, this ideal would have us engage in reasoned conversation with moral and empirical arguments going back and forth, with the potential to advance everyone’s views in the process.

1.7 From Here to There

How can we move toward realizing the two-step ideal of political practice, if only to a marginally greater degree? I see three basic things we can do. First, we can set out this ideal in clear terms and note its potential benefits. For example, we can point out how it could make politics more cooperative and more amenable to progress, both by enabling us to collectively refine our values and empirical views, as well as by facilitating a greater focus on widely shared values. This chapter has been an attempt to provide a basic such outline of the two-step ideal.

Second, we can raise awareness of the factors that prevent us from adhering to this ideal. Specifically, we can educate ourselves and others about the many political biases that influence our judgments, and then explore the implications of these biases — for example, that we should not trust our immediate intuitions but instead adopt a more self-scrutinizing and reflective mindset. The latter step of exploring the upshots of our biases is perhaps the most important and neglected one. For while quite a number of people have studied and written about political biases in descriptive terms, comparatively few have dared to say much about the normative implications of these biases, such as the necessity of disciplining ourselves and tempering our judgments. The next part of the book, Part II, will seek to explore both our political biases and their normative implications.