Human Agency and Convergence: Gaus’s “Kantian Parliamentarian”

Michael Munger

Director, PPE

Duke University

Agreement on Values: Convergence?

Equilibrium:

• Single price in every market

• Vector of prices where each market clears simultaneously—N equations, N unknowns, zero excess demands in each, not just in total

• Dynamic tendency toward single price

Walrus-ian Equilibrium

Kirzner

In our classrooms we draw the Marshallian cross to depict competitive supply and demand, and then go on to explain how the market is cleared only at the price corresponding to the intersection of the curves. ..Sometimes we address the question of how we can be confident that there is any tendency at all for the intersection price to be attained. The discussion is then usually carried on in terms of the Walrasian version of the equilibration process. Suppose, we say, the price happens to be above the intersection level. If so, the amount of the good people are prepared to supply is in the aggregate larger than the total amount people are prepared to buy. There will be unsold inventories, thereby depressing price. On the other hand, if price is below the intersection level, there will be excess demand, “forcing” price up. Thus, we explain, there will be a tendency for price to gravitate toward the equilibrium level at which quantity demanded equals quantity supplied.[So] when price is described as being above or below equilibrium, it is understood that a single price prevails in the market. One uncomfortable question, then, is whether we may assume that a single price emerges before equilibrium is attained. Surely a single price can be postulated only as the result of the process of equilibration itself.[T]he Walrasian explanation usually assumes perfect competition, where all market participants are price takers. But with only price takers participating, it is not clear how unsold inventories or unmet demand effect price changes. If no one raises or lowers price bids, how do prices rise or fall? (p. 116; Kirzner, “Equilibrium vs Market Processes”, in Dolan, FOUNDATIONS, 1976)

What is the Animating Force for Price Adjustment?

The “Auctioneer”

Agreement on Values: Public ReasonThe heart of Gaus’s project is to ask

“whether free and equal persons can all endorse a common political order even though their private judgments about the good and justice are so often opposed.” (Gaus 2011, 2).

Echoing Rousseau: “How can a man be both free and yet bound by wills not his own?”

SAME two problems: (1) Existence and (2) Convergence

Outline of Gaus

• Start with disagreement

• Require that those who disagree give reasons for their positions

• Agree on “allowable reasons”

• Choose one “public reason,” a problem of convergence akin to “value”

• If there is not a unique public reason, must be a tendency to converge toward “equilibrium” (my word, not his)

My Claim

• Gaus sees this process as being entirely decentralized and “bottom up.”

• But the adjustment process that he specifies cannot work without some control and human animation

• Just as the decentralized GET requires an “auctioneer” the Gaus process requires a central direction that would require a benevolent (at least neutral), omniscient agent whose power is automatically deferred to.

• I call this “agent” the Kantian Parliamentarian

Kantian Parliamentarian (KP)Kantian:• there are synthetic a priori propositions which order our

experience but are not derived from it• that metaphysical conclusions can be inferred from the

nature of possible experience• that duty is to be done for its own sake and not as a

means to any other end• that there is a world of things-in-themselves to be

distinguished from mere phenomena• Most importantly, for “public reason,” act only according

to maxims that, if universalized, would be both consistent with reason and with your moral intentions in choosing the maxim.

E.g., “Take anything you want” is a bad maxim because it is inconsistent with your moral intentions and because if others adopted it you would think them immoral and evil

Kantian Parliamentarian (KP)

Parliamentarian:

• Advisor/Judge

• Rules of procedure, not choice of outcomes

• Rules are fixed in advanced and give mutually exclusive and exhaustive, determinate judgments about disputes

Striking Parallel

• What’s interesting, then, is that the “Public Reason” project fails to aggregate individual values and solve the problem of disagreement in exactly the same way, and for the same reasons, that GET fails to arrive at a determinate price vector.

• If people disagree, there is no means by which they can converge on reasons without central direction

The Usual Misfortune of Metaphysicians: Reason, NOT “Common Sense”

…Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood. It is positively painful to see bow utterly his opponents… missed the point of the problem; for while they were ever taking for granted that which he doubted, and demonstrating with zeal and often with impudence that which he never thought of doubting, they so misconstrued his valuable suggestion that everything remained in its old condition, as if nothing had happened…[T]o satisfy the conditions of the problem, the opponents of the great thinker should have penetrated very deeply into the nature of reason, so far as it is concerned with pure thinking,-a task which did not suit them. They found a more convenient method of being defiant without any insight, viz., the appeal to common sense… But this common sense must be shown practically, by well-considered and reasonable thoughts and words, not by appealing to it as an oracle, when no rational justification can be advanced. To appeal to common sense, when insight and science fail, and no sooner-this is one of the subtle discoveries of modern times, by means of which the most superficial ranter can safely enter the lists with the most thorough thinker, and hold his own. But as long as a particle of insight remains, no one would think of having recourse to this subterfuge. For what is it but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and confides in it?(Kant 1772; emphasis added.)

Friedman: “Positive Economics” as Public Reason

[C]urrently, in the Western world, differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different [empirical] predictions about the economic consequences of taking action – differences that in principle can be eliminated by [logic and discussion] – rather than from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight. (Friedman, 1953; p. 5; emphasis added).

If this judgment is valid, it means that a consensus on “correct” economic policy depends much less on the progress of normative economics proper than on the progress of a positive economics yielding conclusions that are, and deserve to be, widely accepted. It means also that a major reason for distinguishing positive economics sharply from normative economics is precisely the contribution that can thereby be made to agreement about policy. (P. 6; emphasis added)

Gaus’s Question

• Is it TRUE that if we disagree about values we can ultimately “only fight”? Or is there a means of converging to a “public reason” or small set of public reasons, even if we DO disagree?

Gaus: Principle of Public Justification (p. 263)

A moral imperative φ in context C, based on rule L, is an authoritative requirement of social morality only if each normal moral agent has sufficient reasons to

(a) internalize rule L

(b) hold that L requires Ф type acts [that is, φ∈Ф]

in circumstances C

(c) think that moral agents generally conform to L.

Paraphrase

• Reflective understanding of bona fide social morality, one in which emotions are well grounded (meaning I feel bad if I violate, and feel angry if you violate)

• So reason has led to a principle that is now internalized and supported by emotion

• The rule is one that ALL have sufficient reasons to internalize and follow

But What if I Disagree?

• When another demands that you comply with a rule, she is demanding that you do what you have sufficient reasons to do, and to want to do: she is not demanding that you obey out of loyalty or altruism, but is appealing to (reminding you of) your reason

• She is saying “You have reasons to comply that you are ignoring. I am not demanding you live as I see fit, but rather as you would agree you must live if you adequately employed your reason.”

• And she says this not just to you, but to any violator that she comes across. (p. 263)

Everyperson or Parliamentarian?

• Gaus sees that “she” as a representative person, and expects that every person will fulfill that role for everyone else

• But if I disagree with the “public reason” the person next to me may disagree also

• And it’s not clear why I accept the authority of the person next to me, and defer. Why shouldn’t she defer to me? I think she is ignoring good reasons to comply with me

• Maybe a genuine disagreement, maybe just the highly evolved human capacity to disguise particular self-interest in public-sounding terms.

Point: Need a “Kantian Parliamentarian” to Validate Reasons

Gaus certainly recognizes the problem. He wants the authority to be the reason, not the person.

I accept that premise. But then we need a way of validating some, and invalidating other, reasons.

So, the KP is not the chooser over public morality. Rather, the KP is the licenser of public reasons. “One’s claim to authority, rather than being authoritarian, is as sound as the judgment that the rule is publicly justified” (p. 264)

Justification

• Gaus: Justification of public reasons can be conducted by a group of reasonable people, even if they disagree. What the group does is to deliberate and agree on all the “moral rules that we all have sufficient reasons to endorse as binding.” (p. 264)

• NOT a contract, not an agreement that is binding. Rather, a consensus that these are potentially valid rules. *I* might not agree to them, but I agree that if a group agreed to them they would have moral justification for doing so.

• In other words, the “Basic Principle of Public Justification” would be satisfied for a society that endorsed and acted on any L that is an element of this set of rules publicly justified rules.

How might this work? Surprisingly Hayekian Problem Statement…

We can solve the puzzle of mutual authority within social morality by abandoning the dyadic perspective of thinking of justification as essentially between pairs of agents, and instead appreciating the “Humean” insight that the development of a social morality involves large-scale coordination among moral agents. Rather than focusing on the two-person case, the social evolutionary view leads us to think of the selection of a specific morality as a many person problem. The problem is not mutual authority but dispersed authority. Once a society of free and equal persons has coordinated on specific moral rules and their interpretation, the point of invoking moral authority is to police this equilibrium selection against “trembling hands”—individuals who make mistakes about what rule is in equilibrium—and those who otherwise fail to act on their best reasons. In these cases the overwhelming social opinion concurs in criticizing deviant behavior. An individual who violates the social equilibrium will not simply be able to check demands on her, for she will meet the same demand from almost all others. In Mill’s terms, the deviant will not simply confront the opinion of other individuals but of “society.” This, I shall argue, renders decentralized authority effective in inducing compliance with social morality (pp. 47-48; emphasis added).

Contradiction

At some points, Gaus appears to endorse the Humean (and ultimately Hayekian) deference to the emergence of moral laws as spontaneous orders.

But when it comes down to nuts and bolts, he requires deliberation among people. The unit of analysis is not the “law,” but the reasons in the mind of each moral agent.

Thus individual moral agents are both the cause of the consensus and also the consequence.

How can price takers change price?

• Obviously the analogy I want to make is to GET, back at the beginning. No way for the dynamic process specified to reach single price convergence in every market, without some way to adjust price.

• No way to deliberate and have bilateral conversations where I am corrected about the acceptability of my reasons. Not that conclusions are wrong, but that my reasons are not allowable.

The KP

• Having an authority to license “allowable reasons” and have everyone required that only licensed reasons can be used to justify actual moral principles might enable Gaus’s conclusions to follow.

• But the point is that even if I grant the premises—which I might not—Gaus’s conclusion still requires the additional assumption of a KP.

• In which case, it is not a decentralized, emergent process at all but a centrally planned, or at least guided, process.

ContradictionMy claim is that Gaus cannot simultaneously have

(1) a set of moral intuitions in a society arrived at by some essentially random historical process

(2) a justified public reason where people change their minds, adjusting to new, better reasons

(3) a societal judgment that will police deviants

Start at 1, try to move to 2, but 3 crushes the change. Tradition, lock-in, “conservatism,” deference to moral authority of custom. So, unless we start at the equilibrium, no adjustment process that can even lead us toward the equilibrium. Everyone is a “law-taker”

The (Later) Rawlsian Project

[A] basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable pluralism-the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions. Citizens realize that they cannot reach agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. In view of this, they need to consider what kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one another when fundamental political questions are at stake. I propose that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. (Rawls, 1997, 765-6).