Complexity, Humility, and Knowledge Problems
Some thoughts on 4D landscapes and ecosystems
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this metaphor of the 4D moral/political landscape I’ve been using and a few recent posts and conversations with friends gave me additional food for thought.
As I’ve mentioned before, I borrowed the concept in part from Dave Schmidtz’s concept of justice as a kind of map. I sort of combined that with the metaphor of a kind of policy watershed that I used in a previous book to create a visual metaphor for how to think about our moral/political landscape.
But the term landscape implies something else: not just human and geographic diversity, in the sense of the pits and peaks of justice, but ecological diversity too. And the ecological diversity of our landscapes has important implications for justice. In the most obvious sense, what is just will depend in part on where you are in the landscape. But we also have to recognize that precisely because we have such rich ecological diversity across all our different landscapes there’s a lot we don’t actually know about what justice demands in any particular case.
In fact, Schmidtz uses the term “ecological justice” in his most recent book, Living Together, precisely to pinpoint the importance of this human diversity.
From his perspective, justice involves thinking about how the different actors in a complex ecosystem interact and, ideally, avoid conflict. Schmidtz rejects ideological or ideal theories about justice as unhelpful, instead focusing on what justice can or should do on the ground, as people live their complex and diverse lives. For Schmidtz, justice is a combination of four primary characteristics:
Justice is about managing conflict - justice is important not only to limit violence, but also, as Schmidtz says, to allow people “to get on with their lives” once conflicts are resolved.
Justice is about managing traffic - justice allows people to coordinate their varied and diverse activities.
Justice is an adaptation - justice is not an ideal, but a process of adapting our expectations to the world around us. We slowly, over time, build a system where we can have reasonably accurate expectations of how other people will behave.
Justice is an ongoing process - this adaptive process evolves over time as people’s needs evolve over time. Our understandings of private property were much different in 1000AD than they are now, because we have different needs and therefore different kinds of property in 2023 than we could have foreseen in 1000AD. This isn’t relativism, but instead an adaptive mechanism by which our expectations about the social world adapt to changes in that social world.
Ecological Justice and Knowledge
The radically moderate lesson that comes from this, which is a lesson shared by everyone from Adam Smith and Charles Darwin to Friedrich Hayek, is that we often don’t have access to the information we need to make decisions about “capital J Justice” because:
Information is dispersed throughout our 4D landscape. A lot of information that might be useful is spread across the lives of millions of people. It’s not impossible to pull out, as we do with targeted advertising, but it’s difficult. Some of this dispersed information relates directly to justice in the sense that it relates to people hopes, expectations, and preferences within their own 4D landscape, but it’s very hard to access.
Information is latent in the 4D landscape and only emerges when called for. Lynne Kiesling uses a great example in a recent post on markets as ecosystems: how much am I willing to pay for a La Croix water? I often won’t know the answer to that question until I’m in the moment. If I’m really thirsty, maybe a lot! If I just had a large drink, maybe very little or nothing at all, because I don’t want sparkling water right now. Arguing that a particular price is unjust or just is meaningless outside the specific ecosystem context in which that price occurs.
Some information is really specific to particular contexts and often isn’t generalizable. My idiosyncratic preference for a particular kind of coffee (cold brew, if you care) while I’m camping doesn’t mean I prefer cold brew in other contexts (I don’t) and doesn’t mean anything much to anyone else about what their preferences while camping (or not) should be. Apart from coffee preferences, sometimes justice is really idiosyncratic. What one person needs to feel whole after a negative encounter may be diametrically opposed to what another person might need or want. Take, for example, the wide variation in murder victim’s families support for the death penalty (or not).
Some information changes too rapidly to make it worth trying to capture. My annoyance at the unjust actions of a particular driver on a particular stretch of road might be generalizable, but it also might not be. The only way we can tell if there’s a background issue that’s contributing to the mismatch between my expectations and this other person’s behavior is to see if that mismatch persists across time and people. If it doesn’t, it might represent a one-off interaction that doesn’t have a lot of relevance for how we think about broader social and political questions.
None of this means that we can’t make any decisions at all, of course. We have data about justice and injustice for a lot of different things. And we’re reasonably good at identifying the pits of injustice: people without enough food or clean water or adequate shelter or decent education or those subject to oppression and discrimination.
But it does mean that we need to be humble about the conclusions we draw from any particular piece of data and it means that we need to be willing to be wrong. And it means that we will always be making decisions with imperfect knowledge.
That’s the bad news. Or rather than being bad or good, it’s just the way life is.
The good news is that our process of trial-and-error playing with imperfect knowledge over time does in fact move us toward better systems, however slowly.
Ecological Justice and Adaptation
What various people over years have recognized - from the Scottish enlightenment to Darwin and modern biologists and economists like Friedrich Hayek - is the recognition that information is spread out across our biological, informational, and moral ecosystems (or rather, that all these things are part of a single ecosystem) and that plants, animals, and humans adapt to that information in gradual and incremental ways. This process - not the fiat of kings and emperors - created the most important gifts humans have today:
It’s why we have complex symbolic language
It’s why we have modern agriculture.
It’s why we have the scientific method
It’s how the common law emerged and grew
It’s why we have the world-wide web.
There are probably other examples I’m missing here, but the important thing all these things have in common is that no one invented any of them. They emerged over time as people adapted to local environments and brought their ingenuity and experimentation to bear on local problems. Along the way, they made mistakes, screwed things up, and had to try something different. This is why adaptation is considered a process of “trial and error” and not just “trial.”
Does this ecological process of adapting to local knowledge and adjusting expectations to the world around us (and vice versa) always work perfectly? Of course not. Sometimes local adaptations to problems are very bad, such as the adaptation of slavery to solve the problem of how to grow sugar in tropical areas where no one wanted to voluntarily work. This was not a good adaptation from a moral perspective, even if it did solve the problem sugar growers faced and made many of them very rich.
But in general, the process is somewhat self-correcting, as Jefferson points out in a prescient passage from the Notes on the State of Virginia. When commenting on slavery, Jefferson notes “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.”
Knowing Jefferson’s other writings, I doubt he had in mind an omnipotent God who dishes out justice from above. What he meant instead was probably something a bit more like ecological justice in action: enslaving other human beings is a fundamentally unstable strategy because those humans tend to fight back. Slavery leads to conflict and, often, to war. It can be somewhat stable in the short term, but it’s not a just system from an ecological perspective because it doesn’t align with human needs and desires over the long-term. Not only does it not reduce conflict, it actually increases it.
Ecological Justice and Radical Moderation
What does this all mean for radical moderates? Well, a few things.
First, this conception of ecological justice upholds the radical moderate’s commitment to respecting complexity and, by extension, humility. We need information about the world and we also need to be humble about what that information offers.
Second, it supports the radical moderate’s call to avoid ideological thinking. It’s a nice comforting feeling to think that your particular worldview can answer every problem in a complex 4D moral landscape, but you’re almost definitely wrong. And being wrong in the moral and political world, when we use the state to enforce our ideals on other people, is a very costly thing indeed.
Third, it supports the radical moderate’s commitment to toleration. And not just toleration of things other people do or believe that we think are stupid and/or vicious. It also means we need to tolerate imperfection as well. As Schmidtz points out, “seeing that various things matter without always pointing in the same direction is not a mistake. When different values point in different directions, that is life.”
Thinking about our 4D moral landscape in terms of ecological justice helps us better appreciate the diversity that makes up our moral and political worlds and also helps us better appreciate the imperfections that a diverse landscape will make inevitable. While each part of a complex ecosystem isn’t necessarily simultaneously beautiful - I’m thinking of those gross centipede things that live under logs for starters - the whole system can be pretty awe-inspiring when we let it.
None of this means we can’t work to make our 4D moral and political landscape better. Nothing about these process of ecological justice requires that we sit around like a caricature of the Social Darwinists and allow people to fester in pits. Every ecosystem and every landscape requires ongoing maintenance and tweaking, which is what a good steward will do (sometimes, we even need to light things on fire).
The people who are in pits deserve all our ingenuity in helping them get out. But the way we do that is by understanding the landscape itself and people’s expectations, not with an ideological bludgeon that’s insensitive to what those people in the pits really need and want.
As always, let me know what you think! Does “ecological justice” make sense? What else do we need to build a better 4D moral and political landscape? Join me in the comments and share and subscribe if you haven’t already!