Landscapes, Binaries, and Scales
How to think about our radically moderate landscape
Photo Credit: Lauren Hall, 2021
Andrew Jason Cohen of Prosocial Libertarians had a nice response to my most recent post this past week. It’s given me the opportunity to think a little more deeply about the project as a whole. As you might (or might not) remember, in my last post I made the perhaps brash argument that political binaries and compasses conceal at least as much as they reveal and that we’re better off jettisoning the entire concept.
Do Binaries/Compasses Actually Help?
Andrew has a few concerns, the first of which is a defense of the helpfulness of binaries for diagnosing political/social problems and maybe prescribing solutions. He argues “For example, in some instances, it is useful to ask ‘will this policy or action result in more freedom or more restrictions of freedom?’ Or ‘will this result in higher infant mortality rates?’ Or ‘will people be more or less able to lead good lives?’”
In sum, he argues, “I don't know of any good reason to think we can't place different actions, policies, or political leaders on those scales in a way that can provide useful information.”
My response is twofold: first, I don’t think it provides the information we think it does and second, that information isn’t nearly completed enough to help us make decisions in the moment.
Even Andrew’s examples point to the problem. The question “will this [policy/idea/action] result in higher infant mortality rates” is only helpful if we also understand the other tradeoffs involved. For example, routine C-section of low-risk mothers tends to lower infant mortality rates at birth, but it may tend to violate maternal consent or even increase maternal mortality rates at the same time. There are tradeoffs for all of the examples Andrew gave and a single pinpoint on a compass or binary doesn’t tell us anything about those tradeoffs.
Even the question “will people be more or less able to lead good lives” has to be asked in a four dimensional context: which people, at what particular point in time and in what geographic context.
To be fair, I do think that’s the right question to ask, but it’s not clear to me how placing a single policy on a point on a political compass tells me anything about whether the tradeoffs involved are worth it, whether its useful now but harmful in ten years, or whether it creates downstream impacts that might be counterproductive. Those are the kinds of questions you can only answer if you get back on the ground in a shared landscape and start looking at how people are actually moving around in the moral/political/social world.
My concern with binaries is just that: they exclude a lot (if not most) of the relevant information we need to navigate the world. And while I’m not a cultural relativist by any stretch of the imagination, there are realities of time and culture and space that make some actions/solutions/policies possible in some contexts and not in others. And you have to know about those variables before you can answer the questions Andrew wants us to consider.
Political Landscapes and Objectivity
That leads me to my second point, which is complexity. Andrew is concerned - understandably - that my discussions may tend to look like I’m denying any objectivity at all. And thankfully that’s not the case.
I take seriously the concept of patterned variation, which was laid out really nicely in a book by my PhD advisor Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right.
Without going down too far down this particular rabbit hole, there are a few reasons objectivity matters:
Basic natural laws still apply in our shared landscape. In a real landscape, we can change a lot, but we can’t eliminate gravity. And some landscapes will challenge human ingenuity more than others. Trying to farm on granite bedrock is probably not going to happen, no matter how hard you try. Similarly - if we’re stretching our metaphors this morning - there will be some kinds of utopian thought that simply won’t work. Our shared landscape comes with basic and fundamental natural constraints that shape the way we think about social, moral, and political change. No matter what, there’s a limit to our ability to shape our shared worlds.
Some of these natural constraints are patterns of human behavior that one could call - very loosely - human nature. The way humans respond to incentives tends to be fixed, at least at high enough levels. As a minor example, people will care for their relatives - on average - more than they care about strangers. This objective reality of human life means that we’ll need an outlet for people to care for their families or they’ll create an outlet of their own, in the form of corrupt nepotism. I argued in my first book, Family and the Politics of Moderation, that the self-reproducing nature of family life makes certain kinds of social, political and moral systems unlikely to be stable over time. These include both individualistic and communitarian experiments that require that we ignore family bonds.
These objective patterns of human values - while they vary considerably over time and space in how they emerge from complex webs of human interactions - still mold and shape the moral/political/social landscape we share. And they provide us with a helpful yardstick for thinking about whether certain kinds of social, moral and political innovations are likely to be stable and/or likely to cause harm over time. It might seem nice in theory to eradicate the family in the name of egalitarian outcomes, but most admit that the amount of human suffering this would take - even if it worked - would make the outcome unjustifiable.
Finally, these constraints/patterns also shape the kinds of values that are likely to animate flourishing communities. Reasonably stable and flourishing communities are likely to take seriously the concept of tradeoffs. Much of their public and private policy is likely to be an unstable practice of balancing different goals and values and tradeoffs against each other to try to create a stable community where different kinds of people can thrive. But there’s a limit to that pluralism and variation. The most obvious limit is that there are some kinds of values that just aren’t compatible with human social life, such as indiscriminate killing or rape or other forms of uncontrolled aggression. But there are others, and part of what social/moral/political philosophy should be doing is finding precisely those patterns of things that flourishing communities share in common.
So I do agree with Andrew, who says “I’m inclined to think the (partially overlapping) set of scales we are concerned with can be organized or structured in some way.” I think this is true too and there’s likely to be ways to pull together the stable components of human behavior and the kinds of environments that incentivize some parts of our behavior over others at the same time that we identify certain kinds of values that are - in general - compatible with and indeed that might tend to lead to human flourishing. I think Andrew and I would both place human freedom on that list. But even the truism that freedom is good may, in some situations, have to be balanced against other kinds of human needs in some kind of more complex Maslow’s hierarchy. I’m still thinking this part through, but what I feel pretty certain about is that binaries and compasses don’t really help us do that thinking.
A Radical Rejection of Binaries and Compasses
There is one thing Andrew misunderstands about my last post that merits correcting (and maybe further thought on my part in terms of whether I’m being clear enough). He argues, contra my landscape metaphor: “We can't draw a map or paint a landscape and place different political leaders, policies, or actions on either in any particularly meaningful way.” Fortunately for both of us, that’s not what I’m trying to do. Placing political leaders, policies or actions onto the landscape as a placement of values misunderstands the point of the landscape in the first place. Political, social, and moral landscapes are living, breathing ecosystems made up of lots of different people trying to navigate their way through complex social, political and moral problems. You can’t assign a static place to any one person or policy on that landscape because the values and goals and trajectories of individuals and communities are always changing. The point isn’t to use the landscape as a more complex kind of political compass. It’s to reject the concept altogether.
The reason the landscape as a metaphor is radically moderate is that it asks us to jettison the task of creating these diagnostic tools in the first place. Instead, as we navigate our shared landscape together we can look around and ask ourselves: what actions will help humans in this kind of landscape come closer to flourishing and what kinds of tools can we help to get them there? That’s a question that requires both high level knowledge about the kinds of animals humans are plus a lot of local knowledge, including knowledge of local values, goals, traditions, and ways of life.
Either way, the political compass doesn’t help us understand how to make good decisions about human well being. It does, however, distract us from finding them.
What do you think? Do political binaries or compasses actually provide us with helpful information? Or are we better off focusing on concrete problems?
Let me know in the comments! And as always share and subscribe!