Finance
Deontic Facts, Agents, and Hayek
If you read the additional material that I link to the care I expect and demand, dear reader (tongue is firmly in cheek here!), then you have read it this paper i referred to which examines the proposed symmetry breakers between the modal ontological argument for the existence of god and the inverse modal ontological argument against the existence of god. One of the symmetry breakers, and the response to it, reminded me of something FA Hayek said when evaluating the concept of “social justice.”
The symmetry breaker in question is the deontic symmetry breaker, which deals with deontic properties. Deontic properties are properties related to what ought to be the case, “properties of obligation and consent (e.g., rightness, wrongness, oughtness, etc.),” which differ from evaluative properties having to do with “properties of value and disvalue (e.g. goodness, badness, etc.)” The deontic symmetry breaker goes as follows (without quotation):
God is defined as a supremely perfect being. But a supremely perfect being should to exist. So God should exist. But what should be the case may be the case. Therefore, God possibly exists.
Therefore, according to this proposed symmetry breaker, we have reason to prefer premise 1 of the modal ontological argument to premise 1 of the inverse modal ontological argument.
One objection to this comes from William Vallicella, who argues that deontic properties cannot sensibly be applied to non-agency contexts. That is, there is no point in talking about what should or should not be the case in situations not under an agent’s control:
As Vallicella puts the worry, “any state of affairs that should or should not exist necessarily involves an agent with sufficient power to bring about or prevent the state of affairs in question.” But if deontic properties do not apply to non-agential contexts, then it is not true that God should exist; there is no agent with the power to bring about or prevent God’s existence, and so the context in question is non-agential.
This idea of the inapplicability of deontic properties to non-agency contexts reminded me of Hayek’s critique of social justice, an idea that he insisted ‘belongs not to the category of errors but to that of nonsense, like the term ‘a moral stone’. ‘ According to Hayek, the reason ‘social justice’ was nonsense is because the outcomes of social processes are non-agential. There are no agents with sufficient knowledge and power to bring about or prevent specific end results of social processes.
As Hayek put it The mirage of social justicethe second part of Law, legislation and freedom: “When we apply the terms to a state of affairs, they have meaning only insofar as we hold someone responsible for bringing them into being or allowing them to come into being…Since only situations created by the human will can become just called or unjust, the particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust.” And the inability of actors to control the outcomes of social processes is not exactly an idea held only by those on the political right – Friedrich Engels also said: “What each individual wants is obstructed by all, and what emerges is something no one wants.” people wanted.” So you can be on the left, even on the far left, and still recognize that the outcomes of social processes are beyond anyone’s control.
To use an analogy, suppose there is a father who deliberately favors some of his children over others. He deliberately showers his favorite child with love, attention, and resources, while outright neglecting and ignoring his other children. This, Hayek would say, is unfair, because it completely influences the outcomes the children experience. But the outcomes of vast and complicated social processes are non-agential, and to speak of those outcomes as just or unjust, as if they were analogous to the hypothetical father above, is nonsensical.
But not everyone shares Hayek’s view that the outcomes of social processes cannot be reliably controlled. Jeffrey Friedman wrote extensively about people who hold on to a ‘ontology of simple society‘ and who believed that certain actors (politicians, technocrats, etc.) can reliably control social outcomes in a manner analogous to the hypothetical father’s ability to control the way he treats his own children. So the more someone adheres to a simple society ontology, the more likely they are to embrace “social justice” and find it a meaningful project because they believe that social outcomes are in fact under reliable agential control. Friedman described how such people expressed themselves in political polls:
Conversely, as Hibbing and Theiss-Morse show using focus group and survey data, disillusionment and anger can arise from the perception of government failure to act. The authors’ angry, disillusioned respondents did not allow that inaction could be caused by arguments about which actions will succeed or what their effects might be, let alone that such arguments could be justified. On the contrary: they seemed to agree that, as one person put it, all that is needed to solve the existing problems is for the leaders of the two parties to get together and say to each other: ‘There is a problem . We will not leave this room until it is repaired.”…Respondents’ chronic dissatisfaction with elected officials was, it seems, due to the belief that the officials had bad intentions, rather than insufficient knowledge, so that they deliberately and knowingly and knowingly refused to solve problems they knew how to solve.
These voters believed that “the reason social problems persist is because elected officials have ‘the ability but not the will to solve the country’s problems.’ The power was the easy part for them, it seems; the hardest thing was the will.” But if you think that politicians and technocrats haven’t solved social problems because they simply don’t know how to do so, then you lose the ability to meaningfully ascribe deontic properties. This does not mean that one cannot still attribute evaluative properties for certain outcomes, and speak about the goodness or badness of such outcomes. If a landslide that no one caused and no one could have prevented wipes out a village tomorrow, I can attribute evaluative properties to that event (“it is a tragedy that this happened”), even though there is no point in assigning deontic properties to that event (“all those rocks and mud shouldn’t have overrun that village.”) But people who cherish a simple society ontology can lose sight of the distinction between evaluative claims and deontic claims—which leads them to believing that an outcome that is evaluatively bad is therefore deontic. unjust. But this is a mistake, and we must avoid falling into it.
