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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Judging political axioms
Message-ID: <130@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 15-Mar-85 16:25:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.130
Posted: Fri Mar 15 16:25:00 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 22-Mar-85 02:15:42 EST
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Ray Chen's problem -- so many political axiom sets with no standards
for judging between them -- is a good one.  Let me reexpress his analysis
to motivate mine (then Ray can tell us if I understood him right).

(1) Axiom sets should be judged by the purposes they fulfill.  Put
more exactly, by the conclusions which follow from them.  One way
I've found of expressing this maxim is to say that good axiom sets
are "proof-generating definitions".  They prove the theorems one
wants to see proven.

(2) Theorems which should be proven by political axiom sets are
theorems of (consistent, most, optimal ...) justice.  Justice is
the vague idea that the theorems we want should be aiming towards.
A more asymtotic way of putting this is that the telos (direction,
goals) of a political system should be to satisfy some conception of
justice.

(3)  We can hope to compare political axiom sets by judging whether
the social systems which follow from them satisfy criteria of justice
which could be generated by this discussion.

(4) "Reflective equilibrium" is a way of testing consistency under
the premise that justice should be fair.  Implicitly, it suggests
that if criteria of justice can be agreed upon, then a decision
procedure for judging between different political axiom sets will
be available.  So the judgment implied in (3) is possible.

(5) (implied by 4) Good criteria of justice should make judgment between
political axiom sets easier by the application of these criteria to
the sets under comparison than judgment in the absence of these criteria.

(6?) In accordance with these points, Ray argues that to reduce arguments
between political axiom sets to arguments between sets of applyable
criteria of justice would be a profitable strategy for success (success
being agreement on a good political axiom set or sets).

I don't agree with (6).  The problem of deciding between sets of applyable
criteria of justice is just as irresolvable (unresolvable?) as the problem
of deciding between sets of political axioms.  So even if the discussion
shifted to justice, I see no reason to expect better results.  Of course,
this is a judgment call; judge for yourself.  Just because a problem is
smaller doesn't necessarily make it either easier to solve or even more
interesting.

I'll go even further.  The set of political axiom sets is just a subset
of the set of moral axiom sets.  The problem of interminable argument
between political axiom sets is the same as the problem of interminable
argument between moral axiom sets.  The reduction Ray thinks he is making is
just a shift from one suffering subset to another.  The problem is not one
of political philosophy but rather one of moral philosophy.  Ray's "reduced"
problem is not even smaller.

Just transforming or shifting this problem of civil wars between incompatible
axiom sets can't further the cause of peace.  Peace can come only from
abandoning this struggle and redirecting our efforts to constructing a
coherent alternative where civil war between premise systems is not permissible
as a strategy for dominance.  This means ignoring and avoiding the fight,
except to illustrate what we don't want the future to hold for us.

These thoughts aren't entirely my own.  They're inspired by what has
become my favorite "book for future generations" -- After Virtue, by
Alisdair MacIntyre.

MacIntyre suggests that the moral terms we use in everyday life and political
rhetoric are almost extinct carryovers from a period when they represented
parts of a coherent moral view intrinsically linked to the structure of
society and its historical development.  MacIntyre labels the best parts
of that coherent moral viewpoint "Aristotelean" after Aristotle's analysis
of the virtues which underlay that moral world view.

Once there were many virtues, interdependently referring to each other
and subject to moderating virtues which balanced their proportion in society.
These virtues included justice, friendship, wisdom, excellence, beauty, and
others.  An Aristotelean polis was supposed to cultivate and preserve the
virtues, particularly the public virtues of justice, wisdom, and excellence.

Good judgment possessed by the citizenry and leaders substituted for modern
day law.  An individual was a zoon politikon, an animal of the polis, who
treated the polis as a natural environment filled with varied forms of moral
life and beauty.  The virtues of the polis would be internalized by the
individual as laws of moral nature.

In a public sphere filled with contending virtues, tragedy -- situations where
one virtue must be violated to fulfill another -- might occur.  However, unlike
the modern point of view which says that conflicting moral obligations are
Gordian knots to be cut by swords of arbitrary choice, MacIntyre suggests
that in an environment which preserves the virtues, tragedies must remain
tragic, so that the violation of a virtue is still a violation even if
it could not be avoided.  Call this the Sophoclean side of the polis.  Aristotle
thought tragedy was avoidable by planning; MacIntyre suggests that some conflict
could not be avoided even in his virtuous polis.  The mechanisms of tragedy and
art exist in part to help understand and teach about these characteristic
conflicts.  Of course, a tragic understanding goes against Ray's "reflective
equilibrium", if his standard for one virtue, justice, is extended to more
than one virtue.

MacIntyre suggests that the Enlightenment project abandoned Aristoteleanism
on a piece-by-piece basis, but created no organic alternative in its
place, while retaining the words it had turned hollow by depriving them of
a context involving virtues.  Most of the rules of this project he labels
"liberal individualism", a point of view which imagines that individuals
can invent premises to moral philosophies out of nothing but their own
imaginations, such that competition between these premises can be papered
over into pluralist "consensuses".  Of course, no such consensus takes
place, and the battle of premises leaves chaos and incoherence in all
remaining moral views, shorn of their societal protection, reduced to
ghosts.

MacIntyre proves convincingly, I think, that all of these so-called
axioms are just creatures of their confused historical periods.  They're
almost all ludicrous and practically vacuous outside their original
place and time of birth.  Much of his persuasive power comes from outlining
the moral philosophy of the best of Britain's golden age of philosophy and
social science -- Moore, Keynes, and the Bloomsbury group.  If their view
of good moral philosophy (a so-called revolution in its time) looks so
stupid today, how could we do better if we remain tied to their kind of
subjective individualism?

A brief quote (ah, I hate to do this): "What then the conjunction of
philosophical and historical argument reveals is that *either* one must
follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions
of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean
diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic *or* one must hold that the
Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been
commenced in the first place.  There is no third alternative and more
particularly there is no alternative provided by those thinkers at the heart
of the contemporary conventional curriculum in moral philosophy, Hume,
Kant, and Mill.  It is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often
destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught."
(p. 118, After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1984))
(apologies to Europeans here; MacIntyre refers to an Anglo-American
conventional curriculum)

Marxists may believe they slip through the noose here, but MacIntyre
thinks not:
"Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic.  For however
thoroughgoing its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may
be, it is committed to asserting that within the society constituted by
those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better
future are being accumulated.  Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced
capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these
resources for the future to be derived?  It is not surprising that at this
point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermensch: Lukacs's
ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary.  When Marxism does not
become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become
Nietzschean fantasy.  One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold
resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies.

A Marxist who took Trotsky's last writings with great seriousness would be
forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in
becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist.
For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic
structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of
advanced capitalism.  This conclusion agrees of course with my own.  For I
too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a *political* tradition,
a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range
of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners -- this does not
at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas
about modern society -- but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by
every other political tradition within our culture."
(p. 262, After Virtue)

We should abandon the project of rationally constructing whole moral and
political systems by deduction from axioms put forth by historically bound,
subjective wills.  That was the Enlightenment project which has failed.

Tony Wuersch
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