Future Imperfect - Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World

David D. Friedman considers various possible futures in this invigorating book. He applies economic, legal, political, philosophical, historical, and evolutionary perspectives to a large class of possible future technologies and helps us to think rationally about how technological change will affect us and how we can change our lives and institutions to adapt to it.

The laws we have, the ways we do things, are not handed down from heaven on tablets of stone. They are human contrivances, solutions to particular problems, ways of accomplishing particular ends. If technological change makes a law hard to enforce, the best solution is sometimes to stop enforcing it. There may be other ways to accomplish the same end – including some enabled by the same technological change. The question is not how to continue to do what we have been doing but how best to achieve our objectives under new circumstances.

Friedman prudently avoids trying to be a prophet and his purpose is not to predict which future we will actually get (in anything but the broadest of outlines). What he does is rather to raise a substantial number of issues that anyone seriously interested in the future ought to contemplate and he draws attention to what is at stake in each debate. He wisely limits his discussion, with few exceptions, to the next thirty years or so: “Beyond that my crystal ball, badly blurred at best, becomes useless; the further future dissolves into mist.”

To make plans for the world of a century hence today based on today’s technology and practice makes no more sense than it did in 1900, when a man with a prudent eye to the future might have worried about avoiding a collapse of the transportation system due to a shortage of hay and outs. 

Future Imperfect is wise and responsible and its analyses are careful and well considered. There is a lot of “on the one hand..., but on the other hand” type of reasoning that such a difficult subject matter requires, but without making the conclusions trivial or uninteresting. Friedman is visionary, but a visionary constrained by reason. He is not afraid to tackle controversial topics or to make bold claims, but he is not one of those annoying authors who are attracted to controversy for its own sake. I found myself agreeing with almost every word, which is very unusual. The book is also very well written with almost no spelling or grammatical mistakes to be found which is also rather unusual.

The book is divided into six parts and 22 chapters. Among the many diverse topics considered we find surveillance technology and privacy, intellectual property, doing business online (ecash), computer crime and law enforcement online, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, biotechnology, genetic engineering, life extension, cryonics, teleportation, and even space colonization. Friedman considers each issue from several angles and avoids being overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. There are risks with all technologies, but some risks are more worthy of being taken seriously than others. People in general often worry about the wrong things to the wrong degrees. Overpopulation and global warming are two examples of things that we probably worry about way too much. The outlook adopted by Friedman puts current scares into a much needed perspective without dogmatically dismissing them outright. He says about global warming that it is

… a problem that at some point we may want to deal with, but not a problem we ought to deal with now. We do not know enough. Working that far ahead risks wasting valuable resources solving problems that will solve themselves sometime between now and then or, worse, spending our resources pushing the world in what will turn out to be the wrong direction. 

Some of the technical details concerning computers and the Internet are bound to become out of date sooner rather than later, and for the casual reader there are perhaps a few pages too many spent on encryption technology, but the broader issues raised (especially those of parts five and six of the book) are bound to be relevant for many years to come. It is also in these later parts of the book that he ventures further into philosophical territory. He touches upon the nature of consciousness, personal identity, pleasure, and happiness, among other things.

My own copy of the book is the paperback from Cambridge University Press, but the whole book is available online for free on the author's website. I read Friedman's classic first book The Machinery of Freedom (first published in the early 1970's) several years ago, but remember being somewhat less impressed by it. I now intend to re-read that one and also to read his other books. 

Anyone interested in the future should read this book.

The Evolution of Morality

There are quite a few books touching upon the topic of how moral behavior might have evolved in humans (and other animals), but very few such books are written by moral philosophers. Richard Joyce’s The Evolution of Morality is explicitly written from the perspective of moral philosophy and is thus a much needed addition to the literature. I am convinced that moral philosophers need a better understanding of evolution and that evolutionary theorists equally need a better understanding of philosophy. In a way this book bridges the gap between moral philosophy and evolutionary psychology.

Joyce sets himself two main goals: the first is to argue that human morality is innate and the second is to draw the philosophical (particularly the meta-ethical) implications of this fact. Specifically, does the innateness of morality vindicate it in some sense, thus staving off the threat of moral skepticism and undergirding some version of moral realism? Or does it instead undermine the authority of morality? Joyce is a follower of John L. Mackie’s moral skepticism and attempts to launch an “evolutionary debunking of morality”. In several ways, Joyce’s argument enhances and reinforces that of Mackie’s Ethics – Inventing Right and Wrong by injecting it with biological insights. Mackie himself was deeply interested in the evolution of morality and he even wrote a couple of articles on these topics (The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution (1978) and Genes and Egoism (1981)). Joyce also makes heavy use of Gilbert Harman's influential argument (see his The Nature of Morality) that moral judgments might be epistemologically undermined on the grounds that they can be explained entirely without invoking their truth (just as religious beliefs can be undermined on the grounds that we can explain the fact that people have these beliefs without invoking the truth of the beliefs).

In the brief introduction, Joyce discusses human nature generally and defends sociobiology and evolutionary psychology from some of the misguided critique that has been directed towards it. He says that “Broadly speaking, no sensible person can object to evolutionary psychology” and that “the idea that the human mind is nothing but all-purpose flexibility is obviously wrong. In reality, the thesis of the human tabula rasa (blank slate) has never been held in pure form by any serious thinker.” He then goes on to discuss altruism and selfishness in chapter 1 and provides some much needed clarity on matters that are often misunderstood. Various forms of reciprocity are then discussed with a little help from game theory. The story is familiar, but important. At the end of chapter 4, he concludes that humans have an innate moral sense for which reciprocity is particularly important:

Evidence from primatology, experimental economics, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and anthropology suggests that the human mind bears the traces of a past in which reciprocity played a big role. The human interest in acquiring knowledge of others’ reputations and in broadcasting one’s own good reputation, our sensitivity to issues of distributive fairness in exchanges, our capacity to distinguish between accidental and purposeful harms (and our inclination to forgive the injuries of the former kind), our sensitivity to cheats and our antipathy toward them (and our eagerness to punish them even at material cost to ourselves), and our heightened sense of possession – all of these arguably innate tendencies suggest a mind built for reciprocation.

It is very important for Joyce to separate the ability and propensity to behave morally from the ability to make moral judgments. He argues that while other animals can have moral emotions and behave morally, only humans make moral judgments. He is particularly interested in explaining how natural selection might have brought about the capacity to make moral judgments: “What might have been done to our brains to get us thinking in terms of obligations, fairness, desert, property, cheating, and so on?”, he asks. His answer is that we can plausibly understand this transition in projectivist terms. He says

… mere aversions and inclinations will not suffice for such thinking; to dislike an outcome is very different from disapproving of it. What is needed is a movement from desiring something to finding it desirable, from feeling contempt for something to judging it contemptible, from praising something to regarding it praiseworthy, from not accepting something to considering it unacceptable, from demanding something to deeming it demanded. This is precisely the changeover that projectivism is well placed to explain.

Joyce holds that an understanding of the process of natural selection sits very comfortably with a projectivist interpretation and thus lends some prima facie support to projectivism. Adopting projectivism as a working hypothesis “may prove fruitful in our bid to understand what our ancestors’ brains started doing that allowed them to make moral judgments” and that this lends some credibility to the projectivist view.

The final two chapters of the book discuss the philosophical implications of the previous four chapters. Joyce here makes a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive evolutionary ethics. He takes what he has been doing in the first four chapters to be of the former kind. Another way in which a descriptive evolutionary ethics might influence moral thinking is by bringing to light empirical facts that are of importance to ethical decisions.

Just as ethical decisions can be influenced by facts about the consequences of certain economic policies, by facts about the degree of unhappiness that a course of action will produce, by facts about the motivations with which an action was performed, and in principle by facts of any kind at all, so too they may be influenced by facts about human evolution […] It is conceivable, for example, that the results of studying human evolution may support specific hypotheses about what kinds of things cause us happiness and unhappiness.

It is precisely this kind of project that, for example, Paul Rubin engages in (applied specifically to the political domain) in his Darwinian Politics. Joyce has no objections to this kind of project, but he claims to be agnostic about how much influence descriptive evolutionary ethics may have in this respect.

Joyce gives us a good treatment of the so-called naturalistic fallacy, something that has very often been misunderstood by both philosophers and non-philosophers. The sweeping idea that the naturalistic fallacy somehow makes any kind of prescriptive evolutionary ethics impossible is not accepted by Joyce who goes on to consider various attempts to vindicate morality on evolutionary grounds. The theories of Robert Richards, Richmond Campbell, Daniel Dennett and William Casebeer are all individually discussed and found wanting. Richards and Casebeer is claimed to locate the wrong kind of “ought” (the wrong kind of value) in evolutionary theory. This criticism is entirely successful, I think (though I have not read these authors). Campbell and Dennett, on the other hand, try to vindicate morality in instrumental terms. And this, Joyce insists, “would leave morality ‘unvindicated’ in the most important sense”.

For all they have said, morality might have the status of an expedient falsehood: practically useful while still being massively mistaken (as is often the atheist’s attitude toward religious discourse, and seems to be Mackie’s attitude toward moral discourse).

Showing that having moral beliefs is socially and individually advantageous does not, Joyce insists, amount to a justification. Nothing in such an instrumental “justification” of morality prevents the skeptic from seeing morality as a useful fiction. I think that Joyce is right to point out the important distinction between the two very different types of justification and that a justification of the one sort does not amount to a justification in the other. But I don’t agree that providing an instrumental justification of morality would be uninteresting or even less interesting. On the contrary! Indeed, once we have realized the futility of any attempted justification intended to show that there are objectively prescriptive moral facts and values, it seems reasonable to ask for an instrumental justification. Morality is, after all, ultimately about practical matters.

There are many more interesting points made in this book, some of which I am discussing in my work-in-progress dissertation. Overall, I think that this is a book that both moral philosophers and evolutionary theorists ought to read.

The Myth of The Rational Voter - Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

... now that democracy is the typical form of government, there is little reason to dwell on the truisms that it is "better than Communism," or "beats life during the Middle Ages". Such comparisons set the bar too low. It is more worthwhile to figure out how and why democracy disappoints. In the minds of many, one of Winston Churchill's most famous aphorisms cuts the conversation short: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." But this saying overlooks the fact that governments vary in scope as well as form. In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets. Democracy enthusiasts repeatedly acknowledge this. When they lament the "weakening of democracy", their main evidence is that markets face little government oversight, or even usurp traditional functions of government. They often close with a "wake-up call" for voters to shrug off their apathy and make their voice heard. The heretical thought that rarely surfaces is that weakening democracy in favor of markets could be a good thing. No matter what you believe about how well markets work in absolute terms, if democracy starts to look worse, markets start to look better by comparison.  

Bryan Caplan's book is a lucid and powerful economic analysis of democracy. Caplan draws on results from economics, history, (evolutionary) psychology, philosophy and political science to make a compelling case for his thesis. Economic issues are at the top of the political agenda and Caplan provides strong empirical evidence that voters have systematically biased beliefs about economics. The beliefs of the median voter manifest the following biases:

• "Anti-market bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of the market mechanism)
• "Anti-foreign bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of interaction with foreigners)
• "Make-work bias" (a tendency to underestimate the economic benefits of conserving labor) and
• "Pessimistic bias" (a tendency to overestimate the severity of economic problems and underestimate the (recent) past, present, and future performance of the economy)

As a result, voters chose bad policies. And contrary to common opinion, voters mostly get what they ask for, Caplan argues. The common analyses of the failures of democracy usually blame self-interested voters, powerful special interest groups and/or the media. But the empirical evidence tells us that voters qua voters are not self-interested. They generally vote for what they perceive as the common good, but they are deeply deluded about which policies would bring about the desired outcome. Special interest groups do have some influence, but only at the margins of public opinion. If politicians disregarded the voters in favour of special interest groups to a significant degree, they would soon be voted out of office. The media is also not in the driver's seat, it merely tells the people what they want to hear. Any news media that did otherwise would soon go out of business. The upshot is that democracy does not fail because it somehow fails to give the voters what they want - it fails precisely because it gives the voters what they want. The painful realization, for many, is that what voters want is often not very sensible!

However, politicians and bureaucrats have some "wiggle room" at the margins of public opinion which they can use to defuse the worst effects of the biases of the voters. If public policy was even more closely matched with what the voting public wants than it actually is, economic policy would be worse, not better. This can explain why, in the face of the fundamental flaws of democracy, economic policy is not as bad as it could be. If everyone voted, policy would be a disaster (as the median non-voter is even more biased than the median voter)! Thus, despite the wishful thinking of what Caplan calls the "democratic fundamentalists", the problems of democracy cannot be "fixed" by more democracy. Indeed, what we need is less, not more, democracy. The obsession with voter turnout and campaigns to encourage people to vote are misguided and even dangerous.  

Caplan argues that people have preferences over beliefs and that giving up our cherished ideological beliefs involves a certain kind of psychological pain. Given the extremely remote possibility that any one vote affects the outcome of an election, it is much less costly for the individual to indulge in ideology than to think rationally about politics. Thus, otherwise rational individuals can be irrational when it comes to politics. And the social cost is substantial. There is much more to Caplan's analysis which deserves careful attention.

The four biases listed above probably have an innate basis, as Caplan acknowledges. Humans are natural pessimists despite rational reasons for optimism; humans are naturally sceptical about foreigners despite overwhelming evidence that international trade and immigration benefits all. A large part of the explanation can be that we evolved in a zero-sum world with little or no possibilities for mutually beneficial trade. As pointed out in an excellent podcast from EconTalk (in which Caplan talks about The Myth of the Rational Voter) the front cover of the book (representing voters as a bunch of sheep) is misleadingly optimistic: "Sheep could converge on a good idea, but around the world and over time, there is a persistent tendency to select economically bad policies. Over time and across countries, stories seem very similar." It is thus not true that people are easily led in general. They are easily led only in certain directions and much harder to lead in other directions because of innate predispositions. People are not blank slates equally open to economic enlightenment as they are to economic fallacies. Rather, they come pre-equipped with various biases that must somehow be unlearned. Economic insights can be learned, of course, but they don't come naturally to people.

Also in the podcast, Caplan stresses that democracy is an ideology, a secular religion. He says that "politics is the religion of modernity". The analogy between politics and religion is apt and can be part of the explanation for why there is so much dogmatism in politics and why people so easily become offended when their favoured views are challenged. 

The Myth of the Rational Voter is a deeply insightful and profoundly important book. Caplan has provided a sobering and much needed analysis of the political system whose virtues have been naively taken for granted for too long - even by those who should know better.  

Darwinian Politics - The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom

The economist Paul H. Rubin has written an excellent study. Relying on an impressive amount of evidence from evolutionary psychology and economics, he shows us how the theory of evolution and the evolutionary history of humans are relevant for understanding contemporary political behaviour. Rubin is convinced that if we understand the ways in which our political preferences evolved, we will be in a better position to understand how we make political decisions and perhaps also how we should decide in these matters. This does not imply making the “naturalistic fallacy”. He is not drawing normative conclusions straight from empirical results. Rather, he calls attention to a large set of facts about human nature that no serious political theorist legitimately could ignore. 

Rubin follows Peter Singer’s work A Darwinian Left and argues, like Singer, “that there are evolved political preferences in humans and that political systems must consider, and perhaps adapt to, these preferences”. But, unlike Singer, Rubin does not start out with a specific political agenda but tries instead “to be somewhat more analytical and allow the agenda to come from the preferences”. He analyses which political institutions allow humans to fulfill their preferences, rather than imposing his own preferences on them. He admits to having started out writing the book as a libertarian, but that he has in the process come to question some of his previously held beliefs. It is refreshing that he for the most part avoids moralizing and takes a more scientific and objective stance to his subject matter. Only on a few well-chosen places does he step down from the meta-perspective to take a normative stand on important issues. The overall conclusion of the book is that modern western societies (particularly that of the United States, primarily because of its ethnical diversity) are the most effective societies for satisfying our evolved preferences. 

Adopting such a project obviously involves rejecting the blank slate myth – the idea that individual humans are almost infinitely malleable and can be fundamentally re-shaped by society. There are very strong evidence-based reasons against the blank slate (as meticulously gathered by Steven Pinker in his excellent book by the same name). Rubin writes that certain rules and behaviours are indeed "programmed" into us and that “we violate these rules only at great peril” which is powerfully exemplified by the disastrous social experiments of communism in Russia, China and elsewhere.  

The themes explored in the book include conflict (within and between groups), altruism and cooperation, envy, political power, and religion. There are so many good and important points made that I will not be able to mention them all here, but I will list some of them and then go on to raise a couple of critical points.

• Humans are highly individualistic and we differ from each other on numerous dimensions. There are reasons why evolution has not generated the same set of preferences in everyone. This explains why human individuality is important and why political ideologies that assume everyone to be the same are doomed to failure.

• We have a common desire for freedom which is an evolutionary very old characteristic of humans. But in addition to wanting to be free ourselves, we also have a desire to dominate others. Sometimes subordinates can resist this desire for power by dominants but at other times they cannot and we have dictatorship. Throughout most of human existence, most individuals (at least most males) have been quite free. It is only during the last 10.000 years or so that most humans have been living in an unnatural state of reduced freedom. Moving from this state to the relatively limited government powers of modern western democracies has caused a major improvement in human happiness by returning us to conditions that are more similar to the environment of our ancient ancestors. (Which is not to say that the current situation cannot be further improved.)

• There are good evolutionary explanations why some (primarily male) individuals seek political power. Those who sought and obtained such power generally left more descendants than those who did not. If those attracted to politics use it as a method of seeking status, then there would be relatively little demand for positions associated with the elimination of political power. Those seeking to reduce the power of government in all dimensions would tend to not seek political power in the first place. (This might explain why libertarian political parties do not do too well). “Given this, those of us not involved in government would do well to form our own reverse dominance hierarchy and attempt to limit the power of government.”

• Certain political behaviors may be counterproductive with respect to our evolved preferences in the novel environments in which we now live. We can learn that satisfying these preferences costs too much, and decide not to satisfy them.

• We evolved in a world with limited possibilities for exchange and other activities that increase wealth. Therefore, we are not well adapted to think intuitively in terms of gains from trade; our minds are built for understanding a zero-sum world in which we no longer live. The fact that all parties gain from trade, and that free international trade is welfare-maximizing is counterintuitive. Economic thinking must be studied and taught, it is not learned intuitively. The result is that humans in many cases now tend to base decisions on outdated zero-sum thinking. 

• One example of such zero-sum thinking concerns our preferences for (material) equality. In a zero-sum world, if some are wealthy, this must be at the expense of the poor. In today’s world, while increasing the incomes of the poor is a desirable policy, increasing equality is not. Policies aimed at increasing equality lead to lower economic growth and actually lead to more, not less, poverty.

• Another example concerns the envy that many people feel toward the relatively rich. This feeling is linked to a belief that the only way to accumulate wealth is to take it from others, perhaps through social cheating. It is easy to see how a basis for such attitudes of envy evolved in a zero-sum environment. But it is equally easy to see how misplaced they are today. In the market economies of modern western societies, the most efficient and the most common way to accumulate wealth is to provide some productive benefits for others. The wealthy have not in general accumulated their wealth through "exploitation". Thus, in most cases our envy towards the rich is misplaced. 

• In a zero-sum world where possibilities of increasing wealth by increasing productivity are not available, the only way to get additional resources is to take them from someone else. Those who were more successful at such predation would have been more likely to become our ancestors. If we evolved in such a world, we might have tendencies to believe that such aggression is a useful strategy. This might explain why we have war. However, since the world is no longer zero-sum this evolved intuition is now counterproductive and many are giving it up. This can explain why violence has declined. Rubin observes that warfare in primitive societies was a more significant source of death than in advanced societies, even when major wars are included.     

• Both ordinary people and professional students of human behavior and evolution have often confused dominance hierarchies and productive hierarchies. The same factors leading humans to (justifiably) dislike dominance hierarchies can lead them to (unjustifiably) dislike productive hierarchies as well, even though the latter may benefit all members. The result is that people may be overly hostile to productive hierarchies and as a result choose policies that actually make them worse off. Rubin takes Marxism to be the most powerful and tragic example of this phenomenon: “Marx opposition to capitalism and the acceptance of Marxism by many individuals (including many intellectuals) was based on confusion between productive and [dominance] hierarchies […] Marx did realize that capitalism was a highly productive system, but his analysis […] reads like a discussion of dominance hierarchies.” The appeal of Marxism (“which persists in some circles even today, when the dismal implications of a communist society should be clear”) “was based on the human opposition to dominance hierarchies, inappropriately applied to productive hierarchies.”       

• Another error made by Marx and accepted by many others may be based on evolved patterns of thinking. There was little capital in the environment in which we evolved and as a result we may not have reliable intuitions about the productivity of capital. This may explain the Marxian labor theory of value: "This theory is clearly incorrect, but it may be intuitively appealing for evolved reasons." It may also explain why many religions forbid interest: "Interest is a payment for the use of capital, and if one does not understand the productivity of capital, it is impossible then to understand the value of interest.”

• Voters exhibit many cognitive biases and illusions in the political process that are not so common in (private) economic decision making. (A point made more fully by Bryan Caplan in his The Myth of the Rational Voter). A rational citizen will pay much more attention to deciding what to buy in the marketplace than to which politicians he prefers. Indeed, given that it is extremely improbable that any one vote will have any impact on the outcome, there is no incentive to vote at all. Still, many people do vote. Rubin suggests that people greatly overestimate their individual contribution because we retain the thought patterns of our small-group evolutionary environment. “We are simply not suited to understand situations in which our decision has no influence.”  

• Humans have a flexible group identification mechanism but it is also powerful. If membership in an ethnic group becomes important for significant purposes, this membership can easily become the basis for strong group identification. Affirmative action (concerning race) is a very dangerous policy because it involves treating individuals as members of ethnic groups rather than as individuals. 

• Libertarianism as a strategy would not have been viable in the environments in which we evolved. Individuals with libertarian preferences would have been less successful than others and left fewer descendants. Such preferences would thus have been selected against, but not completely eliminated which can explain why there is a minority who desire a libertarian order. The conditions have now changed sufficiently so that a libertarian society would be more viable today when the benefits of interventionist preferences may have decreased and the costs of enforcing such preferences increased. Modern western society limits the power of dominants, and individuals in such societies have more freedom now than humans ever had in the past.

Rubin is evidently very well read in both economics and biology and the bibliography is indeed impressive, but (as he himself admits) his analysis is largely uninformed by contemporary moral and political philosophy. He is right to point out that philosophers in general have not paid adequate attention to biology. But in not paying adequate attention to philosophy Rubin himself commits the converse mistake (and citing other authors who also ignore philosophy (!) does not help). In the preface he states that this book is an effort in what E.O. Wilson has called consilience - the unification of knowledge across the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This is an admirable and ambitious intention, and Darwinian Politics does go a long way toward achieving its goals, but it could have been even better if the philosophical literature had been given proper attention. I’m not just saying this because I care about philosophy, but because I really think that philosophical perspectives would have been useful in clarifying some of points made in the book. I now raise a couple of examples of that.

His rather quick and insufficiently motivated dismissal of using a hypothetical state of nature as a starting point in political theorizing and his equally quick and somewhat uncritical embrace of utilitarianism leaves something to be desired. He amusingly points out that the closest real-world approximation to a Hobbesian individual would be an orangutan, not a human. Orangutans live solitary lives with almost no social grouping beyond the mother and offspring. He says further that  

... rules governing social actions of individuals would have come into being along with humans themselves. Asking about the life of human beings in isolation with no social structure would not be meaningful. Moreover, since rules evolved along with humans, asking what rules humans in a totally ruleless state would choose is also meaningless. Such a world has never existed and, in principle, cannot exist.  

While this might demolish Hobbes' particular version of the state of nature (which is wildly implausible anyway!), it does no damage to the social contract idea as such. My point is not that Rubin is wrong, but that insofar as he wants us to stop thinking in terms of a state of nature altogether (which it is not clear if he really does) his argument needs to be a lot more subtle. David Hume's distinction between natural and artificial virtues might be very helpful here. We could agree that a totally ruleless state has never existed and, in principle, cannot exist and that social contract reasoning would indeed be meaningless when applied to the natural virtues, but maintain it with regard to the artificial virtues. John L. Mackie makes a big deal out of this distinction in his Hume's Moral Theory. Mackie stresses how insights from Hume can enhance and refine Hobbes' theory:

[Hobbes'] doctrine that men are completely selfish has been effectively criticized by many of his successors, and must be drastically modified. Nor have we found a need for an absolute political sovereign. Again, while Hobbes sees moral practices as being deliberately adopted through intelligent calculation as a means to individual well-being, this seems not to be their main explanation. These are radical corrections; yet after they have been made the main outlines of his theory still stand. He was right in denying objective moral qualities and relations. He was right in seeing morality as a solution to a social problem of partial conflict which is not solved, but rather made more acute, by human instincts and the ordinary
human situation. He was largely right in his view of the form of the problem, and partly right in his identification of the elements to be used in a solution. But his notion of sovereignty exaggerates the part that has to be played by government, and his notion of covenants overstresses explicit agreement whereas more weight should be placed on the notion of convention that we have extracted from Hume's discussion and the mechanism of reciprocal sanctions.

I agree with Mackie's attitude. We ought to make the state of nature more empirically accurate. In doing so we make the social contract view more, not less, plausible. Maybe, Rubin would agree? He says that "to understand the state of nature, we must replace the Hobbesian world of individuals in conflict with a world with groups in conflict" and that in such a world "behaviour within the group would have been governed by existing, evolved (not created) rules". Besides, the social contract idea is not (primarily, at least) about how rules come into being, but about the validity of rules - it is not about providing an explanation but a justification - a distinction that Rubin fails to make explicit. 

Rubin discusses utilitarianism, Rawls and Marx and thinks that, out of these three theoretical options, it is utilitarianism that goes best together with our evolved preferences. This is, I believe, highly questionable. All of these alternatives are patterned principles in Robert Nozick’s terminology. I think that our evolved preferences go better with historical principles which is shown by our deep and universal concern with reciprocity and moralistic punishment. Utilitarianism downplays reciprocity and gives it only a secondary importance which is not the kind of importance it enjoys in people’s minds. A common objection to utilitarianism (that Rubin does not mention at all) is that it demands too much of us. Utilitarianism demands not only trivial sacrifices for the benefits of others, but can demand significant ones for the benefits of utter strangers (in the name of total utility). Our strong evolutionary based propensity to give precedence to kin (and others close to us including ourselves) is, for example, not respected by utilitarianism (where overall utility is all that matters, not whose utility it is).

Only one objection to utilitarianism is actually mentioned by Rubin and his reply to it is puzzling to say the least. He notes that a common criticism proceeds by showing that the logical implications of utilitarianism are absurd if the theory is carried to its logical extreme. He then comments:

But the argument discussed here is that utilitarianism is essentially the result of fitness maximizing preferences. In this reading, any implications of utilitarianism that conflicts with fitness maximization for the relevant decision-making group are illegitimate extensions of the theory and should be ignored.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this somewhat cryptic passage, but it seems to be the case that Rubin is a utilitarian only with strong reservations. He also fails to explicitly make the standard distinctions between rule and act utilitarianism and between preference utilitarianism and hedonistic utilitarianism (his explicit embrace of Bentham might easily lead us to believe that Rubin is a hedonist, but his argument is concerned with preferences so the principle of charity forbids such an ascription). It remains unclear why his overall argument is supposed to fit better with utilitarianism than with theories in the social contract tradition (including that of Rawls).

As I said above, there is more to this book than I have been able to mention here. It should be said that Rubin’s style of writing is a bit on the formal side and the text could flow better than it does. But what it lacks in style it makes up for in content. Each chapter ends with a short summary and it is wise to start with these summaries together with the preface and chapters 1 and 8 on a first reading. Overall, this is a highly recommended read for economists, political scientists and philosophers alike. 

Michael Shermer on Liberty and the Science of Human Nature

A recent article by Michael Shermer refers to Thomas Sowell’s distinction between the unconstrained and the constrained vision of human nature, later discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate under the alternative labels of the utopian and the tragic vision. Shermer states his reasons for rejecting the utopian vision:

An unconstrained utopian [which in its original Greek means “no place”] vision of human nature largely accepts the blank slate model and believes that custom, law, and traditional institutions are sources of inequality and injustice and should therefore be heavily regulated and constantly modified from the top down. It holds that society can be engineered through government programs to release the natural unselfishness and altruism within people. It deems physical and intellectual differences largely to be the result of unjust and unfair social systems that can be re-engineered through social planning, and therefore people can be shuffled across socioeconomic classes that were artificially created through unfair and unjust political, economic, and social systems inherited from history. I believe that this vision of human nature can be achieved in literally No Place.

Shermer then formulates a kind of middle-ground between these two views of human nature that he calls the realistic vision:

Rather than there being two distinct and unambiguous categories of constrained and unconstrained (or tragic and utopian) visions of human nature, I think there is just one vision with a sliding scale. Let’s call this the Realistic Vision. If you believe that human nature is partly constrained in all respects—morally, physically, and intellectually—then you hold a Realistic Vision of human nature.

He goes on to specify what he takes the realistic vision to involve. He says that

human nature is relatively constrained by our biology and evolutionary history, and therefore social and political systems must be structured around these realities, accentuating the positive and attenuating the negative aspects of our natures. A Realistic Vision rejects the blank slate model that people are so malleable and responsive to social programs that governments can engineer their lives into a great society of its design.

Egalitarianism, Shermer points out, "only works (barely) among small bands of hunter-gatherers in resource-poor environments where there is next to no private property". One of the most telling modern-day examples of the consequences of basing political policies on the unconstrained or utopian vision is the failed communist and socialist experiments around the world throughout the previous century. These social experiments

revealed that top-down draconian controls over economic and political systems do not work.
The failed communes and utopian community experiments tried at various places throughout the world over the past 150 years demonstrated that people by nature do not adhere to the Marxian principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Humans are just not like that! We are not infinitely malleable blank slates waiting to be shaped by society. The realistic vision of human nature is well supported by the evidence from psychology, anthropology, economics, and especially evolutionary theory. Shermer lists many features of human nature that seemingly cannot be changed by environmental factors including the inherited differences among people in size, strength, speed, temperament, personality, cognitive ability, mathematical talent, spatial reasoning, verbal skills, emotional intelligence, etc. that translate into some being more successful than others; the importance to us of family ties; the universal principle of reciprocal altruism and moralistic punishment; the almost universal propensity for aggression and dominance (within and between groups), and the almost universal desire of people to trade with one another.

Shermer believes that even if most moderates on both the left and the right (especially those educated in the biological and evolutionary sciences) can embrace a realistic vision, this vision of human nature is best represented by the libertarian political philosophy. Specifically he holds that attempts to equalize natural inequalities by governmental redistribution programs cannot and will not work given the facts about human nature.

In his follow-up article entitled The Evolution of Liberty, Ronald Bailey continues on the same trail and focuses on the evolutionary origins of the intuitions lying behind non-libertarian views.

Modern progressives are motivated by an old instinct to restore the primitive egalitarianism that characterized human social relations when people lived in intimate hunter-gatherer bands, corresponding to the Marxian notion of primitive pre-state communism. For their part, modern conservatives intuitively dislike the socially disruptive character of markets and free speech and want to protect their group from outside competition and cultural corruption. These atavistic longings are part of the bio-psychological heritage of humanity and must be constantly resisted if the ambit of liberty is to thrive and expand. Liberalism (libertarianism) rises above and rejects the primitive moralities embodied in the universalist collectivism of progressives and the tribalist collectivism of conservatives. In doing so, it made the rule of law, freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and modern prosperity possible. 

Shermer wrote a friendly response to Bailey making the Hobbesian point that the natural state of humanity is abject violence and stressing the grave importance for liberty (and science) of coming to terms with violence. Shermer again cites Pinker who argued that we have already come a long way towards eradicating violence since our days as hunter-gatherers in his The Better Angels of Our Nature. Like Pinker, Shermer too follows Hobbes in assuming an essential role for government in the production of peace. But he is rightly worried about government power getting out of hand and stifling the very liberties it supposedly should defend.

At the moment I'm reading Shermer's recent book The Believing Brain on which I will comment here in the near future.