Daily Archives: April 27, 2012

Do you want to be intellectually honest?

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Michael Giberson

Some techniques for checking the tendency toward extreme partisanship, which can be a ready source of intellectual errors (source):

•Take opposing points of view at face value.

It is more comfortable to treat opposing points of view reductively. That is, rather than deal with a different viewpoint, we prefer to explain it away. “They just want power.” “They just serve special interests.” “They don’t believe in science.” “They are socialists.”

Taking opposing points of view at face value means that we try to pass the ideological Turing test. Could my characterization of another ideology allow me to pass as a proponent of that ideology? Could an opponent’s characterization of my ideology allow that person to pass as someone like me?

•Police your own side.

In political debates, we put a lot of energy into pointing out the errors of our opponents. When somebody writes an op-ed exposing the “myths” that surround an issue, the purpose is to debunk the other side, almost never to question one’s own allies….

Imagine instead an environment in which we primarily tried to expose intellectual error on our own side. In street basketball terms, you “call your own fouls.” The onus of calling liberals’ intellectual fouls would fall on liberals. The onus of calling conservatives’ intellectual fouls would fall on conservatives.

Policing your own side would require a conscious effort to reverse the tendency toward confirmation bias. We would have to search as hard for holes in our allies’ arguments as if they were opponents’ arguments. If the goal is to improve public discourse by removing improper arguments, we are much more likely to succeed by having each side call its own fouls than by having people call fouls on the other side.

Street basketball with teams calling fouls on one another would probably degenerate into unsettled arguments. That is, it would start to resemble politics.

•Scramble the teams.

Many years ago, some men in our neighborhood started a pickup softball game on Sundays. We quickly realized that if we formed regular teams, antagonisms would fester. Instead, each week we formed new teams on a different basis, such as odd-numbered birthdays vs. even-numbered birthdays. Scrambling the teams kept the games friendly.

Much of our partisanship reflects emotional loyalty to the ideological group with which we identify. To scramble the teams, we would need to foster situations in which liberals develop emotional bonds with conservatives.

Emotional bonds develop when people work towards a common goal. Thus, in the past, military service and foreign threats have served to break down ideological differences. Historians view World War II as a period in which American unity was strong….Overall, the end of the Cold War, which reduced the sense of common threat, may account for some of the rise in partisanship within the United States in recent decades.

We need to find a substitute for external threats as a social bonding agent. Maybe some ideological peace could be bought by having liberals and conservatives who both root for the same sports team get together during important games. Perhaps liberals and conservatives could actively participate in charitable endeavors that both can endorse.

The work of [Jonathan] Haidt and other psychologists is persuasive and disturbing. It exposes a tendency to form ideological tribes that use moral arguments as rationalizations. Tribes will go out of their way to misunderstand one another. If we want to get along better and resolve differences more easily, it will take conscious effort to overcome tribal behavioral instincts.

From: Arnold Kling, “The Tribal Mind: Moral Reasoning and Public Discourse,” The American, Thursday, April 26, 2012.

Schmidtz on the philosophy of property

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Michael Giberson

At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, University of Arizona philosopher David Schmidtz discusses what a good concept of property does for society. He sums his view concisely at the end, reproduced below. Go read the rest of it for the background and support for these conclusions.

To summarize, in more concrete terms, when a system of property is working, it enables people to live good lives together by helping people to solve a cluster of key problems:

  1. It puts people in a position to produce.
  2. It puts producers in a position to trade.
  3. It fosters creative destruction by encouraging people to experiment, and to shut down experiments that are not working, and to acquire and transmit information about which experiments work and which do not.
  4. It limits externalities.  That is, it results in people having to pay the costs of their own experiments, and also in people being able to enjoy the benefits of their own experiments, thereby helping a society make progress. In most times and places, this will mean a mixed regime in which important bits of property are held by the public but in which the primary means of production are in private hands. That kind of mixed regime has been tested repeatedly in practice. Evidently, and for well-known reasons, it just works better.
  5. It limits transaction cost.  A system must enable producers to take steps to minimize the cost of getting their product to their customers. The roads must be good. Tariffs must not prevent them from dealing with foreign suppliers, and so on.
  6. It enables producers to grow their business, setting up production processes that exploit opportunities for productivity-increasing division of labor and economies of scale.

A system of good property law and good government does these six things, then stops.  Property rights don’t do everything for people, any more than do traffic lights, or plumbers, but this much they can do: they can structure people’s opportunities and incentives such that the most profitable thing people can do is to be as useful as possible to the people around them. The key to explosive economic growth is simple: Secure our possessions well enough to make it safe for us to be a part of the community. Put us in a situation where the key to personal prosperity is to devise ever more effective ways of making the people around us better off. That isn’t everything, but it is a lot.