Subsidiarity and public reason

Having already expressed my appreciation of this post by Jim Manzi, let me now do the same for this one, as well. Here’s the core of his argument, which is very much worth reading in its entirety:

In effect, sophisticates envision themselves on a higher plane of abstraction than the rubes who think it’s just wrong to sleep with your sibling. These folks believe that they can see that there really is no rational justification for such a rule, independent of sometimes-entangled prudential considerations, and that it is merely “coughed up by an unconscious emotion”.

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So what is the moral basis of the law? Those who believe that basically all non-coercive behavior should be legal can surely make many such arguments. Any such moral argument, however, will ultimately rest on a set of beliefs that could be characterized as being “coughed up by an unconscious emotion”. We might call these, in a less loaded term, moral axioms. You don’t get a free pass out of this game by just saying you favor any non-coercive behavior, because either the restriction on coercion must itself be a moral axiom, or it must, in turn, rest upon some other more fundamental moral axioms.

Manzi’s crucial observation, in other words, is that reliance on what he’s calling “moral axioms” is simply a fact of our ethical and political discourse; it’s something that no one, except perhaps for those who wish to reject moral vocabulary altogether as a bunch of hooey (“fairy tales designed to fool the suckers”, as he says), is going to be able to avoid. (N.B.: A couple of weeks ago, I said some similar things in this post.) And so, since we’re inevitably going to disagree on moral matters, the appropriate political response is the development of forms of government that respect the principle of subsidiarity: let communities in which there is a reasonable body of agreement on such matters structure the rule of law in ways appropriate to their own moral convictions, and require that each of these tiny little governments leave the others alone.

This seems reasonable as far as it goes, but on its own, the “moral convictions are variable and inevitably sectarian, so let’s let government be that way as well” position isn’t going to take care of all of the relevant problems. There is, in the first place, the troublesome fact that disagreement about what ought to be treated as axiomatic in the moral realm is downright ubiquitous, and so we inevitably find ourselves facing the question of what level of intra-communal agreement is required for the imposition of legal restraints on behavior. The passage of laws is inevitably going to require trumping the moral convictions of someone or other, and so even the subsidiarist is going to have to appeal to some sort of metaphysically-laden picture of the relationship between political organization and legal authority. Universal agreement, if it were possible, would make for an easy way to resolve this issue (“Just let everyone establish the laws that they (i.e., all of them) want to establish!”), but since that is not the human condition, something else will have to suffice.

But there is another, more pressing concern in the vicinity, one which also arises out of the hard facts of moral disagreement: namely, that the very possibility of political life under the conditions of ideological diversity demands that we find ways to talk with one another about our divergent moral convictions, to dispute over questions which of them are well-founded and which are not. If we can’t do this – if all that moral argument can come to is the unreflective “coughing up” by one person after the other of a set of axiomatic claims – then real political life becomes impossible: there are questions which we all take to have to do with matters of fact, and we need to treat them as such in order to determine what sorts of laws ought (and not merely “are widely desired”) to be laid down, but according to this picture we seem to be resigned to treating our moral judgments as if they were nothing more than the expression idiosyncratic personal tastes. And the practice of law-making has simply got to be a different sort of thing than, say, the passing of a community resolution claiming that the Big Mac is widely preferred to the Whopper.

Within the tradition of liberal political thought, the widespread view has been that in these sorts of situations, all parties to the disagreement are required to accede to some sort of minimal, metaphysically neutral, universally accessible standpoint from which their differences can be resolved, and the politically acceptable moral convictions – that is to say, those which we can reasonably demand that others abide by – differentiated from the unacceptable ones. But the problem with this response – a problem which is, I think, nicely illustrated by the empirical research on moral judgments that Manzi cites – is simply that there is no such standpoint: or rather, once we reach a position whose baggage is minimal enough that it will be acceptable to all minimally reasonable parties, we will no longer be in a position within which moral judgment is possible at all. It is, in other words, simply impossible for creatures like us to talk about moral and political matters without bringing all (or at least most of) the weight of our most deeply-held, and yet eminently disagreed-upon, convictions to the table along with us. But what, then, are the rules of this debate? Are we simply to give up on law-making in any realm where there is reasonable controversy? Or does it turn out to be the case, as Manzi appropriately hopes it won’t, that “whoever controls the most guns rules”?

Christopher Eberle takes up these sorts of questions in a recent post at The Immanent Frame, and reaches what seems to me to be the right conclusion:

I should form my political commitments as best I can given my epistemic resources, listen to others and revise my commitments in light of what they say, try to persuade others by appealing to their commitments and hopefully get them to see matters my way. Moreover, I should expect my compatriots to return the favor: they should form their political commitments as best they can given their epistemic resources, they should listen to me and revise their commitments in light of what I say, they should try to persuade me by appealing to my commitments and hopefully get me to see things their way. In so doing each of us strives to maximize the number of people who support the policies they believe in good conscience to be morally correct.

What is striking about Eberle’s proposal is the great deal of emphasis that it places on the role of persuasion in political discourse: I am at once required to present my beliefs in a way that will make them persuasive to others, and to be willing to let those others persuade me. But there is not some independent standard which political arguments have to meet in order to count as “acceptable” parts of public reason; rather, it is the evolving standards of the community of which one happens to be a part that set off the appropriate sorts of reasons from the inappropriate ones.

This kind of practice does bear a family resemblance to the kind of flat-footed “moral rationalization” (“begin with the conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification”) that Steven Pinker criticizes in the New York Times essay that Manzi discusses. It is similar to it inasmuch as publicly persuasive arguments are very often going to center on post hoc “rationalizations” rather than what are actually one’s own reasons for having a certain conviction: for as we have seen I may not really have a reason at all for believing something, and if I do take myself to have one, it may not be the sort of thing that would count as a reason in your eyes. But the crucial difference is that the practice of what Eberle calls “conscientious engagement” is a reflective one: just as I am trying to persuade you, I have to be willing to let you try to persuade me, and this means being willing, depending on what you say, to conclude that what I once thought was axiomatic or entailed by some things I took to be axiomatic is not, after all, true. I have to be willing to conclude that even on my own terms, your position is rationally superior to mine, and so to revise my commitments accordingly. This is, of course, quite similar to the “tradition-bound” model of moral inquiry that has been proposed by Alasdair MacIntyre.

It is, however, important to recognize that even with this model of political discourse in place, the need for governmental subsidiarity by no means disappears. Quite the contrary, and for two reasons: first, this kind of discursive political engagement is arguably the sort of thing that can only take place within communities that are sufficiently small; the more distant government is from the governed, the more it will be a technocratic enterprise driven by the interests of the wealthy and otherwise influential. Secondly, one crucial thing that subsidiarity affords is the opportunity to remove oneself, with relative ease, from a community that is functioning in a way that one finds intolerable (or insufficiently tolerant): to cite just one example, if the state of California does succeed in making homeschooling illegal or otherwise impossible, my family can simply move to a different state in the U.S. – this would not, however, be possible if we lived in Germany. In sum, subsidiarity in political organization and the establishment of modes of political discourse that enable us to cope with the facts of ideological pluralism are not at all in conflict; each seems to be a condition of the other in many important ways.

One final point: it seems to me to be essential to virtuous political discourse that each of the participants be honest – with themselves as well as their fellow discussants – about the actual epistemic status of their moral convictions. It is, as I have said, important that we not confuse what are in fact our grounds (or lack thereof) for the beliefs we bring to the table with the various sorts of arguments we present for them with an eye to persuading others. To cite just one example, there is nothing quite as embarrassing as seeing someone trying to delude himself or someone else into the belief that what are in fact sectarian convictions are really the outcome of some sort of “natural law” reasoning. There is nothing wrong with such rationalizing in and of itself; it is just that we must be aware that, as Pinker points out, it usually comes into play only after the convictions it is intended to justify are already in place.

Filed under: government/law, philosophy, politics