We have seen theorists use state-of-nature reasoning to justify different forms of government based on the assumptions about human nature in this hypothetical, pre-governmental state.  In a sense, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions works in reverse, tracing the source of social and political disagreement to disparate visions of human capabilities. [1] His initial definition of a vision is a "pre-analytic cognitive act," which he further defines as "a set of assumptions not necessarily spelled out even in the individual's own mind." [2] He describes the two conflicting archetypes as the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision, while acknowledging that each of us may use visions that are not purely one type or the other, and may even employ different visions at different times and for different types of issues. [3] The operational definitions Sowell provides of the two types of visions are perhaps the clearest ways to grasp the distinction between them.  

In the constrained vision, people are driven by their desires and are, in the main, unable to resist pursuing those desires "except when inherent social constraints are forcibly imposed on them as individuals through various social mechanisms such as prices... or moral traditions and social pressures...."[4] Our ability to understand the forces driving our behavior is limited, and so theorists with a constrained vision prefer social mechanisms and systems that evolve, like markets and religions and common law.  These systems build up wisdom or social knowledge over time by aggregating the tradeoffs made by individuals pursuing their own interests.  Skeptical of our ability to design solutions individually or in groups, constrained theorists rely on the evolution of social systems over time, and favor the trade-offs reflected by such systems over solutions or strategies designed by experts or groups of experts.   

Prices are a great example of the type of systemic knowledge embodied in Sowell's constrained vision.  Suppose demand increases for a product, causing a reduction in available supply.  Producers make trade-offs with regard to the allocation of resources that would be required to increase supply. Suppose also that, in our ideal case, the resources necessary to increase supply of the product in question command a higher price when used for other purposes. Without these additional resources, supply of the original product stays the same.  Its market price rises due to the market forces of supply and demand, eventually leading to a reduced level of demand at the higher price.  As the price rises, people make trade-offs in their budgets to either justify paying the higher price or to spend their money on a alternative product. In this ideal case, no one has to make a decision for the market to adjust the price of a good. Constrained theorists would say no person or group of persons is capable of reasoning to the price that optimizes use of all resources.  Critically, the role of social institutions for "constrained vision" thinkers is to mirror and convey the kinds of systemic adjustments we see in this ideal market example.

The unconstrained vision, on the other hand, sees no inherent inability on the part of people to constrain themselves from acting selfishly or to understand the world around them.  People can act from a sense of social responsibility instead of just from self-interest.  Moreover, we can trust the rational analyses provided by experts and leaders to define what actions would achieve desirable social ends.  Since we are capable of understanding cause and effect, we should use our rational capacities to design and implement the best solutions to current problems.  Over time, people will accept rational solutions and act in accordance with them, even in the absence of compulsory mechanisms.

Continuing with our previous example on prices, we can find an example in which articulated rationality of experts provides a solution that illustrates the unconstrained vision. Imagine the market in a large city sets the price for a gallon of gasoline to cover the costs of finding and drilling for oil, refining the oil into gasoline, transporting the gasoline to the consumer, and reasonable profit for the various entities in the supply chain.  At that market price, so many people are able to buy so much gasoline that the roads are soon hopelessly congested with traffic.  Furthermore, the heavy volume of traffic is causing rapid wear on the existing roads and a serious air pollution problem.  The traffic congestion, excessive wear on existing roads, and pollution are not factored in to the market price of the gallon of gasoline.  They are external to the factors affecting the cost of providing the gasoline to the consumer.  To address these externalities, the city council decides to add a tax to each gallon of gasoline.  This tax artificially increases the price of gasoline, reducing demand and consumption (and traffic).  Furthermore, the tax provides a pool of money the city can use to repair existing roads, to create a mass transit system, and to educate the public on ways to reduce air pollution.  People pay the tax because they have to, but over time more and more adopt public transportation voluntarily because they know it is better for the community in terms of reducing traffic and air pollution.

The constrained and unconstrained visions define a spectrum of beliefs about human nature.  Few, if any, rely exclusively on one or the other vision.  Most of us rely on both visions to some extent. We find one or the other more applicable in different realms, or we may be more or less consistent in the application of a vision.  According to Sowell, even Marxism is a hybrid vision.  

​To differentiate between theories that are mostly representative of one or the other vision, Sowell uses a two-pronged test. The location of discretionary power in an institution or theory is one part of the test.  The other part is the manner in which the product of that discretionary power is applied in society. For constrained theories, the locus of discretion lies with large numbers of individuals making independent tradeoffs in pursuit of their own interests.  The mode of applying all of these individual acts of discretion is indirect, through mechanisms like the "invisible hand" Adam Smith uses to describe how the market regulates supply and demand.  For unconstrained theories, the locus of discretion is with experts or groups of experts who deliberately develop and implement rational solutions to achieve optimal solutions for society overall.  The mode of application is direct, through laws or whatever administrative instrumentality is available for such social engineering. [5]

Over the past several blogs, we have examined the philosophical roots of our Constitution.  Magna Carta represented a dramatic turn away from the notion of divine right, starting the logical process of reassigning sovereign power from one or more elites to all members of the polity. Later, state of nature theorists attempted to justify various forms of government by reasoning from their conception of how people would behave in the absence of a government. From the Enlightenment to the 20th century, we see how different conceptions of human nature lead to very different notions of what government should look like.  We can see the impact of Locke's state of nature on the founders of the United States. Sowell's conflict of visions presents a fascinating perspective on this tradition, and a convergence of sorts with our parallel inquiry into how we can know whether something is right or true.  We'll take that up in our next blog.
 
[1] Sowell, Thomas, A Conflict of Visions, William Morrow and Company, New York, NY, 1987, pp. 18-9.
[2] ibid, pp. 97-8.
[3] ibid, pp. 38-9, 95-6.
[4] ibid, p. 100.
​[5] ibid, pp. 96-108

Perhaps it was the myth that Magna Carta afforded more rights to more people than it actually did.  Perhaps it was the realization that, once divine right became something shared between the king and some subset of society, there was no reason that subset should be anything less than "all of us".  But by the early enlightenment period, philosophers were justifying the powers of government and the rights of the governed using the concepts of a pre-governmental "state of nature" and a social contract.

​By the middle of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes used these concepts to justify the absolute power of the monarch.  In Leviathan, published in 1651, Hobbes depicted the condition of humans without government of any kind.  Hobbes' concept of this "state of nature" was a war of all against all.  According to Hobbes, the benefit of exiting such a state required the surrender of individual liberty to a government with absolute power.

Other  philosophers almost immediately reacted to Hobbes' depiction of the state of nature.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality in 1754, and his depiction of the state of nature was precisely opposite that of Hobbes.  Rousseau felt that humans in such a condition would be living in accord with what he termed "uncorrupted morals."  The introduction of society was, for Rosseau, where corruption enters.  He opens his treatise entitled Social Contract Theory with the statement, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains."

Within a few decades, John Locke had proposed yet another alternative vision of the state of nature as a place governed by a natural law that afforded everyone an equal right to life, liberty and property.  Locke published his Two Treatises of Government around 1689, although he did so anonymously. Needless to say, the social contract emerging from that state of nature was quite different from what Hobbes had envisioned. And it is this version of the social contract that is most often associated with the vision of the founders of the American republic, although the version published in 18th century America was incomplete.

The point here is not to endorse any one version of Enlightenment social contract theory. Rather, I think we should observe the fact that early social contract theorists injected different views of human nature into a state of nature and used that mechanism to generate a logical argument for a form of social contract--and hence for a form of government.  And nearly everyone agrees the "state of nature" is a hypothetical construct rather than any condition that actually existed.  Attempting to defend Locke's view of human nature, or Hobbes', or Rousseau's, reminds me of the old story of the three blind men describing an elephant.  The man who grasps the trunk proclaims that the elephant is like a snake, the one who touches the side asserts that the elephant is like a wall, and the one who hugs a leg is convinced the elephant is like a tree.  None of them are completely right as individuals, but they each have a piece of the truth.  Together, they provide a better approximation of "right" than any of them do alone.

Theorists modified the idea of a state of nature in the twentieth century to make significant improvements to the basic ideas expressed by the Enlightenment philosophers.  We'll take up that thread in our next blog.

If the Constitution is to be our standard for "right," then we should take some time to explore the roots from which the Constitution sprung, the context within which the Constitution was written and ratified, as well as the ways the Constitution has evolved in the two-hundred and twenty-nine years since its ratification. In this blog, we will consider Magna Carta:  one of the seminal documents that contributed to the shift from absolute monarchy to our democratic republic. 

​First, I want to emphasize the role of God in the philosophical underpinnings of both the absolute monarchy and the subsequent evolution to Magna Carta--a first step to limiting the absolute power of the King.  The power of the absolute monarch came from what was termed "divine right".  God was thought to have ordained the King as the ruler.  God's will was manifest in the power of the king to raise armies, defeat enemies and protect the kingdom.  The outcomes of battles were a reflection of God's will.  In order to be legitimate in the eyes of the church, challenges to the authority of a King had to advance the claim of another legitimate heir--someone else who could claim divine lineage.

Thus, when a group of barons--landholders with populations of people from whom they could conscript a military force--stood against King John in 1215, and essentially forced the King to agree to limits on his power, it was a major shift.  John immediately reneged on his commitment to Magna Carta, sparking a civil war.  John died during the war, and the end result was that his nine-year old son, Henry, became King.  Henry was ultimately accepted by the barons when his regent agreed to rule in accordance with  Magna Carta.  All of these things, from John's death to the acceptance of his son as King in a power-sharing agreement with the barons, were seen as evidence of God's will [1].

​Second, I want to point out that Magna Carta was all about the rights of nobles, clergy and freeholders versus the rights of the King.  It had nothing to do with the rights of everyday people, although over time it came to be associated with principles of individual liberty.  One could imagine the barons, attempting to motivate their people to fight against King John, might have suggested that there was something in it for everyone. However, the lowest class addressed were freeholders, those who paid landlords to work their land but were not bound to the land.  Thus, the charter only provided rights for the top 26 percent of the people in the kingdom [2]:  there are certainly no guarantees of rights for commoners in the document sealed by King John.  The people empowered by Magna Carta were people of means, people with property and freedom.  But the legend that somehow individual rights for all people were generated in this process was an influence on the thinking of subsequent generations, including the colonists who framed our Declaration of Independence 560 years later.  And the colonists would take the next step, asserting that ALL men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights that included life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

[1] Danziger, Danny, and Gillingham, John (2004) 1215: The Year of Magna Carta
[2] Daniel D. McGarry, Medieval history and civilization (1976) p 242

The kinds of limits to individual human perception and thought that I described in yesterday's blog as "confirmation bias" have been described for millennia. In his Republic, Plato gives us the Allegory of the Cave, describing the limits of individual perception by comparing us to prisoners chained deep in a cavern so our heads can only see shadows projected on the cave wall in front of us.  Unable to see the  forms that are creating the shadows we see, we can, according to Plato, nonetheless use our reason to postulate the ideal forms that must exist to create our imperfect perceptions.  Nearly two thousand years later, Immanual Kant similarly hypothesized that the limits to our perception were a function of what he called "forms of intuition".  On this view, our conceptual equipment constrains us to describing perception without any direct experience of the causes of our perception.  Fast forward to the modern era, and we find scientists such as Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) describing the physiology of our emotional and rational response to the environment as it has been shaped by evolutionary forces.  More recently still, Hans Rosling (Factfulness) traces specific patterns of misconception--false belief--in our modern world to the kinds of psychological factors Kahneman describes.

​In response to these common descriptions of the limits of individual thought and perception, we find two complementary techniques for improving the clarity and accuracy of our thought, providing a foundation for discussion and compromise with other individuals.  On the one hand, Plato casts his explorations of various topics in the form of dialogues, suggesting implicitly that one way to overcome the limits of our individual thought is to temper our perceptions with those of other individuals.  One could trace the procedural mechanisms described in our Constitution back to this intuition:  that document formalizes processes for dialogue and compromise in the social and political realm to overcome disagreements that may stem from the limits of individual perception.  On the other hand, there is a long tradition of documenting techniques of formal reason, using patterns of both logical thought and fallacy as a way of honing our individual ability to reason in a way that facilitates agreement with others following similar patterns.

​Accountability Citizenship relies on both techniques:  we will spend time discussing the context and evolution of our Constitution.  We also focus on ways to improve the clarity of our thought, with special emphasis on how to distinguish facts from fake news.

When you find yourself in the realm of disagreement, where reasonable people have different views of what is "right," it is important to survey your feelings toward the issue in question.  Specifically, you should ask yourself what you want to be true or right in this instance.

​To be clear, as we have discussed in previous blogs, whether or not you want something to be right or true has absolutely nothing to do with the actual truth or "rightness" of that thing.  For instance, you may not like the fact that, at one atmosphere of pressure, water freezes when the temperature drops to 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  But, in spite of your preference, when you put a cup of water at one atmosphere of pressure and 32 degrees Fahrenheit, it's going to freeze. 

Your personal preferences or likes cannot make something actually true or right, but they can deceive you into misinterpreting the data.  According to brittanica.com, confirmation bias is "the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one's existing beliefs."  Psychology Today states that confirmation bias "leads the individual to stop gathering information when the evidence gathered so far confirms the views (prejudices) one would like to be true."  So, when you find yourself in the realm of disagreement, and are trying to reason your way to what is "right," it is important to understand your bias.  With this understanding, you may be able to recognize your personal confirmation bias and to be more objective in reaching your conclusion.

In tonight's blog, I want to step back from current events for a bit, and focus instead on some tools to help us navigate the issues and choices that are pushed at us each day by a large number of information brokers.  Specifically, tonight, I want to deal with the challenge of navigating right and wrong, especially when different sources conflict with one another and seek to sway your opinion.  I propose a conceptual model that may explain why we disagree about right and wrong, and may offer some tools for resolving our disagreements.

There are some things we can all agree are "right," and there are other things we can all agree are "wrong."  For instance, we probably all agree that the equation "2+2=4" is "right."  And likewise, we can agree that the statement "2+2=5" is "wrong."  But there is also a troubling area of disagreement when we stray from simple statements into more complex realms such as politics, economics, and religion.  We might depict these three regions using a pair of interlocking circles:  a "right" circle, a "wrong" circle, and an area where the circles overlap to represent the realm of disagreement over what is right or wrong.

When we find ourselves in the realm of disagreement, the first question we should ask ourselves is whether all participants in the discussion are using the same standard for "right."  Some of you may react by saying:  "Of course there is only one standard for rightness!"  But that would be wrong.  We can speak of being "right" in the sense of the Unites States Constitution, or in the sense of adhering to some religion or moral theory, or in the sense of being the most practical way to achieve some desired result.  Those three standards for "right" are distinct.  They may agree in some cases, but they certainly conflict in some others. 

In the case of abortion, for instance, there is a clear disagreement between most Christian religions and the Constitution.  The constitutional standard is given by the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which holds that the mother has the right to terminate her pregnancy.  In general, Christian religions hold that human life begins at conception and one cannot terminate a human life without committing murder.  We cannot expect to arrive at a solution to the question of whether abortion is "right" when we are using two standards that are fundamentally incompatible in this case.  The same constitutional protection for religious freedom that enables the argument from the Christian perspective also supports the rights of people who do not believe in the Christian religion.  

​The common language in this case has to be the Constitution, because it is the only standard for "right" to which all the participants in the discussion can agree.  On Constitutional grounds, the Roe v Wade decision relies on the Fourteenth Amendment to uphold a woman's right to have an abortion during the entire length of her pregnancy, while also allowing room for states to restrict abortions after the first trimester.  The decision was reached with seven justices voting in favor and two justices dissenting.  In the forty-five years since the decision in Roe v Wade, Republicans have been in the majority for forty-three years.  Even with an eight-to-one Republican majority in 1992, the Court upheld the Roe decision (Planned Parenthood v Casey).

​I present the abortion issue here only as an example of a case where there is profound disagreement in our society, and to emphasize that, in such cases, the first step to reaching a settlement or a compromise or a decision is to agree on a common standard for right and wrong.  It is simply not the case that there is only one standard, but it is true that the only standard we all must accept as Americans is the constitutional standard.  So in summary, then, we have arrived at a conceptual framework in which there are areas of broad consensus on what is right and what is wrong, but there is also a troubling realm in which there is significant disagreement over what is right and what is wrong.  And we discover, in this realm, that part of the reason we disagree may be because we are using different standards for what is "right."  In such cases, we must all agree to use the constitutional standard because that is the only standard we have in common as Americans.  Even with the application of the single standard--the Constitution--there is still significant room for disagreement. But the adoption of a common standard is the first tool at our disposal when navigating "right" and "wrong" in the realm of disagreement.

"The age-old debate over different conceptions of the good does not have to create partisanship and gridlock.  In the tradition of Aristotle, the "good" of anything is derived from the function of that thing.  The function of a clock, for instance, is to keep time.  One clock is better than another to the extent that it keeps time more accurately.  So if we can agree on a function for our government, we should be able to approach a concept for good that is neutral enough for the purpose of avoiding partisan gridlock.  The preamble to our Constitution offers just such a statement of purpose for our government."  

​Stephen P Tryon, Accountability Citizenship, XLibris 2013, p. x, 

Dear Mr. President, As much as Bill and Ted might wish it, the Constitution explicitly prohibits using the law as a time machine.  You see, at the time the Constitution was written, certain supreme monarchs found it useful to pass laws prohibiting certain activities of people they wanted to punish, and then using that law to punish people for having done the recently prohibited activity, even though the activity was not illegal at the time the person did it.  In Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution, the founders included the statement, "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed." A "Bill of Attainder" is a law that makes someone guilty of a crime without a jury trial.  And an "ex post facto Law" is a law that makes an activity performed in the past illegal even though it was not illegal at the time it was performed.  In other words, "ex post facto Laws" attempt to use the law as a time machine of sorts, and our Constitution expressly forbids that.  So if the memo or memos leaked by fired FBI Director James Comey were not classified at the time he leaked them, the government cannot subsequently classify those memos and use that new classification as a way to punish James Comey.  Comey, as Director, was authorized to set the classification of material in the FBI. Most Excellent!

Dear Mr. President:  Lately you have been tweeting and talking a LOT about how the Mueller investigation is a "witch hunt."  It's not a witch hunt.  According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, a "witch hunt" is "the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (such as political opponents) with unpopular views."  You and your campaign colleagues and the thirteen indicted Russian nationals aren't being investigated because your views are unpopular.  A grand jury--that is 16 to 23 of your fellow citizens chosen randomly--is monitoring the evidence and recommendations produced by an investigation conducted by a duly appointed special counsel.  The investigation has produced real results:  nineteen people have either been indicted or have pleaded guilty to crimes.  That number includes thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies indicted for identity theft and conspiracy in relation to a propaganda campaign designed to influence the 2016 election.  It includes four former advisors of yours who have pleaded guilty to lying about, among other things, contacts with Russians. [1]  Your former campaign advisor, Paul Manafort, is wearing TWO ankle bracelets.  Taken all together, Mr. President, that is not a witch hunt--it's a legitimate criminal investigation.  In my opinion, you should stop calling it a witch hunt... it makes you sound guilty.

[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury