1. James Tooley: Reclaiming Education

James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle. In this interesting book, he makes a powerful case for reclaiming education from the state and giving it back to the private sector, to markets and civil society. Tooley argues for this, not from some narrow ideological perspective, nor on the basis of some controversial normative premises such as that choice is always valuable in itself, or that parents have the unconditional moral right to decide for their own children. Instead, he argues from premises that ought to be acceptable even to his opponents. He claims to give his opponents what they say they want, but without relying on the government they mistakenly think is necessary to achieve it. Many supposed justifications for state intervention in education are carefully dissected here and found wanting; government is not needed, Tooley concludes, either in provision, funding, or regulation of education. 

Tooley's case is heavily informed by recent and historical evidence from the developing as well as the developed world, which provides us with radical new ways of thinking about the way education is provided for in society. “The private alternative”, he argues, can meet the local and global challenges facing education today and in the future. Markets in education, in combination with other agents of civil society, most notably the family and philanthropy, can satisfy educational demand, and it has done so historically (before the state got involved in education in the first place).

My full review of this book can be found here.

2. James L. Payne: Overcoming Welfare

Human beings are naturally compassionate. Giving to the needy is an extremely simple, primitive reaction to their plight. But this is taking the easy way out, argues political scientist James Payne. As Payne points out, those who oppose state welfare programs don’t do so because they are selfish and lack compassion, but because they see that such programs do not work. We could all agree that helping the needy is a desirable thing, the question remains how this can be done in a constructive manner. In order for helping to really work, it cannot be based on sympathy alone. That kind of helping tends to be counterproductive and lock the needy into a destructive state of permanent dependency. What promises to lift the poor out of poverty is to help them get back on their feet; to help them to help themselves. According to Payne this involves “giving with a definite expectation that the needy person will do something constructive in exchange for the help rendered”. One example is helping someone to get a job so that he can earn what he needs himself. This kind of helping bolsters the energy, self-esteem, and productiveness of people in unfortunate circumstances. But this requires taking account of the special circumstances and abilities of each individual recipient, a task much better suited for small, local charities than for large and anonymous government organizations.

Even though most people probably agree that offering a "hand up" is preferable to offering handouts, we still keep getting policies based on the latter, ineffective type of helping. Part of the explanation of this initially paradoxical situation is that government welfare programs have an inherent tendency to lapse into something-for-nothing-giving: “… fiscal, bureaucratic, and institutional pressures inherent in government […] push even programs with the best of intentions into the handout mode.” Payne points toward a fundamental inconsistency in our thinking: “we insist on using government to help the poor, yet government’s way of helping is the much-deplored handout.” Various voluntary alternatives for help and uplift are described and historical evidence indicates that such alternatives have been effective in the past.  

Overcoming Welfare is an inspiring book for those who really care about helping the needy (rather than about promoting their own view of the "good society"). My full review of Overcoming Welfare can be found here. 

3. Terry L. Anderson & Donald R. Leal: Free Market Environmentalism

This book by Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal challenges the common prejudice that free market environmentalism is an oxymoron and argues to the contrary that "if we are to continue improving environmental quality in the twenty-first century, we must harness market forces". The authors show how this could be done (and to various degrees is being done) applied to pollution, waste, fishing, water, energy, nature reserves, and more. In general, free market environmentalism "emphasizes the positive incentives associated with prices, profits, and entrepreneurship, as opposed to political environmentalism, which emphasizes negative incentives associated with regulation and taxes".

At the heart of free market environmentalism is private ownership of natural resources and decentralized decision-making. An important insight of free market environmentalism (and free market thinking in general) is that good intentions are not enough to produce good results: "Instead of intentions, good resource stewardship depends on how well social institutions harness self-interest through individual incentives." In addition to the right incentives, good resource stewardship depends on the information available to the individuals who make decisions about the resource in question. Anderson and Leal give many real-world examples of how bottom-up processes have mitigated many environmental evils past and present, and how political regulation has very often exacerbated them.

Free Market Environmentalism contains many valuable insights into how voluntary exchanges can promote cooperation, compromise, and harmony between different interests and how economic growth can be sustained while environmental quality is enhanced. My full review of this book can be found here. To learn more about free market environmentalism, vistit the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).

4. Bruce L. Benson: To Serve and Protect

The fact that the state has taken such a prominent role in criminal law is not a reflection of the superior efficiency of state institutions, argues Bruce L. Benson. Rather, it is a result of powerful kings beginning to see the legal process as a mechanism for obtaining revenue and for granting special favors to their supporters. Similarly, the development of public police in the nineteenth century was generally a result of their usefulness as political tools, not because they provided superior criminal justice. The rise of authoritarian law reflects the interests of powerful groups in society. Benson thinks that public-good justifications for a government-dominated criminal justice system are ex post rationalizations rather than explanations of their development. It is further argued that the state undermines the incentives for private participation in criminal law and thus forces governments to provide inferior bureaucratic alternatives. The historical reality of crime policy is that public provision of criminal justice is a recent social experiment that has not worked as predicted.

Current governmental criminal justice systems are wasteful and do not work for the benefit of victims of crime and neither do they provide effective deterrence. What can be done? Benson argues that "perhaps the answer is not to 'build more prisons and employ more public police', as today's politicians seem to believe. Perhaps it is not to develop a 'bigger and better' version of some government program, as has been done throughout most of this century. Perhaps the answer is to turn back the clock in an effort to reestablish the incentives for greater private-sector involvement in criminal justice that disappeared centuries ago in the face of efforts by kings to expand their revenues and power."

Benson argues for a refocusing of criminal justice towards restitution for victims. It is criminals, not innocent tax payers, that should pay as much of the cost of crime as they possibly can, and they should pay the victim, not the state. With the right institutional arrangements, making criminals pay restitution will also increase deterrence and improve rehabilitation. Benson believes that such a refocusing towards restitution must go hand in hand with greater privatization in all areas of criminal justice.

5. George Selgin: The Theory of Free Banking

George Selgin argues that even though states have monopolized coinage and money supply, this does not mean that they were the best makers of coin or that coinage is a natural monopoly. "Rather, state coinage monopolies were established by force. Once rulers had set up their own mints they prohibited private issues, making their coins both a symbol of their rule and a source of profits." Selgin challenges the belief held by most economists that "money will not manage itself" and argues against central banking. As an alternative, he sketches a free banking system with unregulated and decentralized currency supply. Such an unregulated system would respond much better to demand for currency and avoid both shortages and excessive money supply and be more stable. The full book is available online for free: The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply Under Competitive Note Issue. There is also a very interesting podcast from Econtalk in which Selgin talks about this subject.

Selgin has recently published a paper in which he considers the potential of electronic currencies (like Bitcoin) "to supply the foundation for monetary regimes that does not require oversight by any monetary authority, yet are capable of providing for all such changes in the money stock as may be needed to achieve a high degree of macroeconomic stability." See also this blog post by Matt Ridley in which he refers to Selgin's works.

But if it is widely believed that all knowledge of the natural world must come from empirical observation, and it is also widely believed that moral knowledge, if any, must be rooted in "conscience", why isn't the world filled with moral sceptics? One reason, Hinckfuss maintains, could be that

... societies can live with obvious contradictions for generations or even centuries - especially if the contradictory beliefs are part of the rationales for important societal relationships. In religion this phenomenon is commonplace. It is no less so in morality - or, for that matter, within science. What usually happens under these circumstances is that the apparent contradiction becomes tagged as a philosophical problem so that society can go on believing in its inconsistencies while the philosophers wrestle with their “problem”.

Moral scepticism is hardly new, and has been around in one form or another since the very beginnings of Western philosophy. What is original with Hinckfuss is that he explicitly connects his moral scepticism with a healthy scepticism of elitism and authoritarianism:

[M]embers of the moral elite are often treated as authorities about moral obligations. Since most members of the society will want themselves and others to act in accordance with what they believe their obligations to be, they will tend to favour conformity to the injunctions of the moral authorities. This restricts their own freedom and the freedom of others. Since an authoritarian society is one in which obedience to authority is preferred to individual freedom, morality and authoritarianism go hand in hand. 

Insofar as people believe that there are objective moral facts, they are prone to also believe that some people are better than others at gaining knowledge of these facts (that there are "moral experts"). And those who are thought to know what ought to be done are also often thought to be worthy of leadership. What Hinckfuss calls "moral societies" are societies where belief in the reality and objective validity of moral obligations is widespread. He conjectures that most or all actual societies, past and present, are moral societies in this sense. He notes that authoritarianism is regarded as some sort of evil in most moral societies. So the question arises as to how moral people live and practice within a system which has properties that they regard as evil. The answer, Hinckfuss proposes, is that they seldom regard their own moral society as authoritarian. People tend to be blind to their own authoritarianism. Yet these same people see so readily the authoritarianism in societies other than their own.

Thus moral agents, identifying as they do with what they believe to be their moral obligations, do not feel coerced by them, and insofar as these beliefs coincide with the moral propaganda of the society in which they reside, which will usually be the case, that society will not appear unduly authoritarian to them. It is only when we allow ourselves to take an outsider's view of the moral society in which we live that its authoritarianism becomes apparent.

Hinckfuss seems to also think that coming to accept moral scepticism helps a person to take an outsider's view of one's own moral society; to take an amoral (which is not the same as immoral!) perspective. 

From an amoral point of view, the moral elite of a moral society would be seen as a bunch of free riders [...] who survive by virtue of the doctrine of deserts, moral parsing and associated arts of good public relations, plus, above all, the fact that it is their moral intuitions which bear weight in social decision making.

But despite his disapproval of freeriding and authoritarianism, and his approval of individual freedom, Hinckfuss also disapproves (which, given his nihilism, obviously cannot be moral disapproval) of economic inequality. This implicitly assumes that liberty and equality are compatible. This is a debated claim (and one that I for one think is deeply mistaken). Under liberty, since people are different from each other in all kinds of ways, including in what ends they strive for, they will use this liberty in different ways, pursuing different ends, and will inevitably end up in very different outcomes as a result. Further, Hinckfuss also seems to disapprove of hierarchies of all kinds. A moral sceptic cannot, of course, say that some hierarchies are morally bad and others morally good, but it must still be recognized that some hierarchies benefit those who are part of them, and thus might not merit disapproval (moral or otherwise). The economist Paul H. Rubin noted in his book Darwinian Politics that, because of our evolved nature, humans often confuse dominance hierarchies and productive hierarchies. The same factors that (very understandably) lead humans to dislike dominance hierarchies in the environment in which we evolved, can (less understandably) lead them to dislike productive hierarchies today, even though the latter may benefit all its members. 

Hinckfuss notes that it is often argued (even by moral sceptics) that morality is useful in securing peace and bringing about the prerequisites for mutually beneficial co-operation. But Hinckfuss argues againt this. He thinks that, on the whole, we would all be better off without morality! Naturally, given his purpose, he focuses on the bad aspects of morality. 

In an amoral society, Hitler and Stalin could not have used moral injunctions to lead ordinary people to persecute fellow citizens and the citizens of other countries in such a heartless manner. In an amoral society, moral propaganda is unavailable to the megalomaniac as a tool for mass manipulation. Tyrants could, of course, still use fear to establish and maintain their position. Nevertheless, fear unaccompanied by moral charisma is a two-edged sword as many tyrants have found to their cost when rebellion has finally broken out. Fear and moral constraints have different social consequences. 

There could be war without morality. But moral propaganda eases the task of those with control of the mass media to get almost all the nation determined to attack, plunder, slaughter and subjugate another group of people.

While this is undoubtedly true and important, it doesn't show that morality on the whole leaves us worse off compared to an amoral society. Wouldn't a wholly amoral society be chaotic and messy? How could we co-operate with each other without moral prohibitions on lying, stealing, killing? Hinckfuss tries to calm us:

Apart from any basic altruistic motivations, there is a more self-interested amoral mechanism which encourages people to want to satisfy the desires of others and which thereby augments the possibility of the rational resolution of conflicts. Everyone soon learns the advantages in receiving the co-operation of others in achieving ends which one desires. But such co-operation is unlikely to be forthcoming from those who do not trust us - from those who believe for whatever reason that there is a considerable possibility that we may behave in ways which are detrimental to their interests. Such people will want to distance themselves from us - to put themselves in a position where our actions are less likely to have an effect upon them. If, therefore, we wish to reverse this tendency, it is necessary for us to become trustworthy in the eyes of as many people as possible - to be thought of as people who are likely to act in the interests of others. It is such mechanisms, rather than any moral injunctions, which encourage us to abide by our promises and contracts, to be open and honest in our dealings with others and to be predictable and cooperative in our own behaviour. It is true that there are occasions when people can advantage themselves by disadvantaging others or by risking a disadvantage to others, with little likelihood of any adverse reaction. Likelihoods build up with frequency, however, so, on the surface, at least, it would seem imprudent to so behave with any regularity. Sooner or later the reputation of such people for taking others into account in their behaviour is likely to suffer and with it would suffer their ability to gain the cooperation, let alone the friendship and love of others.

But isn't this a morality? Some would call principles of rational choice that constrain an individual's behaviour in order to gain the co-operation of others, moral principles. David Gauthier has explicitly argued this in his ground-breaking book Morals by Agreement. However, Gauthier also says (in a paper called "Why Contractarianism?") that

Deliberative justification [grounding constraints on behaviour on rational choice principles] does not refute morality. Indeed, it does not offer morality the courtesy of a refutation. It ignores morality, and seemingly replaces it.

I would prefer to say, as a moral sceptic, and in the spirit of David Gauthier, that I reject Morality (with a big M), but still accept morality (with a small m). Another way to put it is that I reject Morality, but accept an improved version of it: morality 2.0. But what is the difference? The primary difference, I would say, is that morality 2.0 lacks that claim to absolute and objective validity that is necessary for a system of rules to qualify as Morality. 
 

Just as history is written by the winners, so too is moral philosophy written largely by the believers. Although moral skepticism has been a theoretical presence in Western philosophy for as long as anyone can discern, the position has nearly always been presented by its opponents. Callicles was probably a historical figure, and Thrasymachus certainly was, but it is unlikely that the lines that Plato placed in their mouths are remotely close to a sympathetic transcript of anything they ever asserted; their role in the dialogue is to fall silent as Socrates bullies his way to inevitable victory. This pattern repeats through the centuries: Moral skepticism is wheeled on to the stage for the sole purpose of the audience witnessing its crushing defeat. However, unlike the explanation for the paucity of historians from losing sides, the absence of the skeptic’s voice from the dialectic of moral philosophy is not due to his having been defeated (either militarily or intellectually). Indeed, the very fact that moral skepticism needs to be countered again and again – centuries of novel stratagems and ingenious arguments – indicates a foe that cannot be defeated easily, implying that there must exist significant considerations in its favor. The real explanation for the dearth of real-life moral skeptics plying their wares in the philosophical marketplace may be nothing more insidious than a natural process of self-filtration: Those who are drawn to moral philosophy sufficiently to publish works on the topic are more likely than not to be antecedently hostile towards moral skepticism. By analogy, consider theology. One need not believe in God in order to be a capable theologian, but how many atheistic theologians does one really expect to find in the profession? The average atheist, as a matter of contingent fact, simply has little interest in the practice. Similarly, perhaps, the average moral skeptic tends to expend her intellectual energies elsewhere. We suspect that moral skepticism enjoys a higher proportion of support among philosophers in general than it does among moral philosophers in particular.

So begins the introductory chapter by the editors of the recent anthology A World Without Values, edited by Richard Joyce and Simon Kirchin. Moral skepticism (aka subjectivism) is the view that there are no objective values and no moral demands built into the nature of things. The best introduction to moral skepticism remains John L. Mackie's Ethics - Inventing Right and Wrong published in 1978. Mackie argues that values are "not part of the fabric of the world" and further that no substantial moral conclusions or serious constraints on moral views can be derived from logic or moral language alone. Because of this, morality is not something we can discover but something that we have to “invent”. (But we don’t just create morality out of thin air or in whatever way we want. Rather, we create it in response to a fairly determinate social problem that arises from contingent but persistent features of the human condition and the nature of our environment. Morality is a device for overcoming interpersonal conflicts and for making possible mutually beneficial co-operation. We can learn something about the general form and content of a realistic and practical morality by asking what such a device has to be like to fulfil this function in the best way.)

In Joyce's own monograph The Evolution of Morality (my review here), skepticism is argued for by an "evolutionary debunking of morality". Since we can explain why we all have moral beliefs, and why we all make moral judgements, without assuming that any such belief or judgment is true, we lack justification for our moral beliefs. Richard Garner attempts something similar in a work-in-progress paper that I've commented on here.

The fact that religious groups are so involved in political intrigue and manage to find a political niche in most places with centralized authority is very familiar to all of us, so familiar indeed that we may forget that it is a special characteristic of such groups. For instance, castes of craftsmen also try to garner some political support and lend their weight to various political factions, but they are not usually as important as groups of religious scholars. This is not because the goods and services provided by craftsmen are less indispensable or important. In fact the reason may be exactly the opposite. Since the services of literate religious groups are dispensable, the religious schools that do not yield some measure of political leverage are very likely to end up as marginal sects, a process that has happened repeatedly in history.

This, according to the story offered by Pascal Boyer in chapter 8 of his book Religion Explained, is one of the reasons why religious castes or guilds very often try to gain maximal political influence (and why some of them are successful). Even though priests and other religious specialists "are not necessarily central to large-scale political organization [...] the ones that do not manage to garner some political leverage fall by the wayside".

Boyer emphasises the "elusive nature" of the services that organized groups of religious specialists provide, and that any such group always finds itself in a precarious position due to the constant competition with other such groups as well as with "local witch-doctors, healers, shamans, holy men, and knowledgeable elders [...] who can always claim that they too offer some interaction with supernatural agents or protection against misfortune." 

The difficult training and special knowledge make sense and can subsist only if there is some guarantee that people will actually need the special services. At the same time the services in question are very easily replaced, or so it would seem. Perceiving all this and reacting to it appropriately does not mean that you have expert knowledge of political economy. In all such groups, people have a precise though intuitive grasp of their group's position in the market. It does not require much sophistication to realize that your position as a priest or religious scholar is potentially threatened by the alternatives offered by shamans and local healers.

One obvious way to secure their precarious position in the market for religious services is to enter into an "unholy alliance" (my words, not Boyer's) with the political elite. But in order for the political elite to want to bestow special privileges (a monopoly in provision of religious services), they will of course demand something in return: namely, a divine sanction of political authority. It is "largely correct", Boyer writes, "to construe religion as the ally of the oppressors, as an institution that invariably supports centralized political power and offers supernatural justifications for the established order". But this is so, not because religion necessarily supports political authority, but rather because "many successful religious guilds were successful precisely because they adopted this strategy". This creates a selection pressure in favour of religious groups that are pro-authority.  

While centralized political power can be maintained without religion, and religion would exist without centralized political power, there is room for a mutually beneficial alliance between political and religious elites. But note that there need be no element of conspiracy involved. None of the parties (neither the religious leaders, the political leaders, nor the subjects of political power) need be aware of the underlying logic just described. Indeed, they might all wholeheartedly believe in the (dominant) religious doctrine in question. 

Boyer further argues that political and economic factors have not only shaped the way religious guilds organize themselves, but also deeply influenced the very heart of religious doctrine! He notes that it is commonly assumed that "doctrine comes first, and its implementation leads to particular economic and political behaviour". But this assumption is misguided, Boyer argues. Indeed, some crucial aspects of religious doctrine "make sense only if we understand what the market for religious services is like, what kind of commodity religious knowledge and ritual constitute." The standard view, often put forth by religious institutions themselves, is that there are institutions because there is a distinctive "faith" expressed as a doctrine. "To diffuse that unique doctrine and organize activities connected with it, a special organization was then founded, with the result that ritual is standardized." But, Boyer argues, "there is every reason to think that the evolution of religious institutions is more or less the opposite of this standard picture. Doctrines are the way they are because of the organization of religious institutions, not the other way around." Major changes in religion itself are thus consequences of the fact that religious specialists are associated in state-wide groups rather than recruited locally on the basis of personal qualities. The insistence on abstract gods rather than local "ancestors", and an emphasis on "a general and abstract notion of salvation conditioned by moral behavior" (as can be found in most written religious doctrines) are examples of such consequences. Also, "in order to offer a unique set of religious services and a stable one from one religious specialist to the next, a guild requires a description of what it offers." This can help explain why religious texts have become so important in major religions. 

However, when religious scholars attempt to create coherent religious doctrines, they often spawn "abstruse and paradoxical theology"; literate versions of the supernatural concepts that do not connect with any of the "supernatural templates" in our evolved human psychology, and that do not activate the right "inference systems" in our minds. The divorce from common human supernatural templates and inference systems (which are major components of Boyer's analysis of the psychology of religion) is one major reason why such scholarly theological systems are often either ignored or blithely distorted by most congregations. "However great the control religious guilds can obtain through political means and a large diffusion of their doctrines, there always seem to be some nonstandard beliefs and practices left 'sticking out'", Boyer notes. People always seem to add to or distort the official theological doctrine.

This process of addition, re-creation and modification of concepts is constant and in all likelihood destined to go on as long as there are organized groups of literate religious scholars. People may well resort to the services of various literate guilds and even identify themselves as followers of that guild, but this does not mean that their supernatural concepts are really organized by the messages delivered by these specialists. Actual religious concepts always seem to stick out, as it were, to distort the official message or to add all sorts of officially incorrect interpretations. This is in fact inevitable, because the official messages themselves must be understood by people; which means that they must produce inferences to make them coherent or relevant; which in turn implies that their mental constructions must complete, often in divergent ways, messages that are by nature fragmentary, in this as in other domains of cultural constructions.

Literate religious guilds "tend to downplay intuition, divination, personal inspiration, orally transmitted lore and 'essential' persons because all these naturally fall outside the guild's control". But various "imagistic" practices persist and challenge the stability of the official services:

Revelation, trance and other forms of enthusiastic ritual are all difficult to codify and control, which is why they are viewed by religious institutions with considerable suspicion. Also, such rituals offer great scope for enterprising individuals to set up their own particular cult in competition with the guild. Finally, the services of the guild are made stable and distinctive by the systematic use of written manuals and codified messages. But what makes the guild's brand recognizable - an intrinsically positive effect - also makes its rituals entirely predictable. This, then, is the real tragedy of the theologian: not just that people, because they have real minds rather than literal memories, will always be theologically incorrect, will always add to the message and distort it, but also that the only way to make the message immune to such adulteration renders it tedious, thereby fueling imagistic dissent and threatening the position of the theologian's guild.

It is interesting to speculate about how religion would change in the absence of political authority. We already see in the modern western world a rise in so-called "personal religion". Is this a direct result of the weakening of political control over the religious domain? Would religion change further if society became more libertarian? Would large-scale religious organizations (like the Catholic Church) be able to survive under a libertarian order? Would atheism win the day in a libertarian society, or would people return to worship local spirits, ancestors, etc.? 

1. Richard Joyce: The Evolution of Morality

There are many books on the topic of the evolution of moral behaviour, but few of them consider the philosophical question of what morality is; its nature and status. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that most such books were written by evolutionary biologists or economists, not by moral philosophers. Richard Joyce's excellent book views the evolution of morality explicitly from a moral philosophical perspective. He considers whether there can be a "vindication" of morality on the foundation of evolution. A vindication of morality would amount to showing (or providing reasons for thinking) that some moral claims are true. Joyce concludes that attempts to vindicate morality in that sense all fail. He engages instead in what he calls an "evolutionary debunking of morality". Since we can explain why we have moral beliefs, and why we make moral judgements, without assuming that any such belief or judgment is true, there is no evidence for any moral truths. The upshot is moral scepticism. (Richard Garner makes a similar claim in a work-in-progress paper I commented on here.) 

My full review of The Evolution of Morality can be found here. 

2. Bryan Caplan: The Myth of the Rational Voter - Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

Bryan Caplan draws on results from economics, history, (evolutionary) psychology, philosophy, and political science, to show that voters in democratic elections chose bad policies. And contrary to common opinion, the voters generally get what they ask for (though not always; if they did, the situation would be even worse, not better!). Voters generally vote for what they perceive to be in the common good, but they are deeply deluded about which policies would bring about the desired outcome. This, as Caplan argues, is because voters suffer from systematically biased beliefs about economics. These "biases" probably have an innate basis, as Caplan acknowledges. 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. 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.

Caplan provides a brief summary of the main thesis of the book in this article of the same name. There is also a podcast from EconTalk in which he speaks about the book. My full review of this book can be found here.

3. James L. Payne: A History of Force - Exploring the Worldwide Movement Against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed, and Mayhem

The present book by James L. Payne came seven years earlier than Steven Pinker’s masterpiece on the same topic and puts forward the same general thesis: that there is a broad historical trend against physical force. Pinker quotes and refers to Payne's book on numerous occasions and rightly calls A History of Force an insightful book. While Pinker is a psychologist, Payne is a political scientist. As such their perspectives differ somewhat which makes the two books excellent companions to each other. Payne believes that war and taxation and ultimately government itself will eventually go the same way as slavery and dueling. He points out that force isn't the only way to get people to do the right thing and that force-based methods are very often counterproductive.

My full review of this book can be found here. 

4. Jason Brennan: The Ethics of Voting

In his book on "voting ethics", philosopher Jason Brennan attacks what he calls the "folk theory" of voting that everyone has a duty to vote, and that any "good faith" vote is morally acceptable. Even many philosophers and political theorists endorse some version of this folk theory. Brennan argues, to the contrary, that there is no moral duty to vote (except in extraordinary circumstances), but if one votes one does have a moral duty to vote well, otherwise one ought to abstain from voting. People who lack the right motive, knowledge, rationality, or ability to vote well should not vote. By voting "well" Brennan means to vote for what one justifiably believes to be in the common good. If one votes, one should vote on the basis of sound evidence for what is likely to promote the common good. One's reasons for voting the way one does should be epistemically justified. And it is not enough to be informed about the candidates' respective election promises. Much more important is to be reasonably well informed about the social-scientific evidence - from economics, sociology, and history, etc. - about how institutions and policies work. Good voters are "self-critical and use reliable methods of reasoning in forming their policy preferences. They actively engage contrary points of view and work hard to overcome their own biases". Sadly, most voters form policy preferences on the basis of what they find emotionally appealing.

The Ethics of Voting is a very welcome book that makes a perfect companion to Caplan's aforementioned book. It is a well argued and insightful book. The first chapter is available for free on the authors' website. My full review of the book can be found here.

5. David D. Friedman: 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. 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.”

Like all of Friedman's books, Future Imperfect is available online for free on the author's website. My full review of this book can be found here.

James Tooley is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Newcastle. In this interesting book, he makes a powerful case for reclaiming education from the state and giving it back to the private sector, to markets and civil society. Tooley argues for this, not from some narrow ideological perspective, nor on the basis of some controversial evaluative premises such as that choice is always valuable in itself, or that parents have the unconditional moral right to decide for their own children. Instead, he argues this from premises that ought to be acceptable even to his opponents. He claims to give his opponents what they say they want, but without relying on the government they mistakenly think is necessary to achieve it. Many supposed justifications for state intervention in education are carefully dissected here and found wanting; government is not needed, Tooley concludes, either in provision, funding, or regulation of education. Not everybody will be convinced by his argument, of course, but there certainly can be no valid excuse for not taking it seriously.

But Tooley also wants to reclaim education in a second sense: to reclaim it from what he calls “the tyranny of schooling”. We need to realize, he argues, that education is so much more than what is going on in schools. He asks the fundamental questions about what education is, what it is that we ultimately want from it as individuals and as a society, and he attempts to “probe behind surface policies and ask the philosophical questions about whether any of what we do now is morally justified and, if not, how we can put it right”. His case is heavily informed by recent and historical evidence from the developing as well as the developed world, which provides us with radical new ways of thinking about the way education is provided for in society.

It is almost universally agreed that present day systems of state education are not without their problems. Sadly, the solution is always presumed to be the same the world over: "What can the government do about it?" But why, asks Tooley, do we assume we need government here? “The private alternative”, he argues, can meet the local and global challenges facing education today and in the future. Markets in education, in combination with other agents of civil society, most notably the family and philanthropy, can satisfy educational demand, and it has done so historically (before the state got involved in education in the first place).

Tooley presents historical data from several countries indicating that “before the state got involved in compulsory schooling or even funding, we did have almost universal schooling provision – and that the progress was such that universal provision was just around the corner”. Data on literacy rates back this up. Tooley cites E.G. West, who once remarked that “when government [in England and Wales] made its debut in education in 1833 mainly in the role of subsidizer it was as if it jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping”. And one can infer from the figures Tooley presents in the book, that there were similar jumps into saddles of galloping horses by other governments throughout the world. He further suggests that without government, private education would have continued to gallop, and thus that universal education could easily have been achieved without the state, if the state had not suppressed and supplanted the private educational opportunities that were prospering in its absence. The real motivation behind states getting involved in education was not to make sure that every child would be given an education, but (at least partly) to use schooling as an instrument of social control.   

As Tooley notes, equality and democracy are among the key concerns that lead people to want the state to intervene in education. Others are worried about social cohesion, or crime, or economic growth. "Without the government being involved in these areas, we are told, we will never achieve equality of opportunity or equity. Or we will never achieve real democracy. Or society will disintegrate. The main thrust of this book is to challenge these assumptions. It considers whether these ideals, sincerely held by many, can be satisfied by government, or whether they are aspirations better met outside the state." But as Tooley points out, no government has ever been able to achieve genuinely universal education, not to speak of equal education for all. Given their record to date, he finds the belief that governments could provide equity in education a “touching faith”. Compulsory state schooling simply doesn’t achieve the objectives it has set for itself, and reforms will not be enough to change this, it is a fundamental design flaw.

Reclaiming Education is divided into five “sessions” (instead of chapters) and each session is concluded with a “focus group” discussion taking place behind a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”. It is an inspiring book, written by someone who obviously cares deeply about education at every level from the philosophical to the practical, and from the local to the global.  

... individuals confronted with the demands of authority figures are liable to feel an almost unconditional compulsion to obey, and this may prompt them to look for explanations for why the authority is legitimate and why they are morally required to obey. People often defer instinctively to those who wield power, and there are even cases [of the so-called "Stockholm Syndrome"] in which people emotionally bond with others (such as kidnappers) who hold great but completely unjustified power over them, adopting the perspectives and goals of those who hold the power. Once a pattern of obedience has started, the need to minimize cognitive dissonance favors continued obedience and the adoption of beliefs that rationalize the authority's commands and one's own obedience to them. Due to a general status quo bias, once a practice or institution becomes established in some society, that practice is likely to be viewed by the members of that society, almost automatically, as normal, right, and good. 

He points out that none of this by itself shows that existing political institutions are illegitimate, but it does strongly suggest that such institutions would be widely accepted as legitimate even if they were not. At the very least, this should teach us that the brute fact that most people do perceive political institutions as legitimate cannot straightforwardly be taken as evidence that these institutions are legitimate. Insofar as the widespread pro-authority beliefs and attitudes stem from non-rational sources, we ought to place little or no trust in such beliefs and attitudes as guides to truth or reasonableness. 

Huemer bolsters his case by citing not only psychological studies like the famous Milgram experiments and the Stanford Prison experiment, but also historical cases in which fully normal people have committed horrible atrocities that - were it not for their respect for authority - they would not have committed: 

The Nazis, the American soldiers at My Lai, and Milgram's subjects were clearly under no [moral] obligation of obedience - quite the contrary - and the orders they were given were clearly illegitimate. From outside these situations, we can see that. Yet when actually confronted by the demands of the authority figures, the individuals in these situations felt the need to obey. This tendency is very widespread among human beings. 

The widespread acceptance of political authority has been cited as evidence of the existence of (legitimate) political authority, but the psychological and historical evidence seems to undermine this appeal. Even if all governments were illegitimate, and "no one was obligated to obey their commands (except where the commands line up with preexisting moral requirements)", "it is quite likely that we would still by and large feel bound to obey our governments. That is likely, because even people who are subjected to the clearest examples of illegitimate power still typically feel bound to obey". And this is so even in cases where the authority figure in question was choses arbitrarily (as in the Stanford prison experiment where the roles of 'guard' and 'prisoner' was assigned by a lottery and the participants all knew this)! Because of this, the mere fact that we very often feel bound to obey authority figures cannot plausibly be taken as a reason to think that governments are legitimate and that we are obligated to obey our governments.  

Huemer further suggests that theories of authority devised by political philosophers can "plausibly be viewed as attempts to rationalize common intuitions about the need for obedience, where these intuitions are the product of systematic biases". When we feel a requirement to obey (whether this requirement is legitimate or not),

... it is likely that this would lead us to think and say that we are obliged to obey and then - in the case of the more philosophically minded among us - to devise theories to explain why we have this obligation. Thus, the widespread belief in political authority does not provide strong evidence for the reality of political authority, since that belief can be explained as the product of systematic bias. 

This seems to be an instance of the more general phenomenon described by (among others) Michael Shermer in The Believing Brain (we form our beliefs first, for various non-rational reasons, and then we attempt to rationalize the beliefs we already hold); and Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind (intuition comes first, strategic reasoning comes second). Our minds manifest a host of cognitive biases that continually confirm our beliefs as "true". Many philosophical doctrines can be seen as elaborate and sophisticated systematizations and rationalizations of intuitions that themselves lack rational basis (I suspect that Huemer in not as willing as I am to apply this insight to his theory of "Ethical intuitionism"). 

Now, I'm sure the above sketch of Huemer's argument from psychology will leave many people unconvinced. Is it plausible that the widespread belief in the legitimacy of political authority is a result of bias and illusion? Is it really plausible to claim that vast majorities of ordinary citizens of modern, western, democratic states suffer from something like the Stockholm syndrome? Let's briefly look more closely on a few of the components of the argument in turn.   

Cognitive dissonance

"Cognitive dissonance" is used in modern psychology to describe the feeling of uneasiness when holding two or more conflicting cognitions (ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of cognitive dissonance, people may sometimes feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment. What the political scientist James L. Payne (in his book Six Political Illusions) calls "the voluntary illusion" ("the impulse to want to believe that government action is not based on the use of force") is a good example. Payne invites his readers to ask friends and neighbours if government is based on force. Many people will flatly say "No", others will exhibit evasion, confusion, or even embarrassment, and yet others will say that government's use of force - armies, police, prisons, etc. - is not "really" force. Payne exemplifies with his friend Nancy. When asked "Is government based on force?" she replied "Well, it shouldn't be" and added "I suppose that's dodging the question". Payne's analysis:

She knows in one corner of her mind that government is based on force, which she deplores. Yet she looks to government to fix society's problems. She feels that Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, public education, and so on, are desirable programs. Hence, she is conflicted. She doesn't want to disparage the big government she likes by recognizing its distasteful foundation in brute physical force. 

There is no denying that government is ultimately based on force, but as Payne notes, people "see some special character about government that transmutes its violence into something else, something nicer that they can approve of". People naturally dislike force and this "creates a powerful psychological pressure to repress the recognition of government's coercive nature".

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by altering existing cognitions, adding new ones to try to create a consistent belief system, or alternatively by reducing the importance of any one of the dissonant elements. Many studies show that people tend to adjust their beliefs and values to make themselves and their choices and behaviour look better to themselves and to others. Huemer argues that cognitive dissonance generates a bias in favour of political authority:

Almost all members of modern societies have frequently submitted to the demands of their governments, even when those demands required actions that they would otherwise be strongly disinclined to perform. [...] How do we explain to ourselves why we obey? We could explain our behaviour by citing fear of punishment, habit, the drive toward social conformity, or a general emotional drive to obey whoever holds power. But none of those explanations is emotionally satisfying. Much more pleasing is the explanation that we obey because we are conscientious and caring citizens, and we thus make great sacrifices to do our duty and serve our society. Philosophical accounts of political authority seem designed to bolster just that image. [...] whether or not our behaviour is motivated by compassion and a sense of duty, it is likely that we would generally wish to believe that it is. To believe this, we must accept a basic doctrine of political obligation, and we must accept the legitimacy of our government. 

Of course, this does nothing to show that no such doctrine is true, but it seems to undermine one set of powerful reasons for thinking that such doctrines are true.

"Social proof" and status quo bias

Other experiments mentioned by Huemer shows a high level of conformity to the beliefs and attitudes of others ("social proof"), and a general bias in favour of the status quo: "Social proof convinces us that what others believe must be true. Status quo bias convinces us that what our society practices must be good." For example, many of the world's cultures (and our own in the past) include beliefs and practices that strike us as bizarre, absurd, or horrible, but the members of these societies generally embrace their own cultures' beliefs and regard their practices as obviously correct, and vice versa. The conclusion to be drawn is that humans have a powerful tendency to see the beliefs of their own society as obviously true and their common practices as obviously right and good. In A History of Force, Payne applies this simple observation specifically to coercive practices:

If we had been alive in times past, we say, we would have condemned human sacrifice, the torturing of criminal suspects, the slaying of religious heretics, and so on. How - we ask in disbelief - could anyone have endorsed these practices? This attitude of superiority blinds us to the real complexity of the evolution that operates against force-based institutions. When a coercive practice is ascendant, it is not condemned. To the contrary, it is seen as essential for the health of civilization. It is endorsed by the best citizens, and its critics, if it has any, tend to be society's deviants and outsiders.

What does this tell us about the belief in the legitimacy of political authority? Huemer answers:

Government is an extremely prominent and fundamental feature of the structure of our society. We know that people tend to have a powerful bias in favour of the existing arrangements of their own societies. It therefore stands to reason that, whether or not any governments were legitimate, most of us would have a strong tendency to believe that some governments are legitimate, especially our own and others like it. 

Again, this does nothing by itself to show that any government is illegitimate. But it provides reasons to view the common belief in (the legitimacy of) political authority with suspicion.

Stockholm syndrome

Stockholm syndrome is a kind of psychological defence mechanism that can occur when one is under the power of a dangerous person and one's survival chances depend on developing traits that are pleasing to one's captor, including sympathy for the captor. Huemer points out that victims do not consciously choose to adopt these traits, and nor do they merely pretend to adopt them. They simply find themselves with these emotions and attitudes. The existence of such a defence mechanism can be explained in evolutionary terms. Huemer writes

[D]uring the history of our species, it has been common for a person or group to hold a great deal of power over others. Those who displeased the powerful person or group were likely to be killed or otherwise harmed. Those who pleased the powerful were more likely to survive and prosper from the powerful person's favor [and thus more likely to be able to propagate their genes]. It is plausible to suppose that Stockholm-like characteristics would be pleasing to powerful persons. Therefore, evolution may have selected for a tendency to develop such traits in appropriate circumstances. 

Huemer cites empirical evidence that those who develop Stockholm syndrome in hostage situations and the like are in fact more likely to survive. This supports the idea that Stockholm syndrome is an effective survival mechanism. But does it apply to subjects of political power? Huemer lists five conditions under which Stockholm syndrome is most likely to develop: (1) The aggressor poses a credible threat to the victim, (2) The victim perceives himself as unable to escape, (3) The victim is unable to overpower the aggressor or to effectively defend himself against the aggressor, (4) The victim perceives some kindness from the aggressor, even if only in the form of lack of abuse, and (5) The victim is isolated from the outside world. Huemer then argues that these conditions do in fact apply to a considerable degree to citizens of well-established governments. 

1. Governments do control their populations through credible threats of violence. They possess an impressive apparatus for imprisoning individuals; and for those who resist, governments have impressive tools of physical force, up to and including deadly force.   
2. "Escape from one's government tends to be difficult and costly, typically requiring an abandonment of one's family and friends, one's job, and one's entire society. Even those willing to undertake such costs will generally then only become subject to another government. Escape from government in general is virtually impossible."
3. "It is virtually impossible for any individual to defend himself against most modern governments, to say nothing of overpowering them."
4. "Most citizens perceive their government as beneficent in light of the social services that it provides. Some also feel that their government is good because it does not abuse its power as much as most other governments throughout history."
5. Citizens of modern, western nation-states have access to information from other countries, but most people obtain the great majority of their information from within their own country, and the "outside sources" are all in a similar political situation: "It is as though the hostages had access only to the 'outside perspectives' of hostages and hostage takers in other places. In such a situation, it is not clear that access to these perspectives would retard the development of Stockholm syndrome.

Does this mean that most people suffer from Stockholm syndrome? I don't know. It's a fascinating thought. Taken by itself it is bound to strike many people as far-fetched, but in combination with other explanations it might well describe a genuine aspect of our situation.

There is, of course, much, much more to be said on the very interesting topic of the psychology of authority. Steven Pinker's discussion in chapters 8 through 10 of The Better Angels of our Nature (to which I gave shamefully insufficient attention in my review of that masterful work) is essential reading. But Huemer's treatment (which itself contains much more than I've mentioned here; to say nothing of the book as a whole) is a valuable contribution.

The whole first chapter of The Problem of Political Authority is available for free here.

Many people approach democracy, and voting especially, with a quasi-religious reverence. This means that people tend to have firm opinions about when and how people should vote. They tend to think the answers to the questions of voting ethics are obvious. They treat their views on voting as sacred doctrine. They dislike having their views challenged.

In his book on "voting ethics", philosopher Jason Brennan attacks what he calls the "folk theory" of voting that everyone has a duty to vote, and that any "good faith" vote is morally acceptable. Even many philosophers and political theorists endorse some version of this folk theory. Brennan argues, to the contrary, that there is no moral duty to vote (except in extraordinary circumstances), but if one votes one does have a moral duty to vote well, otherwise one ought to abstain from voting. People who lack the right motive, knowledge, rationality, or ability to vote well should not vote. 

By voting "well" Brennan means to vote for what one justifiably believes to be in the common good. If one votes, one should vote on the basis of sound evidence for what is likely to promote the common good. One's reasons for voting the way one does should be epistemically justified. And it is not enough to be informed about the candidates' respective election promises. Much more important is to be reasonably well informed about the social-scientific evidence - from economics, sociology, and history, etc. - about how institutions and policies work. Good voters are "self-critical and use reliable methods of reasoning in forming their policy preferences. They actively engage contrary points of view and work hard to overcome their own biases". Sadly, most voters form policy preferences on the basis of what they find emotionally appealing.

They believe various economic or sociological theories (about how economies, governments, institutions, and the like function) because they find these theories comforting or flattering to their ideologies, not because the evidence supports those theories. They ignore and evade evidence, demonize the other side, and form their preferences through unreliable processes. They are unjustified in their beliefs. Their policy preferences reflect biases and nonrational or irrational bents.

If one votes for some candidate or policy that one believes will promote the common good, but one lacks good grounds for one's belief, then one has, on Brennan's view, acted wrongly. One might well have had good intentions, but one has acted wrongly nonetheless. Good intentions are never enough to bring about good policy.

[M]any politically active citizens - writers, activists, community organizers, pundits, celebrities, and the like - try to make the world better and vote with the best of intentions. They vote for what they believe will promote the common good. However, despite their best intentions, on my view, many of them are blameworthy for voting. Although they are politically engaged, they are nonetheless often ignorant of or misinformed about the relevant facts or, worse, are simply irrational. Though they intend to promote the common good, they all too often lack sufficient evidence to justify the policies they advocate. When they do vote, I argue, they pollute democracy with their votes and make it more likely that we will have to suffer from bad governance.

Brennan guards against an interpretation of him as "anti-democratic". He states that he supports democracy. But he stresses that democracy is not an "end in itself" and that it is not true that the more democratic something is the better it is. We should avoid "democratic fetishism". He holds that "political institutions are like hammers. We judge them in the first instance by how functional they are, by how well they help us lead our lives together in peace and prosperity". He notes that "some political theorists love democracy so much that they wish to see it pervade nearly every aspect of life". But, as Brennan rightly points out, "too much and too frequent democracy threatens to rob us of our autonomy".

In politics, democracy is a method for deciding when and how to coerce people into doing things they do not wish to do. Political democracy is a method for deciding (directly or indirectly) when, how, and in what ways a government will threaten people with violence. The symbol of democracy is not just the ballot - it is the ballot connected to a gun.

After having argued for a normative standard to which votes can be held, Brennan considers how well actual voters behave. He follows Bryan Caplan, who in The Myth of the Rational Voter argued that voters are not only rationally ignorant, but "rationally irrational". A person is said to exhibit rational irrationality when it is instrumentally rational for him to be epistemically irrational. An epistemically irrational person holds beliefs without evidence, ignores and evades evidence against her favoured beliefs, employs logical fallacies, and accepts contradictions in her thinking, etc. The idea is that for the individual voter, the expected cost of maintaining her epistemic rationality in the sphere of politics is greater than the expected benefit. The cost to the typical voter of voting in epistemically irrational ways is very close to zero. The cost of overcoming bias and epistemic irrationality is, on the other hand, often high. The psychological benefit of such irrationality is significant: "Epistemically irrational political beliefs can reinforce one’s self-image, boost one’s self-esteem; make one feel noble, smart, superior, safe, or comfortable; and can help achieve conformity with the group and thus facilitate social acceptance."

... human beings are wired not to seek truth and justice but to seek consensus. They are shackled by social pressure. They are overly deferential to authority. They cower before uniform opinion. They are swayed not so much by reason but by a desire to belong, by emotional appeal, and by sex appeal. We evolved as social primates who depended on tight in-group cooperative behavior. Unfortunately, this leaves us with a deep bent toward tribalism and conformity.

The Ethics of Voting is a very welcome book that makes a perfect companion to Caplan's aforementioned book. It is a well argued and insightful book. The first chapter is available for free on the authors' website. 

Human beings ten thousand years ago had inherited a psychology that made them intensely suspicious of strangers and capable of savage violence toward them under some circumstances, but able to benefit spectacularly from institutional arrangements that made it reasonable to treat strangers as honary friends.

In this book, Paul Seabright (a professor of economics) discusses a wide range of topics including how we have tamed our violent instincts, how human social emotions evolved, and the rise (and sometimes fall) of institutions such as money, banks, cities, firms, states, and empires. He calls our evolution from family bands to industrial cities "the great experiment" and ends up discussing how fragile this experiment is. He asks many interesting questions along the way, but his treatment of these questions often leaves something to be desired. The chapters on violence advance the same general thesis as Steven Pinker’s brilliant work on the subject, and the chapter on how the social emotions evolved is similarly congruent with Matt Ridley’s excellent The Origins of Virtue (among some other similar books). Seabright is however a somewhat less engaging writer than Pinker and Ridley, and his analyses are not as deep and thorough as theirs. The respective chapters on the development of cities and firms are interesting. In the latter, it is argued that the modern firm grew out of the traditional family. The chapter on water is very good in its own right, but it does not fit very well within the theme of the book as whole. (In this chapter, Seabright argues convincingly that given its scarcity and the fact that it is valued for very different purposes by different people, it needs to be treated as an economic commodity rather than as a “basic good” that should be provided to everyone for “free”. See Terry Anderson’s and Donald Leal’s book Free Market Environmentalism for a similar argument.) The revised edition of The Company of Strangers contains a new chapter on the recent financial crisis as well as a foreword by Daniel Dennett, but these add little of value. Overall, it is a good read, but it promises somewhat more than it delivers. Still, there are many insightful points made in the book: 

On violence:

Overall, the evidence does suggest that sedentary societies have had more extensive patterns of fighting and a greater tendency for stratification and hierarchy than their immediate nonsedentary predecessors, but that most hunter-gatherers have still had much higher levels of violence than characterize almost all modern societies. Whatever the explanation for these observed variations, the idea that preindustrial societies were largely peaceful, which has had a seductive hold over human thinking since Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about noble savages in the eighteenth century, has now been convincingly discredited. 

On globalization:

["Globalization"] is widely discussed as though it were a phenomenon of the last few years, even though it has been going on, in one way or another, for much of the last ten thousand years, with waves of intensification beginning five thousand, two and a half thousand, and five hundred years ago, again around a century and a half ago, and yet again after World War II. 

On poverty: 

A little under a quarter of the world's population lives today in conditions of extreme poverty [defined as living on less than a dollar per person per day]. This is an awful fact about the modern world, but there is nothing specifically modern about such poverty. On the contrary [...] around 84 per cent of the world's population lived in such conditions in 1820. We do not hear much about them, since the novels, diaries, and journalism that influence our perception of that historical period were written by the rich. When the poor appear in the novels of the nineteenth century (by writers such as Balzac, Dickens, and Victor Hugo), they are usually the urban poor, whose factory-blackened clothes and bodies suggest an indictment of the industrial system that was also a product of globalization. The rural poor, who suffered in their hundreds of millions from malnutrition, disease, and early death without going anywhere near a factory, have largely been written out of the script. We need to remember: at all previous stages in the great globalizing experiment launched ten thousand years ago by Homo sapiens sapiens, the overwhelming majority of people were desperately poor, and their lives were grim.

On liberalism: 

[Liberalism] may not have received its full philosophical stamp of approval until the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hume. But we should not see these writers as the original inventors of solutions to the problem of cohabiting a planet with people who are different from us, who are our rivals, and who nevertheless also share common interests. We should understand these writers instead as codifying and expressing publicly solutions that were implicit in the human capacities that enabled people for thousands of years to deal - literally - with strangers. 

On the "blank slate": 

[A] great advantage of appreciating the true origins of liberalism is that we can appreciate what is valuable in the ideas of the great liberal philosophers without being wedded to their entirely implausible natural psychology. Locke's tabula rasa theory of the human mind is not taken seriously in psychology any more, and the nature of plasticity in human mental capacities is now seen as the product of ecological requirements during our prehistory: we are good at learning the kinds of things it was adaptive for us to learn rather than to inherit as hardwired competencies.  

On how much ideas matter in politics: 

Ideas as abstractions make almost no difference at all, for politics remains a very tribal activity, based on competition among would-be leaders to find ways of triggering our instincts for loyalty and cooperation. But ideas can be embodied in habits of thought that affect whom we treat as honorary friends and in institutions in which those habits of thought are put to work. 

A theme that runs through the book is that human beings exhibit a kind of "tunnel vision". By this he simply means "the capacity to play one's part in the great complex enterprise of creating the prosperity of a modern society without knowing or necessarily caring very much about the overall outcome". Our individual activities are part of a complex network and we can play our respective parts by just knowing how to behave toward our neighbors in the network. "Sometimes we rationalize this to ourselves by thinking that someone else is taking care of the network as a whole; if so, we are usually mistaken." He points out that we often take an interest in the broader picture, the welfare of our community and the future of the world, but that this has comparatively little effect on how we behave toward our neighbors and on our ability to do our jobs well. Sometimes, however, "this concern expresses itself in strong views about the way in which the production and distribution of economic resources should be organized, as when we protest against the closure of a local hospital". But, as Seabright points out, "the altruism of our gesture is no guarantee that we have thought through its wider implications".

The most frustrating aspect of the book for me is Seabright’s seemingly ambivalent attitude towards politics and collective action.

As the tasks undertaken by the state have multiplied and grown more complex, the ambition of the state to cure the ills of the modern division of labor has grown in turn. The state now taxes and subsidizes, redistributes income, regulates markets, intervenes in response to unemployment. In short, modern states constrain the operation of citizens, firms, and markets in historically unprecedented ways. These activities have the potential to compensate for the failings of a society where everyone has tunnel vision and no one is in charge. At the same time they have increased the need for constraints on what the state itself can do. 

On the one hand, he recognizes some of the many problems inherent in political action. He says, for example, that “Collective action – politics, in a word – reproduces through its own operation the very division of labor whose failings it seeks to redress” and that “we should be wary of supposing that the intervention of government overcomes the problem rather than posing it anew”. He also notes that “the power of political command is underwritten in all countries by military power, and the power of political command is in turn at the heart of the power to tax, to spend, and to regulate” and he writes that “Over and over again, that power has been used, not always to kill or enslave, but at least to tax or extort (these last two terms meaning often the same thing)”. He further recognizes that despite their massive coercive potential, governments “are often strangely powerless to control the details of events around them.” He likens politicians to “a small boy who has dreamed all his life about being allowed to take the controls of an airplane, but who discovers when at last he does that none of the controls he operates seems to be connected to anything, or that they work in such an unpredictable way that it is safer to leave them alone altogether” and concludes that “Politicians have very little power, if by power we mean the capacity to achieve the goals they had hoped and promised to achieve.” Seabright is thus far from naïve about politics. Yet, on the other hand, he thinks that “Political organizations have intervened in many ways in the workings of modern societies, often to very good effect” (even if “their motivations have often been far less elevated than their rhetoric”), but no clear examples of this are given. He talks repeatedly of the state’s “potential to compensate for the failings of a society where everyone has tunnel vision and no one is in charge”, but fails to tell us how exactly this could be done.

What are the failings of an "uncoordinated division of labor"? He says that "the unemployed, the poor, the seriously ill, all in their different ways can find themselves excluded from the compact of trust that, by and large, succeeds in sustaining the baroque edifice that is modern human society. No one planned it that way, but that’s no less reason to find the result unacceptable", and he implies that politics can do something about this. But he does not adequately address the concern that such attempts might do more harm than good. He notes that "Pareto-efficiency says nothing about equality: if the poor cannot be made better off without harming the rich, competitive markets will not help them. In fact, the history of recent economic development suggests that the poor and the rich can have a mutual interest in exchange, but it’s important to remember that competitive markets are about exploring avenues of mutual interest, not about redressing preexisting imbalances of power and wealth". This, he considers to be a "major gap in the theory of competitive and efficient markets". He fails to acknowledge that our very taste for equality evolved under very different circumstances to those that we find ourselves in today, and that our ancient preferences for material equality can be dangerously misplaced and counterproductive in modern society. Insisting on material equality may have been a good idea in the environment of a small hunter-gatherer band with little or no opportunities for production, but insisting on it in a modern industrial society is quite another matter. (See, for example, Paul H. Rubin’s excellent book Darwinian Politics for a fuller version of this argument. Rubin holds that while raising the income of the poor is desirable, policies that aim at material equality are not.)

Even though Seabright recognizes that “It is cooperation that precedes government and not the other way around”, he thinks that “… the infrastructure of modern society, which we think we can afford to disdain because it is so familiar that we are scarcely aware of its existence, would crumble without the coercive potential of the modern state”. But no reason whatsoever is offered for this claim. Since this seems to be self-evident to him, it comes as no surprise that he also thinks that whether the “Great Experiment” will survive much past its first ten thousand years depends on the survival of the state (as a monopoly on coercion within its territory). He then goes on to consider whether the state as we know it is likely to survive in the future. Unfortunately, this very interesting question is entirely reduced to the very different question of whether violent terrorists are likely to successfully challenge the state’s monopoly on force. No mention at all is made of the view that infrastructure (including law and order) could be provided privately. (Seabright should start with Edward P. Stringham’s magisterial anthology Anarchy and the Law, which gives a good overview of the growing literature in that tradition.)

Garner promisingly points out that the subjectivist "can call representatives of all of the human sciences to the witness stand - anthropology, archeology, biology, genetics, history, linguistics, psychology - all of them", and refers to (among other sources) fellow moral subjectivist Richard Joyce's excellent book The Evolution of Morality (my review here). I certainly share Garner's hope on this point, and there is reason to be optimistic about it, but unfortunately Garner (unlike Joyce) doesn't actually call any scientists to the witness stand first hand (with the exception of a reference to Richard Dawkins). He does however point out that "our moral claims and beliefs are relative to (are a function of) what we are, what we have been taught, and what we have come to want and feel" and that "Moral properties and facts drop out of the picture because, like witches, curses, and lucky charms, they play no role in the unfolding of events". What does play a role in the unfolding of events is only "the belief in witches, curses, lucky charms, and moral properties and facts." This type of argument is called an "argument to the best explanation" and Garner is surely right to read Mackie as making such an argument. This becomes perhaps most explicit in Mackie's book on the philosophy of religion (The Miracle of Theism), where he applies such an argument to theistic beliefs:

An important anti-theistic consideration is summed up in the title of one of Hume's works, The Natural History of Religion. This phrase suggests that there is some adequate natural explanation, in terms which do not depend at all on even the approximate truth of the theistic doctrines, for the whole phenomenon of religious belief and practice. The explanation may be that religion satisfies widespread psychological human needs, or that it fulfils some social function. The availability of such an explanation would not in itself tend to show that the theistic doctrines are false, but it would undermine any presumption of their truth that might otherwise be founded on their widespread acceptance. In any field of inquiry we normally start by taking for granted what is almost universally believed, and revise or discard this only reluctantly and for strong reasons. But if we can show that a certain belief would be almost universally held, even if it were groundless, the issue is made far more open: there is no clear onus of proof on either side.

Having thus undermined whatever reasons there were for religious belief in the first place, the atheist has now shaken off the burden of proof. But he has not yet pushed it over to the theist. We thus need to say more and Mackie continues with an appeal to ontological economy:

... the supernaturalist hypothesis fails because there is an adequate and much more economical naturalistic alternative. It is, indeed, surprising that popular defenders of religion so often argue that man has a natural, psychological, need for religious belief. For, in so far as this is so, it tells not for but against the truth of theism, by explaining why religious beliefs would arise and persist, and why they would be propagated and enforced and defended as vigorously as they are, even if there were no good reasons to suppose them to be true.

Others have applied this reasoning to moral facts and properties, most notably Gilbert Harman in The Nature of Morality. In Morals by Agreement, David Gauthier (inspired by Mackie and Harman) explicitly makes the analogy between religious and moral beliefs within the context of an argument-to-the-best-explanation framework. He points out that just as God doesn't play any explanatory role (only the belief in God does so), objective values also don't play any explanatory role (again, only the belief in objective values does so):

... the belief in objective value is widely, if confusedly held, and those who believe in objective value appeal to it in accounting for their behaviour, just as those who believe in God appeal to Him in accounting for their behaviour. But although we must refer to belief in objective value in the explanation we provide for certain choices and actions, we are clearly not thereby committed to such belief. That we cannot understand what religious persons do without referring to their belief in God does not commit us to such a belief. (That we cannot explain what certain would-be geometers do without referring to their belief that it is possible to square the circle does not commit us to such a belief.) Among the beliefs that enter into the explanation of our choices are some that, were they true, would require references to objective value. What we deny is that such beliefs are true.

From the point of view of explanation, moral facts and properties are a fiftht wheel. Like Mackie, Gauthier also notes that this argument "will not show that there is no objective value, any more than it will show that there are no fairies at the bottom of the garden" and says that we should be "content to put objective value on a par with the fairies". But we need not be content with this. And Gauthier does indeed go on to say more. Like Mackie, Gauthier too appeals to ontological economy:

Objective value, like phlogiston, is an unnecessary part of our explanatory apparatus, and as such is to be shaved from the face of the universe by Ockham's razor.

An objectivist could at this point perhaps object that ontological economy is not a self-evident theoretical virtue. Fair enough. But note first of all just how little work Ockham's razor is employed to do here. It merely functions as a tie-breaker, tipping the scales in one direction. You have to have some principle for breaking such ties and a principle of ontological economy seems like a plausible candidate on its own merits (the appeal to Ockham's razor here can hardly be claimed to be ad hoc). Second, we should note just how uneconomical it would be to accept moral facts and properties into our ontology. As Mackie told us (in Ethics - Inventing Right and Wrong), if objective values existed, they would be "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe". But that would not be enough, because insofar as it is claimed that it is possible to have knowledge of such facts and properties that would then have to be through "some special faculty of moral perception or intuition utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else". (But even this would not be enough as this still leaves the relation between moral facts and properties on the one hand and ordinary, natural facts and properties on the other hand unexplained. We normally would say that something (eating meat, for example) is wrong because it has some or other natural characteristic (causing unnecessary suffering, say): the moral somehow depends on the non-moral. But if moral wrongness is supposed to be a real property and if it is supposed to be a fact that meat eating "has" this property, then this relation would also have to be real; it would have to be some metaphysical ("supervenience") relation.) So not only would we be required to posit the moral facts and properties themselves, but also some kind of mysterious "sixth sense" with which we could apprehend these facts and properties, (and a metaphysical relation between moral and natural facts). Problems abound.

But even this is not the end of the matter. The objectivist (someone who thinks that there are moral facts and properties) now faces a powerful challenge. Namely, to provide an account of how moral facts and properties, if they were real, could cause our supposed perceptions of them. It is not hard to understand how the fact that it is raining can cause my belief that it is raining, but how can the supposed fact that eating meat is morally wrong cause someone's belief that it is wrong? How could the supposed wrongness (or the ought-not-to-be-done-ness) of eating meat possibly cause anything at all? That it is raining is something that I can see, hear, feel, and smell, (perhaps even taste?) and there are very good accounts of how such ordinary sense perception works. But there is no analogous account of "moral perception". I think that this is the final nail in the coffin of objectivism.

It makes a lot more sense to think that our moral "perceptions" are products of the feelings and attitudes that we have towards the things we call morally wrong, bad, good, etc. Here subjectivism faces a challenge of its own, however: to explain how, if there are no objective values, moral facts, inherent human rights, etc., so many people have come to think that there are and why they persist so firmly in that belief. After all, if the subjectivist is correct, most people are systematically mistaken. Can the subjectivist explain how this error has come about and why it persists? Garner points out that "a natural history of moral error has yet to be written" (though, the aforementioned The Evolution of Morality is a very good start), but that we can already now "identify a few of the many factors that have contributed to our habit of embracing groundless moral beliefs and defending them beyond all reason". Garner gives us the following hypothesis: 

Given our biological makeup and our socialization (which includes our training in language), we develop desires and  feelings of disapproval and aversion that cause and support the belief that the world contains moral qualities that it does  not really contain.  

 

Sometimes we experience a suite of positive or negative feelings about some event we have observed. Because of what and who we are, and what we have been taught to think and say, those feelings can become part of a complex of causes and conditions that lead us to think and to speak as we would if we had somehow apprehended objective moral properties.

It is on this point that Garner hopes that students of the human sciences can help us to provide "a satisfying and continually improving explanation of the causes and the effects of our mistaken belief in morality". He admits that "the full story of how our moral beliefs take hold is far from simple". Mackie noted that "the apparent objectivity of moral value is a widespread phenomenon which has more than one source". Garner carries on saying "the task of identifying these sources has been made easier by the fact that we are developing a better understanding of what sort of beings we are and of what makes us tick". We must identify some "process by which we turn attitudes and feelings into moral beliefs." Like Mackie and Joyce, Garner appeals to "projection".