Category Archives: deliberation

do fixed beliefs prevent reasonable deliberation?

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In Reasoning: A Social Picture, Anthony Simon Laden (who’s visiting Tufts today) argues that there’s a “standard picture of reasoning” in which the goal is to reach conclusions. You can reason alone, but when people reason together, they assert propositions, back them up with reasons, and strive for assent. Success means reaching a conclusion as reliably and efficiently as possible.

Laden argues that this picture cannot make sense of a valuable and pervasive kind of reasoning that is quite different. Sometimes when we reason, it is not to reach a conclusion but to engage in an activity with someone else that strengthens the relationship, whether that is a civic bond, a friendship, or a romantic or familial tie. I reason with you to learn what you think, to share my views with you, to seek whatever common ground we can, and to see if we can live together rather than in parallel. A characteristic activity of this kind of reasoning is not asserting that P, but inviting a response: What do you think–can we agree that P? Reasoning is “responsive engagement with others as we attune ourselves to one another and the world around us.”

Just as there are good and bad arguments that P, so there are good and bad ways of reasoning together in Laden’s sense. But some of the norms are quite different. A particularly strong argument is one that ends the discussion. But a particularly skillful conversational invitation is one that prolongs the discussion in ways that satisfy both parties. Laden says that his view is anti-foundationalist, because one unhelpful kind of reasoning involves asserting beliefs as bedrock, self-evident, or transcendent. If someone asserts that Jesus is his personal savior, that all history is the history of the class struggle, or that science produces the only truths, that ends the conversation and so makes the individual less reasonable, on Laden’s view.

Here is where I prefer my own account of moral thought as a network of beliefs connected by various kinds of ties (not just logical entailments, but also empirical generalizations, rules-of-thumb, and family resemblances). I don’t think we can declare a person unreasonable because he holds strong commitments. None of the beliefs I listed above happen to persuade me, but I am equally fixed on other beliefs, such as my love for my own family. The fact that I am not really open to discussing that doesn’t render me unreasonable.

But to converse reasonably with others, it does help to have a moral network map with certain features:

1. You shouldn’t keep returning to a few nonnegotiable principles. It’s fine, for example, to hold religious beliefs as a matter of faith. But if you constantly and immediately cite those beliefs, it’s impossible to reason with you. To put the point in network terms, your map can include nodes that are fixed points, but they ought not carry all the traffic. It should be possible to route around them.

2. You should have more beliefs rather than fewer. It is easier to converse with someone who has many interests, commitments, and ideas, because these are points of contact. Such a person is like an organic molecule with lots of surfaces for other molecules to bond to. Yet,

3. Each belief should connect to others in ways that you can explain. That way, to engage me on my belief A provides an entree to discussing my beliefs B and C. If many of my beliefs and commitments are singletons (in network terms), the conversation quickly dies.

Network analysis helps us see what makes a good conversationalist, but it does not show that being a reasonable conversation-partner is morally valuable. Perhaps it is more important to be good and right. That is what people typically say when they have neatly organized and simple mental networks that revolve around a few nodes, whether God, science, liberty, nature, or something else. They say: “It’s all very well to reason civilly and responsively with other people, but what really matters is my belief P.”

Well, it could be true that P. For instance, it could be true that God has laid out all the commandments for how to live, and we’ll see that for certain in the next life. But in this life, I don’t know how we can know that P except by reasoning with other people. Conclusive arguments are scarce in the moral domain; mainly, they are refutations of particular views that turn out to be inconsistent. But although conclusive arguments are scarce,  we come to believe things collectively by discussing them. When the discussion is inclusive, fallibilist, and responsive to everyone’s contributions, the results are better. I am not quite sure whether reasonable conversations increase the odds that we reach the right conclusions, or rather that we create something desirable when we make our moral world by reasoning together. (In other words, I am not sure whether to characterize the activity as discovery or creation.) But the practical conclusion is the same either way. It is most important to be a reasonable interlocutor. That does not rule out holding fixed beliefs, but they must supply just some of the nodes in your moral network, and they cannot be overly central.

something better than a congressional hearing?

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Ted Hesson’s story on ABC News/Univision is headlined “Why Congressional Hearings Aren’t Worth Your Time.” It begins, “There’s a major immigration reform hearing in the Senate today. Don’t bother watching it. The general point of holding these hearings is so that members of Congress can debate a bill and let the public know what’s going on. This hearing won’t do either very well, according to Peter Levine, the director of CIRCLE, a Massachusetts-based organization that looks at civic engagement among young people.”

I am the only person quoted in the piece, but the headline and message (“don’t bother watching”) are stronger than my own views. Hesson quotes these words later on: “I’d be loath to say [a hearing] is of no value,” Levine said. “We want people to follow these important issues, and it’s one way to do so. But it’s not the greatest.”

In fact, I recognize that hearings have many purposes, including generating a legal record. I also acknowledge–and Hesson quotes me saying–that ordinary, low-profile hearings inform Members of Congress and help them refine their views. “But as a hearing grows in stature, it often turns into political theater. ‘When something is very high profile, they switch into entertainment mode,’ Levine said.”

I liked Hesson’s provocative piece, but these would be my own main points (on sober reflection):

1. Congressional hearings have several purposes, two of which are educating the public about the issue in question and letting us observe our representatives’ interactions. For those two purposes, high-profile hearings are not particularly helpful. They are examples of instrumental action (trying to score points) rather than real communication. I am a policy wonk interested in immigration, but I would never take the time to watch the immigration hearings. That is partly because …

2. High-quality journalism still plays an essential role in explaining issues and controversies. A reliable and skillful journalist can watch the hearings and pull out the salient exchanges. She will also read the bill, talk to staffers off the record, and generally tell a more complete picture. The supposedly unmediated access to the hearing that I could get from C-SPAN does not strike me as particularly useful; I want mediation.  I am glad that we have a right to see the whole event, because someone may make useful sense of it. I would not expect most people–even exemplary citizens–to watch it themselves.

3. Hesson quoted Madison (“the mild voice of reason”) at my suggestion. The Madisonian ideal is that our representatives should deliberate: listening, learning, and changing their views. Our culture does not reward that, generally ignoring nuance and treating changes of opinion as “flip-flopping.” I think the underlying reasons include bad news coverage, bad formats for official discussions, and–especially–a lack of civic engagement in the citizenry as a whole. The late, great Elinor Ostrom noted that the proportion of citizens who served on school boards fell by 95% between 1932 and 1982. That was just one example of diminished engagement. If we don’t have experience deliberating, how will we detect and reward it in Congress?

the politics of TED

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Last year, a minor controversy erupted when liberal millionaire investor Nick Hanauer claimed that his TED talk on economic policy had been banned as too “political.” Chris Anderson, the “curator” of TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design), replied that Hanauer’s talk had not been censored. Rather, it wasn’t chosen for the TED homepage because it was not among the strongest talks available; and one of its flaws was its “explicitly partisan” perspective.

I am inclined to think that this particular dispute is a classically fruitless one about whether an individual’s work should be published in a specific private venue. But it raises a broader issue about the implicit politics of TED. To be sure, individual TED talks range very widely. Some address political issues, and famous politicians have given them. And yet I think the dominant view goes like this:

Lots of important problems could be solved by better design. One person can explain the core of a new design proposal in ten minutes. If the idea is good, it will be persuasive, and so listeners will share it, invest in it, adopt it, or otherwise support it. A lot of what’s wrong with the world today is stupid design and the failure of better design ideas to be heard. Because the Internet lowers the cost of distribution, better ideas will now prevail.

Contrast this to the conception of politics that began with the ancient Athenian assemblies and that is still seen today in legislatures, courtrooms, and meetings convened by community organizers:

People have conflicting values and interests, and they need a place to air their differences so that the community has an opportunity to make binding decisions. Everyone has a right to express his own interests. Adversaries should meet in public so that they answer each other and can be held accountable by the whole community. Politics will be contentious and emotional, but it’s also important to maintain constructive relationships and a common commitment to the process, because we will have to address many more disputes after the one that currently confronts us.

If this were your idea of politics, you would never think to “curate” selected 10-minute talks without Q&A or rebuttals. You’d build a space–physical or virtual–in which people could interact as peers.

Now, there is room for more than one mode of communication in our complex world. I like TED talks and see their value for public debate. Also, they are not necessarily about common or public problems; politics is not even relevant to all of them. You’d sound like a curmudgeon if you challenged TED’s credo: “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world.”

But I have met people who see controversial politics as stupid and wasteful and think that there could be a TED-like solution (an “idea worth spreading”) for almost every problem. I was at a meeting in California some months ago in which every participant except me thought that a better design (broadly defined) could solve any social issue. As an example, one person suggested that Nike had done more that any other organization to fight obesity–by making cool sneakers that encouraged running. This was in Santa Monica, where indeed, people run a lot. But see the US obesity trend (left). Nike hired its first ad agency in 1976 and attained 50% of the US market share in 1980. The correlation with obesity does not look too promising (not to mention those sweatshops).

This was only a stray comment, and no doubt, better examples could be cited. Design does relate to obesity in some ways–for example, better urban planning encourages walking. But to implement a better urban plan, you need more than a good idea. You need power, money, and other forms of support. Some of the groups that have power and money right now are manufacturers of heavily subsidized, high-calorie, low-fiber drinks and snacks. They need to be held accountable by old-fashioned politics.

This post relates to the Obama Administration’s preference for “social innovations” over traditional entitlement programs. To be fair, the Administration wants both, but they are willing to trim entitlements at the margin to fund more social innovation, and that seems consistent with the politics of TED.

the rise of fear since 1980

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(Claremont, CA) An analysis of more than 5 million English-language books scanned by Google reveals a general decline in explicit discussions of emotions during the 20th century, except for a significant spike in fear (and rough synonyms of that word) after 1980. See “The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books” by Alberto Acerbi, Vasileios Lampos, Philip Garnett, R. Alexander Bentley (March 20, 2013).

One could raise several methodological questions–some of which the authors address effectively, and some of which linger for me: Are Google’s scanned books representative of all books? Are books representative of the culture in general? Was the relationship between books and the broader culture constant over the 20th century? And does a methodology that essentially depends on word searches capture the real meaning of books? (For instance, a book could be pervasively fearful without using the word “fear,” or any rough equivalent. It could even be marked by a false bravado.)

But let’s say that the finding is meaningful. It’s an interesting trend because the world did not grow evidently more frightening from 1980-2000. The Cold War ended; 9/11 was far off. Yet, at least in some respects, we became more frightened. For example, even as crime rates began to fall, middle-class American parents stopped letting their kids walk around alone in cities. News coverage changed because of shifts in the media marketplace;  rapes, fires, and murders pretty much took over the local TV.

Those are just anecdotal examples from disparate areas of life. But here’s a general hypothesis: provoking fear is an effective rhetorical technique. Fear draws attention and shuts down critical reasoning. It therefore sells news stories, policy proposals, and  candidates. In competitions for audiences or voters, strategists compete to be more frightening. Thus, as commercial advertising, political campaigning, state propaganda, and issue advocacy became more efficient and better funded in the late 20th century, fear was deployed with increasing effectiveness. The results are evident in our books.

there is a state constitutional right to public deliberation

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(Chicago) “The people have a right, in an orderly and peaceable manner, to assemble to consult upon the common good; give instructions to their representatives, and to request of the legislative body, by the way of addresses, petitions, or remonstrances, redress of the wrongs done them, and of the grievances they suffer.” — Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Art. XIX (1780)

Todd Gitlin, who spoke at Tufts on Wednesday, said that provisions like this one exist in about 30 states. It is the phrase “to consult upon the common good” that interests me (and Gitlin). It is different from a right to speak; in consulting upon the common good, one must also listen to peers in some structured way. These provisions testify to a deep tradition of public deliberation in American ideals and practices. And perhaps they create enforceable rights. When local authorities decided to clear “Occupy” encampments, did anyone ask whether the participants were being denied their rights under state constitutions to “assemble to consult upon the common good”?