{"id":22081,"date":"2019-11-21T11:58:31","date_gmt":"2019-11-21T16:58:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=22081"},"modified":"2019-11-21T11:58:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-21T16:58:33","slug":"judgment-in-a-world-of-power-and-institutions-outline-of-a-view","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=22081","title":{"rendered":"judgment in a world of power and institutions: outline of a view"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
  1. Judgment or practical reason (i.e., deciding what is right to do) means forming beliefs about facts, values, and strategies. It is sometimes worth trying to isolate the factual beliefs in order to test them empirically. But no claims are purely empirical, and the goal of distinguishing facts, values, and strategies is ultimately misplaced. (See right and true are deeply connected<\/a>.)<\/li>
  2. Individuals hold many opinions at once, and often some of our opinions are connected logically, causally, or in other ways. This means that we have structures <\/em>of opinions. The form of our structures matters as well as their content. For instance, a structure can be too scattered or too centralized. These structures are better modeled as networks than as foundations plus superstructures. Only some networks of beliefs have nodes that function like foundations. (See an alternative to Moral Foundations Theory<\/a>.)<\/li>
  3. Individuals develop their opinions in constant interaction with other human beings, living or dead. We start with no explicit views of the social world and borrow most of what we think from other people. Whenever a person influences us, that reflects a link in a social network. And those who influence have their own networks of opinions that are linked by logic, causality, or in other ways. Therefore, developing judgments is a matter of participation in a network of people and their networked ideas. (See what makes conversation go well: a network model<\/a>.)<\/li>
  4. A culture is a name for a cluster of individuals with overlapping networks of ideas. It is a useful simplification for a world in which each individual at each moment has different ideas from the same individual at another time and from all other individuals. Some cultures hold foundational beliefs about some questions (e.g, monotheism is a foundational belief in a monotheistic culture); but in general, it is misleading to define a culture in terms of its foundations. (See everyone unique, all connected<\/a>.)<\/li>
  5. Often, we must judge institutions as opposed to concrete acts. (See Moral Foundations theory and political processes<\/a>). For instance, we may need to assess the United States or marriage rather than an individual statement or action. Institutions also generate <\/em>the material for our judgments, including most of what we take to be facts. (See decoding institutions<\/a>.) Institutions exhibit patterns that are not intended or designed. (See the New Institutionalism<\/a>.) <\/li>
  6. Institutions are not best modeled as networks of individuals, because they have salient features–such as rules, incentives, and boundaries–that are not like nodes and links. (See a template for analyzing an institution<\/a>.)<\/li>
  7. The whole system of networked individuals, networked beliefs, and institutions is dynamic, not static. Individuals develop over their lives; institutions are founded, decay, and change; social networks form and shift; and networks of ideas change. (cf. Dewey\u2019s pragmatism<\/a>.)<\/li>
  8. Power operates at all points in this system: e.g., when one individual influences another, when one person is put in contact with or separated from another person, when an institution is designed, and when its norms change. (See decoding institutions<\/a>.) Power is not intrinsically bad; it just means that A can affect B. But some power is <\/em>bad, and power shapes the materials of judgment. <\/li>
  9. Liberty is a genuine value (see six types of freedom<\/a>), but it should not be understood as freedom from others’ power or a right of epistemically free individuals to act according to their own judgments. Our judgments are formed by the communities we belong to (see the truth in Hayek<\/a>). <\/li>
  10. There are better and worse individuals, ideas, judgments, and institutions, but telling the difference between better and worse is a deeply social and iterative process. (See structured moral pluralism [a proposal]<\/a>.)<\/li><\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Judgment or practical reason (i.e., deciding what is right to do) means forming beliefs about facts, values, and strategies. It is sometimes worth trying to isolate the factual beliefs in order to test them empirically. But no claims are purely empirical, and the goal of distinguishing facts, values, and strategies is ultimately misplaced. (See right […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,5,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moral-network-mapping","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22081"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22081\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22088,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22081\/revisions\/22088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}