Ethical Subjectivism: Part 2

Ethics and Democracy
 

A stated above ["Ethical Subjectivism: Part 1"], the very large number of internal and external interactions among practitioners of ethical systems makes almost every attempt at analysis unfeasible. Nonetheless, coming to some sort of understanding that is widely accepted among practitioners is an urgent priority of ethics. In modern times, and especially in the West, finding a modus vivendi is central to the development and maintenance of democracy. One of my major reasons for presenting an ethical theory is a felt need to justify the arrangements of democratic societies. Democracy is a possible solution to resolving ethical conflict among moral agents, a way of reconciling different and competing judgements.

The critical ethical problem is that of Kant and Rawls: how can anyone know that what is judged is ethically and morally correct? Both of those eminent philosophers give solutions that depend only on the internal state of the moral agent. Immanual Kant supposes, along with most other Enlightenment philosophers, that everyone is equipped with a faculty of practical reason; i.e., either an intuitive knowledge of what is right and what is wrong or a method of determining moral value. Moreover, Kant attributes rationality to each person naturally equipped with the faculty of reason. Thus, healthy, sane moral agents do not make mistakes of reasoning because logic is built-in, and they do not err in their moral judgements because ethics is also built-in. John Rawls does not go quite so far as attributing built-in faculties, but apparently agrees with Kant in this crucial factor: moral agents must have a Good Will. In the Rawlsian world, moral agents are rational (whatever that means) when they are favorably disposed toward others, whether on accouint of self-interest or another motive. Whereas Kant claimed that moral agents will make the right decision using the Categorical Imperative, if they also have a Good Will, Rawls claimed that moral agents will arrive at right decisions in the original position if they have a Good Will. Both of those ethical philosophers depend on all participants having good intentions to bring about goodness or rightness or justice.
 

Rawls come closest to my view of the matter, which is to emphasize the wishes of everyone concerned. Rawls questions whether there is any such thing as rationality, a typically post-modern stance, but, in the end, accepts it. For him and Kant, there has to be some general principle that governs moral judgements, but that is only useful if there is also some sort of reasoning mechanism that finds principled solutions to problems; thus rationality. Rawls deviates from Kant in how the general principle are determined. Kant aserts the Categorical Imperative is both the primary ethical principle and also the rule by which other imperatives are formed and tested. Rawls does not make such a sweeping claim. Rawls invents the fictitious "original position," in which condition the Founders of ethics meet to determine the rules of the game. In that meeting, Rawls assumes people will be forced to have a Good Will and to assume all other attendees are like oneself. What's obviously different from Kant's intimate scenario is that, at the start, Rawlsian ethics is social in nature. Those who meet in the original position are assumed to be real people, not figments of the Kantian imagination.
 

Unlike Kant, I do not accept a priori that there are any universal ethical princples. Unlike Rawls I don't believe people in the original position will necessarily have a high regard for others or decide upon "rational:" rules of behavior. Further, I do not believe there is any built-in faculty of reason or practical reason, nor any built-in knowledge of good and evil. Agreeing with Locke, I think we are born tabula rasa as to knowledge of the world, and, going further than Locke,  good and evil as well. Everything we know, including methods of reasoning and judgement, is learned. Ethical principles might be found by generalization from the various moral maxims commonly in use. We are born with brains that, like computer chips, are capable of intelligent processing as well as carrying out some primtive survival (boot-up) activities (such as sucking teats). My views on the matter are supported by the extreme diversity of human cultures, attitudes and opinions on just about everything. If there were any common faculties of reason or morality, or built-in knowledge or values (ignoring how those might get there), I would expect great uniformity of human social behavior everywhere. But what I have learned about human behavior is exactly the opposite: there are very few common behaviors, and all of them pertain to basic survival (eating, sleeping, copulation, urination, defecation, etc). We have even learned to regulate those basic physiological compulsions, as in toilet training. We don't just urinate whenever our bladders are ready; instead, we hold it until it is socially and personally advantageous to let go. It's the same with all the other physiologically necessary behaviors. In this, we are most unlike bacteria, plants and simple animals, which follow fixed lifestyles and exhibit patterns of behavior closely determined by genetic and physiological mechanisms.

If we cannot rely on reason or rationality, how should we explain moral judgement? I have already indicated that moral judgement is an individual matter. Without any guidelines to internal operations of individuals, if individuals are black-boxes, we are limited to what we observe, what is public.I recall that Sir Francis Bacon rejected St. Thomas Aquinas' Aristotelian methods as counting 'how many angels dance on the head of a pin.' Instead, Sir Francis recommended counting the horse's teeth, if we would know how many it has. In the same fashion, the way to make a transition from the private, possibly unfathomable, world of individual moral judgement to the public sphere is simple and direct: Ask the People! This is the most basic criterion of democracy.

One advantage of this solution is that we need not guess whether others are like oneself, a central assumption of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Moreover, we need not contort ourselves with defining and finding similar circumstances. Nor do we have to assume there is a one time startup procedure - the original position - or a set of universal ethical principles. By asking moral agents for their judgements, and whatever else they can tell us about making judgements, we remove all the guesswork. What people believe becomes a matter of record. We are also at liberty to record their behavior as well as our opinion of it. How a proposed ethical principle or moral maxim may apply is for each moral agent to evaluate; i.e., we use our pattern recognition abilities to determine similar circumstances. We need not know how any of those determinations are made, or get into a lengthy debate about pattern recognition. For ethical purposes, it is enough to know that moral agents make judgements for whatever reasons they have, and they can be asked about it. Their report becomes a useful public record for our own deliberations. The simple method of asking unravels the Gordian knot of reflexive and recursive interactions among moral agents. (Taking this point of view makes theorizing about ethics a reverse engineering project.)

There is, of course, a problem hidden in the foregoing: deception, falsity and lies. We do not know whether our moral agents are telling the truth, because nothing forces them to do so. I must defer consideration of that problem to a later chapter.

For my purposes, the model democratic society is exemplified by the New England Town Meeting (NETM). NETMs are a form of direct, participatory, not representative, democracy. The real town meetings are not perfect, of course; nothing ever is. Still, NETMs suggest several important ethical notions which we must approve, if we are, inversely, to find any ethical justification of direct democracy. Now, in looking at direct democracy, I am not suggesting that the sort of ethical system underlying it is the only possible system. There are, for example, ethical systems which justify Nazism, Facism, Communism and Capitalism. Since many of the methods and values implicit in these systems conflict with each other, there has to be something different about their respective ethical ideas. Capitalists who follow Adam Smith's moral model in Wealth of Nations (Smith touted himself as a moral philosopher) assume that 'greed is good,' because Smith shows that greed will inevitably be turned to social benefit. Socialists generally, and Communists as well, deny Smith's premise and argument, and it is refuted by the actual operation of unfettered Capitalism in Western countries. (Smith's system might work in an idealized case based on the assumptions taught in Economics 101.) But I am not advocating any of those solutions: I am interested in justifying the sort of direct democracy in which I often participated during the 1960s and 1970s.
 

The first fundamental assumption of direct democracy is that electors are black boxes. We cannot look inside anyone, or second guess any judgement. The immediate consequence of that assumption is the legitimacy of "participatory democracy." If each person is unavailable to others except as observed in social interactions, there is no feasible method of representation except exact reporting of instructions. In other words, each person is the only one capable of fully representing oneself because no one else can know another's mind. While limited representation is possible by the method of exact instruction, the black box assumption makes any other form of representation suspect or illegitimate. Representatives, instructed or not, always express their own views or, at best, their interpretation of favored constituents' views. The representative system common in Western democracies amply demonstrates that representatives broadly interpret their constituents' instructions or make up their own. ("Trust me!" they say.) There are many instances of avoiding or ignoring instruction in the U.S. Congress. The voters demanded withdrawal from Iraq in the November, 2006 election, but their elected representatives support other plans. The reason representatives always interpose themselves is a feature of biological black-box individuals: each one has a will to survive, to advance oneself. That individuals are self-serving motivates participation in self-government, but also offers representatives an added opportunity to put oneself forward. Participatory democracy is motivated by a distrust of representation (indirect democracy), and by political ambition.
 

The second fundamental principle of democracy is the Principle of Equality. This is co-dependent with the first assumption, because black-box individuals do not offer any differentiating criteria. That is, initially, we have no reason or experience to suppose that any person is different from any other person. Particularly in respect of social interactions, individuals are initially assumed to be alike. The Principle of Equality only sets initial conditions, because people acquire personalities as soon as they do anything. Once social interactions are underway, we learn by experience what each person is like, what are an individual's capabiltiies and disabiities. Equality is a universal condition at birth, because of John Locke's tabula rasa, but disappears as fast as experience is acquired. Nonetheless, democracy insists on taking the initial condition as a permanent condition when making social decisions. United States' laws banning discrimination are based on this notion of equality, modified by conditions of application. In order to maintain the fiction of equality, certain discriminators are defined as irrelevant in some classes of decision making. In fact, each person is born genetically unique and soon becomes acculturated to the conditions of parentage. Laws against discrimination ask us to see each person stripped of those accoutrements in certain situations, because the prohibited discrimination has been determined to have little or nothing to do with performance. The extension of the Principle of Equality beyond birth is a matter of social experience not demanded by any fact of Nature.
 

The third premise of direct democracy is the competence of each participant to make decisions affecting society at large. The assumption of competence is supported by the Principle of Equality, especially in its modified form, but is not the same thing as equality. Competence must be assumed in order for an effective social consensus to develop. While experience supports the notions of tabula rasa and inscrutable minds, at least at birth, it also suggests most of the electorate is not equipped to decide the questions on offer in the modern world. The fact of divergent experiences  has two aspects: it brings to bear different perspectives while also making some people more expert than others. To affirm the principle of competence, one must show that perspective and skill balance; i.e., what is lost in expertise is gained in generality.

A quintessential test of this principle is found in the case of nuclear power, which involves very few technical experts and a large number of lay people. Both experts and the public are divided on what to do about nuclear power. Most of the experts favor it, while most of the public fears it. That division reflects differences of perspective: inside or outside nuclear industries. The experts are focussed on safe and cost-effective nuclear power generation (which funds their jobs), whereas the public is focussed on the dangers of nuclear technology (such as nuclear proliferation and terrorism). The principle of competence asserts that the correct social decision will arrive as a result of the contention of all the interests, even if  most of the participants are ignorant of the details of the problem. For example, a past public solution to the nuclear power problem was to leave it to the experts. In the last few decades, the public lost confidence in the nuclear experts, fearing overriding factors which the experts minimize, so nuclear policy has been stalled. The change in policy status did not, after all, require a detailed knowledge of nuclear physics and engineering, but of human nature and ambitions. The rebuttal to allegations of incompetence is that there are different kinds of competence, all of which are required to make an informed  social decision.

The fourth premise of direct democracy is the willingness of each participant to co-operate with others. This is probably the most troublesome premise of the lot, and the one that relies most on ethical conceptions. There are several aspects of this assumption.

Co-operation is usually required to implement social decisions. It does not take many people to disrupt collective projects. In modern societies, there are thousands of ways to resist or hamper particular undertakings. The Iraq Civil War is an extreme example of the near-total breakdown of social services and civil order due to the armed hostility of maybe 5-10% of the population. In the West, a single tree sitter has stopped major logging operations. Animal rights guerrillas have slowed or stopped some animal-based research. Anti-abortion terrorists have killed doctors and closed clinics. In societies used to orderly conduct, even small disruptions have major effects as Dr. Martin Luther King proved. Thus, civilization depends on at least the passive toleration of public works.

Co-operation is sought to assure acceptance of collective decisions because democracies are far more vulnerable to resistance than other societies. Democracy not only depends on toleration, but needs the active co-operation of its citizens. It is typically human to become emotionally invested in the projects in which one participates, so those who co-operate with a social decision will defend it. The success of a social decision will be greater with co-operation, which reinforces the social mechanism of decision. In direct democracy, each participant is expected to contribute one's fair share to the outcome, first by voting and then by doing. In a participatory democracy, this reinforcement is extremely important, because participation in the decision should increase participation in the work. Participants believe 'this is a good thing to do, so do it.' Whatever project is decided, such as a barn raising, requires a contribution from each person. Some people will bring food or lumber, others will give their labor, and yet others their money or entertainment. Democratically created projects are a community effort, not the work of a self-interested group within the community.

Each of the foregoing premises of direct democracy rests on ethical principles. The assumption of black-box individuals amounts to an ethic of individualism. Each person has separate, inscrutable thoughts, feelings and motives which others must respect. In San Francisco language, this is being "non-judgemental."  This premise is closely related to the respect shown others by participants in Rawls' original position. It is also consistent with Kant's famous doctrine, 'treat each person as an end, not only as a means.' The ethical concept of the worthiness of each individual is at the root of direct democracy.

The Principle of Equality and the factual uniqueness of each indiviual are closely related to the black box premise. Equality is a reasonable assumption because, sight unseen, we have no way to differentiate one black box individual from another. Uniqueness is also a reasonable assumption because we cannot know the details of an individual's composition in advance of experience. Equality and uniqueness are contrary, not contradictory, concepts, because one could be unique and still equal with respect to particular situations. In other words, equality is delimited by the situations in which it applies, unless one interprets it to mean 'always the same.' Uniqueness is importantly assumed in the Kantian doctrine of individual worth, and is one of the reasons for direct democracy. Direct democracy attempts to reconcile each individual with society by consent, which depends on respect for the individual. A strong assumption of uniqueness (individuality) denies the legitimacy of political representation, and forces us to qualify the application of equality. The conflict is resolved in direct democracy by the interaction and consent of the participants.

The requirement of competence rests on philosophical assumptions about consciousness, voluntary choice and factual reality. Participatory democracy assumes people are able to make decisions without external guidance; i.e., they make voluntary choices. The members of society are supposed to be well informed, meaning they have gone to the trouble of learning the facts. In this context, "facts" are usually considered as in naive realism; they are supposed to be real entities external to the individual. Thus, the same facts would be available to everyone. But, direct democracy works just as well without naive realism; i.e., if the facts are whatever person believes they are. After all, when people make their decisions known, they do so based on the information they have. It is well known the people make decisions everyday based on incomplete or erroneous knowledge. What is important in democracy is that participants can be asked why they made their decisions, and to explain their understanding of the circumstances underlying their reasons. Thus, it is the public accounting of facts and decisions that is important, not the metaphysical reality of them. That is exactly the framework implicit in ethical subjectivism.
 

Co-operation is required to translate individual judgements into social decisions and efforts. The Kantian decision maker is stuck "inside" itself, for the Categorical Imperative is something each person uses whether or not there are any Others. In Kant's scheme, the moral judgement is made on the basis of supposing that everyone is like oneself, so would make the same judgement. John Rawls tries to escape being trapped in oneself, so imagines an original position similar to a Constitutional Convention in which participants go about setting their foundational rules for all future decisions. Rawls' original position fills the room with physical clones of oneself who are willing to respect others because they are like oneself. Rawls and Kant assume the players are possessed of something called "rationality," so they don't make just any old choices. Both of them require us to imagine a peculiar situation in order to make a moral judgement. Direct democracy obviates those conjured scenes, because the actual participants are right there to react to any proposals. In direct democracy, we do not have to guess about the status of others, nor do we require any model of their internal processes. Everything we need to know is right there, right in front of us; take it or leave it. So, direct democracy is the bridge between the One and the Other when those parties co-operate in decision making. If the parties do not co-operate, it is impossible to make any decision at all.

What socialized decision making accomplishes is the maximum satisfaction of each participant in the outcome. Direct democracy, considered as a multi-way negotiation and barter, is an optimal outcome for everyone concerned. This does  not mean the actual outcome maximizes value over all possible outcomes. If possible outcomes are considered nodes in a multi-dimensional outcome space, connecting them defines a surface with peaks and valleys. The best possible outcome is the one which raises the surface highest above a zero-level floor in each dimension. There may be several "best possible" outcomes in which improved height in one dimension is gained by reducing height in one or more other dimensions. There may be stable intermediary outcomes which do not increase height in every dimension, but are roughly equivalent in every direction. Thus, the outcome of direct democracy may not be satisfactory to several participants, but it is not so unsatisfactory as to cause those participants to abandon the social process. What direct democracy does assure is a minimum level of satisfaction for everyone - the least common denominator.
 

The co-operative decision making in direct democracy is not explained by Utilitarianism, even if some participants use the Utilitarian rule, "the greatest good for the greatest number." The reason for that may be understood by considering the outcome surface as a tent held up by many poles. The tent has stable and unstable configfurations. If any of the poles is removed, all the surrounding poles will be pulled downward. Depending on how the remaining poles are positioned, all the tent poles may be destablized and pulled down. What maintains the social structure is the interaction of all its elements, which is non-linear. Thus, if a few participants drop out, the entire society could collapse. At the very least, the configuration of the entire society will be changed by the actions of a few. For that reason, direct democracy operates on a principle of community, the good of all, not on an integration of individual goods. Co-operation is required because it is the interaction (as in the tension between tent poles) that regulates outcomes, not just the position or height of each pole.
 

The principles of competence and co-operation also require a mechanism of comunication. This is not strictly an ethical requirement, as languages and other communications are explained in epistemology. For our purposes, it does not matter so much why mutual understanding happens, as that it happens. Communication is the medium of interaction, and since interaction guides outcomes, communcation is critically important in direct demoracy. Communication connects individuals, and constitutes the major mechanism by which individual judgements are socialized. On this account, much of what we know about ethics and morals can be discovered by studying communications such as language, theater and mime, music and other performances.

A common feature of direct democracy is the rule that decisions are made by those 'present and voting.' If potential voters don't show up or abstain from casting ballots, what they prefer is irrelevant, even if their opinions were taken into account by others. It is not enough to be a passive attendee or bystander in direct democracy: active participation is encouraged and expected. The present and voting rule is a form of self-declaration, which is a key feature of my theories of intelligence and ethics. Those who don't declare themselves are simply invisible.
 

Using direct democracy as a model of ethical interactions, I have described some essential features of my ethical theory. Moral judgements are made by self-conscious individuals who are competent to make choices. Moral agents are self-selected participants who communicate and co-operate with other self-selected participants in making decisions and carrying them out. All moral agents are considered equal with respect to the decisions on offer. What is different about this ethical theory from the Kantian or Rawlsian ones is that all of these features are discovered a posteriori. I do not have to deal with Good Wills, original positions or any number of other complexities that arise when we try to make up an abstract theory in advance of any society. It is already hard enough to tease out the ethical elements of actual, observed behavior.
 

My ethical theory has an advantage over those theories which propose some form of absolutism. If there are indeed absolute ethical values, however sourced, we cannot justify democracy. Even Plato understood this very clearly, when he propagandized in The Republic against "opinion" as the shadows in a cave. People with a better understanding will see things more clearly, and the Philosopher King will have a perfect knowledge. For Plato, democracy is the flickering of reflected reality, not Truth, Good or Beauty. Authoritarians of every stripe have never had any use for democracy. For them, it doesn't matter whether what is good and right are commanded by gods, supermen or the local dictator: in every case the opinions of ordinary people are worthless. Even Naturalistic ethical theories that dispense with gods, spirits and souls, but empower some form of physical necesssity, cannot justify democracy. The worst case for all those ethical theories is explaining away democracy: maybe it is the desire of people to socialize. For them, the workings of democracy must be a sham, because the absolute values underlying everything work their way regardless of people's opinions.
 

In favor of those ethical theories that do not justify democracy,  History shows that democratic socieites are rare and don't last. The prevailing pattern of human social organization involves an alpha male (dictator) who manages to stay in power for about a generation. Dynasties are common, but rarely last more than 500 years - about 25 generations or 10 alpha-male lifetimes. Because sons usually chafe under the father's rule, the nature of a regime changes when the King dies. Thus, even in the absence of democracy, the study of dyanasties is lively because  there are no permanent rules and regulations. Two generations is a long time for most people. Scarcely anyone knows their great-grandparents, and most people only know the bare outlines of their grandparent's lives. Consequently, human societies rely on institutional memory to preserve their traditions. The core of institutional memory is record keeping, whether written or oral, but the records are subject to interpretation. The older the record, the more it is interpreted. Thus, social norms change over time, adjusting to changing circumstances and the vagaries of fashion. Ethical theories which justify authoritarian societies or absolute norms must somehow explain the changing rules. Why was polygamy acceptable in most ancient societies, but not in most modern ones? That democracies may be unstable is not a good objection to the ethical theories justifying them, because other types of societies are also unstable.

An empirical approach to Ethics does not solve all problems; it just gets rid of some old sores by amputating them. Most obviously, at this Historical time, there is probably more than one workable theory of Ethics. For that reason, I consider my proposal an ethical theory, not the ethical theory. In my theory, the relations betwen social agents are modelled by the workings of an idealized direct democracy. Using that model, we can investigate further some problems of modern ethical theories as they apply in actual situations.