Transcript
A (0:02)
Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
B (0:16)
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Brian here. This event tonight is part of the Public Lectures program at the London School of Economics and it is also hosted and organised by the Hayec program here at lse. The objective, the Hayek Program, as the name suggests, to explore and advance the intellectual contributions of political economist and philosopher F. A. Hayek. You may Google it for more information or approach me after the event for more information. Our speaker for tonight is Professor Christopher Fryman, who has traveled all the way from the United States to be with us. The contents of his talk is based on his book Unequivocal justice, published by Routledge, which I'm sure you can assess online. Christopher Fryman is a professor in the Department of General Business in the John Chambers College of Business and Economics at West Virginia University. Previously, Chris was an Associate professor of philosophy, William and Mary, where he received an Alumni Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching and The class of 1963 termed distinguished associate professor of Philosophy. He's the author of three books, most recently Libertarianism, the Basics, which Jessica Flanagan, and over 50 articles and chapters. Chris's writings have been featured in a variety of popular outlets including Washington Post, Reason Aon and Insight Higher Education. Joining us tonight is the chairperson and moderator, Professor Paul Kelly. He's a Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and a former Pro Director of LSE. He's the author and editor of 16 books and edited collections and published numerous scholarly articles. His interests range across political theory and philosophy in the history of thought. Do note that this event is being live streamed and will be photographed. Our speaker will speak for approximately 50 minutes followed by a Q and A that will last until 8pm sharp. The question answer session will respond to both questions from the online audience watching and also those with us in person. So now, without further ado, let's put our hands to welcome our speaker, Professor Chris Fryman.
C (2:28)
Thank you. This is an incredible turnout for a talk on John Rawls. What is this, a Tuesday night? It might be the largest crowd I've ever spoken to that was not required to listen to me. So, so, so thank you for coming out. I really do appreciate it. All right, so I am a political philosopher by trade, but I want to start by talking about economics rather than philosophy. Public choice theorists and what you might call proto public choice theorists argue that a lot of traditional economics make very romantic assumptions about both the motivation and the ability of state actors to do good. Here we have Frank Knight. He was an economist at the University of Chicago in the early part of the 20th century. He argued that socialist objections to capitalism rested on an unrealistic picture of the state in which the state both knew how to do good and was motivated to do it. So here's Knight. Socialists believe that the state, conceived in the abstract as a benevolent and all powerful agency, essentially as God, rather than realistically as politicians, could order economic affairs rightly without generating new evils or incurring serious social costs. So one obvious flaw in the socialist analysis of capitalism, at least according to Knight, is that the state is neither benevolent nor all powerful. It's run by politicians rather than angels. Here's Knight again. There are very cogent reasons for believing that with men at all as they are, and with governments as they will be if staffed by such men, neither socialism nor anarchism in any approximation to the ideal pattern is a practical possibility. This is James Buchanan. He was a student of Knights. He was also the winner of the Nobel Prize. He had a similar sort of objection to socialism. Economists quote proper policy advice as if they were talking to a benevolent despot who stood at their beck and call. There's one problem with this analysis. Benevolent despots do not exist. Governmental policy emerges from a highly complex and institutional structure peopled by ordinary men and women, very little different from the rest of us. Once economists start working with the conception of the state that's run by politicians who are no smarter or more altruistic than the rest of us, we might become less optimistic about the ability of the state to do all of the good things that we might want it to do. Now, at the same time economists were working with the benevolent despot model of the state, political philosophers were doing more or less the same thing. One difference, though, is that philosophers were quite explicit that this is what they were doing. They were quite explicit that they were using an idealized conception of the state in their theories. Probably the most famous example of this is John Rawls. Here's John Rawls, most influential political philosopher of the 20th century. Rawls said he was theorizing about what the state should look like in, quote, ideal theory. What is ideal theory? He gives us different specifications in different contexts. So, for example, ideal theory is the study of the state in conditions where everyone, quote, fully complies with, with justice. It's the description of how the state works when it is working well, that is, in accordance with its public aims and principles of design. It's a theory of, quote, what a perfectly just society would be like. These all basically boil down to the idea that we should be theorizing about a perfectly just state for a perfectly just society. And it's not just academics who think about politics in this way. So you'll often hear people say things like, you know, ideally, politicians would care about the good of all their constituents instead of selling out to their wealthy supporters. But then they'll proceed to offer policy proposals on the optimistic assumption whether it turns out to be true or not. So in Rawls defense, he knew that his ideal theory was not realistic. In fact, Rawls knew Buchanan quite well. They corresponded with one another. But Rawls thought the infeasibility objection that people like Buchanan and Knight were making against socialism was not really a problem for his political philosophy, even though it might be a problem for economists. So economics is at least partly trying to describe how the world is, whereas political philosophy is trying to advise us on how the world ought to be. So if you're trying to describe the world as it is, then you probably want to make your theory as realistic as possible. If you're trying to describe the world as it should be, then maybe you should be less constrained by feasibility concerns. So here's a passage from Rawls. Much conservative thought is focused on criticizing the ineffectiveness of the welfare state and its tendencies toward waste and corruption. But here we ask, what kind of regime and basic structure would be right and just could it be effectively and workably maintained? So Rawls is doing normative theory, whereas Buchanan is doing something descriptive. Rawls is asking, what goal should we strive for? What would a state look like not in the actual world, but in an ideal world. And generally speaking, it seems okay to abstract away from real world imperfections when we're doing normative theory. So suppose I said criminal justice system should never convict an innocent person. It's unrealistic to think that this would ever happen, that we would ever have a perfect criminal justice system. Nevertheless, it seems true, like, the criminal justice system really should never convict an innocent person. And this is the ideal we would want it to strive for. And this is kind of similar to the Rawlsian ideal theory view. Second, it's not as though the idealizing assumptions that Rawls makes in his theory are completely unrealistic. So we might say that they are humanly possible in the way that flapping your arms and flying to West Virginia is not humanly possible. So we could do it. So it is sort of within human nature to be able to play fair all the time, to not cheat, to be more altruistic than we currently are, and so forth. So maybe we won't do it, but that's very different from saying that we can't do it in the way that we can't flap our arms and fly to West Virginia. Similarly, to say the criminal justice system should never convict an innocent person again, probably would not happen, will never happen, but it's humanly possible that could happen. It's an ideal. So one upshot of doing ideal theory when we're thinking about a perfectly just state for a perfectly just society is that it rules out public choice, worries about government failure by definition. So by definition we are doing ideal theory where there's no free riding on redistribution, there's no rent seeking, there's no regulatory capture, there's no corruption, and so on. The state always acts justly. So Buchanan type worries about the inefficiency of the state and failures of the state just don't have any force against Rawls theory because he rules them out by definition. So again, the question is, what should the state look like in a world in which everyone is acting justly. Now, at this point, maybe you're asking yourself, well, why does this issue matter? So who cares whether we're doing ideal theory or not? Well, think about it this way. If we theorize for conditions where people are perfectly just and states always work well, it's natural to think that we would want a very active and powerful state that has a lot of power to do good. If, like many classical liberals and libertarians, we're theorizing for non ideal conditions where people are not fully just and governments frequently fail, we might want a subdued state that won't do too much damage when things go wrong. So here's an analogy. Suppose you own a delivery company. You just have one delivery, you can't fire her for whatever reason and you just know she is going to show up for work drunk. You can't stop her. So the question is this, do you want to have her do her deliveries on this or do you want her to do her deliveries with this? If the driver is just going to show up drunk no matter what you do, it seems like you should give her the scooter because she can do less damage. Now granted, if you know she was going to be an expert driver and always be sober, maybe you want the big truck that can carry lots of stuff. However, if things go wrong with the driver, it's going to be very, very bad. If this crashes and it will Be less bad if the scooter crashes. So what kind of tool you want to give her, what kind of vehicle you want to give her sort of depends on what you think she's going to do with it. And so this is analogous to the point that many classical liberals and libertarians make about the state. If you think that political power is likely to be misused for selfish purposes, short sighted purposes, and so on, then you have a good reason to reduce that power. So minimize the power to do bad rather than maximize the power to do good. Here's a famous line from Hayek about Adam Smith. I'm actually not sure this is like an accurate account of what Smith was doing, but I like the line anyway. Hayek says Adam Smith's concern was not so much with what man might occasionally achieve when he was at his best, but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst. So I think that the ideal, non ideal distinction is a kind of fault line between egalitarian liberals like Rawls and sort of libertarian and classical liberals like Buchanan, Buchanan, Frank Knight, and so on. And other people have made similar sort of observations. So people like Thomas Sowell, Steve Pinker, John Tomasi have made similar observations about this being sort of a dividing line between egalitarian liberals and classical liberals. But if Rawls is unfazed by the realism objection of someone like Buchanan for the reasons I've already mentioned, do we have any reason to reject ideal theory and instead do a non ideal theory that allows for government failure? And I'll argue that there is. So the main problem with ideal theories of the state like Rawls is not that they are unrealistic, although they are. The main problem is that they're incoherent, by which I mean they fail to consistently apply their own internal assumptions. And other people have made similar observations, including Will Wilkinson, G. A. Cohen, Jason Brennan and Jacob Levy. And I want to systematically make that argument tonight. So I start with the observation that a society in which everyone does exactly what justice demands of them does not need a state. So I'll argue for this claim in more depth. I'll go through particular cases, but for now just consider that a perfectly just society would have no crime, crime, no cheating, an abundance of altruism, and so on. As GA Cohen puts it, if the right principles are, as Marx thought, the ones that are right for real everyday material life, and if they are practiced in everyday life, then the state can wither away. It's only when people are violent, exploitative, shortsighted and selfish that we need a state. But now we have to open up the possibility the state itself will be violent, exploitative, shortsighted and selfish. We lose the right to assume that the state is just. Another way of putting the point is that ideal theory faces A catch 22 is the COVID of catch 22. Do you read that in high school here? Is that like a thing that's commonly assigned? No, I had to read it in high school. I wasn't impressed. I was like, I thought it was overrated. That's neither here nor there. But a catch 22 is a situation where the solution to a problem is undermined by the very conditions that generate the problem in the first place. Here's a classic example, or at least here's an example that Google fed me when I asked for one. To get a job in show business, you need an agent. But to get an agent, you need a job in show business, maybe. So it goes like this here you spell it out a little more carefully. If you have a job, you can get an agent, but you don't need one because you got a job. If you don't have a job, you need an agent, but you can't get one. That's the catch point too. A similar sort of paradox applies to ideal theories of the state, or so I will argue. So if society is fully just, it can get a just state, but it doesn't need one. If society isn't fully just, it needs a just state, but it can't get one. So this catch 22 gives rise to a dilemma for ideal theorists like Rawls. We either can have an ideal theory of a stateless utopia, it's like the picture of the earth with the stick figures holding hands and singing Kumbaya.