No Room for Political Philosophy

I was recently asked about my opinion on various schools of Political Philosophy (vg. classical liberalism, neoliberalism and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism). I refused to engage with any of them in detail, because my position is that there is no room for different schools of “Political Philosophy”. Ethics and Science (mainly Social Science) are enough to completely determine the best public action.

To develop this idea, I am going to divide the field of political science in three layers: i) Social Welfare definition: what is the ethical objective for political choice, ii) Policy Making: how Science (mainly Social Science) and Ethics combine to generate optimal policies, and iii) Institutional Design: which institutional mechanisms consistently generate the best flow of policies.

Although at individual level there is a trade-off between our personal preferences and the general interest, when we talk about “political philosophy”, we have to abstract (in the Rawlsian way) from our particular interests: the legislator is expected to impartially represent the demos. The formal translation of that demand requires building a social utility function that describes the collective preferences for each possible “state of the world”. This function must be individualistic and impartial. Individualism means that collective well-being is the aggregation of individual well-being, and impartiality means equally aggregating the well-being of the equals (of course, “moral weights” that distinguish those who are substantially different are part of the utilitarian framework).

Once the social objectives have been established (what we “want”), we need to know what can be done. We call the descriptive map of reality “Science”. It is Science that allows the legislator to distinguish on which variables he can act (on legislative power as a Nash equilibrium focal point, see “Republic of Beliefs”), and what are the consequences of any complete set of policies. Given the control variables, the social utility function, and the real constraints, the selection of optimal policies can be abstracted as a constrained optimization problem (with its Lagrangian, or more precisely its Karush -Kuhn-Tucker conditions).

If the reader is the advisor of an absolute monarch who has no other objectives than the well-being of the governed, once the optimal policies portfolio has been selected, her work is completed.

If the reader rather thinks that this kind of ruler is impossible (or at least that after Antoninus Pius no other will be ever found), then political philosophy needs a constitutional meta layer over the object level policy layer. Institutional design finds the voting/elite selection mechanisms that achieve the flow of policies closer to be optimal. The construction of this kind of institutional system is the object of the so-called “Mechanism Design”.

In the specific area of the production and distribution of baskets of private consumption goods, the complete process of optimal institutional design is tractable, and the canonical result is that a competitive market with lump-sum income transfers is capable of optimizing well-being for all possible degrees of inequality aversion (the so-called two theorems of welfare economics). In politics, the state spaces are more difficult to define (there are not nice continuity and smoothness properties), and therefore such definitive results are not available (the classical result is the Arrow Impossibility Theorem, that implies that the “best possible” political system cannot be as perfect as market plus redistribution is in Economics).

Let’s summarize now: different sentient beings with preferences on states of the world share a common world and interfere each other’s pursuit of happiness. That leads to conflicts of interest. To provide the algorithmic system that allows for the maximum level of collective welfare is the “political problem”. Rights or property are useful social devices, but there is nothing fundamental about them. They shall be justified (by the philosopher and the economist) before they are used as a justification (by the jurist). Jesus and Rabbi Ishmael and taught us that Sabbath is for man, and that principle invites us to trace all moral obligation to its root, which is the welfare of some conscious beings.

Of course, in the real world there is some legitimate room for disagreement about the interpersonal comparison of utility (although I am delighted to have Raj Chetty’s estimate on the relationship between the marginal utility of consumption and the level of income), and a much wider margin of legitimate discrepancy on the objective causal laws describing the dynamics of human society.

Cause-effect relationships in the social realm (a complex adaptive system in which we, the aspiring policymakers, are also embedded) are very difficult to discover or even validate, and it is inevitable that in the absence of clear cut scientific knowledge, personal assessments and emotional manipulation influence the political sphere. But these discrepancies, sometimes legitimate and often unavoidable, do not deserve to be considered philosophical.

The technocratic and post-political vision has a long tradition. The framers of the United States Constitution had an openly mechanical idea of the State (“checks and balances”, “A Government of Laws, not of Men”). David Ricardo bought his seat in the House of Commons to defend optimal policy beyond party or class allegiances. That same line of liberalism encouraged the campaigns to reject the Corn Laws. However, to my knowledge, among technocratic-individualist movements, Effective Altruism is the most self-aware due to its direct relation with utilitarianism and modern (epistemic conscientious) rationalism.

[Posted on Effective Altruism Forum, Progress Forum and Less Wrong]