June 2020

Reconciled

The Goal of Police Reform Must Be To Restore Trust Between Police and Citizens

One of the only promising political developments as of late is the possibility of policing reform, in some way to change the incentives that the police face in order to reduce police brutality. I will say, however, that I worry that people aren’t thinking far enough in advance of what a desirable new institutional equilibrium looks like. What sort of enduring relationship do we want there to be between police and the citizens they are sworn to protect? The relationship we want is mutual trust. We want to be able to trust police to enforce the law (or at least most laws, besides grossly unjust and absurd ones), and to otherwise abide by ordinary moral norms. And we want police to be able to trust most people so they don’t react in suspicious and harmful ways without cause. That’s absolutely key: we want both groups to be able to trust each other. High trust and trustworthiness is a kind of equilibrium, and everyone is more at ease and can focus more on positive projects and forms of life when trust is high. The worry I have about the current discussion is that the cited goals don’t seem to be to restore trust but to destroy it and make it harder than ever to restore. Violent protests and continued policy brutality are leading to fewer police and police less willing to do their jobs. This means crime will increase because of police inaction, and police brutality may not be reduced as a result. What we want is more cops on the beat, not fewer, since police presence seems to have a clear negative effect on crime. But we also want the behavior of police to change to resemble that more like in Western Europe, with less militarization, fewer violent weapons, and less use of physical force. We want police to police well, and we should want to be able to trust them to police and police well. The first step in any reform, then, is to ensure that the police are given the right incentives to be trustworthy, in particular by acting within the norms of ordinary moral behavior and the public’s moral expectations about permissible police use of force. Ending qualified immunity could be a step in this direction because the penalties for acting outside of the moral norm would increase. The second step is to reform policing so that police are taught to be more trusting, and less suspicion and desiring to dominate others. With a large public reform in this direction, coupled with benefits for police who are more trusting and trustworthy would be a big step in the right direction. But policy that is punitive, that leads the police to feel despised and untrusted, and so with little incentive to reform, is likely to produce worse policy outcomes. Part of trust is believing that trustees are acting for moral reasons, so we do not want reforms merely aimed at beating cops down and appealing solely to their self-interest. We should also aim at policy that encourages police to act on their conscience, rather than penalizing them for doing so. If we think police are only behaving out of fear, then they will misbehave when they think they can get away with it. But incentives for acting morally can generate more stable behavior because the desired behavior comes from within. It turns out that trust in the legal system is closely correlated with social trust, though we don’t know why just yet. My sense is that police are often seen as exemplary community members, and so when trust in police falls, trust in most people can fall, at least among younger people who are still deciding how trusting to be. We very much don’t want this to happen, since social trust has enormous benefits. So another reason to support police reform is the potentially positive effect on social trust. So, when formulating police policy, please keep the end goal in mind: we want to trust police to enforce the law morally. Our goal should not be to punish the police or destroy them, but to reorient their incentives, discourage bad behavior, and encourage good, trustworthy behavior. As trustworthiness rises, trust can rise as well, creating a mutually reinforcing cycle. The present attitudes towards the police, however, seem destined to reduce trust in the police and reduce police presence, which will hurt everyone. We need policing reform, but it must be guided by the goal of building community trust.  

Reconciled

The Simplest Argument Against Integralism – The Mortara Argument

In this post, I offer the simplest compelling argument against Catholic Integralism that I know of. It is based on the Mortara Case, where Pope Pius IX, sovereign of the papal states, removed Edgardo Mortara, a Jewish boy, from his Jewish family. Pius IX did so because he discovered that the boy had been illicitly baptized by the family’s Catholic servant. The child, by law, was owed a Catholic education, and Pius IX saw to that himself, raising Mortara as his own. Some integralists say Pius IX acted permissibly; everyone else disagrees. On this basis, we can formulate a simple argument as follows: The Mortara Argument (Against Integralism) If integralism is true, Pope Pius IX was morally permitted to remove Edgardo Mortara from his parents. But Pius IX was not morally permitted to remove Edgardo Mortara from his parents. Therefore, integralism is false. Defense of premise 1 Pius IX was, by integralist standards (and perhaps by others), the legitimate sovereign of the papal states, and as such, had a duty to prepare his subjects for eternal beatitude. The moral law forbids forced baptism, but once it occurs, the baptized are under the jurisdiction of the Church and are owed the gifts of the Church, which includes a Catholic education. Being Jewish, the Mortara family was likely to deprive their child of this great good, so Pius IX was morally and legally bound to intervene once he learned that Edgardo had been validly baptized by his babysitter, essentially. Further evidence for premise 1 is that I don’t know any integralists who argue that Pius IX acted wrongly. And you would think that if there were at least some way to show that integralism does not have this implication, that we’d have seen the argument by now. I have read a ton of integralist publications and I just haven’t seen it (but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong). So it seems to me integralists accept premise 1, and that’s further reason to think 1 is true. Defense of Premise 2 Everyone but integralists accept it, including all non-integralist Catholics I know of. I assume this includes at least the last five popes, and probably all living cardinals, and maybe all living bishops in the Catholic Church. That is, the wise within the Catholic Church agree with premise 2, as does seemingly everyone else outside the Catholic Church. Beyond testimonial evidence, and mere moral intuitions, what’s the reason that removing Mortara was wrong? Well, the goods of family life together are very great, and the Mortara family was gravely damaged and its members gravely psychologically harmed. On top of that, it seems unjust to take children from their parents because parents have a natural right to raise their children in accord with their faith, within some reasonable limits. Further, Pius IX’s reasoning does not satisfy the Golden Rule. It would not be acceptable for a Jewish state to treat a Catholic family as Pius IX treated the Mortaras. He did not treat the Mortaras as he would be treated. But even if you can’t expressly state the explanation of the wrongness of the act, the deep set nature of the intuition that Pius IX acted wrongly is itself evidence that the act was wrong. We all have a faculty of moral intuition that either perceives the moral truth or is a summary of our reasoning in that direction, and the deliverance of that faculty is clear. Reject Integralism Before Rejecting Premise 2 I think the intuition grounding premise 2 is so deep set that we are rationally entitled to reject the weakest premise in any argument that Pius IX’s acts were morally permissible. That is, just about any rational person should simply reject the weakest premises in the best arguments for integralism (the basis for showing Pius IX acted permissibly) and take the modus tollens. It seems like any reasonable person would be rationally entitled, if not rationally required, to do so. The only exception is if you think integralism is Catholic dogma, in which case you have to accept that Pius IX acted permissibly or abandon your entire faith. But if I were Catholic and found myself believing integralism is Catholic dogma, I would do everything I rationally could to avoid it. Anyone should be extremely hesitant to accept that Pius IX acted permissibly. So, there’s the argument. It is valid, and the case for the two premises is very strong. This won’t move integralists, I realize. But I do think they have a burden of explaining why we should reject moral commonsense, even the commonsense of Catholic Christians. And Yet… But I still sense a weakness in the argument, related to my first integralism post, which is that these kinds of modus tollens arguments only go so far. That integralism must embrace removing Mortara raises a red flag, but it doesn’t tell us what the problem with the view is. We know integralism has an untoward implication, but we don’t know if the basis for the implication is sufficiently weak that we can reject it, whatever it turns out to be. So the Mortara argument is really less of a proof against integralism and more of a reason to draw out the rationales for integralism and assess them. It should lead us to ask the question, “What went wrong that we ended up at this point?”

Reconciled

Tribal Reasoning and Public Reasoning – Reply to Brennan and My Take on Achen and Bartels

Now that Bleeding Heart Libertarians has closed up shop, the BHL diaspora has begun. Jason Brennan, Chris Frieman, and Jess Flanigan – all friends – have started up a new blog with a different approach – 200-proof liberals. I recommend subscribing to it, though it is meant to have a very different rhetorical style than the BHL project. J has posted a summary of a piece he has written criticizing public reason views for failing to grapple with what we know about political psychology, especially that people engage in post-hoc tribal reasoning in politics. But public reason liberalism, the dominant approach to legitimacy in political philosophy, supposes that people reason independently of their tribe, at least to some extent, such that clear rational commitments can be identified, and justifications for laws and policies can then be crafted in terms of those fairly stable reasons. So public reason liberalism is wrong because it depends on people having more stable rational commitments than they actually do. Obviously I disagree with this argument, which Brennan has constructed by drawing on the new Achen and Bartels book in particular. Fortunately, I think the argument is good enough that I devote some time to it in my forthcoming book, Trust in a Polarized Age. Here I’m going to reproduce much of what I say there. But before I do, let me just say this. I think Americans these days tend to be more impressed by the irrationality of political behavior than Europeans. Many Europeans countries aren’t especially polarized, and some of these countries are very trusting, like the Nordic countries, and so I don’t think the trends J is pointing to are universal features of democratic polities. People are politically tribal to varying degrees, and the US is in a particularly but peculiarly bad place right now relative to some other democracies. So if we take an international perspective, I think the idea that politics is necessarily war looks less plausible even from 30,000 feet. OK, with that, here’s what I have to say about the main line of argument. I summarize the Achen-Bartels view J appeals to in section I. So if you know the view, skip to section II. I. Achen and Bartels’s Challenge. The thesis of Achen and Bartels’s Democracy for Realists is that elections don’t produce responsive government. Instead, “voters, even the most informed voters, typically make choices not on the basis of policy preferences or ideology, but on the basis of who they are—their social identities.” The worry is that “if voting behavior primarily reflects and reinforces voters’ social loyalties, it is a mistake to suppose that elections result in popular control of public policy.” Instead, election outcomes are simply “erratic reflections of the current balance of partisan loyalties in a given political system.” I have already addressed the possibility of using small-scale deliberative bodies to reveal the preferences and reasons of citizens in chapter 7, but Achen and Bartels argue that empirical studies of these small political bodies “seem to be less relevant for understanding democratic politics on a national scale.” For the purposes of this section, I will assume that microcosmic deliberation cannot serve as a substitute for national elections. Part of Achen and Bartels’s argument is that citizens lack enough information and motivation to engage in retrospective voting, voting based on the past performance of political parties and candidates. In general, Achen and Bartels claim to cast “considerable doubt on the view that citizens can reliably form and act upon sensible retrospective judgments at election time.” Retrospective voting is complicated by three factors: low political knowledge, mistaken assessments of one’s own well-being, and a limited time horizon for economic accountability where citizens only attend to their economic condition in proximity to a national election. Achen and Bartels embrace a group theory of politics. This means that “the primary sources of partisan loyalties and voting behavior … are social identities, group attachments, and myopic retrospections, not policy preferences or ideological principles.” This is so in part because extra information doesn’t make citizens more accurate; instead, “party identification colors the perceptions of the most politically informed citizens far more than the relatively less informed citizens.” Citizens are not generally responsive to information about political parties, candidates, and the like, but rather filter the information to empower their group and disempower out-groups. Achen and Bartels think their research has profound implications for democratic theory. It leaves democratic theory “in a shambles” because all “the conventional defenses of democratic government are at odds with demonstrable, centrally important facts of life,” specifically human limitations in information and motivation. II. Preliminary Difficulties I think Achen and Bartels overstate their case. One reply is that voting based on group membership can be an informational shortcut insofar as one’s group allegiance leads one to support the candidates one’s reasons would lead one to support. For instance, if black Americans vote based on how leading black legislators tell them to vote, that may indeed be a reasonable heuristic that helps protect them from serious harms by more powerful social groups. Thus, voting based on group membership, while sometimes problematic, may not be irrational. We can only show that it is irrational if we can show that following the views of the leaders of one’s group leads one to embrace more objectionable policies than one might otherwise accept. Second, Achen and Bartels need to argue that because we determine our policy preferences by group membership, those preferences are unjustified. But what makes our beliefs rational is not how they came about (the causes of the beliefs) but whether the beliefs are justified by good reasons at present (the sustaining justifications of the beliefs). Thus, to show that our political preferences are problematically arbitrary, it is not enough to show that the beliefs are caused by group membership; it has to be shown that the influence of group membership shows that political preferences are irrational. After all, most of our beliefs are heavily affected by all kinds of nonrational

Reconciled

Protesting > Public Health > Jobs and Funerals?

It is now common on the right to condemn those like the health official in this article saying that attending a protest is “really the worst thing they can do from the pandemic standpoint” while simultaneously saying that “protesting racism and injustice is important [my emphasis], and much of the risk of a protest can be reduced by staying 6 feet (1.8 meters) away from people and wearing a mask.” As many have noted, we’ve spent the last two months telling people they have to put up with losing their jobs and even not going to funerals for family members; and the same public health officials who were very strict on these matters have taken a much more lax attitude towards the safety of protesting injustice. DeBlasio has openly threatened Jews for attending funerals, while giving protestors a pass, though to be fair, DeBlasio has been especially egregious. But here is Gov. Whitmer in an orchestrated protest photo-op at a protest, not socially distancing, when she was nearly as draconian in her enforcement of lockdowns. I can’t think of any reasonable conception of justice or rights where this ranking makes sense. It seems to me like the right to be with a family member as they die is stronger than the right to protest. Indeed, this strikes me as blindingly obvious. And yet public health officials don’t seem to see things that way. I don’t know why, so I wrote up this blog post to try and see if I could come up with something that at least sort of makes sense. To begin, the protests cannot be justified on the grounds that they’ll save enough lives from white supremacy to balance out the virus risk. It is not clear we will see big policy changes from these protests that will actually reduce deaths enough to compensate for the increased risk of virus exposure. Instead, the argument needs to point to some other good that the protests provide. So I’ll set this point aside. Here’s the best I can do in terms of explaining the ranking. Most leading public health officials are secular egalitarians. They think there is no God or anything like God, that science tells us more or less how the world is, and that there is a prime, fundamental, transcendent moral value: human equality, and justice understood as preserving equality. Most other values are secondary to preserving egalitarian relations between persons. On this view, protesting racism and injustice is a way of realizing the value of equality, and so participates in the sublime, the highest good. The pursuit of the highest good can justify the imposition of health risks on others. Operating your business isn’t sublime on this view. Indeed, Mill, Keynes, and Rawls all denigrated commercial activity as central to a worthwhile life, so viewing running a business as fundamental to a person’s conception of the good is in some respects uncommon on the left (though seeing being a laborer as fundamental is quite common). So keeping your small business going gets trumped by public health, but protesting inequality is holy and so trumps just about everything else, at least at some margin of health risk. Somehow realizing equality must also be more important than being near loved ones when they die. Perhaps on the secular egalitarian worldview, maybe death is just the end of life and not something to treat as an especially sacred event? Maybe it is nice to be able to be with someone as they did, but perhaps not transcendent or sublime? To me, this is a highly idiosyncratic and obviously mistaken ranking of values. I also don’t think it is the view held by the sincere secular egalitarians I know. But it seems to be the revealed preference ranking of many on the high-status left, including public health officials. I gather from friends that protest organizers on the ground are doing their best to implement public health guidelines, and I believe them. But the leaders seem to be failing us. This is really the best I can do to make these seemingly inconsistent actions philosophically coherent. But you have to attribute really strange value rankings to public health officials and politicians who discouraged funeral attendance but who are actually attending the marches. I have good friends who view the world through a darker lens. They’ll say that what egalitarian elites really value is looking good and virtuous in front of others, and protesting gives them an irresistible opportunity to do so. These aren’t people with weird value scales, they’re bad or morally mediocre people who care more about how others see them than any moral principle. I try to avoid seeing the world in this way, but my “weird value scale” explanation honestly feels like a stretch. Perhaps you can do better.

Reconciled

Low Trust America – Cops and Protestors in a Low Trust Equilibrium

What happened in Minneapolis is a trust disaster. Due to the legacy of racism, black Americans don’t trust legal officials. Indeed, only 17% of black Americans say *most people* can be trusted, in contrast with 46% of whites. I would also bet that white cops trust black Americans relatively little, though getting good survey data on this would be next to impossible. From studying trust, my sense is that police distrust leads some police officers to use excessive force, either out of fear or disdain for untrusted blacks. Excessive force arguably leads black Americans to resent police action more, and trust the police even less. Accordingly, mutual distrust is a social equilibrium in inner cities, and this tense environment creates the powder-keg social contexts we’ve seen all over the country. That is what it’s like living in a low trust society – conflict can erupt at any time. Now for some speculation. My guess is that low trust equilibrium was disrupted in the past because black Americans had more high status leaders who believed in non-violence, or at least who believed in non-violence more strongly than most people. The willingness of black protestors to avoid violence even in situations when it would be justified was a way of signaling honesty, integrity, and conviction. That made them harder to dismiss and ignore, and so harder to distrust. That’s not to say they weren’t mistrusted! But it was one way to extricate a community from a low trust equilibrium. This is totally unfair to oppressed groups, but given how I think about building trust, it seems to me a more effective strategy than more violent protesting. You build trust by playing cooperate when others expect you to defect; and if you are prepared to be non-violence in more cases than people expect, and at great cost to yourself, you can help extricate your community from a low trust equilibrium. But I worry we have lost the moral basis for deeply committed non-violence. Unlike fifty years ago, we don’t have many national leaders who believe in systematic non-violence, or at least who are known for holding that position. Somehow older generations have not passed on a strong belief in non-violence to younger people. I don’t know why this is. But my suspicion is that it is hard to motivate radical non-violence outside of religious belief systems where one thinks that evil people will ultimately get what they deserve, either through divine or karmic punishment. You can get radical non-violence more easily from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism than you can from secular doctrines because those who suffer from being non-violent can psychologically compensate themselves. For they believe that punishment and vengeance are the job or someone or something else. People will get what they deserve, but not from me! Last year I wrote a reference piece on Christian anarchism, which led me to read a lot of Christian arguments for pacifism. They were better than I thought, so I’ve been moving in a pacifist direction. But if it weren’t for Jesus’ teachings and behavior, I’m not sure I’d be very convinced that radical non-violence was the way to go. It helps me to know that, in the end, justice will be done. Of course, other reforms can help restore trust, especially giving police incentive to behave in a more trustworthy fashion. But a strong religion-level commitment to non-violence may help too.

KEVIN VALLIER

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