The Philosophers' Cocoon

Note: I have a co-authored paper with my friends Jonathan Lang and Bekka Williams on this topic. I don't want to speak for them here, so I'm using "I" rather than "we" for this post. They might well disagree strongly with some of the things I say (or the way I say them). However, most of what I say below is indebted to my conversations with Jonathan and Bekka, and is developed much more extensively in our paper.

Here's an important fact about democratic political life: Some political outcomes are considered to be up for discussion, while others are excluded from consideration. For example, when an election is coming up, candidates for major parties (Democrats and Republicans in the U.S.) get a lot of attention, whereas third-party candidates (e.g., the Libertarians, the Greens, etc.) are often excluded. Similarly, when we're debating an issue of public policy, some possible policies are up for discussion, whereas others are not.

We each get to decide whether to include or exclude any given candidate or policy from consideration. And those decisions are collectively (if not individually) consequential. For example, if sufficiently many people exclude a candidate from consideration, then her fate is sealed. Because these exclusionary decisions are consequential, we should try to make them in a principled and reasoned way. When we exclude a given political outcome from consideration, we should be able to offer reasons why.

What principle can be used to decide whether to exclude someone (or something) from consideration in political discourse? Here's an option:

The Probability Principle: For any given political outcome O, there is some probability threshold X such that O ought to be considered iff Pr(O)>X.

The Probability Principle (or some cousin of it) seems to be in the background of many of our exclusionary decisions. For example, in political discourse surrounding the presidential election of 2012, one often heard sentences like this: "Let's not talk about Jill Stein, even though she'd make a great president, because she almost certainly won't win."

Against the Probability Principle, I offer the following argument.

First, political discourse is a form of reasoning about what to do: in political discourse, we are reasoning about whether to elect this or that candidate, or institute this or that policy, or whatever.

But, second, when we reason about what to do at the individual level–e.g., when an individual agent is deciding about whether to give to charity, or go vegan, or fulfill a promise, or get married, etc.–the probability of one's making various available decisions is not a relevant factor. ("I probably will not fulfill my promise, and therefore I should not even consider whether to do so" seems like a very bad inference.)

Thus, if the Probability Principle is true, then there is a disanalogy between political discourse and deliberation at the individual level.

But I see no way to explain why such a disanalogy would exist. Why would "We probably will not elect Jill Stein, so we should not even consider whether to do so" be a good inference if "I probably will not fulfill my promise, and therefore I should not even consider whether to do so" is a bad inference?

I see no satisfactory explanation of the disanalogy between political discourse and deliberation at the individual level. So, I think we should abandon the Probability Principle and look for another one.

Here's an option:

The Utility Principle: For any given political outcome O, O ought to be considered iff considering O is better, in utilitarian terms, than not considering O.

If you're a utilitarian, it'll be easy to sell you on the Utility Principle. But the Utility Principle does not reflect a typical approach to political discourse. Consider: For the average citizen, political discourse has approximately zero utility-enhancing effects, because the average citizen's political speech has very little effect on political outcomes. Given this, if we were to accept the Utility Principle, I think we should recommend that most individuals refrain from considering any political outcomes at all. So, I think, the mere fact that people engage in political discourse at all suggests that most people reject (implicitly) the Utility Principle.

The demarcation problem is this: How can we find a principle to guide us in our decisions about what to include and what to exclude in political discourse? I see three ways that this problem might ultimately be resolved:

(1) Conservatism about political discourse: We might find a principle that could justify all (or most) of the exclusionary decisions that we conventionally make. For example, we might find a principle that would justify the exclusion of Greens and Libertarians from consideration in political discourse, and would also justify the inclusion of Democrats and Republicans in political discourse. 

(2) Moderate revisionism about political discourse: We might find that there is no principle that could justify all (or even most) of the exclusionary decisions that we conventionally make. But we might find that there is some principle that can justify some exclusionary decisions. This resolution of the problem would force us to consider some outcomes that we might otherwise have been disposed to ignore (and might also force us to ignore some outcomes that we might otherwise have been disposed to consider), but would allow us to continue excluding some outcomes from consideration.

(3) Extreme inclusivism about political discourse: We might find that there is no principle that can justify any exclusionary decisions, and therefore any practically possible political outcome deserves to be considered right alongside every other practically possible political outcome.

My money is on (3). I don't think there is any principle that can justify the exclusion of any practically possible political outcome from consideration in political discourse. In my (tentative) view, any given candidate for political office, for example, ought to be given equal consideration alongside all the others, and ought to be discarded only if she is shown to be a worse candidate than the others.

Extreme inclusivism requires a radical change in the way that we engage in political discourse. If we were to become extreme inclusivists, it would not be enough just to consider a few of the third-party candidates, e.g., the Greens and the Libertarians; we would have to consider (at least implicitly) millions of different candidates. I do not think this approach is feasible–i.e., I do not think that very many people will become extreme inclusivists anytime soon–but I think it is what we ought to do.