Gerald Gaus: “Self-Organizing Moral Systems”. Précis by Jeppe Von Platz

and I welcome you to the discussion of Gerald (Jerry) Gaus‘s recent “Self-Organizing Moral Systems: Beyond Social Contract Theory” (also available here). To kick off the discussion, we have a précis from Jeppe von Platz and reply from Gaus. Please join us in the discussion!

Comment on Gaus’ “Self-organizing moral systems: Beyond social contract theory”

Jeppe von Platz

In The Order of Public Reason, Gaus introduced a “Kantian Coordination Game” (Gaus 2011, 393-409). In this game, the players are members of the public, the choice options are the rules of the morality that regulate their social life, and the outcomes are the possible combinations of choices listed as utilities. Since the players care both about living by their most preferred rule, and also that they live together with others in accordance with shared rules; they prefer coordinate to non-coordinate outcomes. To illustrate, think of a so-called Battle of the Sexes, where the choice options are rules (cf. Gaus 2011, 395; 2016, 224; 2018, 123, 126):

 

			Column
			R1	R2
Row	R1		2, 1	0, 0
	R2		0, 0	1, 2

Things get more interesting when we think of iterated, multiplayer Kantian Coordination Games, where many players keep playing until equilibrium. In The Order of Public Reason, Gaus shows that some such games tend to an equilibrium where all players coordinate on one of the two rules. This finding establishes the possibility that members of the public can converge on endorsing moral rules even if they disagree about what the moral rules should be, as long as they care enough about living together in accordance with shared moral rules (Gaus 2011, 400-3, 409-10). If such rules are from the optimal eligible set (cf. Gaus 2011, 321-3; 2016, 214-5), then every member of a public can freely endorse the social morality that public has converged on. In these possible scenarios, the members of the public live together in accordance with a social morality that satisfies the public justification requirement (Gaus 2011, 27, 46, 263-4, 400-3; 2016, 224-6; see also Gaus 1996), in spite of their deep, intractable disagreement about what the rules of social morality should be:

“[W]e can achieve a free moral order while disagreeing on the ideal moral order. […] From the perspective of impartial reason – the moral point of view – no rule in the optimal eligible set is better than any other, yet social processes characterized by the increasing returns of a shared morality can lead us to converge on one rule, which then becomes the uniquely publicly justified rule.” (Gaus 2011, 446)

In “Self-organizing moral systems: Beyond social contract theory”, Gaus returns to and elaborates on Kantian Coordination Games (though he does not use the name). He models a series of such games and argues that the results establish the value of a specific form of diversity and the misguidedness of standard political philosophy.

In the models, N players choose from two rules {R₁, R₂} to live by. They have a relative preference between these rules scored on a scale from 1-10, so that each player assigns each rule a “justice-score” of 1-10. Again, the players care for living with others in accordance with shared rules (i.e., they care for reconciliation itself). This care then serves as a weighting function (w_n where 0 < w_n < 1) on their justice-score for R_i, for n players choosing R_i. Some additional notation:

Justice-score for player A of R_i: u_A(R_i)

Weighting function for player A when n other players choosing R_i: w_A(n)(R_i)

Utility for player A of option R_i with n players choosing R_i: U_A(R_i) = u_A(R_i)*w_A(n)(R_i)

Player A prefers R_i to R_j if U_A(R_i)>U_A(R_j),

and is indifferent between R_i and R_j IFF U_A(R_i) = U_A(R_j)

Assuming that the weighting function for a player (A) w_A(n) includes both ends of the scale (0 and 1), it follows that for any two rules, {R_i, R_j} and any two justice-scores (u_AR_i, u_AR_j) there will be some n where U_A(R_i) > U_A(R_j). That is, for any player there is some n at which they prefer coordinating with the majority on their less preferred option to coordinating with the minority on their more preferred option.

Using this framework, Gaus runs the games with different distributions of justice-scores, combinations of types of weighting functions, varying numbers of players, and updating functions.

 

Model 1

In the basic simulation, N = 101, justice-scores for R₁ and R₂ are random, and the players are sorted randomly into four weighting types (2018, 128-9, 145-7):

Quasi-Kantian players: zero weight (w_n= 0) for rules chosen by 10% or less of N, full weight (w_n= 1) for rules chosen by 50% or more of N (with roughly linear increase in weight for the range of n between 10% and 50%).

Moderately conditional players: zero weight (w_n= 0) for rules chosen by 30% or less of N, full weight (w_n=1) for rules chosen by 80% or more of N (with roughly linear increase in weight for the range of n between 30% and 80%).

Linear players: x% weight to R_i with x% of N choosing R_i.

Highly conditional players: zero weight (w_n=0) for rules chosen by 33% or less of N, weight (w_n=1) for rules chosen by 90% or more of N (with roughly convex increase in weight for the range of n between 33% and 90%).

In the first round, players choose the option with the highest justice score (and R₁ if the justice scores are tied). In following rounds, the players update their choice in simple inductive fashion, changing their choice IFF they would have received higher utility playing the alternative in the previous round (2018, 131-3). Gaus reports on a game where the initial distribution was that 51 players chose R₂ and 50 players R₁. After five periods of play the population had converged on R₂ (i.e., all players played R₂).

Gaus also reports that he found convergence in games that included only three of the weighting-types, though convergence was delayed by one or two periods with the elimination of quasi-Kantians and highly conditional cooperators.

Model 2

In Model 2, Gaus investigates what happens with a population polarized between R₁ and R₂. To do so, he divides the population of 101 players into hi-lo groups, the first randomly scoring 6-10 for R₁ and 1-4 for R₂ and the other group randomly scoring 6-10 for R₂ and 1-4 for R₁.

With randomized weighting types, a closely split population of 52 players with high scores for R₁ and 49 with high scores for R₂, the population did not converge but found a divided equilibrium. A less evenly split population with 56 players with high R₁ scores and 45 players with high R₂ scores converged on R₁ in four periods of play. Gaus again ran the model with combinations of three weighting types and found that delayed convergence by one to four periods, with the highest delay from leaving out highly conditional players.

Gaus finds it significant that the shortest route to convergence is the game with all four weighting types: “as we add diversity of weighting types, polarization can be more easily overcome than in many more homogenous populations […] Here, we see the possibility that one type of diversity can counteract the centrifugal tendencies of another.” (2018, 135)

Model 3

The first two models took the whole population as the reference network for each of the players, but real persons tend to define their values (and choose which rules to live by) in light of the choices and their normative and empirical expectations about a limited segment of the population (for definitions of social expectations and reference networks, see Bicchieri 2016). So, in the third model Gaus segments the population into different reference networks (2018, 135-8). The population increases to 150 distributed across five groups of different polarity as follows (2018, 136):

Group A, 50 players: random justice-scores.

Group B1, 25 players: 20 players high justice score R₁, the remaining 5 high for R₂

Group B2, 25 players: 20 players high justice score R₁, the remaining 5 high for R₂

Group C1, 25 players: 20 players high justice score R₂, the remaining 5 high for R₁

Group C2, 25 players: 20 players high justice score R₂, the remaining 5 high for R₁

Splitting the otherwise identical B1/B2 and C1/C2 into separate groups allows them to be part of different reference networks, as follows (2018, 136):

Group	Reference network
B2	B1, B2
B1	B1, B2, A
A	A, B1, C1
C1	C1, C2, A
C2	C1, C2

 

The reference groups are the basis for player updates, so that a player updates her choice in light of the distribution of choices in her reference network. Also, Gaus has the players update sequentially, so that in each period of play, group A updates and acts first, then B1, B2, C1, and finally C2 (2018, 137).

This is not an innocent change, and I am not clear why Gaus made it. Gaus writes that this change was made “because we have different groups that employ different updating calculations” (2018, 127), but that feature of the game by itself does not seem to warrant the change (players could update as a function of the choices in previous rounds as in the other models). And the change might be nocent (and Gaus agrees [2018, 137]), since sequential move coordination games have few of the interesting properties of simultaneous move coordination games. As the Battle of the Sexes illustrates, a sequential move coordination game may have little interest except to illustrate first mover advantage. The initial distribution of justice-scores and weighting types in A thus disproportionately influences the game. This would be less of an issue if Gaus ran a high number of simulations and reported the result as a probability distribution, but weakens the general implications of a single run of the game.

In any case, with this updating rule, distribution of types, and reference networks, the model obtained convergence on R₁ in ten periods, with the C2 group converging last.

Gaus reports on a few variations of this simulation and notes two more results. First, in simulations with homogenous populations of linear agents or quasi-Kantians, none of the five subgroups (A, B1, B2, C1, C2) achieved sub-group convergence. Second, in another simulation all 20 of the high justice-score for R₂ from C2 were joined by four from C1 and these together formed an “R₂ network” (2018, 138), so this model ended in an equilibrium with a split population of 126 choosing R₁ and 24 choosing R₂. The result was caused by quasi-Kantians in C1 being immune to the pull from switches in the random group (A), which kept those favoring R₂ in C2 from switching. These two results are interesting, Gaus ventures, since they both suggest that weighting diversity is an advantage.

 

Minor worries

The results of the models are, of course, functions of the numbers that factor into player utilities, and it would have been good to see a justification for the choices of numbers.

First, why do all the weighting types include both minimal (0) and full weight (1) at some n? If the models included reluctant cooperators (i.e. types that never give full weight to a rule they disagree with or zero weight to a rule they prefer), then convergence would be less likely.

Next, if the justice-utility scale started at 0, then convergence would not be forthcoming for those that value either R₁ or R₂ at 0. Gaus might reply that the rules are all from the “socially eligible set” (Gaus 2011, 322), which means that all players rank any rule higher than no rule or “blameless liberty” (e.g. Gaus 1990, 281-3; 2011, 316-7, 322, 341; 2016, 187-90, 211-4). That reply introduces the assumption that the argument is limited to rules from the socially eligible set.

Finally, it is a bit odd that Gaus’ models treat justice-scores and weights as independent variables; surely, we can expect correlation between the degree to which a person believes a rule is preferable and the degree to which they are willing to discount it when others don’t act on it?

Having flagged these minor worries, I’ll turn to my one complaint.

 

My one complaint (in two parts)

My one complaint is that Gaus frames his argument as being about the value of diversity and the misguidedness of traditional moral philosophy, especially Rawlsian contractualism. This framing is vintage Gaus, but odd; for these claims are weakly supported by his arguments, and the framing hides what I think is the wild and exciting idea illustrated in the essay.

 

Part One: A wild and exciting idea!

The idea starts with the Humean view that morality answers our need for rules by which we can live together, and by which we can make, navigate, negotiate, judge, and settle claims on each other. We disagree about what these rules should be, but the need for such rules is indisputable.

There are many candidate rules. We can sort these into three sets: all rules, the socially eligible set, and the optimal eligible set. The socially eligible set is a subset of the total set of rules, and the optimal set is a subset of the socially eligible set.

But which of the eligible rules should we rely on for justification of our actions or to negotiate conflicting claims? Here Gaus makes an original suggestion: any and all of the eligible rules are valid sources of moral justification and claims, if the members of society endorse them as such. Moreover, the members of society might come to endorse a set of rules simply because they care enough for living together in accordance with shared rules. In other words, it is possible that all members endorse a rule R_i, because for any person, and any rule R_x other than R_i: U(R_i) > U(R_x), even if R_i is not the most preferred rule of any member of society, for U(R_i) is a function both of the justice-utility and the weighting function, which, in turn is variable with the number of persons that act on R_i.

Morality is thus indeterminate; the members of society could converge on any of the rules of the eligible set, and if they do that rule is valid for that society. Startlingly, there can be multiple and contradictory valid moralities: a society could converge on any of the members of the eligible set, it might change over time from one convergence point to a contradictory one, and different societies might be governed by different moralities, each of which would be valid for them.

Gaus can thus apply the idea of (impure) procedural justice to morality itself! The morality we should live by is the one that we have converged upon, if we have converged on a morality that is in the eligible set (this condition is the impurity). Two worries here are that we might not converge on any set of rules or that we might converge on a non-eligible morality. So, moral philosophy should seek the conditions of convergence and the limits of eligibility.

The main parts of this idea were developed in The Order of Public Reason, but the models in “Self-organizing systems” illustrate and add depth to it. “Self-organizing systems” provides a deeper sense of the complexity and indeterminacy of social morality. This complexity and indeterminacy are illustrated by the multiple equilibria that might obtain from playing any of even the simple games modelled in “Self-organizing systems”; not so much by the results that Gaus reports, but by the fact that the equilibria these games result in can vary with minute variations in the input. The equilibria reached in such complex games are functions of positive feedbacks, cascades, band-wagoning, self-reinforcing mechanisms, path-dependency, and like mechanisms (cf. Arthur, 1994). Will a society converge on some rule (R₁ or R₂ or…) or reach a divided equilibrium? It depends on a number of factors – justice-scores, weighting-functions, the distribution of justice-scores and weighting functions at t₀, updating functions, reference networks, and so on – where even minute variations in the factors can lead to different equilibria, convergent or divided.

Morality is like that! A valid moral code is partially a random affair – the result of an ongoing (complex, reiterated, and continually disturbed) game. And yet, positive morality is the valid source of moral claims, if and because the members of society have converged on it (i.e., if they have converged on a set of eligible rules).

Gaus could have done more to illustrate the complexity of social morality. In particular, and I say this as a friendly suggestion, Gaus leaves it unclear how many simulations he ran with each model and the results he reports are from one or a few simulations where the players converged or failed to converge in some run of the model. These specific results are interesting and serve to prove possibilities, but it would, I think, be more interesting and illustrative to reveal more of the general structure and solutions of these games. The games modeled by Gaus are interesting in part because they have multiple equilibria; for each of the games, the general outcome (the solution) would be a probability distribution over the set of possible equilibria that could be computed directly or approximated by running enough simulations and plotting the outcomes. The illustrative power of these models would’ve been strengthened by revealing the general results.

 

Part Two: Inferential shortcomings

Gaus suggests two conclusions (139-41):

I. Diversity (of weighting types) is good, since it increases the likelihood of reconciliation.

II. Standard political philosophy is mistaken. This mistake is compounded in the Rawlsian contractualist search for consensus.

Ad. I.  Yay, diversity!?

Gaus argues that it is desirable to have a diversity of types of weighting functions in a population. The argument is that convergence is more likely (and happens faster) in games with all four weighting types than in games that leave out one of them, which also means that diversity of weighting types can help overcome polarity in the population.

The result that more diversity of weighting types sometimes aids convergence is clear, but what can we infer from that about the value of diversity as such?

Alas, not much. The argument establishes the desirability of additional weighting types of particular sorts in some situations, but sometimes convergence would come easier with less weighting type diversity. To be simple about it, the condition most hospitable to convergence is if all members are of a single weighting type that shifts weight from 0 to 1 as soon as more than 50% of the population favors one of two rules (for then any majority in round one secures full convergence in round two). So, Gaus needs to say more to establish that weighting type diversity is a good thing.

Also, Gaus’ argument seems to go against the value of perspective diversity (on perspectives, see Gaus 2016 and Muldoon 2016). In “Self-organizing systems”, perspective diversity is treated as a problem, since it makes convergence harder to obtain. That’s why Gaus emphasizes the “possibility that one type of diversity [weighting] can counteract the centrifugal tendencies of another [perspective].” (2018, 135) Here I see a tension in Gaus’ position. On one hand, perspective diversity is attractive in its own right and also epistemically, since it allows us to better search for moral ideals (Gaus 2016, chapter 3; 2018b). Yet, on the other hand, perspective diversity is undesirable, since it makes it harder for us to live together in accordance with shared rules. The tension is brought out, I think, by the moral psychology of convergence. Say that we converged on a social morality, developed the attendant moral psychology, taught it to our children, and so on. The problem of finding stable, shared, valid rules is solved, but perspective diversity is lost. That would not, I think (and I expect Gaus agrees), be a desirable situation. But then convergence might not be desirable after all, in which case the sort of weighting diversity that is conducive to convergence is undesirable.

 

Ad. II. Convergence ⊕ consensus!?

I have thus far bypassed the first three sections of the paper, which place Gaus’ results in the context of his larger engagement with the aims and methods of standard moral philosophy. Gaus frames his project in terms of the misguidedness of moral philosophy and the social contract tradition as traditionally conceived. Gaus claims that moral philosophy and the social contract tradition fail to see the significance of moral disagreement; our object should be neither truth nor the content of consensus, but the conditions of convergence.

Gaus initially notes the difference between two modes of moral reasoning (Gaus 2011, 120-4):

i. Standard moral philosophy, which pursues an individualistic mode of thinking and seeks true judgments of the form “We ought to φ”.

ii. The social contract tradition, which pursues a reconciliation mode of thinking and seeks true judgments of the form “We believe we ought to φ”.

The social contract tradition registers that we seem to make no progress in the first-order project and therefore shifts to search for a consensus that we can use to navigate our first-order disagreements. Motivated by the aim to overcome moral disagreement, the social contract tradition endorses a “reconciliation requirement: Individuals must seek out some device of agreement that reconciles their differences so that they can share convictions about what justice demands we do.” (2018, 122) This branch of the social contract tradition, exemplified by Rawls, seeks to meet this reconciliation requirement by finding norms or principles that all agree to (2018, 124, 139-40). That search must fail, Gaus argues, for “at the end of the day, it is a theory of what the theorist believes that we all believe what we all ought to do […] and for the same reasons we disagree in our simple ‘I believe we ought’ judgments, we disagree in our ‘I believe we believe we ought’ judgments.” (2018, 125)

The range of deep and intractable disagreement includes religious and metaphysical matters, the meaning of life, theories of value, what principles of justice we should live by, and even the importance of living together in accordance with shared principles of justice. Faced with this range of disagreement, we should abandon the quest for consensus.

What we should seek, instead, are the conditions for free moral inquiry and convergence on shared rules (elsewhere Gaus argues that these conditions are best secure by a Hayekian liberal constitution, i.e., “The Open Society” [Gaus, 2011, Part Two; 2016, Chapter IV; 2018b]). When the conditions of free inquiry and convergence obtain, the morality that the members of society converge upon is valid, even if it could have been otherwise. In another recent essay, Gaus writes that this “new program for political philosophy […] switches focus from the moral convictions and plans of the philosopher to those of the agents who form the self-organizing and self-governing moral order. […] In place of conceptions and plans for justice the new program […] seeks to identify “devices” of public reason, to analyze how markets, democracy, polycentrism, liberty rules and jurisdictional rights provide the framework for diverse moral perspectives to form moral and political orders that not only accommodate, but improve, their disparate understandings of justice in an open society.” (2016b, 75)

However, nothing in “Self-organizing moral systems” (or Gaus’ other writings) implies that that we should abandon the old program in favor of the new; that traditional moral philosophy or Rawlsian constructivism are not worthwhile enterprises. To affirm a particular moral perspective is also to assert that it enjoys better argumentative support than alternative perspectives. Every person that has beliefs about the differential validity of moral rules claims that their beliefs have objective validity – the model may randomly assign justice-scores, but agents have reasons for their beliefs about morality. Traditional moral philosophy attempts to establish which beliefs we should have and to assess the relative merits of different beliefs, by assessing the pros and cons of various perspectives; and any agent that has normative beliefs engages in traditional moral philosophy. Surely, it is a worthwhile use of resources to have moral philosophers investigating beliefs, their inferential bases, commitments, and implications – without such investigation, where would agents turn for deep and critical thinking about what perspective, rule, value, or other normative belief they should affirm? The Gausian project takes existing beliefs as input, but we also want to discuss what existing beliefs should be. To advance the “new program of political philosophy” as alternative to the old, is like saying that social science should shift from first-order studies to a program of meta-analysis.

Rawlsian constructivism – and the social contract tradition – provides one avenue of moral inquiry, targeted in part to address the specific question of political legitimacy in a diverse society. The search for consensus might be futile, but it might not – and the search itself can bring about insights that could otherwise be missed. Gaus often emphasizes Rawls’s admission that the overlapping consensus is on a family of liberal conceptions of justice, not on justice as fairness alone (Rawls 2005, xlvii-l; Gaus, 2015, 126; 2016, 153, 157;). Yes, there can be reasonable disagreement even about which liberal conception we should rely on in the design of the basic structure. But didn’t the search for consensus yield a positive and worthwhile result – that there is a limited range of liberal constitutions that can satisfy the demands of democratic equality and a sketch of the minimal conditions any such constitution must satisfy? We might even say that Rawls’s search for consensus identified a limited eligible set of constitutions. Rawls could agree that the choice of any of these is equally good, so any of these could be the basis of a just and legitimate political society.

Traditional moral philosophy is not shown to be a mistaken exercise by Gaus’ argument, nor does Gaus establish the futility of Rawlsian contractualism. Gaus shows that there is another worthwhile enterprise in moral philosophy – the search for conditions of free inquiry and convergence – but the value of diversity extends to modes of inquiry.

 

Conclusion

Here are four different questions of political philosophy:

1. Who should get what – and why?
2. What are the true principles of justice?
3. What principles of justice can we all agree to, as free and equal persons?
4. What are the conditions under which we can come to endorse (converge on) principles of justice, even though we disagree about what those principles these should be?

Gaus has done much to establish the importance of the fourth question, and provides a sophisticated answer to it. But he has not established that trying to answer the second and third questions is not worthwhile – even necessary – to find good answers to the first.

 

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Ryan Muldoon for organizing this discussion and for comments on a draft of my part; to Chris Melenovsky for a helpful conversation; and to Jerry Gaus for wild and exciting ideas.

 

References

Arthur, Brian W., 1994. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economic. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Bicchieri, Christina, 2016. Norms in the Wild: How to Diagnose, Measure, and Change Social Norms. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Gaus, Gerald, 2018. “Self-organizing moral systems: Beyond social contract theory”. Politics, Philosophy & Economics. Vol. 17(2), pp. 119-147.

—- 2018b. “Political Philosophy as the Study of Complex Normative Systems”. Cosmos+Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Vol. 5(2).

—– 2015. “Public Reason Liberalism”. In S. Wall (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

—– 2016. Tyranny of the Ideal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—– 2011. The Order of Public Reason. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

—– 1996. Justificatory Liberalism: An Essay on Epistemology and Political Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

—- 1990. Value and Justification: The Foundations of Liberal Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Muldoon, Ryan, 2016. Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World: Beyond Tolerance. London, UK: Routledge.

Rawls, John, 2005. Political Liberalism (Expanded Edition). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

 

REPLY BY JERRY GAUS

Thanks to Ryan Muldoon and Chad Van Schoelandt for focusing on my paper, and especially to Jeppe von Platz for his comments. I say this not in the way I sometimes do ¾ between gritted teeth controlling exasperation at basic misinterpretations ¾ but genuinely. They are great comments. If I had Jeppe’s comments before I finished the paper I certainly would have done the simulations differently. But that is the advantage of trying to be clear and more formal in what one is doing, for others can pick up on one’s idea and improve upon it.

Let me just make four general comments, which I think will advance the discussion (if there is any!).

1. The aim of the paper was to advance a proof of concept: that under some conditions increased diversity can make agreement easier. The original version of the paper simply sketched out the logic of the model, and that seemed the important point: to see the logic of how, under some parameters, increasing diversity could lead from deadlock to convergence. That still strikes me as a cool idea. Having sketched out the model, I thought it would be useful to provide some simulations to better show how the logic would work. They turned out a bit more interesting than I expected, but they are still baby ¾ perhaps neonate ¾ I hope that others will do a better job, and estimate something like basins of attraction for agreement and divergence for different populations. The complexities that Jeppe notes are all critical to such further inquiry.

I do think the proof of concept, though, is in many ways the crucial thing. As I modelled it, the problem is this. When we use our reflective capacity for moral thinking we disagree. As social philosophers we look around us, and we see our societies riven by one moral dispute after another. These are not disputes about “the good,”  where if we dig deeper we get to a shared conception of “the right” ¾ these are disputes about the right itself. How can we handle them?  Thus one of my wild ideas. What if, sometimes, disagreeing about what is right helps induce convergence on our shared rules of right? I thought that this conjecture is so deeply counterintuitive that a proof of concept was necessary. Hence this paper.

2. I certainly don’t, however, think that the tendency to converge on a moral rule is a positive increasing function of disagreement about morality. That would be mad, even for me. My conjecture would be that the relation might be something like Figure 1:

If  a relation in that neighborhood was discovered, that would indeed be important for thinking about a shared morality. If we were at point A we need not seek to “normalize” away diversity: the processes I pointed to in the paper might produce considerable convergence. Not, of course, agreement of the sort we could obtain if we all endorsed the same conception of justice as in W, a well-ordered society, but that is an illusion anyway. The paper, as I have said, only advanced a proof of concept that point A can be more about hospitable to convergence than point B.

3. Supposing that moral disagreement is part and parcel of perspectival diversity, Figure 1 implies that we can only have so much perspectival diversity in a society that shares a common morality. I think we can push a long way towards drawing on diversity in a shared moral system, but there are limits. Thus, I embrace what Jeppe sees as an unpalatable conclusion: a shared morality limits perspectival diversity. Moreover, dynamically, he is no doubt correct that as we converge “on a social morality” and develop “the attendant moral psychology” and teach this morality to our children, the “problem of finding stable, shared, valid rules is solved, but [some] perspective diversity is lost.” It is important that to share a rule is not to adopt the same perspective, for different perspectives may have very different views of a rule and how well it accords with the perspective’s view of optimal morality. Still, there are limits on how diverse a range of perspectives can embrace a shared rule (think of the Nazi who regularly comes up in Q&A for a public reason paper in a philosophy seminar). The aim of the theorist of the open society is to see how much diversity ¾ or, more correctly, what patterns of diversity ¾ are consistent with a shared moral life that allows us to benefit from each other’s diversity. As Scott Page (2011) notes, diversity, while it often improves a system, at some point can become dysfunctional: the problem is how to draw on it and encourage it, while maintaining system functionality. How far right on the x axis can a society with a functional morality proceed?

4. My favorite phrase of Jeppe’s — it really did make me smile — is “vintage Gaus, but odd.” (I thank him for the “but”). His main complaint is that “Gaus frames his argument as being about the value of diversity and the misguidedness of traditional moral philosophy, especially Rawlsian contractualism,” and he find this unsupported. Oddly (in a different way), I intended this paper as accommodating the claims of traditional moral thinking, which I associated with the “I believe we ought” approach. This is a genuine and inevitable way in which people approach moral thinking, and I associate it with moral and much political philosophy. The paper accepts this, and does not target it. But Jeppe is quite correct that I do not see much value added to political philosophy by tweaking yet another “theory of justice.” Surely decreasing returns must be pretty far along on this production curve. Nevertheless I realize that philosophers immensely enjoy producing and criticizing such “theories,” and I do not wish to begrudge people this fun. And (with apologies to T.B. Macaulay)  “it certainly hurts the health less than hard drinking . . . is not much more laughable than phrenology, and is immeasurably more humane than cock-fighting.”

The point of the paper — and much of my work — is that this first-order model of personal inquiry into what “I think we all ought to do” confronts us with the real problematic of current social philosophy: these enquiries purport to tell us all what to do, but we deeply disagree on what these results are. Thus the crucial project introduced most clearly by Rawls: a second-order analysis — what at one point (1975) Rawls called “moral theory” — to discover what sort of functional framework can arise under the moral diversity of modernity. The diverse outputs of the first-order (“I believe we ought”) inquiry are in the inputs to this second-order reconciliation project. The focus of my critical arguments is on contractualism understood as a second-order inquiry. At least since the mid-1970s Rawlsian contractualism presented itself as such a second-order “moral theory” (Gaus and Van Schoelandt, 2017), and I do indeed believe that it fails in these terms. It fails because it seeks the second-order theory via consensus.  (Bargain-based second-order theories, I argue in the paper, fail for a different reason.) In terms of Figure 1, Rawls aimed at state W, where we agree about justice. That is fine for a first-order theory (why not “create” a well-ordered  utopia?), but it undermines contractualism’s claim to be an effective way of reconciling conflicting first-order judgments (aka “theories of justice”). Rawls came to recognize this, and point W essentially vanishes in his final analyses. Still, his commitment to consensus makes rightward movement on the x axis difficult: point B probably already is a move too far.

Enough from me. Again, my definitely non-gritted thanks to Jeppe for thinking about my paper — and other of my writings — and saying such smart things.

Jerry Gaus

 

References

Gaus, Gerald and Chad Van Schoelandt (2017). “Consensus on What? Convergence for What? Four Models of Political Liberalism.” Ethics, vol. 128 (October): 145–172.

Page, Scott E. (2011) Diversity and Complexity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Rawls, John (1975). “The Independence of Moral Theory.” In John Rawls: Collected Papers, edited by Samuel Freeman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999: 286-302.