Thoughts on Fair Governance, Paternalism and Perfectionism

November 16, 2009

The main problems of Fair Governance, Paternalism and Perfectionism (Buckley) are in my view (i) its lack of originality, (ii) its superficial analysis of some of the authors he mentions to explain issues addressed in the book, and (iii) that it takes certain assumptions for granted without sufficient ground. On the flip side, I think that (iv) it succeeds in (a) presenting certain interesting aspects of happiness and its relation with paternalism, and (b) in explaining the importance of default choices and the way in which choices are presented to us.

(i) It is not very original to assert that paternalism and perfectionism fail in many respects, proving such assertion by providing different kind of examples which argue for and against the former and the latter. Buckley seems to defend some kind of middle point (199). As I see it, Buckley thinks that that middle point would be the aura mediocritas or the golden mean of public intervention. However, he fails in pointing the criteria we should employ in finding where such aura mediocritas lay, and further, on how a politician or a government could make specific decisions, given the enormous difficulty of balancing good government with morality (of the ruler) and liberty of the members of the community. (Weber. Politics as Profession).

The majority of the weak points of paternalism which Buckley addresses had already been attacked during the past century with far more convincing arguments by authors like Hayek or Misses. In their critique to the planned economy of totalitarian states and to the Keynesian approach of state intervention they tried to demonstrate how the state proved to be a poor distributor of goods and services. Hayek argued that the state was incapable of organizing the productive apparatus of the state, as to decipher the deep wishes of its citizens and their preferences over certain type of goods and the prices they would be willing to pay for them, thus, creating market inefficiencies. (Hayek. The Road to Serfdom). Further, he also argued that such deficiencies of paternalism, or collectivism, to use Hayek’s terminology, had a direct relation with human liberty, moral autonomy, and individuality, as for Hayek they were elements that could only flourish in the midst of a free market based society.
In brief, where citizens cannot choose freely what they produce and consume, they cannot be free as economic agents of the market nor as moral beings. Thus, Hayek proved the relationship between economic paternalism and moral perfectionism, and the causality influence that flows circularly between them. Thus I think that Buckley does not have anything new to offer, even more, if we consider that Buckley does not provide any specific solutions to the decision making problem.

The book also lacks originality in this regard: The debate behind the narrative of the book is, using Karl’s Popper categories, the non resolved confrontation between the historicism and tribalism of the enemies of the free society, on one side; and the individualism and liberalism of the open society, on the other. (Popper. The Open Society and its Enemies).

In this framework, Buckley stands, in my opinion, in a similar position to one of the most prominent authors of a liberal sort of communitarianism, namely Michael Walzer, at least in regard to the scope of permissible intrusion of the state into one’s own pursuit of good life. Walzer, as Buckley, I believe, would argue in favor of a certain kind of mild perfectionism and mild paternalism. But he would argue in favor of a mild form of perfectionism not only because of its political value, but rather because it is inevitable. No political organization can escape from it. Not even liberal societies, which evidently defend a particular type of morality. As I see it, liberal communitarianism succeeds in proving that the premise according to which states can be morally neutral is a fallacy (Etzioni. New Communitarian Thinking. 14), thus evincing certain theoretical difficulties of John Stuart Mill’s neutralism. Liberalism and Mill, particularly, assumes that we can have two spheres of morality, one private, and other public, which isn’t entirely true. Our public morality is not only determined by our private morality and vice versa, but they are one altogether kind of morality. The liberal argument in favor of strict separation between the two spheres is simply not real. (Bonilla. 25)

(ii) I also said in the introduction of this paper, that Buckley’s reading of some authors is not accurate. I will take Plato as example. Buckley contends that Plato was a perfectionist. (11). He argues that “The Perfectionist would overrule individual choices when these are immoral. Such theories, which are as old as Plato, assume that the state in its role as a perfectionist has a privileged view of the good and a duty to reform people, whether they want it or not.” I cannot agree with his reading of Plato. Plato’s idea of the “good” was not equivalent to moral righteousness, but rather to what is “true”, even though it is true that the truth is good per se, because it is the nearest reminisce to the archetypical form of things. This clarification leads us to contend that Plato is not an ancestor of perfectionism, but rather of paternalism. The central role of virtue in Plato’s Republic is relevant in the decision process of who must rule, and who has the right to occupy a higher rank in the social structure, but not in the interference in the private life and morals of citizens.

All the elements of cognitive paternalism presented by Buckley in chapter three (3) are present in Plato’s Republic. Every person in the society has to have certain particular intellectual conditions in order to advance to the next level of education. In the top of the hierarchical organization is the philosopher king, which has access to the idea of the good, this is, to the idea of what is, aside from any type of biases, errors of understanding, or lack of information. Thus, Plato is a cognitive paternalist, not a moral perfectionist. Against this argument it could be claimed that Plato was indeed a perfectionist, and that a proof of that was his admiration for the Spartan society, and his intent of creating a similar state in Syracuse. (Jaeger. Paideia) I would be willing to admit this argument as plausible, but this is not was Buckley says.

(iii) I also said above that the author takes certain assumptions for granted, without sufficient ground. I would like to explore one example. When talking about Nozick’s experience machine (6), Buckley assumes that none of us would agree to be hooked up to the machine. This is not true. At least, I believe there would be sufficient reasons to think that in certain social circles, like persons with drug addictions, certain kinds of diseases, extreme hunger, low self esteem, etc., the machine option would be very attractive.

This is relevant because the assumption that people prefer to take their own decisions, as given, speaks strongly in favor of anti paternalism and anti perfectionism, thus narrowing the scope of its reach. But such assumption is not necessarily correct. The example of Grille is more than exemplary in this regard, and definitely it is much more than fictitious. The thoughts of hundreds of thousands of Germans after the breakdown of the Berlin wall are symptomatic in this regard. Many would prefer to return to the commodity of a bureaucrat type of life, working as robot type automats and not as free and autonomous individuals. Cases as Egypt and Sparta, India and China, just to name a few examples, also speak in favor of this tradition in which people are not free to choose a great deal of important things of their lives, but which nevertheless stand tall as plausible cases of political organization. It is equivocal to reject the possibility or goodness, indeed, of preferring a life in which others take the decisions for us, particularly when the world has moved in that direction during thousands of years.

Moving to other critique, Buckley thinks that paternalism has a direct connection with search costs and constrained choice (83), but oddly, instead of elaborating more in the education issue he switches rapidly to other topic. I think that the issue of education is directly related with the problem of capacity. When persons have low capacity, more paternalism is to be expected; and when they have a high capacity, less paternalism is to be expected. We would not be willing to let alone persons of poor China to take the decision if they should or should not pay taxes, say, in order to improve the quality of potable water in far regions of the country. But, we could expect that the people of a well educated country would be willing to do so, if they can be sure that doing such thing is necessary for the improvement of life conditions. Thus, I assert that a society that wants to promote more freedom should make a serious effort in raising the level of education of all its citizens.

(iv) In Chapter Six, Buckley analyses the relationship between paternalism and happiness. (a) I find this to be the most interesting part of the essay. If government and intrusions on liberty have a direct impact on happiness, as the most relevant social good, then the former should be directed as to maximize overall happiness of members of society (I am not completely sure that this is equivalent to what Bentham, Mill, or Zidwick understood anyway by maximization of social happiness). The problem is that if the overall happiness of the members of society does not rise, then the government function would seem to be futile. (101). Even though Buckley is aware that people have an “innate adaption set-point of happiness, determined by character of genes, to which we revert after every gain or loss” (101) he does not go far in analyzing the implications of this for government. If we could trace a graphic of happiness of citizens in a well governed society it would look more or less like this,

were, H is happiness of individuals, T is time, and E is the adaption-set point of happiness. If it is true that human feelings of happiness vary in a way similar to this, then (a) the function of the government would be futile, as it is true that it will never be complete, but (b) necessary, as a government should indeed promote the happiness of its individuals, as even the American Declaration of Independence states.

                However, the hedonic treadmill theory would suppose, I guess, that even war prisoners in a certain point after their captivity would start to enjoy life, under its new conditions, thus achieving happiness, even without intervention of any authority, as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius would claims. (Marcus Aurelius. Meditations). The hedonic treadmill theory thus leads us to a blocked road.

 (b) Finally, Buckley successfully argues how default rules shape our choices (115) by presenting, among others, a case of organ donors in the United States and Europe. (120). He affirms that “How we choose depends on how the options are framed”. I think that this is probably the issue which would likely have the major impact over real government decisions. Facts and statistics in hand, Buckley shows how framing options in one way or another has an impact on psychological biases and particular preferences of agents, thus proving the irrationality with which people behave and take decisions, and thus how the state plays an important role in guiding our preference toward the best options available. Buckley’s argument is that government intervention is admissible, and perhaps, desirable, when default rules would be necessary to foster certain kind of preferences, which the government believes are better for us, but giving citizens opt-out alternatives, in order to strengthen their right to free choice. (125).

As a conclusion I would say that Buckley’s book succeed in highlighting interesting points of reflection and debate, but fails to provide any solution to overcome the problems which derive from his analysis. Anyway, he is coherent in admitting that he does not expect to give magic solutions to the problems raised in the book, and I intuitively adhere to his skeptical approach to the topics analyzed, as I believe that temperance and prudence are the only secure ways toward freedom and a strong democracy.