Adam Gjesdal (Heterodox Academy), "Liberalism, Polarization, and the Aggregation Problem"
Forthcoming, Synthese
By Adam Gjesdal
My paper, “Liberalism, Polarization, and the Aggregation Problem,” identifies a structural problem for the justification of public policy that afflicts all philosophical attempts to adjudicate political disputes through normative argumentation. The problem is how to balance countervailing reasons in a way that all parties to a disagreement have reason to accept. When we balance reasons, we move away from the deductive model of applying logical inference rules to a set of premises. This problem of balancing reasons—or, as I put it in the paper, the “aggregation problem”— takes the following form.
1. P is a reason for R.
2. Q is a reason for ~R.
3. Both P and Q.
4. P and Q is a reason for …
How we fill out (4) depends on how we balance or aggregate P and Q. Here are two ways of doing this. First, we could say that P outweighs Q, so P and Q are a reason for R. This solution requires that everyone accept the claim that P outweighs Q. But whether P outweighs Q might be one of the questions we are trying to answer. A second approach is to assign both P and Q specific deliberative weights. Say P has weight 3, Q has weight 5, and so P and Q is a reason for ~R, because 3 < 5. The problem here is that the precise weights we ought to assign to P and Q may be a substantial part of our dispute. Both approaches are unsatisfactory if our aim is to balance reasons in a way acceptable to all parties who reasonably disagree about the comparative weights.
The paper focuses on the challenges the aggregation problem poses for public reason liberalism. But it arises for any normative approach to public policy that grapples with the countervailing weights of reasons. Public reason liberalism may strike many readers as niche, but its central idea—public justification—is of wide concern. In open societies, we must live together under shared rules while privately endorsing radically different moral criteria for evaluating those rules. On what terms can a democratic society of free and equal people cooperate? Public reason liberalism answers: when those rules are publicly justified by appeal to reasons all reasonable people can endorse. The approach diverges from traditional moral philosophy by limiting justification to a proper subset of our justified beliefs: those that count as “public reasons.” Setting this restriction aside, the approach is structurally the same as what you find in, say, intuitionistic arguments from Judith Jarvis Thomson. Both argumentative styles share the goal of showing why all have reason to accept (or reject) some public policy. What makes public reason liberalism distinctive is its attentiveness to underlying moral diversity in the justificatory community. As a result, theorists of that tradition are reluctant to appeal to elaborate thought experiments, given their limited persuasive force for audiences not already enculturated in the methods of analytic philosophy. This reluctance, the paper shows, is partly misguided.
I treat abortion policy as offering an acute instance of the aggregation problem. On a charitable construal, the debate between pro-choice and pro-life advocates concerns how we ought to balance two competing rights claims. The woman has a right to control what happens to her body, but the fetus has a right to life. My discussion focuses exclusively on elective abortions, ignoring health-related abortions for simplicity. Balancing these conflicting claims determines when in gestation a woman should lose her right to obtain an elective abortion because the fetus’ right to life is weightier than her right to bodily control. The problem seems intractable because there is so much disagreement about when the fetus’ right to life becomes salient, with proposals ranging from the time of conception to the moment of birth. Even if we (unrealistically) were all to agree at what point in gestation the fetus’ right to life becomes relevant, there remains the issue of when in gestation the balance of rights “tips” from favoring the woman’s claim to the fetus’. The aggregation problem concerns finding this precise tipping point.
I also explore a third approach to the aggregation problem, more promising than the two mentioned above. That is Judith Jarvis Thomson’s and David Boonin’s use of intuition pumps to elicit specific judgments in response to thought experiments. Both Thomson and Boonin grant the pro-life camp the metaphysically fraught claim that the fetus has a right to life. They then use thought experiments to determine where the balance of reasons tips. Thomson has her “famous violinist” case. More recently, in Beyond Roe (2019), Boonin uses imaginative variations on the real-life Pennsylvania court case of McFall v. Shimp, which decided that the state could not compel someone to donate bone marrow for transplantation to save another’s life. Part of the paper explains why we should view these thought experiments as sophisticated devices for eliciting judgments of reasons aggregation, helping us make the leap from premises (1)-(3) above to a conclusion in (4). Additionally, I show why Boonin’s method should be particularly attractive to public reason liberals who eschew using intuition pumps.
The problem with this balancing strategy is that intuition pumps rarely elicit the same response in everyone. What is more, sometimes we cannot say that everyone ought to respond to intuition pumps in the same way. I think this problem afflicts Boonin’s argument, and it likely also affects any conceivable attempt to use intuition pumps in tackling the abortion debate. Very briefly, this is because intuition pumps like Boonin’s presume their audience endorses a range of controversial answers to very basic political questions, such as what politics is for. Boonin’s arguments are so compelling because much of his audience (consisting mainly of professional philosophers) already endorses those background views. But not everyone does—especially when we shift our attention from the seminar room to diverse, open societies. People who lack reason to accept Boonin’s argument may find some alternative set of intuition pumps compelling when it better aligns with their views on foundational questions of political life. However, that alternative set of pumps will not sway those who have already been convinced by Boonin. This suggests there is no balancing method all have reason to accept: different people will and ought to balance reasons in the abortion debate in different ways.
This places consensus on abortion policy beyond society’s reach. So much may sound obvious to any casual observer of American politics. What I mean, though, goes beyond this obvious point. Consensus on abortion policy appears unattainable even in an idealized utopia where everyone has the scholarly credentials of Boonin or Thomson and puts years of careful thought and investigation into the issue before advocating for the policy they sincerely regard as required by liberal justice. In utopia, the obstacle to consensus is not evangelical religious belief or forms of anti-feminism. Rather, it is a deep limitation of normative thought: we lack the tools to balance countervailing reasons in a way that all have reason to accept.
The lesson I draw for public reason liberals is that their utopian ideal will be politically polarized, though not (as in actual societies) due to the epistemic failures of citizens. Belief polarization will be accompanied by tensions among groups, as each sees others as advocating via public reason for policies that violate fundamental political rights. Public reason liberals face the burden of explaining their framework’s value as it does not eliminate the strains of communal living under conditions of deep moral diversity. I think this can be done by conceiving of public reason more as a procedure for treating all as politically free and equal, rather than as generating a range of possible outcomes all have reason to accept. More broadly, though, I hope the paper conveys to all philosophers who deal with divisive political questions the need for intellectual humility in acknowledging the limitations of our tools for normative analysis.
References:
Boonin, David. (2019). Beyond Roe: Why Abortion Should be Legal--even If the Fetus is a Person. Oxford University Press.