Against Renaming Victoria

(Of mostly local interest. I speak only for myself, not for my colleagues or anyone else associated with Victoria University of Wellington, my employer. TL;DR: I would prefer not to change the name of my University, for classically or perhaps just cranky conservative reasons.)

The Vice-Chancellor of Victoria University of Wellington, where I work, recently proposed to simplify the name of the institution to “University of Wellington” or “Wellington University.” Professor Guilford, the VC, argues that Vic’s name is easily confused with the many other universities around the world that include the word “Victoria”, and that a name change would be beneficial to the prestige of the University, allowing us to rise in the rankings. He builds his case carefully and addresses many possible objections fairly; I was impressed by his presentation. Moreover, one must grant that he has made a genuine effort to consult with students, faculty, and alumni, taking their views seriously.

The proposed “name simplification” is not particularly objectionable in itself; no one is suggesting we become the Charles G. Koch University of Wellington or the Wellington People’s Friendship University. The VC also seems to envision the name change process as a sort of gradual retreat from, or a controlled forgetting of, “Victoria” (changing things a little bit at a time, via the normal maintenance budget?), obviating any objections based merely on the potential cost of the name change; no multi-million dollar “rebranding” campaign seems to be planned. Yet I still find myself opposed to this proposal; and I thought it would be good to articulate why here, in part because some of my reasons concern themes I have sometimes explored in this blog, and may therefore be of some slight interest to people not connected to Vic.

Conservatism and value

The philosopher G. A. Cohen, in a lovely essay published after his death as “Rescuing Conservatism: A Defense of Existing Value,” opens his discussion of conservatism with a joke that perfectly captures my feelings about this proposal:

“Professor Cohen, how many Fellows of All Souls does it take to change a lightbulb?”
“Change?!?”

It’s not that Cohen was generally averse to change; he was, after all, a socialist who claimed that “injustice lacks intrinsic value” and hence cannot be worth preserving. A proponent of analytical Marxism, he was in theory committed to the abolition of capitalism - certainly not a small-scale change. But he also defended a certain conservative disposition of “accepting the given, of valuing the valuable, and of valuing the valued”:

Just as you may love people because of who and what they are, rather than just for the value of what they produce and for the value of what they instantiate, so you may love a lovable institution because it is the institution that it is and it possesses the character that it has. So if you seek to set the agenda for an institution, you must ask not only what its goals are and should be, and how it may best achieve them, but also what it, the institution, is. And you have, once again, additional personal reason to do so, reasons of specifically personal value, when you, collectively, constitute the institution in question. (p. 148)

Cohen does not claim that a conservative disposition (of valuing existing valuable things) should always trump all other considerations, but that such a disposition does provide reasons to keep valuable things as they are, even if changing them might produce somewhat better things:

The conservative impulse is to conserve what is valuable, that is, the particular things that are valuable. I claim that we devalue the valuable things we have if we keep them only so long as nothing even slightly more valuable comes along. Valuable things command a certain loyalty. If an existing thing has intrinsic value, then we have reason to regret its destruction as such, a reason that we would not have if we cared only about the value that the thing carries or instantiates. My thesis is that it is rational and right to have such a bias in favor of existing value, that, for example, if you happily replace a fine statue by a merely somewhat better one, the production of which requires destruction of the original statue, then you mistreat the now destroyed work as (so to speak) having had the merely instrumental value of being a vessel of aesthetic value. (p. 153)

It may be objected at this point that Cohen’s claim is inapplicable to this name simplification proposal. Changing the name of the University hardly amounts to destroying the institution! Moreover, the kind of change envisioned does not appear to trigger standard conservative considerations about unintended consequences and the difficulties of changing complex systems (about which I’ve written here). But a name is not nothing either; and for long-standing institutions, it seems to me, there are good reasons for leaving names as they are, since they come to summarize and even embody the stories that tie people to them. Let me try to articulate these reasons further.

Why Victoria?

According to the University’s website, Victoria got its name as a result of the parliamentary skills of Premier Richard Seddon. In 1897 Seddon proposed the creation of “Victoria University College”. This was not the first choice of the other proponents of a University in Wellington (e.g., Sir Robert Stout); but it was accepted because it was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria and the House was “loath to disagree” with Seddon’s proposal. (It looked bad to intentionally go out of your way not to honor the reigning monarch).

At least that’s what the Vic website says; a quick skim of the relevant pages of Hansard and of Rachel Barrowman’s history of the University suggests the disagreement seems to have been less about the name of the University than about the specific form the new college would take. But Seddon did use the occasion of Victoria’s jubilee to break the deadlock in a debate over whether to fund a college that had been going on, inconclusively, for about two decades. Wellingtonians were pretty commercial-minded in the late 19th century, and many didn’t think this would be a good use of public funds; but Seddon successfully argued that the establishment of a University would be “a fitting way for the colony to mark the Queen’s jubilee year”.

The historian John Plunkett has argued that the “cult” of Queen Victoria – the widespread circulation of her image, the naming of institutions after her, the production of stories and poems about her, the construction of statues and busts, the grand ceremonies on her anniversaries – was one of the means through which an Imperial imagined community was knitted. She was the first “media monarch,” a great beneficiary of the age of mechanical reproduction whose circulating representations kept the monarchy socially potent long after its political power had gone into terminal decline, an effect that was particularly important in the colonies. It’s worth noting that the symbols connected to “Victoria” did not always have an unambiguous meaning, and could also be used by colonial subjects to assert their distinctive identities and even to criticize Imperial practices; Plunkett has some fascinating quotes from Indian nationalists who “appropriated” the matriarchal discourse surrounding Victoria’s feminine virtues to criticize British imperialism and its martial values.¹ But in this case the choice of “Victoria” for the University’s name did serve as a symbolic link to the empire.

Today there are hardly any reminders of Queen Victoria at the University. There is one statue of her, tucked away underneath the stairs at the Hunter building; but it dates from the 1990s (see my photo below), and like many such statues, it has long since faded into invisibility. (I did not even remember it existed until I watched the VC’s presentation; this is a classic example of those “monuments without viewers” that Paul Veyne talks about). The name “Victoria” for the University no longer commemorates a distant Queen, or points to the Imperial community. When students or staff at the University talk affectionately about “Vic”, the name is merely an anchor for all the stories connected to the place; its everyday usage no more implies a reference to a 19th century monarch any more than the name “Chicago” implies a reference to wild onions today, or “Wellington” to the Duke of Wellington for that matter.



To change this particular part of the University’s name after 121 years thus seems to me then to devalue important parts of many people’s identities – the parts tied to the stories they tell about themselves in the places they’ve inhabited. I’m not saying that the University’s name is a crucial part of its identity – all institutions change constantly while retaining their general character – but it is well enough connected to its members’ identities (many live and work, and have lived and worked, “at Vic”) that changing it without a sufficient reason violates the idea of “accepting the given, of valuing the valuable, and of valuing the valued”.

The name is important because it represents an inheritance of stories, even if the institution would not otherwise change very much by changing its name. Students, alumni, staff, and academics are not simply connected to an institution that happens to be named Victoria (and could next week be named something else without too much fuss), but to a particular named place with its associated history. As Cohen puts it, more generally:

We are attached to particular things because we need to belong to something, and we therefore need some things to belong to us. We cannot belong to something abstract. (168)

Reasons for Renaming

Perhaps a name change might be ok if it could be shown to produce large benefits, or if it were necessary to wipe away the offensiveness of the colonial past. Cohen himself suggests that the sort of conservatism he defends is only a kind of “bias”, defeasible if we can show that much greater value would be produced by change (even if one would still regret such change), or if change were necessary to rectify injustice. And one could add here Michael Oakeshott’s impeccably conservative idea that sometimes change is justified as the “pursuit of an intimation,” the development of a seed that is “already there.” But none of these reasons seem to me to apply here.

The case for renaming assumes that the University’s name recognition will improve following a name change, especially in those markets (primarily Asian) where Victoria is trying to recruit students, and the VC is betting that a name change will (eventually) lead to our rise in international rankings, with all its attendant possibilities for increased revenues and academic recruitment. The VC has assembled data showing that people outside New Zealand do sometimes confuse Vic with other universities, and consulted with branding experts who suggest that the best University names consist of two words, one of which must be “University” and the other the name of the place where the University is located. He also points out that Victoria University of Manchester changed its name to “University of Manchester” without apparent ill effects. Support from the Mayor and other city worthies seems to suggest that it’s now time for the name change; the seed is already there.

All of the listed costs of Victoria’s name, and all of the claimed benefits of changing it, seem to me to be nebulous and uncertain. A quick trawl through the marketing literature on corporate name changes and corporate rebranding does not suggest that there are many clear prestige or financial benefits to renaming; on the contrary, folk wisdom in the field seems to be that companies should nurture their names and brands unless they are somehow tainted. From my admittedly superficial scan of a number of these papers (and remember I’m not in this field!), the most one could say is that “renaming” seems to work best in conjunction with other organizational changes, and that successful rebrandings tend to be expensive affairs. In any case, a substantial number of corporate rebrandings seem to be ways for the organization to distance itself from bad publicity or scandal; a notorious example is Blackwater, ridiculously renamed Xe Services in 2009 and then the even more ridiculous Academi in 2011 to try to escape association with the company’s unsavory role in the Iraq war. (This didn’t work too well; many people still refer to “Blackwater”). None of this applies in the Victoria case.

The best case scenario for renaming, that of Victoria University of Manchester, is perhaps less applicable to Vic’s case than meets the eye. There the University was renamed following a merger with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, which fits in well with the marketing literature’s advice that renaming works best after major reorganizations. Moreover, it appears that Victoria University of Manchester was already known locally as the University of Manchester; so the seed for renaming was there (no “Vic” to contend with). This would have justified its renaming as “the pursuit of an intimation.” None of this is the case for Vic; as far as I know, there was no great dissatisfaction with the University’s name (and various nicknames) among those people most connected with the institution, namely, its current students, alumni, and staff.

In politics and academia, the other renaming practices I’m most familiar with usually come in two varieties, which we might call “patronage” renaming and “revolutionary” renaming. Patronage renaming involves changing the name of an institution to please a patron or a donor; see, e.g, the Soviet examples discussed here, or, for a more recent academic example, the renaming of the School of Law at George Mason University after Antonin Scalia. Revolutionary renaming is the act of changing the name of an institution to honour new leaders or erase the hated past; a classic example is the renaming of Petrograd to Leningrad, or Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad to Volgograd. But the same impulse not to honour a hated past exists at a smaller scale and in academic contexts; witness the discussion about the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale.

Patronage renaming is clearly inapplicable here; the University is not being renamed in gratitude to a specific donor. But one could perhaps make the case for a “revolutionary” renaming of Vic, breaking its connection with a colonial past that is not cherished by Māori, among others. In principle, I don’t think this is wrong. All politics is at least 60% symbolic politics. (I’m willing to go higher with this number, but let’s be conservative). But I don’t think this applies to the case at hand either; nobody seems to be making the case that the name Victoria is a symbol of a hated past that should not be honoured. In any case, as I noted above, by now the name mostly refers to itself – the accumulation of stories and people associated with, and indeed constituting, the institution – not to Queen Victoria.

I am not opposed to attempting to increase the prestige of the University; all things considered, it’s nicer to work at a more prestigious institution. My colleagues do this by producing excellent research, doing great teaching, and engaging with the public in a wide variety of ways; and the leadership team does it too by securing resources and managing them well. But the benefits of changing the institution’s name seem to me to be likely to be too small (how many spots in the QS rankings?) and uncertain (especially when we think about the length of the transition period) to defeat a conservative bias.

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1. This is in an unpublished paper I’ve read, though Prof. Plunkett might have written about it elsewhere. ↩︎
   

The Robustness or Resilience Argument in Practice: Noah Millmann vs. Jim Manzi (Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism IV.55)

Noah Millmann and Jim Manzi over at The American Scene (and Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior) have been debating the degree of deference we should give to economic science when considering what governments should do about a recession. Manzi emphasizes the large degree of uncertainty and difficulty attendant on any attempt to determine whether a particular policy actually works, and he is right about this: we do not know very well whether any policy intervention actually works (or worked), given the enormous number of potentially confounding variables. Lots of econometric ink is spilled trying to figure out this problem, but the problem is intrinsically hard, given the information available. By contrast, knowledge in physics or chemistry is far more certain, since it can be established by means of randomized experiments that are easily replicated. So, Manzi argues, we should give less deference to economists than we do to physicists when making decisions. Millmann sensibly points out that the relevant analogy is not to physics or chemistry but to something like medicine. The knowledge produced by medical science is hard to apply in practice, and doctors base their treatment decisions on a combination of customary practice, experience, and some limited experimental and observational evidence. In particular cases, then, medical practice offers at best an informed guess about the causes of a disease and the best course of action. But Millmann argues that this does not undermine the epistemic authority of medicine: in case of sickness, we should attend to the advice of doctors, and not to the advice of nonexperts.

I think Manzi’s argument would be more compelling if it were put as a robustness or resilience argument (discussed previously here and here). Consider first the case of medicine. If we get sick, we have three basic options for what to do: heed the advice of doctors, heed the advice of non-experts, and do nothing. It seems clear that heeding the advice of non-experts should (normally) be inferior to heeding the advice of doctors. But is heeding the advice of doctors always epistemically preferable to doing nothing? (Or, more realistically, to discounting the advice of doctors based on one’s own experience and information about one’s body). The answer to this question depends on our estimation of the potential costs of medical error vs doing nothing. Because medical knowledge is hard, doctors may sometimes come up (by mistake) with treatments that are actively harmful; in the 18^th century, for example, people used “bleeding” as a treatment for various diseases, which may have been appropriate for some things (apparently bleeding with leeches is used effectively for some problems), but probably served to weaken most sick people further. At any rate, we may not know whether a treatment works or not any better than the doctor; all we know is that people treated by doctors sometimes die. If our estimate of medical knowledge is sufficiently low (e.g., if we think that in some area of medical practice medical knowledge is severely limited), our estimate of the potential costs of medical error sufficiently high (we could die), and our experience of what happens when we do nothing sufficiently typical (most illness goes away on its own, after all: the human immune system is a fabulously powerful thing, perfected to a high degree by millions of years of evolution!) it may well be the case that we are better off discounting medical advice for the sake of doing nothing. Of course, atypical circumstances may result in us dying from lack of treatment; that is one of the perversities to which this sort of argument may give rise. But given our epistemic limitations (and the epistemic limitations of medicine), there may be circumstances where “doing something” is equivalent to doing something randomly (because the limitations on our medical knowledge are so severe), and so we may be (prospectively) better off doing nothing (i.e., tolerating some bad outcomes that we hope are temporary, since our bodies have proven to be resilient in the past).

Consider now the case of a government that is trying to decide on what to do with respect to a moderately severe recession. Here the government can do nothing (or rather, rely on common sense, tradition, custom and the like: i.e., do what non-experts would do), heed the advice of professional economists (who disagree about the optimal policy), or heed the advice of some selected non-economists (or the advice of some mixture of economists and non-economists). When is “heeding the advice of economists” better than “doing nothing,” given our epistemic limitations? And when is “heeding the advice of non-economists” better than “heeding the advice of economists”?

We know that the current architecture of the economic system produces recessions with some frequency, some of which seem amenable to treatment via monetary policy (whenever certain interest rates are not too close to zero), some of which appear to be less so (these are atypical), but in general produces long-run outcomes that seem tolerable (not fair, or right, or just: merely tolerable) for the majority of people (there are possible distributional concerns that I am ignoring: maybe the outcomes are not tolerable for some people). The system is robust for some threshold of outcomes and some unknown range of circumstances: it tends to be associated with increasing wealth over the long run, though it is also associated with certain bad outcomes, and we do not know if it is indefinitely sustainable into the future (due to environmental and other concerns). We also know that there is some disagreement among economists about what is the optimal policy in an atypical recession (which suggests that there are limits to their knowledge, if nothing else). If we think that the limits on economic knowledge are especially severe for some area of policy (e.g., what to do in atypical recessions), historical evidence suggests that sometimes economists may prescribe measures that are associated with intolerable outcomes (e.g., massive unemployment, hyperinflation, etc.), and we think that most recessions eventually go away on their own, we may be justified in doing nothing on epistemic grounds. In other words, if we think that for some area of policy economists’ guesses about optimal policy are not likely to be better than random, and carry a significant risk of producing intolerable outcomes, then conservatism about economic policy is justified (doing what custom, tradition, etc. recommend, and heavily discounting the advice of economists).

But these are big ifs. Suppose that the epistemic limitations of economic science are such that most policy interventions recommended by professional economists have a net effect of zero in the long run; that is, economists recommend things more or less randomly, some good, and some bad, but in general tend not to recommend things that are very bad for an economy (or very good for it). (Historical evidence may support this; “Gononomics” is something of an achievement, not necessarily something common). In that case, we are probably better off heeding the advice of economists (and gaining the experience of the results) than doing nothing (and not gaining this experience); there may not be exceedingly large costs from heeding economic advice, but there may not be very large benefits either, and the result will still be “tolerable.” (At the limit, this sort of argument suggests that we ought to be indifferent about almost any policy intervention, so long as we have reasonable expectations that the outcomes will still be tolerable). Moreover, distributional concerns may dominate in these circumstances; doing nothing has a distributional cost that is passed to some particular group of people (e.g., the unemployed), so we may have reason to be concerned more about distribution than about long-run economic performance. And much depends on our estimates of the epistemic limitations of economic science: sure, economics is not like physics, but is it more like 20^th century medicine, or more like 17^th century medicine? (And the answer to this question may be different for different areas – different for macroeconomics than for microeconomics, for example).

Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that prevent us from understanding the consequences of institutional change, and the bigger the change, the more these limitations apply. All things considered, it is harder to predict the consequences of major institutional change than of minor institutional tinkering. Moreover, even when we are in error about the consequences of minor change, the potential damage to our social life from such errors is also likely to be minor and easily contained, whereas when we are in error about major changes, the damages may be devastating. Hence we should try to avoid wholesale change to our institutions.

The key idea is that ex ante we have a better idea of the risks of small changes than we do of the risks of large changes, and ex post we can contain the damage of small changes better than the damage of large changes. Given reasonable loss aversion in the face of genuine uncertainty, this implies that we should be more careful about larger than about smaller changes to our institutions. Note that the argument is not that major changes will have bad effects, but that we should be more uncertain about the effects of major changes than about the effects of minor changes, and that this asymmetric uncertainty should make us more cautious about undertaking these larger changes.

There is a whole question here about how to define “small” and “large,” but let’s let that slide for the moment, since there are clearly some cases where the argument seems to make sense. Something like it forms part of Burke’s case against revolution: there are many potential bad consequences from trying to completely change an entire form of life, but given our epistemic limitations we can hardly know which major changes will be on balance good and which will be on balance bad. And today we might see this argument deployed to justify less action than some economists might like on restarting the global economy, or less action on climate change than some environmentalists might like, though whether the argument works in these cases depends in part on our estimates of the costs of inaction, estimates that may also be subject to our epistemic limitations. (A full formal investigation of the problems here would presumably use Bayesian analysis. But here I reveal my on epistemic limitations – I do not know enough to use it).

This is a sort of “selection” argument for conservatism, though it does not look like one at first sight. In order for this argument to justify gradualism, however, rather than rigid immobility, we have to assume that small deleterious changes are either eliminated quickly or else that they cannot accumulate and interact in collectively very harmful ways. For example, a firm that produces bad products should go bankrupt without affecting the ability of other firms to operate too much, and small regulatory changes that do not work must be quickly identified and eliminated through some explicit mechanism (e.g., litigation, as in some defences of the common law). Whenever there is no selection mechanism to get rid of such minor but potentially harmful changes (and there may not be one, especially if the changes are only truly harmful in connection with many other changes), they can accumulate until they reach a kind of threshold (when they become really bad). The point is that if our epistemic limitations are binding with respect to the consequences of large “revolutionary” changes, they are also binding with respect to the consequences of collections of small changes that interact in complex ways with one another. Thus, in the absence of knowledge about the interactions of many small changes, the argument would seem to justify rigid immobility, not gradualism.

Indeed, an awareness of this problem seems to have led most classical political thinkers to a position that is in a sense the reverse of the Burkean “gradualist” position, i.e., willing to contemplate major changes to institutions under some limited circumstances (when the legislator has good knowledge) but extremely wary of small changes that might accumulate and interact in unexpected ways (since the presence of knowledgeable individuals capable of understanding their effects in the long run cannot be assumed). Plato, for example, while quite willing to recommend radical institutional innovation in cities (e.g., equal education for men and women, major censorship, new religious institutions, etc.) insisted that a city must be very careful about changing its “educational” laws, in part because the deleterious effects of any minor changes would not be visible until many years later, and they could easily accumulate in destructive ways. Similarly, Aristotle was not shy about recommending large institutional changes to political communities, but nevertheless urged cities to be vigilant about institutional drift, the minor changes that seem harmless individually but may collectively lead to the destruction of a politeia.

The point is not that they believed that major change was epistemically “safe” while gradual change was not; they thought both major and minor change was epistemically problematic. (Plato’s insistence on the need for knowledge in politics is grounded precisely on an extreme distrust of normal human epistemic capacities; we would only need philosopher kings if we were effectively incompetent in political matters). But they did not think gradual change was any less exempt from the problems caused by human epistemic limitations than revolutionary change, since they did not think that there were appropriate “selection mechanisms” able to weed out deleterious gradual institutional change under normal circumstances (other than “state death,” which is of course not especially ideal from the point of view of the state in question; as Josiah Ober has noted, whereas bankruptcy may be the consequence of “failure” in a market economy, “state death” in the classical world typically implied the death or enslavement of much of the population). From this point of view, major but planned institutional change had a slight “epistemic advantage” over unplanned, gradual change, at least so long as gradual changes could accumulate and interact in deleterious ways that could not be easily identified either at the time or in advance. 

Epistemic Deference and Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism I

A couple of months ago, there was a very interesting debate between Jim Manzi and others on the question of whether social science knowledge was sufficiently well established to warrant radical policy innovations. Manzi argued in a widely blogged article that the methodological limitations of the social sciences – in particular, the impossibility of appropriately measuring the counterfactuals of policy interventions through, for example, randomized experiments – implied that the findings of social science should normally not “outweigh settled practice and even common sense” when we are thinking about changing existing practices or institutions. His critics argued, among other things, that social science can provide evidence that overturns such settled practices, since, after all, the status quo is typically the result of power struggles, not rational discussion; why should we give it more credence than the findings of social science, which emerge from a process that at least approximates rational debate?

We might put the general point thus: Manzi thinks that, where the complexity of social reality makes full scientific knowledge all but impossible, it makes better sense to give “epistemic deference” to settled practice; his critics think that the practices of “social science” as a whole (not necessarily a single random study) often have more “epistemic authority” than settled practice. This sort of division about the locus of epistemic authority also maps into a political division between “conservative” and “non-conservative” positions, with the “conservatives” granting some settled practices or institutions the bulk of epistemic authority, while the “non-conservative” position insists that some other person or institution, usually of more recent vintage, should be given greater epistemic deference than settled practice. Is there any way of adjudicating under what conditions are these positions likely to be right?

The conservative position is typically defended by arguments about the “limits of reason.” The classic statement is in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

As Burke puts it, the comparison makes sense; individual reason (or, for that matter, the individual social science study) is highly limited in its epistemic power in comparison to settled social practice. There is typically some reasonable basis for even highly perplexing social practices; and individual reason is likely to be highly misleading in many circumstances. Individually, we suffer from so many cognitive biases and defects that it is a wonder we get up in the morning; and even highly trained experts are often wrong, even in their own fields. (I read somewhere that most peer-reviewed research is eventually overturned). 


But as an argument the comparison is flawed; the relevant comparison should not be that between settled practice and individual reason, but between settled practice and some alternative social practice (e.g., the social practice of science, with its various self-correction mechanisms), or between settled practice and some other collective judgment (e.g., the collective judgment of an assembly or a market). Moreover, the “general bank and capital of ages” is often a “depreciating asset,” as Adrian Vermeule puts it, especially insofar as later people make no contributions to it. From this point of view, Burkean concerns about the limits of individual reason cut much less deeply; the question is about the relative “epistemic power” of different social practices, institutions, or processes. 

Yet I think there is often something to these “epistemic” arguments for conservatism. In later posts, I want to try to investigate under what conditions epistemic arguments for conservatism make sense. (This blog is mostly my scratch research notes, so read at your own risk). As a starting point, I think we might divide these arguments into three kinds: selection arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the operation of a selection filter that is not found in alternative social practices), computational arguments (where the epistemic power of settled social practices comes from the way in which they organize expertise and information), and resilience arguments (where settled social practices are found to be preferable to alternatives because they are adapted to a wide variety of circumstances, even if not optimal for any particular one of them). (Resilience arguments are really a subtype of selection arguments, but I want to think about them separately). More on each of these later.


[update 2:35: edited a few words for clarity].

Footnotes on things I've been reading: Adrian Vermeule's "Law and The Limits of Reason"

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason (2009).

I read this book for somewhat hazy reasons; perhaps I found the title in a footnote of some paper and it seemed interesting, perhaps I ran across it by doing a search in our library catalog for something else and remembered that someone had once recommended  to me another one of Vermeule’s books. But at any rate, I’m glad I did read it, even though the main topic of the book is something that would normally not interest me very much.

The book is basically an attack on the “constitutional” common law, written primarily for (USA) legal scholars. As I reconstruct it, the basic problem is as follows. 200 and some years ago a few very smart people wrote a constitution for a country. (We’ll leave the name of the country blank, since the problem is pretty general; and I want to move away from any particularities of the American situation). Conditions at the time were very different from conditions today, however; so the problem arises as to whether, and how, to adapt the constitution to current circumstances. Should we change the constitution, and if so, who should change it?

At one extreme we can find the pure originalist position: the constitution should never be changed by anyone. This position is not as crazy as it may look at first glance. Assume that the constitution has survived intact for 200 years (and it has not been ignored during this period). It may then be that the very fact that the constitution has enabled the country to survive for 200 years implies that current constitutional rules are “resilient” – that is, they are broadly adapted to all kinds of circumstances, even if not optimal for any of them. They have been tested by time, with its varied challenges, and come out relatively well. Though different constitutional rules might have produced better outcomes at some points during those 200 years, no other set of rules we could design today would have plausibly produced a better outcome overall. We could perhaps temporarily achieve better outcomes (however defined) by adjusting the rules today, but then we could not be sure that the new rules would be optimal for other, as yet unforeseen circumstances, and we would have to adjust them again and again. And given some assumptions about the likelihood and costs of error, the relative wisdom of the framers versus our current wisdom, and our estimates of the rate of environmental change, it might be that it would never be worth our while to try to change these constitutional rules. We can think of this argument in terms of a trade-off between the benefits of adaptation to current circumstances and the benefits of resilience in changing conditions, given the limits of reason. If our estimates of the benefits of adaptation are low enough, of the resilience of current rules high enough, and of the uncertainty involved in formulating “perfect” rules for current circumstances high enough, perfect conservatism is entirely reasonable. (The earliest version of this argument I know of goes back to Plato’s Statesman, which I discuss extensively here. We also see something like this trade-off in nature: an organism can be too well adapted to its environment to survive drastic changes there. “Generalists” may thrive in changing circumstances, while “specialists” die since they cannot adapt quickly enough to these changes).

But suppose that we do not agree with the pure originalist position. (Few people do). The framers may have been very wise, but they did not foresee everything; and we may have a clearly good idea about how to improve existing constitutional rules (e.g., emancipating the slaves). But the problem still remains, since not every potential change is good: when should constitutional rules be changed, and by whom? The constitutional common lawyers argue that the constitution should (normally) not be changed by legislative assemblies or the “explicit” amendment mechanisms indicated in the constitution itself; instead, it should be changed gradually via the decisions of judges, just as proponents of the “regular” common law argue more generally that law should be changed not via legislative codification but rather through the gradual decisions of judges. Common-law constitutionalism thus tends to be associated with arguments for robust forms of judicial review and a general conservatism on matters of constitutional change, the key assumption being that the limits of reason are less binding on judges than on legislatures or the public, though still quite important.

Vermeule subjects this position to withering (though sometimes repetitive) scrutiny, arguing instead for a position that might be called “Benthamite” or “Thayerian” (as he labels it). On this view, legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than courts in deciding to adapt constitutional rules to current circumstances, and hence courts should in general defer to them. (Note that this argument does not say much about incentives: it may be that legislatures face fewer epistemic constraints than judges in constitutional matters, but have worse incentives, and it is not clear which constraints would be “binding” in that situation). I am less interested in his ultimate conclusions, however, which are a bit too US-centric (including a plea for including at least one non-lawyer in the Supreme Court for interesting reasons having to do with the virtues of diversity in deliberative groups), than on his general approach to the problem of the limits of reason in politics and law, which is all about trying to figure out how "collective" mechanisms affect those limits.

Vermeule identifies two basic “epistemic” arguments for the constitutional common law position. On one view, the constitutional common law is better than the constitutional law created by legislatures or other explicit mechanisms because it combines the judgments of many judges over time to produce a judgment that is somehow better than the judgments of any individual judge (for reasons having to do with the Condorcet jury theorem, for example, though other mechanisms might be imagined). We can call this the “aggregation” argument. On the second view, which is associated with Hayek and his followers, the constitutional common law is better than the “explicit” constitutional law of legislatures because the process through which it is produced includes a selection “filter” that weeds out bad rules (the litigation and appeals process, for example) in ways that are not possible for explicitly created constitutional rules. We can call this the “selection” argument.

I am not going to discuss in detail all the considerations Vermeule deploys against these arguments. At any rate, it seems to me that the book is written very much like a lawyer’s brief: the constitutional common-law position is attacked from every possible perspective, some of which are less convincing than others. But a couple of points he makes are quite interesting. First, he argues that the “aggregation” arguments tend to suffer from a “nirvana” fallacy, where the benefits of aggregation are assumed to apply only to judge-made law. But in fact laws that are made by legislatures with many people should also benefit from considerations about aggregation (at least assuming equal incentives for information acquisition and sincere voting, which Vermeule discusses in some detail, though not always satisfactorily). And the kind of aggregation over time postulated by common-law constitutionalists may also suffer from informational cascades and epistemic “free-riding”: judges that defer to past decisions at a later time do not add any new information to the law, leaving the first few judges as the real legislators, for example. (“Epistemic free-riding” may also be a problem in legislatures, especially if the legislature is large, since then incentives for information acquisition are smaller. But this is more or less balanced – under some conditions, at least – by the greater epistemic diversity of legislatures, which should improve the quality of their decisions). Second, drawing on some interesting-looking work by Andrei Schleifer, he suggests that there is no plausible “selection” mechanism for the constitutional common law (though he is agnostic on the regular common law) that ensures bad rules get weeded out. Taken together, he is basically arguing that the limits of reason bind judges at least as much, if not more than, as they bind legislators; there are no special advantages to common-law constitutionalism over other forms of constitutionalism, and many apparent disadvantages.

Anyway, this is probably not a work for everyone (even if it is not particularly difficult to read); but I’m rather interested in “epistemic” arguments for conservatism, and this book offered a good overview of how Burkean arguments about the “wisdom of the past” and Hayekian arguments about the wisdom inherent in decentralized systems can be used or misused.