Pet peeves: the neglect of ancient concepts, a continuing series

(Warning: some complaints about the neglect of ancient concepts by classical scholars). 


I just read a nice piece by W. Jeffrey Tatum on "Roman Democracy?"  in the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought that makes a good case for taking the "democratic" features of the late republican Roman political system seriously, contrary to the common opinion among scholars since the late 19th century that republican Rome was essentially a senatorial oligarchy. 


Tatum sensibly notes that Rome was not a full democracy in the strong sense of the term (pace Fergus Millar), yet he also seems needlessly dismissive of Polybius' and Cicero's judgment that the Roman constitution was "mixed" (pp. 215, 223). Rather, he seems to want to classify Rome as some kind of imperfect democracy, and in the process of casting about for a suitable concept ends up suggesting that Rome was a "delegative democracy" (p. 226). This is a term invented by my old teacher Guillermo O'Donnell to describe political systems like that of Argentina under Menem or Peru under Fujimori, but it is wholly unsuitable for describing the late Roman republic: a "delegative democracy" is a democracy without mechanisms of horizontal accountability, and the Roman republic certainly did not lack that! 


Why not simply say that the best way of describing the Roman political system is through something like the Polybian concept of the "mixed" constitution, or alternatively through the concept of a "hybrid" regime, to use contemporary terminology (though the concept of a hybrid regime today is much less well developed and lacks the normative associations of the idea of the mixed constitution)? The evidence Tatum cites shows quite well that the Roman regime fits the basic ancient criteria for classification as a mixed constitution. It involved a number of distinct centers of power with with complementary but also competing interests (the tribunes, whose power derived from their connection with the popular assemblies and their ability to veto senatorial proposals; the senate, which was the executive committee of the Roman upper classes; and the consuls, whose power derived from their control of military forces in the field) which were not always equally balanced against each other, to be sure, but then again the idea of the mixed constitution did not require that its constituent parts be fully balanced. And it is true that the idea of the mixed constitution had a large normative baggage and implied a certain theory about political stability (which I am currently exploring in this project), but that is no reason to abandon it entirely. 


Aside from concerns about the overwhelming dominance of the senate (which are basically refuted by Tatum), scholars tend to argue that Rome could not be a "mixed" constitution in the Polybian sense because the consuls (the "monarchical" element in the constitution, in the Polybian scheme) were senators and returned to that body, representing senatorial interests all the time. But it seems reasonably clear that in Rome the consuls' power derived not just from the senate, but from their control of armed force and their ability to extract resources from the provinces (as proconsuls after their terms); so Polybius' characterization of the consuls as the "monarchical" center of power (cf. πολιτευμάτων, Histories 6.10.6, which it seems to me could be translated as such) does not seem far-fetched. 


So why the dismissive attitude towards the ancient conceptual apparatus? Rather than throw it out, why not develop it further and see whether it can be adapted to modern conditions? (Another example in the same book: the piece by Forsdyke on the idea of tyranny in classical thought. She seems to suggest that the notion of tyranny in the 5th and 4th centuries was simply a tool in the ideological struggle between the upper and lower classes in the polis, rather than an attempt to actually grasp a real phenomenon, however imperfectly, though the last lines of the piece soften the impression a bit). 

The Class Struggle in Classical Greece

From Aristotle, Politics V.1310a9-11:

at present in some oligarchies they [the oligarchs] swear "And I will be hostile to the people and plan whatever evil I can against them"

Sunday Strange Life Blogging

Not exactly extremophiles tonight. But I found a really neat article about a lovely sea slug, Elysia Chlorotica, which "steals" the chloroplasts of certain algae and derives nutrition from their photosynthesis: in a sense, an animal turns into a plant (picture above, from a neat blog called "Small Things Considered", which is the blog of the American Society for Microbiology; picture source here).

Also via Small Things Considered, a real extremophile, an archaeon that lives in water so hot and acidic it can melt metal rivets (probably worthy of another Sunday extremophile blogging), and the mind-boggling sex lives of mushrooms. The diversity of life never ceases to amaze me.

The most surprising sentence I read today

...while philosophers mandated self-control for kings in regard to both alcohol and sex, the Antigonid king Demetrius the Besieger appropriated the Parthenon itself for the use of his personal harem (ca. 290 BC), and the lead float in the great procession of Ptolemy II in Alexandria in 271/270 was a penis 150ft long with a 20-foot star coming out of its tip.

From a piece by Arthur M. Eckstein on "Hellenistic Monarchy," in the Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, p. 256. The reference to the harem of Demetrius is from Plutarch (Demetrius, 23); the reference to Ptolemy's float is from Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae, 196a-203b). The feminist criticism basically writes itself.

The Hellenistic kings, I learned, were basically warlords (like most kings most of the time - most small coalition, small selectorate political systems are depressingly similar), though they were also more upfront about it than most (their kingdoms were more or less explicitly premised on usurpation and force; they never appeared in civilian garb; they called their territories "spear-won land").

The piece also makes good sense of the idea of deification (which happened with some frequency among Hellenistic kings and later Roman emperors): in a world were gods are basically powerful beings who can grant or deny your wishes, powerful warlords were not functionally different from gods; they too, could grant or deny your wishes, so why not build temples to them? I suspect deification as ideological control (as in modern totalitarian regimes) was probably not used much in ancient times.

One small point of contention. Eckstein thinks that the classical Greek portrayal of the Achaemenid monarchs of Persia as absolute despots (in Herodotus or Plato) was an ideological "fantasy," but the Hellenistic kings were apparently the real deal. The Persian kings, according to him, were constrained by custom and a powerful aristocracy, while the Hellenistic monarchs were (apparently) not. This may be partly true, but I doubt it settles the matter; kings constrained by small aristocracies can be as absolute as kings not so constrained (and even the Hellenistic monarchs must have had a small winning coalition that had to be kept happy, the so-called "friends" [philoi] that Eckstein mentions - friends here is an actual title, not just an informal relation). The well-attested opulence of the Persian court certainly suggests a very high extractive capacity and a not very constrained monarch from the point of view of their subjects, though perhaps their rule was legitimated in a different way and their freedom of action with respect to their selectorates and winning coalitions was smaller than the freedom of action of the Hellenistic kings.

Education, Selection, Discipline

Consider the problem of virtuous leadership in politics. It would seem to be pretty uncontroversial to say that a government is better the more its leaders are virtuous individuals, and that a regime is better the higher the probability that virtuous leaders will be consistently selected to lead it over time. If our political leaders were just and courageous, fair and wise, that would seem to be a good thing, right? To be sure, there are important disagreements about what counts as virtuous leadership and what counts as a political virtue, and at any rate virtuous leadership is not the only thing that matters in politics, but let us put these questions aside for the moment and consider a different question: assuming a certain conception of virtue, what are the possible institutional solutions to the problem of ensuring the rule of virtue, or a close enough approximation? What possible institutions either increase the chances of virtuous leadership, or reduce its need? 

It seems to me that there are basically three solutions to this problem, which we can call selection institutions, disciplinary institutions, and educational institutions.

“Selection” institutions more or less efficiently select the virtuous as rulers and leaders (via properly structured elections, for example), taking the distribution of character and virtue in society as given, or else efficiently select good policies directly by institutional mechanisms that amplify the good qualities of citizens and dampen their bad qualities (via deliberative or aggregative mechanisms, for example). Theories of “epistemic” democracy from Rousseau and Condorcet onwards tend to emphasize these solutions, but the basic idea is quite old. For example, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, none of whom were “democrats” in any important sense of the word, all suggested that though regular people are not individually virtuous, collectively they may yet be good judges of character, especially in small communities where everyone knows everyone else, so that properly structured elections under the right conditions (and there is a lot riding on the qualifications) can result in a relatively good chance of selecting virtuous leadership. The same logic can be applied to the direct selection of policy: if virtuous leadership cannot be ensured, perhaps specific institutions can be created (e.g., referenda or other forms of “direct democracy”) that amplify and aggregate the good qualities of citizens (their private information and local knowledge, for example) so that the kinds of policies that a virtuous leader would implement tend to be selected (I hasten to add that the justification of referenda and other direct democratic institutions is not simply or solely that they tend to result in policies that would have been chosen by ideally virtuous rulers; typically they are justified by the values of participation, autonomy, and the like).

“Disciplinary” institutions more or less efficiently discipline rulers and leaders to act in virtuous ways even if they are not virtuous, taking the outcomes of selection as given. This is the focus of the many theories of political regimes that prescribe separation of power and other such mechanisms; public choice normative theories are an obvious contemporary example, though the basic idea, again, is quite old. So, for example, the theory of the mixed constitution in antiquity is in part a theory of how to induce behaviour that is approximately virtuous by diminishing the incentives towards arrogance and hubris among those who are powerful; it assumes that people who are overly wealthy or overly secure in their power will tend to act in ways that are not beneficial to the community, and hence that other parts of the community need to be given the tools to act as counterweights.

“Educational” institutions, finally, attempt to increase the supply of virtuous individuals in society (who can then be selected into positions of power and responsibility). Many classical writers certainly emphasized such solutions, but one can find examples in contemporary calls for civic education. Educational institutions may aim to directly increase the supply of potential leaders, or may aim to increase the overall level of virtue in the population so that selection institutions will work more efficiently (because more virtuous citizens will be more likely to select leaders properly, perhaps). They may also work directly (e.g., through laws or explicit curricula and in formal settings) or indirectly (as a by-product of other interactions, or as the result of interventions into the broader cultural environment). But the basic point is in both cases to construct institutions, or to shape the cultural environment, in ways that increase the supply of virtue, whether at the citizen level or at the level of candidates for leadership.

It is worth stressing that particular institutions may serve more than one of these purposes. For example, selection institutions such as competitive elections also serve as disciplinary institutions (they are typically selective ex ante and disciplinary ex post). And deliberative mechanisms are typically both selective (of policy) and educational (of participants). But the general analytical distinction between selection, discipline, and education is still, I think, generally useful, as the power of particular effects in any given institutional setting will vary: so elections may, for example, be more efficient at disciplining politicians (i.e., making them behave in ways that approximate virtuous behaviour) under some conditions than at selecting virtuous leaders ex ante.

At any rate, the relationships between these institutions are complex, both within a static context and in the longer run dynamics of a particular system of institutions. From a static perspective, the appropriate balance between selective, disciplinary, and educational institutions (or between the selective, disciplinary, and educational effects of institutions) will depend in great part on a judgment about the relative “efficiency” of institutions for the production and selection of virtuous leaders or the disciplining of non-virtuous leaders. It seems to me, for example, that the greater emphasis on education characteristic of classical thought reflects in part a greater confidence in the effectiveness of the educational technology available to smaller face to face societies; educational institutions for virtue do not seem to scale well in modern, large-scale societies. Similarly, it may be that in modern mass-mediated societies it is increasingly hard to select virtuous leaders ex ante (the noise to signal ratio about their characters is too high, and too susceptible to manipulation or distortion), so that elections need to be reconceived more and more as disciplinary institutions, a thought that most classical thinkers did not seem to consider. For them, elections were primarily selection institutions, and hence did not need to be especially competitive; discipline was produced through the use of the court system or specialized quasi-judicial institutions like the audit (euthuna) and short terms of office, not induced by the regularization of competition common today (note also the prevalence of “term limits” in ancient elections). The parts of the institutional context that appear to be immutable also matter; in an age of monarchy (like the middle ages), where selection institutions (hereditary succession, basically, which is equivalent to more or less random selection) and disciplinary institutions (local noble assemblies, basically) are limited in their effectiveness, it is inevitable that educational solutions would be stressed (hence the many “mirrors of princes” we find, and the relative neglect of discussions of disciplinary and selection institutions).

A potentially more interesting but also more difficult set of questions concern the longer-run dynamics of these systems of institutions. I can imagine, for example, that even though from a static perspective all three solutions are equivalent (so that we could in principle substitute a highly efficient disciplinary system for a highly efficient educational or selection system: consider Kant’s famous comment about the possibility of designing a good constitution for a “race of devils”), from a dynamic perspective things might look quite different. Perhaps an over-reliance on disciplinary institutions would tend to induce a downward shift in the supply of virtue, since all disciplinary procedures can catch people who are actually virtuous, so that potentially virtuous candidates for leadership would be discouraged; or perhaps excessive reliance on selection institutions would increase the risk of really bad outcomes (as on occasion a really bad leader or a really bad policy would slip through). Ancient writers accordingly stressed a relatively balanced mixture of discipline, education, and selection as a solution to the problem of good leadership; but perhaps the appropriate balance will always depend on the actual efficacy of the respective organizational technologies and on material and cultural conditions (so that perhaps we are today right to more or less disregard proposals for extensive civic education as unlikely to lead to significant changes in the virtue of leaders).

What am I missing? Are there other possibilities, other than education, selection, and discipline? 

Endnotes

Things that caught my eye in the last week or so:

• I had not known that in some societies, paternity is thought to be "partible", because they believe that "a fetus is made of accumulated semen" and hence can have multiple biological fathers (the quote is from this book, which sounds interesting, p. 60, via the Less Wrong post linked above, which is also interesting).
• The art of sleeping in seminars. Must remember all the rules next time I sleep in one.
• I found that I had mixed feelings about the possibility of a world without mosquitoes: though apparently their extermination would not be especially damaging (other species would apparently do many of the things they currently do, with the usual caveats that our understanding of their ecological role is limited), I have a quasi-aesthetic negative reflex reaction to the possibility of intentionally exterminating completely another life-form, even one that causes a lot of misery (and even as I know species go extinct from natural causes all the time). I wonder if there is anything out there about the morality of species-cide? I know there was some discussion at some time about the possibility of completely eradicating the smallpox virus, for example, but I don't know if there is serious literature about the morality of the practice (not that we are about to exterminate mosquitoes, mind you - the possibility is purely theoretical). 
• Theatre for audiences of one. I suppose this is closer to conceptual art than to traditional theatre.
• The intelligence of Octopuses. The thing about octopuses is that their "intelligence" is not a by-product of their sociality: they are solitary creatures. Presumably this means that octopi could not develop intelligence that depends on the manipulation of meaningful symbols or language?
• Why the one-eyed do not rule among the blind. An interesting point on the social mediation of insight. 

Polybius and the Dialectic of Forgetting (Or, Theoretical Models in the Classical World)

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, written as part of research for this project.)

The extant fragments of book VI of Polybius’ Histories contain a famous (in certain circles) discussion of the “cycle of regimes” (VI.5.10-9.14). The story goes more or less like this.

Human beings start in something like the “state of nature,” without arts or sciences, and in particular without highly developed moral norms, where we herd together like other animals following the strongest or most daring man (the basic primate pattern, we might say today: I can’t help viewing a lot of the stuff I’m reading right now through the lens of Boehm’s book, and this post will be no exception). This is what Polybius calls “monarchy” (μοναρχίαν), where the authority of the leader is limited by his physical strength and daring. This sort of “natural monarchy” then evolves towards kingship (βασιλεία) properly speaking, which is no longer a simple hierarchy sustained by strength and daring but a moral community where the authority of the leader is very much constrained by relatively egalitarian ideas about justice. In such a community, the king does not attempt to distinguish himself from his subjects by their dress or in their food and drink, and he gains the support of others only insofar as he coordinates the enforcement of community norms (VI.6.11-12), even as he may be weak and infirm; tendencies to domination are effectively kept in check.

Polybius explains the development of these ideas about justice as the result of spontaneous reflection about reciprocity (VI.6.5-10): because we expect others to reciprocate our good deeds, and value the good deeds of others, norms codifying those expectations emerge, in turn sustaining the authority of those leaders who coordinate their enforcement. Our “natural” ideas of justice are thus quite egalitarian (cf. the use of “democratic” language to describe these norms in all regimes: VI.8.4 πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας, VI.9.4 τὴν ἰσηγορίαν καὶ τὴν παρρησίαν), though they will accommodate some hierarchy to the degree that a leader can enforce them. But Polybius argues that this sort of “egalitarian” kingship is not stable; insofar as kingship becomes hereditary (something that is common, Polybius suggests, due to the popular belief in the inheritability of virtuous dispositions) it develops necessarily into tyranny, i.e., a regime where egalitarian community norms no longer constrain the leader. The increase in the security of the position of the king’s heirs, which comes also as a result of other changes (e.g., the emergence of resources such as fortified places that can be monopolized by the leader), increases their temptations to try to dominate others. They begin by trying to distinguish themselves from the others by dress or other signals (VI.7.7), and end by trying to obtain more material resources and reproductive advantages than anyone else in the community. The basic mechanism of change in the Polybian theory of change appears here for the first time: security of position enhances a human tendency to domination (as I was writing this, I came across this recent piece by Ryan Balot that makes a similar point).

But this tendency to domination is counterbalanced by an apparently equally natural tendency to resent domination in the name of the earlier egalitarian community norms. The “best” men – those who are most high-spirited and resentful of domination – will tend to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in the name of these norms, setting themselves up in their place. As speculative political history and anthropology, this is perhaps not self-evident (why would tyranny necessarily give rise to aristocracy rather than democracy or a renewed kingship?), though in general I think Polybius gets the basic features of long-run political development right, even if modern anthropologists would insist on a finer gradation of steps from the basic primate hierarchy to relatively acephalous egalitarian societies to “big man” societies to the kind of morally constrained “chiefdom” that corresponds to Polybius’ notion of kingship and eventually to tyranny. At any rate, the transition from tyranny to aristocracy does fit the history of Rome well enough (and remember, Polybius is writing a history of the growth of Roman power). But as a depiction of a common political psychology, Polybius’ idea is very much on target, insofar as human nature does seem to contain both tendencies towards domination (at least among males) and tendencies to resent domination, and our “default” social norms are mostly egalitarian.

We could thus say that political change, in the Polybian story, is all about the emergence of egalitarian norms, their violation by individuals capable of accumulating resources, and the restoration of such norms by those outside the “winning coalition” who still value such norms. The pattern is repeated at the next step in the cycle. As time and generations pass, the sons of aristocrats become again secure in their position, and again engage in attempts to dominate others in contravention of community norms: this is the beginning of oligarchy. Polybius describes how these new leaders no longer have any experience of the previous egalitarian norms (ἄπειροι δὲ καθόλου πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας), and have forgotten the misfortunes that led their parents to rise up against tyrants (VI.8.4-5). There is a kind of normative drift: signs of distinction that had been freely given to their parents for their services are interpreted by their sons as things that they deserve naturally, so that the relatively egalitarian norms that had regulated the conduct of their parents no longer regulate their own conduct. What happens instead is that the oligarchs abandon begin to pursue unrestrainedly material and other advantages: they take from others without reciprocating. But the egalitarian norms still remain strong within the rest of the population, and so eventually the people rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, banding behind any leaders who credibly promise to enforce the old moral norms. The people, however, remember with fear both the kings (and their transformation into tyrants) as well as the more recent oligarchs (note the emphasis on memory, which is partly the historian’s domain); they thus decide to manage their affairs by themselves, and democracy is born.

In democracy, as in aristocracy or kingship before, egalitarian norms remain strong as long as some are alive who experienced the previous form of domination; but when the experience is lost (with the grandchildren of the founders of democracy, VI.9.4-5), their influence weakens. People begin to take such norms for granted, and those with resources (the wealthy) begin to attempt to “aim at pre-eminence,” i.e., attempt to dominate others. This competitive struggle among rich individuals sets in motion a process of far-reaching social disintegration, where each wealthy individual corrupts the people by turning their desires in the direction of material accumulation and accustoming them to getting what they want by raiding the wealth of other wealthy individuals. This turns the democracy into a rule of violence (χειροκρατίαν), where multiple demagogic leaders compete to dominate by promising each other’s wealth to the people; the process ends with the masses turning into beasts again (cf. ἀποτεθηριωμένον, VI.9.9), i.e., returning to the state described at the beginning of the cycle, herding like the other animals without real social norms, and eventually getting a new “master,” a new leader who is only limited by his capacity for violence, though under social conditions that are different from those operating at the beginning of the cycle.

In summary, Polybius claims that simple regimes develop according to the following cyclical pattern: pre-social state of nature/natural monarchy->;kingship->;tyranny->;aristocracy->;oligarchy->;democracy->;mob rule/post-social state of nature->;natural despotic monarchy (repeat). This “theory” has sometimes been criticized by modern scholars (see, e.g., von Fritz, p. 84) for its apparently “deterministic” or “rigid” sequence of changes, and indeed Polybius’ presentation is a far cry from the nuanced discussions of political change found in Plato (on which he claims to draw, though Polybius’ discussion is very different from what we find in books VIII and IX of the Republic and in the Statesman) and Aristotle (whose discussions of the problem of political change in book V of the Politics he may not have known, given the possible loss from public view of a lot of Aristotelian writing between the third and the first century ADBC). Moreover, the “theory” of the cycle of regimes sits uneasily with Polybius’ “historical” sensibilities; it is abundantly evident to any observer of historical reality that regimes sometimes change in ways that do not fit a clear pattern (as it was to Aristotle, for example, who criticized – wrongly - Plato for a similar idea). Democracies sometimes turn into oligarchies (as when the Thirty took power in Athens in 404BC), monarchies into democracies, and in general any kind of regime into any other kind, as Aristotle documented in exhaustive detail in book V of the Politics. Writers who knew their Polybius well often tactfully pointed this out after summarizing Polybius’ “theory.” Thus Cicero notes in De Re Publica I.68, after a discussion of regime change that is obviously influenced by Polybius, that regimes tend to change in ways that do not necessarily fit any simple pattern (a remark that is attributed to Scipio, who had been a friend of Polybius in real life), and Machiavelli notes that a community would be unlikely to experience all the stages of change described in the theory before it was taken over by a more stable and better organized state (Discourses I.2 – there is a bit of a puzzle here, for though Machiavelli is clearly describing something like Polybius’ theory, he knew no Greek, and book 6 of Polybius had not been translated at the time). Given that Polybius was not politically or historically naïve, it seems unlikely that these observations would have escaped him.

Yet the criticism is unfair. Polybius explicitly indicates that he is simplifying the “more precise” discussions found in Plato and other philosophers (VI.5.10), which he finds too complicated for pragmatic purposes. The “simplified” theory of the cycle of regimes is not to be taken as an accurate representation of historical reality, but as something like a “model” in the sense in which economists use the term: a distillation of the incentives and other influences affecting the main political actors in a regime, and pragmatically useful as a tool for analyzing political changes in more complex regimes, like the Roman one. (Polybius’ “solution” to the difficulties of the cycle, the “mixed regime,” is also best understood as that sort of model, though that is a subject for another post). These incentives are not simply incentives to behaviour (as in much modern rational choice theorizing) but to character: the model describes how certain characters emerge endogenously from certain regimes, given some assumptions about human nature and about the preservation of historical memory.

What is especially neat about Polybius’ presentation of the “cycle” of regimes is how he ties experience and forgetting with the natural tendencies to both attempt and resent domination in the explanation of political change. Constitutions change for the worse because people forget their experience of earlier attempts of some to dominate others, or rather, because the people who overthrow bad regimes are unable to pass on this experience with sufficient clarity to their children as the children’s position in society becomes increasingly secure. Without real fear of domination (which mostly comes from actual experience of such attempts), egalitarian norms do not survive, a point that applies as much to the newly victorious Rome of Polybius’ time as to other polities. (Incidentally, this seems to indicate that the historian’s role is to remind his audience of these misfortunes, a point argued at some length by Balot with many examples from the rest of the Histories). Thus we have a dialectic between the tendencies to resent domination (which sustain egalitarian norms) and the tendencies to dominate (which corrupt these norms): as one gains the upper hand, it immediately begins to weaken. This dialectic is also a process of corruption: healthy norms are first destroyed among a small elite, then among a larger elite, and finally among the entire people as the historical memory of domination is lost first among the heirs of the monarch, later among the heirs of the larger elite that overthrew the tyrant, and finally among the people themselves through the corrupting effects of the competitive struggle for position among rich individuals. A secure, healthy simple regime is in a sense bad for the education of its leaders, whereas a certain kind of misfortune is a good education, a theme that Polybius emphasizes throughout the Histories.

Ultimately, of course, this “model” of political change is used by Polybius to understand and analyze Roman history: Rome was successful insofar as its leaders instinctively chose courses of action that constantly prevented them from giving full rein to their dominating tendencies (e.g., the “checks and balances” of the Roman mixed constitution, which has, I think, been much misunderstood by modern historians who point out, rightly, that Rome during Polybius’ lifetime was basically an oligarchy; but that is another topic) and will be unsuccessful insofar as it achieves full security (as is evident from the later books of Polybius’ Histories, or at least of what remains of them). The model may be historically implausible (in its assertion that typically tyrannies turn into aristocracies, and oligarchies into democracies, for example) but it is no more implausible than some of the rational choice models of political change in use today (which are useful too, I should note), and it has the added benefit of incorporating a plausible moral psychology. By contrast, Aristotle’s exhaustive description of political change in book V of the Politics, though empirically better informed and starting from a basically plausible principle about how the violation of norms about justice leads to political change (where justice is always understood as a form of equality, though differently in different regimes), seems to miss the forest for the trees. Aristotle spends too much time looking at purely accidental causes of political change (“exogenous shocks” in the contemporary economic jargon, such as foreign conquest or institutional drift), or exploring varieties of a single cause of political change (the attempts to dominate others by high-status individuals), whereas Polybius’ model almost begs to be formalized as a story about the interaction between tendencies to domination and tendencies to resent such domination in the absence of perfect memory about the consequences of domination, and it seems readily applicable to a variety of cases even when it cannot explain them completely. From this point of view, it does not surprise me that Polybius’ simplified story was much more influential, historically, than Aristotle’s complex and empirically informed catalogue of the causes of political change: it identifies a key cause of political change for ill, and suggests ready remedies (basically, keeping the fear of domination alive through “checks and balances,” a remedy that is mentioned by Aristotle as well, but only among many other suggestions, some major, some minor).

Sunday Extremophile Blogging: The Pompeii Worm

The Pompeii worm (photo credit: Wikimedia commons). After water bears (which are apparently pretty common - I didn't know, but you can find them in an average pond!), Pompeii worms are the most temperature resistant complex organisms that exist (capable of living in 80C water, and sustaining huge temperature differences between their head and their tail). They basically live in the gates of hell.

Also: not extremophiles, but lots of neat pictures here of interesting new species. I especially like the Dracula minnow and the psychodelic frogfish.

Cicero and Machiavelli on Fear and Love

(Warning: some thinking out loud about some passages of Cicero and Machiavelli, in the course of doing some research for a work in progress. A footnote of interest to historians of political thought or political theorists with a historical bent, perhaps.)

Cicero, Philippics 1.33-34 (the Perseus text is unaccountably missing the last lines of 1.33; a full translation is found here):

What I am more afraid of is lest, being ignorant of the true path to glory, you should think it glorious for you to have more power by yourself than all the rest of the people put together, and lest you should prefer being feared by your fellow-citizens to being loved by them. And if you do think so, you are ignorant of the road to glory. For a citizen to be dear to his fellow-citizens, to deserve well of the republic, to be praised, to be respected, to be loved, is glorious; but to be feared, and to be an object of hatred, is odious, detestable; and moreover, pregnant with weakness and decay. And we see that, even in the play, the very man who said, "what care I though all men should hate my name, so long as fear accompanies their hate?" [The Latin is much more concise and lapidary: "oderint, dum metuant"] found that it was a mischievous principle to act upon.

I wish, O Antonius, that you could recollect your grandfather of whom, however, you have repeatedly heard me speak. Do you think that he would have been willing to deserve even immortality, at the price of being feared in consequence of his licentious use of arms? What he considered life, what he considered prosperity, was the being equal to the rest of the citizens in freedom, and chief of them all in worth.

Machiavelli, The Prince, chapter XVII:

Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.

Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. But when it is necessary for him to proceed against the life of someone, he must do it on proper justification and for manifest cause, but above all things he must keep his hands off the property of others, because men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony. Besides, pretexts for taking away the property are never wanting; for he who has once begun to live by robbery will always find pretexts for seizing what belongs to others; but reasons for taking life, on the contrary, are more difficult to find and sooner lapse. But when a prince is with his army, and has under control a multitude of soldiers, then it is quite necessary for him to disregard the reputation of cruelty, for without it he would never hold his army united or disposed to its duties.

At first glance, it looks as if Cicero and Machiavelli were presenting diametrically opposed positions: Cicero argues that a political leader should avoid being feared, and that it is better that he be loved, whereas Machiavelli suggests that it is fine if the prince is feared. This fits in with the "standard view" concerning Machiavelli's relationship to Cicero (see, e.g., Skinner; consider also, for example, the discussions in The Prince asserting that generosity or honesty are inessential to political leaders, which clearly reverse Cicero's discussion of the need for these virtues in On Duties). There are some (partial) dissents (e.g., Colish), but in general the consensus seems to be that Machiavelli and Cicero present fairly opposed views of the virtues of political leaders.

Yet it is clear from these passages that both Machiavelli and Cicero agree that being hated is fatal to a political leader. They differ mostly insofar as Cicero seems to think that becoming feared without incurring hatred is unlikely, whereas Machiavelli is more sanguine about this possibility. But even this difference can be attributed to the fact that Cicero is considering the kinds of actions that someone who used to be an equal (Antony) would have to do in order to become dominant; and in his view (perhaps exaggerated for rhetorical effect?) these actions are likely to incur hatred alongside fear, and are unlikely to bring real and durable fame. And that thought does not seem to be in conflict with Machiavelli's views at all.

Unrelated point: working through Cicero's Philippics after reading Boehm makes me think that the upper level of Roman society behaved very much like a tribe with a strong ethos of equality, despite the otherwise tremendous material and status inequalities in Roman society. Like tribesmen everywhere, Cicero and his contemporaries among the senatorial class seemed to be extremely sensitive to suggestions that this or that person aimed to become dominant over them, and expended great energy arguing over the symbols of such domination (the office of the dictator, crowns, funeral monuments, public thanksgivings), even as the real threats to their equality lay in the ability of the proconsuls to basically create private armies during their long periods of imperium away from Italy (by Marc Antony's time, they could sometimes spend 5 years on campaign away from Rome). Also, it is amazing how the Romans of the time, like many of the tribes described by Boehm, had few mechanisms to deal with persistent attempts at domination other than assassination. It's actually kind of astounding the sheer violence present in the background of politics at Rome in the waning days of the republic – people are being killed right and left, the senate is often surrounded by armed men, and prominent political figures, Cicero included, are always conscious of the very real threats to their physical safety. And yet they seemed to think that such extrajudicial killings were often quite legitimate, though they of course disagreed about which ones! Late republican Rome was really a Machiavellian jungle, and Cicero was very good at surviving in it; it would seem unlikely if Machiavelli's ideas about political survival were entirely alien to Cicero.

Footnotes on Things I’ve been Reading: Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999).

This is a book about human “political nature.” Clearly the mature fruit of a long life of anthropological research, the book considers a question that goes back to Hobbes and Rousseau: the origins of inequality (or rather, of equality, in this case) and its relationship to “human nature.” To answer this question, Boehm draws on a wealth of ethnographical and archeological evidence, as well as studies of primate societies (primarily chimpanzees and bonobos, but also baboons and gorillas).

The starting point of the book is the observation that, though human societies range from the extremely egalitarian to the abjectly despotic, and our closest primate relatives create basically despotic groups, human forager bands are always extremely egalitarian (Boehm knows. He obviously read almost all significant ethnographies of forager bands as of the late 1990s). This egalitarianism is of course partly due to basic material causes: in a forager society with little division of labor it is difficult to stockpile durable resources or acquire scarce skills in ways that can be exploited for political advantage, as Rousseau saw, especially when dissatisfied individuals have a relatively cheap (though not costless) exit option (people can move between bands easily). But the material causes are not the whole story, as the despotic forager social groups created by our close primate relatives, who also have little “property,” show. In particular, human forager bands are politically egalitarian (and not just economically egalitarian), recognizing no real, permanent authorities (there are typically no chiefs or “alpha males,” and decisions are made by consensus) and displaying a “democratic” ethos of autonomy where each individual thinks himself the equal of the rest (Whether women are considered equals within the band varies from forager band to forager band, partly depending on environmental factors and patterns of exogamy, but for the most part women in forager bands tend to have higher status than women in other forms of society). Boehm tells some striking stories about the general ineffectiveness of “chiefs” in forager bands: people who try to give orders in them basically get ignored.

This observation about forager societies is important because it seems reasonably well established that foraging societies were our “ancestral societies,” i.e., the environments where any natural dispositions that human beings possess even today evolved. We probably lived for at least 100,000 years in such societies before we came up with different forms of social organization, and so the (controversial, but at least plausible) assumption is that insofar as human beings have a political nature, it would be manifested most clearly in such societies, or at least it would have been shaped in such societies (though it is not clear that the forager societies of today are good proxies for the forager societies of 100,000 years ago): there should be a sense in which we were ecologically adapted to life in such societies (rather than in contemporary complex societies). The question is, then, what explains the egalitarianism of forager bands, both current and historical? And is the explanation for forager egalitarianism something that we can attribute to “human nature”?

Boehm’s main thesis is that forager egalitarianism is sustained by moral communities that enable the rank and file to build coalitions to put down would-be “alphas.” Forager bands, in his view, have “reversed” dominance hierarchies that prevent bullies and aggressors from creating a dominance hierarchy of their own: egalitarianism is sustained by the coordinated dominance of the strong by the weak. Without the ability of the rank and file to form large coalitions to put down would-be dominators, the primate tendency is to establish dominance hierarchies, as we see in chimpanzees and bonobos; but the ability to form large and stable coalitions in turn depends on the development of the capacity for symbolic communication, and, to a lesser degree, of projectile weapons. (Low-ranking chimpanzees can sometimes band together and put down alpha males, as the chimpanzees at Yerkes Primate Research Center are reported to have done, but they do not seem to be able to create stable coalitions that get rid of the entire dominance hierarchy, unlike human beings). This seems right to me: in order for status equality to be resilient against attempts to subvert it, it requires a vigilant community to sanction upstarts and bullies; and the vigilance of the community is primarily made possible by a set of norms that strongly promote values such as generosity, sharing, and the like and proscribe certain forms of arrogance, etc., as Boehm notes.

But Boehm goes further: he argues that the emergence and maintenance of egalitarianism in forager societies supports a view of human “political nature” that he calls “ambivalent:” human beings (especially males) display tendencies towards dominance, just like chimpanzees and bonobos (though within a group the strength of these tendencies will be variable, of course), but they also resent being dominated, and in humans that resentment of domination is able to generate strongly egalitarian societies in the right material circumstances. (Boehm suggests that the same resentment of domination can be observed in chimpanzees and bonobos, though without the ability to form stable coalitions for egalitarian purposes they can’t do much about it, especially since male chimps and bonobos do not have an “exit” option: solitary males who leave the group are liable to be killed on sight by other groups). Hobbes and Rousseau, in other words, are both right: in the “state of nature” it is the case both that “every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate that he sets upon himselfe” (Leviathan XIII) which leads to attempts to dominate others (to “extort a greater value from his contemners, by dommage,; and from the others, by the example,” what Hobbes also calls “glory”), and that this very same tendency, when combined with the ability to form large coalitions, informed by an ethos of equality (and with a general lack of “property,” understood as durable and potentially scarce resources that can be exploited to create personal forms of dependence, as Rousseau noted), results in the sort of fierce independence that Rousseau praised in the Second Discourse, at least under the right material conditions (little division of labor or durable property). By contrast, similar tendencies among chimpanzees or bonobos evolved into more or less stereotyped dominance and submission behaviors (which make sense from an evolutionary perspective, since they seem to obviate the need for actual conflict over resources, with its attendant risk of death) and the development of clear status hierarchies.

The most interesting and controversial part of Boehm’s book is in the last couple of chapters, where he tells a story about how the emergence of egalitarian moral communities in our distant forager past changed the selection pressures operating on human beings to produce some altruistic tendencies. The story is too complicated (and necessarily speculative) to summarize here, but basically it has to do with how egalitarian moral communities neutralize the reproductive advantages of bullies and aggressive individuals and increase the force of “between group” selection pressures (favoring “altruistic” dispositions) against “within group” selection pressures (favoring “selfish” dispositions). For example, Boehm has some fascinating remarks about the “meat sharing” systems that almost all foragers develop. Hunting is an important source of protein in forager societies, but it is also irregular. Since some people are better hunters than others, these people could perhaps exploit their hunting skills to extract various advantages (including political domination and reproductive advantages), and indeed they sometimes try. But in all forager societies the group basically “randomizes” credit for kills (by giving credit to the owner of the arrow, for example, but swapping arrows incessantly!), so that the actual hunter cannot exploit the fact that he made a kill to dominate the group in any way. Such meat-sharing systems thus seem to reduce the “reproductive” advantage of selfish dispositions.

In general, this is an excellent book, despite some occasional repetition and somewhat pedestrian prose. But it is worth wondering whether it implies much of anything for politics in complex societies. Boehm is too good of an anthropologist to suggest that we simply have a “natural” tendency to create egalitarian societies (there are many human societies where the ethos of equality of forager bands does not exist, as he notes) but he does seem to think that democratic societies (including larger, more complex societies with formal checks and balances, from the Iroquois confederacy to modern representative democracies) are in far better accord with “human nature” than other forms of society. It is not entirely clear to me what this means. Partly, I suspect that he means that we are happier in more equal societies, or at least that we have a tendency to view justice through the lens of equality; if indeed in the vast sweep of human history over the past hundred millennia we have mostly lived in egalitarian societies, it should not be surprising that we have some deep preference for such societies (I was thinking of this when reading this interesting proposal for “income and wealth ceilings” through taxation – deciding collectively that no one should have more than, say, $100,000). But we would need a more robust moral psychology (I’m inclined to think that this moral psychology would follow “Rousseauan” lines about the interaction between self love and love of esteem) to think properly about this question; and it seems to me at any rate that Boehm underplays the ways in which our moral ethos interacts with material factors. It seems rather important that truly egalitarian societies only exist in circumstances where the division of labor is minimal and the possibilities for exit from the group relatively large, and that complex societies are all over the place in terms of the despotic/egalitarian continuum; much of what Boehm says suggests to me that egalitarianism is actually quite fragile once material conditions change. And if the story of forager societies for 100,000 years is basically a story of egalitarianism, the story of complex agricultural societies has been one of inegalitarianism for a good 5,000 years, which, though not as impressive, is still a pretty long time and has involved more people than the previous 100,000 years. Whether truly egalitarian complex societies are possible seems like an open question, and one that cannot be answered by simply pointing to modern democracies (which have many inegalitarian spaces and some egalitarian spaces).

Human nature, it seems to me, is best understood as capable of “moral coalition” formation (coalitions that are also moralized by a specific justificatory ethos). Under some conditions, these coalitions can be used to generate egalitarian societies, but in others they generate inegalitarian societies (every dominant dictator in a complex society needs a coalition to support him, and these coalitions tend to be moralized and justified in various ways). This seems consistent with what Boehm says, but is perhaps a more “pessimistic” about the possibilities for egalitarianism in complex societies. Anyway, I did not intend to write this much about the book, but it is really good; heard about it via Robin Hanson (thanks!), who also has many interesting things to say about how we might describe human nature.

Computational Ability as Intelligence

I sometimes come across articles like this, where things like the following are said:

He said that plants used information encrypted in the light to immunise themselves against seasonal pathogens.

"Every day or week of the season has… a characteristic light quality," Professor Karpinski explained.

“So the plants perform a sort of biological light computation, using information contained in the light to immunise themselves against diseases that are prevalent during that season."

Professor Christine Foyer, a plant scientist from the University of Leeds, said the study "took our thinking one step forward".

"Plants have to survive stresses, such as drought or cold, and live through it and keep growing," she told BBC News.

"This requires an appraisal of the situation and an appropriate response - that's a form of intelligence.

The move I want to highlight is in the last line: why insist that this is a form of intelligence? It seems to me that “intelligence” is a “status” term: when we apply it to something, we raise (or lower) the status of that something, without necessarily adding to our comprehension of the phenomenon (the recognition of this problem is very old; see my post below on Plato and the idea of distinguishing animals from humans through the criterion of “reason”). If the experiments described are appropriate, it seems clear enough that the plants are performing some kind of computation; but in saying that they thereby have some kind of intelligence we do not learn something more about the plants. At best, we only learn about an attempt to increase the status of the research – to make it seem “sexier” perhaps? – and of the researchers.

The same point could be applied with respect to discussions of human and artificial intelligence. Human intelligence, in its many varieties, seems to be simply a form of computation, distinguishable in degree from other forms of computation but not necessarily in kind: it is a complex of abilities, more or less integrated, for pattern recognition, actuarial calculation of costs and benefits of action, social relationship tracking, and the like, augmented by social rules and institutions (themselves the planned or unplanned emergent consequences of interaction). Some of these abilities can be more or less functionally replicated in modern computer hardware (e.g., the ability to play chess), whereas others cannot, at least not yet or with current techniques. Yet when we ascribe intelligence to people or things, we do more than express that they are able to engage in particular forms of computation. Rather, we are for the most part raising (or lowering) the status of whatever it is that we say has “intelligence.” A sign of this is the way in which the term is often used in a proprietary manner: people may object to descriptions of human intelligence that reduce it to computation, or to descriptions of artificial forms of computation as intelligence. Or people become hugely exercised about ideas about intelligence differentials – either to stress that such differences exist or to deny that they exist or matter.

The problem with ascribing intelligence to various computational systems seems to be less the idea that intelligence is a form of computation than the reduction in status accompanying this reduction: to say that human intelligence is merely a form of computation seems demeaning in some ways, since it diminishes the “scarcity” of intelligence as a distinctively human possession, or makes it less special. But if intelligence is computation, then it can be found, to different degrees of “intensity” and “specialization,” in all kinds of systems: plants, animals, insect colonies, social institutions, and of course suitably programmed computers. Some forms of computation in these systems might be more powerful, for particular purposes, than the grab-bag of abilities powered by the human brain; and some forms of computation may be more or less exploitable by individual human beings (your own brain power is usually exploitable, but the computational abilities of other systems may not be so easily exploitable by people in your position). Moreover, computation is always relative to problems: some systems are more effective at computing solutions to certain problems than others. And though there is such a thing as universal computation, the abstract notion of the universal Turing machine does not imply anything about the ability of universal computers to successfully solve a particular problem in a limited time frame – that always depends on the particular “program.” If the human brain seems unusual, it is because it seems to be able to solve a very large number of problems, either by itself, or in conjunction with tools and institutions that amplify and distribute the computing power of human society.

It seems to me that if we could banish the term intelligence and substitute for it a more status-neutral term, a lot of discussions about cognition and “reason” could become clearer (at least until the new term acquired a sufficient positive or negative status valence). Indeed, this seems to have been one purpose of Turing’s “imitation game”: to break down the preoccupation with demarcating the “intelligent” from the “non-intelligent,” by substituting computation for intelligence as the more interesting concept from a theoretical perspective. There is a quote that appears as the epigraph to Accelerando, from the AI pioneer Edsger W. Djikstra, that expresses this attitude perfectly: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” The question of whether X is intelligent is often no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim: what may matter is the kind of computation that it is able to perform, either by itself, or in conjunction with other agents.

Ideal and Non-ideal Theories of Justice

(Warning: 1500 words on a somewhat technical problem in political philosophy).

A couple of days ago I went to a talk about the distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory in contemporary political philosophy. The distinction is typically presented as a distinction between a theory that describes a perfectly or completely just society, and a theory that describes what justice requires in imperfect societies with varying levels of injustice in order to improve it (but not necessarily to make it perfect). There are more precise ways of articulating the distinction (see, for example, here), but probably the most common way of making it precise is the one that Rawls follows in his A Theory of Justice (where the terminology originates): namely, as a distinction between a theory that describes what justice requires when we can expect everyone or almost everyone to be well disposed to act justly ("full compliance" conditions, in the jargon) and a theory that describes what justice requires when we cannot expect everyone to do what justice requires, or to the full extent that justice requires ("partial compliance" theory). To use Rousseau's terminology, this would be a distinction between theories that take people "as they should be" (and can be, if the institutions of society were correctly ordered) and theories of justice that take people "as they are" (but try to suggest institutions that could improve them).

Rawls famously (or infamously, depending on whom you ask) presented his own theory as ideal ("full compliance") theory. But he did not think that ideal theory was unrealistic, or that it incorporated false assumptions about human nature. Since the development of the moral powers is dependent on institutions, and just institutions would reinforce the development of the moral powers, there is nothing "impossible" about full compliance: the right institutions would produce the maximal amount of compliance, because people who grow up in such institutions would develop the moral powers as much as possible (dispositions are "endogenous" to institutions, to use a bit of useful economic jargon). Of course, Rawls might be wrong about the effects of well-ordered institutions on human characters and dispositions, but the theory is not ideal because he assumes something false about human beings, but only because he assumes (on the basis of what he takes to be the best available knowledge about human moral development) something that does not obtain now but might obtain in a different institutional environment, namely, full compliance with the demands of justice.

Since we do not live under the best possible institutions, we need something like a theory of just transitions, i.e., a theory that prescribes or describes just changes along the path towards a well-ordered society; hence, according to Rawls, we need not just ideal theory but also non-ideal theory (which he did not propose to develop). Crucially, however, he argued that without ideal theory it would be impossible to properly develop non-ideal theory. Rawls' model of action seems to have been, like that of most philosophers, a model of making (in Arendt's terminology): we need some kind of ultimate blueprint if we are to be sure that we are moving in the right direction. But this assumption has been attacked by a number of people (as it was at the talk) who think that the (academically dominant) preoccupation with ideal theorizing has become a kind of scholasticism. The objection is basically that ideal theory is superfluous: we do not need ideal theory to tell us which injustices are important and need to be addressed immediately (e.g., slavery, which we might all agree is unjust – why would we need Rawls' theory of justice to tell us this?), and at any rate ideal theory is insufficient to tell us what to do in other cases (how does knowing what the ideal society look like help us figure out what to do about, e.g., female genital mutilation, if anything?).

There are a few obvious responses to this criticism. On one view, for example, ideal theory helps us clarify the values that should be guiding our actions in the non-ideal world: we need to be able, for example, to know what a commitment to "equality" or "freedom" really entails before we go around making changes to various existing social arrangements in their name. In this case ideal theory does not serve as a blueprint for (long-term) action, but rather as an exploration of the structure of our values and of the kinds of trade-offs among them that we should find permissible. But it occurred to me that one useful way of understanding the relationship between ideal and non-ideal theory is as a relationship between global theories of justice and local theories of justice.

A global theory of justice is a theory about the just arrangements affecting an entire social order (e.g., a country or the entire world): it prescribes changes to the entire structure of institutions that define a social order so as to make such an order just. A local theory of justice, by contrast, prescribes changes to specific institutions or practices on the background of a (e.g., a local theory of justice might be concerned with the rules of war, or with the problem of poverty in some particular context). Typically, global theories of justice will appear to be ideal relative to local theories in that global changes might seem to require many steps, each of which would be more or less likely to happen, which implies a low likelihood of eventual realization, whereas local changes might seem to require fewer steps, so they appear to be feasible. There is often a relatively clear path to implementation for the prescriptions of local theories of justice, whereas there is no such clear path for global theories. Moreover, global theories of justice may incorporate assumptions about human nature, the nature of justice, and about the possibilities of socialization, that are more uncertain than the assumptions that local theories of justice need to make; so, for example, we are less certain about whether any set of institutions can produce dispositions resulting in "full compliance" than we are that some set of institutions might produce the desired behaviour in some particular field of endeavour. From this point of view, we might assign a much lower probability of being true to any global theory of justice than we would to a local theory of justice.

But global theories of justice might still constrain local theories of justice. For example, it would count as evidence against a local theory of justice that it leads us to a situation where certain apparently desirable global changes seem impossible without injustice. Consider a concrete example discussed in the talk. Buchanan and Keohane have argued for a rule enabling some kind of preventive war, so long as it was waged by a suitably defined "reliable moral actor" or coalition thereof. This is a "local" theory of justice, intended to address a specific problem: Buchanan and Keohane think there are circumstances where it would seem to be a good idea to have the "good guys" wage war to prevent the "bad guys" from doing bad things, and they argue that these circumstances would need to be circumscribed through a specific institutional process. But it would also seem that if the rule proposed by Buchanan and Keohane were to become entrenched, it would prevent developments in the international system towards more "ideal" states (e.g., a Kantian cosmopolitan federation), since the rule seems ripe for abuse by militarily hegemonic powers (like the USA). So from the point of view of an "ideal" theory of justice, one would want to say something like "avoid entrenching a rule that is easily exploitable by military hegemons." This would only be evidence against the local theory of justice, not proof against it; given that the global theory is uncertain, no such proof would be given. But presumably a good local theory of justice would be properly informed by a global theory of justice insofar as it tries to avoid a merely "local" maximum of justice (which could not be abandoned for a more global maximum without injustice), or situations where local improvements in justice in one area (e.g., the rules of war) may lead to injustices in some other area (e.g., institutions concerning the distribution of wealth or income). (Note also that there might not be any "universal continuity" of justice: maybe there is no path towards a globally just society that would not involve injustice). To be sure we do not know much about the global maxima of justice (the states of maximal justice), if there are any such, so that for the most part we are reduced to arguing about local improvements in justice; but to the extent that we can constrain arguments about local justice and injustice byviews about what would be globally just, that would seem to be a good thing no? Anyway, the thought seemed more interesting at the time, but here it is. (I had some other thoughts about the "ought implies can" principle as well, but I will leave these to some other post).