If you read the additional material I refer to with the diligence I expect and demand, dear reader (I am being firmly tongue-in-cheek here!), you will have read This paper I reference which examines the proposed symmetry breakers between the modal ontological argument for the existence of God and the converse modal ontological argument against the existence of God. One of the symmetry breakers, and the response to it, reminded me of something FA Hayek said when evaluating the concept of “social justice.”
The symmetry breaker in question is the deontic symmetry breaker, which deals with deontic properties. Deontic properties are properties related to what ought to be the case, “properties of obligation and permission (e.g., rightness, wrongness, duty, etc.)”, which are distinct from evaluative properties that deal with “value and devaluation properties (e.g., goodness, badness, etc.)”. The deontic symmetry breaker is as follows (with the quote removed):
God is defined as a most perfect being. But a most perfect being should exist. Therefore God should exist. But what should be the case may be the case. Therefore, perhaps God exists.
Therefore, according to this proposed symmetry breaker, we have reason to prefer premise 1 of the modal ontological argument to premise 1 of the converse modal ontological argument.
William Vallicella objects to this thesis that deontic properties cannot reasonably be applied to non-agential contexts. That is, it does not make sense to talk about what should or should not be the case in situations that are not under the control of an agent:
As Vallicella puts it, “any state of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be necessarily involves an agent with sufficient power to bring about or prevent the state of affairs in question.” But if deontic properties are inapplicable to non-agential contexts, then it is not true that God ought to exist—there is no agent with the power to bring about or prevent God’s existence, and so the context in question is non-agential.
This notion of the inapplicability of deontic properties to non-agential contexts reminded me of Hayek’s critique of social justice, an idea that he says “belongs not to the category of fallacies but to the category of absurdities, like the term ‘moral stone.'” For Hayek, the reason “social justice” is absurd is that the outcomes of social processes are not agential. There are no agents with sufficient knowledge and power to bring about or prevent specific end results of social processes.
As Hayek said The mirage of social justicethe second volume of Law, legislation and freedom: “If we apply these terms to a state of affairs, they make sense only to the extent that we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to happen… Since only situations created by human will can be called just or unjust, the particularities of a spontaneous order can be neither just nor unjust.” And the inability of agents to control the outcomes of social processes is not exactly an idea that is held only by those on the political right – Friedrich Engels also said: “What each individual wills is obstructed by all the others, and what comes out of it is something that no one willed.” So you can be on the left, even the far left, and still recognize that the outcomes of social processes are beyond anyone’s control.
To use an analogy, suppose a father deliberately favors some of his children over others. He deliberately showers his favorite child with love, attention, and resources, while completely neglecting and ignoring his other children. Hayek would say that this is unjust, because the outcomes experienced by the children are entirely actionable. But the outcomes of large and complex social processes are not actionable, and to speak of these outcomes as just or unjust, as if they were analogous to the hypothetical father above, is absurd.
But not everyone shares Hayek’s idea that the outcomes of social processes cannot be reliably controlled by agents. Jeffrey Friedman has written extensively about people who adhere to a theory of “ontology of simple society“and who believed that certain actors (politicians, technocrats, etc.) can reliably control social outcomes in a way analogous to the hypothetical father’s ability to control how he treats his own children. Thus, the more one adheres to a simple societal ontology, the more likely one is to embrace “social justice” and find it a meaningful project, because one believes that social outcomes are in fact under reliable agential control. Friedman described how such people expressed themselves in political polling data:
Conversely, as Hibbing and Theiss-Morse show using focus group and survey data, disillusionment and anger can stem from perceptions that government is not acting. The authors’ angry and disillusioned respondents did not believe that inaction could be caused by disputes over which policies will succeed or what their effects might be, much less that such disputes could be justified. On the contrary: they seemed to agree that, as one put it, all it would take to solve existing problems is for leaders of both parties to get together and say, “There is a problem. We are not leaving this room until it is fixed.” … Respondents’ chronic dissatisfaction with elected officials was apparently due to a belief that they were malicious, not knowledgeable, and so deliberately refused to solve problems they knew how to solve.
These voters believed that “the reason social problems persist is that elected officials have ‘the ability, but not the will, to deal with the nation’s problems.’ Ability was, for them, the easy part, or so it seemed; the hard part was the will.” But if you think that politicians and technocrats have failed to solve social problems because they simply do not know how, then you lose the ability to meaningfully attribute deontic properties. This does not mean that one cannot still attribute evaluative People with a simple societal ontology may lose sight of the distinction between evaluative and deontic claims, leading them to believe that an outcome that is evaluatively wrong is therefore deontically wrong. But this is a mistake, and we should resist falling into it.
