Abstract

Proponents of the recent movement of realism in political theory have expressed dissatisfaction with the typically Kantian and ideal theoretical assumptions that guide much political and normative theorizing. In this paper it is proposed that these realist theorists could find support for their critique of the Kantian legacy, as well as building blocks for a realist alternative, by drawing on the moral and political thought of David Hume. The paper constitutes a reading of Hume’s writings with the contemporary realist critique in mind. The result highlights four themes in Hume’s thought: (1) The empirically informed approach to normative reasoning. (2) An emphasis on that political theorizing must be conducted on the basis of a realistic political psychology. (3) The critique of social contract doctrines, a critique that is directed at idealistic and rationalistic versions of liberalism. (4) Hume’s account of human sociality and the origins of political authority. Lastly, it is suggested that the fact that Hume combines realism with liberalism makes him of additional interest to the many realists who are seeking to correct rather than reject liberal political theory and who are thus wary of finding themselves too close to Machiavelli and Hobbes, the usual realist predecessors.

Key words: realism, moralism, ideal theory, legitimacy, normativity

Length: 19 200 words

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Fascinerande. Hennes ståndpunkt byggde alltså på antagandet att det framöver inte inte skulle uppkomma några allvarliga kriser. Vi talar om att införa en ny valuta, det vill säga en historisk förändring som för alla inblandade skulle betraktas som i praktiken oåterkallelig. När hon föreställer sig denna framtid, som sträcker sig över hela hennes livstid och vidare in i historien, så ser hon alltså inga djupa ekonomiska kriser, finansbubblor, eller statsbankrutter. Nej, någon gemensam finanspolitik kommer nog inte att behövas…

Det här med perspektiv är intressant: vad är möjligt, vad är troligt, vad är omöjligt? Peter Wolodarski skriver idag:

Jag har aldrig trott på undergångsscenarier eller att Europa åter ska dras ned i det svarta hål som världsdelen befann sig i för bara 70 år sedan. EU-samarbetet har främjat ett fredligt och välmående Europa, i vilket försvarsministrarna dricker kaffe tillsammans – som socialdemokraten Thage G Peterson uttryckt saken – i stället för att mötas på slagfältet.

Här närmar vi oss vad jag betraktar som EU:s framgångsparadox. För om grundidén med EU var att undvika europeisk kollaps och krig – ”det svarta hålet” –  så har man lyckats bra. Men i mina ögon har denna analys lett till att vissa EU-förespråkare i praktiken äventyrar just den bedriften. Om man tror att EU definitivt avvärjt det svarta hålet, genom samarbeten och beroenden, så slutar man bekymra sig för hur EU självt kan komma framkalla det. Man glömmer nämligen risken med att man skapar ömsesidiga beroenden och förpliktiganden, som, när det väl bränner till, medborgarna i medlemsländerna inte fullt ut är villiga att leva upp till. Det är ett grundrecept för politisk kollaps. Sedan länge har jag skakat på huvudet åt de EU-förespråkare som med hänvisning till EU:s hedrande roll som garant för europeisk fred och samarbete argumenterar för att göra EU starkare och mer långtgående. Resultatet kan bli en riktigt bitter historisk ironi.

Detta är som sagt en fråga om perspektiv. Trots sin skepsis mot undergångsperspektiv så erkänner Wolodarski att ”eurokrisen underminerar känslan av trygghet”.

De väldiga krafter som just nu är i rörelse har förutsättningar att slå sönder den sociala ordning som vi lärt oss att ta för given. Historien visar att ekonomiska nedgångar tär på demokratin, och det finns all anledning att frukta vad en kraftig ekonomisk nedgång kan göra med Europa.

Men varför är det först nu som Wolodarski börjar bli brydd? Vem är det som har lärt oss att ta den sociala ordningen för given? Varför har Peter gjort det? Har han inte tidigare betänkt ”de väldiga krafter” som skulle kunna sättas igång?

Nu har jag gnällt tillräckligt. Vad jag önskar är att EU-debatten redan tidigare hade innehållit mindre storslagna visioner om EU-samarbetet, färre optimistiska antaganden, mer begrundan över dystra men möjliga scenarion. Helt enkelt mer realism:

Preventing the worst is the first duty of political leaders, and striving for far-reaching social improvement makes sense only when doing so does not significantly increase the odds that some previous abated evil will reappear. In assessing the odds, leaders and citizens must never assume that a good once secured is secured for good. Disruption is always possible, and the task of shoring up the conditions of decency is never-ending. By historical standards, Europe seems stable today. But realists insists on recalling that Communism died less than 20 years ago, that Iberia threw off authoritarian governments just three decades ago, that France with some difficulty averted civil war as recently as the early 1960s; not to mention that Nazism and fascism were defeated only 60 years ago. And they wonder whether today’s global economic crisis will leave Europe’s new democracies unscathed. To the extent that people accept democracy based on performance rather than principle, extended hard economic times may threaten a repeat of the 1930s. (Galston 2010: 394-95)

Galston, William A. (2010), ‘Realism in Political Theory’, European Journal of Political Theory, 9 (4), 385-411.

Kombitrafik är en väldigt bra idé. Jag har kört en del kombigods tidigare, framförallt åt bryggerier och grossister som säljer till Systembolaget. Med tanke på den vikt och de stora volymer det handlade om så skulle det ha känts väldigt korkat om godset hade åkt långväga på bil till vår terminal.

Men det är varken personliga erfarenheter eller det fiffiga med kombitransporter som är ämnet för detta blogginlägg. Snarare är det att skälen till nedläggningen tydliggör en intressant frågeställning angående marknadspriser.

Den avgörande orsaken är att banavgifterna för tågtrafiken har höjts, vilket gör att priset måste höjas, och därmed att rena lastbilstransporter blir ett billigare alternativ. Peter Wadman, vd för Tågoperatörerna, säger:

– Det här visar hur politiska beslut lätt kan förskjuta konkurrenssituationen.

När jag läste detta slog det mig det slog mig att transportbranschen tydligare än andra uppvisar förhållandet mellan politik och marknad, och därför kan användas som exempel på att ”marknadspriset” aldrig är en ren produkt av marknadskrafter och konkurrens, och följaktligen att det inte bör ges någon aura av auktoritet som objektiv mätare av värde eller effektivitet. Transportbranschen, framförallt genom att konkurrens sker mellan olika trafikslag, är ett tydligt exempel, eftersom det är uppenbart att de statliga investeringarna i infrastruktur (och sätten som staten försöker få in medel för dessa) är helt och hållet avgörande för vilka priser som sedan sätts på marknaden för transporter. Alltså kan marknadens utslag (priser) inte kan tillskrivas det mått av auktoritet som det har fått inom vissa ideologier och ekonomiska teorier.

Det slog mig helt enkelt, jag erkänner att det är långsökt, att detta kunde vara ett sätt att tydliggöra Ernest Gellners långt mer generella och filosofiska resonemang kring de gamla idéerna om ”rättvisa priser” och uppkomsten av den moderna idén om marknadspriset:

The agrarian world is oriented towards stability and hierarchy. Its ideological apparatus endeavours to confer stability on its institutions. All this is reflected in its attitude to economic activity. Just as, for instance, Aristotelian physics envisage a rightful place for objects, towards which they tend to move, so the characteristic economic theory of the age [...] was naturally attracted to the notion of a ”just price”. In a later age, this idea was much decried. [...]

Those deeply imbued with the merits of a free market mechanism tend to scorn what seems to them the spurious moralism of the just price and just wage concept. R. H. Tawney, interestingly enough, shared this vision sufficiently to call Karl Marx the last of the scholastics. [...] The denigration of the ”fair price” concept is part and parcel of the general rejection of metaphysics and superstition by the Enlightened mind. The whole idea, it is suggested, had clearly been based on the infantile expectation that God, or Nature, or some other Authority, sends objects into the world with labels attached, specifying their price. [...]

But we have learnt to separate distinct questions, and to see things as they are. We separate that which is in them and that which is our construct or projection, and we recognize that things do not have any such value place in the scheme of things, there being no such scheme. [...] So prices, and rewards generally, are not prescribed. They reflect the satisfaction things and services give, and their scarcity, and their negotiable flexibility is precisely what encourages innovation, progress, growth. [...]

The ”market” theory of validating value is the crucial point at which the economic and cognitive transformations of mankind meet. The new economy is to be justified in terms of notions which assume a homogeneous atomized world. Value or merit attach to things only as a function of the satisfaction they give. [...] Thus only does value enter the world.

Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is somewhat more complex. [...] The Enlightened mind was not quite as enlightened as it complacently supposed: it committed and exemplified the very error which it castigated. Certainly, the notion of a just price, inscribed into the nature of things, is a superstition. There is indeed no nature of things, and it is not given to assigning value-labels. But, alas, there is no market price either. The apotheosis of the market price, its endowment with an aura of independence, authority and legitimacy, is simply a more subtle repeat performance of the very same old superstition. Enlighteners, enlighten yourselves. The more-enlightened-than-thou spirit in which you preach your vision is a little comic, for thou art a damned sight less enlightened than thou confidently supposest.

The market can only determine the price within a given institutional coercive context. That context is not given either, any more than a ”just price” could be given. Inevitably, it is historically specific. Such contexts vary a great deal, and are the result of imposition or of a particular historical compromise. The illusion of a self-maintaining market as an objective oracle arose because the particular institutional and cultural context into which it first emerged seemed fairly self-evident to those who lived within it. [...] Early industrialism and an early extended market economy were relatively modest in their infrastructural and technological requirements compared with developed industrialism. [...] They could consequently seem to be parts of a reasonably natural, and not too idiosyncratic, order of things. A natural illusion perhaps in its context, but an illusion nonetheless. [...]

In any one given political context, the market will give a unique verdict. If the legitimate political context can also be uniquely defined, the oracular market verdict is also unique. It stands at the end of a chain of reasoning, untarnished by arbitrariness at any point, so it can be revered.

One could specify the ”correct” political background by saying that the political interference should be minimal; this was he famous theory of the minimal, ”nightwatchman” state. The theory has actually been revived in our time, when in fact the tremendous size of the required infrastructure renders it absurd. The theory had its plausibility then, because the state really could be rather small. The society in which a generalized market order merged was so well equipped with the kind of culture and institutional framework required for the expanding market that initially the state was not required to help out a great deal. [...]

Now all that has changed. Highly developed productive technology requires an enormous, centrally maintained infrastructure. Its cost, in developed societies, has come to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of half the national income. Without such an infrastructure, both the production and the consumption of a modern industrial machine would seize up. A modern motor car industry could not dispose of its products were it not for the fact that the political agencies of society ensure the existence of an enormously elaborate and expensive system of roads.

Once the political framework of the market is so conspicuous and large, and is seen to have so many different possible forms, it can no longer be dissimulated as a kind of neutral or innocuous minimum. It can no longer be presented as a mere necessary precondition, one which merely enables that impartial oracle to function, without interfering with or prejudging its verdicts. Such an illusion is no longer possible.

Once this is plain, and it ought now to be plain, the pronouncements of the oracle lose whatever aura they may once have possessed. They cannot be presented as coming objectively from outside the system, without prejudice, reflecting nothing but the tastes and preferences of men, and the manner in which, given the distribution of resources, they can best be satisfied. Once the enormous weight of the political input into the alleged verdict is seen, we are no longer free to use the market as our economic and neutral arbiter. We make the political order. Hence we are responsible for its verdicts. The market verdicts are but its echo.

All this is not in conflict with the claim that, within a politically chosen framework and set of principles of distribution, all further details are best left to ”the market”.

Gellner, Ernest (1989), Plough, Sword and Book. The Structure of Human History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), s. 182-89.

Political theory is about order inside the city. I suggest that it is more precisely the series of texts on the means of avoiding disorder which threatens coexistence within the political community. [...] [T]ransformations of political discourse in the West have been a function of changing conceptualizations of threat to the existence of political order and hence of the different ways of envisaging the origin and nature of this threat.

Pasquino, Pasquale (1996), ‘Political Theory, Order, and Threat’, in Russell Hardin and Ian Shapiro (eds.), Political Order (Nomos; New York: New York University Press), s. 19.

Industrial society is the only society ever to live by and rely on sustained and perpetual growth, on an expected and continuous improvement. Not surprisingly, it was the first society to invent the concept and ideal of progress, of continuous improvement. Its favoured mode of social control is universal Danegeld, buying off social aggression with material enhancement; its greatest weakness is its inability to survive any temporary reduction of the social bribery fund, and to weather the loss of legitimacy which befalls it if the cornucopia becomes temporarily jammed and the flow falters.

Gellner, Ernest (2008), Nations and Nationalism (Second edn.; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), s. 22.

Vad är denna idioti symptom på? Kanske är vi så genommoderna att vi helt enkelt blivit sociologiska analfabeter, så oförmögna att förstå ett främmande synsätt på moral, samhälle och familjeliv att vi istället förnekar dess existens. Sättet att förneka det på blir då att vidga hedersbegreppet genom att låta det inbegripa alla former av våld i nära relationer. Vips finns inte längre vokabulären för att beskriva det problematiska fenomenet.

Jag tror att det är möjligt att med en ansträngning förstå och föreställa sig hur världen ter sig i ögonen på människor präglade av hederskultur. Vad som dock är omöjligt är att försätta sig i deras känsloläge. Det är här David Hume kommer in i bilden.

Denna omöjlighet att förstå starka hederskänslor används faktiskt av Russell Hardin som ett möjligt argument mot David Humes moralteori. I Humes teori spelar begreppet sympati en avgörande roll. Med sympati menas att vi har en förmåga att känna in andra människors känslolägen och att dessa påverkar vår egen sinnesstämning.

Ingen egenskap hos den mänskliga naturen är mer anmärkningsvärd, både i sig själv och i sina konsekvenser, än vår benägenhet att sympatisera med andra och genom kommunikation ta del av deras böjelser och känslor, oavsett om de skulle skilja sig från eller rentav vara motsatta våra egna. (Hume 2004, 58)

Men Russell Hardin argumenterar att Hume möjligtvis överdriver vår benägenhet att känna in och avspegla andra människors känslor:

But contrary to Hume’s claim here, when I hear of someone reacting violently to a smear on his supposed honor, I cannot feel their emotions at all. For example, the father of Fadime Sahindal tells a Swedish court that they must sympathize with the depth of the insult he felt when his daughter refused to marry the man her family had chosen for her, an insult so painful that it justified his killing her. I cannot have any Humean sympathy for his action or his feelings. They are outside my ken so thoroughly that they might as well be expressed by a strange creature from another planet. My sense is of horror at him, not of empathy with him. A psychiatric expert said he is ‘cognitively underdeveloped and lacking in empathy’ (Wikan, ‘Deadly Distrust: Honor Killings and Swedish Multiculturalism,’ 200). That is probably wrong, at least in Hume’s vocabulary. The elder Sahindal has moral sentiments that differ grossly from those of the cosmopolitan Swedish court. The court ruled that he had committed murder. He was inerrantly convinced that he had salvaged his family’s honor, that he deserved high praise. (Hardin 2007, 38)

David Hume (2004), Om passionerna. Avhandling om den mänskliga naturen, (Thales).

Hardin, Russell (2007), David Hume: Moral & Political Theorist (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Kontentan är alltså att oavsett att studier visar på en verklig placeboeffekt, så kan man inte börja använda sockerpiller, för effekten uppstår endast när patienten känner sig säker på att hon undergår en verklig behandling. Placeboeffekten kan helt enkelt inte uttnyttjas av vården på ett institutionaliserat sätt.

Eller jo, det kan den nog – just genom att inte göra det. För jag menar, placeboeffekten är förmodligen verksam även vid användandet av skolmedicin, dvs effekten av en medicinering består förmodligen även i vanliga fall av medicinsk effekt + placeboeffekt (i varierande grad). Om så är fallet så skulle den totala effekten av medicineringen i vårt land minska ifall placeboutskrivning tilläts. För den skeptiska attityden som detta skulle åstadkomma skulle inte bara leda till att sockerpillerna skulle tappa sin effekt, utan det skulle också påverka den den placeboeffekt som tillkommer även vanlig medicin. Således: det enda sättet som man på stor skala kan dra nytta av placeboeffekter är att inte använda placebopreparat.

(Jag gissar renodlad placeboanvändning i praktiken är en icke-fråga, och uppkommer endast i samband med frågan om homeopati. Men den är teoretiskt spännande. Vad säger min apotekare till syster?)

En annan dimension är hur man upptäcker att något är placebo eller att ens förväntningar inte har någon grund. Betänk följande sinnrika ”botemedel”, som garderar sig själv från att bli genomskådat:

We can define a belief-trap by the fact that the anticipated costs of verifying it are so elevated that a rational agent would refrain from doing so. In Poland, until recently many people combated their alcoholism by having the substance disulfiram implanted under their skins. Taken orally, disulfiram’s only effect is to produce violent nausea if one drinks alcohol; in its subcutaneous form it was supposed to cause death if alcohol were consumed. In reality, the substance has no effect at all when it is implanted. But so long as people believed that it did, it was rational on their part not to try to find out whether this was in fact the case.

Elster, Jon (2009), Reason and Rationality (Princeton: Princeton University Press), s. 33-34.

Uppdatering: Jag hittade Fokus-artikeln som föranledde Lars Linders kommentar.

Så jag sänker ambitionen nu och ämnar i några ytterst korta inlägg presentera några teman som jag behandlar i uppsatsen. Först ut blir Hume’s maxim om ”knavery”.

[I]n contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. (Essays, 42)

Man bör alltså anta att alla aktörer kommer att gagna sina egna intressen så långt som omständigheterna tillåter. När man skriver en konstitution eller stiftar en lag bör man göra det under antagandet att det inte går att förlita sig på någons goda vilja eller känsla för det allmänna bästa.

Det finns två idéhistoriska kopplingar som är av intresse för min uppsats, eftersom båda dessa leder till tänkare som har influerat eller framhålls som förebilder av de moderna ”realister” som jag i sin tur vill länka till Hume. Den första kopplingen är till Machiavelli, som är ”the most likely candidate for being Hume’s direct source” gällande denna passage (Whelan 2004, 40). Den andra kopplingen är framåt i tiden, nämligen Madison och The Federalist Papers. Dessa brukar man säga var starkt influerade av Montesquieu, men mindre känt är att Madison läste och hämtade idéer från Hume (Whelan 2004, 327). Utan tvekan är Madisons konstitutionella tänkande i linje med hur Hume ser på saken:

When there offers, therefore, to our censure and examination, any plan of government, real or imaginary, where the power is distributed among several courts,° and several orders of men, we should always consider the separate interest of each court, and each order; and, if we find that, by the skilful division of power, this interest must necessarily, in its operation, concur with public, we may pronounce that government to be wise and happy. If, on the contrary, separate interest be not checked, and be not directed to the public, we ought to look for nothing but faction, disorder, and tyranny from such a government. (Essays, 43)

Hume, David (1987), Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics).

Whelan, Frederick G. (2004), Hume and Machiavelli : Political Realism and Liberal Thought (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books).

Independent Somalia proscribed tribal identification and made it illegal for men to proclaim or inquire after it. Hence men would ask or tell each other about each other’s ex, meaning ex-clan, the units themselves being officially held no longer to exist. (Somalia is not unique in this respect.) So a Somali referring to his ex did not mean his ex-wife. This usage became so widespread that eventually the authorities also proscribed the use of the term ex, because it had virtually come to mean ’clan’. When an anthropologist then enquired whether one could ask a man about his ’ex-Ex’, he was invited to keep his jokes to himself.

Gellner, Ernest (1993), ‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, i Muslim Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), s. 62.