In my essay I will discuss the problems I say with the idea of 'simplicity' in public reason. It will be organised as follows:
Section I: I will give a very brief overview of the aim of political liberalism (justification), it's scope (the reasonable) and its methodological concerns (treating people as free and equal) and postulate the idea that simplicity is a feature of justification that demands that all of these are present.
Section II: I will recount simplicity as it is given in Macedo and argue that it shares a common purpose with the values of public reason in Rawls. Though Rawls's account is broader in scope I believe that simplicity is an important part of it. With this discussion in play I will then turn my attention to the difference between an argument being accessible and being acceptable, show where simplicity fits into this model, and therefore how a justification can come to be accepted.
Section III: Given two thought experiments, one in which the arguments are simplistic, and one in which they are esoteric, I will attempt to show that simplicity taken to extremes will not allow for justifcatory force, and that extremely simple arguments will not treat people as free and equal. The problem I will attempt to show is the dangers to justification of considering 'actual' audiences. This section will conclude with a comment made by Gaus regarding the idea that many actual people will not accept good reasons even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Section IV: I will compare simplicity to the idea of intelligability (as a part of followability) in O'Neill, and argue that the conceptual space occupied by simplicity is taken over by abstraction here. I will then attempt to analyse whether abstraction can cater better to demands of justification than simplicity can.
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3 comments:
Two comments on Section III:
1. 'The dangers to justification of considering actual audiences' is interesting - on some level isn't this unavoidable?
If extremely simple arguments (ie. the lowest common denominator) are both non-justificatory and do not treat people as free and equal, then we have to start looking at threshold tests of reasonableness. At this stage you'd want to avoid over-idealising the audience, and especially with the idea of reflexivity with regard to public reason the actual audience must be taken into account?
2. The Gaus comment I think brings in the role of our intuitions/(feelings) in reasoning; even if there is such a thing as a perfectly logical system, if on the face of it we have that instinctive feeling of dislike there is no amount of reasoning which will matter.
I think Nietzsche and Wittgenstein also make this point, and further, that the phenomenon should be taken into account in reasoning and justification, not merely because it is unavoidable but because it is useful (when not taken to extremes).
Regarding point 1, that is absolutely the case. My second thought experiment will show that we cannot over-idealise the audience. My thought is that simplicity itself is a bad concept in public reason because it denies us being too simple or too complex, but cannot give us any indication of how to strike a happy medium. So I will see if abstraction can do a better job, because it makes arguments simpler without prescribing simplicity.
Regarding point 2, Nietzsche being an irrationalist would embrace this point, but I wonder how much Hegel would (of course). Hegel said 'the truth will have its day', and he believes that systems like formal logic are just as socially mediated as anything else. So, I wonder if Hegel could envisage a time in which Gaus's feeling would become the norm.
All very interesting. Cheers
Just to add two points on O'Neill. First, she strongly opposes building idealisations into the framework of practical justification. In particular, she suggest that idealisation in practical thought either involves plain falsehoods or else depends for its authority on the justifiability (or followability) of its content. (See her Toward Justice and Virtue, chp. 2 and “Abstraction, Idealization and Ideology in Ethics”, in J. G. D. Evans (ed.), Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Problems, Cambridge 1988.) Either way, however, idealisations could not ground, but would at best depend on, practical justification. Accordingly, O'Neill tries to avoid the idealisations of the audiences of followability, i.e., those who are to count as "relevant others" (as determined on other purportedly independent grounds, namely, the presuppositions of activity).
Second, it is not quite clear whether intelligibility in O'Neill could be claimed to have a status comparable to that of simplicity in Macedo. That is because, in Macedo's case, simplicity is not part of the definition of the justification-characterising goal, i.e., accessibility and acceptability, but, it seems, an empirically necessary condition of achieving that goal. In O'Neill, by contrast, intelligibility is part of the definition of the justification-characterising goal, namely, followability "in thought" (where all thought must be followable in this sense, while practical thought must also be followable "in action"). If that is so, then intelligibility might be parallel to what Macedo calls accessibility. At the same time, questions would emerge that lead to considerations we addressed in class already: what exactly is empirically necessary for (wide) intelligibility, or followability "in thought"? Could not Macedo insist that followability, too, requires simplicity? Or are the modalities in the background of a followability standard so "thin," as we put it in class, that simplicity is not required? However, if they are so thin, in a way, perhaps, that allows us to steer clear of whatever might be bad about the populism that appears to be the flip-side of simplicity, would it not also follow that nearly everything could be claimed to be followable? And would this mean that the price of a consistent avoidance of the down-sides of simplicity is *arbitrariness*? Or wouldn't it? (We talked about this....)
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