Pluralistic Societies and Hobbesian Politics
I will participate at the end of the week in the biennial international conference of the International Network of Economic Method. I will be presenting a paper tentatively called “Economics and Social Contract Theory” – though a more accurate title would be “Normative Economics and Multilevel Social Contract Theory”. The first draft can be read here but the general idea can be summarized in a few lines.
While normative economics has been traditionally tied to some form or another of consequentialism, especially what Amartya Sen and John Hicks have characterized as “welfarism”, there have been a few attempts by some economists to develop a normative account within the social contract tradition. James Buchanan, Ken Binmore, and Robert Sugden are maybe the most significant authors. Conversely, many contemporary moral and political philosophers have used tools from economics (especially game theory) to develop a social contract theory account, eg., David Gauthier, Brian Skyrms, or Peter Vanderschraaf. These attempts belong to two brands of social contract theory, Hobbesian contractarianism, and Humean conventionalism.[1] However, there are few examples where economists have tried to develop a contractualist account of normative economics. In the paper (as well in a more general book project on which I’m working currently), I try to develop such an account, that I call the “social choice model of public reason”. More specifically here, I attempt to show how this contractualist account can be articulated with other brands of social contract theory within a “multilevel social contract theory”.
I’ve found the idea of multilevel social contract theory in recent writings of the political philosopher Michael Moehler, especially his 2018 book, Minimal Morality. Moehler argues that in deeply pluralistic societies characterized by enduring moral disagreement, the prospects that individuals agree over the core principles of some moral theory (being utilitarian, Kantian, or anything else) are low. This is of course not a new claim. It is for instance also pivotal in Rawls’s political turn, who argued in his late writings that principles of distributive justice should be “freestanding” and not depend on the endorsement of a particular comprehensive doctrine. What is distinctive however in Moehler’s account is his claim that in case an agreement over moral principles and/or through moral conventions fails to be established, some kind of moral subsidiary mechanism should apply, and a minimal morality should be established based on a Hobbesian bargain. In this bargain, agents are assumed to be instrumentally rational and solely motivated by prudential motivations, the highest one being to ensure peaceful cooperation through institutions guaranteeing to everyone at least minimum standards of living. At the political level, this requirement would materialize notably by the implementation of a universal income.
There is much to be said of the way Moehler theoretically characterizes the Hobbesian bargain and of the resulting implications in terms of political institutions that are warranted. His account avoids many pitfalls that appear again and again in the contractarian literature, thanks precisely to the fact that it is not a fully-fledged Hobbesian account. The point I want to emphasize here however is that if we take the idea of multilevel social contract theory seriously, it seems that liberal and open societies are committed (or doomed, depending on one’s perspective) to live under a Hobbesian modus vivendi. As Rawls noted, it is because of the nature of liberal institutions that principles of justice must political and “freestanding”. If they were to rely on a specific set of moral principles, they would be destabilized by the fact that a liberal and democratic society favors the emergence of new ways of living and thinking, is opened to new culture and religion, and so on. Moehler’s minimal morality builds on a small set of reasons and motivations that all human beings have presumably in common, starting with living decently under peaceful conditions. The question is however whether liberal institutions are sustainable under these conditions. This is even more true that, at least in Hobbes’s political philosophy, a modus vivendi is not a stable exit solution from the state of nature. Interpreting the rise of populist ideas and politics in Western democracies as an indication of this foundational inconsistency between liberal institutions and deep moral disagreement would probably be excessive, as the roots of populism are at least as economic as cultural and moral. But it is nonetheless an intriguing – and not comforting – possibility.
Anyway, I think that multilevel social contract theory and its implications should lead us to reconsider the notion of “agonistic liberalism” developed two decades ago by the philosopher John Gray. Gray was not working within social contract theory but from an account of value pluralism inspired by the work of Isaiah Berlin. Against Berlin, however, Gray claimed that liberalism and value pluralism are fundamentally irreconcilable, or more exactly that it cannot be established that key liberal principles (starting with the importance of negative freedom) should be favored over other moral and political views. On this basis, Gray attacked Rawls’s “political” liberalism for not being political at all, substituting the illusionary consensus enforced by lawmakers and constitutional judges for the political struggles fed by the plurality and incommensurability of values. Though a critic of Hobbes’s rationalism, Gray nonetheless suggested that, in a world of plural values, politics is inherently Hobbesian. What it does imply for the future of liberal democracy is still an open question.
[1] As I explain in the paper, though it may be surprising to associate David Hume with a brand of social contract theory, it is not mistaken. Hume was criticizing the idea that a social contract has been historically agreed on at some point in human history.