LDSP395: Excellent Thinkers Final Exam Review

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Marketplace of Ideas

Holmes biography

• From Boston, graduated PBK at Harvard

• associate justice of the supreme court

• most influential justices

• known as the Great Dissenter

• jurisprudence was progressive, loose constructivist

• most famous work - the common law

  • based on 12 lectures on the foundations of American law

  • argued American law was based on on logic but experience, and that illogical legal doctrines have persited

Abrams et al v. US

• Argued October 1919

• Decided November 1919

• Facts of the case: In 1918, the US participated in a military operation on Russian soil against Germany after the Russian Revolution overthrew the tsarist regime. Russian immigrants in the US circulated literature calling for a general strike in ammunition plants to undermine the US war effort. The defendants were convicted for two leaflets thrown from a NYC window. One denounced the sending of American troops to Russia, and the second denounced the war and advocated for the cessation of the production of weapons to be used against “workers’ soviets of Russia.” They were sentenced to 20 years in prison

• Question: Do the amendments to the Espionage Act or the application of those amendments in this case violate the free speech clause of the First Amendment?

• Decision: The first amendment protects the right to dissent from the government’s viewpoints and objectives, free speech only limited by clear and present danger

Values served by free speech

• (1) individual autonomy

• (2) truth seeking

• (3) self-government

• (4) the checking of abuses of power

• (5) the promotion of good character

1917 Espionage Act

This act made speaking or publishing “disloyal” language about the American political system illegal. It was intended to defeat war plans before they materialized

Holmes’ dissent

• “No argument seems to me necessary to show that these pronunciamentos in no way attack the form of government of the United States, or that they do not support either of the first two counts” (626).

• Congress should only concern itself with clear and present danger.

• “It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where
  private rights are not concerned. Congress certainly cannot forbid all effort to change the mind of the country” (628)

Marketplace (free trade) of ideas

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge” (630)

Benefits of the idea of the marketplace being a free trade of ideas

• truth may get out there, unsuppressed

• people will get to decide (democratic)

Worries of the idea of the marketplace being a free trade of ideas

• Think about the free market with products. Do the best products always win?

• People are not necessarily drawn to what is true. We are drawn to what we want.

• Tyranny of the masses is a concern

• Ad populum fallacy is a concern

Daniel Hot & Frederick Schauer

Two objectives:

• (1) Point our that the metaphor of speech as a free market has mixed empirical support regarding which propositions will be accepted or not

• (2) Even so, there are benefits acting as though truth is decided by free market

Empirical support for idea of free trade of ideas

Holmes have believed that the value of a political idea or ideological program was simply a function of which ideas were accepted and which were rejected. Ideas were good or bad insofar as they were accepted or rejected in the competition of the market.

Hannah Arendt Biography

• Linden, Germany → New York

• political philosopher

• holocaust survivor

  • was put in an internment camp - Camp Gurs

  • only able to escape once she secured her papers

  • fled to NYC with her husband

Normative v. Factual claims

Hannah Arendt Research Topics

nature of power and evil, politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism

• known mostly today for her work on Adolf Eichmann, on how ordinary people can be moved to do evil actions

Truth and Politics - their relationship

Thesis: Truth and politics have an uneasy relationship and this may teach us something about the nature of truth and politics

• No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade. Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful?...”

Her references to Plato, Socrates, Hobbes

• Plato → Truth-telling is risky business

  • Throughout history, the truth-seekers and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow-citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of his life: “If they could lay hands on [such a] man . . . they would kill him,” Plato says in the last sentence of the cave allegory.

• Plato’s Socrates as the man killed

  • Two metaphors (1) midwife (Theaetetus) (2) gadfly (Euthyphro)

• Hobbes

  • Only “such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome”

  • Arendt notes that no one protests mathematical truth. We are concerned with the truth that interferes with one’s dominion

  • We want to rule over one another in big and small ways. Truth may impede this rule

Errors

involuntary untruth

• the ignoramus

Lies

Voluntary untruth

• The sophist

• regard the truth as whatever is expedient

• brag about making the weaker argument the stronger, as though speaking is a game

Difference between Truth and Opinion

Opinion as subjective; truth as subject-independent

Death of Expertise

Author Thomas Nichols

• Concern with knowledge on the internet

• freedom of anyone to post anything

• a mix of expertise and non-expertise all available by google

Sturgeon’s Law

Most products in most fields, he argued, are of low quality, including what was then considered serious writing. “Ninety percent of everything” Sturgeon decreed “is crap”

Internet versus the library

Libraries, or at least their reference and academic sections, once served as a kind of first cut through the noise of the marketplace. Visiting a library was an education in itself, especially for a reader who took the time to ask for help from a librarian. The Internet, however, is nothing like a library. Rather, it’s a giant repository where anyone can dump anything, from a first folio to a faked photograph, from a scientific treatise to pornography, from short bulletins of information to meaningless electronic graffiti. It’s an environment almost entirely without regulation, which opens the door to content being driven by marketing, politics, and the uninformed decisions of other laypeople rather than the judgment of experts.

What does it mean to research

Actual research is hard, and for people raised in an environment of constant electronic stimulation, it’s also boring. Research requires the ability to find authentic information, summarize it, analyze it, write it up, and present it to other people. It is not just the province of scientists and scholars, but a basic set of skills a high school education should teach every graduate because of its importance in any number of jobs and careers

Jonathan Haidt

Areas of Inquiry: Psychology of morality and moral emotions

Key Contributions: moral foundations theory, happyism, social dynamics of polarization and political divisions, disgust

Most recently: The coddling of the American Mind

Moral Foundation Theory

An explanation for why morality varies so much across cultures yet still shows so many similarities and recurrent themes. Each culture and sub-culture constructs virtues, narratives, and institutions on top of these foundations, accounting for moral differences

What are the six moral foundations

• (1) Care/harm

• (2) Fairness/cheating

• (3) Loyalty/betrayal

• (4) Authority/subversion

• (5) Sanctity/degradation

• (6) Liberty/oppression

Care/harm

Underlies virtues of kindness, gentleness, and nurturing

Fairness/cheating

underlines virtues of justice and proportionality

Loyalty/betrayal

underlies virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice for the group

Authority/subversion

underlies virtues of leadership and followership, including deference to legitimate authority and respect for traditions

Sanctity/degradation

underlies notions of striving to live in an elevated, less carnal, more noble way

Liberty/oppression

This foundation is about the feelings of reactance and resentment people feel toward those who dominate them and restrict their liberty

The Righteous Mind

• Build on the work of moral foundations theory

• Central arguments:

  • (1) moral judgments arise from the gut, not reason

  • (2) Political differences are based in different intuition of right and wrong because of a different prioritization of moral foundations/values

What is the central metaphor of The Righteous Mind

The mind is divided, like a rider on an elephant, and the rider’s job is to serve the elephant

Rider

rational mind

Elephant

emotional mind

path

environmental factors

Intuitions

Intellectual seemings based on the gut, or are emotional in basis. Not reason and not ordered to reason - ordered to further social agendas

Evolutionary Reasons

speed much faster than thinking. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning

Intuition vs Reasoning

Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second

Where does morality come from

• Nature: it was assumed either from evolution or from God

• Nurture: it was developed in us by parenting and socialization

• Rationalism: children figure it out for themselves

Where does morality come from? Haidt

Both Nature and nurture

• Nature - we have all of the moral foundations in place (from evolution)

• nurture - socialization prioritizes and matures these foundations and our reasoning about them

Ring of Gyges

We are only good because of social contract

• people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught - especially the damage to their reputations

• justice is not valuable in itself; it is only valuable for its consequences (esteem)

Glauconian view of Justice

People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality

• most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone’s reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences

Intuitive politicians

reputation matters more than character - strive to maintain appealing moral identities in front of our multiple constituencies

The “Poll” Study

• Groups who said (a) they did not care about reputation and (b) those who confessed they did

• They had to talk about themselves for 5 minutes into a microphone. After each minute, they received a rating (1-7) about how much the person listening in wanted to interact with them (rigged)

• Both groups interacted as though they really wanted good ratings. Reputation matters

• We often claim we do not care because caring about reputation seems weak

Post-hoc Rationalization

• Explaining an action after the fact with a rational justification that is not actually relevant to what motivated the action

• It is a kind of “confabulation” - being asked why you did something generates a false memory without the intention of deceit

Confirmation Bias

We attend to evidence that supports what we already believe

The hive switch

We are wired to perceive ourselves as groups; we switch between (1) individual competition and (2) group cooperation and intergroup competition

The Hive Switch: Chimp & Bee

Haidt remarks we are 90% chimp and 10% bee

Hive Switch Thesis

Human beings are conditional hive creatures. We have the ability to transcend self-interest and lose ourselves in something larger than ourselves. That ability is what I’m calling the hive switch. The hive switch, I propose, is a group-related adaptation that can only be explained by between group selection

Evidence of the Hive Switch

• (1) The experience of feeling consumed by group identity

• (2) The fact that there are social facts not reducible to facts about individuals

• (3) The experience of uniquely social emotions

• (4) he says the presence of strong religious communitites across cultures is evidence

Mechanism for the Hive Switch

• (1) These activities increase oxytocin (the neurotransmitter corresponding to bonding; social glue) - reduces selfish decisions and self-directed actions

• (2) Mirror neurons - state matching

Groupishness

People are groupish, we love to join teams, clubs, leagues, and fraternities. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers toward common goals so enthusiastically that it seems as if our minds were designed for teamwork

Multilevel Selection

Natural selection occurs a various levels: individuals, families, tribes, societies etc.

Irving Janis

The idea of Groupthink

Concurrence-seeking

Oftentimes a lack of intelligence is not why we fail to reason well in a group

Groupthink

• The practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility

• Involves non-deliberate suppression of opposing thoughts

• occurs because of social conformity

Antecedents of Groupthink

• high cohesiveness within the group

• insulation of the group from outside sources of information

• lack of methodical procedures for information search and appraisal

• directive leadership

• homogeneity in members backgrounds

• a high stress situation with little hope of finding a better solution than the one advocated by the leader

• the absence of disagreement (conflict, hostility)

Consequences of Groupthink

• Few novel ideas

• “soft lines of criticism”

  • both toward others in the group and oneself

• hatred or rejection of outgroup

  • Irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against outgroups

  • loyalty at the cost of justice

Symptoms of Groupthink

• (1) The illusion of invulnerability

• (2) The constructions of rationalizations to ignore warnings

• (3) Ignoring moral consequences of their action

• (4) Forming stereotypes of enemies or other outgroups

• (5) Applying direct pressure on members of the group that express doubts

• (6) Self-censorship

• (7) The illusion of unanimity

• (8) The appointing of “mindguards” who protect the leader and fellow members from exposure to opposing views

Remedies for Groupthink

• leader can assign someone to the role of critical evaluator

• for policy planning, members can adopt an impartial role, rather than expressing preferences

• welcome in outsiders for outsider perspectives

• Divide group into smaller units to discuss new policies more likely to generate dissent in small groups

Bruce Tuckman

• Author of Stages of Group Development

• motivation, group dynamics, personality measurement

Developmental Sequence in Small Groups

• (1) Forming

• (2) Storming

• (3) Norming

• (4) Performing

• (5) Adjourning

Forming

GS: Testing and Dependence - figure out the nature of the group, test responses - what is acceptable and what is not figure out what kind of group this is

TA: Orientation to the Task - Relevant parameters, how to accomplish the task, type of information to be obtained

Storming

GS: Intragroup Conflict - Group members become hostile and assert their individuality; infighting and polarization

TA: Emotional response to task demands - form resistance to the demands of the task

Norming

GS: Development of Group Cohesion - They accept one another and commit to remaining as a group; establish norms

TA: Open exchange of relevant interpretations - often looks like discussing oneself and group members, as relevant to understanding how to go about performing the group’s shared task

Performing

GS: Functional role-relatedness - Group becomes a problem-solving instrument; works together with specific roles to accomplish task

TA: Emergence of solutions - constructive attempt at successful task completion

Developmental concerns

(1) Group Structure (GS)

(2) Task Activity Development (TA)

Cass Sunstein

key ideas: nudges (libertarian paternalism), freedom of speech, animal rights, taxation, marriage, democracy, echo chambers

“The Daily Me”

A virtual daily newspaper customized for an individuals interests that Negroponte predicted in his book

What’s new

Filtering and niche marketing are growing more sophisticated, “blue camps” versus “red camps”

What’s not new

Self-sorting (but not on this scale - alignment was limited when there was no internet; we used to be forced to interact with greater diversity of viewpoints)

The Colorado Experiment

• Participants from liberal (Boulder) and conservative (Colorado Springs) enclaves

• screened for their opinions anonymously

• then 15-minute discussion within their enclaves

• asked for their opinions again anonymously

Why do enclaves polarize

(1) the role of information

(2) social comparison

(3) corroboration reduces tentativeness

Impacts of polarization on democracy

Increased extremism, fed by discussions among like-minded people, has helped fuel many movements of great value - including the civil-rights movement

Demagoguery

leadership that appeals to the demos (the masses), usually via desires and prejudices of the people instead of reason; convince people they are a man of the people instead of an elite

What does “politics ain’t beanbag”

Politics involves the following

• Trickery and dishonesty

• Nastiness, fighting

Fewer friendships across party lines

Things changed in the 1990s, beginning with new rules and new behaviors in Congress. Friendships and social contacts across party lines were discouraged. Once the human connections were weakened, it became easier to treat
members of the other party as the permanent enemy rather than as fellow members of an elite club. Candidates began to spend more time and money on “oppo” (opposition research), in which staff members or paid consultants dig up dirt on opponents (sometimes illegally) and then shovel it to the media. As one elder congressman recently put it, ‘This is not a collegial body anymore. It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred.’”

Where Does Ideology come from

• prior assumption: self-interest (Marx)

• new assumption: partial explanation - genes (plus social factors, situations)

Ideology

A set of beliefs about the proper order of society and how it can be achieved; preserve the present order (conservatism) or change it (liberalism)

Three major steps

(1) Genes make brains

(2) Traits guide children along different paths

(3) People construct life narratives

Why can’t we all disagree constructively

• self-interest

• genetic predispositions to value differently

• Group consolidation forces

• The fact that “morality binds and blinds”

• we occupy different narratives

• Cultural norms of polarization

Bases of power

sources of social influence, or social power, exerted on a person

Power

the capacity to produce effects on others or the potential to influence

Influence

The change in a target’s attitudes, values, beliefs, or behaviors as the result of influence tactics

Influence Tactics

One person’s actual behaviors designed to change another person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, or behaviors

Legitimate Power

Comes from the belief that a person has the formal right to make demands, and to expect others to be compliant and obedient

Reward Power

Results from one person’s ability to compensate another for compliance - those with ability to give out rewards

Expert Power

Based on a person’s high levels of skill and knowledge

Referent Power

The result of a person’s perceived attractiveness, worthiness and right to others respect - bestowed on you by others - easily abused

Coercive Power

Comes from the belief that a person can punish others for noncompliance - threats and punishment easily abused

Informational Power

Results from a person’s ability to control the information that others need to accomplish some

Positional Bases of Power

is due to their authority role (legitimate, reward, coercive, and informational)

Personal Bases of Power

is due to personal traits or qualities (expert and referent)

Honor

meriting respect or esteem; meeting obligations without the taint of dishonesty

Fame

Being known or talked about; operates through referent power

Admiration

to appreciably perceive the excellences of another with the inclination to emulate can be an asset or a great liability

cultivates vicious habits of attetnion

• vice of vainglory

• seeing over being

• reputation over substance

Cultivates a false sense of immortality or legacy

• Kleos - glory or fame

• being spoken about

• dantes inferno

• image-making of ancient Rome