'Democracy says: “Neither is sufficient. Both must submit to collective deliberation.”'
This is where it all falls apart for me; the assumption that people are capable of collective deliberation. As K said, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Here in the United States, as you know, it's reached the point where people aren't even smart enough to elect reasonably smart people to represent them, and we have an ruling political party consisting of idiots* run by an idiot with dementia. Discussing the parallels between "Effective Altruism" vs. "Virtue Signaling" feels like arguing about which song the band should play while the Titanic sinks.
The fundamental problem is that we've forgotten that any democracy, even a republic such as the United States, requires an informed, educated citizenry to make cogent decisions, and requires its elected representatives to be forced to behave in a manner that reflects the decisions of those citizens. The United States does neither; instead, citizens are kept uninformed by the "media", and the "representatives" choose their voters to maximize their own chance of being re-elected. All the philosophizing in the world won't solve that, which I'm sure David Hume would raise a glass to. "David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel..."
*To be fair, they're not all idiots; some of them are "true believers" in mind-shatteringly false beliefs, or complete sociopaths only interested in the accumulation of power.
Every alternative to democracy assumes an even more fantastic assumption—that the smart people who rule won't be corrupted by power, won't optimize for their own interests, won't make catastrophic errors when unconstrained by democratic accountability.
Yes, democracy requires an informed citizenry. Yes, ours is failing that requirement. Yes, we've systematically destroyed the epistemic conditions democracy needs—through algorithmic manipulation, through plutocratic capture of media, through educational neglect, through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
But the solution to "democracy is failing because its preconditions are being systematically undermined" isn't "therefore abandon democracy for rule by experts." It's "therefore fight to restore those preconditions."
I didn't mean to imply that there was an alternative to democracy on the table; I just didn't see how this rather erudite, intellectual, and kind of dry article advances restoring those preconditions. Yes, it's worthwhile to fully understand why the ship sank...once all the passengers in the lifeboats have been rescued. On the other hand, one can look at this as "documenting the fall" which will help future generations avoid this pitfall, because that's always helped immeasurably (i.e. so little that it falls below quantum measuring limits) in the past. (The Guillotine always falls.)
Kaylon Primary: We have reviewed the organizational structure of your Council and its history of deliberations. What you call 'representative democracy’ is a most inefficient form of governance.
Admiral Halsey: Maybe. But the one thing you can say for democracy is that all other forms of government are even worse. Over thousands of years and on countless planets, it’s the best system anyone’s ever come up with to ensure the strong don’t dominate the weak. At least not for long.
An amazing piece, Mike. I shall need to read 2-3 times to grasp it all. One point which you may allude to here: we all have different values. And it will always be impossible to bridge that gap. We do the best we can and we always fail. We tend to think of a left-right spectrum which is one dimensional but this is a 3 or, dare I say, 4 dimensional arena of values (with different measures of time). We think of the next 3 months or the next 7 generations. And most of us, most of the time think of human morals, our society, the relationship between us humans. While we would like to think that we pay attention to the environment, mostly we don't. The oceans have 10% of the fish they used to, maybe less; species are destroyed. We have no control, as a species, over our fertility. The only way we have been able to support 8 billion people is with massive unrelenting destruction. And the planet does not need us, would be far better without us. We plod on and will always struggle to find a balance. And yet we are an unbalanced , unnatural species. I say unnatural in that our tools and constructions are so beyond what the rest of nature has created that nature cannot compete with us. And this is, so far, our manifest destiny. Maybe we can all, especially the right wing among us, be a little less anthropocentric and weigh our values in favor of the small planet that we live upon. And understand our role as stewards, and not destroyers and conquerors. We need the planet more than it needs us.
Agreed both thought processes can lead to authoritarian capture, but like a lot of what is going on in our media landscape this is both sidesing the hell of the situation. A bunch of twitter trolls screaming about equity is no where near the richest people in the world buying up everything they can to impose their rule on us. The EA has a clear advantage in our current situation that makes the SJWs of the 2010s seem quaint.
Once again, I love your mind ❤️🔥 tho I fear the onslaught of your next Substack since it will probably take me the better part of a month to digest the intricacies of this last one.
Yet I think I get what you are saying. I do not feel that certainty is possible, that those who are like you are the best to know, that you will not learn something valuable in the spaces where you’ve lost your way. Most of my plans get interrupted. No problem. There are other choices. Having grown up being told “don’t be feeling sorry for yourself” and “don’t be so sure of yourself” I learned, against all resistance, that I’m better off without those pieces of baggage. And having gone to boarding school at the age of eight, there was no one to go to to complain about unfairness. This meant I had to try to make sense of what seemed to work for me, which of course included consideration of other people. It also meant that I could logically only allow the same leeway to others. Saying “I’m sorry, I made a mistake” seems so easy that it’s hard to understand why others find it hard. Imperfections seem normal, so guilt and judgement don’t have such sharp edges. Getting lost is usually a potential adventure, both physically and intellectually.
But I do have entrenched ideas in our present political muddle. As a Republican I’m fiscally conservative but I’m also highly emphatic. As Bill Clinton used to say, I do feel other people’s pain. It bothers me immensely to see the vulnerable hurt. And as a consequence I’ve been feeling freaked out about Musk’s idea that empathy is the problem with Western civilization. And I’ve put all the broligarchs into the same basket of ‘not ok’. I instinctively feel that there is no room in a functional and safe world with those guys.
I thank you, Mike, for allowing me to see that the efficiency oriented are not monsters. But let’s devoutly wish and work for a future where our egos learn to function with more flexibility and less fearful judgment.
David Hume’s final say on the connection between “is” and “ought” is in Appendix 1 of his “Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals” (which he considered his finest work).
“It appears evident that the ultimate ends of human action can never be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on his intellectual faculties. Ask a man ‘why he uses exercise’; he will answer ‘because he desires to keep his health’. If you then enquire ‘why he desires health’ he will readily reply ‘because sickness is painful’. If you push your enquiries further and desire a reason ‘why he hates pain’, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.
“Perhaps to your second question ‘why he desires health’, he may also reply that ‘it is necessary for the exercise of my calling’. If you ask ‘why he is anxious on this head’, he will answer ‘because he desires to get money’. If you demand ‘Why?’, ‘it is the instrument of pleasure’, says he. And beyond this it is an absurdity to ask for a reason.”
Thus Hume accepts that all desires can be treated as instrumental (which is to say that questions can validly be asked about the reasonableness of the desire), up to the point at which it is established that they add to the sum of pleasure over pain. Beyond that point, he considers that reason has nothing more to say.
It is true that there is something absurd about the question “why he hates pain?”, just as there is about the question “do married people have spouses?” It is part of the meaning of the words “married” and “spouse” that this is a redundant question. Equally, it is part of the meaning of the word “pain” that this is something that animals would normally rather have less of. But it is not clear why we should draw the conclusion that the answer to these questions can never be accounted for by reason. Rather than being unanswerable by reason, the question is simply trivial.
The characterizations of the two groups fits well. Yet (always a yet from me) your analysis assumes clear categorical separation between the passions and the rational, that virtue and beauty be arbitrary cultural constructs which we may only irrationally appreciate or live in the recognition of -- an Enlightenment which rejects, rather than culminates in, the realizations of the Romantics. In other words, rather than following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, you are with Locke (Shaftesbury's tutor) in claiming that rationality can be purified of our feelings. (Perhaps it can in AI, but in us??)
Per a current biography of Franklin, Shaftesbury was his main philosophical influence, who he read with intensity as a teen. Jefferson's substitution of "pursuit of happiness" for "property" was a nod to Hutcheson, who followed Shaftesbury regarding the reality of our moral sense (as did Adam Smith). The concept of "inalienable rights" is from Hutcheson via Jefferson and Madison.
Are you claiming the founders of American democracy suffered a serious misconception here? If our awareness of virtue, beauty and the good is inherent, and certain of our rights inalienable, these are "is"es from which "oughts" are, in many circumstances, readily apparent. That they most obviously aren't apparent to some is of course also an "is," yet the "ought" to derive from that requires a deeper psychological understanding of their dysfunctional sense of beauty and virtue. How have their passions and capability to perceive what "is" -- including beauty and virtue -- become estranged from reality?
Reading this and taking on board your question, I think I perhaps under-represented my own philosophical stance, that is perhaps too deep in the subtext of this philosophical polemic. You're right that the essay's formulation—"values must be chosen, not discovered"—reads as a cleaner separation between reason and passion than I actually hold. It was a polemical simplification designed to force EA and virtuocracy to acknowledge they're making normative choices rather than discovering logical necessities. But it doesn't capture the fuller position I've been developing. In "A Treatise on Love" (https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/a-treatise-on-love), I argue that love is not just sentiment but an epistemic force—that without our capacity for moral perception, for responding to beauty and virtue, reason itself becomes sterile and disconnected from what matters. This is exactly the moral sense tradition you're invoking. Our capacity to perceive moral truths isn't separable from our emotional and relational capacities. Moral truths are real, but they emerge through complementarity—through the relationship between consciousness (with its natural capacities) and reality.
Where I part ways with using this for political authority is here: Even if moral truths exist and some people perceive them more clearly through cultivated moral sense, this doesn't grant them authority to rule. And I think the founders—despite believing in natural rights discoverable through moral sense—actually agreed with me. Yes, Jefferson was influenced by Hutcheson. But he also designed a system that doesn't grant anyone, however refined their moral perception, authority to impose their understanding without democratic accountability. The Declaration appeals to "self-evident truths" but immediately turns to democratic legitimacy: governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Even if rights are inalienable and perceivable through moral sense, how we secure them remains a question requiring collective deliberation. You and I might both perceive that compassion is virtuous, but disagree about whether honoring that virtue requires universal healthcare or private charity. These aren't disagreements resolvable by one of us having more refined moral perception—they require the hard work of democratic navigation among people with different but potentially legitimate ways of perceiving and prioritizing moral truths.
The difference between authentic moral sense theory and what I'm critiquing in EA/virtuocracy is humility. The moral sense tradition involves recognizing that we perceive through relationship, that our perception is always partial, that others may perceive differently without being morally deficient. EA and virtuocracy lack this. They claim to have calculated or analyzed their way to determinate answers that override democratic deliberation. That's the move I'm rejecting—not the existence of moral truths or our capacity to perceive them through cultivated sentiment, but the claim that anyone's perception grants them authority to impose their understanding on others without democratic accountability. The Guillotine falls on anyone who confuses perceiving truth with the right to rule.
EDIT: When I say moral truths are "real". I mean they're real like a chair. Emergent properties. Not real in the natural law sense. Meaning that they are not fixed. They exist in intersubjective space. Emerging from our sentiments, in conversation with culture, bounded by biological and environmental contingency. In the metaethical sense, I am still very much a moral skeptic, like Hume.
'Democracy says: “Neither is sufficient. Both must submit to collective deliberation.”'
This is where it all falls apart for me; the assumption that people are capable of collective deliberation. As K said, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it." Here in the United States, as you know, it's reached the point where people aren't even smart enough to elect reasonably smart people to represent them, and we have an ruling political party consisting of idiots* run by an idiot with dementia. Discussing the parallels between "Effective Altruism" vs. "Virtue Signaling" feels like arguing about which song the band should play while the Titanic sinks.
The fundamental problem is that we've forgotten that any democracy, even a republic such as the United States, requires an informed, educated citizenry to make cogent decisions, and requires its elected representatives to be forced to behave in a manner that reflects the decisions of those citizens. The United States does neither; instead, citizens are kept uninformed by the "media", and the "representatives" choose their voters to maximize their own chance of being re-elected. All the philosophizing in the world won't solve that, which I'm sure David Hume would raise a glass to. "David Hume could out consume Schopenhauer and Hegel..."
*To be fair, they're not all idiots; some of them are "true believers" in mind-shatteringly false beliefs, or complete sociopaths only interested in the accumulation of power.
Every alternative to democracy assumes an even more fantastic assumption—that the smart people who rule won't be corrupted by power, won't optimize for their own interests, won't make catastrophic errors when unconstrained by democratic accountability.
Yes, democracy requires an informed citizenry. Yes, ours is failing that requirement. Yes, we've systematically destroyed the epistemic conditions democracy needs—through algorithmic manipulation, through plutocratic capture of media, through educational neglect, through gerrymandering and voter suppression.
But the solution to "democracy is failing because its preconditions are being systematically undermined" isn't "therefore abandon democracy for rule by experts." It's "therefore fight to restore those preconditions."
I didn't mean to imply that there was an alternative to democracy on the table; I just didn't see how this rather erudite, intellectual, and kind of dry article advances restoring those preconditions. Yes, it's worthwhile to fully understand why the ship sank...once all the passengers in the lifeboats have been rescued. On the other hand, one can look at this as "documenting the fall" which will help future generations avoid this pitfall, because that's always helped immeasurably (i.e. so little that it falls below quantum measuring limits) in the past. (The Guillotine always falls.)
Kaylon Primary: We have reviewed the organizational structure of your Council and its history of deliberations. What you call 'representative democracy’ is a most inefficient form of governance.
Admiral Halsey: Maybe. But the one thing you can say for democracy is that all other forms of government are even worse. Over thousands of years and on countless planets, it’s the best system anyone’s ever come up with to ensure the strong don’t dominate the weak. At least not for long.
An amazing piece, Mike. I shall need to read 2-3 times to grasp it all. One point which you may allude to here: we all have different values. And it will always be impossible to bridge that gap. We do the best we can and we always fail. We tend to think of a left-right spectrum which is one dimensional but this is a 3 or, dare I say, 4 dimensional arena of values (with different measures of time). We think of the next 3 months or the next 7 generations. And most of us, most of the time think of human morals, our society, the relationship between us humans. While we would like to think that we pay attention to the environment, mostly we don't. The oceans have 10% of the fish they used to, maybe less; species are destroyed. We have no control, as a species, over our fertility. The only way we have been able to support 8 billion people is with massive unrelenting destruction. And the planet does not need us, would be far better without us. We plod on and will always struggle to find a balance. And yet we are an unbalanced , unnatural species. I say unnatural in that our tools and constructions are so beyond what the rest of nature has created that nature cannot compete with us. And this is, so far, our manifest destiny. Maybe we can all, especially the right wing among us, be a little less anthropocentric and weigh our values in favor of the small planet that we live upon. And understand our role as stewards, and not destroyers and conquerors. We need the planet more than it needs us.
Agreed both thought processes can lead to authoritarian capture, but like a lot of what is going on in our media landscape this is both sidesing the hell of the situation. A bunch of twitter trolls screaming about equity is no where near the richest people in the world buying up everything they can to impose their rule on us. The EA has a clear advantage in our current situation that makes the SJWs of the 2010s seem quaint.
Well, this was meant purely as an intellectual intervention. Not a political one. On matters of "which is worse?" — I agree with you!
Thank you for the reminder it isn’t always about politics. :)
Once again, I love your mind ❤️🔥 tho I fear the onslaught of your next Substack since it will probably take me the better part of a month to digest the intricacies of this last one.
Yet I think I get what you are saying. I do not feel that certainty is possible, that those who are like you are the best to know, that you will not learn something valuable in the spaces where you’ve lost your way. Most of my plans get interrupted. No problem. There are other choices. Having grown up being told “don’t be feeling sorry for yourself” and “don’t be so sure of yourself” I learned, against all resistance, that I’m better off without those pieces of baggage. And having gone to boarding school at the age of eight, there was no one to go to to complain about unfairness. This meant I had to try to make sense of what seemed to work for me, which of course included consideration of other people. It also meant that I could logically only allow the same leeway to others. Saying “I’m sorry, I made a mistake” seems so easy that it’s hard to understand why others find it hard. Imperfections seem normal, so guilt and judgement don’t have such sharp edges. Getting lost is usually a potential adventure, both physically and intellectually.
But I do have entrenched ideas in our present political muddle. As a Republican I’m fiscally conservative but I’m also highly emphatic. As Bill Clinton used to say, I do feel other people’s pain. It bothers me immensely to see the vulnerable hurt. And as a consequence I’ve been feeling freaked out about Musk’s idea that empathy is the problem with Western civilization. And I’ve put all the broligarchs into the same basket of ‘not ok’. I instinctively feel that there is no room in a functional and safe world with those guys.
I thank you, Mike, for allowing me to see that the efficiency oriented are not monsters. But let’s devoutly wish and work for a future where our egos learn to function with more flexibility and less fearful judgment.
David Hume’s final say on the connection between “is” and “ought” is in Appendix 1 of his “Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals” (which he considered his finest work).
“It appears evident that the ultimate ends of human action can never be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependence on his intellectual faculties. Ask a man ‘why he uses exercise’; he will answer ‘because he desires to keep his health’. If you then enquire ‘why he desires health’ he will readily reply ‘because sickness is painful’. If you push your enquiries further and desire a reason ‘why he hates pain’, it is impossible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end, and is never referred to any other object.
“Perhaps to your second question ‘why he desires health’, he may also reply that ‘it is necessary for the exercise of my calling’. If you ask ‘why he is anxious on this head’, he will answer ‘because he desires to get money’. If you demand ‘Why?’, ‘it is the instrument of pleasure’, says he. And beyond this it is an absurdity to ask for a reason.”
Thus Hume accepts that all desires can be treated as instrumental (which is to say that questions can validly be asked about the reasonableness of the desire), up to the point at which it is established that they add to the sum of pleasure over pain. Beyond that point, he considers that reason has nothing more to say.
It is true that there is something absurd about the question “why he hates pain?”, just as there is about the question “do married people have spouses?” It is part of the meaning of the words “married” and “spouse” that this is a redundant question. Equally, it is part of the meaning of the word “pain” that this is something that animals would normally rather have less of. But it is not clear why we should draw the conclusion that the answer to these questions can never be accounted for by reason. Rather than being unanswerable by reason, the question is simply trivial.
The characterizations of the two groups fits well. Yet (always a yet from me) your analysis assumes clear categorical separation between the passions and the rational, that virtue and beauty be arbitrary cultural constructs which we may only irrationally appreciate or live in the recognition of -- an Enlightenment which rejects, rather than culminates in, the realizations of the Romantics. In other words, rather than following Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, you are with Locke (Shaftesbury's tutor) in claiming that rationality can be purified of our feelings. (Perhaps it can in AI, but in us??)
Per a current biography of Franklin, Shaftesbury was his main philosophical influence, who he read with intensity as a teen. Jefferson's substitution of "pursuit of happiness" for "property" was a nod to Hutcheson, who followed Shaftesbury regarding the reality of our moral sense (as did Adam Smith). The concept of "inalienable rights" is from Hutcheson via Jefferson and Madison.
Are you claiming the founders of American democracy suffered a serious misconception here? If our awareness of virtue, beauty and the good is inherent, and certain of our rights inalienable, these are "is"es from which "oughts" are, in many circumstances, readily apparent. That they most obviously aren't apparent to some is of course also an "is," yet the "ought" to derive from that requires a deeper psychological understanding of their dysfunctional sense of beauty and virtue. How have their passions and capability to perceive what "is" -- including beauty and virtue -- become estranged from reality?
Reading this and taking on board your question, I think I perhaps under-represented my own philosophical stance, that is perhaps too deep in the subtext of this philosophical polemic. You're right that the essay's formulation—"values must be chosen, not discovered"—reads as a cleaner separation between reason and passion than I actually hold. It was a polemical simplification designed to force EA and virtuocracy to acknowledge they're making normative choices rather than discovering logical necessities. But it doesn't capture the fuller position I've been developing. In "A Treatise on Love" (https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/a-treatise-on-love), I argue that love is not just sentiment but an epistemic force—that without our capacity for moral perception, for responding to beauty and virtue, reason itself becomes sterile and disconnected from what matters. This is exactly the moral sense tradition you're invoking. Our capacity to perceive moral truths isn't separable from our emotional and relational capacities. Moral truths are real, but they emerge through complementarity—through the relationship between consciousness (with its natural capacities) and reality.
Where I part ways with using this for political authority is here: Even if moral truths exist and some people perceive them more clearly through cultivated moral sense, this doesn't grant them authority to rule. And I think the founders—despite believing in natural rights discoverable through moral sense—actually agreed with me. Yes, Jefferson was influenced by Hutcheson. But he also designed a system that doesn't grant anyone, however refined their moral perception, authority to impose their understanding without democratic accountability. The Declaration appeals to "self-evident truths" but immediately turns to democratic legitimacy: governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." Even if rights are inalienable and perceivable through moral sense, how we secure them remains a question requiring collective deliberation. You and I might both perceive that compassion is virtuous, but disagree about whether honoring that virtue requires universal healthcare or private charity. These aren't disagreements resolvable by one of us having more refined moral perception—they require the hard work of democratic navigation among people with different but potentially legitimate ways of perceiving and prioritizing moral truths.
The difference between authentic moral sense theory and what I'm critiquing in EA/virtuocracy is humility. The moral sense tradition involves recognizing that we perceive through relationship, that our perception is always partial, that others may perceive differently without being morally deficient. EA and virtuocracy lack this. They claim to have calculated or analyzed their way to determinate answers that override democratic deliberation. That's the move I'm rejecting—not the existence of moral truths or our capacity to perceive them through cultivated sentiment, but the claim that anyone's perception grants them authority to impose their understanding on others without democratic accountability. The Guillotine falls on anyone who confuses perceiving truth with the right to rule.
EDIT: When I say moral truths are "real". I mean they're real like a chair. Emergent properties. Not real in the natural law sense. Meaning that they are not fixed. They exist in intersubjective space. Emerging from our sentiments, in conversation with culture, bounded by biological and environmental contingency. In the metaethical sense, I am still very much a moral skeptic, like Hume.