Readers, if you read the supplemental material I link to, you will see the diligence I expect and demand (this is a total joke!). this Paper I reference I consider a proposed symmetry-breaking between modal ontological arguments for the existence of God and inverse modal ontological arguments for the existence of God. One symmetry-breaking proposal, and a response to it, reminded me of something. FA Hayek stated when evaluating the concept of “social justice.”
The symmetry breaker in question is Mandatory Symmetry breakers that deal with deontic properties. Deontic properties are properties about how things should be, “properties of obligation and permission (e.g. rightness, wrongness, obligation, etc.)” Evaluative A trait-deontological symmetry breaking that deals with “value and value-free properties (e.g., good, evil, etc.)” looks like this (quotes removed):
God is defined as the most perfect being. But the most perfect being is There is. Therefore, God must exist. But what must be, probably is. Therefore, it is possible that God exists.
So, according to this proposed symmetry breaker, there is reason to prefer premise 1 of the modal ontological argument over premise 1 of the inverse modal ontological argument.
One objection to this comes from William Vallicella, who argues that deontological properties cannot reasonably be applied to non-agentic situations: in situations that are not under the control of any agent, it makes no sense to talk about what ought or ought not to be.
As Vallicella expresses his concern, “Every state of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be necessarily involves an agent powerful enough to bring about or prevent the state of affairs in question.” But if deontological properties cannot apply to non-agentic situations, it is not true that God ought not to exist: there is no agent powerful enough to bring about or prevent God’s existence, and therefore the current state of affairs is non-agentic.
This notion that deontological properties cannot be applied to non-agentic situations reminded me of Hayek’s critique of social justice, which he argued “belongs not to the category of error but to the category of nonsense, like the term ‘moral stone’.” For Hayek, “social justice” is nonsense because the outcomes of social processes are non-agentic: there are no agents with sufficient knowledge and power to bring about or prevent a particular end result of a social process.
As Hayek said The illusion of social justiceVol. 2 Law, legislation and freedom“When we apply these terms to a state of affairs, they only have meaning insofar as we attribute responsibility to someone who caused or allowed the state of affairs to occur. … Only states of affairs created by human will can be called just or unjust, so the details of a spontaneous order cannot be called just or unjust.” And the idea that subjects have no control over the outcome of social processes is not just held by the political right. Friedrich Engels similarly wrote that “the will of each individual is thwarted by everyone else, and something is produced that nobody wanted.” So even the left, and even the extreme left, can acknowledge that the outcome of social processes is beyond anyone’s control.
To use an analogy, suppose a father intentionally favors some of his children over others. He lavishes love, attention, and resources on the favored children, while completely neglecting and ignoring the other children. Hayek says this is unfair, because the outcomes the children experience are entirely agential. But the outcomes of vast and complex social processes are non-agential, and it is nonsense to call those outcomes fair or unfair, as if they were analogous to the fictional father above.
However, not everyone agrees with Hayek’s view that the outcomes of social processes cannot be controlled in a reliable, agential way. Jeffrey Friedman has argued that “Simple Social Ontology” and believed that certain actors (politicians, technocrats, etc.) could reliably control social outcomes in the same way that a father controls how he treats his children. Thus, the more adherents one is to a simple society ontology, the more likely they are to embrace “social justice” and find it a meaningful project, because they believe that social outcomes are in fact under the control of trusted agents. Friedman describes how such people represent themselves in political polling data:
Conversely, as Hibbing and Theis-Morss show with evidence from focus groups and surveys, disillusionment and anger can result from a perception of government inaction. The authors’ angry and disillusioned respondents did not acknowledge that debates about which actions would be successful or what their effects would be could be the cause of inaction, much less that such debates could be justified. Instead, they seemed to agree that, as one person put it, all that was needed to solve existing problems was for leaders of both parties to get together and say, “We have a problem, and we’re not leaving this room until it’s solved.”…Respondents’ chronic dissatisfaction with elected officials seems to be driven by a conviction that officials are malicious and not so ignorant that they will knowingly and deliberately refuse to solve problems they know how to solve.
These voters believed that “social problems persist because elected officials have the ability but not the will to deal with the nation’s problems. To them, the ability is the easy part, or so it seems; the hard part is the will.” But if we believe that politicians and technocrats are not solving social problems because they simply don’t know how, then we lose the ability to meaningfully attribute deontic properties. This doesn’t mean that we can’t attribute deontic properties. Evaluative We attribute evaluative properties to outcomes and talk about whether such outcomes are good or bad. If a landslide that nobody caused and nobody could have prevented wipes out a village tomorrow, we can attribute evaluative properties to the event (“It’s a tragedy that this happened”), even though it makes no sense to attribute deontological properties to the event (“Those rocks and mud shouldn’t have covered the village”). However, people who hold a simple society ontology sometimes lose sight of the distinction between evaluative and deontological claims, and believe that evaluatively bad outcomes are deontologically unjust. This is a mistake, and we should avoid it.
