Consensus interruptus

Journal of Ethics

Volumn 5, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 121-131

  Goodin, Robert E ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Communitarianism; Consensus; Disagreement; Intolerance; Rationality

Indexed keywords

EID: 35348953686     PISSN: 13824554     EISSN: 15728609     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1011900121994     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. Isaiah, 1: 19-20, King James Version. His Republican opponents delighted in reminding President Lyndon Johnson of this more brutal continuation of his favourite Biblical quotation;
2. see William Safire Safire's Political Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 130.
3. Cf., e.g., Will Kymlicka, Liberalism, Community and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)
4. or Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993)
5. with Alasdair C. Maclntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
6. Brian Barry makes precisely this point in distinguishing between nationalism in its "academic" and "popular" forms in his "Statism and Nationalism," in Ian Shapiro and Lea Brilmayer (eds.), Nomos XLI: Global Justice (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 12-66.
7. For elaboration of these themes, see - besides the article to which Keith Lehrer refers - my "Conventions and Conversions: Or, Why Is Nationalism Sometimes So Nasty?," in Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan (eds.), The Ethics of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 88-104
8. and "Liberally Limited Nationalism," in Nenad Miscevic (ed.), Nationalism: A Philosophical View from Within (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), pp. 283-297.
9. "Individualism, Communitarianism and Consensus," The Journal of Ethics 5 (2001), pp. 105-120 (this issue).
10. See further: Keith Lehrer, "Rationality in Science and Society: A Consensual Theory," in Gilbert Ryle (ed.), Contemporary Aspects of Philosophy (London: Oriel Press, 1976), pp. 14-30;
11. and Keith Lehrer and Carl Wagner, Rational Consensus in Science and Society: A Philosophical and Mathematical Study (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: D. Reidel, 1981).
12. What I ought add at the earliest opportunity, though, is that Lehrer's own derivations do not rely explicitly on calculations from Bayes' formula as such. Still, something akin to "Bayesian updating" - adjusting your initial views in light of subsequent events - clearly is what underlies his discussion and makes it appealing. In discussing Lehrer's results "as if" they were based on Bayes' rule, when strictly speaking they are not, I am therefore merely attempting to set his results in the most familiar and widely accepted possible context.
13. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1971).
14. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
15. David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
16. Akin, in this respect, to John Harsanyi's demonstration that average utilitarianism follows simply from Bayesianism plus a few ostensibly innocuous further formal constraints; Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
17. Or anyway unremarked: the formal part of this paper, however, explicitly borrows from his earlier results about "rational consensus in science," of course.
18. C.A.J. Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
19. See similarly Aristotle, "Rhetoric to Alexander," §15, 1431b20-1432al2; in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), Volume 2, pp. 2270-2315.
20. Unless of course the others in response to whom you are revising have acquired some genuinely new information in between times. But even then, Bayesian rationality would require (yea, permit) only that we revise in light of that new piece of information: there would be no reason to (and every reason not to) revise our beliefs in response to that other's beliefs holus bolus, taking into account once again much information that we had already taken fully into account in previous rounds.
21. On tracking, see Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981).
22. That is the larger ambition - though in his George-and-Mary example they were committed to coming to a consensus as a precondition of receiving the bequest at all, of course.
23. According to the formula: Pφ|x = [(Px|φ)(Pφ)]/[(Px|φ) (Pφ) + (Pφ|not-x)(Pnot-φ)].
24. David Hume, "Of Miracles," Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London: T. Cadell, 1777), Section 10. We could, of course, pursue both these options simultaneously. The same condition also makes majority rule the best decision rule, maximizing your probability of winning less your probability of losing.
25. For proofs, see: Douglas W. Rae, "Decision-Rules and Individual Values in Constitutional Choice," American Political Science Review 63 (1969), pp. 40-56;
26. and Michael Taylor, "Proof of a Theorem on Majority Rule," Behavioral Science 14 (1969), pp. 228-231.
27. Thomas Piketty, "Social Mobility and Redistributive Politics," Quarterly Journal of Economics 110 (1995), pp. 551-584.