Policymakers – Knaves or Ignoramuses?

Also, Lockdown – Diabolical Scheme or Cock Up?

In his 1741 essay, “Of the Independency of Parliament,” David Hume famously wrote that

Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest.

According to Hume’s maxim, political analysis should start from an assumption about the (un)ethical quality of policymakers’ motives. The problem of policymaker incentives is that policymakers may not be sufficiently motivated or incented to pursue goals in the interests of their constituents. In order to write an effective political constitution, Hume’s maxim advises, we must assume knavish policymakers that care only about realizing goals in their own private interests. A government founded on a constitution written according to the false assumption that policymakers are selfless promoters of the public interest will sooner or later fail. The fundamental problem of politics is how to incent, motivate, constrain, and cajole policymakers naturally inclined to pursue their own interests into pursuing their constituents’ interests instead.

I have no problem with the Humean vision of political decision-making, as far as it goes. There are whole schools of political economy dedicated to addressing the problem of policymaker incentives (namely, the related schools of public choice and constitutional political economy, both associated with the work of Nobel Prize winner, James M. Buchanan) and their work is important. The political-incentive problem is real and its solution a pressing need.

However, the Humean reasoning has not been taken as far as it can go. A constitution that effectively constrains policymakers to the pursuit of goals associated with their constituents’ interests cannot guarantee that policymakers know either what these interests are, what policy goals are associated with these interests, or how to deliberately realize associated goals. The problem of policymaker incentives is not the most basic problem of political life. Their self-interest is not an unanalyzable matter of course about policymakers. There is something that comes before, that serves to determine, a person’s incentives, namely, their knowledge and ignorance.

The point is easily seen. Imagine that you are, by nature, a violent, hateful, and bitter person, but that due to a strange twist of fate, your knowledge is limited to three courses of action: 1) Petting puppies; 2) Assisting elderly people across busy streets; and 3) Feeding the homeless. If these are the only actions that you know about and know how to perform, can you be incented to do anything else, despite your, in fact, ugly moral character? More to the point, are your (seemingly ethical) actions under such circumstances a consequence of your moral character or your epistemic circumstances? Of course, the same reasoning works in reverse: you might be instinctively inclined to gentleness, love, and forgiveness, but if you know only how to kick puppies, push elderly people into traffic, and steal food from the homeless, your moral nature is not going to come across in your actions. What appears to be bad behavior may simply reflect a person’s deficient epistemic circumstances regarding better alternatives.

It is much easier for policymakers – they confront greater incentives – to pursue their constituents’ interests when they know what these interests are, which policy goals will advance these interests, and how to realize these goals, than when they know none of these things. If they do not know either their constituents’ interests, which goals will promote these interests, or how to realize these goals, it is practically impossible for policymakers to (deliberately) make constituent-minded policies.

This suggests that policymakers’ (to my mind) undeniable tendency toward knavish behavior is less a matter of their deficient moral character than of the fact that they know better how to be knavish than how to be constituent-minded. It is (epistemically) easier for policymakers, who typically know their own interests better than they know the interests of their constituents, to make self-interested policies than to make constituent-minded policies. So, we get more knavish decisions from policymakers, other things equal, than we would if they knew more about their constituents’ interests and associated goals. Their relevant knowledge and ignorance serve to determine their incentives, and, thus, their ultimate choices. As I have put the point elsewhere, Hume and his modern descendants

misplaced the normative cart before the epistemic horse. […] We should assume not that all men are knaves, but that all men are ignoramuses and that the extent of their knavery is in part a function of the extent of their ignorance.  Perhaps unfortunately, “All men are ignoramuses and, because of this, sometimes knaves too” falls from neither tongue nor pen as mellifluously as Hume’s famous phrase. (“Ignorance and the Incentive Structure confronting Policymakers,” Cosmos + Taxis, 2019, Volume 7, Issue 1 + 2, 39-51)

As I will show in a post that I hope to write this week or next, unlike policymakers’ moral character, their knowledge and ignorance can be directly investigated using empirical methods. We cannot determine on the basis of observation alone whether policymakers are naturally inclined more toward their own private interests than toward the public interest, but we can get some grasp on what they know about various self-interested and constituent-minded goals, and infer their likely policy choices from inquiry into their epistemic circumstances.

Lockdown – Diabolical Scheme or Cock Up?

There is a running debate within the camp of lockdown skeptics over whether the choice to lockdown was due more to dastardly behavior on the part of policymakers (who were, according to this way of thinking, always eagerly awaiting the first opportunity to restrict our freedoms, impose social controls, etc.) or to policymakers’ ignorance of considerations necessary to craft a less repressive, and perhaps more effective, response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Did Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, and the rest recommend lockdowns because they were nefarious persons who saw in the pandemic an opportunity for malevolence, or because they took themselves to be ignorant in the face of the befuddling information that they confronted in mid-March 2020, panicked, and reached for the (epistemically) easiest policy tools at hand, i.e., lockdowns, mask mandates, etc. Was lockdown a diabolical plot or a f**k up?

The foregoing discussion of the Humean method of political analysis suggests a few considerations relevant to answering this question.

First, it is little wonder that the question has been raised. Ignorant behavior and simply bad, immoral, or unethical behavior are often observationally equivalent. This is a philosopher’s fancified way of saying that there is no possible empirical evidence that might be used to distinguish ignorant from malevolent behavior. Actions taken on the basis of inadequate knowledge often look exactly like actions based on malicious intent.

Second, the discussion above suggests that the question whether lockdowns were more a consequence of evil than of ignorance might be misplaced, in the sense that the two possible answers are not mutually exclusive or even independent. If there is anything to the foregoing discussion, ignorance can be a cause of (what appears to be) bad behavior. Well-intentioned people can be incented to seemingly immoral behavior, simply due to the nature and extent of their relevant ignorance. The question, “Lockdown – diabolical scheme or cock up?” might be more fruitfully rephrased as “Lockdown – purely diabolical or diabolical-because-of-ignorance?”

None of this is meant to suggest a final answer to the question. It is merely to note that, if we adopt the Humean approach to political analysis – if we start from the assumption that policymakers are knaves and ignore the possibility that they are ignoramuses incented to knavishness by their relevant ignorance – the question about lockdowns cannot even be asked. The only possibility, on the Humean approach, is that the decision to lockdown was always and everywhere a consequence of relevant policymakers’ knavish natures and never a function of their ignorance.

Indeed, the Humean method illicitly smuggles in several dubious assumptions about policymakers’ epistemic circumstances that may well be false. The method cannot be applied unless it is assumed that policymakers know their own interests, which goals are associated with these interests, and how to realize these goals. The policymakers-as-knaves method is really a policymakers-as-infallible-knaves method. If you’re doubtful – as I would suggest, you should be – that policymakers always know their own interests, the goals connected with these interests, and how to achieve these goals, then you should prefer Scheall’s maxim – all policymakers are ignoramuses and, because of this, sometime knaves, too – to Hume’s.