If you read the additional information I link to the diligence I expect and need, dear reader (tongue firmly in cheek here!), you will have learned this paper I indicated which examines the proposed balance between the modal ontological argument for the existence of god and the deviant modal ontological argument against the existence of god. One of the symmetry passages, and the response to it, reminded me of something FA Hayek said when he explored the concept of “social justice.”
The symmetry breaker in question is this deontic symmetry breaker, which deals with deontic properties. Deontic properties are properties related to what ought to be, “properties of obligation and consent (eg, rightness, wrongness, propriety, etc.)”, different what you are testing properties relating to “properties of value and non-value (eg, goodness, badness, etc.)” The deontic symmetry breaker goes like this (citations removed):
God is described as the most perfect being. But the most perfect person should they exist. Therefore, God must exist. But what should be is possible. Therefore, it is possible that God exists.
Therefore, according to this proposed quantifier, we are justified in choosing ground 1 of the modal ontological argument over ground 1 of the reverse modal ontological argument.
One objection to this comes from William Vallicella, who argues that deontic properties cannot be logically applied to non-administrative situations. That is, it makes no sense to talk about what should or should not be the case in situations that are not under the control of any agent:
As Vallicella puts it, “every situation that should or shouldn’t exist actually involves an agent that is powerful enough to bring about or prevent the situation in question.” But if deontic properties do not apply to non-administrative contexts, then it is not true that God must exist—no agent has the power to bring about or prevent God’s existence, so the existing context is not a field.
This view of the ineffectiveness of deontic structures in non-administrative contexts reminded me of Hayek’s critique of social justice, the view he maintains “does not belong to the category of errors but to nonsense, like the term ‘moral stone’. ‘” For Hayek, the reason that “social justice” was nonsense is because the outcomes of social processes lack agency. No agents have sufficient knowledge and power to bring about or prevent certain final results of social processes.
As Hayek puts it The Mirage of Social Justicesecond volume of Law, Law, and Freedom: “When we use principles in the context of affairs, they only have meaning if we hold someone responsible for bringing them about or allowing them to happen…As only situations created by human will can be called just. or unfair, the details of an automatic system cannot be fair or unfair.” And the inability of agents to control the results of social processes is by no means a view held only by those on the political right – Friedrich Engels also said “What each individual wants is interfered with by everyone, and what emerges is nothing. the other loved.” So you can be on the left, even the far left, and still admit that the effects of social processes are beyond everyone’s control.
Let’s use an analogy, let’s say there is a father who deliberately loves some of his children more than others. She deliberately showers her favorite child with love, attention, and resources, while neglecting and neglecting her other children. This, Hayek would say, is wrong, because the effects children experience are absolutely powerful. But the results of large and complex social processes do not have economic implications, and to speak of those results as just or unjust, as in the case of the hypothetical father above, is absurd.
But not everyone shares Hayek’s view that the effects of social processes cannot be reliably controlled by management. Jeffrey Friedman wrote extensively about people who hold on to “A simple social ontology” and who believed that certain actors (politicians, experts, etc.) could reliably control social outcomes in a way similar to a father’s cognitive ability to control how he treats his children. Therefore, the more a person adheres to a simple social ontology, the more likely they are to accept “social justice” and find it a meaningful activity, because they believe that social outcomes are actually under the reliable control of officials. Friedman described how such people revealed themselves in political polling data:
Conversely, as Hibbing and Theiss-Morse show with partisan and poll evidence, disappointment and anger can follow the perception that the government is failing to act. The angry, disillusioned authors’ respondents did not allow that inaction could be caused by arguments about what actions would be successful or what their effects would be, let alone that those arguments could be justified. On the contrary: they seem to agree that, as one said, what will be needed to solve the existing problems is for the leaders of both parties to meet and talk to each other, “There is a problem. We will not leave this room until it is fixed.”…Respondents’ constant dissatisfaction with the elected officials was due to the belief that the officials had bad intentions, lacked enough knowledge, that they deliberately refused. to solve problems that they could solve.
These voters believed that “the reason why social problems persist is that elected officials are ‘competent but have no desire to take care of the nation’s problems.’ Skill, to them, was the easy part, or so it seemed; what was difficult was the will.” But if you think that politicians and experts have not solved social problems because they simply do not know how to do it, you lose the ability to logically explain deontic structures. This does not mean that one can no longer say what you are testing structures in certain outcomes, and speak of the virtues or vices of such outcomes. If a man-made landslide that no one could prevent wipes out a town tomorrow, I can place checkpoints on that event (“it’s a disaster what happened”) or it makes no sense to associate unnatural things with that event (“all those rocks and mud shouldn’t have filled that town.”) But the people who harbor the -simple social ontology can forget the difference between analytical claims and deontic claims – which makes them believe that the result is bad to some extent, therefore it is unreasonable. which is wrong. But this is a mistake, and we must resist falling into it.
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