S.Subramaniyan on the clash between Liberty & Equality

S.Subramaniyan writes in Live Mint

In A Theory Of Justice, John Rawls advances two fundamental principles as being constitutive of any reasonable interpretation of justice as fairness. Rawls’ first principle of justice demands that each person is to have an equal right to the most widespread liberty compatible with a like liberty for all.

Liberty does not require the existence of Justice. The most widespread liberty, compatible with a like liberty for all, would be one where there in no theory or practice of Justice. Other regulative concepts or norms might apply, but nothing would be justiciable.

Equally, there would be little inequality, assuming no barriers to entry or exit, in an area of unconstrained Liberty- this is considered a feature of small scale hunter gatherer societies.

Thus Rawls's first principle demands that Justice not exist or that it have a wholly evanescent existence in response to an existential threat.

If our species values Liberty, why is it most Societies claim to have a system of Justice? The answer is that the administration of Justice is a requirement to redeem a territory from the status of terra nullis. A method of distinguishing licit from illicit violence is created in situations where competing interests clash. However, such Justice is rationed. It is a scarce good because it uses up resources. Moreover, one can do justice on one one's own behalf. I may use reasonable force to defend my liberty and my property. The force I have available may be far greater than that of another person. She may be afraid to exercise her notional liberty by taking a walk by herself. I may suffer no such apprehension. Will the administration of Justice concern itself with providing her such armed protection as would equalize her status with me? No. The thing would be too costly. To have greater liberty, she may well exit this jurisdiction and enter some other jurisdiction where she is safer and thus enjoys more liberty. Equally, if I find the demands of Justice onerous, I may exit the Jurisdiction or effectually secede from it.

Since Justice uses scarce resources, it is a purely economic good. It has no 'foundational principles' save by way of 'legal fictions'. Even those fictions only come into play where a dispute between two or more parties has been brought to it. If there is no prospect of enforcement, there is no effective jurisdiction. Further, the range of justiciability fluctuates dependent on exigent circumstances. The 'doctrine of political question' gains greater salience where there is an existential threat- e.g. to National Security- or where there is a likelihood that Judicial decisions will be ignored or become the basis of counter-mobilization.

Currently in India, the Leftist Government in Kerala is not helping women to exercise their liberty, in accordance with a Supreme Court Decision, to visit a certain Temple. The thing is too costly from every point of view. It is likely that the Bench will reverse it self on this issue.

What would a reasonable 'first principle of Justice' demand? The answer is that the conduct of Judicial processes must themselves be Just in the specific sense of being utile, protocol bound, fit for purpose, and such as would meet approval by fair-minded observers.

It cannot be the case that the first principle of Justice should be to permit actions and outcomes which are arbitrary, mischievous, unfit for purpose, and such as would cause revulsion in the minds of fair-minded observers.

It is not reasonable to say that a first principle to be observed in making a judgment- as opposed to fulfilling a distributive function- involves giving everybody the same amount of whatever it is that comes under the scope of judgment.

 Thus in judging a Beauty contest, we do not say that the first principle of Aesthetics should be that all contestants may exercise the right to be as beautiful as possible subject to a like level of beauty being attained by everybody else. This may entail everybody wearing a paper bag over their head. Clearly this is foolish.

Rawls was not suggesting that everyone be a slave if even one person can never, for some organic reason, rise above such a level. His first principle only existed so that it could be immediately rendered a nullity by this second principle.

The second principle—the celebrated Difference Principle—emphasizes the primacy of maximizing the advantage (in terms of an index of primary goods) of the worst-off person: specifically, “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity".

Social and economic inequalities can't be arranged because they arise biologically- though, no doubt, they may be ameliorated or worsened by some 'run-away' process which itself arises out of such inequality. To pretend that those concerned with Justice have supernatural powers such that they can reorder Society and Economic relationships in a frictionless manner is to show an extraordinary ignorance of the Natural and Social Sciences. Indeed, it suggests an advanced degree of mental retardation or a degenerative disease of the brain.

An existential threat to all Liberty arises from the bare existence of 'offices and positions' which, by reason of the greater powers or immunities they offer, become the subject of competition.

If Knightian Uncertainty obtains- which must be the case if humans evolved by Natural Selection rather than by the fiat of an all-powerful or omniscient God- we don't know who is truly least advantaged or how they may be best benefited.

Thus, this healthy and wealthy young man may be the least advantaged because he has just been infected with a terrible illness which it will be very costly to cure. On the other hand, those poor people who appear emaciated may have resistance to that disease and will live long and lead increasingly prosperous lives. If these facts were known, the difference principle would militate for taxing the poor to help the rich- because they would become poorer than the rest were this help not afforded to them. Furthermore, people in unproductive professions would have a claim to being supported in perpetuity by those who are productive.

In the Beauty contest case, it could be argued that each contestant should be free to display all such portions of her anatomy and all such erotic skills and titillating arts as she may possess. But this could lead to a repugnant outcome. The highly callipygous P. Chidambaram would gyrate his shapely haunches in a manner destructive of all norms of civilized behavior. The masses would be inflamed with lust. India would suffer the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Subramaniyam, perhaps because he is immune to Chidu's dimpled and roseate charms, takes a different view-

In this perspective then, equality and liberty are the cornerstones of any foundational conception of justice, or more generally, of any inclusive view of political morality.

But this is a foolish perspective. It assumes there is no Knightian Uncertainty and thus Humanity has not evolved by natural selection. But, if there is no Knightian Uncertainty, there can be no Scientific or other sort of experimentation such that previously unknown possible states of the world are discovered. Compiling Statistics would suffice to give a probabilistic expression to all Natural and Economic laws. Once this had been done- and this could happen purely by Baldwinian evolution- i.e. channelisation into 'instincts'- an evolutionary stable strategy would be 'hardwired', till the next exogenous deformation of the fitness landscape. There would be little need for language or reasoning or markets or any complex type of institution. Humans would no more have 'foundational conceptions of justice' than amoebae or elm trees.

Given this, it should be cause for concern if the principles of liberty and equality were found to be in mutual conflict.

Why? We may speak of the principles of Beauty and the principles of Virtue. They are not necessarily in conflict because a Beautiful person can be Virtuous. Moreover the path of Virtue, which involves abstinence and self-control, may over the course of the years, yield a countenance of rare distinction and noble harmony. By contrast, the spectacle must sooner or later pall of P.Chidambaram's upthrust buttocks gyrating incessantly while the fellow leers at us over his shoulders. We may say that though the principles of Aesthetics expressed by his D.N.A endowed him with a Platonic perfection of form, yet his dissolute path in life caused him to use the sublimest portion of his anatomy in so meretricious a manner that we feel him to be the embodiment of not Beauty but trash.

Under Knightian Uncertainty we don't know what our Income is or what Rights we possess. This is because Income means the recurring return on our endowments. Next period, it may be nothing. We can't be sure. Similarly, Rights only exist where they are linked to incentive compatible remedies. We don't know whether those remedies will be provided when we really need them. Thus we follow a 'regret minimizing' strategy such that we develop different sorts of hedges, including ontologically dysphoric ones, against a sudden loss of Liberty or Livelihood.

One way this can be done is through Social Insurance and Political and other incomplete Contracts. But this is only one among many different types of hedges the best endowed will invest in. Those who have the least may rely on such schemes having no other option. But, chances are, they will be the first to go to the wall when there is an 'Entitlements Collapse'. Indeed, if the people of Sodom had been rational, they would have maintained at public expense, a class of indigents purely for prudential reasons.

My point is that Liberty and Equality may appear to coincide- but diverge in reality once hedging is taken into account. Equally, they may appear to diverge whereas they are in fact converging. Consider Evelyn Waugh's well heeled characters. They though inequality was stable or rising in the Thirties. Then the War came. It turned out that 'Upper Tenth' hadn't hedged sufficiently against the catastrophic risk represented to their unearned income by Hitler & Co. So Equality increased in the Forties and, as James Buchan writes, a substantial rentier class was taxed out of existence over the subsequent decades. But this did not mean Equality went up permanently. Great fortunes found ways to avoid Taxation. By the Seventies, it was working people who had to pay for the pretense of Equality. They rebelled against 'Solidarity wages' or 'Prices and Incomes Policies' and a bien pensant class of public intellectuals was disintermediated from Governance. This was what was happening in the U.K when Subramaniyam was at the LSE. This is what happened in the India to which he returned. Perhaps, if Modi gets another term, there will be push-back on this. The majority can always be persuaded to accept Social Insurance so long as libtards don't run amok claiming that minorities will get first call on resources. A Rights based approach must give way to a Contributions based approach. Indeed, this is what Marx counsels for countries for whom advanced Socialism is a far horizon.

Indeed, it turns out that there are seemingly reasonable ways of interpreting these principles such that they end up being mutually incompatible.

There are no 'seemingly reasonable ways of interpreting' Tarskian primitive terms like Justice or Liberty. Why? By definition, they have no interpretation or intensional definition but represent pragmatics or are extensional simply.

To interpret an intuition is to kill it. Casuistry has no alethic value. Remember Clinton interpreting the word 'is' every which way? That's what got him disbarred.

Amartya Sen did not understand either Economics or Philosophy. But he was great at pretending to be a sort of Mother Theresa figure and under his aegis a bunch of academo-bureaucratic nitwits gained an interessement mechanism for their imbecility.

Specifically, the potential for such a conflict always exists if we were to defer to the dictates of equality in terms of a version of Amartya Sen’s Weak Equity Axiom, and to the dictates of liberty in terms of his principle of Minimal Liberty (ML).

Sen's WEA says that a guy who has less utility for any given endowment should get more. Thus, if there is a 120 year old billionaire who needs medical procedures costing a trillion dollars so as to remain alive to the end of this week, then everybody else should be on a subsistence wage so that the billionaire can be kept alive.
Clearly, this is a travesty of Utilitarian philosophy.

       income.'
The word axiom comes from the Greek word 'axioma' and has the meaning ''that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident.' To whom does it commend itself to? In Jurisprudence there is either a 'reasonable person' test or else we may speak of a bonus paterfamilias exercising, on behalf of another, a diligence equal to such as he would apply in pursuing his own interests.

What Sen has offered is not an Axiom. It is something no reasonable person would accept. In any case, the thing requires 'interpersonal comparison of utility' (ICU) which can easily be controverted. How do we know Jones processes utility less efficiently? How do we prevent Smith from lodging a claim to be even more disabled by reason of some invisible psychological quirk?

Of course, it is always possible for a judicial process to make ICUs. Indeed, we all do so all the time and this drives mimetic processes. The question for Jurisprudence is whether, following Richard Hare, ICU can give rise to 'universalizable prescriptive statements' which in turn generate an algorithmic decision process which has a canonical form for Economics. The answer is sure- but it is not effectively computable and can only be known ex post. However, a protocol bound Juristic process can do ICU- indeed, our Courts make such comparisons when awarding damages- and so this is an idiographic, not nomothetic, matter. However, the risk of jurisdiction shopping or other 'Exit' means there are severe constraints on the 'macro' effects of Judicial activism. Ultimately, a vinculum juris is either incentive compatible or it is a dead letter. Thus, under all circumstances, there is a trade-off between Pareto Optimality (only achievable under perfect Liberty) and Game theoretic stability of the solution concept (which involve restrictions on Liberty to ensure contract compliance).

Sen’s Weak Equity Axiom, which was originally postulated in the context of income distributions, was subsequently advanced in more general terms by the Stanford economist Peter Hammond in terms of a principle that one might call Minimal Equity (ME).

'Hammond Equity', which uses '“independence of interpersonal comparisons involving irrelevant alternatives”- looks like a way to get back to the old Utilitarian intuition that money has diminishing marginal utility and transfers to the poor boost aggregate welfare. At the time, it was uncontroversial. The economists were assuming ceteris would be paribus.  This seemed reasonable. Young men could easily find a mate of their own class and start a family. During subsequent decades it was discovered that if the economic fitness landscape was capable of drastic deformations, then structural unemployment might arise such that some young men- those with lower transferable work skills and thus lower transfer earnings- would be rendered less desirable marriage partners. Thus “ interpersonal comparisons involving irrelevant alternatives” were not genuinely independent of Welfare.

 Sexual signalling mainly involves wholly irrelevant alternatives- which is why I didn't get laid till I was 19 and had a good job. It is not that 'Liberty' was lacking, I simply did not know what Band to pretend to like so as to send the required signal. Once I wore a three piece suit and carried a briefcase, that sort of thing ceased to matter. It was known that guys like me were doing well out of the Recession. We may have looked like weasels, but weasels do well whatever happens to the economy. Thus, our reproductive fitness suddenly increased.

Women, it seems, are 'Muth Rational'. Transfers could not render men attractive unless they were targeted at men qua men- not attached to children or other dependents. Thus, a husband whose ultimate economic viability was dependent on transfers- not adequate transfer earnings- became less desirable. Large, 'subaltern' classes of people came to see that, for males, transfers were a poisoned chalice. They developed non-economic screening and signalling devices for mate selection and to solve 'the stable marriage problem'.

Furthermore, the existence of Social Welfare safety nets- because they can only flourish in countries under the Rule of Law- attracted immigrants who would work harder or who had a better endowment set. This further contributed to localized structural unemployment.

Transfers thus became a demographic neutron bomb. They could create areas where males with few life chances were deserted by women flocking to the bright lights of the big Cities. Advanced economies developed rust-belts plagued by either 'despair deaths' or gangsterism or both. Different working class communities were impacted differently. Where chance of incarceration was higher- presumably because of historic prejudice and institutional bias- transfers were associated with one sort of social and familial collapse. In other communities, things may have gone the other way- with increased spousal and child abuse being the result of lower male life-chances. Not that independent women had it easy. They ended up paying through taxes for any benefits they received as a class. At the margin, many were net losers though, no doubt, there are also some spectacular success stories.

Peter Hammond started as a Mathematician. Had he first done Mathematical Biology before moving into Econ, he need not necessarily have wasted his life.

Sen’s axiom demanded that in an optimal distribution of income between two individuals, the person who is worse off in both distributions deserves a larger share of the total income.
In a more general setting, one can formulate the principle of ME as follows: given a pair of states of affairs which differ from each other only in terms of the personal features of two individuals—call them 1 and 2, respectively—if, say, person 1 is worse off than person 2 in both states of affairs, then the social choice between the two states should depend only on the preference of the more disadvantaged individual (that is, person 1, in this case). The general principle underlined is that equity must privilege the preference of the more disadvantaged individual in collective choices.

But ICU is being used- and used incorrectly- to identify the 'more disadvantaged'. The fact is Utility is a present value with kin selective altruism factored in. The Price Equation has salience here. Mathematical Economists didn't bother with the Biology- though Price himself slit his throat, after some sort of Damascene conversion, in some slum not far from the LSE while Hammond was there.

The failure of the Indians and their Cambridge chums to understand that human beings are biological beings, not mathematical abstractions, rendered their pseudo-mathematical work on 'Poverty' & 'Inequality' utterly mischievous. Thanks to them, the LSE, to which the Tatas had given a lot of money in its early years, was able to fuck up India long after the Brits had left.

ML defers to a very weak requirement of the recognition of what John Stuart Mill called a protected personal sphere, in which personal preferences are socially respected.

Mill was wrong to think there could be a 'Laxman Rekha' within which the individual could feel sovereign and secure.  To rely on ML, is to put all your eggs in one basket within a circle which, sooner or later, will attract a predator or parasite. Liberty depends on hedging against its loss. What is being described is not Minimal Liberty but a trap only a cretin will fall into.

Suppose I'm a witness in a court case. I am asked 'what were you doing at such and such time?'. Only if I have committed a crime can I refuse to answer. I have no 'protected personal sphere'. I am obliged to reveal that I was plying a nefarious trade as a P. Chidambaram lookalike. What is the outcome? That scoundrel himself turns up to work my corner thus leaving me bereft of clients. My children starve.
                               

More specifically, ML demands that for each of at least two individuals in society, there should be at least one pair of social states each which differ only in a feature personal to that individual, such that the individual’s preference over the relevant pair of states is also accepted as the social preference over that pair.

If there is any sort of 'gene competition' between them, there is no a priori way of distinguishing such social states. No doubt, for a particular juristic process, a 'reasonable man' test may be applied. But that is idiographic Law, not nomothetic Social Science.

The general underlying principle is that liberty requires personal choices to be collectively respected.

Liberty requires no such thing. It is a Tarskian primitive term. It has no definition. Some cretin gassing on about 'personal choices being collectively respected' according to his schemata is an enemy of Liberty just as much as he is the enemy of Common Sense.

Now it is possible to show that there is a specific sense in which, under certain well-defined conditions, the principles of ML and ME can clash.

It is not possible for these cretins to show anything at all save their soiled diapers.

A demonstration of this is available in work I have done elsewhere (“Can we possibly subscribe to both Liberty and Equality at one and the same time?" Think, 2012). The specific technical details of demonstration are beyond the scope of this article, but the conflict between equity and liberty is a common enough theme in political and moral analysis.

There can be no demonstration of a clash between Primitive terms. They simply refer to different intuitions. Suppose those intuitions have a mathematical representation. In that case, there can be a clash iff Maths can't have univalent foundations. But if Maths can't have univalent foundations then all sorts of weird results follow like P=NP.

On the other hand, a Primitive concept, like Utility or Beauty or Justice or whatever can be associated, by the axiom of choice with a partial ordering which, by the Spilrajn extension theorem, can yield a total order and a metric. We could also associate a Tarskian Primitive with an intensional calculus or deontic logic. It is coherent if it has a concrete model- i.e. if we can stipulate 'x is complying with this calculus, and because x is compossible with our universe, therefore this deontic logic is implementable'. This would also mean there is a first order theory of that Primitive concept.

Suppose there is a first order theory of Liberty (L) and also one of Equality(E). Then, by the Robinson Joint Consistency theorem or Craig-Lyndon theorem, either the smallest signature of L ∪ E is satisfiable or it isn't. If it is, we can't speak of a clash of primitives. If it isn't, then there is an interpolating sentence ρ in the language of L ∩ E that is true in all models of L and false in all models of E. Moreover, ρ has the stronger property that every relation symbol that has a positive occurrence in ρ has a positive occurrence in some formula of L and a negative occurrence in some formula of E, and every relation symbol with a negative occurrence in ρ has a negative occurrence in some formula of L and a positive occurrence in some formula of E.

In other words there are cases where knowing something about L means knowing something about E and vice versa. This means, by the Godel completeness theorem, there must be another first order language which has superior 'soundness'. Thus whatever L or E we have, it is not the true first order language for L or E. Thus, to say, if there is a clash between L & E such that  L ∪ E is not satisfiable, then we have the wrong L and the wrong E. There is a proposition ρ in the language of L ∩ E, which is actually second order or type theoretic in some way.

All that Sen, Subramaniam and so on can show is that nonsensical notions clash because nonsensical notions can do anything.  This is a case of ex falso quodlibet- from nonsense any and all nonsense follows. If we can show Liberty and Equality clash, we can also show they had hot make-up sex in the toilet of a Burger King on the North End Road. Equality got preggers. So did Liberty coz did I mention one of them was a hooker whom Randy Andy had just nutted in? Anyway, once all the other members of the Royal Family fled Corbyn's UK, one of the two brats conceived on that night must become the new Monarch. But which one? Arguably, only the hooker Andy nutted in could be considered his common law wife and thus her child has a superior right regardless of birth order. On the other hand, it was by her own lustful actions that the Royal sperm was conveyed to the other womb and thus it is a surrogate with a superior right if it represents primogeniture.

 Is there a nomothetic manner in which this clash between Liberty and Equality can be resolved? Or do we need to watch the security-cam footage? I believe, this is an idiographic matter and am currently on Kickstarter raising money to produce a film employing industry professionals so as to give a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of events. I believe watching my movie is the only utile manner in which we can contemplate the clash between Liberty and Equality. I may mention the final scene where some Frat boys barge in. Thus Fraternity too is depicted.

I know what you are going to say. All this is old hat. If only I had attended the Algebraic Topology classes at the LSE, I would have understood that everything in Social Choice theory is nothing but outlines for Porn films of the above description. Had I been smart enough to recognize this when I was 18, I might have developed into a respected academic like Subramaniam Saar. Instead, I thought the thing a wank pure and simple. It was to Accountancy that I turned- lured by lubricious talk of 'double entry'. But that was also the reason I was quickly sacked.

How should we view this alleged conflict between equality and liberty? A particularly appealing interpretation is available in the important book Taking Rights Seriously, written by the late Harvard philosopher and jurist Ronald Dworkin.

Dworkin was a cretin but not an ignoramus. He understood Hohfeldian analysis. He clerked for Justice Learned Hand. He knew Rights are linked to Remedies. These are subject to scarcity, incentive compatibility and, by reason of the existence of other Rights, highly defeasible. Of course one could always say that the generalized right to liberty is one such that the right's holder himself supplies the remedy. But this is mere rhetoric or else a mischievous manner of eliciting the most absurd, Kafkaesque, judicial consequences.

For Dworkin, the notion of a conflict could be a misplaced one if one allows for a conception of liberty and equality in which the one value is both constrained by, and subsumed under, the other.

This is the problem with treating a Tarskian primitive as a 'conception' and then linking such primitives in an intensional manner. The result is bound to be worthless, absurd shite. It is just a case of ex falso quodlibet.

The moment you say there is an 'essential' or 'necessary' link between two intuitions, there is no way to prevent those two intuitions having sex in the toilet.

Indeed, for Dworkin, it is a moot point whether people have any “generalized right to liberty", as such.

What is a 'generalized right'? Presumably, it is something of which we would say, in general, it would be advisable to have a remedy under a vinculum juris corresponding to this right. Thus, we could speak of culpa levis in abstracto , in the case of a tort, or else broaden the remit of justiciability or Executive privilege so as to deal with the matter. So far, so good. Though we are speaking 'generally', there is an idiographic context. Lawyers and administrators and politicians can tackle the underlying problem BUT ONLY SO LONG AS LIBERTY REMAINS A PRIMITIVE TERM. The moment it is given an intentional definition and linked to other intuitions you get either

1) Djikstra type concurrency deadlock
2) McKelvey Chaos & rent-seeking Agenda Control
3) Sen-tentious shite splattering everyone in the vicinity
4) Liberty and Equality banging each other in the toilet.
5) All of these outcomes with a UN rapporteur overseeing each aspect of the shambles. Also some brown fuckwits getting Nobels or Magsaysay Awards or  other such trinkets.

What can Economics legitimately say about Liberty or Equality? Quite a lot which is useful- or rather which is obvious, and common knowledge- provided both Liberty and Equality- like Utility- are treated as primitives notions. In every idiographic context, we can distinguish types of joint enterprise and 'factorize' the mechanisms which govern them along two different axes- one of which corresponds to a 'regret minimizing' limitation of commitment, while the other represents an incomplete contract with a 'fair division' problem re. appropriable and residuary control rights. Just as mathematical methods can be useful in analyzing incomplete contracts with positive pay-off, so too can Hanan consistency and related concepts illuminate implicit apportioning of catastrophic risk.

What isn't useful at all is what we have had for the last thirty years- viz. the pretense that there is a trade-off between Liberty and Equality. The truth is that both are determined by the same thing- elasticity of demand and supply. Those with elastic response enjoy more Liberty and exit to Tiebout models which, though they may have higher Equality internally, militate for increasingly unequal outcomes with the original population. Moreover, transfers in the name of Equality reduce Liberty and trap people into absolutely worse trajectories.

No doubt, people like S.Subramaniyam- whom I had the pleasure of meeting many years ago- have done a lot of good over the course of their careers. This is because domain expertise of an idiographic type can make Society a much better place. Even having high ideals and interacting with others can have a sort of 'Field theoretic' effect. Compassionate people imagine everybody else is compassionate. However, they made a mistake in thinking that Sen-tentious shite was ever anything but a careerist availability cascade of a brazen and mischievous kind.