The Horwitz Challenge

Living or dead? I often have a hard time determining intentions of living people–with a historical perspective you have a lot more data (correspondences, actions over time, etc).

Dead: Lenin, Bukharin. Totally disagree with them, believe they were smart and well-intentioned.

Living: probably some market socialist economists comes closest. Also some “libertarian” economists who rely too much on neoclassical techniques. Many other economists I doubt whether they really want to do good, rather than just have fun and get ahead in their discipline. I don’t trust living politicians at all.

Tony Blain

John Kenneth Galbraith

Quote from Galbraith

Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

For thinkers — Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism and Heidegger’s Being and Time both influenced me profoundly, although the authors were respectively a Marxist and a Nazi.

For politicians — I can’t even come up with any politicians whose policies are in line with mine whom I like. I’m sure that they are nearly all concerned with making the world a better place, and intend to do so. But concern and intention are just cheap talk and hardly worthy of respect.

If there’s a Wikipedia entry on “arguing in bad faith,” DeLong’s picture ought to be there.

Isn’t this a trivial exercise? Wouldn’t a more informative question be, famous politicians and thinkers whom you think *are* evil?

(My short list would be Rawls & Singer. Famous politicians would be necessarily disqualified because they are almost certainly cynically doing what it takes to remain in power.)

I mean, Hitler didn’t get up in the morning and say, “I am going to do evil today.” He legitimately believed in what he was doing and that it was for the good. How does that make it less monstrous?

John Maynard Keynes and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I must say, however, that I think Horwitz’s logic is unsound. Everyone has a myriad of opponents, since there are many more than 2 possible views; and if you admit all of them, it’s extremely easy to find many opponents whose intelligence and good intentions you respect.

On the other hand, I could imagine a radical leftist saying to me, “Keynes and Moynihan are centrists who barely oppose you. Name someone on the far left who you respect. If you can’t then you lack the good will to be admitted to political conversation.” This would be an essentially fascist demand: If you believe far leftists like Lenin and Bukharin to be evil, you are unfit for society and should be ostracized. Or is one supposed to believe that men may be so deluded as to support murder and tyranny out of good intentions? This belief alone is already part of the left’s ends-justify-the-means utilitarianism.

So Horwitz’s argument is either empty of content (since “opponents” casts a universal net) or implicitly accepts some of the very claims that are at issue in political disputes.

PJ,

For what it’s worth, the context that prompted that was a discussion with a left-liberal friend who was bashing conservatives. I challenged her to name two prominent ones who she thought were very smart and concerned about the greater good. She could name only one, and it was a local Congressperson whose conservative credentials aren’t even all that solid and who is hardly “prominent.” I believe the kids today call that a FAIL.

Of course there are all kinds of “opponents” for any view, but when someone is attacking a particular view and can’t satisfy that challenge with respect to people who hold that view, I think then it’s fair to make a rebuttable presumption that they can’t argue in good faith.

That’s all I was trying to say.

mtraven at
http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/

PJ,

That is also an excellent suggestion. I would add “and to do so with the most charitable interpretation possible.”

Joseph Raz

John Rawls

Jules Coleman

Let me also add G.A. Cohen.

I was going to say Moynihan but David Ricardo beat me to it. So instead I’ll just list Bryan, David, and Arnold (can I insert a smiley emoticon here?) as three good, smart, and arguably famous guys I disagree with at least some of the time.

Lee Waaks:

Sure, Heilbroner did not become a Hayekian or something. He saw Mises as an ideological visionary who was right about socialism by a kind of coincidence. These facts about Heilbroner only go to underline his intellectual integrity. He was pretty far to the left and never gave up his basic intellectual vision. But he could not deny that “capitalism” had outperformed “socialism” and that this “triumph of capitalism” was attributable to the difference of systems, not something extraneous such as bad weather. He faced that fact squarely and did not hide from it. That makes him a good example for the Horwitz Challenge.

Actually it’s interesting that my list are both non-Kiwis. I’m probably too close to the NZ political game to be objective about it. Although if you want me to list people from both the NZ major political parties National and Labour, who I think are idiots, I’m game.

I think that most of the names I would have come up with have already been listed (possibly Eugene V Debs but I agreed with his anti war stuff so maybe that doesn’t count), but I would like to suggest that asking someone to rate the chances that their own views are incorrect is a better way of determining their ability to argue in good faith. Most people give an answer in the range of 1 in a million.

…politicians…who they also think are very smart and genuinely concerned with making the world a better place.

“Thinkers” I’ll grant, but the above is an empty set.

Jacob, Interesting self-description!

To Roger Koppl:

It’s true that Heilbroner never surrendered his ideological vision (nor many other socialists, e.g. G. A Cohen, already mentioned above by another poster on this topic). But the USSR literally had to collapse before they began to rethink their positions. And before that? They accepted, albeit with minimal reservations about the lack of civil liberties, that the USSR was economically robust. I recall that Tom Palmer of CATO, writing on his personal blog, did a good job of showing that G.A. Cohen was a man of bad faith. I wouldn’t be surprised if Heilbroner was of similar ilk. Contrast Heilbroner, Cohen, et.al. with the socialist philosopher Sydney Hook: he never surrendered his ideological vision either, but neither did he ever resort to disgusting apologetics for the USSR.

And let’s not forget what anti-commie-in-residence Bryan Caplan has written re: Eugene Richter’s book, Pictures of the Socialist Future:

“While the early socialists were indeed ‘idealists,’ their ideal was totalitarian. Their overriding goals were to engineer a new society and a New Socialist Man. If this meant treating workers like slaves – depriving them of the freedom to choose their occupation or location, forbidding them to quit, splitting up families without their consent, and imposing draconian punishments on dissenters – so be it.”

The problem I have with allegedly well-intentioned contemporary social-democrats/socialists is that they believe in social engineering writ small, even when they don’t endorse full-scale planning. For them, it’s not just about helping the indigent; it’s about improving the “welfare” of society as they see fit with little regard for individuals’ own preferences.

Bruce Ackerman
Isaac Asimov
Tony Blair
Jeff Greenfield
Sydney Hook
Arianna Huffington
Mickey Kaus
Sinclair Lewis
Matthew Miller
Mencius Moldbug
Markos Moulitsas
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Ralph Nader
George Orwell
John Rawls
Carl Sagan
George Bernard Shaw

Lee Waaks,

Well, there you go. You can’t rise to the Horwitz Challenge. That’s a FAIL.

I think PJ really nails it with the idea to estimate good faith in a debate by having both sides restate the other’s position or argument (and Horowitz polishes it with the requirement that it be in the most charitable way.)

The problem with the original Horowitz test is that it assumes one should consider the other person, and not just their idea. That is one should be concerned with the idea itself, not so much who puts it forward or their intentions. As previously mentioned, many people assume those who put forward ideas they disagree with are either stupid or evil and then dismiss the idea without further consideration. It seems strange to ask someone who they respect from the other side as a method to determine if they can avoid this, as it seems to me the best possible case would be someone who doesn’t even know or care who is their “opponent” but simply knows the ideas and why they disagree with them.

Indeed, what one thinks of their debate opponent’s intentions is largely meaningless. It is difficult for me to know exactly my friend’s intentions in supporting a given idea, much less someone I have never met or known anything about outside their writing, and most likely impossible to actually know. Better to assume they mean well enough, and work to understand their ideas.