Jonathan Haidt argued, in The Righteous Mind, that the way we think about issues is biased by subconscious leanings. Very briefly, he argues that when we hear a proposition, we have an instinctive, subconscious reaction to either favor it or disfavor it. The reasoning process comes after this instinctive reaction has already taken place and works to find an argument that justifies the initial reaction. Just as a defense lawyer starts from the position that the accused is not guilty and crafts their arguments to support that initial position, so too is our own reasoning process lawyer-like, and in the same way. 

So, if, as Richard Feynman said, the easiest person for you to fool is yourself, how do we deal with this problem?

One possibility I’ve talked about before is to make a conscious effort to reduce our ideological certainty. But there is a more actionable step that can be taken as well. When we make an argument for some position or view, we should try to extend our reasoning to other situations to see if it still seems to hold. If an argument starts to seem like it doesn’t hold when applied to other circumstances, that’s a good sign that we might have been drawn to the argument because it justified a specific conclusion we wanted to defend in a specific context, and not due to the strength of the argument itself. 

There are many arguments people have made for or against private schools or school vouchers. One argument against private schools was offered by the socialist writer Nathaniel Robinson, who thinks that privatization in the education system is doomed to fail:

But introducing profit into the school system is very dangerous, for a simple reason: it creates a terrible set of incentives. If we hand a voucher to a for-profit private school, or give a large grant to a for-profit charter school, there is a strong incentive for the school to give as little in return as possible. After all, since a for-profit corporation exists to maximize value to shareholders (not value to students), for-profit schools should try to spend as little money educating students as possible, in order to reap the largest financial gains. If you don’t have to spring for new lab equipment or new textbooks, you have no incentive to do so merely because it would benefit the students.

He also argues that competition is powerless to improve the situation:

In a public school system, all money is spent on the schools. In a for-profit school system, at least some portion of that money is directed instead toward the pockets of shareholders (if it wasn’t, the for-profit schools couldn’t continue to exist). And if we have a school district comprised in total of three for-profit elementary schools, and all of them simply pocket most of the voucher money while failing to educate the children, then no matter what “choices” among schools parents make, they won’t be able to improve the quality of the schools. One might expect new operators to enter the market, but if the only way to make any real money on the children is to neglect them, then new operators won’t be any better than the old ones.

But what Robinson presents here isn’t just an argument against privatization of schools – it’s an argument against the idea of economic competition in general. Robinson says if a schooling system makes a profit, “there is a strong incentive for the school to give as little in return as possible.” He warns us that profit “creates a terrible set of incentives.” But there is no nonarbitrary reason to think profit only creates these terrible incentives in education. Presumably, any private business at all that wants to make a profit should be striving to do as little for their customers as possible. And if competition in schooling doesn’t lead schools to offer better services, because “the only way to make any real money” is through the “neglect” of one’s customers such that “new operators won’t be any better than the old ones,” again, why isn’t this true of competition everywhere? Is Apple, motivated by profit, constantly seeking to offer devices that do as little as possible for the consumer? Does Robinson believe that, say, police departments provide high quality services to communities because they are unburdened by any need to make a profit to operate? 

Lina Khan at the FTC is worried that Amazon facing competition from all brick and mortar stores combined plus competition from Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google is still somehow not enough competition. But presumably, Robinson should advise her to abandon her concern – not because he thinks Amazon does face intense competitive pressures, but because increasing competition is pointless anyway. It’s all just a race to the bottom, with consumers receiving ever-worse services, because of terrible, profit-motivated incentives. Even if a company really is a genuine monopoly, why worry about that? 

Robinson’s argument fails to generalize, pretty spectacularly. Is his argument a post-hoc rationalization based on an underlying subconscious leaning? Since I can’t read minds, I can only speculate. But he does hint at something that seems like good fuel for motivated reasoning. He writes:

I fear privatization not because of some mystical devotion to the inefficiencies of government but because I fear the erosion of the idea of education as something that isn’t win-win, that we give to children because they deserve it rather than because we can profit from it. I worry that the sort of people who run things “like a business” do not really care about children very much, and are motivated by the wrong incentives… However bad our public schools may be, I will always trust those who see children as an ends above those who see them as a means.

Here, Robinson is telling us that the idea of someone providing education as a service in exchange for payment, rather than education being provided because one is simply entitled to be educated, is something that inspires fear in him. He worries about the motives of those who “do not really care about children” and assures the reader he “will always trust those who see children as an ends above those who see them as a means.” He also reminds his readers early on in his article that unlike for him, for “the right, ‘profit’ isn’t a dirty word.”

Imagine that instead of education, the topic was food production, and an advocate of publicly-run farming, after declaring they see “profit” as a “dirty word,” said the following:

I fear privatized food production not because of some mystical devotion to the inefficiencies of government but because I fear the erosion of the idea of feeding our population as something that isn’t win-win, that we should feed people because they deserve it rather than because we can profit from it. I worry that the sort of people who run their farms “like a business” do not really care about feeding people very much, and are motivated by the wrong incentive. However bad our collectivized farms may be, I will always trust those who see feeding people as an ends above those who see it as a means.

All this talk about the unseemly motives of profit-motivated farmers compared to the presumably pure motives of publicly run farms seems pretty trivial to focus on, when you look at the actual levels of starvation that occurred under when food was publicly produced as opposed to systems where farming is run like a business. To spend time handwringing about the motives of the people involved without regard to the actual results is to take your eye off what really matters.