Liberalism and Empiricism

The other day I remarked that I thought America's progressive movement needed more ideology and less programmatic commitments and ad hoc coalition building. Mark Schmitt said I was wrong. While contemplating Mark's rejoinder, what showed up in my inbox but an email from Jon Chait featuring a sneaky pass-through link to his contribution to the TNR 90th anniversary issue. He argues that liberalism is, by its essence, unideological and simply committed to empiricism. Jon thinks of liberalism, in other words, as coextensive with the "reality-based community" that believes solutions "emerge from . . . judicious study of discernable reality.<

There's a lot of merit to that argument, but a serious weakness as well. Even if you don't think the Humean slogan "no ought from an is" quite expresses the truth of the situation, there's clearly something to it. Economics underdetermines economic policy, and adding in sociology, physics, and whatever else you may like doesn't change that fact. Liberalism isn't really unideological simply because nothing can be. Rather, the brand of liberalism Jon is describing is committed to a technocratic version of consequentialism undergirded by some theory of the good. This poses some problems.

One simple problem is that technocratism has a pretty limited political appeal. Timothy Burke had a very worthwhile essay (PDF) on this theme that he wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election. This is something lot of liberals of the "well-educated professionals" variety (i.e., those likely to be reading blogs) have some trouble understanding. When David Adesnik and Dan Drezner -- both of whom clearly despised John Kerry and found a great deal to admire in George W. Bush -- endorsed Kerry on the grounds that Bush was unacceptable after all because "As a professional researcher, I think I simply find it almost impossible to trust someone whose thought process is apparently so different from my own" that sounded to me like an irrefutable argument. The reality, however, is that most people aren't professional researchers or people who share that kind of mindset.

Beyond the narrow problem of crafting an appealing rhetoric, there's still a quite robust philosophical/ideological challenge posed by the need to specify goods in order to make sense of the technocratic agenda. Technocratic liberalism probably finds itself most robustly articulated in the form of the public health state which aims, in essence, to get people to live longer. This works out nicely because "it's better for people to be alive than dead" is an utterly uncontroversial claim outside of the highly unusual cases that give rise to interest in assisted suicide. Still, pushed to the margins it becomes slightly absurd. A tax on junk food would improve public health. So would a ban on smoking even in bars and clubs. A total ban on selling cigarettes and junk food would improve it more. As would, probably, a total ban on alcohol sales. But for that matter, so would a ban on fried chicken, french fries, and, indeed, the deep friers in which such foods are cooked.

One could get a panel of nutritionists together, have them come up with a restrictive menu of healthy foods (which would still allow for a pretty large degree of variety) and ban everything not on the list. The government could establish free gyms everywhere complete with treadmills and issue identity cards to everyone. You would be required to swipe your card and run on the treadmill for 30 minutes (at an appropriate heart rate, needless to say) three times a week or else pay a fine. The fine would be pretty low if you just missed four or five days a year, to allow for the fact that sometimes there are genuine extenuating circumstances. But fines would scale upwards with repeated failures to exercise seriously punishing the slackers. And the fines would be income-linked so as to take a serious bite out of even the rich. Exemptions -- or, better, alternative methods of discharging the exercise obligation -- could be worked out for people with disability. These two policies -- or even merely the mandatory treadmill one -- would do a great deal to improve health outcomes in the United States. A great deal more, I dare say, than would universal health care.

The trouble, however, is that we've now clearly gone beyond the bounds of sound liberal empiricist technocracy and established something more like Public Health Totalitarianism.

Pure empiricism was vacuous, so we tried to fill it with a simple, uncontroversial Good -- it's better to live than to die. But by leaning too heavily on that Good, we wound up trampling all over freedom and other Goods. Working this all out in a way that does justice to the complexity of human life and the pluralism of value turns out to be very difficult. I don't have any particular answers to offer here (if I thought I had -- or ever would have -- the capacity to outline a highly specific theory of the good and then defend a variant of consequentialism based on that theory, I'd have stuck with philosophy) but it seemed worth pointing out.