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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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As you note I think one's beliefs about procedurally fair rules are tied up with their conception of justice. Specifically, people support procedurally fair rules when they believe those rules will lead to just outcomes and oppose them when they think they won't. Unless one is committed to the proposition that procedurally fair rules always entail just outcomes (which I think describes very few people) it's not hard to find examples of cases where the application of procedurally fair rules lead to unjust outcomes. Some common examples in US history include poll taxes and literacy tests. While these rules were generally applied to all voters, they had the effect of disproportionately excluding certain demographics in a way many considered unjust due to those demographics relative poverty and illiteracy. This can also lead to a general skepticism of procedurally fair rules in general, in a way I think we still see today. The belief that the people who want to impose certain procedurally fair rules don't actually think the rule itself is good, but want the rule in effect due to the disproportionate impact it will have on certain groups (ex, debates about voter ID).

Has the appreciation of procedural rules of fairness in fact waned?

My own appreciation for procedurally fair rules as tools to achieve just outcomes has certainly waned. Whether that's my own changing sense of what is just or just an expansion of my knowledge of situations where procedurally fair rules have led to unjust outcomes is hard to say, probably a bit of both.

If so, when?

In my particular case I would say starting five or six years ago. I share the perspective articulated by @drmanhattan16 that there was something different about the 90's compared to today but I am not sure I could identify a sharp breaking point for the culture more generally.

What made the political "left" shift from a celebration of these values to a purely opportunistic application? Was this always purely instrumental, as outlined above?

I suspect a mix of the two. For some people it was always purely instrumental while others followed a similar path I did, becoming disillusioned with procedurally fair rules as a mechanism for producing just outcomes due to a perceived lack of results. I think a big part of the reason the "left" is broadly more skeptical of procedurally fair rules its because the left's political coalition is composed substantially of those groups that have been left in disproportionately worse positions by the application of such rules, and have disproportionately benefited from less procedurally fair rules.

ETA:

This is getting a bit more philosophical but since I have Moore v. Harper on my mind I'll mention I think there is also a population out there that is skeptical about the extent to which we can coherently categorize rules into "procedural" vs "substantive" such that all rules are "substantive" in the relevant sense.

I would absolutely subscripe to the notion that all outcomes of a procedurally fair process are just by definition.

I am interested in picking at this a little. Would you agree that the application of something like a poll tax or literacy test could be just, then? As long as it was administered the right way? If so, would such outcomes also be good or desirable? Or is it possible for an outcome to be both just and bad?

Yes, that is one of the things I wanted to get at: People have a prior notion of what type of outcome is "just" and a procedure is "fair" if it's instrumental in bringing that about. That view is, frankly, insane to me. It's like saying that an election is only fair if my favourite candidates are elected.

I think this goes a little bit too far. Rather, I think there is often disagreement about whether a given procedure is "fair" in the relevant sense. I think most people would agree that fairness consists in something like "treating similarly situated people similarly" with a lot of disagreement bout what it means to be "similarly situated." Continuing the voter ID example some people A and B may be "similarly situated" in that both are US citizens who are prospective voters. But perhaps they are not "similarly situated" in that B must sacrifice much more time, effort, resources, etc than A to get an ID. Is rule requiring and ID to vote fair to A and B? It depends, even if we don't start at an outcome and work backwards (though I agree this happens as well).

I mean, all sets of procedural rules are substantive solutions to the meta question of which procedural rules should be applied. But then we just shift the debate because we still have to ask by what rules that decision should be produced.

The objections I have in mind are less meta than this. Consider again a literacy test. On the one hand, such a requirement is procedural, it's literally a procedure you have to go through in order to vote. On the other hand, the imposition of such a procedure implies a substantive judgement about who ought to be able to vote (specifically that people who cannot or will not pass such a test ought not be able to). So is the imposition of a literacy test a procedural rule or a substantive one?

But I don't think this is what is happening here. People see an outcome they don't like and then they reason backwards and rationalise why the procedure could not have been fair. The referee was biased, Russians/Democrats stole the election, IQ tests were made for preppy kids, etc.

I think you may be seeing people trying to apply pure conflict theory in an environment where only mistake theory is socially acceptable. Somebody made a comment here a long time ago to the effect that "I tolerate anything except intolerance" in fact allows you to vilify anything you like, provided you link that thing to intolerance in some way. This produces tendentious, distorted arguments similar (I think) to "Russians/Democrats stole the election".

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