Tyranny of tyranny of the majority

Tyranny of the majority refers to any scenario in a democracy where a majority of citizens votes to oppress a minority. For example, if 80% of the people in a country vote to enslave the other 20%, that constitutes a tyranny of the majority. The outcome is a democracy with the brutality of an oppressive dictator.

Tyranny of the majority shows that it's insufficient to justify governance solely on the basis that what a majority wants it should get. Governance ought to require both a majority's will and moral justification for the act. But people will vote immorally on occasion. To protect against this, modern democracies have in place limits that minimize the possibility and impact of a tyranny of the majority. For example, the United States has a Bill of Rights as well as other constitutional amendments that guarantee personal liberties from the government. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude; along with our country's separation of powers, which (among other features) grants the courts the power to strike down unconstitutional legislation, it's unlikely for a majority of people to get away with enslaving the remaining minority.

Nevertheless, tyrannies of the majority happen every year. For example, many non-Arizonans decry tyranny of the majority against Arizona's constitutionally questionable enforcement against illegal immigration, just as non-Southerners decry tyranny of the majority when some Southern states force their public schools' science textbooks to give equal credit to evolution and creationism as scientific doctrine. Conservatives tyrannize reproductive rights, and liberals tyrannize fetuses. Democracy turns us into little tyrants who carry voter registration cards.

There are two ways to stop a tyranny of the majority. The first is for the majority to see the errors of its immoral ways and to stop oppressing the minority. This is great when it happens, but it's far from inevitable. Usually, tyrannical majorities keep on with their tyrannizing until they're forcibly stopped—often by a larger, encompassing majority. This is the second way to stop a tyranny of the majority, and it's called kicking the problem upstairs. It's what happens when, say, the federal government imposes uniform civil rights laws on all fifty states: smaller, individual majorities are swallowed into a larger, centralized majority—one that supports equal civil rights. The smaller, anti-civil rights majorities are diluted into powerlessness.

The United States has a long history of kicking problems upstairs to the federal level. It's a tactic underlying many progressive causes. Just as puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time, progressives fear that someone, somewhere might be taken advantage of. The progressive fights for a good cause, and many of the benefits we enjoy today are due to progressives' victories, but as with most benefits there are costs. The act of forcibly ending a regional tyranny of the majority by kicking the problem upstairs brings about its own problems—often ones that don't manifest until later. Much later.

One problem is that tyrannies of the majority don't end merely because problems have been kicked all the way to the top. Tyrannies of the majority still happen at the federal level, owing to the same kinds of democratic pressures that cause them to form at regional and state levels. Only, once a problem has been kicked to the top, there's nowhere left to go—except possibly to war.

We ought to consider the act of kicking problems upstairs to be a nonrenewable resource. Like other nonrenewable resources, its use confers a benefit. But like other nonrenewable resources, its use is finite and produces waste. The benefit is that we resolve tyrannies of the majority affecting us now. The waste is that we're left with governance that's more centralized, and it's inevitable there'll be larger majorities tyrannizing larger minorities later. And because future people suffering those problems won't have an upstairs to kick their problems to, they'll have less means for resolution.

Because of this, we ought to be selective and prudent about what we kick upstairs. This means we ought to let people in other regions and states keep more autonomy for resolving their own conflicts.

CI, PD, and the value of diversity

Today's post answers the question of how I came to be against the categorical imperative.

I never liked the categorical imperative—not since I first learned about it in an ethics class during my second year in college. But my current reason for rejecting the CI is new.

When I first learned about the CI, I thought it could be used to prove just about anything and was therefore a bad theory. For example, CI proponents often use the CI to claim that lying is universally bad based on some specific cases of lying being bad. But there are some specific cases where it's bad to tell the truth, so what's wrong with the claim that telling the truth is universally bad?

In hindsight I'm sure I missed something about the CI.

But nevertheless, a couple years ago I changed my mind in a way that made my previous doubts about the CI moot. What happened is I came to believe that humans are part of their ecosystem, not apart from it. This change-of-mind may not sound like much, but it has profound consequences.

One such consequence is the corollary that we live in a world full of trade-offs—that few ways of doing things are better in all regards. This is opposed to the world view of the rationalist, who believes that by thinking things through hard enough, one can eventually arrive at the best answer. The answer may be worldly, such as the secular ethicist who believes in the universality of the CI, or it may be otherworldly, such as the monotheist who believes in an unlimited god.

The former is Hofstadter's world of pure reason and superrationality, where prisoner's dilemma players have cause to believe their thought process ought to be shared by all other players and that therefore there is a correct answer to the game. But if humans are in an ecosystem then there's no basis for that belief. Behavior in an ecosystem satisfies niche, not law. And niches are finite, mutable, and diverse.

This is in direct contradiction to the CI, which is infinite, unchanging, and uniform. Thus, the CI has no place in an ecological world view—unless of course one niche is to accept the CI.

Now, many people would object to what I've written. They might say: Yes, human behavior is subject to niche, but humans will be judged according to law. Thus, the CI could be valid as a law. This would be the position of, say, a Christian who accepts ecological principles.

I have no counter to that objection. It seems to me that where a person stands on this issue is a matter of faith. And I welcome a diversity of opinions on the matter.

Against the categorical imperative

I reject the categorical imperative. I believe it fails to lead to sound moral conclusions, so I give it little credit as criticism against ideas—mine or others'.

The reason I mention this is so no one around here uses the categorical imperative to argue against something I write. I don't want anyone to have the expectation that I'll be influenced by what you have to say if that's the case. I reject the categorical imperative.

Not that anyone has done such a thing. As far as I remember, no one—myself included—has mentioned the CI here at JEC until today. But today's post is a prudent warning in case I someday make a comment such as, “Nearly all middle-class Americans would improve their circumstances if they spent a lot less money.” That sort of comment inspires CI-based reasoning these days.

For those of you wanting a refresher on the CI: it's the idea that you can determine an action as morally good or bad by asking yourself whether everybody doing that action would make for a better or worse world. If everybody doing it would be a good thing, then the action itself is good. Otherwise, the action is immoral.

This sort of reasoning goes on everyday. Sometimes it lends itself to pleasant ends, such as when someone decides not to litter because of the mess there would be if everyone littered. But sometimes the CI lends itself to unpleasant ends, such as when someone finds themselves pressed to tell the truth and admit that their friend's new haircut is ugly. As for the spending-less-money maxim I wrote two paragraphs earlier, the likely CI-inspired reaction is to worry about the consequence of wrecking the economy if all middle-class Americans consumed less. That's needless universality, I say.

My problem with the CI is that it starts from the assumption that monoculture is a good thing—that in a moral world all people would act the same when in the same context. Though I can accept a lot of axioms as hypotheticals, this is one I find too unlikely. First, there's the practical problem that people don't in fact act the same—one person deciding to do X isn't going to cause everyone to do X—and so measuring humans against such universality is questionable. But more importantly I believe monocultures are themselves bad things. Diverse ecosystems are stabler and more productive than monocultures, and so the best moral measurements will acknowledge that people ought to act differently—even when in identical contexts.

But don't let me convince all of you of this. We shouldn't all reject the categorical imperative. Proponents of monoculture fulfill an important part of our diverse ecosystem.