Philosophy

There has been a movement aiming to teach agents about their privilege by making the information about their privilege as costless as possible. However, some argue that in risk-sensitive frameworks, such as Lara Buchakâs (2013), it can be rational for privileged agents to shield themselves from learning about their privilege, even if the information is costless and relevant. This threatens the efficacy of these information-access efforts in alleviating the problem of elite-group ignorance.

          In response, I show that even within the same framework, in this case David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright's (2021), the rationality of this information avoidance rests on shaky ground in practice. In this framework, whether an agent should avoid information depends on the precise details of (1) how relevant they expect the information to be, (2) their priors about the value of various options, and (3) their risk attitudes. The model suggests that rationality of elite-group ignorance is a function of structural factors that are pervasive but nonetheless not insurmountable, thus offering a way out of pessimism about elite group education.

Risk, Rationality and (Information) Resistance: De-rationalizing Elite-group Ignorance Yong Xin Hui Forthcoming in Erkenntnis Abstract There has been a movement aiming to teach agents about their privilege by making the information about their privilege as costless as possible. However, some argue that in risk-sensitive frameworks, such as Lara Buchak's (2013), it can be rational for privileged agents to shield themselves from learning about their privilege, even if the information is costless and relevant. This threatens the efficacy of these information-access efforts in alleviating the problem of elite-group ignorance. In response, I show that even within the same framework, in this case David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright's (2021), the rationality of this information avoidance rests on shaky ground in practice. In this framework, whether an agent should avoid information depends on the precise details of (1) how relevant they expect the information to be, (2) their priors about the value of various options, and (3) their risk attitudes. The model suggests that rationality of elite-group ignorance is a function of structural factors that are pervasive but nonetheless not insurmountable, thus offering a way out of pessimism about elite group education. 1 Introduction In highly unequal societies with clear demarcations between those with higher privilege and power and those without, agents at the top of the social hierarchy (hereafter, "elite-group 1 agents") are often ignorant of the extent or even of the existence of their privilege, as well as of the struggles of those at the bottom. This ignorance (which we shall call "elite-group ignorance") is not a benign one; it has dangerous societal consequences. Decision-makers, who are disproportionately from privileged backgrounds, might then lack important information about the problems that non-elite-group agents face, and might not understand and thereby be motivated to solve these issues. Even worse, even if we are careful about representation among policy-makers, mass voter ignorance can threaten the accountability of governing institutions and leave decision-makers open to political capture (Guerrero 2021), where decisions are made for the interests of the powerful instead of the rest of the population. Therefore, elite-group ignorance is inextricably tied to stable structures of inequity, such as white supremacy and patriarchy, and has great practical and moral import beyond ordinary ignorance because it "systemically [emerges] from our social practices and [is] importantly related to the persistence of [inequality]" (Martın 2021). Perhaps especially saliently in recent years, there have been various efforts to increase access and decrease cost to elite-group agents to learn about their privilege. From DEI panels to Instagram infographic slides, the hope seems to be that by reducing the cost of learning, the elite-group agents will now be more likely to learn information that could alleviate their ignorance. However, empirical work suggests that DEI efforts that increase access to relevant information are often futile.1 In other words, what if these efforts have failed because the problem isn't cost, and even making information more readily accessible will do little to alleviate the problem of elite ignorance? What if it's because avoiding costless and relevant information about one's privilege could be rational and thus less likely to be swayed in response to criticisms of irrationality? For example, David Kinney and Liam Kofi Bright (2021) argue that within some decision frameworks plausibly regarded as frameworks of normative rationality (they use L. M. Buchak (2013) as an exemplar2) , rational agents can permissibly avoid costless relevant information, 1. e.g. Duguid and Thomas-Hunt 2015; Wynn 2020, where debiasing efforts seem to have limited effectiveness in changing behaviour. 2. For the purposes of the upshots that Kinney and Bright are concerned with, it is significant that normative decision-theoretic models are predictable and stable insofar as the awareness that one is operating with the model, instead of motivating a revision of one's pattern of reasoning, reinforces one's belief that their model is rational. I remain agnostic on whether Buchak's framework, or for that matter any risk-sensitive expected utility framework, is normatively rational in any sense of normative. All I require from rationality is that a 2 and thus do not exhibit willful ignorance in a way that is rationally criticizable. Kinney and Bright worry that risk-averse frameworks can serve as a realistic and rigorous representation of how rational agents, including elite-group agents, make decisions in an instrumentally rational manner, even if these agents have morally-aligned values. If Buchak is right, the argument goes, and there are indeed agents that exhibit Buchakian behaviour, these agents may sometimes coherently and rationally choose to avoid costless and relevant information. If so, shoving low-cost or even costless information in the agents' faces may not prove sufficient for them to learn.3 If this behaviour is rational, it explains why the agent may not, ceteris paribus, have instrumental reason to change their information-avoiding behavior, even if they are aware that they are shielding themselves from learning. This behavior can be thus "reinforced and encouraged,"4 conferring stability to the above-mentioned harms. In other words, we are caught in an "epistemic trap" of harmful behaviour and beliefs that cannot be dislodged by just providing costless information alone or pointing out flaws in reasoning, with inquiry "pulling you more tightly into the trap"(Nguyen 2022). Thus they argue interventions focusing on "changing people's psychological and emotional orientation towards information about their own privilege" are limited, and therefore that hope of a "informed and benevolent elite" and mitigation of harm is vain. I argue that these conclusions are overly pessimistic by showing that Buchakian agents only avoid information in highly circumscribed settings. In particular, deviations on any of a number of parameters of the decision problem will lead Buchakian agents from avoiding information to being willing to pay for it. Variations in 1) How decision-relevant the information is, 2) the agent's priors about the information they accept, or 3) the agent's risk attitudes can all lead Buchakian agents to seek out information. Like a graduate student doing a literature review right before their deadline, the agent prefers to seek out as much (currently) irrelevant information as possible just in case they ever encounter a situation where the certain view acquired by learning this information will come in handy. Therefore, even the most Buchakian of agents might not be rationally permitted to avoid learning about their own privilege, and I rational agent is robustly resilient against intervention. 3. For this paper, I take 'learning' to be modeled as when an agent lets the information affect how they take further actions. This means that even if an agent encounters information, they may choose not to update on it and therefore 'not learn' on my account. 4. Kinney and Bright 2021, pp.20. 3 destabilize the pull of this epistemic trap. If my findings hold water, the rationality of elite-group ignorance is then generally a function of structural factors that are pervasive but nonetheless not insurmountable. As persistent as rational information resistance currently could be, I argue that there are cracks in the fortress of elite-group ignorance that we can focus our destabilizing efforts on, such that our information arrows can penetrate their targets. In §2 , I outline Buchak's model of rational risk-averse reasoning to show how a rational elite-group agent can choose to avoid relevant costless information about their own privilege. §3 shows how the agent's rational standing in their information avoidance is due to myriad factors, such as the perceived relevance of the information, the agent's priors, and their risk attitudes. I then explore the political upshots of my findings in §4 before concluding in §5. 2 Setting the Scene: Buchakian Rational Information Resistance Kinney and Bright reject the assertion that motivated elite-group ignorance is necessarily irrational.5 Elite agents, even with their privileged access to educational resources, might still rationally choose to reject costless and relevant information about their privilege. Kinney and Bright frame their argument using Buchak's risk-sensitive model of instrumental rationality via an example where it is rational to reject costless information. 2.1 Good's Theorem and Harassment The value of information, according to Good (1967), is always non-negative. Those who do not conditionalize beliefs on costless and relevant information do so under pain of irrationality if they will always choose the act with the highest expected utility. Good's Theorem reflects the intuitive notion that learning more information should make the agent more sensitive to different factors, which should allow for more fine-tuned decision-making options.6 5. This in partial response to how Mills (2007) has been interpreted by some as presenting an argument that white ignorance, as an example of elite-group ignorance, is motivated and irrational. 6. Good's Theorem is a technical result; I offer the intuitive gloss because it is all that is required for this project. If agents rank the choiceworthiness of their actions according to their expected value, and they also 4 Why then do agents remain unaware of their privilege even with relevant and costless information? Kinney and Bright consider a choice situation involving an elite-group agent with a choice between a gamble and a sure result, as well as a decision to learn about their privileged position before they make that choice. I agree with the authors that such cases are common. Here's a schematic version of one that illustrates why: Harassment: John, an elite-group agent (he's a white man), is taking the train. He sees that a passenger, Stacey, is being called racial slurs by another passenger, Al. If he leaves the scene, there will be trouble; Stacey's harm results in a utility of -50 (John is sensitive to the social good and includes it in his choiceworthiness calculations). Staying and intervening will be a gamble; either he mitigates the harm (Utility 0) or Al turns on him too and the situation more than doubles (Utility -250). He faces a decision as presented in Fig. 1: should he stay or should he go?7 The expected utility of intervention depends on the likelihood of escalation, which is then a function of whether John is in a biased world. If John is in a biased world (i.e. B), Al is biased towards white people and thus respects him more; the probability of escalation is 0.1. Otherwise, Al would attack him regardless of his race (call this case 'in an unbiased world'), and the probability of escalation is 0.5. His current credence that Al's animosity is equal opportunity (i.e. that ¬B) is 0.8. Therefore, his current expected utility of intervening is EU(intervene) = ((0.8 × 0.5) + (0.2 × 0.1)) × −250 = 0.42 × −250 = −105, less than the flat −50 utility of leaving. Therefore leave ≻ intervene; he prefers to leave. Because John currently has a 0.42 credence that he'll be attacked, he would leave if his goal is to maximize expected utility; his expected utility, or EU(base), is thus -50. However, what if, as illustrated in Fig. 2, he could get access to information and thus know whether he was in a biased world (i.e. 'Whether B'), and then make his decision to intervene based on that? John currently sees a 20% chance that B (with a 0.1 chance of escalation), and 80% chance that ¬B (with equal odds of escalation). Now suppose John learned with certainty rank the choiceworthiness of actions conditional upon a partitioned state according to their expected value conditioned upon the world being in each state, then Good's Theorem shows that the difference between the expected utility of the preferred action based on knowing which finely-grained partitions the agent is in (i.e. the expected utility of learning) and the EU of the preferred action without knowledge about learning about the partitioning (i.e. the expected utility if the agent did not learn) is non-negative. 7. Inspired by The Clash (1982). 5 Figure 1: An illustration of John's current choices and the expected utility of each end-node. John prefers to leave at this point. whether B. If B, the expected utility of intervening is (0.1× (−250))+ (0.9× 0) = (−25), more than the expected utility of leaving. The choiceworthy move would be to intervene. If not B, he would stick with leaving; EU(leave) = (−50) > (−125) = 0.5× (−250) = EU(intervene). The expected utility of learning is now (0.8× (−50))+ (0.2× ((0.1× (−250)+0.9× (−0))) = (−45). So far, so Good: expected utility theory says that the value of information is (−45)−(−50) = 5, a positive number. This is an instance of Good's Theorem, which applies generally. So if we see that John chooses not to learn whether B, can we infer that he's irrational? Not so fast. Enter risk-weighted expected utility (REU). 2.2 Reconceptualizing EUT Before going into the Buchakian framework, let us first reconceptualize the expected utility in terms of differential utility levels and probabilities8. Let's calculate the expected utility of John's learning again. The base utility level corresponds to the utility of the worst possible case, which arises if John learns that B, intervenes, but gets attacked. That's a utility of -250. 8. This is only an algebraic manipulation of the probability calculus; the total expected utility will be the same. See L. Buchak (2017) for a graphic explanation. 6 Figure 2: An update on Fig. 1, given that John can now choose to learn whether B. The next worst possible utility level corresponds to the scenario when not B and he leaves, with a differential utility from the worst utility of −50 − (−250) = 200 and a probability of 0.8+0.2×0.9 = 0.98 that the utility is at least -50 (i.e. either where John leaves or he intervenes successfully). The best possible utility level corresponds to when B is true, he intervenes, and mitigates the harm; the utility differential is 0 − (−50) = 50 and the probability of that is 0.2× 0.9 = 0.18. So the expected utility using a "wedding cake"-like formula is EU(learning) = U1 + ((P2 + P3)× (U2 − U1)) + (P3 × (U3 − U2)) = −250 + (0.98× 200) + (0.18× 50) = −45 where the utilities are in ascending order: U3 is the best case scenario utility with a corresponding probability of P3. In Buchak's model, the agent also factors in risk into their choiceworthiness calculations, where agents instead maximize their REU, incorporating both their expected utility and a risk function R(x). She models risk-sensitive agents by scaling up or down the expected utility of an outcome, such that riskier utility-states are less or more valuable to the agent respectively. 7 Going back to the "wedding cake" formulation: assuming John was risk-averse, we add a risk function to each probability such that we get our "compressing" effect. Let's take R(x) = x2, following Kinney and Bright.9 Now the formula is: REU(learning) = U1 + (R(P2 + P3)× (U2 − U1)) + (R(P3)× (U3 − U2)) = −250 + (0.982 × 200) + (0.182 × 50) = −56.3 which < REU(base) = Max(REU(leave), REU(intervene)) = Max((−50), ((−250) + (0.8× 0.5) + ((0.2× 0.9)2 × 200) + ((0.2× 0.9)2 × 50))) = Max((−50), (−181.1)) = (−50) The preferred strategy10 is now to avoid learning whether B, despite its costlessness, because (−56) < (−50).11 If John was an elite-group agent with a consistent and precise reasoning process, and subscribed to the Buchakian decision framework with a risk function of R(x) = x2, it would be coherently instrumentally rationally permissible given what he believes to avoid learning whether B. He is thus not compelled to amend his decision model as it serves his purposes as he sees them. Generalizing, John could rationally be permitted to avoid information, including information about his own privilege, that enables him to make riskier decisions. Kinney and Bright contend that agents like John "whose behavior constitutes or perpetuates white ignorance [may possibly be] modelled as agents who are risk averse and rational." Their reasoning process is consistent and stable even upon "vigorous intellectual effort"(Nguyen 2022), and because they are elite-groupa agents, their credences are a "[systemic overestimation of] their likelihood of facing negative consequences for certain risky behaviors"(Kinney and Bright 2021). However, given that John's reasoning process may be robust against criticisms (either externally or through internal reflection) of irrationality given that he is a Buchakian 9. This risk function would represent risk-aversion. 10. I use the word "strategy" instead of "act" here, following Briggs (2015); a strategy is a series of acts. 11. Note that not all risk-averse and rank-preserving decision frameworks will result in permissibly rational rejection of costless but relevant information. If, for example, R(x) = x1.1, the REU(learning) would be about -46.8, which is still more than the REU(base) which is Max(−112.7,−50) = −50. 8 agent, Kinney and Bright worry that he will continue to have these mistaken credences.12 The Buchakian model is thus a contender for an accurate model of instrumentally rational elite-group ignorance.13 To summarise, Buchakian risk-averse agents, who are privileged such that learning about their privilege would lead to learning that the world was biased, understand that it could be coherent for them to take the riskier choice. Given their current priors, they might rationally "protect" their future self from taking that gamble via information avoidance. Therefore, according to Kinney and Bright, it would be coherent in this rational framework for John to avoid learning whether B, even if it is costless and relevant. This is worrying if true; elite-group ignorance is harmful in itself and tends to beget more ignorance. 3 Instability and Uncertainty – How Stable is John's Rationality? In this section, I show that the outcome of the Buchakian model relies on how strongly the agent can anticipate the decision consequences when choosing whether or not to seek or accept information about whether B (call this factor "Expected Relevance"). In addition, the effects of Relevance on the value of the information are also dependent on two other factors: The agent's priors when they're confronted with the information, as well as their risk attitudes14. 3.1 The Relevance of Expected Relevance Recall how John was given the chance to learn whether B only as he is about to decide whether to intervene – he knows that whatever information he learns will be immediately relevant to his situation. He worries that the information is misleading15, and his risk-aversion kicks in. 12. Note that this not require John to be aware or intentional at all about his learning. What matters is that if John were presented with his decisions like in the figures above, he would not find them inconsistent; they would be in line with his risk-function. 13. Especially given that empirical research suggests that agents "who have not previously engaged in risky behavior (especially criminal behavior) tend to overestimate the probability of negative consequences."(Kinney and Bright 2021, pp.15) 14. I'll be referring to the two factors as "priors" and "risk attitudes" respectively. 15. I'm only focusing on 'misleading' in the Buchakian sense of the word. Note that the information can be completely accurate, but the agent sees the consequences of learning the information as leading them to choose dangerous actions. 9 However, if an agent cannot predict that they will definitely be confronted with said decision consequences, it will not immediately be obvious to them whether they should avoid learning. If learning is costless to begin with, they may be at least ambivalent about receiving the new information. This is because they are not yet able to calculate the risk-weighted utility given that they do not have the outcomes in mind.16 How could we model this? Perhaps we could say that John simply does not have the Harassment scenario as a consequence in his mind, and therefore that it does not factor into his calculation of the risk-weighted expected utility of learning whether there is bias. A perhaps more realistic option if John is indeed a really risk-sensitive agent is to model John as being uncertain about whether he will end up witnessing harassment with an allyship pamphlet in hand. If he's, for example, presented with an infographic about active bystanding when scrolling in bed at 2am with nary a heckler to be seen, he may not immediately believe that he will use this information to intervene in the future. Given that Buchak's model does not distinguish not anticipating a certain outcome with simply attributing 0% credence to it, the former option of not having the intervention scenario consequence can be represented as an extreme case of having < 1 credence that he will encounter Harassment (i.e. that his credence that he will encounter the scenario is 0).17 Now recall that when John's credence that B was 20% ('Possibility I'), the REU of the preferred choice (i.e. not learning whether B) in Harassment is -50. When the credence in B was 100% ('Possibility II'), the REU of the preferred choice (i.e. intervention) in Harassment is -47.5; at 0% ('Possibility III') it is also to reject learning and leave at -50. However, John isn't always going to be 100% sure that he'd encounter Harassment. If, for example, he assigns a credence of 0.5 that he'd witness Harassment, we can add in Stage S, where John doesn't know whether he'll be encountering Harassment and is making a decision about whether to learn whether B, and possibilities I', II' and III' such that these stages are after John has made his decision to learn whether B (i.e. that he's living in a biased world) or 16. My argument structure mirrors the Jeffrey (1956) classic response to the problem of inductive risk. 17. While the actual phenomenology of attributing 0% credence to an outcome and neglecting to think about it is obviously different, they will result in the same decisions being made if the agent assumes that all the outcomes they can envision have a total probability of 1. To clarify, for modeling purposes the agent's credence that learning whether B will be relevant is interchangeable with how relevant they think the information will be. 10 avoid the information, but before he knows for certain that he'll be encountering Harassment.18 The utility of not learning at Stage S is simply (−50) + (0.5)2 × 50 = (−37.5). In this case, since (−36.575) > (−37.5), Learning is preferred to not learning at S in some cases where John does not have sufficiently high credence that he will witness Harassment. When it is less clear whether B will come in handy, John goes from refusing to learn whether B to being willing to pay for it. Therein lies the crux of Expected Relevance: whether it is rational for privileged agents to avoid such information depends on how sure they are that they'll use the information; in fact, when the consequences of learning whether B are not yet obvious, they may instead choose to seek information. Generalizing over varying credences that the information is relevant, John's attitude towards the information takes a parabolic curve (see 3). Intuitively: at 0 credence, he is absolutely sure that the information will never be useful, and thus is indifferent to learning it. The benefit from deciding over finer partitions then entices him to learn whether B from credence 0 to 0.61, before the fear of being tempted into the worst-case scenario takes over and he becomes averse to the information. 3.2 Ignorance Begets Ignorance What if we instead tweak John's starting priors that B? For example, what if the numerous protests and activism efforts around John have caused more than an inkling of doubt that he was indeed privileged, and he had a credence of, say, 0.5 that B instead? How would that affect his attitude towards learning given varying credences about the relevance of the information? Let's model this by modifying John's priors at stage S (Fig. 4). Not only is John's response to information dependent on Expected Relevance, but the interactions between the value of information and Expected Relevance are also a function of his prior in B. Specifically, the higher his initial credence that B, the higher his Expected Relevance has to be for him to rationally avoid the information. In fact, while the relationship between the value of information and Expected Relevance remains parabolic at this risk attitude, depending on the agent's prior at stage S that the world 18. For calculations at each stage, as well as a detailed diagram, see 20. 11 Figure 3: How REU(information) changes for John against his credence that the information will be relevant. Figures 3-6 have the same axes; they do not include the data point where P(information relevant) = 1. is biased, they switch from seeking to avoiding information (at the x-intercepts) at different credences that the information will be relevant. For example, if John had had a prior of 0.1 that B, ceteris paribus19, the set of situations in which he'd rationally be information-avoidant are a superset of the set of situations in which he'd rationally avoid the information with a prior of 0.5. Perhaps we could say that his higher credence has granted him some "immunity" against rational information avoidance. In this case, John's prior ignorance has made him more likely to further avoid the information. Ignorance begets further ignorance here, and John stays in his Nguyenian inquiry trap as his priors "function to re-assert" the original belief system(Nguyen 2022). This could explain elite group ignorance's resilience and stability to intervention, corroborating both canonical and recent works in standpoint theory, and show how the persistence of this ignorance can arise from structural inequities such as faulty educational practices.20 19. This toy example also assumes that he'll only use information about B for the Harassment scenario. 20. For a survey, see Sullivan and Tuana (2007); for recent modelling work of standpoint epistemology, see Wu (2022). 12 Figure 4: The axes are the same as in Fig. 3, but each line represents a different prior at stage S. Risk function: R(x) = x2. 13 Figure 5: The curve forR(x) = x3 is the most risk-averse curve of the three. 3.3 Risk Attitudes and Ignorance What if John was more or less risk-averse, or perhaps even risk-seeking? From Fig. 5, we see that among risk-averse agents, the more risk-averse an agent is, the lower the x-intercept, i.e. the earlier it will be that the agent becomes information-avoidant as relevance increases. Ceteris paribus, then, a more risk-averse agent would rationally avoid information in at least as many cases as a less risk-averse one. Besides his priors, Expected Relevance's effect on the REU of learning is thus also modulated by the agent's risk attitudes. This is perhaps unsurprising: the more risk-averse an agent is, the more they scale up the worst-case scenario in their utility calculations, and therefore the lower their threshold of relevance before they get scared off learning. In addition, elite-group agents are likely to be risk-averse in gambles like Harassment, where the gamble is between a high probability of modest gain and low probability of significant loss (Kinney and Bright 2021); this therefore explains why elite-group agents robustly avoid information partly due to their risk-aversion. That being said, we have so far been focused on risk-averse agents, while Buchak's theory purports to allow for risk-neutral and seeking agents too.21 Consider Fig. 6: The agent's 21. Many have taken issue with the consequences of risk-seeking behaviour in Buchak's framework, e.g. Zollman 14 Figure 6: Depending on their risk function, an agent's attitude towards info evolves differently across their credence of information relevance. As above, R(x) = x3 is when the agent is risk-averse; R(x) = x is an example of risk-neutrality and R(x) = √ x of risk-seekingness. attitudes towards information differs wildly if they are risk-seeking or risk-neutral compared to being risk-averse; for the risk-seeking agent, their risk attitudes no longer compete with the benefits of learning. This raises questions for Buchak's framework as an explanation of attitudes towards information. Particularly, do risk-seeking agents take to learning like ducks to water, as the graph seems to suggest? This finding warrants further investigation beyond this paper's scope. 4 Resistance and Revolution: Political Upshots Kinney and Bright dismiss the hope of "an informed and benevolent elite." In asserting the "[vanity]" of hoping that the elite could become "informed and benevolent," they presuppose that elite-group ignorance persists as a necessary consequence of an elite class. My findings in §3 are friendly to their arguments that the rationality of elite-group ignorance is a result of structural factors, especially the existence of elite groups in the first place. However, I push back on the vanity of interventions on the elite. Though elite-group ignorance and the elite (2020). 15 class actively reinforce each other, I retain hope that, if we use the same framework, we can still intervene in the meantime. Consider Martın's analogy to a castle under siege, which she uses to describe the "multiple kinds of mechanisms for active ignorance"(Martın 2021) both at the individual level and upstream of the individual. According to the analogy, on an individual level, targeting John's rationality is like one-on-one combat against him. However, on another level, there are "coordinated manoeuvres" like mass archery barrages that provide a "significant layer of protection" that make it hard for John to lose the fight, not to mention a moat or even the geography that can protect his eliteness from the commoners outside. Even if John could only defend himself from woke ally conversion because of multiple structural factors such as educational practices and the simple fact that he is an elite, his ignorance remains difficult to intervene on. However, if the findings in §3 hold water, we can and should still chip at the defenses while the revolution brews. With these medium-term interventions, I believe we may mitigate some harms in the short run (e.g. in Harassment). Furthermore, given that elite-group ignorance is an active player in maintaining the social hierarchies we see(Martın 2021), if we undercut elite-group ignorance enough, we might even weaken the social structures that depend on it. When we finally storm the castle, it wouldn't hurt if the tower defenses have been disabled! Thus, while I agree that John could rationally avoid information, the stability of that rational refusal is highly dependent on John's starting credences about what information he's going to receive and how useful it will be, as well as his risk attitudes. Even if we can't intervene on John's behaviour through criticizing his irrationality (because we're assuming that Buchkian agents are rational), these findings suggest other ways of destabilizing his rationality. If Kinney and Bright's employment of Buchak's framework holds water here, then it seems we have cause to intervene on the factors that result in John's rationality22. Perhaps then, as Martın hopes, we could replace practices that make elite-group ignorance easy to sustain with those that make it difficult to maintain. 22. Recall that I rely on a very thin notion of rationality – all I require from John's rationality is that it leads to the 'sticky' resilience against intervention. 16 4.1 While the Guards Sleep: Destabilizing Interventions According to the modeling above, agents are rationally incentivized to avoid information when Expected Relevance exceeds a threshold. If this is true, then contra in-your-face efforts to convince elites to intentionally "sit with" the information of their privilege (e.g. DiAngelo 2018), we could consider treating learning about their privilege as a self-effacing end that "cannot be acquired through direct pursuit."(Nguyen 2022; see also Parfit 1984; Nguyen 2020). Like blending white beans into broccoli cheddar soup instead of forcing a bean-hater to chug a can of beans, we could incentivize John to learn about his privilege through other autotelic activities – i.e. activities that are done for their own sake – that distract him from the consequences of learning. For example, he could choose to learn about his white privilege by playing a game that implicitly teaches the differential incarceration rates in the U.S. and how they impact communities. If John is so invested in the investigation itself that he is distracted from the worst-case scenario (i.e. the information turns him into a daredevil), his temporal decision-making horizon could be intentionally restricted such that he achieves the self-effacing goal of learning the information, but circumvents the clutches of his own instrumental rationality.23 Intervening when the ignorance is already resilient is unsurprisingly difficult; instead, the results suggest that early intervention will also pay dividends in narrowing the possibilities for rational information avoidance. Especially given that formalized education adds its own incentive structure beyond the consequences of acting with one's privilege in mind, it will also serve as an intervention on Expected Relevance. The findings above then corroborate calls for interventions within the early education system. While all risk attitudes may be permissible, some may be less convenient than others. Therefore, a possible intervention could be to cultivate flexibility in terms of risk attitudes through being open-minded. Perhaps through education or gameplay, John could learn to foster an "openness to surprise"(Lugones 1987) that will allow him to perspective shift. Perspective taking and "active open-mindedness" have been at least somewhat effective in diminishing outgroup stereotypes(Lilienfeld, Ammirati, and Landfield 2009); perhaps there remain ways 23. For more on intentional framing, see Thoma 2018. 17 to get past the tower defenses and allow for effective elite-group privilege education, albeit sneakily. 4.2 Checking our Tools: Testing the Model Interventions are high-stakes and require care. Given how speculative the model and therefore the findings are, it would be responsible to only pursue the suggestions above after the model has been sufficiently tested. How much are the results in §3 reflected in real life? While current studies cannot yet empirically determine how the interventions would actually affect information avoidance, I propose a few directions the research could take. In addition, independent of the applications, my findings illustrate just how unstable the framework could be. The effectiveness of interventions on Expected Relevance require empirical research, such as investigations on whether elite-group agents could ever be distracted from the consequences of learning. What would "distracting" the agents look like, and how much would it cost? Telling people at a DEI meeting that the information they're learning is irrelevant to them doesn't seem like it'd create a great learning environment, for instance, but could we measure how varying whether the module is conducted via a game or just a lecture affects the audience's ability to recognize how their privilege affects the stakes they've been given, and perhaps even if they are more receptive to future learning opportunities (which my findings suggest would be a result of having successfully learned about their privilege and thus updated their priors). Why do my current results still matter? Models are tools of inquiry as much as they are tools of prediction; I hope that my findings provide motivation for investment of research resources to empirically ground or dispute the model. Even if empirical results suggest wariness about the effectiveness of the interventions above, they will provide impetus to revise or search for models that better capture these important phenomena. If it turns out that decreasing Expected Relevance does not improve learning outcomes, then perhaps not only should we reject the results in §3, but also the Buchakian model altogether, as a fitting model of elitegroup ignorance. 18 5 Conclusion We started by outlining how Kinney and Bright employ a Buchakian risk-averse decision model as a proof of concept that not all elite-group ignorance is necessarily irrational. They argue that in these cases, because Good's Theorem fails to apply, risk-averse elite agents plausibly rationally refuse costless relevant information about their privilege; even decreasing costs of education will not result in the elimination of elite-group ignorance. This has worrying consequences about the efficacy of current efforts to educate the elite and trust that they will make better decisions with access to more information. In response, this paper has investigated the different points at which an agent could be rationally required to learn. We have seen that Kinney and Bright's model results are not robust to variations in parameters, including the agent's Expected Relevance of the information. The degree to which the agent is sensitive to the relevance of the information depends too on their priors and their risk attitudes. Therefore, while the rationality of elite-group ignorance sits upon powerful structural factors, I suggest that there are still cracks where we can intervene to destabilize the rational information resistance, and instead make it rational to learn information about one's privilege. The effectiveness of the suggestions above require substantiation with further empirical work before actually being implemented. But not all hope is yet lost for intervention, even with how entrenched elite-group ignorance is as a tool and product of oppression. Redistribution and restructuring can remain our end goals; that does not, however, preclude us from taking steps now to prime ourselves for a successful revolution.24 24. I owe a large debt of gratitude to (in alphabetical order) Liam Kofi Bright, Kevin Dorst, Carolina Flores, Seth Goldwasser, Shelby Hanna, David Kinney, Taylor Koles, Annette Martın, Sven Neth, Felipe Pereira, Joseph Schiavone, Gabriel Vasquez-Peterson, Mark Wilson and Elise Woodard, and several anonymous reviewers, and the audiences at PFEW, PSA 2022, APA Central 2022, and the National University of Singapore (where the paper was presented under the name "Accidentally I learnt: On Relevance and Information Resistance") for their extensive feedback and discussions on previous versions of this paper. 19 Calculations for Section 3 Recall that: REU(Learning) = U1 +R(P2 + P3)× (U2 − U1) +R(P3)× (U3 − U2) U1 = (−250);U2 = (−50);U3 = 0;R(x) = x2 Stage/Possibility P1 P2 + P3 (= 1− P1) P3 REU(Learning) S = 0.5× (0.2× 0.1) = 0.01 0.99 = no Harassment + Harassment, biased, safe intervention = 0.5 + (0.5× (0.2× 0.9)) = 0.59 = (−250) + (0.992 × 200) + (0.592 × 50) = (−36.575) I' = III' 0 (John will always leave) 1 = no Harassment =0.5 = (−250) + (12 × 200) + (0.52 × 50) = (−37.5) II' = 0.5× 0.1 = 0.05 0.95 = no Harassment + Harassment, biased, safe intervention = 0.5 + (0.5× 0.9) = 0.95 = (−250) + (0.952 × 200) + (0.952 × 50) = (−24.375) 20 Figure 7: We've added S, I', II' and III' and the uncertainty of whether John will witness Harassment to John's decision process. 21 References Briggs, R.A. 2015. "Costs of abandoning the Sure-Thing Principle" [in en]. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 45, nos. 5-6 (December): 827–840. issn: 0045-5091, 1911-0820, accessed June 8, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/00455091.2015.1122387. Buchak, Lara. 2017. "Precis of Risk and Rationality" [in en]. Philosophical Studies 174, no. 9 (September): 2363–2368. issn: 0031-8116, 1573-0883, accessed June 8, 2021. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11098-017-0904-7. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11098-017-0904-7. Buchak, Lara Marie. 2013. Risk and rationality [in en]. OCLC: ocn841520426. Oxford: Oxford University Press. isbn: 978-0-19-967216-5. DiAngelo, Dr Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism [in en]. Google-Books-ID: abZdDwAAQBAJ. Beacon Press, June. isbn: 978-08070-4741-5. Duguid, Michelle M., and Melissa C. Thomas-Hunt. 2015. "Condoning stereotyping? How awareness of stereotyping prevalence impacts expression of stereotypes" [in English]. Num Pages: 343-359 Place: Washington, US Publisher: American Psychological Association (US), Journal of Applied Psychology 100, no. 2 (March): 343–359. issn: 0021-9010, accessed August 22, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037908. https://www.proquest.com/ docview/1610752947/abstract/E725D75097CA4B5BPQ/1. Good, Irving John. 1967. "On the Principle of Total Evidence." The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 17.4:319–321. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/bjps/17.4. 319. Guerrero, Alexander. 2021. "The Epistemic Pathologies of Elections and the Epistemic Promise of Lottocracy." In Political Epistemology, edited by Elizabeth Edenberg and Michael Hannon, 156–179. Oxford University Press. isbn: 978-0-19-289333-8. Jeffrey, Richard C. 1956. "Valuation and Acceptance of Scientific Hypotheses" [in en]. Philosophy of Science 23, no. 3 (July): 237–246. Kinney, David, and Liam Kofi Bright. 2021. "Risk Aversion and Elite-Group Ignorance." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Lilienfeld, Scott O., Rachel Ammirati, and Kristin Landfield. 2009. "Giving Debiasing Away: Can Psychological Research on Correcting Cognitive Errors Promote Human Welfare?" [In en]. Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc, Perspectives on Psychological Science 4, no. 4 (July): 390–398. issn: 1745-6916, accessed August 24, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1745-6924.2009.01144.x. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01144.x. Lugones, Maŕıa. 1987. "Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception." Place: Oxford, UK Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Hypatia 2 (2): 3–19. issn: 0887-5367. https: //doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1987.tb01062.x. Martın, Annette. 2021. "What is White Ignorance?" [In en]. The Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 4 (September). issn: 0031-8094, 1467-9213, accessed July 22, 2022. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/pq/pqaa073. 22 Mills, Charles W. 2007. "White Ignorance" [in en]. In Race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 13–38. SUNY series, philosophy and race. OCLC: ocm70676503. Albany: State University of New York Press. Nguyen, C. Thi. 2020. "Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles" [in en]. Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Episteme 17, no. 2 (June): 141–161. issn: 1742-3600, 1750-0117, accessed May 6, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2018.32. https://www.cambridge.org/core/ journals/episteme/article/abs/echo-chambers-and-epistemic-bubbles/5D4AC3A808C538 E17C50A7C09EC706F0. . 2022. "Playfulness Versus Epistemic Traps." In Social Virtue Epistemology, edited by Mark Alfano, Colin Klein, and Jeroen de Ridder. Routledge. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press. isbn: 0-19-824908-X. Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. 2007. Race and epistemologies of ignorance [in en]. SUNY series, philosophy and race. OCLC: ocm70676503. Albany: State University of New York Press. The Clash. 1982. Should I Stay Or Should I go. Thoma, Johanna. 2018. "Risk Aversion and the Long Run." Ethics 129:230–253. Wu, Jingyi. 2022. "Epistemic Advantage on the Margin" [in en]. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 31. Wynn, Alison T. 2020. "Pathways toward Change: Ideologies and Gender Equality in a Silicon Valley Technology Company." Publisher: SAGE Publications Inc, Gender & Society 34, no. 1 (February): 106–130. issn: 0891-2432, accessed August 19, 2022. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0891243219876271. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243219876271. Zollman, Kevin J S. 2020. "On the normative status of mixed strategies" [in en] (August): 43.


Conscience versus equality

Philosophy

Equality v Conscience? Ethics and the Provision of Public Services Annabelle Lever firstname.lastname@example.com forthcoming in The Philosophers Magazine 69 (July, 2015). Should Catholic adoption agencies be required to serve gay couples because they are willing to serve non-Catholics? Should Catholic hospitals be required to provide contraceptives to those who want them? Such questions lie at the heart of contemporary controversy, in Britain and the USA, over the appropriate scope for conscientious exemptions from antidiscrimination law, and over the implications of allowing voluntary associations a role in the provision of public goods and services. Freedom of conscience requires that faith-based institutions be free to serve their members' needs in accordance with their religious teachings. But what should happen when faith-based institutions serve the general public, often with public funds? There are two logically coherent but opposed answers to these questions: 'conscience trumps all' and 'equality trumps all'. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York and President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, represents the first position, and the British Humanist Society represents the second. Both illuminate the complexities of the issues and their limitations highlight the scope for political choice in morally acceptable responses to such questions. According to Cardinal Dolan, conscience is as much implicated in the way Catholicaffiliated hospitals treat non-Catholic employees and patients as it is in the way that the Catholic Church handles purely internal matters, such as the selection of priests, or ministry to parishioners. Consequently, he claims, religious exemptions from nondiscrimination laws that apply to the Church's treatment of the faithful must apply to its provision of services to the general public as well. Hence, he insists, if it is wrong to force the Catholic Church to make contraceptive and abortion care accessible to the faithful, it would be wrong to force it to provide insurance covering such care to non-Catholics working in Catholic schools and hospitals. Similarly, Dolan maintains, if adoption services 2 are precluded from serving gay couples when they minister only to the faithful, they must be allowed to discriminate against gay couples when they serve the general public. By contrast, the British Humanist Society maintains that equality and non-discriminatory public services require religious agencies either to abide by the same antidiscrimination norms as the State, or stick to serving their co-religionists. Hence the Society's report, 'Quality and Equality: Human Rights, Public Services and Religious Organisations', concludes that 'all organisations involved in the provision of statutory public services should be secular ones, but if religious ones are to be given contracts, they must operate in an inclusive, secular manner'. The difficulty with this view is that religious communities have an expressive interest in providing charitable services in accordance with their faith. Soup kitchens are not restaurants, and religion-affiliated hospitals and public services have an expressive and charitable rationale which their for-profit equivalents lack. Thus, even if voluntary associations must abide by norms applicable to the state when they are acting 'in loco statu, (just as they must abide by norms applicable to parents when they act 'in loco parentis), it does not follow that states are never permitted to grant conscientious exemptions to charities which serve the public. Still, the limits of the idea that 'equality trumps all' do not mean that 'conscience trumps all'. No one has a conscientious obligation to provide goods and services to the general public, whatever our duties to the poor and needy. Respect for conscience, therefore cannot require states to compromise the equality of their citizens, or their access to public services. In short, it is one thing to say that religious beliefs should determine religious care of the faithful, and quite another to say that they should determine the provision of non-profit goods and services for the general public, whether or not the state is subsidising those services. There is therefore more scope for political choice in determining the extent of religious exemptions than is sometimes thought. Everyone has duties of charity, and these may lead us to serve those who do not share our ideals and convictions. But it is no violation of conscience when we are unable to provide those services because of state laws which protect people's freedom and equality. On the other hand, there appear to be a range of 3 cases in which states may, but need not, encourage the voluntary provision of public services, and where they may, but need not, grant conscientious exemptions from generally applicable laws. For example, states may wish to promote Jewish-Muslim cooperation in the provision of non-profit goods and services, and therefore to subsidise such things as genetic counselling and advice on domestic violence even if this means accommodating the religious beliefs of their more traditional members. However, states are obliged to ensure fair access to goods and services for citizens, and to protect their dignity. This means that states are entitled, and sometimes obliged, to seek alternatives to existing voluntary associations, and to favour those which will abide by nondiscrimination norms over those which cannot. Imagine two scenarios. In the first, a catholic adoption agency refuses to place children with same-sex couples in a city where there are many other adoption services, including gay-friendly ones. In the second, the same agency exercises a virtual monopoly over adoption services. In the former, accommodating the expressive interests of Catholics is compatible with protecting the self-respect and care of those ineligible for Catholic adoptions. This is not the case on the second scenario. Hence, in such circumstances, the state would be entitled to remove any subsidies that it was providing to the Catholic agency, and to seek out and subsidise non-discriminatory adoption services by others, or to provide them itself. Given the importance of adoption services to prospective parents, to the children involved, and to their birth parents, the state would have a duty to diminish the importance of any voluntary provider who was unable to abide by antidiscrimination norms, in order to meet its own obligations of non-discriminatory care to its citizens. No state has a duty to support the charitable activities of religious groups in preference to other groups, and no state has a duty to support the charitable activities of groupsreligious or not – who behave in a discriminatory fashion. That is the fundamental difficulty with the 'conscience trumps all' approach to the rights of non-profit public service providers. Indeed, the state has no duty to support existing voluntary associations in preference to alternatives. Those who are currently best placed to provide non-profit public services did not gain their position purely on merit. The relative capacity of different religious groups, different charitable groups and different providers of public 4 services is still shaped by the legacy of undemocratic powers and privileges, inherited from the past. So while I have argued against forcing small religious associations to abide by antidiscrimination laws that violate their beliefs, states have duties to ensure that the powerful serve the public fairly, and duties to redress unjust forms of power and privilege. States are therefore entitled to promote non-profit associations which will abide by antidiscrimination norms, and may remove subsidies from existing associations in order to do so. This is not because equality is more important than freedom of conscience. Rather, it is because a conscientious commitment to equality is a fragile achievement and deserving of state support. 1, 198 words.


History of writing and record keeping

Philosophy

History of Writing and Record Keeping by Rochelle Forrester Copyright © 2016 Rochelle Forrester All Rights Reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted Anyone may reproduce all or any part of this paper without the permission of the author so long as a full acknowledgement of the source of the reproduced material is made. e-mail email@example.com Second Edition Published 31 October 2016 This paper was written in order to examine the order of invention of the various writing systems developed by humans. It is part of my efforts to put the study of social and cultural history and social change on a scientific basis capable of rational analysis and understanding. This has resulted in a hard copy book How Change Happens: A Theory of Philosophy of History, Social Change and Cultural Evolution and a number of websites such as http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/rochelle.f/, Sense Perception and Reality and How Change Happens and How Change Happens Rochelle Forrester's Social Change, Cultural Evolution and Philosophy of History website. There are also papers on Academia.edu, Figshare, Mendeley, Vixra and Social Science Research Network websites and other papers on Google docs such as Sense Perception and Reality, How Change Happens, The History of Medicine, The Discovery of the Atomic World and the Constituents of Matter and on Guttman Scale Analysis and its use to explain Cultural Evolution and Social Change and on Issuu and Scribd. Abstract The ultimate cause of much historical, social and cultural change is the gradual accumulation of human knowledge of the environment. Human beings use the materials in their environment to meet their needs and increased human knowledge of the environment enables human needs to be met in a more efficient manner. The human environment includes the human being itself and the human ability to communicate by means of language and to make symbolic representations of the sounds produced by language, allowed the development of writing. Writing developed over time in a necessary and inevitable manner from logographic, to syllabic, to alphabetical systems. This development from simpler word based writing to more complex syllable based systems and then even more complex sound based writing systems was a logical progression from, simple less useful systems, to more complex, but more useful systems. This is an example of how the simplest knowledge is acquired first and more complex knowledge is acquired later. The order of discovery determines the course of human social and cultural history as knowledge of new and more efficient means of meeting human needs, results in new technology, which results in the development of new social and ideological systems. This means human social and cultural history, has to follow a particular course, a course that is determined by the structure of the human environment. 2 Writing was first invented by the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia before 3,000 BCE. It was also independently invented in Meso-America before 600 BCE and probably independently invented in China before 1,300 BCE. It may have been independently invented in Egypt around 3,000 BCE although given the geographical proximity between Egypt and Mesopotamia the Egyptians may have learnt writing from the Sumerians. There are three basic types of writing systems. The written signs used by the writing system could represent either, a whole word, a syllable or an individual sound. Where the written sign represents a word the system is known as logographic as it uses logograms which are written signs that represent a word. The earliest writing systems such as the Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan glyphs are predominantly logographic as are modern Chinese and Japanese writing systems. Where the written sign represents a syllable the writing system is known as syllabic. Syllabic writing systems were more common in the ancient world than they are today. The Linear A and B writing systems of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece are syllabic. The most common writing systems today are alphabetical. These involve the written sign (a letter) representing a single sound (known as a phoneme). The earliest known alphabetical systems were developed by speakers of Semitic languages around 1700 BCE in the area of modern day Israel and Palestine. All written languages predominately use one or other of the above systems. They may however partly use the other systems. No written language is purely alphabetic, syllabic or logographic but may use elements from any or all systems. In order for there to be writing, three criteria must be met: -the writing must consist of artificial graphical marks on a durable surface -the purpose of the marks must be to communicate something -the purpose must be achieved due to a conventional relationship between marks and language Such fully developed writing only emerged after development from simpler systems. Talley sticks with notches on them to represent a number of sheep or to record a debt have been used in the past. Knotted strings have been used as a form of record keeping particularly in the area around the Pacific Rim. They reached their greatest development with the Inca quipus where they were used to record payment of tribute and to record commercial transactions. A specially trained group of quipu makers and readers managed the whole system. The use of pictures for the purpose of communication was used by native Americans and by the Ashanti and Ewe people in Africa. Pictures can show qualities and characteristics which cannot be shown by tally sticks and knot records. They do not however amount to writing as they do not bear a conventional relationship to language. Even so, the Gelb dictum (from its originator Ignace Gelb), that "At the basis of all writing stands the picture" has been widely accepted. An alternative idea was that a system by which tokens, which represented objects like sheep, were placed in containers and the containers were marked on the outside indicating the number and type of tokens within the container, gave rise to writing in Mesopotamia. The marks on the outside of the container were a direct symbolic representation of the tokens inside the container and an indirect symbolic representation of the object the token represented. The marks on the outside of the containers were graphically identical to some of the earliest pictograms used in Sumerian cuneiform. However cuneiform has approximately 1,500 signs and the marks on the outside of the containers can only explain the origins of a few of those signs. The first written language was the Sumerian cuneiform. Writing mainly consisted of records of numbers of sheep, goats and cattle and quantities of grain. Eventually clay tablets were used as a writing surface and were marked with a reed stylus to produce the writing. Thousands of such clay tablets have been found in the Sumerian city of Uruk. The earliest Sumerian writing consists of pictures of the objects mentioned such as sheep or cattle. Eventually the pictures became more abstract and were to consist of straight lines that looked like wedges. The earliest cuneiform was an accounting system consisting of pictograms representing commodities such as sheep and a number. The clay tablets found might for example simply state "ten sheep". Such writing obviously has its limitations and would not be regarded as a complete writing system. A complete writing system only developed with the process of phonetization. This occurs when the symbol ceases to represent an object and begins to represent a spoken sound, which in early 3 cuneiform would be a word. This process was assisted when the symbols, which initially looked very like the object they represented, gradually became more abstract and less clearly related to an object. However, while the symbol became more closely connected to words, it was words dealing with objects, such as sheep, bird or pot. It was still not possible to write more abstract ideas such as father, running, speech or foreigner. The solution to this problem was known as the rebus principle. Words with the same or similar pronunciation to an abstract word could be used to represent the abstract word. The sign for eye could be used to represent the word "I". The sign for deer could represent the word "dear". Which word is referred to by the picture is decided by an additional sign. Pictographs which originally represented a word began to represent the sound of the word. The rebus principle is used to represent abstract words in all word writing systems in Sumer, Egypt, China, and in the Aztec and Mayan writing in central America. The Rebus principle led to cuneiform becoming a form of logo-syllabic writing consisting of both logograms and syllabic writing. The effect of the change from logographic to logo-syllabic writing was substantial. Logographic writing cannot produce normal prose and is restricted to nouns, numbers, names and adjectives. The vast majority of early Sumerian writing consisted of bureaucratic records of products received or products distributed. Only when syllabic writing was introduced into cuneiform did it become possible to write prose such as myths and royal propaganda. The next major development in writing in the old world was the development of the alphabet. The alphabet was developed out of Egyptian hieroglyphs which contained 24 signs for 24 Egyptian consonants. About 1700 BCE Semites who knew Egyptian hieroglyphs began making certain changes in their writing system. They put the letters in a particular sequence and gave them simple names to assist learning and ease of memory. They also dropped the logograms and other signs used in hieroglyphs and just kept the Egyptian consonants and restricted the signs to those for individual consonants. Finally they introduced vowels into their alphabet. Alphabets were soon to spread over most of the world as they provide both flexibility and simplicity for a writing system. Writing also developed independently in Meso-America about 650 BCE. The earliest MesoAmerican writing seems to be logographic writing produced by the Olmecs. Later the Maya developed a writing system that was partly logographic and partly syllabic. There are broad similarities between the Maya writing and the logo-syllabic writing systems used in the old world. Mayan syllabic signs are pictographs of objects whose pronunciation begins with that syllable which is the same system used in early Semitic alphabets. The rebus principle is used for logograms for abstract words as it is used in Sumerian cuneiform. Mayan syllabic signs were commonly signs for syllables of a single constant and one vowel as in the Linear B writing system of Mycenaean Greece. Similar problems which emerged while developing a writing system were solved in similar ways in both the old world and the new world. Writing developed both in the old and the new worlds as a movement from the simple to the complex in the form of increasing abstraction. The simplest way to make a record of something is to draw a picture of it, so that the earliest writing was logographic. However the limitations of logographic writing were to result in the development of syllabic writing to allow for the writing of prose and for a reduction in the number of signs used. The most difficult system to invent due to its high level of abstraction was the alphabet system which was why it was the last system invented in the old world and why it had not been invented in the new world by the time of the Spanish conquest. Florian Coulmas in The Writing Systems of the World states: "The general tendency of development is roughly from pictogram to alphabet via word writing first and then syllabic writing." (Coulmas, Florian (1989) The Writing Systems of the World, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 34). Later he states: "Syllables are clearly more abstract and more difficult to conceive of than words, and accordingly syllabic writing appears historically later than word writing." (Ibid, 41). Still later he states: 4 "The alphabet is the logical conclusion of a development of ever increasing abstraction. As its units are minute and highly abstract it is in principle, universally applicable. ... It is a generally accepted view that the alphabet is the teleological goal of the history of writing." (Ibid. 47). The move from logographic, to syllabic, to alphabetical writing was a move from the easiest form of writing to invent to the most difficult form of writing to invent. The increasing difficulty is caused by the increasing level of abstraction with the move from logographic, to syllabic and then to alphabetic writing. However as the level of abstraction increases, the ease of use of the writing system increases. This is because the number of signs used falls, with logographic systems typically employing thousands of signs, syllabic systems anywhere from 50 to many hundreds and an alphabetic system like the Roman alphabet, 26 signs. This is because the number of words in a language always exceeds the number of syllables and the number of syllables will normally exceed the number of phoneme, upon which alphabetic writing is based. If writing, or a similar record keeping system like the Inca quiqu, had not been invented, then it is doubtful whether states as a form of government could have existed. States such as the Aztec, Inca or the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations require a bureaucracy and record keeping system to account for the payment of taxation (in goods rather than money) and the distribution of produce to government bureaucrats, soldiers and supporters. If writing did not exist, it would be difficult or impossible to run or control any political entity larger than a chiefdom. Somewhere, as societies got bigger and bigger, writing or a similar record keeping system is needed to control the administration of the government of that society. Bibliography: Coulmas Florian (1989) The Writing Systems of the World, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Fischer, Steven Roger (2001) A History of Writing, Reaktion Books, London Sampson, Geoffrey (1985) Writing Systems, Hutchison, London Senner, Wayne (ed) (1989) The Origins of Writing, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln


Philosophy

This short paper is my first attempt at a Social Welfare Function based on human rights. I argue that rights, compared to traditional measures of welfare such as preference satisfaction, income etc., have numerous advantages, including interpersonal comparability and measure-ability. The introduction of controversial ethical assumptions in a SWF framework is not, I claim, unheard of, and human rights at least have the advantage of enjoying widespread support.

. Aggregating Rights (A Social Welfare Function Based on Human Rights) A social welfare function (henceforth SWF) ranks conceivable or possible worlds also called "social states" according to the aggregate levels of welfare they produce. Each social state is given a numerical value by the SWF allowing it to be ranked. This should help policy makers and individuals to achieve the social state with the highest or maximum aggregate welfare. Subject of course to whatever constraints there are: technological or resource constraints, human capital or behavioral constraints etc. A "higher" rather than the "highest" welfare may be the only realistic option. A SWF therefore describes society as a whole, but the whole is an aggregate of individual welfare scores, also called individual "utilities", "interests" or whatever. Individuals should first order possible social states from their own point of view and their own sense of utility or preference, and then these individual orderings of social states are aggregated in some way by a SWF so as to achieve maximum aggregate welfare. A SWF typically looks like this: W(x) = F (U1(x), U2(x), ... , Un(x)) where: W(x) is a real number social utility value for a possible world x U1(x) is a cardinal or ordinal utility value that is interpersonally comparable and that is yielded by some policy or procedure for individual 1 in world x F is a function that yields a real number; F can be different things: the sum of all U's, the average of all U's, the product (multiplication) of all U's etc.1 n is the total number of individuals. SWFs are hotly contested. What should count as individual "welfare" or "utility"? And how do we measure, rank or score it? And if we have an uncontested definition of individual welfare that can be measured and ranked, then how do we compare and aggregate it across individuals? In other words: what is U and what is F? Let's start with the first problem. Income or wealth (counted cardinally in $) is often cited as a good proxy for welfare. When people have more money, they can pay for more goods, services or activities which give them some amount of utility in some form and which therefore enhance their welfare. Income or wealth is also measurable and interpersonally comparable. Aggregating it into a SWF should be relatively easy. Of course, F is this case should probably not be the simple sum of all income levels. Some special focus on the income of the least well off and redistribution of income from those better off would, given the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, increase total welfare utility (W) in a society: one extra unit of utility (income in this case) for a starving person is of greater value than an extra unit of utility for a millionaire.2 1 A sum could be a Benthamite or classical utilitarian SWF; the product a Bernoulli-Nash SWF. 2 A Rawlsian SWF would then perhaps be an option. A Benthamite or classical utilitarian SWF, even though it would allow redistribution if justified by diminishing marginal utility, does not give special attention to the income of the least well off. A Rawlsian SWF allows redistribution even without diminishing marginal utility. 2. However, income and wealth aren't really very good proxies for welfare. Welfare is clearly more than money, even though money can buy welfare. In addition, different people need different levels of income or wealth because they have different consumption requirements (think of a blind person or a paraplegic). So income looks like it's an interpersonally comparable form of welfare when in fact it's not: equal income may yield vastly unequal levels of welfare when welfare is understood as something more than mere income. Well-being may then have to take the place of income (wellbeing could account for the lower welfare of the blind and the paraplegic given equal income levels). But well-being is notoriously difficult to define, let alone measure.3 So we're back where we came from. Perhaps a more subjective approach to welfare could do the trick. Welfare is then not what is objectively good for individuals such as income or well-being but rather what individuals themselves subjectively prefer. This means moving away from what Kenneth Arrow has called the Platonism or paternalism that is often part of welfare economics.4 The social good is not derived from philosophical reflection about the nature of welfare, but is instead the composite of individual preferences, whatever they are. Hence, the welfare that is to be aggregated into a SWF is abstract preference satisfaction. The use of abstract preference satisfaction as a measure of individual welfare allows us to sidestep the problem of interpersonal comparability of more specific preferences or of other possible definitions of welfare such as income. There is no way to compare satisfaction of a preference for alcohol with satisfaction of a preference for a long life. Of course, even if we try to compare abstract preference satisfaction across individual, we'll still have problems because "[t]here is no means of testing the magnitude of A's satisfaction as compared with B's".5 Hence the need to use ordinal rather than cardinal rankings for individual preference rankings. One takes individuals' ordinal preference rankings and aggregates those, irrespective of the nature or intensity of the preferences. However, we then may have to pay the price of running afoul of Arrow's Impossibility Theorem which suggest that individual ordinal rankings can't produce a SWF. Moreover, the interpersonal comparability of abstract preference satisfaction is only apparent. Let's say you have a world with three individual, each with a set of preferences that they rank. Two of them have a high preference for the consumption of porn and rank that first. The other one has no preference for porn and instead ranks the consumption of art first. When abstracting these preferences, most SWFs would result in a ranking of possible social states where the social state in which porn consumption yields the highest total welfare is the best possible state. That is not intuitively appealing. While many of us would give priority to people's preferences even if these preferences are not our own and even if we deem them base, most would stop at evil preferences.6 Hence a SWF based on abstract preference satisfaction is not acceptable. Perhaps we should therefore reconsider the Platonism scolded by Arrow7 (but without the paternalism). I propose to do just that and more specifically to use human rights as the Platonic good. I have good reasons for choosing this good, and I've defended those elsewhere. You may or may not agree with these 3 The capabilities approach which argues that freedom (what people are free to do or be) should be included in welfare assessments is one interesting formulation of well-being, but it's inevitably controversial. 4 K. J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values; 2012, Yale University Press, p. 23. 5 L. Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, 1932, MacMillan, p. 124. 6 There are numerous other problems with preference satisfaction as a definition of welfare, e.g. preference manipulation, people having preferences about other people's preferences (as in Sen's Liberal Paradox, etc.). 7 See note 4 above. One can argue that welfare economics is always and inherently normative. Disagreement about F is indicative of the ethical choices inherent in SWF thinking. See notes 1 and 2 above. In addition, the focus on individual welfare as the only source of social welfare also marks an ethical choice, namely the choice against collectivism. 3. reasons, and the reasons will inevitably be controversial. Introducing controversial elements into a SWF may make it useless, and may result in as many SWF as there are people. However, the controversial elements have always been there. The advantage of human rights is that there is widespread agreement on them at least on the list of rights, not so much on the reasons why we need them. Another advantage of the use of human rights as a proxy of welfare is interpersonally comparability. Thomas Scanlon, although not talking about human rights, says it better: Giving up the idea that value judgments can be avoided altogether allows us to make, within moral argument, the kind of interpersonal comparison mentioned earlier. We can still pursue the aim of Neutrality by basing our moral arguments on a conception of the elements that are important in making a life good that is at least widely shared.8 Measurement of human rights is also less of a problem compared to alternative measures of welfare. People's rights are respected or not. To some extent, this can be objectively ascertained, at least in theory. There are, of course, practical obstacles to human rights measurement, especially in oppressive environments,9 but a reasonable way out of this would be to assume that impossibility of measurement equals absence of respect. Indeed, when rights are not respected, they may be violated in degrees. A SWF based on rights should therefore be able to include measurement of measurable degrees of respect/violation of rights. Again, there is no real obstacle to do this kind of measurement of degrees, at least in the case of most human rights. Free speech for instance is already measured by degrees.10 In order to convince traditional welfare economists of the usefulness of this approach to SWFs, it's probably best to point to the fact that human rights also encompass a notion of welfare. Traditional welfare needs such as food, shelter, rest, preservation of life, security and a basic standard of living are all codified as human rights.11 Human rights take a sufficientarian approach to these issues, meaning that the focus should be on the welfare needs of those members of society who do not yet have the means to satisfy them. Improving the standard of living of those who already have an above threshold level is not required by human rights. This sufficientarianism of human rights suggests that the SWF should be Rawlsian, focusing on the welfare of the least well-off individual member of society. That is true for the welfare element of human rights, but not for the more traditional human rights. The members of society whose rights welfare and other rights are most precarious should of course receive priority as to their rights protection, but at least in the case of non-welfare rights this is only an intermediate goal. The SWF should allow us to advance the rights of all members up to a level of equal protection. Sen's social welfare function is even less useful in this context because it focuses too much on income and income inequality and doesn't capture the full range of human rights. Completely useless are the Benthamite/classical utilitarian SWF: both the sum and the average are more or less indifferent to the distribution of utility among individuals (with the exception of diminishing marginal utility). Human rights are equal rights, hence their distribution is of crucial importance. Perhaps a Bernoulli-Nash SWF in which F is the product? Maybe, but that will only be the start. A complete SWF based on rights requires a lot more work than I can possibly accomplish here. For 8 T.M. Scanlon, The Moral Basis of Interpersonal Comparisons, in Elster & Roemer, Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 44. 9 See Human Rights, the Quantitative Approach, F. Spagnoli 10 Freedom House and others are known for this. 11 Although there is opposition to the inclusion of these rights in the corpus of human rights, especially in the U.S. See here. 4. example, one element of complexity is geography: normally, SWFs are made for a single country, whereas a rights based SWF should of course encompass the whole of humanity. Human rights are rights of all human beings, and there are substantial cross-border effects on rights. I hope to flesh out this proposal another time.