A Conflict of Visions by Sowell
Ref: Thomas Sowell (1987). A Conflict of Visions. William & Morrow Co.
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Summary
This book addresses a fundamental question that seldom gets the attention it deserves: What are the underlying assumptions behind the very different ideological visions of the world being contested in modern times? The purpose here is not to determine which of these visions is more valid but rather to reveal the inherent logic behind each of these sets of views and the ramifications of their assumptions which lead not only to different conclusions on particular issues but also to wholly different meanings to such fundamental words as “justice,” “equality,” and “power.”
A closer look at the arguments on both sides often shows that they are reasoning from fundamentally different premises. These different premises- often implicit- are what provide the consistency behind the repeated opposition of individuals and groups on numerous, unrelated issues. They have different visions of how the world works.
Conflicts of visions dominate history. We will do almost anything for our visions, except think about them. The purpose of this book is to think about them.
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---PART I: PATTERNS
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Ch 1 The Role of Visions
Vision: Our sense of how the world works and the foundations on which we build theories for how the world should work. Visions are a “pre-analytic cognitive act”; it is what we sense or feel before we have constructed any systematic reasoning that could be called a theory. Visions are all, to some extent, simplistic- though that is a term usually reserved for other people’s visions, not our own.
A vision is a sense of causation. It is more like a hunch or a “gut feeling” than it is like an exercise in logic or factual verification. Logic and verification come later, and feed on the raw material provided by the vision. If causation proceeds as our vision conceives it to, then certain other consequences follow, and theory is the working out of what those consequences are. Evidence is fact that discriminates between one theory and another. Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Logic is an essential ingredient in the process of turning a vision into a theory, just as empirical evidence is then essential for determining the validity of that theory.
Special interests often prevail to the extent that they can mobilize support from the general public’s responsiveness to visions which can be invoked for or against a given policy.
The object over the next few chapters will be to examine the underlying social visions whose conflicts have shaped our times and may well shape times to come.
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Ch 2 Constrained and Unconstrained Visions
“At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply” -Walter Lippmann.
This book groups visions into two broad categories- the unconstrained vision and the constrained vision.
Unconstrained Vision: Man can master social complexities sufficiently to apply directly the logic of morality and the common good; man is capable of directly feeling other people’s needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family are involved. The real goal in the unconstrained vision is the long-run development of a higher sense of social duty. Implicit in the unconstrained vision is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards. Man is, in short, “perfectible”- meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection. The concept of “solution” remains central to the unconstrained vision. A solution is achieved when it is no longer necessary to make a trade-off, even if the development of that solution entailed costs now past.
“We can come nearer and nearer, though one cannot prescribe limits to this process. It is sufficient for his purpose that men are eminently capable of justice and virtue- not only isolated individuals, but the whole species. Efforts must be made to wake the sleeping virtues of mankind” -Godwin.
“Eventually, there will be reconciliation of the interests of each with the interests of all- at which point, the path of virtue is no longer arduous. Man could act under the influence of a socially beneficial disposition, rather than simply in response to ulterior incentives” -Condorcet.
Human actions are dichotomized by Godwin into the beneficial and the harmful, and each of these in turn is dichotomized into the intentional and the unintentional. The intentional creation of benefits is called “virtue,” the intentional creation of harm is “vice”, and the unintentional creation of harm is “negligence,” a subspecies of vice…The missing category was unintentional benefit. It was precisely this missing category in Godwin that was central to Adam Smith’s whole vision, particularly as it unfolded in “The Wealth of Nations.”
“Men are capable of preferring an inferior interest of their own to a superior interest of others…The intention to benefit others is the essence of virtue and virtue in turn is the road to human happiness” -William Godwin (Enquiry Concerning Political Justice).
The policies sought by this vision have often been described in terms of their intended goals: “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” “ending the exploitation of man by man,” or “social justice,” for example.
Constrained Vision: The moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity (selfish nature) in particular, are inherent facts of life- the basic constraint in this vision. Each individual’s knowledge is grossly inadequate, compared to the knowledge mobilized systemically through economic markets, traditional values, and other social processes. The fundamental moral and social challenge is to make the best of the possibilities which exist within this constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature. One of the hallmarks of the constrained vision is that it deals in trade-offs rather than solutions, with prudence, the careful weighing of trade-offs, amongst the highest virtues.
To the Federalists, evil was inherent in man, and institutions were simply ways of trying to cope with it. Adam Smith likewise saw government as “an imperfect remedy” for the deficiency of “wisdom and virtue” in man. The Federalist Papers said: Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
The loci of discretion should be as widely scattered as possible, the inevitable errors resulting being accepted as a trade-off, no solution being possible.
The Conflict of Visions
The constrained vision is a tragic vision of the human condition. The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions, which are viewed as ultimately decisive. The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions. By contrast, the constrained vision sees the best as the enemy of the good—a vain attempt to reach the unattainable being seen as not only futile but often counterproductive, while the same efforts could have produced a more viable and beneficial trade-off.
While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society.
In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institutions, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.
The US Constitution, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly reflects the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power. This was in sharp contrast to the French Revolution, which gave sweeping powers, including the power of life and death, to those who spoke in the name of “the people,” expressing the Rousseauean “general will.”
Ideals are weighed against the cost of achieving them, in the constrained vision. But in the unconstrained vision, every closer approximation to the ideal should be preferred.
Modern defenders of legal technicalities which allow criminals to escape punishment who declare, “That is the price we pay for freedom,” or defenders of revolutions who say, “You can’t make omelets without breaking eggs,” are contemporary exemplars of an unconstrained vision which has historically treated process costs as secondary. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum are those who in essence repeat Adam Smith’s view of process costs: “The peace and order of society is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable.”
The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on the nature of man- not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations.
Marxism is a special hybrid, applying a constrained vision to much of the past and an unconstrained vision to much of the future.
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Ch 3 Visions of Knowledge and Reason
Unconstrained Vision
The special role of “thinking people” or of “the brightest and the best” has for centuries been a central theme of the unconstrained vision.
“Reason is the proper instrument, and the sufficient instrument for regulating the actions of mankind” -Godwin.
“Experience is greatly overrated, unreasonably magnified compared to reason, which is the general power of a cultivated mind” -Godwin.
“Everything that bears the imprint of time must inspire distrust more than respect” -Condorcet.
“The pretense of collective wisdom is the most palpable of all impostures” -Godwin.
“Real intellectual improvement demands, that mind should, as speedily as possible, be advanced to the height of knowledge already existing among the enlightened members of the community (‘cultivated minds’), and start from thence in pursuit of further acquisitions” -Godwin.
“Discussion is the path that leads to discovery and demonstration. Accuracy of language is the indispensable prerequisite of sound knowledge. Where knowledge is synonymous with articulated rationality. Virtue is promoted when men must avow their actions, and assign the reasons upon which they are founded” -Godwin.
Knowledge and reason are conceived as articulated rationality in the unconstrained vision.
“A young man now leaving school possesses more real knowledge than the greatest geniuses- not of antiquity, but even of the 17c- could have acquired after long study” -Condorcet, 18c.
To believers in the unconstrained vision, intellectuals are “precursors to their fellows in the discovery of truth,” in Godwin’s words. Likewise, according to Condorcet, “the discovery of speculative truths” is “the sole means of advancing the human race.”
Constrained Vision
In the constrained vision, any individual’s own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions. A complex society and its progress are therefore possible only because of numerous social arrangements which transmit and coordinate knowledge from a tremendous range of contemporaries, as well as from the even more vast numbers of those from generations past. Knowledge as conceived in the constrained vision is predominantly experience- transmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices which indicate costs, scarcities, and preferences, to traditions which evolve from the day-to-day experiences of millions in each generation, winnowing out in Darwinian competition what works from what does not work.
“Not all knowledge in this sense is part of our intellect, nor is our intellect the whole of our knowledge. Our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, and our institutions- all are in this sense adaptations to past experience which have grown up by selective elimination of less suitable conduct” -Friedrich Hayek.
In the constrained vision, it is not simply that individuals rationally choose what works from what does not work, but also- and more fundamentally- that the competition of institutions and whole societies leads to a general survival of more effective collections of cultural traits, even if neither the winners nor the losers rationally understand what was better or worse about one set or the other. Values which may be effective at the tribal level will tend to be overwhelmed by values that permit or promote the functioning of larger aggregations of people. From this perspective, “man has certainly more often learnt to do the right thing without comprehending why it was the right thing, and he still is better served by custom than understanding.” There is thus “more ‘intelligence’ incorporated in the system of rules of conduct than in man’s thoughts about his surroundings.”
Knowledge is the social experience of the many, as embodied in behavior, sentiments, and habits, rather than the specially articulated reason of the few, however talented or gifted those few might be…With knowledge conceived of as both fragmented and widely dispersed, systemic coordination among the many supersedes the special wisdom of the few.
The trade-off perspective of the constrained vision treats defects as inevitable, and therefore not in themselves reason for change, unless their magnitudes merit the inevitable costs entailed by change.
The superiority of experts within a narrow slice of the vast spectrum of human understanding is not denied. What is denied is that this expertise confers a general superiority which should supersede more widely dispersed kinds of knowledge.
“The most dangerous state in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them” -Hayek.
The judge’s moral duty is to faithfully carry out the law he was sworn to uphold, not sincerely change that law to produce better results as he sees them. Within this vision, a scholar’s moral duty is to faithfully promote the intellectual process among his students and readers, not lead them to specific conclusions he sincerely believes to be best for society.
Adam Smith considered it unbecoming for the young to have the same confidence as the old. “The wisest and most experienced are generally the least credulous,” he said, and this depended crucially on time: “It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.”
Unarticulated social experience has remained a more effective guide to behavior than articulated rationality, in the tradition of the constrained vision. According to Hayek, it is enough that people “know how to act in accordance with the rules without knowing that the rules are such and such in articulated terms.”
The arrogance and exhibitionism of intellectuals were likewise recurring themes in Burke- along with the dangers that such intellectuals posed to society. He spoke of their “grand theories” to which they “would have heaven and earth to bend.” Hobbes also saw those who “think themselves wiser, and abler to govern” as sources of distraction and civil war. Hamilton likewise saw intellectuals as dangerous, because of their tendency to follow “the treacherous phantoms of an ever craving and never to be satisfied spirit of innovation.” Even where intellectuals were not conceived of as positively dangerous to the social order, their role as policy-makers was seen in the constrained vision as often inferior to that of ordinary people. John Randolph said that he knew men “who could not write a book, or even spell this famous word Congress” who nevertheless “had more practical sense” than any intellectual.
The Conflict of Visions
The power of specifically articulated rationality is central to the unconstrained vision. The power of unarticulated social processes covering the historical experience of many generations used to mobilize and coordinate knowledge as central to the constrained vision. The issue is not whether one individual or group is wiser than another but whether systemic experience is wiser than both.
In the unconstrained vision, wise and conscientious individuals should strive to shape the best outcomes in particular issues that come within their jurisdiction. The individuals own reason and sincerity are paramount, and roles are seen as needlessly constricting. In the constrained vision, the inherent limitations of individuals mean that each individual’s best contribution to society is their fidelity or adherence to the special duties of his institutional role, while letting systemic processes determine outcomes based on the experiential capital of nations and of ages.
“Children are a sort of raw material put into our hands. Their minds are like a sheet of white paper” Godwin. The young were viewed by Godwin as a downtrodden group, but from among them may be found “one of the long-looked-for saviors of the human race.” However, the constrained view, which seeks prudent trade-offs rather than dramatic solutions, cannot seek prudence in youth, for prudence was regarded as the fruit of experience. Nor was moral fervor a substitute: “It is no excuse for presumptuous ignorance that it is directed by insolent passion,” according to Burke.
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Ch 4 Visions of Social Processes
The complexity of social processes is a recurrent theme in both visions, but in very different senses. To those with the constrained vision, it is axiomatic that no individual or council can master this complexity, so that systemic processes- market economies, social traditions, constitutional law- are relied on instead. But to those with the unconstrained vision, individuals and councils can and must wrestle with social complexity.
The unconstrained vision seeks the best individual decisions, arrived at seriatim and in ad hoc fashion. By contrast, the constrained vision trades off the benefits of both wisdom and virtue against the benefits of stability of expectations and standards.
At the extremes, the constrained vision says, “My country, right or wrong,” while the unconstrained vision casts its exponent in the role of a citizen of the world, ready to oppose his own country, in words or actions, whenever he sees fit. Patriotism and treason thus become a meaningless distinction at the extremes of the unconstrained vision, while this distinction is one of the most central and most powerful distinctions in the constrained vision.
In contrast to the constrained vision, which seeks to analyze, prescribe, or judge only processes, the unconstrained vision seeks to analyze, prescribe, or judge results—income distribution, social mobility, and equal or unequal treatment by a variety of institutions, for example…To those with the unconstrained vision, the best results should be sought directly. To those with the constrained vision, the best processes should be used and protected, because the attempt to produce the best results directly is beyond human capacity.
According to the unconstrained vision, the patterned behavior of society is successful, just, and progressive insofar as it reflects the articulated rationality of man in general and of the most intellectually and morally advanced people in particular. Order- and especially a just and progressive order- is the result of design, backed by the commitment of people dedicated to the general welfare. In broad outline, this is the vision of “the age of reason,” which began in 18c France and has spread throughout the Western world and beyond. In the constrained vision, where man- individually and collectively- lacks both the intellectual and moral prerequisites for such deliberate, comprehensive planning, order evolves historically without design, and more effectively than when it is designed.
Just as the unconstrained vision urges judicial activism on judges, it urges “social responsibility” upon businessmen—that they should hire, invest, donate, and otherwise conduct their businesses with an eye to producing specific benefits to society at large. The socially responsible businessman should, for example, hire the disadvantaged, invest in things that seem most needed by society rather than those most profitable to his firm, and turn part of the proceeds over to charitable and cultural activities, rather than pay all the proceeds out to the stockholders or plow them back into the business. The constrained vision sees such things as outside the competence of businessmen, given the wider ramifications of such decisions in a complex systemic process. According to the constrained vision of human knowledge, what is within the businessman’s competence is the running of his particular firm so as to promote its prosperity, within the law. It is the systemic effect of competition, rather than the individual intentions of businessmen, which this vision relies on to produce social benefit.
Unconstrained Vision: Social processes should be deliberately designed (with a goal towards equity); man is capable of deliberately planning and executing social decisions for the common good.
If effective rational planning and direct control of an entire economic system is possible, then it is clearly more efficient to reach desired results directly in this way, rather than as the end result of circuitous and uncontrolled processes. Where desirability can be specified by a small group of social decision-makers, rather than depending upon a multitude of mutually conflicting values among the populace at large, then social issues become very much analogous to engineering problems…In the engineering analogy, growing out of the unconstrained vision, one can begin with society’s “needs” because it is possible to have an “objective analysis” of “what is really desirable.” The “public interest” can be specified, and therefore pursued rationally. It is then a question of assembling the relevant facts, and articulating them- “a full presentation of the items we can choose among,”- to determine how to achieve the resulting goals. Social issues thus reduce to a matter of “technical coordination” by experts…Select third parties can agree on what constitutes “needs,” “waste,” or the “spoiling” of the natural or man-made environment.
“Truth, and above all political truth, is not hard of acquisition. What is required is independent and impartial discussion by unambitious and candid people” -Godwin.
Bureaucracy itself is a method for bringing scientific judgments to bear on policy decisions; the growth of bureaucracy in modern government is itself partly an index of the increased capacity of government to make use of expert knowledge.
Godwin said we cannot make today’s decisions on the basis of “a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors. Such terms as ‘outmoded’ and ‘irrelevant’ are common in dismissals of what, in the opposing vision, is called the wisdom of the ages.
Being bound by past decisions represents a loss of benefits made possible by later knowledge. Being bound by past decisions, whether in constitutional law cases or in marriage for life, is seen as costly and irrational. The unconstrained vision therefore tends toward seeking the greatest flexibility for changing decisions in the light of later information.
“Am I precluded from better information for the whole course of my life? And, if not for the whole life, why for a year, a week, or even an hour?” -Godwin.
Loyalty, promises, patriotism, gratitude, precedents, oaths of fidelity, constitutions, marriage, social traditions, and international treaties are all constrictions imposed earlier, when knowledge is less, on options to be exercised later, when knowledge will be greater were all condemned by Godwin.
Freedom is defined to include both the absence of direct, externally imposed impediments and of the circumstantial limitations which reduce the range of choice.
Constrained Vision: Social processes evolved slowly over time and should be evaluated in terms of their systemic characteristics- their incentives and modes of interaction- rather than their goals or intentions.
The constrained vision places little faith in deliberately designed social processes, since it has little faith that any manageable set of decision-makers could effectively cope with the enormous complexities of designing a whole blueprint for an economic system, a legal system, or a system of morality or politics.
Man is capable of making long-run and general assessments of social processes, comparing constitutional government with alternative governments or competitive economies with politically directed economies, for example. The mode of assessment is experiential, and the revealed preference of the many- especially when they “vote with their feet”- is from this perspective more persuasive than the articulation of the few.
Language is the epitome of an evolved complex order, with its own systemic characteristics, inner logic, and external social consequences—but without having been deliberately designed by any individual or council. Its rationality is systemic, not individual—an evolved pattern rather than an excogitated blueprint.
What is rejected by the constrained vision is individual or intentional planning of the whole system.
The constrained vision is not a static vision of the social process, nor a view that the status quo should not be altered. On the contrary, its central principle is evolution.
The individual is to be guided by the collective wisdom of his culture.
“The evils of inconstancy are ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice” -Burke.
Those with the constrained vision tend to be less concerned with promoting economic and social equality, and more concerned with the dangers of an inequality of power, producing an articulate ruling elite of rationalists.
“It is a delusion that all the relevant facts are known to some one mind that is capable of making a decision and considering its wider ramifications. The benefits of an advanced civilization derive from the better social coordination of widely dispersed fragments of knowledge- not from greater knowledge in the individual” -Hayek.
It is especially unwarranted for the individual to place himself outside or above the society which makes his life and his understanding possible. Even great achievements by an individual are deemed to be necessarily confined to a narrow slice of the sweeping spectrum of concerns which a society coordinates, and therefore provide no basis for him to imagine that he can disassemble and reassemble in a better way the complex society around him.
The constrained vision takes human nature as given, and sees social outcomes as a function of (1) the incentives presented to individuals and (2) the conditions under which they interact in response to those incentives. These interactions- both conflicting and cooperative- are too complex to lead simply to an average of the intentions of agents…In this vision, the question is not whether “problems” are “solved”—they will not be- but whether the best trade-offs available have been made.
Results do not define justice.
Freedom is the absence of externally imposed impediments.
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Ch 5 Varieties and Dynamics of Visions
Sudden “Road to Damascus” conversions, where a particular event reorients one’s whole thinking, or the change may be more like water wearing away rock, so that one vision imperceptibly disappears, to be replaced by a changing set of implicit assumptions about man and the world.
To be totally unconstrained in the most literal sense would be to have omniscience and omnipotence. Religious visions may ascribe omniscience and omnipotence to God, but that in itself constrains man, and so precludes a completely unconstrained social vision. A 100% constrained vision would mean that man’s every thought and action are predestined, and would be equally incompatible with advocating a particular social vision to be followed.
The two key criteria for distinguishing constrained and unconstrained visions are (1) the locus of discretion (who should decide?), and (2) the mode of discretion (the government or evolved social rationality?).
The locus of discretion in the unconstrained vision is the surrogate decision-maker (individual or institutional), choosing a collective optimum, whether in economics, law, or politics, and whether for a limited range of decisions or for the structuring of the whole society. By contrast, in the constrained vision, the loci of discretion are virtually as numerous as the population. Authorities exist, but their role is essentially to preserve a social framework within which others exercise discretion.
Social decisions are deliberately made by surrogates on explicitly rationalistic grounds, for the common good, in the unconstrained vision. Social decisions evolve systemically from the interactions of individual discretion, exercised for individual benefit, in the constrained vision—serving the common good only as an individually unintended consequence of the characteristics of systemic processes such as a competitive market economy.
Believers in the two visions are thus foredoomed to be adversaries on one specific issue after another.
In the constrained vision, a man’s intellectual, moral, and other capabilities are so limited, relative to his desires (not only for material things but also for justice and love, for example), that his desires inherently cannot all be fully satisfied.
In the constrained vision, trade-offs freely accepted are essentially solutions.
For a constrained vision, it is necessary not only that (1) man’s resources, both internal and external, are insufficient to satisfy his desires, but also that (2) individuals will not accept limits on the satisfaction of their own desires commensurate with what is socially available, except when inherent social constraints are forcibly imposed on them as individuals through various social mechanisms such as prices (which force each individual to limit his consumption of material goods) or moral traditions and social pressures which limit the amount of psychic pain people inflict on each other. The second criterion—the need for systemic processes to convey inherent social limitations to the individual—applies to all mankind, including the wisest thinker, the noblest leader, or the most compassionate humanitarian. Only when all are included within the human limitations it conceives is the constrained vision complete.
In the constrained vision, the current level of material and psychic well-being, which is seen as the product of evolved systemic interactions drawing on the experiences and adjusting to the preferences (revealed in behavior rather than words) of vast numbers of people over vast regions of time…The constrained vision sees future progress as a continuation of such systemic interactions—and as threatened by attempts to substitute individually excogitated social schemes for these evolved patterns.
Those in the tradition of the unconstrained vision almost invariably assume that some intellectual and moral pioneers advance far beyond their contemporaries, and in one way or another lead them toward ever-higher levels of understanding and practice. These intellectual and moral pioneers become the surrogate decision-makers, pending the eventual progress of mankind to the point where all can make social decisions.
A special variant in Godwin is that each individual acts essentially as a social surrogate, making decisions individually but with social responsibility rather than personal benefit uppermost in his thinking. This tradition of “social responsibility” by businessmen, universities, and others implies a capacity to discern the actual social ramifications of one’s acts—an assumption implicitly made in the unconstrained vision and explicitly rejected by those with the constrained vision.
Impartial Spectator: The conscience of each individual who remains the locus of moral (as well as economic) discretion, within a framework of laws and other social constraints, which also reflect moral standards (Adam Smith).
Marxism: History is precisely constraints diminishing over time, with the advancement of science and technology, and that social changes followed in their wake. As a system of contemporary political advocacy, it is an unconstrained vision ending with communism—a theory that the ills of our time are due to a wrong set of institutions, and that surrogate decision-makers, making collective choices with specifically articulated rationality, are the proper locus and mode of discretion for the future.
To Marx, the constraints were ultimately those of material production and the frontiers of those constraints would be pushed back by the march of science and technology. Eventually, the preconditions would exist for the realization of goals long part of the socialist tradition, including the production and distribution of output “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Marx’s vision was therefore of a world constrained for centuries, though progressively less so, and eventually becoming unconstrained. Engels called this “the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”… “Real” freedom of the individual, to be realized under Marxian communism, meant “the positive power to assert his true individuality,” not merely the “bourgeois” freedom of the constrained vision—“the negative power to avoid this or that.”
Marx and Engels saw the emergence of bourgeois freedom—political emancipation from deliberately imposed restrictions—as “a great step forward.”
Under capitalism, Marx considered the worker to be only “nominally free”; he was “compelled by social conditions” to work for the exploiting capitalist.
His overall theory of history was precisely that constraints lessened over time, with the advancement of science and technology, and that social changes followed in their wake. As a system of contemporary political advocacy, it is an unconstrained vision—a theory that the ills of our time are due to a wrong set of institutions, and that surrogate decision-makers, making collective choices with specifically articulated rationality, are the proper locus and mode of discretion for the future.
Utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill)
“Man is thoroughly, relentlessly, and incurably selfish” -Jeremy Bentham.
“It is within man’s power to rationally structure the social universe, so as to produce the result of the greatest good for the greatest number” -John Stuart Mill.
The constrained aspect of the utilitarian vision consists of man’s inherent moral limitations and the consequent need to rely on better incentives rather than better dispositions, in order to reconcile individual desires with social requirements.
Bentham’s own efforts were directed toward creating schemes of incentives, to be enforced by government, whose function was “to promote the happiness of the society, by punishing and rewarding.”
What is at the heart of the difference between the constrained and unconstrained visions is the question as to whether human capabilities or potential permit social decisions to be made collectively through the articulated rationality of surrogates, so as to produce the specific social results desired. The crucial issue is ultimately not what specifically is desired (a question of value premises) but what can in fact be achieved (a factual and cause-and-effect question), though in practical terms goals deemed unachievable are rejected even if conceded to be morally superior in the abstract.
Fascism: Obedience to authority, loyalty to one’s people, willingness to fight; under the overriding imperative to follow an unconstrained leader, under no obligation to respect laws, traditions, institutions, or even common decency.
Both visions make the common good paramount, though they differ completely as to how it is to be achieved.
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---PART II: APPLICATIONS
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Ch 6 Visions of Equality
Like freedom and justice, equality is a process characteristic in the constrained vision and a result characteristic in the unconstrained vision.
Both visions agree that equality of process can mean vast inequalities of results, and that equal results may be attainable only by causing processes to operate very unequally toward different individuals or groups.
Unconstrained Vision: Equality is achieved through the equalization of results (equality of outcome).
To apply the same criteria (for equality) to those with radically different wealth, education, or past opportunities and cultural orientations is to negate the meaning of equality.
“When those incapacitated for work- ‘those less endowed with bodily strength or mental power’- do not share fully in the fruits of society, they are not merely denied compassion but robbed of rights” -Edward Bellamy.
“Human beings are capable of enduring with chearfulness considerable hardships, when those hardships are impartially shared with the rest of the society, and they are not insulted with the spectacle of indolence and ease in others, no way deserving of better advantages than themselves. But it is a bitter aggravation of their own calamity, to have the privileges of others forced on their observation, and, while they are perpetually and vainly endeavouring to secure for themselves and their families the poorest conveniences, to find others reveling in the fruits of their labors” -Godwin.
Equality can be achieved by surrogate decision-makers that exercise discretion for others.
As in other versions of the unconstrained vision in other fields, so in the law, it is not the process but the result which defines equality. According to Tribe, “free speech has not been available at all.” Because “inexpensive methods of communication such as leafletting, picketing, and soapbox orating have given way to expensive media such as electronic broadcasting, newspaper advertising, and direct mail,” freedom of speech as a process does not mean freedom of speech as a result. While there is “equality of voting” there is not “equality of voice.”
It is not merely that some have little and others have much. Cause and effect are involved: Some have little because others have much, according to this reasoning, which has been part of the unconstrained vision for centuries. In one way or another, the rich have taken from the poor. According to Godwin, the great wealth of some derives from “taking from others the means of a happy and respectable existence.”
Constrained Vision: Equality is a social process of equalization which assures equal treatment, whether or not the actual results are equal (equality of opportunity).
“A society that puts equality (of outcome)- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests” -Milton Friedman.
So long as the process itself treats everyone the same- judges them by the same criteria, whether in employment or in a courtroom- then there is equality of opportunity or equality before the law.
“Exploitation” situations are seen as more effectively eliminated by the systemic characteristics of a competitive economy than by the deliberate intervention of political leaders in complex economic processes that they cannot comprehend…Attempts to equalize economic results lead to greater- and more dangerous- inequality in political power. This was the central theme of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, where the goal of simultaneously combining freedom and equality of outcome in democratic socialism was declared “unachievable” as a result, but dangerous as a process change pointing toward despotism.
Government, as a limited set of decision-makers, cannot possess all the knowledge in a society, or anything approaching it, and therefore lacks the omniscience in fact to prescribe just or equal results.
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Ch 7 Visions of Power
How the government exercises power in the economy differ between the two visions. In the unconstrained vision, it is a matter of intentions while in the constrained vision it is a matter of incentives…The government’s intention to protect the public interest forces it to intervene in the economy to undo the harm done by private economic power, according to the unconstrained vision. But the government’s inherent incentive to increase its own power leads it into intervention that is often both unneeded and harmful, according to the constrained vision. Incentives are central to the constrained vision—“the prime problem of politicians is not to serve the public good but to get elected to office and remain in power.”
As with equality, freedom, and justice, power is defined as a result characteristic in the unconstrained vision (Myrdal) and as a process characteristic in the constrained vision (Bauer).
Whenever A can get B to do what A wishes, then A has “power” over B, according to the results-oriented definition of the unconstrained vision. For example, two modern theorists say: “A Controls the responses of B if A’s acts cause B to respond in a definite way.” Even when a “subordinate negotiates with another employer in order to induce his superior to grant him a raise,” that is Control with a capital C in these authors’ terminology, or power. It is the result which defines power. But if B is in a process in which he has at least as many options as he had before A came along, then A has not “restricted” B’s choices, and so has no “power” over him, by the process definition used by Bauer and characteristic of the constrained vision. The “offer of some specific quid pro quo” by A to B would be an exercise of power according to Galbraith, but not according to Bauer, for A has only enlarged B’s options rather than restricted them. Even if the new option offered by A is so superior to B’s existing options as to make B’s choice virtually a foregone conclusion, a quid pro quo is still not power by this definition.
The amassing of military power by a peaceful nation is dangerously counterproductive, according to the unconstrained vision, and absolutely essential to preserve peace, according to the constrained vision.
Whenever one individual or group can change the behavior of another, then the former has power over the latter, as power is conceived by J. K. Galbraith, Gunnar Myrdal, Laurence Tribe, or other modern thinkers in the tradition of the unconstrained vision. Those with the constrained vision reject this conception of power, when behavioral changes are made in response to a quid pro quo, and conceive of power as the ability to reduce someone’s pre-existing options.
Burke considered complaints about our times and rulers to be part of “the general infirmities of human nature,” and that “true political sagacity” was required to separate these perennial complaints from real indicators of a special malaise. Hobbes went even further, arguing that it was precisely when men are “at ease” that they are most troublesome politically.
Unconstrained Vision: The average person would not commit a terrible crime without some special cause at work, therefore, it is the duty of man to control the exercise of power and to limit it to socially desirable results.
Power: The possibility of imposing one’s will on the behavior of other persons (Max Weber, John Galbraith).
“Healthy, rational people will not injure others.” Within this vision, people are forced to commit crimes by special reasons, whether social or psychiatric. Reducing those special reasons (poverty, discrimination, unemployment, mental illness, etc.) is therefore the way to reduce crime: The basic solution for most crime is economic- homes, health, education, employment, beauty. If the law is to be enforced- and rights fulfilled for the poor- we must end poverty. Until we do, there will be no equal protection of the laws. To permit conditions that breed antisocial conduct to continue is our greatest crime.
Such crimes as robbery, riots, rape, and mugging are “inherently irrational” and are explained only by irrational conditions imposed upon the unfortunate segment of society. Such evils of society as poverty, unemployment, and overcrowding “are the fountainheads of crime.” From this perspective, criminals are not so much the individual causes of crime as the symptoms and transmitters of a deeper social malaise: Crime reflects more than the character of the pitiful few who commit it. It reflects the character of the entire society.
Punishment as a trade-off is barbaric, for there is a solution at hand: rehabilitation- a process of returning a person to his more or less natural condition of decency- in principle, much like fixing a broken leg, which consists largely in putting the leg in condition to heal and restore itself, rather than attempting to create a new leg from scratch.
“Is there any vicious habit, any practice contrary to good faith, any crime, whose origin and first cause cannot be traced back to the legislation, the institutions, the prejudices of the country wherein this habit, this practice, this crime can be observed?” -Condorcet.
Warfare is repugnant- articulated reason is much more effective…War results from a failure of understanding, whether caused by lack of forethought, lack of communication, or emotions overriding judgement. Steps for a peace-seeking nation to take to reduce the probability of war therefore include (1) more influence for the intellectually or morally more advanced portions of the population, (2) better communications between potential enemies, (3) a muting of militant rhetoric, (4) a restraint on armament production or military alliances, either of which might produce escalating counter-measures, (5) a de-emphasis of nationalism or patriotism, and (6) negotiating outstanding differences with potential adversaries as a means of reducing possible causes of war.
To Myrdal, without more “social and economic equality” mere “political democracy would be an empty achievement.” His goal has been not simple equalization of processes but equalization of results. Moreover, “regulations backed by compulsion” must be used to move the masses, for “economic development cannot be achieved without much more social discipline than the prevailing interpretation of democracy” would permit. The “resistance to change” of the masses must be overcome. Because of “hardened resistance” to change throughout Third World societies, “modernism will not come about by a process of ‘natural’ evolution” but only by “radical state policies” to “engender development by state intervention.” It is not the masses themselves but “those who think and act on their behalf” who must direct economic development.
Constrained Vision: People commit crimes because they are people- because they put their own interests or egos above the interests, feelings, or lives of others. Believers in the constrained vision emphasize social contrivances to prevent crime or punishment to deter it. Efforts to produce social benefits must focus on general processes on power restrictions- meaning restricting the ability of some to reduce the options of others.
Power: The restriction of the choices of others (Bauer).
Systemic processes produce many results not planned or controlled by anyone.
For war, the steps for a peace-seeking nation to take to reduce the probability of war would be the direct opposite of those proposed by people with the unconstrained vision: (1) raising the cost of war to potential aggressors by military preparedness and military alliances, (2) arousal of the public to awareness of dangers, in times of threat, (3) promotion of patriotism and willingness to fight, as the cost of deterring attack, (4) relying on your adversaries’ awareness of your military power more so than on verbal communication, (5) negotiating only within the context of deterrent strength and avoiding concessions to blackmail that would encourage further blackmail, and (6) relying more on the good sense and fortitude of the public at large (reflecting culturally validated experience) than on moralists and intellectuals, more readily swayed by words and fashions.
Within the constrained vision of Adam Smith, the demands on a soldier, and the weight of responsibility on him for defending his people, elevated his profession to a nobler plane than others, even though Smith conceded that there is a “diminution of humanity” when one is repeatedly in a situation where one must either kill or be killed.
“A nation, despicable by its weakness, forfeits even the privilege of being neutral” -?.
“Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife” ?-.
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Ch 8 Visions of Justice
The concept of social justice represents the extremes of the conflict of visions—an idea of the highest importance in the unconstrained vision and beneath contempt in the constrained vision…The fundamental difference is whether process characteristics (constrained) or goal characteristics (unconstrained) are more important.
Unconstrained Vision: Justice is categorically paramount and rights derived from justice are inherent in individuals. Justice is achieved as a result than a process (social justice).
The need for social order is due to the limitations of man.
“Punishment is “inimical to the improvement of the mind” because incentives of reward and punishment are distractions from the real reasons why one kind of behavior is socially preferable to another” -Godwin.
“It is not “real justice to proceed by “reducing all men to the same stature” according to the crime committed. Rather, justice requires “contemplation of all the circumstances of each individual case” -Godwin.
Modern psychological and sociological thinking enables courts today to individualize punishments to the criminal rather than the crime.
The unconstrained vision sees transfers of material benefits to the less fortunate not simply as a matter of humanity but as a matter of justice (social justice)…Central to the concept of social justice is the notion that individuals are entitled to some share of the wealth produced by a society, simply by virtue of being members of that society, and irrespective of any individual contributions made or not made to the production of that wealth.
‘Social justice is a pervasive and demanding duty’ (Godwin).
“Not only are the poor relegated to receiving crusts, but that insult is added to injury by calling the crusts charity” -Edward Bellamy.
“Our debt to our fellow men” includes “all the efforts we could make for their welfare, and all the relief we could supply to their necessities.”…“Not a talent do we possess, not a moment of time, not a shilling of property, for which we are not responsible at the tribunal of the public, which we are not obliged to pay into the general bank of common advantage” -Godwin.
Laws should be deliberately created, by both legislators and judges, in order to produce desired social results.
The public interest is paramount, with free speech being a derivative right of the individual, precisely in order to serve that public interest- and therefore subject to annulment when it directly and unmistakably threatens the public interest itself.
George Bernard Shaw, disdained people who “plunge into almsgiving to relieve their sickly consciences,” partly because “it fills the paupers with humiliation, the patrons with evil pride, and both with hatred,” but more fundamentally because “in a country justly and providently managed there could be neither excuse for it on the pauper’s part nor occasion for it on the patron’s.”
“Each individual is in effect a surrogate decision-maker for society, even when making purely individual and unofficial decisions—a surrogate not in the sense of controlling others decisions but in the sense of making his own available choices in such a way as to promote the general well-being, rather than his own” -William Godwin.
“The Constitution rests on a particular moral theory and must be understood as appealing to moral concepts rather than laying down particular conceptions—that is, it is to be interpreted broadly as moral values to be applied rather than as explicit rules to follow” -Ronald Dworkin.
Individuals from either the majority population or selected minorities have equal interests and suffer equal losses of those interests when denied a job, college admission, or other benefits. But members of the selected minority groups are also deemed to have suffered past stigmatizing implications of inferiority through discrimination, which current rejected applicants from the majority population do not suffer in “reverse discrimination.” Since stigmas of inferiority are seen as denials of basic humanity, they violate rights, as rights are conceived in the unconstrained vision, while “reverse discrimination” can violate only interests. Once again, in this vision, rights take precedence over interests.
Constrained Vision: It is the experience of the many rather than the brilliance of the few that is to be relied upon, and historical evolution rather than excogitated rationality that is paramount. The law takes no account of the infinite varieties of temperament, intellect, and education which make the internal character of a given act so different in different men. Jurisprudence with all its defects, redundancies, and errors, is the collected reason of the ages (Burke).
Oliver Wendell Holmes expressed the systemic concept when he declared: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.” Articulation was not essential to decision-making, for “many honorable and sensible judgments” express “an intuition of experience which outruns analysis and sums up many unnamed and tangled impressions; impressions which may lie beneath consciousness without losing their worth.” Law incorporates the experience that reflects “not only our own lives but the lives of all men that have been,” according to Holmes. It is a “fallacy” to conceive of law as purely a process of articulated logic, for while “it is true in the broadest sense that the law is a logical development,” it is not “worked out like mathematics from general axioms of conduct.” In short, the logic of the law’s development is a systemic logic: The development of our law has gone on for nearly a thousand years, like the development of a planet, each generation taking the next step, mind, like matter, simply obeying a law of spontaneous growth.
If a man is born hasty and awkward, is always having accidents and hurting himself or his neighbors, no doubt his congenital defects will be allowed for in the courts of heaven but his slips are no less troublesome to his neighbors than if they sprang from guilty neglect. His neighbors accordingly require him, at his proper peril, to come up to their standard, and the courts which they establish decline to take his personal equation into account (Holmes).
“Men, though naturally sympathetic, feel so little for another, with whom they have no particular connection, in comparison to what they feel for themselves; the misery of one, who is merely their fellow-creature, is of so little importance to them in comparison even of a small convenience of their own; they have it so much in their power to hurt him, and may have so many temptations to do so, that if this principle [justice] did not stand up within them and overawe them into a respect for his innocence, they would, like wild beasts, be at all times ready to fly upon him; and a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions” -Adam Smith.
‘Law is not the deliberate logical creation of great minds, but rather represented the evolved and codified experience of vast numbers of people’ -Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“(Man’s) reason is corrupt, and his understanding full of ignorance and error” -Blackstone.
‘Evolved systemic rationality is superior to explicitly excogitated individual rationality’ -Blackstone.
The ultimate good desired is best reached by free trade in ideas; free-speech rights are entitled to sweeping exemptions from interventions of public authority.
A central concern of those with the constrained vision is precisely that there will be major social impacts of a kind completely different from the intentions, including the destruction of the rule of law in the quest for an illusory social justice.
According to Hayek, “the phrase ‘social justice’ is not, as most people probably feel, an innocent expression of good will towards the less fortunate,” but has become in practice “a dishonest insinuation that one ought to agree to a demand of some special interest which can give no real reason for it.” The dangerous aspect, in Hayek’s view, is that “the concept of ‘social justice’... has been the Trojan Horse through which totalitarianism has entered”- Nazi Germany being just one example…The hidden- and dangerous- significance of the demand for social justice, in Hayek’s view, was that it implied a drastic change in whole processes under the bland guise of a mere preference for better distribution. According to Hayek, “society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose,” so that “the demand for ‘social justice’ becomes a demand that the members of society should organize themselves in a manner which makes it possible to assign particular shares of the product of society to the different individuals or groups.”…In short, those who argue for social justice argue for a particular set of results while Hayek’s objections are to the process implied by seeking these or any other specific social results for particular individuals or groups. What he objected to was “a desire for a comprehensive blueprint of the social scene as a whole.” For him, “personification” of society as “a thinking, collective entity” capable of producing specifically desired social results presupposed a mastery of social details inherently “beyond our ken.”
“Human freedom is crucially dependent on rules in general, and especially on rules which carve out domains of exemption from government power. These rights protect ascertainable domains within which each individual is free to act as he chooses and are thus the very opposite of rights to social justice, which imply expansion of the governmental domain to produce social results to which particular individuals and groups are morally entitled” -Hayek.
Hayek regarded Nazism as “the culmination of a long evolution of thought” in Germany by socialists and others whose goals were vastly different from those of the Nazis, but who promoted the erosion of respect for legal rules in favor of the imperatives of specific social results.
“Distributive justice is inherently irreconcilable with the rule of law, and the ideal of a government of laws and not of men is all that stands between a free society and totalitarianism” -Hayek.
In the constrained vision, with justice as with everything else, “the best is the enemy of the good.”
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Ch 9 Visions, Values, and Paradigms
A vision is an almost instinctive sense of what things are and how they work…Whether in science or in social thought, visions or inspirations come first, and are subsequently systematized into paradigms, which embrace specific theories, and their narrowly focused hypotheses, which can be tested against evidence.
The phlogiston theory and the oxidation theory did not coexist and endure together in chemistry. Scientific paradigms tend to succeed each other in history, not coexist through centuries. While still in the early stages of the development of science, “men confronting the same particular phenomena” might “describe and interpret them in different ways.” But these divergences, according to Kuhn, “disappear to a very considerable extent and then apparently once and for all.” No such process has yet become general in social thought.
The fundamental difference between science and social theory is not at the level of visions, or even paradigms, but at the point where theories produce empirically testable hypotheses.
Evidence is not irrelevant. “Road to Damascus” conversions do occur. Even if this conversion is only on a single issue, the repercussions on one’s general vision may lead to a domino effect on other assumptions and beliefs.
Theories may persist because the difficult task of bringing them to confrontation with evidence has simply not been performed with sufficient skill and care. This may be especially so when the person testing the theory has a different vision of his own, and reads the opposing vision in his terms, rather than in its own terms.
Perhaps the most striking demonstration of the power of a vision occurs when no evidence at all is either asked or offered for assertions which are consonant with a prevailing vision. A recent example of this phenomenon has been the oft-repeated assertion that higher rates of broken homes and teenage pregnancy among black Americans are a “legacy of slavery.” Only after decades of widespread repetition of this assertion was a comprehensive factual study done—revealing that broken homes and teenage pregnancy were far less common among blacks under slavery and in the generations following emancipation than they are today.
Both constrained and unconstrained visions are ultimately concerned with social results. The unconstrained vision seeks directly to achieve those results socially—that is, through collective decisions prescribing the desired outcomes. The constrained vision considers it beyond the capability of any manageable set of decision-makers to marshal the requisite knowledge, and dangerous to concentrate sufficient power, to carry out their decisions, even if it were possible. Given the unconstrained vision, which permits results to be directly prescribed, its basic concepts are expressed in terms of results.
Logic is not the only test of a theory. Empirical evidence is crucial intellectually, and yet historically social visions have shown a remarkable ability to evade, suppress, or explain away discordant evidence, to a degree that scientific theories cannot match.
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Misc Quotes
“Imagine an earthquake in China killed a million people over night. If it were somehow possible to make the European feel poignantly the full pain of those who suffered in China, this state of mind would be perfectly useless, except to make him miserable…Nature, it seems, when she loads us with our own sorrows, thinks that they are enough, and therefore does not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what is necessary to prompt us to relieve them” -Adam Smith.
“Economic benefits to society are largely unintended by individuals, but emerge systemically from the interactions of the marketplace, under the pressures of competition and the incentives of individual gain. Moral sentiments are necessary only for shaping the general framework of laws within which this systemic process could go on…The functioning of the economy and society require each individual to do things for other people; it is simply the motivation behind these acts- whether moral or economic- which is ultimately self-centered” - Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations).
“Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day” -Bertrand Russell.
Thomas Jefferson’s reply to those who turned against the French Revolution, because of the innocent people it had killed, exemplified this point: My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. In the end, Jefferson too turned against the French Revolution, as its human cost increased beyond what he could continue to accept.
John Randolph was repelled by the idea of “professors in a university turned statesmen.” In a similar vein, Hobbes regarded universities as places where fashionable but insignificant words flourished and added that “there is nothing so absurd, but may be found in the books of Philosophers.”
“Accuracy of language is the indispensable prerequisite of sound knowledge” -Godwin.
“Intellectuals study more the reputation of their own wit, than the successe of another ’s business” -Hobbes.
“I have no use for pert loquacity…even reason, by frequent repetition, loses its force” -Edmund Burke.
“Words are wise men’s counters but they are the mony of fooles” -Thomas Hobbes.
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Terminology
A posteriori (‘from the later’): Knowledge that is derived from empirical evidence.
A priori (‘from the earlier’): Knowledge that is independent of any experience; i.e. math.
Anathema: Something or someone that one vehemently dislikes.
Axiomatic: Knowledge that is self-evident or unquestionable.
Common Law: Doctrines not set down in any written statute or ordinance, but dependent upon immemorial usage (Blackstone).
Credulous: Having or showing too great a readiness to believe things.
Despot: A ruler or person who holds absolute power, typically one who exercises it in a cruel or oppressive manner.
Dogmatism: The tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinion of others.
Eclectic: Deriving ideas, style, or taste from a broad and diverse range of sources.
Empirical: Based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic; evidence obtained through sense.
Extant: Still in existence; surviving (especially of a document).
Fetishistic: Having an excessive and irrational devotion or commitment to a particular thing.
Hortatory: Aiming to strongly encourage someone to do something.
Inchoate: Just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
Inconstancy: Frequently changing; variable or irregular.
Indelible: (of ink or pen) making marks that cannot be removed.
Infallible: Incapable of making mistakes or being wrong.
Inimical: Tending to obstruct or harm.
Importunate: Persistent, especially to the point of annoyance or intrusion.
Irremediable: Impossible to cure or put right.
Perennial: Lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time.
Polemic: A strong verbal or written attack on someone or something.
Rapacity: Greed or avarice; an insatiable desire for material gain.
Prudence: The careful weighing of trade-offs.
Pusillanimous: Showing a lack of courage or determination; timid.
Salient: Most noticeable or important.
Seriatim: Taking one subject after another in regular order; point by point.
Supercilious: Behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others.
Tautology: A phrase or expression in which the same thing is said twice in different words.
Trepidation: A feeling of fear or agitation about something that may happen.
Tyro: A beginner or novice.
Usury: The illegal action or practice of lending money at unreasonably high rates of interest.
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