Reasoned Politics by Magnus Vinding

Author:Magnus Vinding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: democracy, liberty, justice, equality, animal rights, social norms, consequentialism, political psychology, political cooperation, political biases

11.11 Marginal Realist Upshots on Anarchism vs. Statism

Fortunately, the practical implications at the marginal realist level are relatively clear, even as the answers to the broad idealist questions raised above may not be. And the marginal realist level is arguably also the most relevant one at which to draw practical conclusions at this point.

A plausible thing to push for is to raise the epistemic standards of discussions concerning the state versus anarchy. Specifically, it would be good to reduce overconfidence — on all sides — about the outcomes of various institutions, which appears to be one of the main problems in contemporary discussions. Defenders of statism tend to be highly confident that anarchist institutions could never work, while anarchists tend to be highly confident that they could work, despite the fact that the institutions in question have never been tested in a modern context.

Another sensible step is to highlight some of the biases and blind spots that plague people’s thinking about this issue. One of these blind spots is our tendency to unquestioningly obey (perceived) authorities, including when they give unreasonable or even starkly unethical commands. For example, a person wearing a made-up uniform is significantly better able to get strangers to follow commands on the streets (Bushman, 1988). And in various versions of the famous Milgram experiment, a majority of people were willing, even if reluctantly, to obey instructions to electrocute an innocent person, or rather an actor who pretended to receive electric shocks (Milgram, 1963; 1974). (Milgram has been criticized for the methodology of his experiment and for overstating his results, see e.g. Perry, 2012, yet recent variations of the experiment have yielded largely the same results, Burger, 2009; Dolinski et al., 2017).

These findings have important implications for how we think about authority, and the extent to which we should trust our authority-related intuitions (Huemer, 2013, ch. 6). On the other hand, some scholars argue that we tend to underestimate the good that governments do, because it is rarely visible to us, which may also bias our view of government (Holmes & Sunstein, 1999; Amy, 2011; Hacker & Pierson, 2016). Of course, anarchists might argue that we are even more prone to overlook and underestimate the bad things that governments do (cf. Huemer, 2013, 9.4). But it holds true regardless that our immediate evaluations of government are likely to be flawed and worthy of skepticism.

The causal opacity of (many of) our institutions is another potential pitfall to be aware of (cf. Section 5.2). It implies that clever ideas for novel institutions that look good on the drawing board nevertheless have a real risk of failing in practice. Such ideas may, for instance, overlook the effects that various institutions have on people’s psychology, or overlook other second-order effects that are difficult to predict in advance (cf. Henrich, 2020). Again, this is not to say that radical institutional change is necessarily impossible or undesirable, but it does mean that we should be careful not to be too confident in purely theoretical arguments.

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