Speech given at George Mason University, January 2015

1. Human Agency and Convergence:
Gaus’s “Kantian Parliamentarian”
Michael Munger
Director, PPE
Duke University

2. Agreement on Values: Convergence?
Equilibrium:
• Single price in every market
• Vector of prices where each market clears
simultaneously—N equations, N unknowns,
zero excess demands in each, not just in total
• Dynamic tendency toward single price

3. Walrus-ian Equilibrium

4. Kirzner
In our classrooms we draw the Marshallian cross to depict competitive supply and demand,
and then go on to explain how the market is cleared only at the price corresponding to the
intersection of the curves. ..
Sometimes we address the question of how we can be confident that there is any tendency
at all for the intersection price to be attained. The discussion is then usually carried on in
terms of the Walrasian version of the equilibration process. Suppose, we say, the price
happens to be above the intersection level. If so, the amount of the good people are
prepared to supply is in the aggregate larger than the total amount people are prepared to
buy. There will be unsold inventories, thereby depressing price. On the other hand, if price is
below the intersection level, there will be excess demand, “forcing” price up. Thus, we
explain, there will be a tendency for price to gravitate toward the equilibrium level at which
quantity demanded equals quantity supplied.
[So] when price is described as being above or below equilibrium, it is understood that a
single price prevails in the market. One uncomfortable question, then, is whether we may
assume that a single price emerges before equilibrium is attained. Surely a single price can
be postulated only as the result of the process of equilibration itself.
[T]he Walrasian explanation usually assumes perfect competition, where all market
participants are price takers. But with only price takers participating, it is not clear how
unsold inventories or unmet demand effect price changes. If no one raises or lowers price
bids, how do prices rise or fall? (p. 116; Kirzner, “Equilibrium vs Market Processes”, in Dolan,
FOUNDATIONS, 1976)

5. What is the Animating
Force for Price Adjustment?
The “Auctioneer”

7. Agreement on Values: Public Reason
The heart of Gaus’s project is to ask
“whether free and equal persons can all endorse
a common political order even though their
private judgments about the good and justice
are so often opposed.” (Gaus 2011, 2).
Echoing Rousseau: “How can a man be both
free and yet bound by wills not his own?”
SAME two problems: (1) Existence and (2)
Convergence

8. Outline of Gaus
• Start with disagreement
• Require that those who disagree give reasons
for their positions
• Agree on “allowable reasons”
• Choose one “public reason,” a problem of
convergence akin to “value”
• If there is not a unique public reason, must be
a tendency to converge toward “equilibrium”
(my word, not his)

9. My Claim
• Gaus sees this process as being entirely
decentralized and “bottom up.”
• But the adjustment process that he specifies
cannot work without some control and human
animation
• Just as the decentralized GET requires an
“auctioneer” the Gaus process requires a central
direction that would require a benevolent (at
least neutral), omniscient agent whose power is
automatically deferred to.
• I call this “agent” the Kantian Parliamentarian

10. Kantian Parliamentarian (KP)
Kantian:
• there are synthetic a priori propositions which order our
experience but are not derived from it
• that metaphysical conclusions can be inferred from the
nature of possible experience
• that duty is to be done for its own sake and not as a
means to any other end
• that there is a world of things-in-themselves to be
distinguished from mere phenomena
• Most importantly, for “public reason,” act only according
to maxims that, if universalized, would be both consistent
with reason and with your moral intentions in choosing
the maxim.
E.g., “Take anything you want” is a bad maxim because it is
inconsistent with your moral intentions and because if
others adopted it you would think them immoral and evil

11. Kantian Parliamentarian (KP)
Parliamentarian:
• Advisor/Judge
• Rules of procedure, not choice of outcomes
• Rules are fixed in advanced and give mutually
exclusive and exhaustive, determinate
judgments about disputes

12. Striking Parallel
• What’s interesting, then, is that the “Public
Reason” project fails to aggregate individual
values and solve the problem of disagreement
in exactly the same way, and for the same
reasons, that GET fails to arrive at a
determinate price vector.
• If people disagree, there is no means by which
they can converge on reasons without central
direction

13. The Usual Misfortune of Metaphysicians:
Reason, NOT “Common Sense”
…Hume suffered the usual misfortune of metaphysicians, of not being understood.
It is positively painful to see bow utterly his opponents… missed the point of the
problem; for while they were ever taking for granted that which he doubted, and
demonstrating with zeal and often with impudence that which he never thought of
doubting, they so misconstrued his valuable suggestion that everything remained
in its old condition, as if nothing had happened…
[T]o satisfy the conditions of the problem, the opponents of the great thinker
should have penetrated very deeply into the nature of reason, so far as it is
concerned with pure thinking,-a task which did not suit them. They found a more
convenient method of being defiant without any insight, viz., the appeal to
common sense… But this common sense must be shown practically, by well-
considered and reasonable thoughts and words, not by appealing to it as an oracle,
when no rational justification can be advanced. To appeal to common sense, when
insight and science fail, and no sooner-this is one of the subtle discoveries of
modern times, by means of which the most superficial ranter can safely enter the
lists with the most thorough thinker, and hold his own. But as long as a particle of
insight remains, no one would think of having recourse to this subterfuge. For what
is it but an appeal to the opinion of the multitude, of whose applause the
philosopher is ashamed, while the popular charlatan glories and confides in it?
(Kant 1772; emphasis added.)

14. Friedman: “Positive Economics” as
Public Reason
[C]urrently, in the Western world, differences about economic policy
among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different
[empirical] predictions about the economic consequences of taking
action – differences that in principle can be eliminated by [logic and
discussion] – rather than from fundamental differences in basic values,
differences about which men can ultimately only fight. (Friedman,
1953; p. 5; emphasis added).
If this judgment is valid, it means that a consensus on “correct”
economic policy depends much less on the progress of normative
economics proper than on the progress of a positive economics
yielding conclusions that are, and deserve to be, widely accepted. It
means also that a major reason for distinguishing positive economics
sharply from normative economics is precisely the contribution that
can thereby be made to agreement about policy. (P. 6; emphasis
added)

15. Gaus’s Question
• Is it TRUE that if we disagree about values we
can ultimately “only fight”? Or is there a
means of converging to a “public reason” or
small set of public reasons, even if we DO
disagree?

16. Gaus: Principle of Public Justification
(p. 263)
A moral imperative φ in context C, based on rule L,
is an authoritative requirement of social morality
only if each normal moral agent has sufficient
reasons to
(a) internalize rule L
(b)hold that L requires Ф type acts [that is, φ∈Ф]
in circumstances C
(c) think that moral agents generally conform to L.

17. Paraphrase
• Reflective understanding of bona fide social
morality, one in which emotions are well
grounded (meaning I feel bad if I violate, and
feel angry if you violate)
• So reason has led to a principle that is now
internalized and supported by emotion
• The rule is one that ALL have sufficient
reasons to internalize and follow

18. But What if I Disagree?
• When another demands that you comply with a rule,
she is demanding that you do what you have sufficient
reasons to do, and to want to do: she is not
demanding that you obey out of loyalty or altruism,
but is appealing to (reminding you of) your reason
• She is saying “You have reasons to comply that you are
ignoring. I am not demanding you live as I see fit, but
rather as you would agree you must live if you
adequately employed your reason.”
• And she says this not just to you, but to any violator
that she comes across. (p. 263)

19. Everyperson or Parliamentarian?
• Gaus sees that “she” as a representative person,
and expects that every person will fulfill that role
for everyone else
• But if I disagree with the “public reason” the
person next to me may disagree also
• And it’s not clear why I accept the authority of
the person next to me, and defer. Why shouldn’t
she defer to me? I think she is ignoring good
reasons to comply with me
• Maybe a genuine disagreement, maybe just the
highly evolved human capacity to disguise
particular self-interest in public-sounding terms.

20. Point: Need a “Kantian
Parliamentarian” to Validate Reasons
Gaus certainly recognizes the problem. He wants
the authority to be the reason, not the person.
I accept that premise. But then we need a way of
validating some, and invalidating other, reasons.
So, the KP is not the chooser over public morality.
Rather, the KP is the licenser of public reasons.
“One’s claim to authority, rather than being
authoritarian, is as sound as the judgment that the
rule is publicly justified” (p. 264)

21. Justification
• Gaus: Justification of public reasons can be conducted by a
group of reasonable people, even if they disagree. What
the group does is to deliberate and agree on all the “moral
rules that we all have sufficient reasons to endorse as
binding.” (p. 264)
• NOT a contract, not an agreement that is binding. Rather, a
consensus that these are potentially valid rules. *I* might
not agree to them, but I agree that if a group agreed to
them they would have moral justification for doing so.
• In other words, the “Basic Principle of Public Justification”
would be satisfied for a society that endorsed and acted on
any L that is an element of this set of rules publicly justified
rules.

22. How might this work? Surprisingly Hayekian Problem Statement…
We can solve the puzzle of mutual authority within social morality by
abandoning the dyadic perspective of thinking of justification as essentially
between pairs of agents, and instead appreciating the “Humean” insight
that the development of a social morality involves large-scale coordination
among moral agents. Rather than focusing on the two-person case, the
social evolutionary view leads us to think of the selection of a specific
morality as a many person problem. The problem is not mutual authority
but dispersed authority. Once a society of free and equal persons has
coordinated on specific moral rules and their interpretation, the point of
invoking moral authority is to police this equilibrium selection against
“trembling hands”—individuals who make mistakes about what rule is in
equilibrium—and those who otherwise fail to act on their best reasons. In
these cases the overwhelming social opinion concurs in criticizing deviant
behavior.
An individual who violates the social equilibrium will not simply be able to
check demands on her, for she will meet the same demand from almost all
others. In Mill’s terms, the deviant will not simply confront the opinion of
other individuals but of “society.” This, I shall argue, renders decentralized
authority effective in inducing compliance with social morality (pp. 47-48;
emphasis added).

23. Contradiction
At some points, Gaus appears to endorse the
Humean (and ultimately Hayekian) deference to the
emergence of moral laws as spontaneous orders.
But when it comes down to nuts and bolts, he
requires deliberation among people. The unit of
analysis is not the “law,” but the reasons in the
mind of each moral agent.
Thus individual moral agents are both the cause of
the consensus and also the consequence.

24. How can price takers change price?
• Obviously the analogy I want to make is to GET,
back at the beginning. No way for the dynamic
process specified to reach single price
convergence in every market, without some way
to adjust price.
• No way to deliberate and have bilateral
conversations where I am corrected about the
acceptability of my reasons. Not that conclusions
are wrong, but that my reasons are not
allowable.

25. The KP
• Having an authority to license “allowable
reasons” and have everyone required that only
licensed reasons can be used to justify actual
moral principles might enable Gaus’s conclusions
to follow.
• But the point is that even if I grant the premises—
which I might not—Gaus’s conclusion still
requires the additional assumption of a KP.
• In which case, it is not a decentralized, emergent
process at all but a centrally planned, or at least
guided, process.

26. Contradiction
My claim is that Gaus cannot simultaneously have
(1) a set of moral intuitions in a society arrived at by
some essentially random historical process
(2) a justified public reason where people change their
minds, adjusting to new, better reasons
(3) a societal judgment that will police deviants
Start at 1, try to move to 2, but 3 crushes the change.
Tradition, lock-in, “conservatism,” deference to moral
authority of custom. So, unless we start at the
equilibrium, no adjustment process that can even lead
us toward the equilibrium. Everyone is a “law-taker”

27. The (Later) Rawlsian Project
[A] basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable
pluralism-the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable
comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral,
is the normal result of its culture of free institutions. Citizens
realize that they cannot reach agreement or even approach
mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable
comprehensive doctrines. In view of this, they need to
consider what kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one
another when fundamental political questions are at stake. I
propose that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of
truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically
reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens. (Rawls, 1997,
765-6).