On Moderation

"The Adam Smith Review," Forthcoming

Contribution to a Symposium on "The Pragmatic Enlightenment: Recovering the Liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire" by Dennis C. Rasmussen

Having political opinions is not a matter of having an ideology once and for all; it is a question of taking the right decisions in changing circumstances.-Raymond Aron Although the different aspects of moderation-personal, institutional, and political-are related to each other and, taken together, might point to a thin (as opposed to a thick) definition of this concept, I have preferred to highlight the complexity and diverse faces of this elusive virtue, leaving the question of its precise definition open. I showed that in all of its incarnations, political moderation has a distinct content .and style and forms a diverse tradition of thought, resembling an archipelago consisting of various islands represented by a wide array of ideas and modes of argument and action. The moderate thinkers discussed in these pages affirmed several basic attitudes that allow us to begin describing the school of moderation to which they belonged, beyond their inevitable personal and intellectual differences. The agenda of moderation promotes social and political pluralism and endorses trimming and balance between competing values and principles. It rejects monist conceptions of the public good and the good life and opposes Manichaeism. It prefers gradual reforms over radical revolutionary breakthroughs and sometimes-though not always-searches for a juste milieu or "golden mean'' between extremes that would maintain the equipoise of the community.

The Politics of Moderation in Modern European History, 2019

Moderation is a highly contested virtue on which there seems to be little agreement in our political vocabulary and culture. What is the nature of moderation and why should we care about it? Can moderation ever serve as a foundation for social activism and reform? In this chapter, we try to answer these questions by focusing on the American political tradition which is particularly interesting for any student of moderation. We compare the moderation of the Founding Fathers with the rise of ideological intransigence and the steady decline of political moderation over the past several decades in the United States. The second part of our essay examines a prominent social activist— Saul Alinsky (1909-1972)—to whom the word moderation may have never been applied until now, but whose works and actions displayed, however, surprising affinities with the principles of political moderation. A self-styled “realistic radical,” Alinsky espoused and practiced key tenets of political moderation in his community organizing, albeit in an unorthodox style that may not be associated with moderation at first sight. Alinsky’s case is insightful and challenging for several reasons, beyond the character in question, famous for his wit, quickness of mind, and generous impulses as well as for his openness to working with individuals from all walks of life. By taking a new look at his case, we suggest that moderation is susceptible of being defined in a broad way that goes beyond the stereotypes mentioned above. We argue that a pragmatic form of moderation can have tangible outcomes at the grassroots level and can serve as a basis for effective social activism. As such, it implies a good dose of courage, non-conformism, eclecticism, and flexibility in the fight for the principles of the good society

Co-herencia, 2020

In this paper, I argue for three theses. First, that the problem of Deep Disagreement is usefully understood as an instance of the skeptical Problem of the Criterion. Second, there are structural similarities between proposed optimistic answers to deep disagreement and the problem of the criterion. Third, in light of these similarities, there are both good and bad consequences for proposed solutions to the problem of deep disagreement. Qué respuestas optimistas al desacuerdo profundo generan buenos (y malos) efectos Resumen El presente artículo presenta tres tesis. En primer lugar, plantea que el problema del desacuerdo pro-fundo se entiende, convenientemente, como un ejemplo del problema del criterio desde la óptica del escepticis-mo. En segundo lugar, existen similitudes estructurales entre las respuestas optimistas que se proponen con respecto al des-acuerdo profundo y al problema del criterio. Y, en tercer lugar, ante dichas similitudes, las soluciones que se proponen frente al problema del desacuerdo profundo generan tanto buenas como malas consecuencias. Palabras clave: Desacuerdo profundo, escepticismo, problema del criterio, argu-mentación.

2018

Treatments of deep disagreement often hint at sinister implications but I will argue that we need not accept these pessimistic consequences. Settling disagreements by way of rhetoric or incentive, for instance, may fall short of ideals of rational argumentation, but the moral issues raised by such strategies are different from those raised by compulsion, and realizing that a disagreement is deep might have positive implications providing an incentive to seek other defensible strategies for resolution.

2020

In this talk I present a new approach to modeling practical deliberation (deliberation with a choice in view). This approach models deliberation as the intersection of a plurality of deliberational “moving parts”, that consequently can result in a plurality of outputs for the same input. (This can be conceptualized in computational terms as a multi-tape Turing machine, though I shall not be concerned with computational issues in this talk. This talk will take up philosophical issues exclusively.) My approach competes with the expected utility approach to decision making (a single-output approach), and has the potential for quite different powers of prediction. In particular, it has the power to diagnose (by pinpointing precisely) errors of practical judgment, whereas a single-output approach (if and when it’s actually correct) can signal only that a mistake has occurred. The familiar term is “irrationality”, meaning a failure to comply with the axioms chosen by experts—a pronouncement too vague to be of any diagnostic use. The multi-output approach is also in possession of significant resources to diagnose many things now lumped together under the heading of “risk aversion”.

Thinking Critically in Science and Religion Just what is critical thinking? Of course, there's no single, right answer to this question because we are dealing with metaphors. However, gaining awareness of the options for what it means to think critically can provide us with insight into the place our species assumes in the order of things. We can identify at least three versions of "critical thinking:" 1) negativity, 2) disinterested investigation, and 3) identification of necessary conditions of possibility for experience (properly called "critique").. We can dismiss the negative form quickly although it is very popular because it is inadvertently (?!) fostered by our current education environment in North America. It actually has two moments: negativity and cleverness. Here critical thinking means examining a text to find its mistakes, and then one cleverly develops a thesis to "correct" the author. This reading strategy is the most certain strategy to employ in order to misunderstand an author although it gives one the (almost certainly, false!) impression that one is "more intelligent" than the author. Unfortunately, this form of critical thinking is ubiquitous in the academy, and its destructiveness is one of the greatest barriers to learning.

"Motives for Consensus: Habermas and Kitcher on Ethical Deliberation"