277. In search of a supergame
In foregoing items in this blog I used the notion of a
‘language game’. How are such games related to each other? I talked of
‘stepping from a language game into a wider one’. Baseball and soccer are games
in wider class of ball games. This suggests a hierarchy of games, which may
suggest some game ‘at the top’, which all games obey. I do think there are
nested games, but I do not think there is a hierarchy of all games, governed by
some supergame at the top.
Some crucial language games are those concerning justice
and ethics. They are rivals. One, the dominant one in western societies, is
liberal individualism, with its utility ethics, looking only at outcomes of
actions, effected in markets. An older one is Aristotelian virtue ethics and corresponding
practical wisdom, aimed at a notion of ‘the good life’ in the social context of
a specific community (‘polis’). Another is theological, based on some moral
sense granted by God (Augustine, Hutcheson). Yet another one is based on rationally
adopted duties that apply universally, regardless of interests (Kant).
Can these rival views be reconciled, compared or
judged from the perspective of some wider, encompassing language game? Or are there,
at best, some family resemblances?
In this blog I have adopted the notion of ‘warranted assertibility’,
rather than ‘truth’, and the warrant depends on the perspective. I have
employed a pragmatic perspective by which ideas and actions are evaluated on
the basis of the extent that they ‘work’, logically, empirically, and
practically. Does this offer the basis for evaluating rival views of justice
and ethics? Those will generally share a respect for some form of logic.
Empirical performance depends on facts, but those are interpretations based on
conceptualizations connected to the perspective one holds. Practical
performance in action depends on evaluation criteria that are also part of the
adopted perspective: producing utility, conducive to the good life, obedience
to God.
So, while they do share elements, in some family resemblance,
they differ on fundamental points. In contrast with all others, liberalism is
not oriented towards any notion of the good life. It claims to be neutral with regard
to morality and goodness, leaving those up to individuals to choose for
themselves. Citizens have preferences from whatever conception of the good life
that they may have, and markets serve to allow them to pursue those preferences.
So, goodness is not only lacking as a guide, it is ruled out of consideration.
Theological and Aristotelian perspectives differ
fundamentally in adopting or not faith in a providential God. In Aristotelian ethics
practical reason guides action, while according to David Hume ‘reason is the
slave of the passions’.
If there is no overarching supergame, is there still any
way in which rival views can rationally criticize each other, or are they
irredeemably ‘incommensurable’?
Alasdair MacIntyre develops the following argument.[i] First of all it is important to realize that
perspectives of justice are historical, as traditions that form and change in
specific social settings and cultures. While in a static view differences
between perspectives are irreconcilable, without any ‘master game’ to adjudicate
between them, in a dynamic view of how they develop there may be a way for them
to learn from each other.
Traditions adapt in time as experience accrues and
conditions change, though they maintain some ‘core’ of fundamental principles.
Can they also mutate into some hybrid, some body of ‘novel combinations’, by
some dialectical process of conflicts and their resolution? That would require
some beginnings of a common language.
One may try to understand a rival perspective and then
look critically from that perspective at comparative performance. Does the
rival succeed where one’s own view fails, perhaps? This requires tolerance for
ambiguity, paradox and discrepancies of meaning, trying out things even if they
seem nonsensical in one’s own view. From a pragmatic perspective such attempt
would require immersion in the foreign culture, in its practices and its
language, preferably in the form of a common project with the ‘natives’. Mutual
dependence in trying to succeed with the project provides an incentive for
sharing. Sharing successes and failures one may gather insight in the relative
merits of the different perspectives.
This fits well with the dialectical ‘cycle of discovery’
that I presented in this blog (items 31, 138). There, the basic logic is as
follows. Try to implement your existing view in a novel, foreign context, to
discover where it fails while a local practice succeeds. Next, make hybrids
from elements from one’s own and from the other’s context and experiment with
them. This mixing of apparent incommensurables will yield anomalies of meanings
that do not fit together. Nevertheless the hybrid yields a basis for exploring
the potential of novel elements. That may lead to an ‘accommodation’ to a novel,
more coherent synthesis. But the outcome is not a universal, fixed supergame,
and will itself be replaced in due course. A paralympic game, you might say. Imperfection
on the move.
Could such a procedure perhaps lead to a novel
synthesis of, say, liberal and Aristotelian justice and ethics? That is what I
have tried to do in a proposal for radical change in economic theory.[ii]
[ii] Bart Nooteboom, How markets work and fail, and what to make
of them, Edward Elgar, 2014, paperback 2015.
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