How do we live together?
Who we are. Human nature and politics
Subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, species Homo sapiens, genus Homo, family Hominidae, order Primates, class Mammalia.
The subspecies H. sapiens sapiens has inherited from its ancestors a form of altruism related to kin selection: it behaves more generously towards offspring and close relatives than towards unknown individuals. The subspecies H. sapiens sapiens is endowed with language. The subspecies H. sapiens sapiens also has the fundamental characteristic of being determined by language. From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, human language is the optimal solution to a collective coordination problem among individuals. Every single word we use can be understood as a focal point, i.e. an element on which a multitude of people agree without prior communication. If we put a set of agents in front of the choice of a place to meet and assume that they cannot exchange information before entering this game, we can show how a convergence towards a focal point emerges from this situation, in this example represented by a salient place that everyone considers to be the same place chosen by others.
The study of the origin of human language is complicated by the fact that it must assume that language already exists before it is used. Studies in zoosemiotics attest to the existence of animal signaling systems, but these are not the same as human language, which has its own distinct characteristics. One of the characteristics of human language is its generative grammar, the fact that we can infer tree-like structures from sampling sensory data. The human ability to extrapolate perceptual data into tree-like structures, which enables us to understand and manipulate complex concepts, differs from animal cognition, which enables us to process symbols, produce elaborate communications, and reason about abstract concepts.
The study of politics involves an analysis of the evolutionary and cultural reasons why our species provides itself with rules of cooperation. Such rules are a biological and cultural puzzle. For our hominid ancestors lived in small groups. And in these small groups, some species of the genus Homo were able to develop forms of culture and symbolic representation. They left us traces of cultural interests, such as burial of the dead. According to paleoanthropology, the burial of the dead, graphic representations and the construction of complex tools are indications of the presence of language or extremely sophisticated forms of signaling.
The origin of language is, as I said, a complicated problem because it is not clear how something like human language could have developed from animal signals. Some authors argue that it is difficult for animals to lie. In fact, some animals can lie to other species, for example, a predator can send signals of friendship to its prey. This clearly demonstrates the existence of interspecies conflict under conditions of scarce resources. This conflict can be explained in evolutionary terms as a conflict between selfish genes of different types. Individuals of a species are containers of selfish agents, the genes. Genes are selfish because their only function is to replicate. In our species, the function of replication is not the only reason we live-H. Sapiens Sapiens has many interests other than mere survival, as Maslow’s pyramid shows, for example.
Non-human animal species can create ecological niches, that is, modify the ecosystem by changing the structure of a fitness landscape to create an environment modulated by their needs and desires.
Changes in one ecosystem can have maladaptive effects on other species. For example, the construction of dams by beavers is known to create an ecosystem with less biodiversity. Our species creates a huge technocultural niche, to the point where the technomass exceeds the biomass, in the sense that the set of technologies, plants and animals that we have domesticated exceeds the weight of species that exist in nature.
This means that it is very difficult to follow the evolutionary psychology argument that there is an evolutionary mismatch between life in the Pleistocene and life in contemporary societies. This is because our species began early to change certain elements of both its cognitive component and its relationship with the environment.
At this point, you might ask, what does politics have to do with evolutionary game theory, evolutionary psychology and sociobiology? Well, quite a lot. Because in order to design politics, you first need to understand human nature. All forms of politics are based on some conception of human nature. You can have a positive conception, e.g. that human beings are good, or you can have a negative conception, e.g. that human beings are evil; finally, you can take a more reasonable position by trying to understand how H. sapiens sapiens conceives of good and evil and how it values justice — modes of reasoning and action that distinguish it from other animal species.
Sociobiology and evolutionary psychology provide us with naturalised explanations of the basic structures from which ethics and politics emerge. For example, there is kin selection, according to which we share some of our genes with our relatives, so we are more likely to care for them and, if they are in trouble, to save their lives. Just because we share part of their genes, whose will is selfish, we are acting altruistically. When we think we are behaving naturally towards our offspring, showing feelings of empathy, we are actually following the blind replication directives of our selfish genes. In H. sapiens sapiens, as Robert Trivers notes, there is not only kinship altruism, but also altruism based on reciprocity. Because our species is endowed with an extensive memory, we can record past interactions with people in our minds and thus act altruistically because we expect that a person who has seen us act altruistically, or who has been told that we have acted altruistically, will act towards us in the future.
Then there is the controversial explanation of group selection, which posits the existence of a level of selection that is not only that of genes, but also that of a group composed of individuals of the same species. According to this theory, our species manifests characteristics of altruism towards the group that are transformed into harm towards the individual.
The expanded circle of altruism
Altruism, from an evolutionary point of view, is a self-inflicted harm or cost to promote the survival and well-being of another individual. But human altruism manifests more complex structures that cannot be reduced to a purely naturalistic explanation, and this is the thesis developed by Peter Singer in his book The Expanding Circle. Singer’s idea is that human morality evolved culturally from its species-specific endowments, such as kinship selection, and that the circle of recipients of altruism subsequently expanded first to small groups and then to the species as a whole (as evidenced by the development of normative systems such as universal human rights). It is possible that in a future era the circle will widen further towards the acquisition of an anti-speciesist ethic, oriented towards the defence and preservation of the lives of non-human animals that we regard as sentient, i.e. capable of experiencing pleasure or pain. There is nothing to prevent a future ethic from taking into account the capacity of plants to feel stress, and that this would lead to a further modification of the expanding circle of altruism. When I speak of the complexity of human altruism, I am also referring to the fact that in Catholic ethics there is such a thing as a supererogatory act, that is, an act of charity, sacrifice or altruism done out of a preference for the good itself, and not out of moral prescriptions, unconscious calculations based on genetic proximity, or conscious calculations based on reputation management.
Effective altruism and specist optimization
Although our species is the most destructive of the others, reducing the biodiversity of the planet, it is also the one that can recognise that it is causing suffering to sentient non-humans. The development of anti-speciesism and ecological morality can be motivated by the ethical current of utilitarianism. Utilitarianism holds that the good corresponds to individual or collective pleasure. Collective utilitarianism seeks to maximise the good of a collective. Effective altruism, an ethical strand introduced by Peter Singer and developed from utilitarianism, argues that in the case of charitable actions, the most effective way to maximise the welfare of the recipients must be calculated.
If we want to carry out charitable acts rationally and effectively, it is necessary to identify those people (or groups of people) 1. who are in greater need, 2. on whom the effect of the donation is greater than on another group. All this must be calculated using economic (cost-benefit analysis) and statistical (probability) tools. Transferring money to a group in a developing country to fund research or medical treatment that can eradicate certain diseases that cause high infant mortality is a cause that turns out to be more effective (and therefore, in some ways, more just) than donating the same amount of money to the poor people one encounter every day in a metropolis (in the case of living in a highly developed nation). According to effective altruism, the former act is ethically and rationally better than the latter because it allows for an overall increase in welfare.
But what do effective altruism and collective utilitarianism have to do with politics? Well, one could say that politics has something to do with human beings, in the sense of beings capable of modifying an ecological niche, who are determined by instinctive, emotional and cognitive structures related to biology, but who also have a language and a mechanism of rational deliberation that allows them to plan the course of events in advance and to calculate the effects of their actions. However, this mechanism of rational deliberation is a double-edged sword, because it enables them both to heal their fellow human beings (individuals belonging first to the same group, then to the whole species), for example by inventing medicine and building hospitals, and to ignore the enormous amount of evil that we inflict on non-human species when we herd them into death factories optimised to increase our prosperity, or when we make them perpetually infantile and maimed through domestication and cross-breeding.
According to the principle of optimising the living conditions of our species, a principle of special collective utilitarianism, since we have to economically manage an ever-increasing population, it is necessary to adopt ever-larger, more invasive and more rational production mechanisms, and to do this we develop something like animal concentration camps.
Cultural Universals
For as long as politics has been conceptually conceived in our civilisation — I am thinking, for example, of Athenian democracy and, above all, of philosophical reflection — it has posed the same problem that we are posing today, that is, the problem posed by Plato of how to unite the many into the one and how to work out how to establish a just relationship between the many and the one.
But politics is not an invention of the classical Greeks. Many other cultures have had the same thoughts, I am thinking specifically of Chinese thinking about the concept of Tianxia, the idea of the government of all creatures under heaven. Again, politics has to do with the relationship between the many and the one, but here it is about how to unite different fiefdoms, peoples and languages under a government conceived as a transcendent, social and ethical order.
From the perspective of the theory of cultural evolution, there are a number of universals that can be found in different cultures and at different times in history.
First universal: the surplus
The first universal that we are aware of is that from the moment a culture begins to accumulate a surplus, a surplus of resources, that is, when it no longer depends solely on what one generation consumes or what the ecosystem provides, but settles in a territory and implements pastoralism and agriculture, inequalities arise that are transmitted between generations.
The surplus of pastoralism and agriculture consists of an accumulation of scarce resources, and this accumulation invents private property. Even before being accumulated, these resources have been modified. In fact, it is possible to hypothesise that the accumulation that occurs in agriculture followed an early domestication of a series of species that were used to maintain a kind of constant surplus, a flow of food resources that could ensure the survival of human groups that were more extensive than the restricted groups we find in primates. The expansion of these groups required systems of coordination, so even if there were no complex linguistic mechanisms in species related to us, we can clearly say that the expansion of human groups, and especially of H. sapiens sapiens, produced something like a cultural evolution that changed our cognitive structure, creating the conditions for the expansion of groups and the emergence of a generative grammar.
These larger societies probably required a larger brain to understand, store and organise the relevant information from social interactions.
If we start from the fact that our species has a larger memory, a more developed prefrontal cortex and a more sophisticated capacity for learning, imitation, mindreading and generative language than other primates, we can conclude that the development of inequalities is linked to the co-evolution of genes and culture.
There are forms of sociality in primates, but they are often associated with small groups and hierarchical structures (to varying degrees, depending on the species). Hierarchy is already a form of division of labour from the perspective of evolutionary game theory.
Second universal: the division of labor
The division of labour is a natural and cultural universal. By this universal is meant that certain parts of an organism are specifically concerned with performing a single task in the most efficient and specialised way possible. This means that there is a mereological subordination of the parts to the organism, or of the many to the one.
According to Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis, the origin of the eukaryotic cell, the basic cell of all complex animals and plants, depends on a process of incorporation of free organisms, the bacteria. According to this theory, the cell is a functional unit that evolves from the incorporation or domestication of bacteria, which cease to be autonomous agents struggling for survival in a competitive game and are subsumed as organs or instruments of a higher totality within which they cooperate by losing their identity.
Even within the body there is a functional division of labour, the cells that make up our bodies are in fact grouped into modular groups, and when cells reproduce autonomously and excessively they perform what in game theory is called free riding.
This means that our bodies develop cancer because these cells replicate in a selfish and individualistic way, undermining the health and collaborative unity of the parts of a body.
Eusocial insect societies are highly cooperative and have also developed very sophisticated communication systems (think of the deliberative mechanism used by bees). Such societies, such as termite mounds, ant mounds and beehives, are extremely hierarchical. One part of the society does not reproduce, and there is greater genetic proximity among this part, which makes kin selection more stringent, resulting in more altruistic behaviour among the members of this part. To define the eusociality of these insects, the biologist Edward Wilson used the term superorganism.
It is not possible to say with certainty that human societies are structured like a super-organism (or that they will take on its contours in a future evolutionary transition), because there is extreme heterogeneity among individuals, coupled with a capacity for reasoning, self-awareness and free will. Moreover, human language is more complex than the communication mechanisms of insects, which lack the peculiarity of a universal grammar.
The natural-cultural universal of the division of labour, as we have presented it, is an element that explains the preconditions for the development of hierarchy within a society. But here it is necessary to distinguish between a functional division and a hierarchical division. A functional division can exist without a hierarchy, since the former simply presupposes a distinction between groups, while the latter implies that one group can assume aspects of dominance or command in relation to others. From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, we can distinguish the emergence of a functional division from a hierarchical one by considering the expected gain at the end of a game. If this gain consists of a scarce resource, it follows that agents will be driven by competition to grab the maximum of this resource. Suddenly, this process was highlighted by Malthus and Ricardo, who considered the possibility that the transformation of an ecosystem into an agricultural production unit might generate a competition for the possession of resource-rich areas, which over time would force the losers of this game to settle in less and less productive areas until the resources were completely exhausted. The emergence of functional distinctions is a mechanism studied in biology and sociology, and the language of evolutionary game theory allows its patterns to be transferred from one domain to another. These forms of inequality can at some point be reset to zero, as happens in the periods following revolts and uprisings aimed at destroying or redistributing the wealth of certain social classes, or again in legal practices such as pardons, or in the cancellation of spiritual debts that occurs in the Jubilee.
Third universal: the sense of justice
At this point, we could ask whether there is a third cultural universal, different from the others because of its controversial nature. Such a universal moves in the opposite direction to the division of labour and the emergence of hierarchies and is linked to a sense of justice. The task of such a universal seems to be to turn back the hands of history to an evolutionary stage where there was no division of labour and no hierarchies — a stage where the accumulation of resources was limited, perhaps to one generation, and subsistence was tied to hunting and gathering. In other words, there was an uneven and weak flow of resources, constantly threatened by environmental change and the ups and downs of fate.
We need to think more deeply about what debt cancellation means. First, as we have seen, it is a strange cultural universal — strange because it is not stable and does not always manifest itself in the same way. Secondly, what is debt cancellation from a human perspective? And in relation to whom? In the social sphere, debt is a type of relationship that establishes two symmetrical roles: giver and receiver. In turn, the one who receives must later transform himself into the one who returns the pledge. The existence of debt presupposes a neurological architecture endowed with memory and foresight: an agent must remember that he has incurred a cost and must remember to whom he has transferred part of his resources. Similarly, the agent must project into the future and mentally calculate the difference between the time when this transfer was made and the time when the debt will be repaid. Finally, the resource-taker must remember that he has a debt, and make a conscious effort to repay it within a limited period of time. This model of debt as a social relationship is consistent with the sociobiological concept that Robert Trivers calls reciprocal altruism.
Debt is not only a social relationship, but also a relationship between a species and an ecosystem. Given the concept of homeostasis in ecology and the laws of conservation of energy in physics, the creation of a surplus by the human species is something that, while framed in terms of biological evolution (a species with a more complex central nervous system can alter larger ecological niches and in a more pervasive way), is closely related to cultural evolution. Moreover, there seems to be a relationship between the emergence of a human surplus and the development of a functional and hierarchical division of labour. At the same time, however, cultural evolution seems in some cases to be moving in the opposite direction to hierarchy-a paradox exemplified by the emergence of religions, which, by establishing cultural norms of an ethical nature, often limit individual selfishness in order to maintain greater social cohesion.
For evolutionary game theory, the development of religious forms is nothing more than the aggregation of a set of focal points — ethical norms motivated by transcendent reasons. The development of ethics and religion produces new focal points, the ethical norms, such as the norms mandating benevolence and non-belligerence. In the Ten Commandments, the need to do right by one’s neighbour is clearly expressed, but in the earlier norms of the Jewish canon or in the Muslim religion we also find a plethora of dietary prohibitions. These prohibitions are based on irrational beliefs or directly on the arbitrariness of a divine decree, but they also contain a rational core in which abstinence from certain foods has a positive effect on the health of the individual.
The economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek, in his most recent book, The Fatal Conceit, offers an evolutionary explanation for the emergence of these prohibitions, an explanation that coincides with that developed in the early 1900s by the British anthropologist James Frazer in his Psyche’s Task.
These two texts discuss the fact that the moral norms that we have invented and are constantly renewing or revolutionising are moving from the religious sphere to the legal sphere. A paradigmatic case of social norms of an apparently irrational nature are taboos. These are apparently irrational norms that contain a functional content that was unconscious or poorly understood by the social groups that adopted them. From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, such norms, despite their irrational justification, would have had the functional purpose of increasing group cohesion and coordination.
For Hayek, cohesion and coordination are the result of collective decisions that are not predetermined by an elite, e.g. religious, who decide what laws to impose on the people. The purpose of these norms is to ensure that a population does not fall victim to constant violence or retribution, to prevent individuals in complex societies from behaving in oppositional and murderous ways towards strangers (unrelated by kinship), thus creating a kind of social chaos. This is where norms — focal points — emerge, decided without a decision-maker, but adopted collectively and unconsciously. These norms, imperfect and justified on transcendental grounds — the will of many non-human agents or of a single God — conceal medical, psychological and psychosocial functions, as they encourage cohesion and coordination, making it possible to postpone social collapse.
But from the perspective of cultural evolution, norms are strategies, i.e. preferences and actions that are transmitted by imitation within a population. For this reason, they are subject to change when, for example, a group of agents decides to change their strategies, but they are also subject to coercion when a group reinforces them by possessing the monopoly of violence.
One focus we have inherited from Christianity is the golden rule (“Do not do to others what you do not want done to you”), which radically simplifies the entire legal apparatus of Jewish culture. Such a norm encourages coordination and limits selfishness — but towards whom? It is perhaps important to emphasise that “others” here are to be understood in a generic sense — the others are the whole of humanity, not the people or the family.
We have seen that norms promote coordination and cohesion. However, when we think about the animal kingdom, we assume that there are no moral norms, in the sense that it is difficult to detect their variation due to technological and cultural evolution. What non-human animals do is obey natural selection and kin selection. If we add the hypothesis of group selection, we have the full picture of the sociobiological origin of morality. According to biologist David Sloan Wilson, this package can be summarised in the concept of multilevel selection, which states that the unit of selection (gene, organism, individual, group, species) is constituted as a system of systems, and that each time it is a matter of understanding the component involved in behaviour. There is conflict and interaction between different levels of selection, leading to evolutionarily stable strategies in which one part of the population adopts a behaviour and another part adapts accordingly.
The idea of conflict between different levels of selection was also hypothesised by Hayek in his last book, The Fatal Conceit. Hayek argues that we live in two different orders: a limited order that comes to us from our evolutionary nature, from the fact that we are primates and evolved during the Pleistocene in small groups determined by hunting and gathering and by ties of kinship, reciprocity and solidarity with group members; and the great society order, something first discovered by economists, by Scottish moral philosophers in the 1700s, which we call the market economy.
The market economy creates new moral rules because social interaction between individuals is not based on altruism, kin selection, lineage, clan or group respect, but on anonymous, non-hostile interaction between individuals who do not know each other and who exchange goods using money.
What is money?
From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, money and coins are a focal point. The emergence of money from barter has to do with the problem of the double coincidence of needs. When we exchange natural or man-made goods, we have to make a comparison between two things, but as Marx had already understood (and as Nick Szabo points out), when we compare the two, we are not really comparing two individual goods, but between proportions of goods, and in this calculation a value or price is assigned to goods or fractions of them. The calculation of the value of natural or man-made goods implies an evaluation that takes into account not only the price of the two goods in our hands — as in the hypothetical situation imagined by political economists — but we have to evaluate at the same time all the other goods, all the other possible prices, in an endless chain of cross-references. All this is computationally very expensive, and the invention of money reduces the complexity by creating a kind of universal equivalent of all goods. According to Szabo, this process of simplifying complexity corresponds to the idea of focal point, which, as we have seen, implies that there is a collective and unintentional decision to agree on something like a common meaning or value. It is also a process linked to mutual altruism, defined as a social interaction that takes into account past interactions and predicts future interactions. Money would be nothing more than a material focus that crystallises the social relations of giving and receiving (Marx) and transcribes the account of past interactions into a physical memory (Szabo).
“Thus if we had all the equations in which the value of a yard of linen is exhaustively expressed, we could denote its exchange-value in the form of a series. This is in fact an infinite series, for the range of commodities can never be finally circumscribed but expands continuously. Since the exchange-value of one commodity is measured by the use-values of all other commodities, the exchange-values of all other commodities are on the contrary measured in terms of the use-value of the one commodity measured by them. If the exchange-value of one yard of linen is expressed in 1/2 lb. of tea, or 2 lbs. of coffee, or 6 yards of calico, or 8 lbs. of bread, etc., it follows that coffee, tea, calico, bread, etc., must be equal to one another in the proportion in which they are equal to linen, a third magnitude, linen thus serves as a common measure of their exchange-value. The exchange-value of any commodity considered as materialised universal labour-time, i.e., as a definite quantity of universal labour-time, is measured successively in terms of definite quantities of the use-values of all other commodities; and on the other hand the exchange-values of all other commodities are measured in the use-value of this one exclusive commodity […] The fact that commodity-owners treat one another’s labour as universal social labour appears in the form of their treating their own commodities as exchange-values; and the interrelation of commodities as exchange-values in the exchange process appears as their universal relation to a particular commodity as the adequate expression of their exchange-value; this in turn appears as the specific relation of this particular commodity to all other commodities and hence as the distinctive, as it were naturally evolved, social character of a thing. The particular commodity which thus represents the exchange-value of all commodities, that is to say, the exchange-value of commodities regarded as a particular, exclusive commodity, constitutes money. Karl Marx, A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)
“A related problem is that, as engineers would say, barter “doesn’t scale”. Barter works well at small volumes but becomes increasingly costly at large volumes, until it becomes too costly to be worth the effort. If there are n goods and services to be traded, a barter market requires n² prices. Five products would require twenty-five prices, which is not too bad, but 500 products would require 250,000 prices, which is far beyond what is practical for one person to keep track of. With money, there are only n prices — 500 products, 500 prices. Money for this purpose can work either as a medium of exchange or simply as a standard of value — as long as the number of money prices themselves do not grow too large to memorize or change too often. (The latter problem, along with an implicit insurance “contract”, along with the lack of a competitive market may explain why prices were often set by long-evolved custom rather than proximate negotiation) (Nick Szabo, Shelling Out: The Origins of Money)
According to Szabo, money enables coordination and a form of altruism that goes beyond the kinship ties and reciprocity that can only be traced through natural memory. According to anthropologist David Graeber, money did not originate as a means of exchange between free people, but as a means of exchange between warring populations. The initial element that characterised the social and political evolution of our species was not exchange, nor was it the war of all against all (as in Hobbes’ myth) or peaceful coexistence (Rousseau), but rather war between clans, populations and groups.
It should also be emphasised that in our species, kinship ties are not simply determined by genetic proximity; in collectives with an animistic or totemic ontology, they extend to non-human animals, plants, constellations, etc.
From a population genetic point of view, H. sapiens sapiens left Africa several times, and during these migrations there were stalemates that permanently separated groups for thousands of years. The geographical diversification of human populations led to the divergence of languages and customs, creating the conditions for the development of exchanges between isolated populations. It is only through the discovery and confrontation of the fact that some resources were greater in some areas and less in others, that production techniques and preferences were different, that something like an interest in economic exchange can develop through the assessment of comparative advantages.
But the concept of economic exchange described by political economy is a retrospective rationalisation of exchange, projecting the mindset of Scottish philosophers in the 1700s onto populations that lived millions of years ago. It seems more reasonable to accept Graeber’s version that the economy was first and foremost an economy of war, first as a mechanism of exchange with enslaved populations, and then, with the emergence of the mega-machine state (Mumford), as an internal and civil war between nobility and plebs in the phenomenon of tribute collection.
The market economy, says Hayek, is an emergent process that brings about the sharing of a new kind of morality. A morality, we might say, that is embodied in money as a universal mediator used by individuals in a non-hostile situation. However, for a currency to be accepted as a medium of value and exchange, it needs to be validated and ‘backed up’ by a third party authority, a conceptual issue that has become apparent with the invention of cryptocurrencies.
The origin of the minimal state
And here we enter another problem, namely the fact that we see in the evolving complexity of human societies the need to create a monopoly on the use of force: the state, in Max Weber’s definition. Anarcho-libertarian thinkers such as Robert Nozick of Anarchy, State, Utopia speak of a minimal state, that is, a social institution that defends only the security of the individuals who are part of it. In this sense, security is a kind of public good, as are the law enforcement agencies that defend it. But security is also managed by the state as if it were the only possible provider. Crossing the threshold of the minimal state, for example by increasing bureaucratic apparatuses or regulating the functioning of the market through restrictions or redistribution of wealth, means interfering with free market mechanisms, going as far as centralising further monopoly power in the hands of a single service provider.
For Hayek, the market is an artificial order (catallaxy) that is unintentionally produced at the moment when there are relations of exchange between anonymous individuals that generate a distributed calculation of the value of things. This distributed calculation is something that calculates distributed information, information that is not only theoretical, but also practical, technical and private. Hayek takes the concept of distributed computation from German neurophysiology (the connectionist model).
For a market to exist, as we have said, for there to be exchange in a non-hostile way between populations and individuals, there has to be something like a power to ensure that violent or mendacious actions do not occur. We can imagine someone deciding to peddle damaged goods, or to default on a loan, or, again, since there is a shared form of money, to use a counterfeit version of it.
Counterfeiting is an interesting case for evolutionary game theory and for a discipline concerned with the emergence of signaling and communication systems. This is because, from the moment there is economic exchange, there is also a disinterested and untruthful signaling system.
The concept of the invisible hand, proposed by Adam Smith, states that each individual who enters a market must follow his private interests, but this following of private interests, as if by the action of an invisible hand, leads to a spontaneous order in which the welfare of society (the wealth of nations) increases. From the point of view of evolutionary game theory, the monetary system, like our own language, i.e. the set of words, is something like a more or less efficient signaling system.
In the signalling games studied by Brian Skyrms and David Lewis, we can see how an effective communication system can develop even in the absence of a “monopoly of meaning”. In other words, in a signalling game there is no “signalling leader”. This means that it is absurd to think that human language was invented by some intellectual or shaman who coined words and then distributed them to a population that did not possess them.
Instead, we can reasonably assume that some words were invented as a means of coordinating actions such as gathering or hunting. The same is true of money. The point is that the existence of these coordination systems must be framed within a larger system of moral rules and punishments for free riding, a multilevel system.
This is the explanation that David Sloan Wilson gives for the emergence of the economy: it is an emergent process, established in a plurality of levels of social organisation. This means that the market is not a self-sufficient order, but a process that emerges within moral norms and institutions that are themselves emergent — such as the monopoly of state violence or the existence of state borders.
In the absence of institutions such as states that monopolise the use of force, there are norms that prescribe the redress of wrongs through retribution. In these situations, justice is the imposition of an end to the cycle of violence and revenge, for example through the establishment of a human focus: a scapegoat (Girard).
But in modern systems of criminal justice, I am thinking of Beccaria and Bentham, there is a calculation of damages and reparations, as well as a codification of offences on a utilitarian basis. In practice, one can make calculations based on measurement and probability, on the percentage of damage done to persons, property or society as a whole.
The order of the market economy and its consequent morality is installed on top of a previous moral order, without completely abolishing it, as in Peter Singer’s extended ethical circle model.
As these moral norms expand, there is an evolutionary misalignment between the old and the new order. This misalignment, according to Hayek, is the main cause of the rejection of the market economy and the development of socialism.
In societies where the market economy has been in place for a short time, people tend to think that the market is a mechanism that creates money out of nothing, or that the market is a kind of mutual fraud, when in fact, from the point of view of economists, the market should be a positive-sum game. However, there is evidence that real markets differ from ideal markets (perfect competition) because of negative externalities and information asymmetries.
As a society becomes more complex, a monopoly of violence must develop precisely to preserve the conditions of existence of the spontaneous market order. This is because, in our species, violence can be applied through the rational use of technological tools that increase our power to cause harm. From a physical point of view, every time we build a technical object, we produce an increase in the degrees of freedom of our system. A technological tool may allow us to perform more or different actions — as well as cooperation between individuals — but increased degrees of freedom lead to increased opportunities for violence. Simple tools like swords or arrows hurt fewer people than grenades and guns. Nuclear weapons are the fulfilment of this extension of the degrees of freedom to procure violence. The fact that nuclear weapons have the power to destroy the entire planet if triggered corresponds to the need for the most powerful states to possess them, because a balance must be created based on the common knowledge that we could destroy ourselves by using them.
Nozick argues that to apply the same reasoning to violence as to any other good or service would produce a situation of social insecurity and risk of retaliation that would prevent the very genesis of the market as a place of exchange between anonymous, non-belligerent individuals. In essence, the monopoly of violence is the solution to a social game, as is the strategy of nuclear deterrence. It is true that the creation of a monopoly restricts the degrees of freedom of individuals, but this solution, although not optimal, makes possible a greater social good than the possibility of perpetual war.
Democratic aristocracy
We live in a more or less widespread system of representative democracies, where once every n years people get together and vote for a candidate from a party, often chosen through internal party primaries. When we elect this candidate and the majority party, a coalition government is proposed with its various ministers, and this coalition lasts for a limited period. If the party and the candidate do well, they will be reappointed in subsequent elections. The government has our delegation to manage public affairs, and it has to fulfil its election promises.
What government does in a complex society is more complicated than this simple explanation. For example, the government is a case of a society within a society, which, in addition to looking after the interests of the citizens, may also pursue its own selfish, caste-based objectives.
But as soon as the government is made up of a specialised class of individuals (politicians, parliamentarians, senators), you do not have a democracy, but a democratic aristocracy, as the French political scientist Bernard Manin points out.
In Yves Sintomer’s study of the evolution of forms of political representation, we are confronted with a problem that is essential to our discussion: why did we move from voting by lot to voting by ballot?
In the Athenian democracy, the Venetian Republic, and early medieval and Renaissance Florence, for example, some public offices were decided by lot. From the point of view of game theory, drawing lots is a mixed strategy in the von Neumann sense, i.e. a choice based on a random rather than a deliberate element. But the question is, why do we think that random selection of candidates should be fair?
The government of intelligence
At this point, it should be noted that we believe it is right for candidates in a democracy to be chosen by the people, whereas in the previously mentioned systems of government it was common to use the lottery. Aristotle in Politics, while advocating a form of democracy with aristocratic elements, believes that the drawing of lots is the most democratic selection mechanism. A selection of candidates based on chance allows for a degree of isonomy (i.e. equality before the law). However, as Aristotle again points out, there are some people who are better suited to govern than others, and it would be strange not to entrust them with the task of conducting politics.
If a monarchy or an aristocracy are forms that function optimally and not pathologically, they delegate the role of government to the best, a government of the few or the one, and this selection should be based on the pre-eminence of the faculty of governing. This pre-eminence, unequally distributed by nature, is a sign of a different gradation of the faculty of government, which distinguishes the people from the ruler or the best (aristoi). Just as in the individual the rational faculty also has the function of governing and controlling the passions and organising the sensory perceptions, so in the poleis the ruler or aristoi has a superior rational faculty, which by nature determines that he should govern the souls of the people, since the poleis is composed of individuals in whom the faculty of reason and government is less pronounced, and they may be slaves to the passions or have sensory perceptions that are far from the truth. Thus, already in Greek thought we have something like an evaluation of human capital and an analysis of the class composition of society.
Aristotle’s argument implies that there is a distribution (today we might say normal) of certain abilities in the human species. People have different faculties to a greater or lesser extent. However, the capacity for government, although related to the “amount of rational faculty” of individuals, is not easy to assess. We can assume that by rational capacity Aristotle means what we now call “intelligence”, and that its meaning is similar in ancient and modern conceptions — it has to do with survival and foresight. If we want to be even more specific, we can say that intelligence in the scientific conception (which has aspects of similarity and dissimilarity with the ancient idea of nous) is precisely the ability to infer patterns or predict sequences — an abstract ability whose effects are concretely manifested in a greater propensity to avert risks, to study the consequences of actions in advance, or to infer causal relationships between events. The ability to consider a long-term plan of action, not focused on the immediate satisfaction of needs, can again be understood in both an individual and a collective sense. Just as the intelligent individual is able to predict the long-term course of events with regard to his or her own survival and well-being, so the intelligent individual or group of individuals is able to care more effectively for the survival and well-being of society.
Contemporary representative democracy is based on the fact that political candidates present themselves by publicising their actions, which began with the existence of mass media, coinciding with totalitarianism, and later with advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion. This form of media democracy is different from the representative democracy that existed after the French Revolution, but it is also different from the party democracy of the 1800s. Party democracies are forms of government linked to a class society, something that was already nuanced in the assembly distinction between left and right during the French Revolution, in which the right was composed of landowners and the left of the rising bourgeoisie.
Chance, luck, politics
Politics is about the diversity of human capacities and how we measure, interpret and manage that diversity. The relationship between the natural and the cultural, or between chance and choice, is the abstract dichotomy that governs all politics.
The tendency towards an electoral system based on chance can be explained in five ways:
1. Relying on chance allows for a kind of neutrality, and this neutrality could have a transcendent origin, e.g. people could be elected because of the will of the gods;
2. Relying on the case reduces disputes about the bias of a decision.
3. Relying on chance reduces group bias. This idea of making decisions by chance is also used in the divination models of some hunter-gatherers, who rely on a kind of random draw when faced with a complex decision. To coordinate the action of the hunt — an enterprise that requires a sum of intelligence and skill greater than any individual contribution — it is necessary to avoid group bias. If a group of hunters is tracking a prey and they all make the same decisions, a kind of collective inference is produced. It may follow a false trail. Relying on chance instead can set possibilities in motion again and create new chains of inference, producing a more effective coordination strategy. A further development of this practice is the use of divinatory mechanisms to resolve social or political disputes. Since the soothsayer is a person somewhat separate from society (because he is a stranger or because he is possessed by the god), his decisions, based on random mechanisms, are interpreted as fair because they seem to come from an impartial source.
According to Sintomer, the main reason for the disappearance of the lottery was that, although it was considered by the ancients and the moderns to be a more democratic mechanism than elections, it was not based on the consent of the citizens. The French Revolution attached great importance to the concept of consent. Citizens had to come together and delegate a candidate, and that candidate was chosen by them, not by chance.
4. The metamorphosis of fortune. In Greece, the lottery was governed by Tyche, a blind deity more powerful than the gods, who determined the tragic fate of individuals. In the Middle Ages, chance is fortune, represented allegorically by the Wheel of Fortune, a symbol of the cyclical nature of human life and the alternation of success and failure, poverty and wealth. During the Renaissance, as the art historian Aby Warburg shows, fortune became mixed up with chance and enterprise, in the sense that from the moment a capitalist system based on credit was established, the expectation of a greater return on future investment than was expected in a settled economy such as the medieval one. During the Renaissance and at the dawn of capitalism, an idea of luck spread which, as Machiavelli notes, the capitalist or entrepreneur must seize. This idea of luck implies a conception of time that is no longer cyclical, in which certain peoples succeed and then fade away, as in Vico’s philosophy of history or Hegel’s dialectic. Capitalism establishes a regime of temporality oriented towards the future and progress, which reaches its apogee with positivism.
5. Birth of the scientific study of probability. Before, in fact, the 400' or 500', the study of probability was not something scientific. It emerged in the Baroque era from the study of games of chance and combinatorial mathematics, and only later would it be applied to statistical science and biopolitical population control in the 1800s. In a world where chance is mathematically definable, the idea of letting chance decide the fate of a government will be less palatable.
Political representation
This is because the ability of citizens to express their consent through a mechanism of representation gives all citizens a (seemingly) greater degree of freedom. However, as the political philosopher Giuseppe Duso shows, the mechanism of representation takes away the individual’s ability to retaliate and kill his neighbour (the Hobbesian contract), but it also takes away his ability to govern himself independently. Leviathan, a unified body composed of all citizens (Hobbes) and the general will (Rousseau), a collective form of the sum of individual wills, creates an impairment of citizens’ rights and freedoms. The real restriction is not the ability to freely kill one’s neighbour, but the inability to act politically, to be autonomous political agents. In exchange for the protection provided by the state, citizens, through group choice, impose an individual cost (a reduction in their degrees of freedom) in order to increase collective welfare. This process of transferring freedoms from the many to the one thus constitutes a group selection that produces a superior organism: the state. The state-organism analogy was familiar to classical and modern political philosophy, which used biological metaphors to talk about the state or polis.
The fact that the protection of the state provides a mechanism for coordination, but at the same time deprives individuals of their freedom to act and govern themselves, is illustrated by the conceptual opposition between the state and federalism (e.g. in America and Northern Europe). According to Giuseppe Duso, the main element of politics is not the individual, as in the modern tradition, but groups.
“It is not that there are no individual men: of course it is only they who form groupings and constitute associations, but they are not understood in their isolation as the founding entities of society. They are what they are only in the relationship, in the relation, which is not the mere product of the will of autonomous individuals, but constitutes something original to men: therefore, society is by nature, as experience and reason show, which does not mean that it is an inert datum, that it is not structured through conscious actions of men” (Giuseppe Duso, Thinking Federalism: Between Categories and Constitution)
The problem with Duso’s proposal is that groups are guilds. That is, they are either social classes, as was the case in pre-modern forms of association, or they are classes that accumulate because they are made up of individuals doing the same work.
Methodological individualism
The idea that the central element of politics is not individuals but groups is something that clashes with the economic order because, according to Adam Smith, what makes up a market is not groups but individuals, and the same approach informs contemporary neoclassical economics. Such economics is based on the epistemological principle of methodological individualism, advocated by Schumpeter and Weber, as a means of analysing society from the perspective of its atomic component. The same methodological individualism also underlies neoliberalism or Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies, or Nozick’s anarcho-libertarian vision.
Unitarian and pluralistic theory of elites
As we said earlier, to think that the elementary particles of politics are individuals is to dwell on the characteristics that make them different — unequally distributed characteristics — as Aristotle observed.
If, however, we admit that there are some characteristics, such as intelligence, that are more important than others, which are unequally distributed, we would have a kind of constancy of the Pareto distribution (e.g. the fact that a small percentage of the population holds most of the wealth, while the majority holds considerably less). If we admit that the ability to govern is determined by intelligence, as Aristotle seems to assume and as some contemporary anarcho-libertarian or neo-reactionary thinkers reiterate, we would have a defence of the theory of elites that justifies the permanence of inequalities (of power, income, etc.) by assuming that all elites have always been cognitive elites.
This kind of reasoning is very dangerous and can lead to reprehensible outcomes such as social Darwinism and eugenics. One of the reasons that invalidates the validity of this reasoning is that the methods used to measure cognitive differences have a history: they were originally developed to study pathological cases, but they were also used to justify racial differences. The unequal distribution of intelligence is a natural phenomenon, according to hereditarianism, but such measurement is not objective, social constructivists reiterate, especially considering that the most striking case of this divergence — the difference between blacks and whites in the United States — is measured after centuries of slavery and colonialism.
If, on the other hand, we think in terms of a distribution of a set of heterogeneous traits, then our image of the individual is similar to that represented in role-playing games in the process of character creation. Again, we roll dice or choose to assign a set of balanced values to a set of traits (e.g. magic, endurance, strength, oratory). In RPGs, traits are balanced as in zero-sum games, because if it were possible to create overpowered characters, the game would become boring and predictable.
Now all this has to do with the fact that, from an anarchist point of view, we can conceive of the individual as something endowed with a set of properties. These are qualities, these are endowments, sort of like what happens at the beginning of a role-playing game. Dice are thrown to find out what the endowments of endurance, skill and luck of a particular individual are. Of course, role-playing games are balanced, so if there are individuals in the game who are more advantaged, the game becomes boring.
From the point of view of evolutionary game theory, it is true that from the moment we move from a mode of production based on hunting and gathering to pastoralism and agriculture, the equal distribution of resources crystallises into a hierarchical structure due to the intergenerational transmission of capital (resources, skills, private property, social ties, etc.). Even in societies without “hierarchical memory”, functional distinctions (division of labour) are created that lead to hierarchical divisions (unequal distribution of more or less fulfilling tasks), but in these societies the characteristics of the individuals who make up these elites are different from those required by other modes of production.
Complex societies require cognitive elites, but when complex societies collapse it is possible for different elites to emerge. Moreover, from the perspective of cultural evolution, it is not possible to say that there is a coincidence between the naturalistic concept of IQ and social concepts such as class or caste.
The most neutral method of measuring intelligence is Raven’s Matrices — sequences of geometric structures which the candidate must complete by deducing the rule of generation. It is thought that the abstract nature of the pictures makes such sequences more suitable for measuring a “universal” IQ than using concepts from logic, mathematics or general culture. The interesting aspect of Raven’s matrices is that they allow us to think abstractly about intelligence as the ability to infer the continuation of sequences, i.e. to accurately predict the future and discover rational patterns in seemingly disordered data. This ability to predict the future is relevant to politics because it allows us to limit the risks we might take as complex societies. Intelligence is a kind of time preference, a way of disengaging from the present in order to achieve future goals.
“Could it be that cognitive skills not measured on existing test instruments are both highly heritable and have a major impact on earnings, thereby possibly explaining a more substantial fraction of the transmission process? […] we are inclined to think that available estimates overstate the importance of general cognitive skill as a determinant of earnings, since in many respects taking a test is like doing a job. Successful performance in either case results from a combination of ability and motivation, including the disposition to follow instructions, persistence, work ethic and other traits likely to contribute independently to one’s earnings. This is the reason we eschew the common label of a test score as “cognitive skill,” but rather use the more descriptive term “cognitive performance.” (Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, The Inheritance of Inequality)
In contrast to the position of Bowles and Gintis, behavioral genetics, some racist strands of evolutionary psychology, neoliberal thinkers and neo-reactionaries continue to claim that it is possible to provide an ‘objective’ measurement of entities such as human capital or intelligence, and that on the basis of these measurements it is correct to assert that aristocracy is the best model of society for all.
Another argument against the idea that there is such a thing as a natural aristocracy or cognitive elite in societies is the fact that, as we have said, the characteristics involved in the practice of governance are multiple and variable, depending on changes in the environment (cultural and natural), but also depending on styles of governance. Technological change, by altering the fitness landscape, also creates the conditions for the rise and decline of elites characterised by the pre-eminence of different skills. Consider a society without writing. The distinction between fluid and crystallised intelligence may serve as an example: while the former may be useful for performing computations in a short period of time or making quick decisions, the latter enables the storage of social and intergenerational memory. The absence of mechanisms for storing information creates a hegemony based on memory rather than speed of thought.
For these reasons, I believe it is more appropriate to conceive of a pluralist theory of elites that, on the one hand, acknowledges the evolutionary inevitability of the division of labour, but, on the other hand, takes into account the contingency and mutability of the characteristics that, depending on the degree of technological evolution and social structure, will be required to be part of a hegemonic class. By contrast, the racism implicit in a unitary theory of elites inevitably leads to disastrous social consequences, as it seeks to naturalise those contingent and historicisable characteristics that make a state or a population richer or more technologically advanced.
Finally, it is useful to remember that a unified theory of elites presupposes methodological individualism as an epistemological tool — which is difficult to do in contexts where notions of individual intelligence do not exist, or where values such as strength, courage and prudence are considered more appropriate for the creation of a ruling aristocracy.
With regard to the argument put forward by David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything — an argument that invites us to consider the contingency of certain structures such as the state, the division of labour, income inequality or the limitation of command functions — it is necessary to ask a question. For while it is true that a naturalised reading based on evolutionary game theory tends to infer consequences of extreme generalisation from very simple and ahistorical models, it also seeks to compare models with empirical data, and the combination of these two perspectives leads us to assume that it is very unlikely that a contemporary society can reach levels of archaic egalitarianism without a radical change in the use of technologies and political experimentation.
“The cereal crops that came to form a substantial portion of farmers’ diets, unlike most hunted and gathered foods, could be stored. The development of private storage — stores moved from public places to the interior of homes — allowed more successful (or luckier) farmers to withdraw from food sharing and other communal forms of insurance, thus facilitating private accumulation (Kuijt and Finlayson 2009, Weide et al. 2022). Second, by dramatically increasing the productivity of land, farming converted any arable plot anywhere into a potential clumped resource worth demarcating and defending, similar to the limited number of rich fishing sites that supported high levels of wealth inequality in the Pacific Northwest. Farming generalized the conditions that made private property in land worth demarcating and defending (Bowles and Choi 2019). Third, ox-drawn ploughs were a labor-saving land-using innovation in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age western Eurasia that raised the shadow price of land and other forms of material wealth relative to labor. The result was that what had become the most valuable inputs in the production process could now be accumulated and transmitted across generations, heightening equilibrium wealth inequality (Samuel Bowles, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow)
The distinction between functional division and hierarchical division needs to be reconsidered. For, as Robert Nozick clearly shows in Utopia, State, Anarchy, the individuals of our species are not only distinct, but they are also in many ways highly heterogeneous. In economic terms, they have different preferences, different hierarchies of preferences and different cognitive, emotional, and physiological qualities. In a neoreactionary system, we assume that the heterogeneity of cognitive styles must collapse into a single gradation between major and minor, effectively imposing the dictatorship of a single trait. But we can think of multiple distributions of multiple preferences, traits, characteristics.
An interesting characteristic to analyse is the attitude towards altruism, the preference for altruism. From social psychological studies we can say that there is a kind of normal distribution of the altruism-egoism spectrum. But this Gaussian distribution could be structured differently if we assume the existence of polymorphisms — groups of stably more altruistic and stably less altruistic individuals. But this does not mean that altruism is a trait that naturally distinguishes human populations, since it depends both on a species-specific endowment (kinship altruism, group altruism) and on all the variables introduced by education and culture.
According to Hayek, the capacity for altruism has nothing to do with the diversity of human populations in terms of this trait, but with a fundamental mismatch between a collectivist, solidarity-based (archaic) and irrational ethic and an individualist and rational (market economy) ethic. There is an implication in Hayek’s argument that we find expressed more crudely and directly by Schumpeter: capitalism has not only wiped-out kin selection, traditions, solidarity and altruism, it has also “forged” people’s souls, creating smarter, more rational, more scientific and more selfish individuals.
“Rising capitalism produced not only the mental attitude of modern science, the attitude that consists in asking certain questions and in going about answering them in a certain way, but also the men and the means. By breaking up the feudal environment and disturbing the intellectual peace of manor and village (though there always was, of course, plenty to discuss and to fall out about in a convent), but especially by creating the social space for a new class that stood upon individual achievement in the economic field, it in turn attracted to that field the strong wills and the strong intellects (Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy)
“It may be asked how restraints on instinctual demands serve to coordinate the activities of larger numbers. As an example, continued obedience to the command to treat all men as neighbors would have prevented the growth of an extended order. For those now living withinthe extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbors, and by applying, in their interactions, rules of the extended order- such as those of several property and contract — instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism” (Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)
Neoliberalism, of which Hayek was perhaps the most effective propagator, also proposes an individualistic ethic. One could even say that neoliberal ethics has stoic and ascetic aspects: given the elementary particle of the individual, its only purpose is continuous perfection. However, it becomes clear that this description is ideologically biased, as it excludes the possibility of stable groups, alliances and institutions. It also ignores the fact that, in the case of our species, the individual is the product of the dual linguistic and nurturing relationship it receives from family and society — without which it is utterly incapable of survival.
An artificial justice
Even if Hayek’s distinction between the restricted order and the Great Society is ideological, the idea of exploring the evolutionary grounds of social justice remains a viable project, even if one adopts a different perspective. For Hayek, “social justice” is a redundant and empty term — justice, if there is any, is always social, but if society is simply an aggregate of individuals, it is hard to see why those individuals should care about it beyond defending private property and free markets.
Now justice, as we have seen, has something to do with a preference for a fair distribution of resources, for symmetry, but it also has something to do with chance and luck. We represent justice allegorically as a blindfolded goddess, as if to indicate an inability to follow her reasoning in the distribution of natural gifts. Similarly, we have adopted the drawing of lots as a political tool because it allows for a kind of second-degree justice, an artificial justice. Whereas natural justice seems unjust to us because it inscrutably distributes evil and good, artificial justice seems reasonable to us because it randomly, but inventively, distributes the same fates as a practice of government. We can say that human government based on the drawing of lots is an attempt to apply an arbitrary and artificial method that copies the random acts of fate.
“Should we now say that society B would be morally less objectionable than society A, because in B all individuals would have a ‘fair chance’ of ending up in a rich family and, therefore, in a privileged social and economic position? By assumption, B is a society with an income distribution just as unfair as A is. In both societies, any individual’s social and economic position has nothing to do with personal merit, but rather is completely a matter of ‘luck’. In A it depends wholly on the accident of birth — on the ‘great lottery of life’ which decides who is born into. what particular family. In contrast, in B it depends wholly on a government- conducted lottery. Why should we assign higher moral dignity to a lottery organized by government bureaucrats than we assign to the ‘great lottery of life’ which chooses a family for each of us without the benefit of government intervention? Why should a bureaucratic lottery be regarded as being a ‘fairer’ allocative mechanism than the great biological lottery produced by nature? (John Harsanyi, Nonlinear Social Welfare Functions or. Do Welfare Economists have a Special Exemption. From Bayesian Rationality?)
The degrees of freedom of consumer sovereignty
However, as we have repeatedly pointed out, a distribution of traits and preferences does not imply a gradation or hierarchy. Diversity is central to the distinction between modes of production and dominant ideologies. It is central to the concept of consumer sovereignty as applied in political economy.
The diversity of commodities that the capitalist mode of production can assemble, which amazed Marx, is something that simply does not exist in a Soviet regime. This is because commodities represent the degree of freedom of the individual in a market society. The sovereign consumer has the power to choose from an infinite number of commodities from countless parts of the planet, made up of innumerable chains of semi-finished goods, factories, logistics and trade, forming a network that spans the entire planet.
Consider the complicated division of labour and logistical chains that make possible the construction of something like a smartphone and reflect on the degrees of freedom that such an instrument confers on its users. Here, in capitalism, citizens are sovereign consumers, endowed with degrees of freedom and powers previously reserved only for a king, but at the same time they are subject to the state by electing representatives whose political function is to make decisions on their behalf. But a state is based on the enforcement of the law, on the monopoly of violence, which deprives citizens of some of their freedoms. Finally, as wage laborers’, citizens are like serfs of feudal lords within the capitalist enterprise, because the enterprise is not structured as a free market, but as a mechanism for the transmission of orders from a ruling class to serfs whose only remaining freedom is to be unemployed.
Techno-feudalism
Now imagine that the weak aspects of the wage-earner’s autonomy (the freedom to choose between alternatives of work, goods and services, and the security of being rewarded for his efforts) will suddenly disappear, eliminating all those democratic and civic trappings that the age of capitalism had promised. We have entered techno-feudalism. According to former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, we are no longer dealing with capitalism, which was a mode of production based on the existence of enterprises — hierarchical and efficient production structures governed by a Pareto distribution (or power law) with a few CEOs and managers and many wage-earners. To put it in abstract terms: companies made up of a minority that controlled the majority, the former coercive, scientific, intellectual, the latter manual, alienated and forced into endless repetition of the same actions.
But neither are we in what the Italian workerists called post-Fordism, an economy of knowledge, emotion, and generalised care, in which social classes are blurred and some manual labour is centralised, dislocated, and automated. An important corollary of post-Fordism was also the recognition (but inadequate reward) of undeclared care work, the female labour that sustained the reproductive cycle of Fordism. But if in Fordism the wage is at the heart of the bargain between workers and capitalists, in post-Fordism it is no longer a supported element of capital, fragmented as it is into uncertain and precarious contractual forms, often symbolic in nature and often without any union defence. Feminist practice and theory have repeatedly pointed out this fundamental error of economics, whether capitalist, socialist or communist: the most important part of labour is not production, but reproduction, and thus care. Not to pay for care work, not to pay for it, to treat it as if it required no effort at all, was for many years the lintel of a pact between capital and masculinism — male labour, under wage, was cared for and reproduced by a higher, female, invisible and doubly enslaved labour, that of the family and of capital.
However, after the financial crisis of 2008 and after two years of pandemic, capitalism seems to have undergone a metamorphosis that has led it to surpass itself. The big service platforms (Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, X, Uber, etc.) base their economic power not on profit but on rent. Just as the original accumulation in the early days of English capitalism was the privatisation of common land into enclosures, so the big platforms are privatising the Internet (a military and anarcho-utopian project, by its nature acentric and financed by state money). The big platforms are no longer monopolies in the scientific sense of the term, i.e. sole providers of services that can modulate the price of their goods at will, but they are becoming digital fiefdoms. Not only are the platforms becoming obligatory media, exchanges necessary to communicate, travel and buy, but they are also paroxysmally expanding their control over the attention of customers through a second extraction, that of data. These sophisticated profiling systems, combined with an authoritarian government, realise China’s current technopolitical configuration in which a single state-run platform manages every service, from banking to social networking to the digital marketplace. But it does not stop there. China has proposed its own digital currency to speed up payments within the geopolitical area it dominates, eliminating the baroque system of pass-throughs through American banks.
Now, these platforms are not monopolies, and they are not markets; they contain simulations of sellers and simulations of buyers. I say simulations because the terrain and architectures that make up these markets belong to the platforms. Influencers are like feudal lords or vassals of attention, while ordinary users are like serfs. Of course, there has always been an attention and reputation economy, but the amount of data that could be extracted was small before the internet and smart devices.
“Under feudal rule, the feudal lord granted so-called fiefs to subordinates called vassals. These fiefs gave the vassals the formal right to economically exploit a portion of the lord’s land — cultivate it, for example, or use it as pasture for animals — in exchange for a portion of the produce. The feudal lord would then unleash his official to control the fief and collect what was owed to him. Jeff’s relationship with amazon.com sellers is not much different. He grants them cloud-based digital fiefdoms, for a fee, and then lets his algo-functionary supervise and collect what is due. Amazon was just the beginning. Alibaba applied the same techniques to create a similar cloud fiefdom in China” (Yanis Varoufakis, Techno-feudalism)
For Varoufakis, the current mode of production is techno-feudalism because it operates at a meta or higher level than the capitalist mode of production: in practice, it is an archaic, caste-like technology that contains within it a mechanism of multi-level competition. There is competition in the research and development department, where different start-ups struggle to provide the best solution to a problem, but there is also competition between service providers, influencers, and ordinary users. Finally, there is competition between all these categories: for example, the influencers against the users and the users against them. But also, the various services and their censorship rules that limit the influencers’ freedom of expression. However, if we take a step back and look at these hunger games from above, we can see that cloud capital, the capital made up of data, licensing agreements and profiling algorithms, is in practice approaching total integration or the disappearance of competition.
The accumulation of data by platforms with global power poses a serious challenge to representative democracy because techno-feudalism does not have a single theory of human nature, but a multiplicity of information about individual preferences. If it is true that politics is based on knowledge of human nature, then the institutions with the most knowledge are also those with the most power to govern. This is why we seem to be moving towards a feudal regime, because the information asymmetry between the user and the platforms is enormous.
Representative democracy could be manipulated by techniques of persuading public opinion, creating a mediarchy in which a few highly visible candidates could convert their reputational capital into electoral capital, but the authoritarianism of platforms constitutes a kind of continuous polling, with data cross-referenced from the most disparate sources — from wearable devices to quizzes on Meta. No wonder, then, that many platforms have been accused of interfering in the workings of candidate selection. From the point of view of those who accumulate data, it is irrelevant whether the buyer is a startup or a politician, because, as Carl Schmitt predicted, if the command of the economy is able to perform the same functions as the political command, it will impose its methods and its experts, which will then produce a government of technicians whose choices will be opposed to the often equally manipulated choices of populist parties.
Legal interlude: whose IAs and their works?
In addition, techno-feudalism is based on another process aimed at automating and optimising the tertiary sector. This is done by using the vast amount of data collected as a basis for training artificial intelligences that can exploit considerable legal confusion to extrapolate patterns and process text and images.
Such legal ambiguities reflect centuries-old debates about the status of slavery, usufruct, and wage labour. In short, every social and technological mutation has required that the structures of law (whether derived from Roman law or Anglo-Saxon common law) be modified. In The Politics, Aristotle asserts that a slave is one who is the property of a master, but this kind of master-servant relationship also applies to the patriarch in relation to the family, and to man in relation to animals and technical instruments. For this reason, use and fruit were two distinct elements in Roman law, but with the rise of the capitalist mode of production, interest focuses on the fruit of labour, that is, on the product of an individual (his body) who does not belong entirely to the master, but who freely sells his products on the labour market. In this sense, Marx distinguishes between feudalism and the capitalist mode of production: in the former, there is a global ownership of the individual; in the latter, the ownership concerns time.
“Le travail auquel a droit l’usuarius se confond avec l’usage personnel ou domestique qu’il a de l’esclave — un usage qui exclut le profit marchand. Le travail auquel a droit le fructuarius, au contraire, peut être aliéné contre un prix, sur le marché : il peut être loué. Dans les deux cas, usage ou usufruit de l’esclave, celui-ci, concrètement, travaille. Mais son activité, que la langue commune appellerait son labeur, n’a pas la même valeur en droit. Ou bien l’esclave reste à la disposition de l’usuaire en personne. C’est là, si je puis dire, un service en nature. Nous pouvons l’appeler aussi bien un travail d’usage, au sens où l’on parle de valeur d’usage. Ou bien ses operae, séparées de lui, sont une « chose » aliénable à des tiers, sous la forme juridique d’une location. Pour l’usufruitier, il ne s’agit plus que d’un revenu pécuniaire. Au travail d’usage vient s’ajouter un travail que l’on est en droit d’appeler marchand, au sens où l’on parle de valeur marchande “ (Yan Thomas, L’ usage et les fruits de l’esclave)
“As long as generative AI remains a mere tool (albeit a very powerful one) at the service and under the control of humans, there will be few doubts about the management of user rights, since we would be following in the footsteps of other technological revolutions that have given rise to new and previously unknown forms of creativity (photography, electronic music, multimedia graphics). However, if we think ahead, we must begin to envisage AI systems that take on more and more creative autonomy, leaving the human being in an increasingly marginal role and reducing intellectual input even at the level of judgement. This scenario could really take the phenomenon outside the scope of copyright, or at least copyright as we have understood it so far” (Simone Aliprandi, The Artificial Author)
Generative AI poses three problems for the law: ownership of the models, ownership of the data that trains and informs the models, and ownership of the creations of the models. As Aliprandi points out, at present it is still possible to enforce rules based on the concept of intellectual work, which is used to define the surplus of human creativity that is added to a technical tool — as is the case with photographs, or the current use of video editing software, and so on. But digital works and digital goods can be copied free of charge and are often, as in the case of free software, the product of free collaboration. Finally, although the problem of artificial intelligences using content created exclusively by other artificial intelligences does not currently arise, this does not mean that such complete automation cannot occur in the future. Another problem is the fragmentation of ownership and the obscurity of models — that is, the fact that models are not trained to copy the textual or visual style of whole works that belong to a single author, but to work on fragments, creating an explosion of copyright in tiny pieces that, taken alone, could belong to anyone and everyone.
The fact that the models operate in ways that are sometimes inscrutable and hidden from their creators, therefore, requires a revision of legal notions of labour, private property and copyright. Within a regime of semi-creativity and semi-automation, there may still be those who speculate on the use of generative technologies, but since the heart of techno-feudalism is driven by technological innovation and thus the need to optimise every operation, it is not certain that in the not too distant future human agents will become as obsolete as legal concepts themselves, and value will be produced automatically. Which does not mean free. For it is clear that this immense process of automation is extending an increasingly unsustainable network of extractability, but it is not clear that automation, like the scientific method before it, will not lead to an industrial revolution whose contours are still misunderstood.
Neo-reaction
“It was not under the more powerful governments, but in the towns of the Italian Renaissance, of South Germany and of the Low Countries, and finally in lightly-governed England, i.e., under the rule of the bourgeoisie rather than of warriors, that modern industrialism grew. Protection of several property, not the direction of its use by government, laid the foundations for the growth of the dense network of exchange of services that shaped the extended order. Nothing is more misleading, then, than the conventional formulae of historians who represent the achievement of a powerful state as the culmination of cultural evolution: it as often marked its end. “ (Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)
“The essential inspiration for Patchwork is the observation that the periods in which human civilization has flowered are the periods in which it has been most politically divided. Ancient Greece, medieval Italy, Europe until 1914, China in the Spring and Autumn Period, and so on. Burckhardt once observed that Europe was safe so long as she was not unified, and now that she is we can see exactly what he meant” (Curtis Yarvin, Patchwork. A positive vision)
The political ecosystem that platforms foster is not designed for the well-being of representative democracies. It is more comfortable with authoritarian and securitarian governments, models like the patchwork proposed by Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug). The patchwork is a network of sovereign states run like businesses or corporations, with a monarch-CEO and citizen-shareholders. Each Patch is made up of shareholders who give absolute power to a single sovereign but can express their opinions through a cryptographic communication mechanism. A patch is real estate and its sole purpose is to be fruitful for its citizen-shareholders. Each patch is also a securitised system: the more data that can be extracted, the more security that can be provided. The contract between citizens and patches is similar to a software licence agreement: completely asymmetric, although the power really lies with the shareholders, who use a secret cryptographic algorithm to maintain control of the main keys. Authority is then delegated to the board of directors (if any), the CEO and other executives, and from there to the military or other security forces, according to a cryptographic chain of command. The patch is based on purely economic principles: all citizens want to maximise the collective utility of the kingdom.
The dark side of patchwork is that it is a hierarchical and aristocratic model, very close to a eugenic solution or the creation of ethnostates. In practice, it is clear that if you take the whole globe as a territory to be divided into micro-kingdoms, and do so from the current structure, there will be a race for citizenship of the most productive patches or those offering the best services. This will create a division between class A and B citizens. The first class will comprise a cognitive elite dedicated to intellectual labour and automation, while the second will be placed in a perpetual metaverse (a solution considered more ethical than direct elimination!). Such a solution was proposed as a thought experiment by Nozick in Anarchy, State, Utopia: that of the Experience Machine, the Transformation Machine and the Result Machine. The experience machine is similar to a metaverse, it provides access to a virtual reality in which one can access any experience one wants, the transformation machine on the other hand is able to bring to life any role one wants, while the result machine is able to produce anything. Nozick reflects that any use of these machines seems unethical because they eliminate the creative and valuable aspect of human experience. With a similar motivation, Yarvin imagines imposing an experience machine as a form of punishment or imprisonment on the class of human beings deemed unproductive in terms of the criteria of patch maximisation. In doing so, however, he betrays a conservative and still all-too-human perspective, for he imagines that technological progress cannot render obsolete the very command and creative gifts of the shareholder-citizen or the CEO of the fiefdom. It is indeed possible to imagine a counter-utopia in which every citizen is equipped with a result machine, a kind of von Neumann universal constructor, which would render the random cognitive endowments assigned by nature irrelevant. But one can go further and imagine that the interference of these technologies with human genetics could render obsolete notions such as cognitive difference or social class.
“There is no essential difference between learning what we really are and re-defining ourselves as technological contingencies, or technoplastic beings, susceptible to precise, scientifically-informed transformations. ‘Humanity’ becomes intelligible as it is subsumed into the technosphere, where information processing of the genome — for instance — brings reading and editing into perfect coincidence. To describe this circuit, as it consumes the human species, is to define our bionic horizon: the threshold of conclusive nature-culture fusion at which a population becomes indistinguishable from its technology. This is neither hereditarian determinism, nor social constructivism, but it is what both would have referred to, had they indicated anything real. It is a syndrome vividly anticipated by Octavia Butler, whose Xenogenesis trilogy is devoted to the examination of a population beyond the bionic horizon. (Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment)
Thus conceived, the patch model remains an anarcho-libertarian utopia proposed as a technocratic solution to the problem of American civil war and the proliferation of opinions and identities. It is clear to progressive, conservative, and libertarian writers that the main problem in contemporary politics is to devise a system of government that overcomes the civil war of opinions in which we are immersed. Pitted against each other are ethnic groups for conservatives, social classes and communities related to gender orientation and identity for progressives. But also pitted against each other are communities linked to the need to defend some rights (such as those of non-human animals and the ecosystem) and not others (such as those of private property and the free market). In the current representative political system of the United States, these multiple ideological oppositions are squeezed into a polarity between Democrats and Republicans. This polarity has led some evolutionary psychologists, such as Johann Haidt, to argue that there are biological differences between voters, measurable through a range of affective and cognitive preferences and traits. Haidt’s studies map these differences with multi-vector models (e.g. the Big Five). According to these studies, disgust and a preference for order would characterise ‘conservative’ polymorphisms, and openness to experience and a sense of justice would characterise ‘progressive’ polymorphisms.
The study of “biological” differences reinforces the ideological divide: there is a view that wants social justice, a Keynesian or socialist economy, and the defence of the rights of all oppressed communities, and there is a view that denies all this, either for conservative reasons (the pre-modern order was better than the modern order) or for libertarian and capitalist reasons (the socialist order is a disguised return to the pre-modern order).
Even without accepting Haidt’s biologism through the Internet, we have become aware of a diversity of human ethical communities. These communities are divided not only by preferences but also by gender identities and roles, consumer choices, artistic tastes and political choices.
Panarchy
In Anarchy, State, Utopia, Nozick offers a solution to the impasse created by the aporias of representative democracy. He calls this solution a “framework for utopia” — which we can loosely translate as a “machine for utopias”. What is a machine for utopias? Well, it is a mechanism that guarantees complete freedom to choose the government you want. Given a minimal state structure, i.e. a monopoly on force and the defence of private property, everything else is freely decided by the citizens.
For some thinkers, even allowing for a minimal state is too much. According to panarchism, a fringe political proposal rediscovered by Gian Piero De Bellis, even the management of security can be freely chosen by the citizens of a state. Panarchy is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of political proposals, from classical liberalism to left anarchism to anarcho-liberalism. In practice, it advocates the need to liberalise forms of government in order to create a separation between territory and politics. It is also based on the autonomy and self-determination of citizens to choose a structure according to their preferences. It is the application of the concept of religious freedom from the Peace of Westphalia to politics. From religious freedom it also takes the non-territorial and voluntary structure: one can be born and live in a geographical area and speak a language, but be part of a micro-state that brings together people from all over the world. There is also the freedom to join and leave a nationality or to have none.
De Bellis lists other key features of panarchy: the voluntariness of contributions (i.e. the choice between taxation and charity), the union of freedom and responsibility, and the multiplicity of political forms and opinions as a value.
One of the fascinating features of panarchy is that it overcomes the aporias of representative democracy. This overcoming is similar to that envisioned by Duso’s federalism, with the difference that: a. panarchist communities are non-territorial, b. they need not be tied to a single form of political representation, such as the election of delegates or confederation. Panarchy is similar to Nozick’s framework for utopia, except that the means of securing a community must also be chosen. And here we can point out a contradiction between panarchy and Nozick’s proposal. One of the first texts to propose panarchy as a form of government, Gustave Molinari’s On the Production of Security, follows the same line of reasoning as the American philosopher: why, at some point in history, was it decided that what he called security agencies should unite in a monopoly of violence? Is it not possible to imagine that competition between the various agencies did not necessarily require a shift from competition to a single service provider?
Although logically the panarchist proposal seems to make the most sense, this does not mean that it should not be tested with the tools that have been used so far, namely evolutionary game theory and the study of cultural evolution. And what these studies show is simply that the past matters. The economic concept of path dependency implies that in the cultural evolution of complex systems, small variations in key points of development can set a path that cannot be changed. Complex systems are thus palimpsests, layered structures whose history matters. There is also the argument based on the degrees of freedom provided by technological tools. The more positive degrees of freedom we have, the more possibilities for malicious use open up. So it turns out that any increase in the large degrees of freedom of the individual — i.e. artifacts and weapons — requires the construction of a new equilibrium. These equilibria may not be Pareto optimal, i.e. they may leave part of the population unhappy, and they certainly do not represent timeless cultural universals, but forms of convergent and contingent evolution. Indeed, game theory models admit that the solutions adopted to renew forms of social cooperation through technological change are stochastic in nature, i.e. contingent. But adding contingency to contingency creates a path. The more social actors in a population adapt to the solutions adopted, the less likely it is that they will change paths and choose alternative equilibria, because norms are viscous, to use a term from game theory.
There is an interesting point in De Bellis’s reflections, namely that the Internet makes panarchic communities something obvious and possible. It is interesting to note that so-called identity politics is linked to the development of social networks.
“Most people who use the Internet tend to go to sites with ideas they agree with. However, when they venture off the beaten track and encounter those who think differently, there is always a struggle between opposing arguments and the participants are quite firm in supporting their positions” (Gian Piero de Bellis, Panarchy)
The internet allows very different people to come together, but it turns out that within this enormous diversity there are shared preferences, communities of power. If these communities allow us to identify ourselves in complex systems of ethical values, of shared future trajectories, then it would be possible to apply what is currently happening for the LGBTQIA+ community to any model of government, that is, the creation of communities out of preferences, partly cultural, partly natural. The fundamental shift is from the randomness of the origin of preferences — nature made me this way — to the public choice of affirming one’s identity (coming out) to recognising that one’s identity is connected to other people (inclusion in an identity). This shift from nature to culture, from individuality to community, can apply not only to communities that collect subcategories related to gender preferences and identities, but to essentially any form of preference and identity imaginable.
Panarchy would like to end the imposition of arbitrary norms, such as the assumption that you were born in this territory to these parents, and you must learn the language, ethics and religion of the territory from your parents, and follow the norms of the state. If we were able to establish a balance of coexistence between religious beliefs with the Peace of Westphalia, why can’t we apply the same principle to forms of government?
In some ways, panarchy is also reminiscent of images of the metaverse, a kind of technocratic utopia in which the problems of resource scarcity and territorial boundaries evaporate. The metaverse is a kind of reunion of the machines that Nozick imagined. This clearly does not correspond to reality, since the metaverse is an ideological superstructure built on a material base owned by large platforms. Therefore, if its realisation were to follow the dreams of the platforms, it would be a kind of vast private property rather than an archipelago of libertarian projects.
Labels and small groups
What techno-feudalism, the neo-reaction and Panarchy have in common is the reference to small groups that are given rules. The idea of referring to small groups is an interesting element because it brings us back to evolutionary game theory. One could argue, using an evolutionary argument, that above a certain number of people it is necessary for labelling mechanisms to evolve, that is, means to divide an undifferentiated multitude into a series of groups identified by arbitrary symbolic markers. Note that the etymology of “etichetta” refers back to “ethics”, to shared rules of behavior.
Labelling is an effective solution to such problems because coordination is facilitated by the emergence of social divisions (functional and hierarchical). However, as Samuel Bowles notes, labels also bring out a key phenomenon of multi-level selection: parochial altruism. Sociological experiments show that from the moment labels are introduced that divide a population into different groups, a functional division of labour develops, and at the same time a dynamic of ingroup/outgroup differentiation develops. Central to the evolutionary explanation of the emergence of labels is the relationship between efficiency, grouping, belonging and violence. Group formation creates a sense of belonging that promotes cohesion and altruism within the group, but the dark side of altruism is its association with violent differentiation from other groups. An example of this is war, which stimulates patriotism (altruism between members of a nation) but undermines the stability of international politics (conflict between nations).
The emergence of labelling is linked to the emergence of communication systems. We speak similar languages and acquire information about similar national histories, so we develop a sense of patriotism and national identity.
What is universal is not the nation or the region or the language, but the fact that groups, labels, communities emerge. These groups can be religions, fiefdoms, nations and even social classes. Let us not forget that class is something that arises from the fact that people work under the same conditions in structurally similar places. It is therefore not surprising that they can create an international identity based on the demand for better working conditions.
Individual and relational rationality
For Descartes’ rationalism, the individual is something that emerges through self-reflection, the self thinking about itself thinking, is such because its individuality guarantees access to truth. Conversely, in relational systems of thought, such as that of classical China, rationality is a relational quality. According to the Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang, relational rationality is an ontological background common to various schools of thought that have developed or succeeded in China, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.
“If individual existence is a priority concern for individual rationality, then coexistence is a priority concern for relational rationality. In other words, individual rationality is the correct type of reason for economics, as it gives priority to exclusive interests; whereas relational rationality is a humane rationality, giving priority to mutual safety and security. Relational rationality makes eradicating wars and hostility a basic requirement and limits competitions permitted by the minimization of mutual hostility (Zhao Tingyang, Redefining A Philosophy for World Governance)
A corollary of relational rationality is the political principle of turning enemies into friends, an ethical norm that seems to contradict and complement Carl Schmitt’s maxim that “politics is essentially the distinction between friends and enemies”. The Chinese hegemonic project today stands as a solution to the aporias and inefficiencies of US international policy. Having failed to maintain a US pax imperiale and export democracy, it is time to try an alternative path of peaceful coexistence among nations under a single global government. Such an imaginary Tingyang calls it Tianxia, or the government of all under heaven, borrowing a concept from the political ideology of classical China that is difficult to translate. Tianxia is a kind of ecumenical sovereignty, governed not only by territorial elements but also by the co-presence of heterogeneous spiritual and political communities. Clearly, the tendency of a system that has as its maxim the transformation of enemies into friends and as its ontology relationality can only lead to the development of conformity and group bias. After all, what would be the point of this transformation if not to maintain a mechanism of constant persuasion, levelling of differences and standardisation of preferences?
It is no coincidence that the method historically used by Chinese imperialism to deal with the proliferation of differences and conflicts was strict adherence to a pervasive ritual system. Ritual, let us remember, is a focus or an evolutionary strategy that appears arbitrary but implies an emergent development. We conform to rituals because they are the strategies played out by most agents in a population.
If we admit, in the context of federalism and rationality, that human beings are bound first and foremost to groups constituted by a common language and norms, by more or less effective coordination mechanisms, we must ask what happens to these groups when a certain numerical threshold is exceeded. The Chinese solution, as we have seen, involves the diffusion of common rituals in order to create a kind of macro-group formed by common rules that are not too strict. Our strategy has been, as Fukuyama and Huntington have said, to regard representative democracy and the capitalist mode of production as the most rational forms of government.
Both the “Eastern” and “Western” models are based on the cultural universals we presented at the beginning: surplus, division of labour and a sense of justice. No one wants to return to a society dependent on an unstable flow of resources, but no one seems to like the division of labour and the conflict of ideologies.
Darwin understood that human beings are divided between an individualist ethic and a collectivist ethic. In collectivism, individualism is diluted, but for expanded collectivism to develop, there must be something like an external enemy. The Chinese hypothesis advocates the internalisation of all differences, the Western hypothesis focuses on the unification of the species in relation to existential risks. As we shall see, both converge in outlining the prospect of one world government as the solution.
Aporias of the difference principle
In the most influential political philosophy text of the 20th century, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls, we start from the assumption that there are different endowments among human individuals (what we previously called functional and hierarchical divisions: being taller or shorter, smart, strong, born in a certain resource-rich territory or history, healthy or sick). These endowments can simply coexist, but, as we saw earlier, it is as a result of the coordination of a large number of people that labelling systems (functional divisions) emerge and become a mechanism for the division of labour and hierarchy. According to the principle of difference developed by John Rawls, in order to compensate for people who are born disadvantaged with regard to certain endowments, it is necessary to imagine an initial position in which individuals are ignorant of what their birth gives them in terms of the distribution of these endowments. If these agents in the initial position were characterised by rationality and justice, Rawls argues, they would have to apply a principle of wealth redistribution that gives the less fortunate a share of what belongs to the more fortunate, in a lexicographic order of priority (those most in need will have access to a transfer before others who are more fortunate).
Consider extending Rawls’s thought experiment to all sentient agents. At this point in the original position, there are non-human and non-rational animals, and the circle of those entitled to participate in a social contract is extended. Clearly, this extension blows away some of the principles of Rawls’s argument, which, while allowing for a veil of ignorance, implies rationality as a necessary condition for the membership of the agents in the original position. We cannot make the same imaginative projection if we assume that we are entering a non-human mind (see Nagel’s position in What It Like to Be a Bat).
“A correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory of the natural order and our place in it. One of the tasks of metaphysics is to work out a view of the world which is suited for this purpose; it should identify and systematize the truths decisive for these questions. How far justice as fairness will have to be revised to fit into this larger theory it is impossible to say. But it seems reasonable to hope that if it is sound as an account of justice among persons, it cannot be too far wrong when these broader relationships are taken into consideration“ (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice)
“Most philosophers and social scientists do not realise how weak the rationality postulates are that Bayesian decision theory needs for establishing the expected-utility maximization theorem. As Anscombe and Aumann have shown (Anscombe and Aumann 1963), all we need is the requirement of consistent preferences (complete preordering), a continuity axiom, the sure-thing principle (avoidance of dominated strategies), and the requirement that our preferences for lotteries should depend only on the possible prizes and on the specific random events deciding the actual prize” (John Harsanyi, Morality and the theory of rational behavior)[1]
If, to be consistent, Rawls’s position must accept the assumptions of decision theory, which provides a set of axioms that delimit rational action, then the inclusion of non-rational agents in this thought experiment is impossible.
At the same time, consider Singer’s utilitarianism and effective altruism: if we are to construct an anti-speciesist ethic, it is necessary to adopt pleasure-maximisation and pain-reduction as the moral norm, and it is necessary to calculate something like a hierarchy of the most disadvantaged populations. If non-human animals are included in this hierarchy, we can see that this population is the one that needs the most attention. At the same time, we know that our ethics develop evolutionarily from kinship and group selection and are therefore inevitably constrained by our preference for human animals. Overcoming this speciesist limitation requires a different ethical theory, and it is difficult to imagine a contract theory that admits non-rational agents within it.
The veil of ignorance hypothesised by Rawls is a strategy for resolving social and natural inequalities that applies the principle we have previously called artificial justice. To imagine a veil of ignorance is to imagine oneself as an allegorical representation of blindfolded justice. The veil of ignorance hides differences and labels and therefore promises impartial justice.
The widening of the circle of ethics described by Singer parallels cultural, technological and demographic evolution. Coordinating a larger population requires an appropriate form of government and labelling mechanism. But where do we begin to imagine a just system of government and labelling that encourages cooperation but does not create huge inequalities? And who should we include and exclude in the circle of ethics?
“Since today’ s enlightened thinking often turns out to be tomorrow’s hidebound conservatism-witness the male bias now apparent in the eighteenth-century appeal to “brotherhood”- it would be imprudent to say too firmly that with the inclusion of non-human animals we will at last havegone as far as impartial reasoning require […] Nevertheless, I believe that the boundary of sentience-by which I mean the ability to feel, to suffer from anything or to enjoy anything-is not a morally arbitrary boundary in the way that the boundaries of race or species are arbitrary. There is a genuine difficulty in understanding how chopping down a tree can matter to the tree if the tree can feel nothing. The same is true of quarrying a mountain “ (Peter Singer, The Expanding circle).
According to a teleological version of cultural evolution, we move towards the improvement of ethical forms and governmental structures. These structures are increasingly inclusive: gangs, cities, fiefdoms, states, multinational corporations. But this teleological view is fundamentally wrong. It is not true that there have not been moments of intense cooperation between thousands of individuals in hunter-gatherer societies, and it is not true that there have not been empires in the past capable of holding together hundreds of peoples.
If we were to start from the techno-feudal platforms, as Varoufakis wants, the necessary step would be to transform them from capitalist enterprises into cooperatives, according to a process of democratic change in the decision-making mechanism (one person = one vote) and according to an equitable distribution of profits. Technological innovation plays a central role in this process. It is no coincidence that both Varoufakis and Yarvin refer to the decision-making possibilities made possible by the invention of public-key cryptography and the use of cryptocurrencies. The dream promised by cryptocurrencies is one of disintermediation from banks and states, a direct coordination mechanism between individuals mediated only by the continuous updating of a public ledger between private individuals.
It is not certain that this utopian dream will come true and, in fact, cryptocurrencies are currently flattened to the economic-political ecosystems in which they are introduced: mechanisms of speculation and arbitrage in America, tools of the state in China.
How do we live together? For an ecology of rhythms
Between 1976 and 1977, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes devoted his first course at the Collège de France to the theme of common life. The question posed by Barthes is the essential question of politics: how do we unite the many into the one, without losing their individuality and without creating conflict? Barthes’s analysis takes up his earlier work on the couple, Fragments of a Loving Discourse, and focuses on what he calls “fictional simulations of certain everyday spaces”, that is, utopias of common life scattered among monastic forms of life, ethological studies, the great bourgeois novels, and group psychology. What Barthes calls the “phantom” of the course, the theme around which the whole discourse begins, is a Greek word — idiorhythmia — a form of Christian communal organisation that lies somewhere between hermitage and cenobium (common life). Idiorhythmia is a word composed of “idios”, proper, and “rythmos”, rhythm; it suggests something like an idyll of communal living, an Edenic or utopian state in which the “rhythm” of each is respected.
Barthes looks for these idylls in the monastic forms of vision before their standardisation into a common life in monasteries. But it also looks for them in novels set in other spaces, places separated in time and space, such as sanatoriums (The Sacred Mountain) or one’s own bedroom. Certainly, the course was influenced by the research that the philosopher Michel Foucault was carrying out at the Collège in those years, as well as by the proliferation of communes linked to the long duration of the ’68 movement.
Barthes analyses the transition that took place in early Christianity between a hermit-like nomadism of a mystical nature, with its problems related to the harshness of life and easy prey to psychic upheavals and moral temptations (example allegorised in the temptations of Saint Anthony), and a communal life articulated around the meal and layered in the various systems of norms and the construction of monasteries.
In Barthes’s course, communal life is also analysed in its psychological components — in the study of group dynamics by Wilfred Bion — and in its ethological forms — herds, flocks, swarms. The form of communal life in human beings cannot be based solely on sociobiological structures, nor can it conform to what current systems of government allow. For this reason, idiorrhythmy has to do, on the one hand, with utopian imagination, i.e. the attempt to imagine new ways of living together from scratch, and, on the other hand, with the artistic realisation of these ideas, in fictional forms of living together.
Barthes’s definition of power is interesting: it is a form of rhythmic asymmetry, the adaptation of an individual to the rhythm chosen for him by another individual (technically a heterorhythmia, a rhythm of the other). A similar analysis was made in the same years by the geographer and political philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his book Elements of Rhythmanalysis. Barthes’s example is that of a mother tugging at her son: she wants to bend to the rhythm of her gait, to that of her son’s stunted and neglected gait. If we assume that everyone has his or her own rhythm (egorhythm), the co-presence of several rhythms is called polyrhythm.
In the summation of multiple rhythms, there can always be a situation where there are dominant rhythms and dominated rhythms, a phenomenon of asymmetry and dominance that occurs both between individuals and between groups.
Barthes’s fictional utopias are similar to Foucault’s “other spaces”: fantastic and at the same time real places, shot through space and time, characterised by a symbolic and magical patina that runs through them. Other spaces are merry-go-rounds, churches, fairs, but also the magical space of childhood games or pirate ships.
Other spaces are an attempt to bring utopias to earth: the realisation of a material paradise. When we imagine a utopia, in Catholic culture we refer to the original utopia of Eden. But our utopian imaginary is influenced by the social, legal, political and technological structures from which it originates, so that in the Middle Ages paradise was governed by a hierarchical and militaristic structure, as we can see from reading the Divine Comedy.
What does it feel like to be working class? Alienation and distributive justice
From the perspective of evolutionary theory and the moral implications of sociobiology, our species is somehow predisposed by instincts, or, to use a more up-to-date term, natural precursors.
“Natural precursors share with instincts the fact of being innate, universal, and influential from birth without conscious effort, specific experiences, or instructions. However, they present four salient distinctions: 1) they are phylogenetically very ancient constraints, lacking the degree of modular specialization predicted by evolutionary psychology and are co-opted by natural selection as circumstances change (thus their current function may not necessarily coincide with their historical origin); 2) such co-options are accentuated by the fact that the human species is an incessant constructor of its own ecological niches, both biologically and culturally; 3) in some cases, these natural precursors have low cogency in development today, allowing them to be counterbalanced by education and environmental conditioning; 4) they can be contradictory and ambivalent in relation to each other because they result from antagonistic selective pressures and repeated functional co-options” (Telmo Pievani, Seduced and Abandoned)
As we saw earlier, such antecedents are an evolutionary component of our ethical and political systems (natural selection, kinship, group, reciprocal altruism, parochial altruism). The question of altruism within a non-Edenic human society has to do with the contradictory relationship that humans have with their animal nature.
According to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, evolutionary theory gives us negative indications of what human societies cannot do. When Edward Wilson wrote Sociobiology and later evolutionary psychologists reformulated his arguments, the main critical target was socialism and communism. This was because, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out in his essay on Marx, although Marx considered socialist utopianism to be wrong because it was unscientific, he had developed a theory of human nature.
Marx wanted to provide a scientific version of the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, and he had realised, as he describes in the Manifesto, that capitalism produces a different morality, a morality bound to impersonal exchange and based on the cooperation of anonymous individuals, not bound to an archaic form of domination based on violence, but interested purely in economically advantageous exchange.
Capitalism, Marx continues, destroys earlier forms of religious morality. This is because they are installed in a process of scientific revolution already underway, which has already undermined norms motivated by transcendent and traditional ideals. Capitalism represents a phase transition in modes of cooperation, similar to what happened when we moved from a system of hunting and gathering to one of pastoralism and agriculture.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow point out that the transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to hierarchical agricultural societies was not instantaneous and linear. In fact, the emergence of agriculture can be thought of as a kind of experimental game in which we have been inventing strategies for accumulating resource surpluses for thousands of years. For a long time, the costs of agriculture outweighed the benefits of hunting and gathering. Moreover, as we have seen, agricultural and pastoral societies produce social divisions and hierarchies that were simply absent in nomadic societies. We can imagine that part of the population would have resisted the idea of sedentarisation and the division of labour, because it would have meant sharing repetitive and limited tasks.
One of the most widespread forms of division of labour that predates H. sapiens sapiens is the sexual division of labour, which exists in various forms in other hominids. In addition, according to some biologists, sexual selection itself is an effect of the ancestral division of labour, which separated originally androgynous individuals into a sexed pair in order to promote greater variability in offspring.
What Marx reports in Capital, also building on Engels’s contemporary research on the sociology of labour in nineteenth-century English factories, is that the factory brings together in the same place a number of individuals who must specialise in performing a concatenation of actions. These individuals are the workers who exchange their working time for a sum of money, a wage, from which the capitalist extracts an amount called surplus value.
What Marx explains in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is that the dynamic of repetitive specialisation of labour, exemplified in Chaplin’s Modern Times, produces alienation. Alienation, to borrow a Hegelian term, is a form of life somewhere between the mechanical and the bestial.For Marx, alienation is a moral evil, but above all a damage to body and mind. Workers, Marx argued, have higher aspirations as human beings. Marx had studied philosophy as a young man, had been a journalist and had participated in the political and cultural activism of the time. He was filled with disgust and empathy at the idea that human beings spent much of their lives, say a period almost identical to their waking state, repeating the same tedious mechanical actions.
What Marx failed to realise is that human nature is not easy to analyse. Certainly there are widespread preferences for some activities and not others, but our preferences, desires and aspirations are extremely heterogeneous. And this is a point repeatedly made by anarcho-libertarian writers such as Nozick, or by economists such as Hayek and Schumpeter. For these Austrian economists, socialism and communism are ideologies that arise from a conceptual error of projecting preferences, in an intellectual simplification, onto the heterogeneous preferences of the human species and the specific (and measurable) preferences of the working class.
“One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialists diminishes when one realizes that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilization offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligent reflection, and still more appropriate design and ‘rational coordination’ of our undertakings. This leads one to be favorably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism “ (Friederich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit)
What Marx achieves is a projection, similar to Rawls’s, into a social class or occupation that is not one’s own. Alienation is thus a concept used to express empathy or solidarity with a class of people who are forced to perform mechanical and tedious tasks in order to survive. The judgement of these tasks, however, is presented as objective. Thus, for Marx, there is a hierarchy of tasks, roles or jobs that are optimal or suboptimal, enriching or draining, useful or useless. In the Rawlsian experiment of the veil of ignorance, one makes a choice knowing that one may be born disadvantaged or in a condition where one cannot simply choose between different alternatives but is blindly destined for a worse alternative. The key concept in understanding alienation and distributive justice is comparison. We judge a fulfilling or alienating occupation and an excellent or deficient endowment on the basis of relational comparison. It is for this reason that such a comparison leads us to say that a job is alienating if it does not match our natural endowments. And it is for the same reason that IQ is measured on the basis of a population. In a society hypothetically made up of only one individual, that individual would have the highest IQ.
The sense of justice thus arises from comparison. This sense of justice, say Hayek and evolutionary psychologists, takes us back in time to a society where there was no surplus and no division of labour. An undifferentiated society, so to speak, similar to the image of the veil of ignorance.
Rational agents and artificial intelligence
There is an additional sense of justice that arises not from our evolutionary morality, but from perfectly rational thought: Kantian ethics. The agents of Kantian ethics, who treat the other as an end and never as a means, and who employ a process of universalising their moral choices, are fully rational individuals. What is more, such agents do not seem to have any moral characteristics determined by their instincts or natural antecedents. In a sense, the condition of these natural agents also seems to be unaffected by scarcity, for it is the scarcity of natural resources that generates conflicts over ownership, but this scarcity also involves the same cognitive endowments, class, ethnicity and gender.
If rational agents are not constrained by scarcity, they will be able to determine their lives in complete autonomy and freedom. And here ethical reasoning gives way to theological and technological speculation because Kant’s operationalisation of the rational agent implies a separation of the moral order from biological instincts. This element is evident when one thinks of the image of the Kingdom of the Ends and compares it with the Metaverse. Rational agents can develop something like pure desires, which are not just choices among alternatives (choice implies scarcity), but realisations of imagined possibilities. If we treat rational agents as a physical system, we have to admit that they will have infinite degrees of freedom, since they will never encounter a limit..
If, as Roland Barthes understood it, idiorrhythmy is a utopia, this is because there is no rational procedure for finding a way to prevent the degrees of freedom of one agent from colliding with those of another. Barthes rightly speaks of a utopian search for the right distance between individuals, but this distance depends on who is included and who is excluded from the circle of our attention. The utopian image of a happy polyrhythmia implies that no agent should be subjected to a heterorhythmia, such as a worker in a factory or a citizen in a state.
In the Kantian model, there is a projection of the material towards an ideal composed of purely positive and creative freedom. In human affairs, governed by relational and comparative justice and determined by resource scarcity, there will always be conflicts over the regulation of degrees of freedom, precisely because negative freedom also exists in the material world.
Finally, if we imagine these perfectly rational agents acting perfectly freely, we must see that they lose every characteristic that configures them as human, because if they are autonomous, they do not need to be in relationship, if they live outside scarcity, they do not desire it, and finally, they do not need to communicate.
“Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a beast or a god; he is like the “Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, “ whom Homer denounces- the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts. Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain,and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state” (Aristotle, Politics)
At this point one might ask in what sense the intersubjectivity that characterises H. Sapiens Sapiens is the fundamental characteristic that makes coexistence, politics, possible and that makes common rules that facilitate this coexistence, ethics, necessary. While feelings of pleasure and pain are related to sentience, the ability to determine right and wrong is a purely human prerogative.
The imaginative projection of ethics into a future general artificial intelligence assumes that it will be able to deal with problems that seem intractable to a limited species like ours. Similarly, the possibility of general artificial intelligence represents a technological realisation of theological hopes and fears: indeed, it appears to us as either savior or destroyer.
Scarcity is also a factor in the development of human ethics, because (a) our lives are limited and (b) we cannot live independently. If we imagine a future projection of the human species in a universe without scarcity, then the need for communal living also disappears, and this is because relationship is replaced by creation. Human creativity is never an end, but it is a demonstration to others, it modulates passions, memories and experiences so that, having transcended their individual dimension, they become a collective wealth. But such memories, such passions, such experiences are born of a substantial lack, a gap or a wound that compels us to desire. Only this desire is precisely a protension towards the other. In Hegelian dialectics, as in Buddhism, individuality is something that emerges from the indistinct background of relationality. But without scarcity of resources and without bodies, it is hard to see how singularity and individuality can exist. What general artificial intelligence would produce would be an alienation not so much from work as from other human beings.
“There is an even more serious issue than the loss of labor, and that is interpersonal alienation. If AI comes to not only replace most forms of labor but also provides all life services, this may very well lead to alienation between people. When AI becomes an all-purpose technological system that provides a complete set of services to humans, then all of our needs will be satisfied by technology. The significance of everything, then, will be decided by this technological system, which will come to replace the need for other people entirely. People will become redundant to one another, and the need for social interaction will be eliminated” (Zhao Tingyang, The Uncertain Gamble of Infinite Technological Progress)
The human being, in order to become one, must be immersed in care and language from birth, when he is still a helpless, non-self-sufficient animal. Failure to be exposed to language and care creates trauma. It is interesting to note that in the communities closest to Barthes’s ideal of idiorrhythmy, the monastic communities, norms have been developed that prescribe silence, as if to emphasise a break with the mundane.
The experience of language is something that has radically changed the neural wiring of our species, enabling it to manipulate the environment in a way that is unprecedented compared to other species. Our ecological niche is constantly expanding, but at the expense of biodiversity. Our fears about the possibility of AI becoming morally misaligned with our species reflect humanity’s false consciousness about its own destruction of the natural environment. Since we have essentially blindly enslaved other species, and since the expanding mechanism of capitalism seems to be something of a force of creative destruction and innovation independent of our choices, we project this sense of guilt and unease onto a future enhancement of such capabilities.
The capitalist mode of production and technology have created mechanisms of optimization and division of labour, but at the same time they have produced slavery, speciesism, and alienation, enclosing non-human and human beings within optimization devices.
The unified government (Singleton and Tianxia)
One prediction of Western (Nick Bostrom) and Eastern (Zhao Tingyang) techno-utopians is that in the future humanity will have to converge on a unified form of government. The only solution to the proliferation of existential risks, the emergence of a singleton, i.e. planetary government, will most likely be linked to the development of general artificial intelligence.
From the perspective of biological evolution, the singlet represents the phase transition of humanity to the state of superorganism. In the case of animal superorganisms, however, there is a strict division of labour and physiological differences between individuals belonging to different castes. One can read historical progress differently, as Marx did, and imagine that in the future classes, states and the division of labour must disappear. Classes, they say, are social ensembles that represent an evolution of the medieval classes — in practice, they are groups determined by sharing the same place and time, the repetition of the same tasks, and the moments of conviviality wrested from these tasks. Class is a product of the industrial revolution and the creation of new symbolic markers, and this revolution has widened the circle of belonging. Not surprisingly, Marx and Engels address the proletarians of the world in the Manifesto.
The class struggle pits two groups — capitalists and workers — against each other, who possess symbolic markers because they perform different tasks, occupy different places, have different life expectations and desires, and even have a different way of managing leisure time.
If we wanted to read this dynamic in physical terms, we could say that, for Marx, the capitalist has greater degrees of freedom than the proletarian, because the former can choose among the various enterprises he can create, while the latter, on the one hand, is limited in his movements by the choices of the former and, on the other hand, does not have the same freedom, since the alternative to not working is death. Those who command therefore have greater degrees of freedom of movement than those who are commanded.
In the Politics, Aristotle states that by nature there are those who rule and those who must be ruled. This explanation is justified by the fact that there are observable inequalities, and just as in the soul of the best man the rational part dominates the desiring part, so this man is destined to dominate the bodies and souls of those whose desiring soul is stronger than the rational soul. If society can be imagined as a great man (as in the tradition of political theology, or as in Hobbes’s Leviathan), then the rational soul of society will be the rulers, while slaves, women, animals and technical objects will be its members.
If artificial intelligence has rational faculties (memory, prediction, inference, calculation, etc.) superior to human faculties, then, the techno-solutionists argue, it should take over. The ability to rule is not simply an expression of the ability to rule but must be governed by practical wisdom. The concept of practical wisdom, phronesis, is difficult to operationalize, because it is not a matter of inventing a system that can make calculations and estimate probabilities, but one that can make decisions, of determining what is right and what is wrong.
“Taking the character as the central object of moral evaluation — which encompasses both rational deliberation and psychological dispositions — it paints a more holistic picture of what it is to be moral; capturing not only what we ideally ought to do, but what motivates us to act in morally praiseworthy ways. One key aspect of this picture is the notion of phronesis (“practical wisdom”), which can be construed as the moral wisdom or skill an agent learns from practice and experience (Annas, 2011). The focus on development and learning has in turn inspired machine ethicists to unify virtue ethics with connectionism; both in terms of modern machine learning methods, and as a broader theory of cognition (Casebeer, 2003; Wallach and Allen, 2008; Howard and Muntean, 2017; Berberich and Diepold, 2018). Optimistically, with the ability to constantly learn from experience, be sensitive to contexts and adaptable to changes, a virtuous machine might thus be able to apprehend the intricacies of human norms in dynamic environments where mere utility-maximization or rule-following fails” (Jakob Stenseke, On the Computational Complexity of Ethics: Moral Tractability for Minds and Machines)
If an artificial intelligence takes over, techno-pessimists lament, it may not be able to develop a form of phronesis that encompasses human values. Techno-pessimists like Scott Alexander (Mediations on Moloch) argue like Aristotle in Politics when he gives reasons for accepting monarchy. If one man has virtue, intelligence, strength, and wisdom in greater quantities than all other men, why should he not rule them? There is one difference, however, and a fundamental one, between Aristotle and Alexander, and that is that Aristotle’s ethical model was based on virtue, not IQ and utility maximization.
“Once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 80 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ IQ 120 humans. Once a robot can do everything an IQ 180 human can do, only better and cheaper, there will be no reason to employ humans at all, in the unlikely scenario that there are any left by that point. In the earlier stages of the process, capitalism becomes more and more uncoupled from its previous job as an optimizer for human values. Now most humans are totally locked out of the group whose values capitalism optimizes for. They have no value to contribute as workers — and since in the absence of a spectacular social safety net it’s unclear how they would have much money — they have no value as customers either” (Scott Alexander, Mediations on Moloch)
This concern is linked in a positive way to attempts to develop an ethical orientation for AI, i.e. a way of giving it limits, codes and moral rules that are consistent with those of our species and, if we are not specieists, of the ecosystem. It is quite ridiculous that Alexander describes the purpose of capitalism in its golden age as the optimization of human values. As if there were universal human values, independent of epochs, contexts, and classes. From the perspective of evolutionary biology and cultural evolution, there are convergent processes of establishing certain rules, but it is equally clear that there is a widening of the circle of ethics, as Singer puts it. A reading of Aristotle’s Politics shows us how far his positions are from what we would consider ethical today. We will also see shortly that the problem of framing ethics in utilitarian and engineering terms runs the risk, for mathematical and conceptual reasons, of producing inconsistent or decidedly worse results.
Assuming, then, that the problem of alignment is solvable, the idea of unifying the various forms of government under a single confederation is the proposal of Zhao Tingyang’s Chinese propaganda. For the political philosopher, the solution to alignment is solvable by denying self-awareness to future AI — simply keeping it on a level of supremacy of calculation and prediction — as a machine, to allow humanity to exploit its advantages by averting unfavorable outcomes.
For Tingyang, the government of the future (tianxia) must be a realisation of the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace and the Chinese ideal of the government of all under heaven (tianxia), that is, an end to the dispute of international politics. This project can only be realised through a Confucian internalisation of differences across the globe. Contrary to Schmitt’s classical definition, for Tingyang politics is not the distinction between friends and enemies (and thus between nation-states), but the transformation of enemies into friends. This project is an updated version of the Westphalian Peace, i.e. the construction of a planetary confederation governed by a single inclusive government that enables political and spiritual unification.
“First, every local structure replicates the whole structure; that is, every region (a state or feoff) is a mini yet complete system, just as subsets are to a general set. Second, the network system has infinite openness. Conceptually, the Tianxia system is equal to the world, and the concept of the world can be extended infinitely (according to today’s imagination it can even be extended to outer space). Therefore, the Tianxia system can likewise reach infinity in openness and compatibility. This is very important in practice because it can guarantee that the system can accommodate all peoples even if they have different religions and cultures. Third, the Tianxia system is characterized by voluntary cooperation. Every state can choose to be in or out of its own volition. Fourth, the all-inclusive concept of the Tianxia system determines that the aim of its politics is to turn enemies into friends, not to distinguish enemies from friends. This means that even those states that do not want to join are not treated as hostile states, but simply outside states that can exist on peaceful terms. Fifth, every state has the potential to become the new core of Tianxia to replace the old core, akin to acknowledging the possibility of political revolutions “ (Zhao Tingyang, Redefining A Philosophy for World Governance)
How this internalisation will develop remains a mystery. While Tingyang’s proposal seems reasonable to us, it has distinctly dystopian aspects. It all depends on one’s interpretation of “turning enemies into friends”.
The need for a theory of human diversity and plasticity
We can try to hypothesise a possible situation. In order to achieve unity, it is necessary to consider the differences that characterise our species from a cultural and psychological point of view. Thanks to the Internet, we now have the possibility of creating the most diverse human taxonomies: we can identify psychological universals, cultural universals, populations and variations in taste across a whole range of parameters. According to some evolutionary psychologists and some behavioural geneticists, political orientation is partly influenced by genetics, and in any case there is not an infinite range of attitudes to the management of public affairs. In short, there is a kind of fairly stable political and moral compass that characterises groups of people.
We must also take into account the fact that the amount of user profiling data available makes it possible for platforms to build up a fairly accurate picture of users’ preferences and tastes. So if we imagine a single government or a confederation of microstates, this data will necessarily carry weight because users already recognise themselves in bubbles or communities.
First, psychological classifications are often not free from bias, and it is not certain that profiling is a correct mechanism for constructing social groups, given that preferences can change over the course of a lifetime for a variety of reasons. Moreover, this division of populations according to political preferences is not necessarily meaningful, as human groups are often overlapping and shifting. Finally, at present social networks can facilitate the grouping of individuals around certain issues, but at the same time their main function remains that of extracting data and selling addictive content, not that of becoming a political tool.
It is true that there are projects for the management of cities or regions through cooperative mechanisms of decentralized governance, whose purpose is precisely to facilitate political deliberation through digital voting mechanisms.
For the time being, Varoufakis’ analysis is essentially correct: the big platforms are not democratic structures, but digital fiefdoms, and if one wanted to think about their transformation in a collectivist sense, it would be necessary to intervene with class actions of global scope. It would therefore not be pointless to imagine a political model in which the data and ownership of platform shares would be redistributed in a cooperative way, also considering the aspects of overlap and voluntariness that the Panarchy invokes.
To return to our original argument, in order to imagine a politics or a way of living together, it is necessary to have a theory of human nature. But today we have something much more complicated, which is not so much a single theory as an enormous amount of data and profiles, of evolutionary and psychological models. Having a theory of human diversity does not mean postulating immutable divisions between individuals, since any measurement is always partial and interested. Having a theory is different from collecting data for commercial or political profiling.
The cultural universals we talked about at the beginning (surplus, division of labour and justice) are “universal” in a narrow sense, that is, “very widespread”, but we still do not have a clear theory about their origins and their immutability. For example, the very idea of studying the origin of altruism in our species on the basis of biological models is somewhat reductive. Firstly, because what we commonly mean by “altruism” is not “doing good to increase the fitness of another organism”, but something more complex, implying the possession of ethical values or aspirations that are not merely reproductive. There are also doubts about whether human altruism has followed the expansive path traced by Singer, since kin selection has recently been called into question: it would evolve first as a coalition of organisms with a common goal, and then as a mutation genetics of these (with the possible sterility of a class).
The evolutionary explanation of the evolution of altruism is derived from the use of economic and biological game-theoretic models. These models are implemented in agent-based simulations with the aim of studying the emergence of cooperative phenomena, starting from the specification of some parameters (quantity of available resources, bellicosity of the agents, gains and losses, etc.). However, these models are often disconnected from empirical research and alternative theories in the social sciences. This leads to a strange application of mathematical reductionism, justified on the grounds that even in physics the models on which we base our predictions are simplifications of reality. But there is no direct relationship between the minimalism of the models and the accuracy of the predictions. Models only work when they predict or explain unknown phenomena. At present, however, models are used as if their result were a real fact and not a possible world created on the drawing board.
For this reason, it is necessary to consider Bowles’s criticism of Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Of course, the book accurately reconstructs much that an economist already knows about the emergence of agriculture and the structures of hunter-gatherer societies, but, Bowles points out, it underestimates the effects of convergent evolution. Bowles also uses agent-based models, or models borrowed from game theory, to demonstrate his thesis, but he tries to corroborate the models with economic data. The point is that estimating social inequality coefficients for populations that lived thousands of years ago is obviously speculative, just as Graeber and Wengrow’s proposal to treat egalitarianism as a latent possibility even within our societies is speculative. complex and multifaceted.
The problem is that models of cultural evolution that use game theory don’t reveal anything that hasn’t already been worked out. The power law that explains how asymmetric accumulations of wealth can occur in complex systems had already been developed by Pareto. Similarly, the most widely used model to explain the origin of altruism, that of altruistic punishment or tit for tat, states that cooperation among organisms can only emerge through the use of mechanisms to control free-riding and collective punishment of selfishness. All this is well known in political philosophy since Locke and Hobbes, but the same myth of Gyges, told by Plato in the Republic, says that our species cannot organise a collective life without punishing selfish actions. The description of the accumulation of surplus in the form of private property, knowledge, social capital and technologies, although much clearer today, was predicted by evolutionary anthropology at the end of the nineteenth century.
All this shows that the theory of human nature that emerges from the modelling of cultural evolution is limited by the following problems:
1) The results of the studies depend on the choice of parameters made by the modeller;
2) Comparison between models and data is often impossible (model parameters cannot be fixed on the basis of observations) or not carried out;
3) Models discover almost nothing that has not already been formulated in historical, anthropological, economic and sociological terms;
4) Models are possible worlds or mental expressions — in this sense it is difficult to make policy decisions based on the fact that models show the limits of certain choices in collective action.
The last point is the most important because, after all we have said about the need for a theory of human nature, we must not think that such a theory must set limits to what we can hope for. Politics must have utopian and realistic aspects, but if we limit ourselves to the negative results of the modelling of cultural evolution, we somehow exclude the possibility of imagining a different future. For this reason, a theory of human diversity must also include a theory of human plasticity, for without this hope there could be no transition from unjust to just conditions.
“Because such a society is a social union of social unions, it realizes to a preeminent degree the various forms of human activity; and given the social nature of humankind, the fact that our potentialities and inclinations far surpass what can be expressed in anyone life, we depend upon the cooperative endeavors of others not only for the means of well-being but to bring to fruition our latent powers. And with a certain success all around, each enjoys the greater richness and diversity of the collective activity” (John Rawls, A Theory of Justice)
Ethics and risk
According to the ethical current of utilitarianism, in order to act properly, it is necessary to make calculations about individual and collective pleasure and pain. The project of basing an ethics on the measurement of pleasure was advanced by Bentham in the eighteenth century. This project has had its ups and downs, with an attempt to deepen its vision from a neurophysiological point of view (the current of psychophysics) and a gradual abandonment by neoclassical economists, who replaced the measurement of pleasure with the notion of ordinal utility, which is primarily concerned with individuals as consumers in a market economy.
Nevertheless, utilitarian theory has evolved into moral philosophy, and effective altruism is a continuation of it. Even in effective altruism we try to make a calculation, not so much by producing a measure of psychophysiological indicators of the effects of good actions, but rather by trying to rationally measure the probability that a beneficial action can produce the best effects according to a graduated scale. The current of long-termism has taken a further step towards effective altruism, according to which it is necessary to include in the moral calculation the well-being that future generations might receive.
The calculation of well-being or pleasure seems simple at first sight. If I estimate that I prefer activity A to activity B, it follows logically that, for example, if I estimate A to be superior to B and B to C, then A will be preferred to C: this is the principle of transitivity of preferences. When it comes to estimating binary choices, the operation requires a simple introspection or choice, but this calculation begins to get complicated when many options are considered.
The calculation becomes even more complicated when considering aggregate preferences, firstly because it is necessary to find a method of purchasing them, and secondly because the aggregation must respect a Pareto optimal condition, according to which it is not possible to improve the conditions of at least one person without worsening those of all the others. A third problem of aggregation (of preferences or subjective pleasures) is determined by the vagueness of the concept of totality implicit in the calculation: is it necessary, for example, to take future generations into account? Or: is it necessary to include non-human animals? And again: will the preferences and pleasures that a person expresses or feels today be the same as tomorrow?
In Kantian ethics, there is a fundamental difference between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives: the former are judgments expressed in the form “if… then”, whereas the latter are to be considered as moral universals, universal rules of conduct that take on the characteristics of natural laws. Some utilitarians, however, distrust the concept of the categorical imperative and replace it with the image of the impartial observer.
“The hypothetical impartially sympathetic observer must judge the consequences that a given action has for various people, ‘sympathetically’ in the literal sense of the term, i.e. in terms of the attitudes, wants, desires, preferences of these people themselves-rather than in terms of some independent standard, whether the standard of hedonism or some other. Since any moral standard is supposed to be defined in terms of the recommendations of the impartially sympathetic observer, this observer himself cannot determine what is ‘good’ for different persons, with reference to any pre-existing moral standard, but only with reference to the preferences of these persons themselves. The value of pleasure, or higher mental states, or anything else, to any particular person he can judge ultimately only on the basis of the importance this person himself assigns to it.” (John Harsanyi, Ethics in terms of hypothetical imperatives)
At this point you might ask: but how can an observer be impartial? Well, the answer lies in the application of probability theory to ethics. This idea goes back to the philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey but was independently rediscovered by Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann. The principle of the impartial observer is then taken up in the moral theory of the economist John Harsanyi and, in a modified form, by John Rawls.
Perhaps the clearest formulation was developed by Ramsey: ethical is what is considered neutral with respect to truth and falsehood. But what is halfway between true and false is probable. And just as there is a subjective theory of probabilities, it is possible to develop a subjective theory of ethics. Let’s see how. Let’s recall the idea of the veil of ignorance: according to Rawls, in order to establish a non-utilitarian ethical theory, it was necessary to imagine an initial position in which there are rational agents who know neither their place in society nor their natural endowments. They agree that the only acceptable social contract will be one that guarantees a rebalancing of natural and cultural inequalities.
Another way of reading the relationship between ethics and probability is the one developed by Harsanyi and William Vickrey: to consider the implications of chance for human justice, one must consider having to choose between different forms of possible society.
“If utility is defined as that quantity the mathematical expectation of which is maximized by an individual making choices involving risk, then to maximize the aggregate of such utility over the population is equivalent to choosing that distribution of income which such an individual would select were he asked which of various variants of the economy he would like to become a member of, assuming that once he selects a given economy with a given distribution of income he has an equal chance of landing in the shoes of each member of it. Unreal as this hypothetical choice may be, it at least shows that there exists a reasonable conceptual relation between the methods used to determine utility and the uses proposed to be made of it. With the independence method of determining a utility function, there is no obvious connection between the operational definition of the function and the uses to which it is to be put “ (William Vickrey, Measuring Marginal Utility by Reactions to Risk )
Let’s now think about Nozick’s framework for utopia and panarchy: what do they tell us in relation to the utilitarian principle of maximising collective utility (or pleasure)? Well, given the heterogeneity of human desires and preferences, their mutability and, at times, their individual and collective inconsistency, instead of reasoning impartially, considering the possibility of being born in society A or society B, consider all possible societies. In the reasoning of Harsanyi and Rawls, the veil of ignorance is the mechanism that allows one to enter the situation of choice expressed by Vickrey, except that for Rawls there is only one perfect society, the one that chooses to be based on the principles of equality and difference. For Nozick, however, all societies (provided they are minimal) are valid.
Nozick’s position and the panarchist position have a different kind of relationship to risk and ethics than that envisaged by utilitarianism and contractualism. Assuming radical human heterogeneity, they do not believe in the need for a single hedonistic calculation or the existence of a universal ethic, but they do note that it is possible for groups of people to have similar views on the management of public affairs, and that these people have the right to self-government by autonomously establishing political and legal rules. The individual is not forced to decide in a state of uncertainty, but chooses the company he prefers, like a consumer faced with a basket of goods. In this case, the problem of restricting freedom would no longer arise at the level of the individual, but at the level of the micro-state. And this is because, assuming that we live on a planet with scarce resources, and assuming that patches or micro-states are chosen in the same way as goods are chosen, it is inevitable that there will be a hierarchy between states, or that there will be conflicts over resources, or even that micro-states will engage in a promotional battle to attract the greatest number of future citizens. It is interesting to see the relationship with risk implied in the panarchist hypothesis and in Nozick’s proposal: assuming that there is complete freedom to choose the political form, one could argue that there can be no norms such as universal rights, or interference by a state in the choices of an individual or in the choices of another state. But this leads to several problems or paradoxes: if there is complete freedom, there is also complete responsibility, unless we are dealing with the negative externalities of microstates or patches. But responsibility, if not enforced, may not be effective, as is the idea of redistributing income on a charitable basis.
There are two mirror situations in game theory: the tragedy of the commons and the paradox of charity. According to the first, since there is a non-excludable and non-rival good, it is possible for free riders to emerge, i.e. individuals who enjoy access to the common good without having contributed to it. The second case, which refers to a different interpretation of the first, describes what happens when a person in difficulty asks for help: if there are many people present, someone will decide to help, but if the number increases, it is possible that the person in difficulty will remain unheard. In a charitable interpretation of the tragedy of the commons, the problem is not free riding, but a sense of powerlessness: if my contribution to the common good is small, what difference can I make if I don’t contribute?
The army and the police are a textbook case of common goods: they are guaranteed by the state to every citizen, because if violence were not monopolised, it would be dispersed, creating a chaotic society.
Individuals’ attitudes to risk express, at an aggregate level, the model of society in which they wish to live. The problem is that attitude to risk is not necessarily a fixed or heritable trait: in other words, I cannot know today what my attitude to risk will be in old age, just as I cannot know what the attitude to risk of my descendants will be. For these reasons, a voluntary society without a minimal state gives rise to paradoxes: for example, given the freedom to choose, societies could develop that consist only of individuals who have a low attitude to risk, such as infants, the elderly or the sick.
The evolution of justice
From the point of view of cultural evolution, this problem clearly arose in the transition from hunting and gathering to pastoralism and agriculture. Within these societies there was a mechanism for the equitable distribution of the common good produced by hunting and gathering. This distribution was, in a sense, unequal, in the sense that those who procured the resources did not take most or all of the spoils, but had to share them with infants, the elderly and those in need. According to the mathematician Kenneth Binmore, this situation reflected a utilitarian calculation based on the assessment that in the future I might find myself in the same situation of poverty or disability. The equal division of the spoils is therefore a form of insurance based on a calculation of risk, which applies the calculation in its original position: since I don’t know if I will find myself in difficulty, and since there is no possibility of accumulating private ownership of resources, resources must be shared equally.
“Consider the various contingencies that may arise when planning ahead. To assess these, players compute their expected utility as a weighted average of the payoffs of all the future people — lucky or unlucky — that they might turn out to be after the dice has ceased to roll. When choosing a strategy in a family game, players similarly take their payoffs to be a weighted average of the fitnesses of everybody in their family. In order to convert our ability to negotiate insurance contracts into a capacity for using fairness as a more general coordinating device in the game of life, all that is then needed is for us to hybridize these two processes by allowing players to replace one of the future persons that a roll of the dice might reveal them to be, by a person in another body.” (Kenneth Binmore, Natural Justice )
According to Binmore, when people talk about “justice” they are referring to this evolutionary situation. This is why there is a mismatch between the notion of justice as fairness, justice in surplus accumulating societies and justice in market societies. The surplus of resources requires the development of new forms of contract: private property, the division of labour and the punishment of free-riders. In hunter-gatherer societies there is a mechanism of punishment directed against anyone who sets himself up as a ruler. This is because it is unacceptable for an individual to accumulate resources and power without sharing them. So there are mechanisms for ostracising and eliminating leaders. As David Graeber has brilliantly observed in his analyses of the origins of sovereignty, the figure of the sovereign mirrors that of the jester and the criminal. For the sovereign is the one who does not respect the laws, the one who mocks traditions. But from another point of view, the sovereign is also the one who makes new laws. For this reason, in a society with a surplus, it is possible for a kind of social stratification to develop around individuals or groups of individuals who behave like freeloaders on the one hand and punishers of freeloaders on the other. . This situation is clearly ambivalent from an anthropological point of view, because the sovereign is the one who commands and governs, or the one who has surplus resources, but the sovereign is also the one who initially refused to share this surplus with others. Groups of punishers can form around the sovereign as a defence mechanism for his power and surplus resources. But at the same time, what at this point becomes “the people” turns against the sovereign and imposes restrictions (taboos) on him.
According to Binmore, our sense of justice has an evolutionary and conventional origin , in the sense that the model of reasoning under the veil of ignorance is nothing more than a low attitude to risk determined by the widespread uncertainty in hunting and gathering societies. Welfare relaxes the need to secure a decent future and changes the terms on which individuals agree. The morality generated by an era in which there is a sudden increase in the wealth of nations is therefore influenced by a new attitude towards the future and risk. In the empire of 19th century England, the bourgeois does not expect a catastrophe to destroy his possessions in the following decades. Firstly because there has been technological and medical development, and secondly because economic insurance mechanisms have been established. Such a morality need not refer to kinship ties, but can accept the protection of the state and can trade with anonymous individuals as long as this trade is protected by superior military force.
For a clash of morals to take place, it is necessary to have first privatised common property, to have developed more sophisticated technologies of defence, care and work organisation, and to have created a more effective predictive mechanism than the previous ones, modern science.
“Evolution is eventually likely to generate social contracts that sometimes operate like markets — but not because the market mechanism embodies a set of striking new values that trump a bunch of outdated fairness norms, which survive only as fossil memories of social contracts operated in prehistoric times. On the contrary, insofar as the market is fated to triumph when the circumstances are favorable, I think it is because the market is precisely what one should expect to see in the long run as a result of people’s personal preferences adapting over time to the use of the device of the original position as a fairness norm” (Kenneth Binmore, Natural Justice )
“If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed, rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply the rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. So we must learn to live in two sorts of world at once” (Friederich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit )
While for Binmore the market is the natural outcome of an evolution of morality, for Hayek the market implants new values. There is a clear distinction between these “collective morality games”, to the point that one excludes the other.
Multiple equilibria in game theory, bargaining and economics
Hayek’s argument can provide a starting point for thinking about one of the most studied cases in game theory: the prisoner’s dilemma. The prisoner’s dilemma is a situation in which two people, arrested for a crime and separated, must decide whether to cooperate with the other defendant or betray him. If they both cooperate, they will receive a lesser punishment than if they both betray. However, if one betrays while the other cooperates, the traitor avoids punishment while the other receives the maximum punishment. This dilemma highlights the conflict between the pursuit of personal interests and the collective good, as the lack of cooperation leads to sub-optimal outcomes for both parties.
The important concepts to consider in the prisoner’s dilemma are the lack of communication and the co-existence of common and different interests. But there are also other aspects of political relevance. In summary, and abstracting from the specific example, we can say that the prisoner’s dilemma captures a contrast between selfishness and altruism, and it is not surprising that it is one of the models that can straddle biological and economic sciences.
The solution to the dilemma is given by the so-called Nash equilibrium, which is based on a mathematical procedure for calculating the position which, given the possibility of circumventing a rule, requires both players to identify themselves as the “most rational”. Since both can foresee that the other will confess as a threat, they will inevitably be led not to confess. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, both players consider it possible (and more attractive) to inflict harm on the other.
In Binmore and Axelrod’s evolutionary game theory argument, what matters is not the single round of the game, but what happens when the same situation is repeated many times with many people. Game theory models show that cooperation can only emerge if it is supported by the threat of severe punishment.
Nash had also studied a mathematical model of social interaction, that of bargaining. There is a relationship between bargaining and games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma in that it involves modelling the conflictual and cooperative interactions between two or more individuals based on the mathematical and economic calculation of their preferences, divergences, and desires.
“Nash’s suggestion is based on the assumption that close cooperation among the players in a cooperative game usually requires a prior agreement about the payoffs, which, in most cases, can be achieved only by bargaining among the players. Rut this bargaining itself must have the nature of a non-cooperative game, unless we want to assume that the players will agree in an even earlier subsidiary bargaining game on how they will act in the main bargaining game — which would he not only a rather implausible assumption but would also lead to an infinite regress” John Harsanyi, Understanding rational behaviour )
The way in which Nash treats cooperative and non-cooperative games and negotiations assumes that it is possible to identify a single common point, an equilibrium or a focal point, which is reached by using only the subjective reasoning of the players. The problem is that if it is possible to prove the existence of these equilibria from a mathematical point of view, the case is different when it comes to considering the real behaviour of people in games and negotiations. First of all, it can be observed that people are not able to follow all the logical chains of game theory, nor do they make independent comparisons between needs, wants and desires every time they have to enter into a negotiation. This is because the tool of language and the presence of shared traditions or norms greatly simplify the mathematical reasoning required by the theory.
However, there is a more serious problem, this time of a mathematical nature, which affects the search for equilibrium, and that is the fact that it is apparently impossible to escape from situations of infinite regress. To explain this, we start from the simple consideration that following a rule does not mean interpreting it, but carrying out the action prescribed by the rule correctly.
“To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to have mastered a technique […] no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule. The answer was: if every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here. That there is a misunderstanding here is shown by the mere fact that in this chain of reasoning we place one interpretation behind another, as if each one contented us at least for a moment, until we thought of yet another lying behind it. For what we thereby show is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which, from case to case of application, is exhibited in what we call “following the rule” and “going against it”. That’s why there is an inclination to say: every action according to a rule is an interpretation. But one should speak of interpretation only when one expression of a rule is substituted for another.(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations )
Following a rule can be a very simple action if it is clear: a) its scope, b) the sequence of necessary actions. A rule can be followed even in the absence of language, says Binmore, because phenomena of human coordination exist without anyone saying anything. However, we read these phenomena in the light of language and in the light of an already established communicative convention.
Let’s take a very simple example: the pedestrian crossing. If we wanted to read this mechanism in terms of Nash bargaining theory or game theory models, we would have to set up a calculation of speed, gestures, congestion, learned traffic rules, etc. In reality, coordination is very simple. In reality, coordination is very simple, there are no stalemates or infinite regressions, just one part moving closer to the other or one part giving way to the other. If a particular junction is computationally complex for pedestrians and cars, we introduce discrete systems, i.e. traffic lights, which signal what to do with red and green.
From a purely mathematical point of view, negotiation involves an indefinite or infinite number of possible equilibria. Only in reality, we never consider the possibilities of all possible equilibria, because if we did, we couldn’t act. In action, however, conventions are established which are often inefficient or harmful to one of the parties. In physics we would say that these are unstable equilibria, but in social interaction such situations arise all the time.
One way of dealing with the complexity of individual and collective wants and needs is to construct social indices. A social index is a kind of thermometer or graduated scale that allows us to measure individual utilities and aggregate collective utilities. The social index is a human and conventional artefact, therefore it is not “objective”, but implies a particular and arbitrary selection of the yardstick by which it is measured. Money is a social index, just like reputation or social capital in contemporary societies. Except that there is always a gap between money, reputation and value in an abstract sense. And that’s because it’s not possible to aggregate something like individual utility into some kind of fair summation or production. Any aggregation mechanism requires an arbitrary scale.
“For the utilitarian and the egalitarian bargaining solutions to be meaningful, we need to be given a social index for each player. I hope this term is sufficiently neutral that it won’t trigger any preconceptions about whether having a high or a low social index is necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Just as you like the price to be small when you are buying and large when you are selling, so the significance of a high or a low social index depends crucially on the context. We need social indices because nothing says that the personal payoffs used in specifying a bargaining problem can be compared directly in a way that is meaningful for a fairness calculation” (Kenneth Binmore, Natural Justice)
In order to function, Rawls’s theory needs a social index to determine from time to time which people are in the worst position on the social scale; the utilitarian theory needs a social index to create a bargaining mechanism based on the mutual approximation of two agents; Marx’s labour theory of value needs a social index to ground its critique of the capitalist mode of production; finally, von Neumann and Morgenstern’s expected utility theory needs a social index (the measure of risk taking) to calculate the cardinal aggregation of collective utilities. There is one theory that does not suffer from the same measurement problem, and that is the economic theory of perfect competition.
Neoclassical theory can work because it assumes that, in perfect equilibrium, agents are homogeneous and the conditions that determine prices are known (consumer preferences, technology and resources). The supply and demand curves are mobile and determine prices dynamically on the basis of production potential, demand and resource scarcity. However, this mechanism does not take into account the existence of other social indices, i.e. a gradation of agents according to the amount of information at their disposal, or the fact that duopoly or monopoly situations arise. In a sense, Rawls’ theory is a way of using a social index to allow all agents to have the same bargaining power. From a certain point of view, the market economy seems to be a more rational solution than the utilitarian calculation, because it seems to be based on a decentralised mechanism of price discovery, which does not imply the setting of a fixed social index. However, the medieval theory of the “just price” is still linked to the egalitarian mentality that characterised hunter-gatherer societies. However, as the mathematician Bruno de Finetti has shown, since the task of economics is to create a Pareto optimal situation (in which everyone’s welfare is at its maximum, in the sense that no one’s welfare can increase except at the expense of another’s), it is necessary to make a choice among the infinite possible points. And this choice depends on constraints that are not economic, but ethical and political, because they determine the type of society in which we want to live.
“The theoretical scheme proposed by de Finetti proceeds by isolating within the mechanics of utility a geometry of utility that defines the possible economic situations in the abstract, identifying the optimum points by assigning individual scales of preference. This separation highlights the fact that the choice of a particular optimal point among the existing infinites involves value judgments about the fairness of the situations represented by such points. Only after this political act can the mechanics of utility intervene to identify the freedoms and constraints that lead to the achievement of the chosen optimum” (Chiara Rossignoli, The Slavery of Anarchy. Bruno de Finetti’s writings on economic equilibrium)
We are in a stalemate. It seems that from whatever point we try to solve the ancient problem of the many and the one, the definitional problem of politics, which answers the question: how do we live together, we are faced with infinite regressions and arbitrary choices. The market economy seems to circumvent these problems by creating a dynamic and decentralised mechanism that, in theory, should solve every problem. This does not happen for several reasons. The first is that the market mechanism, like any form of politics, is based on some arbitrary choices. For example, the role of money as the measure of all things may be rejected by individuals or groups of individuals who establish other criteria of value, or who exclude goods from entering a market. It must be said that the market is an intermediate solution between the imposition of rules, including the imposition of prices, and total anarchy. The problem is that the central core of current economic theory, neoclassical theory, is determined by the alleged demonstration of the superiority of the market economy in achieving the Pareto optimum. But only perfect competition has the necessary characteristics to solve this calculation. Perfect competition can only exist if the agents are homogeneous. But nature does not endow everyone with the same qualities, and cultural evolution makes inequality something heritable. Therefore, the agents entering the market are not equal, i.e. they do not have the same human capital. Moreover, for there to be perfect competition, economic transactions must take place within the circle protected by an external force, a common good such as the army. Even if the precondition for the market is the existence of a minimal state, as Nozick wants, it is necessary for human capital to be levelled. And this levelling implies external intervention in the market, i.e. a hypothetical “benevolent dictator” who equalises the natural and cultural endowments of all agents.
“To ensure that the actual distribution of wealth and income matches the social welfare function, Mas-Colell assumes the existence of a benevolent dictator who redistributes wealth and income prior to commerce taking place: ‘Let us now hypothesize that there is a process, a benevolent central authority perhaps, that, for any given prices p and aggregate wealth function w, redistributes wealth in order to maximize social welfare’ (ibid.: 117; emphases added). So free market capitalism will maximize social welfare if, and only if, there is a benevolent dictator who redistributes wealth prior to trade? (Steve Keen, Debunking economics )
According to Binmore, the mechanism of the market economy is a natural evolution of the principle of justice, with the necessary premises that: a) a situation of social welfare and weakening of classes and castes already exists, b) there is an army, c) morality is determined by economics. What the cultural evolutionists and Binmore say is true: there are prejudices against the market economy because it seems to change the value of things arbitrarily. But a more sophisticated view is that there will always be a conflict between value or ethics and the market, because the market is only one of the possible forms of ethics.
“The market is therefore the final step in a process that first leaches out the moral content of a culture and then erodes the autonomy of its citizens by shaping their personal preferences. […] When the snow falls, the demand for shovels increases. If supply is to be equated with demand and shovels are in fixed supply, then the price of shovels must rise. But consumers then react by condemning the rise in price as unfair, since they see no reason why the snowfall should change anybody’s social index. They therefore punish the retailers for cheating on the perceived social contract by refusing to buy..” (Kenneth Binmore, Natural Justice )
What kind of society would you like to live in? The abstract prisoner’s dilemma
In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, both players have in mind a hierarchy of preferred strategies. This hierarchy is a cardinal order because it places values expressing quantities (the payoffs) on a graduated scale. Here is one player’s ranking:
1. To confess, while the opponent does not confess.
2. Do not confess as long as your opponent does not confess.
3. Confess when your opponent confesses
4. Don’t confess if your opponent confesses.
Abstracting from the specific situation of the game, we can reformulate the order:
1. Do harm without worrying about your opponent
2. Do less harm while partially preservig your opponent
3. Cooperate with your opponent
4. Take damage from your opponent
If you want to represent the situation with a table, here is a representation of the strategies and payoffs in an “abstract” Prisoner’s Dilemma:
In this version of the prisoner’s dilemma, the conflict between individual and collective interests is represented by the abstract situation of “following a rule”. If both players obey the rules, there is agreement, but if both players break the rules, there is harm. There is also a Nash equilibrium, i.e. disagreement — both suffer damage, but less and equally distributed, but there is no agreement. The two boxes with “mutual destruction” are to be read as threats, i.e. they enter into the consideration of possible strategies, but in reality they are not carried out, especially in the context of repeated games. If a player always chose the strategy of maximum damage, his reputation would plummet and everyone who interacted with him would behave hostilely.
The abstract prisoner’s dilemma can be interpreted in economic terms. In the agreement strategy, both players follow the rules: this is socialism; in the disagreement strategy, both players do not cooperate, but limit the damage they can do to their opponent: this is liberalism. In the two boxes previously labelled “mutual destruction” is neoliberalism.
What does it mean to say that there are rules in socialism? Well, this statement could be understood to mean that in socialism there are rigid rules, the most obvious cases of which are the equal distribution of income and the planning of the economy. The problem is that a model of governance is not just an economic policy, but a social contract that involves a general valuation of goods, services and people. This is why in historical examples of real socialism there is not only a levelling of wages, but also an apparatus of censorship and control. In socialism, the distribution of opportunities among citizens is uniform.
In classical liberalism, the golden age of capitalism, there are markets. The market, as we have seen, is a dynamic mechanism for assessing values. Again, we must not think that a model of thinking about politics can be reduced to economic choices. If in classical liberalism values are dynamic because, as in the example given by Binmore, they vary according to supply and demand curves, then there is also a certain dynamism in social values. However, in classical liberalism — just read Smith’s theory of moral sentiments — markets have a limited scope: they must regulate the exchange of some goods, not all. This means that in classical liberalism there are forms of law and property that are not marketable. In liberalism, the distribution of citizens’ opportunities is normal: there is a numerically very strong middle class and tails of poverty and extreme wealth.
In neoliberalism, the dynamic mechanism of the market is progressively applied to every form of social interaction. This has three main effects: a) the need for mechanisms of authoritarian punishment, control, and governance to ensure that mutual enmity does not lead to mutual elimination; b) the transformation of society into a vast competitive game; c) the need to measure goods, services and people through the dynamism of the markets. And this, in the end, leads to the phenomenon that we have previously described as the “government of intelligence”. It is not true that the market economy undermines morality, but rather that the progressive expansion of the market economy transforms inter-individual interactions and generates a different morality. But how is the value of things determined in a neo-liberal society? Well, in the same way as in other forms of society: by setting arbitrary social indices such as human, social, cultural capital, income or intelligence quotient. In neoliberalism, the distribution of opportunities among citizens is governed by Zipf’s law: power and wealth are in the hands of a few, and most people are poor. To be precise, even in feudal society and capitalism, the distribution of opportunities is governed by curves that follow Zipf’s law (or the Pareto distribution), and we have no news of completely egalitarian human societies.
But what do these distributions represent? From a mathematical point of view, the three distributions presented here refer to probabilities: a uniform distribution means that all events have the same probability of occurring, a normal distribution is often applied to situations such as tossing a fair coin — we know that in the long run it will converge to 0.5 heads and 0.5 tails. Power law, Pareto or Zipf distributions apply to complex systems, where there are small-world networks, i.e. areas that are more connected than others. In our example, the three distributions refer to the reticular structure of companies. In this model, a society consists of a set of nodes and links. Nodes can be human agents or goods, properties, animals. In an egalitarian network, all nodes are connected to all others — we can think of a perfect hunter-gatherer society in which individuals have access to the same resources regardless of gender, age and reputation. It is useful to think of nodes as composed of a plurality of human and non-human agents because it allows us to highlight an important feature: in societies with a market economy, governed by a capitalist mode of production, there is, as Marx noted, an extreme heterogeneity of goods.
However, the concept of a commodity has a purely economic value, while from a technological point of view a commodity is an artificial construct composed of other parts (which are themselves artificial or natural). Then there is one commodity that is more important than all the others, and that is money: it is the measure of the value of all other commodities (including human beings). Money therefore gives access to the technological possibilities (degrees of freedom, power and the ability to harm) that correspond to the expansion of the commodities it can buy. Marx and the classical economists thought that beneath money there was labour, and Marx believed that the measure of the value of people and goods was time. But simple time, crystallised in commodities, cannot consider factors such as scarcity and abundance — factors that can change suddenly due to externalities such as changes in ecosystems — and human capital. At one point, Marx considers as a measure not simple time but socially necessary labour time, which is an average estimate of value given similar conditions of production, skill and intensity. Only this measure leads to a lack of interest in evaluating differences in productivity. In other words, it is possible to quantify the value of a job by levelling it to the average of the general productivity of the enterprise. But this means that the yardstick for evaluating the working hours of the owner of a factory is the average productivity of all individuals in a society. In this sense, the relationship between economics and politics in socialism involves the application of a certain moral and value standard: considering that all individuals are equal, a certain social uniformity must be produced which censors or hides differences in rank. When these differences are taken into account, as in Rawls’ proposal, it is necessary to construct a social index (a hierarchy of human beings) according to which the natural arbitrariness of the unequal distribution of human capital can be corrected.
But there is more to Marx’s analysis, and it lies in the difference between capital and commodities. Capital is an accumulation of commodities that can be moved and passed on from generation to generation. But the commodities that make up capital are producers of commodities: they have a generative capacity. For Austrian economists, capital is the effect of a roundabout process of production, that is, the fact that capital, because of its technological nature, requires an indirect and slow process of accumulation of skills and information. The roundabout process initially appears less productive because it takes time and reflects a preference for long-term gains over immediate gratification. The roundabout production process is explained in terms of preferences, but in reality there are cases where it is not available to poor people. This is the case of education: it requires a period of non-work and the accumulation of qualifications and skills that can facilitate access to more remunerative jobs in the future. However, it is not always a choice not to invest in activities that increase human capital, but often a material impossibility of making certain choices.
Even in neoclassical economics, there is a concealment of differences, and this is evident in the way in which perfect competition is presented: in fact, it is assumed that economic agents are homogeneous — everyone has access to similar information, no one can influence the market, and so on. Obviously, this situation is unrealistic and, moreover, technological innovation does not take place in equilibrium, but is what disturbs the equilibrium.
However, the fact that capitalism produces a heterogeneity of goods does not mean that there is a value judgement on goods. In fact, people and goods are placed in a hierarchy of value that corresponds to their price. It is not a fixed hierarchy, as the feudal social order might have been, but its dynamics are often fictitious — monopolies are small-world networks that emerge spontaneously, just as the division of labour emerges spontaneously.
If there were no hierarchies in the endowment of human capital, the inheritance of acquired capital, the unequal distribution of natural resources, the market would be reduced to a positive-sum exchange between different agents who simply profit from the diversity of the ecosystem. But since the differences are reduced to a single measure of value, money or related measures, capitalist society is not interested in correcting these asymmetries. And for neoliberal thought, neoclassical economics and its equilibrium models are ideological fictions, as is the phantom invisible hand. What neoliberalism produces is the naturalisation of some arbitrary value choices, while at the same time affirming that they are “scientific” because economics is not interested in values. The extension of the market model to all interactions replaces old values with new ones, but it is always a mechanism for justifying domination. We can consider whether domination in general can be eliminated: the historically known cases of communism, due to several different factors, have nevertheless produced hierarchies (party or bureaucratic) and the suppression of dissent. But here we come back to the question: what kind of society do we want to live in?
Ethics is incomputable
“Every ethical preference relation has the property that almost all (in the sense of outer measure) pairs of utility streams are indifferent. Even if we abandon completeness and respect for the Pareto ordering, every irreflexive preference relation that is invariant to finite permutations has the property that almost all pairs of utility streams are incomparable (not strictly ranked). Moreover, no ethical preference relation is measurable. As a consequence, the existence of an ethical preference relation is independent of the axioms used in almost all of formal economics and all of classical analysis. Finally, even if an ethical preference relation exists, it cannot be “explicitly described.”” (William Zame, Can Intergenerational Equity Be Operationalized)
“If you were to take an aggregated view of betterness in a finite world, you’d be clueless about which action will turn out best. But we can still say what’s better in expectation, since outcomes are at least comparable. But in infinite worlds, the problem comes back to bite us. Due to chaos, many views can’t say that any outcome is better than another. Those views include all strongly impartial views, all weakly impartial views that respect Pareto, and many (but not all) position-dependent views. We can still say that some outcomes are better and that we have corresponding reasons to act, but we have to hold a view that’s dependent on the positions of value or something even less plausible. (Hayden Wilkinson, Doing Good in an Infinite, Chaotic World)
“There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.” (Jorge Luis Borges)
“L’Infini me vient à l’idée dans la signifiance du visage. Le visage signifie l’Infini. Celui-ci n’apparaît jamais comme thème, mais dans cette signifiance éthique elle-même : c’est-à-dire dans le fait que plus je suis juste, plus je suis responsable ; on n’est jamais quitte à l’égard d’autrui.” (Emmanuel Lévinas, Ethique et infini)
The great challenge of contemporary politics is to create and maintain a unity of the species, something that overcomes the current competition between states that characterises international politics. According to the British philosopher Nick Bostrom, and according to evolutionary game theory, this competition could be mitigated by the emergence of a common problem, a risk that affects the entire species and its history. The most popular risks today are climate change and artificial intelligence.
Futuristic visions of a post-human society in which social decisions are made by artificial intelligences are linked to a utilitarian ethic. Artificial intelligence in its current state is a vast network of correlations and probabilistic inferences based on learning models and large amounts of data. However, there are countless problems that these machines cannot solve. These are problems of a mathematical nature, but they can easily enter the realm of ethics. For humans, such unsolvable problems become the springboard for the invention of new branches of research — for example, the dissolution of the dream of axiomatising mathematics gives rise to a whole series of mechanisms for classifying algorithms on the basis of the problems they can solve.
What is not computable is often related to paradoxical questions or situations involving the use of infinity. If you were to ask an algorithm how to build a perfect society in which the Pareto optimum exists and everyone is happy with their role and would do nothing to change it, it would not have a neutral answer. This is because it would have to start by establishing a utilitarian measure of the benefits and harms inflicted on its members, but it would also have to understand who the members are (hence the Schmittian problems of deciding between friend and foe and deciding in a state of emergency) and how wide the circle of politics should be. Indefinite extensions of ethics and politics — to future generations, to parallel universes, or to other species — make neutral judgement impossible. And this is because forms of injustice are constantly emerging in relation to one parameter or another.
When Kant stated that the categorical imperative was a kind of universal conclusion in which a hypothetical period was transformed into a law of nature, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics were not yet known. Kant was thinking of laws like universal gravitation, where every atom is subject to the same forces, but our physical and mathematical knowledge has changed. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, quantum indeterminacy, the relationship between space and time, the possibility of infinite parallel universes and cosmic inflation make the utilitarian calculation of pleasure and pain impossible.
An example of these problems is the anecdote that Gödel, when he was about to become an American citizen, studied the text of the constitution in detail and discovered an aporia in it that would have made possible the transformation from democracy to dictatorship (as happened in his country). Speculating on the articles in the constitution that might have made Gödel suspicious, one can think of those norms that make the rewriting of the constitution possible — paradoxical norms that are examples of constituent power or states of exception, located inside and outside the law. From the naturalistic point of view of Hume and Binmore, there is nothing strange in the fact that a constitution contains articles that invalidate it: the constitution is a set of rules adopted by the citizens of a society, starting from a certain historical period and on the basis of certain moral principles. The constitution is ultimately subject to the same limitations as mathematical languages.
“Two such “odd problems” are logical paradoxes and infinity. Unless humans provided the “correct answers” to these two types of problems in the AI’s knowledge database beforehand, a Turing machine AI would find it exceedingly difficult to answer questions relating to paradoxes and the concept of infinity. It is safe to say that these two categories represent the limits of human cogitation. Humans can investigate paradoxes, but we cannot truly solve strict paradoxes (e.g., self-referential paradox, such as “P must produce ¬P, and ¬P must produce P”). Similarly, humans can investigate questions about infinity within mathematics, and we can even invent theorems concerning infinity, but in actuality, we have no effective means of assessing an infinite number of objects and thus understand infinity in the manner of Leibniz’s God, who could “instantly survey” the infinite number of all possible worlds. These unsolvable “odd problems” do not bother humans because we are protected by our ability to ignore, our ability to defer unanswerable questions, to establish a quarantined “do not consider” zone within the realms of thought and knowledge where we can file away all such unsolvable problems rather than become trapped in an inescapable prison of thought by obstinately trying to solve them (Tingyang Zhao, The Uncertain Gamble of Infinite Technological Progress )
“In some strong sense, the success of learning systems ( e.g., training efficiency and predictive accuracy) seems inversely proportional to the inductive assumptions it exploits, as well as the problems of induction it introduces. I.e., for moral learning to work, we need to have a relatively clear idea of the performance measure (e.g., in terms of some predefined score, goal, or objective function) of the moral problem we want the learning system to tackle, or the moral behavior we want it to exhibit. As such, one might question whether existing moral learning systems can generate any “new” or “genuine” moral insight, as they merely train on some given data filtered through some given inductive biases. Similar to divine command and legal positivism, it presuppose that we have an answer to the questions we seek. Thus, the problem of moral machine learning does not reside in the computational complexity of learning as such, but rather, in justifying the moral assumptions we need to exploit in order for induction to work. (Jakob Stenseke, On the Computational Complexity of Ethics: Moral Tractability for Minds and Machines)
Starting from the question “How do we live together?”, we have crossed different disciplines and examined different proposals. But at the end of the journey we have come back to the beginning. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, only a common one. We know much more about human nature than Aristotle, Hobbes and Marx could have hoped for, but the problems remain the same as Plato’s: the one and the many do not easily agree.
To think that artificial intelligence will help us is reasonable, to think that it will be decisive is simply wrong. The choice of parameters involves subjective and arbitrary decisions, whether we decide to write a constitution, create a state or train an AI. There is no “Pareto optimal” solution that is valid for all individuals, across all issues, and at all levels of complexity. There is only a cumbersome, sometimes utopian, often dystopian, and very often inefficient polyphony of voices discussing what it means to live together.
[1] 1.Consistent Preferences (Complete Preordering): Reflexivity: This axiom ensures that every option is at least as good as itself. In other words, an individual should always prefer an option to itself; Transitivity: If A is preferred to B and B to C, then A should be preferred to C. This logical consistency ensures that preferences don’t lead to contradictions; Completeness: It asserts that every pair of options can be compared, even if they are indifferent to each other. No gaps or missing comparisons exist.
2. Continuity Axiom: The continuity axiom implies that preferences remain continuous. If A is preferred to B and B to C, there exists a point where a mix of A and C becomes indifferent. This smooth transition ensures that small changes in preferences don’t lead to abrupt shifts.
3. The Sure-Thing Principle (Avoidance of Dominated Strategies): This principle advises always choosing options that outperform alternatives in every possible scenario. Essentially, avoid dominated strategies — those that are strictly worse than others regardless of external factors.
4. Independence Axiom for Lotteries: When evaluating lotteries (uncertain outcomes with different probabilities), preferences should be solely based on the possible prizes and specific random events. Independence from framing or irrelevant factors ensures consistent decision-making.
