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Transformative Experimentation, Perspectival Diversity, and the Polycentric Liberal Order

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Abstract

Proponents of political experiments in living, such as Elizabeth Anderson and Ryan Muldoon, often emphasize their potential to generate useful observational data about the relation between social rules and ethically desirable outcomes. This paper highlights another epistemic dimension of political experiments: their potential to transform the cognitive perspectives of participants. I argue that this transformative dimension of experimentation offers an endogenous societal mechanism for increasing perspectival diversity. I explore the implications of this mechanism for institutional design.

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Notes

  1. I thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting the significance of this connection.

  2. As it is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so it is that there should be different experiments in living; that free scope should be given to varieties of characters, short of injury to others; and that the worth of different modes of life should be proved practically, when one thinks fit to try them (Mill 1998, p. 63).

  3. Nozick distinguishes between ‘designed’ and ‘filtering’ devices. In the former, the planners aim to bring about a specific end-state they have in mind.

  4. This line of criticism offered by proponents of political experimentation could also be targeted against Rawls’s original theory of justice as presented in A Theory of Justice (1971). The focus on the view Rawls expounds in Political Liberalism (1993) is helpful for dialectical purposes.

  5. For Müller, this results in the endorsement of modus vivendi arrangements which ‘entail both mutual benefit and an overlapping dissatisfaction’ (p. 12).

  6. ‘I define polycentric democracy as an institutional arrangement involving a multiplicity of polities acting independently, but under the constraints of a democratically supervised framework for institutional competition’ (Müller 2019, p. 3).

  7. A similar set of arguments can be found in Vallier (2018). For a Hayekian perspective reaching similar conclusions see Pennington (2011) and Kogelmann (2018).

  8. The primary transformative effects would naturally accrue to persons who undergo the experiment but they can also accrue to observers of the experiment whose perspectives change meaningfully due to witnessing the experiment. This possibility was pointed out to me by an anonymous reviewer.

  9. A classic example, referred to by Paul (p. 15), is Mary seeing color for the first time; see Jackson (1986).

  10. The contemporary originators of this line of research are Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. For a classic statement of their core insights see Tversky and Kahneman (1974). For a well-known application to microeconomics see Kahneman and Tversky (1979).

  11. Modeling this relation is no straightforward matter. As Epley and Gilovich (2016) point out, ‘people don’t simply believe what they want to believe. The psychological mechanisms that produce motivated beliefs are much more complicated than that’ (p. 133, emphasis in the original). Rather, they ‘reason their way to conclusions they favor, with their preferences influencing the way evidence is gathered, arguments are processed, and memories of past experience are recalled’ (ibid., emphasis in the original).

  12. For the cognitive foundations of this line of explanation see Heath and Tversky (1991).

  13. In the case of investments, the downside of the familiarity bias is lack of diversification which results in lower risk-adjusted returns. In the social epistemic case, the downside is also a lack of diversification in the ideas examined by members of the community. Here the issue is not one of reducing risk so much as avoiding decreasing marginal returns from overly trodden paths of epistemic inquiry. For example, political theorists and philosophers working in the US (myself included) are likely to have read more about democratic theory and US politics even when they might gain more valuable insights by diversifying their cognitive portfolio.

  14. Muldoon (2015, 2016, ch. 2) relates Millian experimentation to perspectival diversity but does not distinguish clearly between the observational and transformative dimensions of experimentation.

  15. In other words, the justice landscape is a moderately rugged one.

  16. Note that the federal government’s role in incentivizing and guiding observationally motivated experimentation may be quite substantial. For arguments to that effect see Galle and Leahy (2009) and Wiseman and Owen (2018). For further public choice related complications see Rose-Ackerman (1980) and Livermore (2017).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Brian Kogelmann and Gregory Robson for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for comments and criticisms which led to meaningful improvements in the framing and the content of the paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Aylon R. Manor

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Manor, A.R. Transformative Experimentation, Perspectival Diversity, and the Polycentric Liberal Order. Res Publica 28, 323–338 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-021-09528-x

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