For love of reason

Free market applies to ideas too

Far be it from me to divide humankind in two, but were I inclined, I’d divide it into those who love reason and those who are indifferent if not outright hostile to it. Members of the first group adore the reasoning process and their own reasoning faculties. The others find the process burdensome and discomforting, something that threatens longheld beliefs and intuitions.

When I say the members of the first group adore their own reasoning faculties, I do not mean that they are arrogantly confident in their intelligence or immunity from error. Quite the contrary: the love of reason contains within it humility, doubt, an awareness of one’s limits and fallibility, and a recognition of the inherently social nature of reason and knowledge.

The thing to read here is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, a paean to the free and competitive marketplace of ideas. Mill wished to establish that this marketplace is indispensable to learning or at least to approaching the truth. My favorite line is this: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

This puts one in the right frame of mind to engage in argument. It’s tempting to approach an argument like a high school debater: I have a proposition to defend, and, damn it, I intend to do just that. This implies an over-investment in the proposition, a sense that, if I lose the argument, I have lost a piece of myself.

It’s understandable. Beliefs form a worldview; a belief shaken is a worldview shaken, and that’s not easy to take.

But that’s a bad attitude. I try to think of argument the way I think of trade: Both sides gain. How can that be?

Mill’s sentence tells us. If you “win” the argument you will likely have learned more about your own position simply by hearing it criticized. Being required to answer counterarguments will prompt you to think of things you might never have thought of otherwise. That’s good! You’ll know your own position better because you know at least some arguments against it.

On the other hand, if you “lose” the argument, you still gain because you have shed an erroneous belief and are now closer to acquiring knowledge that you lacked before the argument. That’s good too.

It’s win-win, like trade.

It’s no coincidence that argument resembles trade: It’s a form of trade. The marketplace of ideas is like the marketplace of goods and services. In both cases, people assert propositions—goods embody propositions— and they’ll find out whether better alternatives exist. In the commercial marketplace, sellers present a case that their goods at the asking price offer the best way for potential buyers to accomplish their objectives. Competitors make counterarguments. Prospective buyers weigh the arguments.

Thus the epistemological case for a free market in goods and services is identical to the case for a free market in ideas. We learn important things about how to flourish that we would likely otherwise not learn.

Finally, the case for political liberty embodies the love of reason. The libertarian ethic holds that, if you deal with others, you ought to deal with them through reason, not just for their sake but for your own. Persuasion is the opposite of force.

I think this provides a case for the free society that is in a sense Cartesian. Descartes wrote that one can doubt everything except the existence of doubt and the doubter. (I’m not saying I agree with Descartes.) Applying something like this method to ethics and politics, we may say that, while one may reasonably doubt proposals about how society ought to be organized, one cannot reasonably doubt the value of doubt and thus the freedom to doubt.

My proposition might win something like universal assent, so I’ll push it further. If one should have the right to doubt, then one should also have the right to express doubt. Expressing it is necessary to find out if it is reasonable. And if everyone has the right to express doubt, everyone then has the right to peacefully acquire the physical means to maintain one’s life and to express doubt. Respect for such rights will generate a variety of humane institutions.

Any doubters out there?