Science and Institutions

Pangrammatically speaking, science is to intuition what politics is to institution. This suggests a rather radical conclusion: science cannot be institutionalized. It is the purpose of politics to transform institutions, and the purpose of science to transform intuitions. The idea of "free inquiry" derives its sense from this grammar.

Amateur Economists

From this week's Economist:

Subsidies to home ownership have also weakened financial services. They encouraged more people to buy houses (which was the point), but, logically enough, also encouraged lenders to take greater risks with housing. This was fine while house prices were rising, but the fall exposed how vulnerable banks’ balance sheets had become.

I don't know very much about this sort of thing, but lately I feel I've been learning a lot about how markets actually (and inexorably) work. Can the credit market and the housing market really be separated in this way, so that it was okay to take risks "while house prices were rising" on their own and in some separate market? I mean, didn't the banks' exposure to ever more innovative forms of risk keep creating new kinds of credit and therefore new buyers for houses they could not previously afford (wrong way to put it: they still couldn't afford it, but they could now finance it anyway).

The bubble burst because the only thing left to lenders was to come up with a clever scheme in which they, say, paid borrowers to take their money. Once new forms of articifical demand could no longer be created (through novel credit instruments, subsidies, and gov't guarantees), the fall had to come. Lenders did not suffer the effects of rising and falling house prices. They were an important part of the cause.

James and Rawls, Pangrammaticists

"The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our behaving." (William James)

"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is the first virtue of systems of thought." (John Rawls)

I would like to say that truth is a rightness in the way of belief, and justice is a rightness in the way of desire. Justice is the virtue of institutions, I agree; but truth is the correlative virtue of intuitions. If truth is the expedient in the way of thought, and I will grant that it may well be, then justice (arguably "the right") is the expedient in the way of feeling. The former is supported by the precision of our concepts, the latter by the precision of our emotions.

As to the way we behave, yes, we may in that regard be right or wrong, and, when this rightness or wrongness is conditioned by institutional factors, I will grant that that right is just and wrong is not. Truth, likewise, is the rightness of our beholding when such beholding is conditioned by intuition.

[Update: all behaviour is conditioned by institutions. And there can be no beholding without intuition. But they can be, as it were, "barely" conditioned. We might perhaps talk of "unbound" behaviour and beholding: actions that lack any immediate motive, beholdings that don't immediately make sense.]

A Categorical Imperative?

Do only what is necessary.

Indecency

Indecency is not injustice but the proximate occasion of injustice. My line on proximate occasions (also of sin) is that they should not necessarily be avoided. In that sense, my position is less than Catholic.

Indecent acts, in fact, are also occasions of greater good, i.e., of higher-level justice, and the road to the improvement of imperfect institutions.

Justice only makes sense in the context of institutions. The reproduction of the conditions of our institutional experience depends on our decency. It can therefore, sometimes, be necessary to behave indecently as an act of resistance. Indecency challenges the immediate power of institutions...

...just as dishonesty challenges the immediate knowledge of intuition. The argument for dishonesty in particular situations is that it creates a space that is freed from habitual judgments on matters of fact. Indecency, likewise, fosters moments that are freed from habitual judgments about how we act. They are "shocking".

[Update (07/07/2014): Art must provide the proximate occasion of scandal. See Andrew's comments and my response to this post.]