The Enlightened Despot

Sarah Palin doesn’t understand why people won’t accept her stated reasons for quitting at face value. Kevin Drum is somewhat sympathetic. Stanley Fish thinks the pundits searching for an angle are more dispicable than Palin herself. They are all way off the mark.

Human interaction would be pretty difficult if it weren’t the default assumption that most people were telling the truth most of the time. Most utterances are fairly trivial; we can generally assume that people aren’t lying to us about the weather, because even the slightest inclination toward honesty would be sufficient to outweigh any possible incentive to lie about such a thing.

Of course, it is customary to give people the benefit of the doubt even when they do have a tangible incentive to lie. Our attitudes toward lying and liars make even this a good bet under many circumstances. Since we tend not to associate with people who have proved to be dishonest in the best, our odds get better with time. And since people are generally rational enough to save their lies for situations in which they are unlikely to be found out, a ceteris paribus assumption of honesty works out fairly well.

If, however, we are concerned only with figuring out what is actually true about the world, and have no interest in common courtesy - as we shouldn’t in analyzing the public actions of political figures - there is no reason whatsoever to make this assumption. That a politician says that x is true when the stakes are high and the chance of being proven a liar are essentially zero (even if a scandal breaks, no one can prove she was lying about her motivation here) should barely count as prima facie evidence for the actual truth of x. When the politician in question is Sarah Palin you can drop the qualifiers: that Palin is quitting for the reasons she gave is no more likely than if she had said nothing at all. Which is to say, not very likely at all.

As always, a little David Hume is instructive:

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

Every woman, too. And in Palin’s case, it isn’t just a supposition.

Mark Liberman has a beautiful side by side of passages from David Brooks (today) and David Hume (three centuries ago, and better reasoned). The upshot: the ‘novel’ problems of science and morality Brooks raises are not novel at all.

David Brooks:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation […]

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. […]

Think of what happens when you put a new food into your mouth. You don’t have to decide if it’s disgusting. You just know. You don’t have to decide if a landscape is beautiful. You just know.

Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain.

David Hume:

There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of MORALS; whether they be derived from REASON, or from SENTIMENT; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; whether, like all sound judgment of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational intelligent being; or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.

The ancient philosophers, though they often affirm, that virtue is nothing but conformity to reason, yet, in general, seem to consider morals as deriving their existence from taste and sentiment.

Here’s a neat web-site that tells you how many clicks it will take you to get from one Wikipedia article to another, and what pages you would go through. A few minutes of testing suggests that the answer is always three. To get from Rod Blagojevich to David Hume, you pass through Bill Clinton then United Kingdom. Watch for this to drop to 1 when Blago quotes A Treatise of Human Nature in his next press conference.

P.S. OK, just as I was about to publish, I found an exception to the 3 clicks rule. It takes 4 to get from Hume to Contango. Contango does it again!

Well, close enough:

Nor is there required such profound knowledge to discover the present imperfect condition of the [GOP], but even the rabble without doors may, judge from the noise and clamour, which they hear, that all goes not well within.