I Am An Epistemic Liberal

I have been pondering the meaning of my life for the last few years a lot, given having gone through some tough personal bouts. One of the ways I’ve coped with that, has been, in my spare time, returning to my love of philosophy. Philosophy has basically become my hobby outside of work and family commitments. And my passion, moral philosophy and epistemology (the study of knowledge), also seemed to be becoming extremely relevant given the age of A.I. emerging, and conversations around versions of technological determinism — from Balaji’s online opt-in societies, to hyperbitcoinization, to the coming AI apocalypse — were really rubbing me the wrong way. Accordingly, I’ve been sniping at these notions for years from my Twitter/X perch. But what is it about my moral views that activates such a moral revolt? It’s the fact I’m an epistemic liberal.

Let’s define epistemic liberalism. To me, it is, the normative stance, that the most moral ethical frameworks are the ones that maximize the normative possibility space. What does that mean? It means, that the ethical structures we seek to build (cultural norms, laws, etc.) should be in service of accommodating the widest range of open inquiry, dialogue, and the freedom to explore a wide array of life paths and ideas. It posits that a free society depends not just on political or economic structures, but fundamentally on a epistemic structure that promotes the exploration of diverse perspectives and possibilities. This approach to liberalism, I think, appreciates the complexity of human knowledge and the limits of certainty, advocating for a social order that remains open to revision and responsive to varied experiences and insights from its members.

When you make a technologically deterministic argument that say, bitcoin will necessarily replace all fiat money, and by extension, the capacity of a state to manage money, you are saying this future necessarily narrows the normative possibility space with questions around potentially other desirable normative notions about other potentially desirable features of money, taken off the table. But note that this is a subtle point here: the argument is that human agency, in aggregate, at least from a normative possibility space, has been narrowed by a technologically deterministic outcome. This does epistemic violence on the notion of human agency. Now, understand, this is a fuzzy notion of how to think of making your initial ethical footing. From here we are not talking about what humans can do in the future, we are talking about what they will do, literally whether they like it or not. This is the offensive and I dare say repugnant notion, at the heart of any technological deterministic ideology.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: techno-libertarianism. If you are following along, you might have already figured out that from an epistemic liberal grounding ethic, the entire notion of techno-libertarianism is what I might dare to call an epistemically authoritarian notion, because it is literally arguing against human agency and for a path-determined future, shaped and constrained by the technology — which by the way, is always an instrument of a human desire. We use technology to serve human passions. We don’t farm because we have farm tools. We have farm tools because we want more food to eat.

This insight is of great consequence to epistemic liberalism, because this means that we can observe a great paradox in some forms of libertarianism very clearly, which is that many libertarian orders are inherently epistemically authoritarian in that they circumscribe normative possibility spaces dramatically.

Anyways, this has been my best attempt to describe the core of my ethical thinking and how I approach all of these various topics.