A Promising Path to Greater Wisdom — Veil of Ignorance
Or what Project Contribute, debating, and John Rawls have in common
By MARTIN REZNY
When you encounter a new idea, how much would you say your opinion of it is affected by who came up with it? A little bit? A lot? Not at all?
If the people who came up with rhetoric are to be believed, you’re affected by that a whole bunch. Of the three main types of rhetorical appeal defined by Aristotle — ethos, logos, and pathos — two are personal. Only logos, appeal to logic or reason, is impersonal. And makes sense.
In our latest ProCon meeting, which I have sadly missed, but was able to review, Nova and Luke went into a lot of detail of how conversations or debates should be structured on the platform, at least for the initial test runs. Turns out that conversation has an astounding amount of settings.
For example, how long should be each speech or post? How many should be allowed per any unit of time? Should any of that be limited at all? Make each post too short, and a complete idea wouldn’t even be formulatable in it (I’m looking at you X/Formerly Twitter). But make it too long, or allow too many posts per person, and it could be literally impossible for the participants to review each other’s ideas in any reasonable amount of time.
Of course, such balancing is entirely doable. After decades of competitive practice, most verbal tournament debating formats have landed on 5 to 8 minutes per speech, which allows for sufficiently deep discussion of about 3 to 5 arguments per speech. Do this back and forth for about 2 to 4 rounds between 2 to 4 teams of 1 to 5 debaters each, and a real debate happens.
Details like this will probably have to be tested and tweaked a lot before the “product” will be ready for any “market”, but there seems to be one thing that we already happen to agree about — there needs to be an anonymous mode. The basic idea behind it is that it’s kinda difficult to do any ad hominem personal attacks when them hominems cannot be identified.
This makes a lot of sense just on the face of it, but it did make me think some deeper thoughts. The immediate counter-argument could be that communication on the internet is so terrible and personally offensive precisely because of the anonymity, but I think this needs to be unpacked. As it now occurs to me in comparison, anonymity has different types.
Maybe “anonymity” isn’t even the right term here. I think technically, what we’re talking about is personal disassociation. In real life, the most common mode of speech is in-person communication. In that, each speaker involved is associated, knowing everyone else, often directly with a substantial insight into their character, or their ethos. This works.
The challenge of all media, especially modern mass media, is to somehow make any communication worthwhile where this level of direct personal insight isn’t possible to achieve. The problem with ethos is that it makes a lot less logical sense when it’s reduced to someone’s projected public image, or when you only think you know who the speaker is. The clinical term for this one-sided misunderstanding is “parasocial relationship”.
While real person’s real character may contain useful information adding weight to their arguments, a character’s persona or perceived authority just aren’t good enough. With modern communication tools, these are too easy to twist or manufacture. The good news here might be, I suspect, that the majority of anonymous online trolls still need either a fake persona (to impersonate, or to satisfy their own ego), or identifiable targets.
Presumably, where would be the (evil) fun in nobody knowing that you trolled someone, or not even you knowing whom you trolled? In a completely personally disassociated discourse, the only targets that can be attacked are ideas, the logos. That can still be done unconstructively, but it’s much harder to make that personal, which is rocket fuel for this impulse.
So, that’s the full theory. But when it’s stated like this, it makes me realize two more things — debating has already been doing a kind of a personal disassociation trick, very successfully for about two millennia; and this is pretty much John Rawls’s veil of ignorance reasoning (how one would design the world before they’re born, if they didn’t know who they will be).
Let’s start with the debating’s disassociation trick. In debating, it is understood that debaters may or may not be presenting their personally held beliefs during debates. The point isn’t to present your ideas, the point is to find the winning ideas (and then maybe realize that if your ideas aren’t the winning ideas, that maybe it would make sense to adopt the winners).
What this does, apart from stirring a very healthy internal dialogue and understanding of other people’s ideas in the debaters’ minds, is that personal attacks don’t get anyone anything. Personal attacks already don’t make logical sense, so they can’t score points for that, but even on the meta level, in this scenario, personal attacks don’t make any personal sense.
In terms of pathos, or emotional logic, how does it make sense to insult someone for saying something, if the assumption is that they’re not saying it because they personally believe it? How does it make sense to try a guilt by association argument, when the speaker isn’t personally associated with the argument? It cannot be feasibly assumed that a debater is a supporter of any idea’s originator or of any of its proponents. It’s just not personal.
Moreover, the veritable magic trick in all of this is that one tends to become what one practices. I dare you to try spending years getting no positive feedback from anyone whenever you make a personal argument, and somehow keep making personal arguments all the time in your personal life. You just get un-used to it. It becomes noticeable, irritating.
I guess you could still be evil and decide to do what you now know is bad for money, fame, or power, but most people don’t want to be knowingly evil if they can avoid it. Which brings me to the veil of ignorance. The overlap in logic here on the level of general principle is that when people know they will profit from something bad, they’re more likely to support it.
In the Rawls’s original veil of ignorance-based economic redistribution argument, a just system is a system which most people would opt for in the absence of knowing how good of a position they will get in it. Rawls’s intuition of what most people would agree on behind a veil of ignorance is something he calls “maximin”, or maximum improvement of the worst possible outcome. In short, to see what’s fair, you need to remove yourself.
In our communication scenario, the veil of ignorance means that for you to be able to assess the true worth of an idea at your most reasonable, you must not know who is saying it. Just like for others to be able to reasonably assess your ideas, they must not know anything about you. At least in the moment of assessing the ideas. Not your looks, not your origin, not your wealth or status, not your education, not your life experience or record.
This is a way in which one could propose what they personally believe, but without being associated with it, and without personally gaining from it, except for a private sense of having learned something, contributed to a mutual effort, or succesfully influenced others. Even debating has more personal pitfalls than this model, as there’s still some potential publicity.
Debating is also probably a less perfect solution overall, since the disassociation of speakers from their personally held beliefs does have its own dangers. At their worst, debaters can lose sight of the importance of actually believing in what they’re saying, becoming spineless mouths for hire. If an unidentifiable speaker is arguing for an idea they believe in, focusing on its success rather than on their success, that’s more powerful.
So, what do you think? Does this make any sense? What would you think about it if John Oliver said it? Or Jordan Peterson? I can totally see this being seen as either a very progressive left-wing idea, or a kinda racist alt-right “I-don’t-see-race”-type dog whistle aimed against only the left-wing identitarians, depending on the perceived ethos of its originator. Of which it honestly is neither, hence further supporting the point (that nobody should treat as specifically mine). Think of “me” as a scri-bot.
In any case, if “you” happen to have any arguments for, against, or tangential to this proposition, I would very much like to hear them. Also, if you find anything about this project interesting, you should visit its new landing page:
