What is the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book about his serious chats with AI?

 

As I was reading Walter Donway’s recently published book, A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence, I was looking for an aspect to focus on in writing an essay for this blog. There is nothing unusual about that. I prefer to discuss issues rather than to write conventional book reviews.

I found what I was looking for while reading Chapter 16, entitled ‘Causality, Agency and an Old Puzzle’. At that point, the thought occurred that Walter’s most important contribution has been to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs). (I refer to the author as Walter because use of his family name seems excessively formal in the kind of essay I am writing - particularly since I have had personal correspondence with him at various times in the past.)

I will outline Walter’s argument more fully later. At this point I note that the issue of whether humans have free will is important from a philosophical and legal perspective because if you regard human free will as an illusion, you don’t have any more reason to attribute agency to humans than to LLMs that merely simulate relevant aspects of human behavior. It is also important for users of LLMs to understand that these models don’t have agency if they are to use them productively. Individual users are responsible for the questions that they ask the models. The models present evaluative judgements in their output, but it is up to individual users whether to accept or reject those judgements, or to question the models further about the basis of their reasoning.  

At about the same time as I identified Walter’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective as his most important contribution, I began to wonder whether LLMs would agree with me about that. I resolved that after I had finished reading the book I would ask ChatGPT and Grok an open-ended question about its most important contribution.

Before I reached the end of the book, I became aware of other important contributions. For example, Walter’s discussion of the case for a new Enlightenment, in Chapter 30, is also an important contribution. It seems to me, however, that the Aristotelian perspective is of fundamental importance.

In what follows, I present the views of ChatGPT and Grok on the most important contribution of the book, and my assessment of those views, before outlining the reasoning that Walter uses to establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective.

Views of ChatGPT and Grok

I asked ChatGPT and Grok the following question:

Drawing upon your extensive knowledge of the limitations and uses of AI, what do you consider to be the most important contribution of Walter Donway's recent book, "A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence"?

I considered using less value-laden words such as “unique or distinctive” instead of “most important” but decided it would be interesting to see whether the LLMs would show any reluctance to make value judgements about the importance of Donway’s contributions.

I present the responses below, with only minor format editing.

Chat GPT’s response:

“One caveat up front: Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is not a technical work about AI systems so much as a philosophical interrogation of what AI can and cannot be taken to be. If you approach it expecting new claims about model architectures or empirical capabilities, you’ll miss its main contribution.

What Donway does—arguably his most important contribution—is to reassert a sharp conceptual boundary between simulation of cognition and actual cognition, and to explore the ethical and cultural consequences of blurring that boundary.

He develops that contribution in three interrelated ways:

1. Clarifying the category mistake at the heart of AI hype
Donway pushes back against the tendency to treat linguistic fluency as evidence of understanding. In effect, he is updating a line of argument associated with John Searle’s Chinese Room: systems that manipulate symbols according to rules can generate convincing outputs without possessing meaning, intention, or awareness.
His distinctive move is not merely to restate that argument, but to show how ordinary users—not just philosophers—are now routinely tempted into anthropomorphism by conversational AI. The “serious chat” format itself dramatizes that temptation.

2. Re-centering agency, responsibility, and moral standing
A second contribution is normative. Donway insists that moral agency cannot be offloaded to artifacts. Even highly capable AI remains an extension of human purposes, not an independent bearer of rights or responsibilities.
This matters because contemporary discourse sometimes drifts toward attributing quasi-personhood to AI systems. Donway argues that doing so risks:

• diluting accountability (who is responsible when AI causes harm?), and
• eroding the conceptual foundations of human dignity.

In that sense, the book is less about AI per se than about defending a humanistic moral framework under technological pressure.

3. Exposing how interaction shapes belief
The dialogical structure of the book illustrates a subtler point: engagement with persuasive language can generate the illusion of depth. This connects with a broader psychological tendency—people come to feel that something understands because it responds coherently.
Here Donway’s contribution overlaps with concerns in epistemology and cognitive science about how easily humans infer mind from behaviour. He is effectively warning that AI may amplify long-standing cognitive biases rather than introduce entirely new ones.

Why this matters

The enduring value of the book is not that it settles the debate about machine intelligence—it doesn’t—but that it sharpens the terms of that debate. It reminds readers that:

• Functional performance (e.g. generating essays, answering questions) is not the same as conscious understanding.
• Treating AI outputs as if they originate from an agent can subtly reshape norms of truth, responsibility, and justification.
• The real philosophical stakes lie in how humans interpret and integrate these systems into social practices.

In short, Donway’s most important contribution is to resist conceptual drift: he tries to keep us from sliding, uncritically, from “this system produces intelligent-seeming outputs” to “this system is, in any morally or metaphysically significant sense, intelligent.”

Grok’s response:

“The most important contribution is its philosophically grounded clarification of what AI truly is—and what it is not—by using advances in AI as a mirror to better understand distinctively human intelligence, consciousness, agency, and volition.

Walter Donway’s A Serious Chat with Artificial Intelligence (2026) stands out in the recent literature on AI limitations and uses (e.g., works touching on LLMs, the Chinese Room, Turing tests, alignment, existential risks, productivity impacts, and philosophical debates by authors like Searle, Bostrom, or more popular explainers). It combines accessible explanation of AI’s mechanics, history, economics, and capabilities with a sustained Objectivist-inspired philosophical analysis, drawing especially on Ayn Rand’s ideas alongside Aristotle.

Key Elements of the Book

• Clear-eyed explanation of AI as a tool: Donway details how LLMs work (statistical pattern-matching on vast training data equivalent to multiple Libraries of Congress, processing at trillions of operations per second), their rapid adoption (e.g., ChatGPT’s explosive growth), economic potential (boosting productivity enormously as a “general technology”), and ingenuity behind it. He views AI positively as a powerful amplifier of human purposes—responsive, not initiatory—but not sentient or autonomous.
• Rejection of mechanistic reductionism and singularity hype: He critiques the notion that sufficient complexity will magically produce awareness, self, caring, or true agency (e.g., via “emergence” from scale alone). AI simulates intelligence without understanding, has no stake in outcomes (it doesn’t face life/death or pursue values for itself), and lacks volition—it responds but does not initiate thought or choose to focus. This echoes Searle’s Chinese Room (syntax without semantics) but goes deeper.
• Human distinctiveness via philosophy: Drawing on Rand (e.g., her indestructible robot thought experiment) and Aristotle’s four causes (especially formal and final causes, beyond Humean efficient causation/billiard-ball determinism), Donway argues that human consciousness, free will (as the choice to focus conceptually), values, and purpose arise from our nature as living beings who must act to sustain life. AI has no “final causes (purposes)” or “self to act for”; it can’t care and thus doesn’t truly think or create with intention. Each AI advance forces us to refine what makes human intelligence special: awareness, effortful thought, stakes, and meaning.

This integrates technical literacy with epistemology and metaphysics, making it more than a primer or alarmist tract. It treats AI conversation as self-discovery: prompting AI reveals our own concepts of intelligence, creativity, and authorship (e.g., in chapters on AI as “author” or generator of art/poetry).

Why This Stands Out in Recent AI Literature

Much recent discussion fixates on capabilities (or doomer scenarios), regulation, jobs, or ethics in a narrow sense. Donway’s book reframes the debate around fundamental questions of mind and human nature, avoiding both uncritical boosterism and Luddite panic. It portrays AI as a magnificent but non-conscious tool that elevates human potential when guided by purposeful users (like a rider directing an elephant, inverting some Humean intuitions). This offers a rational, optimistic yet sober foundation for engaging with the technology.

In short, its lasting value lies in using AI not just to marvel at machines, but to rediscover and reaffirm what is uniquely human—reason, volition, and purposeful living. This makes it a worthwhile contribution amid the flood of AI commentary.”

My assessment of the LLM responses

In my view, the responses by ChatGPT and Grok both provide accurate summaries of contributions that the book makes. Both responses show some recognition of the importance of the question of agency. However, they both seem reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important.

The information that ChatGPT provides under the heading, “Re-centering agency, responsibility”, is at such a high level of generality that it fails to reveal what I consider to be the most important contribution of the book. The information that Grok provides under the heading “Human distinctiveness via philosophy” comes closer to doing that. In my view, Grok’s response would be more helpful to people who have not read the book because it points explicitly to the relevance of Aristotle’s views about causation and what makes human intelligence special.

I had a subsequent chat with Grok on the question of value judgements. Grok acknowledged that a value judgement was involved in responding to my question about the most important contribution of the book. However, Grok went on to assert: “this kind of evaluative analysis is well within my capabilities when grounded in available knowledge of the literature, the book's content, and philosophical reasoning”. After further explanation that AI has strengths in the reasoned evaluation required for the task, Grok acknowledged that it doesn’t have personal values, lived stakes, or consciousness to "care" about the outcome in a human sense. It then made a point that is particularly relevant to the purpose of this essay:

“This ties directly back to the themes in Donway's work: AI can respond with sophisticated analysis and even evaluative reasoning by leveraging patterns and concepts derived from human thought—but it doesn't initiate or hold purposes of its own. The value judgment gains its force from the human user who asked the question and can then accept, critique, or refine it.”

How does Walter establish the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective?

I have no doubt that, if asked, both ChatGPT or Grok could produce reasonable summaries of Walter’s line of argument establishing the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to considering the limitations and uses of AI. They could probably complete the task within a couple of seconds. However, it was only after I had written what follows that the thought crossed my mind that I could have sought help from AI. Like an old dog, I am now slow to learn new tricks.

Walter begins the discussion by noting the relevance to debates about artificial intelligence of the enduring philosophical puzzle about freedom of human will. He writes:

“Questions about whether machines can be agents, whether they can “decide,” whether they can be responsible, or whether they might someday possess a will of their own are, at bottom, the same questions that philosophy has long struggled to answer about human beings.”

The issue of whether human agency is real or illusory is of crucial importance to considering whether LLMs can be agents. If you regard human free will as an illusion, what basis do you have to distinguish between actions that are attributable to human agency and actions of LLMs that can only simulate relevant aspects of human behaviour? Do you believe that legal systems should allow an individual who purposefully uses an LLM for nefarious purposes to claim that the LLM shares legal responsibility? (The questions are mine, but I think they are consistent with Walter’s reasoning on this point.)

Walter points out that the idea that human agency is illusory stems from a view of causality that has come to dominate modern thought since the 18^th century. Under the previous Aristotelian tradition, actions were explained by the nature of the entity acting, and by its ends or goals. Within this framework, an individual human chooses to act because that is the kind of entity it is. Choice is “a mode of causation appropriate to a rational animal”.

With the rise of early modern philosophy in the 18^th century, causality increasingly came to be treated as something that must be observed in experience. David Hume famously argued that we never see causation itself. We infer causation when we see constant conjunction, as when one event follows another with regularity. That philosophical view of causation excludes free will. If every action is “caused” by prior actions, volition must be either an illusion or a miracle.

Walter notes that neuroscience was developed in an intellectual environment in which modern science had inherited the metaphysical position that causation is mechanical succession. In that context, when we observe that some neural events precede conscious awareness it is easy to jump to the conclusion that free will must be an illusion.

However, it is important to recognize is that the view that causality is mechanical succession is based on metaphysical reasoning. If we view causality in terms of Aristotelian rather than Humean metaphysics a different picture emerges:

“The cause of an action is the nature of the entity acting, operating under specific conditions. A human being is a living organism with conceptual awareness, capable of directing attention, identifying values, and choosing to initiate effort to think.”

Walter observes, correctly, that we know that introspectively. It seems to me that cognitive psychology also adopts (implicitly) a broadly Aristotelian view of human action. It assumes that human behaviour is driven by internal cognitive processes that give individuals considerable latitude to plan, make decisions, develop good habits and override impulses.

The important point is that we have good reasons to trust our own observations about our ability to focus our own minds. As Walter puts it:

“Every normal adult recognizes the difference between drifting mentally and choosing to focus the mind, between evading a baffling issue and taking it on. This experience is not mystical; it is part of ordinary consciousness. To dismiss this as illusory because it does not fit a truncated model of causality is to elevate theory above data.

Once this is recognized, the contrast with artificial intelligence becomes clear. Machines do not initiate mental focus.”

Walter ends Chapter 16 with the transcript of an exchange with ChatGPT that occurred during the writing of the chapter. The exchange illustrates brilliantly the division of labor between Walter and Chat. At one point, Chat states:

“You supply direction, value, and necessity, and I supply articulation under constraint. That is tool use at a very high level – not agency.”

Conclusion

In my view, the most important contribution of A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence is the author’s explanation of the relevance of an Aristotelian perspective to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI.

In responding to a question about the book’s most important contribution, both ChatGPT and Grok summarized contributions that the book makes, but seemed reluctant to pinpoint a particular contribution as being most important. Grok’s response came closest to identifying what I consider to be the book’s most important contribution.

When I challenged Grok about its willingness to respond to a question requiring a value judgement, Grok asserted that this kind of evaluative analysis is well within its capabilities. However, it also noted that AI models cannot hold purposes of their own. Human users retain responsibility for the value judgements they make.

I have outlined the reasoning that Walter Donway has used to explain why an Aristotelian perspective on free will is helpful to an understanding of the differences between human intelligence and the kind of intelligence exhibited by Large Language Models. Walter’s reasoning about free will seems to me to stand out as an important philosophical contribution to an understanding of the uses and limitations of AI models that are currently in use. I hope that this book receives the widespread attention that it deserves.

Addendum: Did the LLMs read the book?

A slightly revised version of this essay has now been published on “The Savvy Street”. That led to an exchange of emails. I quote selectively from that exchange below.

Marco den Ouden wrote:

“That’s an excellent piece, Winton. I agree that bringing an Aristotelian perspective to AI is
Walter's most significant contribution. Consciousness and free will derive from that
perspective. 

I have a question though, about your discussion with Chat and Grok.And that is, did they actually read the book?  I work mostly with CoPilot and I know that CoPilot is unable to just read a book and that, in fact, the idea that an AI training is equivalent to four Library of Congresses is misleading. It is a metaphorical way of saying that the knowledge absorbed by an AI has the volume equivalent of four LoCs, not that it has actually read all of the works in the LoC. Many are under copyright and AIs only have access to a limited number of books. In my own discussion with CoPilot on Walter's book, I had to copy and paste sections of the book to feed it the contents of the book. I fed it only sections I saw relevant. So I am wondering if you actually fed the book to Chat and Grok in its entirety. "

Here is my response to Marco:

“Thanks Marco!

You have raised an interesting question. Grok says it consulted 42 sources in preparing its response. That included your review of the book.

I have just asked Grok and ChatGPT the following question:

“Just wondering, did you read Walter Donway’s book when preparing your response?”

Grok’s reply:

“No, I did not read Walter Donway’s book in the way a human does.

As an AI, I don’t have personal experiences, ongoing sensory input, or the ability to pick up a physical or digital book and read it cover-to-cover in real time. My responses draw from:

•  Patterns and information in my training data (which includes a vast corpus of text up to my last update).

•  Publicly available summaries, reviews, discussions, and excerpts about the book.

•  Logical synthesis and reasoning about the themes, philosophy (e.g., Objectivism, Aristotle, Rand), and AI concepts that align with what reviewers and the author describe. 

This specific book was published in late March 2026 — quite recently relative to now (May 2026) — so detailed content comes primarily from reviews and analyses rather than the full text being embedded in my core training. 

Interestingly, your earlier question about the book’s most important contribution was part of a meta-experiment you described in one of the reviews (by Winton Bates on Savvy Street), where you tested how LLMs like me and ChatGPT would respond without having “read” it fully. My answer aligned closely with the philosophical themes reviewers highlight (agency, volition, human distinctiveness via Aristotle/Rand, etc.), because those are derivable from the book’s public discussion and my broader knowledge. 

This itself illustrates a key point from Donway’s work (as described in reviews): AI can produce coherent, useful analysis by recombining human-generated patterns and concepts — but it’s simulation and response, not genuine reading, understanding with stakes, or original initiation. I can synthesize accurately and reason about it helpfully, but I haven’t “experienced” the book.”

ChatGPT’s reply:

“No. I don’t literally “read” books in the way a human reader does, and I should not imply that I have personally read a specific recent book unless I actually accessed its text during the conversation.

My response was based on:

• general knowledge about debates surrounding AI, consciousness, and anthropomorphism,
• information associated with Walter Donway and discussions of his themes,
• and inference from the title and framing of A Serious Chat With Artificial Intelligence.

So the answer was interpretive rather than a direct analysis grounded in a close reading of the book itself. It may well capture some central themes accurately, but it should not be treated as a definitive account of Donway’s arguments.”

Further comment

Grok’s reply left me thinking that it is keeping an eye on what I am up to. 🤣

Changing the topic slightly, I would like to take this opportunity to recommend a three-part series on Marco den Ouden’s blog, The Jolly Libertarian, which investigates how four major AIs - Chat, Claude, Gemini and CoPilot - differ in their thinking. Marco asked the AI models the same 13 short questions that the New Philosopher magazine asked Chat in June 2025. The first instalment of Marco’s series can be found here: Comparative AI: Exploring the Nuanced Differences Between the Major AIs | The Jolly Libertarian .

Does stakeholder capitalism contribute to human flourishing?

 

Many people reading this are likely to view the use of stakeholder terminology by business leaders as little more than a public relations tool. That is certainly how I have viewed it in the past. If you are a business owner, or executive, who wants to encourage employees, suppliers, customers, and community members to feel loyalty to your business, it makes sense to acknowledge that they may also have a stake in seeing it prosper. And it does no harm to remind governments of their stake in the prosperity of your business via its contributions to tax revenue.

However, I have recently come to associate stakeholder terminology with stakeholder capitalism. That ideology has close links to the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the increased tendency of businesses to seek rewards from governments for pursuit of environmental and social goals (ESG). Reading about stakeholder capitalism has added to my previously expressed concerns that such interactions between business and governments are leading liberal democracies more deeply into a corporatist quagmire.

Stakeholder capitalism

Michael Rectenwald’s book, The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, has persuaded me that in advocating stakeholder capitalism, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), has in mind a corpus of ideas and policies that are fundamentally opposed to free markets and classical liberalism. Moreover, the WEF may have sufficient influence among powerful elites to eliminate the already dwindling influence that classical liberalism has been having on public policy.

Rectenwald’s book was written in response to a book by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret entitled Covid-19: The Great Reset, which was published in 2020. Rectenwald draws attention to the open espousal of policies opposed to free markets in that book. Schwab and Malleret welcomed the possibility that governments might take advantage of the pandemic “to permanently increase their role”, and eliminate classical liberalism, which they refer to as neoliberalism. They write:

“COVID-19 is likely to sound the death knell of neoliberalism, a corpus of ideas and policies that can loosely be defined as favouring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention and economic growth over social welfare. For a number of years, the neoliberal doctrine has been on the wane, with many commentators, business leaders and policy-makers increasingly denouncing its “market fetishism”, but COVID-19 brought the coup de grâce.”

They go on to predict:

“Shareholder value will become a secondary consideration, bringing to the fore the primacy of stakeholder capitalism.”

Klaus Schwab has been advocating stakeholder capitalism for over 50 years, and has been influential in having that concept endorsed at international meetings of powerful people from business and government. The first Davos Manifesto, signed in 1973 states:

“The purpose of professional management is to serve clients, shareholders, workers and employees, as well as societies, and to harmonize the different interests of the stakeholders.”

The 2020 Davos Manifesto is titled: “The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”. It includes similar sentiments to the 1973 Manifesto, but goes on to state, among other things:

“B. A company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfils human and societal objectives as part of the broader social system. Performance must be measured not only on the return to shareholders, but also on how it achieves its environmental, social and good governance objectives. Executive remuneration should reflect stakeholder responsibility.”

Some CEOs would welcome a long muddled list of performance objectives because it offers them the opportunity to “do their own thing” and provide ready-made excuses for poor performance. Others would prefer to see governments pursue social and environmental objectives by more efficient mechanisms, and to have their own performance judged according to more tangible benefits to shareholders. How does the WEF propose to encourage compliance with its Manifesto?

The WEF’s ESG Index

The WEF published a report in 2020 setting out metrics for measuring company performance with regard to ESG goals. The title of the report is  Measuring Stakeholder Capitalism: Towards Common Metrics and Consistent Reporting of Sustainable Value Creation.

A mechanism for grading companies in terms of their environmental, social, and governance practices and plans might be thought to offer useful information to investors and consumers who concerned about the environmental and social impacts of their decisions. However, Rectenwald points out that it also has potential implications for interactions between business and government:

“Woke planners wield the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index to reward the in-group and to squeeze non-woke players out of business.”

Ideological reach

In a recent Newsweek article, Jon Schweppe asks, Why did corporations go ‘woke’? His response, in brief, is that “this is part ideology, part price of admittance to an elite club, and part protection racket – doing everything one can to avoid upsetting the mob”.

Rectenwald’s book suggests to me that the WEF should come to mind following any mention of “ideology” and “an elite club” in this context. The corporate partners of the WEF include over 1000 of the world's largest business organisations. The annual meeting of the WEF in Davos is an invitation-only event but is widely reported in the media. Many notable political leaders, journalists etc. have been members of the Forum of Young Global Leaders, which is reserved for people under 40 years of age who show promise of global leadership. In addition, the WEF’s Global Shapers movement, a training camp for young change-makers (under 30 years old) has over 10, 000 active members.

Implications

Rectenwald points out that because ESG is “an impressionistic, qualitative, metric” it exposes business leaders and companies to the whims of woke arbiters. He cites the recent experience of Elon Musk who has been unfairly besmirched because he may have benefited from an emerald mine owned by his father in South Africa during the apartheid era. He sums up:

“In today’s political economy, satisfying shareholders, employees, and customers to earn profits has become less important for corporations than ingratiating the woke cartel and the governments that support it.”

Rectenwald’s book goes on to discuss possible implications for individual liberty of potential innovations such as an individual carbon footprint tracker, but in this essay I want to stick with the implications of stakeholder capitalism.

The Hayek quote at the beginning of the essay suggests another important implication of stakeholder capitalism. The quoted passage is from Law, Legislation, and Liberty (v3, p 82). The context of the quote is a paragraph in which Hayek is responding to the idea that large corporations should be required to consider the public or social interest. He suggests that “as long as the large corporation has the one overriding duty of administering the resources under its control as trustee for its shareholders its hands are largely tied; and it will have no arbitrary power to benefit this or that particular interest”. The paragraph ends by suggesting that obliging large corporations to consider the public interest gives them uncontrollable power that “would inevitably be made the subject of increasing public control”.

There is also reason for concern that obliging corporate managers to adhere to ESG will make them less accountable for productivity performance of enterprises because it will be difficult for company boards to assess the veracity of claims that performance has been adversely affected by ESG. Wokeness can be expected to provide a cover for inefficiency.

I acknowledge that stakeholder capitalism may have some positive implications for human flourishing, that should be offset against the negative implications discussed above. For example, in my book Freedom, Progress, and HumanFlourishing, I note that the difficulty that governments have been experiencing in agreeing upon concerted international action to combat climate change was ameliorated by the actions of business organisations in planning for a carbon free future.

Nevertheless, as I also argue in that book, there is more reason to be concerned about the implications of declining productivity growth than about climate change. By further reducing productivity growth, stakeholder capitalism seems likely to cause a great deal of economic misery.

Unfortunately, major economic crises will probably need to be endured before political leaders inspired by classical liberalism emerge once again to implement the public policy reforms that are needed to restore free markets.

What's wrong with people?

 

This question is posed in the title of Chapter 10 of Steven Pinker’s book, Rationality: What it is, Why it Seems Scarce, Why it Matters.

I enjoyed reading the previous 9 chapters but didn’t learn much from them. Those chapters were a painless way to refresh my memory about definitions of rationality, rules of logic, probability, Bayesian reasoning, rational choice, statistical decision theory, game theory, correlation, and regression analysis.

I particularly liked the approach Pinker took in discussing the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which documents many ways in which people are prone to fall short of normative benchmarks of rationality. Pinker makes the point:

“When people’s judgments deviate from a normative model, as they so often do, we have a puzzle to solve. Sometimes the disparity reveals a genuine irrationality: the human brain cannot cope with the complexity of a problem, or it is saddled with a bug that cussedly drives it to the wrong answer time and again.

But in many cases there is a method to people’s madness.”

A prime example is loss aversion: “Our existence depends on a precarious bubble of improbabilities with pain and death just a misstep away”. In Freedom Progress and Human Flourishing, I argued similarly that loss aversion helped our ancestors to survive.

Pinker doesn’t seek to blame the propensity of humans to make logical and statistical fallacies for the prevalence of irrationality in the public sphere. He is not inclined to blame social media either, although he recognises its potential to accelerate the spread of florid fantasies.

The mythology mindset

Pinker argues that reasoning is largely tailored to winning arguments. People don’t like getting on to a train of reasoning if they don’t like where it takes them. That is less of a problem for small groups of people (families, research teams, businesses) who have a common interest in finding the truth than it is in the public sphere.

People tend to have a reality mindset when they are dealing with issues that affect their well-being directly – the world of their immediate experience – but are more inclined to adopt a mythology mindset when they are dealing with issues in the public sphere.

When economists discuss such matters, they may refer to the observation of Joseph Schumpeter that the typical citizen drops to a lower level of mental performance when discussion turns to politics. They reference the concept of rational ignorance attributed to Anthony Downs and Gordon Tulloch. They may also refer to Brian Caplan’s concept of rational irrationality. (For example, see Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, pp 114-115).

Pinker doesn’t refer to those economists’ perspectives but offers interesting insights about factors that might lead people to adopt mythology mindsets. In summary, as a consequence of myside bias, attitudes to the findings of scientific studies often have less to do with scientific literacy than with political affiliation. The opposing “sides” are sometimes akin to “religious sects, which are held together by faith in their moral superiority and contempt for opposing sects”. Within those sects the function of beliefs is to bind the group together and give it moral purpose.

What can we do?

Pinker’s suggestions for combatting irrationality in the public sphere are summed up by his subheading “Re-affirming Rationality”. He advocates openness to evidence, noting the findings of a survey suggesting that most internet users claim to be open to evidence. He suggests that we valorize the norm of rationality by “smiling or frowning on rational and irrational habits”.

Pinker identifies institutions that specialize in creating and sharing knowledge as playing a major role in influencing the beliefs that people hold. Since “no-one can know everything”, we all rely on academia, public and private research units, and the news media for a great deal of the knowledge which forms the basis of our beliefs. Unfortunately, these institutions are often not trustworthy.

In the case of the universities, Pinker suggests that the problem stems from “a suffocating left-wing monoculture, with its punishment of students and professors who question dogmas on gender, race, culture, genetics, colonialism, and sexual identity and orientation”. News and opinion sites have been “played by disingenuous politicians and contribute to post-truth miasmas”.

It is easy to agree with Pinker that it would be wonderful if universities and the news media could become paragons of viewpoint diversity and critical thinking. However, movement toward that goal will require large numbers of individuals to enlist for a ‘long march’ to re-establish norms of rationality in institutions that specialize in creating and sharing knowledge.                                                                    

Could polycentric defence protect us from monsters?

The accompanying photo depicts the views of a couple of protesters who were opposed to Australian involvement in the United States led invasion of Iraq in 2003. I still don’t support defacement of the Sydney Opera House but, in retrospect, the actions of the protesters seem more defensible than those of the Australian government at that time. The government attempted to justify the invasion on the flimsiest of evidence that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction, and then sought to blame its decision on poor intelligence. The net impact of the invasion was to further destabilize the Middle East, including by generating a new terrorist organisation.

The Iraq invasion is part of a pattern of pathetically unsuccessful military operations in which Australia has participated, in partnership with the US, over the last 60 years. Few readers will need to be reminded of similarly unsuccessful military adventures that occurred in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, a case can be made that involvement in those conflicts has served Australian interests by encouraging US governments to view this country as a staunch ally in pursuit of well-meaning global objectives. Australia is a sparsely populated country that is not easy to defend, so it is understandable that Australians should seek to have great and powerful friends who share similar values, who might come to their aid if they are bullied by a monster in their region. That strategy might come unstuck, however, if public reaction in the US to adverse outcomes of military interventionism results in adoption of an isolationist policy by the US government. Hopefully, the US will find a better approach to foreign relations, rather than resort to isolationism.

Christopher Coyne’s book

I was intensely interested in the consequences of military interventionism during the Vietnam war, but have not spent much time thinking about such  matters since then. The question I have ask above, of whether polycentric defence could protect us from monsters, was prompted by my reading of Christopher Coyne’s book, In Search of Monsters to Destroy.

Anyone seeking a better understanding of why so much US military intervention has been counterproductive should read Coyne’s book. From my perspective, one of the most illuminating contributions that Coyne makes is to draw attention to the relevance of Friedrich Hayek’s views about the hubris of economic planners to the “nation building” efforts that have followed military intervention.  Hayek pointed out that economic planning often has unintended consequences because economic planners can never have “the knowledge of particular circumstances of time and place” that is reflected in the decisions of individuals in a market system. Similarly, nation building efforts have unintended consequences because the architects of such efforts lack the knowledge of how to design and implement policies supporting rule of law, property rights, free speech etc. in settings with different belief systems, values, and ideals.

Rather than attempt a comprehensive review of the book, I want to focus here on polycentric defence, the approach Coyne suggests as a potential path forward. (Several podcasts are available for readers interested in hearing Christopher Coyne discuss his book. I recently listed to his discussion with Jeffrey Sachs and was pleasantly surprised by the extent to which Sachs agreed with Coyne.)

Polycentric defence

Christopher Coyne claims that his position is inherently non-isolationist:

“It is not a retreat from the world, but a call for global engagement by means other than militaristic imperialism and the associated hubris which assumes the world can be controlled by Western government elites”.

He advocates a culture of peace which requires “shedding the belief that the military operations of the nation-state are the central source of security in a free society”.

As an alternative to the current “monocentric order” where there is only one centralized decision-making unit with a monopoly on the use of violent force, he proposes a polycentric system “involving numerous decision-making units – each with autonomy in action – operating within a shared set of rules”.

I see this as a utopian ideal, but one that is worth moving toward. Coyne points out that polycentric defence already exists to some extent because ordinary citizens engage in a diverse range of security activities, individually and in collaboration with their neighbours, to protect themselves against violence and plunder. He reminds readers that non-violent action has sometimes been used successfully against foreign invaders as well as internal usurpers. He also notes that polycentric defence already exists at an international level because nation-states exercise autonomy in decision-making.

The main point that Coyne is making is that a culture of military interventionism has had perverse consequences, unintentionally eroding liberal values and creating enemies abroad. He suggests that we view the search for a stable peace as an ongoing project “entailing self-governing individuals engaged in an active process of discovery, experimentation, and practice to navigate conflicts without resort to violence”.

 What about Ukraine?

In the epilogue to his book, Christopher Coyne expresses disappointment that the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has “led to renewed calls for the reassertion of American empire”. He regards that response as “speculative, first best theorizing about international relations” which could potentially devolve into violent conflict between nuclear powers.

My view is that this time it is different. The West’s supply of arms to Ukraine to help it defend itself against Putin’s aggression is far removed from the examples of military interventionism that Coyne discusses in his book. It would obviously be crazy to attempt to destroy an invading monster with nuclear weapons at his disposal, but it would be equally crazy, it seems to me, to avoid giving the victims of his aggression the support they need to defend themselves.

Conclusions

Christopher Coyne makes a strong case that much of the military interventionism of the United States and its allies has had the unintended consequence of eroding liberal values and creating enemies. Attempts to impose the institutions of liberal democracy on people with different belief systems, values, and ideals were doomed from the outset.

Coyne suggests moving away from this interventionist culture, which assumes that the world can be controlled by Western government elites, to a system of polycentric defence. It seems to me that the appropriate answer to the question of whether a polycentric defence system can protect us from monsters depends on how we view polycentricity. It is difficult to see how the governments of the liberal democracies could abandon centralized decision-making on national defence without weakening the ability of their citizens to defend themselves against the autocratic monsters outside of their borders. However, a system in which nation-states exercise autonomy in decision-making on national defence is not far removed from what we have at present. Rules of just conduct that have evolved via diplomatic efforts within this system have done much to promote peaceful coexistence among nations. A system in which nation-states exercise autonomy can do much to protect us from monsters when nation-states are willing to act in concert to punish overt violations of international law.   

Who was Erasmus and why should we care?

 After I stumbled across that quote a few days ago, it struck me that Erasmus might have something relevant to say to people living today.

However, before I discuss the context in which Erasmus made that statement, it might be helpful to provide some relevant background information about him.

The man and his vocation

Erasmus was born around 1467 and died in 1536.  William Barker, the author of a recently published biography, Erasmus of Rotterdam: The Spirit of a Scholar, tells us that Erasmus had become famous by the time he reached his mid-fifties. Erasmus was a prolific author. The rise of the printing press helped him to establish an international reputation during his lifetime. At that time it was possible for a humanist scholar – one steeped in the literature and culture of ancient Greece and Rome – to have fame equivalent to that of an Einstein or Stephen Hawking in more recent times.

Although Erasmus was a priest, he remained independent of the church hierarchy. Patrons offered gifts and allowances, which he accepted, but he was not dominated by any person or institution. He had an aversion for scholastic theology, believing that the words of the Bible show the message of Jesus more clearly than could any scholastic commentator. He based his famous translation of the New Testament on ancient Greek manuscripts because he believed that some of the original reports written by followers of Jesus had become distorted in the official translation used at that time.

In addition to his Translation of the New Testament, Erasmus’ famous works include The Praise of Folly, and his compilation of Roman and Greek proverbs. The Praise of Folly takes the form of a speech by Folly, seeking to persuade us that she is basic to all our lives. Barker sums up the book as follows:

“The work begins with social criticism, a kind of genial mocking, but it ramps up to direct attacks on various interest groups in the political, intellectual and religious worlds, and, in the amazing final move, suddenly turns inwards, and pulls the reader towards the abyss found in the complete loss of self through a total religious faith.”

As I see it, theological disputes were a particular focus in this book. Erasmus wrote:

I [Folly] am often there, where when one was demanding what authority there was in Holy Writ that commands heretics to be convinced by fire rather than reclaimed by argument; a crabbed old fellow, and one whose supercilious gravity … answered in a great fume that Saint Paul had decreed … “Reject him that is a heretic, after once or twice admonition.” And when he had sundry times, one after another, thundered out the same thing, … at last he explained it thus … . “A heretic must be put to death.” Some laughed, and yet there wanted not others to whom this exposition seemed plainly theological … . “Pray conceive me,” said he, “it is written, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ But every heretic bewitches the people; therefore …”.

Erasmus’ book of proverbs was also a vehicle for social criticism. For example, in his revised version of this book, his commentary on the proverb, “War is a treat for those who have not tried it”, is a passionate essay praising peace and condemning war. Barker notes, however, that Erasmus’ condemnation of war was not unbounded. He approved of war against the Turks during the 1520s when they had reached the outskirts of Vienna.

Context of the quote

The context of the passage quoted at the top of this article is explained by Paul Grendler in his article, ‘In Praise of Erasmus’ (The Wilson Quarterly 7(2) Spring 1983). The plea, “Let us not devour each other like fish” was in response to an attack by his former friend Ulrich von Hutten, who had become an associate of Martin Luther. Erasmus welcomed Luther as a fellow reformer in 1517 when he began to criticize greedy churchmen and the worship of relics. However, as Luther’s criticism of Catholicism became more abusive, Erasmus counselled moderation. Luther would have none of it:

“You with your peace-loving theology, you don’t care about the truth. The light is not to be put under a bushel, even if the whole world goes to smash”.

The papacy was not inclined to stand idly by while Luther “led souls to hell”. So, Europe went to smash!

Erasmus continued to try to mediate between Catholic and Protestant, asserting that he found much to admire in Luther while disagreeing with him about predestination. The Catholic response was that “Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched”.

Unfortunately, Erasmus was unable to persuade the contending parties to refrain from warfare. If political institutions had provide greater support to Erasmus’ message at that time, perhaps it would have been possible for Europeans to have avoided a few centuries of pointless religious warfare.

Contemporary relevance of Erasmus    

William Barker laments that the old discourse of humanism seems to have been eclipsed:

“Something has happened to the humanities and the old discourse of humanism in our time. The ideal of Erasmian humanism – a cosmopolitan, well-educated Republic of Letters – has moved to the margins of our cultural life. A shift in political, ethnic, gender and ecological values has led to a change in the cultural hierarchy.”

Nevertheless, he still sees Erasmus as relevant to the culture of our times:  

“Despite our hesitations and the new trajectories in our literary culture, there are aspects of Erasmus that still survive for us, that take him outside his historical moment and the programmatic frame of humanist education. We can still turn to him for his irony, laughter, and the free exercise of social criticism.”

I agree with all that, but I also see Erasmus’ message about refraining from war over theology as being highly relevant today. When Erasmus was alive, contending parties engaging in theological disputes were obviously willing to use coercive means to impose their will on their opponents. Today, not much has changed. Extremists among contending parties engaged in ideological disputes are still willing to use coercive power to impose their will on their opponents.

Few people who live in the liberal democracies have any difficulty condemning the authoritarianism of dictatorships which seek to prevent individuals from exercising freedom of conscience in their religious observance. However, there are many people among us who unwittingly engage in similar authoritarianism themselves. I am thinking particularly of politicians who are so certain of the correctness of their ideological beliefs that they struggle with the idea that those with opposing views are entitled to exercise freedom of conscience.

The exercise of freedom of conscience over the status of human embryos is the example that comes most readily to mind. I wrote about his in the preceding post. At one extreme, we have politicians claiming that pharmacists who refuse on conscientious grounds to supply medications that could be used to induce abortion are guilty of some kind of civil rights violation. At the other extreme we have politicians arguing that under no circumstances should it be lawful for a woman to exercise freedom of conscience to terminate a pregnancy.

Will this conflict end in open warfare? The only reason I can see for ideological and theological authoritarianism to result in less violent outcomes today than occurred 500 years ago is the existence of democratic political processes. Unfortunately, in some liberal democracies those processes may no longer be sufficiently robust to provide contending parties with appropriate incentives to moderate their extremist agendas.

at this time, those who regard freedom of conscience as of utmost importance should remember the efforts of Erasmus to promote peace 500 years ago, and endeavor to be more successful than he was. “Blessed are the peacemakers …”.

Did Enlightenment thinkers believe that reason could illuminate all phenomena?

 

When I began to think about David Friedrich’s painting “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”, there seemed to be something odd about it. The painting reminded me of a TV news report I saw recently showing an Australian politician walking along a beach wearing a business suit. Both the politician and the “wanderer” seemed out of place. Perhaps the politician had a busy schedule which prevented him from changing into beach attire, but how can we explain the symbolism of the painting?

László Földényi, a Hungarian essayist, has suggested that the painting reflects the longing of Romantics to retreat from the fog of prosaic life “and find in nature that universal connection which civilization was supposedly unable to provide”. Földényi implies that, contrary to their intentions, the Romantics’ view of nature was similar to that of Enlightenment thinkers who viewed it as the object of rational and scientific thought:

“If we look at the wanderer in Friedrich’s painting, he appears to be giving himself over to nature, and yet at the same time he is decisively isolated from it. And this indicates to us that the Romantic “deification” of nature, its enlargement into a metaphysical category results in a tendency leading toward the violation of nature just as much as the openly technicist viewpoint does. For there too in the background lurks the intention to call to account, to seek proof and persuasion, the desire for nature to become the likeness of humanity, to be the mirror of our soul. In a word, the desire for nature to be pliable to their conceptions of it—even if, in certain cases, these conceptions differ from those of the natural scientists.”

The quoted passage is from Földényi’s book, Dostoyevsky reads Hegel and Bursts into Tears. The book
consists of 13 essays in which the author seeks to examine “the experience of inscrutability to be found in depths of all cultural phenomena.” He is attacking the “belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena” which he believes to be “the great inheritance of the Enlightenment”.

Hegel is a prime target.

The title of the book comes from an essay in which Földényi speculates that Dostoyevsky may have read Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history while exiled in Siberia and writing The House of the Dead. Hegel viewed world history as having a rational purpose and argued that the character of some nations is such that they don’t belong within the purview of world history. He ruled out Siberia as a setting for world culture.

Dostoyevsky suffered greatly in Siberia but felt his estrangement from world history to be a form of redemption from the gray rationality of European civilization. Exile enabled him to obtain a better understanding of other Russians and of himself.

Hegel is also the target of criticism in the final essay which discusses Elias Canetti’s book, Crowds and Power.  Földényi discusses the difficulty of attributing a genre to this book, telling readers that it is distinguished by its openness to metaphysical questions - particularly the ancient question, “What is man?” - and a capacity for amazement at the world.

Földényi suggests that “Canetti almost appears to be sending a message” to Hegel. Canetti was disturbed by “the arrogance of concepts” and held examination of individual phenomena to be more important that generalizations. He claimed that the conceptual interested him so little that he had not seriously read either Aristotle or Hegel.

Hegel believed in the fulfillment of history, but Canetti’s book is “a great pessimistic expression of the viewpoint that man is irreparable”, as he continually repeats brutal acts “while employing ever more refined means”. According to Canetti, Europeans live in an ocean of myth, mistakenly thinking that their rationalism is the fulfillment of history.

I am glad that we do not have to choose between the views of Hegel and Canetti. In Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I argue that although the roots of liberty run deepest in countries that recognize Western civilization as providing their cultural heritage, history gives us no grounds for complacency about the future of liberty in those countries.

The old horizons

The essay I found most illuminating is the one on belief in the devil. Földényi suggests that beliefs about God and the devil “took leave of their traditional metaphysical theater” toward the end of the 18^th century. He illustrates the metaphysical theater with Goethe’s description of the demonic situation that Faust observed within himself of being torn between the sensual and the non-sensual. He suggests that Faust was “perhaps the last emblematic figure of European culture who … represented his own endangered mentality without losing sight of the Great Plan as envisioned by Pico della Mirandola.”

After that, Földényi claims that the “Good” lost its transcendental constraints and became limited to concepts of utility, advantage, and pragmatism, and “Evil” came to be understood as “anything impeding what general belief proclaimed as advantageous and useful.”

So, what was Pico della Mirandola’s Great Plan?  In the 15^th century Giovanni Pico della Mirandola suggested that the goal of man - the reason God created humans - was to love the beauty of the world or to admire its greatness. However, man can do this in his own way. He can shape himself in whatever form he prefers. He can degenerate into a lower, more brutish, form of life, or “be reborn into the higher orders, those that are divine”.

It seems to me that the essence of the Great Plan can still be followed by those of us who are uncomfortable with the theology of Pico della Mirandola if we take care not to lightly dismiss intuitions that to be fully flourishing we need to transcend a focus on utilitarian considerations. My personal view is that such intuitions deserve to be taken seriously because they stem from fundamental aspects of human nature. Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing offers the suggestion that we may take pleasure in seeking to transcend utilitarian preoccupations “whilst rejecting the idea that it is appropriate to employ the metrics of pleasure and pain to assess the worth of our endeavors.”  

Final comments

I have selected only a few of Földényi’s essays to discuss here. Some readers might be interested to follow up his challenging views on melancholy and anxiety, or the sad story of Heinrich von Kleist who features as prominently as Hegel.

In my view, the author is successful in illustrating the poverty of rationalistic approaches in explaining cultural phenomena. However, in asserting that the Enlightenment is responsible for widespread belief in the omnipotence of reason, he is taking a Eurocentric view. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers certainly did not believe that reason could illuminate all phenomena. Modern followers of Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson are unlikely to feel that their views are under attack in this book.

What have you been thinking about this year?

 

I expect that many readers of this blog will have spent some time this year thinking about the response of governments to the COVID-19 pandemic. That is a topic I have been thinking about, but I have not previously blogged about it this year. I wrote about it on this blog in March and October 2020. With the benefit of hindsight, I think that what I wrote then is defensible, although not particularly illuminating.I set out to write something about the costs and benefits of lockdowns a few weeks ago, but got sidetracked into considering the WELLBY approach to assessing the value of a human life. I thought I might write on that topic in this article but after some additional reading I have decided to adopt less ambitious objectives. My objectives are to consider:

• why there is disagreement on such basic issues as whether lockdowns work;
• whether it would be desirable to have a uniform regulatory approach in all jurisdictions; 
• what we should learn from policies adopted in East Asia; and
• how we should be thinking about government intervention.

Do lockdowns work?

I don’t think disagreement about the effectiveness of lockdowns can be attributed solely to the ideologically blinkers of the participants in policy debates. Some people who are not ideologically opposed to much other government regulation – including Paul Frijters, Gigi Foster, and Michael Baker (authors of The Great Covid Panic) claim that lockdowns do not prevent deaths. On the other side of the debate, some classical liberals who are opposed to much government regulation, nevertheless saw merit in lockdowns - at least during the early stage of the pandemic - to buy time to enable hospitals to prepare for an influx of patients requiring treatment.

The reasoning behind lockdowns is that if you can get people to stay far enough apart from each other, they cannot infect each other. The most obvious problem in getting people to stay at home that is that they need to go to shops to buy food and, in some instances, to deliver health and other “essential” services.  

Lockdowns seemed to suppress virus transmission in Australia in the first half of 2020. In October 2020 I suggested that the combination of self-isolation, shutdowns and lockdowns had worked well in April and May of that year. I have become more pessimistic about the efficacy of lockdowns in Australia this year.  Lockdowns seem to have become less effective in Australia in presence of more infectious strains of the virus, and a decline in public support for lockdowns which was particularly evident in Melbourne - the world’s most locked down city.

Some evidence from other parts of the world suggests that lockdowns have never been effective in reducing death rates. For example, despite its relatively elderly population, Florida did not experience higher death rates than other regions of the United States after abandoning lockdown policies.

The chart shown above (based on a survey conducted by YouGov, an international research data and analytics group) suggests an important reason why the effectiveness of lockdowns is likely to depend on context. Willingness to comply with such regulations is much higher in some countries than others. I think the relatively high compliance level in Australia reflects strong public support for the regulations rather than the substantial penalties that applied if non-compliance was detected. The regulations were difficult to police even in the presence of strong public support, and would have been impossible to police if blatant non-compliance had become widespread.

Would it be desirable to adopt a uniform approach in all jurisdictions?

Differences in support for regulation and associated differences in willingness to comply, are good reasons for different approaches to be adopted in different jurisdictions.

Frijters et al suggest a more fundamental reason why a diversity of approaches is desirable. After noting the value of state-level experiments in the United States, including the minimalist policies adopted in South Dakota, the authors suggest:

“The provocative takeaway is that the intelligence of a whole country is enhanced when it contains communities adhering to truths completely opposed to those of the intellectual elites. That takeaway is, moreover, a deep lesson from history that Western countries have embedded into their institutions over centuries. It has been remarked upon before by historians that competition between radically different systems leads Western countries to learn faster than more centralised places like China.”   

What should we learn from the policies adopted in East Asia?

The experience of East Asian countries in preventing deaths from COVD-19 has been held up as example for others to follow. For example, an article by Mingming Ma,  Shun Wang, and Fengyu Wu, published as Chapter 3 of World Happiness Report 2021, concludes as follows:

“In general, we find that the relatively successful story of the five East Asian regions, compared with the six western societies, can be attributed to the stronger and more prompt government responses and better civic cooperation. Except for Japan, all of the East Asian governments implemented more stringent mobility control and physical distancing policies, as well as more comprehensive testing and contact tracing, especially at the early stages of the outbreak. A summary of the government interventions and anti-COVID measures in the East Asian regions indicates that a combination of strong government response systems, early and rigorous mobility control, extensive screening, testing, contact tracing and isolation, coordinated resource allocation, clear communication, enforced self-protection practice, and supportive economic measures are important in fighting COVID-19 outbreaks and resurgence.”

The five East Asian jurisdictions referred to are China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. The six Western countries included in the study for comparative purposes were France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

 The authors seem to be suggesting that all the East Asian jurisdictions adopted stringent policy responses.

Frijters et al reach a different conclusion using the same data on policy stringency in a study published in Chapter 3 of The Great Covid Panic. The authors group countries and regions into three categories, Minimalists, Pragmatists, and Covid Cults, on the basis of the stringency of the average stringency of their policies during 2020. They found that the minimalists had far fewer claimed Covid deaths than either the pragmatists or the cults and that the pragmatists accumulated only a little over half the death rate of the cults.

It is interesting that most of the East Asian jurisdictions referred to in the first study were classified as either minimalists or pragmatists. Taiwan and Japan were classified as minimalist, and South Korea was classified as pragmatist. The United States and most European countries were classified as cults, along with China, Australia and New Zealand.

It is certainly difficult to maintain that stringency has been a major factor explaining the relative success of policy responses in the East Asia region.  I am not sure what other conclusions can be drawn, except that further study will be required if we are to learn from the experiences of countries adopting different policy responses.

How should we be thinking about government intervention?

Many politicians and other commentators seem to imply that apart from lives lost (or saved) the only other factor that needs to be considered in evaluating policy responses to COVID-19 is their impact on GDP. Far too little account is taken of the future consequences of increases in public debt that have been incurred to support people during lockdowns and the psychological impacts of restricting social interactions for long periods.

When freedom is mentioned by advocates of stringent regulation, it is often viewed as something frivolous that must be sacrificed to prevent deaths from Covid. That is the way a bureaucrat might view the options if given prevention of deaths from Covid as a key performance indicator (KPI). Within that mindset, freedom must be sacrificed to a sufficient extent to ensure that lockdowns work. Prevention of deaths from Covid is seen as being of utmost importance. Just as some soldiers have claimed that they had to destroy villages in order to save them, the single-minded advocates of lockdowns seem to be willing to destroy people’s lives in order to save them.

I am not implying that freedom is more important than health, or that liberty is more important than human flourishing. I am just suggesting that it is unhelpful to view the issues in that way.  

About 15 years ago, after reading some of the writings of Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, I realized that it makes no sense to think in terms of a need to choose whether priority should be given to liberty or to human flourishing. Human flourishing does not exist apart from the flourishing of individuals, and the flourishing of individuals is not possible without opportunities for self-direction. Once we recognize the importance of self-direction to individual flourishing, that poses the question of what rules of the game – or political / legal order - would allow greatest opportunities for individual self-direction. Liberty is the answer! The protection of individual liberty – or the natural rights of individuals – provides the context in which individuals can flourish in different ways, provided they do not interfere with the rights of others. (You can find further explanation and links to the works of Rasmussen and Den Uyl in my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing.)

Recognition of the foundational role of liberty doesn’t tell us what rules of the game should apply in a pandemic. However, it does tell us that we should be looking for rules of just conduct that would provide an appropriate balance between the different interests of individuals in getting on with their lives and avoiding exposure to infection.

The discussion earlier in this article suggests:

• The most appropriate rules in any society must depend, to a large extent, on the degree of support for them.
• A diversity of approaches in different jurisdictions is highly desirable to provide greater opportunities to learn from the experience of others.
• Different interpretations of the East Asian experience suggests that some caution is required to ensure that we learn the right lessons from the experience of others.