The Defining Wisdom project was born from a concern that talk of wisdom has disappeared from a wide range of academic disciplines, and to their detriment. That wisdom has departed from the conversation is certainly true in the two worlds in which I work, economics and the law.
In this post I want to think about why—or to what extent—this happened. Have these fields turned their back on wisdom, or do they discuss it in different terms? And if the latter is the case, what are the gains from adopting a wisdom-centric perspective?
I should start by defining what I mean by wisdom. My take is simple: wisdom is 1) having a good understanding of what you know (and of what you do not know) and 2) using that understanding to achieve a good outcome; I will remain agnostic for now about what that good outcome should be. It is an admittedly broad definition, a potential concern I will come back to later.
My particular focus is less concerned with how individuals use knowledge to live the good life, and more with how higher-level social institutions channel knowledge to accomplish good outcomes. Think of it as “social wisdom,” as opposed to personal. I will assume that per-sonal and social wisdom are essentially analogous—whether I am right about that may be an interesting question, but one beyond the scope of this post.
With these definitions, it should not be surprising that economics has little to say about personal wisdom. The field generally declines to evaluate people’s preferences. After all, we have only one Latin maxim: de gustibus non est disputandem—there is no disputing tastes (although that is not exactly how Becker and Stigler (1977) famously used the phrase).
But social wisdom is a different matter. Economists often make policy recommendations, and these require some sort of normative basis (1). In general, economists take a utilitarian perspective. We remain silent about the value or merit of what makes people happy, but instead try to maximize that happiness, whatever its causes (2). In other words, economic policymakers are always considering how to channel people’s knowledge to achieve a particular view of the (social) good. This is basically social wisdom.
Law’s failure to discuss wisdom should be even more startling. At every turn, the law is deeply enmeshed with questions of right and wrong, good and bad. Substantive rules allocate rights, duties, costs, and benefits, all of which reflect, shape, and define what a good life is and how it should be led. In turn, the procedural rules are designed (at least in theory) to ensure that those substantive goals are accomplished, taking into account what people know and how they can use that knowledge.
Consider evidence law. For three centuries, lawyers, judges, and academics have struggled with how to use complex scientific evidence in the courtroom (Golan 2004). These debates clearly implicate issues of what we do and do not know: can jurors understand the evidence? Can we shape our procedures to help them understand it better?
But these debates also consider what a good legal system should do. For example, do we need to abandon our commitment to adversarialism—which embodies a host of normative values besides getting to the truth—in this particular area? How do we balance, say, the value of accuracy with that of litigant autonomy?
Thus legal actors have been debating the social wisdom of the legal system—and how to make it wiser—for centuries, just without using the word or thinking about it in such terms. (As an aside, so too have economists who have asked how to make the world more utilitarian-efficient.)
It is clearly a debate that has much to offer to wisdom research. It forces us, for example, to think about how lay actors can proceed wisely at the outer edges of their epistemic competence. It also asks whether a system like the Anglo-American law, which relies on self-centered competition, can come to wise decisions, or whether some sort of “outside” guidance necessary—an instance of the more general question of whether the “marketplace of ideas” is a powerfully accurate or perni-ciously misguided metaphor. And so on. All these issue help us better understand what wisdom is and how we can achieve it.
But what does wisdom research have to offer to this legal debate?
It is clear that epistemology has much to offer the law and social sciences. It is also clear that debates about what the good should be do as well. But do we gain something more from consciously linking them together under an explicit wisdom perspective (EWP)? More precisely, does EWP offer policy fields enough to encourage them to change, or at least expand, their current and long-held traditions for how to think about wisdom-related issues?
The answer to this question may shed light the broader issue of why wisdom is not discussed in so many fields. Few interdisciplinary efforts are selfless: One field will ignore another if it cannot see much to gain from it. Statistics has much to offer the law, for example, but not vice versa. As a result, lawyers increasingly wrestle with what it means for a sample to suffer from selection bias, but statisticians rarely wring their hands over what “intermediate scrutiny” means.
I have been able to come up with at least two benefits that flow from EWP to the social sciences. But they are thin, and I am hoping to find something meatier.
First, EWP may introduce some much-needed clarity. By phrasing a question in terms of wisdom, the analyst is reminded to focus on three things: the positive question of what people know, the normative question of the goal that knowledge should be used to advance, and the “conditionally positive” policy question of how to use that knowledge to achieve the goal (3). Far too often these three distinct issues are blurred or elided. Authors fail to address the importance (or even the existence) of their normative priors, for example, or they make heroic—and unacknowledged—assumptions about how people do or can act.
Second, there may also be some normative punch to framing questions in terms of wisdom. Wisdom may not be a neutral idea of using knowledge to advance any good, but rather using knowledge to advance a particular concept of the good (one that surely varies from place to place, from culture to culture). In other words, the question “That outcome is good, but is it wise?” has meaning. Thinking in terms of wisdom may force us to reconsider normative values we may have other-wise applied reflexively or with little thought (4).
But can wisdom contribute even more? Does a deeper benefit emerge if I lift my assumption that social and individual wisdom can be treated roughly the same? Am I understating the importance of the normative reminder that a wisdom-based approach provides? If its benefit is from reminding us of a particular concept of the good, what is that concept, and does it have meaning in a pluralistic society (the question Valerie raised)?
Or, in the end, is the relationship more fruitful in one direction than the other—and if so, what does that suggest about the future of interdisciplinary work on wisdom?
These questions are by no means rhetorical. Unlike the previous posts, I come bearing only questions, and I am excited to see what thoughts people have in the comments.
by John Pfaff, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University
(1) Not all economists do. Some recognize a science/policy divide and attempt to study only the former. For these, Frank Knight (allegedly) said it best: “As an economist, I cannot tell you whether you should adopt food price controls, but I can tell you that if you do you should expect widespread hunger” (Mashaw 1997).
(2) I have always found it ironic that economics is called the Dismal Science, given that all economists want to do is make people happy. (Or perhaps not ironic, if Levy (2002) is right that economics received its nickname by siding with the anti-slavery forces in 19th-Century England.)
(3) I say “conditionally positive” because taking the normative goal as a given, the policy recommendation is a positive statement. If you want to drive from New York City to Chicago as quickly as possible—that’s the normative goal—you should take I-80W, a positive statement conditional on the goal.
(4) If this is right, then it suggests one possible concern with a proposal Valerie made in her post—a proposal that I almost wholly agree with. Valerie suggests that instead of asking “what is the good?,” we should ask “do people have the power to reflect on the good?,” a substantially less normative question. But while that is surely a good plan for bringing other disciplines to wisdom research, it may not help bring wisdom research to other fields if “what is the good” is a major contribution of EWP to those disciplines.
Sources
Becker, Gary S., and George J. Stigler. 1977. “De Gustibus Non Est Dispu-tandem.” American Economic Review 67: 76–90.
Golan, Tal. 2004. Laws of Men and Laws of Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Levy, David M. 2002. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name: Classical Economics and the Ur-Text of Racial Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mashaw, Jerry L. Greed, Chaos & Governance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Photo by Levi
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