A portfolio theory is a way to minimize risk by diversifying one’s commitments or investments, using hopefully countercyclical strategies so that some part of your portfolio is always growing. Tyler Cowen suggests an amusing epistemic portfolio theory:
That is, most people have an internal psychological need to fulfill a “quota of dogmatism.” If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. I’ve also met people — I won’t name names — who are extremely dogmatic on ethical issues but quite open-minded on empirics. The ethical dogmatism frees them up to follow the evidence on the empirics, as they don’t feel their overall beliefs are threatened by the empirical results.
Some people, if they feel they must always follow the evidence, respond by skewing their interpretation of that evidence.
There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs.
Frankly, I suspect Cowen is recapitulating Gustave Flaubert. Here’s Flaubert:
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
Of course, Flaubert’s maxim is a kind of portfolio of habits related to personal and professional radicalism, where Cowen argues for a specifically epistemic portfolio. But his inclusion of ethical beliefs suggests they may not be far off. I find that I am mildly suspicious of the claim, and I’m leaning towards the belief that dogmatism or fallibilism will tend to aggravate themselves. Why can’t we adopt Bayesean or fallibilist commitments slowly, expanding them as we find the time and energy?
Consider Descartes in the Meditations: must we be suspicious of the authenticity of Cartesian doubt in order to maintain portfolio theory? Descartes looks like a kind of dogmatist about self and God, after all… though that could either mean that he is an example of a portfolio doubter, or that he didn’t work sufficiently carefully through the doubts and had a kind of epistemic bubble and crash.
What I imagine is the opposite of Cartesian doubt: rather than doubt everything all at once and risk epistemic shocks and a resurgence of unemployed credulity, we work on sustainable growth in GDP: Gross Doubt Production. The goal is to root out our dogmatisms throughout a lifetime, growing milder and less certain with age.
In short, where Cowen adopts an epistemic Keynesian model, I’m advocating epistemic Hayekianism:
My focus in this project is to look at various institutions that try to track the truth about moral value, of which the Roman Catholic Church is only one. The Catholic Church is certainly wrong about consensual adult homosexuality, but what’s interesting is that this error is the result of a method of moral inquiry that otherwise will often yields good results. So the question is: could the Catholic Church improve its normative evaluations without destroying its institutional identity? Like many people, I suspect that much of what enabled the Church to preserve its basic values for so long may also prevent it from adapting. In contrast, democratic states have enacted epistemic procedures that are highly responsive to new information, but seem to allow large, systemically risky errors to emerge quite often.
A couple of caveats to the project: I assume that all institutions have an epistemic component: they enact procedures aimed at “getting the right answer” to some or another question. Even though some institutions seek answers specifically to normative questions, any epistemic institution will do: epistemic procedures themselves have a normative component, insofar as there are better and worse ways of inquiring. I assume that there is a sufficient analogy between matters of fact and matters of value such that the methods of professional epistemologists can supply insights for ordinary moral knowers. That means that I’m assuming that there are distinct matters of value into which we can inquire, and that these matters are not exhausted by some set of physical facts.
My questions: what is it about the design of an epistemic institution that leads to error, and can these features be rooted out or mitigated? Put another way: is some kind of errancy or blindspot inevitable? Must the production of knowledge always coincide with the production of ignorance in more than just the trite sense that our attention cannot be both broad and focused?
Epistemic Institutional Design (A reply)
A brief rejoinder to the blogger at St. Angilbert Press, who claims that Ratzinger’s letters regarding the treatment of homosexual priests (which for him would include the so-called ephebophile priests who molested post-pubescent boys) are not infallible because they
seem… to be procedural critiques more than doctrinal or moral prognostications
and thus fail to pass the “matters of faith and morals” test for infallibility.
So far as I can tell, this is simply an argument from assertion:”This is not that.” To my mind, identifying the authority to investigate, punish, treat, and forgive is a “faith and morals” issue, as is the question of whether the principle sin in molesting adolescent boys is statutory rape or homosexuality. But let me try to respond to Angilbert’s assertion with something more than a counter-assertion. Were these “procedural rules” not matters of faith and morals, much of the Catechism Angilbert uses to justify the “faith and morals” provision itself would not qualify as infallible. They are what H.L.A. Hart called “rules of recognition.” If the rules of recognition are fallibile, none of the rules recognized can be infallibile. (This is, in general, one of the major problems with a legal system that purports to be infallible. But I’ll develop this point in the next post in this series.)
There’s a larger issue here: the distinction between procedural and substantive itself regularly trips us up. Inclusion and authority are both moral issues that frequently require us to make arbitrary distinctions in edge cases. Yet it is clearly a moral matter to ask: who has jurisdiction over criminal priests? Is it the Church, or is it the police?
Ratzinger’s letter prescribed a course of pastoral action by which such sinners ought to be reconciled and preserved from temporal authority rather than isolated by secular punishment. Is this really a matter of outside of “faith and morals”? I think not, and I think I’ve justified my claims to the contrary.
Strangely, Angilbert ducks the larger crime/sin question. He claims that molesting post-pubescent boys is homosexuality, not pedophilia, and that homosexuality is a reconcilable sin. While I don’t see the justification for calling homosexuality a sin (contra Aquinas, we see it in nature: this is a classic slippage between procedural and substantive) I do believe that non-consensual sex is a crime that must be punished, and that adolescent boys cannot give meaningful consent to adults. Is there anyone out there who actually supports the claim that these are matters that are better left to the Church’s jurisdiction? Is there anyone who can read about the secrecy order and not shudder?
Does the 1986 letter claim infallibility? Well, it’s based on the 1975 letter Sexual Personae, which Ratzinger didn’t write, and which does claim infallibility through the “constant teaching of the Magisterium and the moral sense of the Christian people.” The power and the problem with various attempts at infallibility is that they are transitive: what the ordinary and universal Magisterium proclaims in 1975 can be reproclaimed in 1986 or in 2001 with slight expansions while preserving the original infallibility. And thus “procedural” matters slowly become “substantive” matters.
Another oddity in Angilbert’s post: I was discussing the case of Father H, who we now know is Fr. Peter Hullermann. Yet Angilbert rebuts using an example of theAmerican priest Fr. Lawrence Murphy. It’s ironic that the Church’s current predicament makes it difficult to figure out which potentially-Pope-linked pedophile we’re talking about.
It’s been a few months since I promised a series of posts on the Catholic Church and epistemic institutional design, but I have been working on it. As the Pope marks the end of the aptly named “Year of the Priest” today, I thought I’d return to it.
In this post, I will show that the very same year that Ratzinger watched a priest he protected from prosecution for child rape finally get convicted of child rape, he wrote a letter invoking the “ordinary universal magisterium” (i.e. infallibility) to claim that homosexuals, which for him includes pedophiles who target boys as young as 11, ought to be treated by the pastorate rather than prosecuted.
Let’s turn to the treatment that he demands for homosexual persons, which as I will show comes with a claim to infallibility because it has the consensus of the bishops and is ratified by the infallibility of the Pope:
“We would heartily encourage programmes where these dangers are avoided. But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral.The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve.
An authentic pastoral programme will assist homosexual persons at all levels of the spiritual life: through the sacraments, and in particular through the frequent and sincere use of the sacrament of Reconciliation, through prayer, witness, counsel and individual care. In such a way, the entire Christian community can come to recognize its own call to assist its brothers and sisters, without deluding them or isolating them.”
Now, the 1986 letter is in part aimed at preserving the repudiation of ordinary homosexuality. (That’s the “deluding” horn of the dilemma.) However, the letter would apply equally well to what the Church has always thought of as homosexual “ephebophilia” rather than pedophilia, which is attraction to adolescent boys, defined as 11-and-above. This distinction is built into the Catholic doctrine of “the age of reason.” As Phillip Jenkins describes it, this failure to internalize the Church’s doctrine on reason is the source of the confusion:
The Chicago study also found that of the 2,200 priests, just one was a pedophile. Now, many people are confused about the distinction between a pedophile and a person guilty of sex with a minor. The difference is very significant. The phrase “pedophile priests” conjures up images of the worst violation of innocence, callous molesters like Father Porter who assault children 7 years old. “Pedophilia” is a psychiatric term meaning sexual interest in children below the age of puberty.
But the vast majority of clergy misconduct cases are nothing like this. The vast majority of instances involve priests who have been sexually active with a person below the age of sexual consent, often 16 or 17 years old, or even older. An act of this sort is wrong on multiple counts: It is probably criminal, and by common consent it is immoral and sinful; yet it does not have the utterly ruthless, exploitative character of child molestation. In almost all cases too, with the older teen-agers, there is an element of consent.
Of course, there’s a reason we’ve set age of consent laws higher than puberty, and there’s a reason statutory rape is still rape. Abusing one’s authority to take advantage of someone who cannot give informed consent actually is a problem. According to many Catholics, it’s specifically a homosexual problem:
Moreover, roughly 85% of all misconduct cases involve priests and boys. So there is also a very obvious homosexual issue at work….
Not so obvious to me, but this is why Ratzinger’s desire to prevent “isolating” such unfortunates has a troubling double meaning: for homosexuals, it means welcoming gay Catholics to participate so long as they acknowledge that homosexual activity is a sin. For pedophiles, it means preventing the intervention of temporal authority. Because the letter would apply equally well to what the Church thinks of as homosexual desire for adolescents, the criminalization of statutory rape threatens “isolation” from the “entire Christian community.” Many of the calls to prevent violence in the 1986 letter also have a double meaning: what sounds charitable and reasonable in ordinary homosexual situations takes on a new and troubling connotation when applied to pedophiles who do not wish to be subject to incarceration and punishment by secular authorities for their crimes. (Yet look at the Catholic Church’s response to Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexual Bill….)
Remember that Ratzinger wrote this letter the same year that Father H, the pedophile priest Ratzinger helped to protect from prosecution, was finally convicted of crimes he committed six years after Ratzinger’s office prescribed a course of therapy, and the priest was returned to pastoral work. Notice that Ratzinger does not recommend criminal prosecutions in this letter, despite the failure of therapy six years earlier in Father H’s case. We’ve since had confirmation that what Ratzinger wrote publicly in 1986 became, through his intervention, the official, though secret, policy for pedophilia in 2001:
Pope Benedict XVI faced claims last night that he had ‘obstructed justice’ after it emerged he issued an order ensuring the church’s investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret.
The order was made in a confidential letter, obtained by The Observer, which was sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001.
It asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood. The letter was signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was elected as John Paul II’s successor last week.
Rather than treating the pastorate as a mandatory reporter, like teachers and doctors, Ratzinger’s secret letter demands that they preserve the anonymity of abusive priests and silence the victims on pain of excommunication.
All that remains is to demonstrate that the 1986 letter was meant to be infallible.
Contrary to popular belief, infallibility is not reserved only for rare moments of Ex Cathedra. In fact, the Pope frequently speaks in ways that are meant to be infallible, especially when issuing papal bulls. Ex Cathedra statements usually concern the metaphysics of Christian doctrine, but the Pope also speaks infallibly on other moral topics. Here’s how that works:
“an act of the ordinary papal Magisterium, in itself not infallible, witnesses to the infallibility of the teaching of a doctrine already possessed by the Church.”
The Pope then claims the right to speak infallibly and exercises that right on a semi-regular basis on matters of public political concern, so long as the new pronouncement “witnesses to the infallibility” of a previous pronouncement. It’s simple logic: start with infallible premises, use infallible inferences, and you’ll reach infallible conclusions. Two examples in the last twenty years include the reiteration that euthanasia is murder and the exclusivity of the priesthood to chaste men. (The latter may be irrelevant to the discussion at hand, but that irrelevance is hardly self-evident.)
What’s more, the Pope is not the only source of infallibility in the Catholic Chruch. There are times when the Bishops of the Church can create a consensus, either by gathering together in a doctrinal Council or by creating agreement through correspondence and drawing up statements of unanimous support. This is the “ordinary universal magisterium,” which is also infallible:
“The term ordinary universal Magisterium means an exercise of the Church’s teaching office where there is complete agreement, or fairly close to complete agreement, among the Catholic Bishops of the world that a particular doctrine is certainly true, but without a solemn definition.
[... T]he ordinary universal Magisterium is infallible. The fact that the bishops are ‘dispersed throughout the world’ (in the words of Vatican II) does not make any difference.”
In these times, too, the Church claims infallility for its pronouncements, which are ratified and signed by the Pope.
We wouldn’t normally expect pronouncements about the specific treatment of ‘homosexuals’ (i.e. pedophiles) to be a matter of infalliblility, except for Ratzinger’s 1986 letter:
[The Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith] wishes to ask the Bishops to be especially cautious of any programmes which may seek to pressure the Church to change her teaching, even while claiming not to do so. A careful examination of their public statements and the activities they promote reveals a studied ambiguity by which they attempt to mislead the pastors and the faithful. For example, they may present the teaching of the Magisterium, but only as if it were an optional source for the formation of one’s conscience. Its specific authority is not recognized. Some of these groups will use the word “Catholic” to describe either the organization or its intended members, yet they do not defend and promote the teaching of the Magisterium; indeed, they even openly attack it. While their members may claim a desire to conform their lives to the teaching of Jesus, in fact they abandon the teaching of his Church. This contradictory action should not have the support of the Bishops in any way.
Remember that Ratzinger letter was meant to supply specific recommendations based on the 1975 “Sexual Ethics” declaration, which claimed:
“At the present time there are those who, basing themselves on observations in the psychological order, have begun to judge indulgently, and even to excuse completely, homosexual relations between certain people. This they do in opposition to the constant teaching of the Magisterium and to the moral sense of the Christian people.”
When the Bishops in the 1975 declaration invoked the “constant teaching of the Magisterium,” they were not simply invoking the “ordinary magisterium,” which can be mistaken or fallible. They invoked the “ordinary universal magisterium,” which is infallible, even though Ratzinger did this before he took the office of Pope. Merely by representing the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, then Archbishop Ratzinger could not lay claim to infallibility for his recommendations, which though signed by the Pope would only constitute “ordinary Magisterium.” But by piggybacking on the “universal ordinary Magisterium” of the 1975 declaration, Ratzinger borrows their general claim to infallibility for his specific prescriptions. By invoking the ordinary universal magisterium, Ratzinger chastises all those who would question his words in that 1986 letter, either in the diagnosis or in the treatment.
So Ratzinger, in 1986, infallibly advocated the treatment of sexual abuse with a multipronged approach that addresses “all levels of spiritual life” as a substitute for temporal criminal investigations, which would only “isolate them.” This, then, is not simply a matter of eliminating bad apples: it is an institutional crisis in which the Church will be forced to choose between fundamental commitments. In my next post, I will try to lay out the choice confronting the Roman Catholic Church.
The Walking Dead
Last year, I wrote:
I’d like to see what a surviving-a-day-at-a-time hero looks like. Whatever collection of writers can come up with that story and characterization will make a lot of money breaking with the current anti-hero conventions. More to the point, it might be good for us. Though we may [not] have had too many actual-or-metaphorical vampires of late, perhaps we do still need to see complicated characters dealing with the morally ambiguous world, and for that I think there’s nothing better than a survivor’s tale, where ordinary folks face the ravages of an apocalypse without losing their humanity. Post-apocalyptic stories capture the sense of morally ambiguous survival without pretense of authenticity or excellence.
Well, it’s finally happened. AMC has begun production of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead. Kirkman’s zombie story is exactly what I was thinking of as I wrote those words: no climax, just life subsisting after the apocalypse, “it’s like a zombie movie that never ends.”
I think this is just what we need… unless it turns out to be true that zombies are popular when Republicans win elections.
