progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

The Telmarc Group
PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
Burkeans insist on small steps rather than earthquakes….they also emphasize the need for
judges to pay careful heed to established traditions and to avoid independent moral and
political arguments of any kind…"
He compares that to Rationalists and Traditionalists. To him a Rationalist seeks answers
to "what is the reason for the tradition…" and Traditionalists are antithetical to so loose
an approach.
Then he states:
"Burkean minimalists usually defend themselves by reference to a many minds
argument…"
This is his jumping off point for taking the idea to extremes. Many minds means just that,
minds in the US as well as elsewhere. The many minds doctrine is where he drags in to
the Constitution the laws of any and all other lands, whether they apply or not. He does
this by introducing the Condorcet Jury Theorem. Simply put the Jury Theorem states 172 :
"If there are N people making a judgment on a subject, and each of the people judge
independently and each person is a rational entity possessing equal knowledge of the
facts, then if the judgment is a binary choice between A and B, and the facts as perceived
by any rational entity would favor A over B, then if a secret ballot is taken amongst the N
jurors and a simple majority vote of the N is required to decide between A and B, then
the probability of the jury choosing A goes to 1 as N goes to infinity."
172 Sunstein really it plowing over well worn ground. It was Arrow who in both his doctoral thesis and his early work
at Rand developed his theory of social choices, it was Sen in his various earlier works and it was even Nozick who
dismisses Sen's argument in Anarchy that others have focused on this point. It is also in Baumol where he goes through
several detailed analyses showing the intransitive behavior of such choices (see Baumol 404-407). This Sunstein has
gone back to a well worn argument which has been subsequently discredited in part and built his entire thesis about it.
Let me demonstrate with an example from Baumol.
Assume three people with four choices, and each person ranks their choices from 1 to 4 as below:
A B C D
Jones 4 3 2 1
Smith 4 3 2 1
Brown 2 1 4 3
10 7 8 5
Clearly choice A wins. And A>C>B>D is the ranking by the vote of each. Now let us assume we drop B, it is irrelevant
since at best it was 3rd we obtain:
A C D
Jones 3 2 1
Smith 3 2 1
Brown 1 3 2
7 7 4
Now A and B are tied and there is no clear decision. The transitive nature does not exist. This is another example of the
quirks of voting and decision making.
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