Knowledge And Decisions

The instrumental case for truth is the instrumental case for human institutions in general — ultimately knowledge costs, which is to say, the unattainability of omniscience. Courts are preferred to lynch mobs even when it is known to a certainty in the particular case that the accused is guilty, and even if the lynch mob inflicts exactly the same punishment that the court would have inflicted. The philosophic principle that we “should not take the law into our own hands” can be viewed instrumentally as the statement that, however great our certainty in the particular case, we cannot supplant legal institutions as cost-saving devices because we cannot assume equal certainty in future cases. If we could know with certainty (zero incremental knowledge cost) in all cases who was guilty, would it not be blind, fetishistic traditionalism to maintain legal institutions to determine such matters? If man were indeed able to take in all existence at a glance — including past, present and future existence — would there be any reason for any institutions? Even if some of these omniscient beings preferred antisocial behavior, why would it be necessary to have rules existing beforehand (and that is what institutions are) to deal with them, when the necessary actions to deal with them could be determined ad hoc — and indeed the potentially antisocial people would know this themselves and be deterred.

Totalitarian institutions would be a contradiction in terms, if the central assumption of omnicompetence were universalistic. But totalitarian movements and institutions are based on a belief in differential knowledge costs (their leader or doctrine supposedly giving them vast advantages over others) and therefore one-way lying. The instrumental value of truth in the other direction is recognized by totalitarian nations’ pervasive surveillance of the population, monitoring of the effectiveness of their indoctrination, and sorting and labeling of the populace according to their perceived instrumental value to the state. All these assessments are intended to be as true as possible, even by the most lying totalitarian state. Soviet economic statistics are generally assumed to be technically correct, even if selectively and misleadingly published,³² simply because it is instrumentally essential that Soviet decision makers have the truth as far as they can get it themselves, and a multitude of copies of two different sets of statistics (one true for internal use and one false for the outside world) would be unfeasible, just from the virtual certainty of leaks in such a massive undertaking in duplicity.

The instrumental case for truthfulness rests ultimately on the same assumption as the instrumental case for human institutions in general, and for free institutions in particular. That assumption is that, because we cannot know all the ramifications of whatever we say or do, we must put our faith in certain general or systemic processes (morality, constitutions, the family, etc.), whose authentication by social experience over the centuries is more substantial than any particular individual revelation or articulation. This is not to say that no social processes should be changed or even abandoned. On the contrary, their history has been largely a history of change — usually based on social experience, even when marked by individual revelation or articulation. What is at issue is: who should decide the nature of these changes, subject to what incentives and constraints? An enduring framework — morality or a constitution — does not preclude change but may well facilitate it, by reducing the fears that might otherwise be aroused by reforms if their full ramifications were literally unbounded and unimaginable. Countries may change faster because they have certain institutional limitations, just as cars travel faster because they have brakes.

The social and political differences between the United States today and two centuries ago are staggering, though all within the same general legal and moral framework. Totalitarian governments can make more rapid changes of personnel (“purges”) and policies (the Nazi-Soviet pact, changes in Sino-Soviet relations, etc.) as of a given time, but the fixed purposes of all such changes may mean less fundamental social and political change within the country than in a democratic or conventionally autocratic system. Certainly it would be difficult to argue that the Soviet Union today is as socially and politically different from the Soviet Union fifty years ago as is the contemporary United States from what it was half a century ago. The change in the status of the American black population alone has been dramatic, in addition to changes in the role of government in the economy and society, and countless shifts in the balance of social and political power among a variety of regional, economic, and philosophic groups.