El concepto de causa y los límites del naturalismo

A mi me gusta especular. El tono triunfalista de esta entrada no debe ser malentendido. Soy un total diletante en estos temas. Lo que es un triunfo es una convicción personal que me permite sacarme un peso de encima, la sensación que he tenido desde que comencé a estudiar leyes de que mi disciplina es irremediablemente medioeval y regresiva... Y creo que los abogados llanos con afanes académicos que han sentido la presión del Law and Economics, del Law and Psychology o de los Empirical Legal Studies pueden comprender esta preocupación y el sentido del post.

No se quien me presentó esta idea por primera vez, pero recién hace pocas semanas logré comprenderla, aceptarla y dejar atrás mi atracción por el naturalismo. Vale aclarar como entiendo el naturalismo, que creo que es una interpretación al mismo tiempo ideosincrática y una muy precisa: para mi el naturalismo sencillamente es la idea de que las relaciones causales son privilegiadas. Para mi una interpretación naturalista del derecho, privilegia lo que causa el comportamiento de los actores jurídicos; una interpretación naturalista de la moral, privilegia su impacto causal en nuestra psicología, cultura o historia.

El problema con el naturalismo así entendido es sencillamente que la noción de causa es profundamente humana. En realidad, no se puede decir que esto causa aquello fuera de la perspectiva del observador humano. En realidad, solo hay fenómenos, unos que suceden a otros con cierta regularidad probabilística. Pero no se puede decir "esto causó aquello" pues esto es elaborar distinciones fuertes, líneas claras que separan un fenómeno de otro, una cosa de otra, y que solo pueden explicarse como productos de nuestra cognición, algo totalmente contingente para el universo tal cual es. 

Cuando renunciamos a la causalidad como noción privilegiada, muchos dilemas se disuelven en misterios. ¿Como es posible el libre albedrío? No lo sabemos, pero decir que no existe apelando meramente a la idea de causalidad es llevarla demasiado lejos. Establecerlo como dogma es darle  a la metafísica la autoridad de la ciencia.

A mi lo que me interesa de esto sencillamente es que tirando abajo la relación de causalidad como privilegiada, el campo de juego se abre otra vez a áreas del conocimiento donde se busca una objetividad no causal. Este campo que nunca se cerró en las matemáticas se abre otra vez para el derecho o para la estética. Estas ideas están ya aquí (y tienen raices históricas profundas), pero si son aceptadas, si son defendidas frente al cientificismo naturalista, puede haber una nueva ilustración para las ciencias humanas y sociales que hoy estan tan perdidas como la ciencia natural en el medioevo.

En fin... El mundo es más extraño de lo que creemos, y no podemos hacerlo mecánico por fiat definicional. Pensando así, hay espacio para respirar y hay espacio para imaginar una ciencia del derecho otra vez.

On legal theory (3) L&E and the certeris paribus clause

But what is a certeris paribus clause? It simply says "the theory holds as long as the assumptions hold", but this can be understood in many ways. 

First, it can be understood in a "scientific realist" way. A L&E postulate is trully a social law, or aproximates one, but since society is very complex, many other "causes" intervene and sometimes displace the causal chain of the L&E postulate. Thus, free markets will create economic efficiency, but if other causes intervene (such as the fact that markets are not free because of state regulation etc.) then the we will not see the effect of the L&E postulate -not because it is not real, but because it is cluttered by other things.- Still, the pull of the L&E postulate is still there, it is only eclipsed by other causes.

In other cases, the certeris paribus clause can be taken in a more "hermentuic" and voluntarist fashion. If people want to behave in an economically rational way, they will exhibit behavior in line with L&E postulates, but when they do not want to behave this way, the postulate's explanatory and predictive value is lost. Thus, L&E will not apply in the family as well as it applies in the firm, and it will not apply in small bed and breakfasts the same way it applies for a large corporation. Rational choice thus must be adapted to social actors' perception of appropriateness. It is noteworthy that making sense of this perception of appropriateness requires interpretive research (legal or otherwise). Here where L&E behavior is not appropriate, it has no pull. It is not a cause obscured by other causes, but a something that is ruled out by people's own self-understanding.

Finally, the certeris paribus clause can be made normative. Behaving in a L&E way is often described as behaving rationally, and rationality is a commendatory word. Many ethical worldviews make this sort of (instrumental) rationality the basis for ethical calculation. So a certain form of utilitarianism (and libertarianism), is based on the idea that rules/institutions/conditions can make thing so that everyone by pursuing his or her own selfish good can make everyone better off (or less worse off), therefore, one should be rational and fulfill the L&E certeris paribus clause.

This is supported by the idea that people's capacity for cooperation and altruism is limmited, while their capacity for self serving behavior is much greater. So consider the realism in international relations. States must behave strategically to achieve balance of power. Altruistic behavior will eventually dry up and it will create power imbalances that rational states will employ through war. 

This third, "normative" approach of L&E is completely independent of the two others. In particular, many conservative/libertarian scholars emphasize that prediction of human conduct is impossible thus a predictive approach ruled out. Similarly they believe that the second approach is confused, given that all human behavior is selfish, there is no altruism, as if one wants to give something away for free it must be because non monetary rewards are in the offing. Consequently, they simply aim to devise a rational system that would create peace and benefits iff people were to be rational and stick by it. Because rationality here is simply bounded selfishness, presumably this is not too much to ask.

Although I reject this normative approach, if it is coupled with better assumptions than the minimal ones of rational choice theory it leads to a very interesting line of research. This is one interpretation of Rawls' constructivist method.

The next entry hopefully will cover critical theory.

On Legal Research (2) Law and Economics (in a wide sense)

Here I am going out on a limb. I have never taken a single course in L&E and never read a book on it. Nevertheless I know I need to write this, and I am close to the tradition through other means... A good place to start is to ask, is L&E causal, interpretive or normative? The answer is:  "it is complicated". I'll explain why. 

L&E departs from certain assumptions of rationality. Rationality here is meant in a technical sense. These assumptions will be more or less sparse, but some typical ones may include:

1) Persons behave rationally.

2) Rational behavior is the maximization of one's utility. This takes into account not only preference, but statistical inference and maybe discount rates for future utility and diminishing marginal utility.

3) The law has a welfare function, it aims to maximize/should aim to maximize the aggregate utility of all persons.

4) Law creates/must create incentives for persons that behave rationally, so that in their utility maximizing behavior, they contribute to overall social welfare.

Moreover, because "utility" or strenght of preferences is hard to measure, usually a ordinality and other symplifying criteria are introduced. Ordinality means that there will be no attempt to quantify preference satisfaction on a scale so that one glass of water for me is 10 units of utility (lets call them Utils) and one glass of cola is 33 Utils. In contrast, all that is needed is that one preferes cola to water (chooses cola over water in a real or hypothetical choice) and therefore the "Cola > Water" relation is fixed.

This is tied together to axioms of choice such as transiativity

Cola > Water > Mango Juice, therefore Cola > Mango Juice

Insensitivity to irrelevant alternatives so that

Cola > Water holds whether I introduce two new beverages (Beer and Wine) into the choice situation.

Completeness

Given any two beverages x and y, either x > y, y > x or x = y (indifference)

All this leads to systems in which certain outcomes MUST be prefererred over other. The most robust one being the pareto criterion in which social state B is better than social state A if at least one person is better off in B and no person is worse off.

Etc. All this is probably better described in wikipedia. Now, the point is. What type of theory is this?

IF one really believes that people are reliably rational in the sense given in "1)" it is a predictive theory. People WILL steal if the utility prospect of stealing is better than that of not stealing.

It is also normative once the welfare elements are introduced. So given that people will steal if no countervailing incentives are in place, law should create those incentives. 

But this can also be sold as a causal prediction / explanation. Because a society of thieves will have a much lower degree of total  utility than a society of normal people, because people are rational, and society is rational, one can expect that laws that create punishment for stealling will emerge. 

Finally, the theory can also be interpretive (although this is the weakest use of L&E). Because lawmaking is intentional activity, activity that aims to achieve some end, law can sometimes be best understood not as an attempt to maximize social utilitiy. That is, a unified view of the law can be given so that contracts, criminal law, etc. are underpinned by an attempt to fashion optimizing incentives.

One of the beautiful things of L&E is that while it is causal/predictive, it does not make men puppets of social forces, it recognizes from the start that men are rational. The problem is that the notion of rationality that is used is one that is quite autistic and mysanthropic... It need not be. But the more "rich" the conception of rationality is, the more contestable are the main axioms.

But men are not always rational. Not even in the mysanthropic sense. This leads to the second issue in any L&E style theory. The certeris paribus clause (for part 3)...

On Legal Research (1) Three Questions

(Esto va a en inglés pues está pensada para personas que no leen español) There is a growing lack of understanding of what makes for good legal research. In particular, there is a too much hurry to make legal research look like research in other disciplines (or what lawyers think research in other disciplines looks like). This will be a series of contributions that attempt to clarify the forms and methods of legal research.

1 Three types of questions

A good place to begin, is to consider that legal research can address three types of questions:

1) Causal questions related to the law

2) Interpretive questions related to the law

3) Normative questions related to the law

Traditional legal research, doctrinal research, is "(2)". Here the goal of the researcher is to define what the law is from a set of materials such as statutes, case law and doctrine. All lawyers are familiar with this, but in this day and age, they cannot explain why this is important, and tend to fall into the temptation of using the methods of "(1)" to do "(2)" which is often a mistake.

Socio-legal research is "(1)". Here the emphasis is not in interpreting the law according to statutes, case law and doctrine, but of seeing the law as a part in a causal chain that begins and ends outside the law, so social reality---> law ---> social reality. Causal questions related to law come in two forms: a) what causes the law? b) what does the law cause? For the first one, studies that show how sociological biases influence is judicial decisions are a good example. For the second, studies that show that law reduce or does not reduce criminality are a good example.

Ethical research is "(3)". Here the emphasis is not in showing what the law is, but what the law ought to be in the aspect of values. This must be emphasized. If the values are fixed, then the study is socio-legal in the form of  "(2)b)": law should create economic efficiency, we identify what laws cause efficiency and legislate accordingly. This is instrumental rationality: what are the best means to achieve a predetermined aim. In contrast, ethical research tries to find what are the true aims of the law. So the question is should the law pursue economic efficiency? Should it pursue something different, like a notion of corrective justice? How should this idea of corrective justice be specified?

These questions exemplify three realms: (1) the causal, (2) the positive law and (3) the normative

I believe these three realms are largely independent of each other. But in many traditions of legal research these realms are mixed together, or one realm is chosen to dominate the rest.

Consider marxist theory. For an orthodox marxism, the basic structure of society fully determines the superstructure. The social (1) explains the positive law (2). Furthermore, an orthodox marxist does not believe in morality or moralizing. Ethics depends on the structure of society, the modes of production and so forth. So the social (1) explains the ethical (3). For an orthodox marxist history follows certain laws. Capitalism will end due to its internal contradictions and it will be replaced by communism, which will change both law and morality. True science is only about prediction, about when and how capitalism will end, and there is nothing important to be said about the positive law or morality, except explaining how it is caused by the basic structure of society. So (1) dominates (2) and (3).

For an example on the opposite direction, consider Dworkin's theory of law. According to Dworkin, there is no sense of the positive law independent of ethics and morality. For any interpretation of the law, the conventional legal sources (statutes, case law, doctrine) never exhaust the possible interpretations that can be made, and consequently there is a need to think which interpretation is best on an ethical light. Furthermore, when the judge reflects or deliberates, he must abstract away from his social situation in order to find the best interpretation of the law. Maybe judges are prone to bias, but a reflective judge cannot say "I will decide x, because x represents the interest of my social class". The judge must justify the judgment with reasons, which are going to reflect a moral conviction. So (3) dominates (1) and (2).

Any research that is truly legal, that deserves to take place in law faculty, has a strong component of (2). Otherwise, it may be best to carry out the research in a sociology department or a philosophy department. So any position that gives emphasis to (1) or (3) should explain why some interest in legal interpretation is relevant. So for a marxist, he at least has to interpret the law in order to show that it does not predict judicial behavior, and for Dworkin, it must show that the content of the positive law has some relevance for answering the ultimately moral question of what the law should be. 

I don't think that the positive law, that is issue "(2)", is ever irrelevant. But this is something that can be debated by academics. What cannot be debated is that people who believe that the positive law is always irrelevant are wrongly situated in a law faculty. Sadly, due to bad theory and the fashionable attitude of being above the law, many lawyers are inclined to believe in this.  

Beyond this general division in three types of questions, covering three realms, there are forms of legal research that deserve special mention because they do not easily fit the scheme: law and economics and critical theory. Law and economics tends to be unclear on whether it is predictive or normative, as it uses a notion of rationality to explain and predict behavior, but it only explains behavior that is (in a precise sense) "rational", and it is not considered falsified if people do not behave "rationally".  So at times law and economics seems to commend rational behavior implicitly or explicitly (this also holds for rational choice theory and related fields of inquiry). Critical theory does not aim at any of the three realms directly. It is better to say that it aims to debunk, to undermine a social structure in order for a undefined new one to emerge. Consequently, in contrast to the three questions here defined, the role of research in critical theory is negative. 

Aporias 2

Esta es corta porque no me place ahondar en el tema. Es esencial a cualquier forma de pensar atea real que lo bueno no tiene por qué coincidir con lo verdadero, que la relación entre bien y verdad es contingente. ¿Entonces por qué los ateos predican tan fogosamente? ¿No sería mejor que dejen a las personas tener las creencias que les hagan bien? ¿O acaso creen que en el ateismo hay más consuelo que en la religión? ¿En qué? ¿En el arte (claramente el sucedaneo ateo de la trascendencia)? ¿En el sexo libre y la legalización de las drogas? Francamente, hay que estar bastante desconectado del mal que existe en el mundo para creer que algo de esto puede llenar los vacíos de alguien que mira la verdad de la extensión del sufrimiento humano, personal y colectivo (y quizá solo un santo lo ve en su real extensión). Predicar el ateismo me parece antietico bajo los cánones del ateismo mismo. No lo sería bajo una visión atea que viese al bien y a la verdad como convergentes, pero si el ateo en cuestión tiene una visión tal, muy a su pesar, guarda sentimientos y actitudes teistas. Es parasitario de ellas, porque las usa para dar sentido a su accionar práctico mientras reniega de ellas en otros. Claro que la razón del ateismo popular es otra: (1) sentirse superior a esa "masa ignorante" supuestamente sin fuerza existencial; (2) crear espacio frente a las costumbres sociales para desarrollar la personalidad de uno en temas íntimos. El "(2)" es una marca de nuestra sociedad actual donde lastimosamente el teismo ha decidido hacer de las mores sexuales su razón de existir. Y los que creen hay una relación rígida entre las restricciones de la sociedad y la religión es porque no conocen Asia. Pero ese "(1)" es tan profundamenta falso. No hay fuerza existencial en aquellos que meramente estan distraidos...

Milkmaids

"[T]o read such Enlightenment figures as Hume or Voltaire with Chr istian eyes is to see every possible opportunity for self-admiration taken; and Voltaire and Hume, like me in my own Enlightenment days, do not seem even to be able to get on with the business of self-admiration without perpetual sneers at "milkmaids" (Voltaire)--that is, at the great mass of people who keep the wheels turning while the Enlightenment sips its chocolate and peers at them through its quizzing-glass. (The eighteenth-century Enlightenment--the Enlightenment proper, so to call it--no doubt hated kings and priests just as it said it did, but its real driving negative emotion was contempt for subjects and churchgoers. This is still true of the current representatives of the Enlightenment, mutatis mutandis.)"

Van Inwagen, Quam Dilecta... 
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/vaninwagen/quam_dilecta.html

Aporías 1.5

En el post anterior refiero a que lo normativo no puede tener nada de misterioso para seres limitados por su biología. El punto es sencillo: es muy fácil definir lo normativo para un ser limitado aún cuando asumamos que lo normativo es lo que esa persona define para sí el bien y el mal; que es lo que los más "libres" consideran como su soberanía. Consideremos la fórmula x es lo que y considerará normativo para sí bajo situación z. Sí en efecto x es el producto de procesos químicos, hay una respuesta determinable (aunque no por la ciencia actual) y ciertamente determinada para x en cada situación z.  z incluye la reflexión, o la interacción de y con otras personas que a su vez operan bajo la misma fórmula. Que esta definición del bien sea "subjetiva", no exime a x de producirse a raíz de procesos biológicos, exhaustivamente biológicos, y por tanto objetivos. Esto es una reducción de lo normativo a una predicción, lo que lo hace plenamente consonante con las ciencias naturales. 

Esta postura desacredita la visión libertina de la ética o descredita una visión biologicista del ser humano. En cualquiera de las dos, la visión de mundo actual fracasa.