The Philosophical Divide between Liberals and Conservatives

Over the past few weeks, you’ve started to notice that something is amiss at your office. The place has developed a strange, unsavory odor and any food left out in the kitchen has been mysteriously disappearing. You’ve blamed Tim from accounting for both issues, to which he has vehemently denied any involvement (but you still have your suspicions). However, one day as you’re throwing away some trash, you notice something unsettling at the base of the garbage can: droppings. They’re way to small to be Tim’s, and so the issue becomes clear: you have a rodent infestation.

To take care of the issue, you call a pest control expert. The company reports that they’ll need to come by and perform an assessment before they can address the problem. You reluctantly agree, but this does irritate you a bit.

“An assessment? Why? It’s definitely just a rodent problem. Can’t you just bring over a bunch of traps and set them up around the office. I don’t see why we have to make this more complicated than it needs to be.”

But the company insists that they are not unnecessarily complicating things. They explain that, before they can proceed, they need to know what type of rodent they’re dealing with. Despite your insistence that a “rodent is a rodent,” they assert that all rodents are not the same, and therefore the extermination strategies they will need to employ will depend on, for instance, whether it is a mouse infestation or a rat infestation.

The nature of a mouse, they explain, is to be curious. Mice are compelled to investigate anything new, and so pest control experts do not need to bother with any tricks when dealing with them; they simply need to focus on placing traps in high-traffic areas. The nature of a rat, on the other hand, is to be cautious. Therefore, when attempting to trap rats, pest control experts first need employ a degree of deception. They have to begin by setting a series of inconspicuous, harmless traps to allow the rats to acclimate themselves to their presence and ultimately develop a sense of safety around them. Once they’re no longer hesitant to approach them, the pest control service can secretly swap the harmless traps for harmful ones; it’s a process that requires patience. It turns out, to your surprise, that developing effective pest-control policies is not just about randomly setting traps, it actually requires a refined understanding of the fundamental nature of certain animals.

However, let’s say the pest control experts come to your office and discover a new problem: mice and rats have started to interbreed, producing a new species which we’ll henceforth refer to as “mats.” (I saw that eye roll! Cut me some slack here — there isn’t a lot to work with. Would you have preferred “rice?”) The company says they aren’t sure what the nature of mats is — whether they’ve inherited the curiosity of mice or the caution of rats — so they’ll have to send some team members to do a few days of observation before they can decide on the proper course of action.

The first night Jason is on watch. He observes the mats uninhibitedly and enthusiastically investigating items around the office, and concludes they are inherently curious creatures. The second night Michelle is on watch. She observes the mats carefully creeping around the office, approaching unfamiliar items only after a great deal of hesitation and contemplation, and concludes they are inherently cautious creatures.

Due to these different experiences, and thus different assessments of the nature of mats, Jason and Michelle will disagree over the best way to fix the problem. They will propose disparate courses of action, exhort others to back their proposals, and stress that the other person’s policies are naïve and misguided. And in this way, Jason and Michelle are just like liberal and conservative politicians, while the mats are just like the people they represent.

“Wait…are you comparing us to fictional rodents and our elected officials to pest control experts?”

Okay, so it’s not the most flattering analogy, but bear with me. The point I’m making, albeit in a less-than-complimentary way, is that similar to how Jason and Michelle debated over how effective certain pest control techniques would be based on their assessments of the nature of mats, liberals and conservatives propose radically different political policies regarding the best ways to govern people because they tend to have irreconcilably different views on the nature of humans.

For individuals on disparate ends of the political spectrum, there is a massive disagreement on what constitutes human nature, and this philosophical divergence is arguably what underlies the majority of our disagreements on policy while also playing a major contributing role in our inability to consistently (or even sporadically) reach compromises. Assessments of what human nature is will inevitably play a massive role in how effective people believe certain policies will be. Therefore, if there is no agreement on what people fundamentally are, then crafting policies that people on opposite ends of the aisle agree with will become nearly impossible, primarily because we are effectively “starting from fundamentally different premises.”

To understand the critical role beliefs about human nature play in our political sensibilities, take a look at the example below:

Imaginary Friend A: “You know what? I think our local government is finally getting their act together. The latest policy has a great deal of potential; there’s a lot of good that can come from it.”

Imaginary Friend B: “No, that policy is foolish! It’s built on the assumption that people are naturally cooperative, which is ludicrous. People are naturally competitive, and so it’s an unsustainable framework.”

Imaginary Friend A: “I disagree. People aren’t naturally competitive, it’s just the social and economic systems in which we find ourselves that make us act competitively. If we remove those, you’ll find people generally get along pretty well.”

Imaginary Friend B: “Oh, please! Hobbes was right when he described the state of nature as ‘nasty, brutish, and short.’ People are self-centered and mean; they always have been and always will be. And that’s okay, but we just have to account for it. We can’t be naïve.”

Imaginary Friend A: “Maybe some people are like that, but even if they are, people can change if we give them a chance.”

Imaginary Friend B: “I’ve given plenty of people plenty of chances, and the only thing it’s proven is that people rarely change. I think that, for the most part, you are who you are, and that’s something that can’t ever be fixed.”

While reading the transcript of the imaginary argument above, although no mention is made of the specifics of the policy, the majority of us find ourselves instantly — and perhaps even passionately — jumping to the defense of Friend A or Friend B. The friends disagree on the policy, sure, but the argument over the specifics of the particular policy is superficial; the true root of the disagreement concerning how effective the policy will be is predicated on their different views of human nature.

What’s fascinating about this is that, although very few people formally study human nature, most everyone has an opinion on it. Similar to how your drunk uncle confidently declares that he just knows he’d do a better job of coaching your hometown professional sports team than that hack who coaches them now, almost all of us feel as though we just know what humans are like (and that’s not much that anyone can do to convince us otherwise). But why? Where does this misplaced confidence come from?

This strong, unshakeable feeling of just knowing is because we’re all what (real) psychologists refer to as folk psychologists. In order to traverse a complex social world, we must all develop theories about how, when, and why people behave the way they do. If we didn’t develop these theories, we’d find ourselves socially paralyzed, forcing us to treat every interaction as a new experience. This would leave us unprepared to respond to the actions — and anticipate the reactions — of others, and ultimately inept at executing even simple social exchanges. In short, we all have opinions on human nature because we’re forced to develop them in order to function in an intricate social ecosystem.

For most people, their opinion of human nature can be loosely categorized as either constrained or unconstrained. These disparate conceptualizations, developed and expounded upon in detail by Thomas Sowell in his fascinating book A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987), typically correlate with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. Although I’ll present them as a dichotomy, it’s actually a more of continuum; on opposite ends you have the pure constrained vision of human nature and the pure unconstrained vision of human nature, and people fall somewhere on the spectrum, with conservatives tending to cluster closer to the constrained vision and liberals tending to cluster closer to the unconstrained vision.

The first and most profound difference between constrained and unconstrained visions of human nature concerns a disagreement over human limitations and ultimate potential. The constrained vision sees humans as inherently flawed, and thus perpetually limited by their nature. This is not meant as a value judgment, or something that should be bemoaned or distraught over, but rather as a factual assessment. Proponents of the constrained vision believe that humans are imperfect, and that this imperfection is not something that can or should be changed. Constrained vision supporters believe that rather than focusing our efforts on the futile pursuit of human perfection, we should concentrate on bringing about the greatest degree of moral and social benefits by accounting for our natural imperfections and working with (and within) those constraints.

The unconstrained vision, however, sees humans in terms of potential rather than in terms of limitations. Proponents of this vision believe that humans are “perfectible,” meaning not necessarily that they are able to reach a perfect state but that they are capable of constant improvement. The unconstrained vision fervently believes that our human nature is not rigid and unchanging, but that we can become better; that our social and moral limitations today do not necessarily have to be the limitations that shackle us tomorrow.

The second disagreement — which stems directly from these discordant views of human nature — concerns how to best structure a society that produces the greatest amount of good. The primary difference here is that the unconstrained vision believes that there are permanent solutions to social woes; that if we draft wise enough policy it’s possible to make people better without suffering negative consequences. The constrained vision, meanwhile, does not believe we can have our cake and eat it, too. The constrained vision believes human imperfection prevents such clean fixes, and thus a good society is not about helping people to fundamentally change, but rather about finding prudent tradeoffs between maximizing our good and minimizing our bad.

For those who hold the constrained vision, the evils of the world (e.g. war, crime, poverty, etc.) are an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of our internal natures. For advocates of the unconstrained vision, our foolish or immoral choices are more a reflection of flaws in the external world that can be rectified via the creation of wiser social policies. The constrained vision sees such evils as a given and asks “how do we effectively limit them?” The unconstrained vision sees them as an obstacle to be overcome and asks “how do we eliminate them?”

An overarching theme when contrasting these two visions is the idea of idealism versus pragmatism. Because the unconstrained vision sees human nature as “perfectible,” idealism is an appropriate framework to employ; we should strive to be great because it’s possible to attain greatness. Alternatively, for the constrained vision, viewing the world through the rose colored glasses of idealism may be nice, but it’s somewhat foolish. In the words of Sowell, supporters of the constrained vision:

The constrained vision and unconstrained vision catalyze different motivational states in those crafting political policy. The former encourages a loss-prevention mindset, while the latter encourages a gain-pursuit mindset. The constrained vision, which leads to a loss-prevention mindset, tends to manifest itself as politically conservative social policies. Due to the imperfection inherent in human nature, social stability is seen as fragile, and thus conserving the security we’ve managed to create is paramount. In this way, progressive policies — which threaten to disrupt the delicate balance we’ve managed to strike in pursuit of idealistic, unattainable ends — are therefore regarded as unwise risks. The unconstrained vision, conversely, leads to gain-pursuit mindsets, and thus tends to manifest itself as politically liberal (or progressive) social policies. Because social ills are due to external issues rather than internal flaws, advocates of this vision argue that conservative policies do more to perpetuate systemic injustices than to protect citizens from the pitfalls of their own flawed natures. Moreover, they contend that progressive policies — rather than being seen primarily as a threat to social harmony — actually have the potential to leave us better off than we were before.

Debates over legal policy serves as a good illustration. Conservatives and liberals often disagree on whether our court systems should strive for deterrence through the threat of punishment or deterrence through the promise of rehabilitation. The logic behind these strategies depends on which view of human nature you hold. For believers in a constrained vision of human nature, because people rarely change (and some are just bad regardless of circumstance or intervention technique), punishment of wrongdoers (as well as the threat of punishment) represents a reasonable tradeoff between limiting personal freedom and preserving social harmony. For those who believe in the unconstrained vision, however, “bad” acts are commonly conceptualized as a flaw produced by external factors rather than by unchangeable internal dispositions. As such, we should focus less on punishing people for the sins of their circumstance and more on rehabilitating them personally and rehabilitating society systemically.

In the political chaos that ensues debating the relative merits of specific social and political policies, liberals and conservatives often fail to recognize that the true root of their disagreement is not a policy disagreement, per se, but rather a philosophical one. Attempting to craft the “best” policy without first establishing what human nature is is like asking two chefs to make the “best” meal for an individual they both believe very different things about. If one chef believes this individual prefers sweet dishes, while the other believes he prefers savory dishes, they will create two very different plates and vehemently argue that theirs is superior. In reality, however, just as the quality of the food depends on the particular tastes of the customer it’s being prepared for, the quality of the policy depends on the nature of the people it’s being crafted for.

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