"I knew it!" Confirmation Bias and Explanation

Source of all evil or defender of all freedom? How the same
event can seemingly justify directly opposing beliefs.

“Confirmation bias” refers to the well-known human foible of favouring their existing beliefs and commitments, even in the face of conflicting evidence. For instance, if you believe that some person – Annie, say – is a shifty person, you will have a tendency to hold to that belief over time, and even come to believe it more strongly. Psychology experiments suggest that confirmation bias works in a variety of ways – including biasing the search for evidence (we search for data that supports our belief, rather than data refuting it), the interpretation of evidence (we look for weaknesses and ambiguities in evidence that questions our belief) and the memory of prior evidence one has been exposed to (we have faster and more thorough recall of confirming rather than dis-confirming evidence). Through these three methods, human beings show a decided tendency to cement their initial beliefs rather than revising them. In some cases confirmation bias can be very powerful. If people are exposed to evidence that Annie is shifty, say, and then shown beyond all dispute that this initial evidence was fabricated, they will still tend to harbour suspicions about Annie’s character that arose on the basis of that evidence, even though they will explicitly acknowledge and believe that the evidence was false!

Of course, confirmation bias is not insurmountable. People can and do decide they were wrong about something; and can recognize and choose to use tests and lines of enquiry that will expose their mistaken beliefs.

Confirmation bias and philosophy

Does confirmation bias affect philosophers too? There are good reasons to believe it does – consider the old saying that “being a philosopher means never having to admit you’re wrong”. The worry expressed here is that philosophers will use the sizable intellectual tools at their disposal to critique and interrogate opposing theories and evidence, and search out subtle cases of confirming evidence. In so doing they will corroborate their initial position, rather than using those intellectual tools to honestly enquire into it. And certainly wholesale changes of philosophical theory by established philosophers tend to be pretty rare. To be sure, philosophers develop their positions over time, revising and responding to new evidence and argument, but direct moves into the opposing camp don’t happen a lot, in my experience at least. (And I have no particularly special virtues in this regard either, of course.)

And it is probably fair to say such biases arise in the emotionally charged milieu of political philosophy even more stridently. Those who think that capitalism is a pretty good idea sometimes seem to be able to find confirming evidence for this belief every day and in every way. And the same is true for those who think capitalism is the fundamental source of every misery in the world. No possible horror can beset humanity without an explanation leading back to capitalism.

Explanations of confirmation bias

So why do we all do it? Well, there are lots of different reasons that have been put forward for this human tendency to cement our beliefs over time. For instance, having to reject a belief is cognitive hard work. The type of thinking that would reject the belief can require effort. Furthermore, the type of thinking that follows from revising the belief takes still more effort – do other beliefs now have to shift because that first one has been rejected? And since human beings are largely prone to avoiding effort, we are motivated to avoid these situations of mental heavy-lifting. Easier to stick with what we know.

Also, the more we understand our world, the better we are doing, and the more secure we feel. Beliefs underwrite our actions and our projects in the world. If our beliefs can be relied upon, then that enhances our ability to predict future events and attain our goals. Finding out a prized belief is wrong threatens that happy security.

And there is a social factor. The more we change our mind and revise what we have said, the less others can feel confident in relying on us as a valuable source of information and insight. Since most of us like our views to be taken seriously, a habit of admitting defeat carries social costs.

There’s a lot to be said for these sorts of explanations of confirmation bias – and the countless others out there in the psychology literature. In all likelihood, confirmation bias is over-determined – there are lots of reasons we do it.

However, I want to reflect on the possibility that confirmation bias arises from largely rational, sensible ways of thinking – in particular the search for explanations for events.

Confirmation bias and seeking explanations

Imagine something strange happens in the world – something you can’t explain. But it is (just suppose) important for you to be able to understand it. So you seek an explanation for it.

What does that involve?

Well, one of the main things it will involve will be aligning this new event with your current beliefs. If you can work out how this new thing happened, given what you already believe, then you will have explained that event. If you can work out how the facts as you currently understand them would have caused (or at least allowed the possibility of) this new event, then you will have explained it. That, pretty much, is just what it means to have an explanation.

So when you start searching for information to explain the event, you search for what we might call linking facts; facts that would allow you to move from your beliefs as they stand to the occurrence of the event.

Current beliefs + Linking facts = Explanation of event (or phenomena)

This, I hope, is pretty straightforward. If we want to understand something, there’s no point aligning it with other people’s beliefs (how would that help?), and no point trying to explain it from first principles all the way up (couple of years to spare?). The new phenomena is understood and explained only when it makes sense, given what we already accept. This doesn’t mean that the linking facts can’t replace or force revision of existing beliefs, but it does mean the existing beliefs fundamentally frame what counts as an explanation.

In fact, this search for linking facts has at least two results.

First, the type of linking facts you are looking for will vary depending on what your current beliefs are. If you believe that the United States is ultimately the root of all international problems, for example, then you will search out the type of linking facts that will explain the current phenomena – the situation in Syria in 2012, say – with the US. You will look for the involvement of the CIA, the pressure the US exerts on the global media, its historical influence on and action in the Middle East, its current oil interests in that region, and so on and on. On the other hand, if you believe that most of the world’s problems arise from extreme ideologies and fundamentalist religious beliefs, then you will search for very different sorts of linking facts.

Second, the search for linking facts will determine when your investigation stops. Once you have located the required linking facts, then the event is understood and explained. You can stop searching. So once you have found – to return to the example – that the US has CIA agents at work on Syria’s border with Turkey, that it has a history of animosity with the Syrian regime, and that Syria is an ally of Russia, then you have explained the Syrian crisis and the way it is presented in the mainstream media.

Job done. Move on.

And, of course, if you had started out with concerns about religious extremism, then in all likelihood a different set of linking facts would have been discovered, and the search stopped at that point. In other words, you will not continue to search in such a way that you might, (a) find subsequent facts that disprove the existence of your linking facts or impact on their capacity to explain the event, or (b) find subsequent facts that would better account for the event, using an entirely different explanation.

Now this search for explanation is not in any sense irrational. But it can clearly contribute to confirmation bias. As well as constraining the nature and end-point of the search, it cements the initial belief even further.

Why?

Because now that initial belief (about the role of the US in world affairs, say) helps explain this new event. The fact that it can explain this means you now have one more reason for believing it. If someone else later challenges this belief of yours, you are entitled to think: “But wait, clearly the US is playing this role, because I found evidence of its presence in the Syrian crisis.” You did not set out to test this belief, but you nevertheless ultimately collected evidence that helped justify your continued belief in it. In this way consideration of the same event by two people with different starting beliefs, even with access to the same information, will contribute for each of them to their justification of their initial beliefs.

And that’s a problem, because it means that confirmation bias arises from what are otherwise quite sensible and effective methods for understanding and explaining events.

On Julia’s 'He needs a mirror' speech

One of my favourite books when I was younger was The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches. It has all the greats, as you would expect, and some little known treasures. I use to pore over the best of them again and again, and you could almost hear the voices springing out from the page when you read them to yourself – the signature sounds of Martin Luther King, JFK, Winston Churchill.

In one of my past lives before I grew up to be a political philosopher, I spent some time in stage acting, so great speeches appealed to me on that level too. They were not only political theory – though the best of them were that as well – but they were theatre, strategy, rhetoric, persuasion and poetry.

Like any such list of the greats of years gone by, whether in music, film or philosophy, they are apt to make the idle reader despair of current offerings. What would it have been like, you can’t help but wonder, to live in a world where people like Martin Luther King actually stood up and spoke that way? What would it have been like to actually be in the crowd and hearing him make history in front of you? To let you be a part of that history?

Julia Gillard’s 'He needs a mirror' was not the stuff of the ‘I have a dream’ legends. No question about that. But when the dust settles on the end of this century, and the great speeches are collected so the next generations can despair over their current crop of political leaders, I hope at least her name comes up, and that some consideration is made as to whether her speech of October 10, 2012, might belong in the sequel to my dog-eared penguin.

To be sure, the speech was not set in a context as grandiose as many of last century’s greats – it was not the culmination of a huge social movement that had gathered tens of thousands of people together to march on their capital, it was not ringing from the halls of a nation newly freed from apartheid, or sounding out as the Berlin Wall fell. There were no epochal events unfolding – no terrible war confronting a nation, no fledging state being formed, no national emergency to rally around.

But that, in a way, was precisely its power.

It is not only great and terrible acts that define a people, a country, a generation. It is the petty and demeaning ones as well. It is all the tiny, needling, fleeting, half-audible, offhand, half-joking words and acts that we almost all are guilty of using – sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes not – that bring people down a peg, that put them in their place, that remind them how things really stand and where they are in the pecking order. It is those acts, as much as the great acts, which define who we are and where we are going. It is – as Leonard Cohen once put it – the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen, that determines who will serve and who will eat.

Individually, maybe, each particular snippet isn’t a big deal. But that’s the thing with racism and sexism. It’s not just arbitrary meanness. Its organized meanness. It’s the little things that are said often enough, and by enough people, and to the same people, that finally start to weigh on them.

So it takes a reckoning. It takes someone being able to fix down one target, and add up the sorts of things they say and do – and the sorts of things they let their friends and allies say and do – and package it all together, and see what that says about the person’s character.

And that’s what Julia did.

And she did it beautifully.

It was theatre.

At the end of the performance I looked in disbelief at the timestamp on my iPad. Had I really just listened, captivated, to a speech in the Australian parliament fifteen minutes long? And had my ten year-old-daughter really just sat next to me on the couch and (excepting a short distraction when the complexities of the Slipper case lost her) watched it with me? Even she – largely a stranger to the evening news – could see the drama unfold as Tony Abbott’s confident smirk began to dissolve, and the realisation sink in for him.

Julia had him.

She knew it.

He knew it.

My ten-year-old daughter knew it.

And the more he sank down in his chair like a cheeky child finally getting the dressing down he knows he deserves, the more my daughter giggled uproariously.

If this was politics, she wanted in.

How long had Julia Gillard been saving up all of those snippets, each perhaps almost-excusable on its own, but able to be drawn together for devastating effect, racked up together when the opportunity presented itself, and when the opponent has the decency to blunder headlong into a political trap that might have been years in the making?

And if the list had been years in the creation, who can blame her? The speech works because we the audience can all put ourselves in her place – doubtless women can do this much more effortlessly than men, of course, because they have in fact been in that place – and wanted to make that list, and dream of one day being able to set it out, publicly, point by point, with the victim trapped with nowhere to turn.

But in the end, if her speech really does merit candidacy in the great speeches of the twenty-first century, it won’t be because we the audience put ourselves in her place, vicariously living through the thrill of the kill, exhilarating though it was.

It’ll be because we put ourselves in Tony Abbott’s place, and we wondered what that speech would sound like when it was delivered to us. And because we decided we didn’t think we’d altogether like how it might sound.

Tony Abbott is not a terrible, evil man. He’s not so far from a regular bloke.

And that’s the point.

Ooops. Ethics and the Psychology of Error

Can we learn about moral decision-making from the psychological literature on human error – that is, the study of how and in what ways human beings are prone to mistakes, slips and lapses? In this blogpost I offer some brief – but I hope enticing – speculations on this possibility.

At the outset it is worth emphasizing that there are some real difficulties with linking error psychology with moral decision-making. One obvious point of dis-analogy between ethics and error is that one cannot deliberately make mistakes. Not real mistakes. One can fake it, of course, but the very practice of faking it implies that – from the point of view of the actor – what is happening is not at all a mistake, but something deliberately chosen. But it seems to be a part of everyday experience that one can deliberately choose to do the wrong thing.

However, the most significant dis-analogy between moral psychology and error psychology is that in most studies of the psychology of error, there is no question whatever about what counts as an error. In laboratory studies the test-subjects are asked questions where there are plainly right and wrong answers – or rational and irrational responses. Equally, in studies of major accidents, the presence of errors is pretty much unequivocal – if there is a meltdown at a nuclear reactor, or if the ferry sinks after crashing – then it is clear that something has gone wrong somewhere.

In ethical decision-making, on the other hand, whether a judgement or an action is ‘in error’ – if this is supposed to mean ‘morally wrongful’ – is often very much in dispute. So someone who judges that euthanasia is wrong, say, cannot be subject to the same error analysis as some who contributes to a nuclear disaster. At least, not without begging some very serious questions.

The way I aim to proceed is to think about those cases where the person themselves comes to believe they made a moral mistake. The rough idea is that a person can behave in a particular way, perhaps thoughtlessly or perhaps after much consideration, but later decide that they got it wrong. Maybe this later judgement occurs when they are lying in bed at night and their conscience starts to bite. Maybe it happens when they see the fallout of their action and the harm it caused others. Maybe it happens when someone does the same act back to them, and they suddenly realise what it looks like from the receiving end. Or maybe their local society and peers react against what they have done, and the person comes to accept their society’s judgement as the better one.

One reason moral psychology might be able to learn from error psychology is in the way that error psychology draws on different modes of action and decision-making and welds them all into one unified process. Interestingly, the different modes error psychology uses parallel the distinctions made in moral psychology between virtue, rule-following (deontology) and consequentialism (utilitarianism).

GEMS

I’ll use here the account relayed in James Reason’s 1990 excellent book, Human Error. Drawing on almost a century of psychological study on the subject, Reason puts forward what he calls the ‘Generic error-modelling system’ or GEMS. GEMS is divided into three modes of human action, in which different sorts of errors can arise. (What follows is my understanding of GEMS, perhaps infected by some of my own thoughts – keep in mind I am surveying a theory that is rather outside my realm of expertise, so I make no great claims to getting it exactly right.)

Skill-based action

The first mode of action is ‘skill-based’. This is the ordinary way human beings spend most of their time operating. It is largely run below the level of conscious thought, on ingrained and habitual processes. We decide to make a coffee, or drive to the store, but we do not make executive decisions about each and every one of the little actions we perform in doing these tasks. Rather than micro-managing every tiny action, we allow our unconscious skills to take over and do the job. This mode of action draws heavily on psychological ‘schemas’ – these are roughly speaking processes of thought or models of action that we apply to (what we take to be) a stereotypical situation in order to navigate it appropriately. The context triggers the schema in our minds, or we deliberately invoke a schema to manage some task, and then our conscious minds sit back (daydream, plan something else, think about football, etc) as we proceed through the schema on automatic pilot. Schemas are created by prior practice and habituation, and the more expert we become on a particular area, the more of it we can do without thinking about every part. To give an example: when a person is first trained in martial arts, they need to consciously keep in mind a fair few things just to throw a single punch correctly. After a while, getting the punch right is entirely automatic, and the person moves to concentrate on combinations, then katas, and so on. More and more of the actions become rapid and instinctual, leaving the conscious mind to focus on more sophisticated things – gaps in an opponent’s defences, their errors of footwork, and so on.

Errors usually occur at this skill-based level when, (a) the situation is not a stereotypical one, and faithfully following the schema does not create the desired result, or (b) we need to depart from the schema at some point (‘make sure you turn off the highway to the library, and don’t continue driving to work like a normal day’) but fail to do so.

Rule-based thinking

The second mode of action is ‘rule-based’. This arises when the schema and the automatic pilot have come unstuck. When operating at the ‘skill-based’ level described above we were unaware of any major problem; the context was ‘business as usual’. Rule-based action emerges when something has come unglued and a response is required to rectify a situation or deflect a looming problem. In such cases, GEMS holds, we do not immediately proceed to reason from first-principles. Rather, we employ very basic rules that have served us well in the past; mainly ‘if-then’ rules like: ‘If the car doesn’t start, check the battery terminals are on tight’; ‘if the computer isn’t working, try turning it off and on again’.

Mistakes occur at this level if we apply a bad rule (one that we erroneously think is a good rule) or we apply a good rule, but not in its proper context. We can also forget which rules we have already applied, and so replicate or omit actions as we work through the available strategies for resolving the issue.

Knowledge-based thinking

The third and final mode of action is ‘knowledge-based’. Knowledge-based thinking requires returning to first-principles and working from the ground up to find a solution. At this level an actor might have to try and calculate the rational response to the risks and rewards the situation presents, and come up with solutions ‘outside the box’. It is at this level where a person’s reasoning begins to parallel ‘rational’ thinking in decision-theoretic or economic senses. That is, it is in this mode where a person really tries to ‘maximise utility’ (or wealth).

GEMS says that human beings do not like operating at the knowledge-based level; it takes not only concentration but also real mental effort. For the most part, effort is not enjoyable, and we only move to knowledge-based decision-making when we have reluctantly accepted that rule-based action has no more to offer us – we have tried every rule which might be workable in the situation, and have failed to resolve it appropriately. We are dragged kicking and screaming to the point where we have to think it out for ourselves.

James Reason argues in his presentation of GEMS that human beings are not particularly good at this type of knowledge-based thinking. Now my first thought on reading this was: ‘not good compared to who?’ It’s not like monkeys or dolphins excel at locating Nash equilibriums to game theory situations. Compared to every other animal on this planet, human beings are nothing short of brilliant at knowledge-based thinking. But Reason was not comparing humans to other animals, but rather knowledge-based thinking to rule-based thinking. He argues that, comparatively, human beings are far more likely to get it right when operating on the basis of rules. Once the rules render up no viable solutions, we are in trouble. We can think the issue through for ourselves from the ground up, but we are likely to make real errors in doing so.

The opportunity for error at this stage, therefore, is widespread. Human beings can read the situation wrongly, be mistaken about the causal mechanisms at work, make poor predictions about likely consequences of actions, and be unaware of side-effects and unwanted ramifications. This isn’t to say knowledge-based decision-making is impossible, of course, just that the scope for unnoticed errors is very large.

A full-blown theory of human action

Ultimately, in aiming to give a comprehensive theory of how human beings make errors, this realm of psychology has developed a full-blown account of human action in general. Most of the time we cruise through life operating on the basis of schemas and skills. When a problem arises, we reach for a toolbox of rules we carry around – rules that have worked in previous situations. We find the rule that looks most applicable to the current context, and act on its basis. If it fails to resolve the situation, we turn to another likely-looking rule. Only after we despair of all our handy rules-of-thumb resolving the situation are we forced to do the hard thinking ourselves, and engage in knowledge-based decision-making – which is effortful and fraught with risk.

(Now one can have worries about this picture. In particular, psychologists of error seem to me to work from a highly selective sample of contexts. Their interest focuses on cases where errors are easily recognizable, such as in artificial laboratory situations and slips of tongue, or where the errors cry out for attention, such as in piloting mishaps and nuclear meltdowns.)

What’s interesting about GEMS, from a moral theory perspective, is how it aligns with the three main theories of moral action: virtue, duty-based theories and consequentialist theories. In what follows, I’m going to insert these three theories of moral reasoning into the three categories of human action put forward by the GEMS process, and see what the result looks like.

Virtue and skill-based action

Virtue theory has deep parallels with the schemas of skill-based reasoning. Virtues are emotional dispositions like courage and truthfulness. When operating on the basis of the virtues, one isn’t focusing on particular rules, or on getting the best consequences. Instead, the point is to have the correct emotional response to each situation. These steadfast emotional dispositions – the virtues – will then guide the appropriate behaviour.

Now, to be sure, it is mistaken to view Aristotle (the first and greatest virtue-theorist) or contemporary virtue-ethicists as basing all moral behaviour on habit and habituation, especially if this is taken to imply not actively engaging one’s mind (Aristotle’s over-arching virtue was practical wisdom). But the formation of appropriate habits, and learning through practice and experience to observe and respond to the appropriate features of a particular situation is a hallmark of this way of thinking about morality. (Indeed, it is reflected in the roots of the words themselves: our English word ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek term meaning ‘custom’ or ‘habit’ – and ‘morality’ comes from the Roman word for the same thing.)

Paralleling the psychology of error, we might say that the primary and most usual way of being moral is to be correctly habituated to have the right emotions and on their basis to do certain actions in particular contexts. We need to be exposed to those contexts, and practice doing the virtuous thing in that type of situation until we develop a schema for it – until the proper response is so engrained as to become second nature to us. Operating on this mode, we don’t consciously think about the rules at all, much less have temptations to breach them. Most good-hearted people don’t even think about stealing from their friends, for instance. It isn’t that an opportunity for theft crosses their mind, and then they bring to bear the rule on not stealing. Rather, they don’t even notice the opportunity at all.

Sometimes, though, problems arise. Even if we have been habituated and socialized to respond in a particular way, we might find a case where our emotionally fitting response doesn’t seem to provide us with what we think (perhaps in retrospect) are good answers. This may be because the habit was a wrongful one. Schemas are built around stereotypes – and it is easy to acquire views and responses based on stereotypes that wind up harming others, or having bad consequences. Equally, if we are not paying attention to the situation, we may be on emotional autopilot, and not pay heed to the ways in which we need to modify our instinctual or habitual response in response to the differences between this situation and a more stereotypical one.

Deontology and Rule-based thinking

At the points where our instinctive emotional responses lead us awry, (if we follow the analogy to the GEMS psychology of error) we will look to rules that have served us well in the past. In ethics these rule-based systems are called deontological theories. Deontology says that the point is not to have the right emotions, or achieve the best consequences, but to follow the proper rule in the circumstances. So when we are jerked out of habitual response by some moral challenge (unexpected harm to someone else, etc), the first thing we do is to scout around for rules to resolve the situation – rules that have previously served us well in the past. These might be very general rules: ‘What would happen if everyone did what I am thinking of doing?’ or ‘What would everyone think of me if they knew I was doing this?’

Or the rules we appeal to might be quite specific. In the GEMS system, we have a variety of options for rules to select, and we try and gauge the most appropriate one for the situation we are in. In ordinary moral thought, this process in fact happens in all the time. In fact there is a technical word for it (and a long history behind it): casuistry. When one reasons casuistically, one analogizes to other, closely related situations, and uses the rule from that situation. For instance, if we are unsure if first-term abortion is morally acceptable, we might first true analogizing to murder of a child, which has a clear rule of ‘thou shalt not kill’. But as we think about it, we might decide that the dis-analogies here are very strong, and perhaps a closer analogy is one of contraception, with which (let us suppose) we accept a rule that contraception is legitimate. Or we might analogize to self-defence, especially in cases where the mother’s life is in danger. In attending to the relevant features of the situation, we select what seems to be the most appropriate rule to use. Sometimes we use multiple rules to develop highly sophisticated and qualified rules for a specific situation.

Utilitarianism and knowledge-based thinking

But what happens when this doesn’t seem to resolve the issue, or we feel torn between two very different rules (as might have occurred in the above abortion scenario)? At this point the third, knowledge-based reasoning would come online. We must return all the way to first principles. In GEMS one way this can occur is through means-end rationality, where we take into account how much we want each outcome, and what the chances of each outcome are – given a particular action of ours. We then choose the action that has the best mix of likelihood and good consequences; we ‘maximise expected utility', as the point is put technically.

And of course there is a moral theory that requires exactly this of us, except that rather than maximizing our own personal happiness, we are directed to maximise the happiness of everybody, summed together. This is the ethical theory of utilitarianism which requires (roughly speaking) that we create the greatest good for the greatest number of people (or sentient creatures more widely). It is here that we have really hard thinking to do about the likely costs and benefits to others of our action. We weigh them up and then act accordingly.

Large-scale pluralist theory of moral action

Is this a plausible over-arching model of what moral thinking looks like? I think it has some merits. It is true that most of what we do, we do without a lot of conscious thought, on the basis of engrained habits and customs. We don’t go through life forever applying rules or calculating consequences; we hope that our habits of action, thought and emotion will generally push us in the right direction more often than not. And this might be particularly true when we are interacting with friends and lovers and family, where following ‘rules’ or coolly calculating risks and rewards might seem quite inapt.

But sometimes we are confronted with ethical ‘issues’ or ‘challenges’. We encounter a situation where habit is no longer an appropriate guide. It sounds right to me that in these situations we do cast about for rules-of-thumb to resolve the problem. We think about what worked before in similar situations, and go with that.

In some cases, though, there can seem no ‘right’ rule; no rule that will work fine if everyone does it, or no rule that does not clash with what looks to be an equally fitting rule. These will often happen in novel situations, rather than everyday encounters. And if they are worth thinking about, then it may be that the stakes in them are rather high – they might be the decisions of leaders, generals, or diplomats. In such cases, really weighing up the possible pros and cons – and trying to quantify the merits and demerits – of each approach seems appropriate.

Note also that some of the major objections to each theory might be managed by this pluralist, sequential account, where we proceed from virtue, to duty, to utilitarianism. For instance, utilitarianism can be philosophically disputed because the pursuit of sum-total happiness may lead us to sacrifice the rules of justice – or even to force us to give up on our deepest personal commitments. But on the approach here this wouldn’t happen. On everyday matters of personal commitment, we operate on the basis of our emotional dispositions and mental schemas and habits. When there is a clear rule of justice at stake, we accept its rule-based authority. But in cases where neither works – and only in those cases – we look to the ultimate consequences of our actions as a guide to behaviour. And even at this level we still have constraints based on our emotional habits and rules-of-thumb. The utilitarian decision-making operates within the psychological space carved out by these two prior modes of judgement.

Of course, like any such speculations, I am sure I raise more questions than I have answered. But it is striking the way that the three modes of decision-making that occur in the psychology of error map onto the three ways of theorizing about ethics, and that the process developed whereby a decision-maker moves from one mode to another does have prima facie plausibility in the way we go about making moral decision-making.

Zombie Apocalypses, Lasertag and Ethics

But does she count as a person for the purposes of
applying Kant's Categorical Imperative?

How would people behave in the world of a zombie apocalypse, and what, if anything, does it tell us about ordinary morality?

One theory is that we would all fall upon each other, tearing ourselves to pieces in a ‘Lord of the Flies’ type frenzy. Life in the zombie aftermath would be – in the words the Seventeenth Century political theorist Thomas Hobbes used to describe the ‘State of Nature’ – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And this is so not because of the dangers from zombies, but rather because of the dangers presented by other humans in a lawless world.

Is this really what would happen?

A recent post on The Conversation suggests – in a light-hearted fashion – that there is some evidence that it is. The author describes the player-to-player carnage of the videogame DayZ, where players struggle to survive in a post-Zombie-apocalyptic world. The costs and payoffs to players in the game are structured so that rational self-interested players benefit greatly from killing others and stealing their stuff. And that, for the most part, is exactly what the players do. Of course, some stalwart do-gooders can be found – healers of the wasteland – but they are all the more remarkable because of the cutthroat and solitary world they inhabit.

Better hope that Z-Plan is tight.

But it seems to me that all this shows is how warped the DayZ game-mechanics must be. A game that has people avoiding teaming up for survival is unrealistic. (Just to clarify that – a zombie apocalypse is of course altogether realistic. But a world where survival is not improved by being in at least small teams, preferably with cordial relations with other nearby teams, is utterly divorced from the irremovable realities of the human situation.) Some level of decency, trustworthiness and sociability is a core part of rational survival.

Now if we were to take the less fun path, this point could be argued through the theories of the great philosophers since Epicurus in the Greek Hellenistic period, and we could use the philosophies of Rousseau and Hume to refute the grim picture relayed by Hobbes. Similarly, we could make the point in terms of contemporary game theory, arguing that the dog-eat-dog ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ model of human interaction is a misrepresentation of ordinary reality, and that the more sociable ‘stag hunt’ game is a better picture of what is going on.

Instead though, I propose to take the fun path, and to compare the DayZ situation that which arises in zombie lasertag.

Stuck for a gift idea for the person who has it all?
Go with zombie apocalypse erotic romance!

But before we turn to violence; sex.

After all, the normal social motivations that pull people together will be just as relevant post-apocalypse. Indeed, this very day marks the book release of what I suspect is the first ever novel-length erotic romance set in a zombified world: Flesh by Kylie Scott.(No, the zombies themselves aren’t getting it on, so get that mental image out of your heads. Ew. No. It’s about a ménage forming amongst three survivors as they band together against the infected hordes.) And the idea here is a pretty plausible one. People are still going to have the same desires for companionship, love and lust in the new world. Probably more. Heck, you may as well live like there’s no tomorrow when there’s every chance there really is no tomorrow. Indeed, a considerable number of writers have written on this premise; it turns out there is in fact a website for the Romance Writers of the Apocalypse.

And there is a deeper point at issue here. There are basic survival gains in simply having a good time. This is the major problem I have with the TV series The Walking Dead. There’s a point at which grimness becomes pathological. Every character in that show seems just a nudge away from committing suicide. Lighten up people! In order to survive, you need to want to survive. You need something to get you through the day – and that might well be whatever gets you through the night. Ultimately, one of the best survival rules offered in Zombieland is not Rule #1 ‘cardio’, or Rule #2 ‘Double-Tap’, but rather Rule #32: ‘Enjoy the little things’. 

Or, in the case of Flesh, the not-so-little things. And all at the same time. Stag-hunt games indeed.

But to return from sex and zombie erotica to violence and zombie lasertag, last week I was fortunate enough to play in a test-run of the new Laserforce Zombie game.

For those who don’t know much about lasertag, the basic principle is pretty simple. You wear a vest-pack with flashing lights and sensors on it, and it attaches to a gun that shoots a laser. When your shot hits the sensors on the vest-pack of an enemy player, their suit registers that it has been hit, and it ‘goes down’ for a period of time – meaning that their lights go out and their gun won’t work. They can still be shot again, so usually they will have to run away and hide somewhere until their suit reactivates and they can start shooting people again. A central computer keeps track of everyone’s score – basically the amount of times they have shot the enemy and been shot by the enemy.

Social Science Experiments: Lasertag vs. DayZ

That’s the simple story. But most games of lasertag – such as the one I play at Laserforce league – are more complicated. A lot more complicated. In ‘Space Marines 5’ (the game that the international competition is held in) you have limited lives and shots and need to get resupplied by team-members – your ‘Ammo’ and ‘Medic’ – in order to stay in the game and keep fighting. Plus there are nukes, rapid-fire, missiles, ‘generator targets’, power-boosts and more. The goal in that game isn’t merely to outscore your opponents, but to eliminate their team altogether. Kill their medic out of the game, and then remove the other players one by one.

On the last League night, league players were used as the test subjects for Laserforce’s new Zombie game. The game is pretty much how you’d imagine it. Everyone but one player starts as a human ‘survivor’, with flashing red lights on their vest. One player starts as a zombie. The zombie (with flashing green lights) wants to infect the survivors, which it can do by shooting them with a ‘missile’. Using a missile is just like shooting them normally, but it takes a little longer. You have to ‘lock on’ to them with your gun pointed at their vest-sensors, which takes a little over a second. The zombie is also hard to kill. He has to be shot multiple times before he goes down, and it doesn’t take him long to get back up again. Once a survivor is infected, they have 30 seconds to get the ‘cure’, which pops up periodically at one of the in-game targets. If you can’t get the cure in time (and you can only ever use one cure per game), then the infection takes hold. Your lights turn green and you turn on your buddies, trying to infect them.

The game is an ‘individual’ game. That is, the score and player rankings are not built around team victory, but solely on individual performance. Your aim is to win personally, not to play a part in getting your team to victory.

So how did the survivors act in this situation, in order to maximise their own individual score?

Exactly how you would imagine. They teamed up.

Of course they teamed up. It took barely seconds for players to realise that there was safety in numbers. To be found on your own was to be infected. You needed players around you to communicate where the zombies are, to check in every direction the zombies might attack your position, and to create enough firepower to shoot the zombie down before he could infect anyone in your group. As well, the less zombies that were out there on the playfield, the more manageable the task was. Keeping track of and defending against one or two zombies was straightforward. But once you have five or six zombies, coming at you en masse and from different directions, the end is nigh.

In fact, so successful was the teaming up and communication amongst the dozen or so survivors that in the first test game the starting zombie wasn’t even able to infect anyone. Spreading out across the upstairs levels, players gravitated towards vantage points that allowed each group to patrol and defend one of the four routes the zombie could take to get upstairs. Equally, being upstairs allowed each group to keep track of an area of the lower playfield; with good communication every player on the field knew exactly where the zombie was at pretty much every moment of the game.

This might have happened in the second game as well, if some morons hadn’t ruined the important social science experiment by deliberately allowing themselves to be infected just so they could stagger about the playfield, infecting survivors and mumbling, ‘Brains, brains’. (I totally deny any involvement in such silliness.)

There was even enlightened self-sacrifice when it came to the cure. After some frenetic in-game arguments, some players were willing to forego getting the cure themselves, in order to let infected players use it. Better to not have the resource yourself than to have an ally turn into an enemy, and to let the zombies get a foothold in the survivor population.

The point is that a basic level of teamwork is a fundamental part of any real-world scenario. Human beings are in many respects, if not a pack animal, then at least a social animal. Throughout history they survive, or perish, in groups. They cannot see every direction at once. They need time to sleep, recuperate and reload. Their capacity to fight off threats increases in their greater numbers. And their natural specializations can lead to a useful division of labour in groups.  In a word, society pays off.

Thus I conclude that the zombie lasertag social science experiment supports the view that some level of moral behaviour – trust, teamwork and so on – arises amongst self-interested rational actors.

What is the result here for moral theory? Well, some might say that morality is entirely divorced from self-interested rational behaviour. Prudence has nothing to do with genuine respect for others. Others might say morality just is enlightened self-interested rational behaviour. The truth, though, is perhaps somewhere in between, and that the sociable teamwork required by the human condition – both in ordinary life and during zombie apocalypses – sets us on a path to morality proper.

A final observation. One interesting facet of the zombie evening was the question of rules. All the players on the night were Laserforce league players – and the League requires players abide by various rules, such as not chasing fleeing opponents with their lights out and not ‘blind-shooting’ opponents (sticking your gun around corners without looking and shooting). These rules are standardly applied in non-league games as well; while there are no referees in these games, others will chastise you (that is, they will abuse the heck out of you) if you clearly breach these rules. But no-one expected the zombie to follow the rules. Of course zombies chase their prey. The rules cannot apply to them. The ease with which everyone instinctually accepted this departure from the rules that accompany every other game was fascinating.

But then the further question arose as to whether the survivors should be rule-bound to the zombies. How could it be wrong to cheat against the undead, by blindshooting them for instance? They weren’t human; they weren’t really persons anymore.

Rational self-interest may lead us on the path to morality proper. But even morality proper has its limits – and they seem to stop about the time you dig yourself out of that shallow grave and start feasting on people’s brains.

There will be morality amongst humans in the post-apocalyptic world – but it probably won’t extend to the post-human. Sorry.

Australia in the UN Security Council: Non-cynical reflections

Security Council meeting on Afghanistan, Sept 2012, UN Photos/Eskinder Debebe

On October 18, in the 67^th session of the UN General Assembly, the United Nations will vote on whether Australia will take up one of the non-permanent seats on offer over 2013-14 at the United Nations Security Council. Australia is in (somewhat oddly, somewhat sensibly) the ‘Western European and Others Group’, which has two seats available in this vote. Australia will be vying against Finland and Luxembourg.

It is easy to be a little cynical about Australia’s bid, and its potential significance. The first thing I asked myself, when I heard of the bid, was whether I thought there was any major issue where Australia’s vote would realistically diverge from that of the United States (and, relatedly, that of the United Kingdom). If Australia was to be no more than a ‘yes-man’ to the US, who already hold veto-power in the Council, then it was hard to understand what real contribution it would make to the Security Council decision-making. And I doubted whether Australia would in fact vote against the US position on any major matters of international security – for much the same reasons as Australia played a role in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. At least when it comes to issues of national and international security, Australia takes its relationship to the US very seriously.

But, on reflection, I think this was the wrong question to ask. I think the important question is this: 

Would Australia be willing and able to impact on the wording of UN resolutions that are proposed by the Western bloc (US, UK, France)? 

And I think the answer to this question is ‘yes’.

The first thing to note is that the specific wording of UN Security Council resolutions is incredibly important – perhaps moreso now than ever before. A matter of word-selection can make the difference between a military action being legal under international law or not (as has occurred in the context of the recent Iraq war, where arguments either way depend on the briefest sentences in two or three resolutions). Resolution minutiae can make the difference between vital action occurring or not occurring.  Action by the peacekeeping force in Rwanda in 1994 was stymied, in part at least, because the operation there was directed to contribute to the security and protection of civilians, rather than to provide security or protect civilians. The difference in wording can seem tiny – but the ramifications can be huge.

What would Australia have to offer, in this respect? Both because it is a ‘middle power’, and because of its actual location on the globe, Australia can have more reason to avoid striking a belligerent tone on matters of international security than the US or UK. Its middle power status makes it more sensitive of the need to compromise, and for the need for sensitivity for the concerns of other nations and peoples. It is these traits – which I think are evinced particularly in the role Australia has played in international peacekeeping for some time – that can make it a valuable contributor to the Council.

Moreover, Australia has very different neighbours to most of the other Western bloc countries. In a way, Australia’s inclusion on the Security Council effectively gets another representative for the Asia-Pacific area onto the Council. As well as helping bring to international attention various issues that are relevant to the region, it seems to me there is good reason to believe that Australia will try to nuance its behaviour on the Security Council in a manner that enhances, rather than detracts, from its relations with Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and so on.

Ultimately, Australia is in an almost unique position (alongside New Zealand) in terms of its politics and positioning on the globe. While it unquestionably shares its fundamental values with the West, its dialogue and relations with its neighbours in the Asia-Pacific region make it sensitive to concerns that are less likely to be felt by Western European nations. And because of the structure of the voting in the Security Council, members that inject a spirit of compromise into resolutions can mean the difference between Council paralysis and action.

The question, then, is not whether or not Australia would take a stand against the US or UK on any important proposed resolution, but whether it would impact on the text of resolutions in a productive and sensitive manner.

I think the answer to that question could be ‘yes’.

Ministry of Radical Philosophy (not Silly Walks) Sketch

 (A man dressed in suit complete with bowler hat comes into shop. He is holding a cat with his arms outstretched, with the cat facing him.)

Minister: ‘Times’ please.

Shopkeeper: Oh yes sir, here you are.

Minister: Thank you.

Shopkeeper: Cheers.

(The Minister takes the paper with some difficulty, keeping the cat in position. He leaves the shop, and walks off. Cut to him proceeding along Whitehall, and into a building labeled ‘Ministry of Radical Philosophy’. For a moment the cat looks away, and the Minister freezes in place. Then the cat returns to looking at him, and he continues on. Inside the building he passes three other people, each behaving in indescribably strange ways. Cut to an office; a man is sitting waiting. The minister enters, still holding his cat.)

Minister: Good morning. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but I'm afraid my philosophy has become rather more radical recently and so it takes me rather longer to get to work. (Places cat on table facing him. Leans forward conspiratorially) Vicarious solipsism. I argue my cat, Snowball, is the only fully existing entity in the universe. The rest of us only exist when she is observing us. (Leans back in chair.) Now then, what was it again?

Mr Pudey: Well sir, I have a radical philosophy and I'd like to obtain a Government grant to help me develop it.

Minister: I see. (Keeping one eye on the cat.) May I hear your radical philosophy?

Mr Pudey: Yes, certainly, yes. Here it is. (Pudey stands) Ahem. First Premise: In our society, we believe in certain moral rules – like respecting human rights. Second Premise: In other societies, they believe in different moral rules. For instance they may not believe in human rights. The conclusion is –

Minister: (Sees the cat about to get distracted by licking itself.) Wait! (The cat licks its privates for a moment, and the Minister freezes in place. It then looks up again.) Right, continue.

Mr Pudey: Right. So – first premise, we have certain moral rules. Second premise, other cultures have different moral rules. Conclusion: (he pauses triumphantly) Other societies are wrong. (Pause. Minister waits cautiously.) Wrong in their moral beliefs.

Minister: That’s it, is it?

Mr Pudey: Yes, that’s it, yes.

Minister: It’s not particularly radical, is it? I mean, the premises aren’t radical at all, and the logic merely performs a low-level reification and a standard is-ought fallacy.

Mr Pudey: Yes, but I think that with Government backing I could make it very radical.

Minister: (rising) Mr Pudey,  the very real problem is one of money. I’m afraid that the Ministry of Radical Philosophy is no longer getting the kind of support it needs. You see there's Defence, Social Security, Health, Housing, Education, Radical Philosophy ... they’re all supposed to get the same. But last year, the Government spent less on the Ministry of Radical Philosophy than it did on National Defence! Now we get $348,000,000 a year, which is supposed to be spent on all our available research projects. (he sits down) Coffee?

Mr Pudey: Yes please.

Minister: (pressing intercom) Ms Wendt, would you bring us in two coffees please?

Intercom Voice: You bastard.

Minister: ... (Smiles indulgently) Now the Japanese have a man who believes in panpsychism and psychological behaviourism at one and the same time; everything both has and has not got mental states. While the Israelis, at least, whenever Snowball is paying attention to them, the Israelis have – Ah, here is the coffee.  (Enter secretary with tray with two cups on it. Puts it down on table.) Thank you for getting that. (Secretary slaps him hard. Minister smiles understandingly. She leaves. Minister leans forward to explain.) PhD Candidate. Radical ethical philosophy of language, you know. Any use of verbs counts as patriarchal marginalization. Promising stuff. (Leans back) You’re really interested in radical philosophy, aren’t you?

Mr Pudey: Oh rather. Yes.

Minister: Well, I’ve told you about the Japanese. The Israelis have a girl who argues the Pythagorean commandment not to touch a white cock follows necessarily from his mathematical theorem. Could neuter entire mathematics departments. For their part, on the continent there’s a fellow who shows beyond dispute that computer viruses must be accorded basic moral considerability and constitutional rights. (Frowns and looks at computer.) Still haven’t received that email from him. And the Russians – well! (Leans forward and whispers.) Don’t spread this one around. Very hush-hush. But the Russians have a thinktank who – building ambitiously on Cartesian arguments for external world skepticism – are daring to question the metaphysical reality of government funded research grants!

Mr Pudey: Oh my God! (Falls off chair in shock.)

“Since you’re a philosopher you must know…” (#4 on the list of top ten things not to say to a philosopher)

So this is basically a gripe.

Read Pufendorf? Wtf? I haven't even read the contents of my own bookshelf!

There are a lot of things I like about being a philosopher. One of the things I like is that when people ask what I do I can tell them I’m a philosopher. Because of the type of places I like to hang out, this often results in them asking me what a philosopher is, which usually means we wind up talking about philosophy. This, for me, is a pretty happy result.

But sometimes it doesn’t work like that.

Sometimes, the person does know what philosophy is. In fact, they have read some, or heard of some somewhere. And finally, they have met a real, live philosopher to talk to about it.

Which is great!

Except when they say:

“Since you’re a philosopher, you must know and have read such-and-such…”

And then, when you tell them you haven’t read it, and maybe don’t even know much about it, their face falls in disappointment. How can you – a professional philosopher – not have read the one piece of philosophy that they have read? It’s like meeting a scientist who says no, she’s never actually encountered the third law of thermodynamics before, but she’s really interested in hearing about it from you. Wtf?

Often, it isn’t even laypeople who do this. In its most prevalent form, it comes from other academics and intellectuals. You stumble into a law seminar and they figure you’ve spent years studying Marx, or at least Macpherson on Locke. You visit the social sciences and they’re pleased they have someone to explain Foucault to them. You flee to the hard sciences, where it is inconceivable you haven’t read Popper and Kuhn.

The basic problem, I take it, is that non-philosophers simply have no idea how vast philosophy really is.

Let me give an example. A few years ago I had the pleasure of teaching on one of my favourite subjects; the nature of moral values, relayed through its history since the Greeks. I agonized over what to put in and what to leave out, and wound up picking a selection of the usual suspects: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus and the Stoics, Aquinas, Hume, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche and G. E. Moore. No real surprises there.

But let’s canvas (as we did briefly in the first lecture) who’s not featuring. The dramatis personae of those who didn’t make the cut is arresting. Most of the major political philosophers have been ignored, including those who had an enormous amount to say about moral values. The inclusions don’t even make space for the philosopher who often heads polls of the public’s view of the greatest and most influential philosopher of all time: Karl Marx. Nor does it include his immensely influential predecessor Hegel. The philosophers who most shaped the political landscape around us are missing: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The philosopher who perhaps alongside Nietzsche gave us the single most sophisticated study of the moral psychology doesn’t get a mention: Adam Smith (yes, he actually did write another book as well as the “Wealth of Nations”). With the exception of Mill there are no card-carrying feminists – worse still there are no women at all (unless Harriet Taylor really wrote as much of “On Liberty” as Mill said she did); no Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir,  Irigaray… There is no-one at all from the Germany or France in the last century, despite the litany of famous authors from there – Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, Foucault… No environmental philosophers – Naess, Leopold.

And we are hardly getting started. Thomas Aquinas is the only exemplary religious philosopher included, despite the wealth of input from the Christian, Jewish and Islamic scholars on the Western tradition of ethics. Where’s St Augustine, at least? Which is another way of observing that the list of inclusions only portrays the most facile patina of historical coverage. After all, there is almost a fifteen-hundred year gap in the middle of the list (did you spot it? Between the Stoics and Aquinas). Are we really to believe that nothing worth inclusion happened throughout that vast span of time, as empires rose and fell, religious traditions clashed and laws developed and dissolved? And don’t even get started on the anglo-centricity problem. Surely the Confucian tradition, at least, warrants mention. And what about the input of non-philosophers? Ever heard of that Charles Darwin fellow? He had a bit to say on the nature of morals. And the sociologists – Weber, Durkheim? And the psychologists and psychoanalysts – Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan? Not worth a mention?

One could go on.

And on.

The point is this: the history and content of moral philosophy – itself just one section of philosophy– is enormous. It is possible to reasonably demand a justification for the exclusion of every given one of these philosophers named above. But that’s just the point. Every one of those philosophers, and many more, warranted coverage in a course of this sort. But, it hardly needs to be said, the course only had so many lecture-slots, and harsh decisions had to be made.

Hegel? Cut.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Smith? Cut.

Anyone French? Cut.

Anyone writing in the last hundred years? Cut.

The rest of you name-brand guys are in.

Oh, except you Marx. You’re cut. No, I don’t care what that bloody poll said.

And just as there are only so many lectures in a course, so too there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many books that can be read. Most decent philosophers take months if not years of study to understand, and philosophers, like everyone else, need to specialize. So the chances are ultimately pretty high that if a layperson or an academic from another field has just bumped into a particular philosopher’s book, or just knows the philosophy that relates to their own domain, that I simply haven’t read it. Sometimes I won’t even have heard of it. And I doubt the problem is confined to me; most philosophers would encounter this (though maybe they don’t worry about it as much as I do).

What’s the cause of this problem? Is it simply that those who bump into some philosophy just assume that – if they as a non-philosopher have encountered it – then surely it must be a central text within philosophy itself? Is it a type of optimism they have that what they read actually mattered, and that the time spent wading through that forty pages of ethical argument at the end of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was worth it? (Gracious – I didn’t even mention non-academic philosophers above!)

Or is the problem with we philosophers? Is it a function of the fact that philosophy never wholly dispenses with its past? Philosophy snowballs through history, gathering accretions but only rarely shedding them, to the point now where a person conversant with the works of every name mentioned above appears more like a polymath than a recognizable philosopher. Granted, there are occasionally efforts to excise vast parts of that history, and so to make philosophy more manageable. Analytic philosophy in the early 20^th Century – under the spell of logical positivism – tried something like this with all those “unscientific” forebears. So too postmodern theory is all-too-easy to be taken as an excuse for not bothering with all those superseded dead, white males from modernist days of yore. I wonder what a tremendous intellectual relief it must be to have some excuse for ignoring all these thousands of years of philosophical thought. But – in the end – we keep going back for more. One generation casts aside Kant, and the next resurrects him. The struggle between Plato and Aristotle begins anew. And the snowball ever grows.

Perhaps the problem is with the way we philosophers write our books. When a layperson or non-philosophy-academic picks up one of our books, it’s unlikely they’ll be bearing in mind that this is just the latest offering on a question millennia old, on which countless theorists have written and are still writing. On which countless wrong turns have been taken and dead-ends found. The reader has happened across just one tiny drop in the ocean of thought, just one skittering pebble in the vast avalanche that is philosophy. Hopefully, of course, the drop might turn out to be an important one, the skittering pebble might be one that ramifies into a new avalanche – but such questions might not be settled for decades or even centuries after publication. In all likelihood, the drop will remain a drop, the pebble just a pebble.

Try putting that as the cover blurb on your new book.

Goodness knows I haven’t. So perhaps ultimately the fault is – at least in part – one of my own making. Perhaps philosophers have a tendency to present to their readers a view of philosophy as so much smaller than it actually is, so as to make our own works comparatively so much larger – and therefore worth reading and thinking about.

So – even though it didn’t make it onto the back cover of my upcoming book – this humble blogpost can be my attempt to communicate to the wider world the point that philosophy is big. Really big. And that the chances are pretty high that I have never heard of that dusty old tome you happened across in that delightful used bookstore.

But I’m happy to hear about it anyway.

Publishing, rejection and peer review in philosophy

“Peer review is the worst form of appraising academic work, except all the others that have been tried from time to time.”

Today I want to offer just a couple of reflections on peer review and publication, in the context of philosophy and the humanities. Hopeful they will be of some help or comfort to those just setting out on the tumultuous journey that is academic publication, or – like myself – still wrestling with its slings and arrows.

The first thing to keep in mind – as my bastardization on Churchill’s line on democracy above is meant to capture – is that peer review is by no means a perfect system. To be sure, it has substantial merits. What better way to judge academic work than to send it to experts in the field? Stripped of the name of its author, the experts judge it only by the cogency of its argument, the originality of the thinking, and the plausibility of its premises. The experts make their determination – hopefully offering thoughts for improvement – and the good papers are published and the poor ones passed over (usually to be reworked and submitted elsewhere). For the most part, the system works and is resilient enough to the occasional less-than-ideal behaviour on the part of individuals within it.

Indeed, one can feel a real dignity and virtue in the system when it works well. Reviewers and editors routinely decide to publish papers with whose conclusions they profoundly disagree; but they nevertheless accept the significance and the cogency of the argument and decide it is worth publishing on that basis. So too, the anonymity of the process really can create an equal playing field. Papers written by professors from Ivy League universities are passed over, and articles penned by PhD students from some backwater are selected. I may not have been to Cambridge, but I can (and have) published in its journal of ethics.

So that’s the good news. Of course it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes, journal editors will reject papers immediately, before sending them out for review. And in such cases usually they will know the name(s) of the author, meaning the process is no longer blinded (processes can be put in place to fix this, of course). I hazard in such cases editors are more likely to give the benefit of the doubt to well-known professors than unknown students. There is no reason to believe editors are more judicious than reviewers in this respect, so it's hard to see why they shouldn't be blinded.

So too, reviewers can be biased. They can evaluate the argument on the basis of whether they approve of its conclusions, or not. Now I think this is often not as large a problem as it might seem, as there are institutional factors that press against it. Effectively, philosophers like (need!) to argue with each other, and to do that requires finding intelligent people who disagree with them. So a good argument against their favourite theory is not something they want to suppress – but rather to publish and then respond to. But bias can rear its head at certain points – both the Sokal hoax and the ‘climategate’ scandal carried the charge that reviewers in those cases focused on whether they agreed with the conclusion, rather than the cogency of the evidence and argument itself.

But the major problem with peer-review is simply this: journal referees are often time-poor, and there are few institutional reward-mechanisms to ensure they carry out their task diligently and judiciously. If a referee makes a laughably wrong decision in rejecting a paper (and the world is littered with stories of what-came-to-be landmark (even Nobel-prize winning) articles that were passed over with brusque rejections) then there is usually no professional fallout from their doing so. Indeed, the institution that employs them will almost never know what happened. This means that every time a referee gives a fair and careful appraisal of a manuscript it is almost always an act of virtue. They did it because they themselves wanted to do the task well, not because there was a system of accountability by which they might be judged and found wanting.

Even if there are no issues of bias or brusqueness, it still remains a grim fact that top journals have (and must have in order to function) very high rejection rates – often well above 90%. This means that reviewers need to be pretty critical; it’s not enough for them to think the manuscript is okay. To be successful the manuscript has to convince two separate referees (and often the editor as well) that this paper simply cannot be passed over; it is brilliant and a perfect fit for the journal. Unless you are a scintillating genius, this means that if you are submitting manuscripts to top journals, you will get rejections.

If you are anything like me, you will get a lot of rejections.

So how to survive, in this world?

The first thing is, of course, not to take rejections too seriously. If you’re in this game, you will get rejections. You will get lots of them. The mere fact that you have had a long series of rejections on a particular manuscript does not mean that the paper is not worthwhile. I have met colleagues who are surprised when I tell them one of my manuscripts has been rejected seven times and I am still revising it and sending it out. (This is not merely my own personal stubbornness; one of the smartest and most well-published early-career philosophers I know told me just the other day that she had hit seven rejections with a manuscript and was still sending it out.) To be sure, in some cases it may be that the paper just isn’t good enough – if all the reviewers tend to be saying the same thing, then changes are in order, at least. But you can just be unlucky. If you believe in the paper and its significance, then you need to stick with it. All of my best publications were rejected at least once by some journal or other. My favourite paper, and the one I feel to be my best contribution to political theory – Two Concepts of Property (The Philosophical Forum, 2011) – had no less than six rejections at various venues before it was accepted. (Though, to be fair to the reviewers that had rejected it, it was heavily revised as it went along, especially in the light of some sympathetic but trenchant critiques put forward by two excellent referees from Social Theory and Practice.)

The point is more general. Just as rejections can make you doubt a paper, they can make you doubt yourself. I think it is fair to say that I have a pretty robust self-belief about my capacities as a philosopher. But when you are hit, again and again, with rejections from multiple sources, about multiple papers, it is easy to start thinking you are getting things wrong in some deep way. But the fact is that if the journals you are submitting to only publish about one in twenty submissions they receive, then even if you are producing high-quality work, multiple rejections will be the order of the day.

With this in mind, it is important to keep in mind that – in publishing like in so many other pursuits – when you are doing well you will tend to chalk it up to your merits, and when you are doing poorly you will put it down to luck. We attribute successes to things in our control, and failures to things outside our control. This is just a part of how human beings think, but it can be a persistent bias. If you (or one of your peers) gets a string of acceptances, then you/they are probably doing a lot right. But you/they are probably also lucky. Around 2009, during my PhD, I received three journal acceptances in a short period of time. Frankly, at that point I thought journal publication was the easiest thing in the world, and that referees were clearly able to recognize manifest genius (i.e. me) when they saw it. Sometime in 2011, I began to realise how wrong I had been. The manuscripts had been good, yes, but I had been lucky as well. And having that lucky start didn’t stand me in good stead when I began to receive rejection after rejection for my next set of manuscripts. Over time it all evens out, but that can mean long periods of rejection after rejection (people are often surprised at how many times a fair coin can turn up heads, if you toss it long enough). That can be pretty tough to handle, especially if you are early in your career, when each publication really counts, and you need them now - not later.

My next point is that there is never a comment from a referee that is not worth thinking seriously about. I mean that. Never ever. So what if they just skimmed your argument? So what if they clearly don’t know the literature as well as you do? So what if they hold to a shoddy interpretation of Hume or Foucault or whoever? It still matters what they thought. When your manuscript finally does get published, it will be read by people who just skim it, who don’t know the literature, and have dubious understandings of Hume and Foucault. You need to consider those readers as well – are there some small changes you can make so as to make your main point sensible to these readers? Could you make the abstract clearer – so that even the laziest scholar will not misunderstand what you are aiming to do in the paper? The point here isn’t to try and please everyone – that’s impossible. The point, rather, is never to write off a reviewer’s comments merely because you are sure they are an idiot. Often, they will still have said something that is worth thinking about seriously. It usually will cost you between two and six months to get those few comments; value them accordingly.

(The point about the abstract is worth emphasis too. I often fall into the trap of getting the paper itself very well-polished, and then realise I need the abstract only when I am about to submit, and just whip something up quickly. This is a mistake. The abstract is crucial. Every word in it matters. It will be the first thing editors and reviewers read – and the first thing scholars generally read when your article is published. You have to get it exactly right.)

Next point: always take the revise-and-resubmit process really seriously. A ‘revise and resubmit’ result should be what you are aiming for when you submit a manuscript. Most good journals will almost never give a straightforward acceptance. And a ‘revise and resubmit’ is usually an opportunity to really improve your paper. The comments you have been given are provided by someone who is clearly sympathetic to what you are doing (otherwise it would have been rejected). This is often the single best source of constructive criticism a scholar can access. Referees and editors will usually not require that you have made every change requested. What they will require, at absolute minimum, is that you have thought very carefully and sympathetically about their comments, and how they might benefit the paper. You don’t need just to do this – you need to demonstrate unequivocally to them that you have done it. (I’ll often provide a document detailing all the changes and my reasons, even if this is not requested.)

One final point: always always always be polite when dealing with journals, even if you feel you have been hard done by. There is nothing to be gained by telling the editor how incompetent one of her referees is, or that she should at least have sent it out for review, or whatever. Editing a journal is hard and often thankless work. The editor cannot second-guess her referees, or her own judgment, or her task becomes impossible. Moreover, venting your frustrations on the editor is a waste of emotional energy that would be better channelled into thinking seriously about whether and how to rework the manuscript. 

Take the criticism to your typewriter, as the old writing adage goes.