In my previous post I advanced the idea that people turn to moralism and from there to government coercion when faced with a free-rider problem. I didn’t provide a detailed, concrete example of the kind of free-rider problem I had in mind but David Foster provided me one: vaccinations.
Civil Liberties
Moralism as a Response to a Free-Rider Problem
From the perspective of evolutionary game theory, moralism presents something of a dilemma.
Evolutionary game theory is a branch of mathematics that seeks to explain the behavior of animals and humans based on the assumption that all behavior ultimately must arise from the imperatives imposed by natural selection. From this perspective, human behavior originates largely in selfish motives and true altruism becomes the most difficult behavior of all to evoke.
Moralists exist in all cultures and in all cultures the moralist seeks to persuade or coerce other members of the culture into obeying the moral codes of the culture. Moralists concentrate on suppressing behaviors that do not cause immediate harm to others. Indeed, most moralists target self-destructive behaviors. Both individuals and societies spend a great deal of time and energy moralizing.
The evolutionary game theorist is forced to ask: Why bother? What is in it for the moralist?
Goon Squad
A speech by David Horowitz at Emory University was shut down by rowdy “protesters.” He was scarcely able to finish a single sentence, and had to leave after only half an hour. More here.
Credit where credit is due: After the event disintegrated into a shambles, the president of the Muslim Students Association came over to Horowitz at Starbucks and expressed her regret at what had happened. Horowitz opines that most of the disrupters were leftist non-students over the age of 30.
Maybe so. But this kind of thing happens far too frequently at American universities. There are few other venues in which one could get away with this kind of disruptive behavior. Try it at your local Rotary club and I bet you will find yourself spending the night in jail. Too many American universities have promulgated that idea that no one should ever be exposed to speech that makes them feel “uncomfortable” and have winked at actions like stealing and destroying newspapers with content someone dislikes. The wimp’s veto, the heckler’s veto, and the thug’s veto have all become common in academia. Indeed, there was virtually no old-media coverage of the Emory incident. Apparently, the shutting down of free speech in academia has become so common that it isn’t even news.
See my Goon Squad thread for many examples of thuggish behavior, especially in academia.
Following an incident at San Francisco State University, a campus Jewish leader named Laurie Zoloth summed up the situation there iin these words: “This is the Weimar republic with Brownshirts it cannot control.”
If thuggish political behavior is allowed to become the norm in academia, it is only a matter of time until such behavior becomes the norm in the larger society as well.
What are You Going to Do About It?
David Foster’s post got me to thinking about the ex-Mayor of Bogota. Unfortunately, my real world experiences are closer to this guy’s observations than what happened in Bogota. In general, I like the Mockus approach to re-establishing an atmosphere of intolerance for incivility. Being a libertarian, I prefer to rely on social opprobrium to discourage behavior that I think is fairly negative, but not negative enough to warrant giving the government more power to regulate.
