Deontic Power and the Social by Malcolm Bull

 

Is social life possible without external reasons? Over the past two hundred years there has been growing reason to suspect that it might be. And the suggestion comes primarily from those who would rather it were not so.

The thinker who addresses the issue most directly in Hannah Arendt, so let’s borrow some of her terms (without any commitment to other aspects of her complex articulation of the ideas) and call the set of desire-independent reasons for action ‘world.’

According to Arendt, no human life is possible without ‘world.’ Every human life presupposes a ‘public realm’, which as a ‘common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other’. That public realm is created in stages: work produces a ‘common world of things’, distinct from our natural surroundings, which transcends the life of any individual. Then this world of things ‘is overlaid and, as it were, overgrown with an altogether different in-between, which consists of deeds and words and owes its origin exclusively to men’s acting and speaking directly to one another.’ The public realm therefore arises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds’, and ‘for all its intangibility, this in-between is no less real than the world of things we visibly have in common.’

 

Forming a world between them saves men ‘from the pitfalls of human nature.’ And it is ‘the making and keeping of promises’, which ‘serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty . . .islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationship between men’.

 

 Promise-making provides what John Searle would call external reasons for action, and it is these that constitute a common world and our individual identities within it: ‘Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities, we would wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart.’

It might appear from this that the world is the inevitable product of the social relations that constitute it. But it is possible to imagine scenarios in which there is an imbalance between the two: world-heavy societies where the public realm outweighs the social relations that give rise to it, and the opposite, relatively world-less  societies where the world seems inadequate to the density of the relationships that produced it. Arendt herself  is preoccupied with the latter, and by the relative worldlessness of what she calls ‘the social’, i.e. the social relationships generated by the rise of modern mass society in which ‘the world between people has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them.’ In these circumstances

the weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered together might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst.

This can happen all too easily, because ‘without trusting in action and speech as a mode of being together, neither the reality of one’s self, of one’s own identity, nor the reality of the surrounding world can be established beyond doubt.’ Such radical indeterminacy sounds like ancient Pyrrhonism [Que sçay-je?], but Arendt claims that ‘the emergence of the social realm . . .is a relatively new phenomena whose origin coincided with the emergence of the modern age.’ The result has been ‘the eclipse of a common public world’ and ‘the formation of the world-less mentality.’

The situation Arendt describes as ‘the social’ or ‘society’ has a sociological explanation. The common world has collapsed because ‘although all men are capable of deed and word’ the relentless instrumentalization of social action that characterized the modern economy has gradually encroached upon it. One way to interpret this change might be in terms of the transition from mechanical to organic solidarity, in which a community united by common consciousness is replaced by one where people have little in common beyond the ability to coordinate their diversified social roles. And in particular Arendt’s ‘world-less mentality’ has affinities with the abnormal forms of organic solidarity that Durkheim called anomie.

According to Durkheim, society normally creates rules for itself because ‘social fictions seek spontaneously to adapt to one another, provided they are in regular contact.’ However, such rules respond to social needs that only society can feel. They emerge from ‘a climate of opinion, and all opinion is a collective matter’, and when that is lacking, anomie can develop. Then, any rules will be ‘general and vague, for in these conditions only the most general outlines of the phenomena can be fixed.

 For Durkheim and Arendt it was self-evident ‘the social’ and the ‘anomic’ were undesirable aberrations, ‘as floating, as futile and vain, as the wanderings of nomadic tribes’. But there is another way of looking at it.

From the perspective of skepticism, the absence of world and of regulation are not intrinsic evils, but the natural outcome of skepticism itself. What is at issue is not the desirability of the outcome but rather its possibility, and ‘the social’ appears to realize the possibility of social skepticism, for it deals with social facts or rules, facts that are made and unmade by social action, but in this case unmade in such away that there is no loss of sociability. . . .

An institutional fact provides external reasons for action because it has deontic power. This is not some additional quality; it is merely the ability to provide reasons for acting that are independent of our inclinations, in other words , ‘external reasons.’ According to John Searle, all status functions carry deontic powers, i.e., ‘rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements and so on’, and ‘it is because status functions carry deontic powers they provide the glue that holds civilization together.’ However, all such deontic powers are conventions, and we only have external reasons for action because we have given them to ourselves. Unless the world keeps on being made this way, it will fall apart, and a world that is falling apart isn’t a social world worthy of the name. According to Searle, ‘everything we value in civilization requires the creation and maintenance of institutional power relations through collectively imposed status-functions.’ And if there were no deontic reasons, ’then the corresponding institutions would simply collapse. . .

but rather than being the end of civilization,  what if a world of weak deontic powers may be something that will allow us all to get along with our lives more effectively?

Our original question was ‘Is skepticism possible?’ Searle’s defense of external reasons provides a basis for thinking that it might be. But only if, contrary to what Searle himself claims, those external reasons (in the form of deontic powers) can be weakened or forgotten without corresponding loss of sociability. So the first question leads to the second:Is a world-less, or at least, less worldly sociability possible for humans, just as it is for animals and might be for robots? Can social life go on, without any loss of functionality or complexity, sustained by instinct, habit, and spontaneous adaption but with fewer rules or obligations or declarations? It might be possible, if not for individuals then for societies. In which case, perhaps one of the potential functions of society is help rid us of the illusions of status functions and help free us from being slaves to convention