If we accept the views of Hayek and sauville that there are two different traditions, namely "constructivist rationalism" and "empirical rationalism", then the differences between Plato and Aristotle can be regarded as indicating the division between the two traditions. The former includes Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hegel, Marxists, Bian Bi and Mill, as well as famous economists such as Langer, Lerner, Samuelson, Arrow and ethicist Rawls in the 20th century. The latter includes Smith, Hume, Locke, Burke, Tocqueville, Mises, Hayek, Buchanan and so on.
I don't care much about this formal division, because many of their views are actually very complicated and it is difficult to summarize them with a simple label. Here, referring to the mechanism design theory put forward by leonid hurwicz and others, a simple system selection model is proposed. According to this model, the difference between Boya and others is mainly the difference of different theoretical premises and the difference of the intensity of premise propositions.
In order to make us have the same starting point when discussing problems, we believe that any social theory includes the following contents: an empirical theory about how the world exists, a normative theory about how the world should exist, and an operable conclusion based on the two. We believe that many disputes about value judgment can be handled in the following two ways: one is the basic normative judgment of "should it be A or not"; Secondly, if we distinguish between basic norms and sub-norms, the debate can be summed up as the choice of methods or strategies to realize basic value norms, which can be judged under certain epistemological premise. Therefore, in principle, we can assume that there are no differences on the basic norms, otherwise we will not be able to discuss the problem (at least this article deals with it). In other words, if there are valuable differences in judgment, we can always think that this is about substandard problems or operational problems; We can always sum up the problem as follows: we have the same premise on normative issues, but the difference is only caused by the difference in empirical theory, that is, only the difference in our understanding of how the world exists makes us form different views on the system choice in the real society.
As for the basic value norms, we can adopt the Pareto optimal standard (that is, there is no other feasible social state, so that at least one person's situation can be improved and others will not be harmed), combined with other intuitively acceptable and non-conflicting standards. Even, we can accept different premises such as fairness or equality (the allocation of resources is the same for everyone or everyone will not be jealous of others) and Rawls' max-min principle (that is, society should choose the best situation for the worst individuals in all feasible social states). The social choice theory initiated by Arrow and others is mainly used to deal with these problems. It should be noted that sometimes we may not be able to list all the basic value norms, but we can be optimistic that this does not prevent us from drawing the necessary conclusions (of course, sufficiency and constructiveness cannot be satisfied).
Therefore, the question we consider can be transformed into: in the view of an objective observer (system designer), how do people behave in society? In view of this understanding, what kind of system choice can be adopted to realize the basic value goal of society? This is also the way that mechanism design theory considers problems. It links social choice theory with game theory. It assumes that people in society act in the way described by game theory, that is, people are actors who maximize their personal interests, and they always make balanced strategic choices under the constraints of technology, knowledge and information, that is, under the premise that others do not change their strategies, everyone's strategies can best realize their personal interests. Social choice theory determines a set of social goals according to the basic value norms, so the so-called mechanism design is to provide an institutional framework, so that the results of people's balanced strategy choice under this institutional framework are in this set of social goals, that is, social goals are executable.
We can get the evidence of our handling of this case from Professor Sabin. Aristotle's political ideal is consistent with Plato's setting moral goal as the main goal of the country.
But there is a fundamental difference between Plato and Aristotle: Aristotle's utopia is actually Plato's second-best country. ..... His ideal is always legal rule, not autocratic rule ... That is, in any good country, the supreme ruler must be the law rather than any individual, no matter who this person is. (Sabin, P 124-5) From a unified point of view, the essence of philosophical kingship and legal rule is how to organize and coordinate a society, especially the institutional arrangement of decision-making power. We are particularly concerned that due to the division of labor and specialization of human society, the distribution of knowledge and information is unbalanced, asymmetric and scattered. So, how does human society coordinate these people with different knowledge and organize them? Undoubtedly, Plato also partially discovered and put forward this ancient and important problem of human society. Sabin pointed out that Plato's theory can be divided into two main parts or two main propositions: politics should be a technology that depends on accurate knowledge; Second, society is for those who have the ability to complement each other to meet each other's needs. "(Sasin's History of Political Theory (P68). Plato's answer to this part hit the crux of the problem, that is, the knowledge (or rules) that need to be coordinated and its executors.
Second, knowledge distribution and institutional arrangements.
In Plato and Aristotle, the rule of philosophy king and the rule of law are both unstructured concepts. The so-called rule of law does not mean that such a law is making decisions as an entity. Aristotle's intention is to emphasize that law, as a system that restricts individual decision-making, should be enforceable. And the law is also enforced by individuals. We can think of them as typical examples of a bunch of concepts. Based on Plato's philosophy, we think there are two kinds of decisions: one is personal choice related to the production, trading and consumption of personal goods; The other is centralized decision-making related to the government or planners, including the supply of legal system as public goods. Social reality is the result of these two decisions acting on the environment. We regard the set of all systems as an interval defined by the boundaries of complete centralized decision-making and complete individual decision-making, so we should first pay attention to the division of the boundaries between centralized decision-making and individual decision-making. In particular, Plato's rule of philosophy king can be understood from two aspects: in a strong sense, the rule of philosophy king can be understood as completely replacing individual decision-making through centralized decision-making by a central government or planner; In a weak sense, the rule of the king of philosophy can be understood as the centralized decision of the government to provide public goods including laws, which is a necessary supplement to personal choice, which is not much different from Aristotle's rule of law. The governance of law can be regarded as an intermediate state between the two extremes of completely centralized central control and completely decentralized anarchism (we also regard conventions and habits as some rules that are in harmony with the law).
Plato and Aristotle have two different hypotheses. First, Plato is a good theorist in a sense (at least he hinted at such a hypothesis to the king of philosophy), while Aristotle is an evil theorist. "The opening of Politics clearly wrote Plato's famous saying: Man is the best animal when he is perfect, but once he leaves law and justice, he is the worst animal." (politics 1, 2; 1253A3 1, and refer to law 847E) (Sabin, P 127). In the words of economics, the former is altruistic and the latter is selfish. Secondly, Plato's idealism convinced him that "... for all individuals and countries, there may be some kind of objective good life, and such a good life can be used as the object of study and can be expounded in an orderly and rational way, so it can be discussed with wisdom. (Sabin, P6 1) "The correct philosophy puts us in a far-sighted position, and we can distinguish what is just for society and individuals in all cases". Aristotle believes that "wisdom grows gradually through the accumulation of experience, and this accumulated social wisdom is reflected in law and practice." The difference between them is that Plato endowed mankind (at least the king of philosophy) with complete rationality, while Aristotle believed that there was no perfect world, that is, limited rationality was the essential feature of society, and he believed that the rational difference between individuals was not so great that one person made all judgments instead of another (sabine, P 128).
From the perspective of information and motivation, we consider this problem in two steps. First, regardless of whether the designers and executors of the system are self-interested individuals, how to distribute collective decision-making and individual decision-making only from the perspective of knowledge distribution and information transmission (Hayek's criticism of centralized planned economy is also carried out in this way) can explain that Plato's plan is not feasible in a strong sense; Secondly, considering that the designers and executors of the legal system are self-interested individuals (the public choice theory initiated by Buchanan is based on the "self-interested government" of Locke, Montesquieu and Lord acton), we can also be researchers. From the perspective of meta-theory, what kind of more basic system can be handled, that is, how to design a rule (game framework) to motivate and constrain it?
Before analyzing the first question, it is necessary to clarify a view that may be misunderstood by the following discussion, that is, anarchism's view of complete personal decision-making. There is no objection to the importance of the government to public goods such as courts, national defense, basic research and transportation. (As for rent-seeking behavior, etc. , can only explain the complexity of the problem). Although the functions of redistribution, preventing monopoly and externalities, and maintaining macroeconomic stability are controversial, it is difficult to completely deny them (we believe that the level of knowledge and technology in a social development is the criterion for solving these problems). But in any case, a sound society needs to be a centralized decision-making to coordinate knowledge. And these coordinated knowledge, as Plato emphasized, is not equal to special and personalized knowledge. However, Plato's choice between "rule by man" and "rule by law" is based on a stronger premise than this. He believes that this kind of knowledge not only has nothing to do with expertise, but also can be monopolized by a few people. The king of philosophy in the ideal country has a complete grasp of this knowledge and can properly use it to govern the country.
The strongest form of "the rule of the king of philosophy" implies that everyone's preferences, initial resources, strategic choices and behaviors in society are observable. In other words, if everyone truly reveals this information, the king of philosophy can receive this information immediately and correctly, and can handle it perfectly, draw the most appropriate decision and send it back to the individual immediately, so that the individual can faithfully implement this decision. As Hayek correctly pointed out, any knowledge of human beings is not enough to deal with such a complex information problem, and a centralized and structured decision-making system can not solve this information problem. Moreover, the problem of incentive compatibility is also difficult to achieve technically, that is, individuals may pass the wrong information or deliberately not implement relevant decisions, because some behaviors are essentially unobservable. In the mechanism design theory, a series of negative results have convincingly proved this point (Tian Guoqiang 1995).
Because the most basic information is scattered, only everyone knows the information related to himself best, that is, the distribution of information is uneven and asymmetric. Then, an economic mechanism needs information transmission, and information transmission needs cost, so for system designers, it is natural that the smaller the dimension of information space, the better. Pareto optimal allocation of resources is recognized as the goal of social choice. Leonid hurwicz, Jordan and others have proved under certain conditions that no other economic mechanism (including market socialism) can not only lead to the effective allocation of resources but also use less information than the competitive market mechanism, and the competitive market mechanism is the only effective economic mechanism with the smallest information space. This can be considered as a partial proof of Hayek's judgment in the past. For Plato's ideal country, it means that at least the strongest form of philosophical king rule is not feasible.
In addition, we need to consider the incentive problem, that is, the institutional arrangement should meet the incentive compatibility constraints and solve how the individual self-interest behavior can be coordinated with social goals. Usually, whether in the voting process or in the market competition, people hope that the strategies chosen by individuals can truly reflect their preferences. For example, in the collective decision-making of public goods, we need to decide how much to invest according to personal preferences; The market socialist economy is particularly dependent on this, otherwise the central plan cannot be formulated. However, in social choice theory and mechanism design theory, there is a theorem that true preference is impossible. One is the theorem given by leonid hurwicz in 1972. For the economic environment, including any private goods or public goods, as long as the number of social members is limited, there is no mechanism that can not only lead to Pareto distribution, but also inspire everyone to tell the truth under the constraint of personal rationality. The second is the Gibd-Suttersville theorem, which strengthens the former and the original Arrow impossibility theorem, that is, if we demand that social decision-making is not "dictatorship" (that is, it is always based on one's interests, and even the rule of philosophical kings admits that social decision-making cannot only reflect one's preferences), then it is difficult for us to avoid the "manipulation" of decision-making, that is, someone can always make their own interests by hiding their own truth and preferences.
Therefore, the philosophy of complete centralization should give way to the rule of law. Because of the stability of the law in a certain time span, it is not necessary to collect and process all the rapidly changing information, nor to guide people's specific behavior choices; In essence, it only needs to send limited information, that is, it only needs to delimit a selection range; It makes full use of the scattered personal knowledge that the former has not used, leaving room for individuals to develop, and the free choice of individuals is the basis of social existence and development.
Third, how to supervise the person being executed.
Because the law (system) itself cannot guarantee its own implementation, it will inevitably involve the issue of "institutional system". Similarly, the "information structure" in game theory also raises a similar question: How do players judge others' judgments on how they treat others (so infinite), so as to believe that their actions (especially transactions with others) can be beneficial to them? This involves the level and system of knowledge. Abstract discussion of this issue will easily lead to "infinite regression". One of the solutions is that we will eventually trace back to a most basic game, whose structure (participants and their resources, preference skills, skills, knowledge, information, system) is determined by history, and players cannot choose history. What we are considering now is the deeper institutional problem to ensure the implementation of the system, that is, to provide enough incentives to enable the system executors to realize the overall interests of society that we (as system designers) hope in the process of pursuing their own interests. From the perspective of mechanism design, the problem can be embodied as such an incentive problem: how does human society choose the system executor? If they are selfish and easy to use administrative power to harm social interests, how to design a system to supervise and restrain them? Expressed in the framework of principal-agent theory, that is, we don't have some specialized knowledge, so we have to entrust some people to represent some things. What knowledge can we use to screen and identify agents who claim to have this knowledge? What system do we use to stop these agents from using their special knowledge to do things that hurt us?
We must admit that there may be pre-existing differences in people's understanding of system realization. But usually only I know myself best, and it is difficult for others to find out whether he really has this knowledge without after-the-fact observation. Plato actually avoided the question of how to choose the executor of the system. Two unfortunate practices made him hope for "accidental luck", that is, "some arrangement from heaven." (Page 62).
Plato never thought about how to make the system executors make appropriate decisions. Since he hopes for luck, he only considers that the system executors are both talented and selfless. It's just the same old tune: unless philosophers become kings, or those who are now called monarchs study philosophy like real philosophers, combine power and wisdom, and crowd out all mediocre people who only study politics without philosophy or philosophy without politics, the country will never have peace, and mankind will never have peace. Otherwise, the system we have formulated will never be realized, and we will never see the light of day, and we can only stay in words "(Plato, V437D-E). Aristotle prescribed a prescription for the rule of law. Aristotle's understanding of the word "rule of law" has three elements: first, it is a rule for public and universal interests. Second, it is the law-abiding rule, that is, don't despise the conventions and agreements confirmed by law. The third law, governance means the rule of voluntary subjects, which is different from the autocratic rule supported only by force. (Sabin, P 127) The first point is actually the goal of the rule of law; The second and third points involve the incentive compatibility of the mechanism and the acquisition of the ruler's ruling qualification, that is, the rule comes from the consent of the ruled; When the rule is not in the general interest of the public, we can't emphasize the obedience of the subjects, but only ask the ruler to step down.
Therefore, a good rule of law must give the people the power to choose the executor of the system and the power to remove the latter when he has no talent or jobbery. The reason is very simple, people may not have much institutional knowledge; However, they have the knowledge to identify whether the consequences of the actions of the system executors are beneficial to them. At least they have the ability to learn, and they will constantly enrich their system knowledge through "learning by doing".
Since we can't change people's pursuit of self-interest, we can't hope to meet such a small probability event as altruism. Our system must proceed from the assumption that if our agent is an egoist, how can we pursue our own interests without harming our interests, and then let his pursuit of personal success and personal welfare serve the society to the greatest extent. Therefore, the ways are clear: first, try to keep the information unobstructed, and let the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press and publication become the supervision of the executive power; Secondly, we can get inspiration from the principal-agent theory. We can not only use the threat of recall afterwards to motivate the executors of the system to serve the interests of the clients while realizing their own interests, but also design an "agent market" to make the competition among agents generate automatic incentives instead of "alliances". This can be regarded as an explanation of the theory of multi-party competition and separation of powers.
Of course, it is not true to imagine that all problems are solved by mechanism design. Based on the above reasons, the limited rationality of human beings is not enough to solve this problem, and the space for social design mechanism is also very small. In addition, in the process of social structure transformation (for example, from an irregular society to a regular society), we must of course follow the basic principles of mechanism design, but we must clearly realize the limited scope that mechanism design can achieve. Due to the differences in people's lifestyles and ways of thinking about nature, society and life, each society has different choices of specific constitutional system, and this difference will be strengthened by people's dependence on their own experience and knowledge, making the structural forms and actual operations of different societies diverse. Those stable systems and related knowledge make people living under the system have enough information to predict the consequences of their behavior choices. They will not easily choose actions that are not allowed by the system, and they will not actively change the current system. In this way, the behavior under the adjustment of the system has formed a self-reinforcing and stable circulation mechanism of "chicken lays eggs, eggs lay chickens", so we will find that there are many inefficient systems with lasting vitality in ancient and modern China and abroad (we also don't have a wide range of institutional choices for us to design mechanisms at will). This is the so-called path dependence and locking effect (Arthur 1, 990; North 1, 994).
We believe that Plato and Aristotle correctly pointed out the position of human beings in the universe, that is, facing a complex and uncertain world, which is the product of a self-organization process, people rely on knowledge to play games with nature and society. This kind of knowledge includes not only the technology to deal with the relationship between man and nature (such as the professional knowledge of farmers and craftsmen), but also the "technology about technical division of labor" to coordinate society. Reasonable social operation is a clever combination of collective decision-making and individual choice, and what ultimately determines its boundary is actually the constantly evolving knowledge of human beings, especially those institutional knowledge. The evolution of knowledge is acquired through experience, and Aristotle is undoubtedly more cautious and acceptable in epistemology; Plato's Theory of Ideas can also be a tool to explain the logical structure of human knowledge after transformation. Because human knowledge is always expressed as a "model" or "model" about the world, and there is no ultimate and complete model.
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