James Gilmour wrote:
Raph Frank > Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 12:35 PM
Also, what is optimal for "Should we use subsidiarity to make
decisions?".
I don't think this question can be answered as you have asked it.
Perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask "Do we want our
decision-making to be based on the principles of subsidiarity (i.e.
bottom-up)?" There are also problems with regard to "optimal". A
benign dictator might make a more "optimal" decision than any
democratic group, but on the other hand you could say that that could
never be "optimal" because it was not democratic. [As Professor Joab
(BBC Brains Trust - long ago!) might have said: "It all depends on
what you mean by 'optimal'"!!]
By the standard of freedom, (real) subsidiarity seems only logical. If
you're an individual and you do something that has no impact on the rest
of the world, there would appear, by that measure, to be little point
for the rest of the world to interfere. If we make this more general,
then if you're a group and you do something that has no impact on anyone
but your group, then there would be little point for those outside to
interfere.
There are two problems with this, though. Some may use logic similar to
the potential way of arguing for a temporary regime of enforced equality
of minorities or sexes in an assembly: to interfere, if shortly, with
the dynamics of the system, one can quickly redirect it towards a
direction that it would naturally find but that would take significantly
longer had you not interfered.
The second is that, for some actions, it's not easy to say who will be
influenced. All may be, because we are social animals. Another argument
I've heard, regarding public services, is that if you do something that
would usually only affect yourself, but that you need a public service
because of this, then that's a concern of all. For instance, in a nation
with public healthcare, some may argue that if you do risky things, that
concerns society in general since you could end up getting hurt and need
the public health service, which the entire society maintains.
In conclusion, it appears that optimization for any given programmatic
sense of optimality can just as well expose edge or corner cases that
one didn't think of, as give what was intended. Still, as long as one
keeps the above in mind, I think subsidiarity is a good idea.
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