We Are Stuck With Human Nature, Not Human Ignorance

Why a tragic view of human nature need not imply a pessimistic view of human reason

The central thesis of Thomas Sowell’s ‘A Conflict of Visions’ is that an enduring conflict between two competing visions of human nature and society drives much of the high-level disagreement we observe in politics.

According to the “constrained” (or “tragic”) vision, humans are deeply and permanently morally and intellectually limited. We are self-interested, biased, and ignorant of most things outside the scope of our own concerns and experiences. So, we must build societies around these constraints of human nature, either by making them too costly to act on or by harnessing them for beneficial ends. This, argues Sowell, is why proponents of the constrained vision prefer free, competitive markets to central planning of the economy: not only do market incentives channel the self-interest of butchers, brewers, and bakers into delicious dinners, but market prices coordinate dispersed knowledge that no humans, no matter how intelligent, could ever possess in full.

Those who embrace this tragic vision are not surprised by poverty, conflict, disorder, or ignorance. Given our moral and intellectual limitations, these are the default conditions of humanity. Instead, the deep challenge for social theory is to explain how fallen creatures such as us could ever escape these conditions and achieve order, peace, and prosperity.

The “unconstrained” (or “utopian”) vision takes a more optimistic view of human potential. Its advocates do not deny that humans can be—and, in the present state of political development, often are—selfish, immoral, and ignorant. However, they ascribe these outcomes not to permanent limitations of human nature but to contingent institutions, specific false beliefs, or a curable lack of moral and intellectual enlightenment.

Instead of resigning ourselves to human self-regard and ignorance, the task of politics is therefore to apply our rational and moral faculties to the design of societies that cultivate and harness our potential. Hence, those with this vision are liable to dream of abolishing not just the profit motive and other competitive social institutions but also, one day, the police and prisons. To the extent that self-interest, and hence conflicts of interest, are products of specific social arrangements or an immature stage of intellectual and moral development, crime and violence would simply disappear in a world of true enlightenment, abundance, and equality.

Visions and Politics

Sowell argues that people’s commitment to these visions explains something that should otherwise be puzzling: why political disagreements about seemingly unrelated issues (economics, crime, law, geopolitics, tradition) so often cluster around two broad camps. For example, why do people’s beliefs about free markets predict their beliefs about law and order, traditional cultural norms surrounding gender, and warfare? Sowell argues that broadly “conservative” or “right-wing” positions on such issues trace back to an underlying constrained vision of human nature and social causation, whereas broadly “liberal” (in the American sense), “progressive”, or “left-wing” positions trace back to the unconstrained vision.

Admittedly, Sowell is quite cautious in presenting this claim. He acknowledges that visions are ideal types, that the visions exist on a continuum, that “hybrid” visions exist, and that real-world political coalitions are shaped by many non-intellectual factors. Nevertheless, he clearly sees it as a significant virtue of his analysis that it can explain the clustering of political beliefs around broadly conservative/right-wing and liberal/left-wing viewpoints.

This part of the analysis is a failure. In general, real-world “ideologies” are less like applications of deep assumptions than ad hoc collections of principles, beliefs, and rationalisations that suit the interests of specific alliances in specific political contexts at specific times.

To take only one example, Sowell takes for granted that the right/left divide bundles together economic and socio-cultural concerns in a distinctive way: the right, or “conservatives”, prefer free markets and cultural conservatism, whereas the left favours top-down management of the economy and cultural liberalism. He then tells a story in which this package reflects the coherent application of deeper visions about human nature and social causation.

Writing in the 1980s, this all probably seemed self-evident. The problem is that this bundling is, in fact, very historically and culturally contingent. Globally, the more common pattern seems to be for economic liberalism (i.e., free markets) to correlate with social liberalism, with cultural conservatives often favouring more state intervention in the economy, not less. Moreover, one can easily tell a story in which combining economic with social liberalism in this way makes more rational sense than the bundling Sowell takes for granted as the coherent expression of a “constrained” vision of human nature and society.

What seems to have happened is that the meaning of “conservatism” throughout the Western world after the Second World War had more to do with a specific alliance between business elites and cultural conservatives than with any underlying vision of human nature and society. It is noteworthy, for example, that the meaning of “conservatism” even in the US today is very different from the package of views Sowell took for granted in the 1980s of Reagan and Thatcher, plausibly because of shifts in the underlying alliances that increasingly shape Western politics.

However, in some ways this analysis is too favourable to Sowell. It suggests that the constrained and unconstrained visions as he describes them are rationally coherent, and that he only went awry in trying to map them onto real-world political belief systems. In reality, I think the problem with his analysis is deeper: the visions themselves combine ideas that don’t bear any rational connection to each other. Specifically, his “constrained vision” of human nature pairs two very different kinds of constraints: moral constraints on the one hand, and what philosophers would pretentiously but accurately call “epistemic” constraints—that is, constraints on our ability to know and reason about the world—on the other.

There is no obvious reason to think that these two constraints must go together. In fact, whereas I think we are deeply morally limited—there is a self-interested, nepotistic, and competitive core of human nature that, short of radical bio-hacking in the future, we will never escape—our collective capacities for reason and knowledge are, in an important sense, open-ended. We are grubby, self-regarding, devious little primates, but we are not consigned to permanent ignorance. And this fact, I think, has important implications for how we should think about politics and social theory.

Our Deep Moral Limitations

It’s always been obvious that if human nature involves permanent moral or altruistic limitations, this will have enormous political implications.

For example, although Plato’s Republic—in many ways, the foundational text of Western political philosophy—is primarily a book about the nature of justice and a just society, much of it also concerns questions of human psychology.

In Book 1, the character of Thrasymachus advances a classic cynical perspective on such questions. If you strip away all the lofty rhetoric surrounding justice, he argues, it boils down to a question of strength: people’s judgements about justice typically reflect their self-interest, so what ends up being called “justice” in a given society is nothing but the advantage of the stronger.

(Plato—well, his mouthpiece in the character of Socrates—rejects the idea, and The Republic is often taught as if Thrasymachus’ views are obviously wrong, but it’s noteworthy that Plato was writing in an era in which perceptions of “justice” coincidentally favoured an extremely hierarchical aristocratic, patriarchal, and slave-owning society. And it’s amusing that Plato’s own model of a just society just happens to hand immense power to… philosophers.)

In Book 2, the character Glaucon presents a more nuanced cynical challenge, illustrating it with the famous story of the Ring of Gyges, which makes its wearer invisible. If a seemingly noble and just man wore such a ring, Glaucon argues, the loss of any reputational motives would cause him to behave like an unjust man. And that’s because justice and morality are fundamentally rooted in self-interest and reputation management. Take away the incentives that sustain this structure and noble, altruistic motives will dissolve along with them.

That is one of the earliest and clearest statements of the constrained vision of human motivation. And in this form, at least, it is sufficiently bleak and extreme—Glaucon is clear that he doesn’t want to believe it and offers it up precisely to learn why it is mistaken—that a vast amount of political philosophy from Plato onwards has aimed to refute it.

In reality, it is possible to endorse a constrained vision of human altruism without thinking that humans are exclusively selfish. For example, Sowell’s own preferred exemplar of the constrained vision comes from Adam Smith. It’s a good choice, not just because of Smith’s famous arguments about how self-interest can, under the right conditions, be channelled into economic activities that benefit everyone, but also because his ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’—the hipster’s favourite Smith book, published seventeen years before ‘The Wealth of Nations’—contains an extremely rich and nuanced moral psychology.

Smith opens this book by observing that “how selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others.” Although his subsequent account of our moral psychology contains too much richness and complexity to be summarised here, the core idea is that our basic capacity for “sympathy” (very roughly, empathy in today’s terminology) and our craving for social approval lead us to internalise an “impartial spectator”, a kind of inner judge whose verdicts we consult even when nobody is watching.

One way of understanding this is that whereas ‘The Wealth of Nations’ focuses on the formal economy of goods and services, ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’ focuses on how morality emerges from the informal prestige economy of social life and its roots in basic processes of sympathy, social evaluation, and social comparison. (Smith’s analysis prefigures Christopher Boehm’s more cynical evolutionary account of the human conscience as “a social mirror. By continually glancing at it, we can keep track of shameful pitfalls that threaten our reputational status or proudly and virtuously chart our personal progress as group members in good standing”).

For Smith, then, humans are not purely self-interested sociopaths. But we are substantially and unavoidably self-interested nevertheless, and our prosocial instincts, while real, are wrapped up with social comparison and reputation management in complex ways, and often warped by partiality, hypocrisy, and self-deception.

This is ultimately why he favours political and economic systems that economise on virtue, especially when such systems connect strangers not bound together by strong bonds of family and friendship, or the immediate reputational pressures of a face-to-face, small-scale community. It is not because we are incapable of virtue, but because human virtue has unavoidable limits that impose non-negotiable constraints on what kinds of societies are possible.

Modern evolutionary and empirical research has largely vindicated this picture, at least in broad outline. The utopian hope that self-regard, social competition, and moral limitations are simply products of bad institutions or a failure of proper “education” is impossible to believe today, not just because such an unconstrained moral psychology literally could not evolve via natural selection, but also because of what we have learned by researching human beings, both through the study of history and different cultures and through more systematic scientific research.

Humans have genuine moral and prosocial motivations, some of which are plausibly innate, but these motives are highly selective and conditional; they are frequently distorted by hypocrisy, self-serving bias, and motivated reasoning; and they are often outweighed by self-interest.

Interestingly, if Smith erred, it was by exaggerating the impartiality of our inner spectator (it is, at best, impartialish) and by downplaying just how much status competition and reputation management shape the nature and intensity of our moral concerns.

For example, the very ideal of an impartial spectator—closely connected to what social scientists call “impersonal prosociality”—is itself culturally specific, plausibly emerging from reputational incentives in individualistic, fluid social ecologies in which people must be able to build cooperative relationships with strangers. (This includes the commercial society Smith inhabited and so astutely analysed). Throughout most of human history, people’s social world was dominated by kinship and other enduring personal relationships, which incentivised the development of moral instincts—and, hence, inner spectators—that are extremely partial, assigning much greater weight to the biased judgements and interests of kith and kin than to those of outsiders and strangers.

Sowell is correct that this constrained vision of human nature has profound political implications. We (or at least most of us) are not purely strategic and self-interested, and complex cooperation would be impossible if we were. However, we will also never be saints, and functional societies must find ways to productively manage deep-rooted, ineradicable instincts towards self-regard, nepotism, and status competition. As Machiavelli put it, “He who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation.”

A Tragic View of Knowledge?

But what does any of this have to do with knowledge? For Sowell, the constrained vision combines this tragic view of our moral limitations with a tragic view of our epistemic limitations.

According to this tragic vision of our epistemic limitations, Sowell argues, we are permanently limited in what we can know as individuals. We do not know enough on our own even to govern our own lives, let alone a whole society. Civilisations therefore depend on mechanisms—traditions, habits, laws, norms, prices—that transmit and coordinate the experiences of millions, including those of previous generations, winnowed by trial and error over long periods of time.

Moreover, this socially accumulated knowledge is often implicit and difficult, if not impossible, to articulate and render explicit. It involves habits, practical skills, emotional dispositions, and ways of doing things that people struggle to explain. It is also embedded in collective customs, rituals, traditions, and institutions that often perform valuable functions that nobody consciously designed or even fully understands.

For example, people are often heavily invested in upholding seemingly arbitrary manners and participating in strange, seemingly irrational communal rituals without appreciating the important roles these practices play in sustaining mutual trust and cooperation. Similarly, the prices of goods encode systemic information about their scarcity, demand, and alternative uses that no buyer or seller needs to know, or could know, in full. As Hayek argued, the knowledge is dispersed across society and embodied in society-wide patterns of behaviour, not located inside anyone’s head.

On this view, then, the socially useful knowledge upon which societies depend mostly involves inarticulate social experience—“wisdom without reflection”, in Burke’s phrase—that is widely dispersed and impossible to concentrate. Hence, this vision is typically highly sceptical of intellectuals, central planners, and any system of values that restricts our assessment of ideas and practices to explicitly articulated reasons.

In contrast, the unconstrained vision adopts a very different epistemology. It argues that socially useful knowledge paradigmatically consists of explicit information—the kind one could read in a book—and defensible explicit reasoning. If ideas, practices, norms, or institutions were not designed according to rational principles, they should be viewed with suspicion; to the extent that they cannot be rationally defended, they should be rejected. So, advocates of this vision have a much more positive view of experts and intellectuals and encourage deference towards enlightened decision-makers, top-down planning, and deliberate institution design.

An Assessment

Although Sowell is right that this conflict of epistemological visions accurately captures the views of certain intellectuals—thinkers like Hayek and Burke obviously lie on the constrained side, whereas many generations of Enlightenment “rationalist” philosophers fall on the unconstrained side—there is a considerable amount of confusion in his analysis.

To start with, the constrained vision bundles together multiple different claims that don’t bear any obvious rational relationship to each other: for example, (1) that individuals are ignorant of most things; (2) that valuable knowledge is often socially distributed, tacit, and accumulated across generations; (3) that decentralised systems can sometimes coordinate and apply knowledge better than central authorities; and (4) that articulated reasoning and deliberate institution design should be viewed with general suspicion.

It is not at all obvious why one should treat these as a package deal. For example, the first two claims seem clearly correct, the third is complicated and plausibly depends on the details of specific cases, and none of them establishes the fourth.

Moreover, it is very unclear what any of them have to do with the constrained vision of moral motivation. There doesn’t seem to be anything incoherent in thinking that humans are deeply morally limited whilst also being highly sceptical of tradition, custom, and free markets, optimistic about articulated rationality, or enthusiastic about deliberate institution design. And in fact, some philosophers embrace a vision of moral constraints without embracing the vision of epistemic constraints that Sowell describes (e.g., Hobbes), whereas others embrace a broadly Hayekian vision of knowledge whilst embracing a much more idealistic view of human moral motivation (e.g., anarchists such as James C. Scott).

A defender of Sowell might concede that such dissociations are possible in principle but nevertheless argue that the two kinds of constraints go together as follows: if we are permanently self-serving, competitive, and morally limited, we should expect these motivational properties to corrupt our reason. For example, perhaps self-interested, status-seeking, and tribal primates are more likely to use reason not as impartial judges but as lawyers, advocates, propagandists, and public-relations agents.

In fact, I think this expectation is correct. However, it doesn’t vindicate Sowell’s constrained vision of knowledge.

First, to the extent that we are self-regarding and morally limited, this will distort not only our explicit reasoning but also our traditions, customs, rituals, social practices, and culturally evolved institutions. Sowell is surely right—as was Burke—that such things often perform latent functions that people cannot consciously articulate. But if one endorses a morally constrained vision, one should expect many of those functions to have more to do with domination, extraction, and oppression than with mutually beneficial cooperation.

For example, it is quite difficult to explicitly articulate or understand the rationale for the centuries-long practice of foot binding in China, but its latent “function” was hardly conducive to advancing the common good. Many norms, rituals, and cultural practices are like that.

Second, if we should be sceptical of articulated reasoning on motivational grounds, that scepticism must also extend to the reasoning of those intellectuals who advocate the constrained vision of knowledge. Figures such as Burke, Hayek, Oakeshott, and Sowell himself do not merely blindly defer to tradition; they articulate reasons for their deference. There is no obvious reason why their arguments should be exempt from the distortions of self-interest and bias that supposedly afflict everyone else.

Third, one can happily accept that humans are morally limited and often self-regarding in their reasoning and conclude that the solution lies in careful norms and incentive structures that channel ambition and bias into collectively beneficial epistemic outcomes.

There is a clear analogy with the economic domain here: just as markets do not presuppose benevolent butchers, brewers, and bakers, well-designed epistemic institutions do not and should not presuppose disinterested truth-seekers. In fact, this is precisely how science works: it is a status game, a complex prestige economy in which esteem and recognition are awarded for making discoveries, exposing errors, and solving challenging intellectual problems. By combining the self-belief, competitiveness, and vanity of scientists with institutionalised norms of scrutiny, criticism, and replication, science can advance the collective frontier of knowledge without relying on any individual scientist to aim specifically at that outcome.

Of course, this process often goes wrong in many ways. Scientists can also win status by publishing flashy nonsense, manipulating data, taking credit for other people’s ideas, and following fashions. The replication crisis and other systemic challenges facing modern science illustrate these problems. Moreover, elsewhere Sowell himself offers an astute analysis of how bad incentives ensure that intellectuals are often overconfident and biased in their theories and recommendations, responding more to internal criteria of fads, fashions, and moral grandstanding than to external criteria of objective accuracy or predictive success. However, this analysis simply concedes that the ultimate issue here is incentives, not permanent limitations: with superior norms, rewards, and institutional procedures, we could produce superior epistemic outcomes.

In fact, the scientific response to the replication crisis illustrates this very lesson. After identifying how incentives in science encouraged unreliable methods, reforming scientists advocated for (and continue to advocate for) innovations such as preregistration, registered reports, open data, better statistical standards, and greater rewards for replication efforts, all of which improve the alignment between individual incentives and knowledge creation.

Similar lessons could be applied more broadly to intellectuals, including public intellectuals. For example, Philip Tetlock has argued over many years that a deep problem with our intellectual class concerns their reputational incentives: they are almost never held accountable for making bad predictions, not least because they are rarely expected to be precise in stating them. Instead, they are rewarded for pontificating in bold, overconfident ways that audiences find entertaining or politically useful. In principle, we could enforce norms and design technologies that track the accuracy of intellectuals’ claims and thereby change these incentives. No alterations to human nature would be necessary.

These reflections connect to the fourth and final issue.

Like Burke and Hayek before him (and Henrich since), Sowell is clearly correct in drawing attention to the limits of human knowledge and explicit reasoning, the benefits of social systems that aggregate dispersed knowledge, and the importance of inarticulate social experience, all of which are often overlooked by intellectuals. He is also clearly correct that some policies and political programmes presuppose absurd claims to knowledge. Economies really cannot be centrally planned from the top down, and socialists and technocrats who think otherwise are making a mistake.

However, no coherent epistemology, “constrained” or otherwise, holds that humans can know anything and everything, or that explicit reasoning delivers knowledge relevant to every goal. Ultimately, what we want in politics is, therefore, meta-knowledge: knowledge of what we can and cannot know, and in which circumstances. When is knowledge too dispersed to be centralised? When do prices reveal socially useful information, and when are they distorted by market power or externalities? When do traditions embody latent “wisdom” or perform valuable hidden functions, and when do they merely advance the relative interests of specific elites, races, classes, castes, or other groups?

Of course, these questions are extremely difficult to answer. But equally obviously, they are questions that we will only ever answer with explicit inquiry, data collection, scientific methods, and rational argument. Hence, even Hayek—and, elsewhere, Sowell himself—advance explicit rational arguments for the limits of articulated knowledge and rationality in specific cases. As others have noted, it is precisely this ability of human reason to reflect on its own conditions and limitations that makes it so powerful, and so indispensable in the domain of politics and social theory.

Although our meta-knowledge will always be partial and fallible, it need not be permanently fixed. Creating wealth is also extremely challenging, and yet humans have achieved spectacular material abundance through accumulated innovations, specialisation, exchange, and institutions refined over many years. Explicit, rational knowledge can be created in a similar way. Our permanent moral and individual cognitive limitations need not impose a fixed ceiling on such knowledge, any more than they must consign us to permanent poverty.

There is a broader point here. Those sympathetic to free markets and cultural conservatism, such as Sowell, often present their viewpoint as a manifestation of epistemic humility, in contrast to the epistemic hubris of rationalist progressives. This is fundamentally confused. The claim that culturally evolved practices are more beneficial than explicitly designed ones, or that market economies are superior to top-down central planning, might well be correct, or at least correct in specific circumstances. But such claims are just as epistemically ambitious as their denials. They involve substantive, contestable theses about how complex social systems work, and they can only be established through evidence and explicit reasoning.

Conclusion

One can—and, I think, should—embrace a tragic vision of human moral motivation without embracing a tragic view of reason or knowledge.

We will never educate or reform our way into a species of impartial altruists unconstrained by the grubby forces of self-interest, status, personal attachments, or self-deception. But these limitations alone do not doom us to ignorance. With the right norms, incentives, and institutions, we can channel the flaws of human nature into the open-ended creation of knowledge and understanding, including wisdom about the limits of our knowledge in specific circumstances. In fact, it is only through this sustained intellectual progress that we have learned that a tragic view of our moral limitations, and hence the importance of careful institution design, is not just a subjective “vision” of certain bygone intellectuals but a genuine discovery of modern science.

This is a more coherent “tragic” vision than the one described by Sowell. Of course, it doesn’t map very well onto any of the major real-world ideologies we encounter today on either the left or right. But fortunately, this misalignment is just what the vision predicts: real-world politics is constrained more by the grimy practicalities of power, alliance formation, and propaganda than by coherent philosophies.