🇺🇸-iii
ping
Previously in this series:
Which is to say, about four hours ago mercury “4773” rodentiation conceded that the objections made to my Effective Americanist manifesto were completely and utterly bogus. Indeed, according to mercury,
Obviously [mercury] was either delusional or lying1 when [mercury] claimed those things in [mercury’s] previous post about America.
However! I cannot allow this to stand. mercury’s explanation for why its objections were bogus seems to me to be obvious nonsense. I of course think that the objections were in fact not spectacularly convincing, as I explained in my previous post, but I will not stand for the retraction of an argument by any of my beloved critics on such terribly flimsy grounds. Thus, I will endeavor to provide at least the vague penumbral outline of a hand-wavey account of what the distinction between an outcome-property and a process-property.
An outcome-property is a function only of the state of the world at a given time11 Can you not define “world state” such that a world state also must track the entire history of the world? Well, of course you can, but that would clearly be cheating. A process-property is a property where you have to resort to cheating to articulate it as an outcome-property.. An outcome-property is not sensitive to history, it evaluates any world state the same regardless of how that world state was reached22 According to what I would call some of the more compelling interpretations of quantum mechanics, the current quantum state actually inherited quantum amplitude not only from one fixed “true” history, but actually from all histories compatible with the current world state. So in a sense outcome-properties as defined here can actually depend on any fact about history that is actually well-defined. But look, that’s obviously cheating. Please apply a more coarse-grained view of what a world state is. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I realize I’m hand-waving, if anyone knows how to not end up hand-waving about things like this please let me know.. A process-property depends on the transition structure between world states.
We can elucidate this distinction with some examples:
Everyone dying
This is an outcome-property. If you look at a world state, either everyone is dead, or not everyone is dead. The history of how we got to that state doesn’t matter33 If you think that clones of people aren’t the same person as the original, then maybe it does matter. Or if you believe in like, certain ideas about continuity of consciousness. If you do, then whether someone died is actually a process-property maybe..
Liberty
Liberty obtains when it is true that agents of the state will not bust down your door and kill you so long as you have not injured anyone else. You could in principle check how often agents of the state busted down people’s doors and killed them for things other than injuring someone else, or how often they would have if people had not been afraid of that sort of thing happening, and determine how much liberty there is.
One cannot look just at a world state and measure how much liberty is in it. One must develop this whole complicated theory of counterfactuals. This is clearly a process-property.
Family
Family is mostly an out-come property. You can go count how many families there are. Maybe whether something counts as a family kinda involves particular counterfactual situations, but I dunno, probably you can just look at like, whether members of a particular family are actively interacting with each other at a given time and in what manner, and then judge how much familiness is going on from that.
Equality
Exercise for the reader: go read about algorithmic fairness and tell me whether the fairness properties discussed are outcome-properties, process-properties, or perhaps some combination of both.
Democracy
“How much democracy is there in the world” could sort of be seen as an outcome, if you track things like what sorts of governance structures a given nation has as part of your world states. But if you zoom out a little — like, imagine you have a world state that’s like, “Alice is the President”. Whether she got there via coup or via democratic election is sort of a fact about history. So the process-property read is also defensible here.
Does this mean the outcome-property vs. process-property distinction is entirely unreasonable and fails to cut reality at the joints? No, I don’t think so, I just think it means you can find cases that are up to interpretation. You can pretty much always do this and you should get used to it. Even if some cases are ambiguous, I do think we are making meaningful philosophical progress by locating the ambiguity to a choice of which facts to consider to constitute your world state.
Can you not define “world state” such that a world state also must track the entire history of the world? Well, of course you can, but that would clearly be cheating. A process-property is a property where you have to resort to cheating to articulate it as an outcome-property.
↩According to what I would call some of the more compelling interpretations of quantum mechanics, the current quantum state actually inherited quantum amplitude not only from one fixed “true” history, but actually from all histories compatible with the current world state. So in a sense outcome-properties as defined here can actually depend on any fact about history that is actually well-defined. But look, that’s obviously cheating. Please apply a more coarse-grained view of what a world state is. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I realize I’m hand-waving, if anyone knows how to not end up hand-waving about things like this please let me know.
↩If you think that clones of people aren’t the same person as the original, then maybe it does matter. Or if you believe in like, certain ideas about continuity of consciousness. If you do, then whether someone died is actually a process-property maybe.
↩
Nozick's concepts of end-state/ patterned principles vs process ones is very similar. He drew this distinction in the context of his disagreement w/ Rawls on egalitarian (with Rawls on the egalitarian / end-state side and him on the libertarian/ process side). Now, Rawls and Nozick are both Very American in thier own ways, so surely both types of principles can form part of the Americanist value function.