Part I
Positivist Foundations of Policy Analysis
CHAPTER 1
Background: Some Origins of the Classical Model
In this chapter, we trace the evolution of what is today's dominant policy model, that of policy situations as rational decisions involving goal-maximizing choices, whether the goal is to increase utility or some other objective function. This history is traced from the Enlightenment onward to the modern-day utilitarian theories of games and decisions. In this treatment, we do not merely (temporarily) focus on the abstract theories stemming from utilitarianism because of their theoretical merits. Rather, we dwell on them to try and show how these theories have been used in policy discourse to justify strong policy models and, sometimes, ideological positions. In all this, it is important for the student to be aware of the historical and epistemological underpinnings of these discourses to better understand and, invariably, critique them. Toward the end of the chapter, we hint at murmurs of the postpositivist and the beginnings of movements away from the rational model. Part of this turning away leads us to the discussions, and models, found in the latter parts of the book. However, this chapter, along with chapters 3 and 4, are important even for the rational model's critics because we can best move forward and reform policy practices by being thoroughly versed in the discourse and theory of classic policy analysis.
Philosophical Tradition (1700s)
Descartes is the philosopher most commonly associated with the model of the mental, that is, a radical separation of the person from nature. When he posited nature as basically something that is entirely doubtable and landed upon the conclusion that, therefore, the only thing that was indubitable was his own capacity to doubt, this signaled the strongest movement toward an intellectual tradition that associated knowledge with pure thought.
Yesterday's Meditation has filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget themâŠI convince myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my deceitful memory recalls to me. I think that I have no senses; and I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, and location are merely inventions of my mind. What then could still be thought true?âŠhave I not thereby convinced myself that I did not exist? Not at all; without doubt I existed if I was convinced for even if I thought anything. Even though there may be a deceiver of some sortâŠhe can never make me be nothing as long as I think that I am something. I am something real and existing, but what thing am I? I have already given the answer: a thing which thinks.
From Descartes' Meditations, 1641
In the most emphatic way, Descartes was paving the way for a tradition that associated truth seeking, analysis if you will, with mental life. The human person was, in his conception, definable only as res cogitans, the thinking being, inasmuch as everything else had to be laid open to doubt. This concept of knowledge as the mental is a striking movement away from any notion that knowledge might be embedded in experience (which involved sensory input, emotion, moral reasoning, and aesthetic sensibility). In fact, this led to scientific traditions that, for centuries onward and to this day, categorized emotion and other nonmental sensations as mere affect.
The model of thought, of course, stems from much earlier. For example, consider the following passage from a text from the Sung Dynasty.
I sat quietly by the desk in my official room,
With my fountain-mind undisturbed, as serene as water;
A sudden clash of thunder, the mind-doors burst open,
And lo, there sitteth the old man in all his homeliness.
Chben, from Suzuki, 1962
It is the notion of the mental (or contemplative) life, freed from the vagaries of nature. At any rate, the model upon which learning and, as we will see, policy analysis, is founded begins with the notion of thought as, while acting upon and influenced by material reality, essentially independent of it. But, of course, the mind itself is, among other things, material reality, a notion to which we are just beginning to return. As an aside, one cannot help but note the parallel with current notions of the World Wide Web as a freely floating medium, existing independently of any place. But of course it is not since each and every bit of information on the Web necessarily must lie in at least one computer's hard drive. Ideas, like bits, have a home. These realities will have implications for our analysis, as we see later on.
At any rate, Descartes made the argument, in the deepest way, for two important notions: first, the notion of the person as essentially and ultimately individual, and second, the notion of the individual as essentially a thinking thing: res cogitans. Knowledge is ratio, truth arrived at through a mental process. But what, then, of external nature? When Descartes pondered upon a melting slag of wax, surely he could not have thought those thoughts if not for the reality of something like wax? Such was the debate that ensued between the rationalists, of which Descartes was the foremost voice, and the empiricists, who included in their number writers like John Locke and David Hume. The latter insisted that nature and material reality were the ultimate source of knowledge and that, by itself, the mind would have no knowledge whatsoever unless it came to it from outside. The empiricists likened the mind to a blank slate that knew only what was written into it through sensory experience. Descartes would say that we know that two and two equals four by reasoning, while Locke would say that we know it by observation, e.g., that I am as full after eating two twoegg omelettes as I am after eating one four-egg omelette (ceteris paribus).
Kant attempted to bring both fields together by stating that nature did exist and did create in us knowledge, but not by nature's own action. Rather, all knowledge of nature was possible because the mind is able to create categories to which sensory input could be assigned (Kant, 1787). The mind is, prior to any experience, equipped with the capacity to classify and order, e.g., to assign a notion of proximity to objects seen by the human eye. Thus, the myriad points of green, yellow, and red light coming to our sense from a tree can be understood by the human mind as belonging to one object (the tree) and not just a jumble of sensory input like dots swirling on a TV screen. This was an even more radical conceptualization than Descartes' since, in Kant's concept, the mind was the organizer of the universe. The universe did exist, but only through the categorical process of the mind that gives it meaning. Perhaps we can appreciate more fully how completely radical this concept was by considering what central event marked the beginning of the European Enlightenment in the first place: the printing of the first encyclopedia, a systematic classification and ordering of knowledge. This was a radical notion, that we could essentially define truth, reality, and the universe through none other than our individual, mental capacity for classification.
But the primacy of individual reason still left important problems to solve, e.g., morality. First of all, while we certainly can believe that an individual can figure out the best course of action or the most reasonable depiction of the truth for her or himself, how could a group of individuals do this together? That is, since we exist as social beings, how does a society reason? How do we engage in moral reasoning, which is reasoning applied to social reality? How do we arrive at the summum bonum, or the good of all of society, not just the individual?
Kant posited that reasoning individuals, through cogitation, should be able to arrive at some basic truths and that all individuals should be able to arrive at the same conclusion. This is because some principles hold regardless of context (i.e., outside of the particularities of a person's experience). These universal rules were true universally and regardless of the particularities of a time or place or person and, as such, held independently of experience. These truths are a priori or prior to experience and, so, are universal. For example, consider Kant's categorical imperative:
Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become universal law.
Kant, 1785
which Kant posited as the universal rule by which we derive other universal rules.
Thus, all that was required was to be sufficiently thorough in our cogitation, whether done as individuals or by many persons together, and we should arrive at these a priori principles, the summum bonum. The practical difficulty with this prescription, of course, is that it is notoriously difficult for different people to agree on the same first principles. Could a group of people who cannot even agree on a choice of pizza ever possibly find a way to come to the same conclusions about more fundamental questions like Social Security? How practical a prescription is Kant's for the formulation of public policy? In chapter 8, we take up the application of Kant's deontological and other ethical theories to the area of public policy.
At around this same time, there arose a voice from across the Channel, and his promised a prescription for public policy that seemed much more amenable to actual application. Taking his cue from the empiricists, Jeremy Bentham sought to ground social principles on reasoning processes that did not involve more than individual thought. Starting from the individual, Bentham posited that the course of action that was best for an individual is none other than that which gave this individual the greatest pleasure or benefit. But what of society? By a process of philosophical induction, Bentham reasoned that, inasmuch as what was best for one individual was the maximization of one's greatest pleasure, what would be best for society was whatever resulted in the sum total pleasure, aggregated over all individuals in that society. The implied mathematical operation is not merely an allusion. Bentham really did propose a moral calculus: to divine the best state for society, one only needs to find out which action gave the largest sum of pleasures, added up over all the individuals in society. To do this, pleasure (or its negative, pain) had to be commensurate â and one had to have ways to actually measure it. Otherwise, one could not carry out the additive operation. This stemmed directly from Bentham's empiricism, in that, in place of the moral reasoning proposed by Kant, Bentham's was simply an exercise of measurement. Simply measure the amount of pleasure or pain for each individual, then simply add up all these measurements over all the individuals, and this gives us the implication for society as a whole. In Bentham's words, the summum bonum consisted in securing âthe greatest good for the greatest numberâ (Bentham, 1789). This notion was further developed by John Stuart Mill, who took up the utilitarian tradition after Bentham.
According to the greatest happiness principle, as above explained, the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable â whether we are considering our own good or that of other people â is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and qualityâŠI must again repeat what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent's own happiness but that of all concerned.
Mill, 1863
This was the first principle of utility, or the basic tenet of the school of Utilitarianism, which has exerted its powerful influence over the policy sciences ever since. This was an important step for policy analysis because this prescription allowed one to bring in the notion of a societal, collective will simply by replacing it by an ersatz society, the aggregate, thus bringing to full circle the model of the reasoning individual. We begin with some principle by which an individual might arrive at some judgment. Then instead of problematizing how to extend this reasoning process over many individuals, Bentham simply substituted a different individual, the âcollective,â whose opinion on a ...