Many-Minds Arguments in Legal Theory

La sagesse collective : principes et mécanismesColloque des 22-23 mai 2008,organisé par l'Institut du Monde Contemporain du Collège de France,sous la direction du Professeur Jon Elster.Intervention de Adrian Vermeule,Harvard Law School,23 mai 2008Many-minds arguments are flooding into legal theory. Such arguments claim that in some way or another,many heads are better than one; the genus includes many species,such as arguments about how legal and political institutions aggregate information,evolutionary analyses of those institutions,claims about the benefits of tradition as a source of law,and analyses of the virtues and vices of deliberation.This essay offers grounds for skepticism about many-minds arguments. I provide an intellectual zoology of such arguments and suggest that they are of low utility for legal theory. Four general and recurring problems with many-minds arguments are as follows:(1) Whose minds?: The group or population whose minds are at issue is often equivocal or ill-defined.(2) Many minds,worse minds: The quality of minds is not independent of their number; rather,number endogenously influences quality,often for the worse. More minds can be systematically worse than fewer because of selection effects,incentives for epistemic free-riding,and emotional and social influences.(3) Epistemic bottlenecks: In the legal system,the epistemic benefits of many minds are often diluted or eliminated because the structure of institutions funnels decisions through an individual decisionmaker,or a small group of decisionmakers,who occupy a kind of epistemic bottleneck or chokepoint.(4) Many minds vs. many minds: The insight that many heads can be better than one gets little purchase on the institutional comparisons that pervade legal theory,which are typically many-to-many comparisons rather than one-to-many.

Disciplines : Philosophie et psychologie,Interaction sociale, communication,Droit
Mots-clés : comportement collectif,rationalité,sagesse,prise de décision,interaction sociale
Type de document : image en mouvement
Type de ressource : lecture
Niveau : licence
Auteurs ou éditeurs : Adrian Vermeule,C.E.R.I.M.E.S.,COLLEGE DE FRANCE,Marcel LECAUDEY,Loïc QUENTIN