The Eutyphro is a poor choice in this context. Only if you believe an ideal 'intensional' language exists and has some mysterious prescriptive power would you find Socrates' argument persuasive. A definition can be recursive and extensional. It can be the solution to a coordination problem. It can't 'divide reality up along its joints' unless Aristotelianism is a true theory in which case our political system is wrong.

The author, however, is making a more vulgar error than any attributable to Socrates. He says ' One ought to know the moral character of any action one is contemplating. And to know that, one must be as well aware of what one does not know as of what one does. Otherwise, no confident judgment about the rightness or wrongness of one’s own action is possible.' This means no choice under Knightian Uncertainty can comply with a moral code. Normative reasons can only exist if we have an Arrow Debreu type universe with perfect infortmation and no missing markets. In that context, I can specify my own partition of the information set and hire someone else to look at the consequences of my actions w.r.t things I don't know. Then, though acting on the basis of partial information, still I have taken into account 'what I don't know' and so, according to the author, I have acted morally. The problem is that perfect futures markets for everything don't exist. They can't if Life evolved by Natural Selection.

The author thinks 'there are two types of ignorance: ignorance of whether an action is right or wrong; and ignorance of what one does and does not know about right and wrong.' Why does he not say there is a third type of ignorance relating to the way these two types of ignorance interact? Why not a fourth type of ignorance relating to the way the third type of ignorance affects the other two? Why not an infinity of such types of ignorance?

This is an old argument. Socrates was aware of it. Why has the good professor chosen to forget it? Well, he believes Trump is uniquely ignorant. Why? It is because Trump believes what he knows is sufficient for him to make him epistemologically autonomous. Voters who vote, believe the same thing about themselves. Any one offering themselves for election to a public office has to assert epistemological autonomy of a certain type. If it turns out an elected official decides things only on the basis of his astrologer, or priest, or some oracular Think Tank's super-computer, there may be grounds for impeachment.

It is a different matter that some candidates express humility while others are cock-sure. That is mere puffery. Many Presidents have tested the waters in their first 100 days and ended up doing a U turn within 18 months.

In the past, Presidential actions were considered to be constructive of policy and hence as signalling playbook reconfiguration. However, Obama came to the conclusion that the Federal Govt and its Agencies have saddled themselves with a stupid playbook. In foreign policy, the Obama doctrine was 'stop doing stupid shit'. On the domestic front, Obama slogged away at wonkish policy initiatives which have made a difference but for which his party was unable to get credit. This suggests that needful reform should proceed on an alethic, bipartisan, basis. It ought to be off limits to Presidential grandstanding. Similarly in Foreign Affairs, let the President blow off steam by firing off missiles from time to time. That sort of one off virtue signalling is better than striving for a coherent foreign policy which involves rejigging the bureaucracy to do that sort of stupid shit on an industrial scale.

Presidents of America, who often affect a folksy ignorance in order to court popular approval, nevertheless have had a certain leadership role and alethic signalling function. At one time it appeared a good thing if their public signals coordinated the emergence of bureaucracies and alliances between bureaucracies. That time has passed. Knightian Uncertainty is qualitatively different now. Twentieth Century bureaucracies don't tame, but rather exacerbate, problems arising from rapid Technological change. Indeed, the latter are parasitic on the former. The War against Terror replenished Terrorist coffers. The US was paying a lot of money to Pakistan while Osama was living comfortably in the garrison town of Abbotabad. The Europeans, and Hillary, were urging the bombing of Syria and Libya without having learned any lesson from Afghanistan or Iraq. The result was that ISIS got money and turned out to be ten times worse than Al Qaeda. This sort of 'stupid shit' has to stop. Presidents are still welcome to fire off a few missiles in anger- that sort of testing of the other side occurs anyway as part of conventional military doctrine- but what is important is to disntermediate bureaucrats and public intellectuals because it is the ice in their veins which precipitates the big cataclysms.





