Why Model Integralism?

The choice is not whether to model but whether to model well.

When I wrote All the Kingdoms of the World, I used a few graphical representations of parts of my arguments. I thought it would help some, but not all, readers follow along. I knew integralists would mock me for it. That happened almost immediately. And it’s okay. But I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain what I’m up to.

Philosophers make all kinds of causal and explanatory claims. I’ve learned from Gaus and Muldoon that these claims imply the presence of a model. Sometimes, these models are implicit, like in G.A. Cohen’s camping trip argument for socialism. Or they’re partially explicit, like John Rawls’s original position. Or they’re explicit, like Robert Nozick’s argument for the minimal state. Regardless, political philosophers model to defend their conclusions.

The question in political philosophy is not whether to model but whether to do so well. The same goes for political theology. I’ve co-authored a few articles modeling stability claims in contractarian thought to critique them. I’ve drawn on Rawls, Jerry Gaus, Ryan Muldoon, John Thrasher, and others there. I used some of those tools to analyze integralists’ stability claims.

Integralists advance implicit models of our social world. That includes their claim that a mere natural law state - one that enforces moral law - will degrade without a church that graces it. The implication is that grace will reduce the degradation rate.

That’s a qualitative claim. And one we can model. One way to model a qualitative claim is to convert it into a quantitative model. The model takes on explicit parameters. We then see under which parameters the claim is true or false. We can reject the qualitative claim if it only holds under implausible parameters, or we can accept it if it holds under a plausible range of parameters.

That’s why I built an explicit quantitative model in Chapter 5. That’s why I used figures of speech like “grace rate.” I wanted to describe how grace restrains destabilizing factors like pluralism. I do that to assess integralist claims about political stability, which are, again, their claims, not mine.

I also wanted to be charitable to the integralist, which is why my model grants them two claims that might be false. First, I grant that religious coercion increases stability up to some margin. Second, I grant that their ideal society can have many policy equilibria. If one policy combination destabilizes, society could return to a different mix and still count as stable.

That is sometimes easier to represent graphically, so I drew some graphs. I used some made-up numbers to illustrate the shape of the curve (which I explain in detail) and go from there. My critics thought I drew the curve arbitrarily, but I defended myself, again, at length.

So, I use a formal model to make their claims explicit and check them as best I can. Again, the choice is not whether to model but whether to model well. My goal was not to end the debate. Indeed, I invite integralists to build alternative models. If they respond by creating their own models, that would be fantastic. We’d advance our understanding.

Unfortunately, some integralists prefer to poke fun. But I will not withdraw my extended hand.

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