On Settling [Course Book ed.] 9781400845316

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
one. Modes of Settling
two. The Value of Settling
three. What Settling Is Not
four. Settling in Aid of Striving
Conclusions
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

On Settling

On Settling Robert E. Goodin Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goodin, Robert E. On settling / Robert E. Goodin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-14845-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Political ethics. 2. Contentment. 3. Compromise (Ethics). I. Title. JA79.G645 2012 172—dc23 2012007183 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Garamond Premier Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments vii I n t rodu ct ion

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on e • Modes of Sett lin g 5 Where This Is Heading 5 Settling Down 7 Settling In 17 Settling Up 20 Settling For 25 Settling One’s Affairs 27 Settling On: The Master Notion 27 t wo • T h e Value of Sett lin g 30 Settling as an Aid to Planning and Agency 31 Settling, Commitment, Trust, and Confidence 37 Settling the Social Fabric 44 t hr ee • Wh at Sett lin g Is N ot 51 Settling Is Not Just Compromising 52 Settling Is Not Just Conservatism 57 Settling Is Not Just Resignation 60 f ou r • Set t lin g in Aid of St rivin g 63 Settling in Order to Strive 64 What Strivings Require Settling, and Why 66 When to Switch between One and the Other, and Why Conclusi on s

Notes 75 References 93 Index 107

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Acknowledgments

This little book had rather unconventional origins. It began in response to an invitation from Brian Howe, former deputy prime minister of Australia, to address a February 2009 conference entitled “Values and Public Policy” in Melbourne. In his longstanding role as conscience of the Labor left, Brian was convening an impressive array of public intellectuals to try to nudge the newly elected government off the Blairite right-of-center. Politically, the conference had no discernable effect, of course. Still, it was a splendid occasion and a fitting tribute to the life’s work of a great Australian. These thoughts were subsequently floated at seminars back at the Australian National University (ANU) and across the United States. During a magical year I spent in Washington as senior research fellow in bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, I benefited from conversations on these topics and many others with NIH colleagues Chiara Lepora, Annette Rid and Alan Wertheimer, over many pleasurable meals. Some of this material has been presented to seminars at the Political Science Department at Columbia, the University Center for Human Values at Princeton and the Philosophy Department at Rutgers and as the 2010 Eldon Lecture in Philosophy at George Washington University. I am particularly grateful for comments from Christian Barry, Chuck Beitz, Geoff Brennan, Peter Caws, Tony Coady, David DeGrazia, Alvin Goldman, Alan Hájek, Jonathan Herington, Nancy Hirschman, Onur Ulas Ince, David Johnston, Karen Jones, Pablo Kalmanovitz, George Kateb, Peter Kivy, Chris Kutz, Melissa Lane, Holly Lawford-Smith, Catherine Lu, Alejandra

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Mancilla, Thomas Mautner, Larry May, Karolina Milewicz, Michael Morreau, Dave Moscrop, Jim Nickel, Melanie Nolan, Martha Nussbaum, Carole Pateman, Ryan Pevnick, Andrew Podger, Georges Rey, Alan Ryan, Melissa Schwartzberg, Peter Singer, Holly Smith, Michael Smith, Larry Temkin, Laura Valentini, Jeremy Waldron, Mark Warren, Brian Weatherson and Lea Ypi. At Princeton University Press, Rob Tempio persuaded me to think of this as a book. I am grateful to him, both for taking that initiative and also for his excellent follow-through. He has been a model editor, his referees incisive and the production team a pleasure. Wivenhoe December 2011

On Settling

Introduction

Thomas Hobbes famously posits, as “a general inclination of all mankind . . . , a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”1 The parts of that passage that stick in the schoolboy’s mind are “power” and “death.” Here I want to shift attention to a less-remarked part of that passage, and to use that as a springboard for exploring a contrasting concept. The Hobbesian trope that I shall take as my foil is the “perpetual and restless desire” that he posits as part and parcel of that “general inclination of all mankind.” Call this the practice of “striving.” It has many mottoes. “Never content yourself with what you have: always seek more.” “Always press on: never stand still.” “Be not complacent or content: be always on the lookout for the main chance.” Emphases vary. But the underlying spirit of “striving” runs through them all. Striving has been a major driver of human history. It lay at the heart of the French Revolution. It was immortalized in the final ringing words of Danton’s rallying cry, enjoining his listeners “to dare, to dare again, ever to dare!”2 It is not only rabble-rousers who champion striving as an ideal, however. Many more reflective writers (Hobbes himself conspicuously not among them) have seen striving of that sort as something very much to be celebrated and admired. That sentiment was particularly strong among the German romantics. Recall how, in Goethe’s telling of the tale, Faust

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promises to surrender his soul to the devil the moment he ceases to strive. faust: If ever I lie down upon a bed of ease, Then let that be my final end! If you can cozen me with lies Into a self-complacency, Or can beguile with pleasures you devise, Let that day be the last for me! This bet I offer. mephistopheles: Done! faust: And I agree: If I to any moment say: Linger on! You are so fair! Put me in fetters straightaway, Then I can die for all I care!3 Faust eventually comes to speak precisely those words, and his soul is forfeit. But in the end, all that striving nonetheless turns out to be Faust’s salvation. As demons are escorting Faust to hell, angels swoop down and whisk him to heaven instead, proclaiming: angels: Who strives forever with a will, By us can be redeemed.4 Striving was a much-vaunted ideal among English romantics, as well. Recall the famous last line of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”5 Those words are inscribed on countless school crests around the world. The motto has even made its way to Antarctica, on the cross erected atop Observation Hill to commemorate the deaths of Robert Scott and his party returning from their trek to the South Pole in 1912.

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“Striving” of that sort is familiar enough as a description of empirical reality, from its microfoundations in Hobbes’s “matter in motion” to its macromanifestations in turbo-capitalism.6 Hobbes himself clearly saw ceaseless striving as leading to no end of mischief. Still, he regarded it as a fact—an unfortunate fact, but a fixed fact nonetheless—about human nature.7 Many shrewd diagnoses of the sources of discontent under late capitalism turn on pointed critiques of just such striving. Tibor Scitovsky traces the “joylessness” of market economies to a vicious cycle—much the same as the one that Hobbes (indeed, even Plato) foresaw8—whereby satisfaction of one desire leads to arousal of another, leaving people constantly dissatisfied and questing for more.9 Here, however, I shall be less concerned to critique that familiar practice of “striving” than I shall be to describe and defend a contrasting practice. I do so by drawing together various strands around the oddly neglected theme of “settling.” This too takes many forms: • “settling down” in a situation and a place; • “settling in,” accommodating ourselves to our circumstances and our place; • “settling up” with people we have displaced, unsettled, or otherwise wronged in the process; and • “settling for,” learning to make do in our newly settled circumstances. • “settling on” a belief or value, project or commitment, way of being or way of living. Those variations on the theme of settling overlap and interweave in such a way as to constitute a stark counterpoint to “striving.” To foreshadow, I will show that what runs through all these forms of settling is a quest for “fixity.” Accordingly, a generalized

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version of “settling on” turns out to be the “master notion” within this cluster. Settling on something, holding it fixed at least for a time, is centrally implicated in all those other forms of settling. It is also a primary source of the value of the practice of settling in our lives. And, as I shall show, the practice of settling is indeed valuable (although any particular act of settling or the terms of any particular settlement might, of course, be problematic).10 Notice, though, that I characterize settling as a “counterpoint” to striving, not an absolute alternative to it or wholesale substitute for it. Settling, I shall argue, should be a complement to striving. In the end, a judicious mixture of both is required. I shall say more in chapter 4 about how the two models might fit together. First, however, I need to say much more of a purely descriptive sort about “settling” in its many modes, in order to get that part of the composite firmly on the table. That more purely descriptive part of the project comes in chapter 1, which offers an inventory of various different modes of settling drawn from a wide range of primary and secondary sources. With those descriptive resources in hand, I then turn in subsequent chapters to the more philosophical task of defending the practice of “settling” (chapter 2) and distinguishing it from other cognate practices with which it might readily be confused (chapter 3).

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Modes of Settling

Let us begin descriptively, by familiarizing ourselves with some of the many and varied facets of settling. In the end, what I am interested in is the practices represented rather than the words that are employed to describe them. But perhaps the best way to approach that task is by surveying the various different contexts in which that term is employed.1 Philosophically, of course, it would be wrong to presuppose that anything very much can necessarily be read off the quirks of language alone. The fact that the same word happens to pop up in all these different connections does not necessarily mean that it is actually the same concept that is at work on each occasion. There is no a priori reason to suppose that we will necessarily be able to provide a coherent account that unifies all those various usages. That is something to be shown, not something to be presumed from the start. Still, these will serve as the descriptive materials on the basis of which subsequent chapters’ attempts at a philosophical synthesis and normative evaluation will proceed.

Where This Is Heading I will argue that there is an important respect in which all of these forms of settling do indeed form a tolerably coherent whole. Inevitably, that analysis cannot accommodate absolutely

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every facet of every form of settling. Nonetheless, it manages to accommodate the great bulk of them. What is central to settling, I shall argue, is a notion of fixity. I shall demonstrate this through analysis of the various forms of settling surveyed below.2 But for a quick overview, lexicography is a good place to start, as is always the case with any conceptual analysis. Notice, therefore, that “fixity” is a feature that reverberates across the plethora of definitions offered by the Oxford English Dictionary for the adjective “settled”: • Of mental states, purposes, habits, etc.: Fixed, firmly embraced or implanted. • Of a matter in dispute . . . : Determined, decided, enacted or agreed upon. • Of a truth, a principle: established, placed beyond dispute. • Of affairs, an institution . . . : Established on a permanent footing and under fixed conditions or regulations. • [Of residence: h]aving a fixed abode. • Of a person: Established in life, esp. by marriage; brought into a regular way of life • Of an estate or property: Secured to a person by a legal act or agreement; held by a tenant for life under conditions defined by the deed. Thus, for example, settlements of disputes—whether in the law courts or battlefields—bring them to an end, and on determinate terms.3 The Act of Settlement of 1701 settled the English Crown upon the Hanovers—thus fixing the line of succession.4 Immigration law offers the notion of a “settled domicile”—a fixed residence. A “settled intention” is one that you intend to remain fixed, at least for a time.5

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Nothing is fixed forever. Settled intentions can be revisited and revised. People can move away from domiciles where they had previously been settled. Middle-class do-gooders settle in settlement houses, intending to remain for a time—but only for a time.6 Nonetheless, the phenomenology of settling is such that, once something is settled, it stays settled, at least for a while. Or at least people intend (or maybe just presume) it to be settled for a time—and, crucially, they proceed with their other planning on that basis. That, I shall go on to argue in chapter 2, is a major source of the value of “settling” in our lives. Those are the sorts of claims that I hope to sustain through a closer examination of the many varieties of “settling” to which I now turn: settling down, settling in, settling up, settling for, settling one’s affairs. All centrally involve a notion of “fixity (at least for a time)” that is characteristic of “settling on.”

Settling Down In various places—Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa among them—we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as “settler societies.”7 The colonial experience in those places was self-consciously one of “peopling” the place. That was done, furthermore, with the aim of creating a society as similar as circumstances allowed to the one the settlers had left behind—pushing aside, in the process, such people as were already there.8 Here, for example, is how Charles Darwin described his 1835 visit to a mission settlement on New Zealand’s Bay of Islands: At length we reached Waimate; after having passed over so many miles of uninhabited useless country, the sudden appearance of an English farm house and its well dressed

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fields, placed there as if by an enchanter’s wand, was exceedingly pleasing. . . . At Waimate there are three large houses, where the Missionary gentlemen . . . reside. . . . On an adjoining slope fine crops of barley and wheat in full ear, and others of potatoes and of clover were standing; but I cannot attempt to describe all I saw; there were large gardens, with every fruit and vegetable which England produces. . . . All this is very surprising when it is considered that five years ago, nothing but the fern here flourished.9 That is the sort of “stamping your mark on the place,” as best you are able, that is associated with self-consciously settler societies. “To colonize” is, on Dr. Johnson’s definition, “to plant with inhabitants; to settle with new planters.” And for Dr. Johnson, like Hobbes before him, it is a defining feature of a “colony” that it is “a body of people drawn from the mother-country to inhabit some distant place.”10 John Stuart Mill corrected him, pointing out that that is not true of all colonies. It was hardly true, for example, of the colony that was British India, only a very small fraction of whose inhabitants were drawn from Britain.11 Still, Dr. Johnson’s description is perfectly apt as a characterization of that subset of colonies that came to be known as “settler societies.” Those really were a matter of (in Seeley’s title) “the expansion of England”—send out Englishmen to settle distant vacant lands, and “where Englishmen are there is England.”12 According to the laws of England as set out in Blackstone’s Commentaries, “If an uninhabited country be discovered and planted by English subjects all the English laws are immediately there in force. For as the law is the birthright of every subject, . . . wherever they go they carry their laws with them.”13 According to The Law of Nations as set out by Vattel, where “a nation takes possession of a distant land, and settles a colony there, that country,

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though separated from the  .  .  . mother-country, naturally becomes part of the state, equally with its ancient possessions.”14 Those settler societies are different, too, in one other crucial respect. To return to the “expansion of England” refrain (although the basic principle generalizes perfectly well beyond the English): where there are Englishmen, there is a right of selfgovernment. Mill thought it a matter of principle that colonies “composed of people of similar civilization to the ruling country” are “capable of, and ripe for, representative government” of their own, at some suitably early date.15 Whether as a matter of principle or pragmatics, settlements at some distance were inevitably administered through highly imperfect mechanisms of communication, command, and control. In the process, they invariably acquired substantial powers of self-rule, de facto if not de jure. Jeremy Bentham went “so far as to compare the difficulties that Spain faced ruling over its colonial possessions with those of governing the moon: ‘It has its Peninsular part and its Ultramarian part! It has its earthly part: it has its lunar part.’ ”16 Thus, for one reason or another and in one way or another, settler societies initially created in the image of their mother countries typically came to operate quite independently of them. We might even follow Carole Pateman in thinking of this in terms of a “settler contract.” As she elaborates: When colonists are planted in a terra nullius, an empty state of nature, the aim is not merely to dominate, govern, and use but to create a civil society. Therefore, the settlers have to make an original—settler—contract.  .  .  . So in a settled colony the terra nullius vanishes; a civil society is developed as colonists plant themselves, husband the land, and create modern political institutions.17

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And since the fiction of terra nullius was a crucial prerequisite for legitimating settlement and empowering the settlers to craft that new contract, it is inevitable that under the terms of this settler contract “the original inhabitants and their societies are of no account and it is as if they no longer exist. They and their lands exist only if expressly recognized by the new state.”18 Thus, all too often, “settlement” was just a polite name for conquest (an issue to which I shall return in my discussion of “settling up” below). Such is the way with settler societies. The experience of settlement, however, is hardly confined to those very special cases of self-consciously settler societies. Settlers of precisely that sort shaped various other places as well. Conspicuously among them were, of course, the United States and Canada. In the 1584 charter that became the founding document of the Virginia Colony, Queen Elizabeth I not only granted Sir Walter Raleigh rights of exploration.19 Elizabeth’s charter further stipulated that “the said Walt er Ralegh, his heires and assignee, . . . shall goe or trauaile thither to inhabite or remaine, there to build and fortifie.”20 Similarly, in the 1603 Charter of Acadia, the founding document of French Canada, King Henry IV ordered, commissioned, and established the Lord of Monts  .  .  . to people and inhabit the lands, shores, and countries of Acadia, and other surrounding areas,  .  .  . to there settle and maintain himself in such a way that our subjects will henceforth be able to be received, to frequent, to dwell there, and to trade with the savage inhabitants of the said places.21 There is no mystery as to why those early monarchs were so keen that settlement should follow exploration. Settlement (“possession”) is the only way in which a prince can secure title to lands, both legally and pragmatically. Legally, “the act of discov-

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ery is sufficient to give a clear title of sovereignty only when it is accompanied by actual possession,” which is why Grotius denied that the Portuguese had any claim to the East Indies.22 And in practice, it is hard to hold on to a territory unless you have people settled there who are prepared to defend it. Thus, for example, “[i]n 1655 England wrested Jamaica from the Spaniards and encouraged . . . buccaneers to settle there as a defense against the island’s recapture.”23 The apogee of this process of settling in subsequent US history was, of course, the Homestead Act of 1862. That statute permitted an individual to purchase, at a deeply discounted price, a tract of public land “for his or her exclusive use and benefit.” It did so, however, only on the strict condition “that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation.” Under the terms of the Homestead Act, it was precisely that settling on the land that was taken to confer title to the land. Homesteaders were legally required genuinely to settle—to remain on the land for five years—before the transfer of title in the property would be effected. [I]f, at any time . . . before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, . . . that the person . . . shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government.24 But that was merely the most famous US example of a process that had been going on far more widely and for far longer. It is quite common for settlers initially to squat on lands not their own, and then after a time to seek to regularize their status there; in that way, illegal squatters eventually become (or anyway seek to become) legal tenants, proprietors, or owners of the property

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on which they had once been squatters. You find that still happening in various illegal settlements around the world today, on the fringes of Third World cities and in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. You find that in nineteenth-century Australia where, when the claims of illegal occupiers were recognized, squatters suddenly became landed gentry and the so-called squattocracy gained legal title to vast tracts of inland Australia.25 You also find the same phenomenon, on a more modest scale, in earlier periods of US history. Among the earliest of white settlers, the typical pattern was first to occupy the land and only later to seek to acquire legitimate title to it. A report of early colonial practice in the Carolinas, for example, describes how the method has hitherto often been for men to settle themselves upon a piece of ground, improve it, build, raise stock, plant orchards, and make such commodities, which being sold, procur’d them slaves, horses, household-goods and the like conveniences; and after this was done, in seven or eight years they might begin to think it time to pay the Lords something for their land.26 The Pre-emption Act of 1841 regularized this practice, specifying that any person who “has made or shall hereafter make a settlement in person on . . . public lands . . . and who shall inhabit and improve the same, and who has or shall erect a dwelling thereon, shall be . . . authorized to” purchase that land at a knockdown price.27 Nor was this focus on settlement confined to North America in the colonial period. It also characterized virtually all of Latin America, from not long after the Spanish and Portuguese conquests.28 As early as 1534, the king of Portugal was giving large tracts of land in Brazil to donatários specifically on the condition that they “defend and settle the land.”29 One of the first initiatives

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of newly independent Mexico was the enactment from 1823 onward of a suite of laws and regulations “to grant vacant lands in their respective territories to empresarios, families, or private persons, whether Mexicans, or foreigners, who may ask them for the purpose of cultivating or inhabiting them.” Those grants were made on the explicit proviso that the petitioner begin to occupy or cultivate the land within two years.30 Some seven hundred such grants were made in relatively short order.31 Organized waves of migration of that sort, deliberately devoted to settling some foreign lands or frontier territories, are themselves only one special case of a much more general phenomenon, however. Stepping back from that, recall that the experience of “settlement” played a crucial role in the social evolution of the human species as a whole. Some ten thousand years ago, “with the development of settled agriculture and the conscious production of foodstuffs, man first acquired the basic ability to increase his resource base.” The significance of this cannot be overestimated. “Prior to this . . . , man lived in communal groups or bands, taking from nature what could be killed or gathered. The limits of man’s livelihood were fixed by a resource base upon which he could not yet improve. He could only live within its biological constraints.” With the development of settled agriculture, that fundamentally changed. As one Nobel laureate in economics writes, “This transition . . . from hunting/gathering to settled agriculture has been termed the Neolithic Revolution . . . and has correctly been compared in importance to the Industrial Revolution. Both . . . witnessed marked increases in man’s control over nature.”32 Indeed, many would say that the shift from wandering huntergatherer to settled agricultural modes of existence marked the true foundation of human society. As Rousseau remarks in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,

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Everything . . . begins to change its aspect [as] men, who have up to now been roving in the woods, by taking to a more settled manner of life, come gradually together, [and] form separate bodies  .  .  . united in character and manners.  .  .  . In consequence of seeing each other often, they could not do without seeing each other constantly. . . . Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be considered in turn; and thus . . . value came to be attached to public esteem.  .  .  . As soon as men began to value one another, and the idea of consideration had got a footing in the mind, every one put in his claim to it, and it became impossible to refuse it to any with impunity. Hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages; and every intended injury became an affront; because . . . the party injured was certain to find in it a contempt for his person, which was often more insupportable than the hurt itself.33 Be Rousseau’s speculative historical social psychology as it may, the shift to settled agricultural modes of existence unquestionably had profound consequences for social structures. It led to larger social groups and expanded specialization and division of labor within them. It also brought with it increased social organization, oriented in the first instance toward collective defense. As Paul Seabright puts it, “When enemies attack, hunter-gathers can simply melt into the forest, but farmers have much more to lose: houses, chattels, stores of food. . . . [Thus,] when our ancestors first began to settle down to a farming lifestyle . . . , the burden of carrying stores of food was soon replaced by the burden of protecting them.”34 As Blackstone asks, rhetorically, “[W]ho would be at the pains of tilling  .  .  . , if another might watch an opportunity to seize upon and enjoy the product of his industry, art and labour?”35 But of course, “there is no such thing as a purely defensive technology”: the same thing that

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makes “you feel more secure . . . usually also makes your neighbor feel less secure. And in that simple but grim externality lies one of the driving forces of modern society.”36 That is one further source—perhaps among many37—of the sorrowful social impetus toward mobilization-and-countermobilization and offensivedefensive arms racing. All of that follows from people physically settling in a place. There is also, however, an important aspect of politically settling in a place as well. That is marked, in a way, by the difference between the first and second stages of Spanish conquest of the Americas—between the extractive colonialism of the conquistadores and the settler colonialism that soon replaced that on the haciendas. Once again, however, all that is just a relatively recent reenactment of the sort of political settling that has been occurring across the world from long before, as “roving bandits” settled in place and become rulers. Settled rulers have a stake in the productivity of the people that they now rule, in their investing and cultivating, in ways they did not when they were just extracting tribute through hitand-run raids. Mancur Olson elaborates that logic as follows: In a world of roving banditry there is little or no incentive for anyone to produce or accumulate anything that may be stolen and, thus, little for bandits to steal. Bandit rationality, accordingly, induces the bandit leader to seize a given domain, to make himself the ruler of that domain, and to provide a peaceful order and other public goods for its inhabitants, thereby obtaining more in tax theft than he could have obtained from migratory plunder.  .  .  . The gigantic increase in output that normally arises from the provision of a peaceful order and other public goods gives the stationary bandit a far larger take than he could obtain without providing government.38

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In addition to rulers settling down to rule, there is also the matter of subjects settling down to be ruled. Remember that a central plank of the original 1601 Poor Law of Elizabeth I required vagrants and vagabonds to settle themselves in some parish in order to claim parish-based poor relief.39 Each parish had a duty to take care of its own—but only its own—settled inhabitants. A mere sojourner “had no legal right to relief from the parish.”40 Subsequent Acts of Settlement went so far as to provide that “persons who attempted to leave their local parish to seek work elsewhere were to be returned home.”41 These arrangements thus amounted, in the telling phrase of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to “Charity in the grip of Serfdom.”42 As with paupers so too with claimants to land: they have no claim unless they are settled in their place. As one US congressman said in debates on the 1830 act that authorized dispossession of American Indians of their traditional lands, “the Colonies recognized a title in the Indians to those lands only which they had subdued and cultivated, but never imagined that the savage had a natural right to exclude his fellow-man from all that he roamed over.”43 In this proposition, the landgrabbing congressmen had The Law of Nations on their side: in Vattel’s formulation, native peoples’ “unsettled habitation in those immense regions cannot be accounted a true and legal possession.”44 Finally, on a more personal level, “settling down” is a euphemism for getting married. Victorians spoke of “settling their daughters in marriage,” as they would have spoken of “settling” a bequest upon an heir in their will.45 Those phrases have largely died out in spoken language, lingering now largely only in period novels. But we still talk of youngsters “settling down,” getting married and having kids, once they have sown their fair share of wild oats.46

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Settling In Once you’ve settled down and fixed yourself in some place, physically or metaphorically, you then typically set about the process of “settling in.”47 In part that is a matter of adjusting yourself to your new place. In part it is a matter of adjusting the place to you. Settling in is a matter of coming to “know one’s place” in time and in space.48 Simone Weil wrote poignantly about “the need for roots,” having fled occupied France. “To be rooted,” she says, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”49 This need has, in the postwar world, been recognized as a fundamental human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims a right to a country of one’s own, which one may leave and to which one may return.50 An international expert group convened by the UN special rapporteur further “affirmed the right to live and remain in one’s homeland, i.e. the right not to be subjected to forcible displacement, as a fundamental human right and a prerequisite to the enjoyment of other rights. . . . [I]nternational law [also] prohibits the transfer of persons, including the implantation of settlers,” without the consent of all involved.51 The Fourth Geneva Convention writes this in to the law of war: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”52 A particularly florid description of what it is like for an immigrant to put down roots and settle into a new place can be found in Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s 1829 Letter from Sydney: As a plant, torn from the soil in which it germinated, and placed in one of a different nature, gradually accommodates itself to the new situation, and at length flourishes as

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if it had never been removed, so the wanderer from home, should he once take root in a foreign land, feels and acts as if he had been born there; his affections are utterly divorced from objects of early attachment; they are wedded to the new abode; he forgets the old country; the new country becomes to him all in all.53 It is not always an easy process of adjustment (indeed, seldom is it easy). Here is Wakefield, again, writing to a correspondent back in England, describing the experience of “settling” in the Australian bush: [In] a highly- civilized country, like England, . . . wants exist, but most of them are supplied as soon as they are formed. In England, when you want to eat, you eat, and there is an end of the want; when you are sleepy, you go to bed; when your clothes are wet, you change them; when you are tired of talking, you take a book; and when you are tired of reading, you begin to talk. But, in the desert, almost every want is severely felt before it is supplied. Everything, from the very beginning, has either to be created or brought from a great distance. Try to reckon the number of your physical wants, which are every day supplied without any effort on your part, and you may form some idea of the physical deprivations of a settler.54 Even when one is merely migrating from one “civilized” place to another, settling in involves a raft of subsidiary arrangements. At the personal level, settling in to a new house involves learning your way around the neighborhood, stocking the pantry, fixing the little things that drive you crazy about your new abode. Settling in to a new job involves learning new rules and routines and getting to know your new colleagues. Settling in to a new coun-

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try involves learning the language and literature, the history and the mores of the new society.55 The settlement houses of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the United States were designed in part to assist poor immigrants to do precisely that.56 At the collective level, too, settling in a new place involves adjustments on both sides. Settlers must accommodate themselves to different physical surroundings, natural resources, climate, and conditions of life. In the process of settling in, they not only come to terms with their new setting, however; they also reshape that setting to suit themselves. They clear the wilderness; they cut roads; they dam rivers and generally stamp their mark on the new place. Settling in is thus a two-way process of adjustment. Being “well settled” is not just a matter of having successfully accommodated yourself to your new situation, although it is that in large measure. It is also, in important part, a matter of altering the new place to suit you. Settling in has its political side as well. It is not just a matter of stationary bandits replacing roving ones. It is also a matter of having rulers who are genuinely rooted in the place, rather than being agents of and oriented toward some other more distant powers. That, for Wakefield, explains why the struggle between government and opposition parties was so much more vicious in the New South Wales colony than back in England. In New South Wales, Government is conducted by Englishmen connected with the colony only by their offices. These persons do not come here to remain. They are not settlers in any sense of the word. By the settlers, therefore, . . . they are regarded as foreigners. They are foreigners, except by name. Their main interests and affections have reference only to England. They are mere sojourners here. They do not like the place, even as a temporary residence.57

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Settling Up Settling typically involves resettling, both for new settlers and for those who had settled there before. Everyone comes from somewhere; in going to somewhere else, they uproot themselves and put down new roots elsewhere. And pretty much every place has someone who is already settled there, at least after a fashion. Maybe not every place is settled in exactly the same fashion. The English dubbed Australia terra nullius, just because indigenous Australians did not settle it in the manner to which the newcomers had been accustomed in the Home Counties of England. But after their own fashion, the original Australians were truly settled in their country, and in ways that gave rise to attachments to place that were far richer than the newcomers ever managed. Whether the original Australians were only incidentally or accidentally displaced in the course of white settlement is contentious (disingenuously so, best I can tell).58 In the United States, anyway, indigenous peoples were intentionally moved on. In the most extreme case, they were forcibly removed from their lands east of the Mississippi and driven along the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma, with some four thousand of them dying along the way.59 But even in more seemingly benign cases, “[t]he Red Man has ever fled the approach of the white man, as the changing mist on the mountain side flees before the blazing sun.” In explaining to the whites why he was signing a treaty that would confine his people to a reservation, Chief Seattle went on to say, “Your God makes your people wax strong every day—soon they will fill the land. My people are ebbing away like a fast-receding tide that will never flow again.”60 Thus arises the need, as part and parcel of settling down and settling in, for “settling up”—coming to terms with those whose previous arrangements have been disrupted by your own act of

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settling. Settlers negotiate and sign agreements with indigenous peoples. However often those treaties were subsequently breached, they at least purported to be (and may well have been intended to be, at the time of their signing) treaties of peace, settling the new settlers’ ongoing disputes with the original inhabitants.61 That was the recommendation of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun in an 1825 report to President Monroe: no arrangement ought to be made which does not regard the interest of the Indians as well as our own; and . . . to protect the interest of the former, decisive measures ought to be adopted.  .  .  . [O]ne of the most cheap, certain and desirable modes of effecting the object in view would be for Congress to establish fixed principles . . . as the basis of the proposed arrangement; and . . . to pledge the faith of the nation to the arrangements that might be adopted. Should such principles be established by Congress, . . . a basis of a system might be laid, which, in a few years, would entirely effect the object in view, to the mutual benefit of the Government and the Indians.62 Such was the official intention (although clearly not the eventual effect) of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that authorized the process that culminated in the Trail of Tears. That act specifically empowered the president “solemnly to assure the tribe . . . with which the exchange is made, that the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them . . . the country so exchanged with them.”63 Coming to terms with indigenous peoples whom settlers have displaced from their homelands is perhaps the most dramatic case of settling up. But settlements of analogous sorts occur whenever the cooperation of previously downtrodden people is

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suddenly required. The “postwar settlement” that came in the wake of World War II amounted to a “settling up,” society’s making good on wartime promises of a “better life” for the working classes in return for wartime sacrifices. The “post-1945 social settlements denoted new constraints on management action, more visible solidaristic political objectives and a greater acceptance of social overhead expenditures charged to firms and households.”64 As with physically settling in to some new locale, so too with settling in to some new social circumstances: that also typically involves unsettling some previous arrangements. There, too, new settlements create displacement. Socially, just as geographically, any new settling requires resettlement of persons and practices disrupted in the process. Settling up with those whose previous arrangements our own settling has unsettled is not a matter of restitution pure and simple. Sometimes it has none of that element at all: there is no tangible object that you can “give back.”65 And even when there is, settling up typically requires more than merely giving back. It involves recasting of relationships on some new footing, much more than recovery of property. It is that symbolic element that makes land rights so politically fraught in many settler societies. What James L. Gibson says of South Africa could equally well be said of Australia: Land is a symbol of all that has been taken away from Africans.  .  .  . [T]he land issue in South Africa is about far more than land. It is not simply that those dispossessed under apartheid and colonialism want their land back; self- interest provides a remarkably poor explanation of support for redistributive policy preferences. Instead, land is a symbol of the country’s repressive past.66

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It is precisely because of that symbolic charge that heartfelt “apologies” by one group to the other, rather than restitution alone, are required genuinely to “settle up.”67 At least sometimes, in the right circumstances, “apology can create a new framework in which groups may rehearse their past(s) and reconsider the present. . . . Especially at the group level, apology has emerged as a power . . . tool for nations and states eager to defuse tensions stemming from past injustices.”68 Full forgiveness of the unforgivable might be impossible.69 But maybe all that is strictly required for reconciliation sufficient to make a new start together is a “shared acknowledgment”—“the public recognition of the painful truth”—that the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission regarded as its greatest contribution.70 It does not always work out that way. It certainly will not, if the apology is treated as a substitute for rather than a supplement to real action of a more material sort. A telling parable on this point was offered by Rev. Mxolisi Mpambani in testimony to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission: There were two boys living opposite each other. John stole a bicycle from Tom and then after a year John came to Tom and said, “Tom, I stole your bicycle and what I need now is reconciliation.” Then Tom looked at John and said, “Where is my bicycle?’ He said: “No, I am not talking about your bicycle now, I am talking about reconciliation.”71 Furthermore, initial apologies often have the effect of reopening old wounds and rekindling old animosities. That is what seems to have happened, at least initially, with Czech and Polish apologies to Germans expelled after World War II and with the Belgian apology for its colonial rule in the Congo.72 Still,

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unsettling silences of those sorts seems a necessary condition of genuinely “settling up” and moving on.73 Settling implies closure, finality—at least for a time. That is true of physical settling in a place; when you are settled, you have stopped moving. It is also true of settling up with someone. Claims, once settled, are not supposed to be reopened. Settlements are supposed to be final. They are supposed to put an end to the matter. At law, when a case is settled, the case is closed.74 So too with settlings up: they are supposed to “close the books.”75 Like the act of Charles II pardoning opponents in the English Civil War, settlements are supposed to consign the matter “to oblivion.”76 While settling aims to fix things, at least for a time, nothing remains fixed forever. Not all settlings up are as short-lived as the treaties of peace with the native Americans. But most settlements end up being renegotiated, sooner or later. In contemporary times, there are recurring complaints from the left (and corresponding hopes on the right) that the old postwar settlement is breaking up, under pressure from various sources.77 Even in courts of law, while it is true that cases declared “closed” cannot ordinarily be reopened, analogous cases can easily arise to unsettle legal relations once again. Sometimes, of course, attempts at settling can prove counterproductive—sometimes precisely because they strive for more finality than can realistically be achieved in that way. Consider the practice of “settling scores.”78 The aim of each party to the practice is to “settle things once and for all.” Each intends (however quixotically) that his or her blow will be the last. But by giving rise to blood feuds and the constant quest for revenge, score settling turns out to be a highly destabilizing activity.79 The hope of genuinely “settling” anything in that way is inevitably futile.

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Settling For When settling up with those whom we have unsettled, we are inevitably involved in the balancing of competing claims. And because those claims inevitably compete, neither side can reasonably and realistically expect its own claims to be met in full. Settling up with those whom our own settlings have unsettled thus inevitably involves compromise. Each side has to “settle for” something less than its fullest aspiration. That is in the very nature of “settling”: “to settle for something means to accept less than some ideal,” less than all that you wanted.80 “Settling for” is a matter of making do. It is a matter of deciding what is “good enough.” It is a matter of settling for something less than “everything.” In that respect it quintessentially marks an “end to striving.” Of course we might always worry that one side or the other has settled for too little. It is always hard to know exactly where to set our standard of what is “good enough.” When bargaining power is grossly unequal, we naturally worry that the settlement will be unfairly skewed. And when others besides the contending parties have an interest in the outcome, we naturally worry that the settlement may not necessarily take due account of all their interests as well.81 But all those worries notwithstanding, settling for less than “all” is part and parcel of the process of settling. Not only should you typically settle for less than “all that you want.” There are many occasions on which you should settle for less than “all you deserve.” This is a common refrain among writers in the “just war” tradition. Grotius is anxious to disabuse anyone of the thought that, merely because he has a right justly to go to war against someone else, “he is authorized, instantly or at all times, to carry his principles into action, and to reduce his theory to practice. So far from this, it frequently happens that it is an act

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of greater piety and rectitude to yield a right than to enforce it.” And Grotius goes on to offer a suite of chapters extolling the benefits of “moderation”—exacting less than one’s full due—in the prosecution of even a just war.82 Vattel wrote similarly that, in the enforcement of peace treaties, “rigid justice is not always to be insisted on.”83 Modern commentators commend the ancient Cynic virtue of meionexia, settling for less than one’s due, on all sides as the best recipe for transitional justice in the aftermath of gross atrocities.84 Even if the Allies in the First World War were due reparations from the vanquished Germans, it would in retrospect have been far better if they had settled for less and not demanded all they were due—as John Maynard Keynes cautioned at the time.85 Not only is that true in connection with interpersonal processes of “settling up” with someone else you have wronged or harmed or otherwise unsettled. It is also true of more intrapersonal processes involved in “settling for” something less than ideally you wanted, in a house or a job or a partner. Putting “the case for settling for Mr. Good Enough” to lovelorn thirty-somethings, Linda Gregerson asks, Where’s the line between compromising and settling, and at what age does that line seem to fade away? Choosing to spend your life with a guy who doesn’t delight in the small things in life might be considered settling at 30, but not at 35. By 40, if you get a cold shiver down your spine at the thought of embracing a certain guy, but you enjoy his company more than anyone else’s, is that settling or making an adult compromise?86 In those more personal settings, too, “settling for” essentially involves accepting something that is nonideal but nonetheless “good enough.”

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Settling One’s Affairs Yet another mode of settling merits at least passing mention: “settling one’s affairs” before death. In old-fashioned parlance wills “settle” bequests on heirs. And so on. Of course none of that is actually settled until you die. Every “last will and testament” is the last only pro tem. So long as you remain alive and lucid, you can always revisit those arrangements and substitute some new settlement for the old. Still, the sense in which your affairs are settled is that provision has been made. One settlement can replace another so long as you live, to be sure. But should you die, your affairs would not then remain unsettled. Whichever proves to be your last will truly settles arrangements for the disposition of your property and the winding up of your affairs.

Settling On: The Master Notion All those forms of settling are “doings” of a relatively active and interpersonal sort. Underlying all of them, however, is a more inward and ratiocinative process of “settling on.” It is more a matter of “setting one’s mind to rest”: the “end of striving” discussed in the introduction. Thus, when “settling down” and “settling in,” you settle on some particular place you intend to stay, at least for a time. When “settling up” with someone, you both settle on terms designed to set matters aright. Settlings on are sometimes a matter of “picking” rather than “choosing.”87 You have several equally good options; or you have several options that are strictly incomparable; or you are operating in the face of uncertainties sufficiently severe that you simply cannot tell which option would be better than the others. In such circumstances (which pretty well mirror those in which most of

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us embarked upon the careers we did, for example), you have no real grounds for “choosing” one rather than another. That absence of grounds for choice would paralyze Buridan’s proverbial ass. Standing between two equally good piles of hay and lacking any well-grounded reasons for choice between them, the ass ends up starving. But any sensible person (or ass) in such circumstances would simply plump for one or the other of those options. You settle on one rather than another groundlessly, picking it rather than making a genuinely reason-based choice. Yet it is far better to settle on one, and pursue it, than to dither among them all, accomplishing nothing in the end.88 In other cases you end up plumping for some resolution or another, and settling on it, not because you cannot rank the alternatives but rather because you and the others with whom you are dealing rank options differently. In settling up, you are often negotiating with other people whose interests and perspectives differ from and partially conflict with your own, in seeking to find a basis for governing your joint affairs.89 Assuming no one’s interests or perspectives are privileged over any other’s (over a certain range, at least),90 there once again are no grounds for choosing one rather than another (within that range). We simply must plump for one, settling on it in order to get on with our joint affairs.91 We “settle on” by “settling for.” That is to say, we settle on certain arrangements, both intrapersonally and interpersonally, knowing they will be better for us in some ways and worse in others than some other alternative arrangements. We settle on them knowing that, on any given occasion, it might turn out to have been better to do something else. Still, we settle on them in the confident expectation that those arrangements are not reliably worse than any other we could have settled on, and that we are better off (in the various way I shall go on to discuss shortly) being settled than unsettled in our arrangements.

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When settling up with others, we settle on arrangements that we know are not as good as we might wish, because we need the cooperation of others whose interests and perspectives differ from our own. Even intrapersonally, we sometimes settle on certain arrangements that we know, or deeply suspect, are not genuinely as good as those we could achieve if we had pursued the matter further. When settling for something we know or suspect to be suboptimal in this way, we typically do so simply to “clear the decks” so we can focus on other matters for a time. To reiterate what I have said above, however: nothing is forever. When we settle on something, that merely involves a commitment to stick with it for a time. But that is perfectly consistent with coming back and reopening the matter at some later time. On the American western frontier, “settlers” often did not stay put for the rest of their lives, but instead they moved on as new opportunities arose.92 So too with the other settlings that govern our lives: they would hardly settle anything if they did not persist for some reasonably protracted period of time; but “resettling” after a decent interval always remains an option.

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The Value of Settling

As announced at the outset of chapter 1, and illustrated through the extended discussion of the many different modes of settling, “fixity” of one sort or another (“settling on”) seems to be central to the notion of “settling.” So far that has remained merely an observation about the way the term is used, and about the wide range of social practices associated with that term. The aim of this chapter is to go on to vest that observation with normative significance. The argument of this chapter will be that that “fixity” is what makes settling a normatively defensible practice that is valuable for people. People plan their lives on the assumption that the things they take to be settled in their own lives will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period. In their dealings with others, they likewise plan on the assumption that crucial facts about those people, too, will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period. In all of that, they furthermore plan on the assumption that crucial features of their larger social environment will remain fixed for some suitably protracted period. Therein, I suggest, lies the value of settling things on those three different levels: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social. The sheer fact of fixity enables people to exercise their agency effectively, in some temporally extended fashion. It enables them to formulate plans and pursue them, to make commitments and keep them, to craft narrative identities and live up to them.

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Settling as an Aid to Planning and Agency In some cases “settling” is good for a person, simply because being in an unsettled state can be bad for a person in various respects. Examples come readily to mind. Settling in a lodging is good at least in part because it ends a period of homelessness, which is not very nice. Settling a dispute is good at least in part because it ends the fighting, which is bad for all concerned. That is clearly part of the story. But there is more to it than that. “Settling” does more than merely put those unwelcome states to an end—settling puts them to a secure end.1 A war settlement is more than a mere modus vivendi or truce that might unravel at any time.2 Settling controversies—genuinely settling them, rather than just stopping fighting over them—allows us to move on, without having to look over our shoulders all the time to check whether the fighting may be about to resume.3 Or again, settling in a lodging is more than merely alighting there, with the attendant risk that you may be moved on at any time. Settling, as I have said, fixes things that were previously unsettled. And that in turn might tempt us to assimilate the value of settling to something else we are already familiar with, the value of resolving uncertainties. But being “unsettled” is worse than merely being “uncertain”—it is a sort of stultifying uncertainty. It is a form of uncertainty that stymies your planning across a wide range of interconnected contexts.4 When you are unsettled, rather than merely uncertain, your being unsettled in that respect prevents you from settling down in a great many other respects. A limiting case of such stultifying uncertainty was described in the testimony offered by one expert witness to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Describing the mental state of women and children who lost male relatives in the Srebrenica massacre, that psychologist reported:

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The fact that they do not know the truth—even the worst truth, would be better for them than this uncertainty, this constant, perpetual uncertainty as to what happened to their loved ones, because they keep waiting, they’re waiting for something. They cannot begin life, they cannot face up with the reality of the death of a missing person. They only remember the moment they bade farewell, the moment when they agreed to meet in a spot that would be safe. As another observer—this one of the disappearances during the “dirty war” in Argentina—observes, “exiles come back or stay abroad, but are alive. . . . Dead are buried and we pay them homage, according to our customs. But the disappeared are neither dead nor alive. They constitute a tragedy.”5 As the psychologist testifying at the Yugoslav Tribunal said, these sorts of uncertainties are stultifying. People need to have the fate of their relatives settled in their own minds, one way or another, in order to get on with their own lives. It is not only in such psychologically fraught circumstances as these that uncertainties can be stultifying, however. Merely having too many things “up in the air” at the same time can be stultifying, in itself.6 As any schoolboy knows, you cannot solve a set of simultaneous equations if there are too many variables and too few equations. Like those equations, fixed points in our lives are what provide the structure that we need to plan other aspects of our lives. Settling some things—treating them as fixed, at least for a time—is for that reason important for human agents to be able to form and pursue plans for their lives. Consider an analogy here to Hobbes’s (admittedly quirky) analysis of the notion of “deliberation.” He treats it as a matter of “de-liberation.” Deliberation thus construed is “a putting an end to the liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our appetite, or aversion.”7 The value of deliberation, on Hobbes’s con-

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strual, would lie not so much in “getting it right” as in “getting it settled,” fixing it once and for all rather than leaving it as an open question to which we will have constantly to return. Or consider, for a less quirky example, “the etymological meaning of the verb ‘to decide’: . . . ‘to cut off ’ ” further reflection on the matter. To “decide” is to “make up one’s mind,” to settle the matter in one’s mind.8 At the intrapersonal level, that is the prime virtue of “settling”: to provide you with some fixed points around which to plan your life. Some things simply “have to be taken for granted in order to keep on with everyday activities.” Some things simply have to be “bracketed out” in our everyday lives. “To live our lives, we normally take for granted issues which, as centuries of philosophical enquiry have found, wither away under the skeptical gaze.”9 Some sociologists putting on airs magic this simple observation up into a pretentious theory about how such everyday bracketings-out of unanswerable questions provide us with (a false sense of ) “ontological security” in our lives.10 But we do not need anything nearly so fancy as that to understand why it might be handy to have some fixed points around which to plan our lives. Truncating the decision tree facing you can be handy simply because it reduces decision costs. By treating some things as settled, you are enabled to focus more of your attention on some branches of that tree and ignore others. You are enabled to focus more fully on the matters that still remain outstanding; and you can make better decisions over those options, from your own point of view, in consequence.11 Of course, economists would regard that as a terrible mistake. They insist that we should always take every relevant factor into account when making any decision. Optimizing over some subset of all the relevant dimensions smacks, to their way of thinking, of “suboptimization.” By so doing, you get the best result

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over the subset that you actually consider, to be sure. But that may well not be the best result, from your own point of view, over the full set of relevant dimensions—including all those you omitted to consider when making that decision. Holding things settled in one dimension while you focus on others would, to the economist’s mind, brook suboptimization of just that sort.12 That, however, is as true as it is irrelevant. Real human beings approach decisions with a distinctly limited tool kit, both in terms of information and, most especially, in terms of cognitive capacity. Working memory holds only around six substantial pieces of information at one time.13 Human actors in the real world simply have no choice but to take some things as given— true, to a first approximation; fixed, for the moment— in order to decide what to do about some other things.14 That, in a way, just echoes familiar arguments in favor of “satisficing” rather than “optimizing.” But although satisficing and settling are similar in several respects, they are importantly different in others. There is more to settling than mere satisficing, making it impossible wholly to assimilate the one to the other. For a start, remember that satisficing is still maximizing of a sort—maximization under constraints of time and information costs, in the classic formulation.15 When satisficing, you make do with some arrangements that might not be absolutely optimal, merely because you do not know what would be absolutely optimal and it would cost you more than it would be worth to find out exactly what would be. As I have said above, “settling for” likewise involves making do with something that is “good enough,” rather than holding out for the very best. But when settling, you are making do in very different ways and often for very different reasons. First, the “different reasons”: The constraints to which “settling for” would have us bow are often not ones of practicality, such as lack of information about how exactly to extract maxi-

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mum benefit from the situation. The constraints to which “settling for” often would have us bow (in the case of “settling up” most especially) are instead constraints of principle. That is not always the case, of course. But there are clearly cases in which it is. And in such cases, when “settling for” less than the whole pie, we do so because that is the right thing to do, in deference to the competing claims of others whose claims are as good as our own.16 A second difference is the “different way” involved in settling. When one is satisficing, nothing is truly settled. Suppose some new information happens our way. Within the logic of satisficing, there is no reason not to reopen the question of what we should do now, in light of that new information. Settling is supposed to be more stable than that.17 Once we have reached a settlement, that is supposed to be the end of the matter. A settlement may be provisional until it has been ratified (by an agent’s principal, or by Congress, or by a court of law). But a settlement that remained deeply provisional in perpetuity—that was always subject to being reopened at the drop of a hat—would not be much of a settlement. There is no such normative expectation that satisficers, in contrast, should necessarily stick (even “for a time”) with what they have alighted upon when merely satisficing.18 The importance of sticking with what we have settled on derives from a core feature of human agency. “The idea of a momentary agent is unintelligible.”19 We are temporally extended creatures who want to be able to exercise agency across time by forming, implementing, and sticking to our plans. We do not simply act from moment to moment. Instead, we settle on complex . . . future-directed plans of action, and these play basic roles in support of the organization and coordination of our activities over time. In settling on a prior plan of action one commits oneself to the plan—though

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of course one’s commitment is normally not irrevocable, and new information can make it imperative to reconsider and abandon a prior plan. Prior plans have, in this sense, a certain stability: there is, normally, rational pressure not to reconsider and/or abandon a prior plan.20 At the very least we are under rational pressure not to do so often, or lightly. It is in the nature of agency that the agent’s intentions determine (and in that sense settle) the agent’s actions.21 When we “form an intention,” we “settle on a course of action.”22 But “settling” of the sort I am discussing here is more than merely intending. People’s intentions can themselves be more or less settled. Some of those intentions might be “mere intentions,” which the agent would indeed feel free to change at the drop of a hat. Others of those intentions might flow from strong “commitments” that the agent firmly intends never to alter.23 In between those extremes, there can be various degrees of more or less “settled intentions,” ones we intend to stick to more or less firmly. (“Commitments” are, I think, best construed as not different from “settled intentions” but rather the limiting cases of them—ones an agent intends to stick to, firmly and for a long time.) Agency involves forming an intention and acting on it. It always inevitably involves “planning,” in that minimal sense. But successful planning invariably requires at least a few fixed points. “Intentions and plans are not irrevocable. They remain open to reconsideration and change. . . . [But] in the absence of reconsideration or abandonment, prior intentions and plans structure further reasoning.”24 For plans to do for us what they are supposed to do in that way—to enable us to exercise our agency in a temporally extended fashion—the plans must be governed by norms dictating “reasonable stability” of those plans. As Bratman says, “those norms of stability . . . are themselves grounded not

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solely in the particular reasons for the particular intentions and actions at issue. They are also grounded, more broadly, in our general interest in the overall cross-temporal organization and coherence of our practical thought and action.”25

Settling, Commitment, Trust, and Confidence Above and beyond easing cognitive burdens and facilitating temporally extended agency by empowering people to act effectively on plans they set for themselves, there are further values that people might derive from “settling,” fixing things more firmly than mere satisficing would have them do. One has to do with the notion of “commitment”; others have to do with related but subtly different notions of “trust” and “confidence.” The point about “commitment” is just this. People are not merely bundles of beliefs and desires. They also have (and want to have, and are better off and better people for having) sympathies and commitments to people, principles, and projects.26 Those commitments specify what a person cares about, and in so doing define who the person is. Given who we see ourselves as being— the desires with which we identify (as Harry Frankfurt would put it),27 the people, principles, and projects to which we are committed (as Bernard Williams would)28—there are some things that we just cannot do, or even seriously consider as live options.29 They lie outside our “narrative identity” thus constructed.30 Here is how that connects to “settling.” That narrative identity is temporally extended, “looking back to draw together the loose strings of memory and existing beliefs[,] . . . looking forward towards future experiences and events.”31 It has a theme, “an organizing idea . . . govern[ing] which events are part of the narrative and which are not, which events are represented as crucial and

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which are not.” The function of that theme is to “provide a stable structure to our narrative identities, which in turn help to constitute us as temporally extended . . . persons.”32 Such themes “exert conservative pressure on narrative identities by pressuring them to maintain their integrity as organized wholes. . . . [A]bandoning or radically altering a theme will require more than mere whim.”33 It is not as if we can never abandon one theme and take up another, in the narrative of our lives. We simply cannot do so often, or lightly, if the narrative is to have any coherence. The themes of our lives must be fairly well settled, in that respect, to make satisfying sense as a coherent whole. Of course, there are various other more pragmatic reasons of a purely strategic sort for valuing commitments vis-à-vis oneself or others.34 Precommitment can help a weak-willed person act in accordance with his settled intentions through periods of temptation. Precommitment can lock you into a strategically advantageous course of action; in a Chicken Game, for example, throwing your own steering wheel out of the car window forces the other driver to be the one to swerve and thus lose the game. Or, as already discussed, simply settling on one or the other of two equally good piles of hay can prevent Buridan’s ass from starving to death dithering endlessly between them. Those are all strategic or pragmatic reasons, however. Intrapersonally, the primary principled reason we have for valuing firm and fixed commitments to principles, values, and ongoing projects is that those, taken together, constitute our character. Steadfastness in pursuit of our principles, values, and ongoing projects manifests our integrity. Williams says that that is essential to “having a reason for living at all.”35 Doubtless he exaggerates to some extent.36 Still, steadfastness of that sort is typically important for self-respect—if only because having fairly firmly fixed commitments to some principles, values, and ongoing projects is

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bound up with what most people ordinarily think of their “self ” as involving. To perform that function, your personal commitments must ordinarily be reasonably settled and not constantly up for reconsideration. When rescuing your mother from the burning building, you had better do so simply because she is your mother. Williams says it would be “one thought too many” to give any further reason, beyond that, as to why it is good to rescue your mother.37 It is not altogether clear what the “one thought too many” thought actually amounts to. But here is one thing it might plausibly amount to: maybe the reason that that would be so is precisely that having that further thought would betoken a willingness to reopen things that should be firmly settled, and beyond questioning. As with mother, so too with the various other people, principles, and projects your commitment to which constitutes the narrative of your life. Those commitments need to be firmly settled in order for you to make sense of your ongoing self as a narrative whole. As Christine Korsgaard writes, Some of the things we do are intelligible only in the context of projects that extend over long periods. This is especially true of the pursuit of our ultimate ends. In choosing our careers, and pursuing our friendships and family lives, we both presuppose and construct a continuity of identity and of agency. . . . In order to carry out a rational plan of life, you need to be one continuing person.38 Of course, one’s principles, values, and projects can compete with one another. And of course and they can change over time. But they had better form a tolerably coherent whole, and they had better persist for some moderately protracted period, if they are going to form the basis of what would commonly be regarded

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as a remotely satisfactory life, judged from within. People with absolutely no commitments—absolutely no fixed points in their lives—cannot enjoy the satisfaction of “achievements” or “accomplishments,” for those very notions depend upon there being some objects or goals fixed in advance, and against which performance is measured and success adjudged.39 Notice, however, that the whole point of having settled, firmly fixed goals—Gauguin’s of creating wonderful art, for example—is to guide the person in striving toward them. The point of “settling things” in this respect is not to stop striving altogether. It is instead to guide and assist our striving. Settling on something gives us something to strive for. Settling facilitates striving by helping us to stop vacillating—to prevent us from striving in too many directions at once. All that I have said so far pertains purely to the analysis of the value of settling from an intrapersonal perspective—from “within,” as it were. But we also have reasons (related to those, but different) at the interpersonal level for valuing firm and fixed commitments to certain other people, to certain principles, and to certain courses of action with respect to them. From an interpersonal perspective, the value that we attach to these things is in the first instance to the other person’s being committed in those ways. Firm and binding commitments render the other’s behavior more predictable, and we can choose our own course of conduct with more confidence, in consequence. But the fact that other people value our being committed in these ways gives us, ourselves, a reason to value being committed. Being able to make credible commitments is what enables us to seal bargains, whether in personal life, in commerce, or in politics.40 We benefit from the commitments, because we benefit from the bargains. We are happy to give a bond, and to be bound, if that is what it takes to get the apartment or to get the job.41

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Hence, on both sides of the interpersonal interaction, the fixity that comes from commitments to people and principles and courses of action has this value of facilitating what would otherwise be risky interpersonal interactions.42 Notice, however, that all those interpersonal advantages flowing from commitments actually flow from one particular feature of commitments: from the fact that they make people’s future behavior more fixed and predictable. While making commitments is certainly one way to fix your future behavior, it is definitely not the only way. You might display a settled and predictable pattern of behavior without having made any commitments or promised anyone anything. You might instead do what you predictably do out of habit, or out of fixed dispositions. It is the settledness and hence predictability of your behavior patterns, rather than commitment as such, that give rise to all those interpersonal benefits I have just been describing. This emerges clearly in the large literature on “trust.” You trust other people when you can reliably expect them to do something that you want them to do. But they might do that for either (or both) of two reasons: they might do it because you want them to; or they might do it because they want to do it themselves, anyway, completely independently of what you want.43 All that you need in order to plan your own affairs with confidence is reliable knowledge that others will behave in a certain way, rather than anything about why they will do so. Writ small, this means that trust can be lodged in another person’s character and dispositions rather than any attitude she may have toward you and your desires. Writ large, this means that trust can be lodged in institutions rather than individuals. That is to say, you can trust someone to do something because you trust her personally to do the right thing (either because you want it or because she wants it herself ); or you can trust her to do something because there are institutions in place that you are confident

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will provide her with a sufficient incentive to do so, rewarding her if she does and/or punishing her if she does not.44 The enforcement mechanisms surrounding formally binding “commitments” do precisely that. The legal institutions of contract law provide incentives aplenty for discharging your contractual obligations. The legal institutions surrounding confidentiality provide incentives aplenty not to breach confidences.45 So too do the social institutions surrounding the “promising game” similarly provide external incentives of an analogous sort for keeping your promises.46 More generally, across informal social networks there can be strong expectations that you will behave in a trustworthy manner, with serious consequences for you if you violate those expectations. Wherever reputation matters—as studies show it does to everyone from Peruvian shantytown borrowers to traders on the Antwerp diamond exchange—the prospect of damage to one’s reputation can provide external incentives every bit as strong as legal ones.47 Trust, in individuals or institutions either, is prey to wellknown “social traps.” There are virtuous as well as vicious cycles: trust begets trust; distrust begets distrust.48 We might be settled in either pattern. Transitioning from virtuous to vicious is unfortunately all too easy, from vicious to virtuous a lot harder. If we are to do the latter, there basically has to be a “restart” button.49 One party or another (or both) simply has to be willing to take a chance, on some occasion or another, and trust the other— hoping that the other will reciprocate, before his own patience is exhausted. That, for example, is what happened in Sweden with the 1928 Labor Peace Conference that ended a long period of bloody industrial disputes and laid the groundwork for the remarkably harmonious labor relations that have since become a model for the world.50 Obviously, such transitions, where they can be accomplished, are highly desirable from the point of view of all concerned. But

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notice one thing: the effect of pushing the “restart” button is to unsettle previously settled patterns. Thus, being settled is not always good (although it still can be better to be dealing with someone whose behavioral patterns are settled, even in ways you wish were otherwise: at least you know how to play him; if he were erratically untrustworthy, you might find yourself sometimes trusting him when you should not, to your great cost). Being unsettled is not always bad (the 1928 Labor Peace Conference broke Sweden’s settled pattern of labor strife, which was all to the good). Notice too, however, that such “good unsettlings” are episodic in nature. To be constantly and completely unsettled is ordinarily a very bad thing indeed. Related to the notion of “trust” is the notion of “confidence.” Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the latter in terms of the former: “confidence” is defined as “the mental attitude of trusting in or relying on a person or thing.”51 That attitude in turn gives rise to (in another meaning of the word “confidence”) “assurance, boldness, fearlessness.” Of course, one can be overconfident (“assurance based on insufficient or improper grounds,” in yet another definition of the term), just as one can be too trusting or trust in error. But being confident of someone or something— having settled views as to their reliability—provides you with the basis for proceeding boldly with your own plans. Being able to take someone “into your confidence” allows you to reveal secret information to her, without fear that it will be broadcast more widely, thus gaining the benefit of information and counsel that would otherwise have been unavailable to you. The Oxford English Dictionary, again, says that “confidence” is “feeling sure or certain of a fact or issue.” But another meaning belies that emphasis on certainty. In statistical usage, a “confidence interval” is “a range of values so defined that there is a specified probability that the value of a parameter . . . lies within it.” We are not certain that the true value lies within that interval; we

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merely believe that the probability that it does so is more than thus-and-such. The more general points that this suggests are that (1) confidence can come in degrees, and (2) we can be confident of things that we nonetheless realize might turn out in the end not to be entirely (or even approximately) correct.52 So too can we be more or less settled, both in our own intentions and in our views as to the reliability of our predictions about other people, objects, and states of the world impacting on our plans. The more settled we are in all those respects, the more confidently we can pursue those plans. If our settled views are radically untrue, or untrue in ways that really matter for the successful pursuit of our plans, then the consequences might be catastrophic. It matters what you settle on, not merely that you settle. It is important that you settle on what is actually true, as best you are able to determine that. But without settling on something, you cannot proceed confidently and effectively (or sometimes at all) with your further plans. Settling provides people with the fixed points that they need, in order to act with confidence and to interact in secure reliance on one another. It may be false confidence, in some unfortunate instances. But without such confidence as comes from such settling, you would not be able to act or interact with confidence at all, anyway certainly not so frequently and so well.53

Settling the Social Fabric Those are all reasons to value certain things’ being settled from an individual-level intrapersonal or interpersonal point of view. There are other reasons to value certain other things’ being settled from a larger social point of view. In certain important respects, the more general social value of settling is similar to the sort of value that individuals derive from

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settling matters for themselves and with one another. Settling outstanding claims and reconciling long-standing grievances of substantial segments of society allows us to “move on,” collectively as well as individually, with other aspects of our lives. Collectively “settling up” with whole peoples that we have displaced and otherwise damaged in the process of our own settling is one of the most poignant instances. It was manifested, however imperfectly, in the South African Truth and Reconciliation process and in white Australia’s long-overdue 2008 “apology” to the original inhabitants.54 Note that collectively “settling up” in a genuine way in cases like those necessarily involves more than merely putting an end to historical injustices. It is important that that be done too, of course. It is important that material consequences accompany fine words, and ancient grievances be redressed as well as they can be. But the point of the process is not so much to “put an end” to things as it is to constitute a new beginning. The aim is to allow the community as a whole—both newcomers and original inhabitants—to move on together toward a better future that they intend to share. Here, for example, is how Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ended his apology to indigenous Australians: Let us turn this page together, Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians, . . . and write this new chapter in our nation’s story together. First Australians, First Fleeters and those who first took the oath of allegiance just a few weeks ago—let us grasp this opportunity to craft a new future for this great land, Australia.55 In addition to the larger value to society of settling old grievances and starting anew, there is also considerable value to individuals in having the basic fabric of their society tolerably well settled. Both individually and in interaction with others, people

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will be better able to pursue their own plans effectively if certain background features of their social environment are fairly fixed in these ways. That is one of the reasons that unorganized or ill-organized territories petition to join larger and better established unions. Consider, for example, the petition from the settlers in the Oregon Country asking the United States to assume jurisdiction over the territory. As the settlers told Congress: We flatter ourselves that we are the germ of a great state, and are anxious to give an early tone to the moral and intellectual character of its citizens. We are fully aware, too, that the destinies of our posterity will be intimately affected by the character of those who emigrate to the country. The territory must populate. The Congress of the United States must say by whom. The natural resources of the country, with a well-judged civil code, will invite a good community; but a good community will hardly emigrate to a country that promises no protection to life or property. Inquiries have already been submitted to some of us, for information of the country. In return, we can only speak of a country highly favored by nature. We can boast of no civil code. We can promise no protection but the ulterior resort of selfdefense. By whom, then, shall the country be populated? By the reckless and unprincipled adventurer  .  .  . ; by the Botany Bay refugee; by the renegade from civilization from the Rocky Mountains; by the profligate deserted seamen from Polynesia; and the unprincipled sharpers from Spanish America.56 More specifically, providing a settled sociolegal environment within which people can plan and conduct their affairs is the whole point of the rule of law. At root, the rule of law requires

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that people be governed according to settled laws with settled meanings, known in advance and applied impartially.57 “[T]he rule of law [just] means regularity, stability, and adherence to settled law,” one jurisprude puts it plainly.58 “Stripped of all technicalities,” Friedrich Hayek explains, the rule of law means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances, and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.59 The value of the rule of law is, in the words of Joseph Raz, that it provides “a stable and safe basis for individual planning”: “we value the ability to . . . fix long-term goals and effectively direct one’s life towards them”; “one’s ability to do so depends on the existence of stable, secure frameworks”; and “the law can help secure such fixed points of reference.”60 These are among the most deeply entrenched commonplaces of jurisprudence. Fixed rules do not necessarily remain fixed forever, of course. We can always argue about how best to interpret the laws and whether we need to change the laws.61 But the underlying purpose of the rule of law is subverted when law is in a constant state of flux.62 Transitional justice is inevitably highly imperfect justice.63 A crucially important part of the legal process is the “institutional settlement” of matters over which we would otherwise come to blows.64 The whole point of institutionalizing the settlement, in turn, is to ensure that it is done in ways that last (institutions being “set in stone”). The rule of law is supposed to constrain how a government deals with its subjects, requiring it to rule them in some appropriately settled way. Not only must government rule through law rather than arbitrary fiat commands. Government must also rule

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under law, of a suitably settled sort. As a matter of pure logic, constitutions must be more firmly settled than ordinary laws themselves if they are to constrain ordinary lawmaking in that way.65 John Locke held particularly high ambitions in that regard for the constitution that he wrote for the Carolina Colony. Its last clause reads, “These Fundamental Constitutions . . . shall be and remain the sacred and unalterable form and rule of Carolina for ever.”66 Few constitutions aspire to quite that degree of fixity these days.67 Most contain provision for their own amendment. But the whole point of a constitution is to fix things more firmly than ordinary statutes or executive orders would do. If the constitution can be changed as easily as any ordinary law, it provides no constraints on legislation at all—nothing is fixed by it. Economically as well as legally and politically, there are many advantages to be had from a settled environment. Often one can best achieve economic gains by settling down and staying put. When doing so literally, one is able to reap the benefits that can come from investing in fixed physical capital: planting crops, constructing factories, damming rivers, and so on. Parking one’s financial capital in some place and leaving it there for a good long while can be similarly productive. One important source of Japanese economic success through the 1980s was, according to many observers, the “main bank” system of finance. Instead of raising capital on the share market, Japanese firms financed their operations by borrowing from their “main bank,” which formed a long-term relationship with the firm and acquired the capacity to monitor and discipline it in consequence. Investing in this way for the long haul rather than the short term is, on this analysis, what long underwrote Japanese economic success, until financial deregulation upset that system.68 In Germany, similarly, it is claimed that Rheinish capitalism is able to outperform its Anglo-Saxon counterpart by availing

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itself of “patient capital”: investors invest for the long haul, rather than constantly chopping and changing their investment portfolios as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts do. “British firms must sustain their profitability because the structure of financial markets . . . links the firm’s access to capital and ability to resist takeover to its current profitability. . . . By contrast, German firms can sustain a decline in returns because the financial system . . . provides firms with access to capital independent of current profitability. . . . Access to this kind of ‘patient capital’ makes it possible for firms to retain a skilled workforce through economic downturns and to invest in projects generating returns only in the long run.”69 This assurance of settled long-term employment in the same firm or industry, in turn, makes it sensible for both employers and employees to make long-term investments in vocational training and education that impart firm- or industry-specific human capital. A more stable and skilled workforce enables firms in places like Germany to be more and differently productive than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, where employees sensibly acquire only more general skills in anticipation of switches in employment.70 The economic advantages that come from being settled in all these ways—in terms of physical capital, financial capital, and human capital—is just this. People who are always making decisions “at the margin” are by their nature unable to “take one step back to take two steps forward.” They will not be prepared to go through a trough to get to a higher plateau.71 The virtue of settled commitments is to tie you to a person, a project, or (in the case of Japanese or Rheinish capitalism) a firm through thick and thin, thus enabling you to reach that higher plateau despite occasional setbacks along the way. Just as it is good personal advice not to divorce come the first argument, so too is it good economic advice not to divest come

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the first downturn. A time might come to divest or divorce, but people who are settled in their marriages and in their investments will not do so prematurely. And they will reap for themselves, and produce for others, considerable benefits precisely in consequence of their being settled in those ways.

three

What Settling Is Not

In the course of my analysis of what settling is and why we value it, I have already had occasion to mention a few things that it is not. It is not merely “satisficing” of the ordinary sort. True, when settling for something, we make do for now with something that is “good enough.” But when genuinely settling on that, we do so with the intention and expectation of sticking with it more firmly and sometimes for different reasons than we would if we had chosen it for satisficing-style reasons alone. Nor is settling merely a matter of ending uncertainty in general. Instead, as I have said, the term properly applies only where the uncertainties are of a very particular form, only where they are “stultifying” in ways that would block you from engaging with a relatively wide range of your other concerns. Those are distinctions of purely analytic importance in getting clear about the nature and value of settling. Next, I want to turn to some distinctions that are of broader social and political importance. There are other more politically charged values and practices—compromise, conservatism, resignation—with which settling might easily be conflated. While settling bears some (sometimes strong) resemblance to each, it is actually distinct in important ways from any of them. Some of the strongest reasons we might have to be wary of each of those other values and practices simply do not apply to the practice of settling, in consequence.

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Settling Is Not Just Compromising On its face, settling would seem to have a lot in common with compromising. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the latter in terms of the former, saying “to compromise” is “to settle (differences) by mutual concession.” But while all compromises are settlements, not all settlements are compromises.1 Furthermore, even where they are, different sorts of settlements can involve compromises of very different sorts. The essence of a compromise is, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary once again, “[t]o come to terms by mutual concession; to come to an agreement by the partial surrender of position or principles.” By virtue of that fact, someone who is “in a compromised position” is in a worse position than before making the partial surrender that constitutes the compromise.2 She is worse off in some sense, anyway. In another sense, however, she is in a better position—or she is so, anyway, assuming the compromise allows her to achieve more of her position or principles than she could have done without it (i.e., assuming that the compromise was not a gratuitous one). Therein lies the apparent “paradox of compromise.” It seemingly leaves you both better off and worse off, and in precisely the same respect: you achieve what you want by surrendering precisely that.3 Any appearance of strict paradox is of course illusory. Rather than surrendering and achieving one and the same thing, you surrender one part of what you want in order to get some other part of what you want.4 Furthermore, it may often have been the case that what you have seemingly surrendered in the course of the compromise was not truly something that you had or could have gotten, anyway. Nonetheless, the phenomenology remains strong. In compromising, at least over matters that are of principled concern to

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you—and arguably all things that are properly deemed “compromises” are of that sort5—you inevitably feel compromised. You have, after all, given up pursuit (even if it would have been inevitably futile pursuit) of something of principled concern to you. And even if compromising was the right thing to have done on balance, it is right at least to acknowledge what was forsaken in the process. Getting 100,001 goods at the price of suffering 100,000 bads is importantly different from getting 11 goods at the price of 10 bads, even though the bottom line is the same—a gain of 1 good, on net.6 Not all settlings—not even all interpersonal settlings— necessarily involve mutual concessions or partial sacrifices, however. Consider, for example, settlements of wars. Sometimes those involve mutual concessions all around. But there clearly can be, and often are, settlements of a different sort. A war can sometimes be settled by force majeur rather than compromise. And unconditional surrender is one way of settling a war, too. Ironically, the sort of settling that I have discussed in relation to “settling up” with people whom we have unsettled, displaced, or otherwise wronged in the course of our own settling is precisely like that. These acts of settling up are (or anyway can be and should be) unilateral concessions rather than bilateral compromises. When you make restitution for past wrongs, you pay in full. There is not—or anyway, should not have to be—any compromise on the part of the party who was wronged.7 Different parties might have to accommodate one another’s differing perspectives on what happened in the past and their differing views about how to proceed together in the future, and so on. But in that one central element of “settling up”—making restitution— there is or should be no compromise involved. Compromise, remember, has an intrapersonal as well as an interpersonal dimension to it.8 You compromise intrapersonally

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when, seeing that all your concerns cannot be simultaneously pursued, you decide to moderate or abandon some in order to pursue some other(s) instead. An intrapersonal compromise of that sort is always involved as part of the interpersonal process of compromising with someone else, as well. (For that reason, the intrapersonal form of compromise should be seen as the more fundamental one.) But such intrapersonal compromises can also occur without anyone else’s being involved. After all, conflicts with other people are not the only things that prevent us from pursuing all of our principled concerns simultaneously. Settling, too, has its intrapersonal aspects. When “settling on” some object or proposition or principle or commitment or course of action, we are in the first instance settling matters in our own minds. We are deciding it is this rather than that that we will settle on and go forward with. Such intrapersonal settling does not necessarily involve any compromise—although admittedly the circumstances which have to obtain for that to be the case are relatively extreme ones. First, it must be the case that all the options available for settling on are equally good options. Second, it must be the case that it would not have been better for us to (if we could) have simultaneously pursued more of those options than we are now settling on. The latter in particular seems highly uncommon: even Buridan’s ass presumably would be better off eating both piles of hay rather than settling for either. When you settle on one of many equally good options and pursue it exclusively, even though pursuing many of them simultaneously would have been better if only you could have done that, you typically do so because the latter is simply not possible. You have to pick only one and pursue it exclusively, for some reason or another. In that case, you will have done the best you are able, in settling as you do. But that is not to say you have not compromised. You have. Or anyway you have (or anyway feel as

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if you have), insofar as you have (or feel as if you have) given up anything of principled concern to you. Of course, not all settlings touch upon matters of principled concern in that way. Some clearly do. Our principles, as I have said, are certainly one of the things we take to be settled features of our lives. When we have made commitments to other people or have in some other way invited or allowed them to rely upon us, we should as a matter of principle care about not disappointing expectations thus engendered. When we have wronged someone, it should be a matter of principled concern to us to see the wrong righted. But many of the things we settle on—where to live, which olive to eat first, whom to employ to repair our car—do not ordinarily touch upon any matter of principled concern. Those are clearly settlings, nonetheless. So if compromises necessarily involve the (at least seeming) sacrifice of something of principled concern, then not all settlings are compromises in that respect, either. Even where they are, notice that settlings are not necessarily permanent forsakings, as genuine compromises would seem to be. Compromising involves doing one thing instead of another. Settling often involves merely doing one thing before another. When settling, we are often merely putting some things on hold so we can focus on others for a time. If we do indeed come back eventually to all the things that matter, and if nothing is lost by the delay in returning to them (which of course will not always be the case), then nothing will truly have been compromised by the serial settling on first one and then the other. Settling on some things for now, so as to get on with other things, amounts in effect to trimming our range of concerns. And “trimming” is of course an old-fashioned term of abuse for “compromising.”9 Trimmers take contentious matters off the agenda, concentrating on the safe middle ground.10 That is why trimmers are looked down upon. His brother recalled that

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“President Kennedy was fond of quoting Dante that ‘the hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’ ”11 The objection there, however, is not to the fact of trimming so much as to what is trimmed. The objection is that matters of great moral concern are left unpursued simply because the trimmer shies away from controversy. There is no reason to think that that will necessarily be true of the sort of trimming practiced by people who are merely “settling on” something, for the time being, while they actively pursue something else. What they settle on is not necessarily noncontentious, nor is the reason that they settle on it necessarily merely because it is noncontentious. Sometimes it might be. They might decide to settle on what is noncontentious because it is noncontentious, on grounds, for example, that where there is no disagreement that consensus is likely to be right. Even then, however, notice why they would ordinarily be settling on that. They do so in order to concentrate their attention on something else—something, ex hypothesi, more in dispute. Unlike trimmers who constitutionally avoid the contentious, people who settle on things that are noncontentious because they are noncontentious do so precisely in order to pursue other matters that are more contentious.12 Notice finally that insofar as trimmers are middle-groundseekers, nothing is ever actually settled with them. They vacillate between sides in a dispute, sometimes coming down on one side, sometimes on the other. “Anxiety is the dominant emotion of trimmers,” precisely because nothing is ever genuinely settled for them. “[T]hey have no system, no ideology, no formulas on which to rely.”13 In this way, too, settling sharply contrasts with trimming or compromising.

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Settling Is Not Just Conservatism Settling might be thought a “conservative” practice. Indeed, one encyclopedist defines conservatism as “an unquestioning and untroubled acceptance of a settled way of doing things.”14 But while the two notions may seem to have something in common, they actually differ in important respects. Conservatism is characterized by a “status quo bias.”15 In writings by conservatives, it is often unclear whether that is supposed just to reflect a brute psychological fact about people. Anthony Quinton rather suggests so. He characterizes conservatism as a “disposition,” and there is much evidence in social psychology that this disposition is indeed common.16 But other writers present their status quo bias as a reflection of what is genuinely of value, rather than merely a reflections of people’s psychological propensities. Such writers would insist that something is more valuable merely because it currently exists, and for that reason has a claim to be preserved rather than being replaced by other things of equivalent or even more value.17 Be that as it may, conservatism clearly entails a commitment to preserving what exists and resisting change to it. To “conserve” is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “to preserve (a condition, institution, privilege, etc.) intact; to maintain in an existing state.” And “conservatism” is defined as “the tendency to resist great or sudden change.” Conservatives accept that it is sometimes necessary to change things in some respects order to preserve them in other more important respects.18 But they insist that the change should, insofar as possible, be gradual and organic, and above all else should reflect experience rather than being driven by abstract doctrine.19 Recall in this connection Tocqueville’s characterization of the French Revolution:

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When one studies the history of our revolution one sees that it was conducted in the same spirit that presides over many abstract books on the principles of government. Same attraction toward general theories, complete systems of legislation, and exact symmetry of laws; same contempt for existing facts; same trust in theory; same taste for what is original, ingenious, and novel in designing institutions; same bent for remaking simultaneously the entire constitution, following the rules of logic and a unique plan, instead of attempting to amend its parts. A frightening spectacle!20 Conservatives are constitutionally wary of abstract schemes for radical reform, on grounds Albert Hirschman deftly summarizes as perversity (“they’ll backfire”), futility (“they won’t work”), or jeopardy (“they’ll cause us to lose something more important”).21 Settling might superficially seem to manifest a commitment similar to conservatism’s to the status quo. Certainly it involves treating some things as settled. But that settling need not share any of those other attributes of conservatism. There is no prejudice against “abstract theory” or in favor of “practical experience” or “long history” necessarily built in to the notion of settling, for example. Quite the contrary, we might settle on some theory and actively pursue its implementation. That would be one kind of settling, but one that would be anathema to conservatives. We can settle on a program of thoroughgoing law reform of the sort that Tocqueville found such “a frightening spectacle.” Indeed we can settle on The Revolution as our cause and bringing it about as our life’s work. Those are all settlings, but they are distinctly unconservative ones. The more general point arising from those examples is that, in settling on some things, we need not and indeed should not settle on all things, attempting to hold absolutely everything con-

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stant. Quite the contrary, we should settle on some things principally in order better to strive for some other things. While the “settling” part of that formula looks conservative, at least in the minimal sense that we do not intentionally change what we take to be settled, the “striving” part of that formula is the opposite of conservative. It seeks to produce change, perhaps even rapid and radical change, in those aspects of the current state of affairs. Notice, too, that many of the things that settling would have us do—“settling up” with those we have harmed, for example— point to the desirability of righting evils that are found in presently existing states of affairs. That is another important way in which settling may not be at all characterized by a conservative status quo bias. Yet another difference is this. Conservatism is all about keeping things the same, once they have been fixed; settling is all about fixing them in the first place. When settling something, we fix it with a view to keeping it fixed, at least for a time. The latter bit—the intention to keep it fixed, at least for a time—has a conservative ring to it. But the former bit does not. The act of settling is itself an intervention designed to change things as they have previously existed—to transform unsettled (or ill-settled) states of affairs into (more properly) settled ones. Notice one final way in which settling cuts against the grain of conservatism. Settling aspires only to fixing things for a time, whereas conservatism would ideally aspire to keeping them the same forevermore. Of course, the conservative recognizes that that is an unrealistic ambition, and pronounces himself prepared in a pinch to tolerate change so long as it is slow and gradual. Things constantly changing like that (even just a little) would be opposite to “settling,” however. Something that is truly settled would be fixed more firmly than that, at least for a while. And then it would be more thoroughly reconsidered, after a while.

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Resettling after a while—coming to some wholly new settlement—is perfectly consistent with the practice of settling, in a way it is not with the conservative ideal. Thus settling is at one and the same time more intolerant of small and gradual changes, and more tolerant of large and periodic changes, than is conservatism.

Settling Is Not Just Resignation Asked whether he was now “content,” angry young man of 1980s rock Elvis Costello jibbed. “I don’t know if content is the right word. Content is a word that never sat well with me. Like ‘maturity.’ They are two words I’ve never liked. I think they imply some sort of decay. A settling.”22 Similarly, feminist Germaine Greer once famously declared, “Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.”23 Such comments point to another objectionable practice to which “settling” might be assimilated: “resignation.” The most relevant sense of that word, as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the fact of resigning oneself or of being resigned to something; acquiescence, submission, compliance; readiness to endure adversity without complaint.” To “resign” is “to give up on, abandon (something aimed at or desired, a wish, a hope, etc.)”; it is “to reconcile oneself to an unavoidable (and usually unwanted or unappealing) prospect, outcome, course of action, etc.” Of course, if the outcome is indeed “unavoidable,” then perhaps it only makes sense to resign yourself to it. You can still regret it, but if the outcome truly is unavoidable, there is nothing you can do to alter it. “Of things impossible . . . deliberat[ion] . . . is in vain,” as Hobbes would say.24 What is either impossible or

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unavoidable we simply have no choice but to accept, or anyway accommodate ourselves to. “Settling” potentially poses a problem in that regard, therefore, only insofar as it involves treating as given some state of affairs that is, in truth, neither impossible nor unavoidable. In settling for something, we sometimes do so precisely because we were as certain as we can be that we could not have achieved any other outcome that was any better than that. Other times, however, we clearly do find ourselves settling for something when we could (and could and should have known we could) have done better. It is those cases to which the complaint that settling involves wrongful resignation is addressed.25 Just notice, however: those cases constitute only a subset of all the cases of settling. Notice, too, why we do that. We settle for things that we do not strictly need to because we cannot attend to everything at once, and we treat some things as settled so we can better pursue other things. Or we do so because we have made commitments or we have other people relying on us in some other way. Or we do so in order to preserve the unity and coherence of the narrative of our lives. We settle on “this,” in order to pursue “that.” Whether it is right or wrong to have settled in that way just depends on the relative importance of the “this” and “that.”26 Hence, as with “compromising” or “trimming,” so too with “resignation.” It all depends on what you resign yourself to, and what you gain by so doing. Even when we resign ourselves to something that we did not have to, settling on that might sometimes be better than not, because what is thereby gained is more important than what is lost. Resigning ourselves to things that matter less, if that is necessary (or even just conducive) to successful striving after things that matter more, is not wrong. Notice this one last difference, too. “Resignation” implies something more like “giving up for good.” “Settling,” in contrast,

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implies merely “giving up for now.” Settling is not forever. It is merely holding some things fixed for a time, leaving open the possibility of reopening at some later date matters that are for now being taken to be settled. But settling also implies an intention to hold them fixed for a time, rather than constantly questioning whether perhaps they should be reopened, so you can indeed get on with those other affairs.27

four

Settling in Aid of Striving

To end as I began, let me return to Thomas Hobbes’s idea of striving, his “perpetual and restless desire” that he takes (he with regret, Goethe and Tennyson with celebration) to be “a general inclination of all mankind.” We all know people like that. Most of us probably lived some portion of our own lives like that, to some extent. But as I hope to have shown, there is also a wellestablished social practice of “settling” that constitutes a sharp counterpoint to such “striving.” What is the most appropriate mix of striving and settling, within any one life, or indeed within a society as a whole? That is hard to say, and quite probably for the very good reason that there is almost certainly no general, determinate answer. It all depends on what you are striving for, what you are settling for, and how exactly they are interrelated. While I have no hopes of specifying with any generality an appropriate mix of the two, I hope here at least to say something about some of the ways in which the two might be interrelated. So doing will, I hope, at least provide a framework within which the “appropriate mix” question might be addressed on a more case-by-case basis. What we can conclude with confidence, however, is that a mix it must be. Both striving and settling are required. For the short, aphoristic way of putting the point (which I shall refine shortly): If we do not settle on some things—our goals—then we will have nothing to strive for.1 If we settle everything too firmly—if we

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resign ourselves too completely to the world as we find it—we have nothing to strive for, and nothing to live for. As Hobbes puts it, “the felicity of this life consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied.”2 Settling and striving are thus deeply intertwined. We ought to settle some things, precisely in order better to strive for others.

Settling in Order to Strive We need to settle in order to strive for two reasons. First, we need to settle on what to strive for. Second, we need to settle on other things in order to free up resources with which to strive for that. Let me discuss each in turn. Obviously, we need to settle on certain things for which to strive. Remember Buridan’s ass, standing between two equally good piles of hay and starving because he could find no grounds for going to eat one rather than the other. Settling on one of them solves that problem. The quick way of capturing the point contained in my earlier aphorism (we need to settle on goals to have something to strive for) is a little too quick, however. Further reflection on Buridan’s ass shows why. In order to solve his feeding problem, Buridan’s ass needs nothing more than a one-off decision to eat this pile of hay rather than that. Genuine settlings are not like that. They are not one-off, episodic decisions unconnected to anything that has happened before or will happen subsequently. Settlings are more temporally extended than that. This point is nicely illustrated by a scene in the film Goodfellas. A mother says to her wayward son, “Why not get yourself a nice girl?” To which the son replies, “I do, almost every night.” The mother tries again: “But a girl you could settle down with.” To which the son incorrigibly replies, “I do, every night.”3 The moth-

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er’s point—and mine—is that one-off decisions and one-night stands constitute no kind of “settling.” Settling involves a commitment to (or anyway an intention or expectation of ) sticking with whatever you have settled on for longer than that.4 Notice, however, that just as “settling” has that more temporally extended aspect to it, so too does “striving.” To “strive” is to engage in a protracted quest for something that is not within your immediate grasp. To “strive” is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “to make one’s way with effort,” against obstacles or opposing forces. It involves an ongoing struggle, not an instantaneous accomplishment. The combination of those two facts—that both striving and settling have this temporally extended aspect to them— provides a fuller and more accurate account of why you must settle on something in order to have something to strive for. You must settle, in a relatively enduring way, upon something that will be the object of your striving, in order for that striving to count as striving. It is the temporally extended nature of the settling on that as the object of your quest that makes your questing for it sufficiently unified over time to count as striving. The second reason we need to settle in order to strive is in order to clear the decks and free up resources. Whereas the first reason points to the need to settle on the thing you are going to strive for, the second reason points to the need to settle with respect to some other things that you are not going to strive for (at least for now) in order for you to do that. You need to treat those other things as given, fixed for a time; you need to put pursuit of those other things on hold; you need to treat those other things as true, for present purposes. In that way, you free up time and attention and other resources with which you can pursue whatever it is you have settled on as the thing(s) that you next want to strive for.

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What Strivings Require Settling, and Why Some strivings require more settling than others. Is there any general characterization of types of ones that do and which do not? Sometimes a need to be relatively settled is dictated by the very nature of the goods for which we are striving. There are some kinds of goods that have a temporally extended dimension, in a way that others do not. Successful striving for goods that are more temporally extended in that way requires a more settled pursuit of them. Preeminent among such goods, perhaps, are certain forms of interpersonal relations. Friendships are like that. Being “friends for a day” makes about as much sense as being “friends for pay.”5 Friendship requires a certain amount of history, and a commitment to one another that extends into the indefinite future. So too with life partnerships. It is not just that you share almost all aspects of your life with your life partner; there is also an implication that you go into it with the intention (which often goes unrealized of course) that it is “for life,” or at the very least that it is going to be a “long-term relationship.” So too with business partnerships. You do not generally enter into a business partnership today only with the intention of dissolving it tomorrow (unless you are engaged in some sort of legal scam). That is true also of the employment relationship. Entering into a contract of employment with someone is importantly different from an employer’s picking up day laborers down at the employment exchange.6 It is not merely goods associated with interpersonal relationships that display this temporally extended feature that necessitates a more settled approach to our striving. The same is sometimes true of projects of various other sorts. It takes quite some time to build a bridge or a building.7 It takes quite a while

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to become fully trained and certified as a surgeon. And sometimes our projects are connected to or, in the course of their pursuit, give rise to others whose time horizon is yet further extended. You learn surgical skills with the intention of practicing them, once you are trained and certified. You build one building as part of a larger scheme of redeveloping some precinct of the city. And so on. Impersonal or physical projects taking on this more temporally extended form, too, require a relatively more settled form of striving in order for them to be pursued successfully. More generally, as I have already said, we cannot properly be said to be “striving” for what we can and do accomplish in an instant. Striving, by definition, involves more of an ongoing effort than that. That in itself is merely a boringly linguistic point: we would simply not properly call them “strivings” if the objects they sought were immediately within one’s grasp. The more interesting question is why we should value “striving” in that more temporally extended fashion, in preference to instantaneous gratification on every occasion. Sometimes of course striving is something that is imposed on us by external circumstance rather than something that is chosen by us. Acquiring all the knowledge and skills required to be a good surgeon is hard work and takes a lot of time: it is not something that can just be immediately downloaded into you by some neural magic. Ditto building a building: the laws of nature (or anyway the limits of our current knowledge of them) determine how long it takes for concrete to set. But sometimes and to some extent we have an open choice between more or less demanding tasks, ones for which we would have to strive harder and (more to the “settling” point) longer. Aristotle and many philosophers following him think it is good we should pursue tasks like that.8 I am here less concerned to argue the abstract moral merits of the matter and more concerned to point out the brute empirical fact that something like

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the principle that “one should pursue protracted, demanding tasks” is often internalized by real-world agents themselves, and for perfectly understandable reasons. Be the sources and justification of that impulse as they may, people often do want their life to have some narrative unity, to “make sense.” Settling on some large projects toward which they strive over a more protracted period, making some commitments that they strive to honor over a long time, answers to this deeper desire that people have for a narrative identity unifying the various temporal parts of their lives.

When to Switch between One and the Other, and Why As I have already often remarked, nothing is nor should necessarily be settled forever. Settling is just a matter of taking something to be fixed for a time—perhaps a long time, but nonetheless just for a time. So questions arise as to when you should switch between striving and settling, and in both directions. Consider first the question of how you should decide it is time to stop striving and settle down, as part and parcel of that settling for something different from (and perhaps less than) you were originally striving for. Some easy answers come readily to mind. When it has become perfectly clear that you are not going to get what you were originally striving for (although quixotic quests have their charm, too). When you discover some new facts about the project you were originally striving for that make it less appealing than it originally seemed. When something else more important comes up, and for some reason or another you cannot strive for both at once.9 When time has simply run out, either on the project you were striving to accomplish10 or on your own days on earth.11

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Notice that in none of those cases (except perhaps the very last) do any of those considerations argue for an end to striving altogether. They merely recommend that you switch what you strive for: that you accept (for now) something less than you were originally striving for in that dimension, and turn your striving elsewhere. Those considerations, in other words, merely recommend that you settle in the one dimension in order to strive in some other different dimension.12 More interesting perhaps—and certainly more central to the concerns of this book—is the opposite question of when you should go back and reconsider something you had previously taken as settled. As I have said, settling should be for a reasonably protracted period, but it is not necessarily forever. How can you know it is time to reopen a matter you have, until now, treated as settled? Again, some easy answers come readily to mind. Obviously, once something you have been striving for has been completely and stably accomplished, it is time to go back to the things your previous settlings had put on hold and ask, “What’s next?” Equally obviously, when some big changes have suddenly occurred in your own life or in your surrounding environment, it is time to check whether things that you had previously taken as settled still should be so regarded. When you have won the lottery, it is time to reconsider your previously settled view that you simply cannot afford a new house. When you have lost your shirt in a stock market crash, it is time to reconsider your previously settled view that you can. When major new options or opportunities arise, more generally, it is time to reconsider what you were previously treating as settled. Such sea changes in one’s own life or surrounding environment are relatively rare, however.13 Most of life is characterized by smooth functions, not sharp corners. Things get a little bit better, or a little bit worse, with each passing day. You get a little

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closer to achieving what you have been striving toward; you win small prizes, from time to time, rather than the lottery’s jackpot; you lose some, but not a lot, on the stock market. When we are dealing with smooth functions with no real inflection points like that, there is no such easy answer to the question of at what point you should reconsider what you have heretofore been taking as settled. There is no one shining moment that stands out from the rest. There is no more reason to reconsider at this particular point any more than there is at any of a great many other points that are equally eligible. Still, of course, small changes cumulate. In situations of merely incremental change, there is no particular reason to reconsider today rather than tomorrow: things are really pretty much the same both days. But as we extend our view across longer spans of time, things might look much more different from one year or one decade to the next. So some mechanisms for forcing occasional reconsideration are required. It will always be slightly arbitrary which moment is picked out, if one really is much like any other. But if there is any strong reason to think that changes cumulate rather than canceling one another out over time, it is not at all arbitrary to adopt those mechanisms forcing occasional reconsideration at arbitrary moments. New Year’s reflections and resolutions work like that. So do “big birthdays.” In one way, both are exercises in slightly silly numerology: after all, you are only one day older than you were yesterday; nothing much has really changed. Still, however arbitrary, such temporal markers provide a useful occasion to take stock and, looking back over the longer period defined by them, reconsider whether it is still a good idea to strive for what you have been striving for and to settle for and on what you have been settling for and on. Let me end this discussion on a slightly more formal note. Taking some proposition as settled flies in the face of Bayesian

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rationality, which enjoins us constantly to update our beliefs in light of credible new information as it comes to hand. And, although Bayesianism formally operates within the realm of beliefs alone, an analogous thought might appeal for analogous reasons in the realm of values. There, too, there would seem to be good reason to update systematically our views about our standards of right and wrong, good and bad, in light of such credible new information (or argumentation, more likely, in the case of values) that comes to hand. But that sort of constant updating would seem to be the very opposite to taking something as settled. The uncomfortable implication thus seems to be that there must be something irrational about settling. One way to wiggle out of that would be to deny that Bayesianism offers the right model of rationality. But that does not seem very promising. There seems something deeply right in saying that rationality requires you to take account of new information, at least so long as it is both credible and pertinent. Another rather more promising way to wiggle out of that uncomfortable implication would be to say that Bayesian rationality merely says that (and mathematically how) we should update, not necessarily when or how often we should do so. It would be wrong to ignore credible, relevant new information altogether, to be sure. But perhaps there is no need to update in response to it absolutely immediately. Perhaps it would be consistent with the spirit of Bayesianism to let various bits of new information accumulate and then update in response to them all, all at once. And that is just what we do when we occasionally go back and reconsider what we had previously taken to be settled. That would be fine from a Bayesian perspective, just so long as we do not have to act on the basis of our (outdated, nonupdated) beliefs before we get around to doing the next updating. If we do, and if the new information would have led us to do something

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different, then our actions would be irrational to the extent of that difference from a Bayesian point of view. I think the only real solution is to bite the Bayesian bullet here, and agree that settling is indeed rather irrational in that respect. In truth, that is no great additional concession, however: it is to concede no more than has already been conceded, in saying that we settle on some things that we know to be suboptimal, in order better to pursue some others things. There are good reasons for being irrational in this way, as I have already elaborated. Settling in some dimensions allows you to strive all the more effectively in others (and there are some things on which settling is required to enable you to strive at all). If those benefits come at the epistemic cost of a little violation of Bayesian rationality, so be it. If it is any consolation, the practice of settling does provide occasional (albeit from a Bayesian perspective too occasional) opportunities for updating. As I have said, periodic reconsideration and potential resettlings are definitely part of that “settling” picture. And in so doing, there is no reason that people should not (and every reason that they should) take due account of all information that has emerged since the last time they considered the matter. The worry is not that settling precludes updating altogether, merely that it prevents that from occurring in a timely manner. Here is one way to assuage those fears. We could (and should, and I think probably typically do) keep a “running tally” in the back of our minds of anomalies—that is, occasions upon which our settled practices have led us to do, think, or say something that does not seem quite right. They sit at the back of our minds as mere niggles. No single one of those anomalies should worry us unduly. Any philosopher is going to have to bite the occasional bullet, whatever theory he adopts. Any scientist is going to observe the occasional deviant result in the laboratory from time to

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time. But once the running list of anomalies has grown too large, those niggles turn into real worries, and it is time to go back and rethink things afresh. Keeping a “running tally” of anomalies, in that way is, I submit, the sort of half-baked Bayesianism that most of us practice all the time. Its virtue from a “settling” point of view is just this: it permits a person both to be settled in a practice for a time, yet also to keep a watchful eye on when it is time to reconsider the matter and perhaps come to a new settlement.

Conclusions

We need, then, a judicious mixture of settling and striving in our lives. We strive because of what sorts of agents we are and want to be: purposeful agents with temporally extended projects, identities, and commitments that we want to cohere well enough both simultaneously and over time to form a tolerably coherent whole. We settle on those things and stick to them over protracted periods for that reason. And we settle for less than might be ideal in other dimensions of our lives in order that we might do that more effectively. The “striving” side of life is where the action is, literally and metaphorically. Hence, it naturally attracts the more attention. The “settling” side of life seems still and boring by comparison. But as I hope to have shown, the settling side is an indispensable complement to that striving side. Some elements of it amount to bowing to unfortunate necessities; other elements can be boasted as proud accomplishments. Either way, settling is an indispensable part of human life and of social order.

Notes

Introduction 1. Hobbes 1651/1946, ch. 11, p. 64. 2. Danton 1792. 3. Goethe 1808/1965, Part I, act 4, 1692–1702. In Marlowe’s (1604) earlier version, there is no such provision: there, the deal was for a straight twenty-four years. 4. Goethe 1832/1965, Part II, act 5, 11936–37. 5. Tennyson 1844. 6. Rosa and Scheuerman 2009. 7. “Nor can a man any more live,” Hobbes (1651/1946, ch. 11, p. 63) wrote, “whose desires are at an end, than he, whose senses and imaginations are at a stand.” 8. The passage from Hobbes quoted immediately above continues, “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.” A similar thought underlies Plato’s description, in Gorgias (n.d., 493a, e), of hedonistic desire as a “leaky jar” that “can never be filled”: a person “is ever compelled to spend day and night in replenishing them, if he is not to suffer the greatest agony.” 9. Scitovsky 1976. See, similarly, Lane 1991; Offer 2006. 10. An analogy: the practice of contracting is good, although any given contract might be unconscionable; the practice of the rule of law is good, although any given law might be bad.

Chapter One

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Modes of Settling

1. In English, anyway. Speakers of Spanish and Swedish tell me it would not be possible to perform an analogous exercise in those languages, where very different terms are employed to describe these practices. But as

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I say, the practices are what ultimately interest me, not the words. It is the practices that I shall be concerned to normatively defend in the rest of the book, and if that defense extends to a variety of practices picked up under different labels in different places, no matter. 2. The list below is a mere subset of Oxford English Dictionary definitions, I hasten to add, selected as being of the most social interest and the most contemporary relevance. But across a range of other senses, this element of “fixity” remains central. Consider, for example dust, formerly “up in the air,” settling (coming to rest) on the mantle. 3. Finch 1930; Jully 1954; Werner 1998. Civil wars, unlike wars between states, rarely end in negotiated settlements. “The key difference between interstate and civil war negotiations is that adversaries in a civil war cannot retain separate, independent armed forces if they agree to settle their differences. . . . [G]roups fighting civil wars avoid negotiated settlements because they understand that this would require them to relinquish important fall-back defenses at a time when no neutral police force  .  .  . exist[s] to help them enforce the peace” (Walter 1997, p. 337). 4. As did the Settlement of 1688 settle the Crown of England on William and Mary (Mansfield 1964; Roberts 1977). 5. Falling somewhere between “mere intentions” and “firm commitments” (Calhoun 2009). 6. Addams 1899, 1919; Blank 1998. 7. Denoon 1983; Fairburn 1989; Lincoln 1995; Pateman 2007. 8. Strictly speaking, the legal definition of “settled” colonies (as opposed to “conquered” ones) is that they are ones planted on lands that were (or were in effect) uninhabited—terra nullius. See Pateman 2007 for an analysis of how that fiction unfolded in both North America and Australia. 9. Quoted in Sinclair 2000, pp. 46–47. 10. Johnson 1785. For Hobbes (1651, ch. 24), “Colonies . . . are numbers of men sent out from the Common-wealth . . . to inhabit a Forraign Country, either formerly voyd of Inhabitants, or made voyd then, by warre.” Blackstone (1765, bk. 2, ch. 1, p. 7) took a dimmer view of the latter: “[S]ending colonies to find out new habitations . . . so long as it was confined to the flocking cultivation of desert uninhabited countries, . . . kept

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strictly within the limits of the law of nature. . . . [T]he seising on countries already peopled, and driving out or massacring the innocent and defenceless natives, merely because they differed from their invaders in language, in religion, in customs, in government, or in colour,” in Blackstone’s view, did not. 11. Both quoted in Lewis 1841, pp. 171–72. 12. Seeley 1883/1914, Lecture II, p. 49. This is of course a tendentious description of the Scots and Irish who settled the United States and Australia, and it elides how they had themselves been driven from their own lands by Highland Clearances and waves of English conquest. 13. Blackstone 1765, vol. 1, sec. 4, pp. 104–5. 14. Vattel 1758, bk. 1, ch. 18, sec. 210. 15. Mill 1861/1975, ch. 18, p. 402. 16. Bell 2005, p. 539. 17. Pateman 2007, pp. 38, 69. 18. Pateman 2007, p. 69. 19. Although it certainly did that, too, granting Raleigh “free libertie . . . to discover, search, finde out, and view such remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries, and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince, nor inhabited by Christian People” (Elizabeth I 1584). 20. Elizabeth I 1584. 21. Henry IV 1603. 22. Grotius 1608/1916, ch. 2, p. 55. 23. Leeson 2009, p. 7. 24. US Homestead Act of 1862, sec. 5. 25. Macintyre 1985, ch. 2. 26. Nairne 1710/1969, pp. 62–63. 27. US Pre- emption Act of 1841, sec. 10; this law applied only to the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Michigan. Although this act was not repealed until 1891, it was largely supplanted for bona fide settlers by the Homestead Act of 1862. The Homestead Act did not extinguish claims made under the Pre-emption Act, but claims under the Homestead Act differed in that individuals had to register them prior to settling on the land. 28. Thomas 2011.

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29. Marchant 1942, p. 493. 30. Mexico 1823, art. 23; 1828, paras. 11, 12. The legislature of Coahuila-Texas set a more generous deadline, stipulating: “It shall be understood that the new settlers who shall not, within six years of the date of their possession, have cultivated or occupied . . . the lands that shall be granted them, have renounced the same, and the respectively political authority shall immediately proceed to take back from them the lands and titles” (Coahuila-Texas 1825, sec. 27). 31. Billington 1956, p. 8. 32. North and Thomas 1977, p. 229. 33. Rousseau 1755/1973, pt. 2, pp. 81–82. For a modern statement, replete with references to the scientific literature, see Sterelny 2012. 34. Seabright 2010, pp. 265, 105. 35. Blackstone 1765, bk. 2, ch. 1, p. 7. 36. Seabright 2010, p. 266. 37. Cf. Adam Ferguson’s (1768, p. 33) observation: “The [tribal] nations of North America, who have no herds to preserve, nor settlements to defend, are yet engaged in almost perpetual wars, for which they can assign no reason, but the point of honour, and a desire to continue the struggle their fathers maintained.” 38. Olson 1993, p. 568. 39. UK 1601. For historical context see Berman 2003, pp. 362–69. 40. Taylor 1976, p. 42 (although under some old rules, sleeping as few as three nights in a household makes a guest a member of that household and renders the head of that household duty bound to provide for the new member). 41. Berman 2003, p. 508 n. 58. Locke’s (1697/1993, pp. 448–49) suggested scheme was more draconian: “all men sound of limb and mind, above fourteen and under fifty years of age, begging in maritime counties out of their own parish without a pass, shall be seized . . . , sent to the next sea-port town, there to be kept at hard labour till some of his Majesty’s ships coming in . . . give an opportunity of putting them on board, where they shall serve three years under strict discipline, at sailor’s pay.” 42. Webb and Webb 1927, p. 396. 43. Wilde 1830.

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44. Vattel 1758, bk. 1, ch. 18, sec. 209. Wandering natives would have at most what Blackstone (1765, bk. 2, ch. 1, pp. 3–4) calls a right of “transient property, that lasted so long as he was using it, and no longer  .  .  . [W]hoever was in the occupation of any determinate spot . . . , for rest, for shade, or the like, acquired for the time a sort of ownership, from which it would have been unjust, and contrary to the law of nature, to have driven him by force; but the instant that he quitted the use or occupation of it, another might seize it without injustice.” A couple centuries earlier, Sir Thomas More (1516/1965, pp. 79–80) wrote similarly in Utopia that war would be “perfectly justifiable, when one country denied another its natural right to derive nourishment from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves . . . [b]ut are merely holding on to as a worthless piece of property.” 45. Bonfield 1988. 46. Massoglia and Uggen 2010. 47. Typically, but not invariably. Much migration is and is intended to be “temporary.” In those cases migrants “settle down” but do not “settle in”— creating all sorts of problems for the theory and practice of inclusivist egalitarian democracy (Carens 2008; Ottonelli and Toresi 2012). 48. Calhoun 2009, pp. 639–40. 49. Weil 1949/1952, p. 41. The passage continues, “A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surrounding. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a part.” 50. UN 1948, art. 13, sec. 2. Article 15, sec. 1 proclaims connectedly, “Everyone has the right to a nationality.” 51. Al-Khasawneh 1997, paras. 12, 64. 52. UN 1949, art. 49. 53. Wakefield 1829, pp. 58–59. 54. Wakefield 1829, p. 11.

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55. To at least some minimal degree: a degree that exclusionary citizenship tests exaggerate, often badly. 56. Blank 1998. 57. Wakefield 1829, pp. 59–60. He continues, “How should they? Is it not Botany Bay? Having to deal with a population, of which far more than half the adults are criminals actually suffering punishment, they acquire the sentiments and manners of gaolers and turnkeys.” 58. Macintyre and Clark 2003; Reynolds 2006. 59. Prucha 1984; Remini 2001. 60. Chief Seattle 1855. 61. See Goodin 2000b and sources cited therein. 62. Calhoun 1825/1969, p. 283. 63. US Indian Removal Act of 1830, sec. 3. 64. Froud et al. 1997, p. 346. See, further, Goodin and Dryzek 1995; Middlemas 1990. 65. In reply to the prime minister’s apology to indigenous Australians, the opposition leader said, “There is no compensation fund for this— nor should there be. How can any sum of money replace a life deprived of knowing your family?” (Nelson 2008, p. 175). One might well ask just how this claim squares with the “pain and suffering” component of damages in tort law, of course. 66. Gibson 2010, pp. 163, 153. 67. If only to “provide the recipient [of the apology] with a reason to maintain a relationship with the wrongdoer or to allow the wrongdoer to remain in her community” (Martin 2010, p. 534). See also Gibney et al. 2008. 68. Barkan and Karn 2006, quoted in Renner 2010, p. 3. Celermajer (2009) provides a deft analysis of what all is required for it to work. 69. Cf. Govier 1999; Minow 1998. 70. Villa- Vicenco and Verwoerd 2000, p. 279; quoted in Gibson 2004, p. 69. The survey research reported by Gibson (2004, ch. 4) suggests that it largely, if inevitably incompletely, succeeded in that goal. 71. Quoted in Govier and Verwoerd 2002, p. 72. 72. Renner 2010.

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73. “Writing it down so we can forget”—take it out of active memory—in an excellent phrase Helder De Schutter tells me he heard somewhere in South Africa. 74. Fiss 1984; Genn 1987. In recent years pressure toward “settlement” has increased, and the frequency of cases going to trial correspondingly declined, in both England (Roberts 2009) and the United States (Galanter 2004). 75. In the title of Elster’s (2004) book on transitional justice. 76. As proclaimed in the full title, “An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion” (Charles II 1660). 77. Froud et al. 1997, 363; Lewis 2007. 78. A matter of which I was reminded, appropriately enough, while visiting New Jersey. Something like this is no doubt what Marx and Engels (1848/1972, p. 344) intend when writing, ominously, in the Communist Manifesto: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie.” 79. Elster 1990. 80. Fiss 1984, p. 1086, emphasis added. Democracies, characterized as systems of “bounded competition,” find this practice particularly congenial, judging from evidence on peaceful settlements of international disputes (Dixon 1994). 81. In his influential article “Against settlement,” Fiss (1984, p. 1085– 86) writes: “To be against settlement is only to suggest that when the parties settle, society gets less than what appears, and for a price it does not know it is paying.  .  .  . [S]ettlement is controlled by the litigants, and is subject to their private motivations and all the vagaries of the bargaining process.” See also Luban 1985. 82. Grotius 1625, bk. 2, ch. 24; bk. 3, chs. 12– 16. 83. Vattel 1758, bk. 4, sec. 51. 84. May 2011, ch. 1, sec. 2. 85. Keynes 1919. 86. Gregerson 2008, p. 80.

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87. In terms of the distinction introduced by Ullmann-Margalit and Morgenbesser (1977). 88. While the choice among options that are “equally good” (etc.) is itself groundless, we may of course have good grounds for preferring any option in that set to any option outside that set. That is to say, we might genuinely “choose” to select an option from within that set, while “picking” which one of them within that set it will be. 89. This is true of bargaining more generally of course (Young 1975). 90. That range might be narrowed by standards of justice or “fair distribution”: it is not necessarily the case that every point on the Paretian frontier is as good as every other. Insofar as our standards of justice or fair distribution are indeterminate—narrowing the range of choice but leaving some options unranked within it—there will still be scope for genuine picking-style settling on. 91. If only to put our joint affairs—e.g., a war we are waging against one another—to an end, as in the case of a peace settlement. 92. For example, one of the most famous settlers of the American frontier, Daniel Boone, started out in Virginia, moved to North Carolina, thence to Kentucky (moving around Kentucky several times, and back to North Carolina once), and ended his days in what is now Missouri.

Chapter Two

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The Value of Settling

1. If something is good, then the secure enjoyment of it is good—not as some separate value that attaches to “security,” but rather as part and parcel of the enjoyment of that good itself being good (Goodin 2003). 2. Kant (1795) criticized peace treaties of his day on precisely that score, for often instantiating something more like a modus vivendi than conditions for “perpetual peace.” 3. If you doubt the importance of that distinction, just talk to anyone who has spent time manning the military outposts on the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, still officially at war after all these years. 4. Goodin 1995, ch. 10. 5. Both quoted in Combs 2007, pp. 142, 159.

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6. I am grateful to Peter Singer for sending me to see the film of this title after I presented this paper in Princeton, saying I had my finger on the popular pulse. 7. Hobbes 1651/1946, ch. 6, p. 37. 8. Frankfurt 1988, p. 170. 9. Giddens 1991, pp. 36–37. 10. See, e.g., Giddens (1991, pp. 36–37), glossing Giddens (1984, ch. 2), glossing Goffman in turn. 11. Which is of course to say you settle on some things in order to strive more effectively after others—a theme to which I shall return below. 12. More generally, economists advocate the “set-inclusion principle,” according to which “adding new opportunities cannot worsen the choice”: “if one opportunity set is a subset of another, the latter must be at least as good” (Arrow 1995, p. 7). Arrow supposes that principle is “universally accepted among philosophers and ethicists,” although Dworkin (1982/1988) famously gives grounds for doubting it. 13. Simon 1985, p. 302. 14. Kahneman and Tversky (1979) report experimental evidence that people are sensitive in fine-grained ways only to changes right around where they currently are. They propose “prospect theory” to explain that phenomenon. But I suspect something simpler, akin to “settling,” may be what is driving those results. Assuming I still retain my house, I know how much it would change my life if I get a new teapot or not. But if I were to become homeless, or win the National Lottery, I just don’t know what life would be like. I suppose it would be indescribably bad, or indescribably good, but I cannot sensibly make adjustments—can’t sensibly decide whether to buy a new teapot or not—if all that is up in the air. 15. Owing to Simon 1957, pp. 241– 60; see, similarly, Calhoun 2009, p. 622. Simon himself, I should say, always insisted it was more than just that—but that is the best sense I can make of it (Goodin 1999). 16. I shall say more about the interrelationship between settling and principles below. 17. Ferrero (2010, p. 21) observes this fact and says, in effect, “so much the worse for settling”: what he calls “diachronic autonomy” is better served, he thinks, if “the agent exercises her rational governance at both

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times,” both when making the earlier decision and when later accepting it in some particular instance. Maybe so. But if an agent had to reconsider each case on its merits in this way, the other advantages of not only settling but even satisficing would be lost. 18. Calhoun (2009, pp. 619, 625) makes the same point in marking the distinction between “mere intentions” and “commitments,” which necessarily involve “an attitude of resistance to redeliberation.” 19. Korsgaard 1989, p. 117 n. 27. 20. Bratman 2000, p. 40; see similarly Bratman 2007, 206ff., 274ff., 283ff., 288ff. 21. “For me to form an intention is for me to enter an appropriate action-description into my plans. My plans specify various courses of action about which the question of whether so to act is seen as settled. This is typically (but not always) because I have settled it myself by forming the relevant intention” (Bratman 1981, p. 259). 22. Bratman 2007, p. 287. 23. Calhoun 2009. 24. Bratman 2007, p. 289. 25. Bratman 2007, pp. 290–91. Holton (1999, p. 241) similarly observes that “if intentions are to fulfill their function, they need to be relatively resistant to reconsideration,” and he proceeds to analyze weakness of will in those terms: “weak- willed people are irresolute; they do not persist in their intentions; they are too easily deflected from the path that they have chosen.” 26. Sen 1977. One might of course argue that those are themselves reducible to beliefs and desires. Be that as it may, they are nonetheless highly distinctive kinds of beliefs or desires or combinations of the two. 27. Frankfurt 1988, ch. 7. 28. Williams 1973, 1981. 29. Williams 1985. Frankfurt (1988, pp. 86–87) analyzes Martin Luther’s declaration, “Here I stand, I can do no other” as a “volitional necessity” of a similar sort. See likewise Sen’s (1977, p. 329) discussion of the character in Shaw’s Devil’s Disciple who, explaining to a woman why he is allowing himself to be hanged in the place of her husband, says, “[W]hen it

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came to the point whether I would take my neck out of the noose and put another man’s into it, I could not do it.” 30. Smith (2010) provides a masterly synthesis of a raft of philosophical and psychological writings on narrative identity. 31. Smith 2010, p. 18. 32. Smith 2010, pp. 13, 14 33. Smith 2010, p. 14. 34. Schelling 2006. 35. Williams 1981, p. 5; see also Williams 1973, 108– 17 36. “A life . . . [can] have narrative unity, and the temporal parts . . . be well integrated, quite apart from that life being guided by one or more long-term commitments,” Calhoun (2009, p. 628) insists. Korsgaard (1989, p. 123) concurs: “Authorial psychological connectedness is consistent with drastic changes, provided those changes are the result of actions by the person herself or reactions for which she is responsible.” 37. Williams 1981, p. 18. 38. Korsgaard 1989, p. 113. As Frankfurt (1988, p. 84) says, “the notion of caring implies a certain consistency or steadiness of behavior; and this presupposes some degree of persistence” that is not conceptually required of mere desires or beliefs. 39. Even a commitment “to do it my way”—to be in control of the constant chopping and changing that Calhoun and Korsgaard describe a few notes back—is a commitment of sorts to that as a goal. 40. Williamson 1983; North and Weingast 1989; Weingast 1997. 41. Recall Schelling’s (1960, p. 43) remarks on the value of the “right” to be sued: “Who wants to be sued! But the right to be sued is the power to make a promise: to borrow money, to enter a contract, to do business with someone who might be damaged. If suit does arise, the ‘right’ seems a liability in retrospect; beforehand it was a prerequisite to doing business. In brief, the right to be sued is the power to accept a commitment.” 42. Schelling 1960, ch. 2; Hardin 1982; Nozick 1991. 43. Representatives might cast their votes in Congress the way their constituents wish, for example, either because those are the wishes of their constituents (who will not reelect them if they do not do as constituents

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wish) or because that is the way the representative wanted to vote himself, anyway (Miller and Stokes 1963; Mansbridge 2009). 44. Goodin 2000a. Parry (1976) discusses this as a distinction between the “political culture” and “constitutional” approaches to political trust. 45. Gurry 1984. 46. Hare 1967; Searle 1969. 47. Karlan et al. 2009; Bernstein 1992. A formal model of the process is found in Karlan et al. (2009). 48. Schelling (1984) discusses “confidence-building” measures during the Cold War, but as his opening pages make clear, it is a problem that has been well-known at least as far back as Xenophon. The problem is as Cornford (1908, ch. 6) nicely puts it: “It is quite a mistake to suppose that real dishonesty is at all common. The number of rogues is about equal to the number of men who act honestly; and it is very small. The great majority would sooner behave honestly than not. The reason why they do not . . . is that they are afraid that others will not; and the others do not because they are afraid that they will not. Thus it comes about that, while behaviour which looks dishonest is fairly common, sincere dishonesty is about as rare as the courage to evoke good faith in your neighbours by showing that you trust them.” 49. Goodin 1984. 50. Rothstein 2005, ch. 7. 51. Philosophers as well as lexicographers conflate the two (e.g., Rotenstreich 1972). So do political scientists (e.g., Lipset and Schneider 1983; Miller and Listhaug 1990). 52. Similarly, parliamentary procedure permits a prime minister to declare a vote on any given bill a “motion of confidence”—or not. The parliament’s confidence in the government does not have to be 100 percent, in the sense that it does not have to vote with him on each and every occasion in order for him to remain in office—merely when formal motions of confidence have been tabled (Huber 1996). 53. In “The fixation of belief,” Charles Peirce (as glossed by Hookway 1993, p. 2) says something similar. In practical affairs where vitally important interests are at stake (which he sharply distinguishes from purely theoretical, speculative, or scientific matters), “full belief ” is required for us to

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act. That he characterizes “as a settled state” such that, “so long as we are confident of a currently accepted belief, we see no need to doubt it or to inquire further into the grounds of its truth.” We are thus liberated to act as required. “Doubt,” in contrast, “is an unsettled state prompting inquiry directed at its elimination.” While such inquiries are under way, action on our vital practical affairs will typically be largely suspended. 54. Rudd 2008. 55. Rudd 2008, p. 173. See, further, Celermajer 2009. 56. Whitcomb et al. 1838. For background see Brosnan 1933. 57. Hart (1958, p. 607) points to the need for “a core of settled meanings . . . if we are to communicate with each other at all and if, as in the most elementary form of law, we are to express our intentions that a certain type of behavior be regulated by rules.” On the “rule by rules” more generally, see Raz 1977, 1994; Goodin 2010. 58. Teitel 2000, p. 11, emphasis added. 59. Hayek 1944, p. 54. 60. Raz 1977, p. 203. Hodgson (1967, pp. 103–4) writes similarly, “[H]ere needs to be a large area in which the law is settled . . . in order to achieve a satisfactory degree of predictability . . . [to] arrange one’s life so as to be certain of freedom from interference by the law and (with the help of a lawyer) . . . [to] carry out transactions with certainty of achieving desired legal results.” 61. Waldron (2011, p. 19) in particular draws attention to “the procedural side of the Rule of Law [that] requires that public institutions sponsor and facilitate reasoned argument in human affairs,” noting that such “argument can be unsettling, and the procedures that we cherish often have the effect of undermining the certainty and predictability that are emphasized in the formal side of the ideal” of the rule of law. 62. Postema (2004; 2010, p. 276) discusses how “continuity over time is essential to the normative guidance distinctively provided by law.” 63. Teitel 2000, esp. ch. 7. 64. Hart and Sacks 1958, p. 6: “The principle [of institutional settlement] builds upon the basic and inescapable facts of social living  .  .  . : namely, the fact that human societies are made up of human beings striving to satisfy their respective wants under conditions of interdependence

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and the fact that this common enterprise inevitably generates questions of common concern which have to be settled, one way or another, if the enterprise is to maintain itself and to continue to serve the purposes which it exists to serve. To leave decisions of these questions to the play of raw force would defeat these purposes. The alternative to disintegrating resort to violence is the establishment of regularized and peaceable methods of decision. The principle of institutional settlement expresses the judgment that decisions which are the duly arrived at result of established procedures of this kind ought to be accepted as binding upon the whole community unless and until they are duly changed.” 65. North and Weingast 1989. Barbera and Jackson (2004) formally prove that constitutions stipulating the same voting rule for ordinary business and for amending the constitution are not generally “self-stable,” i.e., people would generally vote to change the constitution. 66. Locke 1669/1983, art. 120, p. 232. 67. This conceit was quite common in Locke’s time, however. The UK Bill of Rights of 1689 contained the provision, “All which their Majesties are contented and pleased shall be declared enacted and established by authority of this present Parliament and shall stand, remain and be the law of this realm for ever”; and certain provisions in the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland were declared to apply perpetually “in all time coming” (Lock 1989, pp. 555–56). 68. Aoki, Patrick, and Sheard 1994; Sheard 1989. Cf. Miwa and Ramseyer 2005. 69. Hall and Soskice 2001, pp. 16, 22; Hall and Gingerich 2009. 70. Hall and Soskice 2001, pp. 7, 17, 25; Hall and Gingerich 2009. 71. Elster 1979, ch. 2.

Chapter 3

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What Settling Is Not

1. At least all compromises aim at settlements. Compromise as you may, sometimes the other party will simply not agree. And even once you have agreed on some compromise, no settlement lasts forever. At most, things will (you hope) be settled for a time, as with the Missouri Compromise of 1820 over slavery.

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2. As Bellamy and Hollis (1998, p. 64) put it, “Compromisers must endorse a package many of the components of which they would reject if taken in isolation. Though they consider the agreement as the most acceptable to all concerned, each retains his or her own view of what is best.” See, similarly, Day 1989, p. 476; Thompson and Gutmann 2010. 3. Kuflik 1979; Luban 1985, pp. 414– 16. 4. In some classes of compromise, at least. In others, the compromise substitutes something else entirely for what the parties were initially seeking (Lepora 2012). 5. Lepora 2012. This, I think, is a better way of cashing out the difference between “bargain” and “compromise” than Day’s (1989, p. 476). The latter is wrong to model “exchange” as a case in which each gains something and neither loses anything: in an exchange you can, and typically do, relinquish something of (some) value to you in exchange for something that is more valuable to you. It is not that in bargaining you sacrifice nothing whatsoever; rather, it is that you sacrifice nothing of principled concern to you that truly differentiates a bargain or an exchange from a compromise. 6. Lepora 2012. 7. Similarly, when you are “settling your account” in a restaurant, the account is not genuinely “settled” until you have paid in full: there is no compromise on the part of the restaurant-owner in the course of that settling. Although in principle you should not have to settle for less than payment in full, pragmatically it may sometimes be the case that you simply must do so: that is the case with bankrupts unable to discharge their debts in full, for example, and by extension with moral bankrupts who simply stubbornly refuse to let displaced peoples return to the lands from which they have been wrongfully ejected. 8. Lepora 2012. 9. Bellamy and Hollis 1978; Goodheart 2001; Sunstein 2009. 10. Some in a more principled way than others: this is Sunstein’s (2009) distinction between two types of trimmers, more principled “preservers” as distinct from mere “compromisers.” 11. As Robert Kennedy recalls in his foreword to John Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage (quoted in Sunstein 2009, fn. 81). What Kennedy says of Dante is literally correct but substantively misleading. Remember, Dante’s

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Inferno gets colder the further down you go. Hence Dante’s own ranking of moral turpitude is actually opposite to that which Kennedy ascribes to him: Dante consigns opportunistic trimmers to limbo, at the entrance to hell, rather than the bowels of hell (Dante 1332, Canto III). 12. At least they do so insofar as they pursue anything at all—and if they do not, they will be violating my precept, “Settle in some matters in order to strive in others,” announced at the beginning and further discussed toward the end of this book. 13. Goodheart 2001, p. 58. 14. O’Hear 1998, quoted in Brennan and Hamlin 2004, p. 676. As Oakeshott (1962/1991, p. 408) points out, however, it makes no sense from the conservative point of view to preserve the present state of affairs, “if the present [itself ] is remarkably unsettled.” 15. Brennan and Hamlin 2004. In Cornford’s (1908, ch. 7) delightful phrase, it is an argument that “nothing should ever be done for the first time.” 16. Quinton 1993. For the psychological evidence, see Bostrom and Ord 2006 and sources cited therein. 17. This is, for example, Cohen’s (2011) formulation of conservation, although it is important to add that he would limit this to the preservation of presently existing particular things only if they actually embody some positive value in their own right. 18. As Cornford (1908, ch. 7) says, “doing nothing has just as many consequences as doing something.” 19. Quinton 1993, pp. 247, 253–57. See Oakeshott 1947, in particular, on the last point. 20. Quoted in Hirschman 1991, p. 160. 21. Hirschman 1991. 22. Reported in Adams 2010, p. 34. Similarly, Karen Jones—assigned to serve as the official commentator when I presented this material in Melbourne—urged me to “maintain the rage!” (the campaign slogan of Geoff Whitlam’s 1975 campaign to be reelected Australian prime minister after having been dismissed by the governor general: Whitlam lost). 23. Greer 1970, p. 240. 24. Hobbes 1651, bk. 1, ch. 6.

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25. And perhaps, relatedly, to cases where you did not know for sure either way whether the outcome was genuinely avoidable, and you should have at least tried to alter it rather than resigning yourself prematurely to it. 26. And perhaps on whether it was genuinely (or was nonculpably thought to be) necessary to forsake that in order to pursue this. 27. Which is how settling differs from a modus vivendi, as discussed above.

Chapter 4

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Settling in Aid of Striving

1. This fact explains why the value of settling is not purely derivative from the value of striving. It is that too, of course: settling is an aid in striving. But as this point makes clear, settling is also constitutive of what we strive for. 2. Hobbes 1651, ch. 11, p. 63. Remember, too, Faust’s bargain: as soon as he says to a moment, “Linger on! You are so fair!” Faust agrees to “[l]et that day be the last for me” (Goethe 1808/1965, Part I, act 4, 1692–1702). Contrast that, however, with the stylized fairy-tale ending, “And they lived happily ever after.” 3. Scorsese and Pileggi 1990. I am indebted to Jeremy Waldron for reminding me of this reference. 4. The son might still have a comeback: “The life of a Don Juan is what I have settled upon: that is my narrative identity.” But the comeback works, notice, only insofar as that is counted as a commitment, not just “I’ll be a Don Juan tonight” one night at a time; there can be no narrative identity in that. 5. Although that did not prevent Victorian ladies from hiring “companions” to accompany them on their grand tours of Europe. My point is merely that scare quotes are indeed apposite, there. 6. Cf. Beveridge 1907 and Simon 1951. It is equally true—and equally important—in all these cases that the settling is only “for a time,” that the commitment can be revoked after some suitable period. Enlisting for a stint in the army or contracting for a year on the oil rig is importantly different from selling oneself into perpetual servitude.

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7. Although sometimes surprisingly little: the Empire State Building was completed in just 410 days. Thanks (of sorts) to the dilatory builders who took eighteen months to retrofit an elevator into our former stairwell for inducing my corridor colleague Al Hájek to dig out this fact. 8. See, for example, Rawls’s (1971, sec. 65) gloss on the “Aristotelian principle.” 9. Or perhaps merely where striving for both will seriously hamper your pursuit of the one that is more important. 10. As when time limits that state legislatures had put on the validity of their ratifications of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment began running out (Mansbridge 1986). 11. Some youngsters with whom I have discussed these materials have said to me, “This is an old man’s book!” Doubtless there is some truth in that observation. 12. Or better to strive in some old dimension in which you had previously been striving alongside the dimension you are now to treat as settled. 13. Or at least we would much prefer it to be the case that they are. The whole point of Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan is to make it so. The same is true of a vast array of less draconian solutions.

References

Adams, Tim. 2010. Troubadour for a century of song. Guardian Weekly, October 29, pp. 34–35. Addams, Jane. 1899. A function of the social settlement. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 13: 33–55. ———.1919. Twe nty Years at Hull-House. New York: Macmillan. Al-Khasawneh, Awn Shawkat. 1997. Freedom of Movement: Human Rights and Population Transfer. Final report of the Special Rapporteur. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23. New York: UN Economic & Social Council. Available at www.unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/(Symbol)/E .CN.4.Sub.2.1997.23.En?Opendocument. Aoki, Masahiko, Hugh Patrick, and Paul Sheard. 1994. The Japanese main bank system: an introductory overview. Pp. 1–50 in The Japanese Main Bank System: Its Relevance for Developing and Transforming Economies, ed. Aoki and Patrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arrow, Kenneth J. 1995. A note on freedom and flexibility. Pp. 7–16 in Choice, Welfare and Development, ed. K. Basu, P. Pattanaik, and K. Suzumura. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barbera, Salvador, and Matthew O. Jackson. 2004. Choosing how to choose: self-stable majority rules and constitutions. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 119: 1011–48. Barkan, Elazar, and Alexander Karn. 2006. Group apology as an ethical imperative. Pp. 3–32 in Taking Wrongs Seriously: Apologies and Reconciliation, ed. Barkan and Karn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bell, Duncan S. A. 2005. Dissolving distance: technology, space and empire in British political thought, 1770–1900. Journal of Modern History, 77: 523–62. Bellamy, Richard, and Martin Hollis. 1998. Compromise, consensus and neutrality. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 1: 54–78.

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Index

Acadia, 10 accommodation, 3, 17, 19, 53, 61 affairs, settling of before death, 27 agents/agency: and commitment, 35– 36; continuity of, 39; and fixity, 30; and intention, 36; and plans/planning, 32, 35– 36, 37; and temporal extension, 30, 35, 36, 37, 74 agriculture, development of settled, 13, 14 Allies, World War I, 26 American Indians, 16, 20, 21, 24, 78n37, 79n44. See also indigenous peoples anomalies, 72–73 apology, 23, 45, 80n65, 80n67. See also settling up Argentina, “dirty war” in, 32 Aristotle, 67 Arrow, Kenneth J., 83n12 Australia: land rights in, 22; as settler society, 7; squatters in, 12; as terra nullius, 20; Wakefield on, 18, 77n12 Australians, indigenous, 20, 22, 45, 80n65 bandits, 15, 19 bankruptcy, 89n7 bargaining power, 25 bargains, 40, 82n89, 89n5 Bayesian rationality, 70–73

Belgium, 23 beliefs, updating of, 71–73 Bentham, Jeremy, 9 Blackstone, William, Commentaries, 8, 14, 76–77n10, 79n44 blood feuds, 24 Boone, Daniel, 82n92 bracketing out, in everyday life, 33 Bratman, Michael, 36–37 Brazil, 12 Buridan’s ass, 28, 38, 54, 64 business partnerships, 66 Calhoun, Cheshire, 84n18, 85n36 Calhoun, John C., 21 Canada, 10 capitalism, 3, 48–49 caring, 37, 85n38 Carolina Colony, 12, 48 character: and commitments, 38; and trust, 41. See also identity Charles II, 24 Charter of Acadia, 10 choice: and commitment, 39, 40; and fixity, 34; grounds for, 27– 28, 82n88; between more or less demanding tasks, 67; and resignation, 61. See also decisions; options claims: competing, 24, 25, 35; settlement of, 45 closure, 24

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index

cognition, 34, 37 Cohen, G. A., 90n17 Cold War, 86n48 colonialism, 76n8, 76n10, 77n12; and Belgium, 23; and Indian Removal Act of 1830, 16; and settling down, 7–11, 12, 15. See also displacement, of peoples; immigrants/immigration; settling down commitments, 3, 49, 61, 85n39, 91n4; in conservatism, 57; as fixed points, 40; and fixity, 30, 38, 41; formally binding, 42; and intentions, 36, 84n18; on interpersonal level, 40– 42; on intrapersonal level, 37– 40; and planning, 35– 36, 39; revocation of, 91n6; and right to be sued, 85n41; sticking with, 29, 35– 36, 51, 65; temporally extended, 74; and temporally extended striving, 68 compromise(s), 89n2, 89n5; as aiming at settlements, 88n1; interpersonal dimensions of, 52– 53; intrapersonal dimensions of, 53– 54; paradox of, 52; and resignation, 61; and settling for, 25; settling in contrast to, 51, 52–56. See also trimmers concessions, 52, 53 confidence, 37, 41–42, 43–44, 86n52, 86–87n53 Congo, 23 conquistadores, 15 conservation, 90n17 conservatism, 51, 57–60

constitutions, 48, 88n65 contract/contracting, 75n10, 85n41 controversy, settling of, 31 Costello, Elvis, 60 cycles, virtuous and vicious, 42 Cynics, 26 Czechoslovakia, 23 Dante, 56, 89–90n11 Danton, Georges Jacques, 1 Darwin, Charles, 7–8 Day, J. P., 89n5 death, 27, 31–32, 68–69 decision costs, 33 decisions, 6, 49; and compromise, 54; and fixity, 33– 34; in settling to strive, 64– 65; and switch between striving and settling, 68. See also Buridan’s ass; choice; options deliberation, 32–33 democracies, 81n80 desire, 1, 3 disappeared, the, 32 displacement, of peoples, 3, 17, 20–21, 22, 45, 53, 89n7. See also colonialism; migration disposition, fixed, 41 disputes, settling of, 6, 21, 31 Dworkin, Gerald, 83n12 economists, 33–34, 83n12 economy, 3, 48–50 Elizabeth I, 10, 16, 77n19 Empire State Building, 92n7 employment, 42, 43, 49, 66

in d ex Engels, Friedrich, Communist Manifesto, 81n78 England, 11. See also United Kingdom/Great Britain English Civil War, 24 Equal Rights Amendment, 92n10 fair distribution, 82n90 Faust, 1–2, 91n2 Ferguson, Adam, 78n37 Ferrero, Luca, 83–84n17 finality, 24 fixed points: and action, 44; and law, 47; for planning, 32, 33– 34, 36; success measured against, 40 fixing things for a time, 59, 61–62, 65, 68 fixity: and agency, 30; of behavior, 40, 41; centrality of, 6, 7, 30; and commitments, 38, 40, 41; and conservatism, 59; and constitutions, 48; and deliberation, 33; as impermanent, 7, 24; and planning, 30, 31, 32, 36; quest for, 3– 4; and settling down, 17. See also settling on forgiveness, 23 Frankfurt, Harry, 37, 84n29, 85n38 French Canada, 10 French Revolution, 1, 57–58 friendships, 66, 91n5 Gauguin, Paul, 40 Geneva Convention, 17 Germans, 23, 26 Germany, 48–49

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Gibson, James L., 22 goals: fixed, 40; and rule of law, 47; and settling vs. striving, 63–64 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Faust, 1–2, 63, 91n2 good, options as equally, 27, 28, 54, 82n88 good enough, 25, 26, 34–35, 51. See also optimization; satisficing Goodfellas (film), 64 goods: nature of, 66; public, 15; secure enjoyment of, 82n1; temporally extended, 66–68 government, 9, 46, 47–48. See also politics; social level advantages Greer, Germaine, 60 Gregerson, Linda, 26 grievances, reconciliation of, 45 Grotius, Hugo, 11, 25–26. See also law: international Hart, H.L.A., 87n57 Hayek, Friedrich, 47 Henry IV, 10 Hirschman, Albert, 58 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 1, 3, 8, 32–33, 60, 63, 64, 76n10, 92n13 Hodgson, D. H., 87n60 Holton, Richard, 84n25 homeland, 17 human capital, 49 human rights, 17 human species, social evolution of, 13–15 hunter-gatherers, 13, 14

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identity: continuity of, 39; narrative, 30, 37–38, 39, 85n30, 85n36, 91n4; temporally extended, 37– 38, 74 immigrants/immigration, 6, 17– 18, 19, 46. See also colonialism; migration India, British, 8 indigenous peoples, 20–24. See also American Indians; Australians, indigenous injustices, historical, 23, 45. See also justice institutions, and trust, 41–42 intentions, 51; and agency, 36; and commitments, 36, 65, 76n5, 84n18; as held fixed, 59, 62; and plans, 44, 84n21; and precommitment, 38; reconsideration of, 84n25; settled, 6– 7; and temporal extension, 66, 67 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, 31–32 interpersonal relations, 26, 44; and commitments, 40– 42; and compromise, 53; and settling on, 27, 28, 29; as temporally extended goods, 66; and value of settling, 30. See also social level advantages intrapersonal level advantages, 26, 40, 44, 54; and commitment, 37– 40; and compromise, 53– 54; fixed points for planning on, 33; and settling on, 28, 29; and value of settling, 30 investment, financial, 48–50

Jamaica, 11 Japan, 48, 49 Johnson, Samuel, 8 justice, 26, 47, 82n90. See also injustices, historical Kahneman, Daniel, 83n14 Kant, Immanuel, 82n2 Kennedy, John, Profiles in Courage, 89n11 Kennedy, Robert, 89n11 Keynes, John Maynard, 26 Korsgaard, Christine, 39, 85n36 labor, 42, 43, 49, 66 land grants, 11, 12, 13 land rights, 22–23 last will and testament, 27 Latin America, 12 law, 87n57; contract, 42; international, 17; rule of, 46– 49, 75n10, 87nn60, 61, 62. See also Grotius, Hugo; Vattel, Emer de law courts, 6, 24, 35 liberty, 32–33, 86–87n53 life, plan of, 39 life narrative, 61, 68 life partnerships, 26, 66 Locke, John, 48, 78n41 Luther, Martin, 84n29 making do, 3, 25, 26, 34–35, 51. See also satisficing market economies, 3 Marlowe, Christopher, 75n3

in d ex marriage, 16, 26, 49–50, 66 Marx, Karl, Communist Manifesto, 81n78 maximization, 34 meionexia, 26 memory, 34, 37 Mexico, 13 migration, 13, 79n47. See also displacement, of peoples; immigrants/ immigration Mill, John Stuart, 8, 9 Missouri Compromise of 1820, 88n1 modus vivendi, 31, 82n2, 91n27 Monroe, James, 21 More, Sir Thomas, Utopia, 79n44 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 82n87 Mpambani, Mxolisi, 23 Native Americans. See American Indians Neolithic Revolution, 13 New South Wales colony, 19 New Zealand, 7–8 Oakeshott, Michael, 90n14 Olson, Mancur, 15 ontological security, false sense of, 33 optimization, 33–34. See also maximization; reason/rationality; satisficing options: consideration of new, 69; equally good, 27, 28, 54, 82n88. See also choice; decisions parliamentary procedure, 86n52

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Pateman, Carole, 9 paupers, 16 peace treaties, 26 Peirce, Charles, 86–87n53 picking, 27–28, 54, 70, 82n88, 82n90. See also choice plans/planning: and agents/agency, 32, 35– 36, 37; commitment to, 35– 36, 39; fixed points for, 33– 34; and fixity, 30, 32, 36; and intentions, 84n21; and reasonable stability, 36– 37; and settled social fabric, 46– 47; as stymied by uncertainty, 31– 32; and temporal extension, 36; and trust, 41; and value of settling, 7 Plato, 3; Gorgias, 75n8 Poland, 23 political union, 46 politics, 51; and commitments, 40; and land rights, 22; and post– World War II settlement, 22; and settling down, 15; and settling in, 19; and value of settling, 40. See also government; social level advantages poor relief, parish-based, 16, 78n40 Portugal, 11, 12 precommitment, 38 promise, 1–2, 22, 41, 46, 85n41. See also commitments Quinton, Anthony, 57 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 10, 77n19 rational governance, 83–84n17 Raz, Joseph, 47

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reason/rationality: Bayesian, 70– 73; and commitment, 36, 39; and new information, 71; and plans, 36– 37; and settling on, 27, 28. See also anomalies; choice; cognition; decisions; maximization; optimization; satisficing reparations, 26. See also restitution resettlement, 22. See also displacement, of peoples resignation, 51, 60–62 resources, freeing up of, 64, 65 restitution, 22, 23, 53 right to be sued, 85n41 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 13–14 Rudd, Kevin, 45 rule of law, 46–49, 75n10, 87nn60, 61, 62 rulers, 15–16, 19 satisficing, 34–35, 37, 51, 83n15, 83–84n17 Schelling, Thomas C., 85n41 Scitovsky, Tibor, 3 Scott, Robert, 2 Seabright, Paul, 14 Seattle, Chief, 20 security, 33, 60, 82 Sen, Amartya, 84n29 set-inclusion principle, 83n12 settled domicile, 6, 7 settlement houses, 7, 19 Settlement of 1688, 76n4 settlement(s), 35; colonial, 7– 11, 12, 15; of disputes, 6; institutional, 47,

87– 88n64; renegotiation of, 24; of wars, 53 settlers: accommodation by, 19; implantation of, 17; as settling for a time, 29; as settling up with indigenous peoples, 20–24 settler societies, 7–11, 22–23 settling down, 3, 7– 16; as adjustment, 17– 19; and human social evolution, 13– 15; and settling on, 27 settling for, 3, 25– 26; and constraints of practicality vs. principle, 34– 35; as making do with what is good enough, 25, 26, 34– 35, 51; and settling on, 28, 29; and suboptimal options, 29 settling in, 3, 17–19, 22, 27 settling on, 3; and certain arrangements not as good, 29; and commitment, 29, 35– 36; and compromise, 54– 55; intrapersonal aspects of, 54; as master notion, 4, 27– 29; and object of striving, 64, 65; and picking vs. choosing, 27– 28; for a time, 29; and trimming, 56 settling scores, 24 settling up, 3, 25, 26; collective, 45; as coming to terms with, 20– 24; and compromise, 53; and conservative status quo bias, 59; and constraints of practicality vs. principle, 35; as final, 24; recasting of relationships in, 22– 24; and settling on, 27, 28, 29 Shaw, G. B., The Devil’s Disciple, 84–85n29

in d ex Simon, Herbert A., 83n15 slavery, 88n1, 91n6 social level advantages, 30, 44–50, 51. See also government; interpersonal relations; politics sociologists, 33 South Africa, 7, 22 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 23 South African Truth and Reconciliation process, 45 Spain, 9, 11, 12, 15 squatters, 11–12 Srebrenica massacre, 31–32 status quo bias, 57, 58, 59 striving, 1– 3; end of, 27; for fixed goals, 40; as imposed vs. chosen, 67; as perpetual and restless desire, 1, 63; settling as aid to and constitutive of, 91n1; settling as complement to, 4, 74; settling as counterpoint to, 4; settling as facilitating, 40; settling in aid of, 63– 73; and settling in order to strive, 59; and switch to settling, 68– 73; as temporally extended, 65; for temporally extended goods, 66–68 suboptimization, 33–34 Sunstein, Cass, 89n10 Sweden, Labor Peace Conference of 1928, 42, 43 sympathies, 37 temporal extension, 30, 35, 36, 37–38, 64, 65, 66–68, 74

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Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, “Ulysses,” 2, 63 terra nullius, 9–10, 20, 76n8 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 57–58 Trail of Tears, 20, 21 treaty, 20–21, 24, 26, 76n3, 82n2 trimmers, 55–56, 61, 89n10, 89– 90n11. See also compromise(s) trust, 37, 41–43, 58, 86n48 Tversky, Amos, 83n14 Ullmann-Margalit, Edna, 82n87 uncertainty, 27– 28; stultifying, 31– 32, 51 United Kingdom/Great Britain, 49; Act of Settlement of 1701, 6; Act of Union between England and Scotland of 1707, 88n67; Acts of Settlement, 16; Bill of Rights of 1689, 88n67; and colonialism, 7– 8, 9; Poor Law of 1601, 16, 78n40 United States, 10, 11, 12, 29, 77n12; Homestead Act of 1862, 11, 77n27; Indian Removal Act of 1830, 16, 21; indigenous peoples of, 20, 21; Pre- emption Act of 1841, 12, 77n27. See also American Indians Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 17 unsettledness, 3, 31, 43; of affairs after death, 27; and settling as intervention, 59; and settling on, 28; and settling up, 22, 25, 26, 53; as stultifying uncertainty, 31–32

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vagrants and vagabonds, 16 Vattel, Emer de, The Law of Nations, 8–9, 16, 26. See also law: international Virginia Colony, 10

Webb, Beatrice, 16

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, Letter from Sydney, 17–18, 19 wars, 6; civil, 76n3; just, 25– 26; settlements of, 31, 53, 82n2

Williams, Bernard, 37, 38, 39

Webb, Sidney, 16 Weil, Simone, 17 West Bank Occupied Territories, 12 Whitlam, Geoff, 90n22 World War I, 26 World War II, 22, 23, 24 wronged party or person, 3, 26, 53, 55