Optimism and Idealism
November 23, 2023•475 words
I read an article defending the BSD license for open-source software and it got me thinking about the relation between optimism and idealism. Basically, the BSD and GPL are copyright licenses for open-source code that differ in that BSD allows for anyone to share new programs using that code without releasing the changes, while GPL legally requires you to share the changes, i.e. if I made some modifications to Wordpress (GPL) and release it publicly, I'm legally obliged to share the changes I made.
Personally, for a while I associated optimism about human abilities with idealism and pessimism with realism. But this example shows that they aren't the same: the BSD license is optimistic about humanity in that it trusts that people will do inherently good things with their code (and thus not need to share it) while the GPL isn't, as it expects people to do bad with their code (and thus necessitate the public scrutiny of the code). But the BSD license is realistic in how businesses actually use open-source and the GPL is idealistic as it follows the ideal of all code being publicly available.
I guess this reflects more of the political science side as it seems to be about how laws promote ideals, or "virtues" to use the lingo of classic Greek philosophy (in my HUM class I've learned a bit of Socrates and Aristotle's virtue ethics, and I keep seeing these ideas come up. I'll prob make a future post about this). The question is whether having regulations promoting an ideal/virtue actually promote that virtue. In the example above, GPL is a regulation promoting open-source, but it doesn't actually promote the ideal.
To use more topical examples, the ideal of gun regulation is peace, but the question is whether gun regulations actually promote that. Or to use something from my ethics bowl case, there is a thing called the Environmental, Social, and Government index (ESGs) that basically is a measure of how "good" a company is. The tension in this case is whether ESGs are aligned with those goals. ESGs are good in the sense that they incentivize companies to do things aligned with those goals by allowing investors to put their money in "good" companies. But a possible harm in this is that ESGs are an inadequate measure since all systems seem to have loopholes (admittedly a philosophically dangerous statement—the goal of ethical systems is to align with our moral/normative judgments). These loopholes would then allow companies to falsely project themselves as "good" when they in actually aren't. A generalization of this is Goodhart's law [1]. To be less topical, an argument I've seen against the Bill of Rights is very similar: by drawing a struct line, you allow potentially bad governments to toe the line and cross it in loopholes discretely, leading to rights violations.