The Promise of Liberty

The Promise of Liberty

The Promise of Liberty A Non-Utopian Vision

Tibor R. Machan

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Machan, Tibor R. The promise of liberty : a non-utopian vision / Tibor R. Machan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3074-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3074-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3076-6 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3076-5 (electronic) 1. Liberty—Philosophy. 2. Liberty. I. Title. B105.L45M24 2008 320.01'1—dc22 2008039286 Printed in the United States of America

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Renee Machan

Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Why Moral Judgments Can Be Objective

1

1

Theorists versus Their Theories: The Case of Agent Causation

31

2

Ethics and Its Controversial Assumptions

41

3

Individualism and Human Success

63

4

Virtue, Liberty, and Private Property: Aspects of Humanist Political Economy

75

5

Economic Analysis and the Pursuit of Liberty

83

6

Human Rights and Poverty

89

7

Rights, Values, Regulation, and Health Care

99

8

The Morality of Smoking

107

9

Philosophy, Physics, and Common Sense

121

The Calculation Problem and the Tragedy of the Commons

131

10

11 Government Budget Crises

135

12

Some Reflections on the Right to Private Property

139

13

Revisiting a Critique of Libertarianism

151

14

Leo Strauss, Neo-Conservative?

179 vii

viii

Contents

15

Tocqueville and Rand, Contrasting Views of Individualism

189

16

Can and Should the Constitution Be Rescued?

201

17

The Distraction of Anarchism

213

18

“Intellectual” Stuff and the Right to Private Property

217

19

Fetal Rights: Implication of a Supposed Ought

221

20

1985 Speculation: The Fate of Soviet Colonies after the Fall

225

21

Does One Have a Right to Be Wrong?

233

22

Reflections on Democracy

241

23

Altruism (Stakeholder Theory) versus Business Ethics

255

24

Yes, Individualists Should Respect Others’ Rights

265

Postscript: Ethics, East and West

273

Appendix: Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso

283

Index

289

About the Author

297

Preface

Although most of my writing appears in publications aimed at academics and scholars, this is not the case with columns I write. Indeed, I have long had the notion that if an idea has merit it should see the light in five forms: letter to the editor, op-ed column, essay, scholarly paper, and book. The present volume contains mostly works that have appeared mainly as essays or scholarly papers but also includes several original, previously unpublished pieces. Should there be interest in these ideas, readers will now be able to obtain them all in one volume, rather than having to search around for them in libraries or on the Internet. (That, at least, is something I prefer, when I take an interest in someone’s ideas.) A word about the title. No one can claim, reasonably, that the free society has actually been tried anywhere, even though some actual societies have exhibited features of it here and there, now and then. As to whether these features have made those societies better rather than worse for purposes of human flourishing, that is a focus of ongoing dispute. There are no opportunities for pure political experimentation, so most of the critics and supporters must rely on analysis, thought experimentation, personal experiences and testimonials, as well as inferences based on all these. Even such an approach is problematic since, in matters of normative theory, ethics, or politics, the most basic issues are constantly contested. So, for example, even if some set of institutions is agreed to promote, say, human happiness, there are those who contend that human happiness isn’t such a worthy thing to promote, and thus reject those institutions. (This is something that’s recently been contended by several academics, for example, Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.1)

ix

x

Preface

What I wish to call attention to with my title and subtitle is that judging political systems by reference to some fixed ideal, a vision of perfection wherein all human problems have been solved, is highly questionable. Instead, a comparative approach is more appropriate. The main issue that I wish to address is whether the classical liberal, libertarian political idea is comparatively superior to its competitors. Even if some problems can be imagined that such a polity doesn’t address adequately, this may not be construed as a major deficiency if the rival systems do considerably worse. In these matters, one ought not to be aiming for a utopia. Here, as in many areas, the perfect is the enemy of the good! So, then, the material contained in this work touches on a variety of areas and offers up for consideration ideas that purport to be sound and helpful in those areas. Yes, I champion various notions, arguing that they are sound and ought to be adopted wherever that is possible, by anyone in the position to do so. This is especially true where I touch on political issues, but by no means is it confined to those. My central political imperative, the one I have found borne out by history, analysis, personal experience, and whatever else one should bring to bear on supporting some viewpoint, is to recognize that individuals have inalienable rights to their lives, liberty, and property (which includes, of course, the pursuit of their happiness, their life agendas), that the only limitations on these rights should be others’ equal rights, and that the proper function or role of the legal authorities in a country is to “secure” or protect these rights. Yet that imperative cannot survive scrutiny all on its own; it needs to be grounded on other true notions, on facts about us, the world, and the nature of community life. As a result, this book touches on a wide-ranging array of topics. I address some basic issues in ethics, for example, ones that render ethics anything but bogus, as so many today contend in intellectual circles, all those who deny that we have the freedom to choose our conduct and those who deny that moral and political, let alone esthetic, knowledge is even possible. The very first matter to be dealt with, the topic of the introduction, is whether moral judgments and imperatives can be objective, and whether what we believe ought to or ought not to be done is something that human beings can know. This is vital because the skeptical outlook is pervasive and has devastating consequences. Ever since philosophy began to interest human beings, the skeptical temptation about knowledge, especially moral or ethical knowledge, has been very powerful. It gained an especially important boost in how David Hume’s famous “is/ought gap” argument became understood as a refutation of the decisive role of reasoning in normative matters. Since Hume, the idea that norms express not something human beings know but their emotional dispositions, passions, feelings, urges, or something similarly a-rational

Preface

xi

came to dominate Western (especially academic) thought. For example, it is widely thought that the social sciences must be value-free because claims concerning values would amount to a bias or prejudice and cannot be well grounded. An issue I have dealt with in my book Classical Individualism (Routledge, 1998), namely, whether individualism is a sound approach to understanding human community life, does not get addressed directly in this book, although there are once again new attacks on that idea, this time from a viewpoint called post-humanism as well as from certain neuroscientists.2 I have dealt with this challenge before and need not take it up again here. (See, in particular, “Liberalism and Atomistic Individualism,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 34 [September, 2000], 227–47, and my book Classical Individualism [Routledge, 1998].) I introduce this book with a discussion based on an essay I prepared for the conference on the objectivity of morality at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio, in November 2006. Once I manage to make a successful case for the objectivity of moral knowledge, going on to a number of normative topics will be well grounded.

NOTES 1. Eric G. Wilson, Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008). 2. See, for a discussion of post-humanism, http://andymiah.wordpress.com/tag/ posthumanism/rss. It resurrects the Marxist idea that as humanity develops, it will ultimately reach a stage wherein human individuality is abolished and we will all become specie-beings, whereby, as Marx put it in his essay “Critical Remarks on the Article: ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’”: “The human essence is the true collectivity of man.”

Acknowledgments

My work has benefited, I believe, from my repeated discussions of the topics on which it touches, with friends, associates, colleagues, and anyone who volunteers for such a task. Jim Chesher is again, more than anyone, instrumental in prompting me to think things through, over and over. Douglas B. Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, Eric Mack, Aeon Skoble, Randy Dipert, Joe Cobb, Sidney Rose, Jimmy Blake, Ed Hudgins, Ellen Klein, Alex Alexiev, Jack Wheeler, the late J. Roger Lee, Ronald Hamowy, Robert Hessen, Tom Palmer, Ron Lipp, Nick Capaldi, Steven Greenhut, Mary Anthony, Ilana Mercer, Michael Blasgen, and many, many others have been very helpful to me in my efforts to get my views right, even if they may be unsatisfied with the use to which I have put this help. Dick Wallace, Dave Threshie, and the administrators and some faculty at Chapman University and other institutions with which I have been affiliated have been very supportive of my work. I thank them for this from the bottom of my heart. I also wish to thank the following publications for permission to make use of previously published materials: Social Philosophy & Policy, Vera Lex, Encyclopedia of World Poverty, Journal of Value Inquiry, Philosophy Now, Liberty Magazine, Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society, and Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

xiii

Introduction

Why Moral Judgments Can Be Objective

In my philosophical childhood, it was widely accepted that substantive first-order theories in political philosophy and ethics were impossible because claims in those areas could not have objective truth. This was supposed to be shown by Hume’s famous claim that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” —John Searle, Freedom & Neurobiology (2007)

WHY DWELL ON OBJECTIVITY? In a work that aims to consider and ascertain how human beings ought to carry on in their personal lives, social affairs, and public policies, the question of whether it is possible to be objective about such matters is vital. This is why the introduction to this book addresses whether we can make objective—including ethical, moral, and political—value judgments. Are we able to make objective moral judgments? By “objective,” I mean “supportable by reference to facts about the world in contrast to what we may feel, desire, wish, or hope for, vis-à-vis those facts.”1 By “moral judgments,” I mean, broadly, “judgments pertaining to how human beings ought to conduct themselves, how their institutions should be set up, and so forth.”2 This perennial philosophical—yet popular3—topic needs to be revisited often because it is central to human life. Judgments about how people conduct themselves, about the institutions they devise—in short, about whether they are doing what is right or what is wrong—are ubiquitous. Even if one complains that people are judgmental or that they mistakenly think they can make true moral judgments or assessments (when in fact that is supposedly unjustified), 1

2

Introduction

one is making judgments that one intends to have taken seriously, to be correct, even as one is rejecting the wisdom of doing so. “You shouldn’t think moral judgments are objective” is itself a moral judgment, albeit one pertaining to a special undertaking, one of restricted scope. Nevertheless, those making it seem to treat it as objectively true.4 In short, moral skeptics or relativists, too, criticize those who disagree with them, making note of their opponents’ supposedly misguided thinking about this metaethical issue. And they expect that they are correct when they do so—objectively right, that is. Some may hold that such judgments are no more than expressions of what is desirable—that is to say, they express what some desire. But that is not what is meant by making such judgments; these judgments are taken to be true and, thus, objective. The mere expression of a desire does not amount to a criticism. Yet such dialectical points are not sufficient for making a case for the objectivity of moral judgments—that is, to defend the position that it is possible to gain knowledge of (and demonstrate the truth or falsity of) moral judgments as we do with other judgments (for example, those in physics, biology, engineering, or drivers’ education). All that these dialectical points make evident is that denying the objectivity of moral and other evaluations leads to self-referential inconsistency; if this is so, then perhaps what follows is only that we ought to remain silent on the topic (as Wittgenstein appears to have believed).5 One promising approach in defense of objectivity in ethics is to work out a sound, naturalistic idea of what constitutes the human good, and then to demonstrate that certain ways of acting will advance this good, while others will thwart it. If one can show that there are such ways of acting, this would satisfy the requirement of objectivity, since whether certain ways of acting advance the good or not is a matter capable of being established, shown to be true based on evidence and argument. In this introduction I plan to deploy a neo-Aristotelian naturalism in order to keep the “is-ought” gap at bay and place morality on an objective footing.6 I will do this with the aid of the ideas of Ayn Rand, as well as (but only by implication and association) those of Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot. It is important to mention at the outset that, in defending the objectivity of moral judgments, one is not defending the universal applicability of all of them, except where identical circumstances obtain. Thus, if in fact Mrs. George ought to send her child to take piano lessons, it does not follow that everyone should. It is irrelevant that the truth of such a claim is universally ascertainable; the point is that it does not have to apply universally, to all moral agents, although there may be some very basic moral judgments that

Introduction

3

are universally applicable in this sense. (I have defended this point elsewhere.)7 Nor is objectivity about ethics the same as impartiality or neutrality: That someone ought morally or ethically to advance his or her child’s welfare can be the case without whoever knows this having to be indifferent about the matter. “Objective,” in this context, means—at the minimum—that judgments are supported by facts that are themselves independent of human wishes, hopes, desires, or similar states of mind not concerned with grasping facts.8 As the philosopher Raimond Gaita has put the point: Hardly anyone will deny that it requires disciplines of mind and character to “see things as they are” as opposed to how they appear to be and, especially in the case of psychological phenomena, how for many and subtle reasons we fantasize them to be. Nor are many people likely to deny that we must often distance ourselves from our subject so that our fears, fantasies and affections do not interfere with our sense of what is objectively the case.9

Thus, within the limitations of my purpose (to show that objective moral judgments are possible), I will focus primarily on showing that Ayn Rand, as well as other neo-Aristotelians, have made a very promising case for placing ethical and/or moral judgments on an objective footing.10 It bears noting here that nearly everyone holds this view, implicitly, when it comes to their significant moral judgments—for example, about child molestation, rape, racism, sexual discrimination at the work place, terrorism, and so forth. The anti-objectivist position is mostly advanced as a second thought, a theory about the status of moral judgments, and those not involved in formulating such a theory tend, on the whole, to be objectivists (or, to put it differently, implicitly affirm the objectivity of moral judgments). Ayn Rand called her philosophy “objectivism” because she believed it is imperative to defend the idea that there is an independent reality (including ethical or moral reality) that we can come to know objectively, that is, based on evidence and reasoning that yield understanding without distorting what is being understood. She believed, rightly, that this idea has been under serious assault. In opposition to prevailing trends—post-modernists, subjectivists, perspectivalists, and so forth—she as well as I take it that the principles of ethics are no less objective than, say, the rules of some game or sport. In important respects, these rules are similarly conditional, not relative—which is to say, they presuppose some facts (e.g., the choice to live) but are not predicated on contingencies (such as where one lives, the weather, one’s cultural background, etc.). The idea here is that it can objectively be shown, for example, that “If one is to live the good human life, one ought to be honest.” Furthermore, objective ethical knowledge is possible, and the “is-ought” gap is bogus.

4

Introduction

For Rand, “objective” means “neither revealed nor invented, but as produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as the products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality.”11 That is to say, reality exists independently of us and, in order for us to apprehend or grasp it correctly, we must do diligent mental work. In relation to morality, however, this reality involves a certain kind of relationship between who and what we are and what it is that enhances living for beings such as we are. So while objective, morality (as Rand and indeed many others understand it) is agent-relative. It involves knowledge of how a certain kind of being flourishes in the world.

OBJECTIVISM AND OBJECTIVE ETHICAL JUDGMENTS In her essay “The Objectivist Ethics,”12 Rand argues against David Hume (and indeed a large segment of the philosophical community, past and present) that moral judgments can be validated or shown to be well-founded. (She rejects the passage in which Hume denies that one can deduce from true statements about the world what one ought to do. She, however, mistakenly takes Hume to deny that we can derive moral claims from factual ones.) Rand goes on to develop her case, as we have already gleaned above, that human life is normatively pregnant, as it were, bound up, through and through, with a normative dimension.13 The concept of value, Rand argues, is tied intimately to the concept of life; when something is a living organism, there is no escaping certain normative considerations about such a being. Living beings, for example, do well or badly. “Epistemologically, the concept of ‘value’ is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of ‘life.’ To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms. It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”14 (This, by the way, is a point also implicit in the works of Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot; see The Therapy of Desire15 and Natural Goodness,16 respectively.) Because of the human capacity for choice, however—for freely deciding to do one thing or another or yet another17—in the lives of human beings this normative component is transformed into an ethical or moral one. Therefore, it is possible not only to consider whether a human being is doing well or badly, but also whether one is choosing and acting responsibly in doing well or badly. Rand does not try to establish that one can provide deductive arguments for moral judgments. She does argue, however, that moral judgments can be validated or derived from other judgments that are not explicitly moral (though

Introduction

5

they would normally be normative or value-laden). These derivations are not deductions but inferences, more akin to inductions or conceptual implications than to formal deductions—for example, “If one acts prudently, generously, honestly, and/or courageously, one will (for the most part) live a successful, good, or happy life.” This is how best to understand what Rand proposes in opposition to Hume, based on her understanding of the nature of concepts and definitions and how they work in propositions and arguments. We can grasp what Rand set out to do if we consider that, in the sciences, there would also be a gap (call it the “is-must” gap) if we were to expect that scientific reasoning needs to be deductive. But that isn’t so. Scientific arguments that rest on research and testing—and lead, optimally, to objective knowledge of scientific facts, laws, or principles—involve inferences, the conclusions of which are true not beyond a shadow of a doubt but beyond a reasonable doubt. Hume could have no complaint about such reasoning, and as Rand understood moral reasoning, Hume might not have had grounds for complaint about what she set out to defend. It takes the following form: “It is good for a human being to thrive, and the choice to be prudent (or courageous, generous, and so forth) is required for thriving, so it is good for one to choose to be prudent.”18 The precise nature of this choice is, of course, complicated; it would ordinarily involve the cultivation of the virtues that constitute and help promote one’s happiness.19 BEYOND THE “IS-OUGHT” GAP The famous “is-ought” gap that Hume identified expresses the philosophical claim that a conclusion that contains moral terms such as “ought to” or “ought not to” cannot be deduced from premises that lack those moral terms because a valid deductive argument can only have, in its conclusion, components that are fully supported by its premises. If the premises fail to give complete support to the conclusion, the conclusion is not valid. Here is how Hume put the point: In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same

6

Introduction

time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason. . . .20

Hume discredits all rationalist—or deductivist—efforts to prove moral judgments true. He does this by arguing that they beg the question because such a proof would have to have premises that already contain the crucial term “ought” or “ought not,” thus simply pushing the problem back a step in each case, leaving the moral judgment ultimately unprovable.21 In response to Hume, Rand says, In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do. So much for the issue of the relation between “is” and “ought.”22

She writes that the passage from Hume “purports to mean that ethical propositions cannot be derived from factual propositions—or that knowledge of that which is cannot logically give man any knowledge of what he ought to do. And wider: it means that knowledge of reality is irrelevant to the actions of a living entity and that any relation between the two is ‘inconceivable.’”23 However, what Hume actually appears to have contended is not what Rand claims he did, namely, that “knowledge of reality is irrelevant to the actions of a living entity and that any relation between the two is ‘inconceivable’” or that “ethical propositions cannot be derived from factual propositions.” Rather, what Hume argued is that it is impossible to deduce what one ought and ought not to do from what is or is not the case. The difference is not at all negligible.

MOST REASONING IS NOT DEDUCTIVE A deduction is actually a formal logical operation, capable of involving only concepts with closed, final definitions. Within this view, deductions are treated as timeless proofs. This is a tradition of thinking about knowledge along lines

Introduction

7

suggested by Plato, with his theory of forms or the natures of things, and continued, especially, by Descartes. Both of these influential philosophers appeared to suggest that, for us to have knowledge of anything, this knowledge must be capable of being stated as a necessary truth. That, in turn, suggests that whenever reasoning is performed invoking facts that human beings know, this reasoning must amount to a species of logical deduction comparable to that which occurs in formal logical (indeed, symbolic) operations. In such reasoning, the operative terms and propositions are symbolic of closed, final definitions and propositions comprised of terms with such definitions. Such reasoning is, in consequence, timelessly valid, and whatever truth might be achieved by means of it would also amount to timeless, necessary truth. However, when logic is deployed to produce proofs involving facts that may imply other facts, this is not a formal (let alone symbolic) deduction but, rather, another type of proof—another way to derive a factual proposition from other factual propositions.24 David Hume did not discuss the difference between this type of derivation and formal deductions, and, as I argue in my book, Ayn Rand,25 Rand’s Objectivist epistemology holds out a credible promise for the success of such a derivation but does not establish that the strict formal deduction Hume thinks is inconceivable is actually available in establishing or proving the truth of any moral propositions.26

CONCEPTUALIZATION VERSUS DEDUCTION The idea of concept formation clarifies why Rand does not accept Hume’s (or G. E. Moore’s) idea of what it is to know something, and how to define a concept.27 Put plainly, at issue here is the claim that we acquire knowledge by developing and organizing our ideas based on an awareness we have of the world, gathered by means of our perceptual organs, guided by axiomatic concepts (which I have discussed elsewhere and which are central to Rand’s Objectivism).28 In a bit more detail, the process goes on roughly as follows. One detects various similarities and differences by means of the sensory organs; one recognizes that nothing like that is usually, normally possible unless something exists that is being perceived, and then one carefully, parsimoniously, arranges a system of ideas in which the principles of logic are followed, all the while keeping in continued focus the initial differences and similarities, thus learning what it is that exists. The result is a system of sound, well-grounded ideas that best (but not necessarily finally) capture for us aspects of reality that we set out to understand.29 When we know reality, moreover, we do not know it by grasping it forever. We know it at a given time, not for all time.

8

Introduction

One reason it isn’t easy to give an account of knowing reality is that knowing isn’t like other accomplishments with which we are familiar. The way human beings know is, as best we have been able to tell, unique in the world; they know conceptually, not perceptually as most other living beings do, and they have the capacity to reflect on their conceptual knowledge—to become self-aware—a process that needs to be identified and understood without the benefit of easy analogies. But some analogies come closer than others. For example, we know, somewhat by analogy, how we grasp or grab something, as well as we can, but not without the possibility of improvement, and we can observe our grasping or grabbing, as well. All efforts to understand the nature of human knowledge must begin by admitting that there is nothing quite like it in the rest of nature, and that the best we can do is depend on our ordinary, nonsystematic familiarity with cases of knowing, something that runs the risk of begging the question. In a certain respect, an attempt to give an account of human knowing involves starting out on an entirely new endeavor.30 In any case, when we draw conclusions in everyday life—about whether to open a door when trying to go through it, or how to build a bridge or a helicopter, or how to construct an argument for objective ethics—the conclusions are not, strictly speaking, deduced (as formal logicians would characterize deductions) but are conceptually inferred from successive facts that are known contextually. Moreover, the state of our knowledge is subject to change. We may learn that what we once knew (e.g., regarding history or biology) is now understood somewhat differently. Given this, it is also possible to imagine that, in the future, the state of knowledge will change once again. That is, the premises of substantive (including moral) arguments are not finally certain in the way that those of formal, logical arguments are; nonetheless, the conclusions they support can be objective and contextually certain.31 The reason this is different from pure logical deduction is that such deductions are formal and symbolic, and thus not dependent on actual concepts, but only on symbols of concepts. As such, strictly logical deductions are timeless. Let us look first at a simple syllogism from term logic, and then at one from propositional logic. We will see why they can mislead us concerning the nature of logical argumentation about substantive matters. First, All A’s are B’s, all B’s are C’s, so, all A’s are C’s.

This argument does not pose the problem that A is open ended, not finally identified—or, to put it slightly differently, that the concept of A (unlike the concept “human being” or “apple” or “lion”) isn’t finally closed. That is be-

Introduction

9

cause it is not a concept but a formal symbol. Now let’s consider an argument from propositional logic: Given that P implies Q, and that Q implies R, therefore if P then R.

As I have noted, A (or B or C) is not a concept but, rather, a symbol for one. The point to take to heart is that the way symbols behave in formal arguments must not be confused with how concepts would behave. Nor are P, Q, and R propositions—they stand in for them. But to appreciate the nature of substantive reasoning, it is necessary to explore the nature of propositions and concepts, not only their symbolic representations in formal logic texts. Compare the formal symbolic syllogism with the following: “All human beings are biological entities; all biological entities are mortal; so all human beings are mortal.” The concepts here are not finally locked in, so it is intelligible to propose that the conclusion does not follow, since the second premise might be false. The mortality of animals is not a logical truth, as one might put it in terms of contemporary analytic philosophy. But so what? Indeed, science fiction writers often create plausible enough stories by denying various parts of such syllogisms. The conclusions are, thus, formally valid only if the statement of what is an animal or biological entity is treated as closed or finally true, the last word on the subject. But then some will object that definitions merely stipulate and do not confirm reality’s unchangeable nature. Purely formal deductive arguments do not have these problems. This is why most reasoning involves not formally deductive inferences but conceptual (logical) ones, in which a very significant role is played by theories and definitions. Rand made this a central part of her epistemology, in terms of which she aimed to establish the possibility of objective knowledge vis-à-vis both non-moral and moral concerns. In any case, Hume’s view about our inability to deductively prove ethical claims has had an enormous impact on the social sciences and on moral philosophy. Nonetheless, Hume himself did not appear to have embraced the full-blown ethical and political skepticism to which his argument is thought to have given rise. After all, he argued forcefully in support of many normative claims. What he did not do, however, was lay out a cogent explanation for how such support could be provided, apart from deductive inferences. I would argue that this was due to Hume’s (as well as many other philosophers’) embrace of the idea that, unless something is necessarily true, it cannot count as bonafide, certain human knowledge, knowledge that can be defended against skepticism.

10

Introduction

Thus, by affirming what to many appeared an unbridgeable gap between factual and value judgments, Hume’s anti-rationalism laid the foundation for positivism. This is the view that, while what are called empirical facts are something we can know about, values are not within the province of the knowable. This, in turn, is a major reason that social scientists have mostly kept away from making value judgments as scientists. With respect to such judgments, social scientists invoke the “is-ought” gap, saying, in essence, that talking about values would be unscientific, since values are not subject to factual confirmation. Since the hard sciences had always been closely associated with the idea that factual judgments can be confirmed, the social sciences, in order to carry “the mantle of science,” were fashioned to mimic them. The method by which the evidence and reasoning of the hard sciences were supposed to proceed—data gathering and unbiased analysis—needed to be followed in the social sciences, and this appeared to preclude dealing with values, including morality and politics. Rand, like many other philosophers, gave no sign of taking into account the distinction between Hume’s claim that we cannot deduce moral conclusions from factual premises and the possibility that we could derive or infer them from factual premises in some other way. Rand took the former claim to be an affirmation of the impossibility of rational moral judgments, thus showing a tendency toward rationalism, even though in her epistemological works she disavowed it.

MORALITY RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD Ayn Rand, along with Martha Nussbaum, Philippa Foot, Henry Veatch, John Cooper, and others, was a naturalist; all of these thinkers, in fact, developed what can be regarded as Aristotle’s biocentric metaethics (as well as ethics). Such an approach resembles the foundations of medicine: the biocentric approach develops a conception of what can be construed as broad healthfulness, then rests on it a set of guidelines for “healthy,” flourishing living (which, of course, extends beyond the narrowly biological aspect of a person to the entire, robust living human being involved). Once such an understanding is achieved, various practices are identified as promoting a generally healthful life for the kind of living entities at issue, namely, human beings. These practices then are identified as moral virtues, guiding the acting agent toward the living and the achievement of a good human life where that is a matter of choice, akin to how medicine teaches us how to lead healthful lives.32 This approach is, of course, applicable to all living things, so far as what is of value to them is concerned, but with human beings the fact that they con-

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duct themselves by choosing to do so, to embark on their human lives, introduces the ethical or moral—i.e., self-responsible, self-directed—element.33 Morality amounts, then, to the principles of the self-directed fulfillment of the purpose of human flourishing. Let me now turn to the issue of the most general understanding of the good life for human beings. To get a clue about how this could best be answered, let us consider how a general understanding of the goodness, excellence, or well-being of any living entity would have to be understood. A good (or healthy) life of a gazelle or worm, generally considered—as, say, from the viewpoint of someone who studies such living things and has occasion to identify specimens that are good versus mediocre or bad ones—involves knowing the kind of being at issue.34 To be able to identify the specimens that are doing well, one needs to know what kind of living thing is being evaluated. The condition of such a living being cannot be assessed without knowing (even if only roughly) its nature, the characteristic attributes that could be in better or worse shape for the life of such an entity. Birds that get on with their lives by flying long distances, to use a simple example, require healthy wings; if they lack them, they would not be good specimens of such birds. To assess how well a human being is doing in terms of its physical or medical condition, one would have to be well informed about the central physical constituents—organs, faculties, anatomical and physiological features—of such a being, and how well they are doing and are likely to do in the future. That is how a good (versus mediocre or poor) specimen would be identified. This is what is meant by calling this a naturalist approach—taking as one’s starting point a knowledge of the nature of the thing being assessed or evaluated.35 When it comes to broader or more robust attributes than those bearing only on the physical or medical condition of a living entity, it is even more necessary to a have a clear grasp of the kind of being we intend to evaluate. Given the complexity of human beings, a clear grasp of human nature, of the kind of biological entities humans are, is required in order to assess how well they are doing at living a human life.36

HUMAN NATURE AND THE OBJECTIVE HUMAN GOOD The history of thought is, of course, replete with attempts to identify human nature—that is, to learn what a human being is, as such. The attempt has been made difficult because what has been deemed to count as a success in this undertaking has been influenced largely by the Platonist notion of what constitutes the nature of something, and by the Cartesian notion of what it is to know something. Both notions offer up impossible ideals and both, therefore, encourage skepticism.37

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Definitions, which purport to state the nature of something, can nonetheless be understood along lines that Rand and others suggest, namely, contextually.38 The idea is that a definition of something has just the degree of rigor or exactitude that it is reasonable to expect within the ontological region in which the kind of thing being defined is located. To be sure, some things may be given highly formal definitions along the lines required in geometry or some other formal systems such as mathematics. Yet, when it comes to human beings, which are biological, psychological, and moral entities, the definition is open-ended and can admit of some borderline grayness; for example, such a definition need not fully fit a damaged specimen or an infant.39 We might say that the definition identifies the normal cases without barring extraordinary ones.40 Although it is accurate enough (within this conception of what a definition must be) to state that human beings are best understood as rational animals, there is no need for it to be true that every member of the species is at all times fully capable of rationality (e.g., while asleep, as an infant, or as a member in extreme old age, afflicted with senility). All these instances can be accounted for as belonging within the kind in question, without needing to fulfill the criteria of membership to the degree that a square must fulfill its definition in geometry. (Recall here J. L. Austin’s discussion of goldfinches, where he shows that what counts as knowing what a goldfinch is does not include predicting what it will always be!41) To put it another way, experience tells us that rationality is typically a vital part of the life of human beings. While some appear to do without exercising much rationality, they are typically parasitic on others who exercise it routinely. This neo-Aristotelian conception of definitions, developed by Rand and approximated by some others, is as good as it gets, regarding what we require to think reasonably about human affairs,42 and can serve as a standard for the moral evaluation of human actions and institutions.

OBJECTIVE ETHICS AND RATIONAL INDIVIDUALS For our purposes, special heed must be paid to the fact that human nature implies the individuality of each human being. A rational or thinking animal engages its rational capacity volitionally, as a matter of its free will. The point is evident on the basis of several considerations—the explanatory force of the idea, introspection, scientific analysis, and so on.43 Each human being is an essentially unique (and, in a fundamental respect, irreplaceable) entity, and once a human being has activated (or failed to activate) its rational capacity,

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results will emerge that extend the individuation process even further, in various creative, productive, destructive, or obstructive ways.44 This is vital to our concern here because the central place of individuality implies that, although ethics can be objective, it is rarely universal: different human individuals ought (or ought not) to do different things. While no contradictory moral judgments can be part of ethics or morality, there are enormous differences in how people should act. (We can draw an analogy here again to the field of medicine, where there are general principles of healthful conduct, but where the particular judgments about cures, dosages, etc., may vary enormously).45 Along these lines—very much in the spirit of Aristotle’s metaethical approach, but with some variations from the specific understanding he proposed—while certain moral virtues are indeed to be practiced by everyone, so as to live a morally good human life, there will be different ways of exercising these virtues. Some persons may need to practice certain (but not all) virtues quite vigilantly, while other persons will need to focus on practicing different ones (e.g., soldiers may need to be more courageous than, say, accountants, while accountants may need to be more prudent than soldiers). In all cases where we are concerned with determining the right thing to do, the answer can be ascertained objectively, based on facts and reasoning, but facts pertaining to who one is will matter, alongside facts pertaining to what one is. What career one ought to select, what political party one should support, what kind of diet or exercise program one should follow, and a myriad of other questions can be answered in this way, well supported by relevant facts and principles.46 Much else could be said about all of this, but I want to turn now to a particular issue that arises in connection with Rand’s idea of the objectivity of morality or ethics.47 She ties this objectivity to a choice a human being makes to live his or her life, thereby provoking some to suggest that she has, in fact, given away the ballgame and caved in to subjectivism.48

RANDIAN OBJECTIVITY RESTS ON CHOICE Eric Mack and Douglas B. Rasmussen have both argued that, since Rand rests the moral principles that she believes should guide us on a prior choice to live, her substantive ethics—the set of virtues she considers binding on human beings—are conditional, not categorical, and thus subjective rather than objective. Since I share the Randian idea that without a prior choice there is no grounding for ethics, and since I also believe that the ethics she has identified

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as the fundamental guide to human conduct has objective foundations, I deem it important to discuss these criticisms.49 If, as I believe, human beings have free will, so that there is a choice that we can (continually) make to live and think,50 then prior to such a choice we are at most surviving physically (fully dependent on others) with a mind that is (at most) dormant, as yet unfocused, and thus not ready to be aware of any alternatives among which an individual might select one and reject the others. And if no commitment has yet been made to keep focusing one’s mind and thus keep identifying what the right course of conduct amounts to, there cannot be any responsibility. Ignorance may not be an excuse in the eyes of the law, but one’s initial total lack of engagement in reality is an excuse in morality. I should like to suggest that the parable of the Garden of Eden might illuminate what is at issue here: prior to eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had the potential to be fully human. But only after deciding to embark upon the acquisition of knowledge by eating the apple from the tree did this potential become realized and lead to having the personal responsibility to choose right from wrong. The rest of the animals remained in a state of innocence, as it were, because gaining knowledge remained out of their reach. Arguably, every human being replays this development from an amoral infant animal to a developing human moral agent. David Kelley has provided a promising analysis here, spelling out the foregoing point in less metaphorical terms: For humans, the choice to live plays the same role that hard-wired instinct plays for lower animals. Our own choice is the source of our commitment to life; it is what gives us a lock on life as a goal. If the commitment is not there, if I do not actually value my life, then my life cannot be a value for me. It is not something I act to gain or keep. Of course I am still subject to the facts of reality [which include the fact] that life is the only thing capable of serving as an ultimate value. If I try to make something else my highest value—say golf, or chocolate eclairs, or service to the proletarian revolution—just because they give me the most pleasure or inner satisfaction, then I am acting on subjective whim, in denial of the facts of reality. It would be OK on Hume’s or Sartre’s theory, because they are indeed subjectivists. Objectivism does not permit this sort of arbitrary and unconstrained choice. But neither does it commit the opposite fallacy of intrinsicism by ignoring the fact and the role of human choice. If I do not choose to live, if it is a matter of indifference to me whether I live or die, then from a moral standpoint there is nothing more to be said.51

The precise account of the prior state of mind—prior to the time when, gradually or by leaps and bounds, the individual commences the thinking she

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is equipped to do and needs to do—is complicated by the fact that it is yet impossible to administer a test for it. At that stage of human development, there is no self-consciousness by which what is going on in the minds of infant human beings could be brought to light.52 Indeed, because it is hypothesized that in such a state the crucial process of conceptual thinking has not yet commenced, and because it would have to be such conceptual thinking that brings to light the introspective data that would enable us to observe or take note of what goes on prior to the choice to live and to think, the only way to grasp what goes on prior to that choice is by a kind of rational reconstruction. This would involve a consideration of what must have preceded that choice, given what we know of those who have indeed developed, grown up, made progress in their human living, and carried on accordingly. Might it be the case, however, that the infant who fails to make the choice to live and to think is, in fact, doing something that amounts to “lazy thinking”? Might it not, after all, be a moral failure not to take up the task of gradually but relentlessly becoming aware? Yet, prior to making the choice to think, no alternatives as to what one might do could have come into focus, and the process of selection could not yet have commenced. But after the choice (or, as I prefer to put it, taking the initiative) to think has occurred, even if in an incremental, small-step-by-small-step fashion, then to choose to reject the alternative to remain in focus and continue to think can be seen as an evasion of something accessible and of enormous value, a case of selfbetrayal, in light of the original choice to live.53 It is worth noting that the political philosopher Leo Strauss, someone very different from Rand but also, arguably, within the same philosophical tradition, suggests a similar way of understanding the birth (emergence) of morality. As Strauss understands it, the good life for man is simply the life in which the requirements of man’s natural inclinations are fulfilled in the proper order to the highest possible degree, the life of a man who is awake to the highest possible degree, the life of a man in whose soul nothing lies waste.54

In the Randian sense of objective morality, the principles of ethics emerge and are binding on one because they further the goal one has acknowledged one has in life, something fundamental that the agent has decided (at the moment conceptualization has commenced): namely, to embark on living a human life. One may view this decision as a very basic commitment—an oath taken, as it were—to embark upon living a human life. The principles of which one then becomes aware, following one’s taking of this oath, are akin to the objective principles of, say, mechanical engineering that become required once

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an engineer chooses to embark upon building a bridge or skyscraper. Given the initial choice, they are necessary and clearly identifiable as such.55 Even as one embarks on playing some game, such as bridge, one commits oneself to following certain rules that are objective, though they are conditional upon the existence of the game (which did not need to exist). As already noted, the Randian version of objective morality assumes free will and assumes that there is a point when a young human being summons himself or herself to the task of thinking. If one rejects these assumptions— which neither of the critics I am responding to, Eric Mack or Douglas B. Rasmussen, does—one is opting for a radically non-Randian approach to ethics. Why Ethics Is Objective As I have already noted, by “objective” I mean that the claims about what one ought to do or ought not to do can be shown to be true by reference to our very long history of experience with, and study of, facts that are open to any rational mind’s apprehension (although not beyond a shadow of doubt).56 The fact that someone has chosen to embark on living a human life is one such (very general) fact. Other such facts include what the agent’s life requires to flourish, namely, the practice of various virtues in the context of who that individual is, what his or her options and resources are, and so on. Indeed, a Bill Gates would have to be practicing the virtue of generosity in very different ways from someone at the poverty line; the specific judgment of how much they each ought to give to charity would be different, though the general judgment that people ought to act generously would hold true. Without the choice to embark on living one’s human life, the self-binding nature of ethics would be missing.57 Why should one act as ethics—the virtues of living a good human life—would require one to live? The answer is that one should act this way because one has freely accepted the fact that one’s primary goal is to live as a human being (i.e., to live in a way that is fitting for the kind of organism one is). Thus one has committed oneself to what this kind of life requires, much like the more particular case of being bound by the ethics of a given profession that one has taken up as a matter of free choice. As a rather apt analogy, consider that only those not conscripted into military service can be said, properly, to be bound by military ethics, as opposed to those who were drafted and made no voluntary commitment to live by the principles of military life (although this isn’t what, misguidedly, military law requires from conscripts). The same goes, arguably, for any other profession.58 In summary, then, what I have tried to show is this: In a naturalist metaethics such as we find in Ayn Rand’s “The Objectivist Ethics”—as well

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as in Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire and in Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness—an objective ethical position can be developed, based on a sound understanding of human nature (that is, an understanding derived from experience and the study of and reflection upon human nature). In Rand’s and my version, however, two vital issues are central to the substantive ethics that emerge: namely, individuality and freedom of the will.59 What comes out of this inquiry is a system of moral virtues to guide one in living a good or excellent human life to which one has made a commitment as a rational individual, a commitment that binds one to act according to judgments based on such a system of virtues. The particulars, of course, will be quite cumbersome to identify and will require, in most cases, knowledge of the individual agent who is to act in one or another way (“local” knowledge). But this is no different from how, in attending properly, prudently, to one’s physical well-being, one will need to know one’s body, as well as general principles of sound medicine, nutrition, and the like. It seems to me that this approach to ethics preserves a reasonable conception of objectivity for ethical judgments. It is also an approach that reflects quite faithfully how most people make their day-to-day ethical decisions in life (especially if they aren’t guided by various skeptically conceived metaethical theories). What may be important to mention here, although the development of the idea would require a substantial detour, is that the concept of “objectivity” could itself be contextual rather than what it is widely taken to be, namely, just one sort of process or method involved in gaining knowledge.60 Objective knowledge of A will most likely reflect in certain important respects the ontology of A—of what type or even kind of being A is. Obtaining objective knowledge, in short, will not amount to an identical process in each case, because what this knowledge is of will be reflected in what it is to know it objectively. To put it somewhat differently, since objectivity concerns the means by which knowledge is obtained—the type of evidence and argument required to gain knowledge of the world as it is—it makes good sense to suppose that if different facts about the world provide different sorts of evidence and argument by which to learn of them, the objectivity at issue will itself be different in these cases.61 This explains, in the most general terms, why objectivity in ethics is not identical to objectivity in, say, chemistry or psychology. The objectivity is in part related to what type or kind of being one knows. In ethics, since objectivity involves coming to know the guidelines for human conduct (the conduct of a volitionally conscious living being), it follows that the very objectivity of the knowledge will reflect this. Accordingly, in ethics (unlike in, say, metallurgy), objective knowledge is conditional upon whether the being that is to be guided by the principles of ethics has made the choice to commence

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or embark upon its life. Objective knowledge is also, following Aristotle, a matter of “for the most part,” not akin to principles in geometry but more akin to those in medicine. The point of such ethics is to provide guidelines for achieving the good life of the organism in question—in this case, of a human being. If this is the right way to understand objectivity as far as moral knowledge is concerned, what are we to make of an influential viewpoint considered by Thomas Nagel in connection with Bernard Williams’s ethical position?62 Nagel notes that Williams ridicules the idea that “if liberalism is correct, it must apply to all those past people who were not liberals: they ought to have been liberals, and since they were not, they were bad, or stupid, or something on those lines.”63 The suggestion from Williams is clearly that the idea of objective morality is misguided because moral judgments are not universalizable.64 Yet the contextual theory of knowledge that Rand develops, and that others have elaborated upon, would address the issue with which Williams is concerned (according to Nagel’s succinct statement of Williams’s point). Certainly Williams’s viewpoint is a very plausible one; few would insist that the interpersonal ethics or political institutions of ancient Greece ought to have conformed to modern principles of right conduct or of justice. This is what is so insightfully developed by the political theorist Hanna F. Pitkin in her analysis of the concept of justice as having been both stable and variable throughout human history.65 Thus, to repeat a point I have made elsewhere, “Certain principles and truths do endure despite all the variations. For example, although there are options in how children might be raised, some basic ideas do remain true in any human community, any era. It is understood that parents have the responsibility to prepare their children for adulthood—a basic and universal moral assumption.”66 Of course, just what constituted such preparation in the fourth century B.C., as compared to the twenty-first century A.D., will differ, so the moral claims valid for each time will also differ, even though they can be equally true and are based on lasting and stable moral principles. Moreover, we can multiply examples by considering how we ought to act in innumerable circumstances. The point Nagel attributes to Williams—that “personal ethics and political morality cannot aspire to the kind of objective validity that is a reasonable aim for science and mathematics”—is not accurate. In science, there is variation based on historical context, not unlike ethics and political morality, given that the facts available for cognizance at different points in the history of science vary in both the natural and the social sciences. Mathematics is different—although even there some similarities arise, based on context67— mainly because mathematics is a formal discipline, like logic.

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Summing Up for Objectivity In this Introduction, I have defended a vital aspect of the kind of project that this book takes up. In thinking, talking, and writing about ethical and political issues, there is, first, the question of whether we can make objective value judgments. Are we in a position to resolve conflicting claims in morality, politics, political economy? The question has been addressed via Ayn Rand’s attempt to defend the objectivity of ethics. It has been an attempt to (quite briefly but accurately) show why Rand’s belief that ethical knowledge is objective is sound, reasonable, and more convincing than the alternative, namely, that human beings cannot know what is morally right and wrong. The answer that subjectivists and relativists—all the nuanced versions of these—are misguided is based on a controversial but ultimately sensible understanding of what “objective” means, namely, “neither revealed nor invented, but as produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as the products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be performed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality.”68 Ayn Rand called her philosophy Objectivism because she wanted to be sure she was known as someone who defended our ability to know the world as it is, not as distorted or constructed by our minds, not as we wish it to be, etc. Subjectivism and relativism propose these other positions, and Rand was against them; indeed, she considered those who promoted them, such as Immanuel Kant, vicious. When it comes to one of the most controversial areas of human knowledge, namely, ethics or morality, Rand insisted that she was an objectivist here as well, unlike, say, the economists Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, both, like Rand, defenders of the classical liberal, free, capitalist political economy. Both denied that we can know (objectively) what is right or wrong. Friedman, for example, wrote, The liberal conceives of men as imperfect beings. He regards the problem of social organization to be as much a negative problem of preventing “bad” people from doing harm as of enabling “good” people to do good; and, of course, “bad” and “good” people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them.69

Ayn Rand’s ethical objectivism, as has been evident in this discussion, is not simple. She was no straightforward realist who believed that ethical principles are evident in the world independently of human existence. This is what is implied by objectivity in, say, the natural sciences. If a principle of

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physics or chemistry is objective, that means the principle is part of the world, regardless of whether anyone knows it to be so. For Rand, ethical objectivism is not like this. The reason is that without human beings or some beings very much like them, there would be no principles of ethics or virtues. Ethics emerges with human (or possibly some very similar) life only. Once we have human beings living their lives, ethics does apply to them, and this is knowable by us as an objective fact. Nonetheless, there is something conditional about this type of objectivity, namely, the fact that human life is a free option to each individual. Rand advanced the view that only when one makes the choice to live and think (which are practically the same thing, as she understood them) does one become bound by the principles that must guide human living. This idea has proven to be quite controversial. Do people generally make a choice to live and think? Or are they pretty much living and thinking beings without any choice to be such (just as they have no choice about whether to be born)? If the latter, then it would seem that the principles of ethics are binding on them independently of any choice, as a necessary and not conditional aspect of their lives. Why would Rand think that this isn’t the case? Before one answers, it has to be noted—as I have done above—that conditional principles can be every bit as objective as unconditional ones. For example, let us take it that the principle of gravitation is unconditional and necessary (although, in some very broad metaphysical sense, it might well be conditional: if no objects with mass existed, there would be no gravitation). Let us take the principles of a sport or game in which, while the game (say, baseball or bridge) need not have existed at all, once it does, there are principles or standards of conduct that are (conditionally) necessary. In bridge or baseball, if one wants to get something done—make a bid or hit a home run— there are certain ways one must go about doing it; not just any way will do. Of course, the rules of the game could be changed, but similarly, if (improbably) human nature were to change, the principles of ethics would change, as well. And this could be objectively ascertained. Given that human beings have free will, whether they take up the task of living and thinking is up to them. They initiate these tasks, which are not instinctual or automatic. In consequence, whether persons are bound by the principles of ethics is, in the last analysis, up to them, although the alternative would be annihilation (and thus effectively irrelevant). As Rand put the point, Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.70

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As with many aspects of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, her views on the objectivity of ethics and on free will are only sketchily laid out by her. Only in the field of epistemology did she advance a fairly detailed and in-depth theory. Nonetheless, as sketched by her and related here, there seems to be nothing amiss in the Randian idea of objectivity in ethics. Once we commit to living our human lives—and there is no other option, other than fading out of existence—we are freely but firmly bound (by our own choice to live our human lives) to the principles of ethics that are knowable by us. (In the special areas of human life, the same holds: it is only once one decides to become a doctor or a lawyer that, for example, the ethics of the profession become binding.) It may be concluded that it is most likely true that objectivity is possible in ethics, provided that knowledge is conceived in an essentially non-Platonist, non-idealist fashion and provided that “objective” it is not taken to mean that moral values are intrinsic.71

NOTES 1. For a fuller explanation of the nature of objectivity, see Tibor R. Machan, Objectivity: Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2004). 2. Moral judgments here also cover political judgments, in other words. 3. Whether objectivity is possible, for instance, in journalism, self-understanding, or psychotherapy are issues of popular interest and not solely the concern of professional philosophers. 4. Truth is objective in any case. To add “objectively” to “true” serves to signal that no other kind of truth is possible. There can be subjective feelings or experiences or phenomena, but there can be no subjective truths. As to whether criticisms in philosophy qualify as ethical or moral, it seems to me that they do, as part of professional ethics. 5. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” in Philosophical Review 74 (1965): 11–12; and the last sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc.; London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922): “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” As Arto Tukiainen says, “Wittgenstein regarded the point of the Tractatus as ethical. His purpose was to show that there cannot be any meaningful ethical sentences.” So Wittgenstein is supposed to have denied that ethics is objective. See, http://examinedlifejournal.com/articles/printerfriendly.php?shorttitle=wittmoralval&authorid=54. But see, also, Tibor R. Machan, “Heretical Essay on Wittgenstein’s Meta-ethics,” http://www .mises.org/journals/scholar/machan10.pdf (2000). 6. Among those who have made this attempt within the naturalist, neo-Aristotelian school are Henry B. Veatch, For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary

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Ethical Theory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971); John Cooper, Knowledge, Nature, and the Good: Essays on Ancient Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) as well as several others. Only Ayn Rand identifies herself explicitly as an Objectivist, and her work stressing the naturalist basis of ethics predates, at times by decades, the work of these other philosophers (who sadly do not acknowledge this fact in theirs). One of my own early efforts to defend a naturalist-objectivist metaethics appears in Tibor R. Machan, “Epistemology and Moral Knowledge,” Review of Metaphysics 36, no. 3 (September 1982): 23–49. I try to sketch the appropriate conception of human knowledge in support of this task in Tibor R. Machan, “Education and the Philosophy of Knowledge,” Educational Theory 20, no. 3 (1970): 253–68. 7. Tibor R. Machan, “Why it Appears that Objective Ethical Claims are Subjective,” Philosophia 26, nos. 1–4 (1997): 1–23. A recent critique of the is-ought gap is Hilary Putnam’s The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Putnam’s critique, not unlike Nussbaum’s and Foot’s efforts, also comes several decades after Rand briefly laid out her case for the objectivity of value judgments. (See note 11 below.) 8. I discuss a wide range of issues related to objectivity in Machan, Objectivity. 9. Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity, Thinking about love and truth and justice (London: Routledge, 1998), 248. 10. There is a subtle difference between what Rand means by “objective” when it comes to ethics and what she means by the term in other, more straightforwardly epistemological contexts. For more on this, see Jason Raibley, “Rand on the Objectivity of Values,” http://www.ios.org/events/advsem02/JRObjectivity.pdf. 11. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (New York: New American Library, 1970), 54 (emphasis added to indicate the source of objectivity apprehended by human consciousness). As already hinted here, Ayn Rand preceded Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot in making a case in recent philosophy for an objectivist, neo-Aristotelian metaethics. Both Nussbaum and Foot published their discussions of these metaethical matters three decades after Rand came out with her discussion of the topic in her essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in her book, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961). Incidentally, this title is often misunderstood to indicate that Rand is defending some normative version of Hobbes’s psychological egoism. In fact, her ethical egoism is more in line with Aristotle’s eudemonism, whereby ethics per se stands in service of living a good human life. Thus the subtitle’s reference to “a new concept of egoism.” 12. Ibid. 13. Accordingly, it would be a mischaracterization of Rand’s view to suggest that she proposes to derive moral conclusions from non-moral facts. The facts from which she proposes to derive moral conclusions do contain normative elements, but they are in no way disqualified as facts for that reason alone. The qualification of these facts as “moral” or “ethical” is, in crucial respects, similar to the qualification

Introduction

23

of other facts as “biological” or “sociological”; the qualification locates these facts ontologically. 14. Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 18. 15. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 16. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17. I am not going to argue for this here but see, for more on this, Ed Pols, Acts of Our Being (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); and Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). It is also important to keep in mind that efforts to make room for bona fide ethics or morality via compatabilism are futile; where everything human beings do is determined, so that they must do it, there can be no such thing as holding them responsible, morally, for their conduct. 18. Thus, Eric Mack is correct when he writes that “[b]eing an objectivist with respect to claims about the effectiveness of means to chosen ends no more removes an advocate of the choice doctrine from the basic subjectivist camp than it removes Hume from that camp” (Mack, “More Problematic Arguments in Randian Ethics,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Vol. 7 [Spring 2006]: 301). It is not this that removes the choice doctrine from the basic subjectivist camp; rather, it is the nature of the end chosen, namely, the ultimate end of human life, the only such end that makes sense. For Hume, in contrast, that end appears to be anything one might desire, whereas in reality, Rand claims, it is only the one ultimate value that is possible for us: each individual’s human life. Any other choice would amount, in time, to the annihilation of ends. 19. The happiness at issue here is not what so many contemporary social scientists take to amount to happiness—cheerfulness, even giddiness. See, for example, JeanPaul Pecqueur, The Case Against Happiness (Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2006). It is, rather, the self-awareness of living successfully as a human individual. 20. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1961), 423. 21. For a recent effort to address Hume’s concerns, Mark H. Bickhard, “Process and Emergence: Normative Function and Representation,” Axiomathes 14, nos. 1–3 (2003): 121–55. Bickhard also reads Hume as saying that one cannot derive “ought” from “is,” whereas Hume wrote that one cannot deduce “ought” from “is.” 22. Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 19 (emphasis in the original). Did Rand claim to have derived an “ought” from an “is” in her “The Objectivist Ethics,” as Mack states (“More Problematic Arguments,” 297)? Let me reiterate that Rand is using the term “validation” in her discussion of value judgments. This idea of “validation” is not the same as the Humean idea of deduction, nor, it seems, is it the same as Mack’s idea of derivation. What Rand seems to me to be doing is arguing (in some legitimate fashion or other) that moral judgments can (objectively) be shown to be true. She does not develop in detail just what such validation consists of. I surmise, from the full context of her approach to demonstrating the truth of her ideas, that hers is a type of conceptual rather than syllogistic “proof.” At the risk of sounding heretical, Rand’s

24

Introduction

form of validation smacks of the kind of reasoning we find in Wittgenstein or in criminal prosecution, akin to the argument of the best explanation. So her showing that moral claims can be objective rests on a different idea of what it takes to validate such claims than what Hume appears to have regarded as being required for proving a moral claim (and then denied is possible). See Tibor R. Machan, Ayn Rand (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 57ff. It is also necessary to note here that, when Rand and others in this tradition of naturalistic metaethics and ethics defend a principle, they do this “for the most part” and not “necessarily in every conceivable case.” 23. David Harriman, ed., Journals of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1997), 863. 24. Ken Lucey has objected with the rhetorical question, “Does Machan think a fact is such that it can have implications?” Yes. For example, the fact that there is an ashtray on a table in a restaurant implies that smoking is permitted there. Or the fact of someone’s racism implies the appropriateness of moral contempt for that someone. 25. Machan, Ayn Rand. 26. Rand can be interpreted as holding that the kind of strictly formal deductions that others think exclusively deserve the term are simply very broad, symbolic models of logical reasoning. So she would argue that deductions do, in fact, obtain between judgments of facts involving concepts that are themselves contextually (as distinct from timelessly) defined, possessing essential attributes that make logical deductions possible. Her objection to Hume, then, is that Hume failed to see that concepts such as “ought to” and “ought not to” can be derived from definitions of “human goodness” as, in part, essentially involving choices and ultimate values. In other words, Rand would argue that a sound, valid theory of human goodness “deductively” yields moral conclusions, conclusions regarding what one ought to do, so long as by “deduction” one does not mean logical arguments involving closed definitions of concepts. For more, see Machan, Ayn Rand, and Machan, Objectivity. 27. I examine both Hume’s and Moore’s criticisms of “naturalism” in Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), and in Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court, 1989). For both Hume and Moore, definitions appear to amount to necessary truths, whereas in the neoAristotelian, Randian epistemological tradition they are understood to be contextual and open ended. See, Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 28. Machan, Ayn Rand, chap. 2, and Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. 29. By “in which the principles of logic are followed,” I am referring to the policy of being consistent, avoiding contradictions and all the more specialized fallacies involved in bad reasoning. I do not, however, have in mind adhering to the strict requirements of formal or symbolic logic wherein one aims for purely deductive reasoning. For example, such substantive, including moral, reasoning need not result in conclusions whose denials are logically impossible. For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, “Another Look at Logical Possibility,” The Personalist 51 (1970), 246–49: See also Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Logical Possibility: An Aristotelian Essentialist Critique,” The Thomist 47 (October 1983): 513–40.

Introduction

25

30. A fatal flaw of much of philosophical reflection about what it is to know has been (from Plato through Descartes to our own time) that knowledge has often been understood to require timeless certainty. If one knows, it must be impossible to even conceive that one is wrong. Knowledge must be absolute, perfect, incorrigible, finished, and, as it is sometimes put, in the final analysis. For a discussion of a different view of knowledge, see Adam Leite, “Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?” The Philosophical Quarterly 54, no. 215 (April 2004): 232–51. The Platonist (not necessarily Plato’s) view of what knowledge must be is an impossible ideal. This comes across when, for example, Socrates notes that he knows only that he knows nothing. Socrates is arguably invoking the idealist view of perfect knowledge of Forms and disclaiming having achieved it. Given the prevalence of the Platonist view of what knowledge must be, the result has been a great variety of more or less skeptical ideas about knowledge, such as the prominent view that we cannot really know anything or, if we can, perhaps, it is just an approximation; maybe we can have probable or approximate or fallible knowledge. In contrast, I hold that sometimes we probably know this or that: sometimes we have approximate knowledge; sometimes our knowledge is fallible. At other times, however, we simply know, without qualification. It is only the model of ideal (Platonic) knowledge that inclines one to place the qualifiers before “knowledge” in every instance. Currently Richard Rorty’s communitarian view of knowledge is widely respected, according to which one knows in terms of one’s group, and objectivity is not possible but solidarity is. For the full story, see Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). All this has been especially influential with regard to knowledge about right and wrong, good and evil, producing some disturbing practical results in crucial areas such as the way individual rights violations, personal misconduct, professional malpractice, crime, and terrorism are widely understood and discussed. For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, “Terrorism and Objective Moral Principles,” International Journal of World Peace 4, no. 4 (October–December 1987): 31–40. (The ideas of this paper are incorporated in Machan, Objectivity.) What Rand has proposed is the idea, which I strongly share, that human beings, if they do the hard work, can obtain knowledge quite well. There is, of course, ample evidence of this throughout the sciences, in technology and, let’s not forget, ordinary life. But what is this human knowledge? As the name of her system makes evident, the key to knowledge is objective validity (meaning that knowledge must be “reasonable or justifiable in the circumstances”). As she put the point, in her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Objective validity is determined by reference to the facts of reality. But it is man who has to identify the facts; objectivity requires discovery by man—and cannot precede man’s knowledge, i.e., cannot require omniscience. Man cannot know more than he has discovered—and he may not know less than the evidence indicates, if his concepts and definitions are to be objectively valid. (46)

Ayn Rand’s position is, in my view, what Gilbert Harman expressed well: namely, that we must “take care not to adopt a very skeptical attitude nor become too lenient

26

Introduction

about what is to count as knowledge” (Gilbert Harman, Thought [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976], 145). Another prominent twentieth-century philosopher who has advanced this understanding of human knowledge is J. L. Austin, in his essay “Other Minds,” in Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). Arguably, in his On Certainty (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), Ludwig Wittgenstein also suggests such a view of knowledge. 31. Thus, if one reasons, “I just left and locked my car in the faculty parking lot, and it is reasonable to hold that no one has moved it, so that is where my car is now, so that is where I will find it upon my return,” this is not quite the same sort of formal reasoning as “Since p strictly implies q, and q strictly implies r, and since p, therefore r.” (It is here that the undeservedly famous Gettier problem meets its solution.) 32. The living and the achieving are of a piece in this type of ethics; the virtues, in other words, are constitutive of happiness, which is their end. Can flourishing politics—ethics and justice—conflict? Yes, in very exceptional cases—when, as John Locke is supposed to have said, “politics is impossible.” See, H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 175–91. Flourishing, for human beings, comes about through the practice of the virtues, including, at the level of politics, justice. 33. The precise way one makes this choice is a complicated matter because it happens incrementally in one’s life, starting with tiny decisions reaffirmed over and over again, as well as neglected now and then (and, by some, even frequently). For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: NelsonHall Publishing Co., 1975), 94ff. See, also, Tibor R. Machan, “Rand and Choice,” in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 257–73. 34. Such an examination may take place in a survey of such animals or other living things after some natural calamity, such as a severe drought or flood. 35. I consider in some detail the oft-discussed problems with such naturalism— with the idea of an objective “nature”—in Machan, Individuals and Their Rights, chap. 1. 36. In some cases, seriously impaired persons can excel in certain very significant respects (e.g., astrophysicist Stephen Hawking), though no one could reasonably deny their being impaired. 37. For more, see Machan, Objectivity. 38. Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 5. 39. For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). See, also, Austin, “Other Minds.” 40. This is not the place to develop a full case for the contextualism. The position faces many challenges, especially with respect to how a contextual definition tracks the ontological features of what is being defined, the nature of the thing as well as whether it is not merely a different term for relativism. See, for example, Martin Montminy, “Moral Contextualism and the Norms for Moral Conduct,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2007); 1–13. Montminy writes that “According to moral contextualism, moral judgments are analogous to tallness ascriptions” (1), which reduces the position to relativism.

Introduction

27

41. Austin, “Other Minds.” 42. For more along these lines, see Hilary Putnam, Words and Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. Part I, “The Return of Aristotle.” See, also, Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Human Flourishing and the Appeal to Human Nature,” Social Philosophy & Policy 16, no. 1 (1999): 1–43. I have addressed the issue in Machan, Individuals and Their Rights, 68–83. 43. See Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). 44. For more, see Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (London: Routledge, 1998). An Al Capone or, especially, Adolph Hitler becomes individuated in such negative, perverse ways. 45. I believe this addresses Isaiah Berlin’s worries about pluralism in ethics without conceding that such pluralism implies incoherence. 46. Arguably, many so-called self-help books are, in fact, books of ethics, but they have not been treated as such under the influence of the prominent conception of moral philosophy, in terms of which morality pertains only to interpersonal conduct. For a good critique of this position, see W. D. Falk, “Morality, Self, and Others,” in Morality and the Language of Conduct, ed. Hector-Neri Castaneda and George Nakhnikian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965). Proper consideration of how one ought to act as the individual one is will be constrained by the general principles based on one’s membership in the human species—e.g., rationality, respect for human rights, etc. 47. Some have objected that Rand doesn’t manage to derive “ought” claims from true claims about what is the case. See, for example, David Friedman, “Some Problems with Ayn Rand’s Derivation of Ought from Is,” posted on the newsgroup humanities.philosophy.objectivism (reportedly circa November 1996). The criticism rests on a formalist or Platonist conception of definitions and concepts. (See also Robert Nozick, “On The Randian Argument,” The Personalist 52 [Spring 1970].) As such, it misunderstands Rand and her neo-Aristotelian naturalist metaethics and the conception of definitions she invokes. (See also Putnam, Words and Life.) Actually, Friedman focuses not on ethics per se but on politics, complaining (as does Mack) that Rand cannot show, based on her ethical egoism, that one ought to respect another’s right to life, liberty, property, etc. (See, also, Siegfried Van Duffel, “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Critical Review 16 [2004]: “The idea that people are sovereign beings does not allow us to infer that they have an obligation to respect each others’ sovereignty” (371). For a very good discussion of why Rand’s ethical egoism is often misunderstood along similar lines, see Robert White, “A Study of the Ethical Foundations of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Individual Rights” (thesis, Auckland, New Zealand, University of Auckland, submitted 2005). White shows, among other things, that Rand’s egoism is peculiar in that it sees ethics as such as egoistic or eudaemonist. In other words, the explanation of why there is ethics in the first place involves reference to the agent’s ultimate good. 48. Eric Mack, “Problematic Arguments in Randian Ethics,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5, no. 1 (Fall 2003); and Douglas B. Rasmussen, “Rand on Obligation and Value,” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 4, no. 1 (Fall 2002).

28

Introduction

49. Douglas Rasmussen makes the following challenging point about this issue: Rand’s derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ seems of limited value: if I choose to live, then I ought to do such and such, but since there can be no obligation without this choice, there is nothing, either logically or morally, that obligates me to choose to live and thus no reason to be moral. Possibly, there was something to Hazel E. Barnes (1967) including a chapter on ‘Objectivist Ethics’ in her book, An Existentialist Ethics. Morality seems to be based on an irrational or arational commitment—the very thing Rand vehemently rejects (Rasmussen, “Rand on Obligation and Value,” 75)

The claim, however, that this makes Rand’s view “of limited value” assumes that “objective” must mean exactly what Rand disputes it must mean, namely, “intrinsic”— that is, that for a moral standard to be objectively true, it would have to amount to a set of categoricals and could not amount to a set of conditional imperatives. For more, see Machan, “Rand and Choice.” 50. Or, to put it as I prefer, it is possible for us (that is, for each normal human individual) to keep up the initiative to live and to think. Let me stress that the choice to live is a fundamental or first choice, or is best so conceptualized. It may be envisioned as being made, in the initial stages of one’s life, haltingly, implicitly, gradually, over and over again, expressing (as one might put it) the will to live, to be the human being one can become. The choice—or initial emergence of conceptual consciousness—I am considering is a logical first step in action and thus cannot be motivated by some desire or knowledge. It is not a choice in the sense of a selection process, going into force with prior information at hand; rather, it is the exertion of an initial effort by a rational agent who at that stage of its development lacks other decisive prompters to action. This initiative is, as it were, the act of free will. (For more on this perennial topic, see Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society.) As one commentator has noted, what I am defending is a view of morality that’s reminiscent of its characterization as “a system of hypothetical imperatives.” Only, in this case, as the comment goes, “the hypothetical can only really go one way. We might think of the decision to live as one that is inconceivable to reject. . . .” The decision, in other words, is unlike others since it is not considered but commences or initiates any and all considerations. I should note, also, that although the choice to live commits one to flourishing, it does not necessitate it. One can start off with the choice to live but then default on what it implies, namely, to think and act virtuously. But a consistent alternative to choosing to live with this implicit commitment to aim to flourish still would amount to implicitly choosing to wither away. Indeed, if one chooses to live—to survive as a human being—instead of to perish, the implicit choice does involve attempting to flourish. For human beings, the choice to live is not merely to survive—as one survives a plane crash by merely not dying in it—but to live as human beings can. 51. David Kelley, “Choosing Life” (unpublished paper, 2005). 52. Neuroscientists, of course, have made observations of the brain’s behavior in infancy that correlate with what (in later life) turns out to be mental activities, thus suggesting that such activities do take place in infancy and perhaps even before.

Introduction

29

Bernard Baars, author of In the Theater of Consciousness (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), made some interesting observations to me via e-mail on this topic: My friend Stan Franklin, who is a mathematician/computer scientist, talks about ‘autonomous agents.’ Humans are nothing if not autonomous agents—not in a mystical sense, but in a very specific and causal sense. One of the ways we are autonomous is in terms of substitutability of resources. On the level of food, we like to eat meat, but if that runs out, potatoes will do. So there are options. In terms of human relationships, we’d like to have Julia Roberts as our playmate, but there are other fish in that sea. In terms of making a living, we’d all like to be paid for our books, but (etc.). I think that’s one of the keys to autonomy, substitutability of resources. Another is flexibility in acquiring knowledge. Humans are by far the best learners in the animal kingdom, obviously. But acquired knowledge also shapes who we are and how we define our purposes and interests. Gerald Edelman makes a big thing about the distinctiveness of the INDIVIDUAL human brain. His Neural Darwinism gives a conceptual account of individuality from solid biological evidence.

53. To reiterate, the term “choose” can mislead because it is often used to mean “select,” and for selections there need to be several alternatives. This fundamental choice, however, is of the “on versus off” type, so “taking the initiative,” which involves moving from rest to motion, more accurately characterizes what may well be going on here. 54. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 127. 55. For a detailed discussion, see Machan, “Rand and Choice.” At this point, I should stress that the choice not to live, made at the initial stage of one’s life (that is to say, not to initiate one’s living), is pre-moral. One must embark upon life before one is bound by the principles that guide it. Yes, one’s flourishing human life is potentially one’s end, prior to this, but it is not one’s end in fact, actually, without one’s having embarked upon living. I should also note that not choosing to live, not initiating one’s life process, as it were, is not the same as embarking upon suicide, which is done when one has lived for quite a while and is certainly open to moral criticism by that stage of one’s life. Should one decide to commit suicide—maybe justifiably—the method used would also be subject to moral evaluation. 56. This is why objecting to conclusions on these matters on the grounds that it is logically possible (i.e., that there is no formal contradiction in the denial) that they aren’t so is irrelevant. As Wittgenstein puts it, “The reasonable man does not have certain doubts.” Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 29e. That is, some doubts are unreasonable to entertain. 57. This point calls to mind the ancient question, “Why should one be moral?” Because one’s decision—or, if you will, oath—to live one’s human life commits one to living ethically. 58. For more on this point, see Tibor R. Machan and James E. Chesher, A Primer on Business Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). See also the introductory essay, “Ethics and Its Uses,” in Tibor R. Machan, Commerce and Morality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988).

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Introduction

59. Martha Nussbaum, in contrast, seems to be concerned with the human good without giving a central role to choice. I discuss Nussbaum in Tibor R. Machan, Libertarianism Defended (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006), chap. 19, “Two Philosophers Skeptical of Negative Liberty.” 60. Of course, if (in fact, in the realm of ontology) everything is the same type or kind of being (e.g., matter-in-motion, sense data, spirit, or whatever), then objectivity will involve just what it takes to properly grasp this one type or kind of being. For more, see Machan, Objectivity. 61. In this account, truth is a property of judgments or statements, not of abstractly existing propositions. An unknown or unknowable truth is, accordingly, nonsense. 62. Thomas Nagel, “The View from Here and Now,” London Review of Books 28, no. 9 (May 11, 2006). (For my purposes, Nagel’s summary captures the critical point that Williams voices.) 63. Ibid., 10. 64. For more on this, see Machan, “Why it Appears that Objective Ethical Claims Are Subjective.” 65. Hanna F. Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice; On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). See also Tibor R. Machan, “Can There Be Stable and Lasting Principles?” International Journal of Social Economics 32, no. l/2 (2005): 218–27. 66. Machan, “Can There Be Stable and Lasting Principles?” 225. 67. For an example of how context matters in formal disciplines, see Imre Lakatos, Mathematics, Science, and Epistemology, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 68. Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 54. 69. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 12. 70. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs it? (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982), 118. But see also her hero’s statement in the novel Atlas Shrugged, “This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero” (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1992 [1020]. This suggests that even what Rand takes to be the pre-moral choice is subject to moral evaluation. I take her here, however, to be referring to the choices one makes following having made the basic choice that, so to speak, constitutes the entry into the moral universe. One might see it, again, as an analogy with someone having made the choice to be a doctor, after which he or she is committed to paying close attention to medical matters. But, prior to that choice, no such obligation exists. 71. This is a crucial point stressed by Ayn Rand throughout her discussion of objectivity in all her writings but especially Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

Chapter One

Theorists versus Their Theories The Case of Agent Causation

“the [theorist] cannot present a picture of man which patently contradicts his behavior in presenting that picture.” —D. Bannister, “Comment,” in Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, ed. Borger and Cioffi (Cambridge University Press, 1970), 417.

In this first chapter I wish to address the issue of how scholars in many disciplines go about trying to grasp the central elements of their subject matter, namely, the explanation of what occurs in the portion of reality on which they have chosen to focus. As a preliminary to my own discussion of the crucial features of political economy and some of its presuppositions, I want to look briefly at what is implicit in taking up the task of shedding light on one’s topic of concern. It seems quite clear that economists and other social as well as some biological scientists—for example, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists—want to explain, via factors and variables, most if not all events, including the development of institutions, in human history. In other words, they want to point to such factors as the necessary and sufficient preconditions of those events. Yet, as theorists or students of human affairs they take the initiative to advance various theories, conduct various studies, or set out to understand what they study and to organize their experiences, picking and choosing what is relevant and what can be left aside. Are not these two approaches in mutual tension? If we and all we do can be explained by reference to impersonal causes, factors that force us to behave in the various ways we do, where does our own creative initiative enter the picture? Is it then not simply que sera, sera, after all? In the end, are we just like 31

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Chapter One

puppets, being moved around without any will of our own? Is not even the idea of “original work” an oxymoron? And does the idea that we ought to proceed in certain—ways and if we do not we have gone about it in a misguided fashion when we might have not done so—become incoherent? When events proceed outside human affairs, unavoidably, by natural necessity, there is no room of judging them to have proceeded wrongly, no room for criticizing how they have occurred. At most some may lament it but not meaningfully consider that wrongful actions or conduct may have been carried out. One reason so many find it a simple matter to dismiss the idea of free will is that they take it as practically axiomatic, utterly undeniable, that any behavior, including the human variety, is not caused and is fully accountable by reference to events that precede it. What is rejected as a possibility, let alone a fact of reality, is that we ourselves could be causes, so that some, maybe even the most insignificant, actions we take are to be explained by reference to our own causal agency or potency.1 That I am the being whose actions produce these lines on a computer screen, who makes the movements with his fingers, guided by his judgments, that produce the text you are reading, that idea is deemed metaphysically impossible even by many who would otherwise not see themselves as having any metaphysical views at all. But what I do is seen by them as necessarily the result of events that causally impinge on me and make me act.2 To explain this by reference to something I initiated—that I started on my own—is taken as an idea that is out-and-out nonsense. Every event, including the movements of my fingers and the judgments made by me (with my mind or brain) that direct these fingers, must have been, the thesis goes, produced by a preceding event. Otherwise, it is held, the event could not have taken place— there cannot be self-causation or agent causation or being causation. And all this applies, of course, to these thinkers themselves—what they say and do, and what great scientists, composers, novelists, or anyone else otherwise deemed to be a creative individual does, simply had to have happened. There is no room here for original authorship, agency, or choice (initiative). Those concepts, as the late B. F. Skinner would put it, are all “pre-scientific.” Yet, some object. As the late Roger W. Sperry put it, We no longer seek the ultimate nature of reality within the smallest physical elements, nor in their innermost essence. Instead the search is redirected to focus primarily on the patterning of the elements, on their differential pacing and timing and the progressive compounding of patterns, and on their evolving nature and complexity.3

I wish to offer some objections to the deterministic view and to provide an alternative that would not be subject to the charge of my defending a kind of

Theorists versus Their Theories

33

causation that is mysterious or spooky—in other words, nonexistent by scientifically respectable standards. But first, here is one of the preeminent champions of the view that no initiative can exist, but with a twist. For Dennet despite the absence of original actions of any kind, we are not fated to do what we do. He holds the supposedly different idea that everything we do depends on something else that has happened and has impinged upon us. This is how Dennet puts his position: Fatalism is the idea that something’s going to happen no matter what you do. Determinism is the idea that what you do depends. What happens depends on what you do, what you do depends on what you know, what you know depends on what you’re caused to know, and so forth—but still, what you do matters. There’s a big difference between that and fatalism. Fatalism is determinism with you left out. If I accomplish one thing in this book, I want to break the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together. Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now. There’s no conflict between being an avoider and living in a deterministic world. There’s been a veritable explosion of evitability on this planet, and it’s all independent of determinism.4

In this discussion, I will be focusing on some of the points Dennett raises above, as well as on the framework that he appears to presuppose for some of the terms he uses in his discussion. When we think of ourselves acting in the world, most of us tend to assume we can cause things to happen.5 For one, we take our actions to be, well, our actions, not just movements or behaviors that we happen to have undergone. We often make or produce things, as I am doing when I write these thoughts down, or you, when you compose a poem, organize a division of a company, or arrange the flowers in your garden. Indeed, human history is believed by most of us to consist of more or less significant things people have done, badly or well. Art, science, technology, politics, diplomacy, economics, and the rest are all supposedly spheres of human conduct. And it is also thought to be comprised of actions that we might not have taken, such as building gas ovens to burn Jews, running plantations where slaves were owned, or constructing gulags where members of “reactionary” classes were kept captive for years. We tend to distinguish such actions from anything that just happens (whether more or less significant, or more or less beneficial) and that we could not do anything about. That earthquake in California, the tsunami in Southern Asia, and hurricane Katrina, those all happened—we did not do them. The rain and the virus that has produced some of the damages from

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which we have suffered, a flood and a widespread illness, respectively, weren’t our doing. But the damage-control measures applied to them, via medicine or engineering, were. Some would deny that there really is much of a difference between these two kinds of occurrences, despite the fact that, in such debates as global warming, the issue is central.6 They argue that both are happenings, some involving human beings as intermediary factors, some others not involving them. In the final analysis, however, what we do is no less a kind of happening in which we have a role, as a rather complex link in the chain of events that brings about the behavior we otherwise, misguidedly, consider to be acts we produce. Indeed, the issue is whether, when we do have such a part in the process that brings about the action, we are in any way decisive, first causes, or whether we are merely one of many steps in a causal chain. And there are a great many rather influential thinkers who deny that we are—or even possibly could be—such first causes. We cannot originate or initiate anything; indeed, it would be a spooky thing if we could. Yet, is that right? Why would it be spooky if we could produce something on our own? We certainly assume, at times, that we can do just such a thing, as when we think of Einstein having originated the theory of special relativity or Mozart having originated his Requiem. In fact, in less dramatic ways, we think of ourselves as engaging in original creations, as when we put together a funny expression or take an unusual picture. My own children often let on to their belief in having said something original, when after they say it they have a big grin on their faces, indicating that, yes, they know this is a novelty. Okay, but perhaps we are just mistaken when we think these self-aggrandizing thoughts about what we can do. The famous behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, who taught at Harvard University, argued that these ideas are pre-scientific. Dennett argues that the kind of freedom of the will that involves agent causation is mysterious or spooky and, in any case, not worth having. This is the sort that would make us capable of being original actors, creators, and producers. Dennett says we could not make any sense of such freedom of action, and certainly not of any kind of responsibility for actions we take, if it did exist. In his recent book, Dennett tells us the following: How does an agent cause an effect without there being an event (in the agent, presumably) that is the cause of that effect (and is itself the effect of an earlier cause, and so forth)? Agent causation is a frankly mysterious doctrine, positing something unparalleled by anything we discover in the causal processes of chemical reactions, nuclear fission and fusion, magnetic attraction, hurricanes, volcanoes, or such biological processes as metabolism, growth, immune reactions, and photosynthesis.7

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First of all, the main argument for free will is no more mysterious than any argument that relies on a dialectical move. If, as turns out to be the case, free will is assumed even as one tries to deny it—in other words, the action of attempting to deny free will presupposes that the agent is capable of making original choices—that is sufficient to present a very strong case for free will. The kind of independent thinking involved in argumentation does exactly that, namely, presuppose free will, the capacity to make choices, to take the initiative as a conceptually conscious, critical, scrutinizing agent. For of what worth would any argument be if it merely amounted to a computational or genetic process? It would be no more compelling as argument than would be an “argument” advanced by a computer or parrot. The reason we can understand the reference to these as arguments is that we, human agents, can take them as such. But, as products of computers or parrots, they are not arguments, only a bunch of sounds strung together. Second, there is that aspect of the case for free will that relies on introspection. We often know about things this way, as when we answer our doctors very confidently about where we feel a pain in our bodies, or remember an event for which there is no evidence any longer, apart from our memory. These are completely reliable kinds of knowledge, and part of what gives us knowledge of our free will is that we know we often choose, initiate action, and produce or create what we did not have to produce or create. As I am writing the next few words in this discussion, I know at every moment that I could stop, get up, and get a soda from the fridge, or continue with my project, as indeed I am choosing to do. Finally, is Dennett’s distinction between determinism and inevitability (or fatalism) sound? Let’s look again at what he says: Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now.8

Now, suppose that I am typing along here and someone maintains that I am fully determined to do this. I, however, in order to try to show that I am not, stop. Have I avoided something now? No, not according to Dennett’s version of determinism. Some factor, such as the presentation of the idea that I am determined, along with my hard-wired and trained responsiveness to such a presentation, has simply come into play to redirect the flow of events, so that I am no longer typing along but stopping, reacting to the factors or forces. Could I have done otherwise? Not according to the determinist view. Was what happened inevitable? Surely, the presentation of the determinist’s idea could not be avoided; my reaction could not either, and so on and so forth.

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What Dennett takes to be a serious difference between determinism and fatalism is only a difference in how detailed a story one is going to tell. Sure, there is no fatalism of the sort where large movements merely proceed, unstoppably; but there is a fatalism of the sort where zillions of micro-movements interact in ways so complex that not even a humongous computer could predict exactly what is going to happen next. Still, a sophisticated fatalist would rightly hold that whatever is going to happen is fated to have happened, all the details being considered. So, pace Dennett, if we know what avoidance means, we know that, paraphrasing him, in a fatalistic world there is a lot of avoidance. Why? Because what is called ‘avoidance’ is a form of behavior that is determined to occur, just as any other form of behavior is determined to occur. What the above does not show is the right account of free will, only that free will is real. It exists; indeed, it is undeniable for us who are acting agents. The theory of agent causality serves as an account of free will, not as a proof of it. However, if it fails, perhaps the idea that we have free will is false. Maybe a deterministic account of the phenomenon of free will shall succeed where the agent causality account has failed, however incongruous that is given other sources of confidence in the free will thesis (as is made evident in the next chapter). So, it does matter whether the agent causality account of free will is sound. The first obstacle to this is the claim, made by Dennett and others, that the very idea of agent causation is mysterious, spooky. But why is Dennett so confident that agent causation would have to be mysterious? To answer that, we need to consider a famous argument about the nature of causality that occurred back in the eighteenth century. It was David Hume who reasoned that, if we depended for knowing the world entirely and solely on our sensory information, then causality itself must not be thought of as any kind of production or power. The billiard ball that strikes another and is taken, thus, to have made the other move has no (empirically) demonstrable productive powers at all. Instead, if we depend on our senses for knowledge, all we can justifiably claim is that the first billiard ball’s motion was followed by that of the second, and the oft-repeated instances of this result in our coming to gain the idea of causality. (This is an odd move, by the way, since Hume is depending on a productive notion of causality to explain our belief in causality.) Regular or constant sequences like that are, for Hume, all that causes are, involving no evident causal powers. The assumption that all of what we know comes from our senses is a pretty radical one and, although Hume’s idea of causality was very influential, most scientists and nearly all ordinary people did not fully accept his claim about it, because it rested on his radical empiricism. But many did accept a good

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deal of it, so the idea that there can be something productive in a causal relationship has been dropped by most of those who think about causal connections in the world. It is this idea that is deemed to be spooky or mysterious by many, because the productivity of a causal factor assumes something that is not directly evident—it is not perceived by the senses. Instead, it is inferred from the entire context of the causal situation. Say, for example, that the billiard ball has something about it—its solidity, its mass and density—that would produce an impact on another billiard ball so that this other ball would be moved by it; this is something that we do not see but infer. And although much of science welcomes direct evidence first and foremost, as it considers convincing explanatory stories, science also makes room for inferred powers. For instance, black holes could not be detected by way of direct evidence for a long time, since by their very nature they did not release any sensory information since their immense gravitational force did not allow such information, involving (as it has to) the emission of light, to escape for us to perceive it. So, the existence and nature of black holes were both discovered by inference, by noticing facts that could best be explained by the postulation of the black hole. (This is, of course, how the reality of many other beings or events is routinely established—for example, intentions, motives, wants, wishes, expectations, and so forth.) In response to those like Dennett, then, who deny the possibility of agent causality because they regard productive powers of causal factors something mysterious or spooky, such powers are not directly perceived but they can be inferred from other facts that are perceivable. So, if the best explanation of what makes the second billiard ball move is that the first has certain properties that can produce this movement in an entity such as the second ball, then that is a conclusion that is certain beyond a reasonable doubt (although not certain in the absolute sense that Descartes’ idea of knowledge, which Hume deployed for sensory impressions, would have required). Similarly, the power of human agents to be first causes can also be inferred along these lines. Given a certain composition and constitution of their brains, and given their properties, they are capable of making original choices, of taking the initiative, just as we ordinarily believe we can. Dennett and other compatibilists hold that the kind of freedom that agent causation involves is not worth having. They argue that to attribute responsibility to human individuals is, ipso facto, to see them as explaining their conduct as determined, since “responsible” means causally potent. Yet, if agent causation is a fact, it provides the causal potency by which responsibility may be ascribed to individual human beings, not because their conduct is caused by prior events but because they are themselves beings that can cause actions.9 As such it provides, also, a foundation for something Dennett and company need

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to deny, namely, that when we consider our past conduct, we normally, routinely take it that we could have acted other than we did, all things being equal—so that, without any impersonal forces having caused us to do a different thing, we could indeed have done a different thing. This is a view that underlies our ordinary understanding of human action, as well as our view of moral and legal responsibility and culpability. It is also something that is presupposed in criticism, say, of philosophical thinking—when Dennett construes this argument as misguided and not something anyone ought to accept, he, too, implicitly accepts that those who propose it could have done otherwise, not because they could have been made to do otherwise but because they could have, on their own initiative, acted differently—say, thought harder about the topic at hand. This is not the place where the full story of this capacity can be told but it is the place where it can be noted that the requisite evidence for such a capacity could involve inferred powers.10 These, in turn, need by no means be mysterious or spooky things, any more than the immense gravitational powers of black holes need to be deemed spooky or mysterious simply because no one could, until recently, directly perceive them, or one’s intention to work hard for the next year or motivation to feed one’s children need be mysterious or spooky things because these are not directly perceived. There is more to reality than just what the senses can record, even if what that is needs to be fully squared with what the senses can record. And this fact, which has tripped up empiricist views such as logical positivism, is evident in the central point of this paper: no defender of determinism, or denier of free human agency, can account for an evident fact that cannot be missed, namely, that a theorist’s theory has that theorist as its cause—he or she produced the theory and might not have done so were it not for the causal efficacy that had been freely, as a matter of the theorist’s initiative, put in service of that product.

NOTES 1. A good recent source for exploring a variety of positions on this topic is the special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, 12, no. 1 (2005), entitled “A Plain Person’s Free Will.” The title essay, by a judge of the New South Wales, Australia, Supreme Court, David Hodgson, is quite accessible, even though it’s somewhat technical. The responses are mostly academic philosophical pieces. 2. For an extensive discussion of the neuroscience of conscious behavior, see Benjamin Libet, Anthony Freeman, and Keith Sutherland, eds., The Volitional Brain, Towards a Neuroscience of Free Will (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2004). Some argue that human actions, contrary to what many take to be evident, do not follow

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conscious decisions. Despite how it appears, when people act consciously, their conduct is well under way before they themselves are aware of setting out to undertake what they do. Yet, there is evidence that this could not be the customary way people behave because if one were to pick some random event in the environment that one will follow up with a certain action—say, when a red car appears in front of someone on a road he will honk the horn—the agent could not have set out to take the action, namely, honk the horn, prior to the appearance of the red car that came about unexpectedly. 3. Roger W. Sperry, “The Future of Psychology,” American Psychologist 50 (1995):506. 4. Daniel Dennett, interview in Reason Magazine, May 2003 (http://www.reason .com/0305/fe.rb.pulling.shtml). 5. This, by the way, does not imply that we do not often act from habit—just note the ease with which Dennett, in the quoted passages, makes reference to “the bad habit of putting determinism and inevitability together.” For a good discussion of the compatibility of habitual conduct with human agency, see Bill Pollard, “Explaining Actions with Habits,” American Philosophical Quarterly 43, (2006):57–69. 6. A good popularizer of that view is Thomas W. Clark. (See his works at http:// www.naturalism.org/clark_nec.htm.) 7. Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), 100. 8. Ibid. 9. This view is laid out and fully defended in Edward Pols, Acts of our being: a reflection on agency and responsibility (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982). See, also, Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001). 10. A good beginning is available in Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

Chapter Two

Ethics and Its Controversial Assumptions

Given that our project involves a good deal of ethical and political evaluation, it will be very helpful to further explore just what philosophical assumptions underlie the making of such evaluations. Previously I noted that a certain kind of human agency, the capacity to initiate some of our conduct, is indispensable for the very act of theorizing. It will be evident from what follows that such an agency is at the center of our human form of life, as is the fact that we may be judged for how well or badly we conduct ourselves. Whether ethics even exists is often in dispute. That is to say, whether claims such as “People should be honest” or “Children should be cared for” or, again, “Treating members of racial groups with prejudice is wrong” can ever be true is widely disputed. Many believe that ethical claims like these, and claims such as those made in the various sciences, are radically different because claims in the sciences are subject to certain kinds of demonstration that are not available when we attempt to show ethical claims to be true. Another source of serious skepticism about ethics stems from the fact that a good many natural and social scientists think that people cannot be morally blamed for what they do; instead, their conduct is explainable by various causes, and the agent’s initiative, will, or choice is but an illusion. Ordinary folks, too, are at times convinced that people act badly only because something made them do so, some event in their upbringing, some biological component of their make up, or some factor of the culture to which they belong. (We tend to explain our own bad conduct more readily, but blame other people for theirs! And, conversely, we tend to take credit for our good conduct, but often dismiss that of others as having been the result of various impersonal factors.)

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Whether ethics is a bona fide part of human life is not self-evident, nor is it obvious. In order for there to be ethics, some other facts must already exist. Such claims as “Judy should not lie” or “The president of the United Sates of American ought to be honest with the citizenry” assume that Judy and the president have a choice about what they will do. As Immanuel Kant believed, “ought” implies “can.” This means that if one ought to do something, it must be that one can either do or not do it. It also assumes that Judy, the president, and anyone who would look into the matter can identify certain standards of conduct to be used in figuring out what we should or should not do. Some claim that Kant’s insight is wrong, and that we need not be free in the sense of having the capacity either to do or to not do something as a matter of our own initiative or choice, all things being equal, because this would violate the laws of causality that make it impossible for two different outcomes to result from identical circumstances.1 Nevertheless, these philosophers hold to a compatibilist position such that people are still responsible for their actions, even though they could not have acted some other way than they actually did. By “responsible,” they mean, however, not that they could have done something else under the same circumstances but that they were, in fact, instrumental in what came about—they played a causal role in a sequence of causes that resulted in what we are evaluating about them, the way a storm is responsible for a flood that is unwelcome. Such a view, however, is arguably not what amounts to a genuine moral perspective. Both ordinary morality—how most people think about ethics, namely what we ought to and ought not to do—and criminal law take it that human beings are generally free to take different actions from identical circumstances; otherwise, the idea that they ought to have done otherwise—for example, not kidnapped or assaulted someone, not lied and cheated in their marriages, not murdered millions during the Holocaust—could not apply. Arguably then, the compatibilist position is a sort of attempt to have one’s cake and eat it, too—being true to determinism but also to the requirements of the moral point of view. In this discussion I will take the position that either ethics is a genuine part of human life, in which case people are normally free to choose between alternative courses of conduct (all else being equal), or there is no morality and it is all a matter of what will be will be, the way trees grow, lions roar, or earthquakes rip up the ground. First, then, for ethics to be real, it must be that we can exercise some genuine choices, that we have the capacity to initiate some actions. If this were impossible, the idea that we should (or should not) act in a certain way would have no application in human life. Second, ethics requires that some principles that apply to conduct be identifiable or objective. Unless we all can learn those

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very general principles, ethics has no place in our lives. It consists, after all, of principles of conduct that pertain to all human beings. Moral or ethical principles pertain to action, how we should conduct ourselves, and on what basis we should choose or select what we will do. To succeed at living a human life that is morally good, some principles would have to be followed. “Morally good” means being excellent as a human being in one’s life, as a matter of choice or one’s own initiative, not accidentally, and not because one has been compelled to behave in certain welcome ways. So being tall (or talented or beautiful) is not usually an aspect of moral excellence (unless helped along as a matter of free choice), whereas being honest (or courageous or prudent) would be, if ethics was indeed a bona fide dimension of human living. If we could not exercise genuine choices, morality would be impossible since no one could help what he or she is doing. It would all be a matter of good and bad things simply happening, as indeed they often do at the hands of nature, as it were, when tornadoes or earthquakes or diseases strike. Secondly, if we could not identify moral principles, we could never make a sensible selection from among alternative courses of conduct. Depending on what we aim for, we can identify the principles that will enable us to reach our goal. This is clearly evident in such fields as medicine, engineering, and business. Thus, it seems that this second requirement of ethics, that we can identify principles of conduct, might be satisfied. But we will need to explore that further to be reasonably sure of it. Let me explore briefly whether these two assumptions are reasonable or whether they are, perhaps, merely prejudice or myth, as some folks believe who would consign ethics to the dustbin of pre-science, akin to demonology or witchcraft. The conclusions I will reach cannot be considered conclusive— there is not enough time and space to carry out a full investigation. But we will have a chance to look at the major points for and against the assumptions. Without some idea about whether they are true, ethics itself is left unsupported and potentially bogus—it could just as easily be in the class of the occult, such as astrology or palmistry.

1. FREE WILL? The first matter to address is whether we have free will—not necessarily all of us, all of the time but, rather, we as a rule, normally. In other words, are human beings, as they have appeared throughout history in their innumerable diverse circumstances (though not when incapacitated or significantly damaged or as bare infants), capable of bringing about, of their own initiative, the behavior in which they engage?

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Against Free Will Nature’s Laws versus Free Will One of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of physics. The argument here is that all material substances are controlled by these laws and we human beings are basically complicated versions of material substances. Therefore, whatever governs material substance in the universe must also govern human life. Social sciences, for one, which study human beings in their social relations, look into some causes that produce our behavior. So does neuroscience, a sub-discipline of biology, in its study of our individual brains or minds. In each case, the study focuses on the causes of behavior (although, more often than not, all that’s captured is strong correlations). So, the only difference between the rest of nature and ourselves, as far as these branches of science are concerned, is that we are more complicated, not that we are not governed by the same principles or laws of nature. Most definitely, it is argued, no such thing as an original cause is evident in the rest of nature, something that would have to be possible for free will to exist. As one advocate of determinism puts it, “the best response to the demand for an explanation of the relation between an originator and decisions is that an explanation cannot be given. We have to regard this relation as primitive or unanalyzable.”2 In other words, originating or initiating some action seems nothing more than a myth or an unexplainable fact for which no evidence or argument can be given.3 The determinist claims that all our actions, including decisions, are more sensibly taken to be effects of some prior events and may even amount to a mere epiphenomenon.4 It is the determinist’s view that everything we do is the effect of some set of causal circumstances. This makes better sense, say the determinists, than leaving things unexplained and mysterious. Affirming Initiative In response, one can argue that nature exhibits innumerable different domains, distinct not only in their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. There are, to be sure, many domains where we find the familiar cause and effect situation clearly evident—for example, on the billiard table, in geological movements, and in the motion of the planets. But there are areas where something else appears to be going on. For example, is the cause of a musical composition—the composer and his or her creative conduct—itself the effect of a prior cause, so that the composer makes no original contribution?5 It most reasonably seems to be so. Thus “causal” analysis or reasoning does not necessarily rule out something in nature that exhibits agent—or original—causation, the phenomenon whereby a thing produces its own behavior. Causal interactions depend on the nature of the be-

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ings that interact, i.e., what they are. So one cannot rule out, a priori (before investigation), that some beings could have the capacity to act on their own initiative. Thus it seems that there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether there is or is not has yet to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow world view or metaphysics that restricts everything to being just one kind of thing so that everything has just one kind of causal characteristics. Nature appears to be composed of many types and kinds of things, and thus does not have to exclude free will.6 Free will, therefore, seems to be possible, even in a world of causality. Whether free will actually exists is a question that we’ll examine shortly. We Cannot Know of Free Will Another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying, inspecting, or examining nature is what we call “empiricism.” In other words, many believe that the only way we know about nature is by observing it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really is not any such thing. Since no observable evidence for free will exists, they hold that free will does not exist. We Can Know Free Will But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong—we know many things, not simply through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory construction. (Consider, even the purported knowledge that empiricism is a form of knowledge is not “known” empirically!) Take, for example, criminal guilt, which can often be detected without eyewitnesses, by way of theories that serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This approach holds true, even in the natural sciences. Many of the complex phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics, botany, chemistry—not to mention psychology—consist not of what we see or detect by observation but of what we infer by way of a sound theory. The theory that explains things best—most completely and most consistently—best answers the question of what is going on. Free will may well turn out to fall into this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can see directly; rather, it is what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many mistakes that human beings make, in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type associated with physics. We can examine a person’s background and find that

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some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, while others become crooks. Free will, then, is a very helpful explanation. For now, all we need to consider is that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empiricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not strict empirical knowledge. Free Will Is Weird Another matter that often counts against free will is that the rest of (even living) beings in nature do not exhibit it. Dogs, cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., have no free will, and therefore it appears arbitrary to impute it to human beings. Why should we be free to do things when the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It would be an impossible aberration. Some opponents of the free will idea, such as the behaviorist psychologist B. F. Skinner, have stressed this objection.7 Free Will Is Natural The answer here is similar to the one that I gave earlie; to wit, there is great variety in nature—some things swim, some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Discovering that something has free will could be yet another addition to all the variations in nature. Determinism seems to depend upon adherence to a very specific ontology, in terms of which everything must be a given kind of thing, one that can only move when prompted by something else, and this is not something that can be shown to hold true universally, so as to preclude free will. God Doesn’t Allow Free Will There is also a theological argument to the effect that if God knows everything, he/she knows the future, so what we do is unalterable. If someone knows that some future event will occur, e.g., that Haley’s Comet will come nearest to earth at some given time in the future, then whatever is involved in that event cannot have a choice about it. Thus, if God knows that you will have three children, then you have no genuine choice about the matter. It has to turn out that way. God’s “Knowledge” Is Mysterious But God’s knowledge is not likely to be the kind that human beings have; indeed, it is a mystery as to just what it is. As a result, nothing much can be inferred from it. It is a mistake to compare what would follow from a human being’s knowledge of the future versus God’s “knowledge” of the future. The latter is entirely different from the former, and so the ramifications wouldn’t be the same, either.

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For Free Will Let’s now consider whether free will actually does exist. I’ll offer four arguments in support of an affirmative answer. (They are not uniquely my arguments but ones that have been proposed throughout the philosophical community.) Thus far, we have only considered whether free will is possible. But does it exist? The following points support that contention. Are We Determined to Be Determinists—Or Not? If we are fully determined by impersonal forces to behave as we do, this implies that what we think is also so determined. In that case, our belief that determinism is true is also a result of such forces, not something we come to learn as a matter of choosing to use our minds well. But the same holds for the belief that determinism is false. There is nothing one can do about whatever one believes—one was determined to believe it. Doesn’t Judgment Require Independence? If, however, there is no way to take an independent stance and consider the arguments in an unprejudiced manner, because all of the various forces making us assimilate the evidence cause us either to believe or disbelieve in determinism, then both the belief in and the rejection of determinism are a result of such forces, and no independent assessment of the topic is possible. One either turns out to be a determinist or not, and in neither case can we appraise the issue objectively, because we are predetermined to have a view on the matter one way or the other, ad infinitum. In that case, paradoxically, we’ll never be able to resolve this debate, since there is no way to obtain an objective, unbiased assessment—we are not free to judge such matters. Indeed, the very idea of philosophical, scientific, or judicial objectivity, or of ever coming to know anything, has to do with being free. Thus, if we’re engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have some measure of mental freedom. This view was put forward by Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth century German philosopher, as well as by Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist who defends free will.8 We Should All Become Determinists Everyone who accepts determinism would also have all those who reject it accept the view, as well. This is especially true of those involved in the argument about the topic. Both those who embrace free will and those who embrace determinism hold that the others ought to change their minds and join them in holding their position. Of course, if it is right, that is what we all should believe.

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The Dilemma of Determinism However, there’s a dilemma afoot if determinists implore others to accept their views, to change their minds. Since the determinists hold that we cannot help what we believe—such matters are not up to us; there is no choice in the matter—the determinist has no basis for asking us to believe in determinism, to ask that we ought to do so rather than believe in “the illusion of free will.” As Kant also said, “ought” implies “can.” That is, if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a free choice in the matter; it implies that it is up to us whether we will hold determinism or free will as the better doctrine. That, in turn, assumes that we are free. So, even arguing for determinism assumes that we are not determined to believe in free will, but that it is a matter of our making certain choices about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself. We run across this paradox when we find people who blame us for not accepting the view that people’s fate is not in their hands and that therefore we should not blame them. Blaming some while denying that anyone should be blamed is a paradox, one that troubles a deterministic position. In one book defending determinism, the author ends by posing the following question: “If [‘Left Wing politics is less given to attitudes and policies which have something of the assumption of Free Will in them’], should one part of the response . . . be a move to the Left in politics? I leave you with that bracing question.”9 Yet can this be a genuine question, if the answer is predetermined and one either will or will not move Left or Right, and has no choice in the matter?10 This line of attack on determinism suggests that free will exists for human beings as a matter of necessity, since any belief one might have about anything, including whether this matter can be rationally resolved, presupposes the ability of the human mind to address the issue without impediments that would distort how it relates to the topic. Free Will Is a Self-Delusion Many prominent thinkers hold that free will doesn’t exist but that we need to believe in it. The famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, for example, holds this position, as did B. F. Skinner. Some even argue that the belief in free will, albeit wrong, is produced in us by evolutionary forces. Such a false belief has survival value. (Some hold the same view about religion, that the uniquely religious content of religious beliefs is false but has survival value for us.) We Often Know We Are Free Aside from what has already been said here about the basis of free will, it may also be noted that since, in many contexts of our lives, introspective knowledge is taken very seriously, such knowledge about free will also needs to be taken seriously. When one goes to a doctor

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and is asked, “Are you in pain?” and one answers, “Yes,” and the doctor says “Where is the pain?” and you say, “It’s in my knee,” the doctor doesn’t say, “Why, you can’t know; this is not public evidence. I will now get verifiable, direct evidence of where you hurt.” In fact, the patient’s evidence is very good, if not the best, evidence. Witnesses at trials give such evidence as they report about what they have seen, relying as they do on their memory, something they access introspectively. That is the source of the confidence we have in claims such as, “This indeed is what I have seen or heard.” It involves reference to something we recall from memory and is thus something within us, not evident to others without our testimony or report. Even in the various sciences, people report on what they’ve read on surveys or seen on gauges or instruments or in studies. Thus they are giving us introspective evidence. Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasonably reliable. So what should we make of the fact that a lot of people do believe and say things like, “Damn it, I did not make the right choice” or “I neglected to do something”? They report to us, furthermore, that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., or that they intended this or that but not another thing. They, furthermore, often blame themselves for not having done something, thus implying that they know that they made a choice (for which they are taking responsibility). In short, there is abundant evidence from people all around us of their experience with the existence of their own free choices. This cannot be ruled out, since it would also undercut much else we take very seriously, indeed treat as decisive, coming from such sources. But Science Shows that There Is No Free Will It is often held that scientists have shown that free will does not exist. How? By having unearthed, in numerous cases, causal factors that explain what we do—our thinking and our behavior—psychology, physiology, economics, and numerous other fields of science aim to show why people behave as they do, how they come to hold various views, and how they come to act as they do, asserting that it is clear, then, that no such thing as free will exists. Science Discovers Free Will Arguably, however, what scientists and those who claim that they have shown there is no free will actually have done is to rule out free will by virtue of certain assumptions they hold about the world. The most widely held assumption is that every event must have a cause, and that only events can be causes. (We have already touched on this above.) For example, B. F. Skinner does not actually prove that all our behavior is traceable to prior events. Instead, he holds to a certain metaphysical position that implies this.11

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Moreover, there is also evidence from the field of psychophysics that we have the capacity for self-monitoring and self-determination. According to some scientists in this discipline, the human brain has the kind of structure that allows us, so to speak, to govern ourselves. We can inspect our lives, we can detect where we’re going, and we can, therefore, change course. The human brain itself makes all of this possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself—that is, its higher regions can influence the rest—and as a result we can decide whether to continue in a certain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direction. This is how we change habits, restrain impulses, control our temper, “watch what we eat,” alter our developed motor skills in, say, how we play the piano, or even change our established opinions. That is the sort of free will that is demonstrable. For example, the late Roger W. Sperry maintained that there’s evidence for free will in this sense.12 That view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes, for example, that there can be different kinds of causes in nature and, also, that the functioning of the brain as a complex neuropsychological system could manifest self-causation. An organism with our kind of brain could cause some mental functions to occur via what Sperry calls a process of “downward causation.” (Sperry argues that there is some evidence of such causation even apart from how the human organism’s higher mental activities occur, for example, in the way water freezes.) The sort of thing Sperry thinks possible is evident in our lives. We make plans and then, upon reconsideration (which at times takes but a fraction of a second), revise them. We explore alternatives and decide which of them to follow. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon, or continue with it. And, most revealingly, we resist temptations, act despite the desire to do something else, and gradually build up good habits that, at first, were difficult to cultivate. In other words, there is a locus of individual selfresponsibility or initiative—or, to use Ted Honderich’s term, “origination”—that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves, and the way in which we behave. Some Cautionary Points There clearly are cases of conduct in which some persons behave as they do because it was determined by certain identifiable forces beyond their control. A brain tumor, a severe childhood trauma, or some other intrusive force sometimes incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person who engaged in criminal behavior is shown to have had no control over what he or she did. Someone who actually had no capacity to control his or her behavior, could not control his or her own thinking or judgment, and was, thus,

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moved by something other than his own will, cannot be said to possess a bona fide free will. Compatibilism Those who deny that we have free will would seem to be unable to make sense of our distinction between cases in which one controls one’s behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control. When we face the latter case, we still admit that the behavior could be good or bad but we deny that it is morally or legally significant—it is more along the lines of acts of nature or God, by virtue of being out of the agent’s control. This is also why philosophers who discuss ethics but deny free will have trouble distinguishing between morality and value theory—e.g., some utilitarians, Marxists. Morality concerns how we ought to act (or the rightness of conduct), whereas value theory deals with what is good or bad and why. It is possible to address the latter field without taking a side on the free-will issue. But that is not so with the former. Some, as we have already mentioned, will defend the view that even if we have no ultimate control over our actions—even if our behavior, the judgments that we make, or our character is controlled by forces such as the environment or our genetic make-up—we may still speak of ethics or morality. These compatibilists, however, mean something different by the term “ethics” or “morality” than what the terms would mean if we did possess free will. For compatibilists, ethics concerns the standards of good behavior in conformity with rightness, regardless of how it came about that one conformed or did not conform to those standards. Ethics, along these lines, concerns values and how to secure them, without implying that one could, of one’s own initiative, exert control over the achievability of these values. Accordingly, then, without personal responsibility or agency—where one is the cause of what one does, whereby one initiates or originates one’s significant actions— ethics would amount to something drastically different from what we usually mean by the term. Given the way compatibilists see human action—namely, that it is possible to have both a causal explanation of it and of the agent responsible for the conduct—the theory appears to succeed better than all others, including the one dubbed ‘agent-causal free will.’ In fact, however, the compatibilist doctrine does not allow for personal moral responsibility, however much its proponents so insist. No bona fide, ultimate personal responsibility can be attached to behavior that is, so to speak, softly determined. If one’s character has been molded so that one will have integrity and be honest, generous, and so forth, and when one exhibits integrity and is indeed honest, generous, and so forth, one cannot reasonably be said to be responsible for any of this. It is whatever molded one’s character that produced and would explain one’s honesty, generosity, and so forth. Any kind of moral credit would be unwarranted

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and would amount to an illusion, not something well-deserved. (It is indeed for this reason that John Rawls, the most prominent political philosopher of the twentieth century, denied that there is any morally significant difference between those who produce wealth and those who do not; as he put it in his most important work, “The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is . . . problematic; for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit.”13 The very foundation of the welfare state rests, as Rawls saw it, on denying that differences in effort are of any moral significant. Of course, Rawls, like many others, did paradoxically urge that we all recognize this and held that, if one did not, one was morally remiss!) Compatibilism, then, is a dead end and therefore no significant, bona fide moral (as distinct from value) theory can rest on it. Furthermore, there is a direct impact on politics from the denial of bona fide free will—it implies moral and legal egalitarianism, just as had been claimed by the famous American defense attorney Clarence Darrow. Is Free Will Well Founded? These several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free-will position. Can anyone do better with this issue? I don’t know. I think it’s best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing theories. Are human beings doing what they do solely as the consequence of forces acting on them? Or do they have the capacity to take charge of their lives, yet often neglect to do so properly or effectively, making stupid choices? Which supposition best explains the human world and its complexities around us? I think the free-will view makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories, how it is possible that human life involves such an array of possibilities and accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as well as sorrows, creation as well as destruction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change—in language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much fixed by instinct and reflex—even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of extensive prodding in laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments—people initiate much of what they do, for better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without, so to speak, having to do so. This, moreover, can make good sense if we understand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct, rather than relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain unique challenges, not the least of which

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is that they cannot reasonably expect any formula or system to predictably manage the future of human affairs, as some of social sciences seem to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine prospect for solving human problems—only education and individual initiative can do that. It should be noted, however, that free will does not contradict social science, if the latter is not conceived in strict deterministic terms and if the former is understood to allow for long-range commitments, chosen policies, strategies, institutional involvements, etc. Human beings make choices, some of which, however, commit them to a course of long-range behaviors that can be studied in terms of their impact on various features of the social world. People choose to enter schools, careers, and relationships, to form institutions, to carry out plans, etc., and often their choices justify expecting them to stick with a reasonably predictable course of conduct. In economics, for example, one may be studying the market place as an arena wherein human beings make various free choices concerning how they will earn a living, what they will produce and consume, how they will market their products, and how they will bargain for prices, wages, and benefits, etc. The discipline examines the various permutations and consequences of these choices, as well as various regularities that are evident in the overall sphere of their activities. Nonetheless, people are free to do what they do as commercial agents in various ways, embarking upon their tasks more or less intensely at various periods of their lives, for various reasons of their own or because of circumstances they face. None of this need be determined by other than the individual agent, and all these actions are open to moral evaluation.14 Yet this does not take away a good deal of orderliness, even predictability, from people’s economic activities, provided one does not expect them to behave like Haley’s comet or a subatomic particle, according to impersonal laws or random forces. Although social science may appreciate that human beings have free will, it does not necessarily give up being scientific about human life; quite the contrary. And from human commitments, predictions about human behavior can become quite reliable, though never along lines witnessed vis-à-vis mechanical processes. Is the Free Will Idea “Spooky”? Let me recall here Dennett's rhetorical question I have already discussed. He asks, How does an agent cause an effect without there being an event (in the agent, presumably) that is the cause of that effect (and is itself the effect of an earlier cause, and so forth)?15

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As noted above, the central argument for free will is no more mysterious than are others which rely on a dialectical approach. Specifically, if free will is assumed even as we attempt to deny it—which is to say, if the action of attempting to deny free will presupposes that the agent is capable of making original choices—then we have here a very strong case for free will. Furthermore, if the kind of independent thinking involved in argumentation also presupposes free will, then once again free will or the capacity for the initiative as a conceptually conscious agent is well founded. What would any argument be worth if it merely amounted to a computational or genetic process? It would be no more compelling as argument than would be an “argument” advanced by a computer or parrot. The reason we can understand a reference to these as arguments is that we, human agents, can take them as such. As products of computers or parrots, however, they are not arguments, only a bunch of sounds strung together. Second, consider the aspect of the case for free will that relies on introspection. We often know about things this way, as when we answer our doctors very confidently about where we feel a pain in our bodies, or remember an event for which there is no evidence any longer, apart from our memory. These are completely reliable kinds of knowledge, and part of what gives us knowledge of our free will is that we are well aware of the fact that we often choose, initiate action, and produce or create what we did not have to produce or create. As I am writing the next few words in this discussion, I know at every moment that I could stop, get up and get a soda from the fridge or continue with my project, as indeed I am choosing to do. Indeed, without this capacity, the idea of commitment to a project tenacity, perseverance, ambition and such would be vacuous. And whatever one were to say on a subject, it would all be the result of various impersonal forces, never one’s own initiative and self-determined close attention, good judgment or the like. Finally, is Dennett’s distinction between determinism and inevitability (or fatalism) sound? Let’s look again at what he says: Inevitability means unavoidability, and if you think about what avoiding means, then you realize that in a deterministic world there’s lots of avoidance. The capacity to avoid has been evolving for billions of years. There are very good avoiders now.16

Suppose that I am typing along here and someone maintains that I am fully determined to do this.17 I, however, in order to try to show that I am not, stop. Have I avoided some factors that were about to determine my continuing to type on? No, not according to determinism. Some other factors—such as, say, the presentation to me of the idea—well, the physical sounds that we take to

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indicate such an idea (although for materialist determinists the notion of an “idea” would be problematic without its being reducible to some matter or other) that I am determined, along with my psychological responsiveness to such a presentation—have come into play to redirect the anticipated flow of events, so that I am no longer typing along but stopping, reacting to these unanticipated but equally unavoidable factors or forces. Could I have done otherwise? Not according to the determinist view. Was what happened inevitable? Surely, the presentation of the determinist’s idea could not be avoided; my reaction could not either, and so on and so forth. What Dennett takes to be a serious difference between determinism and fatalism is only a difference in how detailed a story one is going to tell. Sure, there is no fatalism of the sort where merely large movements proceed, unstoppably; but there is a fatalism of the sort where zillions of micro-movements interact in ways that even a humongously powerful computer might not predict exactly. Still, a sophisticated fatalist would rightly hold that whatever is going to happen is fated to have happened, were all the details to be fully, totally considered. So, pace Dennett, if we know what avoidance means, we know that, paraphrasing him, “in a fatalistic world, there’s lots of avoidance.” Why? Because what is called avoidance is a form of behavior that is determined to occur, just as any other form of behavior is determined to occur, by way of the daisy chain of efficient causal links that connect the primordial past with the endless future (as per the picture determinists offer of reality). What the agent causation position does not show, of course, is the detailed, correct or true, full account of free will, only that free will exists. Indeed, its existence is undeniable for us who are the acting agents. A detailed theory of agent causality would serve as an account of free will, more so than as its proof.18 If such an account fails, however, perhaps the idea that we have free will has to be given a different account. But the issue we need briefly to consider is whether the agent causality account of free will must be unsound. That is the import of the claim, made by Dennett and others, that the very idea of agent causation is mysterious or spooky. When someone proposes that he has encountered a ghost, we tend to object, not because of the belief that this particular ghost is unreal but because ghosts as such are impossible; their very idea is unfounded and baseless. And that is what the claim by Dennett and others concerning the mysteriousness of agent causality comes to: the idea is impossible. But why is Dennett so confident that agent causation would have to be mysterious and thus impossible? Well, to answer that, we need to consider a famous argument that occurred back in the eighteenth century about the nature of causality.

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It was David Hume who reasoned that, if we depended for knowing the world entirely and solely on our sensory information, then causality itself must not be thought of as any kind of production or power. The billiard ball that strikes another and is taken, thus, to have made the other move has no (empirically) demonstrable productive powers at all. Instead, if we depend on our senses for knowledge, all we can justifiably claim is that the first billiard ball’s motion was followed by that of the second, and the oft-repeated instances of this then results in our coming to gain the idea of causality. (This is an odd move, by the way, since Hume is depending on a productive notion of causality to explain our belief in causality!) Regular or constant sequences like that are, for Hume, all that causes are, involving no evident causal powers. The assumption that all of what we know comes from our senses is a pretty radical one and, although Hume’s idea of causality was very influential, most scientists and nearly all of the rest of us did not fully accept his claim about causality because it rested on a radical empiricism that holds that all of what we know rests on nothing else but the contact our senses experience with input, input we cannot even be sure comes from anything outside our minds (brains). Yet many did accept a good deal of Hume’s analysis of causation, so the idea that there can be something productive in a causal relationship has been dropped by most of those who think about causal connections in the world. It is this idea that is deemed by many to be spooky or mysterious because the productivity of a causal factor assumes something that is not directly evident—it is not perceived by the senses. Instead it is inferred from the entire context of the causal situation. So, for example, that the billiard ball has something about it—say, its solidity, its mass and density, that would produce an impact on another billiard ball so this other ball would be moved by it, is something that we do not see but infer. And although much of science welcomes direct evidence first and foremost, as it considers convincing explanatory stories, science also makes room for inferred powers. For instance, black holes could not be detected by way of direct evidence for a long time, since by their very nature they did not release any sensory information; their immense gravitational force did not allow such information, involving as it has to the emission of light, to escape for us to perceive it. As a result, the existence and nature of black holes were both discovered by inference, by noticing facts that could best be explained by the postulation of the black hole. (This is, of course, how the reality of many other beings is routinely established—for example, intentions, motives, wants, wishes, expectations, and so forth.) In response to those like Dennett, then, who deny the possibility of agent causality—probably because they regard productive powers of causal factors as something mysterious or spooky—it needs to be stressed that such powers are not directly perceived but that they can be inferred from other facts

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that can be perceived and our reflection on that fact. So, if the best explanation of what makes the second billiard ball move is that the first has certain properties—properties lacking in, say, a tennis ball—which can produce the typical movement in an entity such as the second ball, then that is a conclusion that is certain beyond a reasonable doubt (although not certain in the incorrigible, absolute sense Descartes’ idea of knowledge, which Hume deployed for sensory impressions, would have required). Similarly, the power of human agents to be first causes can also be inferred along these lines. Given a certain composition of their brains, given the properties of them, and given the mental capacities—of, say, concept formation and self-reflection—they could well be the kind of beings capable of making original choices, of taking the initiative, just as we ordinarily believe them to be.

2. MORAL SKEPTICISM We now turn to the second assumption and briefly discuss its pros and cons. Let’s once again recall what’s at stake: is there any basis for our ethical or moral judgments? When a politician is denounced, a newspaper criticized for its practices, or a teacher (or even a textbook author) praised or blamed for his or her product, is it possible to justify such judgments or claims? When one claims that one’s parents have mistreated one, or that one’s physician engaged in malpractice, is this just hot air or the expression of displeasure? Is it that we simply know this, without any justification, without any basis for that knowledge? Is ethics, perhaps, some kind of realm where we can be right without any justification?19 Or perhaps there are standards we can identify that can help us show that what we claim is true. Our discussion here will, again, certainly not exhaust the topic. There is much more to be considered in a thorough study. What we will do, however, should help lay the foundation and give a clue as to what that debate involves. Against Morality Moral Diversity versus Objectivity There are too many moral opinions, so how can there be one, true moral standard for all? Clearly, across the globe and throughout human history, great diversity exists and has existed concerning what is supposed to be right and wrong in human conduct. Indeed, apparently decent and intelligent people differ very seriously on the topic. Surely that suggests very strongly that no common, objective standard is available as to how we ought to act. It is mostly cultural anthropologists who advance this view—e.g., Ruth Benedict.20

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No Evidence of the Senses Supports Moral Claims Moral judgments are not verifiable by observation, as are many other judgments we make. We can pretty much decide what color hat one is wearing, how many people are sitting in a classroom, where China’s borders are, how bright the sun is at noon, and other subjects we want to know about, by means of the diligent use of our sensory organs. Yet, no such use is going to enable us to decide whether we ought to tell the truth, write a letter to mother, help the poor, avoid pornography, or ban abortions. Accordingly, moral disputes appear to be impossible to settle. This is an argument stressed by members of the philosophical school of logical positivism—for example, A. J. Ayer.21 The Gap between “Is” and “Ought” No judgment of the case can support a conclusion of what one ought to do—the “is/ought” gap argument of the philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). The rules of sound reasoning and good judgment require that, when one draws a conclusion from premises, the terms that are present in this conclusion also appear in the premises. Yet if one begins an argument with claims about this or that being so and so, there is no “ought” or “should” present, whereas, in a conclusion having moral import, it is just those terms that would have to appear. Clearly, then, such moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises. Morality Is against Nature Nothing else in nature is subject to moral judgment or evaluation, so applying moral judgment or evaluation to human beings is odd, arbitrary, and unjustified. Consider anything—rocks, trees, birds, fish, or whatever, and there is no place for praising and blaming in our understanding of these things. Therefore, bringing morality into the picture when we consider human affairs is arbitrary, out of the blue, unjustified. John Mackie argues, for example, that moral values, if they existed, would be “entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.”22 For Morality Diversity Is More Apparent Than Real (A) Moral opinions tend to differ about details, not basics. (B) Some persons have a vested interest in obscuring moral standards lest they be found guilty of moral wrong-doing or evil. (C) Some persons are professional “devil’s advocates” and propagate skepticism because they are testing, questioning, making

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sure (even if they do not act as if they were skeptics, e.g., toward their children, friends, political representatives). Perceptual Knowledge Is Not All In complicated areas, observations do not suffice to verify judgment—e.g., in astrophysics, particle physics, psychology, crime detection, etc. Moral judgments may require verification by way of a fairly complex theory or definition, for example, what “good” or “morally right” means. (Moral theories propose such theories and definitions.) How Not to Deduce but to Derive Ought from Is (A) Hume was arguing against those who believed that moral conclusions can be deduced from premises stating various facts. But not all arguments consist of deductions, a formal statement linking premises to conclusions by nothing other than its logical structure and the essential meaning of the terms. Thus nothing strictly new is ever established by way of deduction, that is to say, nothing that is not true implicitly already. There is, however, reasoning that is not deductive but, roughly, inferential. Based on our observations, reflections, economical theorizing, and the like, we forge or develop an understanding of the world. When detectives explain a crime, they do not deduce—contrary to Sherlock Holmes—but infer who did it. Scientists work from evidence to conclusions in other than a strictly deductive fashion. They reach their understanding of what is what by developing valid, well-founded concepts and theories that best explain what they see and have previously discovered. Indeed, most often we are concerned with establishing definitions that are not the product of deduction but, rather, generalization, abstraction, and the formation of ideas. Accordingly, (B) the premises of moral arguments could include theories or definitions as to what “good” or “ought to” mean, and thus give support to particular moral judgments. For example, “the will of God is good,” “good is what everyone ought to do,” thus, “the will of God is what everyone ought to obey.” Or, “goodness is living (for human beings),” “living (for human beings) is furthered by thinking,” thus, “goodness is furthered by thinking.” These definitions or theories cannot just be dismissed. There is a possibility that one of them captures accurately what the relevant terms mean, and from this we could infer moral conclusions.23 Nature Is Diverse Enough to Allow for Major Differences As in the case of the free-will hypothesis, there is nothing odd about something new that emerges in nature and invites judgments. Mary Midgley puts

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forth a very interesting idea to the effect that human beings are precisely distinctive in the natural world through having a moral nature, a unique ethical dimension to their lives.24 Indeed, that view was advanced by Aristotle, as well.25 This is evident, as well, as we consider how really extraordinary human life is; what other aspect of nature gives us board games, museums, symphonic music, philosophy, and the novel (as well as such unsavory features as murder, betrayal, ethnic cleansing, or embezzlement)? The Best Theory Is as True as Can Be When we put all of this together, what is at issue is whether we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise. Do we get a better understanding, for example, of why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many individual and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc.? It may be because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern in the way that dogs and orangutans and birds tend to be. In principle, all of the behaviors of these creatures around us can be predicted, because they are not creative in the sense of originating new ideas and behaviors, although we do not always know enough about the constitution of these beings and how they interact with their environment to actually predict what they will do. Human beings produce new ideas, and these can introduce new kinds of behavior into familiar situations. This, in part, is why different people often interpret their experiences differently. Nevertheless, we can make some predictions about what people will do, because they often do make up their minds in a given fashion, as well as sticking to their decision over time. This is what we mean when we note that people make commitments, possess integrity, etc. So we can estimate what they are going to do. Even then, we do not make certain predictions, only statistically significant ones. Clearly, people often change their minds and surprise us. Furthermore, if we encounter different cultures, they’ll surprise us even more. The complexity, diversity, and individuation of human beings are better explained by human beings being free than by their being determined. That, at least, is what is required for ethics, as well as normative politics concerns about justice, freedom, equality, and such, to be a bona fide, genuine subject matter of concern. NOTES 1. See John Kekes, “‘Ought Implies Can’ and Kinds of Morality,” Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1984): 460–67. See, also, his Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

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University Press, 1991), which includes the bulk of the discussion from the aforementioned paper as well as others, such as “Freedom,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 61 (1980): 368–85. 2. Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 42–43. 3. There are some neuroscientists who are not avowed determinists. Professor Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience and Associate Director, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, is quoted to have said that “neural correlates in the brain do not banish free will at all.” Quoted in Kathleen Stein, The Genius Engine (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 21. An excellent discussion of free will in light of recent neuroscience is available in Henrik Walter, Neurophilosophy of Free Will. From Libertarian Illusions to a Concept of Natural Autonomy (Boston: MIT Press, 2001). 4. See, for more, Libet et al. The Volitional Brain. 5. Even in physical reality, as in the freezing of water, the causal relationship isn’t exactly what it is in other domains. The freezing occurs by way of what has been called “downward causation,” instead of the more familiar “action-reaction” causation. For more on this point, see Robert Laughlin, A Different Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 6. The underlying metaphysics here could be called “minimalist,” so it leaves open for discovery whether something can produce original conduct. 7. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (Garden City, NY: Bantam Books, 1972). 8. Nathaniel Branden. The Psychology of Self-Esteem (Garden City, NY: Bantam Books, 1969). A very clear attempt to reconcile determinism with independent inquiry is offered in Adolf Grünbaum, “Causality and the Science of Human Behavior,” in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Herbert Feigle and May Brodbeck (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953), 766–78. 9. Honderich, 129. 10. It cannot, as argued by Joseph M. Boyle, G. Grisez and O. Tollefsen, Free Choice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976). See, also, James N. Jordan, “Determinism’s Dilemma,” Review of Metaphysics 23 (September 1969): 48–66. My own book, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2000), makes these points. The debate about freedom of the will is ancient (e.g., between Democritus and Lucretius), and no consensus has developed anywhere, not like the consensus that has developed on scientific matters such as the relationship between blood clotting and strokes. Just how much controversy reigns about the issue of free will in such everyday areas of concern as criminal law—even with the benefit of a reasonably welldeveloped field of neuroscience—can be appreciated by reading Jeffrey Rosen, “The Trials of Neurolaw: How advances in brain science could transform our legal system,” The New York Times Magazine (March 11, 2007): 48–84. 11. See, for more, Tibor R. Machan, The Pseudo Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishing, 1974). 12. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority.

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13. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 104. 14. For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, ed., Commerce and Morality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), especially “Ethics and its Uses.” 15. Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Viking, 2003), 100. 16. Daniel Dennett, “Pulling Our Own Strings,” Interview in Reason Magazine, May 2003. 17. Perhaps the most detailed exploration of how determinism goes wrong here is offered in Ed Pols, Acts of Our Being (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). 18. For a start on such an account, see Roger W. Sperry, “Changing Concepts of Consciousness and Free Will,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 9 (August 1976): 9–19. 19. This view is advanced in the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Paul Johnston, Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989). But see, in contrast, Julius Kovesi, Moral Notions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), who also approaches ethics from a Wittgensteinian framework. 20. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934). 21. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1936). 22. J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1977), 38. 23. For more along these lines, see W. D. Falk, Ought, Reasons, and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially “Goading and Guiding” and “Hume on Is and Ought.” 24. Mary Midgley, The Ethical Primate (London: Routledge, 1994). 25. Among others who advance a similar approach to ethics are Philippa Foot, Martha Nussbaum, and Ayn Rand (in Natural Goodness [Oxford University Press, 2001], The Therapy of Desire [Princeton University Press, 1996], and The Virtue of Selfishness [New American Library, 1961], respectively).

Chapter Three

Individualism and Human Success

In our culture, many prominent commentators scoff at the idea of success, claiming that it is mostly associated with doing well in the marketplace. Putting it differently, success suffers from its association with profit. Indeed, a great many commentators seem to identify success with career achievements—for scholars, it is how many books they’ve published and with which house; for artists, it is the number of their works exhibited in galleries and museums or performed at prestigious concert halls; for scientists, it is their discoveries and major awards; and so it is with journalists, doctors, and so forth. It appears to be pretty much the case that the dominant model for success consists of thriving in one’s chosen vocation or profession. In business, of course, the model would recommend considering someone’s economic achievements as the main, even sole, measure of whether the person is a success in his or her life. “She is a successful individual” then tends to be meant rather narrowly, without taking a look at the broad range of tasks and commitments one assumes and in which one excels in one’s life. Some of this may have to do with the fact that professional success is visible, while personal success is mostly private and tractable only by one’s intimates. Still, it is misguided to construe success narrowly, as it appears to be the prominent practice. In the context of business, some adjustments could be made by substituting the term “prosperity” for that of “profit.” One can get a pretty good clue from this as to how misguided it is to demean success in the marketplace. Prosperity is vital to human life; to profit in business means much more than to have produced a few favorable figures on a balance sheet. One’s family, for example, will consider it a happy day when the breadwinner succeeds at the task of prospering, so why should one join those commentators who consider it shallow to aim at such success? 63

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But there is something more important at issue here granted that rescuing success in the marketplace is a worthy, albeit it restricted, achievement. A concept of success would be welcome that can be generalized without committing the “one size fits all” fallacy, namely the idea that human beings succeed only if they do so in some one or two professional spheres of their lives. Then one would be a success if one did well in, say, science, education, the arts, or scholarship. Einstein was, by such criteria, clearly a success, as were the major composers, novelists, and painters in human history. Why? Because they strove to succeed at a genuinely worthy task. The problem with this is that it begs the important question of what sorts of tasks are worthy of human pursuit. Are only educators doing what is worthwhile? What of composers, novelists, or scientists? What of farmers? Or of entertainers? How about police or military officers? Are athletes just wasting their time? Even more importantly, is being a professional success sufficient for living a successful human life? I am being a bit coy here—all too many commentators find only business success to be something shameful. Consider what the famous nineteenthcentury French poet Charles Baudelaire said about this: “Commerce is satanic, because it is the basest and vilest form of egoism. The spirit of every businessman is completely depraved. . . . Commerce is natural, therefore shameful.”1 For those like Baudelaire it isn’t only shallow to strive for business success; it borders on the lowly and base. From Plato’s Socrates to modern sages such as the late John Kenneth Galbraith and a great many critics of economic globalization, it is widely thought—by writers, actors, talks show hosts and guests, movie directors, pundits, and others of this ilk—that aiming to make oneself well off, economically, not to mention rich, is disgraceful. This has been standard fare for centuries, gaining enormous support from theology and religion, from literature and poetry because many in these human pursuits have always found it morally and even aesthetically objectionable to aim for amassing worldly goods and satisfactions.2 However, even though such an attitude is flawed, it isn’t necessary to make the opposite mistake, namely, to elevate commercial or business success as the only worthy or highest of human aspirations. One can reject the thesis of business bashing without committing the opposite fallacy of treating it as the highest human achievement. I will lay out a different view, one that sees human success in terms of whether one is making the most of one’s potentials as a human individual. Basically, the thesis I will advance is not all that difficult to appreciate since it matches our ordinary, common experiences—though not so much our reflections—especially in relatively modern societies that have a tradition of respecting and protecting individual rights: People are individuals, unique

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and irreplaceable, yet they are also members of various groups, beginning with the human species, then on to the community of parents and family, moving on to neighbors, fellow professionals and nationals, even to such seemingly trivial groups as fellow stamp collectors, sports fans, and so on. From their very general common humanity, they become more and more diversified, until they are also appreciated for their unique individuality. As the comic actor and novelist Steve Martin has his first-person narrator say in one of his novellas, “People, I thought. These are people. Their general uniformity was interrupted only by their individual variety.”3 These facts are familiar to many of us in modern societies because, among other things, most of us tend to encourage our children to find a way of life that suits them on numerous fronts. Unlike earlier times, when children were expected to follow in the footsteps of their parents—to become farmers, millers, tailors, or soldiers, just as their parents, at least those parents who had some specialty at which they made their living—most of us in civilized societies today endorse the idea that children should discover their own destiny, the life they are best suited to live (based on their talents, interests, opportunities, and so on). Any college teacher could be well aware of the difficulty of this task, while also well aware that nearly all parents encourage their children—and a good many young persons hope—to find the life and career that will help them thrive and flourish on their own peaceful terms.4 Now here we can already see the germination of the individualist conception of success, that is, human success. It is not one or another or a third thing; it is, rather, doing well as an individual on several fronts. What qualifies this significantly, without leading to subjectivism, is that each of us is a human individual and our humanity requires that we thrive in a specific way. Reason, which is what distinguishes human beings from others in nature, is the guide by which we can best coordinate our individual attributes with the opportunities we face, and take our best stab at thriving and flourishing.5 This can be a rather mixed bag, of course. It can involve the potential to raise a family, to have certain career ambitions, to acquire hobbies, to keep healthy and fit, to learn of the world, and, for most of us, to care about our political regime. Indeed, probably the best way to encounter this version of human success is through novels that deal with the lives of unique individual humans engaged in the world. (It is a flawed novel that deals with people as mere types—the rich, the powerful, the greedy, the jealous, the whining, or the depressed, with little attention to the characters as people whose lives flow in significant measure from their individuality, not only from their moreor-less common roles. Yet a work is also flawed if it focuses only on some concerns of the characters, as if they could be isolated from others.)

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Part of the deal is, of course, that one can be a success in one’s life by placing more or less emphasis on different facets. But this isn’t a matter of mere subjective preference or chance. It is a matter of being attentive to oneself, to who one is, as an individual, together with the realization that once one’s individuality is well understood, one’s fulfillment will have to emerge from organizing oneself through the diligent use of one’s reason or rationality. I am not talking about being some kind of intellectual—many of whom are the least rational of people because they often have an unbalanced focus on abstractions, theories, words, and ideas, and therefore fail to integrate these with the particulars of their lives. Being smart, even intelligent, isn’t the highest goal for a person; the goal is to be rational or reasonable about one’s life. But perhaps all of what I have focused on can be accounted for as purely cultural. Individualism has often been dismissed as parochial, only embraced in a certain time and/or place—mostly in the West, particularly in the United States. It has been argued that individualism, even the sort I am talking about, which doesn’t deny the reality of human nature—that is to say, the objectivity of the grounds for the classification “human”—is but a characteristic of a phase of humanity’s collective development. This critique of individualism holds that individualism is humanity’s adolescence, not its mature stage, and it is associated with Karl Marx. Some have dismissed this individualism as simply an accidental attribute of some cultures, while others happen to be more tribal or communal. In short, the point is that individualism isn’t really true at all, generally, about human beings as such, only about some of their cultures.6 Let us now consider some reasons why this is not a good idea. Despite the fact that in many cultures individualism isn’t in full swing, often hardly evident—because of, say, extreme regimentation or lack of opportunity for diversity in life-objectives—there is something about all human beings, anytime and anywhere, that makes their individuality central to their lives. It is because they have the capacity to initiate much of their conduct or behavior that they have free will. They are able to choose, if they aren’t prohibited or kept from doing so, and the first piece of evidence for this is that they choose to think in all kinds of different ways about the world and their place in it.7 However much one might wish to relegate individualism to some accidental, incidental place in human affairs, the very diversity of human thought and life—even if this diversity is merely one of benign personal and cultural differences—shows that people can come up with their own ideas, can follow them, and, thus, often can live unique lives. This is especially clear from the activities of those who quite paradoxically deny or caricature the significance of individuality (as I have discussed in other places throughout this work).

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Furthermore, because their efficacy or aptitude for living depends essentially, centrally, on exercising their own capacity for creative thinking, this individuality isn’t merely a fact of everyone’s nature but also a moral imperative for them. In other words, by our very birth, we are constituted as unique individuals, although this may lie dormant within many of us or be suppressed, either by others or by natural circumstances; we ought morally, whenever possible, to develop ourselves as unique, independent persons with minds of our own. Failure to do so renders one dependent upon others, a kind of parasite, and demonstrates the point through the consequences of trying to live by denying it. None of this means that human beings must be rebels without a cause or non-conformists or anti-social for the hell of it. It means we ought to live thoughtfully, which will produce an awareness of the immense potential for self-development from widespread—but also selective—human associations. That will most likely, barring some kind of catastrophic intrusion, guide us to becoming successful in just the way a human being can and ought to be.8 I do not wish to dwell either on too many objections to these ideas or on the detailed practical implications that, at any rate, cannot be addressed by any general theory. The details are what every person has to attend to, because they require local knowledge that only the individual and some of his or her intimates can access. I do wish to make mention of something, though, that can seriously impede this program of individualist human self-development that I have been defending. That impediment is the widely championed ethical theory of altruism, as well as its cousin, utilitarianism. Altruism is, as noted elsewhere in this work, the most vociferously embraced ethical theory. To quote one of its champions, “‘Altruism’ [is] assuming a duty to relieve the distress and promote the happiness of our fellows. . . . Altruism is to . . . maintain, quite simply, that a man may and should discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness, as such, when he is deciding what course of action to pursue.”9 This is a drastic notion indeed. It means, among other things, that whenever one embarks upon personal success, whenever one aims to thrive or flourish as a human individual, not only is there no moral or ethical merit to any of it but also one is most likely neglecting what one morally or ethically ought to do, namely, looking out for the well being of others. Utilitarianism is only a little less severe on us. It is an ethical theory according to which everyone ought to act so as to promote the greatest happiness or good of the greatest number of others, others who could include all living species or, at least, all sentient ones. As one dictionary defines it, it is “the ethical doctrine that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the criterion of the virtue of action.”10 This “greatest number” might, incidentally, include oneself but it by no means needs to. (I should mention that the fiercest

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champion of animal liberation, one who considers it nearly universally immoral to use animals for anything like medical research, food production, or, especially, sport, namely, the Princeton University philosopher Peter Singer, is a utilitarian.) It goes without saying that, with the popularity of the championing—not, of course, the practice—of these ethical doctrines, the psychological and cultural surroundings within which a successful human life would have to be pursued isn’t very hospitable or encouraging. These doctrines are spread around by novelists—Graham Greene, for example, tells us in one of his books that “None of us has a right to forget anyone. Except ourselves”11— playwrights, sitcom writers, and so on and so forth, not to mention the innumerable commencement speakers who address high school and college graduates, saying, “Your responsibility in life is to go out and serve other people (or humanity).” Why are these doctrines so popular among theorists? The answer to that question would be a long one but here are some hints: In the modern age, starting with the sixteenth century and mostly the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and continuing all the way to Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth—reinforced in religion by the doctrine of original sin—we have been told that people naturally tend to do evil or, at any rate, to act to gain power, usually power over others. We are supposedly hardwired this way. Many economists embrace that idea—not that we ought to be prudent or that we ought to strive to succeed, but that we will, no matter what, try for power and conquest. It is no wonder, then, that an antidote to this story came to be promoted by many ethical theorists. However hard-wired we may be in favor of being mean and nasty self-seekers, we can be reformed if only we are properly socialized by educators, moralists, priests, and, of course, the state. The gist of this idea is laid out by such famous thinkers as the French sociologist Auguste Comte—who coined the term “altruism”—and by Karl Marx, and even earlier by Immanuel Kant (in a somewhat roundabout fashion). But enough of this overly general discussion; suffice it to note that, with such a view of human nature, there is something of a rationale behind urging everyone to primarily benefit others. If not, they would be mean and callous to everyone, which is not a very promising prospect for all concerned. The fact is, however, that we aren’t hard-wired at birth to be corrupt—there is no original sinfulness in the human species. We do not tend naturally to run roughshod over our fellows. We are born without any such innate inclinations, for good or for ill. We are born pretty much uncaring for ourselves or for others, initially, at least in any serious sense. Even the so-called egotism of young children is just mindless, whimsical self-indulgence, the objective of which could be anything—good or bad, for themselves or for others.

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It should be noted, following the insight of the late W. D. Falk, that an ordinary language philosophical analysis of ethics lends itself to biasing others regarding good conduct as primary in human life since that is what people talk about mostly. We praise others for doing right for us and blame them for doing wrong to us, much more than we praise or blame people for perfecting or ruining their own lives. The consensus, therefore, is that altruism triumphs in ethics, but to believe this is to have been led astray by a faulty focus on ordinary language.12 Now, how we ought to act is something everyone needs to learn. And the signals and education one gets from the world, sadly including from one’s parents and friends, are pretty confusing. Consider that all the while the moralists tell us to serve other people, most psychologists tell us to be good to ourselves. (Imagine going to one and hearing that your prime goal in life must be “to discount altogether [your] own pleasure or happiness.” That would quickly lead to being an unemployed psychologist! And how about a doctor or dentist who gave such advice? Yet most of those within the intellectual community, especially moral philosophers, broadcast a very different message. So how is one to know how one ought to conduct oneself? Ethics requires the kind of personal reflection, in the end, that no one else can do decisively for any individual. But let me try to help with that task a bit, since those in my profession are paid to figure out such things. Consider that everything non-human in the world that lives does well when it thrives or flourishes. Now, true, all of these living things are hardwired to thrive, individually, as a group—flock, herd, or pride—or as a species. Depending on its nature, the good of most things amounts to their doing well at living their kind of lives. When it comes to human beings, why should this not be the same? In this case, however, there is a choice. People have the unique capacity to be free to try to defy their own nature and live, so to speak, against themselves. Sadly, there are many who live selfdestructive lives. Sometimes they appear to be caught up in lives of servitude to others; other times, they are just plain stupid or irrational. In neither case does it make sense as part of the natural order of things. At the end of the day—so far as one can tell—what we have to conclude, I believe, is that striving to succeed as the human individual one is amounts to doing the right thing, the ethically, morally right thing as determined by one’s essential nature, the kind of being, as well as who, one is. This isn’t some kind of crass egotism or a shallow indulgence in one’s momentary pleasures or interests. No, it involves thriving as a well-rounded human individual; the virtues one needs to practice conscientiously and consistently include those laid out be such naturalist moral thinkers as Aristotle and, most recently, Ayn Rand, namely, rationality, prudence, honesty, generosity, kindness, even

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charity in certain emergencies—but, first and foremost, rationality and prudence. Among the objectives that any ethical person would require is what I like to call wealth care.13 To prosper is one of the goals every good person would pursue. Common sense accords with this—just consider what your family would think if you were to neglect that goal. Or your true friends? They would consider you to be engaged in a sort of malpractice vis-à-vis your own life. Of course, most of the time, prosperity includes doing things for others. As Adam Smith noted: In civilized society [a human being] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons. . . . Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. . . .14

However, what most modern moral theorists believe is that it is the thought of other people that counts morally, so unless one intends to help others, and does what in fact helps them, albeit so as also to advance one’s own wellbeing, it just doesn’t count for much. So, the Smithian idea that, while trying to prosper, one does well to consider other people’s interests just will not cut it as something of moral significance. What we ought to take very seriously is that, when it comes to business, we have on hand what I have been calling a profession concerned with wealth care—the prudent management of one’s resources, leading to prosperity (either for oneself or one’s clients, but mostly for both). Well, we can only take prominent or popular morality so far. There is too much confusion in the area, given how it is so guided by academic thinking that tends, in the main, to embrace lopsided ideas about right and wrong. Fortunately, there is popular morality and there is sound morality, and the latter is what really matters. That morality got its start with Socrates and Aristotle, and in our time got its clearest conception from Ayn Rand. She called it rational egoism, and I call it classical egoism—mainly to make sure no one mistakes it for the caricature of egoism that we find in most ethics texts today, something traced back not to the ancient Greeks but to Hobbes, who believed egoism meant striving to overcome everything and everyone. The kind of ethics that gives support to the robust notion of success I outlined earlier is one that implores everyone to live rationally, reasonably, alertly, and prudently, and to aim for one’s happiness as the person one is.15 And success at one’s career, including the career of managing firms, handling

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people’s finances, investing in upstart enterprises, or guiding a major corporation to profitability—all these and many other careers—counts as a significant aspect of successful living. Not the whole of it, mind you, but a good measure of it. In the last analysis, at least for now, the key to success is to know oneself, as Socrates put the point, and to be true to oneself, as Shakespeare’s Polonius advised in Hamlet. But this knowledge isn’t something arbitrary or helterskelter—it is of a human individual, which means the human part, what makes us a member of the species, is just as vital to it as are the numerous individual and community attributes. Since we are talking here about something that is everyone’s task, and since it also involves intimate information that few others can have about oneself, the example that is most likely to illustrate my points has to be myself and the few people I am close enough to in my life to know in detail— not that these examples will be of successful lives, necessarily. But they will indicate what is required for leading successful lives, even when the cases in point do not fulfill all the requirements. For myself, for example, I discovered early that I had a crucial, undeniable yen—maybe talent—for abstract thinking, for attempting to deal with the traditional “big questions.” Every generation, I think, has room for some of us to do this since, when it comes to these questions, merely being familiar with the answers given even by the greatest minds of the past just cannot get the job fully done. Some of us need to figure them out in every era, to know why the best answers are the right ones. I committed myself to this when I was twenty-four. But that’s just part of what my life needed to turn out a success—the productive, professional part. For me, it was also vital to make a family, perhaps even somewhat overly important, given how awful my own early family life had been.16 So I tried, not always successfully I need to make clear, to take care of this side of myself. Raising children also became a task for me, part of the task of making a family. There was also the vital task, especially for one who has embarked on the pursuit of wisdom, of forging friendships. When one wants to know about basic issues, discussing them with a few intimates who also have the knack becomes vital. Here I was a bit more successful; I made some very good and lasting friends, with a few failures on the way, as well. Then there was the matter of my economic well-being, as well as my health and fitness; and I also learned that travel, to me, made a very big difference, probably because it had been officially banned for me in my early years (which I spent in communist Hungary). I also figured out that the central topic of my philosophical investigations, toward which all the others would point and help me get matters as right as I

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could, would be individual liberty. My background primed me for this task and, sure enough, my deep and enthusiastic interest in it has not waned over the last forty years of my life and career. But because one cannot successfully tackle one topic without also investigate several others more or less thoroughly, I needed to be attentive to many issues, including the sciences, both natural and social (as they are called). Then, because I knew that getting the thing as right as I could about individual liberty would imply doing something about making it happen, I also became a public lecturer and teacher, not to mention one who studied criticisms of the idea far and wide. But these alone would not make someone a successful person, only a reasonably successful academic. To ascertain success in the broader area of one’s life, it is necessary to take a look at the various dimensions of it, such as family, friendship, neighborliness, citizenship, and so forth, and to see how one has fared on these several fronts. Since this is not a discussion about me personally, I’ll leave the matter aside except to mention that, for me as for anyone, I would argue, all these spheres of life matter for purposes of figuring out how well one is doing, and how much of a success one is as a human individual. So, all of this is merely to show the reader a sketch of a case history, in very brief outline form. To appreciate that this task of personal human success is not some subjective undertaking, it is worth noting that anyone who knows me well could, in principle, tell how my life could be a real success, how it could be a failure or merely mediocre, what with the task of managing its various elements, of balancing the time and resources devoted to them. The claim here is that each of us has this kind of task in one’s life, ranging over the virtually idiosyncratic elements of it to completely public, even political ones. A successful life cannot neglect any of these.

NOTES 1. Charles Baudelaire, The Intimate Journals, trans. Christophere Isherwood (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 51. 2. For a detailed treatment of this story, see Tibor R. Machan and James E. Chesher, The Business of Commerce, Examining an Honorable Profession (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999). For a very good discussion of what is most satisfying to human beings, see Gregory Berns, Satisfaction, Sensation Seeking, Novelty, and the Science of Finding True Fulfillment (New York: Henry Hold & Co., 2005). 3. Steve Martin, The Pleasure of My Company (New York: Hyperion, 2004), 62. 4. I emphatically exclude any pursuits that are criminal or immoral—bank robbery, child molestation, con artistry, or self-debasing life styles such as prostitution and

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sadomasochism. That’s because of the aggressive and self-defeating nature of these, respectively. Excelling as a human individual has its natural limits! 5. By the way, in our time, like many others, there are bands of intellectuals aiming to demean our distinctive humanity, and arguing that we are really just like the rest of the animals, as sentient ones, and so we lack any claim to being special in the world. See, for example, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Humankind: A Brief History (London: Oxford University Press, 2004). See, however, Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 6. See Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Taylor’s thesis has graduated to a movement, more or less sophisticated, namely, communitarianism. 7. See, for an excellent discussion of this issue, Amartya Sen, Reason Before Identity (London: Oxford University Press, 1999) 8. I spell out the case for this in two books, Classical Individualism, The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (London: Routledge, 1998) and Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). 9. As presented ordinarily, by ministers or priests or in fiction, altruism means to rank looking out for others in first place on one’s list of moral duties. W. G. Maclagan, “Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism,” Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1954): 109–110. 10. http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/utilitarianism.html. 11. Graham Greene, Loser Takes All (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1993), 51. 12. See, for a very good discussion of this, W. D. Falk, “Morality, self, and others,” in Morality and the Language of Conduct, ed. Hector-Neri Castaneda and George Nakhnikian, (Cleveland, OH: Wayne State University 1963). 13. For a full development of this idea, see Tibor R. Machan, The Morality of Business, A Profession for Wealth Care (New York: Springer, 2007). 14. Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 14. 15. For a discussion of just what happiness means, see Tibor R. Machan and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Recent Work on the Concept of Happiness,” American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 1–31. 16. For the details, see Tibor R. Machan, The Man Without a Hobby, Adventures of a Gregarious Egoist (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2006).

Chapter Four

Virtue, Liberty, and Private Property Aspects of Humanist Political Economy

The distinction of a humanistic political theory is that its principles derive from an understanding of human nature. Other political theories may derive their principles from a study of the nature of God, or history, or the organic state. But humanism is the normative perspective based on an understanding of human nature. By implication, such an approach is also naturalistic; humanism assumes the need for a factual analysis carried out by means of observation and reason. Although humanism is at least as old as Socratic thought,1 it surfaced in the modern age mostly through the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. In essence, he held that contrary to Hegel, it was not God who created man in His image but man who imagined God, based on his own attributes and potentialities.2 Feuerbach’s influence on Marx is well known but I shall not be arguing here for Marx’s version of humanism, which is statist or socialist—that is, construing the state or society to be the primary focus of attention in political and social theories. (This is a controversial point about which I have no time here to argue in adequate detail.) The type of humanistic political theory I wish to outline is aimed, unlike Marx’s, at being fully applicable to contemporary human beings. I accept that we are indeed human beings, and that human beings have existed here on earth for many thousands of years and have, in certain crucial respects, remained (essentially) similar.3 As to whether, in time, there will emerge a species of entities that may be regarded as further along some evolutionary scale than human beings currently are—and which will have emerged from human life—that is a (Marxist) hypothesis that does not concern me here.

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BASIC NOTIONS An outline must skip over some of the most controversial aspects of the theory and various sub-theories, the development of which would be needed to make it convincing, let alone persuasive. I assume here that skepticism with respect to the nature of something is false. We can, in short, know what the nature of something is, and this knowledge, contrary to many intriguing arguments, is objective.4 That is to say, we can correctly identify the nature of something, and this identification is correct by standards applicable to others who embark upon an attempt to learn about reality. Political theory, not to mention all the other theoretical and empirical inquiries, would be impossible if this were false. The theory of essences (or natures or definitions), which I assume here, does not commit me to any version of the doctrine that when we define a concept, for example, “human being,” the definition must state the timelessly necessary and sufficient conditions for something being a human being. In short, the theory here presupposed is contextual, not the absolutist type with definitions having to state the necessary and sufficient conditions for something being, for example, a human being, given the most advanced understanding reached within the various domains of inquiry from which a theory of what a human being must be has to be ascertained. This theory avoids the pitfalls of both absolutism—namely, of having to be able to correctly state now whether some category or kind of existence will forever remain best-fitted within its presently best-fitted slot in the most successful conceptual framework available to us—and relativism—namely, lacking firm basis for any arguments that invoke an understanding of what (the nature of) something is because such an understanding must be relative to some loose framework.5

HUMAN LIFE AND CONDUCT What, then, does distinguish human beings from the rest of reality? It is that they are beings in need of conceptual awareness of the world in order to sustain and flourish in their existence. And this implies that human beings must also have the capacity to choose to engage in the process of conscious awareness, i.e., conceptual thinking. That is because conceptual thinking involves concept formation, and concepts are not formed automatically but, rather, by virtue of the human effort to focus, to come up with ideas. There are no ideas in the world that impose themselves on the mind. It is with the mind that ideas are formed, either by means of evidence and reasoning or by imagination or even wish fulfillment.

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So, nothing in nature prompts one to form concepts; any person must initiate the mental processes that will lead to the formation of concepts, principles, theories, explanations, and guidelines for conduct. The human mind is not triggered solely by sensory-perceptual input to do its work. With all the complex influences, pressures, and so on, that exert an impact on human development, the person must be at the center of giving his or her life its direction, even if only by choosing to accept the leadership of others, submitting, at various levels of fundamentality, to the influence of society, childhood upbringing, education, the arts, political leadership, etc. In this respect, the thesis often emphasized by Existentialists concerning the fundamental freedom of each individual is correct, but not their belief in the possibility of becoming whatever one chooses to become. What distinguishes a human being from the rest of reality is not all that comprises his or her humanity. Human beings are rational animals, distinctive with respect to the former attribute but not with respect to the latter. Aside from being essentially free to be rational, we are also complex biological entities with all the needs and requirements of successful existence that many other biological entities possess. (There is no inherent conflict between this combination of the biological and the rational nature of each human being.) Others concerned with humanistic society have tended to emphasize the biological nature of each person, and so on, in focusing on the fact that human beings are productive beings, that is, conscious producers. But the fact of productivity is not distinctive of human beings, however essential it may be. This has as its ethical and political result that being immersed in productivity is not the highest form of human life, although it is definitely a central form. Instead, productivity suitable to a rational being in the circumstances of the individual’s particular life, with the possibility of results that satisfy other aspects of human flourishing (e.g., curiosity, art, community, love, leisure), is what is appropriate for each individual. Depending upon the circumstances of one’s life, the age in which one lives, one’s technological opportunities, one’s physical characteristics, etc., the good life for someone will be to develop his or her potentialities as fully as fortune and personal ability make possible. The ethics broadly sketched here—for that is the only thing I can do, in order to cover all cases of human life—would best be called classical individualism or egoism.6 The good life for a person is to flourish as the particular human being he or she is. This view is “egoistic” in that it emphasizes the worthiness of one’s nourishing and the success of oneself as the primary purpose of conduct. Yet this view is distinct from subjectivist—“me, me, me”—egoism that regards each individual as a unique being, not a being with human nature. The theoretical case for this kind of ethics is much better founded than that of subjectivist

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egoism, that is, the egoism of Hobbes and the target positions of most of egoism’s critics.7 A morally good human being, by the above-sketched account, strives to excel as a human being in his or her particular case, that is, strives to be excellent, based on human nature and what he or she is. It is the fact that someone chooses to exert the effort, to initiate the striving, that makes this a matter of moral virtue. The value of what is sought is something human beings share with other living beings, namely the excellent life qua the kind of being something is. But because human beings have a choice between exerting this effort or failing to do so, their doing so is a moral or ethical issue, something concerned with worth that is up to the agent to achieve. Ethics, of course, does not deal with particulars at the philosophical level. It is as individuals and through various types of human beings—for example, teachers, businessmen, lawyers, entertainers, doctors, scientists—that the details of any moral position surface. And that is where personal responsibility lies. Moral theory can help identify the standard of moral worth, but it is not a theory that will produce answers, beyond these very general terms, to one’s moral questions. (Professional ethics pertains to one’s proper conduct as a teacher, and so on, while social ethics has bearing on such relationships as parenthood, friendship, etc.) The highly particularized ethical problems that individuals sometimes encounter are even beyond these more generally codifiable areas, and fall upon the individual who is closest to the case at hand.8 What can we learn from these general points, concerning the end of human life and the sort of conduct required for the fulfillment of this end, pertinent to political life? The central result is that a humanistic political system must give maximum room for individuals, so as to give full expression to their moral nature.

MORAL EXCELLENCE AND LIBERTY Everyone tends to champion freedom or political liberty, provided one accepts what he or she means by that term. The meaning that is central in this discussion is liberty as per not being interfered with in exercising choices pertaining to the quality of one’s life. This sense of “liberty” is most familiar in the context of natural rights theories from John Locke to Robert Nozick.9 Here the emphasis is on the moral foundations of the principles of a humanistic society, whereas in Locke there remains much controversy as to what those foundations are.10 Nozick, too, omitted a full treatment of the moral basis for his Lockean natural rights. Other theorists within this general—classical liberal—tradition have mainly eschewed offering an objective moral ba-

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sis for the natural rights that they have argued human beings have.11 To make quite clear the character of the liberty I have in mind, it is necessary to discuss what is meant by the notion of “one’s life.” A human being is alive as a rational animal, with the potentialities and requirements that constitute such an entity. Only if one has authority over the conduct of the life one possesses can one can properly call this life one’s own. If the moral theory outlined above is sound, then we may infer that one’s life is one’s own, which is to say that no other has authority over it without this authority having been voluntarily delegated; if one should really live for the sake of, say, God or the state or some racial group or the salvation of one’s everlasting (i.e., supernatural) soul, instead of for the sake of flourishing in life as an individual human being (who will die some day and no longer be, as far as our observation and reason inform us), then these have a prior claim upon the life we possess. Since one’s life is something one has the primary responsibility for making flourish, initially no other has any rightful authority concerning it. One, once an adult, is fully responsible for making those decisions that will either improve or impede one’s life. But this still does not give us a precise enough standard for determining the sphere or scope of one’s authority. For that, we need to understand more about human nature. As rational animals, people require for their flourishing the achievement of well-being on numerous fronts, including medical, professional, familial, economic, recreational, etc. They should, therefore, exert the effort to be successful in these various areas. They should seek, for example, wealth, and the amount and kind of wealth they should seek will differ from person to person. But they must all seek some wealth, and they must, consistently with their moral nature, make the choices pertinent to what they will do with their wealth. This is why, even though one may be the wrong choice, that, too, must be left without interference, since only if the choice to do the right thing is respected does one live a moral life. Being forced to do what is right is a violation of one’s nature, one’s dignity. The only apparent exception is when one is forced not to intrude upon another’s life and property, but this is not done so as to make one act properly but to protect another’s independence or sovereignty. The economic dimension of political liberty will here come into focus, although to call it economic could be misleading. Individuals should engage in seeking to advance themselves, and they may have the opportunity to do this by way of commerce, trade, employment, business, industry, entrepreneurship, investment, or credit, among other things. But the purposes of these activities may not be uniform at all—some trade may ensue for scientific purposes, some for artistic, some yet for philosophical purposes, and so forth.

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(The point here is that the category of economics tends to invite focus upon certain uniform motives human beings allegedly have and are allegedly driven by, but no such theory of uniform motivation underlies the present discussion.12) It should be noted that there is no division implicit in the present thesis concerning economic and intellectual liberty. Political liberty—that is to say, having one’s sovereignty systematically respected and maintained—is suitable to the flourishing of human life within the community of other human beings. It is a requirement because of the moral nature of each person, not because of the usefulness for some specific goal, e.g., national economic prosperity, personal economic success, or the like. The institution of private property is essential to the kind of human community in which individual liberty is prized above all other political values. This is because the authority to accomplish tasks, and to give the results of these accomplishments their direction, are indispensable to a morally significant life; it involves being in a position of withholding one’s sanction from those who are in political power. It is, in fact, the way to limit political power to its proper scope, namely, the protection of the rights of citizens. One’s dissent, just as one’s support, depends on having a secure sphere of authority, and this security consists, in part, of being able to make use of, control, freely trade, and otherwise utilize what one has accomplished in life (e.g., a well-written book, a symphony, a bank account, a home, shares in a corporation). Aside from one’s personal (character) achievements—such as one’s reputation and one’s virtue—one should produce tradable items also, which can then be consumed, enjoyed, bequeathed, exchanged, etc., as part of the flourishing of the human life one has. Once the institution of private property is no longer legally protected, the moral agency of an individual, indeed a person’s human dignity, has been undermined.13 This is because the crucial choices that have an impact upon one’s life (and on whether it is an excellent one or not) are not one’s own when others have the authority to break the connection between one’s actions and the results that would derive from them. There is no liberty in a vacuum, nor any responsibility. These must exist in the world, with its various attributes, including the fact that actions have concrete consequences. If the fruits of what a person does are another’s to make full use of—for example if someone’s development of an instrument can with impunity lead to another’s taking it without his permission—then the idea of having moral responsibility for one’s actions no longer applies. The sphere of authority over one’s actions must be all (except the sphere of authority of others’ lives). This requires access to much of reality that has not been made the

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property of others. Therefore, the system of private property (by which the complex distinctions between mine, yours, and others’ is kept legally intact within organized human communities) is an appropriate feature of a humanistic political system. When Marx noted, in “On the Jewish Question,”14 that a system of rights is a system of selfishness, he was wrong only in his belief that the selfishness must be of the narrow Hobbesean variety. Instead, a system of rights, including property rights, is appropriate for purposes of enabling each individual to seek his own moral perfection, namely, his fullest possible development as the individual human being he or she is, in the vicinity and voluntary company of others.

DIFFICULTIES The position advanced here is controversial and impossible to fully justify in a brief discussion. Some of the difficulties that come immediately to mind include the proper relationship between the government of a humanistic society and those who comprise its citizenry, the proper scope of governmental jurisdiction, the financing and operations of such a government without the violation of the very rights it is to protect, the cultivation of decency and virtue within a culture where personal ambitions may go unchecked apart from the boundaries of respect for each person’s natural rights, the practical and socialethical questions pertaining to those who are unfortunate and helpless (including orphaned children and adults who are invalids), and the issue of foreign affairs within a world (or even universe) of friendly, indifferent, and hostile neighboring communities. These and related matters have been discussed by those who have found, as I have, that a free society, in the sense meant within consistent classical liberal or libertarian theory, is indeed best suited for human social life as conceived within a humanistic perspective.15 The present position has not been looked upon with favor by the most prominent political theorists and thinkers of the past several decades.16 Yet, there is much to recommend it on moral grounds alone. Other reasons have also been offered in support of this kind of political libertarianism, mostly by economists defending the economic system of private property capitalism, but these reasons are, in my view, inadequate and often normatively inconclusive. My wish here is to put on record, in the company of other, often drastically different political alternatives, the outline of a moral case for the libertarian political system. I am confident that even such a brief presentation as this will provoke a thoughtful consideration of the nature of a humanistic political order with greater prospects for wisdom.

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NOTES 1. Laszlo Versenyi, Socratic Humanism, with a foreword by Robert S. Brumbaugh (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963). 2. Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity, 2nd ed., trans. Marian Evans (New York: C. Blanchard, 1855). 3. Vitaly Shevoroshkin, “The Mother Tongue,” The Sciences (May/June 1990): 20–27. 4. See Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1989) and Objectivity: Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life (UK: Ashgate, 2004). 5. I take this to be the crux of the thesis of the late Richard Rorty, as presented in, for example, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). It is, for Rorty, the community to which one belongs that sets the standards for what counts as a sound definition of a concept. For a very different conception that is also within the pragmatic tradition, see Hillary Putnam, Words & Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 6. See, Machan, Classical Individualism. 7. See, for more on this, David L. Norton, Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) and Tibor R. Machan, Capitalism and Individualism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). See, also, the classic statement by Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961). 8. For more, see Tibor R. Machan, “Ethics and its Uses,” in Commerce and Morality, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). 9. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Mark Goldie (London: Everyman, 1924), Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). 10. For this, see Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 11. The exception is Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967). Rand’s work, however, tends to be classified as non-academic and thus not accorded the attention that, say, Strauss and Nozick receive. There are, of course, other ethical defenses of classical liberal political theory but many of these rely on theology or supernaturalism. See, for example, Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). 12. Machan, Capitalism and Individualism. 13. Tibor R. Machan, The Right to Private Property (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2002). 14. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39–62. 15. I have addressed these matters in several publications, most recently The Passion for Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and Libertarianism Defended (London: Ashgate, 2005). 16. See, for an especially civil exchange on it, Tibor R. Machan and Craig Duncan, Libertarianism: For and Against (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

Chapter Five

Economic Analysis and the Pursuit of Liberty1

CONNECTING THEORY WITH PRACTICE The connections between the dominant (neoclassical) theory of economic relations and the pursuit of political and civil liberties are of interest to us. Does the dominant economic approach to human affairs, which offers positive grounds for free-market systems, give rational support to acting in defense of free societies? True, the condition of (negative) freedom is an analytic feature of the economic approach to human affairs. Such freedom is a necessary precondition for the pursuit of our subjective utilities or preferences, not itself a utility or preference. But I am more concerned with whether this approach gives rational support to achieving this condition when it has not been fully realized. Put simply, does the economic approach to human behavior provide a rationale for the importance of the kind of political action that would establish and sustain a free society? I am certain that this subject will tie in with our purpose well enough so as to be of broad interest and worth revisiting. To fend off the charge that I am concerned with a straw man—that is, a theory no one endorses—let me cite a clear statement of the relevant features of the theory by one of the most prominent neoclassical economists of our time, Professor George Stigler. There are many others who make the point that this theoretical model of market economics and of its assumptions is widely and prominently embraced. Stigler states the point in succinct terms: Man is eternally a utility maximizer—in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his scientific work—in short, everywhere.2 83

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Gary Becker is no less an uncompromising supporter of the approach I have in mind, one sometimes called economic imperialism: The combined assumptions of maximizing behavior, market equilibrium, and stable preferences, used relentlessly and unflinchingly, form the heart of the economic approach as I see it.3

THE SELF-DEFEATING NATURE OF THE MODEL One criticism by economic defenders of the market is that it is indefensible in its own terms. Quentin Skinner of Cambridge University noted, in his Harvard University lectures, “The Paradoxes of Political Liberty,” that “we are very poor guardians of our own liberties.” He referred to liberalism’s “minimalist view of civic obligation” and lamented the “dangerous privatization” of certain values of Western civilization.4 The impeding feature of liberalism is the definition of the concept “human being” employed as the fundamental assumption of economic analysis. Economists differ somewhat on the precise content of their definition of human nature. Yet most share Stigler’s view that an understanding of human behavior is most promising if we assume that everyone is maximizing utilities, pursuing self-interest, trying to maximize wealth, or the like. Some such idea constitutes the basis for a scientific economic conception of human affairs, and figures prominently in liberalism’s world view. Why is the economic approach to human behavior so stifling, vis-à-vis the pursuit of liberty? Since it defines human beings as relentless, subjective utility maximizers, it fails to produce the conclusion that people should make the establishment and maintenance of a system of liberty a priority in their lives. Economic man, then, has no good reason for choosing to be political or patriotic man. Economic man, as Stigler notes, is also non-scientific man. If one holds that human beings are always in markets, and that their utilities can only be a purely subjective matter, one must infer that scientists are also utility maximizers as they engage in analysis and research. Any other commitment is derivative. Yet this view undermines the claim that a scientist can be objective since, if falsehood gave the scientific economist greater satisfaction than truth, he would sell out his mission. So, by the economist’s own account of human behavior, the economist would be ready to pursue falsehood if that were utility maximizing. At any rate, the pursuit of truth would have to be regarded as accidental, not necessary, to scientific behavior. And when Karl Marx criticized economists—even the great ones such as Adam Smith and

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David Ricardo—he in fact took this line, presumably laid down by economic science itself. He, of course, mercilessly indicted such lesser-known economists as Frederick Bastiat and H. C. Carey for simply espousing notions that serve the vested interest of the economic class to which they belong.5 This is just the point public-choice theorists make about why bureaucrats cannot be trusted with their task, namely, the pursuit of the public interest. This public choice idea means that the pursuit of self- or vested-interest undermines economic scientific work, just as it does the work of politicians and bureaucrats.6 Of course, there are other complaints about the economic man idea, most prominently that it is ultimately vacuous. If, as Stigler claims, “Man is eternally a utility-maximizer—in his home, in his office (be it public or private), in his church, in his scientific work,” what can we even mean if we deny this? Suppose we claim that at least, when people sacrifice their lives for some cause that is of no immediate or even long range personal benefit to them, they do not act as economic man. What do we hear in response to this? The late Milton Friedman gives us the answer when he states, every individual serves his own private interest. . . . The great Saints of history have served their “private interest” just as the most money grubbing miser has served his interest. The private interest is whatever it is that drives an individual.7

Friedman’s idea renders the idea of “private interest” quite meaningless. It also makes the notion that someone is indeed pursuing his or her private interest wholly unclear, not to mention untestable—a favorite concern of positivist economists.

THE REASON FOR THE HIGH VALUE OF LIBERTY Are these valid criticisms? Can they be met? The critics do make a good point. So long as the free market relies solely on economic defenses—that is, on neoclassical economic arguments—one of its analytical implications is that people may quite rationally not act so as to defend it. But is there no other way to defend the free-market society from a framework that does not have these self-defeating implications? While human beings indeed do—and perhaps even should—act as utility maximizers, as (in other words) prudent individuals, this is not all there is to them. They could also be pursuers of certain objective values because they have become convinced of their existence. This rebuttal to the critics of the economic defense of the free society involves a different idea of human nature, though not necessarily one that is wholly opposed to economic man.

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What is to be done? I suggest that we have a perfectly good tradition in which the following are reconciled: science, liberty, morality, and utility (or human happiness). This line of thinking has only been advanced recently but has been hinted at, in earlier times.8 It owes a great deal to the Aristotelian tradition. In Aristotle, there are two features of human life that are closely linked, namely, liberty and human happiness. He recognizes that individuals must be acting volitionally, of their own free will, in order to be credited, morally, for their conduct. He then goes on to identify moral conduct by reference to its principled pursuit of the happiness of the acting agent. Interestingly, Adam Smith recognized the value of this ancient outlook on morality when he wrote the following: Ancient moral philosophy proposed to investigate wherein consisted the happiness and perfection of a man, considered not only as an individual, but as the member of a family, of a state, and of the great society of mankind. In that philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. But when moral, as well as natural philosophy, came to be taught only as subservient to theology, the duties of human life were treated of as chiefly subservient to the happiness of a life to come. In the ancient philosophy the perfection of virtue was represented as necessarily productive to the person who possessed it, of the most perfect happiness in this life. In the modern philosophy it was frequently represented as almost always inconsistent with any degree of happiness in this life, and heaven was to be earned by penance and mortification, not by the liberal, generous, and spirited conduct of a man. By far the most important of all the different branches of philosophy became in this manner by far the most corrupted.9

The Aristotelian view of human morality, revived and modified by Ayn Rand and students of her philosophy, must, of course, be reconciled with science, specifically with those aspects of it that bear on the doctrine of free will. This gives economists a great deal of trouble. Yet their notion of scientific explanation is no longer the sole option. Scientific defenses of the “free will” idea are, furthermore, not unusual and have gained respect, as in the case of those put forth by Roger W. Sperry.10 In ethics, classical egoism, departing somewhat from Aristotle, completes the picture. Here liberalism gains a powerful moral footing: it is indeed morally right for everyone to act so as to become the happiest he or she can be, but here “happiness” is not left undefined but is tied to the nature of human beings and to the individual involved. Thus, this is not a subjectivist, subjective-utility-oriented idea of human values. Accordingly, to cap it all off, the value of political liberty is an objectively demonstrable priority for every individual, on behalf of which a great deal of effort is morally required.

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In this way, it seems that the paradox of liberalism, which made the defense of liberty a mere preference that many people might quite rationally omit from their list of priorities, gets resolved. Whether one should pursue liberty is no longer optional but is, rather, a prominent civic obligation. If true, this outlook can defend both the free market and the imperative to strive to establish it. Because, although one ought to be free to pursue the values one chooses, which is impossible without economic liberty, one is morally—although not necessarily legally—bound to pursue some goals ahead of others. Therefore the pursuit of liberty is rationally justified, not merely a subjectively preferred course of conduct in which some may choose to engage.11

NOTES 1. I have developed some of these ideas in greater detail in Tibor R. Machan, The Moral Case for the Free Market Economy (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988); and Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 2. George Stigler, Lecture II, Tanner Lectures delivered at Harvard University, April 1980, 23–24. Quoted in Richard McKenzie, The Limits of Economic Science (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff Publishing, 1983), 6. 3. Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 5. 4. Quoted in Richard Higgins, “British philosopher says self-interest corrupts Western Liberty,” Boston Sunday Globe, October 28, 1984. 5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage Books, 1973). 6. James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962). See also Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965). 7. Milton Friedman, “The Line We Dare Not Cross,” Encounter, November 1976, 11. What this approach to understanding human affairs secures is what Friedman and other positivists desire, namely, a positive science, that is, “a system of generalizations that can be used to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances . . . by the development of a ‘theory’ or ‘hypothesis’ that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed.” M. Friedman, Essays in Positive Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) 4–8 in the Phoenix edition, 1966. For a meticulous critique of this system, see Steven Rappaport, “What is Really Wrong with Milton Friedman’s Methodology of Economics,” Reason Papers, no. 11 (Spring 1986), 33–62. I should add that I believe that a great deal of the substance of positivist economic analysis could be saved by giving up the way in which the basic assumptions about human behavior and motivation are treated, and substituting conditional statements which could function as value-free

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within the theory but which could give ample room for value considerations when we explore whether the antecedent of the conditional should be put into effect—e.g., if we start with the claim that “If people go to markets, they will pursue their prosperity (in their varied but not purely subjective ways)”—this will yield testable hypotheses just as it leaves open the possibility that, on some occasions, people should not go to market at all—e.g., when their mother is lying on her deathbed or their son needs parental advice. Instead of this move, the positivists prefer obliterating the distinction between concern for prosperity or prudence and concern for others or kindness. 8. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966). Rand is sometimes charged with being an a priorist, but this is wrong. Her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (New York: New American Library, 1979) clearly demonstrates that, for her, sound theories must be grounded in knowledge of facts. (So does her famous motto, “Check your premises!”) For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, “Epistemology and Moral Knowledge,” The Review of Metaphysics 36 (September 1982): 232–49. It is particularly important to keep in mind that the metaethical approach of objectivism—whereby a moral judgment is said to be capable of being shown true or false—is no more arrogant—no less lacking in humility, if you will—than any scientific approach. No infallibility is implied, and the underlying epistemology is not absolutist but contextualist, i.e., it admits that knowledge may require updating, revising, etc., given further learning about and changes in reality. 9. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library Editions, 1929), 726. 10. Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 11. Here is a point mostly missed by those who analyze the global conflict between radical Muslim philosophy and the prevailing, albeit often mixed-up, politics of “the West.” Yes, Muslims and some of their Western defenders (see, for example, Dinesh D’Souza, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 [New York: Doubleday, 2007]) have a point that there is a good deal of morally objectionable conduct in the semi-free societies of “the West”—although there is also a great deal of Nanny statism aiming to ban it, such as the war on drugs, laws forbidding prostitution and some gambling, etc. But the Muslim—as well as many Western religious and social conservatives—answer to this just cannot be right. There is no morality without choice! If one is forced to act right, one isn’t doing the moral or ethical thing. One is behaving properly, perhaps, but without moral significance.

Chapter Six

Human Rights and Poverty

Poverty is a human condition that few welcome. There are some, of course, who embrace it as a matter of their religion or philosophy of life but they are the rare case, indeed. For most, being poor is quite objectionable. And “being poor” is meant here that they are considerably below the level of wealth enjoyed by others in their community. “Poverty,” in other words, is mostly used as a relative concept, comparable to, say, “short” or “far,” unlike concepts such as “ill” and “healthy.”1 In the field of political economy, there are several approaches to understanding and remedying poverty. They tend to depend, in part, on the underlying idea of human nature and the conditions of social life that are best suited to human beings. Here I will discuss several alternatives to considering poverty and its remedies, and end by defending one that stresses the support of institutions that are proven to encourage prudence and productivity. In the course of the discussion, I will briefly revisit a few topics covered elsewhere in this work. Once again, my purpose is to argue that all things considered, and for the most part, free institutions rather than coercive ones promise better relief of one of the central concerns of contemporary public policy. If one begins with the idea that human nature is such as to make it possible for most people to act creatively and productively, the most important question about poverty is what conditions would make productive activity most likely in human communities. If, however, one begins with the idea that human nature is such as to render most people victims of their circumstances, mostly passive entities who must be moved in order to thrive, that too would invite the question of what conditions of a human community would foster such thriving. If, alternatively, human nature is such as to make most people 89

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subject to the will of a deity whose grace determines the fate and fortunes of people, that too will invite a certain kind of community. These three alternative conceptions of human nature could be designated as “free agent,” “passive patient,” and “subject of God’s Will.” The political economies these would support, respectively, are classical liberalism, welfare state egalitarianism, and theocracy. Briefly, the first of these ideas suggests that a society that secures the negative right to liberty or freedom for all is most suitable to human beings; the second of these ideas would suggest that a society that secures the positive right to well-being or capability would be best suited to human beings; and the third would suggest that a form of government with leadership and guidance provided by those who best understand such works as the Bible or Koran would be most fitting for human community life. Let me spell out in some detail the argument for how each of these positions approaches the problem of poverty.

PERSONS AS FREE AGENTS According to this view, human beings possess free will and can rationally organize their lives, given their various circumstances. Some, of course, may begin with great disadvantage, yet these persons, as all others, have the capacity to advance themselves through ingenuity and entrepreneurial savvy. If someone is born into poverty, this is not necessarily a severe impediment, unless the socio-legal conditions make personal advancement by means of creativity, productivity, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship very difficult. In a community wherein free, voluntary interaction is legally protected both from criminals and the government, the poor are often able, if not always willing, to extricate themselves from poverty. The crucial requirement is a legal infrastructure in which individual human rights to liberty, private property, entering into binding contracts, and other conditions of agency are given effective protection. No guarantee of success in flourishing, or even in surv