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 survival, is promised in such a system but it can be argued that the probability of prospering is greater than in other sort of systems. Do human beings fit this viewpoint? If they do, it would have to be the case that they have the capacity to initiate some of their crucial conduct—to put to work their minds and bodies so as to achieve prosperity, to attain their goals, to flourish in careers and family life, to embark upon trade. One serious objection to seeing people along such lines is the doctrine of determinism: they are merely being moved by forces not under their own control, so there is no personal initiative possible in human affairs. If, however, a different doctrine

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is correct, according to which persons grow up to become self-determined, capable of initiating their own actions—if this kind of causation is possible in the world, and if human beings are capable of it—then this viewpoint is likely to be correct. This conception of human nature, and the resulting idea of community life, stresses what are commonly referred to as negative or liberty rights. Having such rights amounts to an imperative to all, including to governments, to refrain from intruding on persons, invading their “person and estates” (John Locke), securing the “moral space” (Robert Nozick), respecting their rights to private property (Richard Epstein, Tibor Machan, et al). Governments are envisioned as agencies instituted to secure such rights, by way of the consent of the governed (who, by instituting government, are exercising their right to self-defense).

PERSONS AS PASSIVE PATIENTS The central contention of this view of human beings is that they are a variety of matter-in-motion, driven to behave as they do by the various forces that operate in nature, including their instincts and genetic make-up, as well as the forces of evolutionary biology. In the case of human community affairs, especially economics, this would mean that persons are at the mercy of such factors as their parents’ prosperity or lack thereof, the economic conditions in which they find themselves at any particular time, and the natural scarcity or abundance that happens to surround them. Accordingly, in order for those who are in a condition of dire need to make improvements in their lives, it is necessary that they obtain whatever will enable or render them capable of prospering. They themselves are viewed as largely incapable of bringing about such improvements, given the conditions that rendered them poor in the first place. For example, John Rawls has argued that most people inherit even their virtues. The assertion that we “deserve the superior character that enables us to make the effort to cultivate our talents is . . . problematic; for such character depends in good part upon fortunate family and social circumstances in early life for which we can claim no credit.”2 So, Rawls continues, “Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out.”3 That is to say, the redistribution of wealth is a general moral and public policy imperative. Entrepreneurial efforts cannot reasonably be expected from those who lack “fortunate family and social circumstances in early life.”

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In cases such as those found in countries with large populations of extremely poor people, the central or at least first remedy is to transfer to them the “surplus” from those in wealthier nations. As the philosopher Peter Unger notes, “On pain of living a life that is seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others.”4 This view has also spawned the international efforts of the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, called the “capability approach.”5 In contrast to the earlier idea of negative or liberty human rights, this conception of human nature and human community life supports the idea of positive or welfare rights, to be provided with support that will enable one or render one capable of living and flourishing in dignity. In the modern era, such rights commonly translate into entitlements that must be provided to those in need. Governments are instituted not merely to protect negative or liberty rights but to protect positive or welfare rights, which requires them to engage in extensive taxation and wealth redistribution, based on the needs of those whose circumstances are seen as preventing them from advancing in life on their own initiative.

PERSONS AS SUBJECTS OF GOD’S WILL This conception of human nature rests on the view that everyone is a creation of God and subject to God’s—or Allah’s or some other deity’s—will. Thus, the central task in life is to obtain accurate directions from God, which is mostly seen as accomplishable by the reading and following of the texts that are considered to contain God’s words—the Bible, Koran, Torah. Such reading is mostly made possible by entrusting various church leaders, scholars, or theologians with the task of translating the texts into usable guides for public policy. This approach to government has an ancient pedigree and extends to the modern era, for example, in Islamic countries, although others, too, are accustomed to this approach—Israel, for example, has a state that rests many of its policies on certain religious ideas and some of the countries of Western Europe continue to maintain at least a ceremonial connection between church and state (England, Sweden, Norway, Holland). Is there any distinctive relationship between such theocratic systems and some doctrine of human rights? Of course, there was the doctrine of the divine rights of kings but this is not, properly speaking, a theory of human rights, which is generally understood to be the rights of all human individuals, not only of the monarch.

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CHRISTIAN POLITICAL THEORY Within the Christian theological tradition, however, the individualist theory of human rights gains support from the view that every individual human being is a child of God and thus possesses dignity. The natural rights doctrine of John Locke (1632–1704) owes something to this view, as does the earlier natural rights position of William of Ockham (circa 1285–1347). Within Christianity, each person possesses free will and must choose to follow Jesus as a matter of his or her choice, not because coerced to do so, and so there is a close affinity between the political (natural law) theories of at least postThomist (yet also Augustinian) Christians and the modern theory of individual human rights. It is arguable, as well, that the Christian position on politics is troubled because the strong obligation to follow Jesus comes into conflict with the freedom of everyone to embark on such a life. (Some argue that the Holy Inquisition was itself a result of this conflict, leading to the torture of those who would not accept Jesus freely but who would, once tortured, accept the Lord of their own accord. Others dispute that a monolithic Inquisition was conducted by the Roman Catholic Church [http://www.geocities.com/militantis/inquisition2.html]). Still, if one takes a more deterministic view of the idea of “God’s Will,” it is difficult to combine this with the classical liberal—that is, Locke’s or Mill’s—notion of individual rights. That is because the classical liberal idea of human agency ascribes to every normal individual the capacity to initiate action, especially in the economic realm (e.g., vis-à-vis entrepreneurship). One way to escape this problem is to embrace Immanuel Kant’s position that, although our phenomenal selves are fully determined—that is to say, as far as how our bodies behave, there is no freedom from universal mechanical causation—in the noumenal realm of the mind or spirit each person is free and morally responsible. This gives rise to individual human rights once again, since, as Kant noted, “ought” implies “can,” so every person requires a realm of liberty so as to be able to act in morally significant ways. Thus, the religious conception of human nature suggests mixed views about human rights, with some religions making ample room for this concept, while others make none at all.

ISLAMIC POLITICAL THEORY AND HUMAN RIGHTS Muslims are roughly divided into two communities, the Sunni majority and Shii minority, and they adhere to different ideas as to political rule. They are known as the Sunni caliphate and the Shii Imamate.

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At Muhammad’s death, most Muslims, since they thought that Muhammad did not name a successor, relied upon the decision of a group of his cohorts; the caliphate, who was chosen by way of consultation (shura) and agreement (called ijma) and took an oath of loyalty (baya) that is sworn by those who elect him, and the compact (ahd) with the people to govern by Islamic law (Sharia) developed into what is widely regarded as legitimate government for Sunni Islam. However, the Shii rejected the Sunni caliphs and regarded them as having subverted Islamic law. The Shii adhered to the idea that Muhammad had selected Ali, who was reported to be his cousin and son-in-law, to be the ruler (Imam) of Muslims. They held that the oldest (male) descendant (Ahl al-Bait) must be the divinely anointed, religious, and political chief. Abbasid rule (750–1250) formed Islamic political theory as theocratic, with theologians as the legal authorities who had royal privilege and professed to uphold the divine goal for the Muslim community under Abbasid edicts. In the last analysis, as matters now stand, there is no unified Muslim political theory that enjoys widespread acceptance. It is a well-known aspect of contemporary Islamic politics, however, that human rights are not respected universally. Most notably, women are not taken to have the sort of self-governing authority men tend to possess in Muslim societies. It is fair to say, therefore, that this religious political tradition does not embrace the idea of individual equal human rights for all.

JEWISH POLITICAL THEORY Jews, as such, do not adhere to a firm political creed, unlike many Muslims, but tend to embrace a variety of democratic, even liberal, institutions, while also encouraging some socialist economic practices and certain mild forms of theocracies, depending on the version of Judaism they embrace. Thus they embrace some variety of human rights theory, mostly a combination of negative and positive individual rights. Jewish political ideas derive, mainly, from the belief that Jews are a separate, unique—chosen—people, not merely adherents to a different religion or a system of moral principles that emerge from such a religion. (Of course, this idea is shared by nearly all traditional and organized religious groups.) Jewish political ideas pertain to how the Jews as a unified people have held on to a political community throughout the centuries, without becoming amalgamated into the communities where they lived as exiles, and how they have retained such clear expressions of their own culture and forms of political conduct.

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HUMAN RIGHTS IN PRACTICE In the contemporary world, negative human rights as rights of individuals, to being treated as agents to carry on with life on their own initiative, play a most important role in the realm of civil, religious, and journalistic affairs. In the United States of America, which is commonly linked to this tradition of rights theory, the First Amendment provides legal protection against coercive treatment in legal proceedings, against censorship, and against religious intolerance. At the same time, positive human rights are widely protected in the realm of economic affairs, where those in dire need are entitled to various provisions (minimum wages, unemployment compensation, consumer protection, affirmative action mandates, and so forth). Sometimes, public policy efforts to protect both of these types of human rights lead to problems since the negative right of, for example, freedom to associate only with those one chooses conflicts with affirmative action mandates to hire members of minorities. If one has the positive right to health care, while health care providers have the negative right to refrain from offering their services, this too can lead to conflicts in such a way that the protection of the former will appear to lead to involuntary servitude by the latter. On the international front, where poverty is a great concern in many regions of the globe, the doctrine of positive rights is often deployed to urge governments to engage in substantial wealth redistribution, although often a less legalistic approach is taken via NGOs (non-governmental organizations), closely associated with the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). (The WB and IMF themselves are not NGOs but international financial institutions; however, in their work, they cooperate with many local and international NGOs.) The United Nations may be regarded as an organization with legal standing but without legal power, so its efforts to promote wealth redistribution are usually a matter of imploring the governments of various developed countries to provide extensive foreign aid. Major figures in the discipline of international economics, such as Jeffrey Sachs, and in political economy, such as Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, are active in urging such governments to heed the UN’s call. Critics of this approach argue that one way that poverty has been widely encouraged is by making it a policy to treat it as a kind of disease, rather than as a temporary malady that individuals throughout the globe need to learn how to escape by means of voluntary organizations and, especially, their own economic initiative. To provide help in other-than-catastrophic circumstances— e.g., when a tsunami occurs—leads to repeated reliance on such help instead of on self-development.

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As we have already seen, this debate ultimately takes us back to a discussion of human nature. As things stand, most of the officials involved in working to abate poverty embrace some combination of views, seeing people as both casualties of their harsh circumstances and individuals capable of overcoming such circumstances if political and legal infrastructures do not hamper them. Perhaps the most novel approach in political theory is that of the communitarians, such as Charles Taylor, whose analysis makes it difficult to involve any strong conception of human rights. Taylor insists that we belong to our communities and thus that the lives we have are not actually ours—we do not, thus, have the right to life, let alone to liberty and property. He speaks approvingly of “a principle which states our obligation as men to belong to or sustain society, or a society of a certain type, or to obey authority or an authority of a certain type.”6 According to this view, there is more than just a moral responsibility to be generous and charitable toward those who are poor. There is an actually enforceable legal obligation to contribute to the community of which the poor are members, thus alleviating their poverty not only within one’s own region of the world but also in the human community as such, globally, as per the remark quoted above from Peter Unger. The classical liberal or libertarian tradition of human rights theorizing, especially that which emerges from John Locke and, more recently, Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, and some neo-Aristotelians (such as Eric Mack, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl), would take issue with this approach and reaffirm, based on various philosophical arguments, the vital importance of negative individual human rights. It would hold that respecting and protecting these would serve most effectively to counter poverty (although never guaranteed against all of it, since individuals can, even when they have the right to work, neglect to exercise this right wisely and prudently, and because nature is often simply merciless). In the last part of this chapter, these points are elaborated.

DEVELOPMENT AND FREEDOM The late Peter (“Lord”) Bauer devoted much of his life to championing the political economy of classical liberalism for developing societies. This, he asserted, was what would bring them out of their wretched states, not a bunch of foreign aid and intervention by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the United Nations. His friend and sometimes critic, Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate who now teaches at Harvard University, had a serious disagreement with Bauer. Sen had been defending what he has dubbed the

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“capabilities approach” whereby the people in underdeveloped, Third World countries must be helped not only by removing all the terrible obstacles placed before them by politicians and bureaucrats but also by providing them with some initial aid and by making it possible for them to influence their governments. Such influence, of course, would direct public policies to garner resources via taxation and then hand out subsidies and other forms of support to special interest groups that had helped vote in those measures. Sen’s basic idea is that, once this opportunity for making an impact on politics has been exploited, development would commence and most often private individuals and firms would start embarking on various productive enterprises. But, argues Sen, first the people need a little help from government and various international groups. Bauer’s and Sen’s conflicting approaches may best be accounted for by reference to what seems to be their respective views of human nature and governments. Bauer seems to have been confident that free men and women would do well by themselves, provided that legal authorities uphold the regime of private property rights and the integrity of contracts. This is the limited government idea, once favored by the American Founders in the Declaration of Independence. It comes from John Locke, who held that government is but a way to secure our rights and that there is no other serious business for it to carry out for us. This view rests on the idea that human beings are able to fend for themselves, in voluntary cooperation, because they are inventive and creative and productive once the threat of criminal and foreign invasion is dealt with in their societies. Sure, there will be some who lag behind, maybe because they are suffering from certain maladies or unusual natural impediments, but to help them it’s enough for neighbors and relatives and philanthropists to give them support. Governments should stay the course and secure individual rights, period. Another matter Sen appears to overlook is what public choice theorists have taught us, namely, that when government gets involved in helping various groups in need, those in government pretty much manage to divert this help to projects they themselves prefer. Bureaucrats and politicians have their own agenda and, when they gain power so as to help out, it is their idea of what needs to be helped out that they will follow, not that of those who reached out to them, especially when they are supposed to pursue something as vague as the public good or interest. Given that politicians and bureaucrats lack the budgetary constraints that normal businesses and families experience, they are also likely to overspend and deplete the resources of their treasuries. Of course, those who are eager for the unfortunate and those left behind to get on their feet must also accept an uncomfortable fact—not everyone is eager to go along with this objective, even among those who are in the worst

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shape. It is utopian to believe that any kind of method for development will be universally effective. When one does hold that view, one is only likely to throw good money after bad and perpetrate serious wastefulness. Some measure of poverty, for example, as well as devastation from natural disasters, will have to be accepted. Human beings are not perfect, and to fail to realize this leads to what Voltaire called “the perfect” being the enemy of “the good.” This applies to efforts to facilitate development across the globe. It seems to me that Bauer had it right, even though from his perspective one must also accept that some underdevelopment will remain in place here and there across the globe. But the kind of efforts urged on us by Sen and, especially, by the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and Bono—massive transfers of wealth from developing to underdeveloped countries—will only lead to disappointment and frustration.

NOTES 1. For a detailed discussion and critique of the statistical basis of the American government’s estimate of U.S. poverty, see Nicholas Eberstadt, “The Mismeasurement of Poverty,” Policy Review, No. 137 (August/September 2006). 2. Ibid., 104. 3. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 101. This idea is extensively developed in Serena Olsaretti, Liberty, Desert and the Market, A Philosophical Study (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), suggesting that the thrust of the defense of the free market rests on the belief that all those who own wealth or assets deserve it. (I will return to this point in several sections of this book.) 4. Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 5. http://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwphe/0211001.html. 6. See, Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Vol. 2 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 188.

Chapter Seven

Rights, Values, Regulation, and Health Care

RIGHTS VERSUS SO-CALLED RIGHTS For the past two hundred years, a debate has flourished in political philosophy regarding what kinds of rights human beings possess. This is not the debate about whether we have any rights at all. Instead, the rights versus socalled-rights debate is about whether human beings have rights other than the negative rights not to be killed, assaulted, robbed, or silenced. Locke, the major seventeenth-century individual-rights theorist, argued that we all possess the natural negative right not to be intruded upon. Because of the kind of beings we are, we require certain social conditions, including respect for our negative rights, when we form communities.1 Locke’s critics argued that the negative rights he identified are only some of the rights that we possess. Such critics maintain that we also have so-called positive rights whereby others must not only refrain from intruding upon us but also owe us positive services such as welfare, health care, and education. Positive-rights theorists do not simply argue that it is decent and morally proper for others to voluntarily help us when we are in need. Rather, they argue that, just as others may be forced to desist from murdering or assaulting us, they can also be forced to give us whatever help they can—including their work, their earnings, and the fruits of their talents.2

NO SO-CALLED RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE The recent debate in the United States about government-supplied health care illustrates the conflict between these two views of rights. Negative rights theorists 99

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argue that individuals ought to strive to live independently and flourish in voluntary association with each other, including obtaining whatever goods they need and want in life. Positive rights theorists argue that individuals naturally belong to each other, as parts of an organic body. Locke put the theory of negative rights on record, but Karl Marx thought little of negative rights and spawned an alternative view of so-called positive rights in social relations. Marx declared that “the human essence is the true collectivity of man,” meaning that we are essentially “species beings,” parts of the larger organic body of humanity.3 Since Marx, other people have softened his hard-line collectivist position into a so-called kinder and gentler theory of positive rights. As a result, some people misunderstand the nature of positive rights, thinking that they simply arise from an elaboration of negative rights. When newspaper columnist George Will noted that one government official leaned toward authoritarianism by inventing positive rights not listed in the Constitution, someone criticized Mr. Will thus: “The Constitution has been amended in the past to include the ‘right’ to vote for African-Americans, women, and eighteen-year-olds, as well as the right to be free from slavery and involuntary servitude.”4 The idea is that, since such so-called positive rights have been added to the United States Constitution, others may also be added. However, such amendments are drastically different from the amendments advocated by many big-government theorists. Many of the amendments are simple elaborations for more specialized cases of the basic negative rights everyone possesses by nature. The right to vote is an application of the right to liberty in the arena of political action: government may not prevent any adult citizen from fully participating in the political system. The right to be free from slavery is a simple corollary of the negative right to liberty, as is the right to be free from involuntary servitude. Just how different such amendments are from the amendments that are proposed by advocates of positive rights can be appreciated when we consider that all positive rights imply involuntary servitude. If someone is coerced into making provisions for the health care, social security, or related needs of others, this is forced labor, plain and simple. Finally, it should be understood that, even if such new rights had been added to the Constitution of the United States, it would not settle the issue of whether they should have been added, or whether they are rights we all have, as opposed to ones that have merely been invented.

ELABORATING OUR RIGHTS The negative-versus-positive rights debate is important and must be clearly understood. Basic negative rights must at times be spelled out in some detail,

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and made applicable to new areas of human conduct used to solve problems. For example, the right to freedom of speech, which spells out the right to liberty for communication, might need to be developed further in light of the growth of the electronic communications superhighway. The right to own property had to be developed further to clarify ownership of portions of the electromagnetic broadcast spectrum. It can be shown, by careful, logical reasoning, that such refinements follow from our basic negative rights. Positive rights, however, violate our basic negative rights, place us in servitude to others, and can be presented as derived from our natural rights only through conceptual fraud. We should be on guard when people who wish to solve social problems advocate unjustified power for governments by distorting the negative rights we all possess. We have only those so-called negative rights otherwise described as natural, God-given, and inalienable. So-called positive rights are deceptive inventions that capitalize on the soundness of the theory of negative rights for dangerous purposes, leading ultimately to the subversion of the original concept of basic individual rights and freedom.

NO RIGHT TO HEALTH CARE EXISTS Regarding an understanding of the nature of the rights human beings have, as such, that I have considered, it is possible to appreciate that human beings have no right to medical care, apart from that which they have contractually secured for themselves either directly or by way of employment contracts and similar voluntary means. An advertisement by the Bedell World Citizenship Fund of Spirit Lake, Iowa, USA Today, on May 4, 2006, urged readers to “Recognize that All Americans Have a Right to Medical Care.” The organization may mean well but, as shown above, it is perpetuating a gross misunderstanding about individual rights. The people who belong to this organization may mean no more than that people in the United States have a legal right to medical care, which is true enough but not crucial, since governments can establish such rights and entitlements, whether justified or not. People who have power have always been able to confer legal privileges on other people, especially if they can obtain such privileges from people by force of arms, by taxation, or by outright conscription. A more vital point in response to this claim, and one which is worthy of reiteration, is that nobody has a natural right to medical care comparable to a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, or private property. These are what political theorists call negative rights, because all they require is that people refrain from intruding on each other. But nobody can have a right to medical care because if some people had such a right, others would

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lose their basic rights to liberty, and to property, which are inalienable and cannot be lost. Some people have argued that, because the protection of negative rights requires the performance of services or production of goods, they are, after all, so-called positive rights. Indeed, such people claim they can only be rights if this protection is provided. But this is wrong because for a right to be protected, it needs to exist prior to its protection. If a parent, for example, has the duty to care for a child, that duty must be identifiable before anyone can insist that it be performed. Just as a duty may go unheeded, so may a right go disrespected and unprotected.

MEDICAL CARE AS A VALUE A better understanding of the relationships people have to health care is that medical care is a value that doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals would, if they were free men and women, provide to people they would choose as recipients, on terms they regarded as acceptable. These provisions are not owed to anyone. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals may not be placed into involuntary servitude to people needing their services. The relationships must be voluntary, no matter how vital the services in question may be to the recipients. The belief that people may justly be coerced so as to secure funds to pay medical professionals, who will then service those who need their work, is an error. In a free country, adult men and women must treat each other as ends in themselves, not as unwilling tools, instruments, or means to each other’s ends. Just as someone may not go over to his neighbor’s home and conscript some unwilling individual to come and mow his lawn or drive him to the hospital but must ask for this and await willingly given help, so any service such as medical care must be obtained without coercion.

COERCION AND DEMOCRACY There are people who believe that, once it has been democratically determined that people must pay for medical services to everyone, there is nothing wrong with collecting taxes for this purpose. This view is wrong, because no group or majority of a group may decide to take what belongs to people. It is no less unjust to do such a thing than it is to hang someone because the majority in some town decides it is acceptable to do so, without first following due process, namely demonstrating through a justice system that the hanging is deserved.

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The myth of having a right to medical care, and all sorts of other services that need the work or resources of others, leads to the view that people can proceed with their lives without having to be responsible for producing or obtaining via voluntary interaction whatever living entails. There are all kinds of costs that people must cover and be prepared to cover, alone or with voluntary cooperation through trade, charity, generosity, or grant of loans from others. Imposing such costs on unwilling others is like dumping pollution on unwilling others, a natural crime. The people at the Bedell World Citizenship Fund ought not to be complicit in perpetuating the perverse political ideology that supports such a practice.

MEDICINE IS NOT SPECIAL There are many ideas in academia that contribute to the myth of the right to medical care. Even the fairly libertarian philosopher Thomas Magnell’s ideas about medicine have the potential of exerting this kind of influence when he argues that, “Medicine is an inherently moral profession, inasmuch as healing and promoting health are paradigmatic moral activities. With wellness as an overarching aim, it is to be expected that goods in medicine will be morally good.”5 This suggests that some other familiar professions, other than, for example, the so-called profession of the paid assassin or thief, may not be inherently moral. Exactly what such a profession might be, Magnell does not say, but perhaps he has in mind a business executive or auto mechanic or chef. With a profession that is inherently moral, there is an attendant idea that what it produces, be it services, goods, or ideas, is special and requires special treatment, including by the law. One such special treatment would be to regard such products as necessary, something to which clients, patients, and customers have a basic right. Yet all bona fide professions are moral. Take entertainers, who may at first appear to be engaged in something trivial, and thus lacking in moral worth. This is wrong, however, since entertainers are producing something significant to us all, for people living in any culture benefit immensely from being entertained. Or let us consider business. Professionals in this field, too, are engaged in the production of what is vital to them and to the lives of their clients. All of this is also true of auto mechanics, television repairmen, farmers, seamstresses, and all the people who have specialized in creating goods and services that benefit many people, themselves and others included. For a profession to be moral, all that is required is that its central purpose have bona fide value to human life. No doubt, as Magnell makes clear, there can be malpractice, not just in medicine but in all other professions. Some people would argue that that is

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exactly what justifies government regulation of the various professions, excluding, at least in the American context, journalism and the ministry, given the protection they receive via the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution from any preemptive government intervention. Yet this view, too, is a mistake. Government regulators are acting unjustly when they set and enforce standards for other people to follow, even though they have not acted in violation of anyone’s rights but only might do so. Government regulators, following what has come to be dubbed (with specific reference to environmental matters) the precautionary principles, perpetrate a form of prior restraint.6 What is wrong with prior restraint is that it imposes burdens on individuals without their having been proven to have violated anyone’s rights, that is, committing a bona fide crime.

ETHICS AND GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS Let us note that two lines of ethical criticism can be leveled at government regulation. One involves violations of individual rights, which some people misleadingly label the deontological criticism; the other hinders the productivity, creativity, and innovation of professionals, which some people equally misleadingly label the consequentialist criticism. These criticisms are really one criticism, since it is precisely because the violation of individual rights treats persons as unwilling means to the ends of others that such persons will tend to act in ways that fall short of their full human potential of acting productively, creatively, and innovatively. Government regulation is a flawed policy, reminiscent of an era of politics when the governments (monarchs) were deemed to have special, divine rights to rule and manipulate the lives of their subjects. In our time, such special rights have transmogrified from divine to democratic ones. Yet if one ruler lacks the authority to manipulate, regulate, or regiment the rest of the population, neither do several of them possess it. Democratic rule may not trump individual rights.

HOW THE VALUE OF HEALTH CARE WILL BE PRODUCED I have focused here mainly on why no one has the right to health care, and why government has no just authority to regulate medical professionals. This focus is owed to the widespread promulgation of the idea that people have such a right, and because it is gravely mistaken to think so. The existence of such a right or entitlement implies the treatment of other people as involuntary servants whose services may be conscripted, or for the payment of whom

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other people’s resources and labor may be expropriated. This is not to deny that there are serious problems facing people in any society, pertaining to their medical needs, or that the medical profession requires standards by which to carry out its responsibilities. The only point that is made here is that none of these problems may be dealt with via coercion, the violation of individual rights, or the preemptive intervention in people’s lives. But this does not yet address the various ways with which the problems ought to be dealt. As to this last issue, however, the answer can only be very general, since the problems as well as the possible solutions to them are innumerable. The answer to how to deal with such issues is that a society requires a legal infrastructure that clearly identifies the realm of sovereignty of each individual, and that spells out the rights of individuals so as to be able to identify criminal conduct, including by people in the medical profession. Once such a legal infrastructure governs the society, the productive, creative, and innovative potentials of those in the various professions (among them, medicine) will be more likely to flourish than in a society subject to the injustices of government regulation.

NOTES 1. See Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: NelsonHall, 1075); and Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court, 1989). 2. See Tibor R. Machan, Libertarianism Defended (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). 3. See Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 4. Robert Maciola, “The Right Stuff,” The Washington Post, Letters, Saturday, December 31, 1994. 5. See Thomas Magnell, “Collapsing Goods in Medicine and the Value of Innovation,” Journal of Value Inquiry 40, supra. 6. For the details of this analysis, see Tibor R. Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1995).

Chapter Eight

The Morality of Smoking

INTRODUCTION In this discussion I plan to focus on whether smoking can be morally unobjectionable, that is, something some persons morally may do, or is it in fact something from which everyone ought to refrain. The issue of whether what is morally objectionable ought also be banned by law is one of political theory, not of ethics per se.1 From the point of view of politics, of course, this latter is a more germane topic. But before it can be dealt with adequately, the question of whether smoking might be morally unobjectionable needs to be addressed. If it could not be, then the banning of it would be simpler even if ultimately not successful to defend. (Some conduct that’s immoral may well be permissible, nonetheless, since it does not involve the violation of anyone’s rights.) As to whether smoking is morally unobjectionable, views have varied from one extreme to the opposite. Ayn Rand, in her best selling and influential novel, Atlas Shrugged, praised the symbolic significance of smoking cigarettes. It is supposed to signify the power human beings have over nature. One character says, “I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. . . . I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”2 On the other hand there are those who object to smoking cigarettes and consider it morally wrong to light up. Some also believe that the government ought to prohibit smoking, although, as already mentioned, I won’t dwell on that issue here.3 As a posting on one anti-smoking web site states, “We think 107

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smoking is too wide spread [a] vice and too [few] things have been told about [the] danger and harm of smoking.”4 Furthermore, “If we look at smoking from a very rational side, we can say there is nothing good in it except the joy and maybe habit.”5 As to current public policy, let me note that teens these days are given tickets in certain states for smoking cigarettes on public sidewalks and adults are prohibited from smoking in private restaurants, bowling alleys, and other commercial places! But more importantly here, many consider smoking morally wrong and they ostracize smokers not only because they may find the activity nauseating, with the prospect of some bad side effects (or negative externalities), but because they deem it a private vice. The gist of what I will defend is this: Adult human beings are not bound by any categorical imperative to refrain from smoking despite the evident health hazards of the practice because health, though vital, is by no means most important in human living. Flourishing as a human individual is most important.

MORAL OBJECTIVISM AND PLURALISM Most of us often make ethical, political, and aesthetic claims,6 yet many doubt that such claims can be true. Instead, such claims are said—by some of the most prominent figures in the social sciences and philosophy—to be “subjective” or “relative” or even beyond the pale of reason. Political economist Milton Friedman, for example, states that “of course, ‘bad’ and ‘good’ people may be the same people, depending on who is judging them,”7 and philosopher Richard Rorty tells us that concerning political principles, “we cannot say that democratic institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right.”8 This view of subjective truth is widespread,9 even as nearly universal agreement can be found regarding some norms. People in different cultures and at different periods of history clearly treat some of them as “objective”; that is, they think that the truth of such claims could be known.10 For example, it is nearly universally agreed that parents ought to rear their children so as to ready them for adulthood; that life-preserving actions are superior to life-destroying ones, at least in non-extraordinary circumstances; and even that one ought to stay out of the way of angry beasts and powerful, angry persons.11 I say “nearly” only to make room for cases where someone refuses to ascent to the truth of such claims because, for example, he or she wishes to disguise a failing or is airing a wholly contrarian philosophical position.12 In the main, however, such claims, as well as many others, are treated as if they

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were true, at least for specific circumstances involving particular persons and their choices.13 While I will not defend the following view in detail here, I wish to suggest that objective ethical claims appear to be subjective because, briefly, ethical claims pertain to how individual human beings ought to act, and that, in turn, depends to a considerable extent on who these individuals and their particular circumstances are. Only at the most fundamental level—vis-à-vis some very rare universal considerations—can we expect what is objective to be also universally applicable. As far as I can asses this, the best candidate for such a universal imperative is “One ought to think, be thoughtful, use one’s mind conscientiously.” Wittgenstein, for example, makes the point—one many other philosophers, from Socrates, Aristotle, Spinoza to Kant and Rand have made—that it is vigilant thinking through which someone becomes a good human being. He says, in a letter to Paul Engelmann, “I work diligently enough but wish that I were better and wiser. And these two things are the same.”14 In some respects this idea is close to the way human health-related claims could appear to be but are by no means subjective. Even though we most often encounter claims in the discipline that apply to people in terms of their special or even unique situations, some basic claims concerning human health are universally applicable. More broadly, the relationship between applied engineering fields and the broad principles underlying them is similar.15 Because of the significance of individuality in human life, the diversity of sound ethical judgments will make it very tempting to conclude that there simply are no universally sound moral ideas at all.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE TO CARE FOR ONE’S HEALTH In the context of the ethics of virtue, there is an imperative to care for one’s health as well as other matters of benefit to oneself. The moral virtue of prudence supports this unequivocally. The exception would be if some value, say the spiritual life or preparing for the life hereafter, requires that prudence visà-vis one’s mundane existence be superseded by prudence vis-à-vis such an overriding value. Another sort of exception would be if some higher virtue might override prudence, such as courage or justice. Is there some value pertaining to one’s mundane life—leaving aside now the troublesome matter of whether an afterlife or purely spiritual life could be shown to be of value to human beings—that might require or at least permit neglecting one’s health? We can consider some examples to show that this is not an implausible suggestion. Athletics, sports, the arts, politics, and adventure all may be values in

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support of which health might not be of primary value for a human being. It is, after all, not an unfamiliar idea that some good persons have pursued the goals of such ways of life in the face of very serious risks to their health, even their sheer lives. A dedicated mountain climber, race car driver, soldier, and movie stunt person often take such risks and is sometimes admired for it. It perhaps strains credibility to compare smoking cigarettes to risking one’s health for some higher purpose. Yet, it is not uncommon for people to take reasonably serious health risks in order to celebrate a birthday, attend a sports event, or go to the barber shop. Most such activities involve driving a car, and accidents are always possible. Individuals with health problems routinely take risks to take part in family and fraternal celebrations. If all this risk taking were morally objectionable, then human beings would have to be said to routinely be living morally disreputable lives. Indeed, some of the best things about human living would turn out to be morally vicious, which seems rather paradoxical (unless the ethics of asceticism is true). But we recognize that we are not responsible merely to live, but to live well, to flourish. Flourishing, moreover, requires that different people will adopt different ways of life. This is what Isaiah Berlin meant when he said that the values of human life are both objective and not universalizable. And while I do not go so far as to maintain, mostly because of certain metaphysical considerations Berlin did not seem to fully appreciate, that the plurality of values often lands us with contradictory commitments,16 I would wish to argue, as I have already suggested, that the diverse contexts of judgment created by our individual circumstances will often result in moral assessments that are by no means universal imperatives.

INTEGRITY AND MODERATION Although certain moral theories do not regard the virtues as prime candidates for guidelines to moral excellence, it is still arguable that a morally good life is a virtuous life. This is not something I can defend here, although I have developed the position elsewhere. Its essence is that to live morally virtuously is to have cultivated good character traits that guide one, in a principled but not robotic way, toward human flourishing.17 This often requires finding flexible policies of moderation and prudence rather than following rigid rules. What makes such an approach to morality different from and more realistic than following a system of rules is the attention to and cultivation of rules of thumb, an economization in the face of uncertainties. Although human beings are rational agents in that they guide their actions with theories, we are not the perpetual calculators that rule-driven moral systems depict. It is our unre-

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lenting, open-ended thinking that will apprehend what flourishing requires, often with novel answers, so that the guidelines we learn cannot become rigid lest they turn against the very goal they are meant to further. Instead it is more plausible to view morality more on the analogy of a skill, such as driving or carpentry or being a business executive. In all these endeavors human beings must initially acquire some measure of proficiency by means of concentration and focus, only to have that proficiency turn into what we might refer to as second nature. And while our conduct should always be monitored and supervised by reason, conduct itself is not the product of constant calculation or cost-benefit analysis. Rather we gain confidence in the principles that become our virtues, even though we have the added responsibility to make sure that they are used in proper measure and we do not become fanatical about any of them as we use them to guide us in our lives.

PLEASURES AND MODERATION Barring the prospect that a morality of self-denial, such as championed (on metaethically highly dubious grounds) by Peter Singer and Peter Unger18 (on grounds that none of us is morally right to enjoy life too much if there are others who are destitute), as well some religions (on the more general grounds that a life of mundane indulgence distracts from our spiritual potential), is sound, it is a feature of the moral life for human beings to develop oneself in all benign respects, major and minor. According to an ethics of self-actualization, happiness requires that we cultivate our capacities for excellence. Excellence requires that we have serious purposes in life—that we become artists, merchants, parents, friends, athletes, citizens, educators, and so forth. But there is also a dimension of self-development, as Aristotle noted long ago, that pays heed to pleasures. To put the matter bluntly, for some people there is pleasure that comes from smoking—as from drinking, gourmet eating, exotic travel, entertainment, and so forth. All these may be enjoyed well or badly, moderately or immoderately. There is nothing blameworthy about the sensible and moderate enjoyment of life and there is no honest way of using these arguments to rationalize senseless and immoderate conduct. The issue is whether morality makes room for smoking or other possibly idiosyncratic pleasures in life that may be good for some but bad for others. What I have been proposing calls attention to the fact that there is a difference between imperatives about, for example, smoking as far as they concern an opera singer or frequent lecturer versus someone who writes novels, directs movies, studies the structure of the atom, or does accounting for a career.

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Of course when we turn to the social dimensions of smoking, other variables, such as whether one has people in one’s home who are sensitive to the irritation smoke can produce for some person or who have emphysema, would enter the discussion. I have dealt elsewhere with some of these issues.19 For present purposes, however, the issue is whether as a matter of one’s private conduct smoking could be morally justified.

BAD SMOKING, WHOSE FAULT? Let me turn briefly to cases of bad smoking—people who should not smoke at all or who smoke immoderately. The issue here is not simply what is wrong and who is at fault but also whether fault can be ascribed at all and to whom it may be assigned. First of all, the issue arises of who is responsible for the behavior in question? There has been an attempt on the part of many—including legal authorities and some victims of smoking related ailments who have sued tobacco companies—to blame the tobacco company executives for ill effects smokers experience from smoking. The issue goes back to one frequently discussed in connection with advertising. The most prominent advocate of the idea that the evil that follows encounters with advertisements for any product or service, including smoking, has been John Kenneth Galbraith. In his book, The Affluent Society,20 he advances the view that advertisers create a dependence effect by producing desires in potential consumers who then become hooked on what is being sold to them. This is especially true in the case of products and services that are by many experts considered to be addictive. Thus, if smokers, especially, cannot help themselves in the face of the “pressure” exerted on them by advertisements by tobacco companies, aren’t the executives at least morally—but perhaps also legally—guilty of causing their ailments? Let me for now ignore the reply to Galbraith given by F. A. Hayek, who did not so much deny that advertising creates desires but did undermine the claim that we are helpless in the face of this. (He argued that all creative activity by human beings produces desires in us but we are able to determine which desires to satisfy, which to ignore or reject.21) What is more important for my purposes here is that the Galbraithian thesis of how potential consumers are caused to depend on products and services being advertised to them has within it an implicit determinism that can then be applied equally to the tobacco executives. Are we, in other words, going to blame company executives for causing people’s smoking habits, only to have these executives defend themselves by

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pleading that they were, of course, helpless in the face of their upbringing— for example, when they went to college and took classes in marketing, advertising, and sales? If potential consumers are victims of manipulation, were not arguably the executives brainwashed into peddling their tobacco wares? So they had no control over becoming tobacco and other product peddlers, so they cannot be blamed either. And their teachers, too, went to various universities and learned how to teach their own students effectively, so they would do well at their professions. And so on and so forth—everyone is a victim of someone else’s influence, ad infinitum. Which is to say, in the end none of us is responsible for anything and moral blaming or praise is pointless, even meaningless: que sera, sera. In this entire discussion the determinist thesis that leaves no room for moral praise or blame or, more importantly, for moral responsibility, has to be precluded. (Moreover, it has been dealt with in several chapters of this work!) It is surely impossible to consider whether what people do is morally right or wrong if they have no power to decide about their conduct at all. One might speak of behaving badly, just as one can speak of this in connection with animals that cause much hurt or damage, without impugning any moral blame. Neither whether one smokes or not, nor the more professional issues of whether to market, advertise, and sell tobacco products could be considered as moral issues if human beings lacked free will.22

HEALTH AND THE HUMAN GOOD I wish to return here to something hinted at before, namely, that health is really not all there is to human life. A piece in The New Republic23 makes the point beautifully—smoking has been with us way before advertising made its marketing so visible. Millions choose to smoke not without awareness that it is dangerous to their health (meaning it is going to reduce their lives by an average of 2.2 years). There are purely recreational smokers who will light up, maybe once a day, with a cup of espresso or a brandy, so clearly addiction, assuming that it is a genuine phenomenon,24 is not a universal reaction to taking up the practice. People quit all the time, so tobacco is not for everyone a special kind of commodity with which people who try it necessarily endanger their health. Yet even apart from the fact that one could engage in recreational smoking that’s morally unobjectionable, for some persons even the sort of smoking that is clearly a health hazard could be morally permissible. The reason is that health, while undeniably one of the clear-cut human goods that is to be promoted in a morally good, flourishing life, is far from the highest good for human beings to

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pursue. That would be happiness, in the eudaemonist sense, meaning success or excellence as the kind of individual, namely, a human being, one is.25

PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY AND SMOKING Perhaps one of the most explosive public issues, with distinct moral dimensions, is what parents are responsible for in their children’s behavior, including health-impeding ones such as smoking, drinking, and other matters. Although in some states it is illegal for those under eighteen to smoke in public, never mind what the parents’ views are on the matter, we can consider the issue apart from this fact of the law. Once again the issue is one of context, not of categorical moral principles. Parents often rightfully expose their children to hazards that are as great if not greater than exposing them to various health hazards. They take them on long weekend vacations when the risk of automobile crashes are greatest. They let them swim in the ocean, go rafting in roaring Colorado rivers, and encourage them to take part in sports that sometimes cause serious injuries, even deaths. Of course, many of these practices can be understood as quite justifiable, considering the importance of the goals they serve to achieve. Visiting grandparents or other family on vacations, building character through sports, and so forth can all be seen as not only permissible but also valuable aspects of child raising. Can one say the same thing about allowing one’s children to smoke, drink, even use some narcotics (apart from their sometimes being illegal)? We might start addressing this issue by noting that certainly people in various cultures around the globe bring up their children differently, including allowing them to smoke, drink and otherwise indulge, at least in moderation. Hungarian children routinely drink wine at the dinner table when they are only eight years old. And that is but a rather mild instance of the diversity involving the raising of children around the world. It would be very difficult to argue that in each case child abuse is going on. Even child labor, which in the United States is outlawed or officially regulated, cannot sensibly be uniformly condemned. It is arguable, of course, that the context of American culture is such that given the information most parents could obtain about the health risks of various practices and given that taking certain health risks, such as those arising from smoking cigarettes, serves no overriding valued purpose, parents in America and similar cultures are morally irresponsible if they allow their children to smoke and indulge in similar risky practices. Yet America and many other developed societies are these days multicultural, despite the fact that information about health risks is nearly universally available. If, thus,

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some persons consider it valuable to encourage or permit independent decision making on the part of their, say, teenage children, who then decide to smoke, this could be seen as no less morally justifiable than encouraging or permitting children to ride horses, play ice hockey, surf, ski, or even gamble a little for enjoyment. Similarly, letting children smoke or drink, especially in moderation, would be no parental malpractice.

MORALITY AND SMOKING Adults and even children might well choose to moderately indulge in smoking, drinking, and similar practices, even granting the health hazards of such activities. Health is not the highest good and guarding it is not a categorical imperative for anyone. It cannot be said apart from knowing a reasonably detailed context of someone’s life situation whether the person ought to or ought not to smoke. For some smoking would be morally wrong, self-destructive, impede personal growth and flourishing, but for others this would not be the case. In most instances a moderate degree of such indulgence is morally unobjectionable. When it comes to imposing the side effects of smoking on others, this too cannot be condemned categorically. If a proprietor of a restaurant or bowling alley or personal home consents, patrons and guests, respectively, may indulge, taking the permission to indicate a judgment on the owner’s or host’s part that for him or her the side effects of smoking will not be a serious impediment or injury. To know if there is anything morally amiss, we would need to gain detailed enough information about the smokers and companions so as to see if what they ought to strive for in their lives is undermined through their indulgence in the practice. NOTES 1. I am on record objecting to any bans on smoking or consuming any other stimulants or narcotics or even the advertising of such practices and products. See, Tibor R. Machan and Mark Thornton, “The Re-legalization of Drugs,” The Freeman (April 1991), 153–55; and Tibor R. Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1995), chapter 9, “Advertising.” 2. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), 61. 3. As with the consumption of many substances and as with much private conduct to which there is widespread opposition in a robust democracy—for example, marijuana smoking and prostitution—tobacco smoking, once it is widely regarded as morally objectionable, is likely to be prohibited. But there is another argumentative

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step that needs to be made before that conclusion can be validly reached. An activity may be morally wrong, yet not by a long shot subject to prohibition or bans—e.g., betraying a friend, laziness or sloth. To prohibit conduct it needs to be shown that apart from its wrongfulness it is also a violation of some just interpersonal principle such as a basic or derivative right or against the public interest. The First Amendment protects even wrongful publishing from prohibition or bans, such as offensive pornography or fascist, Nazi, and communist propaganda. 4. See http://library.thinkquest.org/17360/text/tx-e-zac.html. 5. Ibid. There may be a clue here, in the offhand denigration of joy, as to what often drives the more zealous elements in the anti-smoking movement. Joys, it seems, count for hardly anything as far as many who insist on a puritanical lifestyle seem to be concerned. 6. Even those who object to the claim that norms can be objective make purportedly objective claims when they say that others, too, ought to reject this claim. The “ought” may be only a very mild moral rebuke in this instance, yet judging by the intensity and seriousness with which it is advanced, it is hardly to be taken as an expression of a mere preference. 7. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 12. 8. Richard Rorty, “The Seer of Prague,” The New Republic, July 1, 1991, 37. By “we,” Rorty means “non-metaphysicians,” that is, those who understand that words and ideas do not represent some reality “out there.” 9. Just how prominent it is can be gleaned from the proclamation offered by Richard Posner, judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and professor at the University of Chicago School of Law, that he subscribes to pragmatism “in approximately the sense in which pragmatism is expounded and defended by the philosopher Richard Rorty” (Richard Posner, “Pragmatism and the Rule of Law,” lecture given at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., July 7, 1991). 10. “Objective” is used, in ordinary discourse, as a way to distinguish claims that are unbiased from those that are not. But in the philosophical sense, to call claims “objective” is to focus on the possibility of knowing what they assert, since these claims supposedly rest on what is “out there,” that is, features of objective reality— the properties, relationships, attributes, aspects, and so forth of what exists in the world, as distinct from what we feel about them, prefer them to be, desire from them or of them, and so forth. 11. It might be objected here that what I have listed are at most “good policies” and that a policy cannot be true. Yet arguably, the claim that these are good policies could be either true or false, and the objectivist would try to show that it is true that they are good. 12. Those who deny the objectivity of moral principles usually contrast this with their view that other claims, pertaining to what science discovers or what we observe in the world around us, are capable of being true or false, that what is being asserted in these areas, in contrast to ethics, politics, or aesthetics, is knowable, or cognitively significant. Yet in these areas there is rarely universal agreement about the truths that can be ascertained, nor do all those who address the issues involved make identical

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knowledge claims. But those who uphold this thesis would tend to account for the lack of universal agreement not in terms of the impossibility of reaching it but, rather, in terms of certain impediments some people face as they attempt to figure out what is true or come to know what is the case. Of course, there are those, including Rorty, who would extend their skepticism not just to value judgments and moral claims but also to claims advanced in the sciences and other non-normative areas. They would hold that even in these the possibility of objective truth is an illusion. See, for example, Rorty’s essays “Solidarity or Objectivity?” and “Science and Solidarity,” in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–45. 13. I mean here that as we discuss what we should or should not do in personal, social, political, international, and other contexts, we do adduce reasons and sometimes even reach agreements because of these reasons, despite what such thinkers as Posner tell us, namely, “I am denying the priority of reason in human [moral] judgment. I am suggesting that we can, because we do, have confident beliefs without reasoning to them from unimpeachable truths, unimpeachable or non-unimpeachable, because I haven’t suggested and don’t mean to suggest that our strong moral intuitions are true. They are merely undislodgeable at the time, an undislodgeable part of our grounds for action, and that is good enough for me, because I don’t think we can do better” (Posner, op cit.). Of course, these intuitions are dislodged aplenty, for example, by people who do horrible things, for which Posner and those who agree with him give no explanation. One reason many think moral judgments do not lend themselves to being established as true is that they mistakenly assume that truths in non-normative disciplines can be established with timeless, unchanging, infallible certainty. Yet truth everywhere is different from this. When we know something, or when we have shown some claim to be true, we have the best possible cognitive grasp of it. Although this is difficult to explain by analogy since such a feat is unique—not surprisingly, since the human capacity for conceptually knowing the world is, so far as we know, unique—one might get some assistance for grasping the idea by thinking of how some object can be (literally) covered up. To cover up an object does not require having done so totally, fully, perfectly, and completely, but only adequately for the purposes at hand. Covering something up absolutely may be impossible, in the sense that no conceivable improvement on the task is possible, whereas covering it up is possible. Thus knowing something absolutely is impossible, but knowing it is possible. (We can also fail to cover something up, just as we can fail to know something.) 14. Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein. With a Memoir (March 31, 1917), ed. B. F. McGuinnes (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 4. By “wiser” I take it that he means something along lines of “think more rationally, carefully, and conscientiously.” To illuminate this a bit, I wish to call attention to what Simon Blackburn says about judgment: [Kant] is talking about “an art [of judgment] concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.” That art is the art of judgment, and the reason that it is concealed in the

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depths of the soul is precisely that it cannot be reduced to the grasp of rules, or recipes, or criteria. Nor can it be reduced to the presence, before the mind, of a thing like a picture or even word, and for Wittgenstein’s reasons. Even when pictures, diagrams, and words float before our mind’s eye, judgment only comes about when we have taken them the right way. Judgment then requires something spontaneous, outside the domain of reason; but this ‘something’ is a precondition making any application of reason.

(The New Republic, February 7, 2000, 37) I submit that this allegedly mysterious something is actually oneself, the agent or the will of a person—the personal, chosen, or initiated act of focusing one’s mind— and the reason Kant, Blackburn, and others cannot make sense of it and regard it as something concealed is that these philosophers have a mistaken picture of what it means for something to be natural, non-mysterious. To grasp something, for these philosophers, must amount to some type of empirical contact. When that isn’t available, then the judgment of the being of something must be concealed. Yet, not even the natural sciences are so empiricist about understanding the world as to demand that everything be explainable in empirical terms. I would suggest that there is something sui generis about meaning or judgment. Or is everything reducible to something else? (Another way of putting the matter is offered by Pascal: “Let us labour, then, to think well, for such is the foundation of morality.” Quoted in THE WEEK, July 27, 2002, 17.) 15. For a very well-worked-out application of this model, see Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). See, also, Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, a New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1964). See, also, Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism (London: Routledge, 1998), especially chapter 4, “Why Objective Ethical Claims Appear Subjective.” For additional metaethical issues involved here, see Douglas Rasmussen, “Ethical Individualism, Natural Law, and the Primacy of Natural Rights,” Social Philosophy & Policy (Winter 2000). In this paper and other works, individualists stress their serious disagreement with the characterization of ethics or morality as necessarily of the impartial observer type, where such bizarreness arises that parents aren’t morally correct in taking special care of their own rather than others’ children, that one is morally remiss in caring for oneself and one’s loved ones instead of the poor in Bangladesh, etc. (For these latter results of the impartial observer position, see note 13 above.) 16. See for a refutation of Berlin’s type of moral pluralism, Gregory R. Johnson, “The Non-Sequitur of Value Relativism: A Critique of John Gray’s ‘Post-Liberalism,’” Reason Papers, No. 19 (Fall 1994): 99–107. 17. See, Machan, Classical Individualism. See, for an earlier argument, Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975). 18. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (London: Oxford University Press, 1996).

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19. Tibor R. Machan, “Coping with Smoking,” More Controversial Issues (New York: NewsSource Unit, 1996). See, also, the essays in Robert D. Tollinson, ed., Smoking and Society (Boston: Lexington Books, 1986), especially, Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Smoking, Human Rights, and Civil Liberties.” 20. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). The section in question, “The Dependence Effect,” is reprinted in many business ethics texts, including in T. L. Beauchamp and N. B. Bowie, eds., Ethical Theory and Business (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 360. 21. F. A. Hayek, “The Non-Sequitur of the ‘Dependence Effect,’” Ethical Theory and Business, 508. 22. It is generally understood that to advertise and sell hard drugs, ones that are either immediately very dangerous to—or produce a desire for continued use that is eventually very dangerous to—anyone’s health is morally wrong. It is on par with encouraging some innocent person with much to live for to commit suicide. This is especially morally objectionable when directed at young persons not generally deemed capable of deciding for themselves. Even to adults it should not be done, for it offers support for something they should not do. This is so especially when clothed in the normal garb of advertising, namely, gimmickry, celebrity endorsement, and the bias that all promotional activity contains. We could explore whether the advertising and selling of cigarettes on par with the advertising and selling of hard drugs or similarly immediately dangerous or addictive and eventually very dangerous drugs. But I leave that issue to be considered in the investigation of professional or business ethics, not here. (See, for more along these lines, Tibor R. Machan and Douglas J. Den Uyl, “Should Cigarette Advertising Be Banned?” Public Affairs Quarterly 2 [1988], 19–30.) 23. The New Republic, October 20, 1995. See, also, Tibor R. Machan, “Smokers Stand Alone in Blame,” The Los Angeles Times, March 5, 1988. 24. See, for a dissenting view on whether addiction even exists, Stanton Peele and Archie Brodsky, The Truth About Addiction and Recovery (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); and Thomas S. Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry (New York: Learning Publications, 1987). 25. For the underlying ethics here, see David L. Norton, Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976) and, Machan, Classical Individualism. See, also, chapter 3 in this work.

Chapter Nine

Philosophy, Physics, and Common Sense

Scientific truth is always a paradox, if judged by every-day experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things. —Karl Marx, Wages, Prices & Profit

My aim here is to reflect on the relationship between philosophy, physics, and common sense. I am not a physicist and know what I do about the field mainly from my ordinary awareness of the world and from the lessons taught to me in popular forums such as The Sciences (now defunct), Science News, The American Scientist; and such journals as The Philosophy of Science, Science, Nature; and numerous science programs on TV. Of course, a good deal of physics was part of natural philosophy in the past, and anyone like me, who studied Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, and other philosophers, obtained an introduction to the physics of their day. My main concern is to reflect a bit on some of the ideas that have been advanced recently in such areas as particle and astrophysics, ideas that have now and then been presented to the general public in a tone of alarm, implying that there is much that is mistaken about our thinking of the world—as when we believe that physics studies nature, that realism or the idea that what we are aware of actually does exist, just as we are aware of it all, is right, that what physicists talk about are objectively real entities and relationships, and so on. So, I will suggest, it would be wrong to say that physics proves that, contrary to our understanding, objects are mostly empty space, that space and time are literally unreal, and so forth, although what the discipline discovers about nature does need to be taken into account in our general understanding of the universe. The main point of addressing these issues in this work is to rescue our educated but not specialized understanding about the world from being dismissed as sheer prejudice. 121

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A particularly interesting work, some years back, was a book in which the authors develop the thesis that “Our existence imposes a stringent selection effect upon the type of Universe we could ever expect to observe and document. Many observations of the natural world, although remarkable a priori, can be seen in this light as inevitable consequences of our own existence.”1 In other words, our minds are so structured as to look at the world in a predetermined way, namely, that we are the end product of its development. So, science doesn’t give us what’s what—what actually exists—but what is in conformity with our minds and our feeling of selfimportance. The central impact of some schools of philosophy on physics, as well as some other sciences, has often been a measure of fundamental skepticism, one that is well expressed in the above quotation from Barrow and Tipler. It appears in various guises, but perhaps the simplest statement of it is that what we know about the universe is, in large measure if not fully, conditioned by the structure of our own thinking. This is indeed the gist of what Barrow and Tipler are telling us. “Our existence imposes stringent selection effects” because we think in certain ways. Our minds are supposedly constructing the data our senses process in not-too-subtle ways, and the whole array of means employed to study the universe, as a naive person might put it, is, in fact, founded on several layers of such constructions—including the design of our instruments, the models we use to interpret the data we receive from satellites, particle accelerators, or telescopes and microscopes, and so on. Let me be clear here. Ordinarily, scientists are realists. Working (or what Kuhn calls “normal”) scientists pretty much take it that there is a world independent of the scientist’s own modes of awareness, and that scientists set out to learn about this world what they can. Even when scientists study consciousness itself, they tend to take it that they can study consciousness as such, even if sometimes difficulties may arise from the fact that the faculty or process they study is exactly what is deployed in the study process itself. It is when scientists turn toward quasi-philosophy, as in the cases of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, or even Niels Bohr, Edwin Schrodinger and Werner Heisenberg, that we find the influence of the “primacy of consciousness” turn in modern philosophy. How did all this start? Several movements in the history of ideas appear to have produced the antirealist turn in philosophy and, eventually, science itself. First we find Descartes’ claim that true knowledge is possible only vis-à-vis the fact of our being conscious beings. “I think, therefore I am,” where “I am” is confined to

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mean no more than “I exist as a thinking being,” and affirms, before anything else, the existence of the means of affirming existence, namely, consciousness. Second, and motivated by the same desire to find absolute, incorrigible certainty somewhere, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, as well as their empiricist followers, found hope for their mission in the view that sensory impressions secure for us certain knowledge. As we know, especially in the case of Hume, the radical version of this view produced solipsism. (It is not even clear that Hume endorsed the empiricism so often associated with him; he may simply have used it as a reductio ad absurdum argument to show the futility of the rationalist model—namely, timeless certainty—of what counts as true knowledge.) Certainly, at the hands of Hume, the radical empiricist produced moral skepticism, such as the unknowability of causal powers and the “Is-Ought” gap. In other words, it promulgated a subjectivist view of both causality and morality. Causal relations were to be analyzed not as features of the world itself but as imputations made by us, based on our mental lives, our having had repeated experiences of certain types. And ethical principles, virtues, were to be taken as sentiments of feelings, especially as Hume’s ideas were expanded by the logical positivists. Third, Immanuel Kant saw sciences as affirming just what we had the power to believe, leaving it undecidable as to whether that gave us knowledge of reality. The “ding an sich,” or thing in itself, may well be exactly as we understand it, but we can never tell for sure, never know it. Put differently, we cannot know whether we can know. We can only assume that some underlying reality apart from what we affirm via the sciences exists, but whether the sciences grasp it correctly will forever remain mysterious. This supports a fundamental skepticism about our capacity to know the world for what it actually is. Fourth, positivism tried to do away with the Kantian turn by returning to Hume. Pragmatism also held that we can pretty much do away with the worries about realism and just focus on operational matters: Do our hypotheses offer us means by which to reach our various objectives? At first these two approaches appeared to be hopeful, but neither, in the end, managed to instill confidence that science is in fact a means by which reality itself is correctly identifiable. Positivism ran aground by virtue of the inability to generalize the principle of verification; pragmatism by virtue of its intersubjectivism. So today we have before us mainly the spectacle of a way of understanding what science does that gives us a kind of grand solipsism. We are affirming things about the world that are ultimately the product of our own thinking, our own specific type of conscious existence, and we cannot ever make sure we are right or whether what we think is indeed how things actually are.

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SOME REMEDIES PROPOSED In the introduction to the first volume of his collected papers, Richard Rorty advances his by-now-familiar case against the view he characterizes as representationalism. It will be best if we let Rorty state his own position: In an antirepresentationalist view, it is one thing to say that a prehensile thumb, or an ability to use the word “atom” as physicists do, is useful for coping with the environment. It is another thing to attempt to explain this utility by reference to representationalist notions, such as the notion that the reality referred to by “quark” was “determinate” before the word “quark” came along (whereas that referred to by, for example, “foundation grant” only jelled once the relevant social practice emerged).2

In other words, terms of our language, ideas with which we think, are not usable as means for understanding the world as it is. They do something else. It is not my concern to argue here that terms “represent” reality, since I am not sure how precisely words or ideas do their work of enabling us to do what representationalists and others wish to call attention to and identify, relating our cognitive relationship to the rest of the world. My purpose here is to try to rescue foundationalism or realism from Rorty’s attempt to discredit it, mainly by showing that Rorty’s efforts are not successful and are, moreover, self-defeating despite any denials that this is so. To start with, Rorty will have no less trouble with notions such as “the word ‘quark’ . . . is useful for coping with the environment” than others have had with the notion that “quark” represents reality (as we think and talk). Rorty has done nothing more than to switch vocabulary unless, of course, he is defending the position that he has clearly disavowed, namely that the words he uses identify reality better than do the words of those he is criticizing. That would be to say something close enough to representationalists’ claims, namely, that Rorty’s chosen words “‘correspond to’ or ‘represent’ the environment” better than some other people’s chosen words manage to, in this instance that feature of the environment involving the relationship between words used by human beings and what those words are used to mean. Second, Rorty’s deprecation of the claim that “the reality referred to by ‘quark’ was ‘determinate’ before the word ‘quark’ came along” is self-defeating. Here is one way that point can be defended: Whenever anyone wishes to render Rorty’s own views (e.g., in print, before a classroom), it will be expected, for example, by Rorty himself, that the effort will be successful at referring to (or representing or meaning or identifying) a feature of determinate reality—namely, to Rorty’s prior written expression of his ideas. That will have been there—i.e., in existence prior to the time its rendition is given (e.g.,

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in this presentation or in some book on twentieth-century radical pragmatic thought). A person offering such a presentation will be expected not to produce some invention we will call “Rorty’s views” but, instead, the reality he has grasped, termed “Rorty’s views.” There is, thus, a presumption of what Rorty and his representationalist adversaries call a “determinate” reality in such a case, namely, the determinate reality of Rorty’s own writings. If some teacher proceeded to say that Rorty is, after all, just a relativist, a neo-Marxist or a post-modernist deconstructionist, Rorty could quite rightly object—as indeed he does object throughout one recent book, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), to being classified in various terms other than those he himself has chosen or regards as fitting his (preexistent) written work. This is no less than we expect of those who come forth and put it to us that they have identified something that they believe is best-designated by whatever they define as “quark.” What is wrong with Rorty’s worry about representationalism, and thus with his rejection of a determinate reality? In reply, first, not all who reject Rorty’s viewpoint agree (as Rorty suggests that they do) that we can “climb out of our minds” or find “a skyhook—something which might lift us out of our beliefs,” as we figure out the cognitive relationship at issue. That description simply does not accurately capture the position of many who do hold that when we think and talk we are, indeed, thinking and talking, if taking good care, about a reality that is not being shaped or created or distorted or otherwise influenced by our minds. The thinking and talking is, of course, not independent of our minds—we do those with our minds and the assistance of some other tools or faculties we possess and that are normally involved in the achievement of those tasks. The result, however, is not a construction but an apprehension, the becoming aware of just what exists and often of what has existed for very long before we became so aware. (For a good antidote to Rorty, one might do well with David Charles Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies.3) Accordingly, when we say “Rorty’s position,” in the context of a discussion such as the present, there is indeed a reality, namely, Rorty’s position, that we are thinking and talking about, distinct from our thinking and talking. Whereas, when we say “Hamlet’s position on death,” it is merely fictional, and when we speak of Hamlet’s position on minimum wage laws, it is nonexistent, so no reality corresponds to or is meant by that reference. In order to appreciate these points, it is entirely unnecessary to make use of notions such as “getting out of our minds.” What we do by way of our minds is nothing more or less than to focus on reality and accurately understand it, at least when we manage to do well at the tasks we undertake by the use of

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our minds. Indeed, a better conceptualization of what is going on is suggested by the German term “begriff” and the English term “grasp” or, perhaps even more fittingly, “grab.” By “begreifen,” one means to apprehend or take cognizance of, as with the term “grasp/grab” in the context of discussing the functioning of the mind vis-à-vis reality (including itself). And just as grasping some object, say, with one’s hand does not in the slightest suggest that the object has been intruded upon or altered, so when one grasps or has come to know something, this too lacks the slightest hint of having thus intruded upon or altered what has come to be grasped or known. Fortuitously, perhaps, the analogy between “know” and “grasp/grab” also accommodates another concern of pragmatists, namely, that when one grasps/grabs an object, one need not have full, complete, and timeless control of it; one needs to have it well enough in hand to proceed with one’s purposes. Thus cases of knowing something need not satisfy some model of certainty “beyond a shadow of doubt,” only “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Now, just as grasping or grabbing something may have to involve more or less delicacy, and could indeed go awry through a mishandling of what is grasped/ grabbed—to the point that the grabbing may indeed significantly disturb the object being grabbed—so with knowing. When one knows X, the act of knowing X may be entirely objective in some cases where the process has been highly refined, while it may involve some minor or major distortions or intrusions where the knowing involved a more sloppy process—for example, was embarked upon with careless prejudices or preconceptions obstructing the result. I point this out in response to some observations by skeptics vis-àvis this portion of my discussion. Thus, if I grab a plastic cup, while some microscopic changes may be brought about in the cup in consequences of this, they are inconsequential for the cup as a cup, whereas if a very powerful person grabs that cup and puts a dent in it, the grabbing will have resulted in altering the cup as a cup. Similarly, knowing X may be done in such a way that nothing of X qua X is influenced by the process, while it may also be done in a way whereby X is disturbed, as per the famous Heisenberg principle whereby the knowledge of some subatomic entities is nearly impossible without influencing those entities in their very identities. Nevertheless, this requires explanation and Heisenberg provides it, showing how it is a special, exceptional case. Again, when we know X, must we be influencing X? This notion is what brings into question whether what we know is in fact X or, rather, X+ourimpact-on-X. But knowing X is not molding but grasping it, not shaping but embracing it, as it were. It is as if, when we took a photograph, the camera could not possibly obtain an accurate rendition of that which we are photographing because it must be making an impact upon the subject of its picture.

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Yet, it is far more reasonable to think that, even in this case, the little bit of impact that light may make on the feature of the world we want to photograph is so minor as to be insignificant for purposes of causing any change in it (and, indeed, we can detect that impact only because we are able to know both the being of which we are taking a photograph and light that has that minor impact on it). Or it is as if, when we grasp something, say a hammer, by doing so we must be having an impact upon it, so that this may well make it into something other than what it is, a hammer. The view I propose is perhaps helpful in understanding how human beings relate to reality as they act in the role of knowers. Some have lamented that this relationship is too possessive—knowledge is thus akin to acquisition. Yet knowledge, in fact, is much closer to tracking (as spelled out by Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations [Harvard University Press, 1981]) or apprehending. (Understandably, though, the exact characterization of knowing will be difficult since it is a process that seems to be sui generis, with no adequate analogy to clarify it for us. But for all that, it is not mysterious.) Thus, it seems right, all around, to think that what we know is unchanged by the fact that we know it. Therefore, when we know something, our knowledge is of this (unchanged-by-our-knowing-it) being, not of something that has somehow been influenced or changed by the fact of being known to us. The reason this is a better way to understand it is that any way of understanding knowing the world will suggest that that is indeed how we know the world, rather than that it is how we have shaped the world concerning what we call our knowing something of it. I want to leave now with some comments about common sense. Generally, if a theory implies that none of our common-sense ideas—e.g., that there are solid and gaseous as well as liquid things in the world, or that some things are inanimate, others animate, etc., etc.—are sound, we should be very suspicious of the view. It probably commits what, in my book Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974; Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2006), I called “the blow-up fallacy.” This is committed when one gains a very clear understanding of some portion of the world and then decides that everything else ought to be understood by reference to what has been discovered there. When people, for example, apply Heisenberg’s “uncertainty” principle in a criticism of our capacity to know for certain where we were born, where we parked our cars, or what time it is, they are committing this fallacy. When they take the model of the atom, with the so-called “empty space” that largely fills it, and use it to make the claim that thus, of course, the world is just empty space and nothing solid exists, they commit this fallacy. They are, in short, ripping something out of its proper context.

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I am not suggesting that we become overly sanguine about our understanding of the world. I think, however, that Gilbert Hardin was right when he advised that we “take care not to adopt a very skeptical attitude nor become too lenient about what is to count as knowledge.” The sort of way I have proposed we understand human knowledge—as certainly “beyond a reasonable” rather than “beyond a shadow of a” doubt—secures for us the needed confidence that our best science, including particle physics and astrophysics, does indeed provide us with an understanding of the world. We need to avoid confusing our knowledge of the world with the being of that world. The picture is not the same as what is depicted, but that is no reason to fault it for the quality of picture that it manages to be. We can have excellent knowledge of the world without having the world itself as that knowledge. As to what implication this has for contemporary science, especially physics, it needs to be kept in mind that much of what seems paradoxical there—as in, say, the famous Schroedinger’s cat case, wherein it appears that something both has and has not a property P (being alive) at the same time and in the same respect—may well be the result of the incompleteness and lack of comprehensiveness of the investigation under way. It seems to me that too many people are rushing toward some final, finished account in these very complicated areas of human inquiry, thus accepting the world as weird instead of waiting to make sure that their theories are adequate. Some of the most interesting areas of contemporary science tend to be driven not so much by careful inquiry as by various problematic philosophical positions—for example, Niels Bohr’s account of quantum mechanics appears to draw more on Kant and Kierkegaard than on a full integration of the evidence with the rest of the results of the sciences. (see http://www.horuspublications.com/etexts/kierkeg.html). Finally, a word about science and philosophy. Some scientists and some philosophers of science disparage the contention that science is linked to philosophy, but this is implausible. Science utilizes certain accounts of human knowledge, for example, as it distinguishes between what is sound and what is unsound in the research process. This is true even if the scientist is merely invoking some pragmatic idea such as “it works.” Moreover, certain metaphysical notions, contentions about the fundamental nature of things, also have an impact on science. What can be versus what cannot be functions importantly in some of the concerns about scientific results of theorizing and investigations. (Here again, Niels Bohr’s Kierkegaardian proclamations are illustrative.) This is so despite what Robert Nozick suggests in his last work, Invariances (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), namely, that maybe even the law of non-contradiction is not as invariant or stable as we tend to take it to be. This contention is so patently self-refuting and, in turn,

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discombobulating that Nozick could not sustain the idea in his own ruminations about it. Thus, a minimalist metaphysical underpinning of all human understanding, including the most paradoxical-appearing aspects of science, especially of modern physics, cannot be rejected. This echoes Aristotle, in the end, who noted that at least this much was a fact, anytime, anywhere: A thing (in fact) must be what it is and it cannot be that it both is and is not something, at the same time and in the same respect. Any attempt to contest this falters because it degenerates into incoherence.

NOTES 1. John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press, 1986). 2. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12. 3. David Charles Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1991).

Chapter Ten

The Calculation Problem and the Tragedy of the Commons

Has it been noted, I wonder, that the famous calculation problem facing centrally planned economies, identified by Ludwig von Mises and his followers, and the more recently revived tragedy of the commons (hinted at early on by Thucydides and Aristotle and developed more fully by Garret Hardin1) are, in effect, two sides of the same coin? The one side is the description, the other the evaluation of the same phenomenon, namely, the refusal to recognize private property rights in human affairs. Put briefly first, when individuals are not owners of resources, they are not able to assess the value of them, and when resources are publicly owned, their use will be systematically hasty and imprudent. Thucydides put it this way: [T]hey devote a very small fraction of the time to the consideration of any public object, most of it to the prosecution of their own objects. Meanwhile, each fancies that no harm will come to his neglect, that it is the business of somebody else to look after this or that for him; and so, by the same notion being entertained by all separately, the common cause imperceptibly decays.2

Of course, that individuals are not able to assess the value of things to them may or may not be a good thing. Only if they ought to be able to do so could this be something bad. But when we realize that public ownership leads to systematic haste and imprudence—for example, because resources are quickly depleted if no one knows the limits of use to which these resources may be put—then we get a hint that the inability to assess the value of resources has deleterious consequences for most of us, though there is no one to blame for this except perhaps those who insist on keeping the institution of public ownership in force.

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That is the tragedy. No one is in a position to assess just how much of the resources contained in the commons that are available for us are, in fact, available to any particular one of us, so that as much as can be accessed and used will in fact be consumed. This will involve taking as much and as quickly as is possible, while others scramble equally hard to do the same. The resulting depletion is not, then, a matter of greed or of something else unreasonable, but rather of doing the most that can be done so as to achieve one’s very likely legitimate goals. As to the source of the calculation problem in collectivist systems, of such a socialism F. A. Hayek has this to say: It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movements of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.3

The point is, of course, that when one owns resources, one allocates just the amount of those resources to this or that purchase, based on what one knows of one’s own circumstances, needs, wants, etc., which, in turn, contributes to an overall telecommunications system that serves to inform consumers and producers and thus manages the allocation of resources throughout the market place. It is an underlying assumption of both, the tragedy and the calculation problem, that individual human beings, not collectives, tribes, or communities, make decisions concerning how resources will be used. Indeed, in an absolute monarchy, where the king owns everything and no one else has the recognized authority to decide on the disposition and use of anything, there is no tragedy of the commons, nor any kind of calculation problems. The country is one huge piece of private property and whatever the king decides is exactly the efficient thing to do; however resources are allocated is precisely the best way to allocate them. Those who go without do not matter, since it is the king’s decision that they should go without. And the materials that get depleted are exactly what ought to get depleted, given that the king has so decreed. Of course, since the king is not really the only person with the rightful authority to make decisions about everything, this system is not going to succeed for very long. The king will be resisted, on and off, and eventually deposed by someone who promises better recognition of the sovereignty of members of the society. Let’s put the tragedy of the commons in concrete terms. Consider that a cattle rancher is interested in supplying his cattle with as much feed as he can.

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It is not a matter of what one owns or has obtained via rent but of the effectiveness of the scramble. All the ranchers are under the impression that the commons is available to them, so they will all try as hard as is possible to obtain as much as they can, and this leads to a kind of grabbing from the commons before others take what they want. This can occur in the case of ranchers using the common grazing fields or special interest groups and their lobbyists taking as much as they are able to via the political process of voting and related means for getting something from the treasury. When it comes to commonly owned resources, such as public lakes, rivers, the atmosphere, or forests, this process leads to conduct that is often considered greedy but merely consists of supplying oneself with what one believes one may be able to put to good use, for purposes of pursuing one’s goals. Painters, scholars, scientists, merchants, and all will follow this policy of taking resources and running away with them, not because they are evil or wicked but because they are committed to their tasks. Indeed, some may well deplete resources for entirely charitable, generous, or kind purposes! The way this resembles the calculation problem is not all that difficult to understand. Without private ownership of the resources, the value of such resources is indeterminable. Private owners look to other private owners and those who purchase them to establish the prices of resources. Differential utilization of the resources will prompt different people to ask for and pay different prices, leading to a helpful if not flawless communication system concerning how important the resources are in a given market place. But the commons do not permit such determination and, as a result, impede communication between users and suppliers. One might think, as did socialist planners, that some central authority, standing in for the public (as seen by a dictator or democratic assembly), could tell just how much of the resources should be used by whom, and for what purpose. But no general purpose exists to which such a determination can be made to conform (other than in small groups, perhaps, such as an orchestra, team, kibbutz, convent, or commune, wherein a small number of members come to agree on their common goals). So the depletion of resources is necessarily unguided by a coordination of supply and demand throughout the market via the more-or-less accurate registration of individual or small group wants and needs. In this way, then, the tragedy of the commons and the calculation problem amount to two distinct but related sides of the same obstacle to central planning or even just government regulation. What they have firmly in common is that they arise from the vital fact of human individuality, a central feature of human life that only the free marketplace can accommodate optimally.

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NOTES 1. The contemporary discussion of this idea occurs in Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, 162 (1968): 1243–48. Yet, as will be seen, earlier thinkers have already made note of the “tragedy.” 2. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, bk. I, sec. 141. 3. F. A. Hayek, Individualism & Economic Order, 86–87.

Chapter Eleven

Government Budget Crises

Budget crises—at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels of government—are routine these days. Although there may be one or two years of surpluses, in most regions they are followed by many years of deficits. If governments were judged by the same standards as private firms, most of them would be bankrupt. However, because they can use the tax collector to obtain funds or, in the case of the federal governments of most countries, can print money, governments are nearly immune to the serious adverse consequences of financial mismanagement. Why do governments get into such straps so often? Only rarely is it a case of out-and-out corruption. Far more often, the problem is systemic. There is serious work afoot now that answers this question. Essentially, governments lack the needed basis for assessing the relationship between their resources and their expenses. They are unavoidably ill-informed because the means by which that relationship is best understood is plainly unavailable to governments.

THE CALCULATION PROBLEM Ludwig von Mises, the leading economist of the “Austrian School,” established as long ago as 19221 that, for there to be meaningful and useful economic calculation, there must be a free marketplace where people—for whom governments work—can allocate their resources for whatever they deem worthwhile. When they do this, their millions of purchasing instances communicate to producers in the marketplace what is in demand, what customers will buy, and what they will leave sitting on shelves. This information is vital 135

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in order for producers to be able to estimate what they need to do, and how much of what is likely to sell. Inventories, therefore, will be adjusted very closely to what people who shop are likely to purchase. The system that best communicates this information between buyers and sellers is capitalism. What makes that possible is that people in a capitalist system have a reasonably clear idea of what belongs to them, through the institution of private property rights. As a result, they know what they can spend and what would break their budgets. Even buying on credit is adjusted to their capacity to carry debt. so they have a very clear signal warning them about overspending. When an economic system has this advantage, it is less likely to experience major vacillations, including financial crises, because, on average, people will balance their economic purchases with their available resources. Put that in terms of several hundred million transactions in the market place, and a very complicated yet smoothly functioning system results.2 Von Mises and his most famous student, Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, presented these ideas in the great debate about whether socialist economies can function.3 As one of the most famous, now late, American (Marxist) socialist economists put it recently, “Ludwig von Mises . . . had written of the ‘impossibility’ of socialism, arguing that no Central Planning Board could ever gather the enormous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system. . . . It turns out, of course, that Mises was right.”4 That admission by Heilbroner came, however, only after the collapse of Soviet-style socialism. And the fact that the point applies also to welfare states—systems of government where the state assumes many production and distribution functions that, under capitalism, would remain in the private sector—was not noticed even by those who saw its relevance to socialist systems. Yet von Mises himself realized, as did many of his students, that any attempt at top-down calculation of economic relations was going to be futile. Governments have no ability to gauge what they need and what they must deliver, especially when it comes to such essentially private goods and services as insurance, housing, medical care, transportation, schooling, and the like.5 Whatever reasons might be given for why governments ought to provide such goods and services, there is one that will never be convincing: namely, that they will deal with the economic issues successfully. They just cannot. The reason is relatively simple: When you deal with funds that are not yours, that you collected at gunpoint from others, you never really know what there is for you to spend and on what you should spend it. This is, essentially, both an economic and moral problem. Those who do not know the resources simply have no clear way to know what they ought to do with them, even if those resources are in their legal possession.

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“PUBLIC CHOICE” OBSTACLES Another group of economists, lead by Nobel Laureate Jim Buchanan and his colleague Gordon Tullock at George Mason University, produced public choice theory. The purpose of this theory is to gain a clear understanding of the economic elements of government bureaucracies. Buchanan and Tullock argued6 that bureaucrats are not unlike agents in a capitalist marketplace; they seek to advance their economic objectives. However, because they do not have the feedback mechanism of the market, nor the budget constraints of market agents, their “profit maximization” procedures are far more unruly than are those of private market agents. Accordingly, government bureaucracies are nearly always mismanaged. People always spend more than they have, lacking the natural constraints that most of us face as we go shopping.

SOME CONCRETE CASES IN POINT Both of these theories may leave people wondering just what in particular they identify in day-to-day, real-life circumstances. Some examples will help to answer this. When I was in the U.S. Air Force, I worked as a civil engineering draftsman. After Christmas each year, suddenly I had to work overtime. There was no increase of work load—most people just sat around during the day and then went to work from 6–9 PM, when the overtime would have to be put in. As a soldier, I did not receive overtime pay, but the engineering staff, comprised of government employees, did. When I asked why the overtime was necessary, a G-14 explained that they all needed the overtime income so as to pay for their Christmas purchases. Another case will help illustrate how the theories sketched above play out in practice. Each time a new budget had to be submitted, several rush jobs suddenly had to be done, such as building a little flower garden by the main gate. It was never anything very important. Upon inquiry, it turned out that we needed to spend all of the money in our budget so that we could ask for more money for the next fiscal period. Yet another occasion helps us see the way public-choice theory, specifically, manifests itself. As a member of a Department of Education panel that developed and administered a fellowship program in Washington, I saw the application of the theory. After two years of going through all the work to set it up and get it off the ground, some of the panelists decided they wanted to apply for more money to Congress for this program. Why? They wanted to do it better and get more things done with it. When it was pointed out that this

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wasn’t really our job, few of them cared. (The only thing that prevented the letter from being sent is that, the day we met to consider the idea, the Nobel committee in Sweden announced the Prize for Jim Buchanan, and I explained to everyone what occasioned the event, namely, the development of publicchoice theory, a theory that explained so clearly why people are trying to get more money from Congress for this project.7) When the issue of state fiscal mismanagement comes up, many look for bits and pieces of evidence of wrong-doing and even corruption. But that is not what makes sense of this recurrent phenomenon. It is the fact that governments, as a rule, are very bad at economic calculation.8 They are illcomposed for that purpose. All the incentives are wrong and there are no constraints to guide people to be rational about how to spend their resources. This is why so many countries around the globe are experimenting with privatization—which is the shifting of many kinds of responsibilities from the public to the private sector.

NOTES 1. Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane (London: Jonathan J. Cape, 1936). 2. The idea that capitalism created the Great Depression and other market upheavals is a dangerous myth, as the works of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, Great Contraction, 1929–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), and others have shown. 3. F. A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism [with essays by N. G. Pierson, Ludwig von Mises, Georg Halm, and Erico Barone] (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938). 4. Robert Heilbroner, “After Communism,” The New Yorker, September 10, 1990, 92. 5. Arguably, when it comes to essentially public goods and services, such as military defense, police protection, and judicial services, government can assess cost and benefits. See, Tibor R. Machan, Private Rights and Public Illusions (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1995). 6. James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (University of Michigan Press, 1962). 7. This occurred in October of 1985, in Washington, D.C., at the meeting of the Jacob J. Javits Graduate Fellowship Program meeting. 8. Yet another theory bears on this issue, also the product of the work of a Nobel Laureate in economics. See Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values (New York: John Wiley, 1963). Arrow shows that the ranking of collective or social priorities is impossible in democratic societies. That, too, contributes to fiscal mismanagement and, of course, everyone’s dissatisfaction with what government does.

Chapter Twelve

Some Reflections on the Right to Private Property

FROM MIXING LABOR TO REWARDING GOOD JUDGMENT Although I have discussed this topic in similar terms elsewhere, I return to the topic again because of how vital the concept of the right to private property is to a bona fide free society. Let me begin with a bit of polemic, in response to a throwaway quip by the well-known and prominent legal theorist, Ronald Dworkin, who is professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and the New York University School of Law. His books, Taking Rights Seriously, Law’s Empire, and Sovereign Virtue, are all serious defenses of the idea, basically, that the Lockean tradition of law and politics which the American Founder’s had invoked in crafting the Declaration of Independence and, to a lesser extent, the U.S. Constitution, is wrong. As he wrote a while back, the U.S. Supreme Court, in upholding the law in New York State, in the famous Lochner decision of 1905, that defended private property rights, “relied consistently on the mistaken but principled view that property rights are basic human rights.”1 But, contrary to Dworkin’s assertion, the right to private property is indeed a basic human right. It is a central principle of justice and fundamental to any bona fide free society. Just consider, as one vital case in point, that unless one has the right to private property, one does not have the right to freedom of speech or religion— it is because of that basic human right that government may not censor what we say and write but may do so when it involves public property, such as radio or television stations that use the public airwaves, or a public park. It is also this principle that most directly stands as a bulwark against thwarting the choices of the citizenry concerning where and how they will give expression to their religious worship. In fact, all basic individual rights rest, practically, on the right to private property, and are threatened by its abrogation. 139

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Some have made the point that property rights have been used to justify slavery but that is sophistry. The only reason that one could plausibly claim to own slaves is that they were falsely, immorally, declared not to be full human beings, more akin to domesticated animals than to people. It needed such spurious thinking to get around the fact that human beings have a property right in their own life, their labor, and its fruits and none may violate it with impunity. This right, as all others, specify a sphere of liberty, one within which the individual rights-holder is sovereign and thus authorized to decide what will be done by him or her; others must gain permission from such an authorized individual before they may interfere. In my home, for example, I get to decide which of my CDs will be played on my CD player. Limitations on the level of volume do not contradict this point—such limitations are themselves applicable because of the rights of others whose space may not be invaded. And, also, my factory is going to produce the goods I choose to have produced and the externalities of such production must be internalized or those who experience their dumping must be compensated, all in light of the system of private property rights. The idea of the right to private property goes back to John Locke and even farther in human political history, to William of Ockham and to many even earlier thinkers. It was realized by many in the history of political thought that to be in charge of one’s own life, one must have the right to it fully respected and protected in the legal system. If one may not own one’s life and resources (“person and estate”)—if one lacks the right to life and property—one is at the mercy of those in government as well as others with power who would want to use one or one’s resources regardless of one’s choice in the matter. They can command how one will live, who one will serve, etc. But if one has one’s right to life and one’s right to private property acknowledged and secured, others must gain permission for one’s support, help, or consent, and are barred from simply using a person against his or her will. All of this is evident from how monarchies, wherein kings or similar rulers own the realm, take it as natural for the rulers to order the population about to do not as those individuals choose but as the “sovereign” does. This is why the people are referred to as subjects—they are subject to the will of the ruler, not to their own. Of course, modern liberals like Professor Dworkin don’t approve of this principle because they believe that people and their resources, including labor, must be available for government to order about and to conscript for all sorts of purposes they do not themselves freely accept. This is the Left’s major thesis, after all—people belong to society, to humanity, to the body politic. One very forceful advocate of this was the French social philosopher Auguste Comte, who wrote that “All human rights . . . are as absurd as they are im-

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moral. This [‘to live for others’], the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and duty. [Man must serve] Humanity, whose we are entirely.”2 It is no accident that the first on Karl Marx’s list of what needed to be abolished in bourgeois society on the way to socialism and communism is the right to private property. It is that principle, when observed and protected, that makes us sovereign individuals instead of serfs and slaves or mere cells— specie beings—in the “organic body” of society. Sadly, although the American Founders spelled out excellent contrary ideas in the Declaration of Independence, in the pursuit of national unity and power, they compromised them in the U.S. Constitution. Today, however, with the influential academic leadership of the likes of Professors Ronald Dworkin, Cass Sunstein, Thomas Nagel, et al., the classical, liberal, Lockean ideas of the Constitution, let alone the Declaration, are in jeopardy, ready to be abrogated in the name of some undefined public or common good or the will of the people. It is most important whether this jeopardy is effectively resisted or yielded. On that issue the future of human liberty will hinge. Let me now sketch a more detailed examination of John Locke’s idea. Locke advanced the theory that, when one mixes one’s labor with nature, one gains ownership of that part of nature with which the labor is mixed. Thus, for example, if I gather wood from the wild forest for a fire or for materials to build a shelter, I have a “natural right” to what I have gathered, inasmuch as I have “mixed my labor” with it and, to that extent, have put some of myself into it. Since I have a fundamental, natural right to my own life, including my labor, that part of nature that includes me (i.e. my labor) is also mine.3 Though Locke held that nature is initially a gift from God to all of us, he argued that, once we individually mix our labor with some portion of it, it becomes ours alone. Locke’s is a good beginning but a revised Lockean notion, more promising than that of Locke’s, has been advanced in current free-market thought by way of a theory of entrepreneurship, an idea advanced at about the same time by both philosopher James Sadowsky4 of Fordham University and economist Israel Kirzner5 of New York University. The novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand, perhaps the modern era’s most fervent advocate of capitalism based on a theory of the inalienable individual right to life, liberty, and property, also emphasized the moral role of individual judgment and entrepreneurship.6 According to the entrepreneurial account, it is the judgment that fixes something as possessing (potential) value (to oneself or others), and thus the making of this judgment and acting on it is what earns oneself the status of a property holder. The rational conceptual process of forming a judgment is

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neither automatic nor passive; nor does the process involve more than minimal overt physical effort. It is, however, an act of labor or production nonetheless. What gives the judgment its moral significance is that it is a freely made, individually initiated choice involving the unique human capacity to reason things out, applied to some aspect of reality and its relationship to one’s purposes and life goals.7 One exerts the effort to choose to identify something as having potential or actual value. This imparts to it a practical dimension, something to guide one’s actions in life. Whether one is correct or not in any given instance remains to be seen, but in either case the judgment brings the item under one’s jurisdiction on something like a “first come, first served” basis. For example, assume that George identifies—selects—some portion of unowned land as having potential value. Having made this judgment, George now owns—has rightful dominion over—the land, so that others may not (rightfully) prevent him from exploring it for oil, minerals, or use as a museum or private home. His judgment may have been in error—the land may turn out to be unproductive, or otherwise unsuitable for his purposes. But, by his having first made and acted upon the decision to select the land, he has appropriated it. On this account, then, the appropriation of items in nature has moral significance because it exhibits an effort of prudence, of taking proper care of oneself and those for whom one is responsible. George’s attempt to exercise the moral virtue of prudence by his judgment and subsequent use of what he has chosen to appropriate is potentially morally meritorious. Under the above description, the act of appropriation is a moral act. Apart from actual outcomes, George’s exercise of his judgment here is prima facie morally valuable as an expression of his prudence, industry, good sense, and practical savvy. All of this being so, in order for George to live as a moral agent, responsible for himself and perhaps others, he must be free to make such attempts without intrusion by others. Critics would see such acts not as morally worthy, but as acquisitive or possessive, implicitly deeming them morally insignificant—a person’s attempt merely to benefit himself or one’s loved ones. Without supporting argument, the critics implicitly reject the idea that advancing one’s own well-being, aiming for one’s own prosperity, is something morally negligible or demeaning.8 The critics are mistaken because they fail to appreciate that the agent who is acting to advance his or her own interest is worthy of having this done. Certainly if others, as human beings, are worthy of beneficence, the agent must also be. And the agent is far better positioned to know how to benefit himself than are others, which makes the self-interested conduct far more likely to be successful than acts of generosity or charity.

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Even more importantly, however, the central task of an individual‘s life is human excellence, and each person ought to practice the virtues that achieve it, including the virtue of prudence. Private property rights make this possible, whereas its denial does not. The case in support of private property rights is merely the beginning of the development of an elaborate legal system of private property rights. In complex social contexts such as an industrial or high tech society, property acquisition occurs via thousands of diverse acts of discovery, investment, saving, bequeathing, buying, and selling, with willing participants who embark upon the same general approach to life. Nor is anyone coerced into one particular approach in a polity of private property rights, which accounts for what Harvard University philosopher Robert Nozick noted in his defense of capitalism: the system’s hospitality to diversely conceived utopias, to experiments with great varieties of human conceptions as to the good social life. This is evident in all of the experimental communities, churches, and artistic colonies, as well as economic, academic, and scientific organizations that abound in what has come to be perhaps the largest, most closely capitalist, private-property-respecting society in human history, the United States.

APPLIED RIGHTS THEORY Theoretical defenses of the system of private property rights do not begin to answer all the questions concerning the best application of that system with regard to the multitude of complex problems involving acquisition and use. Though the 1980s ushered in the global movement toward privatization, including Eastern Europe’s substantial rejection of the planned economic system, not nearly enough people are confident that the concept of private property rights serves as a foundation for a sound socio-economic system. As we have seen, this lack of confidence is not due essentially to problems inherent in the system of private property. Rather, resistance comes from the philosophical climate and attitude that have surrounded those who are perhaps the most visible beneficiaries of private property, namely, commercial agents, people in business, and entrepreneurs. Though countless others are just as surely beneficiaries, this is less obvious. Consequently, capitalism is condemned roundly for lack of fairness and for permitting great inequities of wealth, as if these would not arise within or would manage to be far more effectively addressed by another system! It is the simple failure to consider the alternatives to capitalism, coupled with an ignorance of its widespread benefits, that nurtures the widespread anti-capitalist attitude.

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Its defenders argue that the capitalist system has proven itself superior— vis-à-vis justice, prosperity, and other personal and social advantages—in comparison to all other live alternatives. Furthermore, when problems do arise within this system, the courts adjudicating the difficulties can arrive at appropriate solutions concerning particular applications of the right to private property, in everything from radio signals to frozen embryos, and from the air mass to bodies of water. Without elaborate legal and technical discussion, which would be prevented within alternative models, the great potential of the system of private property will remain unexploited—for example, with respect to environmental and ecological concerns.9 Thus, there appear to be two candidates for the philosophical foundations of the system of private property rights. The first is that the system is necessary for the provision of “moral space”; the second—implicit in the first—is that it makes the realization of prudential conduct possible vis-à-vis our natural and social world (natural or original in the case of initial appropriation, and social in the case of voluntary trade). Unless these are sound, the system of private property rights is eventually likely to be defeated as a politicaleconomic model for the modern world.

NATIONAL DEBT AND THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS We can now address a public policy result of the gradual erosion of the role of private property in our legal system. This consequence has seldom been noted and is different from the more obvious problems identified by economists such as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Both von Mises and Hayek have noted, throughout their scholarly works, that without private property rights the price system is corrupted, leading to the development of widespread economic inefficiency in the community. More than 2,500 years ago, Aristotle demonstrated the social value of the right to private property when he said that “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.”10 Garrett Hardin is to be credited with coining the modern expression of this problem as “the tragedy of the commons.” Hardin argued that, without borders identifying which area belongs to whom, the commons, that is, all public resources, tend to be overused, not from human greed but because each user quite understandably wants to maximize the yield of his endeavors.

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The principle of “the tragedy of the commons” has been applied successfully to environmental problems, and many scholars have concluded that, without extensive privatization of public properties such as lakes, rivers, beaches, forests, and even the air mass, environmental problems will remain largely unsolved. It seems to be generally agreed that there are inherent problems in common ownership, but it is less apparent, evidently, that what is required to solve the problems is to transfer common ownership into private. The political will to effect the solution is lagging far behind the analysis that identified the solution. Nevertheless, in this area at least, the identification has been made. What has not been widely noticed is that a “tragedy of the commons” exists in our national treasury. We have here what by law amounts to a common pool of resources, from which members of the political community will try to extract as much as possible to serve their purposes. Whether it’s for artistic, educational, scientific, agricultural, athletic, medical, or general moral and social progress, the national treasury is the trough for all citizens in a democratic society. Of course, everyone has noble reasons for accessing it, and their goals are usually sufficiently thought out so as to inspire confidence in their plans. All they need to further their goals is support from the treasury, so they devote great energy, will, and ingenuity to extracting from the commons whatever they can for their purposes. Unfortunately, as both Aristotle and Hardin knew, the commons are fated to be exploited without regard to standards or limits: “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.” This explains, at least in part, the gradual depletion of the treasuries of most Western democracies. Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States are all experiencing this, as are numerous other societies that open their treasuries to the public for uses that are essentially private. How else can we view education, scientific research, the building of athletic parks, the upkeep of beaches and forests and so forth, than as the pursuit of special private goals by way of a commons, the public treasury? Some might claim that all these goals involve a pubic dimension, a public benefit. Indeed, so does nearly every private purpose, including the widely decried phenomenon of industrial activity, which produces the negative public side effect of pollution and the depletion of a quality environment. Private enterprises can certainly have public benefits, but their goal is to serve the objectives of private individuals. When the public treasury is tapped for, say, AIDS research, the primary beneficiaries of success would be those with AIDS, not the general public; when theater groups gain support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the primary beneficiaries are those working in theater; when milk producers gain a federal subsidy through price regulation,

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or by being compensated for withholding production, the dairy farmers are the first to gain, not some wider public. So we find, one after the other, to the thousands, “public” projects that in reality support private goals, first and foremost. One need only observe who lobbies for the money. But, since the “treasure chest” is public property, it is impossible to rationally allocate the wealth in a manner consistent with proper budgetary constraints. Such constraints arise from considering the implicit limits on spending that are determined by the wealth of the individuals who comprise the society, as well as their credit-worthiness. Without reference to specific individuals or companies, no limits (and thus no clear constraints) can be identified. Instead, politicians spend to the extent that they can borrow and print money, using only anticipated funds; or they reduce the value of existing moneys, funding requests with little restraint other than public opinion. This tendency is fueled by the urgency of various groups of constituents, who express their urgent desires in the ballot box. The inevitable result is the tragedy of the commons, as the public treasury gets looted Without structural remedy, there is no end in sight to this process. Only when the country loses its credit-worthiness in the world community will this near-Ponzi scheme come to a halt. The country will then have to declare bankruptcy, leaving those citizens who had nothing to do with the tragedy— our children and grandchildren—holding the empty bag. Such is the final end of treating with cavalier disdain peoples’ right to private property and individuals’ efforts to enrich themselves. When intellectuals commonly pit human rights against property rights, as though the right to what one owns is not a human right, we are increasingly impoverished, not just individually, but as a society and government, as well. According to Bernard Mandeville and others, “private vices [make] public benefits.” Here is economic insight but moral ignorance: indeed, if we denigrate the pursuit of prosperity, we will produce general misery for everyone, but what these political economists failed to realize is that the striving for personal prosperity is not a vice, but an aspect of the virtue of prudence. It is private prudence, not vice, that leads to public benefit, so we ought not to demean that which enables us to obtain personal prosperity. An additional fallacy common to social philosophizing is the view that what really matters, as we consider public affairs, is the general good, a rather vague idea of collective utilitarianism whereby the “greatest happiness or good or well-being of the greatest number” is the central goal of politics. It is not to our purpose to enter that debate here. Suffice it to say that such remnants of tribalism draw heavily on an initial discrediting of the worthiness of individual human lives.

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SOME MORAL MISTAKES CONCERNING PROPERTY RIGHTS Philosophers and Peter Singer, as well as others, have argued that we owe our wealth to others who are much poorer than we are, around the globe. Unger claims, as we have already noted, that we “must give away most of [our] financially valuable assets.”11 Presumably, then, others, in turn, may take these assets from us, via the legal system and its administrators, in the form of taxation or similar schemes of redistribution, which then could well recommend socialism as the proper political order for human community life. What is wrong here? Unger’s precept not only does violence against our right to private property but also demeans us because it grants us no chance to flourish unless we pay a ransom to others. Nor does it credit human beings with the capacity to be generous, a moral virtue that needs to be practiced voluntarily, not as a result of legal regimentation that robs the agent of any moral credit for doing the right thing. The call for confiscatory charity holds, furthermore, that while others are entitled to our wealth, we are not—as if we were less important, less significant than those others. It also fails to recognize that, often, others who lack wealth may choose to live that way. Perhaps they judge it proper for themselves to do so, or perhaps they have made mistakes that have led to their poverty—in which case they may not even deserve generosity. More importantly, and very often in human history, there are those who have been prevented from pursuing sane economic policies in their lives. For none of this, however, should we be punished by depriving us of the fruits of our own labors in a relatively free-market economy. The ethics of altruism, the broader ethical theory underlying Unger’s claim, is seriously flawed. But neither is it the case that there is no moral virtue attached to helping others. Indeed, an ethical outlook that places the individual agent’s overall well-being first has a great deal of room for generosity, benevolence, kindness, compassion, and similar other-directed practices and attitudes. But it recognizes that the pursuit of happiness for the agent is his first, though not only, ethical responsibility. The institution of private property is the societal principle that renders the practice of such an ethics practically possible. This principle does not rest on crass selfishness, narrow self-interest, or some kind of automatic utility maximization. It rests, instead, on the idea that everyone has the responsibility to choose to live properly; without a determinate sphere of personal jurisdiction, this would not be possible to achieve in one’s community.

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LAST REFLECTIONS ON LIFE AND PROPERTY When both life and property are threatened, there is much talk about how property is only stuff, easy to replace, so one should be concerned only or primarily with life. There are even those who disparage the right to private property, claiming it is not really a human right at all. Some prominent academics have been calling ownership itself a myth, claiming that no one really owns anything and that all wealth belongs to government, which is supposed to manage it for the collective or public good.12 One might have thought this kind of thinking went out of fashion after the demise of the Soviet socialist system in which it was put to the test and failed miserably. No such luck. Latin America today is rife with proponents of socialism, with dictators seeking and being granted absolute power to take over the wealth of various countries from private individuals and companies. Insofar as the wealth consists of such resources as oil, ones that can be harvested with little special skill once they have been discovered and captured, and are abundant for the time being, the resulting socialist and autocratic systems can exist without immediate collapse— even the USSR took some seventy years to go under and it didn’t yet have cheap oil available with which to make up for its otherwise lethargic economic system. In any case, the close ties between life and property can be well-appreciated when one either nearly or actually loses it all, say in a fire, earthquake, or flood. The first thing that comes to light, if one just thinks about it a bit, is how wrong it is to think of property as mere stuff. Instead, property involves a great variety of human creations, natural resources, inventions, and works of art. When property is lost, it is clear that specific and often unique values have vanished from one’s life and, indeed, that one’s life itself has been significantly damaged. Those who nearly lost it all will experience this directly when they resume their lives among their property and take stock of just how much what was threatened had meant to them. And I have more in mind than just those irreplaceable pictures from old-fashioned photo albums, one’s favorite books and records, the paintings and posters on one’s walls, those precious knickknacks all around the house that have grown, almost imperceptibly, into the props of one’s existence. Even small items, taken nearly for granted, can reveal their importance. This is especially so when one is a reasonably creative individual who has a basement teeming with unpublished manuscripts, accumulated artifacts one hasn’t yet finished crafting just the way one had meant to, as well as simple utilities and products one has finally managed to be able to afford with the

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earnings from the labors of one’s life (and some luck, as well). All these are more-or-less precious treasures most of us own, and only those with a dogged misanthropic ideology would turn a blind eye to that fact. Yes, losing one’s property is usually not so calamitous as losing a limb, organ or, especially, one’s life, but even that isn’t always right. After all, some of us old folks might consider the loss of life a better alternative than losing everything that could be so meaningful to our offspring, where those were the only two alternatives we faced. Now those, of course, who care nothing for life itself will care little for property. Certainly they will not cherish the kind of property that involves human creativity and production. Take, for example, Alan Weisman, the author of the book World Without Us,13 for whom the totally untouched—perhaps even unseen—wilds matter more than anything human. Such an outlook is too far removed from reality to be very influential except when it is expressed in the all-too-human language of emotive prose and poetry. Effectively packaged, nearly any idea, no matter how vile, can attract the loyalty of some. But, as Socrates taught us, for the truth of the matter it isn’t wise to turn to artists—their concern, at their best, is mainly with beauty. So, property is very much a human institution, and a precious one at that. It can be corrupted, of course, as anything human can be, but when rightly understood and incorporated into one’s life, it is a vital force indeed.

NOTES 1. Ronald Dworkin, “Letter to the Editor,” The New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007, 45. 2. Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion (Clifton, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1973), 212–30. 3. Of course, one does not “deserve” one’s life, any more than one deserves one’s kidney or teeth, just as is argued by egalitarians such as John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). But, from this, it is not valid to conclude, as Rawls and many others who follow him have done, that others may take away such undeserved belongings and use them for their own goals. One is just the agent who must be sovereign in order to be able to embark upon a morally worthy life, even if this runs the risk of one never doing so. 4. James Sadowsky, “Private Property and Collective Ownership,” in The Libertarian Alternative, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1974). 5. Israel Kirzner, “Producer, Entrepreneur, and the Right to Property,” Reason Papers, No. 1 (Fall 1974): 1–17. 6. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961).

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7. This does not imply any kind of “atomistic” individualism, as some critics insist. (See, for example, “Atomism,” by Charles Taylor, in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985].) It recognizes that at the heart of thought is the individual’s will to think but the process of thinking itself can make ample use of contributions from fellow human beings. 8. The general thrust of this line of criticism is that ethical egoism is wrong. (See how this is applied to political theory in C. B. Macpherson, The political theory of possessive individualism: Hobbes to Locke [Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1962].) But ethical egoism is routinely but misguidedly identified with Hobbesian narrow selfishness. For a full discussion of these issues and a defense of a classical, nonHobbesian egoism, see Machan, Classical Individualism. The egoism that I argue is justified is akin to Aristotelian eudemonism but with an individualist twist, based on a somewhat revised conception of human nature. 9. For a discussion of some of the details of this, see Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 10. Aristotle, Politics, 1262a30–37 11. Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 134. 12. See Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).

Chapter Thirteen

Revisiting a Critique of Libertarianism

THE WELFARE STATE AFFIRMED? When Professor James P. Sterba became president of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, he arranged for a session at which the oft-debated issue of whether welfare rights exist would once again be revisited by me and some others. It is a topic on which he and I have had many exchanges. So he very kindly asked me to once again be part of the discussion, and I prepared a paper for this occasion, one among several efforts of mine to show that Sterba’s contention and arguments are flawed. Some of that paper has become the substance of this chapter. Our exchange on this topic began, as I recall, with an match-up at a conference in Philadelphia, where we each presented our position—Sterba arguing that the U.S. Constitution, with its Bill of Rights resting on the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence, is incomplete without a set of positive rights, while I argued that the Constitution did not go far enough in reflecting the negative-rights thrust of the Declaration. Some of the points in this dispute will be worth revisiting here. I will conclude with my most recent arguments against Sterba’s welfare statist stance.

AMERICA JUSTLY GOVERNED? The United States of America has had its famous constitution since 1789, yet the document is still a subject of much debate. The view developed here is critical of it on the grounds that it failed to give explicit legal support to the separation of state and economics, state and education, state and the arts, state and 151

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medicine—in short, state and culture—in the firm manner in which it secured the separation of state and religion.1 Yet, undeniably among all the political systems throughout the globe and the ages, that of the United States of America has come closest—at least to my knowledge—to implementing some crucial features of the libertarian natural-rights theory. This is due, in part, to the direct influence of John Locke and the indirect influence of Aristotle—via the reading and thinking of the American Founders—on the political philosophy (the Declaration of Independence) and the legal system (the Constitution) of the United States. Of course, the fundamental legal document of a society cannot be divorced completely from that society’s other elements and values. Therefore, to the extent that we take religion to include the moral and political values of a culture, the Constitution will have to be connected with religion—or philosophy. The U.S. Constitution endorses the separation of state and church only in the respect that the state must not be connected with any organized religion, which is to say any particular organized agency promulgating some set of convictions. Religion and philosophy do carry political impact. There is, of course, a problem with the aim of a purely secular public philosophy in a culture guided largely by religiously taught moral principles. But there is no necessity that such principles be grounded on the teaching of organized religions. Clearly, there is an alternative way by which to arrive at basic values besides religion, as anyone who has studied the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics can attest.2 The Founders were largely deists and believed that, while religion had a vital role in the lives of people, it would be best to confine it to their personal lives, leaving the public domain to be dealt with in terms of secular concepts that are accessible to anyone and everyone who would just use his or her mind—or would, as Locke put it, consult Reason.3 The public realm is properly secular because to know about it requires a faculty we all possess and can use, as a matter of our own initiative. Revelation—the source of supernatural belief or faith—is not available to just any person. It requires divine selection and grace—assuming that it exists at all. Religion, in short, is not a proper subject for discerning and especially not for grounding the principles of public life. The point of keeping at least the federal government out of private and social (religious, economic, parental, artistic, etc.) life is to reduce the power of the state or government, to make it serve very specific, limited goals, not to skirt totalitarianism. It is to keep government to the sole business—a monumental one, to be sure, which requires many skills—of protecting and preserving the rights of individuals in the face of threats from within and without the society, and in the face of unavoidable misunderstandings among citizens that require adjudication. Of course, the terms of such government—the standards—would themselves come from certain convictions and philosophical ideals about justice,

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order, stability, liberty, equality, etc. The United States’ Declaration of Independence is, as already noted, a kind of philosophical foreword to the U.S. Constitution, aiming to provide the national consensus on values that should guide the more detailed Constitutional processes of the society. In large measure, the U.S. Constitution expresses the natural-rights libertarian political philosophy of John Locke, although it is more of a political compromise on some divergent values than is the Declaration of Independence. It is a dubious and, at any rate, irrelevant charge that the Lockean/ American doctrine expresses an ideology. This is an insulting view and not worth discussing here. What is compromised in the U.S. Constitution? Abraham Lincoln knew the answer when he noted that the Constitution did not fully enough implement the philosophy of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln opposed slavery on the grounds, as he put it, that “no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.”4 Many who believed in slavery on humanitarian grounds—for example, the famous American socialist George Fitzhugh5—denied this view, in particularly when it came to blacks, toward whom they advocated paternalism. They, along with Lincoln, knew that the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the central features of the American political tradition. But they disagreed with Lincoln and the libertarian strain in American culture that, however noble may be the goal for the sake of which unauthorized governance of one’s fellows would be exercised, it is fundamentally wrong. The initial version of the U.S. Constitution tolerated slavery and this, of course, was its gravest flaw. But some critics, both earlier and contemporary, of the U.S. Constitution are suggesting that its fundamental flaw is that it does not include a guarantee of the rights to welfare and equal opportunity, rights that are supposedly implied in the rights that are listed in the Declaration of Independence, the Lockean rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This guarantee, at least, should be extended to the more disadvantaged members—just as Fitzhugh believed. I want to argue that no such rights are stated or desirable in the Declaration. I will examine Sterba’s argument. It is his main contention that the crucial flaw of the U.S. Constitution is that it fails to guarantee so-called rights to welfare and equal opportunity.

LACKING WELFARE RIGHTS Sterba and many others who champion Franklin D. Roosevelt’s so-called “Second Bill of Rights,” would maintain that the United States, and indeed any constitution, should guarantee basic rights of everyone to “receive the goods and resources necessary for preserving” ourselves.6 But this is not

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what, in fact, human beings have a right to because, for that alleged right to be respected and protected, others would lack the right to their lives, liberty, and property. Instead, we all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—which is to say, not to be killed, assaulted, kidnapped, raped, or otherwise aggressed upon or attacked and deprived of our property by persons in or outside of government. And the U.S. Constitution thus far seems to have secured these rights with some measure of vigilance, although by no means adequately—which is why defending these rights is a constant and continued theoretical and practical task. That, indeed, seems to have secured the unique fame of the United States of America, guided, largely, by tenets that critics consider fundamentally flawed. Such critics claim that various political outlooks would have to endorse these “rights.” Some of them set out to show that welfare rights follow from the Founder’s essentially libertarian position itself. In response to such considerations, Sterba argues as follows: The problem, as I see it, is that if we give Mary [her negative] liberty, it may well be at the cost of restricting George from doing the only thing he can do to meet his basic needs. In rich/poor conflict situations, as I see them, someone’s liberty is going to be restricted. In this situation, either Mary’s liberty to use some of the surplus she has produced (surplus here just means anything beyond what is required for meeting one’s basic needs) is going to be restricted or George’s liberty not to be interfered with in acquiring in the only way possible for him the goods he requires for meeting his basic needs is going to be restricted. Now if George could work for Mary, or anyone else, to earn those goods he needs, or if Mary, or someone else, would just generously give them to him, those alternatives would be preferable. But I am imagining a situation where such alternatives are unavailable, and for that situation I am asking whether Mary’s liberty to use her surplus for meeting her luxury needs should be enforceable over George’s liberty not to be interfered with in acquiring those resources (from Mary’s surplus) that he requires for meeting his basic needs. My answer is that ought implies can favors enforcing George’s liberty over Mary’s. As I see it, the liberty that Mary would lose is far less significant than the liberty that George would otherwise lose.7

Right away Sterba reveals how he thinks about rights or liberty—they are what “we give” people. This is not how rights to one’s life or liberty are grounded, in being granted by “us.” Instead they are grounded on human nature. Next, there is something distinctly Orwellian about how Sterba phrases his points when he says that the liberty of the poor is “not to be interfered with” as they embark upon “acquiring in the only way possible for [them to obtain] the goods [they] require for meeting [their] basic needs.” For Sterba someone’s holding on to his or her property, either personally or by way of

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law enforcement, amounts to “restricting the liberty” of a would-be thief! But there is no right to a liberty to deprive another of his or her holdings. That is like claiming that when a would-be murderer is stopped from murdering, his or her liberty to take the life of the victim is being restricted. Repelling thieves or murderers doesn’t restrict their liberty—it protects their would-be victim’s right to liberty, a right murderers or thieves lack when they attack another. Only if the would-be victim’s life is deemed to belong to the would-be murderer—only if the victim is a justly held slave!—would this hold up. Then there is the problem of the criteria by which one ought to evaluate whether it is more significant that Mary vs. George is interfered with in exercising her right to liberty. Is there some standard of significance that’s intrinsic about which interference is better or worse? The point, of course, of a theory of rights and its expression in a legal system is to identify what actions are justified and what actions aren’t. If Mary’s actions using her great wealth are justified because she has the right to private property vis-à-vis this wealth, than George’s actions aren’t—they are cases of theft, regardless of how desperate George happens to be. Such desperation may justify disregarding Mary’s rights on very, very rare occasions—when peace is not possible, in life boat type situations—but they do not warrant undermining a polity of individual (private property) rights. Before embarking on a more detailed philosophical critique of the welfare rights doctrine, I wish to call attention to a common-sense phenomenon that should suggest why there are no such rights. Consider that when other people do not kill, maim, kidnap, or rob someone, it wouldn’t be required for this individual to thank them for such abstinence! No gratitude is due to those who do not commit such deeds, who restrain themselves and act respectfully toward others’ rights. In contrast, if we are in dire straits, if we need help badly, and others come to our aid, provide us with help or resources, then it is quite natural or routine to thank them for this. Such acts of generosity, charity, kindness, support, and compassion are not due us as is respect for our rights. We aren’t entitled to such acts so that when others perform them, we are naturally appreciative instead of taking it all for granted as we do with respect for our rights. This may not be a universal datum, of course, and in some special communities there could be a practice different from what it suggests. Yet it seems that the way most people deal with the matter is indicative of something basic about human relationships. Also, how could any kind of unchosen enforceable obligation arise from someone’s having even the most desperate needs for what another could provide, not if the other came by what he or she has without coercing another in the process of obtaining what he or she has? It is a sheer non sequitur to move

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from A’s desperate need to B’s having to give up your life/work for A’s sake, for involuntary servitude. A’s life is A’s, no one else’s, so is B’s life B’s, and so on to all human beings. In a state of wild nature, perhaps, this cannot be expected to be adhered to but the point of civilized society, with a legal order, is to forestall all coercion among people. If A has something B deems as extra but it is A’s without the taint of having used another against his or her will—another who has an inalienable right to his life/liberty/property (the right being inalienable, not the goods obtained, which can be sold or given away at owner’s discretion)—then B needs to gain it by voluntary exchange. Otherwise B would own (part of) A. (When one of the communist rulers of East Germany was asked why they shoot people who try to escape over the Berlin Wall, his answer was that they are thieves. What are they stealing? They are stealing labor, which belongs to the state [i.e., the whole society].) But now let me turn to some other philosophical considerations about the welfare rights position. First, let us make clear what such a position amounts to. Sterba, in particular, wishes to show that, if Lockean libertarianism is correct and we do have the familiar basic rights to life, liberty, and property, then we all also have welfare rights, such as to health care and education. What I argue, in contrast, is that since Locke—and libertarianism—are correct, and since the rights to welfare and equal opportunity require the violation of Lockean rights, no one has welfare rights. Arguably the reason some people, including Sterba, believe otherwise is that they focus on rare instances in which some citizens could find themselves in circumstances that would require disregarding rights altogether and their desperate, aggressive—Lockean rights-violating—actions could suggest that they are entitled or have the moral authority to take such actions. It would be, Sterba argues, unreasonable to expect or demand that the desperately poor ought not to take some of the very wealthy people’s resources. It would violate “ought implies can,” Sterba maintains. This would be in situations that cannot be characterized to be “where peace is possible” and every major libertarian thinker from John Locke to the present has treated these kinds of cases.8 Let us be clear again about what Sterba sets out to show. It is that libertarians are philosophically unable to escape the welfare statist implication of their commitment to negative liberty. Despite their belief that they are only supporting the enforceable right of every person not to be coerced by other persons, libertarians must accept, by the logic of their own position, that individuals also possess basic enforceable rights to the provision of various services from others. He holds, then, that basic negative rights imply basic positive rights. He isn’t only contending that in rare, exceptional situations—often called “life boat” cases in ethics—consideration of rights will be suspended. In

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the middle of a hurricane or tornado or earthquake people act nearly from panic or even instinct rather than based on normal ethics. Yes, but that is not Sterba’s point. He thinks such cases imply a welfare state!

NEGATIVE RIGHTS AND WELFARE “RIGHTS” To Lockean libertarians, the ideal of liberty means that we all, individually, have the right not to be constrained against our consent within our realm of authority—ourselves and our belongings. Sterba states that, for such libertarians, “Liberty is being unconstrained by persons from doing what one has a right to do.” Sterba adds, somewhat misleadingly, that for Lockean libertarians “a right to life [is] a right not to be killed unjustly and a right to property [is] a right to acquire goods and resources either by initial acquisition or voluntary agreement.” Sterba does realize that these rights do not entitle one to receive from others the goods and resources necessary for preserving one’s life—such goods and resources are what one is supposed to produce in one’s life or acquire via voluntary exchange (or in some other peaceful way). A problem with this formulation of the Lockean libertarian view is that political justice—not the justice of Plato, which is best designated in our time as “perfect virtue”—for natural-rights theorists presupposes individual rights. One cannot then explain rights in terms of justice but must explain justice in terms of rights. For a Lockean libertarian, any basic right to receive the goods and resources necessary for preserving one’s life from non-consenting others conflicts with the right to one’s life, liberty, and property—the right not to be killed, kidnapped, assaulted, or robbed. The Lockean libertarians argue that the latter are rights held by all individual human beings. To have and, normally, legally protect and maintain—i.e., enforce—the former right would often require the violation of the latter. For example, A’s right to keep and hold the food she has grown or purchased—even if she has, in Sterba’s terms, a surplus thereof 9—is incompatible with B’s right to take this same food from A. These rights could not both be fundamental in an integrated legal system.10 The situation of one having rights to welfare, etc., and others having rights to life, liberty, and property is thus theoretically and practically intolerable. The point of a system of rights is the securing of mutually peaceful and consistent moral conduct on the part of human beings. As Ayn Rand observed, “‘Rights’ are . . . the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.”11 Or, to use the terminology of Rasmussen and Den Uyl, rights are meta-norms that provide the proper framework within which members of society can engage in morally significant conduct.12 Positive rights,

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if enforced, thwart such morally significant conduct—for example, generosity, compassion, charity, helpfulness, and so forth.13 In this respect, all rights theorists agree: basic rights in a legal system serve to secure a moral order in society. But those advocating negative rights hold that this order is best secured when we provide people with reliable, ongoing, flexible but stable borders wherein they can choose their own conduct. And property rights are the concrete implementation of this purpose. Those who advocate positive rights see human beings as somehow naturally in a collective situation, as members of a natural team, owing each member support for some common purpose, even if it reduces the freedom of choice and prospect of success for some individuals.14 To bolster his attempt to derive positive rights from (libertarian) negative rights, Sterba asks us—in another discussion of his views—to consider what he calls “a typical conflict situation between the rich and the poor.” He says that, in his situation, “the rich, of course, have more than enough resources to satisfy their basic needs. By contrast, the poor lack the resources to meet their most basic needs even though they have tried all the means available to them that libertarians regard as legitimate for acquiring such resources.”15 The objective of a theory of rights would, of course, be defeated if rights were typically in conflict. Some bureaucratic group would have to keep applying its moral intuitions on the innumerable—typical—occasions when rights claims conflicted. A constitution is suited to the kind of beings— namely, moral agents—that human beings are if it helps to remove at least the largest proportion of such decisions from the realm of arbitrary (intuitive) choice and avails a society of men and women of objective guidelines that are reasonably integrated, not in relentless discord, and thus not in need of routine, typical discretionary decisions by political authorities such as bureaucrats and even judges. However, most critics of libertarianism assume some doctrine of basic unmet needs, which they invoke to show that, whenever not satisfied for some while others have “resources” that are not needed by them, the former have just claims against the latter. (The language of resources of course loads the argument in the critic’s favor, since it suggests that the bulk of these goods simply come into being and happen to be in the possession of some people, quite without rhyme or reason, arbitrarily [as John Rawls claims16].) This doctrine is full of difficulties—for example, it lacks any foundation for why the needs of some persons must be claims upon the lives of others. Does this include body parts, for examples, and if not, why not? And why are there such needs anyway? To what end are they needs, and whose ends are these and why are not the person or persons whose needs they are held responsible for satisfying or supplying the needs? (Needs, as such, lack any de-

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cisive force in moral argument without the prior justification of the purposes or goals their satisfaction serves to fulfill. A thief has a basic need of skills and powers that are clearly not justified if theft is morally unjustified. If, however, the justification of basic needs, such as food and other resources, presupposes the value of human life, and if the value of human life justifies, as I would argue, the principle of the natural right to life, liberty, and property, then the fulfillment of basic needs for food may not involve the violation of these rights. Nevertheless, some ways of attaining such needs could—including forced redistribution of wealth.)

LIBERTARIANISM VERSUS “OUGHT IMPLIES CAN” I will set these concerns aside for now and attend, instead, to the central criticism Sterba offers of Lockean libertarianism. He claims that, without guaranteeing welfare and equal opportunity rights, Lockean libertarianism violates the most basic tenets of any morality, namely, that “ought” implies “can.” The thrust of “ought implies can” is that one ought to do that which one is free to do, that is, one is morally responsible only for those acts that one had the power either to choose to engage in or to choose not to engage in. This is not so different from the commonsense legal precept that, if one is not sound of mind and uncoerced, one is not criminally culpable. Only free agents, capable of choosing between right and wrong, are open to moral evaluation. This indeed is the reason that many so-called moral theories fail to be anything more than value theories. They omit from consideration the issue of self-determination. If hard or soft determinism is true, morality is impossible, although values need not disappear. If Sterba were correct about Lockean libertarianism typically contradicting “ought” implies “can,” his argument would be decisive. (I know of few arguments against this principle, and they are not convincing.17) It is because Karl Marx’s and Herbert Spencer’s systems typically, normally, indeed in every case, violate this principle that they are not bona fide moral systems. And quite a few others may be open to a similar charge, despite the efforts by some philosophers to smuggle in a kind of moral theory while also embracing determinism, that is, denying that “ought” implies “can.”18 I am not, of course, certain “beyond a shadow of doubt” that libertarianism is not (conceivably, logically, possibly) flawed in the way Sterba claims. It would be dogmatic to hold a priori that it might not be. No system is so well established that one who agrees with it should regard it impossible that it could be flawed—one would need omniscience to possess such certainty.19 Political theories can be expected to be proven true only beyond reasonable

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doubt, and it is reasonable doubt that I find difficult to justify, concerning the merits of libertarianism.20 For the time being, I will concentrate on what could be wrong about Sterba’s suggestion. I will do this by considering the cases he offers, which he considers indicative of the problems he identifies in Lockean libertarianism. Before I turn to this, however, I wish to rebut a point Sterba has pressed against the position I defend. He has contended that I actually grant his views as a matter of theory, not, however, in practice. I do not, however, see such a dichotomy, especially in matters of political theory. Sterba claims that I accept the “theoretical thrust” of his “argument that a libertarian ideal of liberty leads to a right to welfare.”21 This is wrong. What I have actually argued for, in this connection, quite independently of anything Sterba himself has said on the subject, is that there are rare cases when some innocent person who is in dire straits ought to disregard individual rights to property, for example—from which it follows that such a person ought, on rare occasions, to take from another what he or she needs. Even this is confined to cases where no other alternative—say, offering something in trade— serves to fill his need.22 Along with other natural-rights libertarians,23 I have argued that, when conditions make the respect and protection of rights impossible, morality can require one to disregard—but not to violate—rights.24 The point is that rights are not ethical primaries. They are derivative from other moral principles. If, as I have argued, a classical egoist or eudaemonist ethic is sound and it gives rise, in community life, to individual rights to life, liberty, and property, and if, in community life, peace is impossible, then emergency social ethics come into play.25 This idea is not novel. Mill, for example, argued that a person’s liberty may be disregarded on rare occasions, as when he or she is about to step, unknowingly, on a collapsing bridge. Common sense also attests to this—it may be proper to restrain someone who is hysterical so as to prevent his harming himself or doing other wild things, in extraordinary circumstances. It may be proper, even, to slap the person so as to help in his recovery of mental focus. But none of this is carte blanche for rights-violating conduct—or for so-called welfare rights. As the saying goes, hard cases make bad law. A society would not be just for incorporating the ethics of emergency into its legal system. It is true enough that if the world were such that the respect and protection of individual rights engendered general unhappiness, including poverty, then libertarianism would be kaput. But that is akin to the saying that if pigs had wings, they could fly. It does not say that pigs can fly or that libertarianism is wrong. Furthermore, if, conceivably, libertarianism is wrong, it does not follow that the welfare state would be right. The right to welfare is, in any case, a right to involuntary servitude from other persons. Even if people are in dire

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straits, let us say even in deadly straits, it does not follow that they acquire rights to the lives and labors of other persons, even if those are rich lives and labors, involving what Sterba likes to call “surplus wealth.” (As noted already, one cannot simply borrow a concept from Marx and leave off the rest of the Marxian edifice. Surplus wealth makes sense in the context of the rest of Marxian economics, with the theory of exploitation, alienation, etc., all attached. Do we treat one’s second eye as a surplus, or one’s second kidney or other body part or organ? No.) It seems to me that the welfare state—indeed, the claim that people have a legally enforceable right to welfare that is to be legally protected (that is, officially coerced provisions from others, ones who do not choose to offer them)—needs a defense that does not piggyback on the theories of socialism, feminism, libertarianism, or some other position in political theory. This effort to derive welfare statism from other systems is, as far as I can discern, a non-starter. None of this is to say, however, that a concern with how unfortunate but decent people fare in a free society in misguided. It is vital that both the rights of individuals to make their own significant choices in life and their prospects for prosperity and happiness be addressed in any detailed political treatise.26 Libertarianism rests on a conception of human nature that suggests that people who are not coerced to “help” others will be generous, kind, charitable, compassionate, and so forth when the need for these arises.27 It also understands the right to private property as a liberty right, meaning, the right to peacefully acquire, hold, and trade valued things. What this right secures for them is a sphere of personal authority, to choose to do as they deem fit without having to ask for permission from others, including governments. On those rare occasions that in a bona fide free society someone’s right to private property stands in the way of another’s liberty to pursue a meaningful life, the proper policy is to seek out peaceful ways to obtain assistance and not to violate another’s rights. (Consider that if someone has a “surplus” kidney or “eye,” no one else has a right to it but in a rare situation it may be donated to another who is in dire need of it!)

WHAT IS OR IS NOT TYPICAL I need to reiterate here that the case Sterba offers in support of the view that Lockean libertarianism violates “ought” implies “can” is not a typical one but a rare emergency in a free society and thus it does not unwittingly imply any right to welfare, let alone the welfare state. The most it gives rise to is for the generosity of those who are well off, if that generosity is deserved.

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Sterba offers his strongest argument when he observes that “ought” implies “can” is violated “when the rich prevent the poor from taking what they require to satisfy their basic needs, though they have tried all the means available to them that libertarians regard as legitimate for acquiring such resources.”28 Is Sterba right that such are typical cases in a fully free, libertarian society? Are the rich and poor, even admitting for the moment that there is some simple division of people into such economic groups, at each other’s throats all the time? Are the rich, who are often the producers and entrepreneurs in a free society and routinely create employment, preventing the poor from satisfying their basic needs? Even with homeless people, it is clear that many find help without having to resort to theft mostly by seeking it from shelters the well-off have established. Clearly, in a system of justice that legally protects and preserves property rights, there can be cases where a rich person would personally (or by calling the police) prevent some poor person from taking what does not belong to that poor person but belongs, rather, to the rich one—e.g., a chicken that the poor person might use to feed him/herself. Since, subsequent to such prevention, the poor person might starve or at least become seriously ill, Sterba asks the rhetorical question, “Have the rich, then, in contributing to this result, killed the poor, or simply let them die; and if they have killed the poor, have they done so unjustly?” His answer is that they have. Sterba holds that a system that accords with the Lockean libertarian’s idea that the rich person’s preventive action is a just one “imposes an unreasonable sacrifice upon” the poor, one “that we could not blame them for trying to evade.”29 Not permitting the poor to act to satisfy their basic needs is to undermine the precept that “ought” implies “can,” since, as Sterba claims, that precept implies, for the poor, that they ought to satisfy their basic needs by taking from the rich; otherwise they cannot act with dignity, as persons capable of significant choices in their lives, something that libertarianism assumes about us all or at least for the most part. They must, therefore, have the option or liberty—a welfare right—to take from the rich if they are to have a genuine choice about what they ought to do. In fact, as I have already suggested, such cases are atypical in genuinely free—and thus also prosperous—societies populated by individuals assumed to be what libertarians assume about people, namely that they are, on average, industrious, diligent, as well as generous, kind, and willing to help those in dire straits, in emergencies. And this is pretty much confirmed by the historical fact that it is the countries in the world that are more rather than less libertarian or capitalist that (a) achieve prosperity, (b) exhibit private generosity,30 and (c) reduce the number of those in dire straits. Yes, there is never any guarantee that such societies will achieve all these conditions, but neither

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is there any such guarantee with welfare states, which tend, on average, to be poorer and to have greater unemployment and less private charity than do the more rather than less libertarian ones in history.31

PATERNALISM AS REMEDY OF EXPLOITATION Another case that supposedly shows that Lockean libertarianism wrongfully restricts the state to protecting only the (negative) rights to life, liberty, and property is provided by Nancy Davis, concerning the “lonely, shy, and insecure individual” who is being taken advantage of, with her consent, by “a charismatic charmer” (p. 26). Here Sterba asserts that “This example seems to be a clear case where a person is being used even though, in her present circumstances, she has freely agreed to be so used” (p. 27). This case seems to support the thesis that, despite the presence of full, informed consent, the terms of interaction between some people are immoral and, presumably, may be prohibited or regulated by the state. This kind of case is supposed to support a version of paternalism, clearly one feature of welfare liberalism. Securing a justification of this practice would certainly assist the anti-libertarian, statist argument, for if we are generally justified in taking care of other adults without permission from them individually, officials of the state may do this, as well. However, there are sound objections to this that welfare statists, as citizens interested in justice, ought to take to heart. In a recent article, prominent essayist Jim Holt discusses the debate about what has come to be called “soft” paternalism. His “The New, Soft Paternalism”32 is a fair and fairly thorough account of the debate about whether people have multiple selves of which some may be wiser than others, and it does a decent job of considering whether the wiser selves we have ought to get government support, as when states limit gambling or other easily abused activities by their citizens. Holt comes out in favor of the government’s lending a hand to our wiser selves in the end. Here is how he put his conclusion: But what if you are one of those people who rely on more mundane stratagems, like self-binding? The general problem you face (as put by the political theorist Jon Elster [a member of the analytical Marxist school, by the way]) is this: For a given uphill goal and a given strength of will, does there exist a path, however circuitous, that will get you to the top of the hill? By adding a new path here and there, state soft paternalism makes it more likely that the answer will be yes.33 Consider a couple of preliminaries. Invoking David Hume’s idea of the totally—indeed, impossibly—fragmented human self is a non-starter here.

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For Hume, the idea was not to show that there is no self. He advanced the notion, most probably, only as a reductio absurdum against radical empiricism, to show that relying only on our senses gets us nowhere in trying to understand anything, including ourselves.34 Of course, many of us have different ideas and desires, some in conflict, with the result that some people will remain emotionally intact over time while others will waffle about, seemingly without integrity. Yet even the most discombobulated personalities and unhinged characters can have some good moments during which they try to set about straightening out who they will be henceforth—just think of all the New Year’s resolutions here. And, yes, a bit of a push from peers and institutions may help when such folks are ready to lapse once again. None of this, however, implies the authorization of state interference, especially when one considers that those administering the state are fully subject to all of this. Still, it can be tempting to do what Jim Holt, on the advice of Jon Elster,35 is proposing: get the state involved. But, arguably, state soft paternalism has its greatest appeal not because of its successes or justice—it involves, after all, treating people as children by other people who are similarly disposed—or because good theory supports it, quite the contrary. It appeals, rather, because of the powerful governmental habit that has been cultivated in the human race from time immemorial.36 This is a bit akin to the root idea that gives paternalism its psychological appeal, namely that parents know best. And that is right for most kids, of course; for adults, however, it is a disabling, inept approach toward dealing with life, and it gives dangerous powers to governments.37 The governments of most societies have, of course, sold themselves to the people as their parents—or uncles or nannies—who have nothing but the best interests of their children, the people, in mind. Kings notoriously justified themselves along these lines, as have dictators. What differentiates democratic governments is the fact that they work by a process of decisions-bycommittee, and that there are numerous competing committees vying to dominate until, in the end, a decision is reached that supposedly has had the benefit of extensive discussion. Of course, the decision will be coercively imposed but, presumably, is wiser than many private decisions would be. This is the kind of view that began to be questioned with the writings of Baruch Spinoza. Thomas Hobbes, writing just a bit before Spinoza, made the mistake of trusting the democratically selected absolute monarch, arguing, like Holt and Elster, that people want themselves to be ruled, and that a king or government is just who should do the ruling. But as Spinoza began to suggest and, later, classical liberals like John Locke, Adam Smith, and a host of others began to warn us, governments are not made up of angels but of people—people with the crucial added attribute that makes it easy to yield to bad temptations, namely, power over other people.

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In the twentieth century, Jim Buchanan and Gordon Tullock finally put the idea into a fully developed theory called “Public Choice,” which argued that politicians and bureaucrats will routinely pursue their own agendas, not those assigned to them by the people via the democratic process.38 This pretty much means that entrusting government to engage in benign soft paternalism is futile. Yes, some people could benefit from it, if it could be counted upon—although that alone doesn’t make it good public policy, either—but counting upon government to administer soft paternalism without corruption, without abuse, is the big mistake embraced by the likes of Jim Sterba, Steven Kelman, Jim Holt, Jon Elster, and, sadly, millions of others around the globe.

LIBERTARIANISM VERSUS WELFARE STATISM When people defend their property, what are they doing? They are responding to the acts of someone who would take something from them unjustly, something to which they and not others have a right. As such, these acts of prevention are preserving libertarian justice. They are making it possible for men and women in society to retain their own sphere of jurisdiction intact, to protect and preserve their own “moral space.” Those who mount the attack, in turn, refuse to act in such a way that what they do does not encroach upon the moral space of their victims. The point that cuts against the above scenario is that, on some occasions, there can be people who, with no responsibility for their situation, cannot survive without disregarding the rights of others and taking from them what they need. This is indeed possible. But is it typical? The argument that starts with this assumption about a society is already not comparable to Lockean libertarianism. That system concludes that “peace is possible” and so individual rights, which free men and women from those who would thwart their efforts at flourishing, are the best legal foundations for a good society. The underlying notion of human nature in such a theory rejects the description of the world implicit in Sterba’s picture, whereby people are typically in conflict, so that some have and others must take from them in order to survive, with no other alternative available to them. The Lockean libertarian, in short, abates the worries of those rights theorists who would attempt to guarantee rights to service from others by having confidence in the willingness and general circumstances of virtually all persons to make headway in life. Once they are free of autocratic rule and tyranny, the rest will take care of itself as best as that can be expected in an uncertain world and amongst beings who are capable of both good and evil. We have already noted that the idea of “satisfying basic needs” can involve the difficulty of distinguishing between whose actions are properly to be so

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characterized. Rich persons are indeed satisfying their basic needs with their protection and preservation of their property rights. That private property rights are a necessary ingredient of a just and decent society cannot be established here, but I can say that the idea of a definite realm of personal jurisdiction in everyone’s life, extending over such items as land, minerals, stocks, computer programs, poems, musical arrangements, etc., is indispensable for a full conceptualization of someone’s capacity to lead a morally responsible life. This life depends not on some amount of property but on the right to property—to obtain and use valued items. The Lockean libertarian understands that private property rights are morally justified precisely as the concrete requirement for delineating the sphere of jurisdiction of each person’s moral authority, where her own judgment is decisive. Once this basis for the right to property is recognized, and the argument is seen to presuppose a metaphysically hospitable universe where normally people need not suffer innocent misery and deprivation—so that such a condition is usually the result of (a) negligence or (b) the violation of Lockean rights (that has made self-development and commerce impossible), the occasional departures from this typical circumstance of people will have to be seen as an emergency. Normally, then, persons cannot be said to “lack the opportunities and resources to satisfy their own basic needs.” Even if we grant that some poor persons could offer nothing to anyone that would merit adequate returns that would enable them to carry on with their lives and perhaps even flourish, there is still the other possibility to most actual, known hard cases, namely, seeking help. Yes, this is a recourse that libertarians consider legitimate, although most advocates of welfare rights forget about it. I am not speaking of the cases we know, namely people who drop out of school, get an unskilled job, marry, and have kids, only to find that their personal choice of inadequate preparation for life leaves them destitute. “Ought” implies “can” must not be treated a-historically—some people’s lack of current options is a function of their failure to have exercised previous options prudently and wisely. We are speaking here of the “truly needy,” to use a shopworn but still useful phrase— those who have never been able to help themselves and are not now helpless from their own neglect. Are such people being treated unjustly, rather than uncharitably, ungenerously, indecently, or in some other respect immorally, when the rich who know about their plight prevent their efforts to take from them what they truly need if they refuse to seek help peacefully? Contrary to what Sterba suggests, there is much that persons can and should do in those plausible, non-emergency situations that can be considered typical, apart from attempting to encroach upon, abridge, or violate the private property rights of the rich. The destitute should appeal for support, help,

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or assistance from all those rich who seem to have an inordinate amount of wealth that they allegedly do not need. Consider that, when one’s car breaks down on a remote roadway, it would be unreasonable to expect one not to seek some way of escaping one’s problem. Clearly, one ought to at least obtain the use of a phone. Should one break into the home of a perfect stranger living nearby? Or ought one to ask for the use a the phone from such a person as a favor? “Ought” implies “can” is surely fully satisfied here—actual practice makes this quite evident. When someone is suffering from misfortune and there are plenty of others who are not, and the poor person has no other avenue for obtaining help than to obtain it from others, it would not be unreasonable to ask the poor to seek such help as might surely be forthcoming. We cannot assume here that the rich are all callous—supporting and gaining advantage from the institution of private property by no means implies that one lacks the virtue of generosity. The rich are no more immune to virtue than the poor are to vice—at least there is no reason to assume any such discriminatory outlook. The poor typically have options other than to violate the rights of the rich. “Ought” implies “can” can be fully satisfied by the moral imperative that the poor ought to seek help, not to loot. There is then no injustice in the rich preventing the poor from seeking such loot by trying to violate the right to private property. “Ought” implies “can” is fully satisfied if the poor can take the kind of actions that could gain them the satisfaction of their basic needs, and the action in question could well be asking for help. All along, here, I have been talking about the helplessly poor, ones who through no neglect of their own—nor again through any rights violation of others who ought to be prosecuted and made to compensate for their criminal acts—are destitute. I am, in short, taking the hard cases seriously, where violation of “ought” implies “can” would appear to be most likely. What I am not accepting, however, is that such cases are typical. I would consider them extremely rare. And even rarer are those cases in which all avenues regarded legitimate from the libertarian point of view have been exhausted, including appealing for help. We must remember that the bulk of poverty in the world is not the result of natural disaster or disease. Rather, it is political oppression, whereby people throughout many of the world’s countries are legally not permitted to look out for themselves in production and trade. The famines in Africa and India, the poverty in the same countries and in Central and Latin America, as well as in China, the Soviet Union, Poland, Rumania, and so forth, are not the result of lack of charity but of oppression, the kind that those who have the protection of the U.S. Constitution, which does not guarantee welfare rights, are not experiencing. Critics of the document fail to realize that the first requirement of men and women

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to ameliorate their hardship is to be free of other people’s oppression, not to be free to take from other people what they own.39

THE JUST SELF-PROTECTION OF THE RICH For the reasons discussed above, there is no injustice in the rich preventing the poor from encroaching upon their right to private property, nor any justice in the poor conducting themselves in a way that implies such encroachment. “Ought” implies “can” is fully satisfied if the poor can typically take the kinds of action that could gain them the satisfaction of their basic needs, and this action could well be that of asking for help. Of course, there would be immorality if the rich failed to help when this is clearly no sacrifice for them. However, even their refusal cannot be judged categorically immoral. Charity or generosity is not a categorical imperative, even for the rich. There are more basic moral principles that might require the rich to refuse to be charitable—for example, if they have embarked upon the protection of their freedom or of the just society in which they live by the use of most of their “extra” wealth. And certainly courage can be more important than charity, generosity, or compassion. But a discussion of the ranking of moral virtues would take us far along. Suffice it to note that one reason many critics of libertarianism find their own cases persuasive is that they think the libertarian can only subscribe to political principles or values. But this is wrong.40 I wish to reiterate here that there can be emergency cases in which no alternative to disregarding the rights of others is available, but these are extremely rare, not at all the sort invoked by critics such as Sterba. I have in mind that typical “desert island” case where instantaneous action, with only one violent alternative, faces persons—the sort we know from the law books, in which the issue is one of virtually immediate life and death. These are not cases, to repeat the phrase quoted from Locke by H. L. A. Hart, “where peace is possible.”41 They are discussed in the libertarian literature and considerable progress has been made in integrating them with the concerns of law and politics.42 Suffice it to note here that, since we are discussing law and politics, which are general systematic approaches to how we normally ought to live with each other in human communities, these emergency situations do not aid us except as limiting cases. “Hard cases make bad law!” And, not surprisingly, many famous court cases illustrate just this point as they confront these kinds of cases now and then after they have come to light within the framework of civilized society but do so in an exceptional fashion—e.g., by finding defendants guilty of murder but immediately pardoning them!

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DEMEANING HUMAN DIGNITY Let me briefly turn to the case from Nancy Davis and explain why it does not suffice to defend any kind of paternalist statist interference, assuming the case was introduced to help do that. It seems to me that we owe it to the “lonely, shy and insecure individual” not to interfere beyond the bounds that respect his/her autonomy and independence, lest we relegate him/her to the status of a child, which by the example given he/she clearly is not. There are, of course, some people who are psychologically vulnerable to con-artistry. There are marriages and other relationships most of us have encountered in which the kind of situation Davis and Sterba have in mind with their example is evident. Yet I do not understand why such situations make it morally permissible to take the responsibility for sound behavior out of the hands of the vulnerable person. If there is any meaning to the idea of human dignity, it surely must be that any adult who is not crucially incapacitated—incapable of rational judgment in terms of the disciplines concerned with determining criteria for this— ought not to have his/her power of choice taken from him/her. Doing so is akin to kinapping, assault, or, more generally, dehumanization. It seems to me that it evidences considerably less confidence in human nature, that is, individual human beings, to seriously entertain the idea that some of them need to have their judgments made subservient to others. Moreover, it is a self-defeating idea since, if some could require this, surely others might also, and those who do the interfering are not immune. (Here we should note the economist’s insight that failures of the market are rarely, if ever, remedied by political means, since failures of politics tend to be far more costly and irreversible.) Incidentally, despite my efforts to rebut Sterba’s cases in support of the welfare statist implications of Lockean libertarianism, I don’t for a moment doubt that there are some difficulties with this view. Indeed, I would maintain that any view regarding the best understanding we can obtain in any area of inquiry will probably have some difficulties—borderline cases that will not quite fit the general principles being offered. This is true in the hard, soft, and humane sciences. My suggestion here is that we pay less heed to that fact than to how the various theories compare in comprehensiveness, consistency, practicability, and other qualities that apply to the field in question. On that score, I would maintain that Lockean libertarianism is a principled system fraught with far fewer problems that should nag us with welfare state liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, or other social viewpoints in contention in our time. It seems to me that I have now made the points necessary to call into question Sterba’s efforts to discredit the libertarian tendency of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, had I been asked to discuss the merits and demerits of that radical

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document, I would have done virtually the opposite of what Sterba chose to do—I would have praised its libertarian tendencies and condemned those that compromise them, including the recent trend of the Supreme Court to fail to find in the U.S. Constitution grounds for resisting the doctrine of state rights that legally sanctions abridgment of the implicit right to privacy of every individual. I have be no means clinched the case for the negative, so to speak, but I have tried to suggest some reasons why the affirmative position placed before us by Sterba should be rejected. Let me end what we might call this sidebar with a quote from the late Sam Ervin, Jr., who understood the U.S. Constitution somewhat as I do: The Founding Fathers desired above all things to secure to the people in a written Constitution every right which they had wrested from autocratic rulers while they were struggling for their right to self-rule and freedom from tyranny. Their knowledge of history gave them the wisdom to know that this objective could be accomplished only in a government of laws, i.e., a government which rules by certain, constant, and uniform laws rather than by the arbitrary, uncertain, and inconstant wills of impatient men who happen to occupy for a fleeting moment of time legislative, executive, or judicial offices.43

These impatient persons Sam Ervin was talking about would be the ones who would insist on using their own discretionary judgments to decide when the poor are authorized to take from the rich what Sterba calls the latter’s surplus wealth—and, let’s add what is surely implicit in Sterba’s position, their “surplus” labor or, indeed, “surplus” lives. Summary Response: Property Rights and the Very Badly Off So then is it reasonable to always demand respect for property rights? This is the question raised by some critics of the (Lockean) idea that human beings have the inalienable right to their lives, liberty, and property that may never be subject to violation with impunity within the legal system of a free society. Some claim that it is unreasonable to demand this of those in dire straits, the extremely poor, who would only manage to survive and flourish by violating these rights of the well-off. Thus, they argue, the welfare state—in which laws are passed that permit taxing the well-to-do so as to provide for those in dire straits—is just. Of course, most of the welfare obtained via taxation doesn’t serve to benefit people in dire straits but owners, employees, customers, and trading partners of sizable business firms that seek support (e.g., bailouts) in times of economic downturns. The welfare state tends to support those weary of competition from foreign industry and farmers, not unwed mothers who cannot find work by

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which to support their children. But some of the recipients of welfare are in dire straits, through no evident fault of their own. And, so the argument goes, it would be unreasonable to demand of such people to refrain from taking from the well-to-do what they need. As I have argued, since some of what those in dire need require would be the result of the labors of other people, this implies that it is unreasonable to demand of those in dire straits to abstain from coercing productive people to labor for them, to part with what they have produced, to even give up parts of their bodies if they can do without those parts. But that cannot be right—how could it be unreasonable to demand that people not be forced to labor for others? Does not forced labor violate the rights of those who are its victim? Does it not make of some the involuntary servants, even slaves, of others? If one also adds that those in dire straits may very well have ample opportunity to obtain what they need by offering to work for the well-off, to engage in innovation, enterprise, and other efforts that can peacefully secure for them what they need to survive and flourish, the case that they may coerce others to work for them loses even the emotional appeal that at first inspection it possesses. The most that this kind of reasoning advanced in support of the welfare state establishes, then, is that those who are well off ought to be generous toward the very needy, that in emergencies those who can should lend a hand to those who are genuinely helpless, through no fault of their own. Indeed, that is what the virtue of generosity amounts to: it inclines decent persons, ones of good character, to come to the aid of deserving but badly off people. That would be the civilized solution rather than one that resorts of coercive means and treats those well off as unwilling tools or instruments of the badly off, not as people who are ends in themselves and must give their consent whenever they are utilized by others, even the very hard-up among us. There can, of course, be circumstances so unruly, so desperate and catastrophic, that reasonable conduct is impossible, something that Locke himself realized, referring to such situations as ones where “politics in not possible.” In such cases the world is so topsy-turvy that the principles of civilized behavior cannot reasonably be expected to be followed. What does not follow from this is that the legal system of a society must be adjusted so as to accommodate emergencies, to require of well-enough-off citizens to be constant Good Samaritans. As the saying goes, “Hard cases make bad law.” One does not demand that a system of law change because of certain dire circumstances, especially since it would imply that some people get to place the rest under legal obligation to perform a service that should come from good will, not at the point of a gun.

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In Science News, the magazine that reports much of the path-breaking scientific research around the globe, one short item noted that the degree of charity and philanthropy in societies with substantial free, unregimented markets is much greater than in top-down planned societies.44 So not only is coercive welfare unjust but it seems to discourage good will among citizens. And it is mostly such good will that takes the best care of the truly needy among us!

NOTES 1. The Constitution does not provide for the protection of private property rights as it does for the protection of the right to freedom of speech, for example, although in the Fifth Amendment of the Bill of Rights the principle of the right to private property is invoked, a bit obliquely. But in Article 1, Section 8, the interstate commerce clause has been interpreted to authorize Congress to regulate commerce that crosses state lines—virtually all of it, as it is now taken by the U.S. Supreme Court. Initially, however, “to regulate” had been understood to mean “to regularize” and did not serve to justify federal intervention in economic affairs. 2. For my own contribution to this, see Machan, Classical Individualism. 3. For the evidence, see Brooke Allen, Moral Minority, Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); and David L. Holmes, The Faiths of the Founding Fathers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4. Quoted in Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About American Revolution (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), 41 (from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [R. Basler ed., 1953], 108–15). 5. George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South; or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA: A. Morris, 1854). 6. See, for example, James Sterba, “A Libertarian Justification for a Welfare State” Social Theory and Practice 2, no. 1 (Fall 1985): 285–306. I will be referring to this essay, as well as to some later and more developed versions. However, all parenthetical references are to James P. Sterba, “The U.S. Constitution: A Fundamentally Flawed Document,” in Philosophical Reflections on The United States Constitution, A Collection of Bicentennial Essays, ed. Christopher B. Gray (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1989), 134–61. A more general attempt to discredit libertarianism may be found in Jeffrey Friedman, “What’s Wrong with Libertarianism,” Critical Review II (Summer 1997): 407–67. A fatal problem with Friedman’s approach is that it assumes that the burden of proving that the welfare state is inferior to libertarianism lies with the libertarian, whereas since it is supporters of the welfare state who insist that some people may impose their will on other people—for the public good, the public interest, the general welfare, etc.—it is they who owe the proof. This may be appreciated by considering that, if someone comes to another person’s home and insists on entering without permission, it is not the home’s owner who owes the proof of why such a person may be kept out; or, similarly, if someone insists on

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conscripting another’s labor for purposes to which that other has not given consent, again it isn’t the one being conscripted who owes the proof that this is not permissible. For more, see Tibor R. Machan, “Liberty vs. Coercion, The Burden of Proof,” The Freeman 24, no. 1 (January 1974). In this respect, Sterba’s efforts are more appropriate to philosophical scholarship since he aims to establish the merits of the welfare state, not simply claim that libertarianism hasn’t demonstrated its superiority as a political system. 7. This passage is taken from an extensive e-mail exchange between Sterba and me conducted in the Spring of 2008. 8. For how Locke handled such a case, see H. L. A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?” Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 175. 9. The concept of surplus wealth is at home in Karl Marx’s political economy and presupposes the notion of the idea that the capitalist has obtained wealth unjustly. But libertarians dispute this idea from start to finish. 10. I skip mentioning the problem involved with how vague is the idea of “very, very wealthy” people—does this include corporations, museums, churches, farms, research centers, charitable groups, and other holders of resources so they may all be subject to takings by the very, very poor? Why would a tax system whereby government does the taking manage to be just? 11. Ayn Rand, “Value and Rights,” in Readings of Introductory Philosophical Analysis, ed. J. Hospers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 382. 12. Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005). Liberalism or libertarianism is “a political philosophy of metanorms. It seeks not to guide individual conduct in moral activity, but rather to regulate conduct so that conditions might be obtained where moral action can take place” (14). 13. For more, see Tibor R. Machan, Generosity; Virtue in Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998). 14. Consider what Leszek Kolakowsky observes about this: “There has never been, and there will never be, an institutional means of making people brothers. Fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times; it is the perfect path to totalitarian tyranny.” Leszek Kolakowski, My Correct Views on Everything, ed. Zbigniew Janoski (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005). 15. See, in particular, James Sterba, “A Libertarian Justification for a Welfare State,” 285–306. I will be referring to this essay as well as to a more developed version which is available only in manuscript form; all parenthetical references are to this latter work, entitled “The U.S. Constitution: A Fundamentally Flawed Document” (my emphasis). 16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 101–2. For a discussion of the complexities in the differential attainments of members of various ethnic groups—often invoked as evidence for the injustice of a capitalist system—see Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981). There appears to be a persistent prejudicial view in welfare state proponents’ writings when it comes to crediting people with the ability to extricate themselves from poverty without any special political assistance. The whole idea behind the right

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to negative liberty is to set people free from others so as to pursue their progressive goals, not to guarantee for them success which is, in any case, a hopeless, utopian dream, not sound public policy, as the failure of welfare-statist and socialist systems illustrates. This is the ultimate teleological justification of Lockean libertarian natural rights. See Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties. Consider also this thought from Herbert Spencer: The feeling which vents itself in “poor fellow!” on seeing one in agony, excludes the thought of “bad fellow,” which might at another time arise. Naturally, then, if the wretched are unknown or but vaguely known, all the demerits they may have are ignored: and thus it happens that, when the miseries of the poor are dilated upon, they are thought of as the miseries of the deserving poor, instead of being thought of as the miseries of undeserving poor, which in large measure they should be. Those whose hardships are set forth in pamphlets and proclaimed in sermons and speeches which echo throughout society, are assumed to be all worthy souls, grievously wronged; and none of them are thought of as bearing the penalties of their own misdeeds. (Man Versus the State [Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1940], 22)

Consider also the following case: a vicious criminal is being chased by the police and falls and breaks a limb, whereupon witnesses are horrified and feel terrible at the sight of this. This illustrates that we normally give people the benefit of doubt about their misfortunes. But upon being informed of their negligence or ill will, our attitudes and thus our emotions can easily change. 17. See, for example, John Kekes, “‘Ought Implies Can’ and Kinds of Morality,” Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1984): 460–67. See, also, Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 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. I address Kekes’s case in Tibor R. Machan, Initiative— Human Agency & Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). 18. See, for example, Daniel C. Dennett, Elbow Room (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984). 19. I discuss this matter in considerable detail in Tibor R. Machan, Objectivity, Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 20. The notion that doubts without reason are pointless, empty gestures is developed in Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: J. & J. Harper. 1969). 21. James P. Sterba, “Progress in Reconciliation: Evidence from the Right and the Left,” Journal of Social Philosophy 28 (Fall 1997): 102. It might be worth pointing out that there is nothing at all that is “Right” about libertarianism. The Right is conservative, even reactionary, and has traditionally rejected many of the tenets of libertarianism, even its principled adherence to the right to private property and free trade. One need but think of Pat Buchanan’s vociferous opposition to free trade to confirm this point or, if one wants more respectable evidence, of Edmund Burke’s and other conservatives’ (e.g., Russell Kirk’s) criticism of individualism, a central feature of the libertarianism at issue here. Indeed, by some accounts, libertarianism is Left because it is close to Enlightenment ideas that champion reason and science.

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22. Indeed, I argued this point some time before Jim Sterba and some libertarians began debating this issue in the journals. See, Tibor R. Machan, “Prima Facie v. Natural (Human) Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry 10, no. 1 (1976): 119–31. 23. Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet Books, 1961); and Eric Mack, “Egoism and Rights,” The Personalist 54 (1971): 5–33, and “Egoism and Rights Revisited,” The Personalist 58 (1977): 282–88. 24. In an undated radio interview, posted on the Internet (October 23, 1997), Ayn Rand is quoted as having said that “I would say that you would have the right to break in and eat the food that you need (were you to land from a shipwreck in front of someone’s closed but well-stocked house), and then, when you reach the nearest policeman, admit what you have done, and undertake to repay the man when you are able to work. In other words, you may, in an emergency situation, save your life, but not as ‘of right’” (my emphases). In these statements Rand contradicts herself—however, both the placing of her second reference to rights and her essay “The Ethics of Emergencies” indicate her position by showing that what she has in mind is that one is morally justified to disregard others’ rights in such emergencies and it is not a matter of one’s having the right to violate those rights. A similar point is raised by John Locke as regards the status of rights when “politics is impossible.” Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, in Liberty and Nature (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 1990), propose to clear up any confusion arising from the apparent conflict of moral justification by way of the concept of meta-normativity, one that characterizes the moral status of political principles. 25. When Sterba refers to its being unreasonable to demand of someone in dire straits that such a person respect the rights of others to their property—or “surplus wealth”—he also seems to invoke certain elements of such a classical egoist position, namely, whereby individuals ought first and foremost to strive to flourish in their lives. Within such an ethical position it is important to differentiate between the rules of conduct in an emergency situation and the rules of conduct in the normal conditions of human existence. This does not mean a double standard of morality; the standard and the basic principles remain the same, but their application to either case requires precise unique descriptions. Ayn Rand has a valuable discussion of this in her essay, “The Ethics of Emergency.” As she explains there, An emergency is an unchosen, unexpected event, limited in time, that creates conditions under which human survival is impossible—such as a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a shipwreck. In an emergency situation, men’s primary goals are to combat the disaster, escape the danger and restore normal conditions (to reach dry land, to put out the fire, etc.). By “normal” conditions, I mean metaphysically normal, normal in the nature of things, and appropriate to human existence. Men can live on land, but not in water or in a raging fire. Since men are not omnipotent, it is metaphysically possible for unforeseeable disasters to strike them, in which case their only task is to return to those conditions under which their lives can continue. By its nature, an emergency situation is temporary; if it were to last, men would perish. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961), 55.

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26. I develop some of these points in one of my earlier discussions of Sterba’s position, in “Does Libertarianism Imply the Welfare State?” Res Publica 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1997): 131–48. (Sterba and I also debated these topics at Vanderbilt University on October 22, 1997.) It should perhaps be noted here that the issue is vital because it concerns the importance of both the protection of the right to individual liberty (and other, derivative rights) and the prospect of well-being for all, in a just human community. It is fair, I think, to believe that much of Western liberal-democratic-constitutional-republican politics touches upon this matter: How can people secure in their communities the protection of their basic rights to life, liberty, and property while not promoting a callous, ungenerous way of life for anyone who is not deserving of it? (See, in this connection, Tibor R. Machan, Generosity; Virtue in the Civil Society [Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1998].) 27. See Machan, Generosity. 28. Tibor R. Machan, “Ethics vs. Coercion.” In a vegetable garden or even in a forest, there can be good things and bad, but no morally good things and morally evil things (apart from the people who might be there). 29. Sterba, “A Libertarian Justification,” 295–96. 30. For a report on a research project that supports this point, see Bruce Bower, “Altruistic Twist in Market Economies,” Science News 173 (March 15, 2008): 173. 31. Machan, Generosity. See, also, Michael Tanner, The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1996) 32. New York Times Magazine (December 3, 2006). Others involved in so-called libertarian paternalism—which, as far as I understand things and contrary to protestations from some, amounts to a quintessential oxymoron—include Harvard University law professor Cass Sunstein. See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_ id=405940. 33. Ibid. 34. This is a controversial thesis in Hume scholarship. But it makes good sense: Hume was debunking the idea of absolute certainty by way of showing that the absolute certainty obtained via sensory impressions—“it seems to be the case that . . .”— is hopeless, and that one way to see this is that it eliminates the self! 35. Jon Elster, Ulysses Unbound (London: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Elster argues in great detail for the advisability and justice of government regulation based on how the citizenry understands that binding or committing itself to certain standards will forestall yielding to irrational temptations. 36. Jonathan R. T. Hughes, The Governmental Habit Redux: Economic Controls from Colonial Times to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 37. See, for a good discussion of this, Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984). 38. James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962). 39. It is instructive here that Janos Kornay, the Hungarian economist who teaches both at Harvard and at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Collegium of Budapest, argued

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against establishing a welfare state in Hungary, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Hungary’s socialist system, on the grounds that without first creating ample wealth, no welfare state can function. See his The Road to the Free Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System: the Example of Hungary (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). 40. E.g., James Fishkin, Tyranny and Legitimacy : A Critique of Political Theories (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). Cf., Tibor R. Machan, “Fishkin on Nozick’s Absolute Rights,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 6 (1982): 317–20. 41. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights.” 42. See, for my own discussions, Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), 213–222; “Prima Facie versus Natural (Human) Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry 10 (1976): 119–31; “Human Rights: Some Points of Clarification,” Journal Critical Analysis 5 (1973): 30–39. See, especially, Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court, 1989). 43. Sam J. Ervin, Jr., “Judicial Verbicide: An Affront to the Constitution,” Modern Age 25 (1981): 235. 44. http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/05/01/researchers.explore.altruisms. unexpected.ally.selfishness.

Chapter Fourteen

Leo Strauss, Neo-Conservative?

LEO STRAUSS I want to explore here the relationship between the ideas of Leo Strauss and neo-conservatism and whether those ideas might have influenced current foreign and military policies, specifically that of exporting liberal democracy around the globe. I will first consider what Strauss’s contribution to philosophy and, especially, political science has been. Then I will explain Strauss’s own views, insofar as they can be identified. (There is a specific reason why there is a problem here.) I will go on to consider how, if at all, Leo Strauss relates to neo-conservatives. Then I will turn to Strauss’s possible impact on public—specifically foreign—policy. Leo Strauss was nothing if not philosophically enigmatic. He championed a way of expressing philosophy that did not come right out with the sort of claims just anyone who speaks the language could understand. Or, putting it more precisely, he held that the most important philosophers did not speak simply but were, instead, deliberately duplicitous in what they said. This idea is not itself all that unfamiliar or mysterious. Most who are familiar with Plato’s dialogues know of the idea of “the Big Lie.” A somewhat reasonable version of this idea—as distinct from the plainly unreasonable one that requires governments to deceive the public—is that philosophers who are enmeshed in rather complicated and, at times, disturbing truths need to withhold what they know from the general public and give support, instead, to various conventions that people need in order to get on with their mundane lives. Just suppose that it is evident, after the most exasperating philosophical work, that there is no God, or free will, or that the bulk of the laws in one’s country are bunk. This may not be something ready for public consumption—most ordinary 179

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men and women are too busy with their daily affairs to be able to take time out and digest fully such disturbing discoveries. Then there is an even plainer idea that, in many societies, the rulers don’t wish it be broadcast: that they lack legitimacy, that their rule is unjustified. So, for simple self-protection and professional safety, philosophers need to speak enigmatically. These two reasons are discussed in Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing.1 The book’s thesis about the way philosophers speak with a forked tongue puts readers on guard about reaching assured conclusions regarding what Strauss himself thought. Strauss’s writings, especially about the great philosophers—for example, his meticulous and controversial reading of Plato’s various dialogues—left one in the dark about just what Strauss believed, although there were other works where his themes—for example, about the relationship between the dual traditions of Judeo-Christianity and Athenian secular philosophy—did appear to come through loud and clear (if not entirely dependably). So what, then, was Strauss’s main achievement with his approach to philosophical scholarship? First, studying the ancient thinkers was imperative, in order to get a clue as to what philosophy is all about. No facile reading of Plato or Aristotle (or even of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, or Locke) would suffice, nor would reading the more popular, even prominent, academic interpreters of these thinkers do. For example, Strauss would not encourage one to read Plato the way Gregory Vlastos did, focusing on this or that argument, here and there in a dialogue. Instead, Strauss maintained, Plato needs to be read as having a grand agenda, with the dialogues as whole pieces, dramas with an overall point. Karl Popper, who took on Plato and Strauss for holding to a fixed human nature, would not be a good guide to Plato either, by this account.2 Strauss reminds one of Aristotle’s teaching that no one under forty can begin to do philosophy. The following question was posed to Allan Bloom, for example, concerning his interpretative essay in his translation of Plato’s Republic: If he was right about the meaning of the book, many students and scholars aspiring to do philosophical work should actually just stick to street cleaning. Yet if, nonetheless, they could understand that this is part of what the Republic means, does that not undermine the claim? Bloom’s reply was this: “A man like Crito would be absurd if he tried to be like Socrates,” he wrote. True, he profits from being near that great man, and this is the best for him. But he is less of a man, less happy, clearly secondary. My common sense tells me that this is so, and that there is no way of changing it. . . . It is obviously up to all of us to act according to the good. But to do so we must know it. But to know it we must have knowledge of it, which means we must be philosophers, which is im-

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possible for us. Thus we can’t be moral simply. That again seems an intolerable teaching, but it was that of Plato and Aristotle.3

This seems quite puzzling and even incredible. If one studied Strauss further and read his Introduction to On Tyranny, an Interpretation of Xenophon’s Hiero,4 what one would have to conclude is that Strauss’s views about philosophy were even more perplexing than Bloom’s. They came to the following: The philosopher is essentially someone embarking on a search that it is unreasonable to think one can ever complete. Just as Socrates is reported to have thought that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing, the philosopher— the really true one (if such a one may be found)—cannot honestly conclude anything for sure. Despite Allan Bloom’s rhetorical flourishes in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students,5 no one can honestly know basic, absolute, and fundamental truths. Not that relativism is coherent, of course. What is most honest is to claim nothing. Some Straussians, like Harry Neumann, actually became nihilists. As one anonymous author wrote in an article posted on the web site of the Claremont Review of Books (http://www.claremont.org/ weblog/001150.html), “I’m prepared to accept what my friend Professor Scot Zentner has said on many occasions, that Professor Harry Neumann is the first honest Straussian (Neumann openly and quite cogently promulgates atheism/nihilism in his only book, Liberalism6).” Let’s pause here for a comment. Given the idealistic conception of knowledge that Plato appears to have promulgated, this view is not surprising. If one models human knowledge on the impossible dream of final, perfect, timeless forms, drawn from a formal science such as geometry, one will come to conclude that knowledge is indeed impossible, as are values—ergo, nihilism and cynicism.7 If we add to this the admittedly nearly other-worldly importance Strauss associated with the great philosophers and the depth of profundity of philosophy he seems to have insisted upon—evident in recent times only in, say, Martin Heidegger’s work, which Strauss, despite being an exiled Jew from pre–WWII Germany, admired—it all seems to have led him to a kind of elitism that we do, in fact, associate with Plato in our conventional interpretations of his thought. Socrates, in this picture, comes off as beyond reason, beyond any standards of good and evil, right and wrong. Yet, Strauss did not explicitly advance views that amounted to political elitism. Not that he was praising of the modern era of political thought. He even lumped together Hobbes and Locke on the basis of their similar fundamental

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philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, ethics. He appeared, also, to think of the natural rights tradition as misguided for taking freedom to be so vital and for allegedly neglecting virtue.8 However, Strauss also argued that the best bet for philosophers—who must at all costs stick together and form a friendship across the ages, which is perhaps the highest, albeit rather fruitless, way of life—is to promote and defend a version of classical liberalism. Naturally the philosopher has no taste for politics, that pedestrian, vulgar part of life. But, just as Socrates was dragged into politics by his pupils, since they knew that the city needed philosophy so as to have some connection with justice, so the community of philosophers must address philosophy—it must be politic about philosophy, prudent and protective of it. (In his famous discussion, What is Political Philosophy?,9 Strauss offers what amounts, to most of us, to an idiosyncratic conception of this discipline. It is not concerned with being philosophical about politics but, rather, with how to be political about philosophy—how to engage in it best while living in the various imperfect regimes in which we all must live.) The philosopher lives most effectively—which is to say, freely—in the classical liberal polity. Strauss, in a rare passage offering his own ideas, identified the good life for man as 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.10

He also observed that, “political freedom, and especially that political freedom that justifies itself by the pursuit of human excellence . . . requires the highest degree of vigilance.”11 And he added, “There is no adequate solution to the problem of virtue or happiness on the political or social plane.”12 If we put these three ideas together—which, it seems to me, do give expression to Strauss’ own views—we will arrive at a substantially classical liberal social-political outlook. It is the view that the task of politics is to protect basic, inalienable individual rights to life, liberty, property, and so forth, nothing more, and that the task of virtue, human excellence, or happiness is one that only the individual can strive to fulfill, either alone or in personal and voluntary association with others, never by force or coercion.

NEO-CONSERVATISM Now let me turn to neo-conservatism. This is a school of social-political thought associated with scholars and public policy writers such as Irving

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Kristol, Daniel Bell, Normal Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, to start with. Later, neo-conservatism became closely linked with such foreign-policy thinkers as Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz. The first group was characterized as neo-conservative because it’s different from the traditional American conservatives such as William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter, and others whose position about public affairs derives, ultimately, from the thought of Edmund Burke.13 What makes all of these conservative is their belief in deciding on political and public policy issues based on tried and true teachings that have been handed down through the ages. American conservatives, however, were unique in being faced with a radical political viewpoint by the Founders, who were influenced not so much be classical conservatives such as Burke but by classical liberals such as Locke. The neo-conservatives had been, prior to their conversion during the midand late 1960s and early 1970s, thinkers of the left. They were, it is safe to say, social democrats but not out-and-out Marxists or similar radical socialists. Still, they believed in a top-down political economy. Perhaps the best work justifying their version of statism is Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.14 The best indication of how neo-conservatives thought about politics is Irving Kristol’s book, Two Cheers for Capitalism.15 While Kristol & Co. began to see the wisdom of leaving a great many economic matters to the workings of the free market, they never gave up the idea of a strong central government, especially where foreign policy matters were concerned. This was, in part, because of their conviction that the Soviet Union was indeed an evil empire, so the government of a free society needed to be powerful. But there is more. Neo-conservatives have never had much sympathy for the modern version of classical liberalism, libertarianism (despite the fact that Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the first major academic work that gave philosophical credence to this school of political thought, was published by the neo-conservative house, Basic Books). They had disdain for what they took to be the naiveté of the libertarian idea that government must be strictly limited to the protection of individual rights. They also believed that too many aspects of society needed leadership, so they supported the paternalist aspects of the much-more-than-minimal state. Here is how their ideas are summarized by one scholar: These days [neo-conservative] is generally applied to those who believe that, first, American power can be a force for good, and, second, that encouraging democracy and freedom in the Middle East is both possible and necessary to safeguard the nation’s long term interests.16

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David Brooks, in his column about the closing of the neo-conservative journal, The Public Interest, writes, It was about this time people started calling The Public Interest a neo-conservative magazine. I’m not sure that word still has meaning, but if there was one core insight, it was this: Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it’s most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people’s permanent moral aspirations—the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness. That approach led to welfare policies that encouraged work and responsibility. It also led to what many derided as the overly idealistic foreign policies that are now contributing to the exhilarating revolutions we’re seeing across the Middle East.17

I am not a full-time student of neo-conservatism, so some of what I will conclude here, specifically about why these folks support an aggressive foreign policy by the United States of America, amounts to speculation—not a guess, but more of an educated guess. And here is also where some of what Leo Strauss and his students believe comes into play, at least to some extent. Neo-conservatives do hold the view that America is the best bet for the world—its institutional set-up is a very useful combination of modern elements having to do with the sovereignty of individuals and the older idea of a substantial role for government—and that this is a very promising idea that needs to be widely promulgated. Indeed, without its promulgation, there can arise and persist major threats to the countries that do embrace it, such as the United States of America. In short, unless the semi-free society is strong and not only ready to defend itself but also willing to go on the offensive in support of its system abroad, it will perish. Either you are willing to export liberal democracy or it will be crushed by all kinds of barbaric global groups. Here is some of the relevant text, from William Schneider, AEI fellow, written for The National Journal (March 22, 2003): Influential neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, have been arguing for years in favor of an assertive U.S. strategy in the post-Cold War world. In 1997, they and other like-minded intellectuals organized the Project for the New American Century, which urged then-President Clinton to confront Iraq. “America was being too timid, too weak, and too unassertive in the post-Cold War world,” Kristol argues. “American leadership was key to, not only world stability, but any hope for spreading democracy and freedom around the world.” Hartcher says, “This [war] is about the neoconservative view, the idealistic view, the Wilsonian view, that the world would be a better place if only America can make it that way.”

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The neoconservatives advocate a paradigm shift in which the United States spreads American values by asserting American power-by force, if necessary. The neoconservative champion is Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., now an ardent supporter of war with Iraq. “We must keep our nerve,” McCain said last month, “have the courage to understand what our experiences have taught us, have faith in the necessity and rightness of our cause, and do what must be done to make this a safer, freer, better world.” Has Bush adopted their cause? Apparently. In his February 26 [1997] speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, “By the resolve and purpose of America and our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history. And free people will keep the peace of the world.” “It is a bold, ambitious, and risky agenda. But it just may be the real reason America is going to war.”18

LEO STRAUSS, FATHER OF NEO-CONSERVATISM? Now let me return to Strauss. Let’s recall his prudential endorsement of classical liberalism as the best bet for philosophy.19 Strauss’s embrace of classical liberalism—or at least a watered-down version of it—as per liberal democracy did appear to influence neo-conservatives.20 They too believe, some of them because they were taught it by Strauss & Co., that their most important values are best advanced and preserved in a relatively free society, provided such a society is strong and wields power wisely both at home and abroad. This conviction, that philosophy’s, and therefore perhaps humanity’s, best bet is a semi-free society that vigorously promotes its institution across the globe, is very likely the legacy Strauss left to the neo-conservatives. And it is probably what puts neo-conservatives on the side of George W. Bush’s variety of modern conservatives—the “compassionate” statist rather than the classical liberal or American libertarian type. A very apt expression of how this view has held sway in America since the Monroe Doctrine, reinforced by the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and then expanded, in light of the recent annihilation of functional borders around the Western Hemisphere, by the administration of George W. Bush throughout the globe, comes from Bush’s 2005 Inaugural Address: “From the day of our founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the maker of heaven and earth.” Ergo? As Tom Wolfe put the point, “it is America’s destiny and duty to bring that salvation to all mankind.”21 The main difference in the neo-conservative vision is that the neo-conservatives see religion in largely sociological terms, as distinct from the likes of Bush who are, it seems, fully faith-based in their outlook. The former, however, are

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not, as a rule, religious or faithful. For example, as already noted, Strauss struggled with the problem of what to make of the two important traditions in the West, those of Athens and Jerusalem. He clearly preferred the thinking that comes from Athens but he could not deny the significance of the influence and thus importance of Jerusalem, namely, Judeo-Christianity. Certainly, self-respecting neo-conservatives would not ally themselves philosophically with George W. Bush’s conservative base, the religious right, or evangelical Christians. Most neo-conservatives are actually Jewish in their cultural-ethnic origins and too sophisticated to accept notions such as “being born again.” Yet, here too, there is some accommodation. As just mentioned, neoconservatives have from the start insisted on the civilizing role of religion. This may be associated with Strauss’s own view that the vulgar need Big Lies, as per a certain reading of Plato. The precepts of morality and other civilizing forces cannot be expected to come to most people by way of personal philosophical engagement, especially since their yield is highly uncertain and possibly nihilistic. Certain myths are necessary to sustain the great majority of human beings. Thus, the Straussean teachings do appear to accord with how matters have turned out on the domestic and international political fronts: vigorous defense of a version of liberal democracy; substantial support for certain elements of the free society and market, mainly regarding freedom of thought, religion and the press; support for compassionate welfare statism; and an aggressive position toward global forces that threaten any of this.22 The nature of this position may be appreciated from the fact that neo-conservatives, like Normal Podhoretz, had been very critical of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, accusing it of fostering “detente” and “Carterism without Carter.” The difference may be appreciated from the following from columnist Alan Bock: The most important difference between Reagan and the neo-conservatives is that Regan was both temperamentally and politically an optimist, convinced that freedom would eventually triumph. The neo-conservatives impulse—read the more substantive stuff—is deeply pessimistic, Hobbesian, seeking perils everywhere and turning to an ever-enlarged state apparatus to protect the clueless citizens.23

This, then, is one very plausible assessment of the relationship between Leo Strauss & Co., neo-conservatism, and current U.S. geopolitics. NOTES 1. (Glencoe, IL, Free Press, 1952.) 2. Helmut Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, eds. Scientism and Values (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1960).

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3. Personal correspondence from Bloom to Machan. 4. Leo Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” in On Tyranny (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). 5. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.) 6. Harry Neumann, Liberalism (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1991). Neumann says, “for genuine education, there are no ‘fixed entities,’ no facts only interpretations, points of view, opinions—or to put it more harshly, only conflicting prejudices, bigotries and biases or, if you will values.’ There is no fixed, impartial ‘objective’ standard permitting one to honestly say anything is true or false, right or wrong, progress or regress. . .” ( 274). As a corrective, you may wish to read Tibor R. Machan, Objectivity, Recovering Determinate Reality in Philosophy, Science, and Everyday Life (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). 7. See also, Harvey C. Mansfield, “A More Demanding Curriculum,” Claremont Review of Books 5, no. 1 (Winter 2004), where we read, “Relativism is not a crazy position to hold if it means that we lack proof of the major conflicting principles guiding our lives, but it is debilitating if it induces us to level all principles, equality petty and great, and thus dismiss greatness from our view” (78). 8. For more on this, see James R. Stoner, “Was Leo Strauss Wrong about John Locke?” The Review of Politics, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 553–73. 9. Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, the Hebrew University, 1955). 10. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 127. 11. Ibid., 131. 12. Strauss, “Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero,” 194. 13. Buckley’s main pertinent work is Up From Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); Kirk’s is The Conservative Mind, From Burke to Elliot (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1960); and Rossiter’s is The Political Thought of the American Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 14. (New York: Basic Books, 1976.) 15. (New York: Basic Books, 1978.) 16. Clifford D. May, President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy (a Washington, D.C., think tank), The New Republic, February 14, 2005, 4. 17. (The New York Times, March 5, 2005). 18. http://www.aei.org/news/newsID.16723/news_detail.asp. See, also, Deepak Lal, In Praise of Empires: Globalization and Order (New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2004), for a different defense of an aggressive American foreign policy of intervention, arguing that global trade, a highly beneficial process, requires America’s power to keep order around the world. 19. Just exactly why philosophy ought to be cherished is not made clear by Strauss & Co., and their implicit or explicit nihilism calls the merit of the idea into serious question. Arguably, their championing of philosophy amounts to a case of defending a vested interest. 20. This point is partly disputed in an extremely fair-minded treatment of Strauss in Mark Lilla, “Leo Strauss: The European,” The New York Review of Books, October 21, 2004, and “The Closing of the Straussean Mind,” The New York Review of Books,

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November 4, 2004. Lilla does not appear to grant even this much of a connection between Strauss and neo-conservatism. I believe he is mistaken there. 21. Tom Wolfe, “The Doctrine That Never Died,” The New York Times, January 30, 2005), 17 wk. 22. For a critical assessment of this position, see Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The authors make the case that the United States, and the West in general, won the Cold War because they remained largely non-aggressive and thus kept the moral high-ground. America’s moral authority is at risk. That is because the policies adopted in response to the catastrophic horror of Sept. 11, 2001 have rested on a series of critically flawed premises, namely, that the challenges we face are essentially military in character and that military power alone can deliver victory. And while this may be true when barbarian fights barbarian for strips of territory, it is a profound mistake when civilization hopes to emerge triumphant.

Very similar criticisms have come from various neo-Objectivist and Libertarian sources such as the Cato Institute and in other works by me. See, e.g., Tibor R. Machan, The Passion for Liberty (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), especially chapters 13, “Military Defense of a Free Society,” and 18, “Democracy and Foreign Affairs.” For my more direct discussion of the Iraqi war, see several chapters in Tibor R. Machan, Neither Left nor Right (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2004). 23. Alan W. Bock, “The Neocon ‘War with No Dimensions’,” The Orange County Register, Sunday, March 6, 2005, Commentary, 4.

Chapter Fifteen

Tocqueville and Rand, Contrasting Views of Individualism

INDIVIDUALISM—A HUNDRED YEARS APART As a rather friendly observer of nineteenth-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville oddly shared a view of individualism with someone who isn’t usually linked to his political viewpoint, namely, Karl Marx. This is understandable, to some degree, since Tocqueville held various aristocratic premises, the absence of which Marx also found to be lamentable in America’s largely capitalist society. Yet there was a difference between these two thinkers that influenced their attitudes toward the new world. Tocqueville admired individual independence or individuality, even while he expressed concerns about individualism. Marx, on the other hand, was opposed to the very possibility of individual independence, claiming that “The human essence is the true collectivity of man.”1 Why, then, did Tocqueville have the concerns he expressed about individualism, given his respect for individuality? It is worth exploring this matter because the American political idea—as well as its purified version, libertarianism—has been associated with some version of individualism both by its critics and defenders. Here is where Ayn Rand’s version of individualism—along with that of David L. Norton’s—can help us out as a remedy to what Tocqueville appears to have misunderstood.2 The crux of the matter, to provide a hint as to where this discussion is headed, concerns Tocqueville’s pessimistic view of human nature, not an unusual feature of the generally conservative social and political philosophy he articulated in Democracy in America.3 Drawing as he did on a religious—indeed, Roman Catholic—tradition in his understanding of human nature, it is not all that curious that, while admiring the human capacity for independent thought and, thus, 189

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a polity that nurtured it, Tocqueville also feared the prospect of democratic or free men and women withdrawing into themselves, yielding to narrowly selfish inclinations, and thus leaving the concerns of the public realm to a central government. In this way, Tocqueville showed a curiously paradoxical worry that it would be individualism that fueled expanded statism in free societies.4

In contrast, and less paradoxically, Rand believed that an ethical individualism or egoism would fend off statism, provided it was properly understood and practiced. If Tocqueville’s pessimistic understanding of human nature is traded in for Rand’s more neutral or even optimistic view—her “new concept of egoism” or individualism—the results of individualism would not be the shunting of public responsibility but the vigilant pursuit of a public policy of limited government.

TOCQUEVILLE’S INDIVIDUALITY VERSUS INDIVIDUALISM In a widely discussed passage Tocqueville says, in the midst of the continual movement which agitates a democratic community, the tie which unites one generation to another is relaxed or broken; every man there readily loses all trace of ideas of his forefathers, or takes no care about them. Men living in this state of society cannot derive their belief from the opinions of the class to which they belong; for, so to speak, there are no longer any classes, or those which still exist are composed of such mobile elements, that the body can never exercise any real control over its members. As to the influence which the intellect of one man may have on that of another, it must necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens, placed on an equal footing, are all closely seen by each other; and where, as no signs of incontestable greatness or superiority are perceived in any one of them, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition for trusting the authority of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up in his own, and affects from that point to judge the world.5

Why does Tocqueville have this view of American democracy and culture? He answers this by saying, I have shown how it is that in ages of equality every man seeks for his opinions within himself; I am now to show how it is that in the same ages all his feelings are turned towards himself alone. Individualism is a novel expression, to which a novel idea has given birth. Our fathers were only acquainted with egoisme (selfishness). Selfishness is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. In-

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dividualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Selfishness originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

He goes on, and I quote him at some length here, to elaborate this as follows: Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. Among aristocratic nations, as families remain for centuries in the same condition, often in the same spot, all generations become, as it were, contemporaneous. A man almost always knows his forefathers and respects them; he thinks he already sees his remote descendants and he loves them. He willingly imposes duties on himself towards the former and the latter, and he will frequently sacrifice his personal gratifications to those who went before and to those who will come after him. Aristocratic institutions, moreover, have the effect of closely binding every man to several of his fellow citizens. As the classes of an aristocratic people are strongly marked and permanent, each of them is regarded by its own members as a sort of lesser country, more cherished and more tangible than the country at large. As in aristocratic communities all the citizens occupy fixed positions, one above another, the result is that each of them always sees a man above himself whose patronage is necessary to him, and below himself another man whose co-operation he may claim. Men living in aristocratic ages are therefore almost always closely attached to something placed out of their own sphere, and they are often disposed to forget themselves. It is true that in these ages the notion of human fellowship is faint and that men seldom think of sacrificing themselves for mankind; but they often sacrifice themselves for other men. In democratic times, on the contrary, when the duties of each individual to the race become much more clear, devoted service to any one man becomes more rare; the bond of human affection is extended, but it is relaxed. Among democratic nations new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition; the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced. Those who went before are soon forgotten; of those who will come after, no one has any idea: the interest of man is confined to those in close propinquity to himself. As each class gradually approaches others and mingles with them, its members become undifferentiated and lose their class identity for each other. Aristocracy had made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy breaks that chain and severs every link of it.

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As social conditions become more equal, the number of persons increases who, although they are neither rich nor powerful enough to exercise any great influence over their fellows, have nevertheless acquired or retained sufficient education and fortune to satisfy their own wants. They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands. Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.6

It is necessary to relate these long passages from Tocqueville because he reveals in them his conception of individualism, which is but a fraction loftier—by which he means more ennobling and dignified—than selfishness. And Tocqueville’s idea of selfishness is not of the type that we encounter even in the crudest of ethical egoisms, according to which one ought to serve one’s own interests as one conceives of them.7 It is, rather, of the psychological egoist type, according to which one will, driven by one’s instincts, serve one’s raw, momentary desires. This is the egoism associated with Thomas Hobbes and how he understands human beings in a state of nature, bent on overcoming the fear of death, bent on self-preservation and no more. As Tocqueville characterizes it, there are “too ardent and too exclusive tastes for well-being that men in times of equality feel.”8 Men have what Tocqueville characterizes as an innate “love of wealth, but they can still [be] persuade[d] . . . to enrich themselves by honest means,” which is the benign version of individualism that religion can help them to cultivate in a democracy. He states unequivocally that “Materialism, among all nations, is a dangerous disease of the human mind.”9 Individualism, as Tocqueville conceives of it, is more elevated, but only by a bit. Individualism “disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.” Why would this be Tocqueville’s understanding of how an individualist would act? I believe this is based on his admittedly implicit religious and, therefore, substantially pessimistic view of human nature. As a result, he does not credit human beings with a broad, what we might call classical, egoist sensibility we can derive from Aristotelianism. In terms of such a sensibility, a good human individual attends to his or her basic requirements and aspirations, pursues his or her happiness— eudaemonia—in life, which, however, includes one’s public interest, as well. A classical individualist or egoist is one who realizes that, apart from

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his or her own good life and those of his or her intimates, there is a community within which all this is to be achieved that needs being taken good care of. Not that people will necessarily conduct themselves according to these ethics, but there is nothing innately blocking them from doing so, such as original sin or a Hobbesian anti-social disposition. As Rand argues, A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code. Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a “tendency” to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.10

Since paying heed to the structure of one’s society is clearly among the projects that are best for an individual, and since any individual can be committed to pursuing what is in fact good for oneself in this robust sense—for without taking care of the polity, all else is put at risk (just recall Rick’s words at the end of Casablanca, when he decides to forego romance so as to secure liberty, which is in evident peril)—Tocqueville’s belief that those of an individualist disposition would neglect public affairs must be grounded in his underlying pessimism. This is the pessimism so familiar within conservative sensibilities; Edmund Burke is the classic proponent, and Russell Kirk is his twentieth-century epigone. Rand’s Optimistic Individualism Contrast this with the much more optimistic (or, at least, neutral) conception of the human individual that we find in Ayn Rand. She sees human beings as having the choice to become morally excellent, and she understands “moral excellence” to mean the fullest possible actualization in each individual’s life of one’s human nature—being as completely as possible a rational animal, “a being of volitional consciousness.”11

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Ayn Rand rejects the Christian, Hobbesian, or Freudian idea that there are built-in destructive or even anti-social drives or instincts within human nature. This is her main critique of the doctrine of original sin, for example.12 The idea that human beings are born tabula rasa does not mean for Rand—as it does for the very popular and prominent contemporary philosopher of mind, Harvard University’s Johnstone Family Professor Steven Pinker—that there is no human nature, nothing definite that a human mind is.13 It means, rather, that human nature involves a creative consciousness, one that has the capacity to freely attend to the world, to be alert to what the world provides it via the human sensory organs and what that activated faculty of human reason can discern by integrating and differentiating the evidence so provided. Rand’s philosophy of human nature—with its major component of freedom of the will, and the moral responsibility to excel as such a being of volitional consciousness—leaves it entirely up to the individual to actualize the potential for becoming as good at being human as one’s circumstances make possible. This kind of egoism or individualism requires one to live rationally, which in turn requires that one acknowledge not only the immense benefits of a successful personal, family, fraternal, and related life but also those of a citizen. Accordingly, whereas Tocqueville’s pessimistic conception of an individualist human nature leads him to be deeply concerned with how individualism can serve the purpose of securing a just and effective political regime, Rand’s conception implies the opposite. Only an individualist understanding of the moral life—the understanding that makes prudence a moral imperative at all levels of one’s life—can promise a successful disposition toward politics. As she puts the point, Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men: living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreement they entered).14

In this connection, it will be useful to consider certain points raised recently by Adrian Bardon.15 He brings up an issue that’s central concerning the nature of basic individual rights that the American Founders proposed as the foundations of a constitutional government (and which were, in fact, partly incorporated and elaborated upon in the Bill of Rights). Bardon argues that he has successfully “cast doubt on that approach to rights” that holds that “there are negative rights that cannot be outweighed.”16 Interestingly, there is no need to go much further since Bardon’s way of mak-

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ing his point already shows how wide of the mark he is concerning an essential feature or nature of rights. Specifically, individual rights, the inalienable sort the Declaration lists, aren’t like other good things—such as ice skating, volleyball, dinner at home or at a restaurant, a vacation in Hawaii or one in Italy—which may be weighed and compared. It’s a category mistake to think they are, not unlike thinking that one can weigh seconds or that fingers can think about something. Consider a very widely accepted right, that of a woman to be free of rape. What would it mean to have such a right outweighed? Bardon’s conception of such a basic right raises the possibility that someone might weigh it against, say, a desperate male’s desire to gain sexual satisfaction by using her against her will. But this is quite out of the question—the two are incomparable, incommensurate. The right to be free is a principle—a firm limit or a basic standard of right conduct if you will—which identifies the fact that women are free to do as they choose involving their own bodies, that they are sovereign authorities concerning how to live their sex lives, to whom they will give their consent to engage in sex, and so on.17 Of course, Bardon is concerned with property rights but he forgets that these, too, are rights to action, not rights to objects. As Ayn Rand makes clear, “the right to property is a right to action, like all the others: it is not the right to an object, but to the action and the consequences of producing or earning that object. It is not a guarantee that a man will earn any property, but only a guarantee that he will own it if he earns it. It is the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values.”18 Put another way, the right to private property is a right to acquire and to hold—which are both actions—various items that no one has previously acquired and is holding—or ones that others who have acquired them and are holding them are willing, freely, to part with (another action). So, in fact, private property rights are akin to rights to act freely—as when one acts to engage in consensual sex or work or recreation. In the case of property rights, one acts to engage in, as it were, consensual acquisition or holding of some items. (Notice, no one may impose ownership on another against his or her consent because of this right to freedom of actions such as acquisition and holding.) Thus, property rights identify someone’s sphere or range of freedom of action vis-à-vis items in the world, not unlike the manner in which the right to freedom of speech spells out spheres of freedom of action vis-à-vis verbal or written expression of ideas. Indeed, these latter presuppose the right to private property, for speeches need to be given someplace to which one has a right or gained permission from those who do, and writing takes places on materials (paper, blackboards, sand, computers, etc.)

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It is true, of course, that others could well desperately need the items someone has come to own by exercising the right to acquisition and holding, but since that exercise may not be interfered with, and since interference with it would place others in the position of violating the agent’s basic rights—that is, sovereignty—consent needs to be secured in order to obtain even such desperately needed items. A need cannot be weighed against a right, any more than a wish or desire or urgent want can be weighed against a right. There can be no weighing involved, not between rights, nor between rights and needs, and so on, although a rights holder could very well weigh whether to hang on to what he or she owns, contribute it to the person in dire need, contribute it to some cause or project, or otherwise dispose of it, in light of his or her weighing of the importance of these alternative possibilities. The weighing is not of different rights or different people’s rights but of the importance or value of the goals to which one may contribute what one has the right to freely acquire. Here is what would happen if the weighing were about rights: someone would have to do the weighing. By what right would such a person weigh other people’s rights? Would that person’s right to weigh also be open to being weighed? By whom? The whole process would amount to a conceptual and public policy mess. In fact, the role—or conceptual point—of basic individual rights is to remove from public policy, based on constitutional laws that rest on rights, the element of arbitrariness by basing decisions on self-consistent, compossible principles—that is, on the rule of law—instead. The very conceptual point of rights within the sphere of social, political, and legal policy is lost if those rights are subject to being weighed, since they are supposed to be the rock bottom of public policy decision making—if I have a right to do X, this is the end of the story—none may act against me as I do X. There is no such thing as “weighing rights”—the idea is what philosophers call a category mistake, akin to talk about weighing, say, time or concepts. Indeed, to even consider weighing rights is to suggest that the importance of human beings, vis-à-vis their place in the citizenry, may be weighed against each other within the realm of politics, something that had been abandoned once the idea of inherent status was jettisoned, finally, so no one could justly claim to be more important than someone else as far as the law of the land is concerned.

WHEREOF DEMOCRACY IN INDIVIDUALISM? An interesting beginning in the direction of understanding the relationship between individualism and democracy is forged in the works of David L. Nor-

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ton.19 It is not my purpose here to explore in detail Norton’s ideas on this score. Suffice it to remark that he is much more positive about the prospects of such a fusion: In eudaimonistic perspective, the piece of work that each individual is has its associations, that is, its community and tradition. They represent the natural line of growth of the self from interests that appeared initially (in self-discovery) to be its own exclusively, to inclusive interests, that is, from the exclusively conceived self of classical liberalism to the inclusive self of eudaimonism.20

The precise political, let alone public policy, implications of this eudaemonism are not at issue here. Norton envisions a more activist state, compared to Rand and the school of libertarians whom she has inspired.21 However, no longer is it the case that individualism per se must be seen to be an obstacle to public spiritedness.22 As a suggestion, the democratic element in a fully free society that is composed of individualist-minded citizens who are also public spirited would be twofold.23 On the one hand, there would have to be a democratic commencement of such a society—or a democratic continuation of it; otherwise, the country would disintegrate. On the other hand, the scope of democratic influence on public policy would be limited to what public policy itself is limited to, namely, the complex but unambiguous purpose of securing for all citizens the protection of their basic rights, as spelled out in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. NOTES 1. Karl Marx. Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), 126. 2. Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, A New Concept of Egoism (New York: New American Library, 1961); David L. Norton, Personal Destinies, A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). Norton’s Democracy and Moral Development, A Politics of Virtue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), may be taken as a start on a remedy of Tocqueville’s misunderstanding. Another good source for understanding the different types of individualism is Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual, A Contribution to a History of Subjectivity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). See, also, Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism, The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being (London: Routledge, 1998); and Capitalism and Individualism, Reframing the Argument for the Free Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). Rand’s moral individualism is on full exhibit in her best selling novel, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943).

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3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vols. 1 & 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945). 4. Tocqueville, of course, is mostly concerned with how the free society’s encouragement of relative equality of conditions would influence its political affairs. This may be a product, in part, of considering his own and his own country’s very strong aristocratic traditions. I will not be concerned so much with this aspect of de Tocqueville’s thought, except indirectly. 5. Oliver Zunz and Alan S. Kahan, The Tocqueville Reader: A Life In Letters and Politics (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002), 163. 6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 98–99. 7. See, for example, Tom L. Beauchamp and Norman E. Bowie, eds., Ethical Theory and Business (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 16, where the editors identify the view as holding that “all choices either do involve or should involve self-promotion as their sole objective. Thus a person’s only goals and perhaps only moral duty is self-promotion; one owes no sacrifices and no obligations to others.” 8. Tocqueville notably feared the equality of conditions he associated with America. (He evidently ignored many Americans in this observation, especially, of course, slaves and Indians.) But, in a fully free society, the only type of equality that gains official support, as a matter of law and public policy, is the equal protection of individual rights. This equality does support greater equality of conditions than a system of protected social and economic classes, but it certainly does not demand equality of conditions; no one can maintain that the genius of Bill Gates, which is well received in a regime of equal rights protection, demonstrates equality of economic conditions in a society. And, of course, there is no reason it should—both exceptional effort and good fortune undermine such equality, as they naturally should. 9. Ibid., 154–55. 10. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), 137, in “John Galt’s Speech.” 11. Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness. 12. Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: Random House, 1961), “Galt’s Speech.” 13. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). 14. Ayn Rand, “A Nation’s Unity,” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, 2, 3. 15. Adrian Bardon, “From Nozick to Welfare Rights.” Critical Review 14 (2000): 481–501. 16. Ibid., 496. 17. This sovereignty does not mean, as some have held against libertarianism, that whatever the woman chooses to do is morally unobjectionable. There is a vast difference between having a right to do X and its being morally proper to do X, and there is also a vast difference between morally condemning and legally banning doing X. Sovereign individuals are self-governing but not always morally right. 18. Ayn Rand, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1967), 322. Both Nozick and Rand make clear, pace Bardon’s contention about defenders of private property rights, that earning isn’t the sole means by which owner-

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ship can be established—we have a right to our hair or lungs without having earned these because to act to gain and to keep them, as it were, is part of the process of growing up and becoming ourselves. (Life itself is a process of self-generated action so that even the right to life is a right to a wide range of actions.) See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 32–33; and Ayn Rand, “Untitled Letter, Part II,” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. II, #10, 169. 19. Norton, Democracy and Moral Development. 20. Ibid., 148. As Norton makes clear, “For eudemonistic individualism, individual self-actualization is inherently social” (134). 21. See, for example, Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty & Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1990); Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court, 1989); and Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism (London: Routledge, 1998). 22. In this connection, see Tibor R. Machan, Libertarianism Defended (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), especially chapter 1, “Individualism and the Vitality of Community Life,” and chapter 8, “A Positive Libertarian View of Government.” 23. Some, such as Siegfried van Duffel, claim that “The idea that people are sovereign beings does not allow us to infer that they have an obligation to respect each others’ sovereignty.” “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Critical Review 16, no. 4 (2004): 371. Few if any libertarians hold that just being sovereign suffices to obligate one to respect the sovereignty of others. Van Duffel, while quoting a passage from my own book on rights, fails to examine how I, for example, argue for that obligation. Essentially, I show that the moral responsibility to think, to conduct oneself as a rational individual, demonstrates to one “who would,” as Locke might have put it, “but consult one’s reason,” that a regime of individual rights is to one’s rational self-interest. That, in turn, obligates one to abide by that regime and respect others’ sovereignty.

Chapter Sixteen

Can and Should the Constitution Be Rescued?

Is the Constitution a document that one ought to want to rescue? The answer to that question must be approached by considering the substance of the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration sketches the political philosophy on which the Constitution is largely based. Not completely, though, because the original Constitution was, of course, a compromise that made it possible to form the United States of America. Nor was everyone among the Founders on board with what the Declaration set forth as the founding political philosophy of the United States. Too many colonists wanted to keep slavery alive and in order to bring them on board and not have a disunited country—one that would be weak and powerless to resist invasions—the framers made some compromises. Those, ironically, eventually nearly tore the country apart; although there were other reasons for the Civil War, one main reason was slavery. Nor is it uncontroversial to believe that unity is such a high value that those who might wish to secede may be stopped from doing so. (Of course, seceding with hostages, like the slaves, would itself be highly objectionable.) Whatever the complexities of the founding of the United States, one can still turn to the Declaration and detect in it the most fundamental, albeit not fully implemented, tenets of the U.S. Constitution. Had there been enough people who agreed with what the Declaration actually declared, the Constitution would have turned out better. The most crucial elements of the Declaration are contained in the passage that starts “We hold these truths to be selfevident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable [inalienable] Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .” As Abraham Lincoln said about the Declaration, the signers 201

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“meant simply to declare the right so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances might permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which would be familiar to all and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”1 Following the nice summary of fundamental individualism, the most revolutionary aspect of the Declaration in terms of human political history, there is the additional provision that governments are instituted among us to secure our rights—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others; and they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. This statement is perhaps the most radical—meaning going to the roots of the issues of politics—in human political history. Up to that point, the official doctrine of most societies—small, large, ancient, modern—had been that sovereignty—meaning supreme power and government—lies with governments: the king, czar, pharaoh, Caesar, or the tribal chief. In every one of these forms of rule, throughout human history, the basic assumption was that the people who make up the population or the society are subjects and not citizens. Even today, throughout the United Kingdom, people are referred to as subjects, meaning they are subject to the will of the monarch. In Western monarchies, very few take this literally anymore, although the queen is still called “her majesty,” which in American political terms is a meaningless title. It is instructive that there’s no majesty in American politics. While “her majesty” is a woman of great wealth, so Bill Gates is a man of great wealth, yet he is not “his majesty.” The reason that American politics, despite its messiness, does not include such phony honors is that revolution changed our conception of sovereignty in a political context. The notion that the American Revolution and the Declaration laid out is that you and I and each one of us is sovereign, and that, in our sovereignty, we can choose to get together and hire a government. If we do, the government is our agent for certain limited purposes. In other words, it is a free association between the people of a country and some of those people willing to serve in the capacity of governors. Governors of free, sovereign citizens don’t serve on the basis of their more or less arbitrary will, like kings used to. The kings were allegedly instruments of God here on earth, and their duty was to make sure that the realm that they ruled was peaceful and taken care of, and the people were treated decently. That story of the legitimacy of monarchism sounded credible, to some extent, because many did hold to the view that God had agents on earth to govern us, to some degree. But the American Revolution disputed that story, claiming

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that God or nature would not be selective in endowing human beings with basic rights. Instead, we all have these rights, and the king is merely pretending to have a special status among us. Of course, sometimes kings acted honorably enough. But still, the Founders—learning their political theory from the likes of John Locke, who vigorously argued against the divine rights of kings—thought it was a fundamentally mistaken idea. They held that every human being has the basic rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That means that the “king” is just like we all are, in this respect of having basic rights. Why, then, should the king rule you? We did not permit the king to rule us. It’s not like a doctor, where if you want the doctor’s services you allow him to “order or rule” you. “Lie down, go to sleep and I’ll cut you up.” That is what doctors tell you. That is a form of rule but it’s with our consent. If a doctor did that without our consent, he would be a criminal. He would be arrested for violating our rights. But nobody arrested the king for violating our rights because it was believed that the king was a superior being, superior to everyone else. The Founders said “no,” that it was an unjustified view about people, dividing them into superior and inferior ones, that the story we were told lacked proper justification. The divine right of kings is a doctrine that the major teachers of the Founders, like Locke in the seventeenth to eighteenth century, disputed. Out of that, the Founders learned that this whole monarchy story was deceptive, or at least misleading. At worst, it’s a deliberate distortion. Of course, we need an argument that human beings have the rights that the Founders declared we all have. But for the purpose of the Declaration, they wanted to treat that conviction as self-evident. They said “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” That doesn’t mean that they are self-evident but rather that, for the limited purpose of a declaration, the rights mentioned were going to be treated as if they were self-evident. For example, the law of gravity seems self-evident. No one asks for its proof, not under ordinary circumstances. But one could question, examine, and study it, as physicists do all the time. Since the question can reasonably be raised by someone, “Does gravitation operate here and everywhere?” it’s not really self-evident. Yet, for purposes of most activities and events in the vicinity of earth, gravity can be treated as if it were self-evident. Similarly, for the limited purpose of declaring where they stand, the contention that every human being has these fundamental rights and that they are unalienable can be treated as self-evident. But let us now look at what inalienable means. It means that one cannot lose the rights, even if one wanted to. Even if one said “treat me as your slave,” that would be impossible. One’s life is one’s own, period, if one has

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an inalienable right to it. That is because our humanity grounds those rights, the very fact that we are human beings. That and the fact that we live in the community of other human beings justifies the claim that we have a right to our life, our liberty, and our pursuit of happiness. In other words, to lose one’s basic rights, one would have to lose one’s humanity, become non-human (e.g., completely brain-dead). Even then, to use a person against his or her consent would require proof that no person exists any longer. Suppose that one of your relatives became brain-dead, that is, completely lost the capacity to function as a thinking, choosing human being. Such a person, at least arguably, no longer has the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness because he’s lost his humanity. (But that needs to be shown!) That can happen to some people. But ordinarily intact human beings can’t lose their rights. This is so radical that even most Americans don’t understand it. They think, for example, that when a group of people using democracy decide that our lives may be conscripted by the military, or that our property may be taken to, say, build a sports stadium or museum, or our income confiscated to pay for what they want to provide to people, all of that is okay because the majority has decided so. But if our rights are inalienable rights, that is all wrong. You can’t lose your rights because a majority in your community wants this to happen. We know this well enough since most of us clearly oppose a lynch mob. That is, we recognize that no matter how large the crowd that wants to abrogate justice by hanging someone who hasn’t been convicted, justice may not be abrogated. Why? Because even an accused and highly suspected criminal is a human being and has the right that all human beings have, inalienably. These inalienable rights apply, of course, only within human communities, not when one is alone on some desert island. Rights are relational concepts, pertaining to the freedom one must have to act when others could rob one of that freedom. But they should not do so; that is what it means to have such basic rights. All of this implies a radical political philosophy, one that explains why Americans are treated so strangely by most people around the world, especially by intellectuals, politicians, and diplomats, because their philosophy, the fundamental tenets of the American political tradition, does not tolerate what most rulers throughout the world are doing and what those who support them defend. Even our various governments are in violation of our rights, and those intellectuals who still hang on to the idea that government grants our rights are confused about it all. They give a story of how implicitly we gave consent for government to take from us our liberty, property, and so forth, but it’s all a gross mistake or ruse. The fact is that you can’t lose your rights and

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cannot give them to government. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t. You can agree to do certain things, such as becoming a patient of a dentist or surgeon, but you don’t lose your rights because your individual agreement is necessary; others cannot agree for you. So if I disagree with conscription and don’t choose to serve in the military, there is no justice in making me serve. I can be coerced to serve but that is not something that can be justified. Coercion is the means that uncivilized people—people who are barbarians—use to resolve disputes. Civilized human beings settle problems by means of voluntary consent and agreement. They form their groups, not by holding guns to people’s heads and saying “you’ve got to join,” but by convincing them that it’s a worthy thing to join. No one conscripted you to listen to me, although some of you may be here reluctantly. Ordinarily, when you unite with others in a free society, you do so of your own free will, by your own initiative, not because somebody coerces you to do so. And this is implicit in the doctrine sketched in the Declaration. It’s not quite contained in the Constitution, only up to a point. After the Civil War, when the slaves were free, the Constitution was on this score squared with the Declaration of Independence. That is one of the reasons that Lincoln made reference to “four score and seven years ago,” because it was then that the Declaration was drafted and presented to the world. It declared that all of us are created equal, not just whites, tall people, or pleasant ones, but everybody, even those whom you don’t like. Sadly, for too many, that includes blacks, gays, foreigners, immigrants, and so forth. But they are all human beings and have inalienable rights in human communities. A document, however, is only good as long as people stay loyal to it. Therefore, the statement that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance applies to guarding the meaning of a just legal document, including a constitution—and not only the Constitution’s content as understood by those who accepted it initially and by what it implies. America, however, is a melting pot of many people. It melds all sorts of people, and that is just what it was meant to do. But America cannot remain the free society the Founders meant it to be if some of these people try to impose upon the country a form of socialism or fascism or theocracy and so forth. Nor can America tolerate transforming itself into tribalism. Sadly, the Constitution, even originally, contained certain provisions that later lent themselves to easy misinterpretation. For instance, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution includes the famous interstate commerce clause. It says that Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Recently, courts have read this to mean that Congress may manipulate, regiment, and set various conditions for interstate commerce, but others read it as meaning that Congress is authorized to regularize interstate commerce, which is to say

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that all the states may be made to conform to free trade and may not impose duties and tariffs. In our day, the following is construed to be interstate commerce: imagine that there stands a little grocery store on the California side of the border between California and Arizona. In that grocery store, locally made honey is sold. But because there is another store in Arizona that also sells honey, and because the price of that honey is affected by the price of the honey the California store is selling, there is supposed to be interstate commerce in play. Simply because there is an effect through the marketplace, it is called interstate. No trade between the two stores needs to occur, just the possibility that someone might go from one state to the other state, since the price is different; that alone qualifies it as interstate commerce, subject to government regimentation. Now with these influences in U.S. history—and I only mention these to illustrate the point—one can appreciate how difficult it is to keep the original meaning of the Constitution intact. It’s very difficult, especially because most Americans had been engaged in building and did not spend enough time guarding the most precious thing, its Constitution with its fundamental principles derived from the Declaration. So, you can ask, is it really worth saving this basic legal document when it has gotten so corrupted, so undermined? Some of the developments were welcome—for example, the abolition of slavery. But others were produced by jurists guilty of odd interpretations, equivocations, fuzzy thinking, ambiguities, and vagueness in order to make it fit their ideological agenda. The Constitution is a mess. Simply consider what the U.S. Supreme Court did in July 2005, in its rule in Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut. The court ruled that a city has the authority to condemn perfectly good private property that is being used productively and is not a blight, and then lease it to some big business that would bring in more development and pay higher taxes. This is like someone arguing that “I may take your car because I have better places to drive in it than you do. You’re driving to these silly places like Las Vegas or Big Sur, whereas I want to go to Kansas City, where life is real. So, your car is not worth your having, it is worth my having it.” What kind of crazy thinking is this? But the Supreme Court of the United States thought that they were justified by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that private property can be taken for “public use”—which means to build a courthouse or a police station or maybe a road, although even that is a stretch. And even then, government must compensate those from whom property had been taken for these bona fide public uses, and at the market price. This bears little resemblance to the July 2005 interpretation of eminent domain in Kilo v. City of New London, Connecticut. Indeed, by all

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accounts, that interpretation lacked any validity at all, given the inalienability of our rights as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court was willing to churn out this utterly contorted ruling, thereby abrogating a fundamental constitutional rights by completely misreading the Constitution. “Public use” most reasonably means that which all of the public requires, like courthouses, a military base, a police station—meaning, whatever serves the public qua public, as citizens of a free country. It means everyone in the country, without exception. So, by all logic, there are very few things that qualify for public use in the American political tradition. Of course, once the public realm has been expanded to include anything, there is no longer any clear meaning to “public use,” so this becomes yet another instance of how to abrogate and undermine the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. To resist such corruption requires an eternal vigilance that many people are unwilling or unable to provide because they’ve got a life to live. They’ve got other things to do, such as drive their kids to school, hurry to work, fill out forms, and so on. They can’t pour over Constitutional scholarship. But there is a book I want to mention here, one that will help with figuring out the best interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, one that accords with the Declaration’s meaning. The book, written by Professor Randy Barnett’s, is called Restoring the Lost Constitution (published by Princeton University Press in 2004). It shows that the fundamental meaning of the U.S. Constitution, in line with the political principles sketched in the Declaration, is that Congress and government have the authority to exercise only defensive powers. They can’t run our lives—order us regarding what to smoke, what not to smoke, whether one may be a prostitute, gambler, or marijuana grower, and so on. Nothing peaceful is to be placed under the government’s jurisdiction. They may only do one thing: make laws that secure our rights. That amounts to the defensive use of force, nothing more. Consider how normal and commonsensical that is. You, amongst yourself—as you live your life, with your family, with your neighbors, with your co-workers—recognize that the only time you can justifiably raise your fists against someone is if they have already raised theirs against you. That the only way you can shoot somebody is if you have a clear and present danger or highly probable cause that they’ll shoot you. You can’t just say, “I want some sugar or a DVD or some other resources I lack, so I’ll go to my neighbor and use my gun to get it.” Nobody except a violent criminal thinks that this is okay. That is so, even if your objective is very important; even if you need, for example, to drive somebody to work or to the hospital and your car is on the blink, you have to ask your neighbor, “Please allow me to use your car so as to drive my relative to the hospital.” You don’t go over there with a

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baseball bat and say, “I’ll take your car and, if you resist, I’m going to hit you.” We all know that that is not civilized behavior. That is what brutes do; that is what bullies do. But somehow, when it comes to politics, this is all forgotten. We vote in legislation that coerces people to fund a sports stadium, or other people’s health care, education, recreation, or retirement. Where does this come from? What kinds of ethics justifies this? Certainly the American political tradition doesn’t justify it, because you have a right to your life, a right to your liberty, and a right to the pursuit of happiness; that means that anyone who wants a stadium has to pay for it, not rob you and your bank account to subsidize that stadium. And there are a legion of other things that people take for granted, as if they had the authority to do it through the democratic process. But that is not democracy. That is tyranny, just like a lynch mob. Democracy means that you vote on those things that are open for a vote. And, in a free country, what is open for a vote is the selection of those who administer the law. That is it. You don’t get to vote on other people’s haircuts, even if you don’t like them very much. You don’t say, “Well, okay, what do you think of this guy’s hair? Anybody think he should change it? Yeah.” And then he has to. No, you don’t get to do that. That is his life. You don’t vote on other people’s lives. That is tyranny. That is what used to be done before. But a great many people in the academic community, sadly, support exactly that kind of reactionary view of government. There are prominent jurists, philosophers, and political theorists published by Oxford University Press, by the University of Chicago Press, by NYU Press, by other renowned presses. In fact, Randy Barnett’s book from Princeton is a definite exception; very rarely does a libertarian get published by such a press. Most of the libertarian publications come out of small, lesser-known presses. My books, for example, are not published by Oxford or Princeton or Harvard University Press. The people in the academic world who support one another as they review book proposals hold very much to the letter of the American political tradition. They believe— and, while they think they are revolutionary, they are actually reactionary— that they want to go back to when governments ruled and the government granted you rights. You did not have rights based on your human nature. You had the rights that the king wanted to give you. If the king wanted to make you a baron, then you had the rights of a baron. If the king wanted to make you a duke, then you had the rights of a duke, and so on. These are not natural; these are arbitrary grants of rights, and yet these people today in prodigious academic departments in law schools and philosophy departments actually believe this and advocate it. They have books, with titles like The Myths of Ownership and The Cost of Rights, in which it’s argued that you and I and other individuals have no right to property but enjoy our belongings

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merely as a grant from the government, and that taxes are not taken from us but actually belong to government, with the result that we are required to hand them over to the IRS. Taxation is the natural way of the government because, according to them, governments own everything. The government merely allows us to keep a few of our dollars so that we can eat, and drive our kids to school, and so on. But it’s by the government’s permission, just as a king gives permission to his subjects not because they have rights but because it is the king’s prerogative to do that. So, just to indicate the task we face, we have contemporary political and legal theorists who are advocating the very thing that the American Founders overthrew. The idea that George III could call the shots for all of us is exactly what the Founders wanted to be independent of. They recognized that they didn’t deserve it as human beings, that human beings deserved to be treated as sovereign. Yet this is what is being challenged by many prominent scholars throughout the academic world. Although I am in that academic world myself, I’m in a very, very small minority. Sometimes those who are loyal to the original idea sketched in the Declaration of Independence can break through with their message, because it is a large country and there is room for dissent, but such people are mostly marginalized. The major newspapers have very few columnists who promote these ideas, and the major talk shows don’t have such people as guests. They are not the individuals who get to discuss the latest nomination to the Supreme Court. No, that is the job only of the mainstream, of conservatives and liberals. Neither group much prize individual liberty—conservatives basically want to control our minds or souls, the liberals our bodies or economic affairs. Both, however, want control, and haggle only over which part of the human organism to control. The libertarians don’t want to control anything other than aggressive conduct. Libertarians want to make sure that people have certain borders or constraints around them, and that, in order to cross those borders, their permission is required. But unfortunately this lost idea, this “lost constitution” that Professor Barnett wrote about, has been so perverted, so corrupted, that now the answer to the question “How do we rescue the Constitution?” must be approached very carefully, in a circumspect way. So let me return now to the gist of these remarks: There’s no “Society wants,” or “Society says.” Society doesn’t do anything like that. Such a term is a mistake or a linguistic trick. But some people utilize these tricks and make it seem as if there really was some higher authority called “society,” “the public,” or “the community” that could run roughshod over you. And this way of talking is widely promoted either from ignorance or as a ruse. It was especially prominent until it finally had a very serious—but not fatal—setback in 1989,

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when the Soviet Union and its allies realized that you cannot have successful societies where individual rights are violated systematically. That was a conclusion widely recognized but, unfortunately, the opposite, the valid alternative of a genuinely free society, did not receive a vigorous-enough defense. In Europe, the so-called third way is vigorously promoted, as if one could square the circle after all. In America, we also live with the confusion of a half-way house, the welfare state. Some of our rights are reasonably well acknowledged in the legal system, but many of them are violated, as well. It is true that, here, no one is going to drag someone away to jail for speaking out about politics as I do, but authorities would have done so in the Soviet Union or in Hungary. So it’s not as bad as it has been in many places throughout much of human history . . . but is that enough? No. It would be like saying, “I have a mediocre marriage, but everyone else’s is a lot more rotten, so I should just be happy with mine.” That is not the right political alternative for human beings to strive for and promote. They need to struggle to have the best system, even if that is not that likely to come about. Everything that we human beings do is better if we struggle for the best—not for some impossible ideal, of course, but for the best that can be. We can then recognize that we are not always vigilant, diligent, or knowledgeable enough to get to the best, but at least we should keep in mind that we need to strive for it. That is the goal to keep in mind regarding a rescue of the U.S. Constitution: to identify its best interpretation and strive to make it the law of the land. This can be attempted through writing letters to the editor, issuing challenges to city councils that deny that we have rights, giving talks at educational institutions, and showing teachers that they are neglectful by not teaching the content of the Declaration and by so quickly dismissing its content as they focus, instead, on songs and dances and firecrackers. What that effort is about is the continuation of a fundamental challenge to those in human history who have perpetrated what amounts to a rapacious treatment of people everywhere, and who continue to do so, in many parts of the world. Yes, most people in the United States live quite well, which is one reason why they are complacent and are not worrying about creeping minor tyrannies such as the plethora of government regulations and regimentations present in our lives and professions. That is because, compared to what happened in the Napoleonic, Nazi, Communist, and other barbaric ages, this is heaven. When people were systematically butchered, thousands of them at the will of a king or emperor, most of us in the West were not facing such a prospect, nor are we now. So, compared to that, we are in heaven.

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But I don’t think we are going to stay in this heaven unless we strive for a better one. Our constant vigilance is exactly what we need in order to rescue the Constitution that we really ought to have.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Harry V. Jaffa, How to Think About American Revolution (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1978), 41 (from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln [R. Basler ed., 1953], 108–15).

Chapter Seventeen

The Distraction of Anarchism

To be sure, there are those who insistently call themselves anarcho-libertarians, following mainly in the footsteps of the late Murray N. Rothbard. They write, most often, for blogs and other forums at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Rothbard, however, wasn’t your ordinary anarchist, one who rejects all law and government. He advocated what he called “defense agencies” or something along those lines that are, in fact, governments committed to nothing more than defending individual rights. Yes, these would be governments, but they would govern in terms of principles that would restrain their power severely, limited to the function of securing our rights (as the Founders put it in the Declaration of Independence). One area of difference between Rothbardian—or anarcho—libertarians and others is not what so many of the former think, namely, anarchism, but the idea of floating governments. By this view, governments need not have jurisdiction within some contiguous geographical region but can, a bit like pizza delivery or plumbing service providers, float about, adjudicating disputes in any region that hires them to help uphold justice. Could such floating governments function? Perhaps, in times when location doesn’t have a lot to do with movement—as in a Star-Trek-like world where people can travel from one place to another without having to occupy solid space as they do. Or maybe sooner. But this is not the point I choose to focus upon here. Instead, the issue is whether so called anarcho-libertarians occupy a higher moral ground than those who hold that there needs to be some kind of decisive, final adjudication system in place for a free society to function. Most defenders of the classical liberal idea of limited government include as one of their premises that human beings sometimes do not conduct themselves 213

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in a civilized fashion and find themselves, thus, in conflict with others. Even when they do their utmost to act in a civilized fashion and respect the rights of everyone, they can make innocent mistakes that lead to disputes with them. And it is important, in such instances, to have in place a forum and process that will enable them to reach some sort of decisive settlement of the dispute. This is where the institution called “government” comes in, for even the most libertarian of us. Any idea of doing away with government—and renaming it something like “defense agency” or “justice agency” or the like— is a myth, an idle dream for anyone interested in justice throughout human communities. Governments, of course, can have many forms, and most have been corrupt versions in the course of human history; there is no disputing this, among libertarians. But anarcho-libertarians have a penchant for elevating their Rothbardian version of libertarianism as holier than thou—as if they were pure, while all the rest (such as Nozickians, Randians, and those who follow the likes of von Mises and von Hayek) were corrupt, compromised versions. Not so fast. First of all, there is an ongoing and unfinished philosophical dispute about whether the anarcho-libertarian position is any more libertarian than the rest; in my view, at least, it is not at all. As I noted above, the only substantive difference is that the Rothbardians believe governments can move about, float in space, and need not be anchored to terra firma. This is interesting but it’s not a moral issue at all. It is a technical one. More importantly, though, the alleged purism of the anarcho-libertarian rests on semantics—renaming the institution that is to adjudicate disputes and thus gaining some supposedly moral high ground for denouncing all government. Rothbard, for example, defined government in terms of taxation—it is not one if it doesn’t tax. Rand, who had no problem using the term “government,” defined it without this element. So, which is the better definition? Well, historically, most governments have taxed, but does that settle the matter? After all, one may define “marriage” as the exclusive and committed romantic relationship between two people, and then protest that, since adultery and philandering are rife among so-called married people, their so-called marriages have never existed. Those who want what they might and ought to be would then insist on renaming it, but to what point? None that I can see. There is another thing going on here. Much of this, in my view, is turf fighting. By now, libertarianism is not just a movement but a sort of industry, seeking clients all over the place—for example, donors to foundations, institutes, centers, and such. (This is even evident in the way they treat one another’s organizations and the people associated with them—often with out-and-out contempt.) And, aside from the good feeling people may enjoy from thinking themselves to be the pure at heart among all the rest who are, well, not so pure,

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willing to bend a bit here or there, the title to being the holiest libertarian of them all can gain one some coins, too. I will not make the mistake, as some economists might, of construing this as the prime reason for much of the acrimony—for, yes, much of the disputation is sadly very acrimonious—but it is one of a collage of reasons, I think, that so much ink is spilt concerning who is the most libertarian of them all. There is, finally, the proclivity of many people to chime in on what a certain religious, political, ethical, artistic, or philosophical movement really is all about, wishing to have their way of understanding it be acknowledged as the superior, even the only, way. This one-size-fits-all mentality is not confined to libertarians but they, perhaps more than others, may feel more at home with such a motive, since it fits the silly version of individualism: Doing it my way just because, well, it’s my way. This view comes to such folks, I believe, more comfortably, since they are not bound by various notions of duty to the team or the like. (Yet a little prudence might inform them that hanging in there together, in a friendly fashion, might fend off being hanged individually.) Anyway, libertarianism is the political idea that a society is best when it abides most consistently, most fully by principles of individual rights to life, liberty, and property—at least, this is one good way of identifying it. The best institutional arrangements for getting such a society in play and maintaining it are what can be called the problems of libertarian political science—should there be such bodies of specialists as courts, police, military, legislatures, and so on—and, because the viewpoint is rather radical, just exactly what that political science will ultimately yield hasn’t been adequately explored, as far as I can tell. (Most well-funded political science and public policy centers at universities don’t even pay attention to the libertarian alternative, so scholarship and research on that issue is rather sparse.) In my humble view, these acrimonious, pseudo-moralistic, name-calling fights among defenders of human liberty do more damage than service to the central purpose, namely, to make headway and to contain the statists everywhere.

Chapter Eighteen

“Intellectual” Stuff and the Right to Private Property

Over the years, there has been a debate among supporters of the free market concerning whether so-called intellectual property is something to which one may have a private property right. In different terms, the issue is, if someone creates or produces an idea such as a musical composition, a novel or a poem, a design for a software program, or a musical arrangement, whether that person can rightly claim to own it and secure protection against those who want to use it without his or her permission. One central element of the case in support of refusing to grant any property rights to intellectual property, as advanced by some, is that, since such property is intangible, and since tangibility makes what is owned identifiable, intellectual “stuff” such as contained in the above list simply cannot be owned. Ideas are too elusive for them to manage to be definite items to which one can have property rights, unlike, say, a car, a strip of land, a building, or an umbrella. There is certainly something at least initially plausible about this view. What is tangible is more easily subject to delimitation and more capable of being controlled by an owner than something that is intangible. A car or dresser is such a tangible item of property, whereas a novel or musical composition tends to be fuzzy or less than distinct. One cannot grab onto a portion of a novel, such as one of its characters, as one can of a portion of a house, say a dresser. Yet intellectual property is not entirely intangible, either. Consider that a musical composition, on its face, fits the bill of being intangible, yet as it appears, mainly in a performance or on record, it takes on tangible form. Consider, also, the design, say, of a Swiss watch. It is manifest as the watch’s shape, color, and so on. Or, again, how about a poem or musical arrangement? 217

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Both usually make their appearance in tangible form, such as the marks in a book or the distinctive style of the sounds made by a band. These may be different from a rock, dresser, top soil, or building, but they are not exactly ghosts or spirits, either. The tangible-intangible distinction is not a good one for determining what can and cannot be owned and, thus, treated as distinctive enough to be related to owners. Indeed, the distinction seems to derive from a more fundamental one, in the realm of philosophy and its branch, metaphysics or ontology. In a dualist world, reality would come in either a material or spiritual rendition. Our bodies, for example, are material objects, whereas our minds or souls are spiritual or at least immaterial ones. This goes back to Plato’s division of reality into the two realms, actual and ideal (some argue abstract), although, in Plato, particular instances of poems or novels belong to the actual realm. A less sophisticated version of dualism, however, suggests the kind of division that is hinted at through the tangibleintangible distinction. In nature, we may have physical things as well as stuff that lacks any physical component, say our minds or ideas. Yet much that is not strictly and simply physical is intimately connected with what is, such as our minds (to our brains) and ideas (to the medium in which they are expressed). It might also appear that the theological division between the natural and supernatural mirrors the tangible-intangible division. However, that, too, is misleading since no one who embraces that division would classify a poem or novel as supernatural. Thus it seems that there is not much hope in the distinction that some critics of intellectual property invoke. The tangible-intangible distinction seems to be independent of the usual types of ontological dualism; as a result, the case against intellectual property, then, seems unfounded. If there is such a distinction between ordinary and intellectual property, it would need to be made in terms of distinctions that occur in nature, without recourse to anything like the supernatural realm. Supposedly, then, in nature itself there are two fundamentally different types of beings, tangible and intangible ones. Is this right? Again, it may seem at first inspection that it is. We have, say, a brick on the one hand, and a poem on the other. But we also have something very unlike a brick—for example, smoke or vapor or clouds. In either case, it’s not a problem to identify or control the former, while the latter tends to be diffuse and elusive. We also have liquids, which are not so easy to identify and control as bricks but more so than gases. Indeed, it seems that there is a continuum of kinds of beings, from the very dense and precisely delineable to the more and more diffuse ones, leading all the way to what appear to be pure ideas, such as poems or theater-set designs.

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So, when we consider the matter apart from some alleged basic distinction between tangible and intangible stuff, one that seems to rest on certain problematic philosophical theories, there does not appear to be any good reason to divide the world into tangible versus intangible things. Differentiation seems to be possible in numerous ways, on a continuum, but not into two exclusive categories. Nor does it seem to be the case that there is anything particularly intellectual about, say, cigarette smoke or other pollutants, albeit they are very difficult to precisely delimit and manipulate. They are, in other words, not intellectual beings, whatever those may be, yet neither are they straightforwardly tangible; they may be intrusive and can harm someone. I would like to explore the possibility of a very different distinction, namely, one between what is untouched by human meaning and whatever is subject to it. For example, there would be no poems without intentions, decisions, deliberations, and so forth. There would, however, be trees, rocks, fish, and lakes. Is it the point of those who deny that intellectual property is possible that, when people produce their intentional or deliberate objects, such as poems, novels, names, screenplays, designs, compositions, or arrangements, these things cannot be owned? But this is quite paradoxical. The very idea of the right to private property is tied—in at least the classical liberal tradition, starting with William of Ockham, to John Locke and Ayn Rand—to human intention. It is the decision to mix one’s labor with nature that serves Locke as the basis for just acquisition. In the case of such current champions of this basic individual right as James Sadowsky and Israel Kirzner, it is the first judgment made by someone to invest something with value that serves to make something an item of private property. However all of this may come out in the end, one thing is certain: the status of something as property appears to hinge on its being in significant measure an intentional object. But then it would seem that so-called intellectual stuff is a far better candidate for qualifying as private property than is, say, a tree or mountain. Both of the latter are only remotely related to human intentions, whereas a poem or novel cannot have their essential identity without having been intended (mentally created) by human beings. Of course, in becoming owned, a tree and mountain become subject to intentionality, as when someone decides to make use of such a thing for his or her purposes. And, conversely, even in the case of a poem, there are words that are preexisting and only their particular concatenation is a matter of intention. I am not certain what the outcome should be from these related reflections. They do suggest something that is part of both the ordinary and the so-called “intellectual” property traditions, namely, that when human beings are agents

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of creation, when they make something on their own initiative—when they invest the world with their distinctive effort—they gain just possession of what they have produced. And if there is anything that they produce more completely than such items as poems or computer games, I do not know what it might be. For me, then, the issue is this: When one designs and produces something original that one has thought up, some gadget or machine or such, does one then own this design/product? And if someone else copies it, did they take something from the former against his or her will? If the answer is yes to the former, then I think the answer must be yes to the latter. Whether the protection of one’s property occurs via this or that legal device—patent, contract, trademark, what have you—seems a secondary issue and detail. The primary issue is ownership. Also, what ownership of something one conceives and makes may mean for others who may think up the same thing later is irrelevant, no less so than if one finds a piece of land and appropriates it and then later others, too, find it and would like to appropriate it but now may not. Those, by the way, who complain that governments enforce patents and copyright laws should realize that governments also enforce property rights, in societies with governments. Governments in such societies are akin to body or security guards. Certainly, taxing others for this enforcement is unjust but that is not the essential idea behind the enforcement, not if one understands that copyright and patents could be protected without government, as well, just as other private property can be protected without government. But until it is government that protects—not establishes but protects—rights, it will also protect the right to intellectual property, if there be such a distinct thing in the first place. Taxation for such protection is irrelevant, since taxation for the protection of other types of property is also beside the point. Finally, that patents run out may be compared to the fact that ownership can cease with death, too. Of course, patents or trademarks or copyright could all be reassigned from one to another owner, just as property rights to anything can be reassigned upon voluntary exchange or transfer. There is nothing necessarily odd about this, even though the matter hasn’t developed very smoothly and consistently.

Chapter Nineteen

Fetal Rights Implication of a Supposed Ought

Among the many issues considered in connection with the abortion controversy, there is one that has, unfortunately, received little attention. To wit, if the “pro-life” position is roughly right—that is, if human conception entails a serious right to life for the conceptus—then certain radical legal consequences follow. If zygotes, embryos, and fetuses have a right to life comparable to infants and adults, then miscarriages or spontaneous abortions must become subjects of extensive and constant police scrutiny. Every state has some public policy regarding police investigation of unexplained deaths and homicides. (See Wayne R. LaFave & Gerold H. Israel, Criminal Procedure [St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company, 1985], chapter 1.) The authorities must determine that there are no reasonable grounds for suspecting murder or some other variety of illegal killing. In addition, if a fetus or zygote has a right to life, it follows that any activity on the part of the pregnant woman (or even a companion or stranger) that might result in a miscarriage (say, arising from some sport or a minor traffic mishap) could constitute negligent homicide. (See Criminal Law 21 Am Jur 2nd Par. 132; Model Penal Code Article 210, Section 210.1 & 210.4 Criminal and negligent homicide [1962]; Commonweath v. Nelansky, 55 N.E. 2nd 902 [MA. 1944].) In the death of an adult or even a child, the public accessibility of the deceased makes it relatively easy to determine whether foul play can reasonably be assumed. Innumerable forensic methods and devices exist for this purpose. Simply checking the body will usually provide investigators with sufficient information to determine whether there are grounds for suspecting a crime. Often, there are members of the public well-acquainted with the deceased, and these friends, family, and neighbors can testify to suspicious circumstances, history, and the like. The same situation, however, does not apply in the case of deceased zygotes. 221

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Whatever it is that is created at conception—whether it is something that is human or something that is only potentially human—it is often not known to exist until long after conception. Women do not know that they are pregnant immediately after they have conceived. The plain fact is that “unborn children” are hidden for several weeks from the kind of public exposure that even babies enjoy. In advanced civilizations, many of these unborn are monitored by physicians, but this usually occurs only after they have lived and been vulnerable to mistreatment for several weeks. This alone seems to violate the “ought implies can” provision of ethics, which states that if someone is required to act in a particular way, it must be possible for that person to carry out the responsibility. The veil of ignorance that surrounds the early stages of pregnancy causes many problems unforeseen by the advocates of fetal rights. Even if immediate knowledge of conception were possible for a pregnant woman, the situation would be the same. What is required is public knowledge, as well as private knowledge. It is the rights-protecting authorities who must be able to know of the existence of the embryo, zygote, or fetus in order to protect their rights. This requirement is not easy to meet. Of course, one could imagine the following: At the moment of any possible conception—that is, whenever heterosexual intercourse takes place between fertile parties—an extensive machinery of examination, registration, and supervision of possible pregnancies could be generated. Every woman would have the constant duty to check whether she is pregnant. If the answer is in the affirmative, the woman would immediately have to register the conception of the new human being. She would then have to submit to constant inspection and supervision, so as not to permit the possibility of a neglectful miscarriage—for example, from sports, recreation, work, or play, or any of a number of other activities. This kind of “solution,” however, conflicts with the existence of the rights of persons to not have their lives unreasonably scrutinized by authorities—or, as the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution puts it, “against unreasonable searches.” The threat to the rights of possible parents would be enormous—indeed, to do their duty, governments must violate human rights on numerous fronts. A veritable police state would have to be established so as to uphold ordinary justice. This extraordinary extension of state power can also be considered a violation of the “ought implies can” provision, although in a somewhat complicated sense. Ought implies can not only in a physical sense, but also in a moral sense: a moral obligation must not require immoral acts. Rights must be compossible—the human right of a fetus cannot contradict the equally basic human right of anyone else (although some prima facia rights theories allow for the ranking of human rights). Accordingly, even if all pregnancies

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could be detected immediately upon conception, the institutional arrangements required for this would involve extensive rights violations and, thus, make discovery of negligence and other criminal conduct during pregnancy morally impossible. A legal policy consistent with the idea that the human being is formed at conception could not be carried out in a society that respects the sovereignty of all of its citizens, including pregnant women. If a law is unenforceable in principle, it is inoperative. This, in turn, suggests that the “pro-life” position implies a set of legal consequences that are impossible in the very society that supposedly recognizes the rights of its citizens in all cases other than the unborn. If we add to these considerations the possibility that some alternative theory of when a human being comes into existence makes better sense and does not imply a widespread official violation of individual rights, then the case against the “pro-life” position seems very strong indeed. Before it could even be considered sound, it would have to be shown that the widespread intrusion into the lives of persons as discussed here is not implied by the “prolife” doctrine. The normal respect for and protection of individual rights cannot be extended to the being that is created by conception—not, at least, without an absurd invasion of the rights of adult human individuals.

Chapter Twenty

1985 Speculation The Fate of Soviet Colonies after the Fall

INTRODUCTION We are dealing here [in Geneva, Switzerland, in August, 1985] with somewhat speculative matters, although it is not irrational to spend time on considering what might transpire if a tyranny of the magnitude of the Soviet Union came to an end. Given the enormous demonstrable evil of this regime, it is not irrational to consider that the regime will be brought down eventually. Indeed, from what we generally know, it manages to survive only because it keeps its population from knowing the truth about the world, and the world from knowing the truth about itself. Tyrannies have come to an end in the past, but only now and then were they replaced by what could sensibly be considered a drastic improvement. What comes to mind is the American Revolution, which brought down the part of the regime of George III that could be construed as the most oppressive. Also, the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire were destroyed and replaced by relatively free and democratic regimes. For those of us who have taken the precedent set by the American Founding Fathers very seriously and have been concerned with exploring its merits, shortcomings, and possible extensions, it is not enough to entertain the possibility of destroying or bringing to its knees a tyranny such as the Soviet Union. It is even more important to explore the possibility of what might most fruitfully and benevolently replace such a tyranny. This task is made more complex when we turn our attention not to the tyranny itself but to its oppressed neighbors. Psychologically, these neighbors may be distinguished from the main regime by focusing on the difficulty of leadership in any nation that must keep all issues subservient to the choices 225

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made by the imperial tyranny. Eastern European communist countries are more or less political dependents, lacking the kind of sovereignty one associates with the theory of modern nation-states, not to mention those associated with liberal democracies where sovereignty is, strictly speaking, in the hands of the individuals who make up the citizenry. In short, could we expect Eastern European communist countries to be reasonably prepared for selfgovernment of the kind that rejects the model of government exemplified by the Soviet Union? And, if we could, what should we be thinking of as manifesting such independent societies? The Real Nature of Eastern European Societies We should note at the outset that using the term “communist” for any Sovietdominated country is terribly misleading. The only possible meaning that this might convey without doing terrible damage to the integrity of political discourse is that these regimes have declared themselves as following some pattern of development identified as leading to communism within the framework of Marxism-Leninism. Most of us rightfully reject the term “democratic” when associated with such regimes. Ideally, however, we should also reject the term “communist.” Communism is not humanly possible beyond the most restricted of human populations. Marx was aware of this, so he invented the science of dialectical development so as to be able to project the emergence of the type of neo-human being that would be required for a communist world to come into existence. Since this “science” is a hoax, the possibility of communism is a hoax, as well. It rests, ultimately, on affirming the reality of an abstract universal being, namely, humanity, as if it were just the same as an individual, biological person that grows from infancy, through childhood and adolescence, to maturity. Given the ultimate nonsense of this notion, communism a la Marxism-Leninism is a complete myth, one that is beginning to be identified as such even by Marxists. Among them, Agnes Heller, the émigré Marxist student of Gyorgy Lukacs, has called communism a faith. Others have suggested it to be politically impossible—for example, Robert Heilbroner, an American Marxist. Given, then, that we are not dealing with countries that can be described as communist, what are we dealing with when we turn our attention to Eastern European nations under Soviet domination? I wish to borrow a suggestion contained in the title of F. A. Hayek’ s famous work, The Road to Serfdom, written in 1944. What Hayek’s title suggests is that the most sensible result to be expected from the policies associated with Soviet-type countries is a form of feudalism. Not only Hayek but a friend of Marxism such as Heilbroner agrees that in Marxist societies the collective owns “the means of production,

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including . . . labor” (Marxism For and Against, Norton, p. 157). It was not accidental that Marx held very strong nostalgic feelings for feudal systems, believing that under them the working people had a sense of belonging, and enjoyed stability and community, albeit in a state of massive poverty from which only a phase of capitalism could rescue them. Since, by Marx’s own account, no such phase has blessed the Soviet Union and its Eastern European colonies, there is no theoretical ground either in Marxism or in any other framework of analysis in terms of which these systems could be distinguished sharply from feudalism. The fact that by now all of these societies have come under the influence of modern technology, at least to a limited degree, within a fairly limited sphere of human life, does not change this fact in the slightest. When it comes to understanding the Soviet economic system, one could do much worse than to read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Feudalism and mercantilism characterize that system through and through, and the same applies to the Soviet colonies. It is only the somewhat-pleasant aspect of feudal systems, their pomp and pomposity, that we find absent in the MarxistLeninist type economic orders. They do posses their state religion, their rituals and symbols, their ruling classes, their peasantry, and their poverty. Their concentration of military power is no less a sign of the fundamental truth contained in Hayek’s apt allusion. Up from Feudalism At this point, the speculative segment of this paper begins. Unless human life is through and through determined by other than the thoughts and actions of the persons involved, it is clearly not possible to offer predictions about what will happen after the demise of Soviet tyranny and colonialism. History testifies to various courses of development that can follow a liberating national and international event. In Latin and Central America, we find ample evidence of the rotation of tyrannical or dictatorial regimes, each promising to abandon the evil policies of the earlier version, only to invent new ones of its own or to resume past practices with little alteration. Nevertheless, some recent developments may encourage a change in this pattern, especially in countries that are probably correctly identified as being culturally developed almost as far as those of Western Europe and North America. (Surely it would be crass relativism to deny the possibility of greater and lesser cultural development. As to the assumption here that, for example, England or France is culturally better developed than, say, Peru or Iran, I shall not pursue the matter further.) First, politically, there is no way to shield people from the truth that many of their fellows have attained considerable sovereignty and have the power to

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participate in public policy determination. The sheer force of mass communication makes hiding this plain fact very difficult. With the hypothesis of the demise of Soviet tyranny and colonial power, it is even more difficult to envision any successful suppression of this fact. Once widely known to the people of Eastern Europe freed from the exposure only to state propaganda, which can systematically obscure the point, it is bound to have its impact on Eastern European developments. In short, there is likely to be a demand for political liberty, following the demise of Soviet influence. Second, there is likely to be a preoccupation with commerce and industry, mostly of the consumerist variety, following the lifting of the mercantilist restrictions that Soviet influence has made inescapable for virtually all of the Eastern European countries. Of course, some of these countries have been sampling a goodly dose of semi-market economy, by virtue of the clever policies of their leaders (Hungary comes to mind), and because of their economic dependence upon and contact with the population of nearby Western societies. Even the leadership of these societies has begun to see the unavoidable connection between reasonable prosperity among the people and market-like economic conditions. There are, of course, very good reasons for this, some of which guide the thinking of the economic critics of socialism and feudalism, including (a) the famous calculation problem (to wit: planning will fail since the fluctuation of demand and supply must be guided by individual decisions as to what buyers and sellers happen to value); (b) the paradox of democratic socio-economic choice (to wit: if all have a say as to what is to be done, contradictory objectives will emerge as public policy priorities); (c) the tragedy of the commons (to wit: if no sphere of private authority and responsibility is spelled out in the legal system, then resources will be exhausted, mismanaged, wasted, etc.). In short, economic theory and practice shows that in the absence of the market, the economic lives of people are far worse off than when markets prevail. And since poverty is a very undesirable condition, especially when one knows that it is not inevitable, newly liberated countries will likely turn to the market mechanism rather than reinstitute planned economies, something that will not likely be politically feasible either (because it will simply reintroduce tyranny and spread it). Third, and far more radical, is the possibility that even the Western-style insistence on a large public domain will be abandoned. There is a new idea afoot in the West, based upon but extending the old idea of free markets, namely, the idea of privatization. This notion involves the gradual disassociation of previously publicly managed spheres of concern from the various political bodies. At first, this involves contracting out public services to be provided by private sector organizations, businesses, charitable organizations, churches, service clubs, etc. But privatization can be extended much farther. It can involve en-

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tirely removing the once publicly administered sphere of concern from public authority. Spelled out in such works as Robert Poole’s Cutting Back City Hall (Universe, 1980), James Bennett and Manuel Johnson’s Better Government at Half the Price (Caroline House, 1981), and E. S. Savas’s Privatizing the Public Sector (Chatham House, 1982) in the United States, and the work of the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute in England, that of the Institut ‘Economique de Paris in France and the Carl Menger Institute in Austria, and put to the test in England, the United States, Holland, West Germany, Norway, Denmark, Singapore, and Ciskel, Africa, the idea is to extend the radical individualism of the American revolution beyond its customary limits, to influence all aspects of culture. Privatization does not mean the reduction of community life but, rather, its bolstering by separating it from state power. It rests on the view that politics is a distinct and unique area of human social life, which is to concern itself exclusively with matters of emergency, where civilized human relationships have ceased to be functional—e.g. when persons have decided to interact coercively, in violation of their individual rights. All else must remain within the sphere of voluntary human interaction. The concept of community within the framework of privatization is cleansed of its coercive components. Thus privatization is most suitable to being introduced into a culture that has had its community destroyed by the massive coerciveness of tyranny and colonial rule. From the time of Aristotle, there has been confusion between state and community, and it is unfortunately still contaminating the thinking of some of the best theorists. Community does not have to mean a coercively maintained and rigid order. It can be the result of the rational or sensible interactions of human beings, within the context of certain rules of civilization. Once it is understood that these rules of civilization are destroyed by totalitarian tyranny and colonial rule, the alternative idea of privatization, of placing the management of culture into the hands of the private individuals of a society who will proceed in a voluntaristic fashion to solve their problems and introduce new avenues of development and life itself in cooperative and competitive, not combative, ways, will be the most appealing to peoples who have suffered the yoke of tyranny and are ready for community life without the slightest hint of such tyranny. Why should Eastern Europe’s captive countries ever dream for the alternative of a truly, fully free society, which I have defined above by reference to the three possible developments? I have already hinted at the answer. These are countries whose populations have experienced state control for too long. Their own leaders have admitted, on and off, that the real solution to their problems does not lie in further central planning of life for the citizenry, whether economic, artistic, scien-

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tific, educational, or pertaining to any other area of human concern. These are also extremely diverse countries, containing within their borders varied peoples, practices, customs, religions, etc. An unregulated culture will be able to accommodate such diversity far better than some substitute for feudal/socialist central planning. The general system of justice within these countries is the one element that has been uniformly violated—everything else has been injured in the particular ways of the region, culture, etc., of the society. The ways the Soviets have hurt the Poles is different from the ways they have hurt the East Germans or the Rumanians. The Hungarians find themselves imposed upon in ways different from how the Bulgarians experience their oppression. The one thing they all have in common is the massive human rights violation, the demeaning of individual responsibility, personal authority, freedom of choice—in short, the way human dignity has been violated throughout these communities. But the results have been different, depending on what regions we are discussing. This is a crucial point. The practical impact of tyranny will differ. A Jew will experience different abuses than a Christian or a Moslem. A scientist and an artist will experience the oppression of the tyrant differently. The professional journalist and the educator will find themselves differently injured under the impact of serfdom and colonial rule. It is even possible to argue that some of this impact that is so harmful to one’s humanity will also be of some benefit, in the eyes of some outside observer; thus Marx felt that colonial influences in Africa were of great economic benefit, forgetting that economics do not exhaust the concerns of human beings; where they might experience economic advantage, they could also easily experience dishonor or defeat in cultural, religious, or similar ways. The Soviet system has been uniformly dehumanizing, although, since human beings differ from one another in quite drastic ways, this dehumanization has not taken the same form throughout the sphere of Soviet influence. As a result, the one desirable and predictably humanizing influence within these societies has to be the kind of alternative cultural and legal system that protects against dehumanization while preserving diversity. The privatization movement, to pick just one of those listed above, can easily preserve this. It ensures a sphere of personal authority and responsibility for all, but it does not impose some preordained goal that all segments of society must strive to attain. The free market in general is the beginning condition for that kind of unity amidst diversity. And the liberation of all persons to become politically instrumental in the administration of the system of justice—without taking upon themselves that impossible dream of democratic socialism, namely, collective management of a culture’s every problem—will also help to ensure that the society is free for everyone, without being chaotic and unruly.

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CONCLUSION Whenever one is asked to speculate about what will happen, and one admits that human beings are essentially free agents who, barring tyranny from above, can choose to act in a great variety of ways, there has to be a temptation to spell out what, after all, would be the most desirable thing to emerge in the future. I have in these few paragraphs tried to offer some reasonable reflections on what is likely to happen in societies whose peoples have hungered for liberty not just for decades but often for centuries, given what knowledge we now possess of the main differences between free human societies and utopian visions forged, after all, for imaginary creatures. It seems to me that, barring massive widespread suicidal tendencies in the populations of Eastern European, Soviet-dominated countries, their choice following the collapse of the Soviet Empire would be to opt for the maximum freedom that is now conceivable, one compatible with their understandable concern for the preservation of their own cultural differences. Some of this is, no doubt, wishful thinking and will seem so to those who do not find this “extreme” libertarian perspective convincing. I have to express my concern about this by noting that I doubt whether anyone who regards these reflections uncivilized or anarchic can fully appreciate just what it is to be the victim of tyranny in the way that the populations of the Eastern European countries presently are. Freedom is, after all, the greatest concern for these people—not some Hegelian, Marxian notion of “true” freedom, which really means being tyrannically lead to serve someone’s image of who one should be, but freedom from the oppressive intrusion of the will of other human beings. And this radical libertarian alternative—which is the unique element of the American political ideal and which has attracted generations of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and others to the shores of the United States of America—does more justice to that yearning than any other of which I am aware. Unless the people are silenced before they can express their considered judgment on the matter, I speculate that they would regard this political option as a wise one, a conception of individual human community life that does justice to the best impulses among human beings, while also restraining, where need be, some of the more destructive impulses. Eastern Europe is not one culture, nor is every Eastern European country made up of one people. Individuality, whether self-consciously known or simply experientially made evident, is as vital to the full flourishing of people there as it is in the United States, where it is a more-or-less official worldview—albeit under constant attack! It would not be at all surprising if, in the end, when Eastern Europe finally casts off the albatross of Soviet imperialism, that region of the world embraces not just the compromised individualism and libertarianism we

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know in connection with Great Britain, the United States, and other Western societies, but a full-scale privatization that radically separates the form of activities of the state, namely, forcible management, from the essential life of human individuals in society, namely, communitarian cooperation1

NOTES 1. The ideas of this speculative piece were too optimistic. The reason was well expressed by my own mother, who lived under the communists until 1974: “There is no group of young political leaders ready to take over from the socialists, so they will likely resurface after a while, since they are used to running states.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Does One Have a Right to Be Wrong?

That freedom is the matrix required for the growth of moral values— indeed not merely one value among many but the source of all values—is almost self-evident. It is only where the individual has choice, and its inherent responsibility, that he has occasion to affirm existing values, to contribute to their further growth, and then earn moral merit. —F. A. Hayek

The problem that I want to discuss has to do with one of those sticklers about a bona fide free society, namely, with the right to be wrong. It would seem, on first inspection, that it is a queer right to have. Why would one have a right to be wrong? And why would it be right to defend such a right, to stand up for it? It’s a very old issue; it predates the birth of classical liberalism. It was a puzzle to all those who had a concern for natural law but also believed in free will, such as St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Under certain versions of Christianity, for example, the only meaningful way to be a good human being is if one chooses to be. However, if one can choose to be good or to do good deeds, one can also choose the opposite. And, also, if one is prohibited from choosing to be bad, then one is also prohibited from choosing to be good, at least the good of abstaining from evil. In other words, one then has to be good as a matter of law, and will be punished if one chooses to do bad or fails to do good. If one is threatened with punishment for being bad or doing bad deeds, then why is one going to be or do good? Not, apparently, because goodness is what motivates one; one will be good because one is motivated to avoid the adverse consequences of being bad that one is very likely to suffer at the hands of law enforcers. And that doesn’t make one a good human being. If the only 233

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reason that one conserves wildlife is that one is afraid of punishment, well, this may enhance environmental soundness but it doesn’t warrant any special pride on one’s part for being an environmentalist. When the police question someone about a crime and only after they threaten the person with sending the INS or Health Department to look into his or her business do they get answers, there is no justification for considering that person to be proud of fulfilling their civic duty. Goodness must be achieved without coercion, period. This is not to say that good behavior may not be produced by way of laws that require it, nor, again, that one might not have chosen such good behavior had one not been legally required to engage in it. Yet, in such cases, one will very likely not be altogether clear about one’s own motivation, nor will others be. And this can lead to confusions about why one is behaving well. It is especially interesting to investigate this in the context of the First Amendment, because it recognizes our rights both to free expression and to our freedom of worship. So, in both of these areas, Americans are protected in their right to be wrong. People, after all, often commit idolatry, or worship the wrong deity, however, that is to be understood. This is to say, one’s choice of religion is quite conceivably a wrong or bad choice. In journalism, too, a lot of people engage in, for example, “yellow journalism,” that is to say, they are journalistically irresponsible by being sensationalist, distorting the facts, quoting out of context, and so forth, all of which are wrong from the point of view of how journalists ought to act. Yet no action is taken against them in law. This is a matter of self-regulation on the part of the journalistic profession, and on the part of individual journalists. They are counted on to be their own supervisors, their own regulators—unlike business, farming, psychology, and many other professions where heavy regulations interfere with an individual’s conduct. In journalism and in religion, the U.S. Constitution prohibits government regulation—the effort on the part of government to make us do the right thing. In both of these areas, prior restraint is largely legally banned. So, we have at least two easily understood examples, at least in certain countries, of the legal right to be wrong grounded, arguably, on a basic right to be wrong that has acquired legal protection. We seem to have the right to be wrong from the point of view of journalistic ethics, and the right to be wrong from the point of view of what we believe, in matters of religion. You can be completely wrong and yet there is no recourse against you. No sanctions may be applied; no police may be called to arrest you for being wrong in these regards. This is not the same, for example, as when one hires people in some business corporation; one doesn’t have a right to be wrong, for example, by engaging in racial or sexual discrimination in hiring or promotion. If one is be-

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ing racist or sexist, or otherwise chooses wrongly by way of what is arguably unjustified discrimination against somebody, one doesn’t have a right to do that. For such conduct, one may be punished. Governments heavily regulate such matters. (It is the human resources section of most companies that communicates to management the government regulations that dictate what they may or may not do.) So, in many professions, one doesn’t have a legal right to be wrong, other than in those that are covered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Yet, what if we still have the basic right to be wrong? Wouldn’t these state-imposed regulations then be wrong and unjustified? Let us take a look at why one might have a right to be wrong. Unless we find some good reason for this, it may turn out that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is wrong, and that journalists and ministers, along with members of other professions, ought to be regulated to do the right thing by the government. In many countries, they are. Even in England, there is not any stringent protection of the freedom to speak out. There are much fiercer slander and liable laws in that country. In the United States, if you attack a politician and besmirch his character, even falsely, you may not be arrested; you may not be fined for anything along the lines of wrongful conduct. Your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press are protected, even in the face of what is widely recognized as gross abuse. Why would that be okay? Or, alternatively, should such a policy of protecting our right to be wrong not be confined only to journalism and religion but extended over the entire society? In other words, perhaps everyone has the right to be wrong. Should this right, as all others, be protected? This includes people in business, medicine, farming, insurance, and other professions. Perhaps the only kind of wrongful conduct that may be prohibited is the kind that involves the invasion of other people’s sphere of authority, such as assault, rape, robbery, and murder, while inconveniencing them with one’s own bad behavior, such as gambling, unfair discrimination, prostitution, or harmful drug use, are the kinds of wrongful conduct that one has the right to engage in. Arguably, that is one prominent meaning of “freedom” in the political context. The idea is that every adult is sovereign, a self-ruler, concerning matters of right or wrong. In a society that embraces the idea that the first public purpose of government is to “secure our rights,” it is understood that citizens are responsible to deal with human misconduct, not legal officials, except in certain limited cases already listed, such as murder, assault, burglary, and so forth. They do amount to regulating people’s conduct or, rather, banning some of it. The reason these exceptions are said to exist is that banning these activities amounts to protecting others from having their sovereignty invaded. In other words, everyone has the right to be free but not with another person’s

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life and estate. That kind of conduct amounts to violating another person’s rights, so in such endeavors one may be stopped. Let’s go back for a minute to where I noted that it had been recognized by many Christians that a great deal of what one does in life must be under one’s own control. The risk of mismanagement—or sinning—must be accepted because, otherwise, right or proper conduct is not really a person’s own achievement—it’s not really something worthy that one has done, but merely behavior that has been coerced. If I put a gun to your head and make you write a poem under the threat of your life, and it turns out to be a pretty good poem, it would be odd to compliment you (or me) for it. That is because you did not choose to write the poem; you were forced to write it. (Nor did I write it.) It is a bit like those people in the Wild West who danced because others shot bullets at their feet. It might be a wonderful dance, very entertaining, but it’s not an accomplishment of theirs. It is something that is imposed on them by others. Under a view of human nature that recognizes the moral dimension of human life, it is clearly very important that this realm of freedom be recognized and protected. Otherwise, our moral nature is not acknowledged. Of course, acknowledging our moral nature also entails the acceptance of the risk that we will make bad judgments and engage in bad conduct. That is just the way libertarians, classical liberals, and, indeed, a great many people in their casual outlook on life understand what flows from our human nature, namely, the requirement of a sphere of personal jurisdiction wherein people are in charge of their own lives. If not, they are not being recognized for being human, and their human dignity is denied. When people get quite old and others begin treating them in paternalistic ways, this issue often comes up, by way of questioning whether their basic dignity is not being violated. What does that mean? It means that the paternalists do not recognize that these elderly persons ought still to manage their own lives. There are other areas, for example, when someone engages in massive discriminatory hiring, where a lot of people would say, “No one has a right to do that.” For example, when the State of California voted to enact Proposition 14, in 1964, which the U.S. Supreme Court characterized as “authorizing private discrimination,” the highest court struck down the law because, as Justice Byron R. White put it, “The right to discrimination, including the right to discriminate on racial grounds, was now embodied in the state’s basic charter, immune from legislative, executive, or judicial regulation at any level of the state government.” And that is exactly what giving legal protection to a basic right to discriminate entails. Justice White then continued in this vein: “Those practicing racial discrimination need no longer rely on their personal choice. They could now invoke express constitutional authority, free from censure or inter-

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ference of any kind from official sources.” This is wrong. Protecting the right to discriminate in law does not mean that racial or other forms of unjust discrimination are given constitutional authority, any more than protecting the right to freedom of religion or the press means that everything done with the protection of that right gains constitutional authority, such as becoming a Satanist or practicing yellow journalism. Having a right to do X does not by any stretch of the imagination imply that X is the right thing to do. In any case, as Justice White suggested, it might not be okay to interfere with someone who engages in irresponsible journalism, but it is okay to interfere with someone who engages in irresponsible (racist) trading practices. Notice, right off, that this doesn’t really apply consistently in the marketplace. Producers tend to be prohibited from practicing racism, sexism, and bigotry in hiring, subcontracting, and other aspects of trade. But consumers or customers are not so regulated. One is free to stay away from a store because one doesn’t favor the storeowner’s religion, politics, race, or gender. One has the freedom to go to the mall, look into a shop, and decide, “There are two people working there who look to have Arabian ethnic origins, and I don’t want anything to do with them, so I’m going to shop at another store.” This is a form of discrimination generally deemed to be unjustified because the two people who appeared to have Arabic origins are unknown to the shopper. He or she has no idea whether they are decent human beings or not. They are being judged entirely on superficial physical traits, ones they cannot help possessing. Yet, no law prohibits such discrimination and, if someone were to know about the shopper’s reasoning, that person would be prevented from forcing the shopper to behave differently from how he or she wants to behave. As consumers/customers, we are mostly free to be and do wrong. It goes farther than the protection of racial or ethnic discrimination. If, in chatting with one’s barber or hairdresser, one finds out that the barber or hairdresser adheres to politics one dislikes, one can decide that one will never return to the place of business, even though their politics may be right and that of the customer may be wrong. What about that? There is no law that requires one to shop where one has irrationally, unjustifiably decided not to shop. The law, indeed, protects one’s having so decided, should someone else attempt to rectify one’s bad decision by forcing one to shop where one has decided not to. So, there are some severe inconsistencies in denying people the right to be wrong. Some people are given just the sort of protection to be wrong that Justice White lamented; other people are disallowed to be wrong. Why is this so? Perhaps it is because it’s very difficult to supervise people at the mall or the grocery store. There is an effort in some directions, however, to regulate people’s consumer behavior—as when producers are prohibited from trade that consumers want, such as selling certain drugs, providing the opportunity to

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gamble in certain locations, or engaging in prostitution. In those cases, both the producer and the consumer are regulated. But in many others, even apart from what is implied by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, consumers or costumers have their liberty to be wrong fully protected. We have seen that the law is ambivalent—it does and does not protect one’s right to be wrong. Now let me try to defend the view that we really ought to be recognized as having the right to be wrong. Such a defense begins with the recognition of human beings as moral agents. A moral agent has a responsibility to choose to act ethically and properly in his or her life. For moral agents, fulfilling those responsibilities is a central feature in their lives. It’s not just some side issue, but one upon which one’s life becomes a success or failure at the most basic level. Ultimately, to have been a decent human being who’s been honest, who’s been prudent, who’s been courageous, who’s been generous—who has done all sorts of right things in all sorts of diverse circumstances—is central to any moral agent. Of course, there are a great many thinkers who consider morality to be bogus. When Enron and WorldCom executives started to be noticed for their malpractice, very few moral philosophers in the academy commented. This is because most of them would have said, based on their moral skepticism, “Look, we shouldn’t hold these people responsible for having done anything wrong. Who, after all, can know what’s right and what’s wrong?” The reason that few if any emerged from the academy to say this is that, for many, morality is some kind of primitive set of superstitions, not anything a sophisticated contemporary intellectual would take seriously. One idea is that people simply can’t help themselves; they are not free but are impelled to do what they do by their genes, DNA, or upbringing. Or, alternatively, they simply doubt that any moral claims can be shown to be true or false. Ever since David Hume was interpreted to have argued, in the eighteenth century, that one cannot derive any claim about what we ought to do from any claim about what is the case, many in the field of philosophy and the social sciences have embraced moral skepticism. (What Hume actually said is that one cannot deduce moral conclusions from non-moral knowledge; but there are derivations that are not deductions, so Hume was no moral skeptic.) In any case, despite the fact that a great deal of academic, scholarly, or philosophical skepticism about morality is bandied about, there is also a great deal of acceptance of the idea that human beings are indeed moral agents. Nearly everything said about how people should treat their environment, other animals, members of minorities and other cultures, the poor of the world, those in need of expensive drugs to fight their diseases, and so forth implies that we are, indeed, being regarded as moral agents. We are regarded as having the responsibility and capacity to do the right thing, and we are re-

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minded, very often, that we have not done this, or that we have not done it to a sufficiently consistent degree. So, despite the fact that theories of moral skepticism are widespread, it is also true that even those who propound this moral skepticism—about our freedom and about our capacity to know the right thing versus the wrong thing—tend in their own practical affairs to give credibility to the conviction that we are moral agents. They usually punish their children, they usually do complain about their friends when they are betrayed by them, they usually serve on faculty committees and harangue one another for how badly they behave in the academy. But most importantly, they criticize others who fail to accept their own point of view, consider them seriously wrongheaded, and suggest that they ought to change their minds. It is very difficult to act and think consistently when one is a moral skeptic, since human life is inherently bound up with morality. Okay, so moral skepticism tends to stop at the scholarly door. And it is clear enough for all practical purposes that human beings are moral agents because they are faced with alternatives, some of which are good and some are bad, and they are held responsible for how they choose. In other words, they have responsibilities to become successful human beings by choosing what is right, and even those who routinely consider morality to be bogus implicitly accept that we do have many of these responsibilities. The social preconditions for treating human beings as moral agents is the basic right to be wrong. Without that right, people cannot freely make their own moral judgments but will act, rather, from fear of legal sanctions, something that obscures the moral significance of what they do. (Yes, they might have done the right thing anyway, but this is difficult to tell if they must do it.) What they ought to do and not do has been taken over by others—government regulators, for example. This means that, in many spheres of life, their own quality of moral judgment never can surface. Even though it is true that human adults are moral agents and must be free to be wrong, the temptation to subvert this principle is very great. Accepting that people may do something wrong and therefore staying away from interfering with their conduct is extremely difficult. Parents know this all too well. As children grow up and begin taking responsibility for themselves, it is nearly impossible for their parents and intimates to adhere totally to the principle, “Okay, it’s their life, so let them run it, badly or well.” Nevertheless, the fact that something is difficult to do doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing to do. Nobody can maintain that recognizing people as free agents, recognizing their rights, and implementing that in public policy is easy. But, then, most good things are not easy. Whether you want to be a proficient pianist,

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newspaper editor, or philosopher, it means withstanding a lot of temptations to take short cuts. Now, if one wants to be right about basic political philosophy and law, one has to resist the temptation to interfere with people’s bad judgment, no matter how eagerly one is trying to counter it. It’s not up to an outside person to do that for an adult. One can, of course, advise, recommend, implore, plead, or buy off. But it is morally and politically wrong to force oneself on other adults to prevent them from being wrong. They have the right to be wrong, stemming from their nature as moral agents, because of their basic humanity, plain and simple. A genuine free society is one in which everyone has the right to be wrong. This is a necessary consequence of fully recognizing our humanity, without exception.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Reflections on Democracy

DEMOCRACY AND LIBERTY Over the last several decades of American—and, indeed, most of the globe’s—political affairs, the idea of liberty has taken a backseat to that of democracy.1 Liberty involves human beings governing themselves and being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society, it is liberty that is primary. The entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, and to make sure that the rights of individuals to their lives, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and other peaceful conduct are protected from any human agent bent on violating them. Democracy is but a byproduct of liberty. Because we are all supposed to be free to govern ourselves, whenever some issue of public policy—a policy bearing on us all—faces the citizenry, we are all entitled to take part. Democratic government rests, in a free society, on the right of every individual to take whatever actions are needed to influence public policy. Because freedom and liberty are primary, the scope of public policy and, thus, democracy in a just society is strictly limited. The reason is that free men and women may not be intruded upon, even if a majority of their fellows would decide to do so. If one is free, which means a self-governing person, then even the majority of one’s fellows lack the authority to take over one’s governance without one’s consent. This is what the U.S. Declaration of Independence means when it states that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. In a just society, no one loses his or her authority for self-government without giving it up as a matter of choice. No one gets to operate on you, no matter how wise and competent, without you giving your consent, and the same is 241

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true, in a just system, about imposing duties and obligations on people. They must agree to this. If they do not, they are not to be ordered about, at all. The only apparent exception is when it comes to laws that protect everyone’s rights. One may indeed be ordered not to kill, rob, rape, burglarize, or assault another person, even if one fails to consent to this. And when this job of protecting individual rights is performed by government, government may order one to abstain from all such aggressive actions. But that doesn’t actually involve intruding on people, only protecting everyone from intrusions. It is along these lines that the idea of limited government arises: government may only act to protect rights, to impose the laws that achieve that goal, nothing more. Again, as the Declaration of Independence notes, it is to secure our rights that governments are instituted, not for any other purpose. Of course, this idea of limited government hardly figures into considerations of public policy in the United States or elsewhere. Government has never actually been strictly confined to this clearly limited, just purpose. It has always gone beyond that, and often its scope is nearly totalitarian, the very opposite of being limited. But there is no doubt that, even though liberty has been nearly forgotten as an ideal of just government in America, as well as elsewhere, democracy does remain something of an operational ideal. In this way, liberty has been curtailed tremendously, mainly to the minor sphere of everyone having a right to take part in public—that is, pertaining to nearly all—decision making.2 Whereas the original idea was that we are free in all realms, and that democracy mainly concerns who will administer a system of laws that are required to protect our liberty, now the idea is that democracy addresses everything in our lives, and the only liberty we have left is to take part in the decision making about whatever is taken to be a so-called “public” matter. One way this is clearly evident is by how many of the top universities in the United States construe public administration to be a topic having to do primarily with the way democracy works. Indeed, after the demise of the Soviet Union, even though the major issue should have been the salvation of individual liberty, the experts in academe who write and teach the rest of the world about public administration are nearly all focused on democracy, not on liberty. For example, the courses at America’s premier public administration graduate school, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, are mainly focused on problems of democracy. At this institution, nearly 40 percent of the students attending come from some seventy-five foreign countries, including many that used to be under Soviet rule. What they focus on, in nearly all of their courses, is democracy, not liberty. Assignments in these courses tend to raise issues about implementing democratic governance, leaving the issue of how individual liberty should be secured as practically ir-

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relevant. Or, to put it more precisely, the liberty or human right that is of interest in most of these courses is the liberty to take part in democratic decision making. (“Human rights” has come to refer, in most of these courses and their texts, mainly to the right to vote and to take part in the political process!3) Yes, of course, that is a bit of genuine liberty that many of the people of the world have never enjoyed, so for them it is a significant matter, to be sure. But it is clearly not the liberty that the Declaration of Independence mentions when it affirms that all of us are equal in having inalienable rights to our lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It isn’t the liberty to which all human beings have a natural right and the securing of which justifies government. The American Declaration of Independence speaks of a very wide scope of individual liberty, as does, by implication, the Bill of Rights (in the Ninth Amendment, for example), while the premier public administration graduate school in America teaches, at least by implication, that the only liberty of any importance is the liberty to take part in public policy determination. This, I submit, is a travesty. Once democracy is treated as the premier public value, with individual liberty cast to the side except insofar as taking part in democratic decision making, the scope of government is no longer limited in principle or practice. Nearly anything can become a public policy issue, so long as some measure of democracy is involved in reaching decisions about it. And that, in fact, turns out to be a serious threat to democracy itself because, when democracy trumps liberty, democracy can destroy itself. The law could permit the democratically reached destruction of democracy itself! That is just what happened in the Weimar Republic, where a democratic election put Hitler in power and destroyed democracy. If one were to wonder why it is that public forums, including the Sunday TV “public affairs” programs, the Op Ed pages of most newspapers, and the feature articles of most magazines, do not discuss human liberty but fret mostly about democracy, this is the reason: the major educational institutions tend not to care about liberty at all, and have substituted a very limited version of it, namely, democracy as their primary concern. Once that is accomplished, individual liberty becomes defenseless. Indeed, democracy is just as capable of being totalitarian as is a dictatorship, but with democracy it seems less clearly unjust, given that one little bit of liberty is still intact, namely, to take part in the vote.

DEMOCRATIC FRUSTRATIONS When one goes to vote for an individual or measure, supposedly one will follow a belief one has about who has the right ideas—or what the right idea is.

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Otherwise, what is one doing? Perhaps just recording one’s wish. But in that case, if one ends up on the losing side, all that has happened is that some others’ wishes overpowered one’s own. Is that a good enough reason for winning? Are the combined wishes of more people of greater merit than the combined wishes of fewer? There is no reason to believe so—power alone has never made something right. Why, however, are we left mostly with wishes when we cast our votes to decide public policy? Because it is impossible to tell, for large numbers of people, what the right course of action may be. People differ a lot from one another, even while they share some, few, things in common. Sure, certain things are poisonous to nearly everyone, but not always in the same quantities. Sure, we all need certain nutrients but, again, not necessarily in the same amount. And once we get past the biological or medical issues, things begin to get even more complicated. Sure, smoking is bad for one’s health, but is health the highest value for all persons? What of artists or adventurers or champions of various causes who would sometimes give their lives to succeed in reaching their goals? They do not value health above all. Others seem to, however, judging by all the folks who spend much of their time keeping fit. When we get to such issues as primary and secondary education, traffic, and the availability of recreational facilities—beaches, golf and tennis facilities, bowling alleys, and the like—differences become drastic. So, too, with artistic and entertainment choices, travel, and home luxuries; you name it. In all these and innumerable other matters, what is right for one person, family, or group may well not be for others. Therefore, judging such matters collectively, via the ballot box, is utterly futile. All that is left are the different wishes people may have, certainly not a clear understanding of what is right for everyone. This is why some political theorists, including the Founders of the American republic, concluded that the more limited the scope of the authority of public officials, including democratic government, the better. By securing everyone’s right to liberty, including the right to private property, one can make sure that in most areas it is individuals who will make judgments they can actually make correctly, rightly, not by reference to vague wishes and desires. I may wish that my neighbors preferred a certain color of house paint but I cannot know what color is right for them all. The same is true concerning what kind of vehicle everyone should drive, where they should go for vacation, what careers they should pursue, what books or magazines they should read, how they ought to worship, or how they should furnish and decorate their homes.

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However, by making sure everyone has his or her own dominion, his or her own private sphere of authority, these judgments are likely to turn out to be the right ones, certainly better than ones rendered via the democratic process, which simply imposes the wishes and desires of some on the rest. Indeed, this is the most important discovery of the American—known also as the classical liberal—political tradition. This is what individualism really means—not isolation from others but interacting with them without imposing on them others’ ways of life, tastes, preferences, and wishes. As a dream, a lot of us throughout history have created ideals of community life that assumed that we were all the same and would live best akin to a bee hive or ant colony, in complete unison and harmony. Yet that is only a sound notion where what is doing the communal living lacks individuality and unique identity. Some special, temporary human groupings can be like that, selectively, in small measures—as when a choir sings or a band plays completely in unison. In convents, too, and other small groups, some folks exhibit this kind of dream-like homogeneous living, as may be imagined exists in small villages or religious communities like a kibbutz. But from this it is wrong to infer that we all could and should live the same way. Those who have urged us to do so have usually spawned massive totalitarian dictatorships—or less-than-massive democratic ones. The point of securing individual rights is not to encourage wild, reckless, irresponsible living, the kind that is indifferent to the well-being of the community. It is, in part, to make communities fit for human living, as opposed to what is fitting for bees or termites.

DEMOCRACY AND JUDICIAL REVIEW A dispute among constitution scholars has centered on whether judicial review makes any sense in a democracy. After all, it seems undemocratic for the courts to rule against the people’s wishes. For example, the people of Colorado democratically barred gays from getting government protection against discrimination in housing, jobs, etc. For the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn this electoral result appears to be undemocratic. The majority of a given community—the state of Colorado—is not being allowed to have its way, not because the majority of the United States of America canceled their decision but because a group of nine justices voted against them. However one comes down on this issue, judicial review may, in fact, be more democratic than simple majority rule. The basic reason is that unlimited democracy is itself undemocratic, as was shown so clearly and with such devastating

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consequences when the German Weimar Republic was overthrown democratically. Hitler was elected chancellor and then abolished democracy, with democratic approval. This illustrates that, unless the democratic process is kept in check, democracy can defeat itself. What standards should be used to restrict democracy? I reply, the same standards that make democracy a sound method of certain public policy decisions. Individuals have rights, including the right to take part in public policy decisions. If the democratic process violates individual rights, it goes beyond its proper limits. And justices are supposed to make sure that this does not happen. Why should they do this? Because, in the heat of passion, majorities are not always willing to pay heed to the limits of their proper powers. Justices, who are not directly involved in the controversies that break out all across the land, can bring some light to a subject that is dominated by a lot of heat. That, indeed, is supposed to be their professional duty, the object of their oath of office. Assuming, say, that the majority of the people of Colorado stepped beyond their proper jurisdiction by enacting a law that violates the rights of individuals, it was indeed the duty of the U.S. Supreme Court to make clear to them that they do not have such an authority, even if they did go about it democratically. Ultimately, democracy depends upon the firm protection of individual rights, including the right to be treated as an equal under the law. Of course, the problem with the Colorado law is that it wanted to exempt certain people—gays—from receiving various entitlements that others managed to secure for themselves over the last few decades of entitlement-happy state and national legislation. No one should be entitled to get others to stop discriminating against them—it is an individual’s basic human right to freely associate in line with his or her own choices. This should apply to renting one’s apartments or hiring one’s employees. But once the country has made it a matter of law for all citizens to force folks to provide them with such services from unwilling parties, then it is only another step to make that applicable to everyone. That is what the U.S. Supreme Court did—apply a silly but widely accepted principle to everyone.

WHY DEMOCRACY IS NOT ENOUGH Democracy, the rule of the majority of the politically active, is not freedom. Even if President George W. Bush and many other politicians are confused about this, unrestrained democracy is not really much of an improvement over tyranny—it merely multiplies the number of those needed to impose tyrannical rule. It’s still tyranny because some people coerce others in various

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ways, mostly by making them work for goals they haven’t chosen of their own free will. And why is it better to be coerced in such a way, by many people, rather than by just one and some of his or her thugs? It is not. Yet millions of Americans and people across the globe appear to have succumbed to the allure of unlimited democracy. Is this because they hope to gather up enough other people who support their various causes to form a majority and subdue the rest? Is it because they misunderstand the value and extent of democracy? Whatever the reason, democracy cannot trump individual rights—which is why lynch mobs are such widely known examples of democracy having run amuck. There is something about democracy that is right: when it comes to public affairs, all citizens have the right to have an input. It’s only just that they would, since the public realm is everyone’s realm. But what exactly is the public realm? It is whatever is of concern to all citizens as citizens—not by accident. They may all love baseball, but that doesn’t make baseball a public concern, even if all citizens love it. Public policy, public affairs, the public interest, and all such uses of “public” involve what concerns us all as citizens. And there is really just one thing that fits this bill—the securing of our rights. The American Founders, whose most famous ideas are celebrated on the Fourth of July, knew this. Even the framers were pretty loyal to that notion when they said, in the Fifth Amendment, that no private property may be taken unless it is for a public purpose. Why? Because a public purpose is really the combined private purpose of us all, as citizens. It is that which concerns us because we are part of a freely organized human community. And that, in the American political tradition, is all about making sure that we all are and continue to be free, not anyone’s slave, serf, involuntary servant, subject, or the like. That is the paramount public purpose in a free society. Liberal democracy—or what now might best be called libertarian democracy—is all about everyone having a say concerning who is to secure our liberty, what means to use for this public purpose, and certain other but strictly limited related matters. Any time that democracy is deployed for some other reason in connection with politics, it is misapplied.4 (You can, of course, have something akin to democracy in voluntary groups like Rotary, Kiwanis, or Elks, but notice, it only involves those who have freely joined!) If, in a local community, the majority wants a swimming pool, it is a misuse of democracy for them to force everyone to pay for this, because swimming is not a bona fide public matter, not of concern to citizens as citizens. If, however, a community needs a new sheriff, then democracy has everything to do with this, since the sheriff serves everyone in the capacity of peace officer and protector of individual rights. Conference centers, parks, schools, libraries,

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and all such things are not public concerns, even if many, many members of the public are interested in them and would benefit from them. Therefore, to impose the cost of these on people who are not willing to support them is unjust, a form of forced labor. (Even when a genuine public purpose is at stake, imposing the cost on all is unjust, but let me leave that issue to the side for now.5) Sadly, few people around the world are firmly enough committed to this limited use of democracy and, so, when they champion democracy, who knows what they are after? Are they merely interested in mob rule? Are they concerned with widespread participation in proper public affairs? It’s not clear. And probably because so few have, in the past, been free to take part in public policy determination, they somewhat recklessly embrace democracy, however illiberal it may be.6 It’s time to get clear on the issue, though: democracy is just only when it is properly restricted to bona fide public affairs.

MORALITY AND ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY When the term “democracy” is used loosely, as in geopolitical discussions, it is generally used to mean that kind of political system in which everyone can have an input on decisions bearing on public affairs. What is left mostly unspecified is just what counts as public affairs. In a totalitarian state, everything counts as the public realm; in a free country, by contrast, there are strict limits. Most existing countries today lie somewhere between. Democratic decisions impact taxation, government regulation, international diplomacy, education and health policies, and whatever else the government is involved in. The idea of limiting the public realm has gone out of fashion, and was never taken very seriously except by some few political theorists and even fewer politicians, let alone bureaucrats. Once in power, they experience a very strong temptation to expand the reach of the power they have. People who get chummy with government tend not to like it when its powers are limited—they have agendas, and such limitations could impede their efforts to carry out those agendas. In democracies, the politicians’ constituency often urges government to expand its power so as to provide the voters with various benefits—ones, however, that have to be obtained by confiscating other people’s resources, including their labor. In short, democracy often tilts quite powerfully against morality or, more precisely, natural rights. No, there is no consensus about what is the right morality for people to practice, nor about what exactly are their natural rights, but there are some virtues and general political principles that most support

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in advanced civilizations, at least in the realm of private conduct. Few people champion robbing Peter so as to “help” Paul; we usually believe that Peter needs to agree to the idea. Instead of confiscation, most would tend to endorse generosity and charity. The same is true about honesty—on the whole, other than in exceptional cases, most of us value straight talk and have contempt for liars. I think the same can be said about respecting the liberty of others—we hire them if we would like them to work for us; we do not coerce them into doing such work. Millions of others perform valuable labor, but we tend to consider it wrong to conscript this labor for our benefit. Therefore, while there are disagreements about various moral and political-legal matters— abortion, assisted suicide, child-raising, and so forth—there is also a very large sphere of agreement. Yet, when we look at the way democracy functions in most countries, it is in these areas of basic moral agreement that a serious discord is evident. Democratic decisions do, in fact, lead to robbing Peter so as to “help” Paul. (I use the scare quotes because one can hardly call forcing people to part with their resources as bona fide help given to anyone. This is why government cannot be compassionate no matter how many billions they provide in aid!) Democratic decision making routinely endorses conscripting people’s labor, limiting their liberty, making them act as they do not choose to (even when they are not violating anyone’s rights), and so forth. In short, illiberal, unlimited democracy is routinely in conflict with standards of morality or ethics. In practical terms, this means that most countries are replete with public policies that violate individual rights yet are widely accepted, too. Is it so curious, then, that young people in these countries get mixed messages about how they ought to conduct themselves? If it is okay for politicians and bureaucrats to make promises that they not only may not but most often also cannot keep, who is to communicate any objections to how young people comport themselves toward each other and their elders? Why should they not lie, when governments do so all the time? If it is okay for democratically established public policies to violate basic norms7—let’s take Peter’s wealth (he has too much, he doesn’t need it so much, he is using it badly, and so forth) and transfer it to Paul (while taking a good chunk for ourselves, along the way, to pay for our diligent transfer efforts)—why should young people abstain from stealing? What if, especially, they get peer approval? Is this not that like democracy, after all? Throughout the schools in most Western countries, democracy is hailed, day in and day out. At the same time, however, some of the worst kinds of human conduct are carried out in democracy’s name, with the democratic process’s sanction. Does this not tell those students that, when there is wide consensus for breaching basic norms and ethics, it’s just fine to perpetrate the

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breach? So go ahead, it would seem to say; cheat, copy other’s tests, plagiarize, bully some kids, steal from a few, and so on. This would seem to be a natural result of such confusion. It seems clear that, if one expects the younger generation to grow up to be decent people, illiberal democracy is not helping to facilitate this. Democracy Run Amuck On August 19, 2004, the same day that marked the seventieth anniversary of Adolph Hitler being democratically elected as the Fuhrer of Germany, a local city unwittingly celebrated this disastrous occasion by allowing democracy to get out of hand once again, here in America. While the only democracy that is worth championing is one that is strictly limited to certain purposes, not one that lets majorities run roughshod over minorities, even if those minorities amount to no more than one individual, in Garden Grove, California, where some people wish to establish a gambling casino—the very thing that is legal in Nevada and many other places around the world—many people believe that if a lot of them do not want the casino to be there, they have the right to stop it. But is it on their property that the casino is to be built? No. Is it with their money? No. Is anyone forcing them or anyone else to gamble in the casino that is to be built? Again, no. Are the externalities of such an establishment imposing burdens on others? No, not necessarily. Yet these folks—Americans all of them, who probably have a fine barbecue on the fourth of July every year, a day that celebrates the Declaration of Independence, a document that speaks proudly of a country that will respect and protect inalienable individual rights—merrily go about contemplating voting out this perfectly benign entertainment facility. Is a gambling facility really benign? Yes, definitely. Gambling is only bad when done in excess. In moderation, it is in fact every person’s daily fare— we gamble all the time, for profit, for fun, for a living, for innumerable purposes. We gamble on finding love when we wait for someone who may never come to love us; we gamble on finding a career that may never materialize because the market no longer has room for newcomers. Gambling is very much a part of life and can also be a part of life’s entertainment. (Yet, even if it weren’t benign, it’s none of these people’s business, unless their rights were being threatened with violation.) Okay, so it is not the gambling that is at issue. It’s merely not suiting the wishes of some people, so they want to go to the polls and stop others whose wishes would be suited. This kind of political warfare is nasty and mean. In America, it was supposed to be eliminated through having established the

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right to private property. If one investigates this, one will find that it’s there, mentioned in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution! And legal traditions elsewhere mirror this well enough. When people own their own stuff—land, home, business, beach front, broadcast frequency, newspaper, church, and the rest—they have the right to use it, peacefully, for whatever purpose they like. Not everyone will approve, but so what? Do I approve of Larry Flynt’s magazine, Hustler? No way. Do I approve of the National Inquirer? Again, no. Do I approve of the Moonies or Satanic cults or zillions of other things that people embark upon, on the property they own? No. I do approve of a good deal of it, though—like the sports, TV shows, books being published, magazines, newspapers, shops, and such. The point is, what I approve or disapprove of is not the issue politically—the proper issue is that citizens are supposed to have the right to start businesses of all kinds on property they own. And democracy is not supposed to get in their way. So what is democracy to do? Select our leaders, that’s what, like the old sheriff in the Wild West. Democracy is there to help with a limited task—selecting people to administer the law—not with what the law is to be, which is to be decided by reference to the Constitution and its principles and by local judicial procedures where the facts are debated and eventually known well enough. And even there, if our principles are violated, the supreme jurists are supposed to reject the result. What’s certain is that, if this expansion of the reach of democracy isn’t reversed, we can become like Germany, where they used it to elect a dictator.8

TRUE LIBERAL DEMOCRACY When one objects to government meddling in people’s lives, often one gets the response that, after all, so long as government’s decisions are reached democratically, there’s nothing wrong with such meddling. This assumes that democracy is a benign way to arrive at policies that run contrary to what individuals want, even violate their inalienable rights. Why would such an assumption be accepted with so little resistance? One reason is that many people focus just on those democracies that occur in various voluntary associations—clubs, unions, corporations, and so forth. In such groups, democracy functions well and is, in fact, unobjectionable because those taking part in the decision making joined up voluntarily and have what economists call “the exit option.” You can leave the Rotary or Kiwanis Club, or an apartment house or gated community, if you really don’t like what

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the majority does. Your participation is up to you. So when this kind of group reaches decisions democratically, the decisions are accepted from the start; the rule is, “Anyone who joins us must accept how we reach decisions.” Being a citizen of a country is both similar and quite different. Most (albeit not all) citizens do not join a country but are born into it, so it is just that the most minimal requirements are imposed on them. The American Founders spelled these out: respect the inalienable rights of all, and that is all you need to be a bona fide citizen of a free country. The only obligations you have are negative—do not violate other people’s rights. Now this principle applies to everyone, and so it also blocks the democratic means for meddling with people who refuse to comply with the wishes of majorities. Freedom from coercion also means freedom from the coercion of the majority, not just a king or tsar or emperor. And this makes very good moral sense. Why would it be okay for the majority to intrude on some when it is not okay for just one or a few to do so? In recent mainstream public policy discussions, these points have been raised, as already mentioned, by Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek. While Zakaria’s thesis is not so radical as that of the American Founders, he does make a very good case against bloated, unrestrained democracies. These are the cases that illustrate that mere democracy is not enough to guarantee that a country will be governed justly. But then, how exactly should democracy function in a free country? As noted already, in voluntary groups, where members can join or leave of their own free will, democratic means can be nearly unlimited. (I recall once, when I gave a talk at a Kiwanis Club, there was a ritual of the master of ceremonies arbitrarily fining people various sums of money. He was authorized to do this in the bylaws, of course, and no one objected.) But in a country that most people do not join but are born into, democracy must be limited to decisions about policies that do not involve the violation of our inalienable individual rights. Would this not make democracy completely ineffectual and moot? No, because there are decisions to be reached democratically that have to do with the administration of a system of laws aimed at securing our basic rights—e.g., who will sit as a judge, who will build the court house, who will appoint the generals, etc. These are decisions that intrude on no one’s rights— and there are many others. In general terms, selection of the administrators of a just system can occur democratically without the violation of anyone’s rights. But this is a properly limited scope for democracy. This is the proper understanding of liberal democracy, as well. Such a regime operates without depriving people of their liberties, unlike the democratic procedures with which

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most of us are familiar, these days. It is solely a defensive system, never an aggressive one. The revolutionary idea held by the American Founders and those political theorists who taught them wasn’t just that monarchs may not violate our rights. It also applied to majorities. Those, too, must respect our basic rights. That is what limited government means—limited to applying measures that are just and peaceful.

NOTES 1. Even in the former Soviet colonies, democracy seems to be the dominant standard for sound political affairs, with liberty having been virtually forgotten. This is evident in how many of these countries have permitted the democratic process to eclipse liberal developments—for example, by producing socialist policies. 2. The public realm used to be nearly everything since under monarchies it includes the totality of the region where the monarch rules unless curtailed by a constitution. In a democracy the same holds true. 3. The prominent Harvard economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen construes freedom or liberty as the right to political participation! See his Development as Freedom (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 2000). 4. This point is well brought out in Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. 5. For a discussion of how funding government is possible without coercive means (taxation), see Tibor R. Machan, The Liberty Option (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2003). 6. Op. cit., Zakaria, The Future of Freedom. 7. Or, as some call them, basic meta-norms; see Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Norms of Liberty (College Station: Penn State University Press, 2007). 8. Other cases in point would be the triumph of Hamas in the Middle East and of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Altruism (Stakeholder Theory) versus Business Ethics

ALTRUISM AND BUSINESS ETHICS The concept of “business ethics” is often dubbed an oxymoron and, given the popularity of altruism—indeed, given how so many equate that school of ethics and ethics itself—this is quite natural. However, altruism is difficult to reconcile with business ethics because the prime goal of those managing businesses is to flourish economically, to prosper. Owners hire managers so the latter will produce a good return on the investments of the former. Be it big or small, they share the goal of increasing the value of the enterprise, of making the owners economically better off than when they started. Although this need not be characterized as selfishness—something some economists have mistakenly promoted—neither can it be considered unselfishness. The reason it need not by any means amount to selfishness is that the ultimate goal to be served by the economic value created in the running of a business could well be something actually quite unselfish. It is quite easy to imagine that someone like Bill Gates actually earned all his wealth so as to then be able to help the African poor, whom the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is devoted to helping. Even in the more routine cases of running a business, owners and investors often spend their earned wealth on their family and friends, or on projects they find worthwhile (the arts, scientific research, various philanthropies, etc.), not strictly on themselves. What is difficult to dispute, however, is that those for whose economic benefit businesses are managed would normally prefer to decide to whom the wealth being produced is going to be distributed, and how it will be allocated. So, arguably, what wealth production enhances most is, if not self-interest, then certainly the ability of owners to decide what and who to help out (which can, of course, but need not by any means include only oneself). 255

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How, then, does altruism impact business management? Where does it make its appearance in business ethics, if anywhere at all? In commerce and business, as noted, people at the minimum promote their own ability to have an impact on the world by enriching themselves. Often they do aim, of course, to improve upon their own economic well-being. So, if altruism is right, it would appear that commerce and the profession of business face an uphill fight in any effort to gain moral standing. But is altruism right? Should we live for others? This is doubtful, if for no other reason than that altruism itself promotes well-being, not of the agent but the patient. This raises the question of why the patient’s welfare is to be privileged by agents, even though both are human beings. ALTRUISM AND CSR (CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY) Altruism, as one philosopher has defined it, “[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.”1 This ethical stance makes its appearance in business ethics most directly via the theory of stakeholder corporate management, one that stresses the primary of the social responsibility of corporate managers. What is the gist of that? Here is how an encyclopedia, Wikipedia, explains CSR: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an expression used to describe what some see as a company’s obligation to be sensitive to the needs of all of the stakeholders in its business operations. company’s stakeholders are all those who are influenced by, or can influence, a company’s decisions and actions. These can include (but are not limited to): employees, customers, suppliers, community organizations, subsidiaries and affiliates, joint venture partners, local neighborhoods, investors, and shareholders (or a sole owner).2

The characterization here assumes that ethics demands of us to serve all those who have an interest in what we may have to offer, that is to say, assumes that altruism is true. But is it true? And, in consequence, is stakeholder business ethics theory right? Are corporate managers in fact primarily responsible to serve—especially in legally enforceable ways—various people and goals in a society not related to the firm as owners or investors? And must, therefore, business ethics be an oxymoron, given that most businesses do in fact aim to provide economic benefits first and foremost to their owners and investors?

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It bears remembering that altruism emerged in response to (a) the doctrine of original sin (Christianity) and (b) the theory of psychological selfishness (Hobbes), as an antidote to self-indulgent self-centeredness. If this idea is wrong, and human beings do not innately favor themselves, altruism is in a way superfluous.3

PARADOXES OF ALTRUISM Let me address this question by starting with the observation of the poet W. H. Auden, who is reported to have said: “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know.”4 This quip, albeit no more than that, suggests a fundamental paradox with altruism. If it is correct, then everyone ought first and foremost to think of benefiting others (and, as Peter Singer would contend, not just other people but other animals5). But if so, then, properly, an endless chain of someone providing for another is to be created and no one may benefit, since everyone is obligated to give everything away to others, especially those who are in need. Peter Unger spelled this out quite explicitly when he wrote, “On pain of living a life that’s seriously immoral, a typical well-off person, like you and me, must give away most of her financially valuable assets, and much of her income, directing the funds to lessen efficiently the serious suffering of others.”6 But once that has happened, everyone must look for the next seriously wanting person, of which there are bound to be some, no matter how much giving occurs, if only because of the facts of scarcity, endless human desire and the serious diminution of productivity stemming from the fact that no one may keep the bulk of what he or she produces. It bears noting that Singer acknowledges that the ethics he advocates, one that “will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement,” is very difficult to practice. That may well be because it is indeed quite impossible and, if only for that reason alone, also unwarranted. Any ethics that “holds out no inducement” and “does not tell us that we will become healthier, or enjoy life more,” may well not be an ethics for human beings living on earth at all.7 The ethics of Aristotle, for example, promises that if one practices the virtues, as one clearly should, one will flourish in this life, here on earth. This means that ethics by definition is going to guide us toward success in our lives as human beings. Other schools of ethics, such as utilitarianism, promise at least to benefit us collectively. Altruism, in contrast, seems to requires that everyone “discount altogether his own pleasure or happiness, as such.” And that may well mean that altruism is a kind of anti-ethics, an asceticism, even.

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As such, if altruism is the proper ethics for us to follow, it does appear that the concept of business ethics is an oxymoron. But perhaps so would be medical ethics, engineering ethics, legal ethics, and educational ethics—indeed, any form of ethics that aims to guide professionals to do their work properly, since they all do assume, implicitly, that the work of these professionals is ethically unobjectionable.

STAKEHOLDER BUSINESS VERSUS PROFESSIONAL ETHICS In contrast, however, to most other professional ethics, business ethics has recently come under the influence of the stakeholder management school, one that, as we have seen, requires that people in business think not of those who hired them, nor even of themselves, but of everyone else, anyone who may have a stake in the enterprise. Take, as an example, the recent book by Joseph W. Weiss, Business Ethics, A Stakeholder and Issues Management Approach.8 It unabashedly treats the stakeholder approach as the proper ethics for managers of business enterprises. That is to say, it rejects from the outset the idea that those who own a business have the moral right to have it managed so as first of all to provide them with returns on their investment. This book, meant to be used in business ethics courses, shows a diagram indicating all who are stakeholders of businesses. Among the twelve parties considered stakeholders, the owners are treated as equal to, say “Activist Groups,” “Competitors,” and “Government.”9 Consider, by contrast, that the ethical guidelines for artists, scientists, engineers, and doctors would not promote the division of focus on part of the professionals among innumerable potential beneficiaries. Engineers are supposed to focus on competently, honestly, and conscientiously providing services to those who hire them, as are doctors, scientists, and even artists (when they are working on commission, for example). In the case of artists, whatever ethics should guide them, one provision of it would surely be that the artist “follow his or her muse” (or vision), not “serve the public”! Stakeholder theory, following the altruist school of ethics, requires professionals in business to address the problems and demands of anyone whom they could benefit. This point is advanced, as well, in Joseph DesJardins’ An Introduction to Business Ethics, 2nd Edition,10 in which the author defends the stakeholder approach. He notes that the “stakeholder theory rejects [the] privileged position for stockholders.” Although, as he puts it, “Stockholders do have an ethical claim upon managerial decisions and this claim does establish a duty toward them,” these claims “must be balanced against any comparable ethical

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claims of anyone else affected by managerial decisions.”11 This, of course, flies in the face of the rights to private property and free association, rights that authorize individual human beings to have the final say concerning what happens to what they own (provided that no one’s negative rights are violated in the process) and with whom they may choose to enter into mutual voluntary professional relationships. Imagine that a car rental company sells me the privilege of using one of its cars but that the company was looked upon from this stakeholder viewpoint. Renters would not have to return the car to the company but might well be obligated to hand it over to anyone with “comparable ethical claims” affected by the decision of the rental company to keep their cars to themselves and select their customers. Millions, of course, would wish to have those cars but, because they do not own them, they do not get to have them unless they meet the owners’ terms. Imagine if, when one hires an attorney or dentist or gardener, the terms of the relationship would have to involve demands placed on the parties by strangers—neighbors or fellow citizens in need of legal advice or dental care. Yet in the business ethics community such elementary notions of individual rights are rejected, based, in part, on the fact that various laws have be enacted limiting these rights. In the field of law there is, of course, the practice of pro bono work but it is based on the idea of generosity, of voluntary service, not of ethical—let alone legally enforceable—obligations to other-thanpaying clients. Laws, of course, are made for a great variety of reasons; in a nearly unlimited democracy—not to mention more totalitarian systems—they often flatly contradict ethics.12 In response to such considerations, however, DesJardins states that “these legal precedents did not simply fall from the sky. It is the considered judgment of the most fundamental institutions of a democratic society, the courts and legislatures, that corporate management must limit their fiduciary duty to stockholders in the name of the rights and interests of various constituencies affected by corporate decisions.” That is a response that construes widespread opinion—considered judgment—as decisive, and the argument from human nature and natural rights as well as other arguably sound schools of ethics irrelevant. We could call this the lynch-mob approach to ethics. Majorities and their leaders override elementary principles of justice. The idea that what is mine is mine, and that it is I who gets to say what happens to it, in free relationship with willing others, is indeed elementary and fits best within the system of political economy that protects the rights of share- or stockholders, and accords stakeholders the respect of their basic rights, but no decisive influence in how private property will be used and disposed of. By this account,

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owners enjoy exclusive rights of decision as to what is to be done with what they own and invest.13 Nonetheless, in our time, many professional business ethicists ignore this point routinely. Why so? There is no room here to address that question in full—I have already done so elsewhere.14 Suffice it to note that, normally, business is so unabashedly focused on producing wealth for those who own it, nevermind what use they may make of it, that the widespread belief that morally good conduct should—indeed, as some would have it, must—be directed toward the benefit others comes into conflict with it from the start. One can treat engineering, medicine, law, or education as professions that “serve others” by their very nature, although there are problems with that idea. After all, those entering the professions could well be doing—and arguably most often do—so in order to enhance their chances of flourishing in their lives (of fulfilling some personal ambition, realizing a talent for something, etc.). If one considers the decision to enter a profession as being based in large measure on factors such as personal preference, personal ambition, talent, the urging of one’s family and friends, and so forth, the apparently unselfish motivation for entering service professions dwindles or even disappears.

BUSINESS AS A “SELFISH” PROFESSION It is, however, difficult to disguise the open, unabashed “selfishness” of a profession that aims to produce wealth for those for whom it is conducted, the clients, as it were, of those who hire managers of corporations, the small entrepreneurs, and so forth. At even the simplest level—say, when one shops at the grocery store, the farmer’s market, or the mall, commerce is directed, unapologetically, toward making a good deal for the various parties involved. Moreover, because of its focus on worldly, mundane goods, commerce and business have always been found to be something of a distraction from what is deemed to be more important, namely, preparing for the afterlife, readying one’s soul for everlasting salvation. Of course, this view of commerce and business as being exclusively concerned with one’s own welfare and advantage is itself problematic since, for millions of people, obtaining wealth for themselves amounts to but a first step in the allocation and distribution of that wealth. One need but consider such highly visible wealthy individuals as Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet, to start with, and then nearly anyone who is prosperous, to realize that personal wealth is very often spread out to support a large “stakeholder” community, directly or indirectly—family and friends, organizations being chosen for philanthropic benefit, causes involving artistic, cultural, and/or scientific projects, and, of course, employees, subcon-

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tractors, and their families and associates who benefit from the distribution of personal wealth. Yet, even if those who are the rightful owners of the wealth being invested in companies—the managers of which owe a fiduciary duty to enhance value—were to keep the created wealth all to themselves, it is a non sequitur to claim that there is something ethically wrong going on that ought to be remedied via law and public policy.15 Consider that many artists pursue artistic projects in complete oblivion as to who might or might not benefit from the work they put into their creations. The same is true of other people whose lives and works support various chosen goals. No one has any enforceable claim to such lives and works, other than those who are their owners. There is, in short, no sound case afoot that clinches the case against the idea of business as a capitalist system, with owners having decisive authority to allocate their resources and their professional associates, such as business managers, a fiduciary responsibility to serve those owners to whom they have freely chosen to devote their time and skills. We might mention the more religious or spiritual concerns about commerce and business, namely, that the latter can distract from the important task of readying oneself for the afterlife. At least within most Western religions, it is accepted that being guided to live a successful life here on earth is worthwhile. Moreover, readying oneself for ultimate salvation is not what might be construed as a stakeholder ethical stance, given that the beneficiary will be one’s own everlasting soul. So, business ethics, as the guide to conducting commerce and business both decently and successfully, is every bit as legitimate as the ethics of medicine or engineering that guides those professionals along such lines. Nor is it a sound approach to demand of business managers that they work not for themselves, as in a small private firm, or for their clients, stockholders, and investors, but for others who may have a stake in—that is, who could reap benefits from—the enterprise but have no ownership rights in it. There is nothing wrong with being attentive to these stakeholders’ desires, but that is not the first order of business of managers of commercial enterprises. Contrary to altruism, this indeed reflects the common sense ethics that guides most human beings at most times, whereby one’s first task is to excel at living one’s life, but this by no means precludes concerning oneself with more or less intimate others, even strangers when time and resources permit.16

IS BUSINESS ESPECIALLY SUSCEPTIBLE TO MALPRACTICE? In a recent exchange on a business ethics web site, there was occasion to explore the general issues of the nature of business. A portion of that exchange

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will serve to conclude this discussion. One party to the discussion made the following point: Machan’s . . . point concerns “the misguided idea that business per se lacks moral or ethical value, that those in the profession do not do what is ethical as they practice their profession.” There is an ideal . . . that the practice of business is, or can be a vocation in the true sense, a calling. The point is that it can be. But it need not be. One of the fascinating aspects of the business arena is that the doors are not barred to those whose only motive is profit and material gain. (The film Wall Street raises these issues in a very entertaining way, and very much from a moral perspective.) This is not a “good” thing or a “bad” thing because it is part of the package. For the majority, the motivation is complex, not simple: to provide for oneself and one’s family, certainly, but equally to contribute to the wealth of society as a whole by playing a necessary and valuable part in the economic process.17

My response to this comment was that, basically, any profession may be taken up for amoral or even morally pernicious reasons—just consider, as an extreme case, when organized criminals enter some legitimate line of work. At a less severe level, people may take up education or medicine for ulterior motives—they may wish to escape physical labor or to ogle young students or, in the case of medicine, seek to be depended upon, in a psychologically insidious fashion, by patients. So the final point I wish to stress is that embarking on what I like to call the “wealth care” professions (broadly referred to as business—analogous to the health care professions broadly called medicine)—is honorable. There is nothing wrong and much that is morally right with (a) wanting to prosper in life and (b) seeking to specialize in serving others in the capacity of an expert to facilitate this objective. There is nothing necessarily selfish, in the insidious, narrow sense, about committing oneself to enhancing one’s own or other people’s prosperity, any more than there is about committing oneself to enhancing one’s own or other people’s health—both objectives are “selfish” in a sense of being motivated by prudence, one of the major Aristotelian virtues. Altruism isn’t a hands-down winner among the various competing moral or ethical schools of thought. Quite the contrary—it is a misanthropic way of life, and whatever plausibility it has is well taken care of within a eudaemonist ethics and its virtues of generosity and liberality. NOTES 1. W. G. Maclagan, “Self and Others: A Defense of Altruism,” Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1954): 109–27. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_responsibility.

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3. Judging by the troubles of humanity, it does not appear that people are inclined, innately, to be self-interested or prudent, quite the contrary. 4. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/whauden161273.html. 5. Peter Singer, “Animal Liberation,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 20, No. 5 (April 5, 1973) and Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Hearst Corporation, 1991). The passage in question by Singer is revealing. He notes that he could not promise that “we will become healthier, or enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstration, or bombs.” Singer goes on to ask, rhetorically one may assume, whether “man is capable of such genuine altruism? Who knows? If this book does have a significant effect, however, it will be a vindication of all those who have believed that man has within himself the potential for more than cruelty and selfishness.” 6. Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7. Interestingly, Singer wants us all to prize other animals more than we prize ourselves, yet most other animals are hard-wired to prize themselves far more than they prize their fellows in the animal world. (For more, see Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004].) 8. (Mason, OH: Thomson South-Western, 2006.) 9. Ibid, 56. 10. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.) 11. Ibid., 66–67. The term “comparable ethical claim” begs the question. If altruism and stakeholder theory are wrong, an ethical claim may have to meet, first of all, the standard of fulfilling an obligation voluntarily made by managers to shareholders. 12. For how this has wrought havoc, both at home and in the international community, see Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 13. There are, of course, important consequentialist, utilitarian reasons, as well, for preferring the share- or stockholder approach. They include considerations of the tragedy of the commons, of proper incentives that lead to the productivity of a propertyrights-based, capitalist economy, of individual responsibility that accompanies ownership, and so on. 14. See, for example, James E. Chesher and Tibor R. Machan, The Business of Commerce, Examining an Honorable Profession (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1999), and Tibor R. Machan, The Morality of Business, A Profession for Human Wealthcare (New York: Springer Verlag, 2007). 15. It is noteworthy that stakeholder theorists do not claim that it is the obligation of stakeholders to share in the losses of companies whose management must benefit stakeholders just as much as shareholders. 16. This is indeed the contemporary version of Aristotelian morality spelled out in Machan, Classical Individualism. 17. December 28, 2006, PHILOSOPHY FOR BUSINESS; http://www.isfp.co .uk/businesspathways/.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Yes, Individualists Should Respect Others’ Rights

THE NATURAL RIGHTS APPROACH There are different approaches to supporting a free society. Some provide a utilitarian case, claiming that freedom promotes overall satisfaction or happiness or pleasure. Some hold that we have God-given rights, and that only a free society pays adequate attention to this fact, one that requires everyone to be free. Some advance no argument at all but claim it is an axiom of social life that people must be free to do what they want, without being subject to the will of others who haven’t been given permission to interfere. The argument I consider most pertinent to defending a free society comes from the English philosopher John Locke, with some additions from more recent political philosophy, for example, the ideas of Ayn Rand, Eric Mack, Douglas B. Rasmussen, Douglas J. Den Uyl, and myself.1 It rests on the idea that human individuals are moral agents and require, in their communities, what the late Robert Nozick called “moral space,” a sphere of personal authority—sovereignty—so as to carry out their moral responsibilities. Accordingly, the general system of laws and public policies of any civilized, just, human community would need to conform to the principles of individual rights. Otherwise, it is not fit for human moral flourishing, as well as the innumerable ways of human life that would thrive so as to achieve that flourishing. Are human beings moral agents? That is, does human life include a significant dimension of ethical or moral tasks that individuals ought to carry out? This is a very controversial issue but. without entering the debate in detail, it can be noted in support of it that people do tend to treat each other as if this were true. Children are brought up to conduct themselves well rather than 265

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badly, adults are constantly implored to act properly in any sphere of their lives, and even those professionally engaged in discussing this topic— philosophers, scholars, and pundits—are held to standards they are expected to observe in their work. Parents, colleagues, teachers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, police officers—in short all of us—are expected to act ethically. This certainly suggests that human beings are moral agents.2 The natural-rights classical liberal-libertarian position begins with an understanding of human nature as having an essential moral dimension. It then considers the implications of this fact for an understanding of the just human community. Such a community would require mutual respect and protection of everyone’s individual rights, rights one has because of one’s human (moral) nature. Of course, there are numerous implications apart from this, including the fact that—with respect for and protection of individual rights— there would be development, growth of knowledge, flourishing of the arts, encouragement of peaceful human relations, and so forth. This is what is stressed by those who defend the free society on utilitarian grounds, and their defense is, of course, important. But it is incomplete because sometimes, even if only rarely, these goals may be promoted by violating individual rights. The task of a just system of laws and public policies is to secure for every individual the condition for his or her moral agency. Other consequences are not as important as this one, period.

DEBATES ABOUT FREEDOM Among champions of the free society, there are numerous debates afoot. One concerns whether any kind of government is justified. Another concerns the problem of how to spell out the right to private property in spheres such as the air mass. Yet another concerns what sort of moral responsibility, if any, human beings have toward other animals. One lively debate I have focused upon in my work is why one ought to respect other people’s rights. For example, Siegfried Van Duffel has noted, in his essay “Libertarian Natural Rights,”3 that “The idea that people are sovereign beings does not allow us to infer that they have an obligation to respect each others’ sovereignty.”4 One way to show that the respect for the rights of others is warranted is to argue along the following lines: If one should live a rational, wise, and prudent life, as one surely should, and if one takes part in social life, which surely is a wise and prudent thing for everyone to do, one should also recognize one’s fellows in one’s communities for the human beings they are. And, given our mutual humanity, we all require in our communities a sphere of personal

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authority or sovereignty in our lives. This is what rights help us identify, the personal authority or realm of sovereignty of every individual as a human being who lives among other human beings and needs to embark upon a flourishing life as a matter of one’s own initiative; for this, everyone requires a sphere of jurisdiction or, as the late Robert Nozick called it, moral space. So it follows from one’s moral responsibility to be rational, wise, and prudent—to live, in short, morally virtuously—and from one’s membership in a human community, that one ought to respect everyone’s individual rights—one’s own, by means of proper self-defense, and those of one’s fellows by providing what Nozick called basic “side constraints” as one interacts with them. Some among champions of the free society claim this will not work because, first of all, these are merely reasons having to do with oneself, what should motivate one to treat others with respect. Also—but this is a somewhat different objection—there can be some cases when being rational, wise, and prudent would guide one toward not respecting the rights of others, what in the study of ethics are called “desert island” or “life boat” cases. If one finds oneself in such a situation—if, for example, one’s own ultimate end, one’s life, comes to be pitted against another’s, even someone who hasn’t hurt one in the least—there will be no moral responsibility to respect that other’s rights. One can answer the first objection by noting that, when one finds reason to respect other people’s rights, these aren’t about what should motivate one but why certain considerations are worth heeding, in how one acts. Although, of course, one is an individual, one’s reasons are not, as it were, individual reasons. The belief that they must be such comes from a misunderstanding of human reason, one that sees reasoning as calculation, weighing pluses and minuses, a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, the answer stresses that the discussion here is about principles of community life, not specific interests and preferences, although it is true that everyone does have a basic stake in living in a society that is guided, most generally, by the basic principles of individual rights. The answer to the other objection is that classical quip, namely, “hard cases make bad law.” In other words, respect for rights is a guide to forging the laws or general principles of a country. And these laws should not be based on rare exceptions such as life boat or desert island cases. But why not? Should we give up on respecting the rights of others just because it is difficult to do so? John Locke, the father of the classical liberal system of natural rights, said that under certain circumstances “politics is impossible,” suggesting that talk of rights doesn’t apply in such cases. In such emergency situations, human beings must be guided not by political principles but by their personal virtues.

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So, while rights may be disregarded in such rare cases, something else will take their place. There is another way to defend the responsibility to respect others’ rights, namely, by defending the merits of a complete, integrated system of rights by which a country should be organized, and on which its laws should be based. Some champions of liberty have argued for these principles that a country needs as being special types, guiding not one’s conduct—not a matter of ethics—but as guiding how laws are to be made—a matter of politics and law. The idea of these broad principles is to facilitate the country’s population’s ability to carry on in peace and flourish. Others’ rights, then, aren’t a matter of case-by-case respect for them but, rather, of loyalty to a general legal infrastructure that any just society, within which one and all can flourish, requires. When we get out of our intimate relationships and join the world, as it were, wherein there are millions of strangers about whom we know only that they are also human beings, we need some very general principles that define our realm of self-direction, wherein we can order our actions. And individual human rights are just such very general principles. As we “join the world,” it is our moral responsibility to adopt these principles as guide for how to treat others, others who aren’t family, friends, neighbors, or associates, but simply people.5 This has been advanced as a new solution to the problem of how to link ethics to politics in the right way. And while it is a new way of putting the solution, in my view strong intimations of this solution have been advanced in the history of classical liberal, libertarian thought. But putting the matter in this new fashion is, I think, very beneficial. Such a way of defending respect for the rights of all persons makes good sense, but it isn’t new. Indeed, it resembles, as I see it, the idea that it is rational, wise, and prudent to see others as requiring the same sovereignty that one has a justified interest in having all others respect. Such reciprocity makes the best sense, when one lives among other people. But it may also be a good idea to speak of the overall principles one signs up to abide by, just to keep things peaceful and civilized when one joins social life, when one becomes an adult human being. Whichever is the best way to lay out the idea, it comes to something fairly simple: All persons ought to recognize that they and all others have rights, and these rights may never be violated, except perhaps in those rare, hard cases upon which nothing general ought to be based. More generally, the various idiosyncratic ways of defending the free society have something to do with individual styles of thinking about those who advance these ways, rather than with any deep need for their particular way of understanding human community life. There isn’t all that much new under

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the sun, actually, so it is no wonder that the variations aren’t always substantively significant. In highly abstract endeavors such as political philosophy or jurisprudence, the more contributions are made by intelligent folks of good will, the better. Different members of human communities may, in fact, need to be reminded of the basic principles by which people need to interact in somewhat different terms. That is one of the consequences of our being unique individuals while being human, as well.

ANTI-NATURAL RIGHTS Some prominent contemporary political thought would have us believe that our rights are granted to us by government. Famous academics such as Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein have argued as much in their book, The Cost of Rights (W. W. Norton, 1999). As they put it, “individual rights and freedoms depend fundamentally on vigorous state action” (p. 14) and “Statelessness means rightlessness” (p. 19). This is just the opposite of the thoughts of the classical liberal naturalrights theorists and the American Founders. In the Declaration, they stated, albeit rather succinctly, that we have rights because our very creation as human beings has endowed us with them. And they held that these were inalienable and that government is instituted so as to secure them. Clearly, this implies that basic individual human rights come before the government instituted to secure them for us. But perhaps Holmes and Sunstein are right and the American Founders had it backwards. What can we say, in just a few words, in support of the Founders’ idea? Without rehashing John Locke and his followers’ defense of the character of our rights—as derivable from our human nature and the requirements for human community life—there are some simple matters that point to the fact that Holmes and Sunstein have it wrong. Consider a thought experiment that isn’t at all farfetched: An adult human being is stranded in the wild, where there is no law, no police, no courts, nothing. Someone else comes upon him and turns out to be quite aggressive. He is attacked, physically, and all of what he has made for himself out there to survive is under the threat of being taken away from him. It seems pretty clear that such a person would do the right thing by defending himself, if he could, against the aggressor who is threatening his life, his prospects for a future, and possibly his family and friends, as well (if we build up the case in more detail). And if he were to be challenged afterwards as to why he resisted being attacked and robbed, he could say, “This fellow

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wasn’t peaceful toward me, and didn’t respect my rights as a fellow human being, so I had to resist him physically so that he couldn’t succeed in his threats,” or something simpler but along those lines. Yet, if our rights depended upon government granting them to us, such a line of argument, justifying self-defense, wouldn’t hold up. Those who challenged the victim of the attack for resisting the aggressor might say, “But since government is what grants us our rights, and there is no government out here in the wilds, you have no rights. Not to your life, not to your liberty, not to your property, and certainly not to self-defense. Not, at least, until a government is established and grants you these rights. Until then, it is a free-forall, and no complaints make sense against our actions that you consider aggressive.” (Indeed, that is pretty much how Hobbes, but not Locke, would have understood the situation in the state of nature.6) Surely this would be absurd. Yet that is just what would follow if the prominent analysis of individual rights, as advanced by the likes of Holmes and Sunstein, were sound.7 No one would have justification for putting up any resistance against attackers unless some government issued a grant of rights. Given, however, that there are not just imaginable but real circumstances in which human beings interact, with no government having been established or being in operation (for the time being, at least), and given that some of these people can act violently toward others, there is a need for some idea that makes sense of the situation and gives guidance for conduct by those who are victims of the violence. These ideas may not be expressed entirely in the familiar terms of individual rights but that is what they would be intimating, even if in a way that was somewhat unclear and undeveloped. OTHER SOURCES OF OBJECTIONS Of course, saying this much does not end the debate. There are pacifists who will object, as well as communitarians, and many others who reject the very idea that an individual is a sovereign being, that he or she should be his or her own master and not subject, without consent, to the will of others. That is one reason why there is a large literature of political philosophy and theory that considers these issues. Still, not all of us have the luxury of embarking upon a scholarly review of this literature. We need to have the ideas in play made clear, in relatively simple terms. It looks very much as if, when this is done, the case for our having rights based on our human nature as moral agents (under normal circumstances) and before they are codified in law and secured by way of a legal order and its administrators is a better one than its opposite. The simple but clear-enough no-

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tion of self-defense, which would make plain sense to any rational person, however removed from the sophisticated discussions of academic political thought, makes clear enough that individual rights precede law and government. Of course, there is no final answer to these or most other matters that concern human beings. That dream was disposed of in the very first chapter of these lectures. Still, the very idea of a final, timeless, perfect answer is ultimately invalid, an impossible notion, so seeking it is futile.8 Instead, it is best to provide the most up-to-date, well-founded (both on theory and on history or experience) solution to the problem of human community life, namely, how to best organize it. The answer, it appears, is that resting our laws and public policies on a system of basic individual rights is the most rational approach to take.

NOTES 1. Ayn Rand, “The Nature of Government,” in Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1966); Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature, An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1991); Eric Mack, “In Defense of the Jurisdiction Theory of Rights,” The Journal of Ethics 4 (2000): 71–98; and Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1989). See, also, the contributions to Tibor R. Machan, ed., Individual Rights Reconsidered (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2001). 2. A more systematic defense of human moral agency is offered in Machan, Individuals and Their Rights, and in Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism (London, UK: Routledge, 1998), as well as by numerous classical philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, et al. For a discussion of the foundations of such moral agency, see Tibor R. Machan, Initiative—Human Agency and Society (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). 3. Siegfried Van Duffel, “Libertarian Natural Rights,” Critical Review 16 (2004): 353–402. 4. Ibid., 37. 5. I believe this describes, very briefly, the central point of Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s position, especially as laid out in Norms of Liberty, a Perfectionist Basis for Nonperfectionist Politics (College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1968). 7. Another team of critics of the classical liberal natural rights stance is Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). They also insist that rights are grants of government. This is actually a reactionary view, taking us back to monarchies, in which the king was seen as supreme and the rest were subjects, not sovereign citizens with basic rights. 8. A final substantive theory presupposes that the theorist has the capacity to investigate all relevant matters to the end of time, which is clearly impossible.

Postscript

Ethics, East and West

As my last discussion in this work I have chosen a topic that is perhaps somewhat too current, too relevant to conditions in our time. It is the major difference between the way ethics or proper human conduct is understood in the Islamic and Arab worlds and in the West, especially the United States. Let me begin by saying that my title may suggest a sharp difference between East and West, something that would be inaccurate. After all, we are all human beings, although some of us grew up with different ideas from the others and over time these ideas may have divided us throughout the world, though by no means permanently or irrevocably. So, even though there are certain differences between the way ethics is understood in the Arab world by Islamists—especially by those embracing radical Islam—it doesn’t mean that this is something frozen or cast in stone.1 So even though I’m going to be pointing out certain differences between how ethics is viewed in the West and the Middle East, I should not be understood as saying that these differences are impossible to overcome. For example, when not long ago someone suggested that people in Iraq are not ready for democracy, Condoleezza Rice responded that this is wrong; she insisted that they are as ready as anyone can be. Well, both sides are correct but in different respects. Many who live in the Middle East are not ready for democracy—or more precisely, the limited constitutional democratic type of political system professed by many in the West—in the sense that their thinking does not usually conform to the ideals and assumptions of a democratic society. But Condoleezza Rice is also correct because they are capable of changing their minds and with enough teaching and enough attention to the facts that need to be considered, they could very well change and become more sympathetic toward a democratic way of life. 273

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Here, however, I will focus on ethics, the area of concern human beings have about how they ought to act, the principles of good human conduct. A central point about how ethics is understood in the West—both as part of most theological as well as philosophical traditions—is that we tend to believe that in order to do the right thing one must do it voluntarily or choose to do it. No one can gain moral credit for telling the truth because someone holds a gun to one’s head and orders one to speak truthfully. Generally, one cannot gain moral credit if one acts justly, generously, productively, industriously, prudently, or courageously because one is being forced to do so. Thus, one sign of children becoming more mature and becoming closer to adulthood is that they become more and more responsible for their conduct. Generally, throughout Western civilization most of the ways that ethics has been understood include the assumption that an ethical life presupposes that human beings can make choices and that their morally right as well as morally wrong conduct is a matter of their own free will. Acting morally right or wrong is not something people do instinctively, nor something that they can be forced to do by others. It must, rather, be up to them to choose to do so. It needs to be made clear that saying this does not mean that what is ethically right and wrong is up to us. No, only acting ethically or morally is up to us. However complicated, the right thing to do does not amount to personal preference or choice. The reason why most Western political theories and systems, however mixed and inconsistent they may be, tend to be anti-authoritarian and antitotalitarian is that those who developed them recognized that such a political approach to dealing with human beings ignores people’s moral agency and is, thus, in violation of their basic human nature and inalienable rights that derive from it. Human nature involves, in a significant measure, that some very significant portion of what people do is a matter of their own initiative or free will. This is also one of the reasons that we find ourselves so different from all other animals we know of (which doesn’t necessarily mean that some couldn’t arise that will surprise us)—to the best of our knowledge all other animals operate instinctively. They are hard-wired and thus behave without having to choose, to think up what they will do before they do it. Even as a cheetah “decides” when to pounce on its pray, it does so guided by instinct. In contrast to this, human beings have to learn what to do, including what is right versus wrong. It’s not built or hardwired into them. Even contemporary neuroscience acknowledges this much—at a certain point the agent remains in charge of his or her conduct. If we did indeed act as we must, driven by our instincts or genes, we would have very few problems since everybody would be doing the right thing automatically just the same way as birds fly

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south and forage about and make nests automatically. No one needs to teach them right from wrong, as they are raised or in classrooms, in books or through the arts; instead their elders inculcate them as a matter of instinctive instruction. No one needs to reprimand them if they don’t get things right because it’s all imprinted within their genetic make-up. Yes, there are a lot of things fixed in our genes but what is morally right versus wrong doesn’t happen to be among them. Right and wrong is something we learn from our parents, teachers, novelists, movie makers, and sitcoms (I’m unhappy to say). Most adults around us think about these matters, exemplify them in literature, poetry, musicals, movies, and so on, for better or for worse. This is how we become aware of what is the right thing to do and what is not the right thing to do, and in this respect freedom, including political freedom, is (at present and largely) a distinctive part of the Western way of life. In the Bible, for instance, from the very beginning of Adam’s and Eve’s human lives, what distinguishes them from their prior life when they were effectively mere animals is that they eat from the tree of knowledge and thus become capable of sinning because they have the capacity to do either what is morally right or morally wrong, of their own free will. Aristotle, among many philosophers, noted that the moral virtues are a matter of choice. Unfortunately, however, this idea is by no means universal. In many places throughout the world—including in some circles in the West—it is believed that good conduct can be regimented, commandeered, or forcibly imposed on people and that their freedom is of no great significance when it comes to whether they are good or bad, act properly or improperly. So, to take a somewhat mild case, it doesn’t matter very much whether women in Iran wear the veil as a matter of free choice or because the clergy and government require it. As long as women behave as is deemed to be proper, that’s all that counts. To put it differently, what is at issue is good or proper behavior, not chosen or self-directed conduct. In the West it is generally thought that this is what is appropriate when children are being raised but once they reach maturity, morally significant actions must be uncoerced. Thus the widespread suspicion with paternalistic public policies.2 So there’s at least in our time a fundamental difference between how ethical ideals are understood in many of the Arab nations versus how they are understood in the West. That fundamental difference isn’t mostly about what is believed to be right versus wrong conduct—although, of course, there are many differences between, roughly, the West and the East on that front as well. But on that issue there is plenty of disagreement in the West as well. Not everybody has the same idea of right and wrong. But there is one thing that most Western ethical teachers and practitioners believe, namely, that whatever

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is the right thing for someone to do, the only way that one can be blamed or praised is if one’s choice is involved. If a person’s choice is not involved, he or she can not be blamed or praised. Look also at criminal law, which is largely based on people’s very basic social-moral convictions. It is crucial that most defense attorneys are dying to find some way to prove that their clients couldn’t help doing the wrong thing because if they really couldn’t help it, then they’re not blameworthy or culpable for what they did. So, this, too, illustrates that in much of Western civilization human beings are viewed in such a way that right and wrong conduct must be a matter of their own initiative or choice. Otherwise, we see them as something less than human—as beats or invalids, or as deficient or incapacitated, and so they aren’t deemed deserving of punishment. Maybe they become subject to therapy or are confined in mental hospitals. The point is that they’re no longer handled with their full human dignity—the capacity for choice—intact. In contrast, in many other parts of the world and especially the parts with which right now we’re geopolitically most engaged, this is not the case. That is one—though not the only—reason that there’s so much hostility toward the West and, especially, toward America. American culture does have as one of its ideals, albeit often violated in practice, that morality may not—even cannot—be legislated or forced upon people. That is why we have the concept of a victimless crime. Because there can be something that is wrongful but if it does not violate someone’s rights the law should not interfere since interference would rob people of the liberty to make their own choices between doing the right or wrong thing. Obviously there are serious disagreements, for example, among conservatives, libertarians, and liberals on just how much liberty people ought to have about how they conduct themselves in areas where they do not interfere with others; in the main, however, there is a Western tradition, especially in America, that wrongful conduct has to be chosen before it can be punished and that some wrongful conduct may not be legislated, may not be controlled. The bottom line is that it has to be up to the individual whether he or she does the right thing or the wrong thing. Instead of somebody holding a gun to one’s head or threatening to imprison one, ethical conduct needs to be left to individuals and may not be enforced. Most of us recognize that as someone becomes a grown-up, adult, mature human being, he or she is gradually accorded greater and greater responsibility for choosing between right and wrong and is supposed to choose on the basis of the merits of the action and not on the basis of fear or adverse repercussions from others. This is something most parents try to teach their children. They hope that they will become aware of what is right and wrong indepen-

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dently of mere fear or threat of sanctions. They work to bring about in their children a recognition that something is right and that it is to be done for that reason not because somebody is standing there threatening them if they don’t. Of course, this notion of personal responsibility has unavoidable risks. Quite a few people will not live up to the expectation of choosing to act properly, ethically, morally. So a free or approximately free society is marred with the distinct possibility of moral failure, even decadence—excessive gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, drug abuse, and even much worse, such as irrational violence. That is because those in the West tend not to believe that the government should be a totalitarian organization that has any authority to micromanage citizens’ lives. So there is never any guarantee that such an approximately free society is always going to be squeaky clean, morally perfect, not by a long shot. But what can be attested to is that, in a free country, when people are morally good, they are so largely of their own accord. Whether they will be good or not is up to the people themselves and not up to others, including the government. Morally virtuous conduct is not something that can be imposed on us. (Aristotle is sometimes invoked as a critic of this idea. But he may only have argued that educating the young to be virtuous will involve some measure of pressure from family and friends and he explicitly identified moral virtues as a matter of the agent’s choices.) Cultural guardians in regimented—paternalistic, authoritarian, or totalitarian—countries often find this extremely upsetting because they consider the kind of freedom that ascribes to individuals personal responsibility—in other words, one that leaves it up to ordinary folks whether they do the right thing or the wrong—to be offensive to goodness. They want goodness to be totally protected, enforced, and guarded against even the possibility of failure. They do not accept as most people in the West do that when it comes to the human good, it has to be a matter of choice, otherwise it is worthless.3 And so, when many from such cultures look at America and see that there it is mostly left up to individuals whether they choose to do the right thing or the wrong thing, they consider that offensive and degrading. Many in the West, however, are extremely proud of the idea, so much so that they will defend offensive conduct such as what the Danish cartoons showed. They are proud of it because most recognize that their outlook is more in accord with human nature, which is characterized by the freedom to do the right thing or the wrong thing and that it must be up to them whether they do one or the other. They see this as central to our moral nature or agency. This point is made quite clear in various parts of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights; since when one has a right, for example, to liberty, it means that other people may not intrude. When one has the right to one’s life, that means that others may not govern one—individuals are sovereign and

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get to govern their own lives, while others get to govern theirs. As Abraham Lincoln noted, “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.” Such a conviction stands four square against the kind of culture in which leaders would impose on everyone full compliance with what is deemed to be standards of right conduct. Anybody who believes that sort of imposition is the way to govern a society will obviously regard America as indeed a most guilty society, a most morally depraved civilization, for respecting the right of individuals to choose whether they would do the right or wrong thing.4 It is crucial to realize that this isn’t an issue about whether the standards are objective versus subjective or absolute versus relative. Some make the mistake of taking the thrust of modern Western philosophy, of the Enlightenment, to be subjectivism. For example, the influential Hanif Kureishi, who focuses much of his work as a playwright on comparing Western with Eastern traditions, claims that “The project of the West, the Nietzschean project, has been to drive out religion and to produce a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone.”5 Although this is an idea barely connected to Nietzsche—that is, it’s here and there evident in Nietzsche’s ramblings—it doesn’t by any means capture Nietzsche’s metaethics. In any case Nietzsche has been just one influence in the West but arguably not its central thrust. Maybe Nietzsche and Sartre can be so understood but not John Locke, Immanuel Kant, or a host of other prominent moral thinkers as subjectivists. In the Western tradition of philosophical and theological ethics, both ancient and modern, there is considerable support for objective or absolute standards of right versus wrong, as well as the subjectivist/relativist tradition. The former is accompanied by a parallel tradition that to do the right thing is something one must choose to do, otherwise it isn’t to one’s credit to do the right thing at all. Of course, there are other traditions in the great variety of Western ideas on ethics and morality. AristotelianThomism, Spinozist, and others may not be omitted. What Western liberalism develops along these lines is that only if one freely choose to do what is objectively the right thing to do does it count for something morally praiseworthy, creditable, or deserving. Not even in the West does everybody embrace the idea that morality must not be forced on people. There are many organizations, churches, institutions that would just as soon impose upon us all, whether we like it or not, certain standards of conduct. Authoritarianism, the “totalitarian temptation,” is global and isn’t confined to Iran, Syria, Iraq, or anywhere else. In fact, it is right here smack in the middle of the West just as there are liberal practices alive in the East. There are many people who are terribly impatient when something goes wrong, and immediately ask for laws or public policy so as to remedy matters.

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In the last analysis it’s only the individual’s commitment or resolve that prevents him or her from acting immorally, viciously. There is no formula that one can create that’s going to make people good. Just look at societies that have tried to do that, such as Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia. And in less Draconian ways, look at all the monarchies throughout history in which the royal house had been deemed the “keeper of the realm” and taken to be assigned the job of making the society good. All such systems tend to go aground because they violate a fundamental fact of human nature, namely, that a human being has free will and is neither a robot nor an animal driven by instincts. To ignore this fact in a society’s laws and public policies and various institutions is going to bring a society to ruin. And nowhere is this being tried more aggressively in our time than in the Middle East. One reason is the oil that enables most of the countries there to carry on without much human creativity and productivity. If the oil had not been discovered and developed by entrepreneurial effort in the East, the people there wouldn’t have much prosperity. Their current systems do not encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. Also, in most of those societies people tend to be tribal in the way they think about themselves. That is why so many killings of innocent people can occur. Most of us in the Western tradition tend to have the view that only those may be punished for a crime who have perpetrated it. No one may be held guilty for a wrongdoing who didn’t choose to perpetrate it—not the perpetrator’s sisters, brothers, parents, or friends. But this idea, again, is far from universal. It’s not a global conviction. That is very much a part of the Western and, especially American, legal tradition of due process of law. The law may not act against people who are simply near the guilty. One must only go after those who are actually guilty, so that if the authorities can’t catch the guilty then one must give up. No one may be substituted and punished for the guilty. And this same principle is widely held out as a standard of moral thinking—unlike in mere gossip, in serious moral reflection one ought not to pass moral judgment without sufficient evidence of the quality of action being assessed. This general principle of the law does not bother too many people who send suicide bombers to blow up a bunch of school children or fly panes into skyscrapers. Why? Because for many of those people, especially the leaders, if you disapprove of an entire country, like America or Israel, you may hurt and kill any citizen there since they are taken to be one tribe, a collective entity. By the Western legal tradition, however, maybe America or Israel doesn’t always have the best policies but no one may kill American or Israeli babies or civilians in retaliation. That is what in much of the West is called prejudice and is seen to encourage a lynch-mob mentality whereby people are hanged

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merely because they belong to a group the angry mob hates. According to such tribal thinking one may or perhaps even ought to kill anybody from the West because that hurts “the West.” Osama bin Laden has spent some of his time in his videos laying out this position quite explicitly. But the idea tends to be seen as rank absurdity by most Westerners because their traditions—based on elaborate philosophical and related argumentation— tend to be individualistic. Most don’t accept the collectivist notion that has treated entire societies as if all members were guilty for the deeds of a few among them. In short, they reject the idea of collective guilt and tend to eschew class analysis and ethnic and racial condemnation.6 In conclusion, the fundamental difference between at least those in the East on whom the world in the early twenty-first century is very much focused and those in the Western tradition of ethics and morals is that the latter tend—in the main though by no means universally—to view individuals as responsible for their conduct and capable of choosing between right and wrong, and their moral life would be demolished if we forced them to do what is really, actually morality right (apart from what is required for the preservation of the right of individuals to make their own choices regarding their own peaceful conduct7). Once one is an adult, one’s moral or immoral conduct is one’s responsibility, not anyone else’s. And this assumes that every intact human being must be free to choose. Other societies, especially the ones that I’ve focused upon, don’t have this conviction widely enough embraced throughout their culture and through their legal and political tradition.8 That in part explains our major differences between the dominant ethical outlook in the West and much of the Middle East.

NOTES 1. Another area where the differences have been overemphasized is between the West and Asia. See, for an effective debunking of that notion, Amartya Sen, “Human Rights and Asian Values,” in Business Ethics in the Global Market, ed. Tibor R. Machan (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2000). 2. The most recent evidence of concern with paternalism comes from two professors, Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard University, who argue that while harsh paternalism is to be avoided, nudging or “libertarian” paternalism is desirable. See their book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). While it is true enough that people will sometimes influence others by means of mild pressure—nudging—this is acceptable only when it is done within the sphere where those doing the nudging have legitimate authority, e.g., their own home, factory, etc. Thus

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those running a company may introduce music into the workplace so as to calm the nerves of their employees but only because the company owns the workplace and workers have given their consent to being managed (nudged). In one’s own home, too, one may nudge guests to behave in certain ways, such as be sober or attentive to cleanliness. None of this is the kind of coercive, albeit relatively gentle, manipulation that Thaler and Sunstein advocate. 3. There is another matter that is often associated with the moral outlook of the West—or at least some influential Western thinkers—namely, moral or ethical subjectivism. Some even claim that this is the heart of Western liberal thinking on ethics. See, for example, the writings of Leo Strauss and some of his students. For a good summary of Strauss’s intense and influential concerns about this element of Western thought, see Thomas Pangle, Leo Strauss (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006). 4. For an excellent discussion of this topic and of related issues, see Efraim Karsh, Islamic Imperialism by (New Haven, CT: Yale, 2006). See, also, Walid Phares, The War of Ideas (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), for a more comprehensive examination of the differences between Western and Muslim philosophies and religions. 5. Quoted in Rachel Donadio, “My Beautiful London,” The New York Times Magazine (August 10, 2008), 26. 6. Religious grouping is less clearly rejected because it is generally assumed that human beings embrace religions as a matter of free choice, at least once they reach the age of reason or maturity, although it is also acknowledged that many people merely acquiesce in the religious, even political views of their intimates. This renders attitudes toward people of the same religion less clearly objectionable. 7. In their exceptionally insightful book about the normative aspects of (classical) liberalism, Norms of Liberty (College Station: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl very usually distinguish principles that are to guide the conduct of individuals (ethical norms) and principles that are to serve as the political-legal framework (meta-norms) within which free men and women are able to exercise their right to freedom of choice, for better or worse. 8. See, for a good discussion of this and related issues, Irfan Khawaja, “Islam and Capitalism: A Non-Rodinsonian Approach” (unpulished manuscript).

Appendix

Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso

The proposition here is plain: If one is going to be serious about the Lockean proviso, namely, that we have the right of acquisition only if we leave “enough and as good in common . . . to others,” then self-ownership—or in Locke’s terms “property in his own person”—is justified only if we leave “enough and as good” for others of ourselves.1 A little background to situate this discussion is due here: John Locke held that given human nature it is possible to identify certain basic rights all of us have and argued that governments have their justification in securing these rights for the citizenry. Obviously this thesis has been debated at great length and some have disputed the idea from the ground up—for example, Sir Karl Popper argued against the very idea of human nature. (I discuss Popper’s objections and answer them in Tibor R. Machan, Individuals and Their Rights [LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1989].) Among the basic rights Locke believed were warranted by a study of human nature and the requirements of community life is that of private property. This, like the right to one’s life, is supposed to be inviolate except for what has come to be called the Lockean Proviso. I wish to show that this proviso is unwarranted, just as any such proviso is unwarranted where one’s right to one’s life is concerned. As normally taken, the Lockean proviso applies to stuff in nature, so that the right to acquire such stuff is qualified by the proviso: none may become a monopolist.2 But might not this right also qualify ownership in one’s own person, in oneself? The answer may well be that given that the skills and talents that one has developed are often scarce around one’s neighborhood, community, even in the global marketplace as they have rarely been developed by others or at least not to the same degree, so the Lockean proviso applies here as it does 283

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when anything else comes to be owned. Thus, the reasoning would go, one’s exclusive ownership of one’s skills and talents may be unjust. There are in fact practices that indicate that ownership of such skills and talents is not viewed as unconditional—for example, Good Samaritan laws force professionals with certain life-saving skills to provide assistance whether they choose to do so or not. So, arguably when one acquires the skills of a medical professional, one may own the skill provided “enough and as good” is left to help those in dire need. Furthermore, leaders of communities extract taxes from members, whether they want to pay them, so their lives and labors are treated as not unconditionally their own. Before developing the argument against the application of the Lockean proviso to self-ownership, I wish to indicate very briefly why private property rights are sound social-political-legal principles. Why make so much of private property rights? Is the idea, as some critics argue, only an excuse for the rich to remain rich, to keep what they have for themselves and make it impossible for those without wealth to prosper?3 Is it a means by which to keep the poor from getting better off? Not really. The right to private property is the basis for the rule of law as applied to human community life. When this principle is developed into an elaborate legal system, it enables human beings to live in one another’s company, striving to achieve their enormously varied goals without aggressively imposing their will upon others. It is the principle that recognizes, to quote the late comic, Myron Cohen, that “everybody’s got to be someplace.” It makes it possible for everyone to be sovereign, to rule himself and some portion of the world without having to ask permission from others—a king or tsar or the majority. As William Pitt—British Prime Minister in the late 1700s, early 1800s—explained the point of private property rights, “The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail. Its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it—the storm may enter, the rain may enter, but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.” If this right is secured, we enjoy a more or less sizable bit of “kingdom” for ourselves. We are the ultimate authority in some however large or small but inviolate sphere so that we all then have a measure of independence, the freedom to choose what to do with what we own. The right to own stuff doesn’t mean actually having to have anything. The right only recognizes the liberty—the prohibition on others from interfering with one, as one embarks—to seek and obtain property. One may make one’s own what is in nature or what is offered by others in society. (Notice, this precludes owning other people unless they offer themselves and remain in the position to withdraw this offer—even an accepted offer once terms have been

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fulfilled—if they so choose. Bottom line: People are owners, not what’s owned.) One can have this right to property and not exercise it much, by renouncing wealth if that is what one chooses to do. But it would be up to oneself whether or not to accumulate stuff, to hold on to it, to give it away, or to sell it if one so chooses. The right to private property means to specify a range of liberty, of not being subject to the will of others in at least some significant measure. Of course, aside from effort and care, it is a matter of luck, too, the extent to which we can use this liberty to accumulate property. So, since property is generally useful for an abundant life, luck affects how abundantly one lives within the system of the right to private property. But this openness to the effects of luck is quite natural—luck plays a role in all areas of life. Some of us start our lives healthier than do others, some better looking, some more talented, and some, yes, richer (even a lot richer) since if our parents or other benefactors have accumulated extensively they can then bequeath to us the fruits of their hard work and luck.4 So long as these advantages are something obtained without doing violence to anyone, obtained either through hard and smart work or through some measure of good fortune, there is nothing wrong with the resulting differences between ourselves and others in the amount of our property holdings. It is in part because we have the right to do as we choose with what we possess at the start of our lives that we can make a good deal out of our development of our lives: of our talents and skills, in the management of our assets such as good looks, health, or fortunate circumstances. And some manage to build on their initial endowments, others lose a good measure of them, and yet others oscillate back and forth from wealth to poverty and back again throughout their lives. Because human beings are not all identical to start with, and, especially, because they make all kinds of different choices—some better, some worse than others—the idea of equality of conditions, even of opportunities, is a myth and to try to attain it is a major threat to our liberty. There is, however, an area of life where full equality is quite right for us, namely, in the respect owed to our basic rights and, in a legal order, to protection owed to our rights. That is what “equality under the law” signifies, not getting some identical measure of goodies from some government that would, in any case, be impossible. Government, so as to make us all equally wealthy or happy or such would have to be very unequally powerful in order to carry off the constant reassignment of wealth and (effects of) talent and other assets. This then would defeat the purpose of equalization from the very start and make the task hopeless.

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Equality in the legal protection of our rights is a little like the rules of most games—they apply to all the players or competitors fully and equally, but no one actually starts out with identical chances of winning the game, nor carries on with the same success in the course of the game. So the end result is hardly ever equal for all. Still, all the contestants need to play or race by the same rules in order for each to have a decent chance to succeed. The principle of the right to private property shows equality in the legal protection of our rights to be (the only desirable and sensible form of) human equality. Out of it’s implementation in a society, as the sole mode of enforced equality, can arise a very diverse community, domestic and international. Just think of how many different ways of life, religious worship, and productive enterprises can emerge from it! A society where it is implemented would also be the most peaceful and prosperous one ever devised by the political imagination of human beings. Sadly, however, many would rather take over ruling us than accept the diversity that comes from such self-rule. Sadly, because often in these alternative, diversity-destroying societies, wealth is acquired through conquest and confiscation, and even when it is gained through hard work and good fortune, many resent it and would use violence to take it. However, when properly understood, the principle of private property, and its implied principle of equality in the protection of rights, can be seen as the source of most of the great things that social life offers us. “Good fences make good neighbors,” as Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall says, and good fences demarcate property lines. It is too bad we often fail to heed this adage and instead yield to the temptation to tear down fences, tear down claims to personal property, or refuse to erect them. When people act that way they foster violence, war, and mayhem all over the globe. With the case for the principle of private property having been sketched, let us now consider what may lie behind Locke’s decision to offer a proviso. Why should the right not be treated as the United States of America’s Declaration of Independence characterizes our basic rights, namely, as inalienable? I believe this is explained by Locke’s invocation of God as the true owner of the world and all its goods. For Locke the right to private property is a utilitarian device to be used for purposes of dealing with the rivalry that would arise without some sort of initial rationing system. But such a system does not necessarily distribute the goods in an ethical way—some folks may be left without “enough and as good” as others and, by the laws of Christian love and charity, this would be intolerable. Without invoking the idea of God in the establishment of private property rights, however, this element of Christian ethics would not be required. An atheist could well omit a concern for such fair treatment by God and all that

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would be left is the practice of the virtue of generosity whenever extraordinary or emergency needs arise for some who lack property. That is the modern libertarian understanding but not Locke’s. Similarly, when it comes to giving of oneself, in the Lockean-Christian framework it is arguable that one owes others services, services that are part of one’s life. This may even be something one is obligated, by just law theory, to provide. Modern libertarianism, however, sees no such enforceable obligation of justice. Again, the generous or charitable deeds that one ought to perform for others are exercises of benevolence, not of justice, and may not be coerced—involuntary servitude is banned—and only voluntary giving is ethically required, not, however, legally mandated. So, there’s no justification for a Lockean proviso within a system of justice, either when it comes to the distribution of goods (estate), or to the provision of services (persons).5

NOTES 1. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Mark Goldie (London, UK: Everyman, 1924; new edition 1993; latest reprint 1995), 128. In Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (NY: Basic Books, 1974), 174ff, the Lockean Proviso is accepted within the Lockean libertarian framework but quickly declared moot on the grounds that within a regime of the right to private property, so much productivity would ensue that no monopolization of any good would occur. Nozick actually repeats Locke’s own view, where Locke states that [H]e who appropriates land to himself by his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of mankind. For the provisions serving to the support of human life, produced by one acre of enclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much within compass) ten times more, than those, which are yielded by an acre of Land, of an equal richness, lying waste in common. And therefore he, that encloses Land and has a greater plenty of the conveniences f life from ten acres, than he could have from an hundred left to Nature, may truly be said, to give ninety acres to Mankind (133).

2. The kind of monopoly is not the coercive kind whereby a market is secured for some firm by government policy, with competitors kept out by law (as are, for example, first class mail providers kept out of competing with the United States Postal Service in the United States). Rather it is the kind of monopoly one may have in a special attribute or sphere one happens to have, such as one’s knowledge of an invention or an oasis. 3. The classic statement of this comes from Karl Marx’s essay, “On The Jewish Question,” and is developed in C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1962).

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4. Although it is widely claimed that Lockean property rights favor the wealthy, arguably they do not. The wealthy, being more politically influential, are able to deploy government to encroach on the possessions of the less well off if these do not have clear-cut property rights that are vigilantly protected in the law. See Steve Greenhut, Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain (Seven Locks Press, 2004). 5. Aside from the labor of others to which no one other than the laborer is by nature entitled (with the apparent exception of children but only by the prior implicit consent or compact entered into by their parents when they “invited” them into the family), no one is entitled, either, to another’s body parts though not “enough and as good [is] left in common to others.” For more on this, see Samuel C. Wheeler III, “Natural Property Rights as Body Rights,” in The Libertarian Reader ed. Tibor R. Machan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), 272–89.

Index

abortion, 58, 221, 249 absolutism, 75 affirmative action, 95 Africa, 167, 229, 230 agent causation, 31–37, 54–56 altruism, 67, 69, 73n9, 147, 255–59, 261, 262 American Indians, 198n8 anarchism, 183, 213–15, 231, 287 anthropology, 58 Aquinas, Thomas, 233, 271n2 Aristotle, 10, 13, 18, 22n11, 27n42, 60, 69, 70, 86, 109, 111, 121, 129, 131, 144, 145, 150, 152, 180, 181, 229, 257, 271n2, 275, 277 Arrow, Kenneth J., 138n8 arts, the, 64, 77, 109, 145, 151, 255, 266, 275 astrophysics, 45, 59, 121, 128 athletics, 52, 64, 109–11, 114, 145, 222, 251 Austin, J. L., 12, 26n30, 27n41 Ayer, A. J., 58, 62n21 Baars, Bernard, 28n52 Bardon, Adrian, 194, 195, 198n15, 199n18 Barnes, Hazel E., 28n49 Barone, Erico, 138n3

Barrow, John D., 122, 129n1 Bastiat, Frederick, 85 Baudelaire, Charles, 64, 72n1 Bauer, Peter, 96–98 Beauchamp, Tom L., 119n20, 198n7 Becker, Gary, 84, 87n3 Benedict, Ruth, 58, 62n20 Berlin, Isaiah, 27n45, 110, 118n16 Berlin Wall, 156 Berns, Gregory, 72n2 Bible, 90, 92, 275 Bickhard, Mark H., 23n21 Bill of Rights, 151, 153, 172n1, 194, 243, 277 bin Laden, Osama, 280 biology, 2, 8, 31, 44, 45, 91 Blackburn, Simon, 117n14 black hole(s), 37, 38, 56 Bloom, Allan, 180, 181, 186n3 Bock, Alan W., 186, 188n23 Bowie, Norman B., 119n20, 198n7 Boyle, Joseph M., 61n10 Branden, Nathaniel, 47, 61n8 Brodbeck, May, 61n8 Brodsky, Archie, 119n24 Brooks, David, 183 Buchanan, James, 87n6, 137, 138, 165, 176n38 Buckley, William F., 183, 187n13 289

290

Index

Bush, George W., 185, 186, 246 business ethics, 119n20, 255–66 capitalism, 81, 82n7, 82n11, 87n1, 88n8, 116n7, 136, 138n2, 141, 143, 183, 197n2, 199n18, 227, 271n1, 281n8 Carey, H. C., 85 Castaneda, Hector-Neri, 27n46, 73n12 censorship, 95, 139 Central America, 167, 227 charity, 16, 70, 103, 142, 147, 155, 158, 163, 167, 168, 172 , 249, 286 chemistry, 17, 20, 45 Chesher, James E., xiii, 29n58, 72n2, 263n14 child molestation, 3, 72 China, 167, 279 Christianity, 93, 180, 185, 186, 194, 230, 233, 236, 257, 286, 287 citizenship, 42, 72, 80, 81, 100, 101, 103, 111, 139, 145, 146, 152, 156, 163, 171, 172, 176n35, 186, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197, 202, 207, 223, 226, 229, 235, 241, 246, 247, 251, 252, 259, 271n7, 277, 279, 283 Clark, Thomas, 39n6 Clarke, Jonathan, 188n22 classical egoism, 70, 86 classical individualism, 77 classical liberalism, x, 19, 78, 81, 82n11, 90, 93, 96, 141, 164, 182, 183, 185, 197, 213, 219, 233, 236, 245, 271n7, 281n7 Clinton, William “Bill,” 184 Cohen, Myron, 284 Cold War, 184, 188 compatibilism, 37, 42, 51, 52 Comte, Auguste, 68, 140, 149n2 Constitution (U.S.), 100, 104, 131, 141, 151–54, 167, 169, 170, 171, 172n1, 177n43, 201, 203, 206–11, 222; First Amendment 95, 104, 116n3, 234, 235, 238; Fourth Amendment, 222;

Fifth Amendment, 172n1, 206, 247, 251, Ninth Amendment, 243 Cooper, John, 10, 22n6 crime, 25n30, 59, 103, 104, 193, 221, 234, 276, 279 Currie, Gregory, 30n67 Darrow, Clarence, 52 Declaration of Independence, 97, 139, 141, 151–53, 197, 201, 205, 207, 209, 241–43, 250, 277, 286 deductivism, 6 Dennett, Daniel, 33–39, 53–57, 62, 174 Descartes, 7, 25n30, 37, 57, 121, 122 determinism, 32–39, 42, 44, 46–48, 52–55, 61n8, 61n10, 62n17, 90, 93, 112, 113, 159 diversity, 57, 58, 60, 66, 109, 114, 230, 286 Donadio, Rachel, 281n5 Dworkin, Ronald, 139–41, 149n1 Eberstadt, Nicholas, 98n1 economist(s), 19, 30, 31, 33, 49, 53, 59, 63, 64, 68, 71, 75, 79–81, 83–87, 89–91, 93–96, 108, 110, 131, 134–38, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 161, 162, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177n39, 183, 198, 209, 215, 227–30, 251, 253n3, 255, 256, 269, 262 Edelman, Gerald, 29 education, 53, 64, 69, 77, 99, 137, 145, 151, 156, 181, 187n6, 192, 208, 244, 248, 260, 262 egalitarianism, 52, 90, 149n3 egoism, 22n11, 27n47, 64, 70, 77, 82n7, 86, 118n15, 149n6, 175n23, 190, 192, 194, 197 Einstein, Albert, 34, 64 Elster, Jon, 163–65, 176n35 empiricism, 36, 38, 45, 46, 56, 118n14, 123, 164 Engelmann, Paul, 109, 117n14

Index

291

Enron, 238 entertainers/entertainment, 64, 78, 103, 244, 250 Epstein, Richard, 91 Ervin, Sam, Jr., 170, 177n43 existentialist, 28n49, 77

Goldie, Mark, 82n9, 287n1 Good Samaritan laws, 284 Gray, Christopher B., 172n6 Greene, Graham, 68, 73n11 Greenhut, Steve, 288n4 Grisez, G., 61n10

Falk, W. D., 27n46, 62n23, 69, 73n12 fatalism, 33, 35, 36, 54, 55 Feigle, Herbert, 61n8 Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe, 73n5 feudalism, 226–28 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 75, 82n2 Fishkin, James, 177n40 Fitzhugh, George, 153, 172n5 Foot, Philippa, 2, 4, 10, 22n6, 23n16, 62n25 foreign policy, 179, 182–87 Founding Fathers, 170, 172n3, 225 Franklin, Stan, 29n52 freedom of speech, 101, 132, 172n1, 195, 235 Freeman, Anthony, 38n2 free market, 83, 85, 87, 98n3, 133, 135, 141, 147, 183, 217, 228, 230 free will, 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, 28n50, 32, 35, 36, 38n2, 43–55, 59, 61n3, 61n10, 62n18, 66, 86, 90, 93, 113, 179, 193, 205, 233, 247, 252, 274, 275, 279 Freud, Sigmund, 68 Friedman, David, 27n47 Friedman, Jeffrey, 172n6 Friedman, Milton, 19, 30n69, 85, 87n7, 108, 116n7, 138n2 Frost, Robert, 286

Halm, Georg, 138n3 Halper, Stefan, 188n22 Hardin, Garrett, 131, 134n1, 144, 145 Harman, Gilbert, 25n30 Harriman, David, 24n23 Hawking, Stephen, 26n36, 48 Hayek, F. A., 112, 119n21, 132, 134n3, 136, 138n3, 144, 226, 227, 233 health care, 95, 99–105, 156, 208, 262 Heilbroner, Robert, 136, 138n4, 226 Heisenberg, Werner, 122, 126, 127 Higgins, Richard, 87n4 Hitler, Adolph, 27n44, 243, 246, 250 Hobbes, Thomas, 22n11, 68, 70, 78, 81, 121, 150n8, 164, 180, 181, 186, 192–94, 257, 270, 271n6, 287n3 Hodgson, David, 38n1 Holmes, David L., 172n3 Holmes, Stephen, 269, 270 Holocaust, 42 Holt, Jim, 163–65 Honderich, Ted, 50, 61n2 Hospers, J., 173n11 Hughes, Jonathan R. T., 176n36 humanism, xi, xin2 75, 77, 78, 81 Hume, David, x, 4–7, 9, 23n18, 23nn20–22, 24nn26–27, 36, 37, 56–59, 62n23, 123, 164, 176n34, 238

Gaita, Raimond, 3, 22n9 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 64, 112, 119n20 Gates, Bill, 16, 198n8, 202, 255, 260 globalization, 64, 187n18 global market, 280n1, 283 global warming, 34

India, 167 individualism, xi, 27n44, 63, 65–67, 69, 71, 73n8, 77, 96, 118n15, 119n25, 134n3, 150n7, 172n2, 174n21, 189–97, 202, 215, 229, 231, 245, 263n16, 271n2, 287n3 infancy, 28n52, 226 Iran, 227, 275, 278

292

Index

Iraq, 184, 188n22, 273, 278 Islam, 88n11, 92–94, 273, 281n4 “is-must” gap, 5 “is-ought” gap, x, 1–3, 5, 10, 22n7, 23n21, 27n47, 28n49, 58, 59, 123 Jaffa, Harry V., 172n4, 211n1 Janoski, Zbigniew, 173n14 Johnson, Gregory R., 118n16 Johnson, Manuel, 229 Johnston, Paul, 62n19 Jordan, James N., 61n10 journalism, 21n3, 63, 95, 104, 230, 234–37 Judaism, 33, 81, 94, 181, 186, 230, 287n3 Kahan, Alan S., 198n5 Kant, Immanuel, 19, 42, 47, 48, 68, 93, 109, 117n14, 123, 271n2, 278 Karsh, Efraim, 281n4 Kekes, John, 60n1, 174n17 Kelley, David, 14, 28n51 Kelman, Steven, 165 Khawaja, Irfan, 281n8 Kirk, Russell, 174n21, 183, 193 Kirzner, Israel, 141, 149n5, 219 Kolakowsky, Leszek, 173n14 Koran, 90, 92 Kornay, Janos, 177n39 Kovesi, Julius, 62n19 Kureishi, Hanif, 278 Latin America, 148, 167 Leite, Adam, 25n30 Libet, Benjamin, 38n2, 61n4 Lilla, Mark, 187n20 Lincoln, Abraham, 153, 172n4, 201, 205, 211n1, 278 Locke, John, 26n32, 78, 82n9, 91, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 123, 139–41, 150n8, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159–72, 175n24 180, 181, 183, 187n8, 199n23, 203, 219, 265, 267, 269–71, 278, 283, 284, 286, 287n1 Lucey, Ken, 24n24

Maciola, Robert, 105n4 Mack, Eric, xiii, 13, 16, 23n18, 23n22, 27n47, 96, 175n23, 265, 271n1 Mackie, John L., 58, 62n22 Maclagan, W. G., 73n9, 262n1 Macpherson, C. B., 150n8, 287n3 Magnell, Thomas, 103, 105 Mandeville, Bernard, 146 Mansfield, Harvey C., 187n7 Martin, Steve, 65, 72n3 Marx, Karl, xin2, 66, 68, 75, 81, 82n14, 84, 87n5, 100, 121, 161, 189, 197n1, 226, 227, 230 May, Clifford D., 187n16 McCain, John, 184 McLellan, David, 82n14, 197n1 medical care, 101–3, 136 metaethics, 2, 10, 13, 16, 17, 22n6, 22n11, 27n47, 88n8, 111, 118n15 Middle East, 183, 184, 253n8, 273, 279, 280 Midgley, Mary, 59, 62n24 military, 16, 64, 138n5, 179, 188n22, 204, 205, 207, 215, 227 Miller, Earl K., 61n3 minimum wage, 95, 125 Monroe Doctrine, 185 Montminy, Martin, 26n40 moral skepticism, 57, 123, 238, 239 Mozart, 34 Murphy, Liam, 150n12, 271n7 Murray, Charles, 176n37 Mussolini, 279 Nagel, Thomas, 18, 30n62, 141, 150n12, 271n7 Nakhnikian, George, 27n46, 73n12 naturalism, 2, 24n27, 26n35 natural law, 93, 118n15, 233 natural rights, 26n32, 27n47, 78, 79, 81, 93, 101, 118n15, 152, 153, 157, 160, 181, 199n23, 248, 259, 265–69, 271n3 Nazi, 116n3, 210, 279 negative rights, 99–102, 151, 156–58, 163, 194, 259

Index

neo-conservatism, 179–88 Neumann, Harry, 181, 187n6 neurobiology, 1 neuropsychology, 50 Nicolaus, Martin, 87n5 Nietzsche, 278 Norton, David L., 82n7, 119n25, 189, 197n2, 199n20 Nozick, Robert, 27n47, 78, 82n9, 91, 96, 127, 128, 143, 198n15, 265, 267, 287n1 Nussbaum, Martha, 2, 4, 10, 22n6, 29n59, 62n25, 95, 118n15 objective morality, 15, 16, 18 objectivism, 3, 4, 7, 14, 16, 19, 29, 22–28, 30, 88n8, 108, 116n10 Olsaretti, Sarena, 98n3 Olson, Mancur, 87n6 Pangle, Thomas, 281n3 paternalism, 153, 163–65, 176n32, 280n2 Peele, Stanton, 119n24 perspectivalism, 3 Phares, Walid, 281n4 physics, 2, 20, 44, 45, 59, 121–22, 128, 129 physiology, 49 Pierson, N. G., 138n3 Pinker, Steven, 194, 198n13 Pitkin, Hanna F., 18, 30n65 Pitt, William, 284 Plato, 7, 11, 21, 25n30, 27n47, 64, 125, 129n3, 157, 179–81, 186, 218, 271n2 Poland, 167 political skepticism, 9 political theory, 75, 76, 82n11, 93, 94, 96, 107, 150n8, 160, 161, 203 Pollard, Bill, 39n5 Pols, Edward, 23n17, 39n9, 62n17 Popper, Sir Karl, 180, 283 pornography, 58, 116n3 positive rights, 95, 99–102, 151, 156–58 positivism, 10, 38, 58, 123

293

Posner, Richard, 116n9, 117n13 post-humanism, xi post-modernism, 3, 125 poverty, 16, 89–91, 93, 95–98, 98n1, 147, 160, 167, 174, 227, 228, 285 private property, 75,77, 79, 81, 90, 97, 101, 131, 136, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149n4, 155, 161, 166, 168, 172n1, 174n21, 195, 199n18, 206, 217, 219, 244, 247, 251, 259, 266, 283–86 287n1 propositional logic, 8, 9 prostitution, 72n4, 88n11, 115n3, 235, 238, 277 psychology, 3, 12, 17, 22, 31, 34, 39n3, 45–47, 49, 55, 59, 61n8, 68, 69, 164, 169, 192, 225, 234, 257, 262 public-choice theory, 137–38 public policy, 82, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96–98,108, 144, 165, 174, 198n8, 215, 221, 228, 239, 241–48, 252, 261, 278 Putnam, Hilary, 22n7, 27n42, 82n5 racism, 3, 24n24, 237 Raibley, Jason, 22n10 Rand, Ayn, 2–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15–30, 62n25, 69, 70, 82n7, 82n11, 86, 88n8, 96, 107, 109, 115n2, 118n15, 141, 149n6, 157, 173n11, 175nn23–25, 189–91, 193–95, 197–99, 214, 219, 265, 271n1 rape, 3, 195, 235, 242 Rappaport, Steven, 87n7 Rasmussen, Douglas B., xiii, 13, 16, 24n29, 27n42, 28n49, 96, 118n15, 157, 173n12, 175n24, 199n21, 253n7, 265, 271n1, 271n5, 281n7 rational egoism, 70 rationalism, 6, 10, 123 Rawls, John, 52, 62n13, 91, 98n3, 149n3, 158, 173n16 realism, 121–24 relativism, 19, 25n30, 26n40, 76, 82n5, 117n12, 118n16, 125, 129n2, 181, 187n7, 227

294

Index

religion, 48, 64, 68, 88n11, 89, 92–95, 111, 139, 149n2, 152, 185, 186, 189, 192, 215, 227, 230, 234, 235, 237, 245, 261, 278, 281n4, 281n6, 286 Renaut, Alain, 197n2 Ricardo, David, 85 Rice, Condoleezza, 273 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 153 Roosevelt, Theodore, 185 Rorty, Richard, 25n30, 82n5, 108, 116nn8–10, 124, 125, 12n2 Rosen, Jeffrey, 61n10 Rossiter, Clinton, 183, 187n13 Rumania, 167 Russia, 279 Sachs, Jeffrey, 95, 98 Sadowsky, James, 141, 149n4, 219 Sartre, 14, 278 Schneider, William, 184 Schoeck, Helmut, 186n2 Schwartz, Anna, 138n2 Searle, John, 1 self-defense, 91, 267, 270, 271 Sen, Amartya, 73n7, 92, 95, 253n3, 280n1 sexual discrimination, 3, 234 Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, 81n3 Shii Muslims, 93, 94 Singer, Peter, 68, 111, 118n18, 147, 257, 263n5 skepticism, 9, 11, 41, 59, 76, 117n12, 122, 123, 238 Skinner, B. F., 32, 34, 46, 48, 49, 61n7, 127 Smith, Adam, 70, 73n14, 84, 86, 88n9, 164, 229 smoking, 24n24, 107–19, 244 socialism, 132, 136, 138n1, 141, 147, 148, 161, 169, 205, 228, 230 Socrates, 25n30, 64, 70, 71, 75, 109, 149, 180–82 Soviet Union, 167, 177n39, 183, 210, 225–27, 242 Sowell, Thomas, 173n16

Spencer, Herbert, 159, 174 Sperry, Roger W., 23n17, 32, 39n3, 50, 61n12, 62n18, 86, 88n10 Spinoza, Baruch, 109, 164, 180 St. Augustine, 233 Stalin, Joseph, 279 Stein, Kathleen, 61n3 Sterba, James, P., 161–76 Stigler, George, 83–85, 87n2 Stoner, James R., 187n8 Stove, David Charles, 125, 129n3 Strauss, Leo, 15, 29n54, 82n10, 179–87, 281n3 subjectivism, 3, 13, 14, 19, 23, 65, 77, 86, 123, 278, 281n3 success, 11, 63–73, 77, 80, 90, 114, 145, 158, 174, 238, 257, 286 suicide, 29n55, 119n22, 231, 249, 279 Sunni Muslims, 93, 94 Sunstein, Cass, 141, 176n32, 269, 270, 280n2 Supreme Court, 38n1, 139, 170, 172n1, 206, 207, 209, 236, 245, 246 Sutherland, Keith, 38n2 Syria, 278 Tanner, Michael, 176n30 taxation, 92, 97, 101, 102, 145, 147, 170, 172, 206, 209, 214, 220, 248, 253n5, 284 Taylor, Charles, 72, 73n6, 96, 98n6, 105n3, 150n7 terrorism, 3, 25n30 Thaler, Richard H., 280n2 Thucydides, 131, 134n2 Tipler, Frank J., 122, 129n1 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 189–200 Tollefsen, O., 61n10 Tollinson, Robert D., 118n19 Torah, 92 trade, 79, 90, 103, 144, 160, 167, 174n21, 187n18, 206, 220, 237 tragedy of the commons, 131–34, 144–46, 228, 263n13 Tse-tung, Mao, 279

Index

Tukiainen, Arto, 21 Tullock, Gordon, 87n6, 137, 138n6, 165, 174, 176n38 unemployment, 95, 163 Unger, Peter, 92, 96, 98n4, 118n18, 147, 150n11, 257, 263n6 United Nations, 95, 96 utilitarianism, 67, 146, 257 Uyl, Douglas J. Den, xiii, 73n15, 96, 118n19, 119n22, 157, 173n12, 175n24, 199n21, 253n7, 265, 271n1, 271n5, 281n7 value judgments, 1, 6, 10, 19, 22n7, 23n22, 117n12 Van Duffel, Siegfried, 27n47, 199n23, 266, 271n3 Veatch, Henry B., 10, 21n6 Versenyi, Laszlo, 82n1 von Mises, Ludwig, 19, 131, 135, 136, 138n1, 144, 214

295

Walter, Henrik, 61n3 wealth redistribution, 92, 95 welfare rights, 92, 151, 153–56, 160, 166, 167, 198n15 welfare state, 52, 90, 136, 151, 157, 160–63, 169–73, 176n26, 177n39, 210 Wheeler, Samuel C., III, 288n5 White, Robert, 27n47 Wiggins, James W., 186n2 Will, George, 100 Wilson, Eric G., ix, xin1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 21n5, 24n22, 26n30, 29n56, 30n65, 62n19, 109, 117n14, 174n20 Wolfe, Tom, 185, 188n21 WorldCom, 238 Worrall, John, 30n67 Zakaria, Fareed, 252, 253n4, 263n6 Zunz, Oliver, 198n5

About the Author

Tibor R. Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics, Chapman University, CA. He is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, AL. Machan is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The author of thirty-plus books—most recently, The Morality of Business: A Profession for Human Wealth-Care (Springer, 2007)—and editor of more than twenty others, Machan has written over hundred and fifty scholarly papers, some included in philosophy readers (e.g., “A Brief Defense of Free Will,” “The Non-existence of Welfare Rights,” and “Do Animals Have Rights?). Hoover Institution Press has published ten volumes in the series Philosophical Reflections on a Free Society, which Machan has edited. Anarchism/ Minarchism, Is Government Part of a Free Country, co-edited by Machan and Roderick Long, was published by Ashgate. Machan was visiting professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, 1992–1993. He edited Reason magazine for two years and had been editor of Reason Papers, an annual journal of interdisciplinary normative studies, for twenty-five years. He lectures in Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, the Republic of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Latin America on business ethics and political philosophy. He has appeared on Bill Buckley’s Firing Line, more recently on PBS-TV’s Religion and Ethics in America and Life & Styles, John Stossel’s John Stossel Goes to Washington, and on numerous radio stations, as well as on the Dennis McCuistion Program in Dallas, Texas. His memoir, titled A Man Without a Hobby, was published in 2004.

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