Questions of the Day
By Art Carden • Wednesday May 12, 2010 7:03 AM PDT • 8 Comments
Why is liberty always on trial? Why does the burden of proof rest with freedom, private property, and voluntary exchange rather than coercion, socialized property, and compulsory exchange? Why is the assumption or assertion that some people should govern others almost always implicit in the discussion?
Cross-posted at the Mises Blog.
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The answer is, in my view, fairly simple; we’re primates. A thoughtful study of primate behavior goes a long way in making sense of our own. Like all mammals, primates have a strong sense of rank, order, and dominance. The State, at the end of the day, is the Alpha writ large. Everything the Alpha does is an expression of dominance, even apparent acts of kindness and charity. What sets us apart, among other traits, is that we are consciously aware of this ranking. This puts us in a position to question it. However, it is not what comes naturally. The ‘default’ option is to just accept it. Dominance and being ruled is the story of most of human history.
Along comes the Enlightenment, which challenges this long-ingrained evolutionary trait. That is why we face an uphill battle; we are fighting our own simian origins. Hopefully, the side of liberty will be victorious in the long run. However, this also means we will only get asymptotically close to a free world. We’ll never quite get there.
Tristan Band | May 12, 2010 | Reply
Because, as Marx wrote, “the right of man to property is the right to enjoy
his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily without regard for
other men, independently from society, the right of selfishness.” The same applies to freedom itself. It is the right to selfishness (though of course not an order to be selfish).
If selfishness is evil, the rights to life and property are gutted of their principal rationale. If selfishness is evil, then only a fetishistic concern with voluntary action can endorse freedom.
Because alturism is dominant, it is taken for granted that there is no essential value in self-governance. In this context, demands that rights be respected appear ridiculous. “What is the point?” people ask. “We all depend on each other, we are not monads; and we have a moral duty to aid the needy.”
In this light, rights are empty of substantial normative content. They wither to a desicated form where their primary purpose is to protect us from a Hobbesian society. Note that this view of the purpose of rights fits the common view of selfishness as solipsistic.
Alastair Jardine | May 12, 2010 | Reply
@Alastair: That would be the Objectivist rationale, correct? I personally don’t buy it anymore, but it is at least coherent.
Another issue is that human beings have trouble conceiving of order without design. Without an ‘Alpha” to make it happen.
Tristan Band | May 12, 2010 | Reply
Tristan, I would suggest that the concept of order without design is incoherent and that only an ontological view is correct. As the philosopher Alvin Plantinga shows, for any rational inquiry, it is “properly basic” (i.e., tautological) to assume that each of us has a mind, that there are other minds, we have free will, and that the natural world is orderly (i.e., set with predictable and recurring regularity). To assume otherwise provides no framework in which to infer and ends all inquiry. In other words, the world’s existence and the laws that govern it are set and not subjective, relative or consequential. Moreover, the dynamics of chaos theory and quantum mechanics only exist within a pre-conditional foundation of a design in which such phenomena can exist and operate, and such a design itself is not random or chaotic. The evidence fully supports this design thesis. This view is also fundamental to the view of the Austrian School of economics, starting with Carl Menger being influenced by the work of the philosopher Franz Brentano and the earlier Scholastic tradition rooted in Thomas Aquinas.
I would also suggest that the Objectivist view is replete with contradiction. Self-interest and reciprocity are not the basis for an objective standard for morality and epistemology. If self-interest is the only standard for truth, then truth is entirely subjective, which of course is a “defeater” since this would be a claim of objectivity. For an excellent critique of subjectivism in aesthetics, morality and epistemology, please see the book, The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis (also available free online).
David Theroux | May 12, 2010 | Reply
Tristan, that’s my Rand/Machan understanding of rights, yes. Rights secure a ‘moral space’, in Nozick’s phrase, where we are morally independant from others. In an important sense rights are ‘meta-normative’, in that they secure a human’s means of making good choices – viz. exercising rationality over one’s self and one’s property. My previous post was alluding to the egoism of rights, and that it’s implausible to defend rights (or liberty if you prefer) on alturistic grounds. Why? Because rights protect the rights-holder’s interests. The alturist has no basis for respecting the right of people to ignore other’s needs. If they appeal to moral agency – respecting people’s choices – they elevate the form of morality over its substance: who should get values.
David, self-interest is not the basis of an objective view of morality. It’s the other way around. An objective view of morality is the basis of self-interest. You need to know the truth about humans life as such in order to know how to act selfishly. It is in your self-interest to be objective. If you acted subjectively or solipsistically, this would be against your self-interest. Did Bernie Maddoff advance his own long-term, all-things-considered interest by indulging his ugly desires?
It is possible to know your objective self-interest through the study of ethics. For the same reasons we can advise a child to practice self-control because we know it will aid their life, we can devise general ethical principles.
Alastair Jardine | May 12, 2010 | Reply
Good question, Art.
I don’t know the answer.
mikehell | May 14, 2010 | Reply
Alastair, Thanks for your comment. You are certainly correct that morality stems from an “objective view.” As C.S. Lewis notes in The Abolition of Man:
“A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.”
And from Lewis’s book, Christian Reflections:
“The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Subjectivism about values is eternally incompatible . . . . We and our rulers are of one kind only so long as we are subject to one law. But if there is no Law of Nature, the ethos of any society is the creation of its rulers, educators and conditioners; and every creator stands above and outside his own creation.”
But such an objective view (or natural moral law) must then be independent of one’s subjective view or self-interest. Such an objective standard or ground of right and wrong must be a rule with which we judge individual choices. In other words, objective morality cannot be both rooted in or derived from the subjective views of an individual and simultaneously a separate and fixed standard. The problem here stems from the atheist/naturalist worldview that assumes that only the material world exists and hence nothing about the universe, one’s existence and one’s mind exists other than matter/energy and the material laws of physics. But if metaphysical naturalism were true, then the very idea of studying ethics and the modernist belief in atheism/naturalism is also simply the product of material laws, and hence has no meaning. One’s very views would simply be determined by physical laws and the outcome would have nothing to do with “truth” or “objectivity” but instead solely that they occur as brain events. But the problem deepens because the very idea of believing in physical laws and morality (or anything at all) similarly has no basis in being “true” because these ideas would also be determined. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane stated:
“If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motion of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”
But clearly an objective, non-material reality does exist, and the basis of rights is not some “selfish” (i.e., narcissistic) view but instead the recognition that a natural moral law defines our lives and to be moral, we must be unselfish and submit to this objective rule which defines and makes all rights possible. In other words, the very concept of objective morality requires the altruistic act of giving up one’s selfish ambitions whenever they might differ from the natural law standard of doing good to others (Golden Rule). And to claim that “enlightened” self-interest would mean to do so overlooks the point that if self-interest is the only basis for morality and one is faced with a choice that would clearly benefit oneself by harming others but for which one would never be caught, the “egoist” would be “altruistic” (and hence “immoral”) not to take it. Indeed, selfishness or “egoism” is the basis for virtually every tyranny in history.
The further point here is that we are relational beings and altruism (or “love” or being “other-directed”) is what every person seeks—we all seek the immaterial joy and meaning that is only possible by being loved (unselfishly treated) and by loving others (being altruistic). Indeed, this is the basis for all human aspirations and self-interest cannot be squared with this profound longing. Love is not a quid pro quo nor a reciprocity—it is giving to others.
It is no accident that universal natural law and the ideas of liberty sprang not from “egoism” but directly from Christian theism, as the sociologist/historian Rodney Stark and others have shown. And the erroneous theory of “egoism” or “selfishness” as the basis for morality and liberty not only runs exactly contrary to the natural longings (natural law) of human brings, but further serves to support the absurd stereotypes by the proponents of collectivism that free markets are atomistic and foster cruelty and indifference to human suffering.
David Theroux | May 14, 2010 | Reply
Because in the wake of the industrial revolution and mass media/global communication, progressivist statism has become the dominant western religion. Your question is like an early atheist wondering why no Christian concerns himself with proving his concept of god.
Mna | May 20, 2010 | Reply