Fires start during a trip back east, and returning means joining the displaced

By Tibor R. Machan

When the Southern California fires began, I was in Alabama, ready to drive to Atlanta to give a talk at Emory University's School of Law. My adult daughter was back here in Orange County but didn't have the means for removing much from our house – my vehicle was in the shop!
Obviously I was extremely apprehensive. Living as I do in funky Silverado Canyon unavoidably leads one to think about the prospect of major fires, especially during as dry a year as 2007 has been. But I have lived around in California since 1962, and fires are fairly routine threats. I recall a major blaze in Santa Barbara, for example, which, if memory serves me right, nearly burned down half the city. Next to earthquakes, it is fires that most frighten Californians.

Because I travel a lot and for good spells of time, I am likely to be caught unprepared for the task of moving stuff out of my home, and that was true this time as well. So I tried very hard to keep abreast of the fires from afar, to learn as much from TV and radio as possible. But, to my frustration, all the news programs seemed to have in mind were indifferent spectators, not so much the direct participants. Of course, news organizations need to make a buck with what they decide to showcase but, still, it was a bit of a shock that they gave viewers so few specifics.

The world is made up of specifics, not generalizations, even if generalizations are vital for planning and such. But what I wanted to know is whether the fire had burned near my home, how near, how likely to be nearer soon, how soon, etc. And I am sure that thousands of others had those kinds of concerns.

Instead, what the news reports have kept stressing are "large" facts, such as how many hundreds of thousands were evacuated, how many major fires were burning, how many homes had burned, how many fatalities had occurred. After the 14th time I heard and saw that 13 major fires were burning in Southern California I wanted to shake the person on TV and implore him or her to list where these major fires were burning. But no, never mind such specifics. It seems only the magnitudes mattered; the details could be kept to the minimum.

It occurred to me that the news aimed to please spectators of spectacular events, not people who had a stake in those events. That's not really so surprising – within the audience relatively few would have a direct interest in the fires, whereas millions across the country would go gaga seeing all the huge flames and hearing the huge logistical numbers given out by reporters.

When, after I flew back to Orange County late Tuesday and had had a bit of rest at a friend's place, I called the Orange County Fire Authority, I was told the firefighters at Silverado Canyon – which wasn't engulfed in flames – might let me fetch some stuff from my home. Alas, when I arrived in the area to do this, a police officer gently and firmly told me, "No dice," or words to that effect. I was told I had to wait until the Fire Authority canceled the evacuation order. When was that likely to happen? No idea at all, none.

It occurred to me, though I am not confident about it, that perhaps some more hands-on help could have been provided at locations where the fire was only a threat, not yet an actuality. Why not lead a group of people back in to get some of their valuables, and then lead them out, if no imminent threat of being hurt existed?

But never mind. I cannot claim to have expertise about this issue, so I just speculate what could work better than simply shutting down places indefinitely.

For now I just wait, as do thousands of others. I may turn out to have been luckier than many but that, also, is too early to know.

Groundless Environmentalism

Tibor R. Machan

As one considers all the calls issued by environmentalist for people to desist from interfering with wild animals and plants, one may notice that something vital is hardly ever addressed. For example, a recent program on PBS featured supposedly endangered giant crocodiles and the narrator repeatedly insisted that there must be serious, worldwide measures adopted by governments to make sure that these huge animals remain alive and flourish, even if this means depriving many human beings who hunt them of their livelihood.

Even giant killer crocodiles are protected and elaborate bureaucratic maneuvers are needed in order for professional hunters to save people from them. One such bureaucrat on a program I caught insisted that the giant killer crocodile must not be destroyed, no matter what, never mind the danger it poses to the local human population (in Burundi).

Mind you, I am very glad that there are these animals. I enjoy learning about them, watching their behavior. I am even in favor of not endangering them needlessly, provided this does not intrude on the efforts to nearby humans to live and flourish. I am very much in favor, as a recent book of mine is titled, Putting Humans First (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Yet I have nothing against efforts to make sure that various interesting animals or plants are well taken care of by those who care about them.

What bothers me a lot is that I do not hear any discussion on the various programs that address endangered species just what criterion is appropriate when deciding whether a given endangered animal or plant species can be left to wither. After all, animals and plants come and go in and out of existence all the time. History is replete with this process of extinction and regeneration. The fact that in some cases the process involves decisions and actions by human beings seems to me entirely innocent. Such is life on planet earth. Unless it is demonstrated that something vital is lost when a species becomes extinct, I am not convinced that it needs to be saved. Mere sentiment cannot suffice as a reason for interfering with the human use of animals. After all, animals are routinely killed off by other animals or by various disasters that occur in the wilds with no help from human beings. Just what is to determine whether the extinction of some living species are part of the natural order or some kind of malfeasance on the part of human beings?

This is never discussed in these programs, although intimations are made that there is something necessarily bad about any extinction or even endangerment. But why is this to be believed? No one appears to address this issue and, instead, narrators keep suggesting that people who kill or endanger wild animals are evil and must be stopped from doing so. There appears to be very little but rank misanthropy afoot here, without a serious examination of whether what people who use wild animals are actually doing anything wrong.

It is no answer to say that such people are hurting animals, or even to claim, perhaps quite truthfully, that they are helping to extinguish animals or plants. As already noted, animals and plants are extinguished all the time, much of the time by other animals and plants. So when people take part in this process, it is not at all clear that they are perpetrating something evil or even environmentally harmful. The mere dismay that some people feel when wild animals and plants are extinguished or endangered clearly does not suffice to make a case for its being wrong to do so.

If it were entirely costless to carry out policies that stop endangering species of life, hardly anyone could complain. But it isn’t costless. Often it is the livelihood of many human beings that gets sacrificed in order to stop endangering non-human life. And that is what should be at the forefront of thinking about this topic—people matter more than other living things, generally speaking.

Of course it would be swell if nothing that is liked by various human beings became endangered. Reckless, wanton destruction is certainly something to be avoided. But that is not what’s at issue here. The misanthropy evident from many who express concern in most p0ublic forums about the environment—a loose term if there ever was one—seems to have no support at all other than sentiment. And such sentiment should not be permitted to undermined human life and flourishing.

Some Inconvenient—Politically Incorrect—Truths?

Tibor R. Machan

The famous Nobel Laureate, James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA with the
late Francis Crick, got into hot water in the UK recently for suggesting
that blacks may have some problems with coping with the enormous
challenges faced in Africa. Yes, this suggests that many blacks may suffer
from some deficiencies, an idea that has been bandied about for two
hundred years not always out of racism but out of a certain kind of
physical anthropology. Even Karl Marx believed that those who live on
infertile land, Slavs (in Siberia) and Negroes (in Africa), would suffer
from malnutrition and other maladies and this could have an impact on
their brains, which is, after all, part of the body and the body responds
to nutrition big time.

Watson was roundly condemned and felt the need to apologize. On this
side of the Atlantic Justice Department official John K. Tanner got
roundly attacked, in particular by Senator Obama, one of the main
Democratic presidential contenders, for pointing out that “minorities
don’t become elderly the way while people do. They die first.” This, too,
is an old idea, one that had been aired often during the social security
privatization debate not long ago. It points to the very likely and
uncomfortable fact that a great many black citizens will never receive the
money they paid into social security because they do not live long enough.
The reasons are many, including the poverty that is increased for them by
way of taxing them to death, liberally in this case.

But never mind about the truth or falsity of Watson’s and Tanner’s
remarks. In a free country one is supposed to have one’s freedom of speech
vigorously protected, even when it is a prominent (partly) black
presidential contender who would want to shut someone up. Yes, if one
misrepresents official policy in an official capacity, it may not have
first amendment protection. But what if one is saying what is actually
true or at least widely believed among professionals and academics who
address an issue?

Back in the heydays of academic feminism there was a similar attack on
speech from one Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon of the University of
Michigan School of Law. She argued in her little book Only
Words—published very prominently by Harvard University Press—that
pornography is a form of assault and should not have First Amendment
protection. And there is a theory that is fairly influential that certain
types of speech involve “fighting words” and thus must be viewed
differently from normal speech that can be ignored and thus cannot
justifiably be considered injurious and therefore criminal. Never mind
that pornography assaults no one even if it may insult and denigrate
women. Speech, of course, and art can do that aplenty but given that
these are nonetheless peaceful activities, they should not be made
criminal in a free society.

One might say the same thing about the unpleasant and perhaps even
offensive findings about the death rate among black citizens and the
difficulties Africans may face because of malnutrition. More generally,
factual hypothesis advanced, especially in good faith, ought never to be
banned, nor should anyone be penalized for considering them—which is what
was so wrong about the firing of ex-Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers
when he suggested that maybe women don’t embark upon scientific careers as
much as men do because there is something about their brain that is less
suited for science or math than the brains of men. Maybe all wrong but to
consider it unacceptable in the world of academia is absurd.

There are dozens and dozens of cases of hypotheses
being advanced, considered, and eventually rejected or accepted throughout
the history of science, including the sciences that bear on human affairs.
To politicize this process is unbecoming of a free society. (Remember, by
the way, that it was the very famous and much beloved-by-liberals Supreme
Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was a serious believer in
eugenics!)

Maybe the lesson is that we are still suffering from the influence of the
kind of thinking that makes issues of values incapable of rational
consideration. This is what positivists argued in the early parts of the
20th century. So when values enter a discussion—and they do all the time
during political disputations—many people resort to ad hominems instead of
rational arguments. They charge their opponents with having the wrong
biases! But they do not see a way to showing that those biases are bad, any
more than to showing that their own are good.

Positivism, however, is dead. Values can be rationally discussed and
it is possible to conclude in favor of some and against others. So instead of
banning controversial ideas, politicians and others ought to just argue with them.
If they win, that’s to their credit. If they lose, it civilized thing is to admit it.

The Tragedy of Medical Commons

Tibor R. Machan

Perhaps you think that all that stuff about abuse of medical services is just bunk, an attempt to discredit Hilary and the other advocates of socialized medicine for Americans. Well, you can never be sure about the motivation of people you hardly know but I bet there are good reasons for doubting the viability, let alone the morality, of socialized medicine.

I have a good friend in Birmingham, Alabama, who is a medical doctor who does emergency room service on a regular basis and his stories confirm the fear of the tragedy of the medical commons. When people believe they are getting something for nothing, when they draw on the common pool of resources to finance their medical maladies, a great many of them will give very little thought to prudence, thrift, and cost. As my friend tells me, the emergency ward is being visited by people, many of them taking advantage of free ambulance service as well, for the slightest of problems. They come in and take up the time of doctors and nurses even though all they have wrong with them is something like a bloody nose or a sore throat. When the doctor tells them that theirs simply doesn't qualify as an emergency but for a measly $3 they could be looked at, most of them refuse to pay and leave, all the time chugging on a can of beer and smoking them good old smokes, which costs them far more than the $3 that would get them to a doctor. Week after week these kind of scene replay in the emergency ward and there is nothing that can be done about it since America's government supervised medical system, which is as near to a socialist one as one can be without actually being fully socialized, makes it all possible.

All the while these kinds of episodes are multiplying around the country, the English and Canadian systems of socialized medicine are coming under scrutiny and severe criticism for driving competent doctors away and creating fatal shortages. The trivial use of hospitals, nurses and doctors will, of course, have deadly consequences on the few but serious emergencies that do show up. The lines of patients get longer and longer by the week. The entitlement mentality has no restraint--if a service is deemed to be due someone as a matter of his or her basic right, why worry about the fact that making use of it will bankrupt the system?

I remember a good friend of mine--actually, an ex wife--once joined a commune in Oregon since some friends of hers were already there and she liked their company. Maybe she thought all those in the commune would be agreeable folks. To her dismay, however, a great many of the people turned out to be leeches, ones who simply want to get a free ride off the few who actually tried to make the experiment work. Instead of pitching in with their fair share of work, they waited for the few diligent, conscientious members of the commune to get things cleaned up, restock the pantry and so forth, while they sat about doing nothing to pitch in.

The Clinton ideology, derived as it is from Karl Marx's Utopian vision of a future communist society (via her mentor the Marxist Rabbi, Michael Lerner), fails to accept that there really are people who lack good will and commitment to flourishing in their lives. Instead, if they are given a chance by kind and gentle and gullible politicians and bureaucrats, they will sit on their butts and let others take care of them not because they are in great need or suffering impediments but because they are plain lazy and shiftless. Such a "judgmental" outlook on human life is cast to the side by the Clinton crowd, who knows why except perhaps to make sure that no one's vote is lost at election time. The price of it is a disastrous health case system that will produce fatalities for which of course no one will take the blame.

Child Care Politicized

Tibor R. Machan

Gail Collins writes for The New York Times pleading that the presidential candidates address child care as one of their main topics, that they promise us that the government will address and confront the task of child care. As she puts it, “Right now, the only parents who routinely get serious child-care assistance from the government are extremely poor mothers in welfare-to-work programs. Even for them, the waiting lists tend to be ridiculously long. In many states, once the woman actually gets a job, she loses the day care. Middle-class families get zip, even though a decent private child care program costs $12,000 a year in some parts of the country.”

Collins writes as if it were simply self evident that a proper government take over child care from parents. She never even raises the issue of why this should be the case except to say that “You need certification in this country to be a butcher, a barber or a manicurist, but only 12 states require any training to take care of children. Only three require comprehensive background checks. In Iowa, there are 591 child care programs to every one inspector. California inspects child care centers once every five years.”

One may assume, then, that Gail Collins thinks parents, too, need certification and that there should be government inspectors checking on how children are being raised. Her argument, if you can call it that, is simply that government has gotten into nearly everything else in people’s lives, so it should be involved big time in child care as well.

But this is all question-begging. Just because government messes with nearly everything, it doesn’t follow by a long shot that it ought to do so nor that it should expand its role in people’s lives. Collins is upset that when in “1971, Congress actually passed a comprehensive child care bill . . . it was vetoed by Richard Nixon.” She frets that “The next time the bill came up, members were flooded with mail accusing them of being anti-family communists who wanted to let kids sue their parents if they were forced to go to church.”

The only person she believes is addressing the issue to some rather minimal extent is, of course, Hilary Clinton. After all, Clinton wrote a book titled “It Takes a Village And Other Lessons Children Teach Us.” Collins fails to mention that the claim that Clinton’s statism about raising children was inspired by a UC Berkeley educated Marxist thinker, “Rabbi” Michael Lerner, editor of the Left Wing Jewish magazine, Tikkun and that the it takes a village idea is indeed communist.

I don’t raise the point because I hope to scare people, as Collins claims must be the case with those who make the charge that Clinton’s is a communist notion. I raise it because it is a rotten idea to remove responsibility from parents for the care of their children and to transfer it to the state. It was a bad idea when first suggested in Plato’s famous dialogue, Republic, even though Socrates only advocated this policy for the supposedly ideal society—thus it was for him only a kind of model, not a practical recommendation. But it was a very dangerous notion, envisioning leaving strangers, especially politicians and bureaucrats, in charge of bringing up the young.

I lived in a country during my early years where it was taken as a given that the government is responsible to raise children, to “educate” them, care for them, to nourish them. The result was, not just there but throughout the Soviet bloc, the alienation of children from their parents, the widespread snooping by children who were taught to turn in their parents for political incorrectness, and, of course, the eventual collapse of the society.

Child rearing is a serious challenge, which is why the lesson folks like Collins and Clinton should be teaching is for people not to have children unless they are well prepared for doing so, economically, psychologically, morally, and in all the other ways required to be good parents. It is no answer to avoid this personalized approach to parenting and to bring in government which, as should be known by all, including columnists for The New York Times, is pretty bad at nearly everything it sets out to do. Never mind it isn’t its proper task in any country, let alone in America.

America’s Lasting Principles

Tibor R. Machan

Do the principles of the Declaration of Independence have lasting significance? Are they stable and enduring—or applicable only to a given time and place? What about the principles expressed in our Constitution? Is that, as some political leaders and even jurists of our time have claimed, “a living document,” meaning, is it something malleable, flexible, to be adjusted to different historical periods?

What matters is whether such principles are fundamentally applicable to temporal yet ubiquitous human community life. Are they consistent with human nature, and do they reflect how we ought to live in each other’s company?

It is known, for example, that when studying adolescent psychology, the principles involved cover only an early stage of human life. Are the principles of the Declaration and those that underline the US Constitution principles of this kind, able to inform us only about a given historical period, maybe even only in a given geographical area? Or are they "universal" in the sense of being relevant to every known human society?

Certainly the founders thought they were in fact appealing to enduring principles. They did not make this claim casually. Only after they had studied the basic principles of human organization as articulated by such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu, and as manifested in history, did they affirm what they regarded as lasting ideas and ideals.

These they regarded as derived from our basic human nature, which doesn’t change from year to year and place to place. A human individual was Aristotle's "rational animal" 2000 years ago, and this is still so today. Which is why we can still read the ancient authors—Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and the rest—with profit. All these and millions of other people—historians, poets, novelists, scientists, explorers and jurists—speak to us intelligibly across the ages. If we could resurrect them, we could sit down and have a discussion. Maybe not about the Internet, but certainly about child-raising, friendship, politics, beauty, all the elements of our shared humanity—all the values and concerns that do endure. Because human nature endures.

For example, all human beings, in all ages and places, have been creative. They invent things. The don't merely rely on what happens to be available in the environment, as do other living things. Plants and lower animals survive and flourish by following built-in directions. Much of our own physiology is also hard-wired. But most other living things don’t have to learn, don't have to figure out how things work and how they might contribute to their lives. We need to learn—and, as we well know, some people refuse to. We face alternatives, and therefore have moral responsibility for what we do.

If human beings foul things up, we know well enough that it’s often their own fault. Unlike animals, people can make bad choices— as when they judge others not by the "content of their character" but by their national or ethnic or racial background, or when they molest children, or betray their country, or engage in professional malpractice. We are able to betray the principles we ought to live by.

All this is in the nature of a creative being. What the Declaration gave eloquent voice to is that certain basic principles of community life rest on these lasting, stable, fundamental facts about our nature. Accordingly, those principles, too, are lasting, stable and fundamental within any community of human beings, recognized or not.

Today's Fundamental Philosophical Threats against the Free Society

Tibor R. Machan

Introduction
Some would have it that we can have a philosophy of freedom without, well, a philosophy. In other words, they find it rather pointless to dwell on various philosophical topics, such as free will versus determinism, the problem of knowledge, what is the nature of right conduct and so forth. Instead they wish to focus on so called practical issues, such as how much prosperity or science or satisfaction is produced in a relatively free versus planned society. As if these considerations didn't have some philosophical dimensions.

Without by any means implying that philosophical issues are exclusively central to a defense of a just system of human community life, it would be of some value to see what philosophy can—indeed, needs to—contribute to such a task. Let me take a brief look at some of the most important of these.

Knowledge of what is Right
Among classical liberals there is a sizable group that would eschew the belief that human beings are able to know what is right, how they ought to act and organize their communities. Value-skepticism, we may call it, is rife among these champions of liberty. Examples include many members of the Austrian School and Chicago Schools of economics who embrace what they call value subjectivism, the view that what is right for someone to do is really something that only the person involved can say, based on his or her preferences or desires. So knowing anything about how another person ought to act is impossible because that is entirely up to that person to say.

The fact that this view tends to backfire, despite being thought to be a bulwark against tyranny and authoritarianism, does not appear to disturb too many who embrace it. How does it backfire? Well, when classical liberals proclaim that the free society, as they understand it, is what we ought to promote and accept in our legal order, they are themselves saying something about a value that supposedly applies to us all. Some, such as the late Milton Friedman, have bitten the bullet and accept that theirs is but a preference for freedom, not something they can justify for everyone. But others continue to make it appear that the free society is just and good for all human beings. But if values are subjective, how could this be defended?

Also, the late Roy Childs's point to von Mises seems still telling: if legal positivism is true, then why complain about government actions that redefine what you can do with property? Indeed, why should consumer satisfaction be the measure of efficiency? If there is no moral knowledge, then there is no basis for complaints other than ultimately one of influence and power.

So it is clearly a concern for those who champion the free society how this matter of our capacity to know what is right—not just for each of us subjectively, personally but for people as such—is resolved. That is especially so in the current era of globalization, wherein the ideals of liberty are promoted for all people around the globe, not only for special modern or “advanced” societies. After all, one of the grounds for rejecting globalization—that is, the extension of the principles of the free market to all corners of the world—is what is called cultural relativism. It’s ok to have free markets in, say, the USA or Western Europe but not in Cuba or Somalia. Indeed, this very point was being stressed at the conference on human rights in Vienna, held a few years back, by many heads of government from Asia and Africa. If one is to argue that this line is but a rationalization for maintaining oppressive regimes, one will have to show that the cultural relativist stance is misguided. And for that it is necessary to show that what is right for people to do, especially regarding the organization of their communities, can be known to us.

I will not attempt to make this case here but I do wish to indicate where I would look for the solution, namely, in a theory of truth that does not require for us to have final or timeless knowledge in order to be able to lay claim to knowing something to be so and so. From this I would then proceed to show that what economists have called subjective are, in fact, individual or agent relative but also quite objective cases of knowledge. It's analogous to the value of, say, nutrition, medicine or clothing: While there are some clear enough general principles in these areas, when it comes to applying them individual and type differences will matter, too. So while it is right to take pain killers when one hurts, how much and which kind one ought to take will be dependent on one’s own physiology. Similarly, it is right for someone to raise his or her kids to prepare them for adulthood, the specifics of how to raise them will, however, vary depending on the details of one's circumstances which are objectively real yet not at all uniform.

Free Will versus Determinism
Not unrelated to the former concern is this one about whether human beings have the capacity to make basic choices, to take the initiative in their lives, including their economic conduct. Just for starters, entrepreneurship is directly related to this issue: if we lack free will, we are not really taking any kind of initiative in our economic undertakings and the entrepreneur has done nothing different from one who lacks his or her skills and aptitudes.

More generally, one concern that brings in the free will issues is personal responsibility for how one conducts oneself. Another is whether those who invade someone’s moral space or violate their rights, may be said to be doing what they ought not to do and perhaps ought to be stopped from doing it. Here a famous philosophical slogan, coined by Immanuel Kant, comes to mind, namely, “Ought implies can.” It permeates our legal and moral thinking: if someone is deemed incapable of making a choice, holding him responsible is impossible. Thus, the insanity defense or the claim, in moral talk, that, “But I couldn't help it.” And if a Hitler or Stalin or Fidel are simply compelled by impersonal forces to act as they do, then their conduct is just a lamentable event of reality, no different from a plague, hurricane, mad dog or rained out picnic.

Some have replied to this by claiming that in the context of political theory we need no discussion of this topic because we have all we need with the idea of initiated force. If what I do involves just myself, not someone else who physically compels me to do what I do, we then have personal responsibility a plenty and any talk of free will is superfluous. The freedom or liberty that's of interest to us is of this kind: not having people behave intrusively, we might put it, but clearing the way before all to carry on unimpeded.

Trouble is that imploring people to abstain from intruding on one another is entirely pointless unless they can have a say in how they conduct themselves, unless they are the one's who determine their conduct rather than its being produced by impersonal forces. Let's recall Kant's insight, again, reinforced by Rand with her observation that at the point of a gun morality ends. What could be the meaning of “You should not invade the moral space of another,” or “You ought to respect people's rights,” or again, “You ought not to trespass,” unless people have free will? That is, unless they have it in their power to determine what they will do rather than this being determined for them by forces over which they have no control.

Indeed, all the lamentations about the persistent and often increasing power-grabbing of governments, here or abroad, are entirely beside the point unless those in government (and those they claim to represent) can make choices as to how they will conduct themselves. In other words, these will reduce to nothing more than, well, outcries of dismay, as would be damning the skies because it's raining or a virus for invading one's body. Yes, these matters are often devastating but they are not anyone’s fault that could have been avoided. From slavery to kidnapping, from rape to robbery, it would all be just bad things happening, no different from—well, the point need not be repeated.

But there is more. The issue of personal responsibility is no less important when it comes to assessing the merits of the free society. If indeed all of what we do is beyond our control, if we are powerless to do much about our lot, then imploring the poor or disadvantaged or inept or lazy to get going with self-improvement rather than promote measures that rob Peter to help Paul are also pointless. And, perhaps more importantly, any resistance to wealth—or other advantage—redistribution could be rejected on grounds that those with more are unfairly benefited. They not only sometimes but on no account could have had anything to do with their better lot. It is not only that sometimes luck favors people but that all benefits are a matter of luck, while all harms a matter of misfortune. Nobody ever deserves his or her faring better in life than do others. We are all in the same boat, so why are some at an advantage? The only public policy that would seem to be just in the light of this situation is some kind of effort to even things out. If merits is out of the question, so is being better off, if we can do something about it.

Sure, it is paradoxical to claim as does John Rawls, that we deserve none of our advantages because our very character is just a matter of forces outside of our control, so we should , therefore, proceed to even things out. After all, if nothing is under our control, neither is whether anything gets evened out or not.

Still, the first part of that story does suggest that something is amiss. People who believe we are all equally helpless can then easily make the move, well we must, therefore, do the right thing and divvy up the wealth equally among all. No one deserves to be better off! Not that this follows logically but it does have emotional appeal!

There is also a good deal of talk among classical liberals about voluntary and free actions and institutions—trade, commerce, consensual sex, drug abuse or churches, clubs, corporations, and so forth, respectively. Yet, do we even know what "voluntary" and "free" mean unless we have some way to define these terms and distinguish them from what is meant by their supposed opposites, such as “coerced,” “compelled,” and “regimented.” Moreover, none of these terms are value free, suggesting, as they seem clearly to do, that something untoward is going on when the latter situations obtain.

Or, again, why isn't the gunman's offer, "Your money or you your life?" simply acknowledging a choice someone has, instead of something insidious, called a deadly threat which ought not to be made? Further, the concept of "intervention" seems to be normative.

So the free will versus determinism issue does have bearing on whether and how we might defend the free society. If it's all a matter of que serra, serra, there is nothing to complain about.

Individualism versus Communitarianism
Are human beings, as many classical liberals hold, essentially individuals, unique and irreplaceable, or are they, akin to say bees in a hive or members of a choir, interchangeable? Is it as Karl Marx believed, namely, that “The human essence is the true collectivity of man”? Or is it rather as classical liberals, Objectivists and libertarians hold, namely, that human beings are in their very nature to be understood by reference to who not just what they are? Is it the case, in other words, that what they are is largely a matter of who they are?

Back in the early 70s, in my first book, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (Arlington House, 1974; Hamilton Books, 2007), it was to me striking that the famous Harvard behaviorist psychologist would identify the individual human being as no more than a theoretical point that is, in fact, no individual being at all, just an arbitrary point-event in an endless string of events from time immemorial to eternity.

Just how successful my attempt was to refute this might be assessed by reference to the fact that Professor Daniel Dennett, the president of the American Philosophical Association in 2001, gave a presidential address in which he contended that none of us exist as individuals and that, as a result, none of us can claim authorship to anything at all. Even his own talk could not be construed as being his own doing—it's, as Skinner had argued, but an arbitrary point in a river of events proceeding through time.

Here, too, classical liberals have, I am convinced, a philosophical topic to address. Is individuality vital to our humanity or is it, like Marxists, neo-Marxists and many communitarians claim, an invention that serves the class interests of the bourgeoisie? Are we, rather, specie-beings whose very identity is a matter of “belonging” to communities, as Charles Taylor argues in his famous critique of classical liberal social thought, “Atomism”?

What if anything hinges on this? To start with, however much the free market may facilitate prosperity, knowledge, the arts or whatever, if somehow it is suited to a being other than ourselves, by accommodating our non-existent individuality—through its capacity to accommodate enormously diverse groups of individuals, with all their variety of needs and wants—it can be criticized for being bad for us. Even such famous arguments as that offered by von Mises and his students, namely, that there is a calculation problem with planned and even regulated economies, and the somewhat related one that such systems fall pray to the tragedy of the commons, rely on the truth of individualism. Who cares, as Professor Mishan has noted, that some arbitrary set of preferences by diverse individuals isn't being satisfied by central planners if what they aim for is, in fact, the uniformitization of human community life (illustrated so nicely by the Communist Chinese mass rallies in which all the people wear blue pajamas)? As Mishan notes, the Mises-Hayek critique

"...would be more compelling ... if the declared aim of [e.g.] a Communist regime were that of simulating the free market in order to produce much the same assortment of goods. We should bear in mind, however, that the economic objectives of a Communist government include that of deliberately reducing the amounts of consumer goods which would have been produced in a market economy so as to release resources for a more rapid build-up of basic industries." [My emphasis]

The Mishan critique rests on the recognition that what matters to von Mises & Co., albeit inexplicitly, is that markets serve up a great diversity of assorted goods to suite the varied needs and interests of human individuals. Socialists and communist regimes, however, do not recognize human individuality as central to human life. Their version of a productive economy is to serve human beings qua members of what Marx called in his posthumously published book, Grundrisse, “an organic whole (or body).”

Last Reflections
As we see, several famous philosophical issues, in the last case the exact nature of human beings, emerge to confront the champion of the free society. And there are others—some of the perhaps with a theological dimension, such as whether human beings possess original sin, what is the precise nature of human evil and what can community life do about it, is evil to be dealt with politically, and so forth—but for now my aim has been to suggest that there really is something that philosophy as such can contribute to the struggle for the free society. I am a pluralist, one who holds that there are many disciplines needed to get at the broadest, widest accessible and possible understanding of human life. Economics, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology or any other single field isn't going to do it for us. This, indeed, is just another aspect of the division of labor resting, in this instance, not only considerations of efficiency but on those of the nature of reality itself, metaphysics and ontology.

Contrary to what some friends of liberty hold, there is no one Archimedean point from which we can begin and gain a full understanding of the world, including human affairs. The more we encourage within our scholarly community a diversified approach, the better the chance of getting it right and explaining it to those whose support we need to advance the cause of bone fide human liberation.

Let me add a point in conclusion here about something many people not only outside but also within the discipline of philosophy find annoying about the field. This is that there seems to be no progress made in it, that all the topics keep reoccurring, in every era or generation. So, the critics ask, “What's the use of this kind of inquiry anyway? It's making no advances at all in how we understand the world.”

Yet philosophy is probably just the sort of inquiry in which progress isn't the goal, but basic understanding, something each generation of human beings would need to gain for itself, not simply inherit from the past. In this regard human beings are akin to adolescents: they want to do it on their own, at least when it comes to answering the most basic questions.

This does not mean there are no good or even best answers to the questions being asked, only that once we get a hold of them we cannot expect things to just settle down, with no more work facing us. Yesterday's perfectly good answers will need to be rediscovered by the new crop of inquiring minds!

Thus philosophy may seem to be spinning its wheels but is in fact often embarking on its proper task, which is to get a justified, sensible, rational understanding of the world for each new generation of inquirers. This suggests, rather strongly, that those who have confidence in the comparative merits of the free society, will always have some philosophical work awaiting them, in every generation. That, in part, is the meaning of the famous slogan, coined initially by Wendell Phillips, namely, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Ethics, East and West

Tibor R. Machan

My title may suggest a sharp difference between East and West and that would be inaccurate. After all, we are all human beings, even though 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.
So although I will point out certain differences between how ethics is viewed in the West and the Middle East, this 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 towards the democratic way of life.
Here, however, the focus will be 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 are forced to do by others. It is, rather, up to them to choose to do so. There are intimation of this view in Aristotle, not to mention St. Augustine and Immanuel Kant. But 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, what is the right thing to do is not a matter of 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 anti-totalitarian is that they recognize that such an approach to dealing with human beings politically 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 into them. If it only were, we would have very few problems since everybody would be doing the right thing automatically just the same way as birds fly south and forage about and make nests automatically. No one needs to teach them in classrooms in books but their elders inculcate them as a matter of routine or instinct. No on needs to reprimand them if they don't get things right because it's all in their genetic make-up.
Whereas, there are a lot of things fixed in our genes but what is morally right versus wrong doesn't happen to be amongst 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 worse. This is how we come to 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 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 the own free will. Aristotle, writing much earlier, already 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.
So there's 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 difference 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. There is one thing that most Western ethical teachers and practitioners believe, namely, that whatever 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 the criminal law, which is largely based on people’s moral convictions. It is crucial that most defense attorneys are dying to find someway 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 choice. Otherwise, we see them as something less than human—as invalids, as deficient or incapacitated, and so they aren’t deemed deserving of punishment. Maybe they become subject to therapy or placed into mental hospitals. The point is that they're no longer dealt with their full human dignity—the capacity for choice—in tact.
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 towards the West and, especially, towards America. American culture does have as one of its ideals, albeit often violated in practice, that morality may not—even cannot—be legislated or force 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 but in the main 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 threaten 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 independently of a mere fear or 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 decadence—excessive gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, drug abuse, and even much worse, such as irrational violence. That is because we don't believe that the government should be a totalitarian organization that has any authority to micromanage our lives. So there is never any guarantee that such an approximately free society is always going to be squeaky clean, morally perfect, no. But what can be attested to is that in a free country when people are good, they are good of their own accord. Whether they will be good or not is up to the people themselves—up to others, including the government. 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 force and pressure from family and friends.)
Cultural guardians in regimented—paternalistic, authoritarian, or totalitarian—counties 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—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 what it comes to the human good, it has to be a matter of choice, otherwise it is worthless.
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. 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 is 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 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.
It is crucial to realize that this isn’t an issue about whether the standards are objective versus subjective or absolute versus relative. In the Western tradition of philosophical and theological ethics there is considerable support for objective or absolute standards of right versus wrong. And this is accompanied by a parallel tradition that to do the right thing is something one must choose to do, otherwise one isn’t really one’s doing of the right thing at all. Of course, there are other traditions in the great variety of Western ideas on ethics and morality.
Not everybody even in the West embraces 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 in the midst of us. 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.
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, to be “the keeper of the realm.”
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 anything 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 perpetrated it—not their 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.
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 merely because they belong to a group the angry mob hates. According to such tribal thinking one may, even ought to, kill anybody from the West because that hurts “the West.” Osama bin Laden has spent some of his time on his videos laying out this position quite explicitly.
But the idea tends to be seen as rank absurdity by most Westerners because their traditions 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 amongst them.
In conclusion, the fundamental difference between at least those on the East on whom we are now very much focused and ourselves is that we 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 even what is really, actually morality right. 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. That in part explains our major differences between the dominant ethical outlook in the West and much of the Middle East.

Gore’s Talk of a “moral & spiritual” Issue?

Tibor R. Machan

Trust me, please, I have no personal grudge against Al Gore. For me it mattered very little that Bush instead of Gore got to be president—I consider them both bad for the country, only in slightly different ways. True, I find Gore’s style difficult to stomach—his posture of piety irks me a lot. But Bush’s swagger is no better.

So it is nothing personal when I distrust Gore’s climate change/global warming crusade. Part of it is my principled skepticism of all things political these days. And make no mistake, Gore’s crusade is political, despite what he keeps telling us, namely, “We face a truly planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” He reiterated this point again when he spoke about his receipt of a share of the Nobel Peace Prize recently.

What’s troubling about this declaration is that it is just plainly false. So Gore is being disingenuous. Why?

A political issue is one that is debated with an eye to forging public policies, legally enforceable edicts which if one disobeys can land one in jail. For example, if someone urges that smoking pot be made illegal or legal, one is involved in a political issue. The law will either condemn or liberate those who smoke pot, period. A moral and spiritual issue, in contrast, is one that depends on one’s voluntary actions. For example, if someone chooses to give money to charity, this is a moral issue. Not doing so does not make one a lawbreaker. Doing so doesn’t have anything to do with compliance with the law or some public policy. Or take supporting the arts or sciences or championing sexual abstinence or marital fidelity. All of these are a matter of morality, of freely choosing to do what one believes to be the right thing. You could also consider it all spiritual in that what is involved is one’s personal values, values pertaining to how to live one’s life as a matter of one’s free choice.

The climate change/global warming issue is clearly of the political type. Gore and others who are advocating the idea that “We face a true planetary emergency” want to have various laws passed and public policies institute, nation and world wide. These would be mandatory, not something the millions of those affected would have to decide about on their own, with no legal sanctions attending to what they decide. Quite the contrary.

All this should be plain and to deny it as Al Gore does qualifies as prevarication, lying. So how can someone who does this be trusted? Why should one believe that Al Gore & Co. are leveling with us all about climate change and global warming when Al Gore himself utters blatant lies like the one about whether this is political or moral/spiritual matter?

Or could it be that Al Gore is simply ignorant about the difference between political issues and moral/spiritual ones? Even if that is plausible, surely the guy has a huge staff of experts within his entourage, in innumerable areas of study, so one or two of them would have reached out to him with advice on how confusing his pitch is about what the clime change/global warming issues is about. Someone would certainly have told him, “Hey, Al, stop saying this is not political when it clearly is—you are advocating laws and public policies, not private decisions by people.”

So I just don’t buy it that Al Gore is merely misinformed about the nature of politics versus morality. No. He is evidently trying deliberately to mislead us into thinking that he isn’t advocating anything that would coerce us all to do one thing or another but merely giving us moral or spiritual advice.

And once this is clear, how can Al Gore be trusted about the rest of what he is advocating? It is far more credible that what he is after is power over our lives, power to dictate to us to behave as he judges fit. Exactly why, that is not something I am privy to—why do dictators want to be dictators? Why do tyrants want to be tyrants? That is a vital question but here what is crucial is that Al Gore seems clearly to be trying to deceive and the consequence of the success of his deception is likely to give him immense power over other people’s lives. And that is something to be resisted by us all.

Jesuit Business Ethics?

Tibor R. Machan

Chapman University’s Argyros School of Business & Economics was host to the inaugural Ethics Academy presented by the local Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics and the Passkeys Foundation, Jefferson Center for Character Education. The keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Spitzer, Ph. D., S. J., a Jesuit priest and president of Gonzaga University, as well as founder of the Spitzer Center for Ethical Leadership.

I was asked to give a very brief welcoming remark, which lasted about a minute. In time Dr. Spitzer took the podium and delivered his lecture. His first and, to my mind, central point was that there is a decline of ethics in American culture and it is due to the prominence of striving for what he called “comparative identity,” in contrast to what he dubbed a
“contributory identity.”

The former consists of evaluating oneself in terms of
how much better, richer, intelligent, learned, more powerful, effective, skillful, etc., one is compared to other people. The latter consists of evaluating oneself in terms of how much one contributes to family, neighborhood, society, and so forth. As applied to business ethics, the focus of the Ethics Academy on this occasion, having a contributory identity means, in the words of Dr. Spitzer, focusing on “the stakeholders” of the enterprise in which one is involved. Focusing on advancing the benefits of stakeholders secures oneself his or her contributory identity, a far better goal than gaining a comparative identity.

I think that Dr. Spitzer got it only half right. Focusing on how one compares with others has its place (for example, in figuring out the price of one’s goods and services), but it should not be an end in itself. He was right about this—focusing on comparisons when it comes to self-assessment tends to leave one unstable, constantly worried, even unfocused and ethically confused.

But what of Dr. Spitzer’s alternative, striving to gain a contributory identity? Is that really a good idea?

The notion, at bottom, is nothing but the ethical system of altruism laid out in great detail by the French philosopher and father of sociology, Auguste Comte. One should serve others. That is at the heart of the stakeholder theory of corporate management, also, one that now dominates the field of business ethics. It contrasts with the idea that those in business ought to focus first on making their enterprise prosper, for the shareholders and investors. The opposite, the stakeholder theory, is a non-starter, when push comes to shove.

Figuring out what benefits others is always difficult
and it inclines people to become meddlesome. They need to concentrate on other people’s needs and wants, something most of them are unprepared for. This is what leads to the pushiness of politicians and it certainly isn’t what is most desirable about people in business. Yes, to some extent businesses flourish by figuring out what other people want, but only in the context of an exchange, of what they can professionally contribute to others in return for payment in accordance with the market price of the
goods and services they can contribute. It is a tit-for-tat relationship, not a contributory one.

As to ethics, a contributory identity tends to involve second-guessing what others want and need and this can involve some pretty wrongheaded notions. What if what others want to have contributed to them is seriously objectionable, immoral? The first thing that must be considered in all professions, including business, is whether one can produce something worthwhile, something important, and then one can see if there is a demand
for this. Otherwise, in a primarily demand driven approach to business—or any other profession—one will again be judging what one should do based on what others want regardless of whether their wants have merit.

But perhaps the greatest paradox of the contributory identity comes from the quip by W. H. Auden: “We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.” In other words, if one’s identity must, first of all, be contributory—rather than, say, thoughtful and professional—what should those do to whom the contributions are made? What
kind of identity should they have? If they too must be contributory, who, ultimately, will be the beneficiaries of all that contribution? An endless daisy chain of self-sacrifice is generated in such a system.

So, I agree, it is unwise to focus on comparisons as an individual charts one’s personal or professional conduct. But neither is it wise to focus mainly on benefiting others. The focus should be on doing one’s work well, including the work of living one’s life and whatever profession one takes up based on one’s talents and opportunities.

Boston Legal Hypocrisy?

Tibor R. Machan

A couple of weeks ago Boston Legal, the TV series created and produced by David E. Kelley—otherwise known as Mr. Michelle Pfeifer—featured a program in which a partner of the firm opted to withdraw her sizable contribution for climate change research to Stanford University because Exxon/Mobile also gave them some big bucks. This plot line gave Kelley, who was credited with having written the segment, the chance to sound off on how big corporations manage to buy research from universities. Receiving huge sums, the thesis goes, even though there are no official strings attached, cannot but bias the researchers in favor of the interests of the donors! That was the basic message and it was delivered in characteristically moralistic tones, making sure no one missed the point that morality in this and other matters with which the program deals lies on the side of those championing Kelley’s causes.

Just how contorted the idea is that Kelley is peddling here can be appreciated from a recent Associated Press story that reports the receipt from the National Science Foundation by the University of California, Merced, of a $4.6 million grant “to start an outdoor laboratory geared toward studying climate change in the Sierra Nevada range.” The direct recipients of this grant will be researchers at various ”UC campuses, including Berkeley, Irvine, Davis and Santa Barbara, as well as scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno and the Pacific Southwest Research Station of the U. S. Forest Service.”

First of all, clearly those favoring the climate change-global warming hypothesis may also have to consider that their motives are likely to be influenced by money. Some big companies may wish to downplay climate change and global warming for purely mercenary reasons, regardless of what the evidence shows. But then government agencies such as the NSF could well have their own agenda and those producing findings that support it could well have biases of their own. Not that they have to, no more than those who receive funds from Exxon/Mobile or other big corporations.

The point is that there are agendas being pushed on both sides, by no means just from private oil firms, and if this must corrupt research, it will do so in both camps. But, of course, this idea never surfaced in the Boston Legal episode. The notion that climate change/global warming researchers might themselves be biased because they receive big bucks from the Feds was nowhere to be heard on that episode, trust me.

Second, when a private company gives a grant to a research centers, taxpayers aren’t forced to contribute. Those who don’t agree with Exxon/Mobile’s take on climate change or global warming can buy oil and other products the company makes from competitors. When the National Science Foundation provides funds to all these universities, it is using money extorted from citizens at gun point. So there is no way to opt out from funding the research by those who believe it is all a hoax, exaggerated or unscientific. Such funding is akin to the sort that many find objectionable when government support is provided to, say, abortion clinics or certain types of stem cell research; or when a highly controversial military expedition is being funded with taxes even though millions of American’s consider it immoral.

Of course, no such considerations made any appearance in Mr. Kelley’s business-bashing episode of Boston Legal. This, too, makes it very clear that all the posturing of holding the moral high ground is groundless. No thought was given to the possible immorality of confiscating resources from those who disagree with some governmental project. Only the purported evil of big oil got a forum.

Finally, notice, too, that all of this business-bashing is being broadcast on ABC-TV, a humongous commercial organization that is about as fully enmeshed in trying to make a buck as is Exxon/Mobile, and probably selling Exxon/Mobile air time to advertise its goods and services. Mr. Kelley and his team are certainly not free of complicity with big business; rather they are all making a very nice living from getting ABC-TV to run their show even as they explicitly and implicitly call into question the integrity and good will of all those who try to earn a profit.

In the end, what’s most important to remember is that the integrity of professionals in science, education, engineering and other fields isn’t all that easy to undermine, not if those individuals will not allow it. To think that a grant from Exxon/Mobile will corrupt researchers could well be a case of projection on Mr. Kelley’s part. Maybe he is easy to corrupt with money, so he thinks everyone is.

Federal Censorship of Children’s Book?

Tibor R. Machan

Governments run the country’s schools and while some variation is still evident in how they are administered, there is a pretty strong movement toward a one-size-fits-all policy. Certainly, when the United States federal Congress can pass bills banning books from use in elementary schools, this does not bode well for educational pluralism and diversity.

A little book, King & King, by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland (published in Berkeley, CA, by Tricycle Press), is the occasion for Congress’ threatened ban. Some Republican politicians are very upset because King & King is about gay marriage and treats it approvingly, as a valid option for citizens who wish to marry others of their own sex. Instead of leaving it all to the educators and their clients, the parents, the politicians are about to butt in. And why should they not?

When government takes over an area of our lives, it will follow the lead of whoever happens to have the power to impose a preferred policy. In a society that amounts to an approximate democracy, such things should be expected however unhappy they will make many of us. Politicization of education is rife in America now—elementary, secondary, and university education are all replete with numerous agendas over which parents and students have zero say. There was, of course, sex education; later came all the indoctrination about how wonderful the United Nations is for the world; then, and still continuing big time, came environmentalism, with its sub-branches of global warming and animal “rights” propaganda. Preaching against drug use was part of this trend. And, of course, there are the endless battles over whether any or how much religion may enter the classroom.

The bottom line is that education at all levels cannot be neutral. Even in the hard sciences teachers will sneak in their own ideas about abortion, the origin of the universe, and other controversial topics. And there is really nothing awful about this for a free society. One would expect such diversity at our schools as much as one would on the magazine racks around the country. (A free press is a good model by which to assess how a free system of education, divorced entirely from government, would look like.)

But to suggest such an approach to education amounts to out and out heresy for most mainstream commentators. Recently I made a suggestions along these lines in the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry and the next issue published several lengthy letters to the editor, each denouncing my position. One even proposed that there is ample diversity in public—government—education, so why fret? (I wonder how that letter writer will respond to the Congressional efforts to bring about a nationwide ban on King & King?)

As for me, I have no objection at all to telling young people about the gay marriage option. Certainly my three children were apprised of that early in their lives and last I checked I detected no outrage on their part about it. But there are many who do see endorsing gay marriage as something evil, based on their religious convictions, upbringing, politics, or whatever. And while I and many who have no objection to gay marriage may engage in civil debate with these folks, we will not impose on their children classroom instructions against their own beliefs. (In a relatively open society students will have occasion to meet up with contrary opinions outside their class rooms anyway, so why make a fuss?)

Congressional butting in is only palatable in areas of our lives that have become politicized. No one in Congress can threaten a bill to ban certain sermons in church, to force editorial writers to treat ideas fairly, and so forth. This is because the U. S. Constitution wisely, if rather partially, regards religion and journalism off limits to political interference. Sadly that is not what the Constitution does about education.

Blind to Long Term Damages

Tibor R. Machan

Eva Hoffman has written some interesting books, including novels, about post-Communist Eastern Europe. For all her insightfulness in those works, however, she can exhibit a profound blindness about the impact of communism on the societies that were touched by that system.

In a review of Polish novelist Adrzej Stasiuk’s novel, Nine, published in the October 11, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books, Hoffman gives clear and sadly surprising evidence of this blindness. Here is the passage that jumps out at the reader:

“During the Communist decades, the food and clothing shortages, the grim Warsaw architecture, and the dreariness of living quarters could be seen as symptoms of ‘the system.’ Under which people had a perfect right to be unhappy. But no such rationales could be sustained after the Soviet bloc dissolved. The material conditions of most people’s lives remained largely unchanged, especially in the early stages, but a whole layer of ennobling interpretation was stripped away. Drab apartments, shabby clothes, and other indignities could no longer be seen as part of a large struggle against communism, but became simply signs of poverty and hopelessness”(p. 42).

So, let’s see what Hoffman is telling us here. Poland and the other former Soviet bloc countries could be seen as suffering all kinds of indignities, economic, psychological, moral and the rest, during the Soviet era because the Soviet system was seen to account for them. But as soon as that system ended, the lingering similar indignities Hoffman lists were left simply as “signs of poverty and hopelessness.” This suggests that the Soviet socialism had an impact on these countries and its people and institutions only up until it lasted as an operating system.

Now this is bizarre. When people suffer injuries in, say, an automobile crash, they usually need months to recover after the crash is over. When victims of assault and battery are no longer being beaten up, they go on suffering from the effects in innumerable ways. Would it not be reasonable to think, too, that after 45 years of tyranny, economic calamity, oppression, murder, mayhem and all the rest of what the Soviet system delivered upon its victims, the process of recovery would take time and the awful aftereffects of the ordeal would be extensive and last quite a long time. Especially when the follow-up to the ordeal is not really a healthy exercise in freedom but a mishmash of welfare statism these countries cannot afford and advice from erudite foreigners that does very little put the societies on the path of bona fide convalescence and recovery.

I suppose the reason Eva Hoffman is blinded to what to me seems quite obvious is that she, being a friend of the editors of The New York Review of Books, holds out hope for some kind of recovery in Eastern Europe without actual radical change. This is actually an attitude many share in those parts, somehow wishing both to cast off the Soviet style socialist oppression but retain, in some magical way, the expectation of the promises of socialism—equality, abundance, society-wide mutual love, absence of seeking profit in a market place, etc., etc., and so forth. This dream of squaring a political economic circle is most likely what is exacerbating the malaise that Ms. Hoffman and the author of the novel she was reviewing find so upsetting but apparently quite incomprehensible.

The fact is that bad systems can end and yet leave long lasting effects. Just consider America’s tragic history of chattel slavery and how the country hasn’t yet managed to recover from it. And when intellectuals like Ms. Hoffman and Mr. Stasiuk seem to be clueless about these matters and give their analyses and advice in light of their gross cluelessness, the problems keep piling up instead of abating.

I am not someone who likes to draw analogies between living organisms and societies but to a point that can be instructive. When a living organism has suffered enormous damage from some calamity, it needs to be treated with the utmost care and trained to regain its strength. A failure to recognize that the damage has produced long lasting effects can only make things worse.

Power versus Precaution?

Tibor R. Machan

Over the last few years of following the debates about both anthropogenic global warming and what to do about terrorism, it is odd that neither lobby group tends to worry about the erosion of individual liberties. To put it differently, those who want to set up Draconian precautionary public policies to deal with global warming tend to be the ones who reject Draconian precautionary measures when it comes to dealing with terrorism—and vice-versa!. Why? Alarmists about the environment are willing to ignore individual rights, as do those worried about terrorism who tend also to scoff at fears that anti-terrorist hysteria will erode our liberties.

This is odd. If I am concerned about government eroding protection of individual rights, why would I not worry in both the above cases? Why would I not complain that environmentalists are undisturbed when their proposals pretty much mean government regimenting people’s lives inside and outside their homes—dictating to them when they may drive, how much, what fuel to use, how much to consume, etc., and so forth—when I do complain loudly that taking measures against the prospects of terrorism will curtain civil liberties—impose snooping, require getting federal ID cards and the rest? How come that the agendas of the environmentalists may bring upon us major restrictions of our liberties but the agendas of the anti-terrorist lobby may not—or vice-versa? After all, both limit our liberties in very substantial ways.

Once again the answer appears to be that Left and Right are both willing to make use of the power of government if it comes to advancing their own particular agenda; but they oppose using government when the other side wants to deploy it for its own. The one thing both neglect is a consistent concern about our right to liberty.

So, if global warming is to be dealt with, never mind the rights of individuals. It is more important to set up measures to cope with the possibility of environmental threats. Never mind that it isn’t even clear that global warming would be such a terrible thing—certainly it takes no rocket scientist to realize that many people in Siberia and Mongolia, for instance, may indeed welcome that prospect. As to terrorism, the main thing to fear from the terrorists is that they would bring about a religious dictatorship, conscript us all to follow their faith, kill or maim us if we resist. But if resisting terrorism promises something very similar—those who fail to comply with the policies that supposedly thwart the terrorists are going to be dealt with pretty harshly—then it seems that fighting terrorism promises to be nearly as bad as experiencing it.

In a genuine free country the official legal policy should be to solve problems without abridging the basic principles of the system. These principles are individual rights, supposedly unalienable even in times of emergency. So whatever precautions need to be taken to deal with one or another hazard, threat, or prospective calamity must be made to conform to those basic principles. This is probably most evident in how a free society deals with crime. Regardless of urgency, the rights of the accused may not be disregarded. Sure, now and then officials and some members of the public propose to do away with due process, habeas corpus, and so forth. But this tends to be widely resisted as well. Most people seem to appreciate that in a regime of individual liberty—in a free country, in other words—there must be vigilant resistance to compromising the basic principles of the system.

It would be very gratifying and refreshing if both those who worry about global warming and those concerned with terrorism would focus a good deal of their energy on how do deal with those problems without violating anyone’s rights. Then, perhaps, members of these groups could even gain some trust among the general population, trust that they aren’t more interested in gaining power over others than in solving the problems that seem to serve as the excuse for gaining that power.

Rights & Duties, Left & Right

Tibor R. Machan

It is interesting that both the Right and the Left complain about the American (Lockean) political tradition because it emphasizes individual rights and not responsibilities or duties. The complaint is ill founded, however.

First, a regime of individual rights does directly imply legal responsibilities or duties, albeit of a limited sort. If all human beings have a right to their lives, liberties, etc., this implies that everyone has the legally enforceable duty to abstain from violating these rights. If violations do occur, sanctions may be applied. And in a complex society those responsibilities are quite complicated, though they involve mostly not doing things to people rather than doing things for them.

Yet, implicit in a regime of individual rights is also the idea that citizens have innumerable familial, fraternal, professional, and related responsibilities. These, however, are either ethical and thus not subject to legal enforcement, or contractual, in which case whether one assumes them is itself a free choice of a citizen.

What critics fail to heed is that duties that are carried out because the legal authorities threaten averse repercussions if they aren’t are of no moral significance at all. If citizens provide support for their fellows because if they do not, they will go to jail, this does not improve anyone’s moral character and does not add to the moral quality of the society. Quite the opposite—a totalitarian approach to conduct sets in whereby citizens do not have to cultivate their virtues but merely obey authorities. It is difficult to imagine that anyone, Right or Left, interested in improving the ethics of a society’s population would find satisfaction with such a result.

So the complaint about the idea underlying the Lockean regime of individual rights not making room for responsibilities in our lives is entirely off base. If there is any political system that makes room for our innumerable moral responsibilities in life, it is the Lockean individualist kind because only in such a system are citizens free to make the choice to do the right thing. Of course, this also means they are free to choose badly, but that is part of the human condition. We have free will and to exercise it involves the risk that we may not do so properly. But to substitute the government, whether representative or dictatorial, for the citizen’s own moral conscience or lack thereof is antithetical to a civilized human community.

Here is where both Left and Right are so much alike. Both want people to behave right and differ mostly on which areas of life they want to ethically micromanage. The Left wants us all to be generous and charitable toward those in need, those less fortunate than others, those who may through their own fault or without fault fall behind in life or have never gotten ahead in the first place. Generosity, charity, philanthropy, compassion, and such are what the Left wants from us all and if it isn’t forthcoming in sufficient abundance, the Left will readily send out the bureaucrats and the police to make sure we all do the right thing by their lights.

The Right is no different from this except in where lies its priority. Piety, humility, spirituality, prudence, religiosity, honor, valor, and similar virtues stand at the forefront of what the Right demands of us all and if we do not deliver, the Right is just as willing to regiment us to fall in line with its vision of propriety as the Left. And they are willing to call in the bureaucracy and police just as readily as the Left to make sure the citizenry complies.

Censoring, banning, and regimenting are exactly what both Left and Right advocate and, of course, the Lockean individualist regime stands in their way. Why? Because the Lockean tradition leaves morality to individual choice. Not what is moral but whether individuals will do what is moral. That is the nature of freedom. That is what a free society ensures for its citizenry. And that is what neither Left nor Right has any patience for—they both distrust persuasion, education, proselytization, peer pressure, and other peaceful means of inducing their fellows to do the right thing. They distrust us fundamentally, yet somehow trust themselves to be wise and virtuous in the midst of all this human imperfection.

That is one reason one finds both the Left and the Right so fond of utopian visions, since they commonly promise to set everything aright from above. As if those “above” were superhuman. But, of course, they are not and so the power they gain quickly corrupts them and the result is that human community life turns out to be a disaster, nothing like the glorious vision Left and Right wishes to bring to fruition.

Let’s trust the Lockean tradition, even if its promise is modest. It can actually be fulfilled and come off as quite civilized and just, contrary to its critics’ contentions.

Multiculturalism Takes Another Hit

Tibor R. Machan

It is a central theme of multiculturalism that human conduct is never right or wrong, merely either in conformity or not with the demands of one’s culture. So that when women are subjected to beatings or female “circumcision” in certain places around the globe, whether this is OK to do is dependent on what those in the culture approve of. So, by the tenets of multiculturalism, there are no universal principles to guide how people act, how they may be judged. It’s all relative.

Some years back International Greenpeace faced a dilemma. Since the group championed both animal rights and multiculturalism, the members were hard put to figure what to do about a tribe of Canadian Indians that bludgeoned baby seals as one of its cultural practices. In time Greenpeace reportedly decided that multiculturalism is more important and dropped its objections to the slaughter of baby seals.

Oddly, when in a recent issue of The New Republic one George Pelecanus discussed Michael Vic’s involvement with dog fighting ["Barking Mad," September 10, 2007, pp. 12-13], he made no mention of the fact that in multicultural terms, what Vic did might be deemed quite acceptable. There is, to wit, a problem with condemning Vic conduct for~anyone championing~cultural diversity. Just what are the limits of multiculturalism, if anything, and why?

In very nearby Mexico, for example, cockfighting is a popular spectator "sport." Across the border in its banned. In Spain bull fighting is deemed to be perfectly acceptable, while elsewhere it is taken to be a barbaric indulgence. So what gives? How does the often astute New Republic stand on this issue? Is there something universally wrong with cruelty toward animals or is it a cultural matter? Why one or the other?

Even for those who consider it unethical to mistreat animals—well, some of them, because they rarely fret about the mistreatment of insects or flies—there are some distinctions that need to be addressed. For example, is something that’s unethical also to be legally prohibited? But then would all those who believe so fervently in freedom of the press or free speech be completely wrong? After all, under the legal protection of the right to freedom of speech—or as many now put it, freedom of expression so as to include all sorts of artistic creation—people may say endless unethical things.

A good case in point is that not very long ago many people in the West criticized the violent reaction of some Muslims to the caricature in some Danish newspapers of the prophet Mohammed. These Westerners readily granted that many of the cartoons were insulting, even blasphemous—thus unethical, in fact—but insisted that this did not by any means justify banning them or punishing those who created and published them. Their stance is based on the view that while it is quite possible that certain conduct is morally objectionable, it doesn’t follow that this justifies prohibiting it. If it did, a most basic precept of Western liberalism would come under fire. So, instead, we have the distinction between crimes—namely, conduct that may be banned—and wrongdoings, which may be condemned but not banned.

Now does the mistreatment of dogs by Michael Vic or anyone else amount to unethical conduct that may be banned? Or is it conduct that in a free society must be discouraged some other way, without the benefit of the force of law? Certainly many in America take it as given that mistreating the dogs should be legally actionable—see, for example, https://community.hsus.org//campaign/da_thank_you?qp_source=gaba8a&gclid=CIz40fSC2Y4CFQPrYgod7zm0Ag. Are they right? If so, does it follow that misconduct in general may be prohibited? And does that not imply that the very idea of a free society ought to be abandoned and the conduct of the citizenry of any society micromanaged, regimented so that it conform to ethical standards? Or is there some criterion by which wrongful conduct can be separated into those subject and those not subject to legal sanctions? Is all of this supposed to be merely a matter of how people happen to feel in some country or region of the globe but not in others?

In which case why not look upon the conduct of Michael Vic and others who mistreat animals as simply something some would ban but others would not, and rightfully so? The criticism and legal condemnation of Mr. Vic seem to me to have been based mostly on sentiment, not on a rational assessment of the relevant issues. And doing so violated a very basic principle of a civilized society, namely, the rule of law. It seems to me that the matter needs to be thought through and not be approached merely by consulting one’s feelings.