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.

What Free Country?

Tibor R. Machan

When I first arrived on these shores, back in 1956, the idea that America is a free country had at least some rhetorical currency, backed by frequent enough association between the country’s founding documents and the desirability and undesirability of various public policies. Just as Abraham Lincoln, so many others who addressed what kind of laws the country ought to have tended still to invoke the authority of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and ideas from the Founders and Framers.

Not that it was all hunky dory with the country then or, indeed, before. But the prevalence of ideas of basic rights—the kind that marked out one’s personal, private dominion—and liberty—of the negative sort, freedom from intrusions by others, including governments—was in plenty of evidence in public discussions, debates in Congress and so forth.

Today there seems no one—other than the lone Texas Representative Ron Paul—on the political scene who is concerned with the freedom of American citizens. Correspondingly, public policies and laws are passed and enforced, via ordinances and legislation, as well as court rulings, that pay no attention to whether they invade the rights of individuals to their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It’s all about entitlements, instead. The so called civil rights era is now widely understood to be one that simply granted blacks and other minorities certain privileges, maybe to make up for previous mistreatment, maybe as a way to establish the Nanny State as the norm. It isn’t seen primarily as being about setting blacks free of state intrusion in their lives.

Along with the ubiquitous expansion of the public square, one that spreads the idea that people’s behavior is to be regimented by politicians in accordance with some supposed consensus in the country (and privacy can be ignored since everything is about that vague thing called “the community”), this trend has pretty much served to return the American continent to its pre-revolutionary European roots where the issue of the rights of individuals is hardly alive. A good case in point is a report in, of all places, the October issue of Road & Track magazine. It is short and to the point, so here it is in its entirety:

“Seniors Denied: The owner of a service station in Merrill, Wisconsin, has been ordered by the state to raise its prices. The proprietor was offering senior citizens a 2-cent-per-gallon price break and youth sports boosters 3 cents per gallon. However, the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection says those deals violate Wisconsin’s Unfair Sales Act, which requires stations to sell gas for about 9.2 percent more than the wholesale price. The owner received a letter from the state auditor stating he would be sued if he did not comply.” (p. 32)

So, even while the business ethics and law communities are awash with complaints about how greedy people in the market tend to be and with the theory of Corporate Social Responsibility—the one that insists that companies focus not on enriching their owners but “stakeholders”—a simple act of generosity by a merchant is rejected by public authorities in Wisconsin. Who knows that motivated the bureaucrats, apart form simply affirming their legal power to tell people how to run their business, lest someone take it seriously that in America there is a free market system of economics. No, that cannot be tolerated.

Instead, in the spirit of all the court rulings and laws that gain their impetus from Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, the interstate commerce clause (which courts have interpreted for about a hundred years as granting public authorities carte blanche over the economic affairs of everyone in society), regimentation is the economic norm now.

Yet, while this is a growing trend, apologists of statist economic intervention, such as Princeton economist Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, keep claiming that America is fallen victim over the last few daces to an extreme laissez-faire ideology. This is not only blatantly false about the country as a whole but it is contradicted daily by the kinds of local and state economic policies we see on exhibit in Wisconsin.

A simple act of generosity, of trying to help out seniors, is struck down! What a shame, in this, supposedly, free country!

Triumph of Envy at EU Court

Tibor R. Machan

The thirteen member European Court of First Instance has delivered its decision reaffirming the judgment against Microsoft Corporation, claiming that the company has been wielding excessive market power by way of its addition of a digital media player to Windows, something the court claimed undermined an previously dominant firm, Real Networks. This judgment will cost Microsoft $689,400,000.00 in fines as well as having to allow competitors to make use of Microsoft’s confidential computer code.

Just the other day I was looking through a magazine I get, Liberty, in which one of the articles is titled “Why I dislike Europeans.” I was thinking that this is a silly title since Europeans are a diverse lot and, moreover, why would it be important why someone dislikes them all. But when these kinds of news come out of the old continent, I, originally from there, too am tempted to develop a dislike for Europeans. Of course, this is only one of their courts but as with courts everywhere, this one probably is giving expression to a widespread attitude, in this case of envy toward Microsoft.

The act of bundling simply should not be any kind of crime. It is their product and they have the right to bundle and to keep the way they do it secret. So long as this is disclosed to potential customers, there is not a thing morally—and should not be legally—wrong with it. Bundling is, after all, a practice of nearly all industries that produce goods and services for sale—cars come with radios installed that would cost a fortune to remove and replace with some other radio of one’s liking. Prominent actors who star in movies ask for others they want to have in the project, directors, actors, and so forth. The list of bundling could go on endlessly.

Envy seems like a far better explanation for how the European Court ruled in this case. Microsoft’s success just must drive these people to distraction. Given the history of how most people in Europe had gained their wealth and economic dominance, namely, through politically and militarily backed conquest of and expropriation of resources from millions of subjects—the real exploitation of the feudal, not capitalist, era that gave credibility to Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation—it is perhaps understandable that many in Europe and elsewhere around the globe believe all wealth comes from malfeasance.

Massive fortunes used to be gained through looting, thieving, and rank oppression, including especially the conscription of labor. So the idea that a company like Microsoft could obtain its market success honestly, mainly through ingenuity and hard work, simply hasn’t gained a foothold. The achievement of wealth through market processes is relatively new in human history and only taken to be the norm by most people in the United States of America and a few other places.

Still, one would expect the erudite members of a prominent court to have shed the prejudice that it takes to persecute a firm like Microsoft but it appears that this is a vein hope just yet. I haven’t checked, but I am pretty sure most editorials in Europe welcome cutting Microsoft down to size. Few, I bet, are taking the court’s ruling as an opportunity to teach some lessons in free market economics, the right to private property, freedom of trade. Instead most probably share Harvard University law professor Andrew I. Gavil’s not surprising academic opinion that the court’s “decision is a strong endorsement for what in the United States would be considered aggressive policy on dominant firms,” one “that’s going to continue to play out in other kinds of cases.”

I am sure Microsoft doesn’t need my help to carry out the practical, legal aspects of this battle but given Bill Gate’s political philosophy—revealed in his obstinate support of the estate tax and other policies coming from the Left—the philosophical case for his company could probably use some shoring up. Perhaps he ought to familiarize himself with Ayn Rand’s world-famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, the 50th anniversary of the publication of which is being celebrated this year. It could help him understand the motivation behind a court ruling that is punishing him for being a success in the market place.

Shoring Up the Nanny State

Tibor R. Machan

Given how bad the arguments are for forced wealth redistribution, it is no great surprise that mainstream welfare statists are constantly revamping them. In the August 22, 2007, issue of the International Herald Tribune, the European paper that’s put out by The New York Times, an editorial makes yet another attempt to help give the nanny state the moral advantage. Let us take a look at how this attempt is made.

“...The United States has long had one of the most meager tax takes in the industrial world. America's social spending—on programs ranging from Medicare and Social Security to food stamps—is almost the stingiest among industrial nations. Among the 30 industrialized countries grouped in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, only four—Turkey, Mexico, South Korea and Ireland—spend less on social programs as a share of their economy.

“Long a moral outrage, this tightfisted approach to public needs is becoming an economic handicap. Shortchanging public health impairs America's competitiveness. If the United States is to reap the rewards of globalization, the government must provide a much more robust safety net—to ensure public support for an open economy and protect vulnerable workers.”

To appreciate these desperate lines, it is necessary to render them into more honest terms. So, first of all, what we are actually being told is that the United States has achieved what in human history cannot be but a triumphant accomplishment—it extorts far less of its population’s resources than do other countries; most of them are still stuck in the ethos of pre-capitalist economics, mercantilism, where the government manages the bulk of the economy (i. e., its citizens). Instead, in the USA economic challenges are dealt with mostly by free men and women, not by politicians and bureaucrats.

Instead of lamenting this, it ought to be celebrated. What else is due a country that has managed to substantially abandon the notion and practice of having its population live off the work and resources that are extorted from its productive citizens? Instead of depending on kings, tsars, pharos, and other rulers of the realm, in America individuals and families are starting to fend for themselves by means of voluntary cooperation—trade, insurance, inheritance, etc. And they are exporting this idea to many other regions of the globe via globalization and privatization.

To call advancing toward greater self-sufficiency by a substantial portion of a country’s population that has become less and less dependent upon the government “a moral outrage” is to engage in Orwellian doublespeak. It is a moral triumph not to depend upon stealing from Peter to provide for Paul and to provide a legal infrastructure in which both Peter and Paul have an excellent chance of flourishing economically (and otherwise).

But there is also a problem with the facts in those two passages. While certain kinds of taxes are lower in America than elsewhere in the industrial world, other types are more Draconian. All the hidden taxes involved in the extensively regulated economy which people in commerce need to pay by way of vast bureaucracies and legal teams, are not accounted for. Firms need to pay vast sums so as to fend off the feds, to cope with anti-trust suits, etc.!

The so called public health problems in the USA, such as they are, are mostly the result of the government’s extensive intervention in medical and insurance matters—the health professions are the most highly regulated by the governments in the country. Only education is more socialized, from elementary to the highest levels.

This idea, that “If the United States is to reap the rewards of globalization, government must provide a much more robust safety net—to ensure public support for an open economy and protect vulnerable workers” is utter nonsense. Governments must steal any provisions to make them available, which then means resources that people might allocate according to their own understanding of what they need and want are being managed by people who are clueless as to what actually needs to be produced.
The idea also lacks the benefit of the insights of public choice theory, namely, that politicians and bureaucrats are far from public servants. Instead they pursue agendas of their own depriving the resources from those who produced them and thus rendering them unavailable to be used as their owners would chose. Local knowledge is a far better guide to what is needed than the ideas that legislatures and bureaucracies concoct about the public interest (which is really mostly private interests having been lobbied for successfully).

In fact the nanny state is mostly a matter of providing appealing intentions, not of coming up with successful performance. No doubt, some folks benefit from its policies but never without imposing the cost on others who then are stymied in their efforts to pursue their goals. And there is nothing to celebrate about that.

Death Taxes are Wrong

Tibor R. Machan

The debate about death taxes has resurfaced. Oddly even some Democratic Senators, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, have decried the estate tax as unfair. As she declared, "I, for one, intend to fight for these family businesses, fight for these communities, and fight for these jobs in rural country-America." To which the left of center New Republic commented, “It was all very moving. Especially if you stand to inherit an enormous fortune.”

Well, I do not “stand to inherit an enormous fortune,” nor do my children. I am millions of dollars from being a millionaire, that’s for sure. But it seems to me morally obscene to want to raid the wealth of those who mean to leave theirs to their families. It matters not a wit, from an ethical standpoint, that some of those who will get the money may not deserve it. This argument—reminiscent of the late Harvard political philosopher John Rawls’s beef that no one really deserves anything much since it is all determined to happen, whatever they “achieve”—is entirely specious, a blatant non-sequitur.

A great many of us do not deserve a great deal that we happen to have—our health, talents, good parents (if we are lucky to have them), nice neighbors, a decent country in which we have been born, our good looks, and on and on. Yes, how we assemble these assets or resources is often where our virtues make their appearance in our lives. But as far as fairness is concerned, which bothers so many who push for retaining and even increasing the estate—or death—tax, nothing in life is fair. (As I have argued before, fairness is a minor, administrative virtue, applicable only where a prior promise requires one to pay attention to members of some group, like a professor who is required to fairly distribute his or her pedagogical attention to all of his or her students!)

What is really at issue and is not discussed much is our unalienable private property rights. If I honestly make my millions and want them to go to my family, who has authorized all those politicians and bureaucrats to take it way to use as they want to? You think democracy has done that? No way.

One cannot do with any degree of moral justification in concert what one may not to do individually. And no one is authorized to take from people what they have either earned or simply happened to have come by through good fortune. They alone have the authority to assign who may use or will inherit their wealth. Even if those to whom they leave their wealth are ne’er-do-wells, it is nobody’s business other than the folks’ who have decided to bequeath their wealth as they saw fit. It makes no difference if inheritance sometimes leads to sloth. That is a private moral matter, not something for politicians and bureaucrats to fret about, just as they have no authority to mess with us because we are, say, wasting our talents or refusing to be productive or marry the wrong mate. In a free country such vices or failures will come back to haunt people who are guilty of them and certainly do not confer any authority upon aspiring paternalistic politicians and bureaucrats.

When human communities are formed, slowly or quickly, their purpose isn’t to have some members direct the lives of the rest of the members. Their purpose is to make it possible for all the individuals in the community to act as freely as possible and to take full responsibility for their actions. Politics, properly understood, is supposed to be about protecting, securing individual rights, just as the American Founders stated. Politics is not about treating members of human communities as if they belonged to some kind of “organic body” (Karl Marx’s term), as some kind of conscripted group guided by a special class of people who deem themselves more wise and virtuous then the rest of us.

In a genuinely free country laws don’t function as tools for regimenting people, imposing on them visions to which they have not given their consent. The vision that includes wealthy people distributing their wealth to “society” is deeply flawed. Not the least of its flaws is that “society” is actually just some other people who pretend to stand in for us all. That famous “we” are really just certain tricky folks pretending to know that’s to our good.

So I once again invoke a famous, apt saying of Abraham Lincoln, namely, "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent." That includes no raiding the what the wealthy leave to their families.

Global Warming Ad Hominem

Tibor R. Machan

Someone I know in the community of academic philosophers who works mostly in environmental ethics recently labeled me a “global warming denier” because I am—along with quite a few lay and expert individuals interested in the topic—skeptical about the human contribution to global warming and related environmentalist contentions. Now this clearly isn’t how philosophers are supposed to conduct debates. It is more reminiscent of Thrasymacus than of Socrates, that’s for sure, the guy who crashes a serious discussion with his rude intrusions. Why?

Well, the term “denier” gained its prominence in recent decades from discussions about those who claim that the Holocaust never happened. Such folks do exist—in fact, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is among them, as well as a bunch of neo-Nazis and some—a few—Word War II revisionists I have actually met.

Now to deny that the Holocaust happened, that Hitler initiated and tried to carry out the final solution of ridding Germany, maybe even all of Europe, of Jews, is blatantly dishonest. It amounts to refusing to take account of innumerable historical records, photographic evidence, eye witness testimony, mass graves, etc., etc.

It is hard to imagine that this kind of denial is based on mere ignorance. Rather, much more likely, it comes from a hatred of Jews. It comes from the legacy of their vicious treatment throughout much of ancient and modern history, ending with the mass murder of millions of them in the 20th century.

In short, calling someone a denier is to morally indict the person, even to the point of charging him or her with complicity in such mass murder after the fact. Is this anything comparable to anthropogenic global warming skepticism? Clearly not.

Anthropogenic global warming skepticism involves serious doubts about whether the recent increase in atmospheric temperature has been dramatic and whether it is the result of human activities—mostly industrial as well as involving transportation and farming. Whatever the best understanding of global climate fluctuation may turn out to be, it is certainly not based on the kind of hard and fast evidence that we have of the Holocaust.

Most of the estimates about current and future climate change are based on complicated, often quite incomplete and relatively primitive records and on the computer models that utilize these records. While there is no serious debate about the usefulness of researching the issue with the aid of these records and the models that rely upon them, it is by no means ridiculous to regard the results less than conclusive. Indeed, even most environmentalist who share Al Gore’s perspective understand their concerns to be precautionary! That is to say, they are basically advising caution so as to guard against anything drastic happening in the future.

Let us suppose they are right. Could anyone reasonably compare having doubts about their advice to doubting that the Holocaust has happened? No way. Just the fact that we are talking about predictions of the future, which is always somewhat uncertain—except perhaps about such elementary matters that there will be a future—should make it clear that this isn’t a matter of denying anything since what will happen hasn’t yet happened and cannot actually be denied yet!

What the labeling of anthropogenic global warming skeptics as “deniers” does very strongly suggest is a good deal of desperation on the part of those who deploy that term. It suggests less than serious confidence in their own projections, needing instead of evidence the demagoguery of throwing around ad hominems, that is, insults.

Which would, it seems to me, add some more credibility to the skepticism that some people want so badly to silence. (Yes, Virginia, some American politicians have already tried to silence the skeptics by threatening those who fund their research with repercussions such as withdrawing whatever support they receive from government or excluding them from eligibility for government contracts in areas completely unrelated to climate change research!)

With the recent discovery of some serious errors in calculating the temperature of the earth—turns out the early 1990s were not the hottest years because there were hotter ones in the 1940s—the work of the skeptics is essential and to dismiss—indeed to morally deride—it is scandalous.

America and Libertarianism

Tibor R. Machan

Because America is still widely regarded as a pretty decent country, even while Left, Right and the rest find a lot of fault with it, the question of whether Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Populists, or Libertarians are the most faithful to its central ideas and ideals is important to ask and answer.

The Left—or modern liberals—claim they are the true champions of American values because they stand up for the little guy and reject dominance by big business, just as some of the Founders did. The Right—or conservatives—believe they are the most faithful Americans because the country was founded by more or less avid Christians and has always embraced various important religious traditions, both social and political. Populists think they are the most American of them all because they claim they stand up for the power of the underdog, the people without much means but large in number.

Why does the libertarian think America is best understood in terms of libertarian ideas, principles, theories, and ideals? Because of what the Declaration of Independence states. Libertarians hold, with that venerable document, that everyone has an unalienable right to his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. This means that others must secure one’s permission before utilizing one’s labor, time, works, resources for any purpose whatever. No one may intrude on another person without that person’s permission or consent.

The rights mentioned in the Declaration are unalienable, which means no one can lose his or her rights, they cannot be voted away, no one, government or neighbor, is authorized to violate them regardless of how important the purpose might be used to justify such violation. If one is concerned about the poor, others’ support must be obtained without coercion. If one is interested in converting someone to a different faith from the one he or she is practicing, this must be done by means of persuasion, by convincing people, not be forcing them to change their beliefs. If one disapproves of homosexuality, drug use, gambling, hunting, horseback riding or any other fundamentally non-coercive conduct by others, one must never resort to force to try to change their beliefs and behavior. If one wants to further space research or the fine arts, that too must be achieved without conscription anyone into these pursuits.

That is what having an unalienable right to one’s life and liberty and so forth means. No exceptions, even if there are complications and nuances involved in how these ideas and ideals are implemented.

It is interesting that Osama bin Laden’s latest lecture to those in the West urged them all to convert to Islam. Now urging them to do this is fully consistent with the principles of the Declaration. But terrorizing them if they refuse completely violates them. (One can ask Mr. bin Laden why one ought to convert to Islam but the answer cannot be because the Koran commands it, since that Koran has authority only over those who are Muslims, not over anyone else! But this holds also for anyone who urges another to convert to any faith at all—the reasons must be independent of the doctrine to which one is urged to convert.)

Many people in the West are not all that far from believing what Mr. bin Laden does, namely, that everyone ought to covert to their way of life, leave everything else behind. And it is only because of certain principles, the ones the Declaration lays out so succinctly, that most do not resort to coercion to try to get others to convert.

It used to be quite popular in the West, this coercive conversion idea. And in many ways it still is, as when people use the power of government—of physical force and its threat—to force others to give up their own resources, their own private property, so as to support some worthy cause. That is totally against what the Declaration identifies are our unalienable rights. Sure, most people in the West resort not to out and out terror but to more indirect force, via the legislative process, to pursue public policies that treat others as unwilling means to their ends. But the principle isn’t all that different from rank terror—the prospect of spending years in jail unless one pays up when the legislature insists one must for some cause or another is certainly terrifying to anyone.

The only contemporary political idea that really squares with the letter and spirit of the American founders is, then, libertarianism. Sure, they may not have gone so far as libertarians do to affirm the absolutely sovereignty of every adult individual. They may not have come up with substitutes for taxation, a system of extortion that violates the principle that one has an unalienable right to one’s life and liberty. But they laid the groundwork for advancing toward a truly free society. And it is libertarianism that most fully captures the implications of what they did declare to hold as being self-evidently true.

Revisiting Animal “Rights”

[Summary of talk given at the University of Heidelberg, 7/13/07]

Tibor R. Machan

Introduction
In the concern about how human beings treat animals, whether as pets, as prospective nourishment, or for medical research or ex-perimentation, one school, led by Professor Tom Regan, has proposed the idea that animals have rights like human beings do, while another school, under the leadership of Professor Peter Singer, has proposed that the well being of animals should be considered in a utilitarian as-sessment of how they ought to be treated. I aim to argue here that the concept of "rights" has not be shown to apply to animals in any-thing like the way it applies to human beings. Looking at the concep-tual foundation of basic rights, especially a la John Locke, rights are founded on the moral nature of human beings, specifically on their moral agency. They identify, as the late Robert Nozick put it, our moral space. Given that animals have not been shown to possess moral agency, the basis of ascribing to them rights of the sort human beings possess is lacking. As to the utilitarian case associated with Pe-ter Singer, I will only mention, briefly, that Singer's ultimate founda-tion for ethics does not support any kind of normative stance toward animals, given that he is fundamentally a non-cognitivist or conven-tionalist. I shall develop these ideas and consider some objections to my position.

Outlining the Case Against Animal Rights
Since 1985 I have addressed the question of whether animals have rights in the sense that human beings are said to have them, first in my papers “Some Doubts About Animal Rights,” and “Do Ani-mals Have Rights?” and later in my book Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite. Since then I added yet another paper to my examination of the topic, namely, “Rights, Liberation and Interests: Is there a Sound Case for Animal Rights or Liberation.”
In the presentation today I plan to offer an outline of my objec-tions to animal rights and consider some questions that arise in con-nection with these objections and have been raised both directly in criticism of my work and indirectly by supporters of the animal rights/liberation position. In particular, I wish to make clear that the reason I object to animal rights is that I hold that arguments for such rights commit what has been dubbed by some “the fallacy of the sto-len concept.” This fallacy is well exhibited by defenders of intelligent design when they make confident use of the concept “intelligence” but deny, in the same breath, that intelligence arises from a living human brain, in particular the frontal cortex. Affirming that intelligence ex-isted at one time while such a human brain did not is to commit the fallacy because the concept of intelligence requires the concept of the human brain as its foundation in reality.
In the same way, the concept of rights—as in the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and private property—presupposes something that such rights theorists as William of Ockham and John Locke affirmed, namely, human moral agency. In more recent times the natural rights advocates Ayn Rand and Robert Nozick both rested their conviction that human beings have basic rights on the fundamen-tal idea that human beings are by their nature moral agents. As Nozick argued, rights secure the moral space that human beings require in their communities, the breach or trespass of which space undermines their dignity or capacity for morally significant action. This kind of ac-tion requires choice—or, as Kant had it, “ought” implies “can,” mean-ing, the responsibility to do the right thing and avoid doing the wrong assumes that the agent can choose between the one and the other; either way of acting is open to the agent, all things being equal.
Given that non-human animals aren’t moral agents—not in the general and fundamental sense, certainly, that we take human beings to be—there is no conceptual basis for ascribing to them the kind of rights that human beings are said to possess. Some higher primates do exhibit sensibilities that some take to be characteristic of moral agents but they do not involve moral responsibilities, guilt or pride. So, then, to attempt to ascribe such rights to non-human animals as akin to attempting to build a third story in a building that has not got a basement and first story. It produces a mythical but not an actual right.
This is the gist of my skeptical argument about so called animal rights. Notice here that the point of my argument isn’t so much to es-tablish that animal rights do not exist—which would require proving a negative—but rather that the existence of such rights hasn’t been es-tablished. To put it somewhat differently, the burden of showing that animals have those rights human beings possess hasn’t been met.
If, however, it were to be argued that animal rights aren’t the sort that human beings are said to have, then we have something like the case of God’s existence that denies that God is omniscient, om-nipotent and omni-benevolent—it is not about the God that is of inter-est in philosophy and theology. Rights not founded on the moral agency of the rights holder are not the sort of rights that command re-spect and require protection in a just legal order; they aren’t the rights of interest in political and legal theory.



Some Criticisms of the Refutation
The Marginal Case Argument
There have been several efforts to discredit my argument and I wish now to turn to some of them. One maintains that the claim that human beings are moral agents is wrong since there are human be-ings, such as infants and some invalids, as well as all of us while asleep—who lack the capacity for moral agency, yet they are generally deemed to posses the basic rights ascribed to human beings. As Na-than Nobis and David Graham put the point:
...true, we might agree that only humans have this capacity for dis-cerning right and wrong, but only some humans, not all: it's not the case that all humans who, intuitively, should not be treated as ani-mals are treated have this "moral nature" that Machan describes: they don't make moral decisions and so are not moral agents. Thus, Machan's theory of rights seems to provide no protection for vulner-able humans—human babies, severely mentally challenged individu-als, and others (regrettably these humans are often called "marginal cases" or "marginal humans")—who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes. So, if such humans have rights, this shows that Machan's argument against animal rights is unsound because he has a mistaken view of what is necessary for having any moral rights.
There are several problems in this passage. First, I do not speak about moral rights anywhere in my argument against animal rights. I am talking about natural rights in the tradition of John Locke. It is these sort of rights that serve as the foundation for laws that secure for human beings their moral space. Graham and Nobis make a lot of my failure to discuss moral rights yet do not say why such a discussion is relevant. After all, moral rights are no what is at issue in the animal rights debate. What is at issue is the kind of rights that warrant legal protection.
Another problem with this response is that it demands an ac-count of a definition of the concept “human being” that is impossible to attain and because of this it cannot support any account of the kind of rights animal rights advocates are interested in ascribing to non-human animals. To complain that moral agency is lacking while some-one is in a coma or asleep is to misunderstand the point of a definition, a statement of the nature of something. Such a statement is not a necessary truth but a truth for “the most part.” Human beings are moral agents when they are intact, awake, healthy, and so forth, not, however, while asleep or seriously brain damaged or in a vegetative state. However, the definition of “human being” applies to them none-theless since it captures what best distinguishes them from other ani-mals.
It is unclear what kind of rights my critics want to ascribe to animals if they are dissatisfied with the rights associated with the natural rights tradition or rights talk. Yes, a conventionalist approach to rights may provide some very weak support for human and animal rights but not the kind that either human or animal rights advocates need in order to back up their demands for treating human beings or animals with the kind of respect that human beings receive in light of their possession of natural rights. In another words, if the rights in-volved are conventional—which is to say, they are not derived from something firm such as human nature but decided upon in some community—they then may be over-ridden by some alternative pref-erences of the majority in a human community that could abolish rights altogether.
The point of claiming that animals have rights, exactly as it is of claiming that human beings do in the Lockean tradition, is to convince those who make laws, perhaps the majority, perhaps its representa-tives, that animals really ought to be treated in certain ways, namely, left alone, free to do as they will. It is not sufficient for this to establish that some group, say the majority, could decide, willy-nilly, to claim rights for animals. Some group might not, just as easily, and if there can be no convincing objection to this, nothing of significance has been achieved by ascribing rights to non-human animals. This also holds for ascribing merely conventional rights to human beings—it carries to philosophical or moral weight at all.
The Moral Agency Argument
Another objection to my defense of skepticism about animal rights is that in our Darwinian era, in which the theory of evolution has become scientifically validated, there is no justification for regarding human beings as unique in being moral agents. As John Gray states,
The idea that morality is uniquely human has many variations, but all of them rest on the assumption that humans are in some funda-mental way exempt from the evolutionary laws that govern other animals.
Gray goes on to state that
Darwinian theories have no place for teleological explanations—that is to say, explanations that rely on ascribing purposes to evolution-ary processes.
Let us take a closer look at this objection. First of all, there are variations among Darwinians. Some of them argue that it is possible to find purposive or goal-directed behavior among living things, espe-cially when we come to humans who have evolved so as to be able to set their own goals, purposes or ends. Some believe that all of hu-man behavior consists of random events, without any purpose or end in sight for any of it and certainly with no free will anywhere to be found.
The most curious invocation of Darwin's views is found among environmentalists who tend to both accept it and then apply it in quite inconsistent ways. For example, many environmentalists insist that there is what we can identify as a healthy ecosystem. Supporters of endangered species legislation insist that there is an optimal balance in nature which is supposed to include a great variety of living species. And they believe in ethics, as well, urging us all to abide by certain standards of right conduct so that the environment is well cared for. Urging us to act this way certainly suggests that human beings have a moral nature.
Darwinian teleological explanations do not ascribe a goal to evo-lution—except in the sense that what results from natural selection needs to be successful, namely, survive. But there is no reason to deny the validity of teleological explanations to some aspects of life. Indeed, most biologists invoke just such explanations when they talk about the beak of a particular bird or the color of the fur of a certain type of rabbit and how these serve to promote the welfare of the ani-mals in question. Similarly, there is nothing anti-Darwinian about the claim that certain ways of choosing to act—e.g., those in conformity with the virtues—enhance the life of a human being.
Contrary to Gray’s claim, if human beings are moral agents it doesn’t follow that they are “exempt from the evolutionary laws that govern other animals.” The process of natural selection, Darwin’s most important discovery, does not imply that a species that emerges in nature cannot posses moral agency. The contrary is far more com-patible with Darwin’s theory.
The highly diverse natural living world can accommodate a kind of animal that has the capacity for moral responsibility and choice. Af-ter all, among all the living things on earth, among all the different species, there are enormous differences. A sea horse, for example, is very different from a puma. Yet both are subject to Darwinian evolu-tionary laws. Why then would it not be possible for human beings to have emerged from a process governed by those same general laws with attributes and capacities that are very different from those other animals possess? Their capacity for making original choices, for free will and moral responsibility, could be as much a part of the natural order as the male sea horse’s capacity to carry the young (unlike other animals, where it is the female that does this).
Moreover, environmentalists routinely talk of the health of the ecosystem, which is one reason they are concerned about, say, an-thropogenic global warming. Health is a concept that pertains to an organism's doing well at proceeding toward the goals of surviving and flourishing. It assumes that there exists such a goal, one that can be enhanced or thwarted as the organism carries out its life processes. If the goal is enhanced, it is a healthy specimen, if it is thwarted than it is unhealthy (either from some internal malaise or from external im-pediments).
The very idea of health contradicts the idea of mere random, mechanical development. If all development had to be purposeless, then none would be an enhancement or a thwarting of the life of something. It would be akin to how we see the movements of celestial entities—they just move, none of their movement is better or worse in and of itself. It makes no sense to construe the behavior of Mars or the sun as good or bad, healthy or sick. All of that is misapplied when it comes to behavior that has no goal, no end in sight.
So, now, if one accepts that Darwin rules out both purposive talk and endorses thoroughgoing determinism, applicable to all living things including humans, then talk about a healthy or sick ecosystem is completely out of order, as would of course be chiding human beings for failing to promote it. There can then be no sensible discussion without morality of how human beings should act as far as the envi-ronment or animals are concerned—they will do what they are deter-mined to do and they have no choice in the matter, nor is there some standard by which how they act can be evaluated since nothing is ei-ther good or bad for the ecology or the environment. It all just hap-pens, period.
So in terms of some of the most elementary features of envi-ronmentalist language certain moral concepts are quite explicit—we are all being urged to conduct ourselves responsibly toward the wilds, for example. And this sort of admonition is not addressed to non-human animals, suggesting very strongly that environmentalists ac-cept the moral nature of human beings.
So, a version of Darwinism clearly does not negate the moral na-ture of human beings. Although people are animals, they also differ from other animals—as indeed, other species of animals differ from one another—in that they are moral agents. And this is quite compati-ble with Darwinian biology.

Reply to Another Critic
In the title of his comment on my recent paper “Why Human Be-ings May Use Animals,” Professor John Hadley refers to non-human animals as “others,” as if they were akin to, say, one’s neighbors. (He also loads his title with the notion that using such others would be some kind of “abuse.”) So, then, even before reading his comment, one is already lured into sharing his conclusion, never mind that the argument is yet to come and may turn out to be unsuccessful.
But, of course, this is something many of us do—the title of my own original paper assumes that we may use non-human animals and proposes to justify this. Still, I shall henceforth resist such ploys whenever I am tempted to use them. Let me then get to why I do think Hadley’s case is unsound.
The form of his argument is of the reductio ad absurdum variety. He purports to accurately recast my own argument in such a way that (a) it is compatible with what I believe and say and (b) results in an “unpalatable conclusion.” What is that? That cognitively impaired hu-man beings maybe used by the non-impaired ones.
This not only conjures up the Nazis but Hadley explicitly states that “It was the Nazis who used cognitively impaired human animals as resources for the sorts of tasks that Machan claims are necessary for beings considered more important to ‘succeed in life’ or ‘flourish’ as in medical research.” The approach to arguing one’s position that charges one’s opponent with sharing the views and policies of the Na-zis is a pretty low blow but, again, not all that unusual. Let us now see how he justifies this rather drastic charge, namely, that my views are equivalent to those of the Nazis.
Hadley states that in my paper I am making only a generaliza-tion when I define human beings as animals capable of moral agency. This is because there are cases of what we would all regard as human beings who are “incapable of moral reasoning.” He puts it this way: “After all, if the value of an individual is commensurate with their [sic] capacity to engage in moral reasoning, then it is reasonable to suggest that human animals wholly incapable of moral reasoning will have value at least equal to, or even below, some nonhuman animals such as greater apes.”
Let me first note that Hadley changes my own wording quite sig-nificantly. He speaks of the “capacity of engage in moral reasoning,” whereas I speak of moral agency. He never justifies his rewording. Perhaps he has in mind the same thing, but those were not my terms. Quite a few human beings who are moral agents aren’t capable of en-gaging in moral reasoning at some point, say when asleep. And such reasoning, in any case, is something moral philosophers do, not ordi-nary folks who, for example, when they act negligently—say by driving recklessly—aren’t reasoning much, yet their moral agency is in no dispute. Is one necessarily capable of moral reasoning when one is blamed for this? I am not sure but it doesn’t sound right—moral rea-soning is more of an intellectual activity—it requires deliberation—whereas moral agency requires only that one is capable of intentional action or conduct, judgments that issue in behavior. Such judgments may well amount to no more than unexamined beliefs, ones someone has picked up without any “moral reasoning.”
But perhaps this is indeed minor for even such minimally intel-lectual performance could rest on the capacity to reason morally. The risk of such recasting of someone’s way of stating his or her argument is considerable, however. My own moral theory, for instance, makes reasoning itself a moral act, so those who do in fact reason correctly, carefully, are ipso facto morally praiseworthy. This is in the tradition of Aristotelian “right reason” ethics. I do not hold that there is some spe-cial intellectual activity called “moral reasoning.”
In any case, is Hadley correct to hold that because I define hu-man beings as “rational animals,” that is, “animals with the capacity to think abstractly,” and ascribe to them moral agency—being responsi-ble to act rightly and open to praise or blame depending upon whether they do so—I am committed to the view that I consider “rights inap-propriate for cognitively impaired human beings”? No.
When one defines a class of beings, one focuses on what they are normally, and in the case of living things, what they are at their state of maturity. So infants and those who are impaired will not (yet) fit the correct definition of the concept “human being” fully but it is clearly understood—in biology, botany, and other life sciences—that a certain definition is the most apt way to classify them.
A pheasant, to take another case, may be defined as “a large bird related to and resembling domestic poultry.” Now some pheas-ants, in fact, will lose their wings or experience some other temporary or even permanent impediments or alterations, yet this does not lead to their being something other than pheasants. No new classification will be required for such specimens of pheasants and whatever biologi-cal or zoological statements will be applicable to pheasants will be ap-plicable to such infant or impaired instances, with appropriate modifi-cations taking account of their special status.
This epistemological approach is routine. Furniture may be de-fined as “the movable items such as chairs, desks, or cabinets in an area such as a room or patio,” yet when some chairs are affixed per-manently to a floor or if one of them breaks and is no longer usable as a chair, or, again, if some piece of furniture from years gone by be-comes a fragile museum piece and would break upon being moved, it does not alter the fact that the most apt definition of furniture still ap-plies, provided the requisite modifications are made. “Model furniture,” “play furniture” or the like will clarify that, though these pieces are in-deed properly called “furniture,” they are exceptional for the specified reasons. No wholesale reclassification of them is required or would be rational.
When a person is asleep and does not evidence moral agency, he or she is still a moral agent and if moral agency is what justifies the ascription of rights to human beings, the sleeping person possesses the rights in question. Similarly with infants or children—which partly explains the substance of the debate about abortion rights: though no one disputes that zygotes, embryos, fetuses, or infants are unable to exercise moral agency as of yet, it makes perfectly good sense to in-quire as to whether they possess rights since normally they are on the way to becoming mature members of the class of beings who are nor-mally moral agents. When it comes to impaired people, again the pol-icy of classifying them with normal mature people for the sake of learning what sort of political principles need to be observed in order to treat them properly (say, in the field of medical ethics and law) is the most rational approach to take, provided certain modifications in the way they are to be treated are also spelled out. (Thus, children’s rights are not respected and protected exactly the way the rights of human adults are, nor are the rights of the invalid or senile.)
Hadley and some others who have addressed my discussion of the basis of natural rights —namely, the normal capacity for mature or adult human beings for moral agency (which is in gradual develop-ment from infancy and which is temporarily or permanently under-mined for impaired persons)—are making a case for a way to under-stand what it means to be a given kind of being via a definition that is useless for deriving any kind of policy conclusions, be these ethical or political. That is because these definitions are envisioned as having the attributes of logically necessary truths, not of definitions as they de-velop in such sciences as biology, botany, sociology, economics, and psychology. They confuse definitions in the formal disciplines like logic and geometry with those in these substantive disciplines (or spheres of knowledge). As such, they rob themselves of any possibility of defining substantive entities, as distinct from formal ones.
A theory of rights is by its very nature general, guiding law and public policy, and since human beings living in communities who are in need of such guidance aren’t formal entities, definable by statements that are necessary truths, there will naturally be some exceptional cases. (This, among other things, accounts for the familiar jurispru-dential idea that “hard cases make bad law,” as well as the doctrine of judicial discretion which authorizes legal authorities to make excep-tional rulings.)
Despite Hadley’s very confident language alleging that my ap-proach to assessing whether animals have the kind of rights human beings have (that would justify banning their use by human beings) fails, he has not shown such failure, nor, therefore, that my ideas lead to anything like the Nazi practices he claims I must endorse, nor, cer-tainly, that non-human animals have rights. They do not, whereas young and impaired human beings do, along, of course, with the rest of us (which makes good sense of why Amnesty International and various organizations monitoring governments and legal systems con-cerning whether they respect and protect rights are focusing on hu-man, not animals rights).
In his comment-review of my book in which a spend some time discussing so called animal rights (posted both on Amazon.com and his web site —Nathan Nobis says that my basic idea is that “a being has rights—it is wrong to harm it for pleasure or even serious bene-fits—only if it has a ‘moral nature,’ i.e., a ‘capacity’ to see the differ-ence between right and wrong and choose accordingly (pp. xv, 10).” This is roughly right but contains a serious misunderstanding.
This misunderstanding consists of a mischaracterizes having rights in a very important respect that really should be avoided.
Having rights does not mean it is wrong to harm someone for pleasure or even serious benefit, not if they consent (as in sports or scientific experiments). Having rights means it is wrong to invade someone’s person or property, as when I assault another person or rob him or trespass over his land. Harm is definitely not the issue since often invasive actions are not at all harmful, may even be quite help-ful. When someone is hospitalized against his will, this is invasive but it is not harmful—could, in fact, be helpful—but by rights theory it is also a violence against the person, against his human dignity. Or when someone is burglarized, this may not be harmful at all—the person may be so wealthy as not to suffer any harm from the burglary. If I trespass and take up residence on someone’s land, that may again not be at all harmful.
One clear way to appreciate this point is to contrast the benefi-cial nature of some paternalistic actions with their rights violating character. The whole point about rights is they spell out what Robert Nozick called the “moral space” surrounding moral agents, space re-quired for them to exercise meaningful moral choice (something non-human animals cannot do).
Indeed, in Putting Humans First I state that it may well be wrong to harm or hurt animals—I explicitly condemn wanton infliction of suf-fering—but that is not an issue of rights. For example, even in human relations, when one wrongs another person—say a friend or lover or kin—it is not even usually a matter of violating rights. It is more often, instead, not treating the person as he or she deserves or should be treated. Rights violations are only a small group of such untoward ac-tions toward others, mainly to serve as the basis of the rule of law in a free society.
Hadley goes on to add to his objection that “Machan says hu-mans are of that ‘kind’ [meaning moral agents] and animals are not and so concludes that humans have rights and animals have none. But these arguments are imprecise: true, only humans have this capacity, but only some humans, not all. Thus, his theory of rights seems to provide no protection for vulnerable humans who are not moral agents and so lack the moral nature he describes.”
The humans my critic says aren’t moral agents are, typically, in-fants and people in a coma and other marginal or borderline instances which are clearly enough known to be such (we could add people who happen to be asleep). A legal system that aims for the protection of human individual rights deals with some of these cases by making special provisions in light of their special attributes. To object to re-garding human beings in general as moral agents because of these marginal cases is akin to objecting to regarding, say, chairs as artifacts for sitting simply because, well, one cannot sit on museum chairs or broken ones.
The exceptional nature of these marginal cases is obvious but not relevant so long as they remain marginal. As the famous saying goes, “hard cases make bad law.” The point of rights is to spell out a broad framework for how to treat beings with a moral nature, not to address the special cases.
One should not develop theories about how the world should be understood based on marginal, exceptional cases, cases that, by the way, couldn’t even be identified as marginal or exceptional without first having a clear enough grasp of typical or normal ones an under-standing of which enables one to develop general principles, laws or rules. Where would medicine or engineering be if such exceptions could undercut the principles that guide our actions in these fields? In-deed, no one who embarks upon a systematic statement of ethical or legal principles, based on the most up to date substantive understand-ing of the world, is ever going to be able to produce the kind of geo-metrical framework these critics demand of me as I spell out a reason-able conception of human individual rights.

Summary of My Position
So what have I tried to do here? I outlined, very briefly, my skeptical argument about animal rights, claiming that the foundation for the sort of rights human beings are said to have does not obtain in the case of animals. I then responded to the charge that the rights I agree human beings have cannot be defended because human beings often fail to exhibit moral agency (when they are vulnerable, for ex-ample). And finally I replied to those who maintain that human beings lack moral agency altogether and any differentiation between human and animal rights based on this capacity must fail.
I should like to close with just one more important point. The fact that animals lack rights does not imply that no moral considera-tions apply to how human beings interact with them. Just as human beings may have moral responsibilities toward great works of art, none of which have rights, so they could also have moral responsibilities to-ward animals, or some animals, even though these animals have no rights. Rights talk pertains to human beings because of their capacity for moral agency. But even in the case of human beings, many other moral considerations apply to how they interact with one another and the world around them other than considerations of rights.
Endnotes:
1 Tom Regan, The Case of Animals Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
2 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation , New York: New York Review of Books, 1975.
3 See, Peter Berkowitz, “Other People’s Mothers,” The New Republic, January 10, 2000. Berkowitz shows Singer to be a non-cognitivist and also makes note of the fact that despite Singer’s proclamation that the very old ought to be allowed to die and the resources to keep them alive ought to go to help those who suffer poverty and deprivation, Singer himself has spent extensive resources on helping his own elderly mother.
4 “Some Doubts About Animal Rights,” Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 19 (1985), 73-75.
5 Tibor R. Machan, “Do Animals Have Rights?” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 5 (April 1991), 163-173.
6 Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
7 Hon-Lam Li & Anthony Yeung, eds., New Essays in Applied Ethics: Animal Rights, Personhood, and the Ethics of Killing (New York: Palgrave & Macmillan, 2006.
8 Nathaniel Branden, “The Stolen Concept,” Objectivist Newsletter, January 1963.
9 David Graham and Nathan Nobis, “Putting Humans First?” Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Fall, 2006): 90-91.
10 John Gray, “Are We Born Moral?” The New York Review of Books, May 10, 2007, 26.
11 Ibid.
12 For more on this, see James G. Lennox, 'Teleology' in Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, eds. Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth Lloyd, Cambridge MA , 1992, pp. 324-333, and 'Darwin was a Teleologist', Biology and Philosophy Vol. 8 (October 1993) pp. 408-421.
13 For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, “Environmentalism Humanized,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 7 (April 1993), 131-147.
14 Tibor R. Machan, “Why Human Beings May Use Animals,” Journal of Value Inquiry 126 36(1) (2002).
15 See, John Hadley, “Using and Abusing Others: A Reply to Machan,” Journal of Value Inquiry xxx; 1-4, (2004)
16 Ibid., p. 2.
17 Indeed, that may well be the source of their negligence. For more on this point, see Tibor R. Machan, Classical Individualism (London, UK: Routledge, 1998), chapter 3, “Human Action and the Nature of Moral Evil.”
18 See, for example, Nathan Nobis at http://www. courses. rochester.edu/nobis/papers/review-of-machan.html.
19 This pretty much means they are unable to produce any kind of theory of rights or ethical conduct based on an understanding of what kind of beings might have such rights or require certain conduct. Perhaps this is why these philosophers seem to be more apt to engage in criticism than theory development, at skeptical reflections rather than at producing a workable understanding of something.
20 I develop some of these points in greater detail in Tibor R. Machan, Putting Humans First, Why We Are Nature’s Favorite (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
21 Op. cit., Machan, Putting Humans First.
22 http://www.courses.rochester.edu/nobis/papers/review-of-machan.html.
23 It was the philosopher J. Roger Lee who made all this clear in a paper titled “Choice and Harms,” critical of another philosopher, Judith Jarvis Thomson. (The exchange is included in M. Bruce Johnson and Tibor R. Machan, eds., Rights & Regulations [San Francisco: Pacific Legal Foundation, 1983].)
24 Unfortunately, these critics do not bother to look at the work I have produced on natural rights theory so as to develop my position as fully as possible—Tibor R. Machan, Human Rights and Human Liberties (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), and Individuals and Their Rights (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1989), work that paves the way for my discussion of so called animal rights.

On a Blog called Technoraty one entry goes like this: "The libertarian arguments against animal rights I’ve seen, most of which stem from the tradition of Rand and/or Rothbard, engage in twin, massive cheats...." What a wonderful way to set out to engage in a discussion, is it not? Rand and Rothbard and others who see things roughly their way "engage in twin, massive cheats..." In other words, they are liars, not wrong! Well, there is no reason to talk with people who consider you a liar--clearly there is no hope of any kind of fruitful exchange once such a ad hominem has been hurled at someone. This is one way I am not all that fond of Blogging--there are too many people involoved who lack even a modicum of civility.

Ideas in Conflict

Tibor R. Machan

Amartya Sen is a Harvard University, Nobel Prize winner in economics, who has been Master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he also received much of his higher education. Sen has been a very active player in the field of political economic debates and although he is no champion of the fully free society, he has been closely associated with the ideas of human freedom as they relate to economic development in poor countries. He is widely respected and admired and was on excellent terms with both the late Robert Nozick, the Harvard libertarian political philosopher, and Peter Bauer, the late developmental economists who trusted classical ideas of liberty to serve as the best means to rescue the poor around the globe.

On of Sen’s most influential books is Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999). At first glance the title suggests that Sen shares Bauer’s ideas but that would be wrong. Sen’s idea of what freedom means is very different from Bauer’s and other classical liberals and libertarians.

What Sen means by freedom is the ability—or capability—of people to take active part in politics whereby they can demand support for their various projects. We know this system as the democratic welfare state. But in Sen’s hands it has some nuances worth exploring.

For starters, Sen holds that the infrastructure or legal order of a country is something that is to be decided upon by way of the democratic process or national conversation. In other words, there are no principles such as the American Founder’s believed in, basic individual rights governments must secure. The principles, if we can even call them that, are conventional, decided upon in a kind of national dialogue. The idea of natural rights or natural laws that are supposed to be discovered and on which the law ought to rest is absent from Sen’s position. Everything is open for debate and discussion and only after the discussion has ended can we talk of constitutional principles, fundamental laws, justice and the like. As he puts it,

“Indeed, the connection between public reasoning and the formulation and use of human rights is extremely important to understand.~ Any general plausibility that these ethical claims, or their denials, have is dependent, on this theory, on their survival and flourishing when they encounter unobstructed discussion and scrutiny, along with adequately wide informational availability.” (“Elements of a Theory of Rights,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 32.4 [2004] p. 349.)

Contrary, then, to the American political tradition, which owes a great deal to John Locke’s idea of natural rights—meaning, rights derived from an understanding of an objectively ascertainable human nature—Sen’s idea of basic justice or right has no foundation in nature, only in widespread conversation.

Now this sounds like a coherent notion until one digs a bit into some of what is presupposed in Sen’s position. One thing, for example, that does not appear to rest on debate and discussion is the right of everyone to take part in the discussion! So it appears there is, after all, a natural base for Sen’s idea of freedom—everyone, because of his or her humanity, has the right to take part in political deliberations. Why? The one good answer to this is that by virtue of our human nature, we are entitle to have our political ideas aired in a human community. Being human, moral agents, is what this entitlement or right rests on, not on a discussion or debate.

Now if it is true that there is at least one principle that isn’t negotiable, namely, the principle of free political participation, there could be others. If it turns out that the same features of human nature that support this right to freedom also support other rights, they, too, would be morally and political immune to being discussed away.

One such right that is immediately evident is the right to private property. One’s labor and time, for example, couldn’t be up for public debate—no one has the right to decide that you or I may or may not make decisions respecting the disposition of our labor, our time, indeed, our lives!

Sen’s idea of freedom, however, strongly implies that participants in a democratic discussion and political debate could conclude with the idea that my or your or anyone’s life could be conscripted to serve various goals to which no consent has been given. But then the same could hold for the right of participation in political discussion—that right, too, could be debated away (and in some countries it has been and is, because the foundation of the right to take part in politics is not deemed to be natural but conventional).

A well integrated theory of freedom cannot accept that some of our rights are firmly grounded while others up for debate. These rights are all unalienable. Which means that democratic debate may not end with conclusions leading to the abrogation of these rights. And that is just the kind of freedom that the classical liberals, like Peter Bauer, believed is fundamental and not up for compromise. It is also the best avenue for development and emergence from poverty.

Professor Sen’s bifurcated theory of the right to freedom, whereby political participation is an absolute but property rights, for example, a mere conventional right, just will not hold up when fully scrutinized.

Some Little Good News

Tibor R. Machan

When you write columns, most of them turn out to be critical. This despite my beef about how mainstream news is routinely negative, so nothing much about new scientific advances, medical breakthroughs, great novels just finished, and so forth manages to be reported. But I don’t wish to fall in line with such negativism.

So here is a bit of good news. In her recent column, “Fooled by Winds of Reform,” in the International Herald Tribune (8/25-26/07), Camelia Entekhabifard wrote a line I must celebrate. She writes, “Iranian citizens who have sought to progressively influence the country’s youth....” The rest isn’t relevant to my point, so I’ll leave it be. But just notice: Entekhabifard uses “progressively” correctly, in contrast to nearly everyone else on the punditry circuit where the term “progressive” is mostly deployed to refer to some kind of statist measure by a government—more national health service, more wealth redistribution, more government regulation, etc., and so forth.

Now all these so called progressive measures are, of course, blatantly reactionary, the very opposite of progressive. “Progress” is supposed to be made when matters improve, when public policies become more adjusted the proper ideas and ideals of justice. These statist measures, in contrast, all entrust government with immense powers and they move the responsibility for solving problems from the voluntary to the coercive realms of society. All those who have this blind faith in government hold out hope that if only some problem is handed over to politicians and bureaucrats, matters will be just fine. (They really ought to learn more about public choice theory!) Yet that is the old idea of the top-down running of society, the idea that shored up monarchies for centuries, the idea that wasn’t given up by the so called revolutionaries like Karl Marx.

So what most call “progressive” is, in fact, regressive, reactionary, and, most importantly, fatally flawed. (As F. A. Hayek called the notion, “a fatal conceit.”) In historical terms the idea of progress should be attached to developments that free people from dependence on government. Given that for centuries on end problem-solving had been entrusted to pharaohs, tsars, monarchs, dictators, and politburos, why would continuing and enhancing such a system be construed as progress?

No. It is indeed, as the remark by Entekhabifard implies, when citizens take over the task of running their lives and governments are kept to the minimal job of keeping the peace that true progress is in evidence. So it would be progress if Iranian citizens gained the right to self-determination and take from their government the power to influence the country’s youth by means of various versions of coercion.

Come to think of it, this is so even in Western societies, where, sadly, the education of the young is entrusted to governments, as if that didn’t mean mostly indoctrination rather that teaching! (There should be a separation of education and the state just as firmly secured in law as there is of the separation of religion and the state! That way not only would there be greater justice but we could be truly critical of what is going on in so many near-totalitarian countries across the globe where education is firmly in the hands of governments.)

There should really be a groundswell campaign in support of taking back the concept “progressive” from those who try to hoodwink us all into believing that re-empowering governments around the globe is what progress consist of. It doesn’t. Even in terms of simple history, that is rank regress.

All in all, of course, there is no guarantee that matters will change—progress—as they ought to. That is a matter of human will and determination, not of impersonal historical forces. The only type of progress that people can hope for, at the broad public policy level, would involve making of government nothing but a body guard, not our secular or spiritual savior! If it were not for the strongly entrenched, age old governmental habit, this kind of progress may in time get off the ground.

Keep Talking of What You Know

Tibor R. Machan

As an avid fan of tennis as well as some features of the Sunday supplement magazine, Parade—my secret pleasure is to read Walter Scott’s inside front cover gossip column and Marilyn von Savant’s “Ask Marilyn”—I was looking forward to read the interview with Andre Agassi, former tennis megastar. I was looking forward to his views on tennis—the recent Wimbledon and U. S. Open tournaments, some of the current greats like Roger Federer, the Williams sisters, Maria Sharapova, et al.

You can imagine my dismay when what the piece offered up is Andre’s slip shod philosophy of life. Ditties like “It’s better to be lucky than good,” and “I’m a tortured soul in most things I do; I’ve succeeded at something that at times I’ve hated, and that’s relevant to the person who goes down to the auto repair shop and puts in his time.” Hardly a word about tennis!

So you may ask, who am I to complain. After all, I’ve kept writing columns, books, articles, scholarly papers, and giving lectures and seminars nearly nonstop for nearly 40 years. Surely I must be talking a lot about stuff I know little about.

Not really. Mostly I try hard to stick to the topics I have researched and studied all my life and leave ones I know little about untouched or at most for speculation and questioning. Why? Well, I’d want to be right about things, not just babble on about them.

Take that offensive bit about auto repair shop workers. Has Agassi done serious research about whether folks who work that job hate it? I actually check out such things and have managed to ascertain, though only informally, that a great many people who work at jobs others wouldn’t go near with a considerable measure of satisfaction. Take folks who collect trash. Some might think they just have to hate the work but it doesn’t look like it.

Indeed, when I hear about how long a vacation most Europeans take each summer—from five to ten weeks, the International Herald Tribune reported recently—while Americans tend to take only about two or three weeks, I suspect the reason is that Europeans on average treat work as a chore, while Americans tend to turn work into something rewarding if not out and out enjoyable.

I recall when I was working at a U.S. Army depot in my teens, the team of kids who took on the job of re-strapping a whole lot of oil boxes that have been badly strapped to start with, we managed to make the work into something of a contest and, thus, quite a lot of fun. When I drove a school bus during my graduate school days, I nearly always enjoyed it despite the early hours and screaming students. And back when I was a box cart loader I learned how to make loading up those freight wagons a challenge and, thus, not at all a pain. So, I suspect that most people who work in auto repair shops have chosen this line of work so as to suit their talents, inclinations, options, and such and aren’t moaning about how badly they have it in life.

Yes, tennis is enjoyable, but it is foolish to think it is the only enjoyable profession for people. The one-size-fits all attitude Agassi exhibits in his comment should remain a secret prejudice of the man, not a piece of supposedly worthy insight from which perhaps some of his fans will take a very bad lesson.

No less flawed is the idea that it is better to be lucky than good—to start with, those who aren’t good, tend to blow their luck on trivial pursuits. Moreover, luck is something we cannot do much about—it either comes or it doesn’t—whereas goodness is up to us and we can usually make a decent effort to bring it about in our lives.

Anyway, the point is not complicated: Folks do better talking about stuff they know about than when they just shoot off their mouths, perhaps with the illusion that having gotten good at one thing, they are now experts at everything.