What’s With Candidates’ Non-Responses
Tibor R. Machan
Someone with the views about the proper scope of politics that I have concluded is sound may be thought to be completely cynical about politicians. As one character’s thinking in Alan Furst’s spy novel, Dark Star, would have it, “Politicians were like talking dogs in a circus; the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said.”
I cannot say I am not tempted to think this way. Why?
All you need to do is follow for just a little bit the current California scramble to attract voters to the October 7 special election. Whenever one of these people is asked a question – or indeed, whenever their campaign managers is asked something – invariably the response is obfuscation, changing the subject, broad generalities, and, well, BS, to be plain about it. “What would X do about the California deficit?” “Well, there are many problems in the state and our candidate is best qualified to deal with them and his or her staff really has a plan that will make it all right.” Or perhaps, “Now that you mention the deficit, isn’t it interesting that those in office haven’t been diligent enough to come to terms with it.” Or, and here is the most frequent ploy, “I am glad you asked that question because we are willing to go anywhere in the state to address anyone’s concerns about anything, any time, so you can see that we are best suited to run the state government.” As if any of this amounted to an answer.
Why are politicians so blatantly evasive? One suggestion that seems to carry conviction is that since they are dealing with such a huge electorate, each with such an incredibly long and diverse wish-list, politicians and their spin doctors have concluded that saying nothing is safer than to say anything at all.
If they did propose something specific and clear cut, odds are they would more likely alienate a great many voters instead of attracting a sizable number to their camp. Any specific proposal will only please a small percentage, whereas saying nothing at all leaves open the possibility that no one will notice the evasion and some kind of blind hope or a reliance on image and charisma will carry the day.
As much as this sounds like a promising answer, it is so cynical about voters that I find it very difficult to accept it. I do not consider myself such a superior being, compared to other voters, that only I and a few others – like Alan Furst’s fictional character – could notice the rank evasion in how candidates handle questions. Nor do I think my values are so unique that only I and a few others would find this repeated, persistent evasiveness and obfuscation an unworthy trait in a person, let alone someone who aspires conscientiously to serve millions of people in state or any other government.
So what may well be true is that because many others are just as disgusted with the deliberate shelling out of non-answers to questions posed to candidates as I am, this sizable group simply does not vote. The remaining millions are those who do have some kind of blind faith in – or are moved by the irrelevant imagery projected by – some candidate. And there are the loyalists who line up behind some special interest leadership – say, the public service or teacher unions – and vote for anyone these people recommend.
But the reason why such a relatively small percentage of the voting population goes to the polls is probably that the disgust with evasiveness is indeed widespread.
How might this be remedied? Only by getting government out of the zillions of tasks it hasn’t any business trying to perform and giving it a clear mandate everyone has a stake in, defending our rights. Then the issue will indeed be what Michael Dukakis once said – and was roundly condemned for having said – namely, a candidate should be judged primarily on competence. Not on how he or she can fulfill a wish-list that not even Santa could handle.
Thursday, September 04, 2003
Wishes versus Individual Rights
Tibor R. Machan
When social life becomes politicized, one is tempted to present all one’s wishes to politicians and bureaucrats because they have the power to fulfill them. A local resident, for example, wishes that a restaurant down the street from him not play any music he doesn’t like, anytime of the day. Even though the various bureaucracies dealing with these matters gave permission for the restaurant to feature live music, this resident wrote to the politician who represents the area, who then managed to sic the AFT on the proprietor and the music got banned. Or a parcel of land is being planned for development, all in line with the rules, passing various boards and commissions. But, no, those with strong wishes against it are needling their politicians and even the courts to get the thing stopped.
The case of the Alabama court house display of the Ten Commandments is not unlike these others. A great many people who are devout Christians wish for one of their icons to be displayed in the court house, so that’s what should happen, period. Or many wish that there be no smoking in any restaurants in California or New York or wherever, so they appeal to the politicians and bureaucrats and they, in turn, deliver.
The examples could continue ad infinitum. This kind of populism – enacting into law whatever enough people wish for – is, of course, a form of dictatorship. No, not the dictatorship of one powerful person such as a Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin but of several thousand or millions who happen to share strong wishes among themselves.
But notice that there is also a tradition in the American system that opposes such lynch mob politics. This tradition emphasizes individual rights and their protection by the law. According to that tradition, within one’s own realm of authority – that is, when it comes to oneself, one’s home, one’s business establishment – the decisions lie in one’s own hands not in those of politicians. And the public authority within that venerable tradition is severely limited.
In short, in the American political tradition of limited government, politicians and bureaucrats have just one basic job: to secure the rights of all individuals. They are not there to promote the projects of any group of these individuals.
No one’s favorite idea is supposed to get special government endorsement or support. If I do not wish for people to smoke, I am supposed to advocate this, promote it through various voluntary means without getting politicians to back my wish and ban smoking for folks who don’t want to live by my wishes. Or if I have a strong wish for my fellow citizens to pay attention to my ideals and principles, I must proselytize on my own and with my cohorts without getting government to pick us for favorites, as against all the others with their own ideals and principles. Unless the music from the restaurant is unreasonably loud, just because some cranky guy nearby wishes there to be none in “his” region, he does not get to call the shots with the aid of the local sheriff or the state senator. Nor do a bunch of citizens get to have their wish for “no more people and homes in ‘our’ neighborhood” fulfilled by means that crush the rights of others – they have the option to purchase the land they want unoccupied or to persuade the owner not to build on it, in peaceful, non-coercive ways.
But this idea that government upholds the basic rules of a free society and leaves the rest to peaceful cooperation – or lack thereof – among the rest of the citizenry seems to have very little standing in our day. Everyone thinks his or her wishes should rule, never mind other’s rights and the limits of state.
Yet, it is exactly that idea of politics – whereby government is supposed to secure our rights and we must go about getting our wishes without its favoring us with its forcible intervention – that made this country special and politically sound in the world. That is what earned it the label, “leader of the free world.” For the only freedom that’s really worth having is individual freedom.
Tibor R. Machan
When social life becomes politicized, one is tempted to present all one’s wishes to politicians and bureaucrats because they have the power to fulfill them. A local resident, for example, wishes that a restaurant down the street from him not play any music he doesn’t like, anytime of the day. Even though the various bureaucracies dealing with these matters gave permission for the restaurant to feature live music, this resident wrote to the politician who represents the area, who then managed to sic the AFT on the proprietor and the music got banned. Or a parcel of land is being planned for development, all in line with the rules, passing various boards and commissions. But, no, those with strong wishes against it are needling their politicians and even the courts to get the thing stopped.
The case of the Alabama court house display of the Ten Commandments is not unlike these others. A great many people who are devout Christians wish for one of their icons to be displayed in the court house, so that’s what should happen, period. Or many wish that there be no smoking in any restaurants in California or New York or wherever, so they appeal to the politicians and bureaucrats and they, in turn, deliver.
The examples could continue ad infinitum. This kind of populism – enacting into law whatever enough people wish for – is, of course, a form of dictatorship. No, not the dictatorship of one powerful person such as a Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin but of several thousand or millions who happen to share strong wishes among themselves.
But notice that there is also a tradition in the American system that opposes such lynch mob politics. This tradition emphasizes individual rights and their protection by the law. According to that tradition, within one’s own realm of authority – that is, when it comes to oneself, one’s home, one’s business establishment – the decisions lie in one’s own hands not in those of politicians. And the public authority within that venerable tradition is severely limited.
In short, in the American political tradition of limited government, politicians and bureaucrats have just one basic job: to secure the rights of all individuals. They are not there to promote the projects of any group of these individuals.
No one’s favorite idea is supposed to get special government endorsement or support. If I do not wish for people to smoke, I am supposed to advocate this, promote it through various voluntary means without getting politicians to back my wish and ban smoking for folks who don’t want to live by my wishes. Or if I have a strong wish for my fellow citizens to pay attention to my ideals and principles, I must proselytize on my own and with my cohorts without getting government to pick us for favorites, as against all the others with their own ideals and principles. Unless the music from the restaurant is unreasonably loud, just because some cranky guy nearby wishes there to be none in “his” region, he does not get to call the shots with the aid of the local sheriff or the state senator. Nor do a bunch of citizens get to have their wish for “no more people and homes in ‘our’ neighborhood” fulfilled by means that crush the rights of others – they have the option to purchase the land they want unoccupied or to persuade the owner not to build on it, in peaceful, non-coercive ways.
But this idea that government upholds the basic rules of a free society and leaves the rest to peaceful cooperation – or lack thereof – among the rest of the citizenry seems to have very little standing in our day. Everyone thinks his or her wishes should rule, never mind other’s rights and the limits of state.
Yet, it is exactly that idea of politics – whereby government is supposed to secure our rights and we must go about getting our wishes without its favoring us with its forcible intervention – that made this country special and politically sound in the world. That is what earned it the label, “leader of the free world.” For the only freedom that’s really worth having is individual freedom.
Espresso Tax and the hidden costs
Tibor R. Machan
News reports had it the other day that Seattle’s politicians and bureaucrats have cooked up yet another extortion scheme. They are now planning to put a 10 cent tax on every shot of espresso coffee. No, regular coffee, which is drunk by nearly everyone, will not be taxed – one may assume opposition to that would be too costly for the Seattle extortionists. But espresso coffee, which is drunk by fewer folks who probably will not bother to organize any serious opposition since they have better things to do with their time, will get the axe.
Now why is this of any significance? After all, such schemes have been the norm ever since taxation was invented in the ancient feudal eras and, in America, ever since politicians have managed to hoodwink the public into voting in the income tax, which pretty much opened the floodgates so there’s no principled way to stop a tax. What is interesting about the Seattle extortion scheme is how some journalists – in this instance the CBS radio correspondent who reported the item midday August 25th – have become naively or consciously complicit in perpetrating it.
After reporting the plan, this particular CBS network radio anchor mentioned that the ten cent tax on espresso coffee will produce various wonderful public projects, such as child care facilities, in greater Seattle. Thus the reporter managed to provide a boost to the idea, mentioning only that the extorted funds will be very helpful to some needy people in the city.
What about the millions of folks who will be the victims of the extortion? Did the CBS anchor say anything about what the loss of millions of dollars will do to other projects, ones that might have been funded by espresso coffee drinkers? Of course not, proving, once again, the insight of Frederick Bastiat, the 19th century French political economist who wrote “[ fcp://@fc.freedom.com,%231011100/MailBox/That_//www.jim.com/ ]That which is seen, that which is not seen,” the essay which explains how because political projects get a lot of visibility, their costs tend to be largely unreported, even unnoticed. Our CBS radio network anchor’s conduct is a typical instance of Bastiat’s point.
Of course, there is something else amiss with the CBS anchor’s conduct – it is entirely unprofessional. By reporting only on what the proposed espresso tax is partially going to produce – and only “partially” because, after all, the taxation process will also eat up a good deal of the funds obtained – this rather prominent CBS journalist was exhibiting an undeniable bias. It is just this bias that many journalists – especially at CBS, the target of the expose book, Bias (Perennial, 2002), by Bernard Goldberg – are contesting. Yet here is an instance of it that stares us in the face.
Of course, the CBS anchor would claim that he was merely reporting what the politicians claimed. Yet, why was he not reporting what critics of the tax claimed?
Taxes, as all extorted funds, not only take resources from projects taxpayers would prefer as against what the politicians prefer. But they also increase the of politicians and decrease that of citizens. That, indeed, is the point of trying to keep one’s funds under one’s own control – not greed, not meanness, not lack of compassion, not stinginess. It is to be in the position to provide the direction to one’s resources, whatever that direction may be.
The ten cents robbed from espresso consumers in Seattle – and the billions of dollars from the American public – by politicians and bureaucrats might have been left to those who own those funds to use and dispose for various projects, be these personal, familiar, social, religions, philanthropic, or recreational. The central point though is that it would have been the owners of the resources who decided what use is made of them, not the politicians and bureaucrats.
And that is just what makes taxes so important to those politicians and bureaucrats – the more taxes there are, the more power they!
Tibor R. Machan
News reports had it the other day that Seattle’s politicians and bureaucrats have cooked up yet another extortion scheme. They are now planning to put a 10 cent tax on every shot of espresso coffee. No, regular coffee, which is drunk by nearly everyone, will not be taxed – one may assume opposition to that would be too costly for the Seattle extortionists. But espresso coffee, which is drunk by fewer folks who probably will not bother to organize any serious opposition since they have better things to do with their time, will get the axe.
Now why is this of any significance? After all, such schemes have been the norm ever since taxation was invented in the ancient feudal eras and, in America, ever since politicians have managed to hoodwink the public into voting in the income tax, which pretty much opened the floodgates so there’s no principled way to stop a tax. What is interesting about the Seattle extortion scheme is how some journalists – in this instance the CBS radio correspondent who reported the item midday August 25th – have become naively or consciously complicit in perpetrating it.
After reporting the plan, this particular CBS network radio anchor mentioned that the ten cent tax on espresso coffee will produce various wonderful public projects, such as child care facilities, in greater Seattle. Thus the reporter managed to provide a boost to the idea, mentioning only that the extorted funds will be very helpful to some needy people in the city.
What about the millions of folks who will be the victims of the extortion? Did the CBS anchor say anything about what the loss of millions of dollars will do to other projects, ones that might have been funded by espresso coffee drinkers? Of course not, proving, once again, the insight of Frederick Bastiat, the 19th century French political economist who wrote “[ fcp://@fc.freedom.com,%231011100/MailBox/That_//www.jim.com/ ]That which is seen, that which is not seen,” the essay which explains how because political projects get a lot of visibility, their costs tend to be largely unreported, even unnoticed. Our CBS radio network anchor’s conduct is a typical instance of Bastiat’s point.
Of course, there is something else amiss with the CBS anchor’s conduct – it is entirely unprofessional. By reporting only on what the proposed espresso tax is partially going to produce – and only “partially” because, after all, the taxation process will also eat up a good deal of the funds obtained – this rather prominent CBS journalist was exhibiting an undeniable bias. It is just this bias that many journalists – especially at CBS, the target of the expose book, Bias (Perennial, 2002), by Bernard Goldberg – are contesting. Yet here is an instance of it that stares us in the face.
Of course, the CBS anchor would claim that he was merely reporting what the politicians claimed. Yet, why was he not reporting what critics of the tax claimed?
Taxes, as all extorted funds, not only take resources from projects taxpayers would prefer as against what the politicians prefer. But they also increase the of politicians and decrease that of citizens. That, indeed, is the point of trying to keep one’s funds under one’s own control – not greed, not meanness, not lack of compassion, not stinginess. It is to be in the position to provide the direction to one’s resources, whatever that direction may be.
The ten cents robbed from espresso consumers in Seattle – and the billions of dollars from the American public – by politicians and bureaucrats might have been left to those who own those funds to use and dispose for various projects, be these personal, familiar, social, religions, philanthropic, or recreational. The central point though is that it would have been the owners of the resources who decided what use is made of them, not the politicians and bureaucrats.
And that is just what makes taxes so important to those politicians and bureaucrats – the more taxes there are, the more power they!
Why Taxes are Really a Bad Thing
Tibor R. Machan
This is one of my favorite topics because I like to tell it like it is even when so many fashionable folks think I am way off base.
You’ve heard it before, I am sure – taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Bunk – that’s a ruse someone who loved big government dearly tried to perpetrate and, yes, one with which he managed to fool quite a lot of people. Millions still believe that taxes are necessary just to have a decent community.
Well, here is what’s wrong with that. Even the most vital services governments provide can be bought instead of extorted from us. There is no free rider problem – meaning, because some pay for something others can use, others will stubbornly refuse to contribute -- and even if there were one, it wouldn’t justify extortion.
What folks don’t seem to understand is that a truly just society is a place where people can live without having to deny their basic humanity. And our humanity consist primarily in needing to be free of other people’s oppression. That is why slavery was such a vicious institution. That is why oppression is so terrible, be it by one bloke, a party, or a majority. That is why any kind of coercion must be banned. People require, for their flourishing, to be free to choose and when this freedom is impeded, even just a little bit, their humanity is being assaulted.
The fact that in most of human history people lived under oppression doesn’t in the slightest undermine the moral point I am making here. Throughout history there has also been theft, rape, robbery, murder, assault and all kinds of related evils, yet no one would seriously argue that those are just part of the price we pay for civilization. That’s because it is clear cut enough that these practices are evil.
Yet what is taxation but imposing an ongoing, heavy burden on persons without their consent, just so that they can make a living, own property, and buy and sell goods in the market place.
Sure, there are services that make working free of intrusion more likely and these services cost something. But we should only have to pay and get these services if we choose to do so. That is what civilized life requires. We should be able to try doing without the services and suffer the consequences.
But most of us would not try to live without cops, courts, and the military, all of which make working, owning property, trading things and stuff more convenient. And we can arrange to obtain these services without deploying any kind of coercive force, contrary to what those try to peddle us who hold that extortion and coercion are needed so as to reduce, well, extortion and coercion. That is just nonsense.
OK, so it hasn’t been tried too often to get legal services governments provide without extracting funds for this coercively, at the point of a gun. Taxes are common, so they are widely thought to be necessary, but this is where the big mistake lies.
Why, however, would so many bright enough people insist that taxation is necessary and moral?
In her first novel, We The Living, Ayn Rand has one of her characters ask, “And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.”
Yes it would be but there are many, many people who love the idea of ripping off the rest so as to get greater control of the world around them, including of other people. And these folks want to peddle the idea that someone must be authorized to extract from the rest of us funds and labor time and goods and services so as to do certain kinds of good things.
They start by saying, “Well, we must have such extractions so as to provide us with the police, the military and the courts.” But they never end there. Once they have gotten millions of us to say, “Oh, yes, those things are vital, so you go ahead and use coercion to get them,” they proceed to say, “Well, now that we have the authority to use coercion, why not use it for all kinds of purposes other than proving security from others?” And the state then grows and grows and grows and the moral argument against it has been lost.
As I said, the whole thing is a ruse and it is about time for folks to recognize it. The main reason taxation actually prevails is that we haven’t yet fully grasped the implication of asserting individual rights and rejecting the divine rights of kings and the supremacy of government.
We need, in other words, to extend the American revolution to its logical conclusion.
Tibor R. Machan
This is one of my favorite topics because I like to tell it like it is even when so many fashionable folks think I am way off base.
You’ve heard it before, I am sure – taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Bunk – that’s a ruse someone who loved big government dearly tried to perpetrate and, yes, one with which he managed to fool quite a lot of people. Millions still believe that taxes are necessary just to have a decent community.
Well, here is what’s wrong with that. Even the most vital services governments provide can be bought instead of extorted from us. There is no free rider problem – meaning, because some pay for something others can use, others will stubbornly refuse to contribute -- and even if there were one, it wouldn’t justify extortion.
What folks don’t seem to understand is that a truly just society is a place where people can live without having to deny their basic humanity. And our humanity consist primarily in needing to be free of other people’s oppression. That is why slavery was such a vicious institution. That is why oppression is so terrible, be it by one bloke, a party, or a majority. That is why any kind of coercion must be banned. People require, for their flourishing, to be free to choose and when this freedom is impeded, even just a little bit, their humanity is being assaulted.
The fact that in most of human history people lived under oppression doesn’t in the slightest undermine the moral point I am making here. Throughout history there has also been theft, rape, robbery, murder, assault and all kinds of related evils, yet no one would seriously argue that those are just part of the price we pay for civilization. That’s because it is clear cut enough that these practices are evil.
Yet what is taxation but imposing an ongoing, heavy burden on persons without their consent, just so that they can make a living, own property, and buy and sell goods in the market place.
Sure, there are services that make working free of intrusion more likely and these services cost something. But we should only have to pay and get these services if we choose to do so. That is what civilized life requires. We should be able to try doing without the services and suffer the consequences.
But most of us would not try to live without cops, courts, and the military, all of which make working, owning property, trading things and stuff more convenient. And we can arrange to obtain these services without deploying any kind of coercive force, contrary to what those try to peddle us who hold that extortion and coercion are needed so as to reduce, well, extortion and coercion. That is just nonsense.
OK, so it hasn’t been tried too often to get legal services governments provide without extracting funds for this coercively, at the point of a gun. Taxes are common, so they are widely thought to be necessary, but this is where the big mistake lies.
Why, however, would so many bright enough people insist that taxation is necessary and moral?
In her first novel, We The Living, Ayn Rand has one of her characters ask, “And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.”
Yes it would be but there are many, many people who love the idea of ripping off the rest so as to get greater control of the world around them, including of other people. And these folks want to peddle the idea that someone must be authorized to extract from the rest of us funds and labor time and goods and services so as to do certain kinds of good things.
They start by saying, “Well, we must have such extractions so as to provide us with the police, the military and the courts.” But they never end there. Once they have gotten millions of us to say, “Oh, yes, those things are vital, so you go ahead and use coercion to get them,” they proceed to say, “Well, now that we have the authority to use coercion, why not use it for all kinds of purposes other than proving security from others?” And the state then grows and grows and grows and the moral argument against it has been lost.
As I said, the whole thing is a ruse and it is about time for folks to recognize it. The main reason taxation actually prevails is that we haven’t yet fully grasped the implication of asserting individual rights and rejecting the divine rights of kings and the supremacy of government.
We need, in other words, to extend the American revolution to its logical conclusion.
Monday, June 30, 2003
Right to Privacy – From the Declaration to the Constitution
Tibor R. Machan
One old gripe about a near-libertarian interpretation of the Constitution -- leveled at the court, for example, when it overturned a Connecticut law banning contraception in the name of the right to privacy -- is that it mentions no right to liberty or privacy.
On the Fourth of July, however, we should note that the Constitution contains the Ninth Amendment. It states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” What this means is plain: there are other rights we have besides those listed in the Constitution.
But what rights are they?
Before the Framers produced the Constitution, there was the Declaration of Independence, being celebrated today, and many of those same Framers signed it. It makes clear that those who founded this country agreed that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
A consistent reading of this passage implies, plainly, that we have the right to do anything that does not violate others’ rights, contrary to what many champions of big government, Right and Left, would admit.
Sure, the Bill of Rights lists rights the Framers believed needed special mention, such as the First Amendment, the second and the fourth stand out. Yet all these clearly presuppose the right to liberty or privacy. Why, shouldn’t government carry out unreasonable searches if those being searched didn’t have a right to be left alone? A traditional monarchy, for example, isn’t bound by such restraints since it doesn’t recognize individual rights to liberty or privacy. But the Framers left behind the English monarchy because it violated individual rights. There is also the somewhat belated 14th Amendment. It states that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
So, clearly, the unenumerated rights mentioned in the Ninth Amendment can very reasonably be said to include the right to liberty and/or privacy. Such a right is a very broad one, of course, and our public officials, including many judges and justices, are hesitant about admitting that it is one of our operational constitutional rights. For if they do admit this, it would bring to a screeching halt the bulk of meddlesome government regulations which these officials depend on for their jobs.
But that doesn’t matter. What is relevant is that if we consider the matter reasonably -- by reference to the meaning of the terms involved (which is how the Framers signaled their intentions) -- then the US Constitution was devised in part to make sure that rights not enumerated in it would also be protected, and that one of those rights surely must be the right to liberty or privacy.
What is so upsetting to so many people is that a principled approach to American politics will not make it possible for them to fight just for those liberties they prefer, leaving the liberties they dislike abridged by government. And so they try against all reason to squeeze out of the Constitution a system of government that favors their own liberties as well as the limits they wish to place on other people’s liberties.
In fact, however, an honest reading of that document -- given its political legacy of the Declaration of Independence and its internal integrity -- makes this exercise a futile one.
Tibor R. Machan
One old gripe about a near-libertarian interpretation of the Constitution -- leveled at the court, for example, when it overturned a Connecticut law banning contraception in the name of the right to privacy -- is that it mentions no right to liberty or privacy.
On the Fourth of July, however, we should note that the Constitution contains the Ninth Amendment. It states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” What this means is plain: there are other rights we have besides those listed in the Constitution.
But what rights are they?
Before the Framers produced the Constitution, there was the Declaration of Independence, being celebrated today, and many of those same Framers signed it. It makes clear that those who founded this country agreed that “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
A consistent reading of this passage implies, plainly, that we have the right to do anything that does not violate others’ rights, contrary to what many champions of big government, Right and Left, would admit.
Sure, the Bill of Rights lists rights the Framers believed needed special mention, such as the First Amendment, the second and the fourth stand out. Yet all these clearly presuppose the right to liberty or privacy. Why, shouldn’t government carry out unreasonable searches if those being searched didn’t have a right to be left alone? A traditional monarchy, for example, isn’t bound by such restraints since it doesn’t recognize individual rights to liberty or privacy. But the Framers left behind the English monarchy because it violated individual rights. There is also the somewhat belated 14th Amendment. It states that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
So, clearly, the unenumerated rights mentioned in the Ninth Amendment can very reasonably be said to include the right to liberty and/or privacy. Such a right is a very broad one, of course, and our public officials, including many judges and justices, are hesitant about admitting that it is one of our operational constitutional rights. For if they do admit this, it would bring to a screeching halt the bulk of meddlesome government regulations which these officials depend on for their jobs.
But that doesn’t matter. What is relevant is that if we consider the matter reasonably -- by reference to the meaning of the terms involved (which is how the Framers signaled their intentions) -- then the US Constitution was devised in part to make sure that rights not enumerated in it would also be protected, and that one of those rights surely must be the right to liberty or privacy.
What is so upsetting to so many people is that a principled approach to American politics will not make it possible for them to fight just for those liberties they prefer, leaving the liberties they dislike abridged by government. And so they try against all reason to squeeze out of the Constitution a system of government that favors their own liberties as well as the limits they wish to place on other people’s liberties.
In fact, however, an honest reading of that document -- given its political legacy of the Declaration of Independence and its internal integrity -- makes this exercise a futile one.
It's as if it were their own money
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
When the House of Representatives voted recently to eliminate the federal estate tax (something the Senate probably will not support), liberal Democrats reportedly objected that "it was immoral to add to the nation’s record-setting debt to benefit those at the economic pinnacle" (The New York Times, 6/19/03).
Such objections reveal just what those offering them think about the wealth of this nation – that it belongs to the government which then decides who is to benefit from it, and who is not. As if eliminating a tax amounted to giving something to people, providing them with a benefit, instead of stopping taking things from them that belongs to them in the first place.
Relatives to whom a business or some other source of wealth had been left by now deceased persons are forced to pay estate taxes. The wealth had been left to these relatives, but in order for the relatives to receive what they were given they must first pay a huge sum to the government. This is extortion, plain and simple – "You’ll get what someone else freely gave you provided you first pay us not to send you to jail or fine you." That is how the mob behaves – "You get to run your business provided you pay us not to burn it down."
Liberal Democrats think, however, that the wealth never belonged to those who left it to their relatives but belonged to the government that permitted it to be held and used by the bequeathors. So, the issues for liberal Democrats is, should the government continue to permit the wealth to be held and used by the relatives provided they pay some kind of fee or rent.
That is exactly the thinking behind what monarchs did when they sold everyone on the idea that a country belonged to them and those working there were their serfs, with the products these "serfs" created belonging to the monarch as well. So, a quarter of millennia after the American founders dispatched monarchy, the system is back again, along with its economy of mercantilism. Liberal Democrats, as well as those to their left, really believe that government owns us and our work and we only get to keep some of this if the government deems that suitable to its purposes.
Unfortunately, while liberal Democrats are avid supporters of such mercantilism, Republicans aren’t quite opposed to it either. After all, when it comes to their own various pet projects, Republicans are not above treating our assets and incomes as their own disposable wealth. Just look at the perks Republicans attach to various bills they believe will pass, sending these to their constituents in the full spirit of wealth redistribution. Thus when they do not quite like the degree of extortion liberal Democrats favor, they have no moral arguments to offer against it. Thus we get Speaker Dennis Hastert intone with this kind of muddled thinking in response to the liberal democrats’ opposition to eliminating the estate tax: "This isn’t just for rich people, this is for everybody who shares in the American dream. ... We need to pass this piece of legislation, so we can keep this American heritage of families working, of families creating wealth, of families creating businesses."
Never mind about the rights of those relatives to receive what they were given free and clear by the deceased. Never mind the immorality of taking anything at all from them as booty. Never mind that what the government confiscates is loot and doesn’t belong to it. Why? Because saying such things would cut the Republicans off the booty, too.
So, instead we get the old line of defense of free trade and free enterprise and freedom in general, namely that such freedom is good for the country, not that everyone has a right to it. Because saying so would concede that it is these individuals who have the first right to say what happens to their wealth, not the politicians.
In other words, Republicans do not want to acknowledge any more than liberal Democrats that American citizens have a right to their assets and products. They only claim that it would be more efficient to leave them to hold and manage those assets and products on behalf of the country.
Ayn Rand, the most passionate defender of the free society in recent times, noted that when you compromise on the principle of liberty, you eventually have to cave in to the demands of those who do not believe in liberty. You have no principled defense of your position and so it continues being eroded, slowly but surely.
That is just what the Republicans are showing us when they give wimpy objections to the liberal Democrats who would just as soon confiscate everyone’s wealth if they could and manage the country according to their own personal vision, never mind the diverse yet often perfectly valid visions of the individuals who own that wealth in the first place.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and author of "The Passion for Liberty" (Rowman & Littlefield). He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
When the House of Representatives voted recently to eliminate the federal estate tax (something the Senate probably will not support), liberal Democrats reportedly objected that "it was immoral to add to the nation’s record-setting debt to benefit those at the economic pinnacle" (The New York Times, 6/19/03).
Such objections reveal just what those offering them think about the wealth of this nation – that it belongs to the government which then decides who is to benefit from it, and who is not. As if eliminating a tax amounted to giving something to people, providing them with a benefit, instead of stopping taking things from them that belongs to them in the first place.
Relatives to whom a business or some other source of wealth had been left by now deceased persons are forced to pay estate taxes. The wealth had been left to these relatives, but in order for the relatives to receive what they were given they must first pay a huge sum to the government. This is extortion, plain and simple – "You’ll get what someone else freely gave you provided you first pay us not to send you to jail or fine you." That is how the mob behaves – "You get to run your business provided you pay us not to burn it down."
Liberal Democrats think, however, that the wealth never belonged to those who left it to their relatives but belonged to the government that permitted it to be held and used by the bequeathors. So, the issues for liberal Democrats is, should the government continue to permit the wealth to be held and used by the relatives provided they pay some kind of fee or rent.
That is exactly the thinking behind what monarchs did when they sold everyone on the idea that a country belonged to them and those working there were their serfs, with the products these "serfs" created belonging to the monarch as well. So, a quarter of millennia after the American founders dispatched monarchy, the system is back again, along with its economy of mercantilism. Liberal Democrats, as well as those to their left, really believe that government owns us and our work and we only get to keep some of this if the government deems that suitable to its purposes.
Unfortunately, while liberal Democrats are avid supporters of such mercantilism, Republicans aren’t quite opposed to it either. After all, when it comes to their own various pet projects, Republicans are not above treating our assets and incomes as their own disposable wealth. Just look at the perks Republicans attach to various bills they believe will pass, sending these to their constituents in the full spirit of wealth redistribution. Thus when they do not quite like the degree of extortion liberal Democrats favor, they have no moral arguments to offer against it. Thus we get Speaker Dennis Hastert intone with this kind of muddled thinking in response to the liberal democrats’ opposition to eliminating the estate tax: "This isn’t just for rich people, this is for everybody who shares in the American dream. ... We need to pass this piece of legislation, so we can keep this American heritage of families working, of families creating wealth, of families creating businesses."
Never mind about the rights of those relatives to receive what they were given free and clear by the deceased. Never mind the immorality of taking anything at all from them as booty. Never mind that what the government confiscates is loot and doesn’t belong to it. Why? Because saying such things would cut the Republicans off the booty, too.
So, instead we get the old line of defense of free trade and free enterprise and freedom in general, namely that such freedom is good for the country, not that everyone has a right to it. Because saying so would concede that it is these individuals who have the first right to say what happens to their wealth, not the politicians.
In other words, Republicans do not want to acknowledge any more than liberal Democrats that American citizens have a right to their assets and products. They only claim that it would be more efficient to leave them to hold and manage those assets and products on behalf of the country.
Ayn Rand, the most passionate defender of the free society in recent times, noted that when you compromise on the principle of liberty, you eventually have to cave in to the demands of those who do not believe in liberty. You have no principled defense of your position and so it continues being eroded, slowly but surely.
That is just what the Republicans are showing us when they give wimpy objections to the liberal Democrats who would just as soon confiscate everyone’s wealth if they could and manage the country according to their own personal vision, never mind the diverse yet often perfectly valid visions of the individuals who own that wealth in the first place.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and author of "The Passion for Liberty" (Rowman & Littlefield). He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
Frank Rich's view of Americans
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
One of this country’s most prominent newspaper columnists is Frank Rich of The New York Times. While the Times has taken a few hits on its reputation recently, Rich is not among those who endured criticism. Rich is not directly associated with the Times' recent controversy because he writes columns. And Times’ columnists are often treated as public philosophers par excellence.
In his June 8 column, in the Arts & Leisure section, Rich began with the following: "Here is how desperate Americans are to be on TV ..." He goes on to note that many people line up on various locations across the country where they expect television cameras to get a glimpse of them. The 15 (or fewer) minutes of fame syndrome is, of course, old hat now, but never mind that for the moment. Columnists, including yours truly, do not shy from repeating themselves – it was George Orwell who is reported to have said, "The first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."
What is remarkable about Rich’s statement is how unself-consciously it assumes that what characterizes some publicity-hungry folks across America is, actually, characteristic of Americans as such. He does not say "Here’s how desperate some Americans are to be on TV." No, it is Americans who are desperate to be on TV.
Well, I have to admit that now and then I like being on TV – mostly if I have something of value to say, as I did when John Stossel was kind enough to have me on one of his special programs on ABC and when back in 1982 I had the privilege of being on William F. Buckley Jr.’s "Firing Line" on PBS. But would I wait four hours to have a camera get a glimpse of me standing outside some studio? No, I wouldn’t, nor would, I seriously suspect, millions of my fellow Americans. It takes desperation, indeed, to go to such lengths for so little.
Rich, however, uses the mere existence of a few thousand Americans eager to be on TV to jump to the conclusion – or carelessly suggestion – that it is Americans, all of them, who are desperate to be on TV. Why would a columnist from The New York Times allow himself to say such an evidently silly thing?
I do not read minds, but one can make inferences about people’s general thinking from reading and listening to what they say in various circumstances. My suggestion is that Rich has a very low opinion of Americans as Americans. In short, he doesn’t much like Americans just in their role of being Americans. This shows from his willingness to think such silly things about them all, even while it is clear that only a small fraction of them seem to be silly as he claims all are (which isn’t all that bad a thing, in any case). It is this bad opinion of Americans as Americans – that is, as citizens of the United States – that would allow him to throw elementary caution and logic to the winds and make an assertion smearing them all with the silliness that is true at most of a fraction of them.
Now people often generalize on the basis of a little bit of evidence, but this makes sense only when the little bit of evidence is representative. So, if one goes to Italy and finds that the several dozens of Italians one meets all speak Italian, it is safe to conclude that in that land Italian is spoken even without having met everyone there.
Rich, however, had no such representative sample at his disposal, quite the opposite. He was considering only people who could perhaps be said to be desperate for some kind of minor fame (And, actually, what is so terrible about that? Taken individually, most of us spend much time on stuff others consider utterly silly.). And on that basis he was willing to leap to the view that it is Americans who are desperate to be on TV.
So, what of it? Well, it goes to show – or at least to suggest – that one of the nation's most prominent columnists has it in for Americans. His willingness to think badly of them is evidence of that. Which is sad. Maybe it’s time for The New York Times to select a columnist who isn't so hostile to his own country.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and author of "The Passion for Liberty" (Rowman & Littlefield). He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
One of this country’s most prominent newspaper columnists is Frank Rich of The New York Times. While the Times has taken a few hits on its reputation recently, Rich is not among those who endured criticism. Rich is not directly associated with the Times' recent controversy because he writes columns. And Times’ columnists are often treated as public philosophers par excellence.
In his June 8 column, in the Arts & Leisure section, Rich began with the following: "Here is how desperate Americans are to be on TV ..." He goes on to note that many people line up on various locations across the country where they expect television cameras to get a glimpse of them. The 15 (or fewer) minutes of fame syndrome is, of course, old hat now, but never mind that for the moment. Columnists, including yours truly, do not shy from repeating themselves – it was George Orwell who is reported to have said, "The first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."
What is remarkable about Rich’s statement is how unself-consciously it assumes that what characterizes some publicity-hungry folks across America is, actually, characteristic of Americans as such. He does not say "Here’s how desperate some Americans are to be on TV." No, it is Americans who are desperate to be on TV.
Well, I have to admit that now and then I like being on TV – mostly if I have something of value to say, as I did when John Stossel was kind enough to have me on one of his special programs on ABC and when back in 1982 I had the privilege of being on William F. Buckley Jr.’s "Firing Line" on PBS. But would I wait four hours to have a camera get a glimpse of me standing outside some studio? No, I wouldn’t, nor would, I seriously suspect, millions of my fellow Americans. It takes desperation, indeed, to go to such lengths for so little.
Rich, however, uses the mere existence of a few thousand Americans eager to be on TV to jump to the conclusion – or carelessly suggestion – that it is Americans, all of them, who are desperate to be on TV. Why would a columnist from The New York Times allow himself to say such an evidently silly thing?
I do not read minds, but one can make inferences about people’s general thinking from reading and listening to what they say in various circumstances. My suggestion is that Rich has a very low opinion of Americans as Americans. In short, he doesn’t much like Americans just in their role of being Americans. This shows from his willingness to think such silly things about them all, even while it is clear that only a small fraction of them seem to be silly as he claims all are (which isn’t all that bad a thing, in any case). It is this bad opinion of Americans as Americans – that is, as citizens of the United States – that would allow him to throw elementary caution and logic to the winds and make an assertion smearing them all with the silliness that is true at most of a fraction of them.
Now people often generalize on the basis of a little bit of evidence, but this makes sense only when the little bit of evidence is representative. So, if one goes to Italy and finds that the several dozens of Italians one meets all speak Italian, it is safe to conclude that in that land Italian is spoken even without having met everyone there.
Rich, however, had no such representative sample at his disposal, quite the opposite. He was considering only people who could perhaps be said to be desperate for some kind of minor fame (And, actually, what is so terrible about that? Taken individually, most of us spend much time on stuff others consider utterly silly.). And on that basis he was willing to leap to the view that it is Americans who are desperate to be on TV.
So, what of it? Well, it goes to show – or at least to suggest – that one of the nation's most prominent columnists has it in for Americans. His willingness to think badly of them is evidence of that. Which is sad. Maybe it’s time for The New York Times to select a columnist who isn't so hostile to his own country.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and author of "The Passion for Liberty" (Rowman & Littlefield). He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
Saturday, May 31, 2003
NPR and Media Bias
Tibor R. Machan
Over the years there’s been this on-going debate about whether the American news media is biased toward the Left or the Right. For example, most recently John Stossel’s selection as Barbara Walters’ co-host of ABC-TV’s “20/20” has been attacked by the Left leaning media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. It has urged viewers on the Internet to “[t]ell ABC to provide John Stossel with some of the competition that he professes to admire so much. If he is allowed to openly and consistently advocate for his laissez-faire point of view, ABC should also provide comparable airtime to a critic of laissez-faire policies--preferably one who does not have Stossel's extensive record of inaccuracies.”
I do not wish to jump into this dispute, although one wonders whether having Peter Jennings as a constant head shaking, finger wagging body-language commentator, with unmistakably Left leaning views, did not suffice to show ABC-TV’s belief in competition? And other than one inaccuracy Stossel apologized for on air, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting is simply whistling in the dark. Furthermore, competition is supposed to occur between networks, not necessarily on them!
What I am more interested in is the fact that in all the debate about whether American media is biased toward the Left or the Right few ever mention the undeniably biased and all so ubiquitous National Public Radio. NPR is a huge network of radio programs, involving news, analyses, interviews, and, of course, classical music and jazz programming, located on nearly every university and college campus across the USA. As the NPR Web Site tells it, “NPR serves a growing audience of more than 15 million Americans each week via 620 public radio stations and the Internet and in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa via NPR Worldwide, to military installations overseas via American Forces Network, and throughout Japan via cable.”
As far as its tone is concerned, NPR is very polished, as if all of its personnel graduated from Swarthmore or Vassar. They all sound exactly alike, without anyone on the air who doesn’t have just the right phlegmatic New England accent, often coupled with a curious sounding name like Corey Flintoff, Cokie Roberts, Ketzel Levine and so forth. But never mind these minor quirks.
What is more important is that NPR is partly funded from money extorted from citizens who are forced to pay taxes just to be able to keep a job or to sell goods or services. Sure, NPR stations also receive voluntary support from some of their listeners but from what I have been told the bulk of them could not survive without the subsidy provided by the government, either directly or via the educational stations that carry NPR programming on a non-profit basis. And certainly the fact that they receive tax funds would obligate them to be scrupulously unbiased.
However, NPR is beamed to millions of college radio station listeners and it is clearly biased toward the Left. For example, nearly anyone who is supportive of more government funding for environmentalist projects (especially ones involving extensive private property confiscation) is welcome on Fresh Air and similar interview programs. Then, also, so called public affairs programming would include quite a few hard hitting interviews but in the case of NPR nearly all of these are of the “throwing the Christians to the Christians” variety.
Because I am committed to hearing out the views of people whose overall viewpoint I regard basically mistaken, I often tune in NPR and on nearly every occasion I am amazed at how brazenly biased is its programming. Even the news coverage shows this, as when reports from the war against Iraq relentlessly focused on whatever negative story they could find, and reported virtually all the criticisms of USA policy (something with which, by the way, I also found serious fault). On NPR the refrain is nearly always that of what we might call the Soft Left--as if Ralph Nader, with his politics of economic democracy--meaning that economic decisions are all to be made by politicians--were the network’s ideological czar.
As far as I can tell, NPR’s government-supported near-monopoly of college and university radio broadcasting is far more significant than, say, the popularity and ubiquity of Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show. Hammering away with their Soft-Left bias at nearly all the college students of the nation and pretending to deal with topics fairly and professionally, amounts to a very significant bias in American media, one that no Rush Limbaugh could possible balance. Yet oddly this is rarely if ever discussed when the topic of media bias is touched upon.
Tibor R. Machan
Over the years there’s been this on-going debate about whether the American news media is biased toward the Left or the Right. For example, most recently John Stossel’s selection as Barbara Walters’ co-host of ABC-TV’s “20/20” has been attacked by the Left leaning media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. It has urged viewers on the Internet to “[t]ell ABC to provide John Stossel with some of the competition that he professes to admire so much. If he is allowed to openly and consistently advocate for his laissez-faire point of view, ABC should also provide comparable airtime to a critic of laissez-faire policies--preferably one who does not have Stossel's extensive record of inaccuracies.”
I do not wish to jump into this dispute, although one wonders whether having Peter Jennings as a constant head shaking, finger wagging body-language commentator, with unmistakably Left leaning views, did not suffice to show ABC-TV’s belief in competition? And other than one inaccuracy Stossel apologized for on air, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting is simply whistling in the dark. Furthermore, competition is supposed to occur between networks, not necessarily on them!
What I am more interested in is the fact that in all the debate about whether American media is biased toward the Left or the Right few ever mention the undeniably biased and all so ubiquitous National Public Radio. NPR is a huge network of radio programs, involving news, analyses, interviews, and, of course, classical music and jazz programming, located on nearly every university and college campus across the USA. As the NPR Web Site tells it, “NPR serves a growing audience of more than 15 million Americans each week via 620 public radio stations and the Internet and in Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa via NPR Worldwide, to military installations overseas via American Forces Network, and throughout Japan via cable.”
As far as its tone is concerned, NPR is very polished, as if all of its personnel graduated from Swarthmore or Vassar. They all sound exactly alike, without anyone on the air who doesn’t have just the right phlegmatic New England accent, often coupled with a curious sounding name like Corey Flintoff, Cokie Roberts, Ketzel Levine and so forth. But never mind these minor quirks.
What is more important is that NPR is partly funded from money extorted from citizens who are forced to pay taxes just to be able to keep a job or to sell goods or services. Sure, NPR stations also receive voluntary support from some of their listeners but from what I have been told the bulk of them could not survive without the subsidy provided by the government, either directly or via the educational stations that carry NPR programming on a non-profit basis. And certainly the fact that they receive tax funds would obligate them to be scrupulously unbiased.
However, NPR is beamed to millions of college radio station listeners and it is clearly biased toward the Left. For example, nearly anyone who is supportive of more government funding for environmentalist projects (especially ones involving extensive private property confiscation) is welcome on Fresh Air and similar interview programs. Then, also, so called public affairs programming would include quite a few hard hitting interviews but in the case of NPR nearly all of these are of the “throwing the Christians to the Christians” variety.
Because I am committed to hearing out the views of people whose overall viewpoint I regard basically mistaken, I often tune in NPR and on nearly every occasion I am amazed at how brazenly biased is its programming. Even the news coverage shows this, as when reports from the war against Iraq relentlessly focused on whatever negative story they could find, and reported virtually all the criticisms of USA policy (something with which, by the way, I also found serious fault). On NPR the refrain is nearly always that of what we might call the Soft Left--as if Ralph Nader, with his politics of economic democracy--meaning that economic decisions are all to be made by politicians--were the network’s ideological czar.
As far as I can tell, NPR’s government-supported near-monopoly of college and university radio broadcasting is far more significant than, say, the popularity and ubiquity of Rush Limbaugh’s radio talk show. Hammering away with their Soft-Left bias at nearly all the college students of the nation and pretending to deal with topics fairly and professionally, amounts to a very significant bias in American media, one that no Rush Limbaugh could possible balance. Yet oddly this is rarely if ever discussed when the topic of media bias is touched upon.
Addressing the Arguments of a Mayor
Tibor R. Machan
The Mayor of Ft. Collins, CO, published a letter on his web site in response to a student who protested smoking ordinances and quoted me to indicate the problem with such laws. The quote used went as follows: "Why do [government officials and voters] believe that they are entitled to non-smoking in restaurants when they do not belong to them? Whoever owns the area…ought to have the right to say whether smoking is permitted in it."
Mayor Ray Martinez responded as follows:
There are many good reasons why the government steps in and looks after the health and safety of the public in general. Just for a few examples, some states require motorcyclists to wear helmets, seatbelts in the vehicle, no smoking on the airlines, you can't move into your home until the builder receives a "certificate of occupancy," which means the government inspects the home before you can live in the home you are purchasing, restaurants have many regulations regarding the temperature they have to keep the refrigerator, certain foods, cleaning up responsibilities, handling of foods, liquor licensing, being searched at the airport for the safety of all, guidelines on where you can and cannot drink alcoholic beverages and at what age, privileges of driving depending on your health condition, your age, testing ability to qualify for a drivers' license, where you can and cannot ride a bicycle, etc. and the list goes on.
[http://www.raymartinez.com/editorial/get_article.cfm?content_id=199]
I was not asked to be part of this debate and do not know if the student who chose to quote me had the chance to reply. However, the Mayor’s response merits attention because it contains some very popular ways of defending government intervention in people’s lives and because he appears to be sincere and certainly civil in his response.
Let me take the examples the mayor offers in order. He says that “some states require motorcyclists to wear helmets, seatbelts in the vehicle….” Indeed, it is the law in many states that when using state roads, motorcyclists must wear helmets and those in cars must wear seatbelts. These laws, however, rest precisely on the principle of property rights. The states own the roads and make the rules of using them. (One might raise the question whether the states ought to own the roads, but that is not the issue here.) Ownership confers the authority to make the rules and the mayor appears to agree.
The mayor then goes on to mention the FAA’s rules of prohibiting “smoking on the airlines…” While there is a federal regulation to this effect, he doesn’t defend it and it is indeed questionable whether it can be defended. An airline in a free society ought to be free to offer its services on its own terms and costumers ought to be free to either accept or reject them. It is just from this kind of diverse provision of services that competition arises. By imposing the terms, the government undermines both freedom and competition. As to some basic health provisions, the pressure of possible law suits and insurance company requirements would meet those without involving any government intervention.
The mayor goes not to note that “you can't move into your home until the builder receives a ‘certificate of occupancy,’ which means the government inspects the home before you can live in the home you are purchasing….” Again, this is an accurate enough report on how things stand but it misses the point: perhaps they ought not to stand this way. It is arguable that governments, which in the Declaration of Independence are said to be instituted so as to “secure [our] rights,” exceed their proper authority when they go around inspecting homes and imposing rules on how they must be built, except in so far as certain ways of building homes can involve a clear and present danger to innocent third parties.
The mayor then mentions that “restaurants have many regulations regarding the temperature they have to keep the refrigerator, certain foods, cleaning up responsibilities, handling of foods, liquor licensing….” And again he is correct but the point isn’t whether there are such regulations but whether they are just, proper, for the government to issue and enforce. All these regulations could be achieved without government – insurance companies could require all these measures before they will sell insurance to restaurants, for example. And organizations akin to the Better Business Bureau could also carry out these kinds of functions. Finally, if a restaurant owner decided not to provide these services and customers were still willing to trust the establishment, it would be their right to do so in a genuinely free society. The mayor continues in the same vein noting that passengers are “being searched at the airport for the safety of all,” and that there are “guidelines on where you can and cannot drink alcoholic beverages and at what age,” that the “privileges of driving depend… on your health condition, your age, testing ability to qualify for a drivers' license, where you can and cannot ride a bicycle, etc. and the list goes on.” All this is true. The last part of the list concerns, again, the fact that governments own the roads and are responsible for administering them, so they set the rules of the road. As to searches at airports, these also take place in government facilities and are therefore subject to the government’s rules, although that isn’t the only alternative – airports could be privately owned and administered and once again insurance companies could set requirements that would result in safety regulations.
What the mayor’s comments show is lack of consideration for alternative ways of securing safety, ways that do not do violence to the principle of individual rights. They also reveal complacency about the slippery slope of encroaching government intervention in people’s lives – from his sort of reasoning one can indeed move to justifying a totalitarian state.
Finally, since restaurants are private property in most instances, most of the mayor’s examples do not apply to whether they may be regulated by the government, including as to whether costumers may nor may not smoke there.
Tibor R. Machan
The Mayor of Ft. Collins, CO, published a letter on his web site in response to a student who protested smoking ordinances and quoted me to indicate the problem with such laws. The quote used went as follows: "Why do [government officials and voters] believe that they are entitled to non-smoking in restaurants when they do not belong to them? Whoever owns the area…ought to have the right to say whether smoking is permitted in it."
Mayor Ray Martinez responded as follows:
There are many good reasons why the government steps in and looks after the health and safety of the public in general. Just for a few examples, some states require motorcyclists to wear helmets, seatbelts in the vehicle, no smoking on the airlines, you can't move into your home until the builder receives a "certificate of occupancy," which means the government inspects the home before you can live in the home you are purchasing, restaurants have many regulations regarding the temperature they have to keep the refrigerator, certain foods, cleaning up responsibilities, handling of foods, liquor licensing, being searched at the airport for the safety of all, guidelines on where you can and cannot drink alcoholic beverages and at what age, privileges of driving depending on your health condition, your age, testing ability to qualify for a drivers' license, where you can and cannot ride a bicycle, etc. and the list goes on.
[http://www.raymartinez.com/editorial/get_article.cfm?content_id=199]
I was not asked to be part of this debate and do not know if the student who chose to quote me had the chance to reply. However, the Mayor’s response merits attention because it contains some very popular ways of defending government intervention in people’s lives and because he appears to be sincere and certainly civil in his response.
Let me take the examples the mayor offers in order. He says that “some states require motorcyclists to wear helmets, seatbelts in the vehicle….” Indeed, it is the law in many states that when using state roads, motorcyclists must wear helmets and those in cars must wear seatbelts. These laws, however, rest precisely on the principle of property rights. The states own the roads and make the rules of using them. (One might raise the question whether the states ought to own the roads, but that is not the issue here.) Ownership confers the authority to make the rules and the mayor appears to agree.
The mayor then goes on to mention the FAA’s rules of prohibiting “smoking on the airlines…” While there is a federal regulation to this effect, he doesn’t defend it and it is indeed questionable whether it can be defended. An airline in a free society ought to be free to offer its services on its own terms and costumers ought to be free to either accept or reject them. It is just from this kind of diverse provision of services that competition arises. By imposing the terms, the government undermines both freedom and competition. As to some basic health provisions, the pressure of possible law suits and insurance company requirements would meet those without involving any government intervention.
The mayor goes not to note that “you can't move into your home until the builder receives a ‘certificate of occupancy,’ which means the government inspects the home before you can live in the home you are purchasing….” Again, this is an accurate enough report on how things stand but it misses the point: perhaps they ought not to stand this way. It is arguable that governments, which in the Declaration of Independence are said to be instituted so as to “secure [our] rights,” exceed their proper authority when they go around inspecting homes and imposing rules on how they must be built, except in so far as certain ways of building homes can involve a clear and present danger to innocent third parties.
The mayor then mentions that “restaurants have many regulations regarding the temperature they have to keep the refrigerator, certain foods, cleaning up responsibilities, handling of foods, liquor licensing….” And again he is correct but the point isn’t whether there are such regulations but whether they are just, proper, for the government to issue and enforce. All these regulations could be achieved without government – insurance companies could require all these measures before they will sell insurance to restaurants, for example. And organizations akin to the Better Business Bureau could also carry out these kinds of functions. Finally, if a restaurant owner decided not to provide these services and customers were still willing to trust the establishment, it would be their right to do so in a genuinely free society. The mayor continues in the same vein noting that passengers are “being searched at the airport for the safety of all,” and that there are “guidelines on where you can and cannot drink alcoholic beverages and at what age,” that the “privileges of driving depend… on your health condition, your age, testing ability to qualify for a drivers' license, where you can and cannot ride a bicycle, etc. and the list goes on.” All this is true. The last part of the list concerns, again, the fact that governments own the roads and are responsible for administering them, so they set the rules of the road. As to searches at airports, these also take place in government facilities and are therefore subject to the government’s rules, although that isn’t the only alternative – airports could be privately owned and administered and once again insurance companies could set requirements that would result in safety regulations.
What the mayor’s comments show is lack of consideration for alternative ways of securing safety, ways that do not do violence to the principle of individual rights. They also reveal complacency about the slippery slope of encroaching government intervention in people’s lives – from his sort of reasoning one can indeed move to justifying a totalitarian state.
Finally, since restaurants are private property in most instances, most of the mayor’s examples do not apply to whether they may be regulated by the government, including as to whether costumers may nor may not smoke there.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
A fruitful idea about morality?
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
As someone who teaches about ethics and morality in colleges and universities, I have noticed that most of my students entertain a conflicting position about the subject. They see it either as a one-size-fits-all system of guidelines, wherein everyone has to act the same way or they are bad people, or as purely subjective, wherein nothing is either right or wrong and it’s all a matter of one’s opinion.
And this is understandable. If there are right answers to questions about how we should conduct ourselves, it seems to many those answers must apply to us all, equally. Otherwise how could they be right? So they are pulled toward what is often called moral absolutism. But it also seems quite reasonable that certain answers as to how one ought to act do not apply to other, very different people.
How can both of these valid insights be satisfied.
One possibility is that a sound, correct morality offers perhaps just one or two very basic principles, ones that are broad enough to apply to everyone, simply in virtue of being human. But this morality would also recognize that different individuals need different guiding principles, given their special situations, including their unique individuality.
We have this, for example, in medicine or nutrition. There are basic principles or guidelines in these areas, but when they are applied to people, accommodations must be made to the individuals in question -- are they men or women, young or old, tall or short, of a certain metabolism or another, allergic to this or that? So, while the basics of medicine and nutrition are taught pretty much the same everywhere, when they are applied things begin to vary quite a bit.
In morality or ethics, also, we may well have certain very basic principles that we all need to heed and practice -- such as "Think things through before you act," or "Be honest with yourself" or "Don’t deceive anyone," "Do unto others as you have would have them do unto you," or "Pursue excellence in life." (I leave aside now which might actually be the one or few sound and universal guiding principles -- that takes a lot of figuring out.) But as applied to particular, individual persons, what specific guidance would emerge from such basic principles will not be the same from one person to the next.
Yet something very important about both the concerns expressed by my students and many others would be satisfied in so understanding morality: There would indeed be something quite absolute or invariable about how we ought to act, yet this wouldn’t amount to an artificial detailed one-size-fits-all code.
Indeed, the idea would help with many things that concern us all: a just legal system would not have many general laws, only a few, because citizens are quite different from one another and have just a few things in common as citizens. The marketplace would make sense, what with all its highly varied goods and services aiming to fit different customers and using the varied talents of producers. Even art might benefit from this outlook: We all tend to think, I believe, that some things really are artistic while others lack this quality; yet we also realize that different people, with various special attributes, backgrounds, and so forth, will appreciate different works of art. Instead of thinking that everyone who responds to something other than what inspires oneself is artistically blind, varied works will be seen as have artistic value to different sorts of people, varied talents will produce varied yet still artistically excellent works. Yet, there will still remain plenty of room for concluding that some creations do not cut it at all.
Anyway, there isn’t much hope of settling big issues like this in a brief discussion, but perhaps some hints toward a sound approach could at least be suggested. Very formidable thinkers throughout human history have grappled with these matters and studying their reflections would be a prerequisite for making headway. What I was trying to do here, however, is no more than sketching out some promising ideas.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., author of "A Primer on Ethics" and co-author of "A Primer on Business Ethics." E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
As someone who teaches about ethics and morality in colleges and universities, I have noticed that most of my students entertain a conflicting position about the subject. They see it either as a one-size-fits-all system of guidelines, wherein everyone has to act the same way or they are bad people, or as purely subjective, wherein nothing is either right or wrong and it’s all a matter of one’s opinion.
And this is understandable. If there are right answers to questions about how we should conduct ourselves, it seems to many those answers must apply to us all, equally. Otherwise how could they be right? So they are pulled toward what is often called moral absolutism. But it also seems quite reasonable that certain answers as to how one ought to act do not apply to other, very different people.
How can both of these valid insights be satisfied.
One possibility is that a sound, correct morality offers perhaps just one or two very basic principles, ones that are broad enough to apply to everyone, simply in virtue of being human. But this morality would also recognize that different individuals need different guiding principles, given their special situations, including their unique individuality.
We have this, for example, in medicine or nutrition. There are basic principles or guidelines in these areas, but when they are applied to people, accommodations must be made to the individuals in question -- are they men or women, young or old, tall or short, of a certain metabolism or another, allergic to this or that? So, while the basics of medicine and nutrition are taught pretty much the same everywhere, when they are applied things begin to vary quite a bit.
In morality or ethics, also, we may well have certain very basic principles that we all need to heed and practice -- such as "Think things through before you act," or "Be honest with yourself" or "Don’t deceive anyone," "Do unto others as you have would have them do unto you," or "Pursue excellence in life." (I leave aside now which might actually be the one or few sound and universal guiding principles -- that takes a lot of figuring out.) But as applied to particular, individual persons, what specific guidance would emerge from such basic principles will not be the same from one person to the next.
Yet something very important about both the concerns expressed by my students and many others would be satisfied in so understanding morality: There would indeed be something quite absolute or invariable about how we ought to act, yet this wouldn’t amount to an artificial detailed one-size-fits-all code.
Indeed, the idea would help with many things that concern us all: a just legal system would not have many general laws, only a few, because citizens are quite different from one another and have just a few things in common as citizens. The marketplace would make sense, what with all its highly varied goods and services aiming to fit different customers and using the varied talents of producers. Even art might benefit from this outlook: We all tend to think, I believe, that some things really are artistic while others lack this quality; yet we also realize that different people, with various special attributes, backgrounds, and so forth, will appreciate different works of art. Instead of thinking that everyone who responds to something other than what inspires oneself is artistically blind, varied works will be seen as have artistic value to different sorts of people, varied talents will produce varied yet still artistically excellent works. Yet, there will still remain plenty of room for concluding that some creations do not cut it at all.
Anyway, there isn’t much hope of settling big issues like this in a brief discussion, but perhaps some hints toward a sound approach could at least be suggested. Very formidable thinkers throughout human history have grappled with these matters and studying their reflections would be a prerequisite for making headway. What I was trying to do here, however, is no more than sketching out some promising ideas.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., author of "A Primer on Ethics" and co-author of "A Primer on Business Ethics." E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
Thursday, May 15, 2003
Ethics and its Controversial Assumptions
Tibor R. Machan
Whether ethics even exists is often in dispute. For example, many believe ethics and science to be incompatible. A good many social scientists and psychologists think that people cannot be morally blamed for what they do; instead their conduct is explainable by various causes. Ordinary folks, too, are at times convinced that people act badly only because something made them do so, some event in their upbringing or some factor of the culture to which they belong. (We tend to explain our own bad conduct more readily but blame other people for theirs!)
So whether ethics is a bona fide part of human life is not self-evident, nor obvious. In order for there to be ethics, some other facts must already obtain. Consider, for example, the claim that "Judy should not lie," or "The president of the United Sates of American ought to try to restrain his powers over the lives of people." This assumes that Judy and the president have a choice about what they will do. "Ought" implies "can." This means that if one ought to do something, it must be that one can either do or not do it. It also assumes that Judy, the president and anyone who would look into the matter can identify certain standards of conduct to be used in figuring out what we should or should not do.
First, then, ethics requires that we can exercise some genuine choices, that we have the capacity to initiate some actions. If this were impossible, the idea that we should (or should not) act in such and such a fashion would have no application in human life. Second, ethics requires that some principles that apply to conduct be identifiable or objective. Unless we all can learn those very general principles, ethics has no place in our lives. It consists, after all, of such principles of conduct that pertain to all human beings. Moral or ethical principles pertain to action, how we should conduct ourselves, on what basis we should choose or select what we will do. To succeed at living a human life which is morally good, some principles would have to be followed. "Morally good" here means: being excellent as a human being in one's life but as a matter of choice, of one's own initiative, not accidentally. So being tall or talented or beautiful are not aspects of moral excellence, whereas being honest, courageous and prudent would be, if ethics is indeed a bona fide dimension of human living.
If we could not exercise genuine choices, morality would be impossible since no one could help what her or she is doing. It would all be a matter of good and bad things simply happening, as indeed they often do at the hands of nature, as it were: when tornadoes or earthquakes or diseases strike. Que serra, que serra, period.
If we could not identify moral principles, we could never make a sensible selection from among alternative courses of conduct. Depending on what we aim for, we can identify the principles that will enable us to reach our goal. This is clearly evident in such fields as medicine, engineering and business. Thus, it seems that this second requirement of ethics, that we can identify principles of conduct, might be satisfied. But we will need to explore that further to be able to tell.
Let me explore briefly whether these two assumptions are reasonable or merely prejudice or myth as some folks believe, ones who would consign ethics to the dustbin of pre-science, akin to demonology or witchcraft.
The answers I will reach cannot be considered conclusive -- there isn't enough time and space to carry out a full investigation. But we will have a chance to look at the major points for and against the assumptions. Without some idea about whether they are true, ethics itself is left unsupported -- it could just as easily be in the class of the occult, such as astrology or palmistry.
1. Free Will?
The first matter to address is whether we have free will -- not necessarily all of us, all of the time but, rather, as a rule, normally. In other words, are human beings, as they have appeared throughout history in their innumerable diverse circumstances (though not when incapacitated or significantly damaged) capable of bringing about, of their own initiative, the behavior in which they engage?
Against Free Will
Nature's Laws versus Free Will. First, one of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of physics. The argument here is that all material substances are controlled by these laws and we human beings are basically complicated versions of material substances. Therefore, whatever governs material substance in the universe must also govern human life.
Social science, for one, which studies human beings in their social relations, looks into some of causes that produce our behavior. So does neuroscience, a sub-discipline of biology, in its study of our individual brains-minds. In each case what is studied are the causes of behavior. So, the only difference between the rest of nature and ourselves, as far as these branches of science are concerned, is that we are more complicated, not that we are not governed by the same principles or laws of nature.
Most definitely, it is argued, no such thing as an original cause is evident in the rest of nature, something that would have to be possible for free will to exist. As one advocate of determinism puts it, "[T]he best response to the demand for an explanation of the relation between an originator and decisions is that an explanation cannot be given. We have to regard this relation as primitive or unanalyzable."1 In other words, originating or initiating some action seems nothing more than a myth or an unexplainable fact, for which no evidence or argument can be given.
The determinist claims that all our actions, including decisions, are more sensibly taken to be effects of some prior events. It is the determinist's view that everything we do is the effect of some set of causal circumstances. This makes better sense, say the determinists, than leaving things unexplained, mysterious.
Affirming Initiative: Now, in response one might argue that nature exhibits innumerable different domains, distinct not only in their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. There are, to be sure, many domains where we find the familiar cause and effect situation clearly evident -- for example, on the billiard table, in geological movements, and in the motion of the planets. But there are areas were something else appears to be going on. For example, is the cause of a musical composition, the composer, itself some effect of a prior cause, so that the composer makes no original contribution?2
So, "causal" reasoning does not necessarily rule out that there might be something in nature that exhibits agent or original causation, the phenomenon whereby a thing causes some of its own behavior. Causal interactions depend on the nature of the beings that interact, what they are. So one cannot rule out, a priori (before investigation), that some beings could have the capacity to act on their own initiative.
Thus it seems that there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether there is or is not is something to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow world view or metaphysics that restricts everything to being just one kind of thing so that everything has just one kind of causal characteristics. Nature appears to be composed of many types and kinds of things and thus does not have to exclude free will.
So, free will seems to be possible, even in a world of causality. Whether free will actually exists we'll examine shortly.
We Cannot Know of Free Will. Now, another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying, inspecting or examining nature is what we call "empiricism." In other words, many believe that the only way we know about nature is by observing it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really isn't any such thing. Since no observable evidence for free will exists, therefore free will does not exist.
We Can Know Free Will. But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong -- we know many things not simply through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory construction. (Consider, even the purported knowledge that empiricism is our form of knowledge is not "known" empirically!)
For one, many features of the universe, including criminal guilt, are detected without eyewitnesses but by way of theories which serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This is true, also, even in the natural sciences. Many of the complex phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics, botany, chemistry -- not to mention psychology -- consist not of what we see or detect by observation but is inferred by way of a theory. The theory that explains things best -- most completely and most consistently -- is the best answer to the question as to what is going on.
Free will may well turn out to be in this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type associated with physics. We can examine a person's background and find that some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, while others become crooks. Free will, then, amounts to a very helpful explanation. For now all we need to consider that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empiricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not strict empirical knowledge.
Free Will Is Weird? Another matter that very often counts against free will is that the rest of (even living) beings in nature do not exhibit it. Dogs, cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., have no free will and therefore it appears arbitrary to impute it to human beings. Why should we be free to do things when the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It would be an impossible aberration. Some opponents of the free will idea, such as the behaviorist psychologists B. F. Skinner, have stressed this objection (for example, in the book Beyond Freedom and Dignity [Bantam Books, 1972])
Free Will is Natural. The answer here is similar to what I gave earlier. To wit, there is enough variety in nature -- some things swim, some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Discovering that something has free will could be yet another addition to all the varieties of nature. Determinism seems to depend upon adherence to a very specific ontology, in terms of which everything must be a given kind of thing, one that can only move when prompted by something else, and this is not something that can be shown to hold universally so as to preclude free will.
Does God Allow Free Will? There is also the theological argument to the effect that if God knows everything, he/she knows the future, so what we do is unalterable. If someone knows that some future event will occur, e.g., that Haley's Comet will come nearest to earth at some given time in the future, then whatever is involved in that event cannot have a choice about it. So if God knows that you will have three children, then you have no genuine choice about that matter. It has to turn out that way.
God's "knowledge" is Mysterious. But God's knowledge is not likely to be the kind human beings have, indeed, it is a mystery just what it is. So nothing much can be inferred from it. It is mistake to confuse what would follow from a human being's knowing the future versus God's "knowledge" of the future. The latter is entirely different from the former and so the implications wouldn't be the same either.
For Free Will
Let's now consider whether free will actually does exist. I'll offer four arguments in support of an affirmative answer. (They are not uniquely my arguments but ones that have been proposed throughout the philosophical community.) Thus far we have only considered whether free will is possible. But does it exist? The following points support that contention.
Are We Determined to be Determinists -- or not? There is an argument against determinism to the effect that, if we are fully determined in what we think, believe, and do, then the belief that determinism is true is also a result of this determinism. But the same holds for the belief that determinism is false. There is nothing you can do about whatever you believe -- you had to believe it. There is no way to take an independent stance and consider the arguments in an unprejudiced manner because all the various forces making us assimilate the evidence either cause us to believe or disbelieve in determinism. One either turns out to be a determinist or not and in neither case can we appraise the issue objectively because we are predetermined to have a view on the matter one way or the other, ad infinitum.
But then, paradoxically, we'll never be able to resolve this debate, since there is no way of obtaining an objective assessment. Indeed, the very idea of philosophical, scientific or judicial objectivity, as well as of ever coming to know anything, has to do with being free. Thus, if we're engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have some measure of mental freedom. This view was put forward by Immanuel Kant, the important 18th century Germany philosopher, as well as by Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist who defends free will in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem (Bantam Books, 1969).
Should We Become Determinists? There's another dilemma of determinism. It starts with noting that the determinist wants us to believe in determinism. In fact, he believes we ought to do so rather than believe in "the illusion of free will". But, as the saying goes in philosophy, "ought" implies "can". That is, if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a free choice in the matter; it implies that it is up to us whether we will hold determinism or free will as the better doctrine. That, in turn, assumes that we are free.
In other words, even arguing for determinism assumes that we are not determined to believe in free will or determined but that it is a matter of our making certain choices about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself. We run across this paradox when we find people who blame us for not accepting the view that people's fate is not in their hands so we should not blame them. Blaming some while denying that anyone should be blamed is a paradox, one which troubles a deterministic position. In one book defending determinism, the author ends by posing the following question: "If ['Left Wing politics is less given to attitudes and policies which have something of the assumption of Free Will in them'], should one part of the response ... be a move to the Left in politics? I leave you with that bracing question."3 Yet can this be a genuine question, if the answer is predetermined and one either will or will not move Left or Right and has no choice in the matter? I t cannot, which is the idea advanced by Joseph M. Boyle, G. Grisez and O. Tollefsen, in their book Free Choice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).
We Often Know We Are Free. In many contexts of our lives introspective knowledge is taken very seriously. When you go to a doctor and he asks you, "Are you in pain?" and you say, "Yes," and he says "Where is the pain?" and you say, "It's in my knee," the doctor doesn't say, "Why, you can't know, this is not public evidence, I will now get verifiable, direct evidence where you hurt." In fact your evidence is very good evidence. Witnesses at trials give such evidence as they report about what they have seen. This invokes, in a certain respect, introspective evidence: "This indeed is what I have seen or heard." It involves reference to something we recall from memory and is thus within us, not evident to others without our reports. Even in the various sciences people report on what they've read on surveys or seen on gauges or instruments or studies. Thus they are giving us introspective evidence.
Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasonably reliable. So what should we make of the fact that a lot of people do believe and say things like, "Damn it, I didn't make the right choice," or "I neglected to do something." They report to us, furthermore, that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., or that they intended this or that but not another thing. They, furthermore, often blame themselves for not having done something, thus implying that they know that they made a choice (for which they are taking responsibility).
In short, there is abundant evidence from people all around us of their experience of the existence of their own free choices. This cannot just be ruled out, since it would also undercut much else we take very seriously, indeed treat as decisive, coming from such sources.
Science Discovers Free Will. Finally, there is also the evidence of the fact that we do seem to have the capacity for self-monitoring. The human brain has the kind of structure that allows us, so to speak, to govern ourselves. We can inspect our lives, we can detect where we're going, and we can, therefore, change course. The human brain itself makes all this possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself3/4that is, its higher regions can influence the rest3/4and as a result we can decide whether to continue in a certain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direction. This is how we change habits, restrain impulses, control our temper, "watch what we eat," alter our developed motor skills in, say, how we play the piano, or even change our established opinions. That is the sort of free will that is demonstrable.
At least some scientists, for example Roger W. Sperry -- in his book Science and Moral Priority4 and in numerous more technical articles -- maintain that there's evidence for free will in this sense. This view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes, for example, that there can be different kinds of causes in nature and, also, that the functioning of the brain as a complex neurophysiological system could manifest self-causation. An organism with our kind of brain could cause some mental functions to occur via what Sperry calls a process of "downward causation." (Sperry argues that there is some evidence of such causation even apart from how the human organism's higher mental activities occur, for example, in the way water freezes.)
Now the sort of thing Sperry thinks possible seems evident in our lives. We make plans and then, upon reconsideration (which at times takes but a fraction of a second) revise them. We explore alternatives and decide to follow one of these. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon, or continue with it. We resist temptations, act despite the desire to do something else, and gradually build up good habits which, at first, were difficult to exhibit. In other words, there is a locus of individual self-responsibility or initiative -- or, to use Ted Honderich's term, "origination" -- that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves, and the way in which we in fact behave.
Some Cautionary Points. There clearly are cases of conduct in which some persons behave as they do because they were determined to do so by certain identifiable forces beyond their control. A brain tumor, a severe childhood trauma or some other intrusive force sometimes incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person who engaged in criminal behavior is shown to have had no control over what he or she did. Someone who actually had no capacity to control his or her behavior, could not control his or her own thinking or judgment and was, thus, moved by something other than his own will, cannot be said to possess a bona fide free will.
Compatibilism. Those who deny that we have free will would seem to be unable to make sense of our distinction between cases in which one controls one's behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control. When we face the latter sort of case, we still admit that the behavior could be good or bad but we deny that it is morally and legally significant -- it is more along lines of acts of nature or God by being out of the agent's control. This is also why philosophers who discuss ethics but deny free will have trouble distinguishing between morality and value theory -- e.g., some utilitarians, Marxists. Morality concerns how we ought to act (or the rightness of conduct), whereas value theory deals with what is good and bad and why. It is possible to address the latter field without taking a side on the free will issue. But that is not so with the former.
Some, though, will defend the view that even if we have no ultimate control over our actions -- even if our behavior, the judgments which we make, or our character is controlled by forces such as the environment or our genetic make-up -- we may still speak of ethics or morality. They are called compatibilists. They would mean by the term "ethics" or "morality" something different from what the terms would mean if we did possess free will, however. Ethics would concern good behavior, conduct in conformity with standards of right regardless of how it came about that one conformed or did not conform to those standards. Ethics, in line with the compatibilist position, might concern itself with values and how to secure them, without implying that one could of one’s own initiative exert control over whether these values would be achieved. Accordingly, then, without personal responsibility or agency, where one is the cause of what one does, whereby one initiates or originates one's significant actions, ethics would amount to something drastically different from what we usually mean by the term.
Given the way compatibilists conceive of their doctrine—namely, that it is possible to have both a causal explanation of human conduct as well as its being the agent’s responsibility to have engaged in that conduct—the theory does succeed better than all others, including the one dubbed agent causal or libertarian free will. But the compatibilist doctrine does not in fact allow for personal moral responsibility, however much its proponents so insist. No bona fide, ultimate personal responsibility can be attached to behavior that is, so to speak, softly determined. If one’s character has been molded so that one will be honest, generous, and so forth, and then one is indeed honest, generous and so forth, one cannot reasonably be said then to be responsible for being honest, generous and so forth. It is whatever molded one’s character that would explain one’s honesty, generosity and so forth. Any kind of moral pride or credit would amount to an illusion, not something well deserved.
Is Free Will Well Founded?
So these several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free will position. Can anyone do better with this issue? I don't know. I think it's best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing theories. Are human beings doing what they do solely as the consequences of forces acting on them? Or do they have the capacity to take charge of their lives, often neglect to do so properly or effectively, make stupid choices? Which supposition best explains the human world and its complexities around us?
I think the free will view makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories, how it is possible that human life involves such an array of possibilities, accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as well as sorrows, creation as well as destruction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change -- in language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much fixed by instincts and reflexes -- even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of extensive prodding in laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments -- people initiate much of what they do, for better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without, so to speak, having to do so! This, moreover, can make good sense if we understand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct rather than relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain unique challenges, not the least of which is that they cannot reasonably expect any formula or system to predictably manage the future of human affairs, such as some of social sciences seem to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine prospect for solving human problems -- only education and individual initiative can do that.
Yet, it should be noted that free will does not contradict social science if the latter is not conceived in strict deterministic terms and the former is understood to allow for long range commitments, chosen policies, strategies, institutional involvements, etc.
Human beings make choices, some of which, however, commit them to a course of long range behavior which can be studied in terms of their impact on various features of the social world. People choose to enter schools, careers, relationships, to form institutions, to carry out plans, etc., and often their choices justifies expecting them to stick with a reasonably predictable course of conduct.
In economics, for example, one may be studying the market place as an arena wherein human beings make various free choices concerning how they will be earning a living, what they will be producing and consuming, how they will be marketing their products, bargaining for prices, wages, and benefits, etc. The discipline examines the various permutations and consequences of these choices, as well as various regularities that are evident in the overall sphere of their activities.
Nonetheless, people are free to do what they do as commercial agents in various ways, embark upon their tasks more or less intensely at various periods of their lives, for various reasons of their own or because of circumstances they face. None of this needs to be determined and all these actions are open to moral evaluation.5
Yet this does not take away a good deal of orderliness, even predictability from people's economic activities, provided one does not expect that they behave like Haley's comet or a subatomic particle, according to impersonal laws or random forces. If social science appreciates that human beings have free will, they do not necessarily give up being scientific about human life, quite the contrary. They could, instead, be closer to dealing scientifically with human life.
2. Moral Skepticism
We now turn to the second assumption and briefly discuss the pros and cons.
Let's once again recall what's at stake: is there any basis for our ethical or moral judgments? When a politician is denounced, a newspaper criticized for its practices, or a teacher (or even a text book author) praised or blamed for his or her product, can any of this be made out? Is it possible to justify such judgments or claims? When one claims that one's parents have mistreated one or one's physician engaged in malpractice, is this just hot air or the expression of displeasure? Is it that we simply know this without any justification, without any basis for that knowledge? Is ethics, perhaps, some kind of realm where we can be right without any justification?6 Or perhaps there are standards we can identify that can help us show that what we claim is true?
Our discussion, here, will again certainly not exhaust the topic. There is much more to be considered in a thorough study, but what we will do should help lay the foundation and give a clue as to what the debate involves.
Against Morality
Moral Diversity vs. Objectivity. There are too many moral opinions, so how can there be one, true moral standard for all? Clearly, across the globe and throughout human history great diversity exists and has existed concerning what is supposed to be right and wrong in human conduct. Indeed, apparently decent and intelligent people differ very seriously on the topic. Surely that suggests very strongly that no common, objective standard is available as to how we ought to act. It is mostly cultural anthropologists who advance this view -- e.g., Ruth Benedict, in her famous book Patterns of Culture.
No Evidence of the Senses supports Moral Claims. Moral judgments are not verifiable by observation, as are many other judgments we make. We can pretty much decide what color hat one is wearing, how many people are sitting in a class room, where China's borders are, how bright the sun is at noon, and other subjects we want to know about, by means of the diligent use of our sensory organs. Yet, no such use is going to enable us to decide whether we ought to tell the truth, write a letter to mother, help the poor, avoid pornography or ban abortions. Accordingly, moral disputes appear to be impossible to settle. This is an argument stressed by members of the philosophical school logical positivism -- e.g., A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Dover, 1936).7
The Gap Between "Is" and "Ought" No judgment of what is the case can support a conclusion of what one ought to do -- the "is/ought" gap argument of the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). The rules of sound reasoning, good judgment, require that when one draws a conclusion from premises, the terms that are present in this conclusion also appear in the premises. Yet if one begins an argument with claims about this or that being so and so, there is no "ought" or "should" present, whereas in a conclusion having moral import it is just those terms that would have to appear. Clearly, then, such moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.
Morality is Against Nature Nothing else in nature is subject to moral judgment or evaluation, so applying moral judgment or evaluation to human beings is odd, arbitrary, unjustified. Consider anything -- rocks, trees, birds, fish or whatever, and there is no place for praising and blaming in our understanding of these things. So bringing morality into the picture when we consider human affairs is arbitrary, out of the blue, unjustified. John Mackie argues, for example, that moral values, if they existed, would be "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."8
For Morality
Diversity is More Apparent than Real. (A) Moral opinions tend to differ about details, not basics. (B) Some persons have a vested interest in obscuring moral standards lest they be found guilty of moral wrong doing or evil. (C) Some persons are professional "devil's advocates" and propagate skepticism because they are testing, questioning, making sure (even if they do not act as if they were skeptics, e.g., toward their children, friends, political reps).
Perceptual Knowledge is Not All. In complicated areas observations do not suffice to verify judgment -- e.g., in astrophysics, particle physics, psychology, crime detection, etc. Moral judgments may require verification by way of a fairly complex theory or definition of, e.g., what "good" or "morally right" means. (Moral theories propose such theories and definitions.)
How not to Deduce but to Derive Ought from Is (A) Hume was arguing against those who believed that moral conclusions can be deduced from premises stating various facts. But not all arguments consist of deductions, a formal statement linking premises to conclusions by nothing other than its logical structure and the essential meaning of the terms. Thus nothing strictly new is ever established by way of deduction, nothing that isn't true implicitly already. There is, however, reasoning that's not deductive but, roughly, inferential. Based on our observations, reflections, economical theorizing, and the like, we forge or develop an understanding of the world. When detectives explain a crime, they do not deduce -- contrary to Sherlock Holmes -- but infer who did it. Scientists work from evidence to conclusions in other than a strictly deductive fashion. They reach their understanding of what is what by developing valid, well founded concepts and theories that best explain what they see and have previously learned about. Indeed, most often we are concerned to establish definitions which are not the product of deduction but generalization, abstraction, the formation of ideas.
Accordingly, (B) the premises of moral arguments could include theories or definitions as to what "good" or "ought to" mean and thus give support to particular moral judgments. For example, "the will of God is Good," "Good is what everyone ought to do," thus, "the will of God is what everyone ought to obey." Or, "Goodness is Living (for human beings)," "Living (for human beings) is furthered by thinking," thus, "Goodness is furthered by thinking." These definitions or theories cannot be just dismissed. There is a possibility that one of them captures accurately what the relevant terms mean and from this we could infer moral conclusions.9
Nature is Diverse Enough to allow for Major Differences As in the case of the free will hypothesis, there is nothing odd about something new emerging in nature that does invite judgments. Mary Midgley puts forth a very interesting idea, in The Ethical Primate (Routledge, 1994), to the effect that human beings are precisely distinctive in nature by having a moral nature, an ethical dimension to their lives. Indeed, this view was advanced by Aristotle, as well. This is evident enough when we consider how really extraordinary human life is3/4what other aspect of nature gives us board games, museums, symphony music, philosophy or the novel?
The Best Theory is As True as Can Be
When we put all of this together what is at issue is whether we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise -- do we get a better understanding, for example, of why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many individual and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc. It may be because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern the way cats and dogs and orangutans and birds tend to be. In principle, all of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predicted because they are not creative in a sense that they originate new ideas and behavior, although we do not always know enough about the constitution of these beings and how it would interact with their environment to actually predict what they will do. Human beings produce new ideas and these can introduce new kinds of behavior in familiar situations. This, in part, is what is meant by the fact that different people often interpret their experiences differently. Yet, we can make some predictions about what people will do because they often do make up their minds in a given fashion and stick to their decision over time. This is what we mean when we note that people make commitments, possess integrity, etc. So we can estimate what they are going to do. But even then we do not make certain predictions but only statistically significant ones. Clearly, very often people change their minds and surprise us. Furthermore, if we go to different cultures, they'll surprise us even more. This complexity, diversity, and individuation about human beings is best explained if human beings are free than if they are determined.
That is, at least, what is required for ethics to be a bona fide, genuine subject matter of concern.
Endnotes:
1 Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 42-3.
2 Even in physical reality, as in the freezing of water, the causal relationship isn't exactly what it is in other domains. The freezing occurs by way of what has been called "downward causation," instead of the more familiar "action-reaction" causation.
3 Ibid., p. 129.
4 New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983.
5 For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, ed., Commerce and Morality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), especially "Ethics and its Uses."
6 This view is advanced in the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Johnston, op. cit., Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. But see, in contrast, Julius Kovesi, Moral Notions (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), who also approaches ethics from Wittgenstein's teachings.
7 A very helpful discussion of the type of argument Ayer advances can be found in Laurie Calhoun, "Scientistic Confusion and Metaethical Relativism," Ethica, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1995), pp. 53-72. See, also, Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, Inc., 1979).
8 J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 38.
9 For more along these lines, see W. D. Falk, Ought, Reasons, and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially "Goading and Guiding" and "Hume on Is and Ought."
Tibor R. Machan
Whether ethics even exists is often in dispute. For example, many believe ethics and science to be incompatible. A good many social scientists and psychologists think that people cannot be morally blamed for what they do; instead their conduct is explainable by various causes. Ordinary folks, too, are at times convinced that people act badly only because something made them do so, some event in their upbringing or some factor of the culture to which they belong. (We tend to explain our own bad conduct more readily but blame other people for theirs!)
So whether ethics is a bona fide part of human life is not self-evident, nor obvious. In order for there to be ethics, some other facts must already obtain. Consider, for example, the claim that "Judy should not lie," or "The president of the United Sates of American ought to try to restrain his powers over the lives of people." This assumes that Judy and the president have a choice about what they will do. "Ought" implies "can." This means that if one ought to do something, it must be that one can either do or not do it. It also assumes that Judy, the president and anyone who would look into the matter can identify certain standards of conduct to be used in figuring out what we should or should not do.
First, then, ethics requires that we can exercise some genuine choices, that we have the capacity to initiate some actions. If this were impossible, the idea that we should (or should not) act in such and such a fashion would have no application in human life. Second, ethics requires that some principles that apply to conduct be identifiable or objective. Unless we all can learn those very general principles, ethics has no place in our lives. It consists, after all, of such principles of conduct that pertain to all human beings. Moral or ethical principles pertain to action, how we should conduct ourselves, on what basis we should choose or select what we will do. To succeed at living a human life which is morally good, some principles would have to be followed. "Morally good" here means: being excellent as a human being in one's life but as a matter of choice, of one's own initiative, not accidentally. So being tall or talented or beautiful are not aspects of moral excellence, whereas being honest, courageous and prudent would be, if ethics is indeed a bona fide dimension of human living.
If we could not exercise genuine choices, morality would be impossible since no one could help what her or she is doing. It would all be a matter of good and bad things simply happening, as indeed they often do at the hands of nature, as it were: when tornadoes or earthquakes or diseases strike. Que serra, que serra, period.
If we could not identify moral principles, we could never make a sensible selection from among alternative courses of conduct. Depending on what we aim for, we can identify the principles that will enable us to reach our goal. This is clearly evident in such fields as medicine, engineering and business. Thus, it seems that this second requirement of ethics, that we can identify principles of conduct, might be satisfied. But we will need to explore that further to be able to tell.
Let me explore briefly whether these two assumptions are reasonable or merely prejudice or myth as some folks believe, ones who would consign ethics to the dustbin of pre-science, akin to demonology or witchcraft.
The answers I will reach cannot be considered conclusive -- there isn't enough time and space to carry out a full investigation. But we will have a chance to look at the major points for and against the assumptions. Without some idea about whether they are true, ethics itself is left unsupported -- it could just as easily be in the class of the occult, such as astrology or palmistry.
1. Free Will?
The first matter to address is whether we have free will -- not necessarily all of us, all of the time but, rather, as a rule, normally. In other words, are human beings, as they have appeared throughout history in their innumerable diverse circumstances (though not when incapacitated or significantly damaged) capable of bringing about, of their own initiative, the behavior in which they engage?
Against Free Will
Nature's Laws versus Free Will. First, one of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of physics. The argument here is that all material substances are controlled by these laws and we human beings are basically complicated versions of material substances. Therefore, whatever governs material substance in the universe must also govern human life.
Social science, for one, which studies human beings in their social relations, looks into some of causes that produce our behavior. So does neuroscience, a sub-discipline of biology, in its study of our individual brains-minds. In each case what is studied are the causes of behavior. So, the only difference between the rest of nature and ourselves, as far as these branches of science are concerned, is that we are more complicated, not that we are not governed by the same principles or laws of nature.
Most definitely, it is argued, no such thing as an original cause is evident in the rest of nature, something that would have to be possible for free will to exist. As one advocate of determinism puts it, "[T]he best response to the demand for an explanation of the relation between an originator and decisions is that an explanation cannot be given. We have to regard this relation as primitive or unanalyzable."1 In other words, originating or initiating some action seems nothing more than a myth or an unexplainable fact, for which no evidence or argument can be given.
The determinist claims that all our actions, including decisions, are more sensibly taken to be effects of some prior events. It is the determinist's view that everything we do is the effect of some set of causal circumstances. This makes better sense, say the determinists, than leaving things unexplained, mysterious.
Affirming Initiative: Now, in response one might argue that nature exhibits innumerable different domains, distinct not only in their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. There are, to be sure, many domains where we find the familiar cause and effect situation clearly evident -- for example, on the billiard table, in geological movements, and in the motion of the planets. But there are areas were something else appears to be going on. For example, is the cause of a musical composition, the composer, itself some effect of a prior cause, so that the composer makes no original contribution?2
So, "causal" reasoning does not necessarily rule out that there might be something in nature that exhibits agent or original causation, the phenomenon whereby a thing causes some of its own behavior. Causal interactions depend on the nature of the beings that interact, what they are. So one cannot rule out, a priori (before investigation), that some beings could have the capacity to act on their own initiative.
Thus it seems that there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether there is or is not is something to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow world view or metaphysics that restricts everything to being just one kind of thing so that everything has just one kind of causal characteristics. Nature appears to be composed of many types and kinds of things and thus does not have to exclude free will.
So, free will seems to be possible, even in a world of causality. Whether free will actually exists we'll examine shortly.
We Cannot Know of Free Will. Now, another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying, inspecting or examining nature is what we call "empiricism." In other words, many believe that the only way we know about nature is by observing it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really isn't any such thing. Since no observable evidence for free will exists, therefore free will does not exist.
We Can Know Free Will. But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong -- we know many things not simply through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory construction. (Consider, even the purported knowledge that empiricism is our form of knowledge is not "known" empirically!)
For one, many features of the universe, including criminal guilt, are detected without eyewitnesses but by way of theories which serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This is true, also, even in the natural sciences. Many of the complex phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics, botany, chemistry -- not to mention psychology -- consist not of what we see or detect by observation but is inferred by way of a theory. The theory that explains things best -- most completely and most consistently -- is the best answer to the question as to what is going on.
Free will may well turn out to be in this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type associated with physics. We can examine a person's background and find that some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, while others become crooks. Free will, then, amounts to a very helpful explanation. For now all we need to consider that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empiricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not strict empirical knowledge.
Free Will Is Weird? Another matter that very often counts against free will is that the rest of (even living) beings in nature do not exhibit it. Dogs, cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., have no free will and therefore it appears arbitrary to impute it to human beings. Why should we be free to do things when the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It would be an impossible aberration. Some opponents of the free will idea, such as the behaviorist psychologists B. F. Skinner, have stressed this objection (for example, in the book Beyond Freedom and Dignity [Bantam Books, 1972])
Free Will is Natural. The answer here is similar to what I gave earlier. To wit, there is enough variety in nature -- some things swim, some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Discovering that something has free will could be yet another addition to all the varieties of nature. Determinism seems to depend upon adherence to a very specific ontology, in terms of which everything must be a given kind of thing, one that can only move when prompted by something else, and this is not something that can be shown to hold universally so as to preclude free will.
Does God Allow Free Will? There is also the theological argument to the effect that if God knows everything, he/she knows the future, so what we do is unalterable. If someone knows that some future event will occur, e.g., that Haley's Comet will come nearest to earth at some given time in the future, then whatever is involved in that event cannot have a choice about it. So if God knows that you will have three children, then you have no genuine choice about that matter. It has to turn out that way.
God's "knowledge" is Mysterious. But God's knowledge is not likely to be the kind human beings have, indeed, it is a mystery just what it is. So nothing much can be inferred from it. It is mistake to confuse what would follow from a human being's knowing the future versus God's "knowledge" of the future. The latter is entirely different from the former and so the implications wouldn't be the same either.
For Free Will
Let's now consider whether free will actually does exist. I'll offer four arguments in support of an affirmative answer. (They are not uniquely my arguments but ones that have been proposed throughout the philosophical community.) Thus far we have only considered whether free will is possible. But does it exist? The following points support that contention.
Are We Determined to be Determinists -- or not? There is an argument against determinism to the effect that, if we are fully determined in what we think, believe, and do, then the belief that determinism is true is also a result of this determinism. But the same holds for the belief that determinism is false. There is nothing you can do about whatever you believe -- you had to believe it. There is no way to take an independent stance and consider the arguments in an unprejudiced manner because all the various forces making us assimilate the evidence either cause us to believe or disbelieve in determinism. One either turns out to be a determinist or not and in neither case can we appraise the issue objectively because we are predetermined to have a view on the matter one way or the other, ad infinitum.
But then, paradoxically, we'll never be able to resolve this debate, since there is no way of obtaining an objective assessment. Indeed, the very idea of philosophical, scientific or judicial objectivity, as well as of ever coming to know anything, has to do with being free. Thus, if we're engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have some measure of mental freedom. This view was put forward by Immanuel Kant, the important 18th century Germany philosopher, as well as by Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist who defends free will in his book The Psychology of Self-Esteem (Bantam Books, 1969).
Should We Become Determinists? There's another dilemma of determinism. It starts with noting that the determinist wants us to believe in determinism. In fact, he believes we ought to do so rather than believe in "the illusion of free will". But, as the saying goes in philosophy, "ought" implies "can". That is, if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a free choice in the matter; it implies that it is up to us whether we will hold determinism or free will as the better doctrine. That, in turn, assumes that we are free.
In other words, even arguing for determinism assumes that we are not determined to believe in free will or determined but that it is a matter of our making certain choices about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself. We run across this paradox when we find people who blame us for not accepting the view that people's fate is not in their hands so we should not blame them. Blaming some while denying that anyone should be blamed is a paradox, one which troubles a deterministic position. In one book defending determinism, the author ends by posing the following question: "If ['Left Wing politics is less given to attitudes and policies which have something of the assumption of Free Will in them'], should one part of the response ... be a move to the Left in politics? I leave you with that bracing question."3 Yet can this be a genuine question, if the answer is predetermined and one either will or will not move Left or Right and has no choice in the matter? I t cannot, which is the idea advanced by Joseph M. Boyle, G. Grisez and O. Tollefsen, in their book Free Choice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).
We Often Know We Are Free. In many contexts of our lives introspective knowledge is taken very seriously. When you go to a doctor and he asks you, "Are you in pain?" and you say, "Yes," and he says "Where is the pain?" and you say, "It's in my knee," the doctor doesn't say, "Why, you can't know, this is not public evidence, I will now get verifiable, direct evidence where you hurt." In fact your evidence is very good evidence. Witnesses at trials give such evidence as they report about what they have seen. This invokes, in a certain respect, introspective evidence: "This indeed is what I have seen or heard." It involves reference to something we recall from memory and is thus within us, not evident to others without our reports. Even in the various sciences people report on what they've read on surveys or seen on gauges or instruments or studies. Thus they are giving us introspective evidence.
Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasonably reliable. So what should we make of the fact that a lot of people do believe and say things like, "Damn it, I didn't make the right choice," or "I neglected to do something." They report to us, furthermore, that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., or that they intended this or that but not another thing. They, furthermore, often blame themselves for not having done something, thus implying that they know that they made a choice (for which they are taking responsibility).
In short, there is abundant evidence from people all around us of their experience of the existence of their own free choices. This cannot just be ruled out, since it would also undercut much else we take very seriously, indeed treat as decisive, coming from such sources.
Science Discovers Free Will. Finally, there is also the evidence of the fact that we do seem to have the capacity for self-monitoring. The human brain has the kind of structure that allows us, so to speak, to govern ourselves. We can inspect our lives, we can detect where we're going, and we can, therefore, change course. The human brain itself makes all this possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself3/4that is, its higher regions can influence the rest3/4and as a result we can decide whether to continue in a certain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direction. This is how we change habits, restrain impulses, control our temper, "watch what we eat," alter our developed motor skills in, say, how we play the piano, or even change our established opinions. That is the sort of free will that is demonstrable.
At least some scientists, for example Roger W. Sperry -- in his book Science and Moral Priority4 and in numerous more technical articles -- maintain that there's evidence for free will in this sense. This view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes, for example, that there can be different kinds of causes in nature and, also, that the functioning of the brain as a complex neurophysiological system could manifest self-causation. An organism with our kind of brain could cause some mental functions to occur via what Sperry calls a process of "downward causation." (Sperry argues that there is some evidence of such causation even apart from how the human organism's higher mental activities occur, for example, in the way water freezes.)
Now the sort of thing Sperry thinks possible seems evident in our lives. We make plans and then, upon reconsideration (which at times takes but a fraction of a second) revise them. We explore alternatives and decide to follow one of these. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon, or continue with it. We resist temptations, act despite the desire to do something else, and gradually build up good habits which, at first, were difficult to exhibit. In other words, there is a locus of individual self-responsibility or initiative -- or, to use Ted Honderich's term, "origination" -- that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves, and the way in which we in fact behave.
Some Cautionary Points. There clearly are cases of conduct in which some persons behave as they do because they were determined to do so by certain identifiable forces beyond their control. A brain tumor, a severe childhood trauma or some other intrusive force sometimes incapacitates people. This is evident in those occasional cases when a person who engaged in criminal behavior is shown to have had no control over what he or she did. Someone who actually had no capacity to control his or her behavior, could not control his or her own thinking or judgment and was, thus, moved by something other than his own will, cannot be said to possess a bona fide free will.
Compatibilism. Those who deny that we have free will would seem to be unable to make sense of our distinction between cases in which one controls one's behavior and those in which one is being moved by forces over which he or she has no control. When we face the latter sort of case, we still admit that the behavior could be good or bad but we deny that it is morally and legally significant -- it is more along lines of acts of nature or God by being out of the agent's control. This is also why philosophers who discuss ethics but deny free will have trouble distinguishing between morality and value theory -- e.g., some utilitarians, Marxists. Morality concerns how we ought to act (or the rightness of conduct), whereas value theory deals with what is good and bad and why. It is possible to address the latter field without taking a side on the free will issue. But that is not so with the former.
Some, though, will defend the view that even if we have no ultimate control over our actions -- even if our behavior, the judgments which we make, or our character is controlled by forces such as the environment or our genetic make-up -- we may still speak of ethics or morality. They are called compatibilists. They would mean by the term "ethics" or "morality" something different from what the terms would mean if we did possess free will, however. Ethics would concern good behavior, conduct in conformity with standards of right regardless of how it came about that one conformed or did not conform to those standards. Ethics, in line with the compatibilist position, might concern itself with values and how to secure them, without implying that one could of one’s own initiative exert control over whether these values would be achieved. Accordingly, then, without personal responsibility or agency, where one is the cause of what one does, whereby one initiates or originates one's significant actions, ethics would amount to something drastically different from what we usually mean by the term.
Given the way compatibilists conceive of their doctrine—namely, that it is possible to have both a causal explanation of human conduct as well as its being the agent’s responsibility to have engaged in that conduct—the theory does succeed better than all others, including the one dubbed agent causal or libertarian free will. But the compatibilist doctrine does not in fact allow for personal moral responsibility, however much its proponents so insist. No bona fide, ultimate personal responsibility can be attached to behavior that is, so to speak, softly determined. If one’s character has been molded so that one will be honest, generous, and so forth, and then one is indeed honest, generous and so forth, one cannot reasonably be said then to be responsible for being honest, generous and so forth. It is whatever molded one’s character that would explain one’s honesty, generosity and so forth. Any kind of moral pride or credit would amount to an illusion, not something well deserved.
Is Free Will Well Founded?
So these several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free will position. Can anyone do better with this issue? I don't know. I think it's best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing theories. Are human beings doing what they do solely as the consequences of forces acting on them? Or do they have the capacity to take charge of their lives, often neglect to do so properly or effectively, make stupid choices? Which supposition best explains the human world and its complexities around us?
I think the free will view makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories, how it is possible that human life involves such an array of possibilities, accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as well as sorrows, creation as well as destruction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change -- in language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much fixed by instincts and reflexes -- even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of extensive prodding in laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments -- people initiate much of what they do, for better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without, so to speak, having to do so! This, moreover, can make good sense if we understand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct rather than relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain unique challenges, not the least of which is that they cannot reasonably expect any formula or system to predictably manage the future of human affairs, such as some of social sciences seem to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine prospect for solving human problems -- only education and individual initiative can do that.
Yet, it should be noted that free will does not contradict social science if the latter is not conceived in strict deterministic terms and the former is understood to allow for long range commitments, chosen policies, strategies, institutional involvements, etc.
Human beings make choices, some of which, however, commit them to a course of long range behavior which can be studied in terms of their impact on various features of the social world. People choose to enter schools, careers, relationships, to form institutions, to carry out plans, etc., and often their choices justifies expecting them to stick with a reasonably predictable course of conduct.
In economics, for example, one may be studying the market place as an arena wherein human beings make various free choices concerning how they will be earning a living, what they will be producing and consuming, how they will be marketing their products, bargaining for prices, wages, and benefits, etc. The discipline examines the various permutations and consequences of these choices, as well as various regularities that are evident in the overall sphere of their activities.
Nonetheless, people are free to do what they do as commercial agents in various ways, embark upon their tasks more or less intensely at various periods of their lives, for various reasons of their own or because of circumstances they face. None of this needs to be determined and all these actions are open to moral evaluation.5
Yet this does not take away a good deal of orderliness, even predictability from people's economic activities, provided one does not expect that they behave like Haley's comet or a subatomic particle, according to impersonal laws or random forces. If social science appreciates that human beings have free will, they do not necessarily give up being scientific about human life, quite the contrary. They could, instead, be closer to dealing scientifically with human life.
2. Moral Skepticism
We now turn to the second assumption and briefly discuss the pros and cons.
Let's once again recall what's at stake: is there any basis for our ethical or moral judgments? When a politician is denounced, a newspaper criticized for its practices, or a teacher (or even a text book author) praised or blamed for his or her product, can any of this be made out? Is it possible to justify such judgments or claims? When one claims that one's parents have mistreated one or one's physician engaged in malpractice, is this just hot air or the expression of displeasure? Is it that we simply know this without any justification, without any basis for that knowledge? Is ethics, perhaps, some kind of realm where we can be right without any justification?6 Or perhaps there are standards we can identify that can help us show that what we claim is true?
Our discussion, here, will again certainly not exhaust the topic. There is much more to be considered in a thorough study, but what we will do should help lay the foundation and give a clue as to what the debate involves.
Against Morality
Moral Diversity vs. Objectivity. There are too many moral opinions, so how can there be one, true moral standard for all? Clearly, across the globe and throughout human history great diversity exists and has existed concerning what is supposed to be right and wrong in human conduct. Indeed, apparently decent and intelligent people differ very seriously on the topic. Surely that suggests very strongly that no common, objective standard is available as to how we ought to act. It is mostly cultural anthropologists who advance this view -- e.g., Ruth Benedict, in her famous book Patterns of Culture.
No Evidence of the Senses supports Moral Claims. Moral judgments are not verifiable by observation, as are many other judgments we make. We can pretty much decide what color hat one is wearing, how many people are sitting in a class room, where China's borders are, how bright the sun is at noon, and other subjects we want to know about, by means of the diligent use of our sensory organs. Yet, no such use is going to enable us to decide whether we ought to tell the truth, write a letter to mother, help the poor, avoid pornography or ban abortions. Accordingly, moral disputes appear to be impossible to settle. This is an argument stressed by members of the philosophical school logical positivism -- e.g., A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (Dover, 1936).7
The Gap Between "Is" and "Ought" No judgment of what is the case can support a conclusion of what one ought to do -- the "is/ought" gap argument of the philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). The rules of sound reasoning, good judgment, require that when one draws a conclusion from premises, the terms that are present in this conclusion also appear in the premises. Yet if one begins an argument with claims about this or that being so and so, there is no "ought" or "should" present, whereas in a conclusion having moral import it is just those terms that would have to appear. Clearly, then, such moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.
Morality is Against Nature Nothing else in nature is subject to moral judgment or evaluation, so applying moral judgment or evaluation to human beings is odd, arbitrary, unjustified. Consider anything -- rocks, trees, birds, fish or whatever, and there is no place for praising and blaming in our understanding of these things. So bringing morality into the picture when we consider human affairs is arbitrary, out of the blue, unjustified. John Mackie argues, for example, that moral values, if they existed, would be "entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe."8
For Morality
Diversity is More Apparent than Real. (A) Moral opinions tend to differ about details, not basics. (B) Some persons have a vested interest in obscuring moral standards lest they be found guilty of moral wrong doing or evil. (C) Some persons are professional "devil's advocates" and propagate skepticism because they are testing, questioning, making sure (even if they do not act as if they were skeptics, e.g., toward their children, friends, political reps).
Perceptual Knowledge is Not All. In complicated areas observations do not suffice to verify judgment -- e.g., in astrophysics, particle physics, psychology, crime detection, etc. Moral judgments may require verification by way of a fairly complex theory or definition of, e.g., what "good" or "morally right" means. (Moral theories propose such theories and definitions.)
How not to Deduce but to Derive Ought from Is (A) Hume was arguing against those who believed that moral conclusions can be deduced from premises stating various facts. But not all arguments consist of deductions, a formal statement linking premises to conclusions by nothing other than its logical structure and the essential meaning of the terms. Thus nothing strictly new is ever established by way of deduction, nothing that isn't true implicitly already. There is, however, reasoning that's not deductive but, roughly, inferential. Based on our observations, reflections, economical theorizing, and the like, we forge or develop an understanding of the world. When detectives explain a crime, they do not deduce -- contrary to Sherlock Holmes -- but infer who did it. Scientists work from evidence to conclusions in other than a strictly deductive fashion. They reach their understanding of what is what by developing valid, well founded concepts and theories that best explain what they see and have previously learned about. Indeed, most often we are concerned to establish definitions which are not the product of deduction but generalization, abstraction, the formation of ideas.
Accordingly, (B) the premises of moral arguments could include theories or definitions as to what "good" or "ought to" mean and thus give support to particular moral judgments. For example, "the will of God is Good," "Good is what everyone ought to do," thus, "the will of God is what everyone ought to obey." Or, "Goodness is Living (for human beings)," "Living (for human beings) is furthered by thinking," thus, "Goodness is furthered by thinking." These definitions or theories cannot be just dismissed. There is a possibility that one of them captures accurately what the relevant terms mean and from this we could infer moral conclusions.9
Nature is Diverse Enough to allow for Major Differences As in the case of the free will hypothesis, there is nothing odd about something new emerging in nature that does invite judgments. Mary Midgley puts forth a very interesting idea, in The Ethical Primate (Routledge, 1994), to the effect that human beings are precisely distinctive in nature by having a moral nature, an ethical dimension to their lives. Indeed, this view was advanced by Aristotle, as well. This is evident enough when we consider how really extraordinary human life is3/4what other aspect of nature gives us board games, museums, symphony music, philosophy or the novel?
The Best Theory is As True as Can Be
When we put all of this together what is at issue is whether we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise -- do we get a better understanding, for example, of why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many individual and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc. It may be because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern the way cats and dogs and orangutans and birds tend to be. In principle, all of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predicted because they are not creative in a sense that they originate new ideas and behavior, although we do not always know enough about the constitution of these beings and how it would interact with their environment to actually predict what they will do. Human beings produce new ideas and these can introduce new kinds of behavior in familiar situations. This, in part, is what is meant by the fact that different people often interpret their experiences differently. Yet, we can make some predictions about what people will do because they often do make up their minds in a given fashion and stick to their decision over time. This is what we mean when we note that people make commitments, possess integrity, etc. So we can estimate what they are going to do. But even then we do not make certain predictions but only statistically significant ones. Clearly, very often people change their minds and surprise us. Furthermore, if we go to different cultures, they'll surprise us even more. This complexity, diversity, and individuation about human beings is best explained if human beings are free than if they are determined.
That is, at least, what is required for ethics to be a bona fide, genuine subject matter of concern.
Endnotes:
1 Ted Honderich, How Free Are You? The Determinism Problem (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 42-3.
2 Even in physical reality, as in the freezing of water, the causal relationship isn't exactly what it is in other domains. The freezing occurs by way of what has been called "downward causation," instead of the more familiar "action-reaction" causation.
3 Ibid., p. 129.
4 New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1983.
5 For more on this, see Tibor R. Machan, ed., Commerce and Morality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988), especially "Ethics and its Uses."
6 This view is advanced in the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein by Johnston, op. cit., Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy. But see, in contrast, Julius Kovesi, Moral Notions (London, England: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), who also approaches ethics from Wittgenstein's teachings.
7 A very helpful discussion of the type of argument Ayer advances can be found in Laurie Calhoun, "Scientistic Confusion and Metaethical Relativism," Ethica, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1995), pp. 53-72. See, also, Renford Bambrough, Moral Scepticism and Moral Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, Inc., 1979).
8 J. L. Mackie, Ethics (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 38.
9 For more along these lines, see W. D. Falk, Ought, Reasons, and Morality (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), especially "Goading and Guiding" and "Hume on Is and Ought."
Friday, May 09, 2003
The Tax Anomaly
Tibor R. Machan
Since the American revolution, when monarchy was rejected on this continent and sovereignty was finally legally established for individual human beings, not governments, there has been a problem with taxation. The institution is an anomaly, plain and simple, in a genuinely free society. In such a society one has unalienable—meaning, never justifiably violable—rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among other rights. But instead of transforming public finance from a coercive to a voluntary system, the framers left intact taxation, albeit changed so that at least there’d be representation along with it.
Those who kept loving government more than individual sovereignty have made use of this anomalous feature of our legal system to expand the state. It is quite natural that this should have occurred—whenever one compromises a principle, eventually the compromise devours the principle altogether. (This is why ethics counsels even against little white lies—it corrupts character.)
By now the tax system in the USA doesn’t even adhere to the principle, “No taxation without representation.” (It was the famous pre-Revolutionary patriot James Otis who said, “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”) Government actually taxes members of future generations, ones certainly not represented in Congress. And taxes are imposed on travelers all over the place by politicians who do not represent them. What is far worse, but to be expected, given the logic of such processes, is that instead of confining taxation to financing the only proper function of government, which is “to secure [our] rights,” taxation is now used to fund every project in society that the human imagination can conceive.
But, isn’t it the case that, to quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization”? That is a ruse! It comes from one of America’s legal giants who had no sympathy at all for limited government, quite the opposite.
In fact, taxation is extortion. The government tells us, “You may work for a living only if you hand over roughly forty percent of your earnings to us to fund goals we have decided need funding.” This is not what citizens of a free society deserve from their agents, ones who are entrusted with protecting not attacking their rights.
But, didn’t “we” enter into a social compact that resulted in the tax system we have? No we didn’t, not if we indeed have unalienable rights—no contract can give up anyone’s rights. I certainly may not contract so that you lose your rights. A contract can only be entered into voluntarily—unwilling third parties may not be conscripted to it. If, as in the case of the USA, the society is grounded on unalienable individual rights, the only way government can come about is through “the consent of the governed.” And while this had been understood too loosely in the past, even by the American founders, its meaning is clear: you and I must consent to be governed.
Now we do consent to being governed if we remain within the legal jurisdiction of a certain sphere, but only to the extent that is just—it is the just powers of government only to which we can consent, and to tax isn’t one of the just powers of government. To be properly funded, some other, but in any case voluntary, means must be found. Since, however, this is a very novel idea—about as novel even in the USA as free markets are in the for former Soviet bloc countries or freedom of religion in Iran—studies as to how to bring it off are in short supply. (Remember, most universities are tax funded, so they aren’t likely to encourage alternative ways of funding government!)
Still, there has been some progress in the study of funding government without any coercive means. One method proposed is to charge for all contracts which are, ultimately, backed by the courts. Sure, one can just shake a hand and proceed, but this isn’t likely when multimillions are at stake and legal recourse is wanted in case of some kind of mishap. There is also the possibility of funding government via lotteries. And at the beginning, governments could make a bundle and fund plenty of their proper undertakings by selling off all the properties that they should not own in the first place.
No, I am not expert in the field of public finance for a government of a free society. Still, I can say confidently that if the idea were not dismissed so readily by those who just love to tax their fellows for projects of their own, human beings could put their minds to the task profitably enough and find a way to eliminate this anomaly from our midst.
Tibor R. Machan
Since the American revolution, when monarchy was rejected on this continent and sovereignty was finally legally established for individual human beings, not governments, there has been a problem with taxation. The institution is an anomaly, plain and simple, in a genuinely free society. In such a society one has unalienable—meaning, never justifiably violable—rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among other rights. But instead of transforming public finance from a coercive to a voluntary system, the framers left intact taxation, albeit changed so that at least there’d be representation along with it.
Those who kept loving government more than individual sovereignty have made use of this anomalous feature of our legal system to expand the state. It is quite natural that this should have occurred—whenever one compromises a principle, eventually the compromise devours the principle altogether. (This is why ethics counsels even against little white lies—it corrupts character.)
By now the tax system in the USA doesn’t even adhere to the principle, “No taxation without representation.” (It was the famous pre-Revolutionary patriot James Otis who said, “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”) Government actually taxes members of future generations, ones certainly not represented in Congress. And taxes are imposed on travelers all over the place by politicians who do not represent them. What is far worse, but to be expected, given the logic of such processes, is that instead of confining taxation to financing the only proper function of government, which is “to secure [our] rights,” taxation is now used to fund every project in society that the human imagination can conceive.
But, isn’t it the case that, to quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization”? That is a ruse! It comes from one of America’s legal giants who had no sympathy at all for limited government, quite the opposite.
In fact, taxation is extortion. The government tells us, “You may work for a living only if you hand over roughly forty percent of your earnings to us to fund goals we have decided need funding.” This is not what citizens of a free society deserve from their agents, ones who are entrusted with protecting not attacking their rights.
But, didn’t “we” enter into a social compact that resulted in the tax system we have? No we didn’t, not if we indeed have unalienable rights—no contract can give up anyone’s rights. I certainly may not contract so that you lose your rights. A contract can only be entered into voluntarily—unwilling third parties may not be conscripted to it. If, as in the case of the USA, the society is grounded on unalienable individual rights, the only way government can come about is through “the consent of the governed.” And while this had been understood too loosely in the past, even by the American founders, its meaning is clear: you and I must consent to be governed.
Now we do consent to being governed if we remain within the legal jurisdiction of a certain sphere, but only to the extent that is just—it is the just powers of government only to which we can consent, and to tax isn’t one of the just powers of government. To be properly funded, some other, but in any case voluntary, means must be found. Since, however, this is a very novel idea—about as novel even in the USA as free markets are in the for former Soviet bloc countries or freedom of religion in Iran—studies as to how to bring it off are in short supply. (Remember, most universities are tax funded, so they aren’t likely to encourage alternative ways of funding government!)
Still, there has been some progress in the study of funding government without any coercive means. One method proposed is to charge for all contracts which are, ultimately, backed by the courts. Sure, one can just shake a hand and proceed, but this isn’t likely when multimillions are at stake and legal recourse is wanted in case of some kind of mishap. There is also the possibility of funding government via lotteries. And at the beginning, governments could make a bundle and fund plenty of their proper undertakings by selling off all the properties that they should not own in the first place.
No, I am not expert in the field of public finance for a government of a free society. Still, I can say confidently that if the idea were not dismissed so readily by those who just love to tax their fellows for projects of their own, human beings could put their minds to the task profitably enough and find a way to eliminate this anomaly from our midst.
"Looting" in Iraq
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
This idea that Iraqis are criminals for looting is full of problems. To begin with, can you loot from a dictator? What about from a dictator who isn’t even in power any longer? After the dictatorship collapses, whose stuff is being looted anyway? To whom does the money in those government banks belong? To whom do the artifacts in museums belong?
Well, they belong to no one — or to everyone. If they do not belong to no one, then there is no looting going on, only some grabbing of stuff that’s lying about, left there by, well, the original looters who accumulated this stuff with the money they stole from the people who are supposedly doing the most recent looting.
If the stuff belongs to everyone, it’s like public property and everyone who is part of the public has a claim to it. Sure, in modern societies, public stuff is usually controlled by the government. The government, in turn, hands it out to people who have jumped through various bureaucratic hoops to obtain it. But when the bureaucracy itself is in shambles, the public stuff is obtained mostly by random, disorderly pickings.
Think of it for a moment: The Iraqi "looters" now dubbed criminals, sometimes even being shot for engaging in "looting," had been systematically looted for decades. So, now that they realized that their original looters -- dictator Saddam Hussein and his gang -- are no longer in power, they decided to go scavenger hunting.
Sure, the American officials in charge there now may have wanted to have it all left to be sorted out by them or their newly appointed bureaucrats. But that may — or even need — not be much of an incentive to all the previously victimized Iraqis to abstain from grabbing some valuables while the picking was possible.
In short, maybe what we had and still have in Iraq in the aftermath of the dictatorship’s demise is a version of the tragedy of the commons. That tragedy goes on in most countries, only in more orderly fashion. All those lobbyists flocking to centers of government holding out their hands for what the public servants might hand to them from the loot they have taken from nature or the pockets of the citizenry are but organized looters, actually. And as it has been so well shown by economists and others, since the time of Aristotle to Garrett Hardin, when stuff is owned in common, there is a problem environmentalists should be very concerned about. As Aristotle put it, "that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few."
What might help in restoring a civilized approach to the treatment of valuables in Iraq? It is something with which they aren’t very familiar, namely the institution of private property rights. But since such an idea has meant the encouragement of greed, avarice and similar sins, rather than what it actually does, namely promote responsibility and care for things, it isn’t likely that Iraqis will see much of it very soon. Not even American officials who may try to assist the Iraqis in restoring order have much of a clue about the merits of full privatization.
So, perhaps the "looting" Iraqis ought to be viewed with more understanding and even compassion. The main difference between their looting and that done by others around the globe is but a detail: the rest follow some sham rules, while the Iraqis made no pretense at having any such rules where public "ownership" is concerned.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and co-author of "A Primer on Business Ethics." He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
By TIBOR R. MACHAN
Freedom News Service
This idea that Iraqis are criminals for looting is full of problems. To begin with, can you loot from a dictator? What about from a dictator who isn’t even in power any longer? After the dictatorship collapses, whose stuff is being looted anyway? To whom does the money in those government banks belong? To whom do the artifacts in museums belong?
Well, they belong to no one — or to everyone. If they do not belong to no one, then there is no looting going on, only some grabbing of stuff that’s lying about, left there by, well, the original looters who accumulated this stuff with the money they stole from the people who are supposedly doing the most recent looting.
If the stuff belongs to everyone, it’s like public property and everyone who is part of the public has a claim to it. Sure, in modern societies, public stuff is usually controlled by the government. The government, in turn, hands it out to people who have jumped through various bureaucratic hoops to obtain it. But when the bureaucracy itself is in shambles, the public stuff is obtained mostly by random, disorderly pickings.
Think of it for a moment: The Iraqi "looters" now dubbed criminals, sometimes even being shot for engaging in "looting," had been systematically looted for decades. So, now that they realized that their original looters -- dictator Saddam Hussein and his gang -- are no longer in power, they decided to go scavenger hunting.
Sure, the American officials in charge there now may have wanted to have it all left to be sorted out by them or their newly appointed bureaucrats. But that may — or even need — not be much of an incentive to all the previously victimized Iraqis to abstain from grabbing some valuables while the picking was possible.
In short, maybe what we had and still have in Iraq in the aftermath of the dictatorship’s demise is a version of the tragedy of the commons. That tragedy goes on in most countries, only in more orderly fashion. All those lobbyists flocking to centers of government holding out their hands for what the public servants might hand to them from the loot they have taken from nature or the pockets of the citizenry are but organized looters, actually. And as it has been so well shown by economists and others, since the time of Aristotle to Garrett Hardin, when stuff is owned in common, there is a problem environmentalists should be very concerned about. As Aristotle put it, "that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few."
What might help in restoring a civilized approach to the treatment of valuables in Iraq? It is something with which they aren’t very familiar, namely the institution of private property rights. But since such an idea has meant the encouragement of greed, avarice and similar sins, rather than what it actually does, namely promote responsibility and care for things, it isn’t likely that Iraqis will see much of it very soon. Not even American officials who may try to assist the Iraqis in restoring order have much of a clue about the merits of full privatization.
So, perhaps the "looting" Iraqis ought to be viewed with more understanding and even compassion. The main difference between their looting and that done by others around the globe is but a detail: the rest follow some sham rules, while the Iraqis made no pretense at having any such rules where public "ownership" is concerned.
Tibor Machan is a professor of business ethics and Western Civilization at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., and co-author of "A Primer on Business Ethics." He advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at Machan@chapman.edu
Friday, May 02, 2003
SARS, Quarantine and Liberty
Tibor R. Machan
Let us assume here that SARS is a contagious disease that can be identified as such by doctors, including ones screening people who arrive from foreign shores. Would it be proper for the government to quarantine such folks?
If the disease is a serious health hazard, quarantine by legal authorities would be proper. Why?
It is the proper task of government to secure citizens’ rights. If someone with a contagious disease chooses to mingle with others who aren’t aware of this person’s disease, this person is very likely about to inflict a serious health hazard on these innocent citizens who haven’t chosen to mingle with the diseased person. So, the authorities entrusted with the job of securing our rights then have the responsibility to keep such people out of circulation.
Of course, whether SARS is such a serious disease is not something I know for sure and so I must put the matter in hypothetical form. If the disease is serious—not merely someone with a bad sneeze who may transmit a slight cold to others with whom contact will be unavoidable—then if this person intends to mingle with others, this person will be intent on embarking on criminal behavior—on assaulting others with his or her disease. No one has the right to do that to other persons who haven’t been forewarned and who have no choice about remaining in the vicinity of the diseased person.
None of this deals fully with the SARS phenomenon. There are, to the best of my knowledge, many others who carry contagious disease other than SARS. Thousands of persons with, for example, influenza travel freely about the globe without anyone going into panic about it. And, yes, influenza can kill! Arguably, then, SARS is something of a media driven scare, not a real serious hazard, compared to others afoot in various parts of the world.
The phenomenon reminds me of the time when thousands of people canceled trips to Europe after the USA bombed Libya back in April 1986 and there was fear of terrorism because of the bombing. One clever economist did some calculations and found that by remaining home, the chances for serious injury and even death for those who canceled their trips increased because of traffic hazards they would face when driving around on US soil. In contrast, flying to Europe and taking a train or a tour bus to various parts would have meant minimal danger to the tourists. No one, to my knowledge, has done a follow-up study on just how many of those who stayed away from Europe met with traffic mishaps. But the initial calculations by the economist seemed right.
In the present SARS scare thousands of people are foregoing vacations in China, Hong Kong, Toronto and other places where SARS has made its appearance. Given the relatively small numbers of those who have been felled by SARS, and given the statistical probability of meeting with traffic mishaps, it seems to me clear enough that this media driven and highly selective scare is once again leading to some unrecorded disasters.
Not much can be done about it, of course. When people get scared, however unreasonable their fear may well be, they will take measures to protect themselves. However, their protection may lead to worse things than what they feared in the first place.
It would be nice, under the circumstances, if the media—primarily news organizations—would report the comparative hazards stemming from SARS versus from other diseases and from the protective measures people are taking to avoid SARS. It should not be necessary for ordinary citizens, who rely so much on news organizations to inform them about what’s what, to become experts in this area. They should, instead, enjoy the services of their news reporters who should, in turn, dig deeper than superficial data that provides little more than grounds for panic rather than information that can help us make intelligent decisions. (For some official, government provided information on SARS, visit http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/faq.htm.)
Tibor R. Machan
Let us assume here that SARS is a contagious disease that can be identified as such by doctors, including ones screening people who arrive from foreign shores. Would it be proper for the government to quarantine such folks?
If the disease is a serious health hazard, quarantine by legal authorities would be proper. Why?
It is the proper task of government to secure citizens’ rights. If someone with a contagious disease chooses to mingle with others who aren’t aware of this person’s disease, this person is very likely about to inflict a serious health hazard on these innocent citizens who haven’t chosen to mingle with the diseased person. So, the authorities entrusted with the job of securing our rights then have the responsibility to keep such people out of circulation.
Of course, whether SARS is such a serious disease is not something I know for sure and so I must put the matter in hypothetical form. If the disease is serious—not merely someone with a bad sneeze who may transmit a slight cold to others with whom contact will be unavoidable—then if this person intends to mingle with others, this person will be intent on embarking on criminal behavior—on assaulting others with his or her disease. No one has the right to do that to other persons who haven’t been forewarned and who have no choice about remaining in the vicinity of the diseased person.
None of this deals fully with the SARS phenomenon. There are, to the best of my knowledge, many others who carry contagious disease other than SARS. Thousands of persons with, for example, influenza travel freely about the globe without anyone going into panic about it. And, yes, influenza can kill! Arguably, then, SARS is something of a media driven scare, not a real serious hazard, compared to others afoot in various parts of the world.
The phenomenon reminds me of the time when thousands of people canceled trips to Europe after the USA bombed Libya back in April 1986 and there was fear of terrorism because of the bombing. One clever economist did some calculations and found that by remaining home, the chances for serious injury and even death for those who canceled their trips increased because of traffic hazards they would face when driving around on US soil. In contrast, flying to Europe and taking a train or a tour bus to various parts would have meant minimal danger to the tourists. No one, to my knowledge, has done a follow-up study on just how many of those who stayed away from Europe met with traffic mishaps. But the initial calculations by the economist seemed right.
In the present SARS scare thousands of people are foregoing vacations in China, Hong Kong, Toronto and other places where SARS has made its appearance. Given the relatively small numbers of those who have been felled by SARS, and given the statistical probability of meeting with traffic mishaps, it seems to me clear enough that this media driven and highly selective scare is once again leading to some unrecorded disasters.
Not much can be done about it, of course. When people get scared, however unreasonable their fear may well be, they will take measures to protect themselves. However, their protection may lead to worse things than what they feared in the first place.
It would be nice, under the circumstances, if the media—primarily news organizations—would report the comparative hazards stemming from SARS versus from other diseases and from the protective measures people are taking to avoid SARS. It should not be necessary for ordinary citizens, who rely so much on news organizations to inform them about what’s what, to become experts in this area. They should, instead, enjoy the services of their news reporters who should, in turn, dig deeper than superficial data that provides little more than grounds for panic rather than information that can help us make intelligent decisions. (For some official, government provided information on SARS, visit http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars/faq.htm.)
Rush Limbaugh's Fallacy
Tibor R. Machan
Every time I drive to school, I listen to Rush Limbaugh for about five minutes. It is cultural anthropology for me more than an interest in Rush's latest ridicule of Daschle & Co.. although I sympathize with that.
Last time I tuned in he was trying very hard to explain away the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found in Iraq. His take is that there were other good reasons to go to war there, namely, the alleged connection between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda, the terrorist network, and Hussein's sadistic dictatorship. So, Rush reasons, never mind the WMD--we had the authority to do the war even without them.
Why would Limbaugh try so hard now to rationalize the war with Iraq? Well, for one, he seems to by loyal to a fault to George W. Bush and wants to make sure the guy continues in office. Without the WMD he may well be beaten up in the upcoming race for taking America to war without good reason. The sad fact for Rush is that those other reasons he gives for why Bush was justified in going to war are not good reasons, actually.
It is not the business of the United States Armed Forces to engage in retaliatory armed conflict against some country that is merely speculatively connected with the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the USA. Some kind of procedure is needed whereby within the rule of law the connection is firmly established and Iraq's regime is shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have supported Al Qaeda's terrorism. Just to point a finger and say, they had something to do with this simply isn't enough, not in a civilized society. Indeed, the thing that is supposed to differentiate terrorists from civilized warriors is that the former care nothing about the niceties of the rule of law--due process, burden of proof, rules of evidence and such.
What then about Saddam being a vicious dictator? Trouble is there are many such around the globe, have always been, and while everyone is authorized to try to assassinate these guys, morally speaking, armies of various countries owe it to their citizens to stay on their post and stand ready to defend them. They have no moral authority to gallivant about the globe and purge it of dictators--they already have a job of defending the rights of their citizens.
So Limbaugh's efforts to bail out Bush just won't wash. Bush knew better, too, which is why he insisted that the war with Iraq is first and foremost about the weapons. Why was that important?
Because in a free country the military must act defensively, never aggressively. Preemptive strikes are justified only if there is serious, demonstrably high probability that another country will attack. This is akin to the idea in the criminal law that if one acts against another because the other is about to act against oneself, it is excusable; otherwise it is aggression, nothing less. Even in the cases where battered woman's or wife's syndrome is invoked, the idea is that the man was certainly going to attack the woman, so she could only escape the attack by acting first.
Of course, the US military has acted in the past without the justification needed for preemptive attack. But those cases are far more testy to square with the basic American idea that self-defense is the only justification for using force against other people.Humanitarianism is usually given as the justification for such cases of military interference. Do they suffice as such? May a country's military invade another country when that country's rulers oppress the bulk of the people there?
This is a big question and only a little space is left to deal with it. Suffice it to say that citizens of other countries could, as volunteers, be justified in coming to the aid of the oppressed but the armies are not since, well, their job is to defend their own citizens.
Tibor R. Machan
Every time I drive to school, I listen to Rush Limbaugh for about five minutes. It is cultural anthropology for me more than an interest in Rush's latest ridicule of Daschle & Co.. although I sympathize with that.
Last time I tuned in he was trying very hard to explain away the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found in Iraq. His take is that there were other good reasons to go to war there, namely, the alleged connection between Hussein's regime and Al Qaeda, the terrorist network, and Hussein's sadistic dictatorship. So, Rush reasons, never mind the WMD--we had the authority to do the war even without them.
Why would Limbaugh try so hard now to rationalize the war with Iraq? Well, for one, he seems to by loyal to a fault to George W. Bush and wants to make sure the guy continues in office. Without the WMD he may well be beaten up in the upcoming race for taking America to war without good reason. The sad fact for Rush is that those other reasons he gives for why Bush was justified in going to war are not good reasons, actually.
It is not the business of the United States Armed Forces to engage in retaliatory armed conflict against some country that is merely speculatively connected with the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the USA. Some kind of procedure is needed whereby within the rule of law the connection is firmly established and Iraq's regime is shown beyond a reasonable doubt to have supported Al Qaeda's terrorism. Just to point a finger and say, they had something to do with this simply isn't enough, not in a civilized society. Indeed, the thing that is supposed to differentiate terrorists from civilized warriors is that the former care nothing about the niceties of the rule of law--due process, burden of proof, rules of evidence and such.
What then about Saddam being a vicious dictator? Trouble is there are many such around the globe, have always been, and while everyone is authorized to try to assassinate these guys, morally speaking, armies of various countries owe it to their citizens to stay on their post and stand ready to defend them. They have no moral authority to gallivant about the globe and purge it of dictators--they already have a job of defending the rights of their citizens.
So Limbaugh's efforts to bail out Bush just won't wash. Bush knew better, too, which is why he insisted that the war with Iraq is first and foremost about the weapons. Why was that important?
Because in a free country the military must act defensively, never aggressively. Preemptive strikes are justified only if there is serious, demonstrably high probability that another country will attack. This is akin to the idea in the criminal law that if one acts against another because the other is about to act against oneself, it is excusable; otherwise it is aggression, nothing less. Even in the cases where battered woman's or wife's syndrome is invoked, the idea is that the man was certainly going to attack the woman, so she could only escape the attack by acting first.
Of course, the US military has acted in the past without the justification needed for preemptive attack. But those cases are far more testy to square with the basic American idea that self-defense is the only justification for using force against other people.Humanitarianism is usually given as the justification for such cases of military interference. Do they suffice as such? May a country's military invade another country when that country's rulers oppress the bulk of the people there?
This is a big question and only a little space is left to deal with it. Suffice it to say that citizens of other countries could, as volunteers, be justified in coming to the aid of the oppressed but the armies are not since, well, their job is to defend their own citizens.
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