With Apologies to Montesquieu
As virtue is necessary in a republic, and in a monarchy honor, so fear is necessary in a despotic government.... -Montesquieu
But if you want to have a big-government society, then you need to cultivate sloth, ignorance, guilt, envy, and a distaste for self-reliance. You need a people who are spoiled, lazy and dull. For then, not only will they not resist your government, but they will demand it. The alternative of a small, liberty-based government will be incomprehensible and scary to them.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Positive Liberty a Vacuous Concept At Best
...leftist legerdemain at worst. Here's the gist of it.
2 follows from 1.
3 does not follow. Now that you have changed the concept of liberty to include power and wealth, things which held true of liberty when the concept was narrowly defined as negative liberty no longer necessarily hold true. It holds true of negative liberty that a deficit of someone's negative liberty is a violation of his right. But it doesn't necessarily hold true of positive liberty. If you define "liberty" as fried chicken, don't expect every use of the word to hold true that held true before. In fact, since we are speaking of power and wealth, and we know that there are no positive rights to power and wealth, we know that in some cases an unequal distribution of liberty (as power and wealth) is not a violation of rights. For an unequal distribution of power and wealth in some cases is not a violation of rights. Cases of theft or tyranny are cases in which it would be a violation of rights. How ironic that leftism advocates theft and tyranny in response to distributions of power and wealth which are not in fact unjust. Legerdemain is needed in order to accomplish such a sophistical feat.
4 follows from 3.
In sum, 1 is idle stipulation and 3 is an invalid inference. Positive liberty has very little substance, though it may be used sophistically to marshal us along to the leftist drumbeat.
A coda: Some may wish to preserve positive liberty as self-direction, strength of will, self-control. One is constrained by weakness of will, by vice. However, even this won't work. We can speak of vices as hamstringing us, coercing or constraining our actions only figuratively. For they are not entities distinct from the agent. They are structures and dispositions of the agent. You can be free of your vices only in the figurative way that you can be free of a hamstring injury. A man with a hamstring injury is as free as he would be without it. It's just that there is something wrong with him. And a lack of liberty cannot literally be something wrong with you. Keep your concepts clear. Speak figuratively if you like, but don't use figurative speech as a foundation for a moral or political philosophy.
...leftist legerdemain at worst. Here's the gist of it.
- First, we expand the concept of liberty to include power and wealth.
- Next, we show that since power and wealth are unequally distributed, liberty is unequally distributed.
- We then infer that those with more power and wealth are violating the right to liberty of those with less.
- Finally, we conclude that those with more power and wealth are obliged to give some of theirs to those with less.
2 follows from 1.
3 does not follow. Now that you have changed the concept of liberty to include power and wealth, things which held true of liberty when the concept was narrowly defined as negative liberty no longer necessarily hold true. It holds true of negative liberty that a deficit of someone's negative liberty is a violation of his right. But it doesn't necessarily hold true of positive liberty. If you define "liberty" as fried chicken, don't expect every use of the word to hold true that held true before. In fact, since we are speaking of power and wealth, and we know that there are no positive rights to power and wealth, we know that in some cases an unequal distribution of liberty (as power and wealth) is not a violation of rights. For an unequal distribution of power and wealth in some cases is not a violation of rights. Cases of theft or tyranny are cases in which it would be a violation of rights. How ironic that leftism advocates theft and tyranny in response to distributions of power and wealth which are not in fact unjust. Legerdemain is needed in order to accomplish such a sophistical feat.
4 follows from 3.
In sum, 1 is idle stipulation and 3 is an invalid inference. Positive liberty has very little substance, though it may be used sophistically to marshal us along to the leftist drumbeat.
A coda: Some may wish to preserve positive liberty as self-direction, strength of will, self-control. One is constrained by weakness of will, by vice. However, even this won't work. We can speak of vices as hamstringing us, coercing or constraining our actions only figuratively. For they are not entities distinct from the agent. They are structures and dispositions of the agent. You can be free of your vices only in the figurative way that you can be free of a hamstring injury. A man with a hamstring injury is as free as he would be without it. It's just that there is something wrong with him. And a lack of liberty cannot literally be something wrong with you. Keep your concepts clear. Speak figuratively if you like, but don't use figurative speech as a foundation for a moral or political philosophy.
Monday, May 25, 2009
The Trouble with Mill, On Liberty
I hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men have rights to liberty. These are basic rights, not in need of proof or any justification other than the fact that they are obviously true and axiomatic. There being nothing that would count as evidence that a system of morals could be acceptable in which men did not have rights to liberty, we could not coherently interpret any such system as a system of morals. I think this verificationist argument shows that the proposition that all men have rights to liberty is a logical truth.
Keep in mind that these basic rights are defeasible; basicity does not entail absolute rules. I hesitate to call the rights to liberty "inalienable" for that reason. However, they could be interpreted as inalienable in the sense that even while one may forfeit one's right to liberty, it still remains the case that were the circumstances causing that forfeiture removed one would have that right to liberty.
In any event, Mill's book suffers for committing itself to rule-based moral theory and assuming that the right to liberty needs to be delimited by a rule and proven. It needs to be neither. This is the big problem with the book.
Of course, Mill will think the right to liberty needs proof if he thinks he needs to reduce it to a rule and prove that rule. The extent of the right to liberty is indefinite and not to be delimited by any rule. The variety of moral claims - duties and rights - is not subsumable under a system of rules. There is no finite decision procedure of moral deliberation that has any plausibility.
That Mill is a rule-based theorist commits him to progressivism. Any rule will be progressive, as it will be markedly different from ordinarily-held moral values. For those values are not subsumable under any system of rules. Thus does Mill become incompetent with respect to the need to preserve tradition. He praises not it but progress away from it. He realizes he should say more than this, and he says, "Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience." But he isn't able to develop this point. (Hayek was able to explain it. Although a utilitarian, he wasn't ensconced in rule-based moral theory as Mill was.)
The result is that Mill's liberty teeters unstably, with its progressivism and dubious basis in utilitarianism. The book has many an eloquent passage defending liberty of speech, thought, and way of life on the basis that these promote utility. Of course this is a reasonable argument to make. But that it is the foundation of the right to liberty is a mistake. We have that right even without those benefits.
I hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men have rights to liberty. These are basic rights, not in need of proof or any justification other than the fact that they are obviously true and axiomatic. There being nothing that would count as evidence that a system of morals could be acceptable in which men did not have rights to liberty, we could not coherently interpret any such system as a system of morals. I think this verificationist argument shows that the proposition that all men have rights to liberty is a logical truth.
Keep in mind that these basic rights are defeasible; basicity does not entail absolute rules. I hesitate to call the rights to liberty "inalienable" for that reason. However, they could be interpreted as inalienable in the sense that even while one may forfeit one's right to liberty, it still remains the case that were the circumstances causing that forfeiture removed one would have that right to liberty.
In any event, Mill's book suffers for committing itself to rule-based moral theory and assuming that the right to liberty needs to be delimited by a rule and proven. It needs to be neither. This is the big problem with the book.
Of course, Mill will think the right to liberty needs proof if he thinks he needs to reduce it to a rule and prove that rule. The extent of the right to liberty is indefinite and not to be delimited by any rule. The variety of moral claims - duties and rights - is not subsumable under a system of rules. There is no finite decision procedure of moral deliberation that has any plausibility.
That Mill is a rule-based theorist commits him to progressivism. Any rule will be progressive, as it will be markedly different from ordinarily-held moral values. For those values are not subsumable under any system of rules. Thus does Mill become incompetent with respect to the need to preserve tradition. He praises not it but progress away from it. He realizes he should say more than this, and he says, "Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of human experience." But he isn't able to develop this point. (Hayek was able to explain it. Although a utilitarian, he wasn't ensconced in rule-based moral theory as Mill was.)
The result is that Mill's liberty teeters unstably, with its progressivism and dubious basis in utilitarianism. The book has many an eloquent passage defending liberty of speech, thought, and way of life on the basis that these promote utility. Of course this is a reasonable argument to make. But that it is the foundation of the right to liberty is a mistake. We have that right even without those benefits.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Charles Taylor on Positive Liberty III
The basic flaw in Taylor's article is his premise that the defenders of negative freedom and opponents of positive freedom
shar[e]...with the rest of us in a post-Romantic civilisation which puts great value on self-realization, and values freedom largely because of this.
Thus does Taylor think that such people are committed, whether they like it or not, to accepting that self-fulfillment is a species of freedom.
This makes no sense. The fact that freedom is a necessary condition of self-fulfillment doesn't show that self-fulfillment is a species of freedom; it proves precisely that it is not. The "necessary condition" here is of the practical-causal kind, not of the logical genus-species kind. Of course, if you need to have an animal in hand order to have a bird in hand, this proves a bird is a kind of animal. But that is a logical genus-special condition. When we say a man needs freedom in order to fulfill himself, we mean that he needs it as a matter of practical necessity. But if you need a wife in order to be happy, this doesn't prove that happiness is a species of wife. In fact, it proves that it is not. Because that is the practical-causal kind of condition.
Your weakness of will and your failure to understand which endeavors it would be good and fulfilling for you to undertake are therefore not species of unfreedom. They are vices of akrasia and ignorance. You need freedom in order to overcome these vices. When you overcome them, you may speak metaphorically of becoming free. But this is only freedom from your own vices. To speak of one's vices as forces that get in one's way is figurative. As Jeff Goldstein and Friedrich Hayek have advised, we must take great pains to avoid verbal traps.
The basic flaw in Taylor's article is his premise that the defenders of negative freedom and opponents of positive freedom
shar[e]...with the rest of us in a post-Romantic civilisation which puts great value on self-realization, and values freedom largely because of this.
Thus does Taylor think that such people are committed, whether they like it or not, to accepting that self-fulfillment is a species of freedom.
This makes no sense. The fact that freedom is a necessary condition of self-fulfillment doesn't show that self-fulfillment is a species of freedom; it proves precisely that it is not. The "necessary condition" here is of the practical-causal kind, not of the logical genus-species kind. Of course, if you need to have an animal in hand order to have a bird in hand, this proves a bird is a kind of animal. But that is a logical genus-special condition. When we say a man needs freedom in order to fulfill himself, we mean that he needs it as a matter of practical necessity. But if you need a wife in order to be happy, this doesn't prove that happiness is a species of wife. In fact, it proves that it is not. Because that is the practical-causal kind of condition.
Your weakness of will and your failure to understand which endeavors it would be good and fulfilling for you to undertake are therefore not species of unfreedom. They are vices of akrasia and ignorance. You need freedom in order to overcome these vices. When you overcome them, you may speak metaphorically of becoming free. But this is only freedom from your own vices. To speak of one's vices as forces that get in one's way is figurative. As Jeff Goldstein and Friedrich Hayek have advised, we must take great pains to avoid verbal traps.
Unjustly High Taxation is not Slavery
As Hayek points out in Constitution of Liberty, power is not a species of liberty, nor is wealth. To call power or wealth by the name "liberty" is a verbal trap which will cause one to think that because people have rights to liberty, wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. This is to misconstrue the right to liberty as a right to others' property. It is to mistake property for liberty and to assume that since I have a right to liberty, I have a right to be given the property I need to do what I want to do.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, however. Libertarians are fond of arguing that unjustly high taxation is slavery. It is not. It is theft. When a man steals my property, even if it is the fruit of my labor he has not enslaved me or deprived me of liberty. Did the guy who made off with your TV set, enslave you for a day and a half? Of course not. Slaves must work, as they are coerced by their masters. Thieves coerce no one to work.
As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice...." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.
As Hayek points out in Constitution of Liberty, power is not a species of liberty, nor is wealth. To call power or wealth by the name "liberty" is a verbal trap which will cause one to think that because people have rights to liberty, wealth should be redistributed from the rich to the poor. This is to misconstrue the right to liberty as a right to others' property. It is to mistake property for liberty and to assume that since I have a right to liberty, I have a right to be given the property I need to do what I want to do.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, however. Libertarians are fond of arguing that unjustly high taxation is slavery. It is not. It is theft. When a man steals my property, even if it is the fruit of my labor he has not enslaved me or deprived me of liberty. Did the guy who made off with your TV set, enslave you for a day and a half? Of course not. Slaves must work, as they are coerced by their masters. Thieves coerce no one to work.
As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice...." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will V
Let's make a final pass over this issue of reasons for action. Frankfurt thinks that the concept of a person is of beings "capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are." But it is impossible to make sense of what would count as reasons for wanting to be different in that way. One might wish that some of one's desires, a small subset radically inconsistent with the vast majority of ones desires, would simply go away in order to liberate one from the irrationality of an inconsistent set of desires. Such is the wish of the unwilling drug addict, for example. But this wish is a desire generated by the set of first-order desires. In fact, it supervenes on them. It even supervenes logically, given a the simple recipe for prudential rationality I've proposed in the earlier posts. In other words, there is nothing to this wish other than the first-order desires themselves.
The picture Frankfurt offers, then, commits itself to externalism about reasons for action: that they are independent of one's first-order desires. This he does in order to rescue free will from obscurity. However, externalism is an inscrutable notion. No one has any idea of a reason to desire that is independent of one's antecedently held desires. Reason is, as Hume said, the slave of desire. Furthermore, as we've seen, the commitment to externalism is not necessary in order to explain free will.
Let's make a final pass over this issue of reasons for action. Frankfurt thinks that the concept of a person is of beings "capable of wanting to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are." But it is impossible to make sense of what would count as reasons for wanting to be different in that way. One might wish that some of one's desires, a small subset radically inconsistent with the vast majority of ones desires, would simply go away in order to liberate one from the irrationality of an inconsistent set of desires. Such is the wish of the unwilling drug addict, for example. But this wish is a desire generated by the set of first-order desires. In fact, it supervenes on them. It even supervenes logically, given a the simple recipe for prudential rationality I've proposed in the earlier posts. In other words, there is nothing to this wish other than the first-order desires themselves.
The picture Frankfurt offers, then, commits itself to externalism about reasons for action: that they are independent of one's first-order desires. This he does in order to rescue free will from obscurity. However, externalism is an inscrutable notion. No one has any idea of a reason to desire that is independent of one's antecedently held desires. Reason is, as Hume said, the slave of desire. Furthermore, as we've seen, the commitment to externalism is not necessary in order to explain free will.
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will IV
You may well ask how my alternative to Frankfurt's position of second-order desires does not itself posit second-order desires in order to explain free will. After all, haven't I said that one's will is dependent on one's wanting to maximize the net long-term fulfillment of one's first-order desires? That wanting would seem to be a second-order desire.
Not so. A bonafide second-order desire is a normative standard to the the set of first-order desires. It sits in judgment of them. It chooses amongst them based upon criteria other than their relative strength. In contrast, the desire to maximize the fulfillment of the set of first-order desires which I have posited is a servant to those desires themselves. It is like a political mechanism by which they maximize their fulfillment through compromise. Its particular determinations are derived from that set, rather than being independent norms by which the contents of that set are judged. It is a norm to each on of them but only because it is the resultant vector of all of them. Prudence is the servant of desires.
This theory of will avoids Frankfurt's problem with moral and prudential reasons. On my theory, one's reason for acting is always a given first-order desire. On Frankfurt's theory, one's reason for acting, if one has free will, is one's desire to fulfill a given first-order desire. Frankfurt separates the agent from what ought to be his reasons because he thinks we must be rendered wantons if he does not take this drastic step. But on the contrary, such a step isn't necessary in order to distinguish ourselves from wantons, and it makes it impossible to make sense of our reasons for action.
You may well ask how my alternative to Frankfurt's position of second-order desires does not itself posit second-order desires in order to explain free will. After all, haven't I said that one's will is dependent on one's wanting to maximize the net long-term fulfillment of one's first-order desires? That wanting would seem to be a second-order desire.
Not so. A bonafide second-order desire is a normative standard to the the set of first-order desires. It sits in judgment of them. It chooses amongst them based upon criteria other than their relative strength. In contrast, the desire to maximize the fulfillment of the set of first-order desires which I have posited is a servant to those desires themselves. It is like a political mechanism by which they maximize their fulfillment through compromise. Its particular determinations are derived from that set, rather than being independent norms by which the contents of that set are judged. It is a norm to each on of them but only because it is the resultant vector of all of them. Prudence is the servant of desires.
This theory of will avoids Frankfurt's problem with moral and prudential reasons. On my theory, one's reason for acting is always a given first-order desire. On Frankfurt's theory, one's reason for acting, if one has free will, is one's desire to fulfill a given first-order desire. Frankfurt separates the agent from what ought to be his reasons because he thinks we must be rendered wantons if he does not take this drastic step. But on the contrary, such a step isn't necessary in order to distinguish ourselves from wantons, and it makes it impossible to make sense of our reasons for action.
Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will III
There is a class of people who are my superiors and whom I would therefore be reluctant to think of as lacking freedom of the will. By upbringing they do not flee in battle, do not abandon their children when childrearing is unpleasant, and do not indulge in resentment, self-defilement, or envy. It never occurs to them to do these things, in spite of any momentarily strongly-felt desires to do so which may flare up within them sometimes. They have no need for second-order desires. Yet they are free.
Even Frankfurt sees that such spontaneously prudent beings (SPBs I'll call them) are free. He must because they obviously are. His picture of free will as conformity of action to second-order desires cannot easily account for this, however. He could propose that the second order desires of SPBs are subconsciously held, but that would be idle speculation. He could bring up his wanton again, the fellow who doesn't care how his first-order desires cause him to act or doesn't care on which of them he acts. Unless we accept his theory of free will, we will have to accept that the wanton is free, Frankfurt might say.
So, let's propose another psychology in order to settle these quandaries. If the wanton cared about which of his desires he followed in that he wanted his actions to maximize the net long-term satisfaction of the largest set of them - in other words if the wanton wanted to be prudentially rational - then he would have the potential to be free. If he successfully endeavored to act in such a prudent manner, he would be free in the sense that momentarily strong desires would be unable to sway him from his choice to maximize his larger set of desires. If this became effortless and unreflective for him, he would become an SPB.
The psychology we need, then, is not Frankfurt's top-heavy structure of orders of desires but only the rather more cognitive than connative capacity to reflect on the set of desires in order to determine which cause of action most satisfies it. Freedom of the will, then, is a mechanism for remembering which course of action is most desirable in the sense of maximizing the fulfillment of one's set of first-order desires. Employing this mechanism in order to repel temptation to do otherwise is enough to constitute freedom of the will. No desirability in the sense of second-order desires to follow first-order desires is needed.
There is a class of people who are my superiors and whom I would therefore be reluctant to think of as lacking freedom of the will. By upbringing they do not flee in battle, do not abandon their children when childrearing is unpleasant, and do not indulge in resentment, self-defilement, or envy. It never occurs to them to do these things, in spite of any momentarily strongly-felt desires to do so which may flare up within them sometimes. They have no need for second-order desires. Yet they are free.
Even Frankfurt sees that such spontaneously prudent beings (SPBs I'll call them) are free. He must because they obviously are. His picture of free will as conformity of action to second-order desires cannot easily account for this, however. He could propose that the second order desires of SPBs are subconsciously held, but that would be idle speculation. He could bring up his wanton again, the fellow who doesn't care how his first-order desires cause him to act or doesn't care on which of them he acts. Unless we accept his theory of free will, we will have to accept that the wanton is free, Frankfurt might say.
So, let's propose another psychology in order to settle these quandaries. If the wanton cared about which of his desires he followed in that he wanted his actions to maximize the net long-term satisfaction of the largest set of them - in other words if the wanton wanted to be prudentially rational - then he would have the potential to be free. If he successfully endeavored to act in such a prudent manner, he would be free in the sense that momentarily strong desires would be unable to sway him from his choice to maximize his larger set of desires. If this became effortless and unreflective for him, he would become an SPB.
The psychology we need, then, is not Frankfurt's top-heavy structure of orders of desires but only the rather more cognitive than connative capacity to reflect on the set of desires in order to determine which cause of action most satisfies it. Freedom of the will, then, is a mechanism for remembering which course of action is most desirable in the sense of maximizing the fulfillment of one's set of first-order desires. Employing this mechanism in order to repel temptation to do otherwise is enough to constitute freedom of the will. No desirability in the sense of second-order desires to follow first-order desires is needed.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will II
Frankfurt proposes an ordering of desires as a structure which explains free will. Free will, he says, is the success an agent has in choosing to act on those of his desires which he desires to be the ones he acts on. In other words, to have free will is to desire certain of your desires to determine your actions and to succeed in acting on those and not on the others. The desires for certain desires to be effective are second-order desires. Their objects are first-order desires.
Something is wrong with this picture. I touched upon the problem in the previous post. But let's look at it from a different angle: reasons. (By "reasons" I mean internal reason, or motives, rather than facts external to desires which may be cited as grounds for having those motives.) Your reason for action should be your first order desires, should it not? For instance, if you play tennis or defend justice, it would be fitting if your reasons for doing so were that you most desired to do those things. But we wouldn't want to say that it would be fitting for your reason to be that you desired to desire to do those things, would we? Well, I wouldn't. For instance, I wouldn't like to tell my son that I desired to raise him but my reason for doing so was because I desired that that desire be the one I acted on. It would be better if my reason for raising him were that my desire to raise him was the strongest amongst the competing desires. I call this competitive strength "preference." I assume that reasons for action and will are pretty close to one and the same. So, we shouldn't appeal to second-order desires to explain free will. Preference is what one most desires. It is the resultant vector of all the component vectors which are the set of one's desires. Free will is acting on that resultant vector because one knows it is the resultant vector. Unfree will fails to do so but moves one to do something else.
Frankfurt has will and preference down to second-order desires, rather than the resultant vector of first-order desires. This is too ornate. It may be that sometimes we have to reflect on competing first-order desires and choose which we desire to win the tug of war amongst them, for the most part this does not seem to the best picture of what's most commonly going on in the head. As we noted in the first post, Frankfurt portrays the person most at ease in freedom as not at all undergoing this sort of reflection. This shows that even he can tell that second-order desires are not part of the best picture of things.
More in the next post.
Frankfurt proposes an ordering of desires as a structure which explains free will. Free will, he says, is the success an agent has in choosing to act on those of his desires which he desires to be the ones he acts on. In other words, to have free will is to desire certain of your desires to determine your actions and to succeed in acting on those and not on the others. The desires for certain desires to be effective are second-order desires. Their objects are first-order desires.
Something is wrong with this picture. I touched upon the problem in the previous post. But let's look at it from a different angle: reasons. (By "reasons" I mean internal reason, or motives, rather than facts external to desires which may be cited as grounds for having those motives.) Your reason for action should be your first order desires, should it not? For instance, if you play tennis or defend justice, it would be fitting if your reasons for doing so were that you most desired to do those things. But we wouldn't want to say that it would be fitting for your reason to be that you desired to desire to do those things, would we? Well, I wouldn't. For instance, I wouldn't like to tell my son that I desired to raise him but my reason for doing so was because I desired that that desire be the one I acted on. It would be better if my reason for raising him were that my desire to raise him was the strongest amongst the competing desires. I call this competitive strength "preference." I assume that reasons for action and will are pretty close to one and the same. So, we shouldn't appeal to second-order desires to explain free will. Preference is what one most desires. It is the resultant vector of all the component vectors which are the set of one's desires. Free will is acting on that resultant vector because one knows it is the resultant vector. Unfree will fails to do so but moves one to do something else.
Frankfurt has will and preference down to second-order desires, rather than the resultant vector of first-order desires. This is too ornate. It may be that sometimes we have to reflect on competing first-order desires and choose which we desire to win the tug of war amongst them, for the most part this does not seem to the best picture of what's most commonly going on in the head. As we noted in the first post, Frankfurt portrays the person most at ease in freedom as not at all undergoing this sort of reflection. This shows that even he can tell that second-order desires are not part of the best picture of things.
More in the next post.
Frankfurt on Freedom of the Will I
The essay, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" is chapter 2 of The Importance of What We Care About.
Let's broach the issue by simply laying out two points in the essay which seem to me to be mutually inconsistent:
The essay, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" is chapter 2 of The Importance of What We Care About.
Let's broach the issue by simply laying out two points in the essay which seem to me to be mutually inconsistent:
- "[I]t never occurs to him to consider whether he wants the relations among his desires to result in his having the will he has."
- [T]he conformity of a person's will to his higher order volitions may be far more thoughtless and spontaneous than this." [Where "this" refers to "formed deliberately and...[with] struggles to ensure that they are satisfied."]
Monday, May 11, 2009
Right/Left
Oh, so I'm on the right and you're on the left? You're more towards the Bolsheviks, and I'm more towards the National Socialists, then? But you are not all the way over there with Lenin and Stalin, because you side with Hitler on some points. You're more moderate than Stalin because you tend toward the fascist on some issues, I guess. Right? We all lie somewhere on a spectrum that runs from Stalin to Hitler, in your view. Bolshevism and National Socialism together are the entirety of political philosophy, in your view.
Is that what you mean? Such is the depth of your political wisdom. Maybe it's not what you mean. But if you are on the left, either this is what you mean or you are so confused that you mean nothing at all when you speak of these things but only intend to give voice to your resentment. Which is it in your case?
I don't share any of the values of the National Socialists, not even moderate versions of them. What are your political values? Individualism and freedom from government control didn't exactly leap to mind, did they? In fact those concepts are slightly suspect in your view. You resent them for reasons you can't put your finger on. Someone has made you resent them. Why would someone do such a thing?
But while I share nothing with the National Socialists, you share many of Stalin's values, perhaps in moderated form. Don't you? For example, you are in favor of enormous government power over the American economy and severe limitation of private property rights. You also want capitalism to end. You don't want it to end but just to be under complete government control? Then you tend toward the fascist on that issue.
Have you ever given much thought to self-reliance, private property rights, limited government, gratitude, innovation and hard work? No, you prefer to dream of the American government controlling half of the economy and also controlling private enterprise, as well as eliminating the American health insurance industry and replacing it with more government. The prospect of government spending at 50% of GDP carries on importance or significance for you.
In fact, then, you tend towards both Stalin and Hitler. You see, they were on the same page. "Right" is a word leftists use to mean "enemy of my favored kind of totalitarianism." That's how you use it, just as the Bolsheviks wanted you to do. It is a leftist brickbat; it has no philosophical content. You've been hoodwinked by your "education" into believing that Stalin and Hitler, left and right, were polar opposites. You probably think that Hitler was conservative, don't you? Such is the profundity of your confusion and ignorance, flaws which you should take steps to correct but will not. Stalin and Hitler were both totalitarians who believed in government control of property and business and the elimination of individual liberty. Perhaps you are more moderate in your views than they, but your views are of the same kind. Do you eschew violence as a means, though they do not? Perhaps not. You will, after all, support the police as they arrest people unwilling to participate in your new government-controlled system. What if great numbers of these people really get in the way of the implementation of your totalitarian vision? Perhaps they should be eliminated. 100 million of them were eliminated in favor of totalitarianism in the last century. What's a few more if it will get you where you, in your ignorance, think justice (it's really revenge and the gratification of resentment and guilt, but you wouldn't know the difference) may be found? Never mind the economic impossibility of it all. That never stopped Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, your less moderate intellectual forebears.
You have filled a hole in your mind with twaddle festooned with pompous language intended to create a semblance of political philosophy. You are cheering as the American experiment in liberty, self-reliance and prosperity, which created more prosperity and freedom than any other force in history, is taken out back and shot. But never mind, your hatred of the rich is as far in political philosophy as your ken will take you. You even think that conservatives were in bed with big business but that the fascist government you currently applaud is not. You have no idea what ramifications the federal debt has or what the significance of permanent yearly deficits of $1T is, and you don't know anything about economics. But you support the spending that will cause these deficits. You somehow vaguely think that this must be done because of what conservatives did to your country, even though you don't know what conservatism is or how much damage the enormous size of your government has done to your country in the last 75 years.
You probably resent this post but have very little grasp of it. Resentment is your modus operandi in the political forum.
Oh, so I'm on the right and you're on the left? You're more towards the Bolsheviks, and I'm more towards the National Socialists, then? But you are not all the way over there with Lenin and Stalin, because you side with Hitler on some points. You're more moderate than Stalin because you tend toward the fascist on some issues, I guess. Right? We all lie somewhere on a spectrum that runs from Stalin to Hitler, in your view. Bolshevism and National Socialism together are the entirety of political philosophy, in your view.
Is that what you mean? Such is the depth of your political wisdom. Maybe it's not what you mean. But if you are on the left, either this is what you mean or you are so confused that you mean nothing at all when you speak of these things but only intend to give voice to your resentment. Which is it in your case?
I don't share any of the values of the National Socialists, not even moderate versions of them. What are your political values? Individualism and freedom from government control didn't exactly leap to mind, did they? In fact those concepts are slightly suspect in your view. You resent them for reasons you can't put your finger on. Someone has made you resent them. Why would someone do such a thing?
But while I share nothing with the National Socialists, you share many of Stalin's values, perhaps in moderated form. Don't you? For example, you are in favor of enormous government power over the American economy and severe limitation of private property rights. You also want capitalism to end. You don't want it to end but just to be under complete government control? Then you tend toward the fascist on that issue.
Have you ever given much thought to self-reliance, private property rights, limited government, gratitude, innovation and hard work? No, you prefer to dream of the American government controlling half of the economy and also controlling private enterprise, as well as eliminating the American health insurance industry and replacing it with more government. The prospect of government spending at 50% of GDP carries on importance or significance for you.
In fact, then, you tend towards both Stalin and Hitler. You see, they were on the same page. "Right" is a word leftists use to mean "enemy of my favored kind of totalitarianism." That's how you use it, just as the Bolsheviks wanted you to do. It is a leftist brickbat; it has no philosophical content. You've been hoodwinked by your "education" into believing that Stalin and Hitler, left and right, were polar opposites. You probably think that Hitler was conservative, don't you? Such is the profundity of your confusion and ignorance, flaws which you should take steps to correct but will not. Stalin and Hitler were both totalitarians who believed in government control of property and business and the elimination of individual liberty. Perhaps you are more moderate in your views than they, but your views are of the same kind. Do you eschew violence as a means, though they do not? Perhaps not. You will, after all, support the police as they arrest people unwilling to participate in your new government-controlled system. What if great numbers of these people really get in the way of the implementation of your totalitarian vision? Perhaps they should be eliminated. 100 million of them were eliminated in favor of totalitarianism in the last century. What's a few more if it will get you where you, in your ignorance, think justice (it's really revenge and the gratification of resentment and guilt, but you wouldn't know the difference) may be found? Never mind the economic impossibility of it all. That never stopped Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, your less moderate intellectual forebears.
You have filled a hole in your mind with twaddle festooned with pompous language intended to create a semblance of political philosophy. You are cheering as the American experiment in liberty, self-reliance and prosperity, which created more prosperity and freedom than any other force in history, is taken out back and shot. But never mind, your hatred of the rich is as far in political philosophy as your ken will take you. You even think that conservatives were in bed with big business but that the fascist government you currently applaud is not. You have no idea what ramifications the federal debt has or what the significance of permanent yearly deficits of $1T is, and you don't know anything about economics. But you support the spending that will cause these deficits. You somehow vaguely think that this must be done because of what conservatives did to your country, even though you don't know what conservatism is or how much damage the enormous size of your government has done to your country in the last 75 years.
You probably resent this post but have very little grasp of it. Resentment is your modus operandi in the political forum.
True Love
Of course, I'm talking about romantic love, not one's love for one's children or friends or non-spouse family members. True love exists, though I'd guess it's uncommon. It's not necessary for a good marriage or a happy life. There can be good marriages in which the spouses love one another but one (or both) doesn't "truly love" the other. There are lives which lack true love but are much better than some lives that have it. It can cause trouble in a life, too. So, it's not a cardinal purpose of life. But I digress. The point is to define it.
Here is an analytical definition of true love:
"S truly loves R" =df "S admires many of R's characteristics in the categories of the psychological and moral (character traits, talents, dispositions) and the physical (appearance and behaviors), and including the large and important characteristics and also the small and unimportant ones. Also, S deeply admires some traits of R from each category. Finally, S also has romantic feelings for R (desires to show R affection physically, desires to couple with R, desires R sexually, and so forth.)
To refute an analytical definition, think of a counterexample. I don't know what would count as a case of true love in which S wasn't described by the definiens I've given. Nor can I imagine evidence that would suggest that although S could be described by the definiens, S did not truly love R. That is the argument for this definition. But it could collapse under the weight of a good counterexample.
Of course, I'm talking about romantic love, not one's love for one's children or friends or non-spouse family members. True love exists, though I'd guess it's uncommon. It's not necessary for a good marriage or a happy life. There can be good marriages in which the spouses love one another but one (or both) doesn't "truly love" the other. There are lives which lack true love but are much better than some lives that have it. It can cause trouble in a life, too. So, it's not a cardinal purpose of life. But I digress. The point is to define it.
Here is an analytical definition of true love:
"S truly loves R" =df "S admires many of R's characteristics in the categories of the psychological and moral (character traits, talents, dispositions) and the physical (appearance and behaviors), and including the large and important characteristics and also the small and unimportant ones. Also, S deeply admires some traits of R from each category. Finally, S also has romantic feelings for R (desires to show R affection physically, desires to couple with R, desires R sexually, and so forth.)
To refute an analytical definition, think of a counterexample. I don't know what would count as a case of true love in which S wasn't described by the definiens I've given. Nor can I imagine evidence that would suggest that although S could be described by the definiens, S did not truly love R. That is the argument for this definition. But it could collapse under the weight of a good counterexample.
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Sacrifice
Let's rehearse this business about Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence, again. Here is the passage which I mentioned a couple of years ago. It begins with Ellen Olenska:
Think of other cases. For example, a woman who realizes in her late 20's that her husband and mother are poor family members, too absorbed by their mild narcissistic and rage disorders to know what love is. Also, the woman has few other really good and intelligent people with whom to make friendships. Nevertheless, this woman resolves to stay with this family because there are children involved who need their mother and father to stay with them. She thus gives up more than a decade of time to living a life which is in large part not good for her and also lonely. She achieves the insight into happiness which Olenska does, and she does what she ought just as well as she. But, no perfect Olenska, she also has days from time to time on which she is Archer.
Gratitude and virtue are a sort of spinal cord of character. Failing the former, the latter is difficult. If you have both of them in spades, you come to a fulfillment of character which is the stuff of self-love, as Olenska discovers but Archer never does.
Let's rehearse this business about Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence, again. Here is the passage which I mentioned a couple of years ago. It begins with Ellen Olenska:
Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing - give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ....And because my family was going to be your family - for May's sake and for yours - I did what you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do. Ah," she broke out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for you!"At this point, Archer suggests Olenska go out with her friends: "Since you tell me that you’re lonely...."
...
The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final and irrevocable. It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever lift that load from his heart....
"At least I loved you-" he brought out.
On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a child's.
...
[Olenska:]"I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and - unnecessary. The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before - and it's better than anything I've known."
She smiled a little under her wet lashes. "I shan't be lonely now. I WAS lonely; I WAS afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a room where there's always a light."This rare opportunity to achieve and manifest character virtues presents itself to Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska. Olenska takes full advantage of this opportunity, while Archer has only middling success. Only Olenska grasps the opportunity to retain one's happiness in spite of the painful sacrifice required for these virtues. Archer hasn't the foggiest idea of this happiness.
Think of other cases. For example, a woman who realizes in her late 20's that her husband and mother are poor family members, too absorbed by their mild narcissistic and rage disorders to know what love is. Also, the woman has few other really good and intelligent people with whom to make friendships. Nevertheless, this woman resolves to stay with this family because there are children involved who need their mother and father to stay with them. She thus gives up more than a decade of time to living a life which is in large part not good for her and also lonely. She achieves the insight into happiness which Olenska does, and she does what she ought just as well as she. But, no perfect Olenska, she also has days from time to time on which she is Archer.
Gratitude and virtue are a sort of spinal cord of character. Failing the former, the latter is difficult. If you have both of them in spades, you come to a fulfillment of character which is the stuff of self-love, as Olenska discovers but Archer never does.
Sunday, April 05, 2009
Charles Taylor on Positive Liberty II
Let's cut the chase. Taylor's essay is about two forms of liberty which, even if they are kinds of positive liberty, are not the kind the reality of which is at issue in political philosophy. The essay is tightly argued enough and it is of interest in the analysis of individual liberty, a topic in metaphysics. But its overall importance to political philosophy was not well enough thought out before the writing. All this about Maginot lines and totalitarianism are meant to make it seem as though the kinds of liberty Taylor argues for are problems for the proponent of liberty and opponent of totalitarianism. But they're not.
There are three candidates for kinds of positive liberty in play:
In fact, #1 and #2 run counter to totalitarianism. It is precisely the state which ought to stay out of the way of the individual, so that he may be left to cultivating his liberty in the sense of #1 and #2. The state is ill-equipped to help you be rid of your impulse desires or to give you self-understanding; and it is dangerous when it is empowered for such a cause. Taylor's essay goes astray in overlooking this possibility and assuming the opposite.
Also, I'm not so sure that #1 and #2 are positive liberty. Taylor says they are the exercise of capacities, rather than the lack of external obstacles to one's actions. Well, they certainly are the lack of certain internal obstacles: rashness, incontinence, weakness of will, and cognitive failures. I don't see how they are capacities. They strike me as two kinds of negative liberty. If negative liberty is the lack of anyone's preventing one from acting, #1 and #2 speak to the special case of the lack of one's own getting in one's way in virtue of one's own vices.
So, the kinds of liberty Taylor uses to support the case for positive liberty and against the foe of totalitarianism are not kinds of positive liberty. Even if they were, they still wouldn't be the kind which we should count in favor of totalitarianism.
UPDATE: Yes, even #3 is arguably a covert form of negative liberty. We'll discuss #3 in the next post. But for the moment take note of the fact that totalitarian and General Will-supporting political viewpoints take one's political mastery to be a goal distinct from the the lack of a master over oneself. The latter is a logical prerequisite to the former but is not the goal whereas the former is. In any event, the genuine proponent of positive liberty desires that the individual melt into the General Will. His concept of #3 isn't a negative one.
UPDATE: Some trivial editing today.
UPDATE (10/22/2009): Bah! I didn't explain what I was driving at clearly enough. In short, #1 and #2 are forms of liberty to which the proponent of liberty is attracted, but they do not even tend to support totalitarianism, while #3 supports totalitarianism but isn't even slightly attractive to the proponent of liberty. Taylor's essay trades upon a blurring of this distinction between #1 and #2, on the one hand, and #3, on the other.
Let's cut the chase. Taylor's essay is about two forms of liberty which, even if they are kinds of positive liberty, are not the kind the reality of which is at issue in political philosophy. The essay is tightly argued enough and it is of interest in the analysis of individual liberty, a topic in metaphysics. But its overall importance to political philosophy was not well enough thought out before the writing. All this about Maginot lines and totalitarianism are meant to make it seem as though the kinds of liberty Taylor argues for are problems for the proponent of liberty and opponent of totalitarianism. But they're not.
There are three candidates for kinds of positive liberty in play:
- Freedom from the constraint upon one's actions of impulse desires which make one do what is not what one would prefer to do with full information and full coherence of prudential reasoning.
- Freedom from the constraint upon one's actions of mistaken beliefs about what is important to one.
- Political mastery, so that no one else is one's master.
In fact, #1 and #2 run counter to totalitarianism. It is precisely the state which ought to stay out of the way of the individual, so that he may be left to cultivating his liberty in the sense of #1 and #2. The state is ill-equipped to help you be rid of your impulse desires or to give you self-understanding; and it is dangerous when it is empowered for such a cause. Taylor's essay goes astray in overlooking this possibility and assuming the opposite.
Also, I'm not so sure that #1 and #2 are positive liberty. Taylor says they are the exercise of capacities, rather than the lack of external obstacles to one's actions. Well, they certainly are the lack of certain internal obstacles: rashness, incontinence, weakness of will, and cognitive failures. I don't see how they are capacities. They strike me as two kinds of negative liberty. If negative liberty is the lack of anyone's preventing one from acting, #1 and #2 speak to the special case of the lack of one's own getting in one's way in virtue of one's own vices.
So, the kinds of liberty Taylor uses to support the case for positive liberty and against the foe of totalitarianism are not kinds of positive liberty. Even if they were, they still wouldn't be the kind which we should count in favor of totalitarianism.
UPDATE: Yes, even #3 is arguably a covert form of negative liberty. We'll discuss #3 in the next post. But for the moment take note of the fact that totalitarian and General Will-supporting political viewpoints take one's political mastery to be a goal distinct from the the lack of a master over oneself. The latter is a logical prerequisite to the former but is not the goal whereas the former is. In any event, the genuine proponent of positive liberty desires that the individual melt into the General Will. His concept of #3 isn't a negative one.
UPDATE: Some trivial editing today.
UPDATE (10/22/2009): Bah! I didn't explain what I was driving at clearly enough. In short, #1 and #2 are forms of liberty to which the proponent of liberty is attracted, but they do not even tend to support totalitarianism, while #3 supports totalitarianism but isn't even slightly attractive to the proponent of liberty. Taylor's essay trades upon a blurring of this distinction between #1 and #2, on the one hand, and #3, on the other.
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Charles Taylor on Positive Liberty I
First off, just a short note: a point of order. Taylor attributes to the positive liberty skeptic and negative liberty proponent a strategy of denying the reality of positive liberty in order to deny totalitarian political philosophy a premise it needs. He calls this the negative liberty proponent's drawing a "Maginot Line," on the one side of which is the negative liberty which he accepts and the other side the positive liberty which he absolutely denies.
This is pretty close to ridiculous, either on Taylor's part or on the part of any negative liberty proponent who upholds such a strategy. The facts about liberty are what they are independently of whether totalitarian political philosophy is wrong and ought to be refuted. To become confused about this is to relinquish genuine philosophical inquiry and enter into the sham inquiry of the dogmatist. To the extent that Taylor proposes that all negative liberty proponents are dogmatic sham inquirers, his essay suffers.
[Let's rehearse Susan Haack's concepts of the sham inquirer and fake inquirer. The former has a dogma which he will not relinquish under any evidential circumstances, and he lets this bias distort his inquiries and debates by attempting to make the evidence seem to be consistent with his dogma or seem to show that his dogma is true. The fake inquirer, on the other hand, is the sophist who, not caring about truth or falsity and having no dogma, likes to bullshit (as Harry Frankfurt would have called it) by arguing for positions which he doesn't believe to be true and using any rhetoric which will make those positions seem to be true. Neither kind of pseudo-inquirer intends to discover what the evidence shows to be true.]
First off, just a short note: a point of order. Taylor attributes to the positive liberty skeptic and negative liberty proponent a strategy of denying the reality of positive liberty in order to deny totalitarian political philosophy a premise it needs. He calls this the negative liberty proponent's drawing a "Maginot Line," on the one side of which is the negative liberty which he accepts and the other side the positive liberty which he absolutely denies.
This is pretty close to ridiculous, either on Taylor's part or on the part of any negative liberty proponent who upholds such a strategy. The facts about liberty are what they are independently of whether totalitarian political philosophy is wrong and ought to be refuted. To become confused about this is to relinquish genuine philosophical inquiry and enter into the sham inquiry of the dogmatist. To the extent that Taylor proposes that all negative liberty proponents are dogmatic sham inquirers, his essay suffers.
[Let's rehearse Susan Haack's concepts of the sham inquirer and fake inquirer. The former has a dogma which he will not relinquish under any evidential circumstances, and he lets this bias distort his inquiries and debates by attempting to make the evidence seem to be consistent with his dogma or seem to show that his dogma is true. The fake inquirer, on the other hand, is the sophist who, not caring about truth or falsity and having no dogma, likes to bullshit (as Harry Frankfurt would have called it) by arguing for positions which he doesn't believe to be true and using any rhetoric which will make those positions seem to be true. Neither kind of pseudo-inquirer intends to discover what the evidence shows to be true.]
Monday, March 30, 2009
Analyzing Negative and Positive Liberty
Of course, the question remains, Isn't all of this just semantics? That is, what is this issue all about? It seems that everyone understands negative liberty. If some people want to call an individual's personal fulfillment or individual control of the political system "liberty," as well, who cares? There seems to be no fact of the matter about whether those two things are really liberty independently of linguistic convention, so it seems to be fake issue which may be dissolved as "mere semantics."
What this objection overlooks is that if "positive liberty" is allowed into our vocabulary the proponent of positive liberty will also demand that negative liberty of the well-off be curtailed in order to increase the positive liberty of the poor, the personally unfulfilled, and those who have not had much of a voice in their government. For it is assumed by all parties that one may have as much liberty as is compatible with others' having the same amount. This is why you aren't allowed to walk down the sidewalk swinging your arms wildly, driving your car into people's living rooms, or enslaving people. People of excellence, wealth, and, due to their talents and the importance of their roles in society, customary influence in the political sphere will have to sacrifice some of their negative and positive liberty in order to increase the positive liberty of the losers in society who are unhappy, poor and, due to their having little to offer, have little role in political life. Wealth and political sway will have to be artificially transferred to these people because, thought they have as much negative liberty as anyone else, they don't have much positive liberty.
If this is what the advocate of positive liberty will argue, then perhaps the issue is not bogus. However, perhaps it may be drained of its newly found substance. Perhaps the assumption we stipulated above should be amended to read:
So, the issue is of substance. We are forced to come up with an analytical definition of liberty if we want to answer the charge of varies leftists, big-government liberals, and totalitarians that, as a matter of our common devotion to liberty, the losers in life deserve to have more personal fulfillment and political influence provided for them by the winners at the cost of the winners' negative liberty.
Next, we will take up Charles Taylor's essay on this point: "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty".
Of course, the question remains, Isn't all of this just semantics? That is, what is this issue all about? It seems that everyone understands negative liberty. If some people want to call an individual's personal fulfillment or individual control of the political system "liberty," as well, who cares? There seems to be no fact of the matter about whether those two things are really liberty independently of linguistic convention, so it seems to be fake issue which may be dissolved as "mere semantics."
What this objection overlooks is that if "positive liberty" is allowed into our vocabulary the proponent of positive liberty will also demand that negative liberty of the well-off be curtailed in order to increase the positive liberty of the poor, the personally unfulfilled, and those who have not had much of a voice in their government. For it is assumed by all parties that one may have as much liberty as is compatible with others' having the same amount. This is why you aren't allowed to walk down the sidewalk swinging your arms wildly, driving your car into people's living rooms, or enslaving people. People of excellence, wealth, and, due to their talents and the importance of their roles in society, customary influence in the political sphere will have to sacrifice some of their negative and positive liberty in order to increase the positive liberty of the losers in society who are unhappy, poor and, due to their having little to offer, have little role in political life. Wealth and political sway will have to be artificially transferred to these people because, thought they have as much negative liberty as anyone else, they don't have much positive liberty.
If this is what the advocate of positive liberty will argue, then perhaps the issue is not bogus. However, perhaps it may be drained of its newly found substance. Perhaps the assumption we stipulated above should be amended to read:
It is assumed by all parties that one may have as much negative liberty as is compatible with others' having the same amount.But the advocate of positive liberty will require proof that the principle should be fine-tuned in this way when, after all, the principle originally included no reference to species of liberty.
So, the issue is of substance. We are forced to come up with an analytical definition of liberty if we want to answer the charge of varies leftists, big-government liberals, and totalitarians that, as a matter of our common devotion to liberty, the losers in life deserve to have more personal fulfillment and political influence provided for them by the winners at the cost of the winners' negative liberty.
Next, we will take up Charles Taylor's essay on this point: "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty".
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty III
Just to sum up: This is a classic of 20th C political philosophy, in particular for its carefully marshaled indictment of positive liberty as a threat to negative liberty. It is also incoherent. It is also a case study in the evolution of classical liberalism into big-government liberalism, liberal statism, or, in Jonah Goldberg's phrase, liberal fascism.
This essay, therefore, shows how it can be that "liberalism" is now a label used to refer to statist infringements of liberty. The modern liberal is on the left and devoted to big government and redistribution of wealth. He has traveled far from classical liberalism. Berlin's incoherent essay shows in a nutshell how he got lost.
Just to sum up: This is a classic of 20th C political philosophy, in particular for its carefully marshaled indictment of positive liberty as a threat to negative liberty. It is also incoherent. It is also a case study in the evolution of classical liberalism into big-government liberalism, liberal statism, or, in Jonah Goldberg's phrase, liberal fascism.
This essay, therefore, shows how it can be that "liberalism" is now a label used to refer to statist infringements of liberty. The modern liberal is on the left and devoted to big government and redistribution of wealth. He has traveled far from classical liberalism. Berlin's incoherent essay shows in a nutshell how he got lost.
Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty II
Berlin's essay defends positive liberty vehemently, though without argumentation. One of his interpreters sees the essay as a "polemic against positive freedom" which "left his commitments to social justice unspecified" (M. Ignatieff, Berlin: A Life), while another, M. Rothbard (in The Ethics of Liberty) says, "Berlin fell into confusion, and ended by virtually abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall, willy-nilly, into the 'positive liberty' camp."
Both views are correct because Berlin was confused. It is worth quoting again the passages in which Berlin lashes out at those who do not cherish the positive liberty of the poor. As I said in post I:
...Berlin’s fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual’s person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined. (Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty)
Not so. Rothbard thinks that if Berlin could only see that removing property from the wealthy and giving it to the poor was an infraction of the rights of the wealthy to liberty, then he would have backed away from his "social justice" and avoided the confusion. But on the contrary, Berlin knew that his redistributive ambitions would impinge upon liberty. Indeed, he said precisely in "Two Concepts",
Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust or immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality...an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or in peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my 'liberal' individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom - social or economic - is increased.
Of course Rothbard fails to explicate Berlin's essay; the essay is incoherent. Berlin holds that social justice both is and is not liberty. Now we're at the heart of the flaw in the essay. Berlin is bothered by his conscience and his shame to speak out in favor of positive liberty. He doesn't want to associate himself with the wolves by arguing solely for negative liberty. Yet, he also sees that his goal of positive liberty requires infringing upon the negative liberty rights of the wealthy. He thinks that their wealth depends on the misery of the poor which is impossible in a system of pure negative liberty. He sees the rich as wolves and the poor as sheep devoured, which is an appropriate simile only for a system in which negative liberty rights are not enforced but not for one in which they are.
The flaw of Berlin's essay, then, is two-fold. It both embraces and eschews positive liberty, and it is based on the confused notion that a system of absolute negative liberty is one in which the wealthy oppress the poor.
Berlin's pluralism about competing values is spot on, and this, along with the carefully-argued indictment of positive liberty, is what makes the essay valuable. However, when the pluralist misunderstands one of his values - justice - and makes an illicit addition to his set - equality of economic outcome - then he ends in confusion and incoherence. In addition, he champions the New Deal and other monstrous infringements upon liberty and frugality.
This is the transition from classical liberalism to big-government liberalism. Big government is a burden of debt on America, and in the case of the current financial debacle, the liberal government's meddling in the mortgage market has brought us a housing bubble and the real possibility of economic collapse. We respond now with more government spending, of course. What we reap next is what liberalism, in its confusion, has sewn.
Berlin's essay defends positive liberty vehemently, though without argumentation. One of his interpreters sees the essay as a "polemic against positive freedom" which "left his commitments to social justice unspecified" (M. Ignatieff, Berlin: A Life), while another, M. Rothbard (in The Ethics of Liberty) says, "Berlin fell into confusion, and ended by virtually abandoning the very negative liberty he had tried to establish and to fall, willy-nilly, into the 'positive liberty' camp."
Both views are correct because Berlin was confused. It is worth quoting again the passages in which Berlin lashes out at those who do not cherish the positive liberty of the poor. As I said in post I:
Indeed, he claims that "it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction" of this goal of positive freedom is, as well as negative freedom, "an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind." Again,Elsewhere Berlin lashed out at systems of full negative liberty for the usual trite reasons about their letting the "wolves eat the sheep." He praised the New Deal and other restrictions on economic freedom as correct trade-offs of negative freedom or "social justice" (a hackneyed leftist phrase meaning redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.) Rothbard attempts to diagnose the confusion of a man who so clearly understood the threat of positive liberty yet also embraced it.
[I]t is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and...not to recognize this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age.
...Berlin’s fundamental flaw was his failure to define negative liberty as the absence of physical interference with an individual’s person and property, with his just property rights broadly defined. (Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty)
Not so. Rothbard thinks that if Berlin could only see that removing property from the wealthy and giving it to the poor was an infraction of the rights of the wealthy to liberty, then he would have backed away from his "social justice" and avoided the confusion. But on the contrary, Berlin knew that his redistributive ambitions would impinge upon liberty. Indeed, he said precisely in "Two Concepts",
Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience. If the liberty of myself or my class or nation depends on the misery of a number of other human beings, the system which promotes this is unjust or immoral. But if I curtail or lose my freedom, in order to lessen the shame of such inequality...an absolute loss of liberty occurs. This may be compensated for by a gain in justice or in happiness or in peace, but the loss remains, and it is a confusion of values to say that although my 'liberal' individual freedom may go by the board, some other kind of freedom - social or economic - is increased.
Of course Rothbard fails to explicate Berlin's essay; the essay is incoherent. Berlin holds that social justice both is and is not liberty. Now we're at the heart of the flaw in the essay. Berlin is bothered by his conscience and his shame to speak out in favor of positive liberty. He doesn't want to associate himself with the wolves by arguing solely for negative liberty. Yet, he also sees that his goal of positive liberty requires infringing upon the negative liberty rights of the wealthy. He thinks that their wealth depends on the misery of the poor which is impossible in a system of pure negative liberty. He sees the rich as wolves and the poor as sheep devoured, which is an appropriate simile only for a system in which negative liberty rights are not enforced but not for one in which they are.
The flaw of Berlin's essay, then, is two-fold. It both embraces and eschews positive liberty, and it is based on the confused notion that a system of absolute negative liberty is one in which the wealthy oppress the poor.
Berlin's pluralism about competing values is spot on, and this, along with the carefully-argued indictment of positive liberty, is what makes the essay valuable. However, when the pluralist misunderstands one of his values - justice - and makes an illicit addition to his set - equality of economic outcome - then he ends in confusion and incoherence. In addition, he champions the New Deal and other monstrous infringements upon liberty and frugality.
This is the transition from classical liberalism to big-government liberalism. Big government is a burden of debt on America, and in the case of the current financial debacle, the liberal government's meddling in the mortgage market has brought us a housing bubble and the real possibility of economic collapse. We respond now with more government spending, of course. What we reap next is what liberalism, in its confusion, has sewn.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Natural Law, Conservatism, Moral Theory, and Divine Command Theory. Also, Verificationism and Moral Theory
Before returning to Berlin on liberty, let's tie together some loose ends. Many people are confused about the concepts listed in the title of this post. Over the last few months I have posted on them. Now it's time to lay some confusions to rest. I've also owed you my post on verificationism and moral theory for two years now.
As I said before, natural law does not entail that God exists. If God does not exists, it remains the case that this world exists and that humans have a nature such that good lives are to be had by behaving in certain ways but not in others and right acts are to be done only if one does certain things but not others. It is, for instance, right to repay a debt when promised and wrong to kill people for fun. Self-reliance is good, while sloth is not. These things are so because of the way human beings are and because of the meanings of moral terms. Anyone who understands human nature and knows the English words "right" and "good" can see that these things are so.
If God created human beings to be so, that's all well and good. But to contemplate this creation confuses the natural law theorist who has faith in God. He thinks that human nature is so because God made it so and that this explanation is the more fundamental one underlying the explanation that moral facts are what they are because human nature is the way it is. However, this is a confusion of causal explanation with essential explanation. The fact that Joe baked the bread isn't more fundamental to the explanation that the bread is nutritious because it is made of wheat. Nor is the fact, if it is a fact, that God made the wheat. It is informative to know who made something, but it doesn't tell us why the bread is nutritious. We have known for 2500 years now that right and wrong aren't so because God says so. We shouldn't confusedly think that the natural law theory of morality entails that God exists. It can be combined with divine command theory but it needn't be.
Conservatism takes human nature and moral language seriously. It doesn't try to ignore or change the former or pervert the latter, as leftism and other assorted statisms and totalitarianisms do. The moral term "right" has to do with judgments about the competing interests of multiple people. To say that an action is "right" is to say that it strikes a proper balance of these interests, that is, it distributes fulfillment of them in accordance with the most coherent set of shared preferences in the society of the speaker and the agents about whom he is speaking and assuming that these preferences are informed by the relevant facts of the case and of human nature.
Think of it in this way. No one would be able to interpret a speaker who said, "I know that this action goes is highly antithetical to our society's most coherent set of preferences and that these are informed by all the relevant facts about human nature and the case in question, but it is the right thing to do." (To see how this works in deliberation, go here.) No one would know what to take as evidence that what he was saying was correct. Now, these preferences are just the balances struck between altruistic and self-interested desires. So, to say that an action X is "right", then, is just to say that "X is consistent with the relevant non-moral facts of the case and of human nature and X best coheres with the largest and most coherent set of altruistic and self-interested desires shared in our society." No one has any idea what would count as evidence that X was wrong if X did indeed fit with the facts and this coherent set of desires. This is just a fact about moral language. A similar analysis may be made of "good" but we'll leave that aside for the moment, as it is relatively trivial extension of this analysis.
This is why leftism and the rest of the ideological fetishes are non-starters. They distort moral language. They do not aim at correct reflection of the facts of human nature. The loose ends I'm tying together here form a very powerful explanation, then, of truths we know must be true: that right is what it is partly because of human nature and independently of God's existence, and that conservatism is the only non-fetishistic political philosophy, while the others are perverse.
Before returning to Berlin on liberty, let's tie together some loose ends. Many people are confused about the concepts listed in the title of this post. Over the last few months I have posted on them. Now it's time to lay some confusions to rest. I've also owed you my post on verificationism and moral theory for two years now.
As I said before, natural law does not entail that God exists. If God does not exists, it remains the case that this world exists and that humans have a nature such that good lives are to be had by behaving in certain ways but not in others and right acts are to be done only if one does certain things but not others. It is, for instance, right to repay a debt when promised and wrong to kill people for fun. Self-reliance is good, while sloth is not. These things are so because of the way human beings are and because of the meanings of moral terms. Anyone who understands human nature and knows the English words "right" and "good" can see that these things are so.
If God created human beings to be so, that's all well and good. But to contemplate this creation confuses the natural law theorist who has faith in God. He thinks that human nature is so because God made it so and that this explanation is the more fundamental one underlying the explanation that moral facts are what they are because human nature is the way it is. However, this is a confusion of causal explanation with essential explanation. The fact that Joe baked the bread isn't more fundamental to the explanation that the bread is nutritious because it is made of wheat. Nor is the fact, if it is a fact, that God made the wheat. It is informative to know who made something, but it doesn't tell us why the bread is nutritious. We have known for 2500 years now that right and wrong aren't so because God says so. We shouldn't confusedly think that the natural law theory of morality entails that God exists. It can be combined with divine command theory but it needn't be.
Conservatism takes human nature and moral language seriously. It doesn't try to ignore or change the former or pervert the latter, as leftism and other assorted statisms and totalitarianisms do. The moral term "right" has to do with judgments about the competing interests of multiple people. To say that an action is "right" is to say that it strikes a proper balance of these interests, that is, it distributes fulfillment of them in accordance with the most coherent set of shared preferences in the society of the speaker and the agents about whom he is speaking and assuming that these preferences are informed by the relevant facts of the case and of human nature.
Think of it in this way. No one would be able to interpret a speaker who said, "I know that this action goes is highly antithetical to our society's most coherent set of preferences and that these are informed by all the relevant facts about human nature and the case in question, but it is the right thing to do." (To see how this works in deliberation, go here.) No one would know what to take as evidence that what he was saying was correct. Now, these preferences are just the balances struck between altruistic and self-interested desires. So, to say that an action X is "right", then, is just to say that "X is consistent with the relevant non-moral facts of the case and of human nature and X best coheres with the largest and most coherent set of altruistic and self-interested desires shared in our society." No one has any idea what would count as evidence that X was wrong if X did indeed fit with the facts and this coherent set of desires. This is just a fact about moral language. A similar analysis may be made of "good" but we'll leave that aside for the moment, as it is relatively trivial extension of this analysis.
This is why leftism and the rest of the ideological fetishes are non-starters. They distort moral language. They do not aim at correct reflection of the facts of human nature. The loose ends I'm tying together here form a very powerful explanation, then, of truths we know must be true: that right is what it is partly because of human nature and independently of God's existence, and that conservatism is the only non-fetishistic political philosophy, while the others are perverse.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty I
This is a profound essay, a classic in political philosophy. I will suggest in this little series that it has a deep flaw, but you should read it if you have not. As I said before, it embodies part of liberalism's transition from classical liberalism evolved to big-government "liberalism." For now, two notes.
Negative liberty is "not being interfered with by others." Positive liberty, a rather more opaque concept, is autonomous action or being one's own master (by partaking in activities such as giving oneself the law, achieving an elevated status, and being in a society recognized as autonomous by other societies.) Berlin's explanation of the totalitarian dangers lurking in the concept of positive liberty is quite eloquent. But do not mistake the essay for a simple argument in favor of negative liberty and against positive liberty. In fact, Berlin defends positive liberty tenaciously.
In particular, Berlin describes the efforts of subjected societies to become democracies or to gain the status of respectable autonomy as a just cause ("their cause is just"). Indeed, he claims that "it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction" of this goal of positive freedom is, as well as negative freedom, "an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind." Again,
[I]t is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and...not to recognize this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age.
We'll take up Berlin's caveats later, but this is strong stuff.
I, for one, must stand as one who, in Berlin's eyes, suffers from "a profound lack of social and moral understanding." I do not accept that positive liberty has any worth whatsoever. Moreover, anything bad in the subjection of a society derives from infringement of individuals' negative liberty rights and has nothing to do with a lack of positive liberty or group autonomy, whatever those things are.
We have not gotten to the bottom of this flaw in Berlin's essay, but we will in the next post.
This is a profound essay, a classic in political philosophy. I will suggest in this little series that it has a deep flaw, but you should read it if you have not. As I said before, it embodies part of liberalism's transition from classical liberalism evolved to big-government "liberalism." For now, two notes.
Negative liberty is "not being interfered with by others." Positive liberty, a rather more opaque concept, is autonomous action or being one's own master (by partaking in activities such as giving oneself the law, achieving an elevated status, and being in a society recognized as autonomous by other societies.) Berlin's explanation of the totalitarian dangers lurking in the concept of positive liberty is quite eloquent. But do not mistake the essay for a simple argument in favor of negative liberty and against positive liberty. In fact, Berlin defends positive liberty tenaciously.
In particular, Berlin describes the efforts of subjected societies to become democracies or to gain the status of respectable autonomy as a just cause ("their cause is just"). Indeed, he claims that "it is a profound lack of social and moral understanding not to recognize that the satisfaction" of this goal of positive freedom is, as well as negative freedom, "an ultimate value which, both historically and morally, has an equal right to be classed among the deepest interests of mankind." Again,
[I]t is the notion of freedom in its 'positive' sense that is at the heart of the demands for national or social self-direction which animate the most powerful and morally just public movements of our time, and...not to recognize this is to misunderstand the most vital facts and ideas of our age.
We'll take up Berlin's caveats later, but this is strong stuff.
I, for one, must stand as one who, in Berlin's eyes, suffers from "a profound lack of social and moral understanding." I do not accept that positive liberty has any worth whatsoever. Moreover, anything bad in the subjection of a society derives from infringement of individuals' negative liberty rights and has nothing to do with a lack of positive liberty or group autonomy, whatever those things are.
We have not gotten to the bottom of this flaw in Berlin's essay, but we will in the next post.
U.S. Government Moves Against Institutions of Civil Society, Requires Involuntary Servitude
The Federal Government is attempting to divert the flow of private wealth away from private charities and to itself. It is now about to pass laws requiring that American children do work for "charitable" projects it selects (HR 1388 "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education", S277 "Serve America Act"). It is now about to end the tax deduction for charitable contributions.
The Federal Government is attempting to divert the flow of private wealth away from private charities and to itself. It is now about to pass laws requiring that American children do work for "charitable" projects it selects (HR 1388 "Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education", S277 "Serve America Act"). It is now about to end the tax deduction for charitable contributions.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Next up at Philosoblog
Next, we'll take a look at Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty." It's essential reading if you want to understand how classical liberalism evolved into big-government "liberalism."
Also on our slate are examinations of Hayek on liberty and conservatism and Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt, and Patrick Devlin on liberty.
Next, we'll take a look at Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty." It's essential reading if you want to understand how classical liberalism evolved into big-government "liberalism."
Also on our slate are examinations of Hayek on liberty and conservatism and Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt, and Patrick Devlin on liberty.
American Values
Liberty and self-reliance: How often have you noticed these values being mentioned, championed, raised in the center of debate, or placed at or near the center of the set of values to which we are devoted?
These are no longer core American values. They haven't been for many decades. They are central values for many Americans, but they have faded from the common set. The common set has at its core prosperity and equal distribution of wealth. American political values and virtues have been replaced by these. The replacement was driven by wealth, envy, resentment, hatred, and sloth.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-John Adams
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
-Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. -Thomas Jefferson
[A] wise and frugal government...shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. -Thomas Jefferson
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
-James Madison
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
-James Madison
There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
-James Madison
Hat tip: Mark Alexander.
Liberty and self-reliance: How often have you noticed these values being mentioned, championed, raised in the center of debate, or placed at or near the center of the set of values to which we are devoted?
These are no longer core American values. They haven't been for many decades. They are central values for many Americans, but they have faded from the common set. The common set has at its core prosperity and equal distribution of wealth. American political values and virtues have been replaced by these. The replacement was driven by wealth, envy, resentment, hatred, and sloth.
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
-John Adams
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
-Thomas Jefferson
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. -Thomas Jefferson
[A] wise and frugal government...shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government. -Thomas Jefferson
I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.
-James Madison
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.
-James Madison
There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
-James Madison
Hat tip: Mark Alexander.
A Government of Men
Surprise! You vote for an asshole who's never accomplished anything in his life, and that's what you get. How could that have been predicted? Who would have thought that a 47-year-old man who'd never achieved anything in his life would fall flat on his face as president within weeks?
Well, at least he has Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd to help him along. They wouldn't happen to be idiotic and incompetent buffoons on the take, would they? They are? What a shock!
Who would have thought that Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, and Obama would use your children's money like monopoly money, bankrupting them while they are still in the cradle? Who would have thought that a man who knows nothing about economics or business would come into office, promise to halve the deficit, and immediately lay out budgets that the CBO says will balloon it beyond the scope of imagination? Surprise! And who would have thought that such a man would be utterly incapable of handling a major financial problem, such as the one we find in AIG and the tangle of MBS/CDS? Amazing, isn't it? Astoundingly, he decided to turn his attentions from this problem to an imagined crisis in insufficient government health insurance, alternative energy, cap-and-trade programs, and highway bridges. Well, at least he can act suave in shades and make fun of retarded people on TV.
Who would have thought that our Congress and Executive would not be august and noble statesmen but instead would promise bonuses to AIG executives in order to get them to fix the CDS mess that might otherwise cast the world into a deep depression, feign outrage and shock over the bonuses, and then tax the bonuses at 90%, not expecting those execs to walk and leave the mess to drive us into depression? Eh? Who would have thought that?
Now, it turns out that the president can read aloud what someone wrote for him and make fun of retarded people on national TV, but he can't speak extemporaneously about issues of the day. Amazing, but true! Who would have thought that a man who went to a pathological church for twenty years would have been a pathological narcissist? Oh, well.
Did you know what you can tell about anyone who can't speak about an issue? That there is no evidence that he understands that issue and significant evidence that he does not. And do you also know what you can tell about anyone who can't speak insightfully and extemporaneously about the important issues which intelligent people are supposed to be able to discuss? That he isn't very bright. He may have an IQ as high as 125, but that isn't very bright, especially when there is no significant achievements or common sense to bolster it.
Who would have thought that a man who never exhibited any profound political, economic and historical sensibility would turn out to be an empty suit in office! It's pretty surprising, isn't it?
But we get ex post facto bills of attainder and a budget bent on bankruptcy while we are in a recession. Welcome to what you voted for!
This is a government of men, not of law. The American electorate is not sufficiently knowledgeable or virtuous to elect decent men. During the last few decades, our political system has collapsed and been replaced by another one. We can only hope that the current system fails miserably, so that the electorate learns, starts over, finds some way to recreate the American political system. The best thing that could happen now is a severe depression. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on a low light, it will be impossible for the electorate, ignorant and spoiled as it is, to wake up by any other means than being subject to abrupt and shocking distress. Fortunately, our leaders are even more incompetent and stupid than we and have exhibited every indication, for instance with their "budget", that they will turn the light under the pot up to high.
Don't look for hope in the GOP. It is merely less infected by corruption and idiocy. Your political system is broken and dysfunctional. It is not the American political system laid out by the Founding Fathers. We need to go through the hell necessary to give us to understand that we must replace it with the original. We must regenerate the virtues necessary for sustaining the original. Is there an example in history of a society returning to health after decline into depravity?
UPDATE: Here's VDH. Read the comments.
Surprise! You vote for an asshole who's never accomplished anything in his life, and that's what you get. How could that have been predicted? Who would have thought that a 47-year-old man who'd never achieved anything in his life would fall flat on his face as president within weeks?
Well, at least he has Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd to help him along. They wouldn't happen to be idiotic and incompetent buffoons on the take, would they? They are? What a shock!
Who would have thought that Pelosi, Frank, Dodd, and Obama would use your children's money like monopoly money, bankrupting them while they are still in the cradle? Who would have thought that a man who knows nothing about economics or business would come into office, promise to halve the deficit, and immediately lay out budgets that the CBO says will balloon it beyond the scope of imagination? Surprise! And who would have thought that such a man would be utterly incapable of handling a major financial problem, such as the one we find in AIG and the tangle of MBS/CDS? Amazing, isn't it? Astoundingly, he decided to turn his attentions from this problem to an imagined crisis in insufficient government health insurance, alternative energy, cap-and-trade programs, and highway bridges. Well, at least he can act suave in shades and make fun of retarded people on TV.
Who would have thought that our Congress and Executive would not be august and noble statesmen but instead would promise bonuses to AIG executives in order to get them to fix the CDS mess that might otherwise cast the world into a deep depression, feign outrage and shock over the bonuses, and then tax the bonuses at 90%, not expecting those execs to walk and leave the mess to drive us into depression? Eh? Who would have thought that?
Now, it turns out that the president can read aloud what someone wrote for him and make fun of retarded people on national TV, but he can't speak extemporaneously about issues of the day. Amazing, but true! Who would have thought that a man who went to a pathological church for twenty years would have been a pathological narcissist? Oh, well.
Did you know what you can tell about anyone who can't speak about an issue? That there is no evidence that he understands that issue and significant evidence that he does not. And do you also know what you can tell about anyone who can't speak insightfully and extemporaneously about the important issues which intelligent people are supposed to be able to discuss? That he isn't very bright. He may have an IQ as high as 125, but that isn't very bright, especially when there is no significant achievements or common sense to bolster it.
Who would have thought that a man who never exhibited any profound political, economic and historical sensibility would turn out to be an empty suit in office! It's pretty surprising, isn't it?
But we get ex post facto bills of attainder and a budget bent on bankruptcy while we are in a recession. Welcome to what you voted for!
This is a government of men, not of law. The American electorate is not sufficiently knowledgeable or virtuous to elect decent men. During the last few decades, our political system has collapsed and been replaced by another one. We can only hope that the current system fails miserably, so that the electorate learns, starts over, finds some way to recreate the American political system. The best thing that could happen now is a severe depression. Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water on a low light, it will be impossible for the electorate, ignorant and spoiled as it is, to wake up by any other means than being subject to abrupt and shocking distress. Fortunately, our leaders are even more incompetent and stupid than we and have exhibited every indication, for instance with their "budget", that they will turn the light under the pot up to high.
Don't look for hope in the GOP. It is merely less infected by corruption and idiocy. Your political system is broken and dysfunctional. It is not the American political system laid out by the Founding Fathers. We need to go through the hell necessary to give us to understand that we must replace it with the original. We must regenerate the virtues necessary for sustaining the original. Is there an example in history of a society returning to health after decline into depravity?
UPDATE: Here's VDH. Read the comments.
Friday, March 13, 2009
A Terrible Oversight in Mill and Hayek
I find myself in the uncanny position of defending liberty more stridently and absolutely than two giants of libertarianism. You see, Mill and Hayek overlooked something important: a person's right to liberty.
I'm referring to On Liberty and The Constitution of Liberty. You can find a few posts below regarding the former. As for Hayek's book, I'll have a few more thoughts on it in subsequent posts.
They are both wonderful books. They both make enormously important arguments for liberty from considerations of utility. One of the most important of these is that people who would control others (the various statists, tyrants and totalitarians) don't have enough information to know what is good for others. It is better to leave each man to his own devices since he will best be able to tell what is good for him. Moreover, Hayek makes quite clear the fact that there is a tradition which we need to preserve, which has evolved over a lengthy and vast field of individual experience and discovery, and compared to which the knowledge of those who wish to control others is tiny. Hayek is startlingly eloquent on that point, to the extent that there is no use in my discussing it here. Go and read the first two chapters of his book.
However, besides Mill the avowed utilitarian, we have Hayek tarnishing his brilliant case about human cognition with this howler:
If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.
If there were omniscient men, no one would have a right to liberty? Hardly. Let me state the obvious.
You have a right to liberty because your life is yours.
In an undergraduate philosophy class you might convince yourself that an omniscient man's advice was binding since he would know what's best for you. You might conclude that a person should do what the omniscient man said and would have no right to make up his mind for himself what to do. But beyond the sophomoric level it is easy to see that the omniscient have no right to control others. It is wrong for me to control my neighbor, even though he is a fool and it is obvious to any reasonable person that the decisions he makes are bad for him. The reason is that his life is his. That's an airtight argument and I'm surprised the champions of individual liberty missed it. As important as the utilitarian argument from lack of knowledge is, it is no more important than this one.
But there is more to the story. It is too simplistic to leave it with these two arguments, one utilitarian and one based on basic rights to be left alone. There is a place where the right to be left to one's own devices blends together with the considerations of utility. At that point we can see that being left to one's own devices is inseparable from the good life and happiness taken so seriously by those overly concerned with considerations of utility.
The point is this. A human being's good is found partly in winning for himself his way of life by coming to understand himself and becoming able to control himself in accordance with that understanding. Self-control and self-directedness are important components of a good life and not just because they enable one to do what one wants but because they are excellences in themselves and therefore to be coveted and prized upon being obtained. Part of what's good about a good life is that it has been of one's own making and created through one's own experience and discovery.
So, not only is the utilitarian case of Mill and Hayek incomplete and, in the instance of the Hayek quote, incorrect. It is also mistaken about the nature of the good that is promoted by preserving individual liberty.
I find myself in the uncanny position of defending liberty more stridently and absolutely than two giants of libertarianism. You see, Mill and Hayek overlooked something important: a person's right to liberty.
I'm referring to On Liberty and The Constitution of Liberty. You can find a few posts below regarding the former. As for Hayek's book, I'll have a few more thoughts on it in subsequent posts.
They are both wonderful books. They both make enormously important arguments for liberty from considerations of utility. One of the most important of these is that people who would control others (the various statists, tyrants and totalitarians) don't have enough information to know what is good for others. It is better to leave each man to his own devices since he will best be able to tell what is good for him. Moreover, Hayek makes quite clear the fact that there is a tradition which we need to preserve, which has evolved over a lengthy and vast field of individual experience and discovery, and compared to which the knowledge of those who wish to control others is tiny. Hayek is startlingly eloquent on that point, to the extent that there is no use in my discussing it here. Go and read the first two chapters of his book.
However, besides Mill the avowed utilitarian, we have Hayek tarnishing his brilliant case about human cognition with this howler:
If there were omniscient men, if we could know not only all that affects the attainment of our present wishes but also our future wants and desires, there would be little case for liberty.
If there were omniscient men, no one would have a right to liberty? Hardly. Let me state the obvious.
You have a right to liberty because your life is yours.
In an undergraduate philosophy class you might convince yourself that an omniscient man's advice was binding since he would know what's best for you. You might conclude that a person should do what the omniscient man said and would have no right to make up his mind for himself what to do. But beyond the sophomoric level it is easy to see that the omniscient have no right to control others. It is wrong for me to control my neighbor, even though he is a fool and it is obvious to any reasonable person that the decisions he makes are bad for him. The reason is that his life is his. That's an airtight argument and I'm surprised the champions of individual liberty missed it. As important as the utilitarian argument from lack of knowledge is, it is no more important than this one.
But there is more to the story. It is too simplistic to leave it with these two arguments, one utilitarian and one based on basic rights to be left alone. There is a place where the right to be left to one's own devices blends together with the considerations of utility. At that point we can see that being left to one's own devices is inseparable from the good life and happiness taken so seriously by those overly concerned with considerations of utility.
The point is this. A human being's good is found partly in winning for himself his way of life by coming to understand himself and becoming able to control himself in accordance with that understanding. Self-control and self-directedness are important components of a good life and not just because they enable one to do what one wants but because they are excellences in themselves and therefore to be coveted and prized upon being obtained. Part of what's good about a good life is that it has been of one's own making and created through one's own experience and discovery.
So, not only is the utilitarian case of Mill and Hayek incomplete and, in the instance of the Hayek quote, incorrect. It is also mistaken about the nature of the good that is promoted by preserving individual liberty.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Depression
We've been on the lefty bus for decades. Now it's swerving into a brick wall instead of proceeding surely towards its destination. The survivors will heal and reflect on the vices and ignorance which drove them to let the insane drive the bus. This is almost optimal. The only better scenario would have been our waking up and taking the wheel. That was not going to happen, given the vice and ignorance. At least we will have a chance to avoid the fate of reaching the destination.
The bus is driving toward the gulags. We are asleep on it. The idiot driver is swerving into the wall. At least we won't reach the guglags, whence there is no return.
Plus, with the hardship millions upon millions of American children will not grow up spoiled as they otherwise would have done.
We've been on the lefty bus for decades. Now it's swerving into a brick wall instead of proceeding surely towards its destination. The survivors will heal and reflect on the vices and ignorance which drove them to let the insane drive the bus. This is almost optimal. The only better scenario would have been our waking up and taking the wheel. That was not going to happen, given the vice and ignorance. At least we will have a chance to avoid the fate of reaching the destination.
The bus is driving toward the gulags. We are asleep on it. The idiot driver is swerving into the wall. At least we won't reach the guglags, whence there is no return.
Plus, with the hardship millions upon millions of American children will not grow up spoiled as they otherwise would have done.
Philosophy Blogs
Why are you here? That's the question.
No, I mean why are you here at Philosoblog? After all, there are also Bill Vallicella and Franklin Mason. Click, click!
Why are you here? That's the question.
No, I mean why are you here at Philosoblog? After all, there are also Bill Vallicella and Franklin Mason. Click, click!
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Aiming
To have set out a few goals, dear to one and fulfilling plenty of one's most coherent and persistently strong dispositions, and to have fulfilled these goals during significant part of a life enjoyed and found worthy of cherishing are feats which produce great happiness. This is the recognition of one's great fortune and extraordinary experience of fulfillment in it.
In youth you figure out what you want to do over a decade or two. These are things that resonate deeply with your talents, desires, and moral aspirations. Staying true to these goals and persistently planning and doing what is best to fulfill one's goals, you end up years later dizzy and in awe of your good fortune.
For us it is a proper function to feel intense gratitude for a good life. This is resulting from and, by feedback, contributing to the effort to fulfill one's goals.
To have done what one wanted, to have excelled in areas that drew one inexorably and with delight at their fitting in with one's set of aspirations and to have experienced deep gratitude for these things bring one to recognize that one has loved oneself well all along, in the sense of Bishop Butler, namely, that one has taken as one's only ends the goals generated from one's most coherent and persistently strong dispositions, including those that require regard for others, as well as those that do not. Certain long-term projects were best and one pursued them instead of fluffy, ephemeral, undesirable pastimes. The relief at having chosen right leads to the gratitude. There is a potential horror or nausea when contemplating the failure to have chosen right.
To have set out a few goals, dear to one and fulfilling plenty of one's most coherent and persistently strong dispositions, and to have fulfilled these goals during significant part of a life enjoyed and found worthy of cherishing are feats which produce great happiness. This is the recognition of one's great fortune and extraordinary experience of fulfillment in it.
In youth you figure out what you want to do over a decade or two. These are things that resonate deeply with your talents, desires, and moral aspirations. Staying true to these goals and persistently planning and doing what is best to fulfill one's goals, you end up years later dizzy and in awe of your good fortune.
For us it is a proper function to feel intense gratitude for a good life. This is resulting from and, by feedback, contributing to the effort to fulfill one's goals.
To have done what one wanted, to have excelled in areas that drew one inexorably and with delight at their fitting in with one's set of aspirations and to have experienced deep gratitude for these things bring one to recognize that one has loved oneself well all along, in the sense of Bishop Butler, namely, that one has taken as one's only ends the goals generated from one's most coherent and persistently strong dispositions, including those that require regard for others, as well as those that do not. Certain long-term projects were best and one pursued them instead of fluffy, ephemeral, undesirable pastimes. The relief at having chosen right leads to the gratitude. There is a potential horror or nausea when contemplating the failure to have chosen right.
Keeping what is Precious
The reason for my recent post recommending homeschooling in order to produce people educated in American political values is that if you think in terms of time spans of several decades from now, you notice opportunities to protect what is right and good that need attention. Twenty and thirty years from now we will need people who remember what is precious of American political culture. They will remember history and grasp the greatness of the U.S. Constitution's division of power. They will preserve a high regard for liberty, self-reliance, justice as just deserts, charity, polite decency in society, prosperity, and other values.
The present moment is dramatic with the ignorance and credulity of the electorate and with the blundering buffoonery of the American left and its stupidly ruining the American economy. The attendant damage to liberty, self-reliance, justice as just deserts, charity, polite decency in society, and prosperity spurs one to protect these values. One thinks in terms of decades. We need to teach thousands upon thousands of children what we know. We need to preserve in them what is precious. This is a great gift to them as well as a fulfillment of our loyalty to what is worth preserving.
The reason for my recent post recommending homeschooling in order to produce people educated in American political values is that if you think in terms of time spans of several decades from now, you notice opportunities to protect what is right and good that need attention. Twenty and thirty years from now we will need people who remember what is precious of American political culture. They will remember history and grasp the greatness of the U.S. Constitution's division of power. They will preserve a high regard for liberty, self-reliance, justice as just deserts, charity, polite decency in society, prosperity, and other values.
The present moment is dramatic with the ignorance and credulity of the electorate and with the blundering buffoonery of the American left and its stupidly ruining the American economy. The attendant damage to liberty, self-reliance, justice as just deserts, charity, polite decency in society, and prosperity spurs one to protect these values. One thinks in terms of decades. We need to teach thousands upon thousands of children what we know. We need to preserve in them what is precious. This is a great gift to them as well as a fulfillment of our loyalty to what is worth preserving.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
What Now
We're moving from 30% of GDP gummint, through 40% and will be at 50% in a few years, hobbling liberty and and hamstringing prosperty. We have a government that has taken its deficit spending from the 2008 level of $450B to $1.9T overnight and gussied this up as fiscal responsibility. The economy will be crushed under the enormous tax burden and wasteful spending. The debt will now be unmanageable and unimaginable. Soon enough most of the economy will be the government, even though the basic principle of American political philosophy is limited government.
All this is not irreversible. The failure will be spectacular and miserable, etching in the mind of Americans a deep impression of life under big government. Afterward, if there are enough who remember what the Founding Fathers and the original Americans created, who have observed the steady destruction of that creation over the last 100 years, and who can explain these things well, then there will be a chance to rebuild from the ruins. It's anyone's guess whether there will be enough virtue, memory and understanding amongst the generation who are children now. But if there is enough, this isn't irreversible.
If you have kids, pull them out of school and homeschool them. Quit your job if you must and work nights stocking the grocery store. Drive home history, Constitution, liberty and self-reliance. If you have grandkids, be a nosy busybody and speak to their parents about this. Offer to homeschool the kids. Twenty and thirty years from now we will need enough people who have a grasp of what's precious. Those people are languishing in government schools now. Homeschooling is now a duty, defeasible only if it is impossible for you.
[This is a comment I left over at Just One Minute.]
We're moving from 30% of GDP gummint, through 40% and will be at 50% in a few years, hobbling liberty and and hamstringing prosperty. We have a government that has taken its deficit spending from the 2008 level of $450B to $1.9T overnight and gussied this up as fiscal responsibility. The economy will be crushed under the enormous tax burden and wasteful spending. The debt will now be unmanageable and unimaginable. Soon enough most of the economy will be the government, even though the basic principle of American political philosophy is limited government.
All this is not irreversible. The failure will be spectacular and miserable, etching in the mind of Americans a deep impression of life under big government. Afterward, if there are enough who remember what the Founding Fathers and the original Americans created, who have observed the steady destruction of that creation over the last 100 years, and who can explain these things well, then there will be a chance to rebuild from the ruins. It's anyone's guess whether there will be enough virtue, memory and understanding amongst the generation who are children now. But if there is enough, this isn't irreversible.
If you have kids, pull them out of school and homeschool them. Quit your job if you must and work nights stocking the grocery store. Drive home history, Constitution, liberty and self-reliance. If you have grandkids, be a nosy busybody and speak to their parents about this. Offer to homeschool the kids. Twenty and thirty years from now we will need enough people who have a grasp of what's precious. Those people are languishing in government schools now. Homeschooling is now a duty, defeasible only if it is impossible for you.
[This is a comment I left over at Just One Minute.]
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Rights, Moral Reasoning, and Big Government in Mill's On Liberty
Mill fails to acknowledge that there are rights to be left alone to one's liberty that hold independently of projected net utility calculations. It's no surprise that a utilitarian fails to do so, yet it's no use pretending that the fact that your life is yours and not anyone else's is not a very good reason you should be left alone to do as you like. Yet so Mill must pretend for never even mentioning this reason.
The lacuna bespeaks a stilted strategy of Mill's: to discover principles of morality and to conduct moral reasoning by proving these and then applying them. In this case the principle is "the general principle of liberty" which is that one's actions insofar as they don't concern others' interests cannot be wrongful to others, whereas actions which harm others are punishable. He wants to prove this principle and establish it as an applicable tool of reasoning. He has to scrape together utilitarian excuses where this principle seems to fail, and he must ignore moral factors that don't fit into the simple model. This is not how moral reasoning should proceed. Moral reasoning should embrace any moral considerations which obtain in the situation under scrutiny. Mill does some of this case-based reasoning in the book, but his goal is to establish his utilitarian liberty.
Over the course of the book, Mill deems justified many specific infringements of liberty on the grounds that only negligible liberty is lost or no harm done in these cases. He sees certain cases very clearly but he bungles the account of them up because he chooses to serve his general principle rather than to fit the facts. Another woeful lacunae in the book is that Mill doesn't recognize that the government interference with individuals' actions which he says doesn't really infringe upon liberty or inhibit utility requires taxation of third parties and this taxation is a considerable infringement of liberty.
This is not to say that some of his observations on the disutility of liberty infringement aren't spot on. While one waits in vain to hear Mill acknowledge that taxation is liberty-infringing he sees that the
These are insights of a man during the 1850's. The book is a hodge-podge of such insights, classic defenses of freedom of thought and debate, and also contortions of moral theory. It's classical liberalism, which its admiration of progressively-vectored moral theories and its solicitous regard for the sanctity of individual liberty. It would have done better to dispose of the progressively-vectored moral theories, but then its central argument - the defense of a general principle - would not have been a non-starter. It's better to preserve the manifold values we cherish than to choose a certain way to progress beyond them with new principles of liberty and utility.
Mill fails to acknowledge that there are rights to be left alone to one's liberty that hold independently of projected net utility calculations. It's no surprise that a utilitarian fails to do so, yet it's no use pretending that the fact that your life is yours and not anyone else's is not a very good reason you should be left alone to do as you like. Yet so Mill must pretend for never even mentioning this reason.
The lacuna bespeaks a stilted strategy of Mill's: to discover principles of morality and to conduct moral reasoning by proving these and then applying them. In this case the principle is "the general principle of liberty" which is that one's actions insofar as they don't concern others' interests cannot be wrongful to others, whereas actions which harm others are punishable. He wants to prove this principle and establish it as an applicable tool of reasoning. He has to scrape together utilitarian excuses where this principle seems to fail, and he must ignore moral factors that don't fit into the simple model. This is not how moral reasoning should proceed. Moral reasoning should embrace any moral considerations which obtain in the situation under scrutiny. Mill does some of this case-based reasoning in the book, but his goal is to establish his utilitarian liberty.
Over the course of the book, Mill deems justified many specific infringements of liberty on the grounds that only negligible liberty is lost or no harm done in these cases. He sees certain cases very clearly but he bungles the account of them up because he chooses to serve his general principle rather than to fit the facts. Another woeful lacunae in the book is that Mill doesn't recognize that the government interference with individuals' actions which he says doesn't really infringe upon liberty or inhibit utility requires taxation of third parties and this taxation is a considerable infringement of liberty.
This is not to say that some of his observations on the disutility of liberty infringement aren't spot on. While one waits in vain to hear Mill acknowledge that taxation is liberty-infringing he sees that the
most cogent reason for restricting the interference of government is the great evil of adding unnecessarily to its power. Every function superadded to those already exercised by the government causes its influence over hopes and fears to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or of some party which aims at becoming the government. If the roads, the railways, the banks, the insurance offices, the great joint-stock companies, the universities, and the public charities were all of them branches of the government; if, in addition, the municipal corporations and local boards, with all that now devolves on them, became departments of the central administration; if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government and looked to the government for every rise in life, not all the freedom of the press and popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name.And
A government cannot have too much of the kind of activity which does not impede, but aids and stimulates, individual exertion and development. The mischief begins when, instead of calling forth the activity and powers of individual and bodies, it substitutes its own activity for theirs; when, instead of informing, advising, and, upon occasion, denouncing, it makes them work in fetters, or bids them stand aside and does their work instead of them.
These are insights of a man during the 1850's. The book is a hodge-podge of such insights, classic defenses of freedom of thought and debate, and also contortions of moral theory. It's classical liberalism, which its admiration of progressively-vectored moral theories and its solicitous regard for the sanctity of individual liberty. It would have done better to dispose of the progressively-vectored moral theories, but then its central argument - the defense of a general principle - would not have been a non-starter. It's better to preserve the manifold values we cherish than to choose a certain way to progress beyond them with new principles of liberty and utility.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
You're Being Hoodwinked into Serfdom
Liberty fades away imperceptibly. Within a generation or two it will no longer be mentioned. Out of sight, out of mind.
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary. —Ayn Rand, 1975
Liberty fades away imperceptibly. Within a generation or two it will no longer be mentioned. Out of sight, out of mind.
One of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary. —Ayn Rand, 1975
Monday, February 23, 2009
Why Conservatism Can't Win
It's a disposition to encompass many important values into the fold of moral deliberation and public policy. So, it can't have a slogan because slogans epitomize and it has no epitome. It's for carefully sifting through the facts and determining the most coherent application of the array of potentially relevant values. So, it can't prescribe simple rules or decision-making algorithms or appeal to simple triggers of enthusiasm. It's for people who will consider what happened in history in order to determine what should be done now, not for people who simply want to charge off with a favorite finitely codifiable doctrine and have everyone else comply with it. It's for carefully making one's way forward while preserving what is precious, not for explosive and dramatic shifts into a set of new ways which we don't clearly understand or have good reason to prefer. It's for keeping government power severely limited, and it is in principle against corruption and crime amongst government officials because it doesn't have any end which could be used to confuse an electorate into believing such means justified. So, it can't do politics as usual, which is what you need to do to win nowadays.
It's a disposition to encompass many important values into the fold of moral deliberation and public policy. So, it can't have a slogan because slogans epitomize and it has no epitome. It's for carefully sifting through the facts and determining the most coherent application of the array of potentially relevant values. So, it can't prescribe simple rules or decision-making algorithms or appeal to simple triggers of enthusiasm. It's for people who will consider what happened in history in order to determine what should be done now, not for people who simply want to charge off with a favorite finitely codifiable doctrine and have everyone else comply with it. It's for carefully making one's way forward while preserving what is precious, not for explosive and dramatic shifts into a set of new ways which we don't clearly understand or have good reason to prefer. It's for keeping government power severely limited, and it is in principle against corruption and crime amongst government officials because it doesn't have any end which could be used to confuse an electorate into believing such means justified. So, it can't do politics as usual, which is what you need to do to win nowadays.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Moral Blindness in the Credit Crunch
America's federal government officials refuse to acknowledge their share of the blame for the financial mess. Their share is the lion's share.
Of course, many investors, bankers, and traders turned out to be stupider than their MBA degree-granting institutions would like to admit. They kept pumping up the pressure on real estate prices as if bubbles do not pop.
Agents of the federal government - the FMs, CRA, ACORN, and the Federal Reserve - set up a system in which blowing the bubble was strongly encouraged. Artificially low interest rates, the MBS/CD debauchery, and the pressure to make bad loans exerted by the CRA and ACORN were a system of government controls that inhibited free market pressures.
It is difficult for Americans to recognize the blame that their government deserves, a fact which is even more remarkable, given how much Americans detest their government. This is because we accept as given that the government will interfere strongly with the market and put the onus on business to comply with the government's leftist and redistributionist rules of business. We now expect this government influence. It is part of the woodwork. We don't notice that it is not necessary but merely optional.
This is why we stupidly blame free market forces for the credit crunch. While some businessmen were incontinent and stupid at the prospect of making a bundle in the FM/MBS system, free market forces have none of the blame for this because they were not in play. This is the key point: The Bush Administration should have regulated the CDS market and tried harder than they did to get the Democrats to clean up their monster FMs. But this only means the administration should have interfered with the market more in order to compensate for the effect of other government interference with the market. To think that the Bush Administration left the market too free is to exhibit a misunderstanding of what happened. Since this misunderstanding persists even though the facts are plain, it is a kind of blindness. Of course, the leftists will prey on your blindness and pronounce the era of free market capitalism dead.
UPDATE: Terence Corcoran, Financial Post.
America's federal government officials refuse to acknowledge their share of the blame for the financial mess. Their share is the lion's share.
Of course, many investors, bankers, and traders turned out to be stupider than their MBA degree-granting institutions would like to admit. They kept pumping up the pressure on real estate prices as if bubbles do not pop.
Agents of the federal government - the FMs, CRA, ACORN, and the Federal Reserve - set up a system in which blowing the bubble was strongly encouraged. Artificially low interest rates, the MBS/CD debauchery, and the pressure to make bad loans exerted by the CRA and ACORN were a system of government controls that inhibited free market pressures.
It is difficult for Americans to recognize the blame that their government deserves, a fact which is even more remarkable, given how much Americans detest their government. This is because we accept as given that the government will interfere strongly with the market and put the onus on business to comply with the government's leftist and redistributionist rules of business. We now expect this government influence. It is part of the woodwork. We don't notice that it is not necessary but merely optional.
This is why we stupidly blame free market forces for the credit crunch. While some businessmen were incontinent and stupid at the prospect of making a bundle in the FM/MBS system, free market forces have none of the blame for this because they were not in play. This is the key point: The Bush Administration should have regulated the CDS market and tried harder than they did to get the Democrats to clean up their monster FMs. But this only means the administration should have interfered with the market more in order to compensate for the effect of other government interference with the market. To think that the Bush Administration left the market too free is to exhibit a misunderstanding of what happened. Since this misunderstanding persists even though the facts are plain, it is a kind of blindness. Of course, the leftists will prey on your blindness and pronounce the era of free market capitalism dead.
UPDATE: Terence Corcoran, Financial Post.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Mill On Liberty and the Pressure to Conform: Too Little Substance
In the previous post I noted that Mill is committed, as anyone should be, to the importance of passing along traditions that promote good lives. He also rails against the pressure to conform to convention. Perhaps living in Victorian England has given him a certain perspective which we living in the era of pierced faces cannot imagine, but in any event, the tension between the commitment and the railing is never resolved substantively in the little book.
In short, of course valuable traditions must be inculcated in the youth of a society and of course too much pressure to conform is bad. Both positions should be seen as trivially true by anyone with whom it would be worth deliberating. So, that much is true, but trivial. Unfortunately, that's all we get with Mill. How shall we decide cases in which these two vectors collide? He gives us no help.
Mill tosses the term "progressive" around in Chapter III: Of Individuality. In those passages he could be read as an anti-conservative. Yet such a position would be straightforwardly inconsistent with Mill's regard for tradition, as I explained it in the previous post. Now, progressivism is untenable, with its stupid disregard for tradition and its record of fascism. On the other hand, the rigid conventionalism Mill excoriates is also untenable. But we knew that, or we should have known it. So, what of substance do we get from Mill on this issue? Nothing.
Of course, if your society is too rigidly conventional, Mill's eloquently individualistic passages might be of use. But even these are merely consequentialist in nature, totally overlooking the fact that the individual has a right to do with his life as he likes because it is his and no one else's. Moreover, Mill never acknowledges that the eccentrics he admires should have the spine enough to take a bit of mockery and derision from the conformist crowd, especially if the chosen eccentricity is as useless and detrimental as a pierced face.
In the previous post I noted that Mill is committed, as anyone should be, to the importance of passing along traditions that promote good lives. He also rails against the pressure to conform to convention. Perhaps living in Victorian England has given him a certain perspective which we living in the era of pierced faces cannot imagine, but in any event, the tension between the commitment and the railing is never resolved substantively in the little book.
In short, of course valuable traditions must be inculcated in the youth of a society and of course too much pressure to conform is bad. Both positions should be seen as trivially true by anyone with whom it would be worth deliberating. So, that much is true, but trivial. Unfortunately, that's all we get with Mill. How shall we decide cases in which these two vectors collide? He gives us no help.
Mill tosses the term "progressive" around in Chapter III: Of Individuality. In those passages he could be read as an anti-conservative. Yet such a position would be straightforwardly inconsistent with Mill's regard for tradition, as I explained it in the previous post. Now, progressivism is untenable, with its stupid disregard for tradition and its record of fascism. On the other hand, the rigid conventionalism Mill excoriates is also untenable. But we knew that, or we should have known it. So, what of substance do we get from Mill on this issue? Nothing.
Of course, if your society is too rigidly conventional, Mill's eloquently individualistic passages might be of use. But even these are merely consequentialist in nature, totally overlooking the fact that the individual has a right to do with his life as he likes because it is his and no one else's. Moreover, Mill never acknowledges that the eccentrics he admires should have the spine enough to take a bit of mockery and derision from the conformist crowd, especially if the chosen eccentricity is as useless and detrimental as a pierced face.
Natural Law, Procedural Conservatism, and Progress
Mill's On Liberty contains good examples of case-based reasoning and reasoning based on facts about human beings. Such facts are more likely to depict human nature than abstract rules based on procedurally non-conservative inquiry (e.g., Kant, Rawls, various progressivistic theories) which look at what is not the case and talk about that instead.
As Mill ably argues, freedom of opinion and fundamental liberty to choose ways of life and values which reflect human nature. We prefer them, after recognizing the relevant facts and deliberating over our desires in order to determine our preferences. Human nature is really such that these values suit it; we are such that we prefer them. This is natural law. Of course people have sometimes selected constraint over individual liberty. But such mistakes are eventually discovered via procedural conservatism: the discovery of errors about the the relevant facts or incoherence between the preference as determined and our desires. With reason's assistance we revise our preference in favor of liberty and against constraint. Hence the abolition of slavery. (There is no moral reasoning other than procedurally conservative kind, and only it can monitor its own performance.)
Of course, liberals, such as Mill, tout progress away from error toward what is preferable. This is why he recommends that conventional ways of life not be imposed on individuals but their choice of way of life should be free to diverge from convention. The trouble is that this thesis is too weak to be a real challenge to conservatism. Even Mill admits that
A classical liberal is simply a conservative who places more emphasis on individual experimentation with new ways of life than most conservatives do. Beyond this point lies progressivism, leftism, fascism and the other illiberal and anti-traditionalistic views. Classical liberalism, then, recognizes natural law and progress. It is not distinct from conservatism, however.
Mill's On Liberty contains good examples of case-based reasoning and reasoning based on facts about human beings. Such facts are more likely to depict human nature than abstract rules based on procedurally non-conservative inquiry (e.g., Kant, Rawls, various progressivistic theories) which look at what is not the case and talk about that instead.
As Mill ably argues, freedom of opinion and fundamental liberty to choose ways of life and values which reflect human nature. We prefer them, after recognizing the relevant facts and deliberating over our desires in order to determine our preferences. Human nature is really such that these values suit it; we are such that we prefer them. This is natural law. Of course people have sometimes selected constraint over individual liberty. But such mistakes are eventually discovered via procedural conservatism: the discovery of errors about the the relevant facts or incoherence between the preference as determined and our desires. With reason's assistance we revise our preference in favor of liberty and against constraint. Hence the abolition of slavery. (There is no moral reasoning other than procedurally conservative kind, and only it can monitor its own performance.)
Of course, liberals, such as Mill, tout progress away from error toward what is preferable. This is why he recommends that conventional ways of life not be imposed on individuals but their choice of way of life should be free to diverge from convention. The trouble is that this thesis is too weak to be a real challenge to conservatism. Even Mill admits that
...people should be so taught and trained in youth as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of experience.But conservatism acknowledges and even requires that individuals should have the liberty Mill has in mind. But the traditions Mill admits should be inculcated into youth will limit their individual liberty. For they will develop preferences and habits which will persist and circumscribe the scope of any experimentation with ways of life in which they decide to partake. And in order to inculcate the traditional values Mill acknowledges, we need to judge them more worthy of inculcating than their eccentric competitors. So, their will be considerable social pressure in favor of the traditional values Mill admits must be preserved and passed on. Individual liberty must be constrained in these ways. Perhaps Mill does not see it, but he simply cannot be the free-spirit he takes himself for, given his stated commitment to tradition.
A classical liberal is simply a conservative who places more emphasis on individual experimentation with new ways of life than most conservatives do. Beyond this point lies progressivism, leftism, fascism and the other illiberal and anti-traditionalistic views. Classical liberalism, then, recognizes natural law and progress. It is not distinct from conservatism, however.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Conservatism and Moral Theory
I would like to tie some strands together. Bear with me; many of the strands are in archives. In the last little while we've been looking at human nature and conservatism. In the more distant past I've discussed moral theory, as well. You can see an intimate connection.
Conservatism has two levels: procedural and, let's call it, indexical. Procedural conservatism is the logical and empirical level. It is the commitment to conducting moral deliberation so as to maximize the fulfillment of preferences we have, rather than to import an arcane theory or particular creed as a fetish to hold above our preferences in austere and slavish reverence. It is the rejection of all moral theories that pretend to stand in judgment of the set of preferences we find ourselves with. With Hume, we acknowledge that reason can serve this set by seeking its most coherent version and consistency with all relevant facts; there is no Kantian or Rawlsian Reason, and no leftist or libertarian ideology, which this set ought to serve. Unlike the emotivists and subjectivists, we recognize that right and good cannot be directly read off of our desires and sentiments, the sentimentalist tradition having taken a wrong turn after Hume, thanks to Stevenson and Ayer. Tradition reflects natural preferences discovered through lengthy deliberation and experience. It is this reasonable tradition which procedural conservatism serves and which rationalists, ideological fetishists, subjectivists and the rest desire to overthrow or ignore.
Indexical, or cultural conservatism is the devotion to a certain set of values a certain culture we can point out. This culture rests upon lengthy deliberation and observation of human nature and in particular a certain set of preferences widely shared in a society. Ways of life flow from human nature and from procedural conservatism which are worth pursuing and preserving.
There is nothing to normative moral theory other than the recommendation that we use common-sense reasoning for coherence amongst our moral judgments and in turn (at the lowest level) amongst our desires. In other words, beyond procedural conservatism, as I've described it, there isn't much else to say in the way of normative theory. Kant, Rawls, Mill and the rest, including the enormous amount of ink spilled by 20th Century specialists in normative theory, a non-entity of a scholarly or philosophical field, should be seen as of little value and wrongheaded. Common-sense procedural conservatism has never been seriously injured by any critic, and Kantianism, utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, and the rest have been refuted over and over again with no hope of vindication in sight.
The lowest-level reason for this is that the link between what is right or good and what we prefer is logical. There is nothing we could count as evidence that a way of life was preferable (in a reflective equilibrium in which all things had been considered and thorough application of common-sense reasoning for coherence amongst our desires and consistency with the facts had been applied) and yet wrong. Nor is there anything we would count as evidence that something was right and yet detestable (in a reflective equilibrium in which all things...etc.) "Right" and "good" are thus reducible to desire. This is the direction in which the sentimentalist tradition of Hume should have gone and on this blog has gone.
To conclude: Conservatism is both procedural and substantive. If you've find what I've said about procedural conservatism a bit hard to grasp, don't worry. It is just ordinary common-sense prudential reasoning. If you are not biased in favor of one value over all others, if you try to determine what is best in view of the most coherent and fact-based set of all of the values we hold dear, then you practice procedural conservatism already; most people do, I think. Substantive conservatism is the disposition to preserve, and improve it via procedural conservatism, a certain culture which promotes good lives, suits what is important to us, and suits our nature. This explains why we find people listing particulars in effort to define conservatism, for example, Allen C. Guelzo in this week's National Review magazine:
I would like to tie some strands together. Bear with me; many of the strands are in archives. In the last little while we've been looking at human nature and conservatism. In the more distant past I've discussed moral theory, as well. You can see an intimate connection.
Conservatism has two levels: procedural and, let's call it, indexical. Procedural conservatism is the logical and empirical level. It is the commitment to conducting moral deliberation so as to maximize the fulfillment of preferences we have, rather than to import an arcane theory or particular creed as a fetish to hold above our preferences in austere and slavish reverence. It is the rejection of all moral theories that pretend to stand in judgment of the set of preferences we find ourselves with. With Hume, we acknowledge that reason can serve this set by seeking its most coherent version and consistency with all relevant facts; there is no Kantian or Rawlsian Reason, and no leftist or libertarian ideology, which this set ought to serve. Unlike the emotivists and subjectivists, we recognize that right and good cannot be directly read off of our desires and sentiments, the sentimentalist tradition having taken a wrong turn after Hume, thanks to Stevenson and Ayer. Tradition reflects natural preferences discovered through lengthy deliberation and experience. It is this reasonable tradition which procedural conservatism serves and which rationalists, ideological fetishists, subjectivists and the rest desire to overthrow or ignore.
Indexical, or cultural conservatism is the devotion to a certain set of values a certain culture we can point out. This culture rests upon lengthy deliberation and observation of human nature and in particular a certain set of preferences widely shared in a society. Ways of life flow from human nature and from procedural conservatism which are worth pursuing and preserving.
There is nothing to normative moral theory other than the recommendation that we use common-sense reasoning for coherence amongst our moral judgments and in turn (at the lowest level) amongst our desires. In other words, beyond procedural conservatism, as I've described it, there isn't much else to say in the way of normative theory. Kant, Rawls, Mill and the rest, including the enormous amount of ink spilled by 20th Century specialists in normative theory, a non-entity of a scholarly or philosophical field, should be seen as of little value and wrongheaded. Common-sense procedural conservatism has never been seriously injured by any critic, and Kantianism, utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, and the rest have been refuted over and over again with no hope of vindication in sight.
The lowest-level reason for this is that the link between what is right or good and what we prefer is logical. There is nothing we could count as evidence that a way of life was preferable (in a reflective equilibrium in which all things had been considered and thorough application of common-sense reasoning for coherence amongst our desires and consistency with the facts had been applied) and yet wrong. Nor is there anything we would count as evidence that something was right and yet detestable (in a reflective equilibrium in which all things...etc.) "Right" and "good" are thus reducible to desire. This is the direction in which the sentimentalist tradition of Hume should have gone and on this blog has gone.
To conclude: Conservatism is both procedural and substantive. If you've find what I've said about procedural conservatism a bit hard to grasp, don't worry. It is just ordinary common-sense prudential reasoning. If you are not biased in favor of one value over all others, if you try to determine what is best in view of the most coherent and fact-based set of all of the values we hold dear, then you practice procedural conservatism already; most people do, I think. Substantive conservatism is the disposition to preserve, and improve it via procedural conservatism, a certain culture which promotes good lives, suits what is important to us, and suits our nature. This explains why we find people listing particulars in effort to define conservatism, for example, Allen C. Guelzo in this week's National Review magazine:
If to love liberty, to hate slavery, and to believe that free labor holds out the best hope of "self-improvement" and "advancement" do not exemplify what American conservatism ought to be, then I am at a loss to know what does.The overall view is, following Hume, sentimentalist in reducing good and right to what we prefer, where what we prefer is reducible to our desires, inclinations, and sentiments. Be careful over this point. As Jonah Goldberg says, also in this week's National Review magazine,
...redemption and meaning are derived not from indulging your "authentic" instincts and drives, but from striving to live up to external and timeless ideals.That is so. Conservatism strives to preserve ways of life which suit our preferences. These ways are derived from lengthy experiment and deliberation amongst experienced inquirers. They are not derived from the individual's simply reflecting on what he wants (as certain philosophies of authenticity or existentialism and subjectivism or emotivism recommend.) Your culture has already discovered a plethora of ways of life which reflect lasting facts about you. You must reflect within yourself to discover which of these ways or novel innovation amongst them best suits you. You need them even more than you need authentic introspection. They embody truths about your nature which momentary "authentic" impulses do not.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Conservative Deliberation and Human Nature
I said:
Deliberation in a healthy forum is the attempt to determine a course of action or policy which maximizes the fulfillment of an array of parameters - values which, due to the vagaries and limitations of circumstance, cannot all be perfectly fulfilled all of the time (or even any of the time.) This is prudential reasoning about what is important to us (such as decency, justice as getting what one deserves, prosperity, security, freedom) in effort to preserve as much of it as we can. It is like the individual's prudential reasoning over what is important to him, in which he attempts to fulfill as many of his desires as possible. Logical and circumstantial coherence constraints guide this reasoning, as for example, when we notice that an increase in security is inconsistent with maintaining liberty and prosperity at current levels. This is case-based reasoning. It applies principles only as rules of thumb or heuristics, which are nothing more than gestures at a host of non-controversial cases about which all parties to debate are expected by the applier of a principle to agree.
The array of values map onto our preferences and are suited to our functional dispositions. The mapping isn't mechanical, as the array itself has gone through the civilizing process of the aforementioned deliberation over and over again in a tradition (as, for example, when we ferret out incoherent values that ill-fit the rest of the array, such as the value that sanctions a man's right to keep innocents as slaves.) In other words, human nature doesn't come off the rack perfectly smooth in it's internal coherence of desires. This coherence is won and urges natural to us tamed by reflection upon more powerful urges also natural to us. The point is that deliberation in a healthy forum is this process of seeking coherence amongst our array of values and determining actions which cohere with that array by maximizing its net fulfillment.
This is procedural conservatism, the epistemic side of the heart of conservatism. Therefore only conservative deliberation is healthy deliberation. Normatively speaking, only conservative deliberation is deliberation.
The alternative to conservative deliberation is the development of absolute principles or rules in isolation from human nature, from the array of things which are important to us, and from the messy business of facts, history, and various contingencies uncovered by lengthy exposure to case-based reasoning. It is favored by leftists and libertarians. The former fetishize economic equality and state power, whereas the latter fetishize liberty. They cling to the fulfillment of their fetish, come what may. Facts in conflict with the sanity of these approaches are explained away. This is dogmatism. It isn't deliberation.
Now, I don't mean to stigmatize all leftists and libertarians, but only those who have completely lost their hold on healthy deliberation. Some, on the other hand, have not. They are conservatives with eccentric views. They engage in procedural conservatism, unlike their dogmatic kin. But they see things idiosyncratically and cleave to redistribution and state power or to liberty much more often than other conservatives in the forum. They do not fetishize their conclusions beforehand but arrive at them legitimately.
There is a lot more on this sort of thing in the archives. I'll have more posts on it in the future.
We're moving on to Mill's On Liberty next.
UPDATE: The remarks I made about eccentric views indicate that I'm not saying that conservatives are the only genuine deliberators in the forum. When you meet someone who is espousing what are not conservative views, he may be a conservative in the procedural sense. He is a genuine deliberator. Most leftists do not match this description, however. In my experience, almost all have been dogmatists.
I said:
I've slipped from "conservative deliberation" to "genuine, true deliberation." There is no difference, and if you think otherwise, you're mistaking the semblance for the real thing. There is nothing that would count as evidence that a course of behavior or way of life that went against what we know to be true about our nature and our set of time-honored, human-nature-tested and cherished values was the right course or a good way of life. For the only kind of thing that counts as evidence in these matters is what we prefer, what suits us.
Deliberation in a healthy forum is the attempt to determine a course of action or policy which maximizes the fulfillment of an array of parameters - values which, due to the vagaries and limitations of circumstance, cannot all be perfectly fulfilled all of the time (or even any of the time.) This is prudential reasoning about what is important to us (such as decency, justice as getting what one deserves, prosperity, security, freedom) in effort to preserve as much of it as we can. It is like the individual's prudential reasoning over what is important to him, in which he attempts to fulfill as many of his desires as possible. Logical and circumstantial coherence constraints guide this reasoning, as for example, when we notice that an increase in security is inconsistent with maintaining liberty and prosperity at current levels. This is case-based reasoning. It applies principles only as rules of thumb or heuristics, which are nothing more than gestures at a host of non-controversial cases about which all parties to debate are expected by the applier of a principle to agree.
The array of values map onto our preferences and are suited to our functional dispositions. The mapping isn't mechanical, as the array itself has gone through the civilizing process of the aforementioned deliberation over and over again in a tradition (as, for example, when we ferret out incoherent values that ill-fit the rest of the array, such as the value that sanctions a man's right to keep innocents as slaves.) In other words, human nature doesn't come off the rack perfectly smooth in it's internal coherence of desires. This coherence is won and urges natural to us tamed by reflection upon more powerful urges also natural to us. The point is that deliberation in a healthy forum is this process of seeking coherence amongst our array of values and determining actions which cohere with that array by maximizing its net fulfillment.
This is procedural conservatism, the epistemic side of the heart of conservatism. Therefore only conservative deliberation is healthy deliberation. Normatively speaking, only conservative deliberation is deliberation.
The alternative to conservative deliberation is the development of absolute principles or rules in isolation from human nature, from the array of things which are important to us, and from the messy business of facts, history, and various contingencies uncovered by lengthy exposure to case-based reasoning. It is favored by leftists and libertarians. The former fetishize economic equality and state power, whereas the latter fetishize liberty. They cling to the fulfillment of their fetish, come what may. Facts in conflict with the sanity of these approaches are explained away. This is dogmatism. It isn't deliberation.
Now, I don't mean to stigmatize all leftists and libertarians, but only those who have completely lost their hold on healthy deliberation. Some, on the other hand, have not. They are conservatives with eccentric views. They engage in procedural conservatism, unlike their dogmatic kin. But they see things idiosyncratically and cleave to redistribution and state power or to liberty much more often than other conservatives in the forum. They do not fetishize their conclusions beforehand but arrive at them legitimately.
There is a lot more on this sort of thing in the archives. I'll have more posts on it in the future.
We're moving on to Mill's On Liberty next.
UPDATE: The remarks I made about eccentric views indicate that I'm not saying that conservatives are the only genuine deliberators in the forum. When you meet someone who is espousing what are not conservative views, he may be a conservative in the procedural sense. He is a genuine deliberator. Most leftists do not match this description, however. In my experience, almost all have been dogmatists.
Monday, February 09, 2009
Love
Love is guidance towards character. That is to say, to love someone is to desire to guide him towards good character.
This is why you can't love God.
This is why you can be lonely despite appearances and despite many seeming friends.
In order to love a man it is necessary to know who he is. A man who is not understood by any of his acquaintances is unloved. This is how a man whose acquaintances are all myopic, narcissistic, mentally ill, or similarly vicious, can be unloved despite appearances.
UPDATE: Caveats that go without saying: 1. If you're paid to mentor a person toward good character that's not love. The desire I'm referring to in the definition is an ultimate, non-instrumental desire. 2. You can, of course, be deeply grateful to God and devoted to virtue in light of that gratitude.
Love is guidance towards character. That is to say, to love someone is to desire to guide him towards good character.
This is why you can't love God.
This is why you can be lonely despite appearances and despite many seeming friends.
In order to love a man it is necessary to know who he is. A man who is not understood by any of his acquaintances is unloved. This is how a man whose acquaintances are all myopic, narcissistic, mentally ill, or similarly vicious, can be unloved despite appearances.
UPDATE: Caveats that go without saying: 1. If you're paid to mentor a person toward good character that's not love. The desire I'm referring to in the definition is an ultimate, non-instrumental desire. 2. You can, of course, be deeply grateful to God and devoted to virtue in light of that gratitude.
Limited Federal Government RIP
The Democrates in Congress think you're stupid, ignorant or vicious in some other manner. They're right. You'll vote them in again.
The Constitution depicts a strictly limited government. We no longer have a limited government by any stretch of the imagination.The Federal Government of today is acting far outside the bounds of the Constitution. It has been doing so for 80 years or so. Slow poison. We're already dead.
Ever talked to a Canadian who had to come here to get treatment for a tumor? Do you think socialized medicine is not in the "stimulus" bill?
Ever lived in a country where half the economy was the government?
Think the New Deal stopped the Great Depression? Go ahead and try your New Deal again, then. It'll work this time, right?
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work... I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started -- and an enormous debt to boot. - Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury Secretary
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. So are their children.
The Democrates in Congress think you're stupid, ignorant or vicious in some other manner. They're right. You'll vote them in again.
The Constitution depicts a strictly limited government. We no longer have a limited government by any stretch of the imagination.The Federal Government of today is acting far outside the bounds of the Constitution. It has been doing so for 80 years or so. Slow poison. We're already dead.
Ever talked to a Canadian who had to come here to get treatment for a tumor? Do you think socialized medicine is not in the "stimulus" bill?
Ever lived in a country where half the economy was the government?
Think the New Deal stopped the Great Depression? Go ahead and try your New Deal again, then. It'll work this time, right?
We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work... I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started -- and an enormous debt to boot. - Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury Secretary
Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. So are their children.
Friday, February 06, 2009
The United States Passes from Tragedy to Farce
The Democrats think you're stupid enough to accept that hundreds of billions of dollars spent years from now on big government programs is an emergency economic stimulus. Krauthammer explains. The Congressional Budget Office says the pork will harm the economy, not help it. But your government doesn't let the facts get in the way because it thinks Americans are too ignorant of these facts and too stupid to process them. President Obama:
So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point.
Either he's really that ignorant and stupid or he thinks you are. It doesn't matter which is the case. The American government is so broken, stupid, and corrupt, and the voter so ignorant and backward in his values, that at this point the American experiment is over. It has been over for several decades now. The generations after the Greatest Generation are stupid, ignorant, narcissistic, vain, and spoiled. There is no use mourning the death of America. It wasn't recent.
Sure, there are millions upon millions of liberty-loving patriots left. So, what? Their numbers are relatively few and diminishing.
No, the tragedy was decades ago, albeit it was a slow poison that gradually spread to the brain and heart. The poison was wealth, ignorance and leftism, a lethal cocktail. The corpse flops around, a zombie, a clown. We've passed to farce at this point. This bill, this Congress and Executive, are a farce. We'll vote them in again soon. We deserve them. Pity about the children, though.
Not to worry, we press on. We think in terms of centuries and preserving what is precious and fragile. These are things that the United States has forsaken but we have not.
The Democrats think you're stupid enough to accept that hundreds of billions of dollars spent years from now on big government programs is an emergency economic stimulus. Krauthammer explains. The Congressional Budget Office says the pork will harm the economy, not help it. But your government doesn't let the facts get in the way because it thinks Americans are too ignorant of these facts and too stupid to process them. President Obama:
So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point.
Either he's really that ignorant and stupid or he thinks you are. It doesn't matter which is the case. The American government is so broken, stupid, and corrupt, and the voter so ignorant and backward in his values, that at this point the American experiment is over. It has been over for several decades now. The generations after the Greatest Generation are stupid, ignorant, narcissistic, vain, and spoiled. There is no use mourning the death of America. It wasn't recent.
Sure, there are millions upon millions of liberty-loving patriots left. So, what? Their numbers are relatively few and diminishing.
No, the tragedy was decades ago, albeit it was a slow poison that gradually spread to the brain and heart. The poison was wealth, ignorance and leftism, a lethal cocktail. The corpse flops around, a zombie, a clown. We've passed to farce at this point. This bill, this Congress and Executive, are a farce. We'll vote them in again soon. We deserve them. Pity about the children, though.
Not to worry, we press on. We think in terms of centuries and preserving what is precious and fragile. These are things that the United States has forsaken but we have not.
A Note on Natural Law Theory
I was wrong here. Natural law theory has two species. The first entails divine command theory, along the lines I indicated in that post. On this view, it is God's intention in our nature which provides the normativity to be gleaned from in; you get from is to ought because God's will is in our nature and his will ought to be followed.
The second species of natural law theory is the view that there are in human nature certain functional structures, dispositions to prefer, inclinations, (as I've been discussing in the last little while), which are grounds for drawing moral conclusions: conclusions about what is right and which lives are good. (How you get from is to ought I've explained before and will soon do again.) This theory does not entail the existence of God. I was pleased to see Randy Barnett noticing this lack of entailment in the first few pages of his book The Structure of Liberty.
I was wrong here. Natural law theory has two species. The first entails divine command theory, along the lines I indicated in that post. On this view, it is God's intention in our nature which provides the normativity to be gleaned from in; you get from is to ought because God's will is in our nature and his will ought to be followed.
The second species of natural law theory is the view that there are in human nature certain functional structures, dispositions to prefer, inclinations, (as I've been discussing in the last little while), which are grounds for drawing moral conclusions: conclusions about what is right and which lives are good. (How you get from is to ought I've explained before and will soon do again.) This theory does not entail the existence of God. I was pleased to see Randy Barnett noticing this lack of entailment in the first few pages of his book The Structure of Liberty.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Democratic Party Lexicon
Make sure you adjust your concepts of these terms.
Tax Cuts - Welfare payments from the IRS to people who don't pay taxes.
Emergency Economic Stimulus Bill - Enormous spending on big government programs most of which will occur years from now and after the current recession.
Bringing fiscal discipline back to Washington - Increasing the deficit to over $1T from now on.
Hero - 47-year-old man with hypnotic oratory but no accomplishments in his career.
Returning Moral Integrity to Washington - Putting tax cheats Geithner and Daschle in the President's Cabinet.
Liberty, Self-Reliance, Limited Government - These hoary old terms are obsolete and now deprecated. Remove them from your vocabulary.
Make sure you adjust your concepts of these terms.
Tax Cuts - Welfare payments from the IRS to people who don't pay taxes.
Emergency Economic Stimulus Bill - Enormous spending on big government programs most of which will occur years from now and after the current recession.
Bringing fiscal discipline back to Washington - Increasing the deficit to over $1T from now on.
Hero - 47-year-old man with hypnotic oratory but no accomplishments in his career.
Returning Moral Integrity to Washington - Putting tax cheats Geithner and Daschle in the President's Cabinet.
Liberty, Self-Reliance, Limited Government - These hoary old terms are obsolete and now deprecated. Remove them from your vocabulary.
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