Lefist Modus Operandi

1. The leftist will brand conservative opponents as "right wing" - somehow fringe, extreme. The irony is that right and left are flavors of socialism - one fascistic and one communistic. So, anyone in the leftist's audience who accepts that conservatives are "right wing" is deeply confused. The leftist is able to drive the confused audience away from conservatism by depicting it as leftism in its fascistic flavor. The left-right spectrum is a trick of the leftist. It is incoherent as a depiction of the actual array of possible political positions.

2. The leftist will disparage the motives of opponents' argument as merely brute manifestations of economic forces. Marx's great success was to spread the tactic of depicting the opposition to leftism as merely the attempt of the wealthy and their deluded servants to protect the free market system. By depicting the opposition in this way the leftist persuades the audience that there is no need to examine the opposition's arguments. Better yet, he may be able to convince the audience that there are no such arguments. The point is that leftism inculcates a reluctance to analyze arguments which run counter to leftism. It does this by characterizing any such disposition as itself merely the tool of the capitalist and free-market system to protect monied interests. This is one of the reasons why college graduates of sociology, English, anthropology, and history are unable to think critically. They have been taught that criticism is merely the ascribing of causes to belief, rather than the analysis of reasons for belief. Marx was a great success. He severely debilitated the modern mind. This debility is part of the reason for the success of leftism, even after its 100 years of ghastly failure.

3. The leftist will over-regulate the economy, creating dysfunctions and crises. These will usually be precipitated by businessmen acting in their self-interest. Blame the crisis on the businessmen, take power, regulate even more. The 2008 credit mortgage insurance crisis and the current inefficiency of American health care are due to government over-regulation. Of course, where the businessmen precipitated the crisis one could make the case that this might have been prevented by more regulation. The naive will fall for this. What the Marxist has done in that case is to shift the game into his stadium where you're either on the big government team or the totalitarian team. Those who call for less government regulation have to cut through an entire frame of reference in order to make their case. What is required is a smart and educated public. If this is unavailable, the leftist wins.

4. The leftist will lie. Of course, all people are tempted to prevaricate and sometimes succumb. But Marx argued that all morals are mere manifestations of economic forces. He was a nihilist and he inculcated this stance in his followers. Lying poses no problem for such people. It is the rare leftist who simply wants to uncover the truth about political and moral issues. Leftism is political movement to a totalitarian state. It is not a set of ideas aimed preserving truth in political and moral beliefs. In that sense of "ideology", in which ideology turns on epistemic issues of truth and justification, leftism is not an ideology but a social movement. It is no accident that there is not a single formidable argument for leftism. Marx had none. Rawls had the best but it was very poor.

Of course, the common American liberal is only partly infected by leftist intellectual and psychological dysfunction. He adopts these modus operandi only partially.

Leftist Modus Operandi: Mortgage and Health Care

First take a few decades of using government to interfere with the free market, creating "crises."

For example, over-regulate the mortgage industry by lowering interest rates, putting pressure on banks to make mortgages to people who can't afford them, and creating MBS and CDS in order to sop up the risk. Don't worry, there will be a hole in the plan somewhere. Ah, yes, there it is. The risk will nevertheless concentrate itself in these CDS holders because many in the mortgage industry will see a chance to make a killing in such a system and there will be a housing price bubble. It will pop and you will have your crisis. As the Leninist says, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." In this overregulated system, where the free market is sufficiently crippled that it cannot correct itself by throwing the losers to the curb, there will always be little holes of underregulation where statism is incomplete. These leaks will precipitate the crisis. You may plausibly blame the crisis on underregulation. The people, in their ignorance of the byzantine system you have created, will not know the difference. They will believe that the free market is to blame. You may plausibly blame everything on greedy businessmen and seize power.

Another example is the health care. Regulate the heck out of health insurance. Tell insurers what they must offer. Make it so that they can't compete in a free market across state lines. Make the justice system cause doctors to perform 25% of their tests for no medical reason but only so that they will not be sued. Crippled by government, the system will become very inefficient, provoking what the people may be ignorant enough to think is a crisis caused by the free market. You may plausibly blame everything on greedy businessmen and seize power.

There will always be idiots and immoral slime in the business world. There will always be such people in every walk of life. What the leftist does is to use government over-regulation to cause crises, inefficiency and waste in the economy that get exacerbated in certain cases by businessmen's idiocy and greed. The regulation will not be totalitarian enough to prevent these businessmen's wrongdoing. Then the leftist steps in, blames the problems on under-regulation of the economy. If the people are ignorant and gullible enough, they will assent. Then they will get totalitarian regulation of the economy.

The alternative is good, minimal regulation of the economy: regulation that prevents the most egregious crimes, monopolies, and crises and does nothing else - regulation that lets fools who make bad mortgages lose, regulation that allows insurance companies compete to offer cheap insurance. That is the kind of regulation that creates a free market economy. America should try having a free market economy. We wouldn't have had the mortgage crisis and we wouldn't have such inefficiency in the health insurance industry.

Suggestion

Remember these values?

• Liberty
• Self-reliance
• Hard-work
• Property
• Community
• Charity
• Limited government
• Non-covetousness (refraining from envy)
• The formation of society as people prefer, unrestrained by government.
• Anti-megalomania (e.g., George Washington)
• Low taxes
  

These are values to be treasured. Productive of good lives, protective of rights, they are at the core of American values. Cherished less and less in America, they fade away.

Consider these values:

• Economic equality: everyone having the same amount of wealth.
• Large welfare state, unlimited in its power to take from the rich and regulate life.
• Security and ease of life, not having to worry about taking care of oneself.
• A society designed, top-down, and the design implemented, top-down, by leaders in government.

These are not values to be cherished. They are not at the core of American values. They are the values of statism (the phenomenon which at its extreme is totalitarianism, at its weakest is the European, Canadian and American socialist welfare state and in its flavors is any of the forms of leftism: communism, socialism, or fascism.) These values are not productive of good lives or protective of rights. Yet, their role in American society increases. During the last eighty years, with the rise of leftism in Europe and America, they have been replacing the American values.

The two sets of values are incompatible. You must choose which side you are on. Europe has chosen. America has been choosing and is still choosing. It must choose the American side or the statist side.

Say, out loud, "capitalism, free market economy." Do you feel a certain disdain, a hatred, and anger in the pit of your stomach? If so, then you have been trained to choose statism already. Who would have done such a thing to you? Who would stand to gain power from your support for statist policies? You should review that decision.

You must decide which society you will give to your children.

Poverty and Rights

Ever go camping? Recall what it's like. The tent. Scraping together a fire and a latrine. No fridge. Now imagine the camping continuing for the next fifty years, or however long you lasted. That's poverty. That's dire straits.

Now imagine you have a car, refrigeration, heating and air conditioning, free education through twelfth grade, and adequate medical care, nutrition, and clothing. You have little else, but you have the opportunity to gain much more simply by graduating from high school, not getting pregnant, not staying intoxicated, getting a job, and doing your best at the job every day. That's not poverty. It's not dire straits.

Outside of contracts, there is only one positive right: the right of innocents in your community who are in dire straits to be assisted by you. When someone in your community bleeds, you provide first aid. When a child in your community falls into poverty, you help him out. This assistance may require some transfer of wealth. The principle of charity is at work here. Whether we should use government to provide the assistance and to transfer the wealth is a question I leave open at the moment.

Americans are for the most part in fulfillment of its duties regarding positive rights. They provide the assistance necessary for Americans to avoid poverty.

More important are negative rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. The American governmental system is in serious violation of Americans' negative rights. It is not a limited government. It crosses the line.

Your Beloved Leader

Well, you voted for this asshole. Watch the video. Yup, that's him alright.

You know, it's funny. He sure seemed like an asshole when you picked him. How strange that it turned out that that's what he was.

Historical Oddities: Liberty and Prosperity

They're linked. They causally reinforce one another. Oddities. More often there is oppression, poverty, disorderly anarchy, death, disease, etc. Think liberty and prosperity are here to stay, indelible features of the social world? Think you can create a bloated and wasteful government which spends more money than the private sector and have your liberty and prosperity too?

For the sake of the ease of not having to look after oneself and for the sake of economically equal outcomes, we will relinquish liberty, with which an enormous government is incompatible. Prosperity will evaporate. But we will have no ease and we will have a tiny group of wealthy masters above us. We will return to the usual: oppression and poverty. Liberty and prosperity will return to their normal abode, the history books.

You Are Insane



Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are broke. We are out of money and have only creditors to float on. There is a depression. The unemployment rate will be double-digit for the foreseeable future. Yet, you want to start another government health care program on the grounds of fiscal responsibility. And you want to raise taxes. You also want to hamstring any industry which emits greenhouse gases - any industry which uses energy - even as the earth's temperature has been flat for the entire decade, exploding the global warming models.

$400B deficits were considered monstrosities a decade ago. Now we accept permanent deficits of over $1T without objection. Consider the woman who used to feel horror at her husband's imbibing six glasses of scotch every night. Now she willingly purchases the entire bottle he imbibes in the morning and the one he imbibes at night. Passive, dull, broken, she submits. She even shares in the delight he derives from drowning his resentments in booze. This is her life now. She no longer knows any other. She knows she lies to herself. She no longer cares.

Liberty, self-reliance, and limited government are not even memories anymore. The insanity has grown for the last eighty years. The patient is no longer the same person as the healthy young man he once was. You can still from time to time see something in the eyes, though. Something longing, something panicking, a frenzied resolve to turn things around, unable to move. A light of awareness. A sorrow. But the light is usually not there in the eyes, which usually glower, dull, ignorant and brutal, while the morbidly obese body plods on, wallowing in its own waste, bellowing in pride as it erects a throne of feces at the bottom of the grave which it took eighty years to dig for itself. It will be dead before it can be buried alive. When the earth is dumped in only its children will be there to receive it, bewildered, doomed.

Natural Law and Government Health Insurance

1. Bureaucrats in the federal government aren't going to take as good care of your health as you and your personal doctor, unmolested by federal interference, would do. The government will waste much more of the wealth inserted into this system than the private sector would. It's wrong to overlook these things and to nationalize the health care system. They are so as a matter of natural law.

2. Outside of contracts, there is only one positive right: the right of the innocent in dire straits in your local community or vicinity to be given simple assistance. Other innocents in dire straits in more geographically and socially distant locations have much less claim to your assistance, but they have some. It diminishes as we move outward until the duty is gone at some distance.

This point of view is treated with contempt by libertarians who think that even your good neighbor who, through no fault of his own, lies badly injured before you has no right to your administering first aid, calling an ambulance, or any other action. The libertarian will agree that you would be rightly branded as callous, mean and wicked; but he balks when it comes to the question, "Did your neighbor have a right to your help?" But the fact is that you would have done wrong by your neighbor and he would have had a right to simple assistance. The censure may be appropriate punishment, but it is punishment for wrongdoing and all wrongdoing violates another's rights.

This position also angers leftists, who believe that you ought to have your wealth redistributed to the destitute, no matter what their social and geographical distance to you. At least libertarians are respectable. Leftists, on the other hand, are rich and give little to the poor, even while maintaining that it is a strict duty to redistribute the wealth. They oughtn't to be taken seriously, especially since there is not a single good argument for their strange position.

But I digress. The point is that #2 is correct and it reflects natural law. The alternatives do not and are not correct.

3. When forced to pay a fixed fee for unrestricted access to a good by a large national government, people will be unrestrained in their use of the good and the system will go bankrupt unless the fee is raised very high or the access severely restricted. The fee will be lower and the access less restricted if the good is provided by the free market at prices set by market forces. It is wrong to overlook this and cause our society to switch from private to public provision of goods. This is so as a matter of natural law.

Morality has contours impressed upon it by its conformation to human nature. There may be other moralities on other planets for other species of people with other natures. Not everything goes, as the meanings of "right" and "wrong" are not utterly ambiguous. But there is some flexibility to these terms across species and, within species, across societies. Yet within any given species, constraints of its nature obtain, rendering certain moral stances untenable. Foolishly running against human nature usually results in calamity. Nor is it that the fool's morality - his communism or what have you - better while we are by nature unable to attain to it. It is not better. It is wrong. It may be right for a species of people with utterly different motivations but it is not right for us.

Yet the lust for power renders one able to fool the foolish and hoodwink the ignorant. Human nature gives us constraints on what is morally suitable for us but it unfortunately does not usually give us the wisdom to be able to maintain our values within those constraints unmolested by the power-hungry and their useful idiots. I can't prove that 1, 2, and 3 reflect natural law here. The proof is in the collective historical wisdom of a society, conserved against the odds and grasped only partially by any of its members, some more fully understanding it than others. If you are unaware of any reason to think that the big-government welfare state isn't made more likely to be disastrous and the free market more likely to produce flourishing by natural law, then you are an example of the imperfection of human nature when it comes to practical wisdom. As a result of this ignorance, innocents will die from having health care withheld from them by the government. And vast sums of wealth will be taken from those who rightfully own it against their will and put into the black hole of government.

National Food and Shelter Plan: A Proposal

Health care is a right. Every American has a right to health care. This is because health care is a basic need without which one cannot function. Yet, food and shelter are much more basic needs than health care. It is possible to live without health care if you are lucky. But you can't live without the food and shelter.

Health care is a right because it's a basic need. Food and shelter and much more basic needs. Therefore, every American has a right to food and shelter. In addition, food and shelter cost about as much as health care insurance, maybe more.

The analogy is tight. Americans have a right to food and shelter. It's time for a national food and shelter plan. Food and shelter should be provided for a monthly premium, which should be waived for those who can't afford it.

Having paid your monthly premium or had it paid for you by more fortunate Americans, you would simply show up at any grocery store and take your food. The government would pay the grocer to provide you the food.

Now, what the government would pay the grocer would be competitive. Some say that many grocers would fold because their income would drop. But I don't believe that. Others say that there may come a time that rationing of food might have to occur because being able to take whatever food we want simply wouldn't do. This is true, but it's acceptable. We can't all have filet mignon or name-brand cereals. The government will have to dole these out rationally.

This is the kind of vision that really gets to the heart of what it means to be an American: to grow the government very, very big so that it can take care of everything instead of greedy businessmen raping us six ways to Sunday. All men are endowed with unalienable rights to food, shelter, health care and to not having to worry about all those things or about greedy businessmen making a profit off of them. That way, Americans can be free to do what they like, like video games and picnics and hobbies. That's the core vision of American values. That's the American way.

Watch out for reactionaries who don't want government to interfere with and strong-arm business. Those people are fascists.

Natural Law, Secular and Indeterminate

But to get back, let me give you a small taste of what I mean. It's pretty clear once you think about it. Though perhaps we are accustomed to natural law being fully determinate of all issues of right and wrong and also dependent upon the existence of God, neither is the case.

The natural law we're considering here is of course moral law. But take an analogy from biology where we may also speak of natural law. There are certain environmental conditions to which human beings are suited to thrive and others which cause them to do poorly. Just run through a variety of conditions and you'll see this. 4000 degrees Farenheit is inconvenient, as is zero degrees. Oxygen in the air is nice. When there's too little of it, well.... Also, there is a kind of diet which enables us to thrive. You can see that. Rocks and twigs are not so good. An all-meat diet isn't good, either. Etc.

Indeterminacy remains, though how much of it is an open question. How much greens to eat? Equatorial climate, or one more like that of France or Pennsylvania? The question closes up when you press the considerations further and look at anthropological and biological evidence for the suitability of certain environment and diet and the unsuitability of others. An array of different and approximately equally suitable environments and a similar array of diets remain. Yet the complete malleability of human nature as a theory drops out.

Now, is it preposterous to think that social arrangements, ethics, and character virtues are also tethered to human nature? Of course not. On the contrary, it is preposterous to think that human nature is suited to only certain diets and environments but is not a constraint on our choice of ethics and character virtues. This constraint, this tether, is natural law. It has some slack in it. There is more than one decent and admirable set of moral values which fits with natural law. Again, it is an open question how wide the options are. But the more you examine the question, the more it closes.

Let me throw out a value or two:

1. Each person ought to be allowed to act as he prefers and not be forced by others to act in accordance to their preference.

2. Violation of #1 is a forfeiture of one's own protections under #1. In other words, if you force others to act in accordance with your will, you may rightly be stopped.

3. Self-reliance and industry are good, and sloth is bad.

4. One ought to help members of one's community who do not violate principle #1 but who fall into dire straights through no fault of their own.

5. Failure to distinguish between dire straights fallen into through no fault of one's own and dire straights created by sloth and foolishness is bad. One ought not to help the foolish and slothful.

Etc., etc.

There are caveats to all of these principles, of course. There are no moral rules, but only summary rules of thumb. But you get the gist.

How about your values? Are they likely to suit human nature? Or do you suspect they likely violate natural law, while you look away? Do you feel lucky where others have failed repeatedly?

But there is more than human nature working in natural law. There is an analytical core to it. Wanton cruelty is immoral. Small kindnesses done for innocent people are good. These are so by definition. The terms "right", "wrong", "moral" and so forth have meanings which are not utterly inelastic. For example, a bowling ball can't be "what is right." Nor can it be immoral. The point is that there is an analytical definition of "rightness" which constrains morality as well as human nature does. Natural law, then, is the fact that the meanings of moral terms and the kind of creatures we are constrain how it is good for us to live.

In any event, these facts about natural law are so even if God does not exist. Imagine a world in which He does not exist. In that world, these facts are so. Imagine another world in which these facts are so and there is a God who holds human nature constant while attempting to make it the case that these facts about natural law no longer obtain. He fails. Q.E.D. Even God can't make cruelty good and liberty worthless. He didn't make them, respectively, bad and valuable in the first place.

The upshot is that the dismissal of natural law as hopelessly absolutist (i.e., committed to absolute determinacy in all areas of morality) or hopelessly committed to divine command theory is a non-starter.

By the way, progressivism is wedded to that non-starter, just as a matter of fact. If you're a lefty, you need to reform your position to say that socialism and statism are consistent with natural law and even more adherent to it than the alternatives. Good luck with that. Principle #1 is a tough customer. And when you look at the prosperity that has issued from this liberty, you really have problems. Why don't you consider abandoning your desire to be a puppet master, a designer of society? You're in violation of natural law. You might want to reflect on what motivates you. It isn't the plight of poor people. After all, you don't give all your wealth above the poverty line to charity, now, do you? You don't volunteer at the soup kitchen 15 hours a week, now do you? What, then, would drive you to embrace values that fly in the face of natural law?

The Federal Government's Authority Over Your Healthcare

The federal government has the right to prevent you from contracting with any agency for health insurance. In other words, you do not have the right to form contracts with another party for the purpose of health insurance coverage unless the federal government gives you that right.

You do not have a right to refrain from purchasing health insurance. If you fail to purchase it, you may be held to be in violation of the law if the federal government so desires. The federal government will then have a right to punish you and force you to purchase health insurance.

American insurance companies may rightfully be prevented from offering health insurance coverage by the federal government. They have no right to offer it if the federal government does not give them such a right.

If the federal government chooses to do so, it may rightfully put private insurance companies out of business by undercutting their premiums by selling federal government insurance policies at a loss. That's legal. The federal government may use such tactics to create a monopoly. It has such a right.

When there is only one insurance company left, the federal government, it will have a right to deny its customers medical treatment. As in Canada and England, the American federal government has a right to withhold medical treatment from its customers.

The federal government can afford to create another federal health insurance program at this time.

In short, rights come from somewhere: the federal government. And money comes from nowhere.

Natural Law and Indeterminacy

The modern American liberal feels a sensation of resentment well up in his esophagus whenever he is told that there are natural laws of morality which are written in human nature and cannot be successfully overridden by conventional morality. He consigns any such notion to antiquated religious zealotry, theocracy, and so forth, waving away any mention of the fact that this country was founded on "the laws of nature" and "inalienable rights." He sees admirable thinkers such as Clarence Thomas as religious zealots and theocrats. He changes the subject when the Founding Fathers are brought up in this connection.

Yet, of course there are natural laws. The Founding Fathers had thrice your intellect and learning. Think twice before you blithely contradict them. Just think for a moment about the real thrust of the leftist's distaste for natural law. Reflect for a moment what might be in your breast with regard to these matters.

You are deeply dissatisfied with traditional American values and ways of life and want the government to create a new social structure in which freedom is vastly curtailed in favor of wealth redistribution. You want rich, white, conservative Christians to have less wealth and power, and you want their wealth and power to be handed over to poor, non-whites who are not conservative Christians. Everyone who subscribes to the existence of natural laws says this is a very bad idea. So, you hate natural law and those who espouse it. This is the attitude which cost 100 million lives for your cause in the 20th Century and ruined the black American family. It's an attitude which kills by having the government of England and Canada deny health care to people who have earned enough money to pay for it and then gotten sick. But you persist. Your moral aspirations are based upon resentment. Think for a moment about what it is that you resent. It's not pretty that you resent it. I won't mention what it is. You know. It's a very dark place to be. Yet, there you are.

There is a way out of your detestable little conundrum. Think a minute. Take a breath.

Natural law does not entail the existence of God or the authority of religion. There is no divine command theory in natural law, which is a good thing, because divine command theory was refuted by Socrates in the Euthyphro 2500 years ago. So, relax. You can continue to hate mainstream American Christianity while accepting natural law.

Also, natural law is not fully deterministic of right and wrong. It sets up a large array of fundamental values which are inalienable from human nature. These have to do with the nature of justice, fair play, family ties, liberty, charity, and so forth. They allow for a considerable degree of flexibility and may be adhered to with equal fidelity by societies of vary different conventional moralities. There is a game with certain rules and structures and avenues of success, but there are many ways to play the games, many styles which take the game in differing directions with acceptable results. This means that a society can decide how it would like to live. In other words, it may maintain loyalty to its cherished values without violating natural law while other societies with different values maintain their values without violating natural law. All this is so, provided that the two societies in question are lucky enough and wise enough to have values consistent with natural law, of course.

So, relax, you can have your atheistic relativism, provided of course you see that the relativism is constrained in scope by natural law. You'll have to scrap the leftism, though.

Founding Fathers Quotes

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. -George Washington, Circular to the States, May 9, 1753

A people... who are possessed of the spirit of commerce, who see and who will pursue their advantages may achieve almost anything. -George Washington, letter to Benjamin Harrison, October 10, 1784

Can you consent to wade through the vile mire of dependency, and owe the miserable remnant of that life to charity, which has hitherto been spent in honor? If you can — GO — ...Go, starve, and be forgotten! -George Washington, letter to the Officers of the Army, March 12, 1783

But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. -John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, July 17, 1775

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.... -John Adams, Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. -Benjamin Franklin, April 17, 1787

But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views. -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, 1781

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the, designs of ambition. -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 19, 1787

Liberty is the very idol of my soul, the parent of virtue, the nurse of heroes, the dispenser of general happiness...." -Arthur Lee, The Farmer's and Monitor's Letters to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies 1769

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.

Alfie

Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you've missed you're nothing, Alfie.

-Hal David

Positive Liberty a Vacuous Concept At Best

...leftist legerdemain at worst. Here's the gist of it.

1. First, we expand the concept of liberty to include power and wealth.
2. Next, we show that since power and wealth are unequally distributed, liberty is unequally distributed.
3. We then infer that those with more power and wealth are violating the right to liberty of those with less.
4. Finally, we conclude that those with more power and wealth are obliged to give some of theirs to those with less.
   

I object to 1 as it makes no sense as an analysis of liberty. It is a redefinition of liberty. It is not an analytic definition; it is a redefinition. It is true only if stipulative. Fine, stipulate all you want, but don't pretend to be analyzing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

1. "[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."
2. [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."]

Quote 1 describes the wonton, a non-person with no freedom of the will or even any preference amongst his desires. Quote 2 describes a person to whom the enjoyment of freedom of the will comes easily. I think that if we unpack this in the next post, we will see that 1 and 2 are mutually inconsistent. In brief, Frankfurt loads up his theory of second-order desires (which the wanton lacks) so heavily that it is to blunt an instrument to discern between the wanton and the effortlessly free person. There certainly is a role for 2nd order desires in a theory of personhood and freedom, but not such a heavy role. Something simpler will do and also allow us to make the distinction which Frankfurt's theory cannot make.

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.

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.

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:

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!"
...
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."

At this point, Archer suggests Olenska go out with her friends: "Since you tell me that you’re lonely...."

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. Freedom from the constraint upon one's actions of mistaken beliefs about what is important to one.
3. Political mastery, so that no one else is one's master.
   

Now, #1 and #2 are all well and good. But even if we accept that they are forms of positive liberty, they haven't the slightest tendency to support totalitarianism. #3 can easily be marshaled in support of totalitarianism, as the only solution to it is the General Will or some sort of fascist regime in government. Without that, someone is someone else's master at least to some extent. For unless we all dissolve into the state, some other individuals rule us to some extent.

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.

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.]

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:

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".

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.

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:

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.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.