There are more socialists than individualists in government for the same reason that murderers tend to populate the cohort of thieves.
Yesterday, discussing talk about bullying in schools, I wrote the following:
Bullying is wrong on several levels. Were children instructed in and held to standards of justice — or even of decent manners — bullying would be taboo, and the encouragement to “speak out” (not “snitch”) would work itself naturally into the everyday talk and badinage of children.
But children have little instruction in what justice is. We had little of it when I was in school. And now “justice” seems dominated by institutions, not persons. That is, when we think of justice we think of police and lawyers and social programs. We don’t think of the rules of behavior and of standing up for what’s right on a personal level.
There is something wrong here. Not horribly wrong, but inelegantly thought-out. And I noticed it upon rereading the piece right after I published it on this site.
Justice and manners aren’t terms existing on the same logical level. Justice is a virtue in ethics, and a putative goal of law. Manners is a distinct “jurisdiction” of normative effort, on parallel not with justice but with law and ethics. Manners is a big hunk of the ceremonial domain of social life, the codified (or merely intuited) traditions that help regulate and limit and compel behavior in certain distinct ways, making social life easier. It is normative, like law. And like ethics.
Though justice is a term appropriate to both practical normative discussion where formalized coercion is the chief focus (law) as well as theoretical normative discussion where some form of reason or appeal to general interest is the focus, justice is not normally applied to manners, which tend to have the “stink” of the arbitrary about them.
It might be that this is a widespread error. It might be that justice should apply to manners as well as law and ethics.
This is perhaps worth some thought.
Last night I served as projectionist, at the local park, for a showing of the documentary Bully. Sponsored by a local abuse shelter, the event was pitched to the local school. No teacher or administrator showed up. Perhaps they’ve seen the movie, and they know how badly teachers and administrators of public schools look.
How bad? Like priests of the Catholic Church, too many whom have been raping boys or covering up for same. For millennia, it turns out.
OK, perhaps not that bad. More like typical government functionaries, witless authorities unable to do their jobs.
I highly recommend the movie, which proceeds without narrator. The interviewed subjects can and do speak for themselves. We witness actual bullying in progress, on school buses, at bus stops; we hear numerous accounts of bullying — and not just by kids: in one account, a whole community of adults turn on a girl for “coming out” as a lesbian.
We see community meetings and candlelight vigils for the suicides of the bullied. And there was much talk about “speaking out.”
But two words are not mentioned in the film, by anybody: justice and manners.
Bullying is wrong on several levels. Were children instructed in and held to standards of justice — or even of decent manners — bullying would be taboo, and the encouragement to “speak out” (not “snitch”) would work itself naturally into the everyday talk and badinage of children.
But children have little instruction in what justice is. We had little of it when I was in school. And now “justice” seems dominated by institutions, not persons. That is, when we think of justice we think of police and lawyers and social programs. We don’t think of the rules of behavior and of standing up for what’s right on a personal level.
And yet it is at the personal level that each person must engage with the concept of justice. For justice is a virtue. Contrary to John Rawls and the mavens of modern pseudo-liberalism, it is not primarily a feature of institutions. It is a practice. It relies on choice and habit. It demands impartiality of a kind, and the abandonment of some personal gain to obtain the mutual gain of social co-operation. And it demands the control of emotions, too.
In the signage at the presentation of the film, I saw another virtue mentioned: empathy. Empathy’s important, and it is indeed something that can be conjured up by a movie such as Bully. But empathy is not justice. Empathy is the imagined “point of view” of the other, and a positive solidarity of emotions with that conjured point of view. It is absolutely essential to social life, as explained and explored in Adam Smith’s A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Ethics. But justice is a step up from empathy. it is a step up in rationality. And it is necessary to stop bullying, as it is to stopping the cycles of violence outside of schools and childish tribalism.
So, too, is manners. Actually, manners might be seen as “justice” without the sanction of law, nuanced by custom. Public schools in America, in the 20th century, lost track of justice and manners. No wonder. They were taken over by psychologists and administrators and set adrift from traditional moorings. They found no new moorings — at least, none that were adequate.
I think that, while it might be possible to reintroduce ethics and manners into public schools, we’re likely to see little improvement. The institutions have become hidebound. Better, I think, to introduce competition into education at the k-12 level, let different organizations of pedagogues compete for parental patronage. And let respect for others, and standards of decency and justice come into play at a fundamental level.
The level of choice.
Since writing the above, a few hours ago, I see a conceptual mistake. I’ll correct this tomorrow.
Barack Hussein Obama has been a great success for race relations in America. He’s proved, by example, that an African-American progressive can be just as scummy and tyrannical as any white Main Streeter — and, for some crucial issues, ideology simply doesn’t matter: The plutocracy will be served.
Racial equality, yeah!
There exist trenchant criticisms of the libertarian idea. Henry Sidgwick, in his The Methods of Ethics (seven editions, 1874-1907), provided a concise set of challenges to the doctrine as he understood it. Each of his points is well worth addressing. And yet when today’s major thinkers muster up their inner dialectician to rail against the freedom philosophy, they usually fall flat, get caught up in inessentials and absurdities.
Take Jeffrey Sachs. In “Libertarian Illusions” he attempts to unveil and discredit the ism behind the Ron Paul phenomenon. It’s a pretty lame attempt. Here’s his basic characterization of his target:
Libertarianism is the single-minded defense of liberty. Many young people flock to libertarianism out of the thrill of defending such a valiant cause. They also like the moral freedom that libertarianism seems to offer: it’s okay to follow one’s one desires, even to embrace selfishness and self-interest, as long as it doesn’t directly harm someone else.
Yet the error of libertarianism lies not in championing liberty, but in championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values. Libertarians hold that individual liberty should never be sacrificed in the pursuit of other values or causes. Compassion, justice, civic responsibility, honesty, decency, humility, respect, and even survival of the poor, weak, and vulnerable — all are to take a back seat.
A well-educated liberal-leaning friend of mine gave the exact same rap years ago. He also referred to “liberty as a value,” so I’ve long pondered that odd phrasing. I think of liberty as a condition dependent on relationships (with other people). I don’t primarily think of it as “a value.”
I value liberty, yes, and will agree with Sachs that it is not my only value; I have many others. Nearly all freedom-lovers do. They have lives. Personal lives, communal lives, careers, hobbies, interests . . .
Yet, I do value liberty highest in the political and legal context.
This distinction is important. In which domain of life and thought is liberty relevant? What does it compete with — that is, what do some folk place higher, or “alongside,” liberty?
Sachs provides a list. An odd list. Among his enumerated values are compassion, honesty, decency, etc., — and I rate these human characteristics highly, too. I promote them in various ways, every day, in my personal life, within the community I inhabit. But when it comes to making policy for the instrumentality of coercion within my community and nation — which Barack Obama recognizes as the distinct realm of political governance — I take caution. Compassion for people in groups A and B isn’t going to elicit from me policies that would be unjust to individuals X, Y and Z, or folks in groups C and D, no matter how my heart “bleeds” for them, to use a common cliché.
Which brings us immediately to: Justice. Sachs is no Sidgwick. The great 19th century utilitarian philosopher understood how individualist liberals (i.e., libertarians) regarded liberty (freedom):
It has been held that Freedom from interference is really the whole of what human beings, originally and apart from contracts, can be strictly said to owe to each other: at any rate, that the protection of this Freedom (including the enforcement of Free Contract) is the sole proper aim of Law, i.e. of those rules of mutual behaviour which are maintained by penalties inflicted under the authority of Government. All natural Rights, on this view, may be summed up in the Right to Freedom; so that the complete and universal establishment of this Right would be the complete realisation of Justice,—the Equality at which Justice is thought to aim being interpreted as Equality of Freedom.
Sidgwick then went on to argue that this idea doesn’t quite work, in his lights, though he saw its attraction. But note: He didn’t pretend that justice “is a value” separate from liberty. He understood that, for libertarians, justice is liberty systematized — or, at the very least, law is only just when systematically organized around the idea of basic, equal rights to freedom.
To say that libertarians shove justice to the back seat is either witless error or sly dishonesty. Sachs being no dummy, I suspect the latter.
Of course, rhetoric in political debate rarely ascends to honest dialectic. It’s mostly filled with cheap, dishonest verbal barrages. And no doubt Sachs thinks that, since the libertarian view of justice doesn’t work for him, he may characterize libertarian views of justice as, in effect, “non-justice.”
Odd, in someone who valorizes honesty in his list of things over to which liberty must, at least sometimes, give up the driver’s seat.
The reason to talk about liberty “as a value” is that, when we speak of values, we order them: This is more important than that; the other less vital than yet another. And it’s pretty obvious Jeffrey Sachs wants liberty to slide over, even take a back seat, to a number of other issues and interests. So you can see why speaking of liberty “as a value” is so strategically important to him, and to other modern “liberals”: they want to shunt aside considerations of freedom much of the time.
Often, like Barack Obama, they’ll talk about particular liberties running up to an election — checks on governments’ ability to put you in prison or kill you outright, based on mere suspicion — but it’s no surprise that such folk abandon liberties-talk when they get into power. Guantanamo was an enormity to Obama before election; a necessary part of the war on terror, after.
This experience with politicians, which every libertarian has had, is probably one of the largest influences on why we valorize liberty so highly. Politicians are in the business of compromising about the practice of coercion. Justice, in its fundamentals, is not about compromise. Politics is. So libertarians cast a suspicious eye on political processes, and certainly do not regard the outcomes of such processes as anything like “justice.”
More importantly, the liberty element in justice comes down to a core idea that Sachs does not ever mention. He never cracks the nut of the libertarian idea: Liberty limits coercion, the use of force — we are free only to the extent that we are not being robbed, beaten, bullied, or otherwise victimized by some agent (individual or group of same, under cover of some hallowed idea or symbol, or not). Libertarianism is basically the doctrine that no one has the right to initiate force; only defensive and retaliatory force can be justified.
Indeed, crimes are defined by the use of initiated force, or (by extrapolation) fraudulent machinations to extract one’s time or property by deception in contract. To say that liberty must be “balanced” by “other values” is to say that those other values trump one’s right not to be bullied, pummeled, entrapped, coerced, etc. Sachs does not bother even mentioning how his “other values” could possibly warrant the strong arm of initiated force: How doeshonesty trump liberty? Argue, please, how respect justifies threatening with force those whom you allegedly respect for not complying with your schemes.
Sachs’s list of “values” appears hastily constructed indeed.
Honesty, for example, is the origin of much libertarian analysis. Libertarians regard most of the common rationalesfor force as dishonest, inconsistent, and overlaid with flowery garlands of rhetoric.
And, in matters where people make contracts, honesty becomes a prime concern. It’s on the grounds of honesty that fraud — a concept derived from initiated force and the notion of rightful property — makes sense. So to say that libertarians place liberty above honesty seems, as P.H. Nowell-Smith neatly phrased such talk, logically odd.
Listing “respect” as something libertarians shunt aside, or back down the value scale, proves equally absurd. Most who advocate liberty for all (rather than merely take liberty for oneself) do so out of respect for others. Indeed, in the standard rhetoric of rights, “recognizing” a right is the same thing as “respecting” a person’s rights. Respect is what it’s all about, at core.
The idea of respecting individuals as individuals, and not merely for their utility in some governmental scheme, or because they fall into this group or that (race, religion, ethnicity, income category), has been central to libertarian thought for a very long time. It was there in Kant, and there, as well, in anti-Kantians like Herbert Spencer and Ayn Rand.
But don’t consult Sachs to learn out about libertarian thinkers. His short treatment of Rand is a travesty: “Ethical libertarians, exemplified by the late novelist Ayn Rand, hold that liberty is the only true virtue. Rand claimed when a rich man responds to a poor person’s plea for help (even by giving mere pennies), the rich man actually debases himself. This view is the opposite of Christian charity and Buddhist compassion, according to which moral worth is achieved by helping others.”
Of course, Rand doesn’t consider liberty a virtue at all. Her virtue is rational self-interest, a “new concept of egoism.” And though I reject Rand’s ill-conceived “virtue of selfishness,” and have argued against it as one of the gravest errors any libertarian thinker has made, I’ll say this: I don’t remember her arguing that benevolence and charity and generosity were “debasements” of the rich man. I’d like to see the reference. Did Sachs cull this notion from some early, Nietzschean work, such as the repulsive spectacle, Night of January 16th?
In times past, the Sachses of this world would have targeted Herbert Spencer as the callous anti-compassionate individualist. And those folks were wrong, too, for Spencer, though dubbed a “Social Darwinist,” was the 19th century’s chief theorist of empathy (following Adam Smith, he made do with a nuanced meaning of the traditional term, “sympathy”). Spencer grounded liberty on altruism as well as egoism, expounding at length on the importance of beneficence to the good society, the free society (see the final two books of his Principles of Ethics).
Spencer is relevant to this discussion because he so clearly limned the structure of morality, specifying that justice requires non-aggression (Sidwick’s “non-interference”) and that benevolence must be placed as something beyondjustice, a supplement. Rights to freedom were more fundamental than compassionate giving, yes; but Spencer provided reasons for this prioritization: liberty defends and encourages the voluntary co-operation that actually advances civilization and a true sense of general well-being; beneficence has much more limited social utility.
Trade is a form of voluntary co-operation, and its benefits are mutual: both parties to any exchange aim to gain. Compassionate giving is not mutual, on the face of it. It’s one person giving to another, with the gift coming off the tally of wealth or energy of the giver and accruing to the recipient. It does not increase the powers and wealth of both parties, which is why Spencer treated it carefully, urging caution. It is also why libertarians are very skeptical about those who push “compassion” above freedom, who conflate justice with love.
It is compassionate to give to the poor, or the less well-off in whatever realm of life (to assist the slow in learning, to help the sick to heal, to comfort the dying). And in point of observable fact, compassion is as important for most libertarians as it is for most human beings. And it can be both compassionate and generous to give to organizations designed to provide aid to the victims of chance or fate or even their own perversity.
But it is neither generous nor compassionate to force A, B, and C to help D, E, and F. One cannot be generous with other people’s money: that’s the worst form of prodigality. One cannot be compassionate in taking from some to give to others. Such a practice makes mockery of the very word “compassion” — one only has to listen to the political clamor for student loan forgiveness, or against any critique of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, to witness both cupidity and effrontery in near pure form.
Strangely (and indicatively), the technical difficulties of giving to others are rarely addressed by the alleged advocates of compassion. Instead of dealing with them, Sachs provides a stark thought experiment comparison, imagining rich folk on the one hand, and starving folk on the other — and in that context many folks unhesitatingly follow his line of thought. But that’s rarely the context of actual need . . . though one could argue that, today, the only cases where taking from the rich and giving to the poor really make much sense would be in massive expropriation from middle-class and wealthy westerners, giving that wealth to the deeply impoverished in Africa and Asia.
And yet such a vast international transfer rarely sees the light of day. But if liberty must be abandoned for compassion in the face of true needy, that policy would surely be primary. I guess in Sachs’s trinity of “liberty, compassion, and civic responsibility, these three,” the greatest of these is . . . nationalism.
But when one forgets borderlines, and struggles to consider helping the truly needy, the problems become more obvious. What do we give to whom? How much? Are there negative effects to giving?
These problems expand exponentially when forcing some to help others and making such actions an ongoing program. Recipients aren’t simply meek receptacles of others’ largesse. People respond to the incentives of the permanent gift environment. They change their behavior to get more. If the benefactor gives to mothers without husbands, some women will indeed engage in riskier sexual behavior that leads to more offspring. If benefactors pay for (or write off) hospital bills to the uninsured, some people will choose not to insure for illness and injury. If it becomes expected that benefactors will pay for all retirements, then fewer people will adequately save for their retirements.
These incentives influence folks on several levels, and is not a matter, always, of conscious life planning. It’s often about levels of risk in the face of the diminishing bad consequences of risky behavior. If the risks of “bad behavior” are made less, we are likely to get more of that bad behavior.
But it gets worse . . . when unilateral giving is coupled with vast takings, not only does the recipient list for all that “compassion” tends to grow, but class divisions increase as more expect to live at the expense of others, and greater “contributions” are required from those others to support the dependent classes. Parasitism emerges as a dominant social mechanism.
After decades of such programs, people now wonder why the number of “poor people” increases. Why, after billions spent on a “War on Poverty” is there still poverty?
It’s because it pays to be poor.
This is well demonstrated in both economics and sociology, though rarely talked about. Honesty would require the advocates of compassion to discuss this often, but those who speak of a “compassionate politics” rarely hazard such concerns. And they deride those who do. Without compassion.
Nearly every person I know who has adopted the freedom philosophy while coming from other commitments has thought about this at some level. Not all read the vast literature on these subjects — and very few dare read the dread Herbert Spencer! Many simply reflect on the general experience with socialism and the welfare state as preparation for adopting the libertarian idea.
And personal history often helps. Anyone who’s given their labors in a modern society a second thought recognizes the play of incentives on what they themselves do. The longer unemployment benefits are extended, the longer one is likely to remain unemployed. Statistics bear this out, but introspection often suffices. Though libertarians may rank among the hardest working of Americans, we all feel the tug of leisure, and it’s easy to lose one’s grip on the work ethic — the tough work required to seek and maintain employment, whether as a wage earner or professional contractor or entrepreneur.
I focus on compassion longer than his other trumps because it obviously means so much to Sachs. Libertarians realize something that Sachs does not address: That compassion and giving have severe limitations, and — when coupled with governmental exploitation and political demands — too easily becomes the acme of compassionate giving’s opposite: greed. There may be no group greedier than a public employee union pushing for the expansion of their benefits and the bureaucracies that allegedly help “others.”
True progress happens when people face up to the ultimate truth about voluntary co-operation: You must please others to get ahead. Some others. Some paying others.
The great tragedy of the poor is that they have little to offer anyone else. So they are left with gifts or plunder as a way of life. The horror of this is not well recognized, because, like death, the truth is so unpleasant. Though poverty is a frequent subject of literature, no tale has done for poverty what Leo Tolstoy did for mortality in “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” The degree of universal evasion of the truth of this condition eclipses my ability to measure.
That this message isn’t a main and explicit lesson provided by “public education” is a good sign that education isn’t very educational.
Jeffrey Sachs would undoubtedly point to education as a vitally important “public good” tinged with a dollop of redistributive “compassion” that advocates of “civic responsibility” must advance. And yet this industry is one of the prime examples of massive and thorough government failure. Government-provided (tax-funded, government-run) schooling has engendered a whole education culture mostly devoid of practical use. We live and think in the context of near-universal miseducation.
Most libertarians have thought themselves out of at least some of the traps that establishment educators have set for them. And if they place the idea of resistance to force above all else, it is not in a vacuum, fed only by folks like Ron Paul and Ayn Rand and others.
We who are libertarians have dealt with these ideas on a personal level as well as theoretical ones discussed by economists and philosophers. Vague hand-waving about “civic responsibility” cannot trump our preference for a society respecting individuals and based on a humane division of responsibility that does not evade the actions and actual potential of human beings.
Indeed, when libertarians speak out, protest, devise legislation and repeals, and even go so far as to engage in the ugly work of politicking, they are engaged in “civic responsibility”; pretending that libertarians do so for narrowly selfish reasons is absurd. When Sachs says that the “vast majority of Americans today embrace liberty, civic responsibility, and compassion, and seek a government built upon all three,” libertarians don’t necessarily disagree. The difference? Libertarians judge massive expropriation as not only undermining of justice but also as corrupting the actual culture of voluntary giving.
It is not compassionate to denigrate individual liberty and personal responsibility. It is not compassionate or responsible to advance the war of all against all in the form of the modern redistributive state.
And it is not compassion to wear “giving” on one’s sleeve. That’s a pharisaic something else.
Compassion can only flourish where liberty is the rule.
Generosity and sympathy, when set loose in the environment of the modern state, are corrupted by dangerous greed and the vile temptations of plunder. Sachs’s brief dismissal of libertarianism ignores the modern state’s grave hazards — and carefully elides any mention of substantive libertarian critique of that state. (He engages, instead, in a typical canard: Praising Europe at America’s expense. This tactic quickly loses any grip on reality as Europe descends into poverty and strife.) Sadly, Sachs’s work in general rests upon acceptance of vast patterns of coercion and theft. It is understandable how a person so highly placed in the intellectual wing of the modern state would find the general order a great and grand thing. It is a system that valorizes his own very dear self.
But enormities, too, are big, impressive, over-powering.
Against such powers and principalities, libertarians insist that such influences need not over-power our reason and judgment.
And against lame attacks on the libertarian idea? Actual, informed arguments against libertarian ideas would be of more use. For, it may be that only by overcoming the problems (real or perceived) in libertarianism will we ever achieve a free society.
Final thought: Sachs’s main gambit, the “play of many values,” was precisely the issue that decisively turned me to libertarianism. Value subjectivity and value diversity present grave problems for moral philosophy and political practice. They do not require the kind of robust state that Sachs seems to think they do.
Attempts to summarize all morality into a simple principle are ancient. Long before Kant’s categorical imperative we were blessed with the Silver and Golden Rules. Indeed, there is a sort of progress in the development of these rules:
Silver: Do not do unto others that which you do not want done to yourself.
Golden: Do unto others that which you want done unto you.
Cat. Imp.: Act only in such a manner that you can at the same time will that your act should become a universal law.
But the progress may be illusory. The Silver standard may be best. The negative formulation does not entail perversities that can develop from very particular values. Under the Golden Rule, my preferences could be so “out there” as to cause disharmony, not increase it. For example, I might prefer to greet strangers with impromptu opera arias. After all, I would prefer it if everyone sung to me. So, taking my strange preference for improvised singing, I inflict upon society a mad barrage of baritone assaults.
Kant’s categorical imperative is, if not more dangerous, at least far murkier. It requires that we figure out which features of an act should be universalizable. Further, as one philosopher noted with some perspicacity, universalizability is easily trivializable.
But, courtesy of John Stossel, I am now thinking of the “wisdom” of Michael Medved:
“You can only make a profit in this country by giving people a product or a service that they want,” [Medved] says. “It’s the golden rule in action.”
Is it, though? Is trade really an instantiation of the Golden Rule?
When I offer a good on the market, am I “doing unto others that which I want done unto me”?
Rarely. Or: Not quite.
As in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, it depends on which features you identify as pertinent and which features you ignore as not.
Say I offer a book on the market, from my large personal library. Am I giving unto others that which I want myself? No. I don’t want the book.
Or, I could redefine the situation (and boy, do philosophers and normal rationalizers know how to redefine situations!) to say that I am offering something on the market that someone else wants, and that’s what I want from them: Something I want more than they want.
This is an added complexity. It recognizes value diversity and value subjectivity — something the ancient maxims do not do (though, of course, the commentaries on them often do, of necessity).
Further, to call it the Golden Rule is to take from that rule its element of charity. And charity does seem to have been Jesus’ intention, at least if dozens of preachers I’ve heard expound on the subject can be believed. Trade, on the other hand, withholds desired items until terms for exchange can be met. It’s not about charity. Not at all. Any act of trade increases the advantages of both traders. And both sets are generally out for themselves, thinking of the other only instrumentally, so to achieve greater returns for each’s own interests.
Market activity implies another rule, a rather different formulation: Offer unto others that which you suspect they want; accept from others only what you want more than what you give.
As a positive imperative, this turns out to be far more effective than the Golden Rule. It does so because it demands reciprocal advantages. In the words of Destutt De Tracy,
exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain
What the Golden Rule aims for, but — because it mentions no element of contract and terms, and is usually promoted in the context of unilateral charity — fails to deliver, exchanges actually accomplish. The rule that exchanges follow is about reciprocity — which the Golden Rule touches on only by imagining it: The reciprocity is all one-sided, in the imagination and motivation of the actor. In exchanges, the reciprocity is an explicit condition of the transaction.
Further, while the Golden Rule apparently demands that one act to others unilaterally to their betterment by your standards, thus implying a huge element of altruism, trades (exchanges of goods and services) appeal to a stronger motivating force (one’s own perceived interests, whatever they may be) and builds the altruism (the mutual advantage) into the very structure of the transaction.
Traditional moralists and critics of capitalism often decry the horror of people aiming to satisfy their separate, horrid egos, but err in two ways, when criticizing trade:
1. Though both parties to any transaction are seeking their own interest, that interest can incorporate (and often does, perhaps usually does) many elements of altruism. For instance, I may be trading to get the best deal on a First Aid kit for my family or church or fraternal organization. My very aim is to serve others. And that First Aid kit may end up serving strangers or visitors. But in seeking out the best price or the highest-quality merchandise, I am likely to be quite diligent in serving my interest, no matter how broadly my interest may be. This is why Wicksteed coined the term “non-tuism.” It’s not egoism that is served by markets, but all sorts of interests. But each transaction itself, by serving the separate interests of those involved, seems egoistic.
2. Though one typically considers a transaction in terms of its advantage to oneself, the good one offers in exchange for what one really prefers is done so in hope that it pleases the opposite party more than what they would trade to you. Though one can certainly imagine this prospect in as cold a calculation as any, often this goes about in the standard human way, through empathy. And even altruism — direct concern for another — plays a part. After all, we offer things that others want.
3. Then there is the element of the very opposite of “moral hazard.” Call it moral assurance, or moral support. By acting to help another on condition that they help you, you further instill in that other the status of independent, autonomous being. Though the goods you exchange are unequal in value — reciprocally unequal, so to speak (in that I prefer what I get to what I give, and you prefer what you get to what you give me) — a sort of equality between the actors is assumed. Each can walk away before the transaction is made. Or each can gain (if each has not engaged in fraud, and each has calculated the returns from the transaction correctly). Such transactions do not impart a sense of communal solidarity. But they do impart a sense of respect. It may be a grudging respect. But each act implies that each participant to a trade is master of their own values, own decisions. Thus each transaction is a form of moral support to moral autonomy. And this is no small cultural contribution.
The Golden Rule is addressed to unilateral action. Further, it prescribes motive. As such, it limits the purview of the analysis of action. By concentrating on it — as many moralistic folk do — one loses track of the actual chains of causation in the social world. Emphasizing the Golden Rule unfits a person from understanding modern society and its ubiquitous element of trade.
It is no wonder, then, that many moralistic critics of capitalism err in economics — seeing only a fraction of the fractal universe engendered by voluntary trades — for they have been trained not only to not see the full reciprocity in exchanges, but they also have been trained to treat others as less than themselves.
That is, the Golden Rule, by focusing on unilateral action and altruistic motive, itself sets up a moral hazard. It encourages those who attempt to follow the rule to view others as beneficiaries of their acts of kindness, not as independent beings to be consulted before acting. And moralists become arrogant, pharisaical pests rather than helpful guides to action. In politics they add to the rot that the Leviathan state so easily sets into society.
This moral hazard element of a key maxim in traditional morality is, in part, a result of its misuse.
But it is a characteristic misuse. Quite understandable.
I remain convinced that the Silver Rule is superior. (There has been a lot of debate about this.) The rule’s “negative element” of discouraging bad acts undergirds the possibility of reciprocal action through trade . . . and other forms of co-operation. It provides the foundation for Destutt de Tracy’s “admirable transaction.” The Golden Rule, on the other hand, encourages the very kind of over-reaching, over-weening moralism that can corrupt a large society, preventing its full flowering in the vast diversity of mutual reciprocity of trade.
As registered trademark slogans go, Christian Mingle’s is quite the corker: “Find God’s Match for You.”
Talk about a powerful search engine!
Not Google, but God.
I wonder what the click-through charges are.
I’m sure that many other slogans were considered. How about…
ChristianMingle: Because Going to Church Is Such a Bother
ChristianMingle: It’s Better than Being Hit on by the Pastor’s Wife’s Husband
ChristianMingle: Select Using Our Patent Pending IotaSearch Theological ScoreCard!
ChristianMingle: Jonah Drew Lots, Lot Got Daughters – Don’t Choose the Old Testament Way
ChristianMingle: Wherever Two or Three Are Gathered In Front of Their Computers, Trying Not to Masturbate…
Medical care, like marriage, should be a matter of equal rights, true. But, like marriage, one’s “right to medical care” does not entail the obligatory services of anyone.
If you cannot find a partner moved by love, lust, or pity, you will remain unmarried. And live alone, until you die. Still, though unmarried, your rights have not been abridged.
If you cannot find a doctor or nurse to aid you when ill or injured, or to advise you when healthy but concerned — if no professional is moved by acquisitiveness, curiosity, or pity — then you will remain untreated. And suffer alone. Until you die.
And your rights have not been abridged.
The great, preposterous cliché of sports motivators is the ubiquitous “there is no ‘I’ in ‘Team.’” This is supposed to indicate the need for self-sacrifice in co-operative efforts.
And, certainly, in most co-operative efforts one must forgo some self-directed strategies and self-gratifying agendae to get the job done.
But the truth remains that a team wherein all have sunk their selves into the social construct of the group effort becomes something much worse than a team. The people become a mob.
It is vitally important for there to be many individuals in the team. Many I’s. They must merely organize themselves in a negotiated dance of I-You relations.
I will refrain from going all Martin Buber, here, and merely note that much of the rhetoric of co-operation is, in truth, hyperbolic at best, perverse at worst.
Which is the case with a lot of social uplift and “we-help.” Indeed, one could almost define “socialism”* as the misattribution of sociality to the principles gleaned from superficial and hyperbolic anti-individualism. The error, here, is a huge one. It is Individualism, not socialism, that embodies respect for others as separate persons, not as mere cogs in the wheels of others’ designs. It is individualism that holds the keys to sociality.
Recently, gay marriage has become all the rage. A once-individualistic notion now sounds socialistic, at least in the mouths of its loudest proponents. Perhaps I have been jaded by my thirty-plus years of advocacy for this notion, but — as witness in my last post — but I find the temper of the current movement at least partially distasteful. The too-obvious prominence of some notion of inclusion and the common insistence on the importance of equality over the older agenda of liberation largely explains my vexation with the “kids these days.”
My approach to social reform is very different. Forswear the state as much as you can. You want to marry? Then “live in sin” (as we used to say), make your pledges, write down your contracts, and call yourself married. If the state or its loathsome concatenation in the federal government gives more privileges to those with licenses, demand the change there. Deny the state any right to “license” marriage or privilege one form of marriage over another.
Since writing my last discussion of gay marriage, I have learned of another privilege denied to gay couples that heterosexual marrieds have, automatically: immigration rights; that is, the right to take a spouse from another country and skip all the vile, exclusivity rigamarole that is America’s border policy.
So, yes, let us have “gay marriage” and recognize it under the 14th Amendment. But also recognize it under the Ninth Amendment: as a right (and rite!) retained by the people.
For the specter of people demanding the government “give them something” makes them supplicants. It is unbecoming.
Do what you will that is peaceful, and then demand that the state recognize the authority of your peaceful contracts. The current movement for gay marriage assumes that the state is all-important to marriage, and that is just unspeakably dangerous.
In my slogan, at top, I provide not the “equal” sign but an “equal or greater than” sign as the logo for marriage rights now. For it is too easy to be caught up in a struggle for mere “equality.” No one worth his salt wants to be merely equal. Or made equal. Each person ought to strive, instead, for his or her own quality.
For, in a free society, equality is a term of art. In the old days, men like Volney would commonly assert that there is “nothing more obvious” than that all men are equal. I submit that this has to be understood only in a narrow sense, for in a practical sense, nothing is more obvious about human beings than that they are radically and even unalterably unequal.
But our inequalities are diverse, not univocal. One man is not greater than another, and that is that, for one is greater than another at sports, or one sport, but inferior at the arts, or one art. Measurable IQ is one measure, practical social skills another. I am both your superior and your inferior.
This is a slightly more complicated thought than “all men are created equal,” but it is the truth, and fairly obvious, at that. Some of my qualities are better than yours, others inferior. Most are unmeasurable, merely orderable in preference, and those preferences vary from person to person. This welter of inequalities sort of balance out to a general notion of equality, but that level of “balance” does not pertain to every instance.
So, when someone demands “equality” from others, or the state, it is not always clear what that someone means.
I always hope that the equality asked for, or demanded, is judgment by an equally applied, or universal, standard, which in a special sense means “equal treatment.” (It does not really mean actual equal treatment, of course: by the same standard means judging different behaviors differently: A criminal is not to be accorded the same treatment as a peaceful citizen. Really. But, before the criminality is determined, the judging must assume impartiality.)
As you can see, the literal meaning of many of these common terms are at variance with their “understood” meanings, as terms of art. Equality in a free society is a legal fiction. We are all presumed responsible adults, and treated with forbearance as free people. But if one of us does not reciprocate this “basic deal” (for it is a deal that can only work if there is general reciprocity), then the actual freedom goes.
The problem comes when some people do not have the wit to see that equality is a term of art, and operative only at a certain level of abstraction and generality. They do not understand the difference between a vital legal fiction and a utopian goal. And thus many who talk about “marriage equality” also yammer about “economic equality,” and many other impossible things.
And these utopians have a horrible tendency not to recognize the complex nature of social institutions, and the limitations we have in making even marginal improvements through specific piecemeal design changes. They do not see that our limitations in ability to make wholesale changes at every level require limits on power. And they seem to pretend that inequalities are ineradicable. Real inequalities of talent, inclination, energy, opportunity and nearly anything else. They see the basic nature of man as “unfair” — and it is. Making societies more peaceful and just does not replace the injustice of nature. It cannot. But it can ameliorate the harsh conditions of some deep differences in qualities between I and you, us and them, and we against all the atoms of itness in nature.
Credo: A limited conception of equality limns a division of responsibility, opening up vast expanses of voluntary co-operation where there is iteration after iteration of mutual gain. And progress. Quality increasing. Leaving old inequalities passé.
Move on, folks; move on.
* To translate into Hayek-speak: The socialistic ethos of the age is the re-animation of an atavism, the revivified entelechy of principles that were mere partial truths operative in tribal times. Contrary to trendy anti-capitalism, it is in individualism that the great social wisdoms reside.
