- The ABCs of Israeli occupation Irfan Khawaja, Policy of Truth
- The board game of the alpha nerds David Hill, Grantland
- It’s now China against the world Lily Kuo, Guardian
- Majority rule, slavery, and Hobbes Michael Rozeff, LRC Blog
Thomas Hobbes
Nightcap
- When do emergency measures turn into dangerous government overreach? Jonathan Wolff, Times Literary Supplement
- A philosophy of fear – and a society of scolds Daniel McCarthy, Modern Age
- The perils of lockdown living Sayed Kashua, New York Review of Books
- It’s time to take UFOs seriously Alexander Wendt (interview), Vox
Nightcap
- Anthony de Jasay, RIP Alberto Mingardi, EconLog
- A grim portrait of human nature Lou Marinoff, Footnotes to Plato
- The last Englishman Soni Wadhwa, Asian Review of Books
- What can history tell us about the future of international relations? Sørensen & Møller, OUPblog
Law and Liberty: Hobbesians vs Rechtsstaaters
Individual freedoms are tethered to law, but in what sense? We could call Hobbesian the insight into law and liberty which states that norms are addressed by the sovereign power to the individuals. The Sovereign is the only one who prescribes the law, being the individuals subject to the legal obligation. Even the limitations to the power of the government in the face of fundamental rights – such as the Due Process – are not expressed in terms of limits to the sovereign power but of commands to the public servants: for example, the imprisonment of an individual without accomplishing the legal standards of Due Process allows the government’s agents to punish their unlawful colleagues. The law is always addressed, in the last resort, to an individual by the State.
Proponents of individual liberty thus advocate equality before the law, which means simply “only one state for everyone,” or “individual rights before the state.” Examples include the said guarantee of Due Process, or a system of check and balances among the branches of the government as safeguards against arbitrary coercion by the State. However, they all have a severe difficulty in defending individual liberties without recourse to an extra-system concept, such as natural law, moral duties, or political statements. The emphasis in formal legal procedures would be the utmost in coherence between liberalism and Hobbesianism, but it is easy to slide from procedures that protect individual legal rights to devices assuring the enforcement of the law – which has the individual as its last subject. It seems it is hard to restrain oneself from invoking metaphysical rights when it comes time to advocate individual liberty.
Nevertheless, it should not be surprising that every limit to political power of the State over the individual depends on metaphysical notions, since it is a tenet of the Hobbesian insight that the power of the State is absolute. Moreover, the Minimal State – a true effort to advocate individual liberty without resting on metaphysical notions – owes to Thomas Hobbes its main inspiration.
Historical evidence suggests, however, that in the relation among power, law and liberty is the other way round. The development of common law in England and the phenomenon of the reception of the Roman law in Continental Europe show that law is not necessarily created ex nihilo by the State. The State could provide enforcement to a given system of law, as it is shown in the book System of the Modern Roman Law (System des heutigen Römischen Rechts), by F. K. v. Savigny. Moreover, the States could adapt legal notions originating in private law to elaborate procedures to follow in the public sphere. The principle “venire contra factum proprium non valet” was born in private law and today is a guarantee to the individual against the arbitrary action of the State.
This is the process of rationalization of power described by Max Weber, the German concept of Rechtsstaat or the widely known concept of “Rule of Law.” In that process of rationalization, lawyers outshone the sages, the mandarins, and the humanists in the administration of public affairs by incorporating legal procedures and principles taken from private law. There might be differences among these concepts and historical events, but their common invariances allows us to get the gist.
There is, also, an evolutionary case for the relative advantages of a Rechtsstaat over the notion of sovereignty. In the former the decisions are principle-based while in the latter they are mostly taken by expediency. Since the said principle of venire contra factum proprium non valet and other legal procedures constrain rulers’ whims, government actions are more rational, in the sense of transitivity of preferences.
Thus, in the long run, the performance of the Rule of Law is higher than the Rule of Men. Lawyers outshine mandarins in government posts and, in turn, governments run by lawyers outperform governments run by mandarins. One device to switch from a given form of State to another one is, for example, immigration: people flock to countries where the Rule of Law prevails.
What we have called the Hobbesian insight into Law and Liberty is tied up with the definition of liberty as power. Thus, the equation of law and liberty becomes a zero-sum game: the more state, the less individual liberty, and the less state, the more individual liberty. On the other hand, the definition of individual liberty as absence of arbitrary coercion engages with the concept of Rule of Law: to substitute principles for expediency reduces arbitrary coercion and, thus, enlarges individual liberty.
Does this Rechtsstaat insight into Law and Liberty dissolve the question about the dimensions of the State? Not at all. But it provides a more strategic view: a big State will demand more decisions to be taken on expediency. A small state will provide two advantages to the enjoyment of individual liberty as absence of arbitrary coercion: more decisions based on principles and a larger space for the law to evolve by its own and discover new legal principles in response to the constant changes in the society.
But even if the conclusions might be the same (a smaller State), the two insights carry within them a set of premises that ineluctably will unravel by themselves when it comes the time of a deeper controversy. Then, the Hobbesian Insight will present the disjunction between Minimal State and metaphysical boundaries to the absolute power of the State. The Rechtsstaat strain, instead, will provide a humbler but subtler position.
The Protestant Reformation and freedom of conscience
This year we celebrate 500 years of the Protestant Reformation. On October 31, 1517, the then Augustinian monk, priest, and teacher Martin Luther nailed at the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, a document with 95 theses on salvation, that is, basically the way people are led by the Christian God to Heaven. Luther was scandalized by the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church, believing that this practice did not correspond to the biblical teaching. Luther understood that salvation was given only by faith. The Catholic Church understood that salvation was a combination of faith and works.
The practice of nailing a document at the door of the church was not uncommon, and Luther’s intention was to hold an academic debate on the subject. However, Luther’s ideas found many sympathizers and a wide-spread protestant movement within the Roman Catholic Church was quickly initiated. Over the years, other leaders such as Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin joined Luther. However, the main leaders of the Roman Catholic Church did not agree with the Reformers’ point of view, and so the Christian church in the West was divided into several groups: Lutherans, Anglicans, Reformed, Anabaptists, later followed by Methodists, Pentecostals and many others. In short, the Christian church in the West has never been the same.
The Protestant Reformation was obviously a movement of great importance in world religious history. I also believe that few would disagree with its importance in the broader context of history, especially Western history. To mention just one example, Max Weber’s thesis that Protestantism (especially Calvinism, and more precisely Puritanism) was a key factor in the development of what he called modern capitalism is very accepted, or at least enthusiastically debated. But I would like to briefly address here another impact of the Protestant Reformation on world history: the development of freedom of conscience.
Simply put, but I believe that not oversimplifying, after the fall of the Roman Empire and until the 16th century, Europe knew only one religion – Christianity – in only one variety – Roman Catholic Christianity. It is true that much of the paganism of the barbarians survived through the centuries, that Muslims occupied parts of Europe (mainly the Iberian Peninsula) and that other varieties of Christianity were practiced in parts of Europe (mainly Russia and Greece). But besides that, the history of Christianity was a tale of an ever-increasing concentration of political and ecclesiastical power in Rome, as well as an ever-widening intersection of priests, bishops, kings, and nobles. In short, Rome became increasingly central and the distinction between church and state increasingly difficult to observe in practice. One of the legacies of the Protestant Reformation was precisely the debate about the relationship between church and state. With a multiplicity of churches and strengthening nationalisms, the model of a unified Christianity was never possible again.
Of course, this loss of unity in Christendom can cause melancholy and nostalgia among some, especially Roman Catholics. But one of its gains was the growth of the individual’s space in the world. This was not a sudden process, but slowly but surely it became clear that religious convictions could no longer be imposed on individuals. Especially in England, where the Anglican Church stood midway between Rome and Wittenberg (or Rome and Geneva), many groups emerged on the margins of the state church: Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, and so on. These groups accepted the challenge of being treated as second-class citizens, but maintaining their personal convictions. Something similar can be said about Roman Catholics in England, who began to live on the fringes of society. The new relationship between church and state in England was a point of discussion for many of the most important political philosophers of modernity: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Edmund Burke, and others. To disregard this aspect is to lose sight of one of the most important points of the debate in which these thinkers were involved.
The Westminster Confession of Faith, one of the most important documents produced in the period of the Protestant Reformation, has a chapter entitled “Of Christian Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience.” Of course there are issues in this chapter that may sound very strange to those who are not Christians or who are not involved in Christian churches. However, one point is immediately understandable to all: being a Christian is a matter of intimate forum. No one can be compelled to be a Christian. At best this obligation would produce only external adhesion. Intimate adherence could never be satisfactorily verified.
Sometime after the classical Reformation period, a new renewal religious movement occurred in England with the birth of Methodism. But its leading leaders, John Wesley and George Whitefield, disagreed about salvation in a way not so different from what had previously occurred between Luther and the Roman Catholic Church. However, this time there was no excommunication, inquisition or wars. Wesley simply told Whitefield, “Let’s agree to disagree.”
Agreeing to disagree is one of the great legacies of the Protestant Reformation. May we always try to convince each other by force of argument, not by force of arms. And that each one has the right to decide for themselves, with freedom of conscience, which seems the best way forward.
A Matter of Legitimacy
Dictionaries give us two definitions of “legitimacy”: “the quality of being legal” and “the quality of being reasonable and acceptable”. The two meanings are intertwined: we expect reasonability from the laws and we infer the content of a law we do not properly know from what we regard as reasonable. Unreasonable laws are not acceptable to the people and Cesare Beccaria warned us about how unreasonable prohibitions engender more and new crimes.
Political Realism and Legal Positivism cross their paths when it is time to discuss what is the ultimate foundation of obligation, both political and legal: facts and force. An overwhelming force deployed upon individuals and peoples will always be able to impose what is reasonable and acceptable. For Thomas Hobbes, as fear is not a sufficient reason for annulment of covenants, the feeling of terror from the subject to the sovereign does not challenge the legitimacy of his power.
Libertarianism is, in principle, a political stance on the state that denies its legitimacy or, at least, denies unlimited sovereignty. And we stress “in principle” because we want to point out that not all versions of Libertarianism accomplish the said aims. In this regard, we want to single out one crucial trait of every Libertarian political theory: is it possible a stateless order of cooperative coordination between individual plans? Does its existence depend upon our own volition and agreement? We want to make a distinction between two strains of Libertarianism: the one which affirms the possibility of a stateless society and the one which does not.
Paradoxically, the affirmation of the possibility of a stateless order of cooperation legitimates the Hobbesian stance on unlimited sovereignty: having at their disposal the alternative of a stateless political order, individuals opt freely for a Leviathan. What we have to decide now is the extension of the power of the government, but at this point there is no restriction left to the power of the Leviathan to determine its own limits.
On the other hand, for the strain of Libertarianism that regards the absence of a state as impossible or not desirable because, for example, the justice is an artificial virtue that demands a government to enforce it, the state is a fact that has no reasonable alternatives. As the theft that compels us to choose between our bag or our life, there are no reasonable options left to us but accepting the power of the state. As David Hume pointed out, tacit conventions as the stability of the possessions require a political order to enforce it. Therefore, the factual power of the state will be legit only as long as it enforces the tacit order of human cooperation that allows individuals to fulfil their plans. Notwithstanding this last strain of Libertarianism does not deny the legitimacy of the state, it does consistently deny the legitimacy of any type of unlimited sovereignty.
Milton on Free Political Institutions: ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ (1649), ‘A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Courts’ (1659), ‘The Ready and Easy way to Establish a Free commonwealth’ (1660)
“He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.” (Comment on John Milton by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834)
For my introduction to Milton see here, for my post on freedom of the press in Milton see here.
Milton made important arguments for the kind of political institutions which would serve liberty, as well as discussing to goal of freedom in discussion of opinion. Though there are two basic Milton texts identified here, I will not attempt to distinguish them here, let alone take into consideration every possibly relevant text by Milton. This is a period of rapid change in political institutions in England (also applying but unevenly and differently in Ireland and Scotland; at this time Wales has to be considered part of England), of experimentation including the execution of King Charles I just before the publication of the first essay identified was published and the institution of a Commonwealth and Free State, in that year, and of reaction in the sense of royal Restoration in the year that the last essay identified was published. Context matters and so does change, but I think for the purposes of this post as opposed to a blog about the details of Milton’s life as a man of letters and politics, this will be mostly an overview rather than a tracking of Milton’s evolution.
As with his views on free speech, Milton’s views on political institutions mix religious commitments with knowledge of English history and great scholarship of ancient texts. The knowledge of ancient texts to some degree overlaps with the knowledge of religious texts, which is one reason why intensified study of the Bible in the sixteenth and seventeenth century tended to serve general cultural development and liberty.
Milton’s objections to monarchy are partly established through his reading of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible where he argues that God warned the ancient Jews against adopting the institution of monarchy. Anyone interested in following up which parts of Hebrew scripture Milton is using here should start with the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 8. Disasters that befall the Biblical Jews are in some measure the consequence of ignoring God’s counsel in this matter. Of course, many have seen the Bible as justifying not just monarchy, but absolute monarchy so Milton goes to some effort to argue that monarchy was a second best institution for the Jews from God’s point of view and that the Jews never gave their monarchs absolute power.
The view that Milton has then, of the rights and powers of kings, is that they are established by covenant with the community and not a divine authority which the community must obey. The idea of covenant is important in Christianity, with regard to the view that the ancient Jews had a covenant with God as his chosen people and that Christ offered a new covenant for all humans willing to follow him as the son of God. These covenants were very much emphasised in the Protestant culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which thought it was returning to a relation with God obscured by centuries of Catholic interposition of church hierarchy between believer and divine word.
The idea of covenant moved quite quickly from theology to political and legal thought in Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch theologian and legal-political thinker who was one of the major shapers of modern thought in these matters. Milton does not emphasise him in these essays, but he was certainly an influence. For Grotius, the covenant is at the centre of theology, and influences his view of the obligation to obey law and government, though he does not use the language of covenant greatly in that context. The point being in political terms that in some way laws and political institutions rest on some choice of the community to obey them. In Grotius’s thinking, this is more about the reason for obedience than an incitement to rebellion where laws and institutions lack popular backing, but the latter aspect is necessary outcome. This ambiguity carries on into the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1551) which takes a foundational social covenant (defined more in legalistic than theological terms) as the basis of absolute obedience to the sovereign, but certainly influences the view of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Civil Government (1690) according to which ‘the people’ (in practice Locke meant the upper classes reğresented in Parliament) the right to overthrow government.
So Milton precedes Locke’s view that rebellion against unjust government is lawful, even admirable, and that laws are uniquely made by ‘the people’ in Parliament and never by a monarch. Milton himself draws on earlier historical precedent for this view of government as based on contract and the right of rebellion against government which ignores that contract. Particularly important is the Dutch Revolt of the late Sixteenth Century, in which merchant towns rebelled for political, commercial, and religious reasons against the absolutist Catholic monarchy of Spain which had acquired them for rather accidental dynastic reasons in recent history. Final agreement with Spain took a long time, but the new Dutch Republic quickly established the possibility of a mercantile republic in modern Protestant Europe and offered support to those who considered republics to be more Protestant than monarchies. Milton draws further on recent Scottish history, pointing out that a Protestant Scottish parliament had deposed Mary, Queen of Scots, in the preceding century. In general, Milton argues that the idea of monarch contradicts the idea of an ordinary human with an ordinary body, with legal accountability like anyone else, and so can never be incorporated properly into a state of free citizens.
Though monarchy which obeys such agreements is allowable from Milton’s point, it is not ideal and is very likely to decay into outright tyranny. Nevertheless he offers examples of how great monarchs of European history, including Roman Emperors, accepted that their power was only justified by serving law and the good of the community. As Milton emphases the last great Roman Emperor Justinian (ruling from Constantinople towards the end of the period during which any Roman Emperor controlled much territory beyond Anatolia and the Balkans) produced the greatest codification of Roman law, making himself the servant of law, not god on Earth. In any case is monarchy might be just about tolerable in many societies for Milton, the proper practice of Protestant Christianity certainly required a freedom from the religious and institutional church authority demanded by kings. Protestant ideas of free discussion of religious ideas and self-governing groups of believers could not thrive under a king (which was a reasonable estimate since Protestant Dissenters were not really equal citizens until the nineteenth century when the monarchy had become largely ceremonial, and indeed the last monarch who really struggled for a more than figurehead role, George III, was en enemy of religious emancipation).
Milton developed a view of how a republic, or commonwealth, might survive over the long term, certainly a longer term than the period it lasted in England, in its purest form only from 1649-52, and then the Lord Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell until 1658 and his heir Richard Cromwell until 1660. He thought that while the country might need a new parliament in 1660, once elected it should serve permanently, replacing dead or absent members through its own method. What Milton seems to advocate here though is not a permanent republican law, but something necessary to institute a permanent republic. Milton thinks of the beginnings of a republic as embattled and as needing to act more like an army than a fully stabilised and secure civil republic should. Both the chance for election and eligibility to vote can be restricted while the republic secures itself against selfish internal a faction and external danger. Here Milton runs into the problem Niccoló Machiavelli, an ardent republican despite frequent misrepresentations, encountered in The Prince, how to get a people that is not very republican and maybe not very ready for a republic to the point where civic virtue and understanding of public good are strong enough for a workable republic.
Milton’s life and public service under the take over of the English republic by the quasi-monarch Oliver Cromwell, followed by his life and exile from public life under the restored monarchy, is the context for the quotation from Coleridge at the head of this post. For Milton, republicanism and associated ideals, became more and more associated with some better and other world. After the Restoration Milton certainly became the author of poetry rather than political essays, producing in particular Paradise Lost, a religious epic which places him just below Shakespeare in general evaluation of English literature. We could look there for a more ‘transcendental’ exploration of republicanism and liberty, and I had hoped to do so. However, this task will be deferred as I think a responsible investigation of republicanism in Milton’s poetry, though a recognised area of discussion, is just too big and different to incorporate into this sequence of posts. Later I hope.
Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, and A System of Politics (Expanding the Liberty Canon): Second of Two Parts
Oceana is a long piece of ‘utopian’ political fiction writing, which does not really work as an exercise in literary fiction as far as I can see and barely keeps up the pretence. Oceana refers to a thinly disguised version of Britain and a lightly fictionalised account of its history, as a means for expounding Harrington’s thoughts about the best political system. A System of Politics is a more concise and economical account of Harrington’s thought than Oceana though its list form tells you something about Harrington’s limits as a writer.
Harrington is in a friendly dialogue with a major sixteenth century writer, the Florentine republican Niccoló Machiavelli and sometimes in the earlier part of Oceana in a critical dialogue with a major English writer, Thomas Hobbes, from his own time. The idea that sometimes still circulates of a liberal England/Britain versus an absolutist continental Europe is rather challenged by this. One of the most influential advocates of liberty in British history was inspired by an Italian against an English writer. Though Harrington does refer favourably to Hobbes’ own mentor, Francis Bacon, philosopher, chief minister to the monarchy, jurist, and writer of utopian political fiction. Harrington does not mention the Hobbes-Bacon relation, and his his use of Bacon’s thought suggests a fascination with the kind of monarchism advocated by Bacon which mixes legalism with the application of scientific method to the prudential art of government. Harrington, it appears, wanted republicanism to incorporate such aspects, creating some distance from ancient republicanism in which law comes from tradition and wise individuals rather than the kind of centralised accumulation of new laws and a judicial apparatus to apply them which is what Bacon was dealing with and which also influenced Hobbes. Harrington’s interest in what well run monarchies with some respect for law can teach republics also expresses itself in remarks on the Ottoman Empire and on the famous chief minister of the French monarchy, Cardinal Richelieu, one of the key figures in the development of the modern state and modern statecraft. Harrington regrets lack of knowledge of the principles underlying Richelieu’s formidable achievements in promoting peace within France and taking France above Spain as the leading European power of the time.
When Harrington is focused on republics strictly speaking, he has two main concerns: land distribution, formation of the right kind of aristocracy. These concerns overlap as questions of concentration of land are also questions of what kind of aristocracy might exist. Harrington resists what he regards as the too extreme devotion of the Ancient Athenians to democracy, which did not allow an effective aristocracy to form. As with early modern attitudes to Plato, his preference for Sparta is rather against modern sensibility. However, that preference ran up to the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States which was deliberately designed to prevent the ‘excesses’ of Athenian democracy and promote a ‘balanced’ republic like those of Rome or Sparta which had a long life based on reserving some powers for the aristocratic parts of the political system.
Harrington’s thoughts about aristocracy are directed towards forming a changing open class of people who provide political leadership and resist the wilder extremes and instability of popular opinion. This is more or less a project for the formation of an effective version of what is now generally referred to as a political class or a political elite. Harrington’s belief that the aristocracy should change in composition and exist in balance with the preferences of the common people lead him to oppose land distribution of a kind which created a rigid permanent oligarchy aristocracy of the richest landowners. Laws to prevent this are referred to by Harrington as ‘the agrarian’, with consideration of examples from antiquity and from his own time. He argues against primogeniture (land going to the eldest son) and in favour of equal division of land between the children of landowners which he suggests as well as having political benefits will reduce loveless marriages designed to get propertyless daughters of the aristocracy married to a major landowner. In a rather more general way, he seems sympathetic to schemes to prevent concentrations of landed property. Such apparent interference with property rights may look at odds with how ideas of liberty develop in the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, but Harrington was living at a time when it was very difficult to disassociate land ownership and political power, and more generally difficult to disassociate economic status and political rights.
It takes the continuous greater development of commercial society which Locke reacts to at the end of the seventeenth century to see that property ownership should be seen in terms of transferable rights and the public benefits of land owned by whoever being part of a commercial system in which its products are traded to everyone’s benefit. The other side of Harrington’s assumption, highly normal for the time, that political power comes from land ownership, is that servants and the economically dependent cannot have full political rights and are not part of the democratic political system. The democratic system that elects an open changing aristocracy in some form of senate along with a a very complex series of other elections of public officials advocated by Harrington. This was enough to make Harrington seem like a fanatic for extreme democracy until democracy did begin to appear in the British political system, with the extension of the franchise in the late nineteenth century following on (but not immediately at all) from earlier agitation on the part of the new industrial working class. His writing is bit frustrating and can seem a bit remote from current ideas of liberty, but in historical context he made a major contribution to the growth of law and liberty in Britain. He deserves to be read by anyone who wishes for a really deep understanding of the development of ideas of government constrained by law and liberty.
Investment & Prudence
To be prudent amounts to making sure that one takes good care of oneself in all important areas of one’s life. Health, wealth, family, friendship, understanding, etc. are all in need of good care so that one will achieve and sustain one’s development as a human individual. It all begins with following the edict: “Know thyself!”
All those folks who make an effort to keep fit and to eat properly are embarking on elements of a prudent life. Unfortunately, the virtue of prudence has been undermined by the idea that everyone automatically or instinctively pursues his or her self-interest.
We all know the rhetorical question, “Isn’t everyone selfish?” Because of certain philosophical and related doctrines, the answer has been mainly that everyone is. In the discipline of economics, especially, scholars nearly uniformly hold the view that we all do whatever we do so as to please ourselves, to feel good. No room exists there for pure generosity or charity, for altruism, because in the final analysis everyone is driven to act to further his or her own wellbeing, or for carelessness, recklessness. If people do not achieve the goal of self-enhancement, it is primarily out of ignorance – they just don’t know what is in their best interest but they all intend to achieve it and even when they appear to be acting generously, charitably, helpfully and so on, in the end they do so because it gives them satisfaction, fulfills their own desires and serves their idea of what is best for them.
This is not prudence but what some have dubbed animal spirit. People are simply driven or motivated to be this way, instinctively, if you will. The virtue of prudence would operate quite differently.
One who practices it would be expected to make a choice to pursue what is in one’s best interest and one could fail also to do so. Practicing prudence is optional, not innately produced. Like other moral virtues, prudence requires choice. It is not automatic by any means. The reason it is thought to be so, however, has to do with the intellectual-philosophical belief that human conduct is exactly like the behavior of non-human beings, driven by the laws of motion!
Once this idea assumes prominence, there is no concern about people having to be prudent. They will always be, as a matter of their innate nature. What may indeed be needed is the opposite, social and peer pressure to be benevolent or kind, to adhere to the dictates of altruism, something that requires discipline and education and does not come naturally to people.
It would seem, however, that this idea that we are automatically selfish or self-interested or prudent doesn’t square with experience. Consider just how much self-destructiveness there is in the human world, how many projects end up hurting the very people who embark upon them. Can all that be explained by ignorance and error?
Or could it be, rather, that many, many human beings do not set out to benefit themselves, to pursue their self-interest? Could it be that human beings need to learn that they ought to serve their own wellbeing and that their conduct is often haphazard, unfocused, even outright self-destructive (as, for example, in the case of hard drug consumers, gamblers, romantic dreamers, fantasizers and the lazy)?
It seems that this latter is a distinct possibility if not outright probability. It is a matter of choice whether one is or is not going to be prudent, in other words. And once again, ordinary observation confirms this.
One can witness numerous human beings across the ages and the globe choosing to work to benefit themselves, as when they watch their diets or work out or obtain an education, and many others who do not and, instead, neglect their own best interest. Or, alternatively, they often act mindlessly, thoughtlessly, recklessly, etc.
The contention that they are really trying to advance their self-interest, to benefit themselves, seems to be one that stems from generalizing a prior conviction that everything in nature moves so as to advance forward. This is the idea that came from the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who learned it from Galileo who took it from classical physics.
Accordingly, acting prudently, in order to advance one’s wellbeing, could be a virtue just as the ancient philosopher Aristotle believed it to be. And when one deals with financial matters, careful investing would qualify as prudence, just as is working out at a gym, watching one’s diet, driving carefully, etc.
Homicide and the State
I am one of the hundreds of thousands, possibly of millions of conservatives with strong libertarian leanings. Incidentally, I am not just talking, I showed it in several things I wrote and published. (Please, ask me.) There are several things however that prevent me from stating unambiguously that I am a libertarian, and much less, a Libertarian.
Of the two main philosophical obstacles the first is the mainstream libertarians’ barely concealed pacifism. I deal with this issue in several postings in factsmatter.wordpress.com that include the name “Paul” in their title (I also have objections to Ron Paul, the politician, another topic treated in some of the same postings.) My second problem is that it seems to me that serious libertarians have not dealt adequately with the central issue of the state as peacemaker.
Let me say before I proceed that it may well be the case that I am simply exposing my ignorance, that the subject has been examined by many good minds and that I have simply not come across their efforts. There might even be forums where the issue is discussed frequently and about which I am ignorant because of my bad habit of spending a lot of time watching French television series. And by the way, I propose (forcefully) the following rule: No one must give anyone a reading assignment if he/she has not even done the assignment. Don’t tell me to read what you have not read thoroughly yourself!
Now back to the state as peacemaker. Continue reading
Notes On Liberty 