A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Part III: Beyond the Minimal State

    (see here for Part I and here for Part II)

    Suppose that the foregoing argument is right, and that anyone committed to the minimal protection of basic libertarian rights should prefer a minimal state to an anarcho-capitalist world of competing defense agencies. Are there further considerations that drive us beyond affirming the minimalist night-watchman state of classical liberalism?

    There might be if, as I argued below, there is no clear line to be drawn between the protection of “negative” and “positive” rights. The protection of any “right” requires that economic resources be dedicated to the task. But, I’ve already conceded that the costs of protecting “negative” rights should be socialized in order to prevent the basic rights of those I referred to as the “weak, the helpless, and the infirm” from going undefended. So, are there reasons to support the further socialization of other “rights” such as the “right to welfare” or the “right to education”?

    It seems to me this may be the case. There are those people who are, for example, truly unable to provide the means of subsistence for themselves. Is having access to such means less crucial than having access to the protection of one’s life from aggressive assault? It’s hard to see how. So, how do we justify “socialized” provision of the latter and not the former?

    Once we’ve conceded that the costs of providing some goods (i.e. rights-protection) may be socialized, what, logically, prevents us from extending the principle to other crucial goods? This is not to say that all, or even most, goods should be socialized. Obviously, both history and economic theory have shown that socialism is untenable. But, by the same token, history has shown that the so-called mixed economy appears to be more or less stable.

    I conclude, therefore, that government is justified to provide at least a) basic protection of so-called negative rights and b) collective provision of essential goods to those unable to provide them for themselves. This justifies going beyond the classical liberal night-watchman state, though whether it would justify the far-flung apparatus of the modern-day welfare state is an open question.*

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    *I won’t even attempt to deal here with the numerous critiques of welfare state policies based on models of economic efficiency. Needless to say, these must be taken into account by anyone who proposes some new government intervention. Though, I suspect many of them are not as decisive as their proponents often assume.

  • Part II: Do We Even Need Government?

    (see here for Part I)

    Radical libertarians, so-called anarcho-capitalists, argue that government, defined as an agency or institution with a coercive monopoly on deciding when force is legitimate in a given territorial area, is not necessary to protect human rights. As a subset of libertarians, an-caps consider human rights to include life, liberty, and the right to acquire and transfer property.

    Most libertarian anarchists favor the establishment of private competing rights-protection agencies (hereinafter RPAs) to replace the current coercive government monopoly on such services. No RPA would have a coercive monopoly in a given geographic area, thus distinguishing it from a government. The idea is that individuals would subscribe to their preferred RPA, with market mechanisms providing checks and balances on concentrations of power.

    Thus envisioned, an anarcho-capitalist society would be a contractarian one. By this I mean that, since rights protection services are to be provided by private competing agencies, you will only get as much rights protection as you contract for. There would be no government to ensure that every person gets a certain amount of rights protection.

    In fact, this seems to show that the much-touted (by libertarians) distinction between so-called negative and positive rights is not as clear-cut as it first appears. This is because if we think of “rights-protection” as an economic good (which it surely is), there are costs to providing protection of “negative” rights, just as much as “positive” ones. Someone has to provide the protection of these rights. The protection of a “negative” right to liberty has a cost just as much as the enforcement of a “positive” right to education. In other words, asserting a right doesn’t mean much if you can’t protect that right, either by defending it yourself, or contracting with someone else to protect it.

    But if this is the case, then we face an urgent question. How, in an anarcho-capitalist world, are the rights of those who are unable to enter into contractual relationships to be protected? I have in mind here not only children, but also other “marginal cases” such as the severely retarded, the mentally ill, the comatose and others who are utterly dependent on others for their care (I won’t even mention even more controversial marginal cases such as animals or the unborn, except to say that the same principle would apply to them as well). In short, the weak, the helpless, and the infirm would lack moral standing.

    The problem, it seems to me, is that with no agency to assert unilateral rights-protecting authority (i.e. a State) over anyone unable to contract for such a service themselves, there is no way of ensuring that their purported rights will be protected in an anarcho-capitalist social order. While the State is, at least officially, committed to protecting basic rights, what incentive would a private RPA have for intervening to protect the rights of someone with whom it had no contractual relationship?

    If this is right, then for all our talk of rights, we are left with the situation of the weak and helpless essentially unchanged. Since they can’t contract for rights-protection on their own behalf, they would remain, for all intents and purposes, under the control, and at the mercy of, other people. They would be, in essence, “owned” by those who were able to exercise power over them.

    I see no way to avoid the conclusion that crucial rights will go unprotected – as a matter of policy – in an anarcho-capitalist social order. Because individuals who can’t contract for rights-protection would not be guaranteed to receive rights-protection in an anarchist society (by definition). So, a monopoly agency that provides a minimum amount of rights-protection to everyone in the moral community, even if they cannot contract for such rights-protection themselves, would be necessary. That is, we should be, at the very least, libertarian minarchists (i.e. proponents of a minimal state committed to the protection of basic rights of life, liberty and property).

  • Why I Am Not a Libertarian (Anymore) Part I

    As hinted in earlier posts, for quite a while I thought of myself as a libertarian as far as political philosophy went. Libertarianism, I think, often appeals to people who value abstract, systematic theorizing and like the idea that you can deduce a blueprint for an ideal political arrangement from a few simple axioms. Over time, though, I’ve come to believe that libertarianism fails at crucial points (this will hardly come as a shock to most people!), and that it might be worthwhile to put some of those second (and third, and fourth) thoughts into words.

  • Maybe "Humane Slaughter" Is an Oxymoron

    Keith Burgess-Jackson directs our attention to this article in the Washington Post on the conditions in modern slaughterhouses. Despite the passage of the (somewhat Orwellian-sounding) Humane Slaughter Act, the level of enforcement appears to vary greatly:

    For example, the government took no action against a Texas beef company that was cited 22 times in 1998 for violations that included chopping hooves off live cattle. In another case, agency supervisorsfailed to take action on multiple complaints of animal cruelty at a Florida beef plant and fired an animal health technician for reporting the problems to the Humane Society. The dismissal letter sent to the technician, Tim Walker, said his dislosure had “irreparably damaged” the agency’s relations with the packing plant.

    “I complained to everyone — I said, ‘Lookit, they’re skinning live cows in there,’ ” Walker said. “Always it was the same answer: ‘We know it’s true. But there’s nothing we can do about it.’”

    Some blame the lack of enforcement on the “privatization” of inspection processes:

    In the past three years, a new meat inspection system that shifted responsibility to industry has made it harder to catch and report cruelty problems, some federal inspectors say. Under the new system, implemented in 1998, the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter violations its inspectors find each year.

    We are also offered this interesting paradox:

    Industry officials say they also recognize an ethical imperative to treat animals with compassion. Science is blurring the distinction between the mental processes of humans and lower animals — discovering, for example, that even the lowly rat may dream. Americans thus are becoming more sensitive to the suffering of food animals, even as they consume increasing numbers of them.

    The article goes on to detail some of the mishaps that have resulted in gruesome suffering in animals such as cattle being skinned alive and botched stunning techniques that allow conscious pigs to be dunked in tanks of hot water where they are scalded and drowned.

    If these were cats and dogs instead of cows and pigs, would we be more outraged by this kind of thing? But pigs and cows are just as intelligent and sociable as cats and dogs and are just as sensitive to pain. What is the morally significant difference?

  • Thought For the Day

    “There are many things wrong with the internationalist idea to Make the World Safe for Democracy, one of them being that it is not that different from the nationalist idea that What Is Good for America Is Good for the World.” – John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner

  • Just Don’t Shred the Constitution, That’s All I Ask

    A friend writes:

    “I’m beginning to think our only hope of choosing a national leader is to hold him/her to the standard of not f**king s**t up. Is that libertarian?” [edited for content – hey, this is a family-friendly blog!]

    I love this! That’s exactly where I am right now. I carry no water (Hold no brief? Carry no torch?) for John Kerry, but George Bush is, in my view, a failure and a danger as president at some very fundamental level.

    What really put me over the top were the recently uncovered so-called torture memos wherein some clever Justice Department lawyers argued, among other things, that the president might be legally justified in setting aside laws against torture due to the powers that inhere in the office of the president. This, to my mind, is nothing short of an assault on the very principles of limited, constitutional government, and the thought that the Bush administration sought legal justification for such a thing (even if they had no intention of putting it into practice) makes them dangerous in a way that goes beyond mere differences of policy.

    As Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings put it:

    They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It’s not one guy somewhere, it’s a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.

    Now, Henley’s a libertarian, but my friend isn’t. Yet he rightly (but partly tongue-in-cheek, no doubt) senses that holding government to a minimum standard of “not f**king s**t up” embodies a very libertarian insight. I’m no doctrinaire libertarian myself (anymore!), but one thing that libertarians harp on that more people could stand to take to heart is that the state is not to be trusted. This is true whether Democrats or Republicans are at the helm, but under present conditions, I’m inclined to agree with Jim Henley that Republicans (and especially those in the executive branch) represent the greater threat to liberty under the law, which is the cornerstone of our system of government if anything is.

  • C.S. Lewis, Vivisection and Kenosis

    Continuing the animal rights theme, this weekend I read C.S. Lewis’s essay “Vivisection” (found in his book God in the Dock). Lewis criticizes philosophical naturalists and Darwinists who support experimentation on animals, on the grounds that as materialists who deny the moral uniqueness of human beings, they would also have no rational grounds for objecting to experimentation on “inferior” human beings. Lewis writes:

    Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing up our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies or capitalists for the same reason. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun. We hear all that Nazi scientists have done them. We all suspect that our own scientists may begin to do so, in secret, at any moment.

    Lewis’s point is that if we accept the naturalist position that human beings are just a different kind of animal, and if we accept that the struggle for existence determines the content of morality, then it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t favor “our kind” (be it our class, our race or our nation) at the expense of other human beings. In other words, if “speciesism” is just another preference – if there is no morally significant difference between humans and animals – then whatever justifies using our power to exploit animals will also justify using our power to dominate other humans if we are able.

    Only the Christian doctrine of the distinction between humans and the rest of creation provides a stopping point on this particular slippery slope, according to Lewis.

    But does that mean that if we are Christians we have carte blanche to do whatever we like to animals? Nope.

    Lewis says:

    And though cruelty even to beasts is an important matter, [the vivisectors’] victory is symptomatic of matters more important still. The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements. In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

    When we accept something like cruelty to animals for the sake of our own benefit, whether it’s something trivial like better cosmetics or a tasty meal, or something more serious like a potential cure for a disease, we have adopted the view that the ends justify the means. This is inimical to Christianity, which teaches that we cannot do evil that good may come.

    An alternative to the law of the jungle that Lewis deplores might be what we could call an ethic of generosity. Christianity teaches that “There is no greater love than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends.” An ethic of generosity would be willing to seek the good of the other, even at the expense of the self. It involves giving up what might be our due in terms of strict justice, because love “does not count the cost.”

    Indeed, the very life of Jesus reflects this idea of surrendering power for the sake of the other. The author of Philippians quotes what many scholars believe to be an early Christian hymn in describing the person and work of Christ:

    Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:

    Who, being in very nature God,

    did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

    but made himself nothing,

    taking the very nature of a servant,

    being made in human likeness.

    And being found in appearance as a man,

    he humbled himself

    and became obedient to death–

    even death on a cross!

    Therefore God exalted him to the highest place

    and gave him the name that is above every name,

    that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,

    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

    and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,

    to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:5-11)

    The Son of God – of one being with the Father – empties himself (the Greek term for this “emptying” is kenosis) of his divine power and takes the form of a servant, entering into the human condition with all its attendant suffering. And he does this for the sake of a lost and sinful humanity. He is the Good Shepherd who goes in search of the lost sheep, not counting the cost.

    The life of the Christian should imitate this pattern – that of serving, or seeking the good of others, rather than dominating them, even if it requires self-sacrifice. Christians are commanded to love their neighbors as themselves, and even to love their enemies. This would seem to imply a widening of the circle of moral concern, rather than constricting it to “our kind of people.” Care for the poor, the outcast, and the widow – those who were the most powerless and vulnerable – is commended throughout the Bible. Also, more recently, the elderly infirm, the sick, and the unborn have been special objects of concern for Christians. I would suggest that the same moral trajectory invites us to extend such concern to animals, even when withholding it could benefit us. After all, who is more powerless and voiceless than the animal?

  • Animal Rights and Wrongs

    Do animals have rights?

    I used to resist this conclusion because I thought it implied that animals were on a moral par with human beings, and that was something I just couldn’t accept. I’m an unrepentant speciesist, I guess.

    But it now occurs to me that one can sensibly talk about “animal rights” without implying some kind of fundamental moral equality between animals and humans.

    One way of understanding the notion of “rights” is to see a right as a moral claim. For instance, if it’s wrong to kill an innocent person, then any innocent person has a claim upon the rest of us not to be killed unjustly. Or, you could say that person has a right not to be killed unjustly.

    Now, some people seem to think that rights must be rooted in some ethereal metaphysical property inherent in the rights-possessor (which is why philosophers have been tempted to locate the source of rights in some property possessed only by people, such as rationality or free will, and why they have generally denied that animals have any rights). I think this is what Jeremy Bentham had in mind when he said that rights were “nonsense on stilts.” But on the understanding sketched above, a “right” is just a correlate of a moral principle or duty. It isn’t wrong to kill an innocent person because they possess some quality “the-right-not-to-be-killed-unjustly.” Rather, the right not to be killed is constituted by the moral principle.

    So, by analogous reasoning, if there are moral principles that govern our relations with animals, then it seems reasonable to suppose that those principles could imply that animals have certain rights.

    For instance, nearly everyone with a modicum of decency would agree, I think, that it’s wrong to torture an animal simply for pleasure. But if this is right, then it seems to follow – if one accepts the (admittedly sketchy) account of rights given above – that animals have a right not to be tortured for pleasure. And this in no way implies that animals have the same rights as human beings, since the moral principles that govern our relations with animals may well differ from those that govern our relations to other humans.

  • Party People

    There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the increasing “polarization” or partisanship in American political life. The so-called red states are full of NASCAR-watching, gun-toting die-hard Republicans, and the blue states are where the latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, NPR-listening Democrats make their home. And never the twain shall meet, apparently. Some reports have suggested that there’s an increasing amount of self-segregation occurring among red-staters and blue-staters. We’re huddling in our little enclaves of ideological purity and thus never have to encounter anyone who might challenge our views.

    Now, I wonder how much of this is a reality taking place on the ground and how much is hype driven by a media-imposed narrative growing out of that famous electoral map in 2000. But, even more, I wonder about the phenomenon of partisanship itself.

    After all, the platforms of political parties don’t consist of internally coherent sets of policy prescriptions deduced from self-evident first principles (okay, except maybe the Libertarian party). Rather, the platforms are the result of a lot of haggling between various interests groups and then cobbled together and given a gloss to make it appear as though there are some consistent guiding principles at work. Add to this the fact that in practice, all parties depart from their platforms to greater or lesser degrees as need arises.

    Therefore, no reasonable* person will agree with a given party 100% of the time. So, in deciding which party to support, it seems to me one has to do two things: 1) decide which issues are the most important at the time and 2) figure out which party is most likely to act in ways consistent with one’s own position on those issues. Since most major parties are hopelessly inconsistent, it seems best to identify one or two issues of major importance and vote accordingly (assuming one thinks it’s worthwhile to vote, but that’s a different topic!). This approach is often derided as “single-issue voting”, but, surely there are some issues that really are so important that they pretty much trump anything else. And, besides, the alternative seems to be the mindless partisanship of “My party right or wrong!” Now, it may be that a lot of politics is driven by this kind of tribal affiliation with a certain group, but is that the best position for a rational person to take?

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    *I’m using “reasonable” here in a rather minimalist sense to mean having an internally consistent set of beliefs, and bracketing the question of whether those beliefs themselves are justified or likely to be true

  • What the World Needs Now Is Another Blog Like I Need a Hole in My Head…

    …nevertheless, here it is. I intend to spew my thoughts on religion, politics, books, and whatever else manages to catch my moth-like attention out into the dark, unforgiving void of cyberspace. Call it an exercise in narcissistic nihilism. That’s what the internet’s for, right?