A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • Huxley, the perennial philosophy, and the scandal of particularity

    Aldous Huxley is best remembered for his chilling depiction of a totalitarian state in Brave New World. I’ve long thought that Huxley’s vision was in many ways more accurate than Orwell’s, at least as far as the West is concerned. We seem more likely to fall for a spiritually dead consumerist dystopia than a boot-on-the-neck Stalinist one (though one shouldn’t be overly optimistic!).

    This article    , however, makes the case that Huxley’s later writings that set out his positive spiritual, philosophical, and social vision deserve consideration. His mature philosophy appears to have been an attempt at synthesizing Eastern thought with an appreciation for modern science, and the author suggests that it can speak to many of our current social and spiritual problems.

    I remember reading Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy years ago and I still have a certain affinity for that outlook. (I’d identify E.F. Schumacher, especially in his Guide for the Perplexed, and Huston Smith as other proponents.)

    Huxley defined the perennial philosophy as

    the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being. (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii)

    This philosophy, in Huxley’s view, underlies the great religious traditions of the world, especially in their more mystical forms. Thus the differences between traditions are somewhat relativized.

    Christianity, of course, contains a certain tension between the universal and the particular: the logos is the light that enlightens every person, but that logos became incarnate in a particular human being with a particular culture and history. Some versions of Christianity emphasize the universal to the detriment of the particular, seeing the historical Jesus mainly as a symbol of a universal truth. However, there’s also a danger–or so I’d argue–in the opposite view. Some schools of Christian theology posit a sharp discontinuity between Christian revelation and all other perceptions of the divine, whether they belong to other religious traditions or to “natural” reason.

    I don’t think any version of Christianity that wants to lay claim to orthodoxy can sever the religious life from the particular history of Jesus; Christians believe that God was manifested in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus in a way that makes a permanent difference for the life of the world. And yet, an important tradition in Christianity–represented, for instance, by several of the early church fathers–holds that non-Christian wisdom points to the same “divine Reality” that became incarnate in Jesus. Moreover, the Bible itself often portrays “outsiders”–people who not only existed before Jesus, but were outside the chosen people–as knowing God and offering him true worship.

    This position is basically sound in my view, but there is a fine line between affirming that knowledge and true worship of God is possible outside of Christ and dismissing the importance of the Incarnation. After all, if God can be known apart from special revelation, why is it necessary for God to become man? Is the knowledge of God available to non-Christians saving knowledge, or does it have the status of a “preamble to faith” as natural knowledge of God is referred to in some Catholic theology? What exactly is it that God achieves for us in Jesus that wasn’t possible otherwise?

  • Mill, liberal perfectionism, and religion

    As a tangential follow-up to this post, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a petty exhaustive discussion of J.S. Mill’s moral and political philosophy here.

    Specifically, here’s a discussion of the relationship between Mill’s utilitarianism and his liberalism; here’s a comparison between Mill’s liberalism and other variants, such as Rawls’s.

    The emphasis here on on Mill’s “moral perfectionism” and how it relates to his liberalism is striking. Mill thought the point of human life was to develop those capacities for rational thought and moral autonomy–capacities essential to human nature. But unlike classical “perfectionist” theories of morality, Mill thought that a liberal society was necessary to foster human flourishing, because no one can exercise those capacities for us.

    Mill’s perfectionist liberalism is part of classical liberal tradition that grounds liberal essentials in a conception of the good that prizes the exercise of a person’s rational capacities. In Mill’s version, the good consists in forms of self-government that exercise the very deliberative capacities that make one a moral agent. He concludes that the state cannot foster this kind of good by regular use of paternalistic or moralistic intervention. Liberties of thought and action are central to the exercise of these deliberative powers. But equally essential are certain positive conditions, such as health, education, a decent minimum standard of living, and fair opportunities for self-realization. Even paternalistic intervention can sometimes be justified when, without it, people’s deliberative powers will be severely compromised. If liberal essentials can be justified by the right sort of perfectionist account of the good, then the perfectionist need not be illiberal. And this sort of classical perfectionism explains ways in which many liberals do think that the state can and should help its citizens lead better lives. In these ways, Millian liberalism articulates a tradition of classical liberalism that has enduring significance.

    What makes Mill’s perfectionism liberal is that these are precisely the sort of capacaties that no one else, particularly the state, can exercise for us. The state can, however, provide certain goods (a guaranteed decent standard of living, education, other public goods) that are necessary conditions for exercising these capacities.This is an interesting contrast to Rawlsian liberalism, in which the liberal state is supposed to be neutral between competing conceptions of the good.

    One thing that interests me about all this is whether it opens the possibility of rapprochement between a Millian liberalism and a religious perspective. Many religious views identify the good of human life as developing and exercising capacities–capacities for knowledge and love, of God, neighbor, and creation. And like the capacities whose exercise Mill identifies as necessary for human flourishing, the development and exercise of these capacities can’t be coerced. No one can make me love God and neighbor, and no one can do it for me. The exercise of these capacities can, however, be facilitated by the provision of certain essential goods and freedoms–freedom of worship and conscience, for instance, as well as the other sorts of goods Mill identifies.

    Keith Ward seems to identify with such a “religious liberalism”; in his book Religion and Human Fulfillment where he advocates what he calls “transcendental personalism”:

    [H]umanism or personalism–the belief that the realization of distinctive personal capacities is the highest moral ideal–is a moral advance on views of morality as obedience to allegedly authoritative rule that need have no relevance to human fulfillment. But humanism is not intrinsically anti-religious. It developed from a Judeo-Christian stress on the value of every human life as made in the image of a God of freedom, creative power, and self-giving goodness. It posits a moral goal for human life, and so it remains strongly suggestive of an objective moral purpose in the universe, and of a being (presumably intelligent and good) who could conceive such a purpose. (p. 6)

    Later, in discussing various interpretations of Jewish law, Ward writes:

    [O]bedience to the laws of justice is rooted in love of the creator who desires that all creatures should find fulfillment, who gives every human being a unique value and unique potentialities to realize, who helps those who seek such realization, and who will ultimately bring creation to fulfillment and final liberation from all that impedes fulfillment–that is, from evil. There is implicit here an ideal of justice, but it is not one that is in conflict with a humane secular ideal. It is rooted in the belief that all individuals are of worth, and that human society should enable all to realize something of that worth in their lives. (p. 180)

    I think it’s pretty clear here that, like Mill, Ward would agree that “moralistic or paternalistic” intervention is not generally conducive to enabling people to realize worth in their lives but, similarly, that there is much the state can do to foster that realization by providing certain essential goods. This might be a more fruitful religious justification for liberalism than the usual quasi-Rawlsian state neutrality arguments. Worth thinking more about.

  • Carter on Singer

    Joe Carter is, I think, too hard on Peter Singer in this post. Singer is wrong about a lot of stuff–his views on disability and on bioethics in particular. But as much as anyone he deserves credit for bringing the abuses of animals in factory farms to public attention, not to mention his work on our moral obligations to very poor people in other countries.

    Too many people get the impression that morality is a zero-sum game and that, in particular, raising the status of animals means lowering the status of humans. Singer has contributed to that impression with his jeremiads against the “sacredness” of human life. But they’re logically distinct issues. Tom Regan’s version of animal rights, for instance, doesn’t have any of the unsavory implications for “marginal” humans that Singer draws from his version of utilitarianism.

  • Mill, animals, and liberalism

    Gaius asks whether a liberal who traces her intellectual lineage to J.S. Mill–i.e. who sees the purpose of politics as permitting the widest possible scope for human liberty consistent with the liberty of others–can consistently be in favor of laws for preventing cruelty to animals or protecting the environment:

    how [did] liberals, historically, either politically allied themselves with or actually became, some of them, animal welfare advocates, animal rights advocates, conservationists, protectors of endangered species, environmentalists, or nature preservationists, all of whom lend weight to some value or other, different from individual liberty, against human liberty[?]

    Historically, I think the answer to Gaius’s question is pretty clear: Mill, and his mentor Jeremy Bentham, were in fact advocates for reform in the treatment of animals. It was largely liberals like Bentham and Mill who brought concern for animal well-being into the mainstream of moral philosophy as well as into the political arena.

    Bentham and Mill were utilitarians and justified the arguments on behalf of animals on the grounds that, what counts morally is maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Bentham famously said that what matters morally with respect to animals is not whether they can speak or think, but whether they can suffer. Sentient beings are morally considerable because it matters, from their point of view, what happens to them. And while I’m not as familiar with Mill’s thought in this area, it appears, at least from this excerpt, that he followed Bentham in this.

    Philosophically, the different branches of the animal rights tradition can be traced to the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill and to the liberal individualism of Kant (as well as the liberal aspect of Mill’s thought; whether there’s a tension between Mill’s liberalism and his utilitarianism is an interesting question). Peter Singer is the most prominent representative of the utilitarian strain, while Tom Regan represents a Kantian approach.

    These two traditions employ somewhat different principles, which sometimes lead to different conclusions. For instance, Singer’s utilitarianism emphasizes the equal consideration of interests, meaning that animal suffering has to be treated the same, morally speaking, as relevantly similar human suffering. However, Singer’s view also allows for killing animals (or disabled humans) if it can be done painlessly while retaining the same amount of overall utility. Regan’s more Kantian position is that animals, as “subjects-of-a-life,” possess basic rights to life, freedom, and well-being and must be treated as ends in themselves. Both positions contend that “speciesism” is an invidious distinction akin to racism or sexism.

    Essentially, the animal rights advocate argues that liberal principles–such as equal consideration of interests, rights to life and liberty–ought, logically, to be applied to animals (or at least certain animals). This is usually because it is held that there’s no good reason for drawing the line of moral standing at the species boundary. Thus the animal rights position can properly be thought of as an extension of liberalism rather than a repudiation of it.*
    _____________________________________________________________________
    *The case of the environment may seem trickier, but it might be argued that a liberal could support environmental protections insofar as they are necessary to avoid harm to sentient beings–human or non-human. Liberals and animal rights advocates would, however, disagree with so-called deep ecologists who locate moral value primarily in ecosystems rather than individual sentient creatures.

  • Beyond Prejudice 4

    In the previous posts we saw Pluhar make a two-step argument for moral rights. First, she argued that any agent, reflecting on the nature of her own agency, must advocate for herself basic rights to freedom and well-being, simply because she is a purposive agent. Second, Pluhar contends that the principles of consistency and universalizability require that agent to affirm moral rights for other purposive agents.

    But, to get to the heart of Pluhar’s project, what does this have to do with nonhuman animals? How does she make the case for extending generic rights to freedom and well-being to them?

    Pluhar contends that “all preferentially autonomous agents” meet the requirement that is sufficient for possessing basic rights. Preferentially autonomous agents are simply “beings who act to satisfy preferences” (p. 249).

    This class of beings is considerably larger than the subclass of reflective, rights-claiming agents. Preferentially autonomous beings need some minimal requirements in order to function, regardless of their level of intellectual sophistication. As Paul Taylor points out with regard to the sense of freedom relevant to this issue, absence from constraint is essential to nonhumans and humans alike: “[Absence of constraint] is a concept of freedom that is of central importance for every creature which has a good of its own to realize. For being free in this sense is being in a position to be able to preserve one’s existence and further one’s good, and being unfree in this sense is being unable to do these things.” Equally essential is life and the capacities that allow one to pursue that life when one is given a chance to do so: minimum “well-being.” Following Gerwith’s line of reasoning, it seems that agents as such, not just conceptually well-developed agents, should have the rights of freedom and well-being attributed to them. (p. 249, emphasis in the original, footnotes omitted)

    As we saw earlier, Pluhar follows Gerwith in arguing that being a purposive agent–having things one wants to do–is by itself sufficient for claiming basic rights, and, to be consistent, attributing such rights to any being meeting that condition. Undeniably, many nonhuman animals meet this condition–they have goals and wants; they seek to pursue them; and they require minimum conditions of freedom and well-being in order to do so. Once they’ve crossed this threshold, their relative intellectual inferiority just isn’t relevant when it comes to attributing basic rights to them.

    This view has the merit, lacking in views Pluhar has rejected (such as the full-personhood view), of explaining why so-called marginal humans also have basic moral rights:

    All consciously conative beings are goal directed; they have preferences or purposes that they want to have satisfied. This holds for very young and mentally limited humans just as much as it holds for the most intelligent of human agents. The intelligent agent must logically recognize, Gerwith argues, that those whom he calls “marginal agents” are individuals striving to survive just as she is, seeking shelter, food, drink, and companionship. As such, they are due full moral consideration. Purposiveness is the key similarity between these others and normal human adults; it justifies the attribution of rights to the former by the latter, despite the fact that the individuals compared differ greatly in their ability to fulfill their purposes. (p. 250, emphasis in the original, footnotes omitted)

    (Interestingly, this leads Pluhar to a relatively conservative view on abortion: she argues that a fetus, once it has achieved sentience and purposiveness, has a prima facie right to life “in the last half of gestation (earlier, if evidence warrants it)” (p. 253). Though, on her view, abortions prior to sentience would not be wrong (much less should they be legally prohibited), and abortions after sentience occurs might be right if “the woman is protecting her own physical or mental health by making this choice” (p. 253).)

    To try and put Pluhar’s case in a somewhat more intuitive way: you could see it as a variation on the Golden Rule (a comparison she makes at one point). Reflecting on our own situation, we claim the right to pursue our own lives and seek our flourishing, which requires at least a minimum level of freedom and well-being. And recognizing in all sentient, purposive creatures a similar striving to live their own lives and seek their own goods, we should treat them as we would like to be treated if our situations were reversed. This doesn’t really seem like much to ask when you think about it. It may be that our chief resistance to accepting the basic rights of other creatures to live their own lives isn’t so much the intellectual difficulty as that it would require a radical revision to many of our current practices.

  • Beyond Prejudice 3

    If, following Pluhar, we agree that any reflective agent has reason to affirm that she has basic rights to freedom and well-being, why should that agent extend those rights to others? In other words, must the reflective agent also be a moral agent?

    To start, let’s review why Pluhar (following Gerwith) thinks that any reflective agent is warranted in asserting her right to basic rights to freedom and well-being.

    The shift from the prudential to the moral point of view, according to which others’ interests count too, begins with the agent’s justification of the rights claim made in premise 5 [see previous post]. As Gerwith points out, rights claims, as opposed to bald demands, are claims that one is entitled to or due certain behavior on the part of others; hence, such claims need to be warranted. The warrant for an agent’s claim to basic (“generic”) rights is very straightforward: She has purposes she wants to fulfill; that is, she is a “prospective purposive agent.” This is the most fundamental “practical justifying reason” that can ever be given. As one who wishes to act, she must claim or advocate that she is entitled to the conditions that make action possible. Thus, she accepts:

    (7) “I have rights to freedom and well-being because I am a prospective purposive agent.” (p. 243, emphasis in the original, footnotes omitted)

    Once the agent has accepted premise 7, it’s a straightforward matter–one required by basic logical consistency–to universalize it:

    The particular identity of the agent is not important here […] the fact that she has purposes she wants to achieve is what counts. This inevitably leads to the next step in the argumentative shift from the prudential to the moral point of view: the acceptance of the principle of universalizability.

    (8) “If the having of some quality Q is a sufficient condition of some predicate P’s belonging to some individual S, then P must also belong to all other subjects that have Q.”

    It follows, Gerwith argues, that the agent must hold:

    (9) “All prospective purposive agents have rights to freedom and well-being.” (p. 243, footnotes omitted)

    In other words, if I, as a “prospective purposive agent,” am led to claim my rights to freedom and well-being because they are necessary for me to pursue any goals–that is, my goal-seeking nature is enough to warrant the assertion of rights, then, to be consistent, I must affirm that any purposive agent likewise possesses such rights. This is because they would have the same quality (purposiveness) that warrants my own claim of rights.

    We are led, according to Pluhar, to affirm what Gerwith refers to as “the supreme principle of morality”:

    (10) “Act in accord with the generic rights of your recipients as well as of yourself.” (the Principle of General Consistency) (p. 244, footnotes omitted)

    Astute readers will recognize this as a variation on the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I recognize in myself basic (generic) rights to well-being simply by virtue of the fact that I have goals I want to pursue, I’m forced, on pain of inconsistency, to recognize those rights in other goal-pursuing agents. If I hold that I have rights, I have to hold that other (relevantly similar) beings have the same rights. Hence the transition from the prudential to the moral point of view.

    But Pluhar wants to show that this applies not only to other human beings but to (at least some) other animals too. In the next post I’ll discuss her argument for why (some) animals count as purposive agents who fall under the scope of this version of the Golden Rule.

  • Beyond Prejudice 2

    I want to zero in on what I think would be the most controversial steps in Evelyn Pluhar’s argument for rights (both for human and nonhuman animals).

    In this post I’ll focus on the first: the move from an agent affirming her own goals and desires to affirming a right to freedom and well-being necessary to pursue her goals.

    Pluhar reconstructs Alan Gerwith’s argument that any reflective agent must, logically, hold that she has the rights to freedom and well-being. The first two premises are derived from the nature of agency itself–its conative or goal-seeking aspect:

    (1) “I do X for end or purpose E.”
    (2) “E is good.”

    Pluhar clarifies that “good” in premise two doesn’t mean morally good, but simply that the end for which an agent acts must be regarded by that agent as desirable or valuable enough to pursue.

    Pluhar continues:

    When the agent reflects about the nature of agency itself, she will realize that action of any kind has two necessary preconditions or “generic features”: (a) the ability to have purposes or goals and (b) the freedom required to pursue those goals. In order to have goals, one must in turn be alive, have a certain minimal quality of life, and have certain basic mental and physical capabilities. [Alan] Geriwith combines these requirements for the first generic feature of action under the heading of “well-being.” The next premise expresses the fact that the reflective agent who wants to pursue her goals must also value her well-being and freedom and hold that they are good:

    (3) “My freedom and well-being are necessary goods.”

    “Necessary goods” means not only that freedom and well-being are necessary conditions for successful goal pursuit: it carries the agent’s approbation. Note that Gerwith is not claiming that the agent’s freedom and well-being are good: his point is that the reflective agent must hold them, as generic features of action, to be good. Even an agent bent on being enslaved or immolating herself must value the freedom and well-being needed at that moment to carry out her purpose. (p. 241, emphasis in the original, footnotes omitted

    This step in the argument is fairly noncontroversial, I think. If an agent, by definition, regards the end that she acts for as good, then she must regard as necessary goods those things that are preconditions of any action whatsoever, what Pluhar describes as freedom and well-being.

    The agent’s realization that her freedom and well-being are requirements for the achievement of any of her goals leads her to the next premise:

    (4) “I must have freedom and well-being.”

    This premise is not just shorthand for “I must have freedom and well-being if I want to act”; it is an expression of the agent’s “advocacy” of her own freedom and well-being. She wants freedom and well-being because she wants–as does every agent, by definition–to achieve her goals. This inevitably leads her, Gerwith argues, to claim that she is entitled to freedom and well-being:

    (5) “I have rights to freedom and well-being.”

    Note once again that Gerwith is not arguing that the agent has these fundamental, “generic” rights: he is saying that she holds or accepts that she does, as an agent who wishes to pursue her goals. (241-2, emphasis in the original, footnotes omitted)

    This is where things start to get a little tricky. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem to follow from the fact that I regard something as good that I must also regard myself as entitled to that thing, to have rights to it. Simply because I affirm the goodness of freedom and well-being as necessary for me to act, does it therefore follow that I have to affirm my rights to them?

    Pluhar thinks that Gerwith’s argument shows that it does indeed follow:

    Gerwith now uses an indirect proof to show that any agent logically must hold that she has these basic rights. If she were to deny 5, she would also have to deny:

    (6) “All other persons ought at least to refrain from removing or interfering with my freedom and well-being.”

    Premises 5 and 6 are logical correlatives: rights claims are claims against others. But if the agent denies 6, then she must accept the following substitute premise:

    (6′) “Other persons may (i.e., it is permissible that other persons) remove or interfere with my freedom and well-being.”

    However, 6′ contradicts [4]: “I must have freedom and well-being.” (pp. 242, footnotes omitted)

    In a nutshell, the argument here is that if I deny that I have rights to freedom and well-being, then I am committed to 6′–that other persons may remove or interfere with my freedom. But this contradicts 4 above: my affirmation that I must have freedom and well-being. I can’t simultaneously affirm that I need freedom and well-being and that others can take it away from me (other things being equal).

    It’s important to be clear about what Pluhar thinks this argument shows: not that I have the rights to freedom and well-being, but that I’m logically committed to affirming or claiming those rights for myself. For if I don’t, I undercut the very nature of my own agency by denying that I need what are necessary conditions for exercising that agency.

    In the next post I’ll look at how Pluhar/Gerwith thinks we move to the extension of moral rights to others; after that we’ll examine Pluhar’s extension of the reasoning to animals.

  • Beyond Prejudice 1

    I recently finished Beyond Prejudice, a book on “the moral significance of human and nonhuman animals,” by philosopher Evelyn Pluhar. Pluhar is part of a second generation of animal rights/liberation theorists who build on the pioneering work of thinkers like Peter Singer and Tom Regan. Pluhar’s main contention is that attempts to rebut the assertion of moral claims on behalf of animals fail, and that animals (at least of certain kinds) should be regarded as having basic moral rights such as a (prima facie) right to life and a right to the freedom of noninterference.

    Pluhar spends the first part of her book refuting the most common views that deny full moral considerability for animals: the full-personhood view (only rational autonomous agents have rights) and the speciesist view (only members of species typified by rational autonomous agents have rights). She also critiques Peter Singer’s version of utilitarianism on the grounds that it entails that it would be morally permissible (indeed, morally obligatory in some cases) to (painlessly) kill a conscious agent so long as she is replaced by another agent who experiences a net balance of good over evil. In other words, Singer’s utilitarianism is unable to show why individual beings (rather than just their experiences) are valuable and deserving of protection.

    Having, she believes, refuted the full-personhood view, the speiciesist view, and utilitarianism, Pluhar attempts to offer a compelling positive case for animal rights. After all, proponents of the views she has rejected might be willing to bite the bullets of unpalatable consequences, not to mention that people’s moral intuitions about the acceptability of some of these implications may vary.

    So, Pluhar sets out to defend and extend a line of reasoning first elaborated by philosopher Alan Gerwith that, Pluhar believes, shows that animals have basic moral rights. Gerwith’s argument, as Pluhar develops it, goes something like this: any conscious agent with desires and goals who reflects on it must, logically, affirm her right to be allowed to pursue those goals. As freedom and well-being are necessary conditions for pursuing goals, she is committed to affirming her right to freedom and not to have her well-being frustrated, simply in virtue of the fact that she is a purposive, striving (Pluhar uses the term “conative”) agent.

    But, to be consistent, this agent must affirm the right of all conative agents to freedom and well-being. This is because her assertion of her own rights depends on her status as a conative being:

    Reflective agents (full persons) logically must advocate basic rights for themselves because, without the necessary conditions for acheiving their purposes, they cannot have what they regard as good: they cannot have what they want. Universalizability and consistency require that other beings who also could not have what they regard as good without these preconditions must also be accorded such rights. (p. 262)

    It’s because I have desires and purposes that I must press my right to those conditions (freedom, well-being) that I require to pursue them. Not to affirm such rights for myself would imply that others have the moral permission to interfere with my freedom and well-being (since rights are claims against others). But this contradicts my own desires, since I want to be able to pursue my goals (by definition, or else they wouldn’t be my goals!). Reflecting on my own existence as a purposeful agent entails that I lay claim to basic rights to freedom and well-being, since these are preconditions of my pursuing any purposes whatsoever.

    And, if having basic rights is a necessary condition for me to achieve my purposes, then consistency demands that I recognize such rights for any being seeking to pursue its own good and get what it wants. This is because I have affirmed my own purposive nature as a sufficient reason for claiming basic rights (e.g., the rights to life and well-being); consistency requires that I affirm those rights for any purposive agent.

    The category of purposive, or conative, beings, Pluhar emphatically contends, includes animals, at least animals of a certain level of development and sophistication. Animals have desires and goals, and if–as Pluhar has argued–each of us is committed to affirming basic rights for all purposive agents, then the conclusion is inescapable that some animals (Pluhar thinks it includes at least all mammals and probably birds) have basic rights to life and freedom.

    My goal in this post was to summarize Pluhar’s argument, as much for my own benefit as anything; next I’ll offer some thoughts of my own.

  • The new new new fusionism?

    I remember those days of–what?–three years ago when the “new fusionism” was supposed to be an alliance of pro-lifers and foreign policy hawks. And then there was “liberaltarianism.” Now it’s an alliance between “neo-Benedictines” and “libertarians.” The idea is that folks who want to live in Alasdair MacIntyre-style local communities heavy on religious identity and traditional morality can make common cause with libertarians to get the state off their backs and allow them to set up communities that reflect their values.

    As Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher says:

    the Benedict Option is looking to be the only viable solution to a truly conservative/traditionalist social order. If that can only exist in America within a libertarian meta-order, then perhaps we should explore the possibilities of a new fusionism.

    Philosophy geeks may be reminded of the “utopia” section of libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick argued that a libertarian political order could allow for just these types of experiments in community life and that utopia just was the possibility of multiple such experiments coexisting side-by-side.

    The trick, though, with the idea of “thick” communities enjoying autonomy from the dread liberal state is that it’s not clear how you balance communities’ desires for self-determination with the individual rights that good liberals think the state should protect. It may be unfair that advocates of federalism and states’ rights have been tarred with the brush of white supremacy, but the ugly historical reality is that community autonomy has all-too-often been used to oppress individuals and minorities.

    Of course, a true traditionalist might argue that individuals are properly subordinate to the community and that liberal individualism is a decadent system that makes true virtue impossible and undermines communal bonds. And such a person might argue that individual and minority interests must sometimes be sacrificed for the good of the whole.

    Personally, as I’ve argued before, I think we ought to be more circumspect about our ability to clearly perceive the good and that the fragility of human selves ought to make us wary of demanding political communities that embody a “thick” conception of the good. And I believe this for theological reasons: we are finite, sinful creatures prone to running roughshod over the weak. One of the justifications of the liberal state, as I understand it, is to protect the weak from the certainties of the strong. I don’t want to pretend that this is an easy or obvious balancing act, but I’m not prepared to endorse the “night-watchman” state as a recipe for social peace.

    p.s.     Be sure to check out John Schwenkler’s take.

  • John Stuart Mill – right about everything

    Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals; and opposed adulterating Anglo-American liberalism with too much systematic French theory—all this along with an intelligent acceptance of the free market as an engine of prosperity and a desire to see its excesses and inequalities curbed. He was right about nearly everything, even when contemplating what was wrong: open-minded and magnanimous to a fault, he saw through Thomas Carlyle’s reactionary politics to his genius, and his essay on Coleridge, a leading conservative of the previous generation, is a model appreciation of a writer whose views are all wrong but whose writing is still wonderful. Mill was an enemy of religious bigotry and superstition, and a friend of toleration and free thought, without overdoing either. (No one has ever been more eloquent about the ethical virtues of Jesus of Nazareth.)

    All of which makes trouble for a biographer. Every time we turn a corner, there is Mill, smiling just a touch too complacently at having got there first.

    Read the rest of this very interesting article here.

    Obviously, I don’t think Mill was right about everything–I think Millian liberalism needs to be tempered with a bit of Burkean skepticism about radical change and Niebuhrian pessimism about human nature. But he was certainly right about a lot, and he informs many of the presuppositions of Right and Left to this day.

    See also this piece from a while back.