Where can we find answers to the most important questions about freedom and flourishing?

People who visit this blog sometimes ask for more signposts to help them find my answers to the most important questions about freedom and flourishing. In the past my response has been to suggest that they read my Kindle ebook, Free to Flourish, which is available for an extremely modest price. However, my thinking has moved on in some respects since that book was published in 2012. So, this post identifies what I see as the most important questions and provides some links to indicate where answers can be found.

1. What is the purpose of life? The answer that Aristotle gave around 350 BC sets us on the right track. Happiness (human flourishing) is the purpose of human existence. Individuals flourish as they actualize potentials, including the potential for self-direction, that are specific to the kinds of creatures that humans are. The best summary of my views on the nature of happiness and human flourishing is still to be found in Chapter 2 of Free to Flourish.
2. Is there an ethical proposition that is relevant to all aspects of our lives? I agree with the view of Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen in The Perfectionist Turn, that “the existential fact that we must make something of our lives” is of fundamental importance. Interpersonal relations are also important, but don’t enter all aspects of our lives. See: Does the I-You relation enter into every aspect of the moral life?
3. How can you become a better person? To bring some abstract philosophical ideas down to earth, I have considered how a hypothetical person attempting to make something of his life might answer if asked whether he is a good person. A central part of his answer is that becoming a good person is like playing cards well: “He says that rather than bemoaning the fact that you have not been dealt a better hand, it is better to maintain good humour and focus on how best to play the cards you have been dealt. You never think of cheating and you avoid playing with people who cheat. You like to win, but you participate mainly to enjoy the social interaction. Playing the game is also a learning experience. You learn how to perceive opportunities, develop strategies, cooperate with others, and to win and lose graciously. As you learn to play well you become a better person”. See: How can we know what we ought to do?
4. Should we be motivated by mutual benefit in our interactions with others?  Robert Sugden observes in The Community of Advantage that when individuals participate in market transactions it is possible for them to be motivated by mutual benefit. They may see virtue in voluntary transactions that enable people to get what they want by benefiting others, rather than purely personal benefit, or the potential to use proceeds for altruistic purposes. Sugden points out that being motivated by mutual benefit is consistent with Adam Smith’s famous observation that we do not rely on the benevolence of shopkeepers to provide us with the goods we need. The shop keepers don’t sacrifice their own interests to provide us with goods, but they may act with the intention of playing their part in mutually beneficial practices. See: Do you acknowledge a personal responsibility to seek mutual benefit?
5. Is human flourishing primarily about psychological health, capability or opportunity? In a post addressing that question argue that all three aspects of flourishing are relevant if we are considering the extent to which particular individuals – our relatives, friends and acquaintances - are flourishing. However, from a public policy perspective, attention should focus primarily on the opportunities available for people to live the lives they aspire to, because government policies impinge greatly – often negatively – on growth of opportunity. 
6. Why do you consider freedom to be integral to human flourishing? There are two reasons: a) Individual humans have potential for self-direction and cannot fully flourish unless they are free to manage their own lives and accept responsibility for their actions. As Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl point out, recognition of individual liberty is necessary to ensure that individuals can flourish in diverse ways without coming into conflict. Chapter 3 of Free to Flourish still provides a reasonable summary of my views. b) Good societies that provide conditions favourable to individual flourishing are characterised by individual freedom. As discussed in Chapter 6 of Free to Flourish, freedom provides the basis for peacefulness and individual opportunity, which in turn enable a greater degree of economic security to be sustained. As discussed in Chapter 7, economic progress – the growth of economic opportunities supporting individual flourishing – is attributable to advances in technology and innovations that were made possible by economic freedom and supporting beliefs, ideologies and social norms.
7. What is the greatest threat to the ongoing expansion of opportunities for individual flourishing in coming decades? In Free to Flourish I argued that the failure of democratic governments to cope with their expanding responsibilities poses the greatest threat to the ongoing expansion of opportunities for human flourishing in coming decades. I maintain that view.  It seems to me that, over the next 20 years or so, people in Western democracies are likely to suffer to a greater extent from the consequences of an explosion in public debt than from climate change. See: How can we compare climate change and public debt risks? Nevertheless, I acknowledge that climate change could possibly pose a serious threat to civilization and argue that we should not ignore the risk of catastrophe even if we think the most likely outcome is benign. I have argued that climate change policies should focus to a greater extent on choosing the lowest cost methods of reducing the risk of catastrophe. See: What is the appropriate discount rate to use in assessingclimate change mitigation policies?
8. Will it be possible to avert democratic failure, and if not, is there a basis to hope ongoing human flourishing will be possible? Since writing Free to Flourish I have become more pessimistic about the potential for citizens to unite to restore better norms of political behaviour in the western democracies. However, I now see a basis for hope that the faltering institutions of representative government could one day be replaced by superior institutions. Blockchain technology and smart contracts may have potential to enable people to act together to produce some public goods cooperatively without central government involvement. See: Where did I go wrong in writing about the greatest threat to human flourishing?

Are values opposed to virtues?

In an article recently published in “The Australian”, Peter Kurti, a senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, noted:

“Unease is growing in Australia that something has changed for the worse in our live-and-let-live culture”.

The context of his comment is the “opprobrium and venom” that dissent from “prevailing new orthodoxies” about gender and sexual orientation seems to attract. The author suggests this has contributed to “the sense that the common bonds of civility that helped to build mutual trust in our society are under strain”.

I concur with those sentiments. They are consistent with views recently expressed on this blog: Does Israel Folau deserve support from advocates of free speech?

However, the headline of Kurti’s article “Israel Folau: Moral compass all askew as virtue is eclipsed by values” seems to me to be codswallop. Unfortunately, the headline accurately reflects Kurti’s explanation for the fracturing of our culture in terms of what he describes as “the eclipse of virtue by values”.

It is difficult to see how values can be opposed to virtues in terms of common usage of those terms in discussions of ethics. The Concise Oxford defines the terms as follows:

Virtue: “moral excellence, uprightness, goodness”; “the seven cardinal virtues”.

Value: “one’s principles or standards, one’s judgement of what is valuable or important in life”.

Kurti makes values appear to be opposed to virtues by claiming that values “are simply emotional statements about personal beliefs, feelings or attitudes”. He claims that values “cannot be normative because it is impossible to erect any shared meaning on the foundation of something that is personal and subjective”.

Those claims are clearly incorrect. For example, when Friedrich Hayek writes about the “values of a free civilization” he is not referring merely to emotional statements about personal beliefs, feelings or attitudes. What Hayek and others have written about shared values is clearly closely related to norms of behaviour.

Kurti doesn’t seem to recognise the existence of shared values. His constructivist perspective, evident in use of the term “erect” when discussing the possibility of shared meaning, has apparently made it impossible for him to comprehend that the common values of an open and free society could evolve spontaneously as individuals pursue what is important in their lives.

Perhaps what Kurti was intending to convey is that the common bonds of civility are fracturing because people are increasingly adopting personal beliefs, feelings and attitudes that are inconsistent with common bonds of civility. So, why does he seek to discredit values language?

I was hoping that question might be answered by reading Kurti’s recently published CIS paper, entitled Cracking Up? Culture and the Displacement of Virtue. No such luck! In that paper, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Iain Benson are quoted as asserting that values language rejects the idea of shared moral goods, but they are no less wrong about that than Peter Kurti.

I agree with much of what Kurti writes about the importance of the traditional virtues. However, when Kurti refers to virtues he is referring only to the traditional virtues. I think that poses a problem for him. He claims “prevailing new orthodoxies” exist, so he must surely acknowledge that the people who subscribe to those new orthodoxies see political correctness as a virtue.

In my view it is probably an overstatement to claim that the new orthodoxies are “prevailing”. But it is impossible to deny that there has been a shift in what many people perceive to be virtuous that is inextricably linked to a shift in their values.

There is a more fundamental problem is asserting that cracks appearing in our live-and-let-live culture can be mended by appealing to the traditional virtues. The traditional virtues have been acknowledged for thousands of years, but our live-and-let-live culture has only recently evolved.  Freedom of religion has had a firm legal basis in only a few countries for only a couple of centuries. The idea that members of minority religions should not be discriminated against has been a widely shared value and accepted norm of behaviour for less than a century in most western countries, including Australia. Our live-and-let-live culture, with harmonious collaboration between people of different religions, ethnic backgrounds and gender in work and community organisations, has only been in existence for a few decades, despite the lip service paid to civility in earlier times. Live-and-let-live has been inclusive of LGBT people for an even shorter period.

The shared values underlying our live-and-let-live culture include freedom of expression, tolerance and politeness.  The norms of behaviour associated with these shared values enable people to obtain mutual benefit from working, playing sport and socializing with people whose attitudes and behaviours they disagree with, and in some instances may even consider to be immoral.

The main threat to our live-and-let-live culture comes from those who insist that to enhance social harmony people should exercise much greater restraint in what they say and publish to avoid the possibility of giving offence to members of the religious, ethnic, gender and LGBT groups pandered to by identity politics. This gives rise to the potential for a return to tribal values as members of an increasing number of individual groups abandon shared values and threaten social disharmony in order to redress perceived disadvantages or to obtain advantages over others. 

The most obvious and straight forward way to avoid a return to tribal values is for supporters of our live-and-let-live culture to make their views heard whenever the shared values of that culture come under threat from those who take offence unreasonably. A return to tribal values can be avoided if enough people of goodwill continue to support the rights of others to express views they disagree with.