Did Robert Nozick hold a view of the evolution of natural rights that is similar to that held by John Hasnas?

 

This question came to mind while I was reading Chapter 4 of John Hasnas’s recently published book, Common Law Liberalism: A New Theory of the Libertarian Society. Chapter 4 was originally published in 2005 in Social Philosophy and Policy (22, 111-147) but I hadn’t previously read it.

In this chapter, entitled ‘Empirical Natural Rights’, Hasnas suggests that neither John Locke nor Robert Nozick offered adequate arguments for the existence of natural rights. (His discussion of Nozick focuses on Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) He offers an alternative conception of natural rights – empirical natural rights (ENR) – that evolve in the state of nature. He then proceeds to argue that ENR form a good approximation to the negative rights to life, liberty and property on which Locke and Nozick rest their arguments, and that ENR have instrumental moral value.

In the first part of this essay, I outline Nozick’s evolutionary explanation for emergence of the ethics of respect. Following that, I compare the evolutionary accounts offered by Hasnas and Nozick, and finish the essay considering the normative status of ENRs.

Nozick’s evolutionary explanation for the ethics of respect

As far as I know, Nozick never claimed to have provided an account of the evolution of natural rights, but I believe that he did so in Chapter 5 of Invariances (published in 2001). Since I outlined Nozick’s speculations about evolution of the ethics of respect in Chapter 2 of Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, I will reproduce some relevant paragraphs below:

“Nozick’s account of the evolution of the ethics of respect, draws upon biological evolution as well as cultural evolution. He suggests that the higher capacities of humans, including capacities for conscious thought, control of impulses and planning, have been selected for by evolution because of the benefits they bring, for example in enabling adherence to ethical norms.^[i] Evolution may have shaped humans to enjoy the benefits of cooperative activity. A reputation for adhering to norms of cooperative behavior brings rewards by attracting further cooperation, and may have conferred reproductive advantages.^[ii] A capacity for evaluating objects and desires might have been selected for, or exist as a beneficial side-effect of a combination of capacities.^[iii] Conscious self-awareness may have been selected for because it makes humans capable of norm-guided behavior to mutual benefit.^[iv]

Nozick suggests that internalization of norms brings ethics into play. Something other than (or in addition to) punishment by other people must support rules if they are to become ethical principles or values. The internalization of norms enables people to follow them when no-one is watching who can sanction deviations.^[v]

The norm of social coordination and cooperation proposed by Nozick has these characteristics:

“It makes mandatory the widest voluntary cooperation to mutual benefit; it makes only that mandatory; and it (in general) prohibits interactions that are not to mutual benefit, unless they are entered into voluntarily by all parties, or unless these interactions (such as the act of punishing another) are in response to previous violation of the principle or to preparations to violate it”.^[vi]

Moral progress, Nozick suggests, incorporates, among other things, shrinkage of the domain of mandatory morality to enable a domain of liberty and personal autonomy to be established, and for the ethics of respect to emerge.^[vii] 

Nozick acknowledges that someone could agree that ethics originates in mutually beneficial coordinating activity and yet claim that conscious self-awareness is valuable for reasons other than norm following. He sums up:

“Still, if conscious self-awareness was selected for because it makes us capable of ethical behavior, then ethics, even the very first layer of the ethics of respect, truly is what makes us human. A satisfying conclusion. And one with some normative force”.^[viii]

Since the ethics of respect entails recognition of Lockean rights, Nozick’s naturalistic explanation implicitly recognizes that such rights are natural.”

Comparison of Hasnas and Nozick

The differences between the evolutionary accounts offered by Hasnas and Nozick seem to me to amount to differences of emphasis. Nozick emphasized the link between conscious self-awareness and ethical behaviour, whereas Hasnas’s account seems to have a more Hayekian emphasis on evolution of rules that are not the result of deliberate human design. Hasnas emphasizes dispute settlement:

“Various methods for composing disputes are tried. Those that leave the parties unsatisfied and likely to again resort to violence are abandoned. Those that effectively resolve the disputes with the minimal disturbance to the peace of the community continue to be used and are accompanied by ever-increasing social pressure for disputants to employ them.

Over time, security arrangements and dispute settlement procedures that are well-enough adapted to social and material circumstances to reduce violence to generally acceptable levels become regularized.” (130)

 Hasnas acknowledges the normative significance of the rules that evolve:

“Over time, these rules become invested with normative significance and the members of the community come to regard the ways in which the rules permit them to act at their pleasure as their rights. Thus, in the state of nature, rights evolve out of human beings’ efforts to address the inconveniences of that state. In the state of nature, rights are solved problems.” (131)

The rules presumably came to have normative significance because people thought about them and recognized they had merit (aided by the persuasive efforts of Moses and other community leaders).

Hasnas does not claim that ENR fit the definition of natural rights as moral entitlements that humans possess simply by virtue of their humanity. He suggests that ENR are natural in the sense of having evolved in the state of nature and pre-date the formation of civil government.

I am not entirely persuaded that the distinction between ENR and natural rights is necessary. As far as I am aware, humanity didn’t exist prior to the biological and social evolution that resulted in the emergence of modern humans about 100,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, the question arises of whether it is possible to provide a normative justification for natural rights purely based on speculation about the evolutionary origins of ethical intuitions about rights to life, liberty and property.

The Normative Status of ENR

 Hasnas argues that ENR have instrumental moral value regardless of the moral theory and general approach to ethics one adopts:

“This is because empirical natural rights facilitate peaceful human interaction and peace is an important, if not pre-eminent moral value in virtually all moral theories.”

The author spends a few pages making this point. He has no difficulty persuading me of the importance of peace to the moral theory that I subscribe to. However, I see some groups of people in the world who claim to hold moral theories that support activities directed towards plundering, murdering, and enslaving others.

It seems to me that those of us who believe that peace is a pre-eminent moral value should be willing to provide explicit normative reasons why we consider peace to be so important.

 

 

 

---

[i] Nozick, Invariances, 243.

[ii] Nozick, Invariances, 246.

[iii] Nozick, Invariances, 276.

[iv] Nozick, Invariances, 299. Conscious self-awareness also enables each of us to recognize the existential responsibility of making a life for oneself. See: Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Perfectionist Turn, 7.

[v] Nozick, Invariances, 247-8.

[vi] Nozick, Invariances, 259.

[vii] Nozick, Invariances, 265.

[viii] Nozick, Invariances, 300.

Should Libertarians be Attempting to Influence Culture? A Discussion with Winton Bates and Chris Matthew Sciabarra (I)

 

I have asked Chris Matthew Sciabarra to present his views on the question posed above because he has possibly thought more deeply than any other living person about the relevance of social context to the pursuit of libertarian ideals. The depth of Chris’s thinking on these matters became apparent to me when I recently reviewed his trilogy of books on the dialectics of liberty:

Marx, Hayek, and Utopia, State University of New York Press, 1995.

Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, second edition, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. (The first edition was published in 1995.)

Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

My review has been published on “The Savvy Street”.

In his dialectical approach, Chris emphasizes the importance of contextual analysis across time. The most relevant example is his discussion of Murray Rothbard’s views. Rothbard held that nonaggression is all that is required of a libertarian society, and that could be assured through adoption of a libertarian law code after government ceased to exist. Chris argues that the experience of political freedom is not likely to be fully efficacious in the absence of a supporting edifice of cultural and personal practices.

Before asking Chris for his contribution to the discussion, I outlined why I am reconsidering my views on the question of whether libertarians should be seeking to influence culture.

Why am I reconsidering my views?

Until recently, I was definitely opposed to J S Mill’s position in the passage quoted above. It seemed to me to be woolly thinking to suggest that the sanctions imposed by “prevailing opinion and feeling” were akin to tyranny. I have argued in the past that libertarians should focus on reducing the tyranny of the legal order. It seemed to me that while individual libertarians might take a position supporting or opposing particular elements of cultural change, in their role as advocates of liberty they should focus on issues specifically related to government e.g. constitutions, laws, regulations, and actions of government officials.

I began to reconsider my views before reviewing Chris’s books. After reading The Individualists, an excellent history of libertarian ideas Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, I was prompted to write on this blog on the question: Where is the soul of libertarianism? That question stems from the subtitle of the book: “Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism”, and from the discussion, in the final chapter, of the battle between bleeding heart libertarians, left libertarians and paleolibertarians for control of the Libertarian Party in the United States. The Individualists left me wanting to promote the view that the soul, or essence, of libertarianism stems from the nature of human flourishing. I suggested that I would have preferred to see the book end by acknowledging that libertarians are engaged in an ongoing struggle against authoritarianism, as people on opposing sides of the culture wars seek to enlist the coercive powers of the state to pursue their interests.

Another reason for reconsidering my views is because it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the actions of governments and those of some other organisations.  For example, when interest groups lobby private businesses to adopt particular environmental or social policies, there is an increasing tendency for political parties to become involved by threatening regulation either in support of or in opposition to interest group advocacy. There also seems to be increasing acceptance that governments should take an active interest in codes of conduct adopted by organisations that have traditionally been viewed as independent of government (e.g. universities) particularly if they receive substantial government funding. Another example is the non-transparent influence of governments on the publication policies of social media outlets. It has become increasingly difficult for free speech advocates to distinguish between government censorship and the editorial policies of media proprietors.  

The only reason I can think of right now why libertarians should not be attempting to influence culture is the difficulty they would have in agreeing on what kinds of cultural change they would like to promote. Libertarians are, almost by definition, independently minded people.

With that thought in mind, I will now hand over to Chris.

Chris Matthew Sciabarra’s view

I want to thank Winton Bates for inviting me to participate in this ongoing dialogue, which began with his discussion of my Dialectics and Liberty Trilogy. Next year, I will formally mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the first two books of that trilogy—Marx, Hayek, and Utopia and Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical—and the twenty-fifth anniversary of its finale, Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. I will devote more attention to each of these books as we approach their birthdays!

My appreciation notwithstanding, I’m somewhat overwhelmed by Winton’s view that I have “possibly thought more deeply than any other living person about the relevance of social context to the pursuit of libertarian ideals.”

Recently, several articles have been published, lamenting the state of libertarianism—how it has lost its relevance and practicality, how it has lost its way. I can attest to the fact that whatever libertarianism is today, it is not what it was when I first encountered it in the late 1970s. As a twentieth-century offshoot of liberalism, libertarianism emphasized the centrality of individual rights. But this was not a purely propertarian vision. It was a liberal ideal that situated intellectual, political, and economic freedom within an inclusive cosmopolitan social framework.

I often heard the mantra that libertarianism was about getting the government out of the boardroom and the bedroom. I took seriously Ayn Rand’s view that a “new intellectual” movement was necessary to unite the “homeless refugees” in American politics: the nontotalitarian “liberals” and the nontraditional “conservatives.” I took seriously Murray Rothbard’s call “for a new liberty” that transcended the limitations of left and right.

Even more importantly—and in complete agreement with Winton—I took seriously the neo-Aristotelian perspective that any struggle for human freedom is simultaneously a commitment to the project of personal flourishing. Each implies the other. Each requires the other. And each depends upon a culture that nourishes both.

Alas, we are facing a political climate here in America—and in many other countries throughout the world—in which there is a struggle between competing forms of illiberalism on both the left and the right. I have not concealed my view as to which is the greater threat. But illiberalism of any kind anywhere is a threat to human freedom and personal flourishing everywhere.

The opening epigraph of John Stuart Mill hints at the importance of focusing on how power manifests itself in reciprocally reinforcing ways. The approach of so-called “thin libertarians”—that is, those who have argued that freedom does not require a robust defense of anything beyond a nonaggression principle—is so myopic that it collapses in on itself. Somehow, someway, such “thin libertarians” have ushered in, through the backdoor, cultural presuppositions that they believe are necessary to the achievement and sustenance of human freedom.

Indeed, even Murray Rothbard, who once declared the sole importance of the nonaggression “axiom,” notably shifted his support toward what he called “Liberty Plus.” This was an acknowledgement that some kind of cultural matrix was necessary to nourish the freedom project. Rothbard argued that the paleoconservative values of a Christian culture, a “shared ethnicity,” and a “shared religion” were the only bulwark against the “modal” libertines who had taken up the banner of freedom. Hans-Hermann Hoppe furthered this view with a vengeance, arguing that libertarianism could not survive the conditions of “moral degeneracy and cultural rot” brought on by those who engaged in what he saw as the sordid promiscuity, vulgarity, obscenity, and illegitimacy of alternative lifestyles (in other words: anyone who identified as LGBT+).

Given that anarcho-capitalists like Hoppe advocate a society based on the creation of private propertarian fiefdoms, in which property owners can expel any groups upholding non-approved religious, cultural, or sexual practices, or even people whose skin color they don’t like, the very idea of a cosmopolitan liberal order was anathema. In other words, such libertarianism simply dispensed with liberalism, the very tapestry from which it emerged.

That’s not what I signed up for.

I believe that it is partially because of these developments in some libertarian circles that the radical liberal project remains stillborn, despite the gallant efforts of so many fine thinkers who have worked so hard to make the more robust case for freedom and flourishing. That project requires us to examine the systemic nature of tyranny and oppression—that is, the ways in which power relations are manifested on multiple levels in any given society. The cultural level is perhaps the most crucial of all.

And make no mistake about it: Power is not a purely political phenomenon. As Mill suggests, “prevailing opinion and feeling,” can be just as tyrannical as anything political. Indeed, James Madison warned that liberty could be destroyed from the top-down by political compulsion and from the bottom-up by the cultural imposition of conformity. Madison understood that liberty thrives on diversity.

So, in response to the question, “Should Libertarians be Attempting to Influence Culture?”, I can only say that this presupposes an understanding of more basic issues. First, libertarians should be focused on exploring the role of culture in shaping political and social outcomes. And in a global context, this also entails exploring how different cultures may or may not support the radical liberal project.

I have championed the dialectical method because, as the art of context-keeping, dialectics demands that we examine any problem, issue, or event on different levels of generality and from different vantage points. By shifting our perspective on any problem, issue, or event, we emerge with a fuller understanding of the varied ways in which these phenomena manifest themselves. We can then begin piecing together how the parts interrelate and function in a system examined across time.

I will have a lot more to say about these issues in forthcoming exchanges. For now, I’m delighted that Winton has invited me to participate in this unfolding dialogue.

Addendum:

Chris Mathew Sciabarra has also posted this discussion on his blog, Notablog. Please take a look at Chris’s blog.

Is it possible for humans to flourish if they don't live good lives?

 

I asked myself whether it is possible for humans to flourish if they don't live good lives after reading an article by Markus Knee and Damiel Haybron entitled "The Folk Concept of the Good Life: Neither Happiness nor Well-Being” (SSRN Electronic Journal, Jan. 2024).

I am not sure whether my attention was drawn to the article serendipitously or because of some kind of algorithmic conspiracy. An email from ResearchGate alerting me to the article arrived in my inbox on the same day that I had participated in a roundtable discussion on human flourishing with Ed Younkins, Roger Bissell, and Vinay Kolhatkar. We each presented views based on our three books:

Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society, by Edward W Younkins;

Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, by Roger E Bissell and Vinay Kolhatkar; and

Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, by Winton Russell Bates.

The roundtable discussion can be viewed on The Savvy Street Show. (The transcript of the discussion is available here.)

The article by Knee and Haybron

Knee and Haybron tested whether the folk view that a person “leads a good life” differs from the folk view that a person “is happy” and “is doing well” by asking survey participants to respond to vignettes involving socially sanctioned wrongdoing toward outgroup members. Their findings indicated that, for a large majority, judgments of bad character strongly reduce ascriptions of the good life, while having no impact at all on ascriptions of happiness or well-being.  They conclude that the lay concept of a good life is clearly distinct from those of happiness and well-being, likely encompassing both morality and well-being, and perhaps other values as well. Importantly, morality appears not to play a fundamental role among the folk in their views of either happiness or well-being.

So, who are the folk? There were 283 participants in this study (recruited on Prolific). It seems likely that the views of participants are representative of Americans. The sample has a bias towards females (64% female), but there is no obvious bias in the age of participants (average age 36, age range 19 to 78). I expect that folk in other countries with similar cultural heritage would have similar views, but that has not been tested   

Why should philosophers be interested in what folk think about the meaning of concepts? Socrates wandered around Athens asking people what they thought about the meaning of concepts, but I think modern philosophers have different motives. Socrates asked questions that were designed to encourage people to think more deeply rather than conducting surveys to assess their current views about the meaning of concepts.

I think the main reason why philosophers should be interested in what folk think about the meaning of concepts is because communication is easier if definitions accord with common usage of terms.

Differences between the views of the folk and the philosophers

Knee and Haybron claim that most philosophers assume that a good life is equivalent to well-being. I am not sure that “assume” is the correct word to use. Philosophers are usually careful to define the terms they use, so perhaps the authors mean that philosophers’ definitions of a good life and of well-being are at variance with the meaning that most folk give to those concepts.

One of the philosophers who has influenced my understanding of the meaning of human flourishing has adopted a definition of well-being that seems to me to make it equivalent to a good life. As I explain in the Introduction to Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, Neera Badhwar uses well-being in her definition of the highest prudential good (HPG):

“Well-being as the HPG consists of happiness in an objectively worthwhile life.”

I prefer to use the term flourishing, rather than well-being because flourishing better captures the dynamic nature of individual human development.

My understanding of human flourishing has also been strongly influenced by Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen, who argue that human flourishing can be best understood as “the exercise of one’s own practical wisdom”.

I combined the Dougs’ perspective with Badhwar’s to define human flourishing as:

“the exercise of one’s own practical wisdom, with integrity, in the pursuit and achievement of happiness in an objectively worthwhile life”.

Objective worth entails moral virtues and choice-worthiness. In my book, I endorse the idea that the basic goods of a flourishing human constitute “living well” and “are the actual elements of a good life”. Perhaps the folk might not agree that the same elements are involved in the same proportions in “living well” as in “a good life”.  However, I hope most folk would agree with me that “living well” requires more virtue than “doing well”.

In any case, I claim that my view of human flourishing is close to the folk view of leading a good life.

I am not aware of any tests having been made of the folk view of human flourishing. Casual observation suggests to me that the concept of human flourishing is not used widely enough for there to be a general “folk view” of what it means. When I tell folk I have written a book about human flourishing I am often asked what flourishing means and how it differs from related concepts such as happiness and thriving.

How do Knee and Haybron view human flourishing?

Knee and Haybron seem to view human flourishing as involving no more virtue than lay perceptions of happiness and well-being. They claim that their results suggest that “philosophers following Plato in claiming that serious immorality precludes flourishing are defending a less-than-intuitive position”. Neo-Aristotelians who claim that lack of integrity impairs flourishing would presumably be viewed in the same light.

In his book, The Pursuit of Unhappiness (published in 2008) Dan Haybron discussed the question of whether Genghis Khan - who claimed to obtain happiness by conquering his enemies, taking their property, and outraging their wives and daughters – could be considered to have been a flourishing human (pp 159-60). In that context, he claims that it is “neither here nor there” to assert that Genghis Khan didn’t have a good life – a life that is desirable or choice-worthy. He is asserting that consideration of goodness is irrelevant to the question of whether a person is flourishing.

A Google search for “human flourishing” suggests to me that a view of human flourishing which has no reference to goodness is not currently widely accepted in the literature discussing human flourishing. Most of the items I found near the top of the list linked human flourishing to living a good life, being holistically good, engaging in meaningful activities, having regard to traditional virtues etc.

Does it matter if different people define human flourishing in different ways? Perhaps it adds only minor confusion to intellectual discourse. However, the way terms are used in intellectual discourse is likely to influence the folk view (common usage) over the longer term.  I think it would be unfortunate if we end up with a folk view of human flourishing that is indistinguishable from current folk views of happiness.

Conclusion

An empirical study by Marcus Knee and Daniel Haybron has found that the folk view that a person leads a good life differs from the folk view that a person is happy or doing well. Judgements of bad character strongly reduce ascriptions of the good life but have no impact on ascriptions of happiness or well-being.

I claim that the view of human flourishing that I have adopted is close to the folk view of living a good life.

However, Knee and Haybron seem to have a view of human flourishing that has no reference to goodness. Their view of human flourishing seems to be at variance with widely accepted views in relevant literature.

I doubt whether there is a folk view of human flourishing at present but one seems likely to develop with increasing use of the term. In my view, it would be unfortunate if we end up with a folk view of human flourishing that is indistinguishable from folk views of happiness and doing well. Those who wish to avoid that outcome should take advantage of every available opportunity to assert that human flourishing means living a good life.

Addendum

1. The Aristotle “quote” at the top of this essay is my interpretation of part of Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1, Chapter 7. In the 5^th paragraph, Aristotle considers the function (ergon) of a human (the capacities and activities that make a being human). That is the context in which he is considering what activities or actions eudaimonia, or human flourishing, requires. (Eudaimonia is often translated as happiness but it involves more than the modern, emotional state, concept of happiness). Aristotle asserts that human flourishing (the chief good) is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. What he means by “activity of the soul” is closely related to exercise of practical wisdom.

2. A revised version of this essay has been published on "The Savvy Street". The revised version incorporates quotes about flourishing from the books by Ed Younkins and Roger Bissell and Vinay Kolhatkar.

Why has "Norms of Liberty" made a lasting impression on me?

 

Norms of Liberty is a work of political philosophy written by Douglas B Rasmussen and Douglas J Den Uyl, and published in 2005.

The blurb on Amazon provides a good description of what the book is about:

“How can we establish a political/legal order that in principle does not require the human flourishing of any person or group to be given structured preference over that of any other? Addressing this question as the central problem of political philosophy, Norms of Liberty offers a new conceptual foundation for political liberalism that takes protecting liberty, understood in terms of individual negative rights, as the primary aim of the political/legal order.” 

Rasmussen and Den Uyl argue for construing individual rights as metanormative principles. These principles establish the political/ legal conditions under which full moral conduct can take place.

The authors distinguish metanormative principles from normative principles that provide guidance for moral conduct within the ambit of normative ethics. This crucial distinction allows them to develop liberalism as a metanormative theory rather than as a guide for moral conduct.

The authors show that the moral universe can support liberalism without either being minimized or requiring morality to be grounded in sentiment or contracts. Rather, liberalism can be supported, and many of its internal tensions avoided, with an ethical framework of Aristotelian inspiration―one that understands human flourishing to be an objective, inclusive, individualized, agent-relative, social, and self-directed activity.

Readers who are looking for a more expansive synopsis should read Ed Younkins’s essay, ‘Rasmussen and Den Uyl’s Trilogy of Freedom and Flourishing’, published on The Savvy Street.

Some explanation of the authors’ use of the term ‘liberalism’ might be helpful at this point. As well as defending classical liberalism and libertarianism, the authors seek to defend other types of political liberalism (as the term is used in the United States) which still subscribe to some of the tenets of classical liberalism e.g. that people should be free to pursue their own conceptions of the good life.   

My purpose here is not to review the book but to explain why the book has made a lasting impression on me. First, I will explain why I thought the book made an important contribution when I first read it in 2007. Then, I will explain why I still think the book provides the most appropriate framework in which to consider the rights of individuals.

My initial impression

Rasmussen and Den Uyl advanced their argument for construing individual rights as metanormative principles in large part as a response to communitarian and conservative critics who claimed that liberalism had undermined its own principles.

I had read some communitarian literature prior to reading Norms of Liberty but I was more concerned about the threat to individual rights posed by people who wanted to make happiness a goal of national economic policy. The people concerned wanted to use survey data on average life satisfaction to monitor achievement of that goal. I was concerned that responses to life satisfaction surveys don’t give appropriate weight to everything that is important to people and that using such surveys to pursue a national happiness goal would interfere with individual choice. (I wrote an article about such matters in 2004. It can be found here.)

I read Norms of Liberty at a time when I was ready to move beyond utilitarianism. The welfare economics that I had been imbued with decades earlier seemed to imply that it would be good for governments to adopt aggregate welfare as an over-arching policy goal if only it was possible to measure individual utility in a manner suitable to be aggregated (or averaged) in some way. However, after some economists began to claim that life satisfaction surveys provided a way to do that, the potential conflict with individual liberty could not be ignored. It seemed wrong for liberty to be viewed as just an element in an individual’s utility function. But how could one avoid viewing liberty in that way if the sole goal of individuals is to maximize utility functions?

The answer that Norms of Liberty provided to me was that I needed to step aside from a framework in which all goals of individuals could be summarised neatly in terms of maximizing a nebulous concept referred to as “utility”. I needed to think more broadly in terms of individual flourishing as a multidimensional process. Liberty is integral to individual flourishing because individual flourishing is an inherently self-directed process.

I began blogging soon after reading Norms of Liberty. Some of my initial posts reflect the favourable impression the book had on me soon after I had read it. For example:  What does flourishing mean? , and Is Freedom and necessary condition for human flourishing?

 Later views

Over the years, I have discussed many different things on this blog.  Blogging has been a learning process. I cannot claim that the views I have expressed have always been philosophically coherent.  

Nevertheless, I claim a degree of consistency in advocating for a political/legal order which protects the possibility of individual self-direction, and ensures that the flourishing of any person or group is not given structural preference over any other. I also claim consistent optimism about the potential for the vast majority of individuals to flourish – with help from family and friends – if governments protect their natural rights and refrain from interfering with the manner of their flourishing. (I don’t deny that government assistance has helped some people to flourish but I observe that government assistance is often offered in a manner that encourages people to languish.)

Those ideas are also themes of my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing, as well as being reflected in many of the essays on this blog.

While re-reading Norms of Liberty a few days ago, I was struck by its relevance to recent political developments in many of the countries often referred to as western liberal democracies. When I first read the book, I had the impression that groups who sought to have their modes of flourishing given structural preference over others lacked the political power to implement their policies. At that time, the main threat to individual self-direction seemed to come from well-meaning paternalists who wanted to use the coercive powers of the state to make people happy.

More recently, it seems to me that some groups are increasingly seeking to use the coercive powers of the state to have their modes of flourishing given structural preference over others. I don’t see this tendency as being confined to any one religious or political group, although some are more prone than others to advocate restrictions on liberty.

One development that seems to me to be of particular concern is the increasing prevalence of the idea that freedom of speech should be restricted to protect people from being offended by what others may say about their ethnicity, religious views etc. If the legal system gives people greater incentives to take offence at what others say, it is reasonable to predict an increase in the extent to which people take offence, leading to demands for further restriction of freedom of speech. Threats of violence should be prohibited because they are incompatible with peaceful coexistence. Beyond that, however, restriction of freedom of speech is a slippery slope that is likely to increase, rather than lessen, conflict between different community groups.

Conclusion

My purpose in writing this essay has been to explain why Norms of Liberty, by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, has made a lasting impression on me.

At the time I first read Norms of Liberty, in 2007, I was particularly concerned about threats to liberty posed by the proposals of some utilitarians who want to make happiness a goal of national economic policy and to use survey measures of average life satisfaction to monitor achievement of that goal. I was concerned that average life satisfaction doesn’t adequately account for liberty. That provided the context in which I was ready to step aside from the idea that all the goals of individuals could be summarized in terms of utility maximization. It made more sense to think of individual flourishing as a multidimensional process which is largely self-directed and to think of liberty as the metanormative principle that protects the possibility of individual self-direction.

I still think the best defence of liberty is to view it as the means of protecting the possibility of individual self-direction, and ensuring that the flourishing of any person or group is not given structural preference over any other. While re-reading Norms of Liberty it struck me that since the book was written, groups seeking to have their modes of flourishing given structural preference over others have come to pose an increasing threat to liberty in the western liberal democracies. Peaceful coexistence among different groups is likely to break down if norms of liberty are not adequately defended.

Can discourse ethics help us to assess ideas about justice?

This essay focuses mainly on the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas.

Habermas, who will be 95 years old tomorrow, developed a theory of communicative rationality based on the argument that all speech has an inherent goal of mutual understanding and that humans possess the communicative competence to bring about such understanding.

Habermas is a public intellectual, but I haven’t followed his contributions to discussion of topical issues closely enough to judge whether they exemplify the discourse ethics that he advocates. My main reason for interest in Habermas’s discourse ethics is the apparent influence he has had on other philosophers, including Hilary Putnam and Amartya Sen.

In this essay I briefly outline the principles of Habermas’s discourse ethics, the ideological background and motive for his focus on communication, and similarities and differences between his communication ethics and those of Michael Polanyi and Ayn Rand, before briefly discussing whether his discourse ethics offers a normative basis to assess ideas about justice.

Principles

Habermas’s two principles of discourse ethics relate to the philosophical justification of a moral standpoint. The first concerns consensus (or possible consensus):

Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse.

The second is a generalizability rule, or principle of universalization:

All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities).  

(For references, please see the entry on Habermas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

Ideological background and motive

The context in which Habermas developed his ideas about communication has been explained by Chris Sciabarra in Marx, Hayek, and Utopia. Sciabarra explains Habermas’s project as an outgrowth of the Frankfurt school, which “attempted to recapture the dialectical method of Marx, while maintaining a Marxist faith in the human triumph over unintended consequences” (Chapter 7)

Friedrich Hayek argued that any attempt by an individual or group of individuals to produce social change would inevitably have unintended consequences. Hayek argued that achievement of Karl Marx’s historical projection of a communist utopia would require a different kind of species capable of total knowledge of the consequences of their actions, rather than humans who are only capable of partial knowledge.

Sciabarra presents Habermas’s ideas about communication as a reconstruction of Marx’s project to focus on empirical conditions under which people could engage in practical, transformative social action. Habermas’s ideal society is one based on non-exploitative social relations. He views all social systems as networks of communicative actions, and argues that the institutions of power depend on and perpetuate a distorted form of social communication.

Habermas argues that if people could master ideal speech they would move towards the goals of truth, freedom and justice. One of the important characteristics of ideal speech is that the speaker must want to express his intentions truthfully so that the hearer can believe in (or trust) the utterance of the speaker. Participants learn to trust one another and share value orientations when speech is free from deception and other forms of communicative distortion. Habermas suggests that social consensus will emerge as people achieve communicative competence. (My intention is to convey the gist of Habermas’s argument without distorting it but my account has all the limitations of a summary of a summary.)

Comparison with Polanyi and Rand

Michael Polanyi was a polymath whose understanding of the importance of tacit knowledge was largely endorsed by Hayek. Sciabarra presents a quote from Polanyi which suggests that his position on communication differs little from that of Habermas. Both emphasised the importance of trust in communication and the potential for shared values to emerge from dialogue. However, Sciabarra also notes a crucial difference between them. While Habermas argued that the tacit component of dialogue could be fully articulated, Polanyi held that this was not possible.

Habermas argues that depth hermeneutics, a form of psychoanalysis, could make explicit the tacit causal connections that take place in an individual’s subconscious, overcoming blocks to consciousness, and enabling a reintegration to occur. One goal of this process is intersubjectivity – enabling participants in discussions to exchange roles with one another in expressing their needs and interests.

Sciabarra discusses the similarity and differences between Ayn Rand’s communication ethics and those of Habermas in Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. Rand recognized that honesty is an essential component of rational human relations and fully understood the exploitive nature of strategic forms of communication. Rand’s followers emphasize that self-deception is distortive of an individual’s efficacy and communicative competence.

Sciabarra suggests that an “emphasis on communicative truthfulness, self-awareness, and “de-repression” is as crucial to the Randian project as it is to Habermasian discourse theory”. (293) He suggests that “she sustained a belief in a conflict-free society of individuals united by their common love for the same values” (355). However, Rand’s values differed from those of Habermas: She “would have vehemently rejected Habermas’s emphasis on “intersubjectivity” and the social consensus of norms”. (291)

Relevance to ideas about justice

If we are seeking to reach agreement with others it seems obvious that we should seek to understand the basis for their points of view. For example, if a person is engaged in a discussion with his or her spouse about who should cook dinner, agreement is more likely if each party understands why the other might or might not want to cook on a particular day.

In the example I have just given, both parties have a strong incentive to reach agreement to enable a harmonious relationship to continue. It is also possible to think of contexts at a societal level where people have a strong incentive to reach agreement and are willing to set aside differences in current interests in making collective decisions. James Buchanan and Gordon Tulloch suggested that when individuals are considering constitutional rules that they expect to be in place for a long time, they may be able to set aside current interests because they are uncertain about what their interests will be in any of the long chain of collective choices made according to those rules. (The Calculus of Consent) I wonder if Habermas would approve if the participants in a constitutional convention agreed to rules protecting individual rights to property ownership.

This brings me to a fundamental problem with Habermas’s generalizability rule. Douglas Rasmussen pointed this out. (‘Political legitimacy and discourse ethics’, International Philosophical Quarterly, March 1992) According to Habermas, the “moral point of view” requires one to consider the satisfaction of one’s own needs and interests from an impersonal point of view – from a point of view which treats the fact that some needs and interests are uniquely yours as being of no consequence. Rasmussen points out that this so called “moral point of view” is not compatible with the moral reasoning of real people in real situations:

“One cannot even recognize his own life as his and his own reasoning as his very own if in order to play the moral game one must forgo all special attachments to ends that are uniquely one’s own.” (30)

Rasmussen concludes by noting that values associated with modernity, including recognition of the inherent worth of the individual human being, are inconsistent with Habermas’s “moral view”:

“Such a modern view, then, does not call for theoretical attempts to paper over the real and legitimate differences among the values and projects of individuals by attempting artificially to induce consensus through a generalizability of interests rule or by appealing to the so called “moral point of view”. Rather, it requires that one accept the moral propriety of pluralism and individualism, and from this starting point attempt the difficult task of constructing a theory of justice.” (34)

Conclusions

Jürgen Habermas has proposed that principles of discourse ethics can provide a normative basis to assess ideas about justice.

Habermas developed his principles of discourse ethics while reconstructing Marx’s project. He envisaged that the potential for “ideal speech” could enable a social consensus to emerge for movement towards the goals of truth, freedom, and justice.

Habermas’s discourse ethics is similar in some respects to the views of communication ethics advocated by Michael Polanyi and Ayn Rand. However, unlike Polanyi, Habermas argued that the tacit component of dialogue could be fully articulated. Unlike Rand, Habermas argued for intersubjectivity, which amounts to adoption of an impersonal point of view.

There is a fundamental problem in applying Habermas’s principles of discourse ethics to assess ideas about justice. Habermas’s generalizability rule seeks to artificially induce consensus by papering over legitimate differences among values held by individuals. 

Addendum

Readers may also be interested in Chris Sciabarra's discussion of possible libertarian applications of Habermas's view in a section on "Dialogical Models" in libertarian thought, in Chapter 9 of "Total Freedom". That section surveys various thinkers in Austrian and libertarian traditions. 

Did Hayek acknowledge the importance of individual self-direction in his vision of spontaneous order?

 

One of the reasons why Friedrich Hayek’s vision of spontaneous order is more attractive than collectivist alternatives is because it offers individuals greater opportunities for self-directed flourishing. However, the question arises of whether Hayek may have undermined the appeal of his vision by presenting a view of the limitations of human reason that leaves little room for individual self-direction.

In exploring this question, I sketch out the importance of self-direction to human flourishing, Hayek’s objections to constructivist rationalism, Hayek’s reverence for tradition and social evolution, Hayek’s attitude to free will, and the role of human agency in Hayek’s account of spontaneous order.

Importance of self-direction

 In helping make the case that “self-direction is the central necessary constituent or ingredient of human flourishing” Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen quote Aristotle and Henry Veatch, a leading neo-Aristotelian of the 20^th century. Veatch writes:

“Is it not evident that not only does a human being not attain his natural end by an automatic process of development and maturity after the manner of a plant or animal? In addition, no human being ever attains his natural end or perfection save by his own personal effort and exertion. No one other than the human individual – no agency of society, of family, of friends, or of whatever can make or determine or program an individual to be a good man, or program him to live the life that a human being ought to live. Instead, attaining one’s natural end as a human person is nothing if not a ‘do-it-yourself’ job.” (The Perfectionist Turn, 51-2)

The errors of constructivist rationalists

Chris Sciabarra makes an important point about Hayek’s anti-rationalistic beliefs:

“His enemy is not reason but the constructivists who have “historically again and again given birth to a revolt against reason”. (Total Freedom, 131)

Hayek observes that constructivist rationalists - enthusiasts for a deliberately planned society - tend to base their case on the synoptic delusion, “the fiction that all the relevant facts are known to some one mind, and that it is possible to construct from this knowledge of the particulars a desirable social order”. (LLL, v1, 14) Hayek argues that by over-estimating the powers of reason, constructivist rationalism has given birth to a revolt against the wisdom embodied in abstract rules, including rules of just conduct, which tell us what not to do. (LLL, V1, 31-34) The abstract rules protect individuals from arbitrary violence by others and enable them to try to build for themselves a protected domain with which nobody else is allowed to interfere and within which they can use their own knowledge for their own purposes. (LLL, V3, 163)

Hayek’s reverence for tradition and social evolution

In my view, Hayek sometimes went too far in downplaying the ability of humans to understand the significance of abstract rules. For example, in one instance he claimed that “submission to undesigned rules and conventions whose significance we largely do not understand, this reverence for the traditional, that the rationalistic mind finds so uncongenial, … is indispensable for the working of a free society”. (COL, 63) It seems to me that most people are capable of understanding the purposes served by rules of just conduct. It makes more sense to explain those purposes than to suggest that reverence for the traditional should be sufficient reason for compliance.

The emphasis which Hayek placed on group selection in the evolutionary process also downplays the potential role of reason. Hayek argues that rules of just conduct evolved because the groups which practiced them were more successful and displaced others. (LLL, V1, 18) James Buchanan pointed out that there is no reason to believe that group survival will always lead to a more beneficial state of affairs. Chris Sciabarra makes the same point, also noting that Hayek does not provide an objective standard by which to judge as desirable or undesirable the consequences of spontaneous orders. (Total Freedom, 131)

Buchanan suggests that Hayek’s skepticism about the ability of humans to rationally design social institutions, including constitutions, precludes any attempt at reform. In their excellent discussion of this point, Peter Boettke and Scott King suggest that the issue has been confused by conflating the question of the origin of institutions with questions relating to the development and improvement of institutions. They note that Hayek is open to attempts to improve spontaneous orders through small revisions in the overall rules. (I refer to the chapter entitled ‘Hayek and the Hayekians on the Political Order of a Free People’, in Hayek’s Tensions: Reexamining the Political Economy and Philosophy of F. A. Hayek, edited by Stefanie Haeffele, Solomon M. Stein, and Virgil Henry Storr.)

Hayek’s attitude to free will

Discussions of Hayek’s attitude to free will often begins with his venture into theoretical psychology in The Sensory Order, published in 1952. When I read the ‘Philosophical Consequences’ chapter of that book, about 30 years ago, I gained the impression that Hayek was an advocate of free will. Hayek certainly rejects the idea that it is possible to explain why people hold particular views, at particular moments, from knowledge of their material circumstances. Immediately afterwards, in discussing free will more explicitly, Hayek asserts:

“To us human decisions must always appear as the result of the whole human personality – that means the whole of the persons mind – which, as we have seen, we cannot reduce to something else.” (See page 250 of “The Essence of Hayek”, 1984 by W. Glenn Campbell (Foreword), Kurt R. Leube (Editor), Chiaki Nishiyama (Editor).

Hayek based his argument against microphysical reductionism on the belief that the human brain can never fully explain its own operations. Paul Lewis has suggested that if Hayek had relied more fully on the ideas of organismic biologists he would have been able to develop an emergentist argument against microphysical reductionism, thus providing a stronger basis for use of concepts such as goals and purposes. (See Lewis’s chapter entitled ‘Tensions and Ambiguities in Hayek’s Social Theory’ in Hayek’s Tensions, cited above. Those who are interested in reading a philosophical emergentist argument for free will can find one in the The Metaphysics of Emergence, by Richard Campbell. I reviewed the book here.)

In The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek offers a potted summary of the free will debate. He notes that the concept of universal determinism that dominated 19th century science seemed to eliminate the possibility of free will. He also notes that physicists have now abandoned universal determinism but doubts that this affects “the puzzle about the freedom of the will”. He then states:

“It appears that the assertion that the will is free has as little meaning as its denial and that the whole issue is a phantom problem, a dispute about words in which the contestants have not made clear what an affirmative or negative answer would imply.”

However, Hayek’s subsequent discussion of the conclusions generally drawn by determinists and voluntarists about their respective positions leaves little doubt about where he stands:

“The determinists usually argue that, because men’s actions are completely determined by natural causes, there can be no justification for holding them responsible or praising or blaming their actions. The voluntarists, on the other hand, contend that, because there exists in man some agent standing outside the chain of cause or effect, this agent is the bearer of responsibility and the legitimate object of praise and blame. Now there can be little doubt that, so far as these practical conclusions are concerned, the voluntarists are more nearly right, while the determinists are merely confused.” (COL, 72-73)

In discussing the difference between “inner freedom” and the absence of coercion, Hayek had already made clear his belief that it is possible for a person to be guided by “considered will”, “reason or lasting conviction, rather than by momentary impulse or circumstance”. He adds:

“If a person does not succeed in doing what, after sober reflection, he decides to do, if his intentions or strength desert him at the decisive moment and he fails to do what he somehow wishes to do, we may say that he is ‘unfree,’ the slave of his passions.” (COL, 15)

Later, Hayek asserts:

“The recognition that each person has his own scale of values which we ought to respect, even if we do not approve of it, is part of the conception of the value of the individual personality. (COL, 79)

The role of individual human agency

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote:

“Freedom to order our own conduct in the sphere where material circumstances force a choice upon us, and responsibility for the arrangement of our own life according to our own conscience, is the air in which alone moral sense grows and in which moral values are daily re-created in the free decision of the individual. Responsibility, not to a superior, but to one’s conscience, the awareness of a duty not exacted by compulsion, the necessity to decide which of the things one values are to be sacrificed to others, and to bear the consequences of one’s own decision, are the very essence of any morals which deserve the name.” (231-2)

That statement seems to me to be broadly consistent with the do-it-yourself job of being a good person, as described by Henry Veatch. However, some of the things that Hayek wrote later give a different impression. In The Constitution of Liberty, he advocated submission to rules and conventions, quoting David Hume’s assertion that “the rules of morality are not the conclusions of our reason”. (63) In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek writes:

“Man is as much a rule-following animal as a purpose-seeking one.”

Mario Rizzo has suggests (in a paper entitled, ‘F.A. Hayek and the Rationality of Individual Choice’) that Hayek’s mature views about rationality should be understood in terms of a general framework acknowledging that humans are both purposeful agents and rule-followers. In emphasizing the importance of rule-following behaviour, Hayek didn’t abandon individual rationality. Even at the purely individual level, leaving aside the need to coordinate plans with others, rule-following makes sense because we live in a world of uncertainty and because our minds have limited capacities to know and compute.

Hayek seems to have rarely considered individual agency apart from the spontaneous order. The following paragraph provides a good summary of his perspective:

“What makes men members of the same civilization and enables them to live and work together in peace is that in the pursuit of their individual ends the particular monetary impulses which impel their efforts towards concrete results are guided and restrained by the same abstract rules. If emotion and impulse tells them what they want, the conventional rules tell them how they will be able and be allowed to achieve it.”

Personal perspective

Did Friedrich Hayek undermine the appeal of his vision by presenting a view of the limitations of human reason that leaves little room for individual self-direction? In his efforts to counter constructivist rationalism, I think Hayek inadvertently understated the role of human reason in individual flourishing. However, if individuals have greater potential for self-directed flourishing than Hayek thought possible, that makes spontaneous order a more attractive option.

In assessing Hayek’s views on the role of self-direction in individual flourishing it is important to recognize that advising individuals how best they could flourish was incidental to his main purpose. One way to illustrate that is by reference to my book, Freedom, Progress, and Human Flourishing. I draw fairly extensively upon Hayek’s wisdom in the first part of that book in discussing topics such as the definition of liberty, rules of just conduct, transmission of ancient law to the modern world, and evolution of social norms.

I only mention Hayek’s contribution once in the chapter discussing the challenge of self-direction. His views are referred to in that context not to emphasize the difficulty of self-direction but to counter the view that we (humans) are prone systematically to make serious mistakes in the individualized pursuit of happiness. I draw attention to the fact that Hayek urged respect for social norms that embody the experience of generations in advocating a legal and social order consistent with pursuit of happiness by individuals. (150-1)

In retrospect, I could also possibly have drawn on Hayek to point out implications of the fact that reasoning is cognitively demanding. In pursuing our personal goals it often makes more to sense for us to choose rules (norms) to follow, based on our own previous experience and the experience of others, than to attempt to reason our way through life by treating every issue that arises as though nothing similar has ever previously been encountered in human history.