How did beliefs about individual rights travel from Cicero to Locke?

This rather long post follows on from one in which I asked how we got from natural law to natural rights. In case you are wondering, the “we” referred to are people who currently have relatively broad scope to exercise natural rights to liberty. 

I concluded the preceding post by suggesting that many of the ingredients of John Locke’s view of liberty and natural rights, enunciated in the 17^th century, were already present in Cicero’s account of natural law from the 1^st century BC.

This post is about the ways in which beliefs about individual rights were transmitted, or evolved, over time. When people think about the transmission or evolution of beliefs and shared values it is common to have in mind a process in which books and other media are maintained or rediscovered, and thinkers reject or build on the premises of the reasoning of those who came before.

However, transmission and evolution of beliefs about individual rights can also occur as people observe the spontaneous evolution of rules of just conduct and social norms. It is possible for such evolution to occur spontaneously as “the result of human action but not human design” (to use an expression coined by Adam Ferguson, but much loved by Friedrich Hayek). Evolution of the English common law is often cited as an example of that process.

How much can be explained in terms of the spontaneous evolution of rules?

Hayek began his discussion on the classical and medieval tradition of the evolution of law by noting that even in the height of democracy in ancient Athens it was not possible to alter the rules of just conduct by a simple decree of the assembly. A change could only be brought about through a complicated procedure involving a specially elected body (Law, Legislation and Liberty (LLL), V1, p82). He also notes that classical Roman civil law was almost entirely the product of law-finding by jurists rather than legislation. (See the preceding post for Cicero’s quoting of Cato in support of that view. Hayek included that quote in Constitution of Liberty, p57). The famous law code of the Emperor Justinian was largely a collection of past laws and extracts of the opinions of Roman jurists.

Hayek argues that in the early medieval period, for about 1,000 years, law was again regarded as something to be discovered, not made. He quotes Fritz Kern:

“There is in the Middle Ages, no such thing as the ‘first application of a legal rule’. Law is old; new law is a contradiction in terms; for either new law is derived explicitly or implicitly from the old, or it conflicts with the old, in which case it is not lawful” (LLL, V1 p 83).

Larry Siedentop describes how the Christian church created canon law in the 12^th century by sifting through Roman law to establish which rules were compatible with Christian beliefs. Canon law covered aspects of private and criminal law including usury as well as marriage, adultery and divorce. Siedentop comments:

“Little wonder that at times civil lawyers felt their domain was under threat” (Inventing the Individual, p 212).

Hayek notes that from the 13^th century onwards, law making on the European continent gradually came to be regarded as an act of the will of the ruler. He suggests that was associated with the rise of absolute monarchy. England managed to preserve the medieval ‘liberties’, because of “a deeply entrenched tradition of common law” under which jurists “had developed conceptions somewhat similar to those of the natural law tradition” (LLL, V1, p 84-5). Hayek mentions the contribution of Edward Coke in defending the common law tradition against King James I and Francis Bacon, that of Mathew Hale in opposition to Thomas Hobbes.

That account almost takes us to John Locke. In his discussion of natural rights, Locke does not seem to have acknowledged the relevance to his views of the common law of England. However, as noted by Stephen Shepherd, Locke left evidence that he had read Coke and that he was influenced by near contemporaries, who had learned the law from Coke and the common lawyers. Shepherd also points out that Locke’s account of property rights has parallels in the common law (‘The Common Law and the Constitution’, American Society of Legal History, November 2005).

Spontaneous evolution via legal processes can explain how many ideas about natural rights evolved and persisted, but has limited capacity to explain recognition of natural rights of people who haven’t had standing in the courts. Judges can only discover individual rights in respect of cases that are brought before them. For example, the famous case (Somerset v Stewart) in which Lord Mansfield found slavery to be unsupported by the common law of England was decided in 1772 (many years after Locke died). The case was heard because Somerset's three godparents, from his baptism as a Christian in England, made application to the court on his behalf. Lord Mansfield narrowly limited his judgment to the issue of whether a person, regardless of being a slave, could be removed from England against their will, and said they could not.

A more fundamental limitation of spontaneous evolution of natural rights arose because in medieval times the common law was constrained by the influence of church authorities. For example, English common lawyers conceded jurisdiction to the church courts in relation to usury, defined then as "whatsoever is taken for a loan beyond the principal". The common law courts did not protect the rights of individuals to engage in mutually beneficial arrangements to borrow and lend money.

In order to understand the evolution of rules in relation to matters such as usury it is necessary to consider the evolution of reasoning about natural law.

How was Locke influenced by the evolution of reasoning about natural law?

Locke attributes the view that all are created equal “with no-one being subjected to or subordinate to anyone else” to Richard Hooker (1554-1600), an influential theologian in the Church of England:

“The judicious Richard· Hooker regards this natural equality of men as so obvious and unquestionable that he bases on it men’s obligation to love one another, on which he builds their duties towards each other, from which, in turn, he derives the great maxims of justice and charity”.

Such views are, of course, central to Christianity. By mentioning Richard Hooker, however, Locke was indicating that he wanted to link his views to the symbolism of natural law which, as Linda Raeder has observed, was “a well-developed tradition of Western moral and political discourse”:

“The symbol was first advanced by the ancient Greeks, impressively elaborated by the Roman Stoics (most notably the Roman orator Cicero [106-43 B.C.]), and later incorporated into the Christian tradition as the “unwritten” law embedded in the heart of man and similar constructs. During the Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the “Angelic Doctor,” provided Christian civilization with a philosophical elaboration of the natural law that remains a characteristic element of Roman Catholic teaching to the present day” (The Nature and Purpose of Government, A Lockean View, 2017, p25).

As Larry Siedentop has pointed out, some leaders of the early Christian church recognised freedom of religion. Tertullian (c 155 – c 240) argued that “it is a basic human right that everyone should be free to worship according to his own convictions” (Inventing the Individual, 2015, p 78). Unfortunately, many of the church leaders who followed did not recognise such basic human rights.

Augustine (354 – 430) acknowledged the ethical significance of free will, and tried to strike a balance between fatalism and the belief that individuals could achieve salvation by their own efforts. He emphasised that it is important for individual Christians to develop a moral perspective, or conscience, and argued that it was the task of the church to try to create and tend consciences. Augustine’s emphasis on the importance of conscience set the scene for theologians who came much later to recognise freedom of conscience.

In the 9^th century, Eriugena, an Irishman, known by his contemporaries as John the
Scot, produced a vigorous defence of free will against those who claimed the authority of Augustine for their view that “predestination applies both to good and bad” (Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History, 2006, pp 110 – 112).

Research by Brian Tierney (discussed in Larry Siedentop’s book, pp 245-9) found the idea of natural rights to be present in 12^th century canon law. Important contributions, including those of Rufinus, Odo of Dover and Hugguccio, led to a range of individual rights – overlapping those recognised by jurists in ancient Rome - being defended in terms of natural justice.

   

Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) gave some recognition to freedom of conscience. He acknowledged that under some circumstances a person is justified in acting in accordance with an erring conscience, even if this entails disobeying the state. Nevertheless, he defended persecution of religious heretics.

Aquinas made an important contribution to liberty in recognising that laws exist primarily to enforce the rules of justice, rather than to make human beings virtuous (George H Smith, The System of Liberty, 2013 p 91).

Arguably, Aquinas’ most important contribution to liberty came indirectly via his Christianisation of the teachings of Aristotle. Aquinas argued that individuals can attain some happiness in this world through their natural capacity for contemplation of (religious) truth. Darrin McMahon suggests:

“Aquinas’s opening up of a space in which ‘some partial happiness can be achieved in this life’ continued a process of restoring agency to the individual that had received impetus from the work of Eriugena and others during the Carolingian Renaissance” (op. cit. pp 129 – 131).

In the 13^th century, John Duns Scotus argued that “an act is neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy unless it proceeds from the free will” and, in the 14 the century, William of Ockham associated reason with individual experience and choice, and saw ‘right reason’ as obligated by principles of equality and reciprocity. (I wrote about Duns Scotus and Ockham in my review of Siedentop’s book.)

In the 16^th century, the late Spanish scholastics made important contributions to recognition of natural rights. Murray Rothbard highlighted the role of Francisco de Vitoria (c 1450 – 1514) who denounced the conquest and enslavement of the Indians of the New World (Economic Thought Before AdamSmith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, V1, p 102). Rothbard also notes that some of those who followed Vitoria in the Salamanca school, made important contributions in defining circumstances in which the charging interest on loans was acceptable. Juan de Mariana (1536 – 1624) was the forebear of John Locke’s theory of popular consent. He held that in transferring their original political power from a state of nature to a king, the people reserved important rights, including rights concerning taxation, vetoing laws and reclaiming political power (Rothbard, op cit, pp 117-119).

 

A recent book by Ángel Fernández Álvarez points out the striking similarities between Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689) and Mariana’s On the King and the Royal Institution (1599). Fernández points to evidence that Locke had read Mariana’s books and that he and Mariana had the same position on the origin of property in work as well as the similar views on natural rights mentioned above.

What about Spinoza?

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Jewish-Dutch philosopher whose views were influential, but difficult for his contemporaries to cite. In the 17^th century, being accused of being a Spinozist was apparently as hazardous for an author’s claim to have views worthy of consideration as being accused to be an atheist. Spinoza held that there is only a single substance, which may be called either God or Nature, raising the issue of whether he was a pantheist, an atheist, or a "God-intoxicated man".(Anthony Kenny, A New History of Western Philosophy, p 550, 552).

The similarity between many of the views of John Locke and Spinoza has been noted by Wim Klever (Locke’s Disguised Spinozism). Spinoza argued:

“Inward worship of God and piety in itself are within the sphere of everyone's private rights, and cannot be alienated.”

Spinoza held that such “opinions fall within a man's natural right, which he cannot abdicate even with his own consent” (George H Smith, The System of Liberty, 2013, p91).

Conclusion

Beliefs and values supporting natural rights of individuals to life, property and liberty seem to have travelled from Cicero to Locke through both the spontaneous evolution of rules and evolution of reasoning about the natural law. Those different transmission processes interacted. There were periods when reasoning about natural law held back recognition of individual rights to participate in mutually beneficial activities e.g. lending and borrowing. Eventually, however, reasoning about natural law reinforced and extended individual rights recognised under common law.

How did we get from natural law to natural rights?

It seems to be becoming fashionable these days for people in the western world to downplay the importance of liberty. Some people even express a Utopian vision of a society in which we would sacrifice liberty to enable wise scientists to govern our lives, making sure we don’t harm the environment, that everything we do is in the interests of social justice, that no-one says or does anything that might offend anyone else, and of course, that we all feel happy. When you try to remind these visionaries that scientific socialism ended in tyranny, they say it will be different next time. When such people take over, guess what happens.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Lord Acton wrote that in 1887, well before Lenin, Stalin and Mao, came on the scene as young idealists, intent on creating utopias. They were ruthless in attaining power, and became evil tyrants to retain it.

Anyone who doubts the value of liberty should ask themselves what it would be like to live in a country that doesn’t allow the basic freedoms that they take for granted. What would it be like to live in a country where you don’t have freedom of religion, where you can be put in jail for expressing views not approved of by political leaders, where you could be subject to arbitrary arrest, where your property can be seized by the government, or where your freedom to  move around is restricted? Such countries are still easy to find.

The purpose of that introductory rant was just to suggest that the liberty we have is worth keeping. If you want to keep it, you should be interested in how we got it.

You don’t need to know much history to be aware that recognition of the right to life, liberty and property has had strong links to the concept of natural rights. You might also be aware that John Locke 1632 -1704) is widely viewed as an important figure in promoting the concept of natural rights.

John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government was “outstanding in its lasting effects”. The quoted phrase, by Friedrich Hayek, is in the Constitution of Liberty (p 170). Rights to life, liberty and property are often referred to as Lockean rights. The attribution is appropriate even though the definition of such rights has changed somewhat since Locke wrote his Second Treatise. Locke’s exposition of natural rights has had lasting effects on political philosophy and discussion of constitutional issues.

Locke’s view of natural rights stems from his perception of the state of nature, prior to government:

“In this state men are perfectly free to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and themselves, in any way they like, without asking anyone’s permission—subject only to limits set by the law of nature”.

He goes on to explain that natural law entails obligations to respect the life, liberty and possessions of others:

“The state of nature is governed by a law that creates obligations for everyone. And reason, which is that law, teaches anyone who takes the trouble to consult it, that because we are all equal and independent, no-one ought to harm anyone else in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”

A couple of chapters later, in explaining property rights, Locke asserts that individuals own themselves:

“every individual man has a property in his own person; this is something that nobody else has any right to. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are strictly his. So when he takes something from the state that nature has provided and left it in, he mixes his labour with it, thus joining to it something that is his own; and in that way he makes it his property”.

John Locke obviously made an important contribution in explaining that natural law implies natural rights. However, I don’t think a few quotes from Locke provides an adequate answer to my question of how we got from natural law to natural rights. As discussed in a recent post, the history of liberty began in the ancient world.

Where can we find an example from the ancient world of a statement of natural law that provides some recognition of a right to liberty? Aristotle might come to mind as a possibility, but as indicated in another recent post, I have some misgivings about his account of natural law.

Cicero provided a more coherent account of natural law, in my view. He saw natural law as a moral force integral to human nature, whilst also recognizing the laws of the republic as the product of an evolutionary process protecting the rights of citizens.

 Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer and philosopher who lived from 106 BC- 43 BC. He has been described as eclectic in his philosophy (e.g. by Anthony Kenny in A NewHistory of Western Philosophy, 2010). For my purposes, Cicero’s eclecticism is helpful. His views provide a coherent synthesis of some of important contributions of those who came before, including Aristotle and the Stoics.

The following quotes from Cicero’s Treatise on the Laws illustrate his view of natural law as an inner moral force:

“For of all the questions on which our philosophers argue, there is none which it is more important thoroughly to understand than this, that man is born for justice, and that law and equity are not a mere establishment of opinion, but an institution of nature”.

“But in nothing is the uniformity of human nature more conspicuous than in its respect for virtue. What nation is there, in which kindness, benignity, gratitude, and mindfulness of benefits are not recommended? What nation in which arrogance, malice, cruelty, and unthankfulness, are not reprobated and detested!”

“It follows, then, in the line of our argument, that nature made us just that we might participate our goods with each other, and supply each others’ wants”.

“As far as we are concerned, we have no other rule capable of distinguishing between a good or a bad law, than our natural conscience and reason. These, however, enable us to separate justice from injustice, and to discriminate between the honest and the scandalous”.

The laws of ancient Rome gave citizens immunity from arbitrary arrest and recognized their rights to make legal contracts, to own property, to choose an occupation, and to move freely, as well as the right to vote and stand for public office. In the introduction to The Republic Cicero recognised that the laws of the republic were the product of an evolutionary process. He approvingly quoted Cato, the elder, as claiming “that the condition of Rome was pre-eminent above all other countries” because: 

“the constitution of our republic was not the work of one, but of many; and had not been established in the life of one man, but during several generations and ages. For [Cato] said so powerful a mind had never existed; from which nothing had escaped; nor that all minds collected into one, could foresee so much at one time, as to comprehend all things without the aid of practice and time”.

It seems to me that many of the ingredients of John Locke’s perception of natural rights were already present in Cicero’s account of natural law. That leads me to my next question:

How did we get from Cicero to Locke?

How could the great philosopher of human flourishing endorse slavery?

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was the great philosopher of human flourishing. He argued that although health, wealth, honour, pleasure etc. may be sought for themselves, we choose them also for the sake of living well. Living well involves making use of the vital functions that make us human. Many of the vital functions of humans, including nutrition, reproduction and movement, are the same as those of other animals. However, humans also have the capacity to use reason to guide themselves and exercise appropriate moderation in their behaviour. Parents and fellow citizens may help us to acquire good habits, but we are individually responsible for exercising the practical wisdom that we require to flourish.

It would be reasonable to expect that a person who held such views would be opposed to slavery on the grounds that slaves can only use reason to guide their actions within the limits imposed by their owners. So, how could Aristotle endorse slavery?

Julia Annas explains in The Morality of Happiness that Aristotle saw slavery to be natural. His appeal to nature has two aspects. The first is his claim that slavery has a natural basis in differences between types of people. According to Aristotle, there are “natural slaves” whose “state is such that their function is the use of their body, and this is the best they can do”. On that basis he argues that “it is better for them to be ruled”. He also suggests that the benefits owners obtain from use of slaves “differs only a little” from those obtained from use of domesticated animals. Aristotle saw the relationship of subordination between owner and slave as an example of a general pattern, also encompassing the relations between men and women (p 152).

The second aspect of Aristotle’s appeal to nature was based on his observation that slavery was widespread and should therefore be considered natural.  (p 153).

Julia Annas suggests that Aristotle’s defence of slavery fails even in terms of his own view of what is natural. Aristotle distinguishes between natural behaviour, governed by internal sources of change, and forced behaviour, brought about by external factors that overrule the internal sources of change. Even if we were to accept Aristotle’s claim that some people are natural slaves, that cannot explain the functioning of actual slavery which is based on the use of force.  Again, Aristotle’s observation that slavery was a “near universal social institution” did not justify his inference that it is natural in the sense of not resting on force. Annas comments:

“The usual may be natural with plants and animals, but the complexity of human nature allows the usual to be something that is forcibly repressed, unjust and in every way frustrating to normal human capacities” (p 155).

How could Aristotle not see this? Perhaps he perceived that some people are natural slaves because he couldn’t imagine the slaves he knew as free citizens. Many of us have a somewhat similar problem today is assessing the potential of individuals to accept more responsibility than they have at present. There seems to be a common cognitive bias that leads us to identify people with their current roles. We don’t know what people are capable of until we see them in a different role.

Aristotle’s perception that it was natural to make slaves of defeated enemies can possibly be explained as the biased perception of a slave owner, but his loose definition of circumstances in which external force is involved left him scope to take a biased view. He was able to disregard the use of force at the heart of the system of conquest and slavery by identifying the whole system as a natural system.

Similarly, Aristotle’s loose definition of circumstances in which external force is involved enabled him to condemn the profit motive and the market economy. In this instance he identified the natural system as the primitive system of directly producing what meets one’s needs, and only using exchange as much as required to satisfy unmet needs and get rid of unusable surplus. That enabled him to identify the market economy as an external force that disrupted a natural system.

Aristotle’s view of what is natural would have been less prone to bias if it had been based on the natural rights of individuals, and hence the naturalness of mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation and exchange among individuals. That would have made it much more difficult for him to condone any use of force (coercion) that constrains individual flourishing.

However, we shouldn’t judge Aristotle too harshly for his wobbly views about what is natural. It is worth remembering, that a more coherent view of natural law didn’t prevent eminent philosophers who lived much later from also endorsing slavery. For example, Thomas Aquinas, who lived over 1500 years after Aristotle, also endorsed slavery despite holding the view that the first precept of the natural law is to do good and avoid evil.

A question worth exploring further is the extent to which Aristotle’s views on the potential for individual human flourishing played a role in the eventual recognition of the natural rights of individuals, via Aquinas’ endorsement of those views in his natural law theory of morality.

Was individual liberty discussed as a political ideal in the ancient world?

“There seems to be scarcely any discussion of individual liberty as a conscious political ideal (as opposed to its actual existence) in the ancient world.”

Isiah Berlin wrote that in his essay, Two concepts of liberty, first published in 1958. Berlin was a distinguished, Russian born, British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas. His view should not be lightly dismissed, but he does seem to have understated the extent of discussion of individual liberty as a conscious political ideal in ancient Athens and Attica.

Why should we care whether people in the ancient world discussed individual liberty as a conscious political ideal, or just took it for granted? I think we should care because the reasons why norms of liberty emerged and disappeared in parts of the ancient world may have contemporary relevance. An understanding of the role played by conscious endorsement or opposition in sustaining or eroding norms of liberty in the ancient world might help us to understand the presence, absence, strength or fragility of those norms in various parts of the world today.

In one of his online articles about Ancient Greece’s Legacy for Liberty, Roderick Long draws attention to the views of Hesiod, along with Homer one of the twin founders of Greek epic poetry. Hesiod’s poems appear to date from the 8^th or 7^th century BCE. In his poem, Works and Days, Hesiod advocates respect for the rights of others. He advises his brother Perses, to “put away all notions of violence” for “fish, and wild animals, and the flying birds” may “feed on each other, since there is no idea of justice among them,” but “to men [Zeus] gave justice,” which is the “best thing they have.”  Hesiod condemns both force and fraud: the grabbing of goods either by “force of hands” or by “cleverness of … tongue.”

Hesiod contrasts war and market competition as “two Strifes” with different natures: 

“There is one Strife who builds up evil war, and slaughter.

She is harsh; no man loves her ….

But the other one was born the elder daughter of black Night. …

she is far kinder.

She pushes the shiftless man to work, for all his laziness.

A man looks at his neighbor, who is rich:  then he too

wants work ….  Such Strife is a good friend to mortals.

Then potter is potter’s enemy, and craftsman is craftsman’s

rival; tramp is jealous of tramp, and singer of singer”.

In The Other Greeks, Victor Hanson notes that Hesiod presented an ideology of reward for honest toil in agriculture. Secure property rights gave the owners of small farms incentives to work hard. Successful farmers were able to expand their holdings. Hesiod’s views about the virtue of hard work were presumably shared by the owners of many small farms at the beginning of the polis period of ancient Greece.

Hanson argues that the owners of small farms had a strong impact on the development of democracy in ancient Athens. He notes that by the early 6^th century BCE Athens had free markets and “was struggling toward the formal political recognition of a true class of yeomanry, who owned their own plots and sought political representation equal to their economic success".

Most of these farmers were apparently hoplites (citizen soldiers) who made up nearly half the citizen population of the early poleis after having been incorporated by the Solon, a famous lawmaker, into the Athenian political system around 600 BCE. Hanson comments:

“An enormous social transformation had obviously taken place in Greece, nothing less than the creation of an entire class, which through sheer preponderance of numbers overwhelmed the aristocratic culture of Dark-Age Greece."

The Athenian democracy gave citizens considerable individual liberty as well as the right to participate in politics. According to Thucydides, the leading Athenian politician Pericles (c. 495-429 BCE) declared:

“The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes”.

Writing later, Plato and Aristotle agreed with that assessment, but were critical of the individual liberty they saw exercised in Athens. Roderick Long suggests that Plato makes Athenian democracy sound like the panarchist ideal: there is “no compulsion to rule in this city, even if you are qualified to rule, or to be ruled if you do not want to be; or to be at war when the others are at war, or to keep the peace when the others are keeping the peace,” so that democracy constitutes not so much a single political system as a “supermarket of constitutions” where each person can “pick out whatever pleases him”. Aristotle suggested that according to the democratic conception, “freedom and equality consists in every one’s doing what they please,” so that “every one may live as he likes.”

Plato and Aristotle seem to have exaggerated the extent of liberty in Athens in order to argue against democracy.  In assessing the extent of liberty in ancient Athens it should also be remembered that many of residents were non-citizens or slaves.

An eminent  ancient historian also discussed freedom of speech as a political ideal. Herodotus (c. 484-425 BCE) puts into the mouth of Artabanos, advisor to Xerxes, a defense of the distinctively Athenian ideal of freedom of speech:

“O king, if opinions opposed to one another be not spoken, it is not possible to select the better in making the choice, but one must accept that which has been spoken”.

Did imposition of the death penalty on Socrates (399 BCE) for exercising freedom of speech conflict with that ideal? Chris Berg suggests that Socrates’ use of irony and rhetorical skill to induce people into questioning their beliefs would have been seen to be contrary to the purpose of Athenian speech freedoms. Socrates might have appeared to be deceitful because he was not forthright in expressing personal views. That interpretation of events is consistent with Plato’s account of the defence Socrates offered at his trial. Rather than defending his right to freedom of speech, Socrates asserts that he is honest and undeceitful.

Although the norms of liberty that existed in ancient Athens seem to have evolved without much conscious effort, they were not taken for granted. There was considerable discussion of the extent to which individual liberty was desirable, and the weight of intellectual opinion seems to have generally been more sceptical of the merits of liberty than it is today.

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.  

Do Australian building regulations promote safety, accessibility and livability of new dwellings?

A few months ago, I would have been astounded if someone told me that a building certifier in Australia could legally issue an occupation certificate with front path pedestrian access as shown in the photo above. In order to use the path, it was necessary for pedestrians to step over a concrete obstacle (14 cm on the driveway side and 23 cm on the house side). There was no way anyone could plausibly claim that the concrete obstacle was necessary for drainage, because water ran away from it toward the centre of the driveway.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that before buying a townhouse off the plan I had been lulled into a false sense of security by claims of building regulators that the Building Code of Australia (BCA) sets minimum standards for safety, health and amenity of buildings. I was not aware of the existence of the National Construction Code (NCC) at that time, but it wouldn’t have surprised me that it purports to provide “the minimum necessary requirements for safety and health; amenity and accessibility, and sustainability in design, construction, performance and livability of new buildings”.

I should have known better! I knew from the experience of many years working for governments that bureaucrats are no less prone to making extravagant claims than are people working in other occupations.

You might be thinking that even though it would be most unfortunate if someone was injured by tripping on the concrete obstacle, the existence of an occupation certificate, certifying that building regulation had been complied with, would protect the Owners Corporation against a compensation claim. That might be too sanguine a view. Legal information available from a reputable online source suggests that owners might not be fully covered by insurance if they could reasonably be expected to be aware of the issue and had not taken steps to address it.

The bigger issue of regulatory capture

In drawing attention to this pedestrian access issue, I am conscious that it is trivial by comparison with the building safety issues currently in the news associated with high-rise apartments in Sydney (Opal Tower and Mascot Towers). Michael Lambert, a former secretary of NSW Treasury, who reviewed building regulation for the New South Wales government and presented his report in 2015, has been quoted as saying that the issues associated with the Opal Tower “are likely just the tip of the iceberg”.

The Lambert report found “the incidence of building defects is significant” and “the incidence appears higher in NSW than elsewhere”. Lambert was not able to be more specific about incidence because “comprehensive information is not regularly collected on building defects”. He recommended that performance data be collected to enable the performance of the system to be assessed against clear objectives. In particular, he proposed a program of proactive investigations and audits of certifiers, linked to an education and training program for them. Lambert also recommended action to reduce the conflict between the accountability of certifiers for acting in the public interest and their commercial drivers for commercial success, including maintaining good relations with builders and owners/developers.

Michael Lambert has expressed disappointment that the recommendations of his report have not been more fully acted upon by the NSW government. It is not clear to what extent timely implementation of Lambert’s recommendations would have improved the quality of high-rise building in NSW, but the government’s failure to act more decisively on his proposals for incremental improvement seems to indicate that regulatory capture has become entrenched in this industry.

The theory of regulatory capture, advanced by the Nobel Prize winning economist, George Stigler, among others, refers to the tendency for regulatory systems created to act in the public interest, to instead advance the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate regulated industries. As it currently operates, the system of private certification seems to provide more protection to developers, builders, architects, engineers, and local government agencies that provide planning approval, than to home buyers.

Does more regulation provide the answer?

The knee jerk reaction of many people to quality control problems in the building industry is to urge that regulation be extended further and enforced more rigorously. However, even if determined political leaders can manage to steer some regulatory reform through the process of industry consultation, we need to face the reality that it would be prohibitively expensive for building regulation to be made much more than a ‘box ticking exercise’. Regulators can certify that certain things have been done, but that doesn’t ensure effective quality control. For example, regulators can certify that concrete has been poured to construct foundations, but it takes the resources of a building firm to control the quality of the concrete that is poured.

The main commercial incentives for firms to maintain effective quality control are to enhance their reputation in the market and to avoid litigation. Reform-minded political leaders should be seeking to identify how those market and legal incentives are impaired, and what corrective action could be taken.

Some readers might still be thinking that additional box ticking regulation would be an appropriate response to the specific question of safe residential access. I am wary of that approach because it could end up adding excessively to building costs and make homes less affordable.

Consider, for example, the guideline for dwelling access proposed by Livable Housing Australia:

“A safe continuous and step free path of travel from the street entrance and / or parking area to a dwelling entrance that is level.”

Complying with that condition would not have added much to the construction cost of our new townhouse, but in many instances a step free path would impose excessive costs. In a paper written over a decade ago, Alan Moran, pointed to evidence from government housing authorities - which commission a considerable part of the housing that is specifically geared towards the needs of people with disabilities - that the costs of the building are increased by at least 4% and up to 20% where houses are built fully compliant with the relevant Australian Standard.

The issue of liability

There are two overlapping aspects relating to the issue of liability for safe pedestrian access to residences. The first aspect is liability for compensation in the event of personal injury. My understanding is that the law sensibly provides liability on all parties involved to exercise reasonable care. I don’t know whether courts have held that developers and builders maintain some liability after residences have been sold. It would be a travesty, in my view, if they are able to hide behind an occupation certificate, when that does not certify that minimal safety standards have been met for pedestrian access.

The second issue of liability relates to the question of who should be liable for ensuring that reasonable expectations of home buyers are met in relation to safe pedestrian access. In thinking about this I have gone back to a paper written many years ago by Ted Sieper, an astute Australian economist who has been under-recognized because he eschewed academic norms to publish or perish. (Ted’s paper was entitled: Consumer protection – boon or bane?  It was presented to a C.I.S. conference held at Macquarie University in April 1978.) Ted argued that in considering the choice between the alternatives, caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – and caveat venditor – let the seller beware – law makers should compare the relative transactions costs that would be imposed on buyers and sellers. He noted: 

“while consumers with different safety requirements can discriminate cheaply among different products, producers can only with great difficulty discriminate among consumers”. 

(I am grateful to Greg Cutbush for suggesting that I look for Ted’s paper.)

I think Ted’s transactions cost point is highly relevant to the issue of safe pedestrian access. It seems reasonable to expect that that developers and builders would generally show some care to avoid compensation claims for personal injury. However, it is up to individual home buyers to shop around to obtain the standard of access safety they require.

With the benefit of hindsight, we should have insisted that an appropriate standard for safe residential access was written into the contract of sale before we agreed to buy. If the developer had been reluctant to agree to that provision, that would have set alarm bells ringing in our minds.

Regulators should stop making misleading claims!

There is irony in the fact that regulation to protect consumers aims to discourage misleading claims by vendors, but apparently does nothing to discourage building regulators from making misleading claims about the products they are selling.

Regulatory authorities should be required to renounce misleading claims they have made that the BCA and NCC provide minimum necessary standards for safety.  

If building regulators want to be helpful to home buyers, they should advise them to consult their lawyers to ensure that contracts for sale require developers to meet appropriate standards for safety and amenity.   

Why did my grandmother have a problem with nostalgia about "the good old days"?

“Don’t you talk to me about the good old days!”

I can remember hearing my grandmother say that in the 1950s, when I was a child. She was responding to a visitor who was talking nostalgically about the horse and buggy era.

My grandmother would have none of that talk. She was a mild-mannered, softly spoken person, but she wanted people to acknowledge that the “old days” were not so good.

I remembered what my grandmother had said recently while thinking of how best to illustrate how economic progress had improved the lives of people in Australia during the 1950s. Rather than adopting my usual approach of reciting statistics, it occurred to me that my grandmother’s story might make the point more effectively.

Ethel Vernon was born in 1900. She had happy childhood memories, but her life changed radically when she was 17 years old. That was when she married Archie Bates, who was quite a few years older than her. By the time Ethel was 30, she and Archie had 7 children.

At the time, 7 children would not have been considered a particularly large family. The average for Australian women who were born in 1900 was about 3 children. About one-quarter of women born at that time had no children, presumably because the First World War reduced the number of potential marriage partners. That meant the norm was about 4 children per family.

Archie worked as a station hand and overseer on Woodlands, a sizeable sheep property at that time, located on the Wimmera river, near Crowlands in Victoria. I think the economic circumstances of the family would have been somewhere near the average for Australians in that period.

From the photo shown above, taken in 1925, it looks as though family members were reasonably well fed and had at least one set of respectable clothes. The photo shows Ethel and Archie at the centre, with their four eldest children and some friends and neighbours. 

During the 1920s, the standard of living of the Bates family, like that of most other Australians in rural areas, had more in common with that of most rural people in a middle-income country, like Brazil, than with the way most people live in rural Australia today.

For example:

•    There was no running water in the house. When you needed water, you went outside and turned on the tap on the small rainwater tank.
•      When you needed hot water, you had to heat it on the top of the stove, or light the copper.
•      There was no refrigerator. Food could be preserved for a day or so using a Coolgardie safe that worked on the evaporation principle.
•      When you wanted to use the toilet, you had to go outside and up the garden path to a dunny built over a hole in the ground.
•       There was no washing machine. All clothes were washed by hand.
•       There was no electric light – just kerosene lights and candles.
•      When you wanted to go somewhere you had to walk, unless you were lucky enough to own a horse.

What my grandmother remembered when people talked to her about the “old days” was the drudgery of long days of housework, looking after a young family without the benefit of modern conveniences. I think she was probably also irked by being wholly dependent on the money her husband gave her.

My grandmother’s standard of living didn’t improve much until the 1950s. The depression and Second World War restricted economic opportunities for people living in rural Australia, as in many other parts of the world.

During the 1950s my grandmother’s circumstances improved markedly. She gained some economic independence by obtaining the franchise for the Crowlands post office and telephone exchange, but the improvement in her standard of living seemed typical for the times.

I saw all this happen because I was living with her:

•     She was able to afford a new kitchen and bathroom with running water installed. She had a much larger water tank constructed.
•     She bought a slow combustion wood stove that provided continuous hot water.
•      She bought a fridge that ran on kerosene.
•     Running water enabled a flush toilet to be installed using a septic tank system.
•     A few years later she bought an electricity generator and set of batteries. That enabled her to use a washing machine as well as to have electric lights.
•     In the early 1950s grandmother bought a Holden ute.  After that, use of the horse and sulky became a recreational activity rather than the primary mode of transport.

My grandmother was extremely grateful for the conveniences of modern life. She saw them as a blessing, even though she was not materialistic. She believed that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” and her heart was in cultivation of the goodness in herself and others.

In later life, my grandmother’s main recreational activity was voluntary work for a charitable organisation. That would not have been possible without the time-saving devices in her own home.

It isn’t difficult to understand why my grandmother objected to people talking nostalgically about the horse and buggy era. Economic progress brought about a remarkable transformation in the quality of her life.

Does Israel Folau deserve support from advocates of free speech?

If your employer sacks you for breaching your employment conditions by publishing material on social media, I don’t think you can claim that your right to free speech has been violated. By accepting an offer of employment, you agree to abide by the conditions of that employment. The employer has not used force to prevent you from publishing the material concerned. You remain free to continue to publish such material after having been sacked.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) acted legally or wisely in sacking Israel Folau. I will leave the legal question to the lawyers. My focus here is on the wisdom of sports clubs and other organisations taking stands on social issues and insisting that employees align with their values.

Israel Folau was sacked for a post on Instagram asserting that hell awaits drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolaters, unless they repent. The ARU insists that such comments preclude Folau from remaining an employee of the ARU because they do not align with the ARU’s values.

I think it was most unwise for the ARU to assert values in conflict with the opinions any employee might express on theological matters, such as the existence of hell and who may go there. The values pursued by sporting organisations should be related to furthering the interests of their sport and the collective interests of its supporters. It would be reasonable for the ARU to insist that players refrain from being offensive to other team members, but any team member who claimed to be offended by theological assertions made on social media should be told to grow a thicker skin.

It seems to me that Rugby Australia was also unwise to support the ‘Yes’ case in the national plebiscite on same sex marriage in 2017. Despite the merits of the ‘Yes” case, sporting organisations should have avoided taking public positions on this issue. It is obviously imprudent for organisations that seek the support of the general public to risk causing offence to significant groups of supporters by becoming involved in divisive social issues.

Qantas is another organisation that came out strongly in favour of the ‘Yes’ case, even though its involvement in the issue risked offending significant groups of customers, shareholders and employees. I wonder whether the CEO and Board considered the possibility that supporters of the ‘No’ case might arrange a boycott.

In a post on his blog a few weeks ago, Jim Belshaw speculated whether an employee of Qantas who supported the ‘No’ case might be reluctant to speak out publicly:

“I thought what would I do if I worked for Qantas and wanted to campaign for no? Would they fire me or would I just be marked never to be employed again?”

Jim speculated that a person in that situation might consider that the best way to save their job (or contract) would have been to shut up.

Jim’s comments prompted me to re-read John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty that “the moral coercion of public opinion” should be of as much concern to advocates of liberty as “physical force in the form of legal penalties”. I remain unconvinced that the concept of ‘moral coercion’ is meaningful. Public opinion doesn’t force anyone to do anything, or to refrain from doing anything.

Yet, I feel that Mill was on the right track in urging advocates of free speech to oppose attempts by cultural warriors to use employment conditions as a weapon to keep people silent. Mill seems to have been particularly concerned that under the influence of religious bigots, public opinion favoured use of employment conditions to prevent people from expressing socially progressive views. However, the argument he used also applies to attempts by the advocates of socially progressive causes to influence public opinion in favour of the use employment conditions to silence social conservatives:  

 “In respect of all persons but those whose pecuniary circumstances make them independent of the good will of other people, opinion is as efficacious as law; men might just as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread”.

In my view, Mill exaggerated the impact of public opinion and the consequences of job loss, but he makes a valid point. Advocates of free speech should be concerned about the use of employment conditions to constrain freedom of expression on matters that have little to do with the missions of employing organisations.

It seems to me that advocates of free speech should be encouraging community organisations and corporations to refrain from taking positions on cultural and religious issues that have little to do with their missions. We should continue to acknowledge that employers have the right to sack people who breach their employment conditions. However, we should support voluntary collective action to discourage organisations from imposing employment conditions that unreasonably restrict freedom of expression of employees.

Postcript:

Jim Belshaw has a follow-up post in which he refers to an article by Peter Singer suggesting that the ARU scored an "own goal" by firing Israel Folau. Singer cites Mill in support of free speech: "as John Stuart Mill argued in his classic On Liberty – once we allow, as a ground for restricting someone’s freedom of speech or action, the claim that someone else has been offended by it, freedom is in grave danger of disappearing entirely".
It is great to have common cause with Peter Singer on the importance of free speech, even though I disagree with his radical utilitarianism.

Can subjectivism and objectivism be reconciled?

Readers who don’t recognise the faces depicted in my amateurish artwork might be thinking that the question is absurd because opposites can never be reconciled. That is a feature of the real world. However, subjectivism and objectivism are labels that have been attached to different schools of thought. We need to look at what lies behind the labels to assess whether the schools of thought can be reconciled.

I have previously struggled with related issues when considering whether human well-being is subjective or objective. I will return to that question later in this post.

Edward Younkins has little difficulty in reconciling subjectivism and objectivism in his excellent book, Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society, 2011. The book is subtitled, Towards a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. The subtitle accurately summarises what the book is about. This is a scholarly work that should be read by anyone who has reasons to be interested in whether such a synthesis is possible. Readers of this blog will have observed that the approach to freedom and flourishing adopted here is eclectic, but strongly influenced by Neo-Aristotelian classical liberal philosophy and Hayekian economics. Ed’s reconciliation of objectivism and subjectivism goes part of the way in helping me to think about the coherence of my own views.

Reconciling Mises and Rand

The Austrian economist to whom Ed devotes most attention is Ludwig von Mises. Mises observed that all human action involves choices that are made subjectively by individuals having regard to their internal purposes, ends or goals. Valuation reflects the acting person’s internal scale of preferences. Mises held that economists should study the implications of individual human actions without regard to their motives or causes, which are the objects of study for psychologists.

Ayn Rand argued that the minds of the individual humans are competent to achieve objectively valid knowledge of the real world. The senses, aided by reason in accordance with the rules of logic, enable us to obtain objectively valid knowledge of reality. When a correct cognitive process has been followed, it can be said that the output of that process is objective. It is up to individuals to discover what will further their own lives and what will harm them. Values reflect facts as evaluated by persons with respect to the goal of living. The objectivity of value derives from the fact that some actions tend to promote human life and others detract from it.

Ed Younkins points out that the claim of Miserian economists that values are subjective is compatible with Rand’s claim that values are objective because “they exist at different levels or spheres of analysis”:

“The value-freedom (or value-neutrality) and value subjectivity of the Austrians have a different function or purpose than does Objectivism’s emphasis of objective values. On the one hand, the Austrian emphasis is on the value-neutrality of the economist as a scientific observer of a person acting to attain his ‘subjective’ (i.e. personally-estimated) values. On the other hand, the philosophy of Objectivism is concerned with values for an acting individual moral agent himself”.

Ed provides a more complete explanation in his book, but the quoted passage is a good summary.

Did Hayek claim that morals are not rationally justifiable?

Ed’s reconciliation of Objectivism and the subjectivism of Austrian economists doesn’t get me off the hook entirely regarding the compatibility of Hayekian and neo-Aristotelian philosophies. A decade ago, after re-reading Rand’s warnings (via John Galt in Atlas Shrugged) about becoming “an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know for reasons he is not to question”, I re-considered my support for Hayek’s view that there is merit in observing long-standing norms of behaviour that serve purposes beyond our understanding.  My conclusion was that both views deserve consideration. Hayek was correct to emphasise that societal norms may deserve respect even if we don’t fully understand their purpose, because they evolved through an evolutionary process in which groups that adhered to superior rules were most successful. Rand was correct to emphasise that the purpose served by rules protecting lives, liberty and property are usually capable of being understood.

There are some passages in Hayek’s final book, The Fatal Conceit, that are incompatible with neo-Aristotelian philosophy (and my own views) but it seems likely that those passages were written by W.W Bartley, the book’s editor, rather than by Hayek, whose health was deteriorating at the time. For example: “Moreover, while it is true that traditional morals, etc. are not rationally justifiable, this is also true of any possible moral code …”. Bruce Caldwell suggests that the assertion that our morals are not rationally justifiable is “a position that clearly derives from Bartley” (Hayek’s Challenge, p 317). Here are another sentence for which I hope Hayek was not responsible:

“There is no reason to suppose that the selection by evolution of such habitual practices as enabled men to nourish larger numbers had much if anything to do with the production of happiness, let alone that it was guided by the striving after it” (The Fatal Conceit, p 69).

I think that statement is false. Without downplaying the importance of survival as a motive, a realist would acknowledge that until recently human reproduction has been largely an outcome of the actions of humans striving for happiness via the habitual practice of sexual gratification. Moralists have long argued that people can’t find happiness by seeking pleasure, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped many from striving to do just that. Furthermore, the literature of the distant past, as well as more recent times, suggests that those who were most successful in passing on their genes would generally have been living in societies providing relatively good opportunities for individual human flourishing, and they would generally have been flourishing individuals enjoying good health and relative prosperity. It also seems likely that persons with happy dispositions have generally been more likely to form lasting bonds and to care for their offspring.

The objective nature of human flourishing and happiness

Ed Younkins clearly views human flourishing as an objective state of life:

“Flourishing is a successful state of life, and happiness is a positive state of consciousness that flows from, or accompanies, a flourishing life. The legitimate function of every human person is to live capably, excellently and happily. This involves an ethic of aspiration toward one’s objective well-being that is actively attained and maintained”.

Ed introduces the concept of metalevel happiness to distinguish “enduring and justified contentment with one’s life as a whole” from transitory feelings. His description of metalevel happiness seems to have firm roots in antiquity:

“Metalevel happiness requires a proper perspective that comes from the serenity or peace of mind that one gets from knowing that: (1) one is free to rationally choose among alternatives; (2) a person’s potential for happiness is oriented in some particular way and with some particular nature which is not a matter of choice; and (3) nothing external can harm the core of one’s self. Serenity requires wisdom, a sense of proportion, and the ability to deal with pain and emotions in a balanced and rational manner. Happiness means being serene in the face of the unchangeable, courageous before the changeable, and wise enough to determine which is which”.

It seems appropriate to end this post here, leaving you to ponder how best to follow Edward Younkins’ good advice about cultivating the serenity required to be objective about subjective feelings.