The Great Awakening-In God We Trust
Principle for a Free Socierty THE VIRTUE OF LIBERTY
The Virtue of Liberty
Tibor R. Machan
Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, Alabama
Reproduced by kind permission of The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533
About the Author:
Smuggled out of Hungary in 1953, Tibor Machan came to the United States in 1956. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College, a master's degree from New York University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Professor Machan has taught at numerous colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, including Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, UC Santa Barbara, and the U.S. Military Academy. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. He has written and edited several books, among them The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism (Random House, 1987), Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) and Capitalism and Individualism (St. Martin's Press, 1990).
He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been a regular columnist for the Orange County Register since 1967. Professor Machan is a contributing editor of The Freeman.
The father of three children, Machan currently resides in Auburn, Alabama.
Published February 1994
ISBN 0-910614-93-8
Copyright © 1994 by
The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533
For Mike and Sharon
Acknowledgments
I thank the editors of the Public Affairs Quarterly, and Man, Economy, and Liberty, Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard for permission to make use in this work of some of the material that has previously appeared in their publications.
Preface
This book grew out of my Institute for Humane Studies Lectures which I have been giving since the summer of 1990 throughout Europe- Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, as well as in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
My main objective in these lectures has always been to explain in plain terms- addressed often to undergraduate and graduate students from around the world for whom English is a novel and not fully developed language- the ideas underlying classical liberalism. Since there are several versions of this political viewpoint, the lectures explain these various versions. But I also defend, as the best of the classical liberal outlook, the natural rights perspective associated primarily with John Locke and the thinking underlying the political institutions of the United States of America.
A word about the title. "Virtue" is used in it to mean "that which makes for excellence." Not, however, moral excellence, since liberty, both in its metaphysical and political senses, is a capacity and precondition of human life, respectively, not an action guiding principle by which human beings ought to guide their day to day conduct--except in the sense that they ought to acknolwedge its role in their lives and the quality of their political communities. This work, then, examines the merits of (the right to) political/economic liberty and some of the problems surrounding the effort to understand those merits.
I have reworked the lectures considerably, and have added discussions that may help in dealing with certain prominent contemporary social and political issues and controversies. In this effort I wish to thank Douglas Rasmussen and Mark Turiano for the many hours they spent with me brainstorming these ideas and considering the numerous objections to them I wanted to anticipate. I also wish to thank the Department of English at the United States Military Academy- especially Colonels Peter Stromberg, Anthony Hartle, Paul Christopher, and Captain Ted Westhusing- with the members of which I had the opportunity, as visiting professor of philosophy during 1992-93, to air many of these views in a regular faculty seminar during the Spring 1993 term. Comments and objections by members of the department have helped me, I believe, to clarify some of the issues covered.
Tibor R. Machan
West Point, New York
May 1993
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
I Why Do We Have Rights?
II Liberty and Virtue
III The Right to Private Property
IV Morality, Liberty, and the Market Economy
V Environmentalism Humanized
VI Does the Coercive State Have Moral Standing?
VII Individualism, Naughty and Nice
Endnotes
Index
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
As the number of those who are concerned to protect, revitalize, and preserve individual liberty has grown, so have the arguments in support of this effort. From Alcibiades and Lykophron to Locke, Mill, and Spencer and, finally, to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and others in our time, the arguments concluding with support for individual liberty have become numerous and varied.
Although this may appear to be good- "variety is the spice of life" and such- there are certain problems with such pluralism. True enough, the same conclusion can be supported by different premises. Thus the proposition, for example, that "all cases of theft are wrong" may be justified by reference to the effects of the theft upon the thief, the victim, the stability of the community, or God's opinion of the agent, some premises are better than others in that they are more likely to be true. It is generally a virtue of a theory that it has fewer problems with its premises than do other theories. And if a theory requires too many speculative premises or even false ones, its vulnerability is obvious.
In other words, while many arguments are interesting and sometimes helpful for research purposes, it would probably be best to have one good argument. For those whose defense of individual liberty is serious, and who respect other people's capacity to appreciate rational inquiry into human affairs, finding the best case for the classical liberal political order should be a concern. This does not have anything to do with the right to advance different arguments- of course, anyone ought to be free to do that. But for the purpose of securing a good case for a position, it may be useful to have one strong argument rather than many. (The same conclusion, of course, may be supported, from different premises, but not from contradictory premises, and too often the free society has been advocated on grounds that are not mutually consistent.)
Following the survey of major liberal or libertarian ideas in recorded Western thought, it will be possible to begin the discussion of classical liberalism in a more philosophical vein. Throughout this book I plan to call on some of the ideas discussed in this introduction, so we should start with them.
Let me begin with the earliest of hints in the record of Western philosophy that liberty has been construed as a value. Let us begin way back in ancient Greece.
Xenophon. In Xenophon's Memorabilia (i, 2, 40-46) we find the young Alcibiades in a debate with Pericles; here Xenophon records a lengthy argument in which Alcibiades pushes Pericles into a corner. The idea is that if law serves to protect against force, then law must not initiate force; thus any law that does so, is invalid. As Alcibiades puts it, "Isn't it lawlessness if a tyrant does not use persuasion, but instead enacts measures and forces the citizens to carry them out?" And he adds, "Would we, or would we not, call it force when a few in power enact measures for the people without using persuasion....isn't it force rather than law if the majority, prevailing over those who have money, make proposals and do not use persuasion?" This argument is of the reductio ad absurdum kind and is surely effective as a destroyer of some ideas of law. Its problem is that it provides no foundation for a better conception. At most it paves the way for constructive work.
Lykophron. The argument advanced by the sophist Lykophron, whose case is simply recited by Aristotle in the Politics, amounts to a mere assertion as to the purpose of law, namely that it is properly "a guarantee (or guarantor) of mutual rights." It seems, by the context of Aristotle's discussion, that Lykophron was advancing the idea of a limited government, assuming, of course, that the rights to be guaranteed were individual negative rights. But if we keep in mind that only negative rights can be possessed "mutually," that is, by all people at once, without conflict, then this assumption is reasonable and we find here a case of early libertarian political theorizing.
Hippodamus of Miletus. Hippodamus, however, seems to have had more to say, again, without any record of argument. He believed "that there were only three kinds of laws concerning which lawsuits should take place: laws against hubris (violent personal assault), blabe (damage, as to property), and thanatos (homicide)." I am here repeating the description offered by Fred D. Miller, Jr., in his highly informative paper "The State and the Community in Aristotle's Politics" (Reason Papers, No. 1). Miller discovers the evidence for this early libertarian school of thought in Aristotle's Politics (b37-39). Clearly Hippodamus is offering a very restricted scope for government action, one that Aristotle seems to find too limited.
Christian Theology. Biblical theology alludes to the importance of the human individual and to the individual's requirement of freedom so as to aspire to the salvation of his or her everlasting soul. In terms of some prominent Christian doctrines, one must choose to follow God's will, lest one earn no credit for behaving properly.
The Middle Ages. Beginning in about the twelfth century we find a serious concern for natural rights, liberty, and property rights, in such writers as Jean Gerson, William of Ockham and others (see Brian Tierney's account in "Origins of Natural Rights Language," History of Political Thought, Vol. 10 [Winter 1989]). Ockham said that property rights are "the power of right reason." This may well mean that in order for one to be able to successfully exercise moral judgment, one must also enjoy basic rights, a sphere of moral jurisdiction. Generalized, this view is clearly libertarian- à la Nozick's doctrine of "moral space." Earlier writers, while they lacked a coherent and developed natural rights theory, nevertheless made extensive use of the language of natural rights, usually to indicate spheres of personal or subjective jurisdiction wherein it is morally neutral what the person might do. (See also Brian Tierney, "Villey, Ockham and the Origin of Individual Rights," T. Witte and F. S. Alexander, The Weightier Matters of the Law, A Tribute to Harold J. Berman, as well as other works by the same author investigating the origin of natural rights language, disputing, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre's thesis that such language was invented around the sixteenth century.)
Hobbes. A radical individualism was developed by Thomas Hobbes who, though an absolute monarchist in his explicit politics, laid some of the foundations for the homo economicus approach to human social life. Hobbes saw us all as striving to seek our own self-satisfaction and thought that this would require the protection of those laws that made
self-satisfactory conduct possible. The only reason he favored a strong monarchy is that he never learned about public-choice theory and thought a strong state would best assure peace. Hobbes' psychological egoism became the cornerstone of the doctrine captured in Bernard Mandeville's dictum, "private vice, public benefit," whereby the pursuit of private or selfish objectives could result in the public benefit of widespread prosperity. This is certainly still one of the most prominent arguments for liberalism and the free market, especially with reference to the troubles of Eastern European societies. It is still the crux of the liberalism advanced by neo-classical economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.
Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza didn't quite defend a doctrine of individual rights but did argue that a good government will provide us with as much liberty as possible- especially the freedom to express our views.
Locke. The first modern philosopher with a full-blown libertarian political theory was John Locke. He held that each person is by birth a sovereign (when he or she reaches adulthood), with no natural rulers or natural subjects. Government is established to protect individual rights and the consent of the governed is required to legitimize government and limit its powers. Locke is also the first major thinker to give a prominent place to the right to private property as an extension of individual rights and liberty. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke built his libertarian theory on numerous other concepts, or at least claimed to have borrowed from them. Let us see what argument we find here. Essentially Locke accepted as an alleged law of nature that each person owns himself, ergo his labor and whatever this labor touches of as yet untouched nature. There are some supporting elements to Locke's case that make it broader: for instance his belief that because nature inclines man toward seeking happiness, it is a law of nature to do so; and his assertion that political institutions should protect and preserve what the law of nature implies for human community life. The natural rights of Locke are, then, the proper conditions of human social life, the "libertarian constraints," as Nozick calls them.
Two brief points about this view. The idea that I own myself does not amount to a very clear position, since it implies that where we find an instance of numerical identity- i.e., I and myself are the same entity though designated differently for purposes of different grammatical contexts- we find also a two-term relation- i.e., between me, the owner, and me, that which is owned. While some rhetorical force may be attributed to saying that I own myself, the point doesn't make sense from a logical perspective. (It is different when I say that I know myself, since my mind, which knows, can stand in the relationship of knower to the rest of me, as well as to myself prior to when it knows.) As to the alternative case Locke offers, resting on some kind of ethical hedonism, this view is a mixture of plausible and implausible ideas. Locke seems to mean by his phrase "inclines toward happiness" a psychological fact about us, and he seems to mean by "happiness" something much closer to "pleasure" than to "self-esteem." If I am right, as the scholarship on Locke seems to bear out, then we have a false or incomplete basis for natural rights here. In the one instance Locke is wrong- lots of us aren't inclined toward pleasure; and if we are to take it that
we should pursue pleasure, Locke says nothing about why this is so. So while Locke says many informative, even brilliant, things about the central libertarian political principles, his support for them is weak, as was noted by Nozick even as he decided to accept Lockean rights in his entitlement theory.
Smith. Adam Smith was the first scientific economist, although he himself saw his own work in moral philosophy, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as even more important than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, his path breaking book in political economy. Smith defended the view that there is plenty and stable enough concern on everyone's part with advancing their own earthly well being that by securing for them all their natural liberty, the greatest chance would be established for establishing public prosperity. Smith did not stress individual rights, although something very much akin to a system of individual rights would underlie his system of free enterprise. Neither was Smith, as many charge, a crass egoist, quite the contrary- his moral psychology suggested that sympathy arises because of our natural feeling for others's well being. Furthermore, in his political economic work Smith did not defend individualism on grounds that everyone is entitled to strive for his or her own good but because such striving would best secure public wealth. Smith is among those most often targeted as a liberal ideologists, e.g., by Karl Marx, instead of taken to be defending a political-economic framework he thought would be genuinely sound for human community life.
Mill. John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that government may only interfere with individual liberty if its exercise harms someone other than the agent doing the acting. Mill, by no means fully libertarian, maintained this view on the grounds that in freedom the truth would win out, creativity would flourish, and, therefore mankind's progress would be assured. But there is no good reason to count on truth always winning out in a free debate, since people can turn off their minds at will. Creativity may indeed flourish, but why is this a good thing? Mill's answer, that such creativity will secure mankind's progress, is only of argumentative force if it can be shown that (a) it is true, and (b) mankind's progress is what we should seek via our political systems. But it is not even unlikely that some sort of creativity can destroy mankind. Nor is it clear that mankind itself, since it is not a concrete thing but a generalization or general term to designate a group, benefits from anything; only individuals can do so. Indeed, Mill's theory of value is largely responsible for the birth of the welfare state, since he advocated that political policy should be geared to securing the greatest (hedonistic) happiness of the greatest number of people, something that later was thought to be achievable not by leaving people be (laissez-faire) but by economic planning. At any rate, Mill's case for liberty rested on the importance of the collective, so it is not even libertarian in spirit. I am, of course, speaking of the essentials, not denying that Mill's words give eloquent expression to some of the ideals of the freedom philosophy.
Spencer. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, started as an individualist, but his case was fully deterministic, based on Lamarckian evolutionary theory. He believed that evolution, which governs all of existence, led toward differentiation- just the opposite of what B. F. Skinner and Marx believed. And for human beings this means that the highest stage of community life would have to be laissez-faire capitalism. In his ethics he argued for rational utilitarianism or a version of rational egoism, but in the end this ethics was no ethics at all. For an ethics to be bona fide- i.e., a genuine ethical theory- it must be true of it as a minimum that what is said to be right by it people could
choose to do or not to do. But in any determinist theory this is precluded, so determinism, including evolutionary theory that proposes mechanistic development and motion in human affairs, is incompatible with ethics or politics. Thus Spencer is unable to argue that we should respect one another's liberty. (Still, Spencer's discussion of ethics, once we omit the problems with its foundation, is brilliant.)
Mises. We come now to Ludwig von Mises' freedom philosophy, most comprehensively presented in his book Human Action. I should note that Mises was not a fully consistent libertarian. For example, he believed in conscription and some other statist measures, at least for certain emergency circumstances. Essentially he defended the free market on grounds that the achievement of one's goals is far more likely when people are left free than when they are not. Central planning renders the market defective in the function of enabling its participants to organize their lives in line with what they want to do. The price mechanism is destroyed and information becomes distorted. Mises shows in his book Socialism that central planning leads to an irrational economic order, contrary to all those alleged rational planners. But Mises never defends the view that people ought to be free to do what they want. He believed that value judgments are subjective, so he could not argue for the value of liberty. He did seem to believe that since no one else could defend a denial of the value of liberty, liberty, as a condition for choosing between alternatives that can have subjective value, should prevail. As all subjectivist or relativist arguments in support of something, this one is self-refuting. Indeed, we can see today how many people right and left denounce the classical liberal stance of value-subjectivity and propose some of the most detestable notions of what is right and good, simply because classical liberalism left a vacuum for all sorts of mystics and statists to fill.
Hayek. F. A. Hayek's approach- which also supports less than a fully libertarian polity, since Hayek accepts some kind of welfare safety net- is a bit more complicated. Hayek advances his view most successfully in The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, 1961), as well as many later works. Although he learned a lot from Mises, Hayek's views have changed, too. It is not safe to treat Mises and Hayek as interchangeable. Essentially, however, Hayek argues for liberty on grounds that central planning leads to suppression of creativity, growth, development, and progress. Problem- solving proceeds best when the rules of conduct are minimal and spontaneously generated. One can know only the most general principles of conduct, e.g., the rule of law; but the more particular these are, the more difficult it is to identify the proper solution to problems ahead of time. In his semi-Kantian fashion Hayek wishes to accept only general categories as reliable, leaving all other knowledge for free people to develop in free association with each other. Hayek is not a purist libertarian and has said that some regulation, some welfare, some statism in general cannot be ruled out a priori. On the whole, however, he is the libertarian version of the conservatives' Edmund Burke. As such he does not admit of natural laws or natural rights, nor of any objective moral standards. He is enamored with the evolutionary and mechanistic conceptions of science to the extent that he refuses to defend human free will. And he has said that his defense of liberal political institutions does not rest on, and is incompatible with, an ethical point of view. Here, too, we find the same faults present in Spencer's case for liberty, although as in all the thinkers discussed, there are numerous points in Hayek's political and economic theory that serve to lend strong support to various libertarian analyses of political and social affairs.
Nozick. Robert Nozick's case for the freedom philosophy- advanced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), but abandoned in one of his later books- is based on a so-called transcendental argument: what principles should we adopt so that our political affairs will make the best sense? Nozick proposes that by accepting Lockean natural rights as the limits to action, we will develop a state of nature from which rational and rights-respecting conduct will, by an invisible hand, generate the limited government form of libertarian political order. He takes Rothbard's anarchism as a serious challenge and holds that it can be overcome by noting that people are afraid of arbitrariness, so they will establish a monopolistic defense agency. Once this limited state exists, nothing can justify enlarging it, except perhaps some instances of repairing past injustices. Nozick's argument rests on certain methodological assumptions, among them that people will act to overcome their fears, to abate them by instituting certain procedures, such as government. But Nozick fails to show that they are right in doing this, that it would not be better for them to refuse to yield to their fears and remain outside civil society. Rothbard and his students have been attacking Nozick on this point, as have a number of those who share his views but would ask for greater scope of government power. Nozick's failure to develop a moral theory on which his Lockean natural rights might have rested- e.g., rational egoism- has led to the spectacle of a wholesale intellectual dismissal- left and right- of the first libertarian book to have achieved some modicum of recognition across the intellectual spectrum. Ordinarily the dismissal of the arguments of a libertarian could be consigned to prejudice, but here Nozick simply deprives himself of a good defense.
Friedman. Milton Friedman, a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist, did not provide an extensive philosophical case for liberty in the book where he plays out his general political position, namely, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962). As a concerned citizen and pundit he frequently touches on philosophical issues as he points to the neglect of liberty across the world. When he does so he tends to invoke the argument from skepticism and ethical subjectivism. This is not uncharacteristic of defenses of individual liberty advanced by classical and neo-classical economists. The argument alleges that no one knows what is right and wrong, either generally or in the case of some particular person, institution, policy, and so forth. Therefore nobody should force anyone to comply with one's own baseless beliefs about right and wrong. Friedman believes that if we did know right and wrong, and we learned that we could stop someone doing wrong, we would have an obligation to stop him. Friedman appears to have a view of virtue as producing some good, as driving toward some intrinsic good thing, e.g., the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That would explain why he believes that knowing that A does something wrong entitles B to stop him. For that to be true, it would have to be true also that B is obligated to advance the chances of the realization of some intrinsically good thing. If the doctrine of moral goodness assumed here is mistaken, then it does not follow that knowing that A does something wrong requires B to stop A. A's doing something wrong that does not interfere with B's doing what he chooses cannot have relevance to B in the way that would justify interference (defense), not if A's doing wrong is wrong for A, i.e., is a violation of principle that A should abide by, which means that A should choose to abide by. B cannot improve A's character, or A himself, by forcing A to do what A should have chosen to do. But this point is difficult to make without entering into a lengthy discussion of the difference
between various theories of virtue and goodness. For someone who believes that all viable ethical theories rest on intrinsicist theories of the good, it would have to be either that we should all act as paternal leaders of the fallen, or that we cannot know what is good or how to achieve it. Yet if so, then there seems to be no reason to advocate liberty either, since such advocacy assumes that it is good to refrain from doing what one has no basis for doing, or that it is good to refrain to act from ignorance. But why is this good? Friedman can have no answer to this without undermining his own defense of liberty.
Spooner, Stirner, and LeFevre. Some other defenses of liberty might be mentioned here very briefly. Lysander Spooner, whose ideas so many libertarians embrace, thought that natural law tells us our moral responsibilities and the extent of our liberty, but he never demonstrates this. He assumes a Lockean analysis of personal autonomy, and objects to contracts made in our name on that ground, but the point strikes home only within the context of the American political tradition, something we are not entitled to assume in this discussion. Other anarchists have been used to give backing to libertarian ideas. For example, Max Stirner is sometimes cited, because he advocated a subjectivist egoism in terms of which each person is a unique, unclassifiable entity whose business is to inject himself into the universe as powerfully as possible. Stirner thinks that talk of natural rights is spooky, and this is because he construes the nature or the essence of a human being as something mystical, ideal or otherwise mythical. But this view begs the question, nor does it make sense to deny human nature while still talking about what each person, each individual, everyone, or every ego should do. Who is being addressed? The paradox is obvious. There is also Robert LeFevre's case for liberty in terms of which any retaliatory use of force, as in punishment or defensive injury, is a case of aggression. LeFevre also denied that any such concept as "justice" makes sense and his views imply that only the present can be taken care of, only by oneself, with no possible planning on criminal procedure or authorization of agents to act in one's behalf. Since this view is without foundation, and since LeFevre admitted to being a subjectivist about moral principles, his view must be regarded as a personal testimonial.
Rand. Ayn Rand's case for liberty- presented in her novels and such non-fiction works as The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1961) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1964)- derives from her rational egoism. Since each person should live by striving for happiness or success as a human being, and since this requires that persons initiate their own conduct in line with their own judgments, in a social situation it is wrong to prevent anyone from exercising those choices and decisions that do not prevent others from exercising theirs. Natural rights are the conditions proper to living a human life among others, and adjudicating disputes that arise among people in terms of the recognition of these rights will lead to justice. The right to life means that each person should act by one's own judgment, that none should govern without personal authorization, implicit or explicit, from those subject to government. Since one is not a disembodied soul but a rational animal with requirements to be satisfied in regard to both central aspects of one's life, the freedom
of each person in society must imply the freedom to judge and to act. Since to act requires space, things with which to sustain oneself, etc., the right to liberty implies the right to acquire what nature places before human beings. The natural right to property means the natural right to take those actions that will lead one to use and dispose of things in moral security from others (that is, with moral justification). Granted that not all acts of acquisition are right, still all acts of acquisition that do not violate others' rights are politically permissible- i.e., they do not authorize anyone to prevent them. In Rand an entire philosophy underlies the ethics and politics, although Rand herself has only outlined her objectivism and today a number of people are taking up the task of elaborating and modifying it. Essentially in Ayn Rand we have the robust philosophical treatment of politics we find in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, something not available from many libertarian sources today. There is an explicit ethics that provides standards for private conduct and moral evaluation, and there is a political system in which the liberty of each person to give guidance to his own life is established as rightful, even if on moral grounds alone such individuals might have to be condemned. Thus Rand detested pornography, could not stand homosexuality, and had no kind words to say about current art, yet formulated a most powerful, principled defense of liberty in terms of which such practices can withstand anyone's alleged authority to ban them.
In my view Rand's position is largely sound. I lament only her bad manners, occasional thoughtless rush to judgment where her knowledge did not qualify her, and her unwillingness to give credit for ideas she learned. Her refusal to enter philosophical debate amidst her complaint that no one paid her the respect she deserved was also disappointing. Successful philosophizing is not achieved primarily in novels, nor in self-published magazines. Unless one makes oneself available to the inquiring community, one will not be discussed and one's long-term influence will be correspondingly minimal. Philosophical disputation is not always pleasant, nor do all those involved in the discussion deserve to be taken seriously. But to abstain completely is to allow those with catchy ideas to carry the day, even if their catchiness is not the function of their soundness and truth but the cleverness and perseverance with which they have been promulgated.
In these few paragraphs I have tried to outline several roads to the freedom philosophy. I have not defended a number of my comments, and much more could be said about these various positions. It may simply be useful to become aware of the schools of thought that have given what one values in life some measure of support. One can orient oneself about how best to make one's own values live longer, acquire greater strength, and maybe win some major battles, even wars, in the course of one's lifetime.
Tibor R. Machan
Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, Alabama
Reproduced by kind permission of The Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533
About the Author:
Smuggled out of Hungary in 1953, Tibor Machan came to the United States in 1956. After serving in the U.S. Air Force, he went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Claremont McKenna College, a master's degree from New York University, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Professor Machan has taught at numerous colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, including Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, UC Santa Barbara, and the U.S. Military Academy. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. He has written and edited several books, among them The Main Debate: Communism versus Capitalism (Random House, 1987), Individuals and Their Rights (Open Court, 1989) and Capitalism and Individualism (St. Martin's Press, 1990).
He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has been a regular columnist for the Orange County Register since 1967. Professor Machan is a contributing editor of The Freeman.
The father of three children, Machan currently resides in Auburn, Alabama.
Published February 1994
ISBN 0-910614-93-8
Copyright © 1994 by
The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc.
Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533
For Mike and Sharon
Acknowledgments
I thank the editors of the Public Affairs Quarterly, and Man, Economy, and Liberty, Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard for permission to make use in this work of some of the material that has previously appeared in their publications.
Preface
This book grew out of my Institute for Humane Studies Lectures which I have been giving since the summer of 1990 throughout Europe- Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, as well as in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
My main objective in these lectures has always been to explain in plain terms- addressed often to undergraduate and graduate students from around the world for whom English is a novel and not fully developed language- the ideas underlying classical liberalism. Since there are several versions of this political viewpoint, the lectures explain these various versions. But I also defend, as the best of the classical liberal outlook, the natural rights perspective associated primarily with John Locke and the thinking underlying the political institutions of the United States of America.
A word about the title. "Virtue" is used in it to mean "that which makes for excellence." Not, however, moral excellence, since liberty, both in its metaphysical and political senses, is a capacity and precondition of human life, respectively, not an action guiding principle by which human beings ought to guide their day to day conduct--except in the sense that they ought to acknolwedge its role in their lives and the quality of their political communities. This work, then, examines the merits of (the right to) political/economic liberty and some of the problems surrounding the effort to understand those merits.
I have reworked the lectures considerably, and have added discussions that may help in dealing with certain prominent contemporary social and political issues and controversies. In this effort I wish to thank Douglas Rasmussen and Mark Turiano for the many hours they spent with me brainstorming these ideas and considering the numerous objections to them I wanted to anticipate. I also wish to thank the Department of English at the United States Military Academy- especially Colonels Peter Stromberg, Anthony Hartle, Paul Christopher, and Captain Ted Westhusing- with the members of which I had the opportunity, as visiting professor of philosophy during 1992-93, to air many of these views in a regular faculty seminar during the Spring 1993 term. Comments and objections by members of the department have helped me, I believe, to clarify some of the issues covered.
Tibor R. Machan
West Point, New York
May 1993
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
I Why Do We Have Rights?
II Liberty and Virtue
III The Right to Private Property
IV Morality, Liberty, and the Market Economy
V Environmentalism Humanized
VI Does the Coercive State Have Moral Standing?
VII Individualism, Naughty and Nice
Endnotes
Index
Introduction: Varieties of the Freedom Philosophy
As the number of those who are concerned to protect, revitalize, and preserve individual liberty has grown, so have the arguments in support of this effort. From Alcibiades and Lykophron to Locke, Mill, and Spencer and, finally, to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Rothbard, and others in our time, the arguments concluding with support for individual liberty have become numerous and varied.
Although this may appear to be good- "variety is the spice of life" and such- there are certain problems with such pluralism. True enough, the same conclusion can be supported by different premises. Thus the proposition, for example, that "all cases of theft are wrong" may be justified by reference to the effects of the theft upon the thief, the victim, the stability of the community, or God's opinion of the agent, some premises are better than others in that they are more likely to be true. It is generally a virtue of a theory that it has fewer problems with its premises than do other theories. And if a theory requires too many speculative premises or even false ones, its vulnerability is obvious.
In other words, while many arguments are interesting and sometimes helpful for research purposes, it would probably be best to have one good argument. For those whose defense of individual liberty is serious, and who respect other people's capacity to appreciate rational inquiry into human affairs, finding the best case for the classical liberal political order should be a concern. This does not have anything to do with the right to advance different arguments- of course, anyone ought to be free to do that. But for the purpose of securing a good case for a position, it may be useful to have one strong argument rather than many. (The same conclusion, of course, may be supported, from different premises, but not from contradictory premises, and too often the free society has been advocated on grounds that are not mutually consistent.)
Following the survey of major liberal or libertarian ideas in recorded Western thought, it will be possible to begin the discussion of classical liberalism in a more philosophical vein. Throughout this book I plan to call on some of the ideas discussed in this introduction, so we should start with them.
Let me begin with the earliest of hints in the record of Western philosophy that liberty has been construed as a value. Let us begin way back in ancient Greece.
Xenophon. In Xenophon's Memorabilia (i, 2, 40-46) we find the young Alcibiades in a debate with Pericles; here Xenophon records a lengthy argument in which Alcibiades pushes Pericles into a corner. The idea is that if law serves to protect against force, then law must not initiate force; thus any law that does so, is invalid. As Alcibiades puts it, "Isn't it lawlessness if a tyrant does not use persuasion, but instead enacts measures and forces the citizens to carry them out?" And he adds, "Would we, or would we not, call it force when a few in power enact measures for the people without using persuasion....isn't it force rather than law if the majority, prevailing over those who have money, make proposals and do not use persuasion?" This argument is of the reductio ad absurdum kind and is surely effective as a destroyer of some ideas of law. Its problem is that it provides no foundation for a better conception. At most it paves the way for constructive work.
Lykophron. The argument advanced by the sophist Lykophron, whose case is simply recited by Aristotle in the Politics, amounts to a mere assertion as to the purpose of law, namely that it is properly "a guarantee (or guarantor) of mutual rights." It seems, by the context of Aristotle's discussion, that Lykophron was advancing the idea of a limited government, assuming, of course, that the rights to be guaranteed were individual negative rights. But if we keep in mind that only negative rights can be possessed "mutually," that is, by all people at once, without conflict, then this assumption is reasonable and we find here a case of early libertarian political theorizing.
Hippodamus of Miletus. Hippodamus, however, seems to have had more to say, again, without any record of argument. He believed "that there were only three kinds of laws concerning which lawsuits should take place: laws against hubris (violent personal assault), blabe (damage, as to property), and thanatos (homicide)." I am here repeating the description offered by Fred D. Miller, Jr., in his highly informative paper "The State and the Community in Aristotle's Politics" (Reason Papers, No. 1). Miller discovers the evidence for this early libertarian school of thought in Aristotle's Politics (b37-39). Clearly Hippodamus is offering a very restricted scope for government action, one that Aristotle seems to find too limited.
Christian Theology. Biblical theology alludes to the importance of the human individual and to the individual's requirement of freedom so as to aspire to the salvation of his or her everlasting soul. In terms of some prominent Christian doctrines, one must choose to follow God's will, lest one earn no credit for behaving properly.
The Middle Ages. Beginning in about the twelfth century we find a serious concern for natural rights, liberty, and property rights, in such writers as Jean Gerson, William of Ockham and others (see Brian Tierney's account in "Origins of Natural Rights Language," History of Political Thought, Vol. 10 [Winter 1989]). Ockham said that property rights are "the power of right reason." This may well mean that in order for one to be able to successfully exercise moral judgment, one must also enjoy basic rights, a sphere of moral jurisdiction. Generalized, this view is clearly libertarian- à la Nozick's doctrine of "moral space." Earlier writers, while they lacked a coherent and developed natural rights theory, nevertheless made extensive use of the language of natural rights, usually to indicate spheres of personal or subjective jurisdiction wherein it is morally neutral what the person might do. (See also Brian Tierney, "Villey, Ockham and the Origin of Individual Rights," T. Witte and F. S. Alexander, The Weightier Matters of the Law, A Tribute to Harold J. Berman, as well as other works by the same author investigating the origin of natural rights language, disputing, e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre's thesis that such language was invented around the sixteenth century.)
Hobbes. A radical individualism was developed by Thomas Hobbes who, though an absolute monarchist in his explicit politics, laid some of the foundations for the homo economicus approach to human social life. Hobbes saw us all as striving to seek our own self-satisfaction and thought that this would require the protection of those laws that made
self-satisfactory conduct possible. The only reason he favored a strong monarchy is that he never learned about public-choice theory and thought a strong state would best assure peace. Hobbes' psychological egoism became the cornerstone of the doctrine captured in Bernard Mandeville's dictum, "private vice, public benefit," whereby the pursuit of private or selfish objectives could result in the public benefit of widespread prosperity. This is certainly still one of the most prominent arguments for liberalism and the free market, especially with reference to the troubles of Eastern European societies. It is still the crux of the liberalism advanced by neo-classical economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker.
Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza didn't quite defend a doctrine of individual rights but did argue that a good government will provide us with as much liberty as possible- especially the freedom to express our views.
Locke. The first modern philosopher with a full-blown libertarian political theory was John Locke. He held that each person is by birth a sovereign (when he or she reaches adulthood), with no natural rulers or natural subjects. Government is established to protect individual rights and the consent of the governed is required to legitimize government and limit its powers. Locke is also the first major thinker to give a prominent place to the right to private property as an extension of individual rights and liberty. In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke built his libertarian theory on numerous other concepts, or at least claimed to have borrowed from them. Let us see what argument we find here. Essentially Locke accepted as an alleged law of nature that each person owns himself, ergo his labor and whatever this labor touches of as yet untouched nature. There are some supporting elements to Locke's case that make it broader: for instance his belief that because nature inclines man toward seeking happiness, it is a law of nature to do so; and his assertion that political institutions should protect and preserve what the law of nature implies for human community life. The natural rights of Locke are, then, the proper conditions of human social life, the "libertarian constraints," as Nozick calls them.
Two brief points about this view. The idea that I own myself does not amount to a very clear position, since it implies that where we find an instance of numerical identity- i.e., I and myself are the same entity though designated differently for purposes of different grammatical contexts- we find also a two-term relation- i.e., between me, the owner, and me, that which is owned. While some rhetorical force may be attributed to saying that I own myself, the point doesn't make sense from a logical perspective. (It is different when I say that I know myself, since my mind, which knows, can stand in the relationship of knower to the rest of me, as well as to myself prior to when it knows.) As to the alternative case Locke offers, resting on some kind of ethical hedonism, this view is a mixture of plausible and implausible ideas. Locke seems to mean by his phrase "inclines toward happiness" a psychological fact about us, and he seems to mean by "happiness" something much closer to "pleasure" than to "self-esteem." If I am right, as the scholarship on Locke seems to bear out, then we have a false or incomplete basis for natural rights here. In the one instance Locke is wrong- lots of us aren't inclined toward pleasure; and if we are to take it that
we should pursue pleasure, Locke says nothing about why this is so. So while Locke says many informative, even brilliant, things about the central libertarian political principles, his support for them is weak, as was noted by Nozick even as he decided to accept Lockean rights in his entitlement theory.
Smith. Adam Smith was the first scientific economist, although he himself saw his own work in moral philosophy, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments as even more important than An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, his path breaking book in political economy. Smith defended the view that there is plenty and stable enough concern on everyone's part with advancing their own earthly well being that by securing for them all their natural liberty, the greatest chance would be established for establishing public prosperity. Smith did not stress individual rights, although something very much akin to a system of individual rights would underlie his system of free enterprise. Neither was Smith, as many charge, a crass egoist, quite the contrary- his moral psychology suggested that sympathy arises because of our natural feeling for others's well being. Furthermore, in his political economic work Smith did not defend individualism on grounds that everyone is entitled to strive for his or her own good but because such striving would best secure public wealth. Smith is among those most often targeted as a liberal ideologists, e.g., by Karl Marx, instead of taken to be defending a political-economic framework he thought would be genuinely sound for human community life.
Mill. John Stuart Mill argued in On Liberty that government may only interfere with individual liberty if its exercise harms someone other than the agent doing the acting. Mill, by no means fully libertarian, maintained this view on the grounds that in freedom the truth would win out, creativity would flourish, and, therefore mankind's progress would be assured. But there is no good reason to count on truth always winning out in a free debate, since people can turn off their minds at will. Creativity may indeed flourish, but why is this a good thing? Mill's answer, that such creativity will secure mankind's progress, is only of argumentative force if it can be shown that (a) it is true, and (b) mankind's progress is what we should seek via our political systems. But it is not even unlikely that some sort of creativity can destroy mankind. Nor is it clear that mankind itself, since it is not a concrete thing but a generalization or general term to designate a group, benefits from anything; only individuals can do so. Indeed, Mill's theory of value is largely responsible for the birth of the welfare state, since he advocated that political policy should be geared to securing the greatest (hedonistic) happiness of the greatest number of people, something that later was thought to be achievable not by leaving people be (laissez-faire) but by economic planning. At any rate, Mill's case for liberty rested on the importance of the collective, so it is not even libertarian in spirit. I am, of course, speaking of the essentials, not denying that Mill's words give eloquent expression to some of the ideals of the freedom philosophy.
Spencer. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, started as an individualist, but his case was fully deterministic, based on Lamarckian evolutionary theory. He believed that evolution, which governs all of existence, led toward differentiation- just the opposite of what B. F. Skinner and Marx believed. And for human beings this means that the highest stage of community life would have to be laissez-faire capitalism. In his ethics he argued for rational utilitarianism or a version of rational egoism, but in the end this ethics was no ethics at all. For an ethics to be bona fide- i.e., a genuine ethical theory- it must be true of it as a minimum that what is said to be right by it people could
choose to do or not to do. But in any determinist theory this is precluded, so determinism, including evolutionary theory that proposes mechanistic development and motion in human affairs, is incompatible with ethics or politics. Thus Spencer is unable to argue that we should respect one another's liberty. (Still, Spencer's discussion of ethics, once we omit the problems with its foundation, is brilliant.)
Mises. We come now to Ludwig von Mises' freedom philosophy, most comprehensively presented in his book Human Action. I should note that Mises was not a fully consistent libertarian. For example, he believed in conscription and some other statist measures, at least for certain emergency circumstances. Essentially he defended the free market on grounds that the achievement of one's goals is far more likely when people are left free than when they are not. Central planning renders the market defective in the function of enabling its participants to organize their lives in line with what they want to do. The price mechanism is destroyed and information becomes distorted. Mises shows in his book Socialism that central planning leads to an irrational economic order, contrary to all those alleged rational planners. But Mises never defends the view that people ought to be free to do what they want. He believed that value judgments are subjective, so he could not argue for the value of liberty. He did seem to believe that since no one else could defend a denial of the value of liberty, liberty, as a condition for choosing between alternatives that can have subjective value, should prevail. As all subjectivist or relativist arguments in support of something, this one is self-refuting. Indeed, we can see today how many people right and left denounce the classical liberal stance of value-subjectivity and propose some of the most detestable notions of what is right and good, simply because classical liberalism left a vacuum for all sorts of mystics and statists to fill.
Hayek. F. A. Hayek's approach- which also supports less than a fully libertarian polity, since Hayek accepts some kind of welfare safety net- is a bit more complicated. Hayek advances his view most successfully in The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago, 1961), as well as many later works. Although he learned a lot from Mises, Hayek's views have changed, too. It is not safe to treat Mises and Hayek as interchangeable. Essentially, however, Hayek argues for liberty on grounds that central planning leads to suppression of creativity, growth, development, and progress. Problem- solving proceeds best when the rules of conduct are minimal and spontaneously generated. One can know only the most general principles of conduct, e.g., the rule of law; but the more particular these are, the more difficult it is to identify the proper solution to problems ahead of time. In his semi-Kantian fashion Hayek wishes to accept only general categories as reliable, leaving all other knowledge for free people to develop in free association with each other. Hayek is not a purist libertarian and has said that some regulation, some welfare, some statism in general cannot be ruled out a priori. On the whole, however, he is the libertarian version of the conservatives' Edmund Burke. As such he does not admit of natural laws or natural rights, nor of any objective moral standards. He is enamored with the evolutionary and mechanistic conceptions of science to the extent that he refuses to defend human free will. And he has said that his defense of liberal political institutions does not rest on, and is incompatible with, an ethical point of view. Here, too, we find the same faults present in Spencer's case for liberty, although as in all the thinkers discussed, there are numerous points in Hayek's political and economic theory that serve to lend strong support to various libertarian analyses of political and social affairs.
Nozick. Robert Nozick's case for the freedom philosophy- advanced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), but abandoned in one of his later books- is based on a so-called transcendental argument: what principles should we adopt so that our political affairs will make the best sense? Nozick proposes that by accepting Lockean natural rights as the limits to action, we will develop a state of nature from which rational and rights-respecting conduct will, by an invisible hand, generate the limited government form of libertarian political order. He takes Rothbard's anarchism as a serious challenge and holds that it can be overcome by noting that people are afraid of arbitrariness, so they will establish a monopolistic defense agency. Once this limited state exists, nothing can justify enlarging it, except perhaps some instances of repairing past injustices. Nozick's argument rests on certain methodological assumptions, among them that people will act to overcome their fears, to abate them by instituting certain procedures, such as government. But Nozick fails to show that they are right in doing this, that it would not be better for them to refuse to yield to their fears and remain outside civil society. Rothbard and his students have been attacking Nozick on this point, as have a number of those who share his views but would ask for greater scope of government power. Nozick's failure to develop a moral theory on which his Lockean natural rights might have rested- e.g., rational egoism- has led to the spectacle of a wholesale intellectual dismissal- left and right- of the first libertarian book to have achieved some modicum of recognition across the intellectual spectrum. Ordinarily the dismissal of the arguments of a libertarian could be consigned to prejudice, but here Nozick simply deprives himself of a good defense.
Friedman. Milton Friedman, a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning economist, did not provide an extensive philosophical case for liberty in the book where he plays out his general political position, namely, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962). As a concerned citizen and pundit he frequently touches on philosophical issues as he points to the neglect of liberty across the world. When he does so he tends to invoke the argument from skepticism and ethical subjectivism. This is not uncharacteristic of defenses of individual liberty advanced by classical and neo-classical economists. The argument alleges that no one knows what is right and wrong, either generally or in the case of some particular person, institution, policy, and so forth. Therefore nobody should force anyone to comply with one's own baseless beliefs about right and wrong. Friedman believes that if we did know right and wrong, and we learned that we could stop someone doing wrong, we would have an obligation to stop him. Friedman appears to have a view of virtue as producing some good, as driving toward some intrinsic good thing, e.g., the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That would explain why he believes that knowing that A does something wrong entitles B to stop him. For that to be true, it would have to be true also that B is obligated to advance the chances of the realization of some intrinsically good thing. If the doctrine of moral goodness assumed here is mistaken, then it does not follow that knowing that A does something wrong requires B to stop A. A's doing something wrong that does not interfere with B's doing what he chooses cannot have relevance to B in the way that would justify interference (defense), not if A's doing wrong is wrong for A, i.e., is a violation of principle that A should abide by, which means that A should choose to abide by. B cannot improve A's character, or A himself, by forcing A to do what A should have chosen to do. But this point is difficult to make without entering into a lengthy discussion of the difference
between various theories of virtue and goodness. For someone who believes that all viable ethical theories rest on intrinsicist theories of the good, it would have to be either that we should all act as paternal leaders of the fallen, or that we cannot know what is good or how to achieve it. Yet if so, then there seems to be no reason to advocate liberty either, since such advocacy assumes that it is good to refrain from doing what one has no basis for doing, or that it is good to refrain to act from ignorance. But why is this good? Friedman can have no answer to this without undermining his own defense of liberty.
Spooner, Stirner, and LeFevre. Some other defenses of liberty might be mentioned here very briefly. Lysander Spooner, whose ideas so many libertarians embrace, thought that natural law tells us our moral responsibilities and the extent of our liberty, but he never demonstrates this. He assumes a Lockean analysis of personal autonomy, and objects to contracts made in our name on that ground, but the point strikes home only within the context of the American political tradition, something we are not entitled to assume in this discussion. Other anarchists have been used to give backing to libertarian ideas. For example, Max Stirner is sometimes cited, because he advocated a subjectivist egoism in terms of which each person is a unique, unclassifiable entity whose business is to inject himself into the universe as powerfully as possible. Stirner thinks that talk of natural rights is spooky, and this is because he construes the nature or the essence of a human being as something mystical, ideal or otherwise mythical. But this view begs the question, nor does it make sense to deny human nature while still talking about what each person, each individual, everyone, or every ego should do. Who is being addressed? The paradox is obvious. There is also Robert LeFevre's case for liberty in terms of which any retaliatory use of force, as in punishment or defensive injury, is a case of aggression. LeFevre also denied that any such concept as "justice" makes sense and his views imply that only the present can be taken care of, only by oneself, with no possible planning on criminal procedure or authorization of agents to act in one's behalf. Since this view is without foundation, and since LeFevre admitted to being a subjectivist about moral principles, his view must be regarded as a personal testimonial.
Rand. Ayn Rand's case for liberty- presented in her novels and such non-fiction works as The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet, 1961) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (Signet, 1964)- derives from her rational egoism. Since each person should live by striving for happiness or success as a human being, and since this requires that persons initiate their own conduct in line with their own judgments, in a social situation it is wrong to prevent anyone from exercising those choices and decisions that do not prevent others from exercising theirs. Natural rights are the conditions proper to living a human life among others, and adjudicating disputes that arise among people in terms of the recognition of these rights will lead to justice. The right to life means that each person should act by one's own judgment, that none should govern without personal authorization, implicit or explicit, from those subject to government. Since one is not a disembodied soul but a rational animal with requirements to be satisfied in regard to both central aspects of one's life, the freedom
of each person in society must imply the freedom to judge and to act. Since to act requires space, things with which to sustain oneself, etc., the right to liberty implies the right to acquire what nature places before human beings. The natural right to property means the natural right to take those actions that will lead one to use and dispose of things in moral security from others (that is, with moral justification). Granted that not all acts of acquisition are right, still all acts of acquisition that do not violate others' rights are politically permissible- i.e., they do not authorize anyone to prevent them. In Rand an entire philosophy underlies the ethics and politics, although Rand herself has only outlined her objectivism and today a number of people are taking up the task of elaborating and modifying it. Essentially in Ayn Rand we have the robust philosophical treatment of politics we find in Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, and Kant, something not available from many libertarian sources today. There is an explicit ethics that provides standards for private conduct and moral evaluation, and there is a political system in which the liberty of each person to give guidance to his own life is established as rightful, even if on moral grounds alone such individuals might have to be condemned. Thus Rand detested pornography, could not stand homosexuality, and had no kind words to say about current art, yet formulated a most powerful, principled defense of liberty in terms of which such practices can withstand anyone's alleged authority to ban them.
In my view Rand's position is largely sound. I lament only her bad manners, occasional thoughtless rush to judgment where her knowledge did not qualify her, and her unwillingness to give credit for ideas she learned. Her refusal to enter philosophical debate amidst her complaint that no one paid her the respect she deserved was also disappointing. Successful philosophizing is not achieved primarily in novels, nor in self-published magazines. Unless one makes oneself available to the inquiring community, one will not be discussed and one's long-term influence will be correspondingly minimal. Philosophical disputation is not always pleasant, nor do all those involved in the discussion deserve to be taken seriously. But to abstain completely is to allow those with catchy ideas to carry the day, even if their catchiness is not the function of their soundness and truth but the cleverness and perseverance with which they have been promulgated.
In these few paragraphs I have tried to outline several roads to the freedom philosophy. I have not defended a number of my comments, and much more could be said about these various positions. It may simply be useful to become aware of the schools of thought that have given what one values in life some measure of support. One can orient oneself about how best to make one's own values live longer, acquire greater strength, and maybe win some major battles, even wars, in the course of one's lifetime.
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