Without people like Glenn Greenwald around, I would not have found inspiration to become The Ultimate Philosopher. Greenwald is someone with an (almost) unparalleled ability to condense issues down to their very essence. Consequently, he sees pretty much of all that counts as "mainstream narrative and debate" in this country as corrupted through and through, in some fashion or other. His approach to the whole Wikileaks/Assange farce is one such instance of this.
(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)
Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.
Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.
There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?
Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.
What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.
[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Showing posts with label government. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Friday, December 3, 2010
Conservatism vs. Liberty
I was provided these links in an email:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
The bottom line: the dictum, "Do whatever you like, so long as you don't hurt anyone else," does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order an individual life. There is a complex nexus of feedback relations between individual lives and the social order, of which the legal order is an aspect. Individual lives depend upon society, and constitute it. As they go, so it goes; and as it goes, so do they. To say this is no more than to say that if we are to live, we must do so together, and so must order our lives in respect to each other, and to our joint prosperity--not just across space, but across time.
Ordering lives across time, across generations, is the function of tradition. Libertarianism presupposes a vibrant moral tradition, that has informed a people from the bottom up, so that the net result of their unsupervised activities is social harmony, justice, prosperity. Where such a tradition perdures, the libertarian project can perhaps succeed. Where not, not. If you have no tradition, you have no nexus of support for your individual agency, and thus no true freedom to organize your activities toward your own ends. Rather, you have only raw lurching from one dire exigency to the next, with no notion of a fundamental moral order to inform your deliberations. Randian atheism demolishes the ontological basis for morality, and so cannot but destroy moral tradition, thus preventing the option of libertarianism. "If there is no God, then all is permitted"--including force, and fraud.
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Justice vs. Force
From poll answers provided by Allen Wood, a Stanford philosophy professor and leading Kant scholar:
Um . . . well, the Ultimate Philosophical Retort to this more or less academic-mainstream view is, "How are the inequalities obscene?"
One simple but fundamental error in current-day mainstream moral and political philosophy (that is, unless A. John Simmons represents some kind of silent libertarian mainstream, but I kind of doubt it) is the confusion of matters of justice with matters of what rights people have. Rawls's Theory of Justice is focused almost exclusively with how coercive institutions ought to deal with questions of both liberty and equality. The stolen assumption here is that institutions ought to be coercive at all.
Okay, let's imagine a eudaemonistic culture. Eudaemonism is concerned with self-actualization and the conditions required for such. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the agent's own moral dispositions, and then things like good upbringing and education, a minimally supportive culture, having basic needs fulfilled and . . . freedom (to exercise one's capacities, as a necessary constitutive element of eudaemonia). Equality hardly enters into the picture at all except in minimal legal terms (i.e., equality under the law). But take the core concern here that a left-liberal might share: the importance of fulfilling the conditions under which people can flourish. Ensuring that basic needs are met is part of that moral vision. So let's just posit this plausible assumption: a eudaemonistic culture is one in which people are concerned that the basic needs of people are met.
Now, where is force supposed to enter this picture? If a theory of "social" justice is about "what human beings owe to one another" as a matter of basic human decency, that's all fine and good. How does that translate into a prescription that people or a polity engage in force to see to it that these obligations are fulfilled? It's a complete non sequitur.
The basic rational principle of political governance is that it secures logically prior rights, i.e., that it secures the conditions of freedom under which people can flourish. Protecting freedom is the only proper concern of government. Matters of "obscene" inequalities are a moral concern that people in non-coercive organizations have every right (and duty, if we're really dealing with moral obscenity) to address. The paradigm that absolutely has to be tossed out here, however, is the force-is-acceptable paradigm. It's an age-old paradigm used and applied across the ages where human beings as a species hadn't reached a high-enough stage of enlightenment to recognize the evil of using force against rational beings.
(As far as moral obscenity goes, let's not buy into the floating, irrational egalitarian notion that the social problem to be concerned with is inequality per se. There is no rational moral principle underlying any such concern. As some version of eudaemonistic ethics is the only rational underpinning for any social-political ethics, the proper focus of concern here is not inequality but rather whether the requisite conditions for self-actualization have been fulfilled. Equality or inequality plays no significant role in this analysis. To decry, say, starvation in the Third World as a moral obscenity is not to decry it on grounds of inequality. I do keep in mind Prof. Wood's hedge here; maybe he's not advancing his concern for moral obscenity on such irrational grounds as egalitarianism, but rather on grounds having to do with meeting basic conditions for self-actualization in light of current disparities that supposedly can [only?] be addressed through political means.)
What we should seriously consider as philosophers is whether the coercive state is anathema to (eudaemonistic) moral values, even and perhaps especially including the socially-oriented concern that the basic conditions for self-actualization are met. To say that good people ought to do certain things or provide such-and-such conditions for one another as a matter of justice, is not to say that the coercive state is the means by which people get (i.e., make, through force) one another to respect the demands of justice.
My "force is evil" view might be labeled or lumped into the cluster of views known as "philosophical anarchism." If that means, simply, that people ought not to use force against one another, then "philosophical anarchism" is the only acceptable social-political position and, frankly, the only one that common-sense analysis leads to. The basic social principle I endorse is that no one has the right to initiate physical force against anyone else, and that any social institution must respect individual rights; a social institution calling itself government isn't exempt from such a requirement. Government, like any other social institution, should be based only on the consent of the participants involved.
The scheme of voluntary communities envisioned by Nozick in "A Framework for Utopia" (the last chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is much like what I have in mind. Unlike Nozick, however, I have a broader moral vision to offer which makes a plausible road to "utopia" so much as realistically possible: a society in which eudaemonistic values are widespread is a society in which (a) people tend to be a lot more appreciative of the requirements of self-actualization and are therefore more empathetic and peaceful and (b) a society where the institution of government becomes (perhaps radically) transformed from government as we know it today.
Suppose, for instance, that the mindset that made "Galt's Gulch" possible is so widespread, and the success of such a model so compelling, that government functions amount to the functions performed by Judge Narragansett in the valley. Ayn Rand firmly denied that she was an anarchist, but the model of governance entailed by widespread acceptance and application of her moral ideals meets the social conditions demanded by the self-styled anarchists (excepting perhaps the left-anarchists, unless they really wouldn't mind the productive geniuses going off to form their own capitalistic societies, in which case the left-anarchists' desire for peace exceeds their desire to interfere with capitalist acts amongst consenting adults). The essential aspect of government in Rand's definition is the exclusive power to enforce laws in a defined geographical area, as a necessary prerequisite to the Rule of Law. That sounds consistent with the requirement that all governments must be based entirely on the consent of the governed and where the model of governance is not unlike the minimalistic dispute-resolution functions provided by an effective legal apparatus as was the case in the Gulch.
Doesn't this vision of a good society offer a lot more to inspire people than a force-based quasi-egalitarian vision does?
One thing entailed in this vision is that politics as we know it (and politicians as we know them) can be a thing of the past. No longer would we entrust our concerns about justice (or other things) to the fucking sociopathic narcissists running governments these days. No longer would we entrust these narcissists with coercive powers over our activities. How we interact with one another would no longer be a matter of how to employ force but how to get on with the task of flourishing (which includes taking an interest in the flourishing of others). Provisions of welfare goods thereby would become, properly, a matter of ethics rather than politics. Sounds to me that Ayn Rand identified the issues here at a greater level of fundamentality than Rawls did, ergo Rand > Rawls. Duh.
My real position could be accurately described as 'anti-hyperinegalitarianism'. But given the obscene inequalities we have in the actual world, this is close to egalitarianism,
Um . . . well, the Ultimate Philosophical Retort to this more or less academic-mainstream view is, "How are the inequalities obscene?"
One simple but fundamental error in current-day mainstream moral and political philosophy (that is, unless A. John Simmons represents some kind of silent libertarian mainstream, but I kind of doubt it) is the confusion of matters of justice with matters of what rights people have. Rawls's Theory of Justice is focused almost exclusively with how coercive institutions ought to deal with questions of both liberty and equality. The stolen assumption here is that institutions ought to be coercive at all.
Okay, let's imagine a eudaemonistic culture. Eudaemonism is concerned with self-actualization and the conditions required for such. Those conditions are, first and foremost, the agent's own moral dispositions, and then things like good upbringing and education, a minimally supportive culture, having basic needs fulfilled and . . . freedom (to exercise one's capacities, as a necessary constitutive element of eudaemonia). Equality hardly enters into the picture at all except in minimal legal terms (i.e., equality under the law). But take the core concern here that a left-liberal might share: the importance of fulfilling the conditions under which people can flourish. Ensuring that basic needs are met is part of that moral vision. So let's just posit this plausible assumption: a eudaemonistic culture is one in which people are concerned that the basic needs of people are met.
Now, where is force supposed to enter this picture? If a theory of "social" justice is about "what human beings owe to one another" as a matter of basic human decency, that's all fine and good. How does that translate into a prescription that people or a polity engage in force to see to it that these obligations are fulfilled? It's a complete non sequitur.
The basic rational principle of political governance is that it secures logically prior rights, i.e., that it secures the conditions of freedom under which people can flourish. Protecting freedom is the only proper concern of government. Matters of "obscene" inequalities are a moral concern that people in non-coercive organizations have every right (and duty, if we're really dealing with moral obscenity) to address. The paradigm that absolutely has to be tossed out here, however, is the force-is-acceptable paradigm. It's an age-old paradigm used and applied across the ages where human beings as a species hadn't reached a high-enough stage of enlightenment to recognize the evil of using force against rational beings.
(As far as moral obscenity goes, let's not buy into the floating, irrational egalitarian notion that the social problem to be concerned with is inequality per se. There is no rational moral principle underlying any such concern. As some version of eudaemonistic ethics is the only rational underpinning for any social-political ethics, the proper focus of concern here is not inequality but rather whether the requisite conditions for self-actualization have been fulfilled. Equality or inequality plays no significant role in this analysis. To decry, say, starvation in the Third World as a moral obscenity is not to decry it on grounds of inequality. I do keep in mind Prof. Wood's hedge here; maybe he's not advancing his concern for moral obscenity on such irrational grounds as egalitarianism, but rather on grounds having to do with meeting basic conditions for self-actualization in light of current disparities that supposedly can [only?] be addressed through political means.)
What we should seriously consider as philosophers is whether the coercive state is anathema to (eudaemonistic) moral values, even and perhaps especially including the socially-oriented concern that the basic conditions for self-actualization are met. To say that good people ought to do certain things or provide such-and-such conditions for one another as a matter of justice, is not to say that the coercive state is the means by which people get (i.e., make, through force) one another to respect the demands of justice.
My "force is evil" view might be labeled or lumped into the cluster of views known as "philosophical anarchism." If that means, simply, that people ought not to use force against one another, then "philosophical anarchism" is the only acceptable social-political position and, frankly, the only one that common-sense analysis leads to. The basic social principle I endorse is that no one has the right to initiate physical force against anyone else, and that any social institution must respect individual rights; a social institution calling itself government isn't exempt from such a requirement. Government, like any other social institution, should be based only on the consent of the participants involved.
The scheme of voluntary communities envisioned by Nozick in "A Framework for Utopia" (the last chapter of Anarchy, State, and Utopia) is much like what I have in mind. Unlike Nozick, however, I have a broader moral vision to offer which makes a plausible road to "utopia" so much as realistically possible: a society in which eudaemonistic values are widespread is a society in which (a) people tend to be a lot more appreciative of the requirements of self-actualization and are therefore more empathetic and peaceful and (b) a society where the institution of government becomes (perhaps radically) transformed from government as we know it today.
Suppose, for instance, that the mindset that made "Galt's Gulch" possible is so widespread, and the success of such a model so compelling, that government functions amount to the functions performed by Judge Narragansett in the valley. Ayn Rand firmly denied that she was an anarchist, but the model of governance entailed by widespread acceptance and application of her moral ideals meets the social conditions demanded by the self-styled anarchists (excepting perhaps the left-anarchists, unless they really wouldn't mind the productive geniuses going off to form their own capitalistic societies, in which case the left-anarchists' desire for peace exceeds their desire to interfere with capitalist acts amongst consenting adults). The essential aspect of government in Rand's definition is the exclusive power to enforce laws in a defined geographical area, as a necessary prerequisite to the Rule of Law. That sounds consistent with the requirement that all governments must be based entirely on the consent of the governed and where the model of governance is not unlike the minimalistic dispute-resolution functions provided by an effective legal apparatus as was the case in the Gulch.
Doesn't this vision of a good society offer a lot more to inspire people than a force-based quasi-egalitarian vision does?
One thing entailed in this vision is that politics as we know it (and politicians as we know them) can be a thing of the past. No longer would we entrust our concerns about justice (or other things) to the fucking sociopathic narcissists running governments these days. No longer would we entrust these narcissists with coercive powers over our activities. How we interact with one another would no longer be a matter of how to employ force but how to get on with the task of flourishing (which includes taking an interest in the flourishing of others). Provisions of welfare goods thereby would become, properly, a matter of ethics rather than politics. Sounds to me that Ayn Rand identified the issues here at a greater level of fundamentality than Rawls did, ergo Rand > Rawls. Duh.
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