Tag: one fundamental right

Joe Huffman writes a response to the überpost, and begins with this devil’s advocate question:

(Kevin) says:

But the ideas of Western civilization in general, and the American philosophy in specific have proven themselves superior.

“Superior” on what scale? How is it that you measure that superiority? By the scale used by Muslims we are arrogant, decadent, and sinful. We drink alcohol. Our women, who are the tools of Satan, are allowed to tempt men with exposed skin in public are allowed to attend schools. We charge interest on the loaning of money. We do not pray to Allah. We tempt the youth of the faithful to desert that which is holy and become sinful. We have succumbed to Satan. Our power is not proof of our superiority. It is proof of the bargain we have made with the Prince of Darkness.

The Germans in the late 30’s had a “noble goal” as well–“purification” of the human race. A similar argument could be made of the Japanese in the same time frame.

Who are you to say Western civilization is superior? By what measure and how have you determined that measure is superior?

As I say in my piece, I believe there is one fundamental right – a man’s right to his own life (or a woman to hers.) This is the core of Lockean philosophy, and the measure of liberty in any society is how well the government of that society protects that right and its corollaries, though in practice none do it (or can) perfectly. The utopian vision of the anarcho-capitalists is a society that does so, perfectly, by not having a government at all. But this is only a dream, because you can never get a group of three or more people who will agree on what all of the corollary rights are, and there will always be people who will go along to get along. During a phone conversation last night with Publicola, I mentioned that I wanted to use a quote in the überpost, but I wasn’t able to work it in anywhere. It’s another Heinlein quote:

You can never enslave a free man, the most you can do is kill him.

Too many people are not free even in their own minds. That’s one of the reasons coercive societies work, and utopist societies don’t.

But on to Joe’s specific question, how do I measure Western civilization’s superiority? By this:

In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible. The immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is “the pursuit of happiness.” As writer V. S. Naipaul notes, “much is contained” in that simple phrase: “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation, perfectibility, and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known [around the world] to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

And this:

When soldiers from any other army, even our allies, entered a town, the people hid in the cellars. When Americans came in, even into German towns, it meant smiles, chocolate bars and C-rations. — Stephen Ambrose

Western philosophy in general, and the American philosophy in particular, best protects the right of its citizens to their own lives. As a result of this, America has become the superpower that it is. It draws those who understand that they are free, and “blows away” more rigid systems, generally without having to fire a shot.

But we are not perfect. This blog and many like it stand as testament to the fact that even nominally free governments constantly arrogate power, and are loath to surrender any they have taken. The only thing that can slow this (I don’t think it can be stopped) is the resistance of their citizens. If enough of those citizens understand that they are free, then the predation of government can be limited, but if too many are ignorant or apathetic their eventual enslavement is highly likely.

And I’m not putting on a tinfoil hat here and blaming the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderburgers or the Skull and Bones Society or any other shadowy group. I’m with Justice Louis Brandeis here:

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

And Robert J. Hanlon:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Or, in this case, ignorance and apathy. (Ignorance is curable. Stupidity is organic.)

Joe continues in his essay:

Paraphrasing Greg Hamilton here: In the eyes of Muslims what Osama Bin Laden has to say about the West is as inherently obvious, once articulated, to them as the superiority of Western civilization is to us.

True. Once again, two incompatible philosophies are now fighting it out for domination. The question is open as to which will win, since our side has an internal component that is trying to tear it down from the inside. That component is made up of those who are not Lockean in philosophy, and who see that philosophy as hypocritical and false:

The State (in Germany) and the Emperor (in Japan) were what the individual existed to serve. Hence, we were “playing by their own rules” by killing civilians in our efforts to defeat the Germany state and the Emperor of Japan. And even then it is clear that many had serious qualms about the actions taken. We weren’t blind to the hypocrisy of suspending our principles. It was a reluctant pragmatic concession to reality not mapping perfectly to our theory of individual rights.

Our “suspension of principles,” our hypocrisy, is the spike on which our internal opponents attempt to spindle Lockean philosophy. This was the point of the überpost. We must understand that the ideals of Lockean philosophy must yield to objective reality when objective reality rears its ugly head.

All societies are defined by their philosophies, and their philosophies are, in effect, shared delusions. When placed in conflict, objective reality highlights the flaws in those philosophies, and makes them obvious. If the society will not recognize the flaws and take pragmatic steps to counter their effects, that society will most probably be on the losing side of the conflict. AFTER the conflict that society can once again resume its suspended belief, or it can continue on in some changed form. Americans dropped firebombs on German cities and firebombs and nuclear weapons on Japanese cities, killing tens of thousands of innocent children. Then we helped rebuild Japan and Germany into economic powerhouses – powerhouses that far better protect the rights of their citizens than the old societies did.

The point of the whole rights discussion has been one of pragmatism vs. absolutism. Islam is an absolutist religion. So is communism/socialism. The American belief in individual rights tends very hard towards absolutism, but it has been flexible and pragmatic enough to survive the Civil War and two World Wars without deforming too far. Western culture is being attacked from within and without by absolutists who accuse it of falseness because of the fact that we have acted against the absolute requirements of our stated creed. Unless we believe as a society that what we fight for are ideals – things worth believing in – and not self-evident, absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental ultimates, then we run the risk of losing the conflict because we won’t make the pragmatic concessions necessary to survive.

UPDATE: Right as Usual comments.

Or: Finally! The Uberpost!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXn5-r8mj-s?t=28s?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0&w=640&h=480]

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love, true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

That was part of the “young man’s speech” delivered by the character “Hub” – played by Robert Duvall – in the film Secondhand Lions. Those are good words. There’s wisdom there. Here are some more good words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Thus the United States of America were born – as no other nation had ever before been born – with a declaration that government exists to serve the rights of the individual, not for the individual to serve the power of the State; and that failure to perform that singular function is sufficient grounds for the overthrow of the government in default.

“L’Etat c’est moi” (I am the state), once said Louis XIV. “The PEOPLE are the State,” said Thomas Jefferson. A few decades later Louis XVI found out, once his countrymen came to believe, that Jefferson was right. (Of course, the French then handed the scepter over to Napoleon, but, after all, they were French!)

The day I started this blog I posted my essay What is a ‘Right’? and it has spawned a considerable amount of conversation and commentary here and at other blogs over the last three and a half years. On this site alone there have been at least a dozen associated posts, six of which are linked on the left sidebar. The comments to the most recent installment, Contracts and Absolutes from a few months ago, illustrate that the topic is still not exhausted.

Prepare to be exhausted! (That was for you, Alger! ;-D)

In What is a ‘Right’?, I stated:

A ‘right’ is what the majority of a society believes it is.

I was taken to task for that position pretty early on. In that six-part exchange with math professor Dr. Danny Cline, we thrashed the topic pretty thoroughly, but not, apparently, thoroughly enough. So, let me see if I can express my position so clearly now as to remove any ambiguity or misunderstanding, and relate this to the current world situation so that you can see why I believe it is important for others to accept my argument.

In my discussion with Dr. Cline he proposed that the rights of man are akin to mathematical axioms; that those rights exist in the realm of logic like the the concepts of pi or Pythagoras’ Theorem, and only wait to be discovered. I allowed that he might be correct, but that it takes a certain type of person to do the discovering. There are very few people who think about things like fundamental rights or mathematical axioms. Those who think about ideas like rights are called philosophers, and philosophers (influential ones, anyway) are rare, and rarely in agreement. Like economists, if you lined up all the philosophers who ever existed, they wouldn’t reach a conclusion.

This is not to say that their ideas all have equal merit.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As one commenter noted, that phrase is a slightly modified version of “life, liberty, and property” – a concept philosopher John Locke expressed in his essay Two Treatises of Government. Among other things in that work, written between 1680 and 1690, Locke refutes the long-held philosophy of the “Divine Right of Kings.” Given the fact that Locke’s father lived – and fought – during the English Civil War, a war in which a king was deposed and beheaded for being abysmally bad at his job, it isn’t surprising that Locke was able to logically justify such an act by his countrymen. However, in that same work he also came up – through logic – with a right to property which included ones own life and liberty:

Man being born, as has been proved, with a title to perfect freedom and uncontrolled enjoyment of all the rights and privileges of the law of Nature, equally with any other man, or number of men in the world, hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself, in crimes where the heinousness of the fact, in his opinion, requires it. (Book II, Chapter Seven, “Of Political or Civil Society,” section 87)

I have often quoted Ayn Rand, and her declaration:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

Rand’s “one fundamental right” merely restates Locke’s, for “a man’s right to his own life” requires his liberty and property, but note the difference between Locke’s position and Rand’s. Locke argues that in a state of nature Man has the right to do all the things he describes – defending his property (life, liberty, estate) even unto inflicting death upon another, but Rand argues that a “right” is specifically the codification of proper action in a “social context.” In other words, rights establish proper behavior between individuals in a society.

Rand’s work and Locke’s before it stand in contrast to centuries of thought by other philosophers who didn’t discover the axiom of the individual right that Locke did, and both Rand and Locke were and are opposed by philosophers contemporary to them and contemporary to us, such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger.

The core of the discussion to date has involved three primary questions:

A) Are there “absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights” that exist regardless of whether a society recognizes (much less protects) them;

B) do those rights belong to all people, everywhere, at all times, simply because they are human – and;

C) are those rights “self-evident?”

My answer is: A) Yes; B) No; and C) Self evident to whom?

Yes, I realize that position A) contradicts my initial “what a society believes it is” statement, but bear with me. I believe in Rand’s “one fundamental right,” and have so stated in earlier posts. The source of that right I have stated before:

Reason.

Or Nature. Yaweh. Christ. Vishnu, Mother Gaia, Barney the Dinosaur. I don’t know, nor do I care overly much, but reason works for me.

I believe that right is “real” because I believe that – given the chance – average specimens of humanity will conclude through reason that they are of value (to themselves if no one else), and that their physical selves and the product of their labor belongs to them and not another.

It’s in what comes after that “one fundamental right” that we begin to run into problems.

Let’s proceed backwards. Are the “Rights of Man” self-evident? Then:

1. List them. All.

2. Illustrate which are axioms and which are corollaries of those axioms.

3. Explain why every society in history has violated all or at least the overwhelming majority of these rights, if they’re absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate, and self-evident.

4. Explain what a society that honored and protected these rights would look like.

And, finally,

5. Explain why such a society does not now exist and never has.

I think everybody will fail at item #1. I made that point ealier, too:

“[I]t would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up; because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation; and it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.” – James Irdell, at the North Carolina ratifying convention

He’s right. Everybody can come up with their own list. Professor Saul Cornell, Director of Ohio State University’s “Second Amendment Research Center” seems to believe there’s a “right to be free from the fear of gun violence.” I believe there is no such thing. If there was, there’d be a right to be free of the fear of all other kinds of violence as well. (Tranquilizers for everyone?)

C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General of the United States believes that everyone has a right to health care. That’s nice. It explains where the tranquilizers are going to come from. But who provides it? Who pays for it? And who decides what level of “health care” each individual is entitled to?

Olivia Shelltrack is a resident of Black Jack, Missouri whose family was recently prevented from occupying the single-family home she and the father of two of her three children rented because the couple is not married. Ms. Shelltrack believes “People should have a right to live where they want to live.” The majority of the town council believes otherwise. (I want to live here.)

California State Senator Sheila Kuehl believes

“There is only one constitutional right in the United States which is absolute and that is your right to believe anything you want.”

As Tom McClintock points out in the linked article, that right is the only right a slave has. Interesting that a politician would espouse that one as the only absolute right.

Cardinal Francis Arinze believes “one of the fundamental human rights: (is) that we should be respected, our religious beliefs respected, and our founder Jesus Christ respected.” But I don’t believe that, either. I’ve said before, I’m in general agreement with “MaxedOut Mama:”

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It’s worth it.

It’s a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else’s rights, because if you don’t there is no one to defend yours.

Do you see the problem?

On these topics where we are in disagreement, how do you decide who is “right”? Whose cherished rights do you abrogate, and whose do you defend? Who gets to judge? I mean, if they’re absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate, and self-evident?

Our Founders decided that they needed to enshrine certain rights they believed fundamental into the establishing legal document for our nation. The Declaration of Independence provided the moral underpinnings for the nation, the Constitution provided the legal ones. James Madison, fully aware of the problem noted by James Irdell, tried to protect other, unenumerated fundamental rights by including the Ninth Amendment, but his effort predictably failed as that amendment has been likened to “an inkblot” by no less a figure than a previous Supreme Court nominee.

Jefferson did declare that “all men are created equal,” and were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” yet the Constitution of the United States as written and ratified allowed for the alienation of liberty, life, and property. It even codified slavery. In short, the “unalienable rights” of man have been alienated pretty much without thought, without much argument, and from the beginning of this nation. So, it has been asked, was Jefferson wrong? That depends on your perspective. If you understand that the Declaration was an expression of philosophy, not a statement of fact, then no, he wasn’t wrong.

Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

It’s always been a question of what we believe. Ayn Rand, from her 1974 speech Philosophy, Who Needs It? given to the graduating class of West Point:

As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears….

Societies are defined by their philosophies, regardless of where that philosophy comes from or even how well-defined and coherent that philosophy may be. As I pointed to in An Illustrative Example, author Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel demonstrated that the philosophy of the Pacific tribe of the Moriori – one of peace, restraint, cooperation, and negotiation – served them well for many years as they lived on an island with little material wealth and difficult living conditions. However, when they were exposed to the Maori culture – one of territoriality, violence, and conquest – their philosophy failed them utterly. Had they protested against the violation of their “absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights,” it would have availed them nothing, because to the Maori the Moriori were “others,” and not due the consideration of equals. This has been the template for human behavior since before recorded history.

The American philosophy has been described (but not defined) here before, from the introduction to David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America:

We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our Republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”

Paradoxical, yes, but this nation was the first modern nation established with a mandate to protect the rights of its individual citizens. However flawed in practice, it’s the ideas that matter:

Western concepts of equality cannot truly be described as just another culture competing with others. Western thought is not a mere tradition but rather the outcome of a special political philosophy. It is an artificial construct that derives rules of behavior from reason, as distinct from traditional societies. – Amnon Rubinstein, The New York Sun, May 1, 2006 via Empire of Dirt

“Traditional societies” that is, that throughout history have “just growed,” like Topsy, developing their cultures haphazardly – strictly from the competing influences of environment, religion, exceptional individuals, and interaction with other cultures. Unlike those other cultures, Western society in general and the American culture in specific is based on “a special political philosophy” indeed: one of individual rights. One that dates back to the Greeks, at least.

This is the problem I want to illustrate with a belief in absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights. Remember Rand:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.

This definition works perfectly inside a social context. It worked for the Moriori. It worked for the Maori. But when those two societies clashed, the Moriori were wiped out. The Maori were not of their “social context,” and to the Maori, the Moriori had no rights. The Moriori had no experience with physical conflict, and were unable to defend themselves. In accordance with their philosophy they tried appeasement and negotiation, and instead received slaughter and enslavement.

We like to pride ourselves that American society is different, superior, more “true” than all other preceding societies. After all, what other polity has accomplished what we’ve accomplished in the mere two centuries we’ve existed on the planet? We enjoy an unprecedented standard of living (even our poor people are fat!) Americans invented powered flight. We broke the sound barrier. We went to the moon! And who has a higher moral hill to stand atop? Twice in the last century we’ve ended Europe’s bloody wars. We stopped the expansion of facist, imperialist, and communist forces, defeated their sponsor governments utterly, and have more than once reconstructed former enemy nations into peaceful, productive democracies. As then-Secretary of State Colin Powell stated so eloquently:

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we’ve done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home… to live our own lives in peace.

But to do that, we’ve sometimes put aside some of our beliefs in the face of hard reality, only to take them up again once the crisis was over.

All societies change, and what changes first is their commonly held beliefs. Robert Heinlein wrote once:

Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.

Ours is not immune. In 2004 I wrote “While Evils are Sufferable” wherein I said:

The “Right,” in the overwhelming majority, believes that America, the United States of, is the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. We’re the Sword of Justice, defenders of the oppressed from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, from sea to shining sea (so long as it’s in our National Interest to be.) As long as this belief represents the dominant paradigm, that is the way our nation will act, in the main. We are human, of course. We’re not perfect. We will make mistakes, but as I wrote in That Sumbitch Ain’t Been BORN!, those mistakes are just that. They are not evidence of our evil Imperialist nature, just mistakes. The “Left,” quite simply, thinks we’ve left the tracks if we were ever on them to begin with. To them, we’re oppressive, racist, imperialistic warmongers out to take what isn’t ours and distribute it unfairly among the white males. After all, they have centuries of European exploitive colonization to point to, don’t they? The Greens think we need to give up industry so that we can “save the planet.” They don’t hate America, they hate humanity. Of course, the Anarchists see both sides as delusional and dangerous. They believe that the Free Market is the answer to it all, and that we need to give up this nationalistic fantasy crap and start dealing with objective reality.

As if objective reality would appeal to people who voluntarily share common delusions.

Appealing or not, objective reality is again raising its ugly head, and we must wake up to it if we wish to survive. Not only “survive as a society,” but survive individually.

Locke declared that man in a state of nature…

…hath by nature a power not only to preserve his property – that is, his life, liberty, and estate, against the injuries and attempts of other men, but to judge of and punish the breaches of that law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves, even with death itself….

The “state of nature” is the ultimate objective reality. In it, people will do whatever is necessary to survive, or they don’t survive. In point of fact, throughout history – even today – people have not only defended their lives, liberty and property, they have taken life, liberty, and property from others not of their society. And they have done so secure in the knowledge that their philosophy tells them that it’s the right thing to do. This is true of the The Brow-Ridged Hairy People That Live Among the Distant Mountains, the Egyptians, the Inca, the Maori, the British Empire, and the United States of America. It’s called warfare, and it’s the use of lethal force against people outside ones own society. Rand explained that:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.

That’s a critical definition. If a society truly believes that:

…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

then that society cannot wage war. It cannot even defend itself – because to take human life, to destroy property, even to take prisoners of war is anathema to such a society, for it would be in violation of the fundamental rights of the victims of such action. (See: the Moriori. Or the Amish.)

This creates a cognitive bind, then, unless you rationalize that the rights you believe in are valid for your society, but not necessarily for those outside it. Those members that violate the sanctions on freedom of action within the society are treated differently from those outside the society that do the same. Those within the society are handled by the legal system, and are subject to capture, judicial review, and punishment under law, whether that’s issuance of an “Anti-Social Behavior Order” in London, or a death by stoning in Tehran. Those outside of a society who act against that society may be ignored, or may risk retaliatory sanctions up to and including open warfare, depending on the situation. (See: Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, nuclear weapons.)

In every successful society the majority must share a common philosophy and believe that philosophy is superior to all others. It must, or that society will change. The philosophy of any society can be one of aggressive evangelism, or quiet comfort, or anywhere in between, but successful societies are marked by one key characteristic: confidence.

Confidence that (your society) would still be around next year, that it was worthwhile planting crops now, so they could be harvested next season. Confidence that soldiers wouldn’t suddenly appear on the horizon and destroy your farm. Confidence that an apple seed planted in your backyard will provide fruit for your grandchildren. That if you paint a fresco, the wall its on will still be standing in a century. That if you write a book, the language you use will still be understood half a millennia in the future. And that if you hauled stone for the great cathedral which had been building since before your father was born, and which your baby son might live to see completed if, the good Lord willing, he lived to be an old man; your efforts would be valued by subsequent generations stretching forward toward some unimaginably distant futurity.

And above all, the self-confidence that you are part of something grander than yourself, something with roots in the past, and a glorious future of achievement ahead of it.

But when a society faces the fact that its philosophical foundation does not match objective reality, it is inevitable that there will be a loss of confidence and a societal change. James Bowman has written a book on the loss of confidence in Western culture, called Honor: A History. In it, he describes how the Western concept of honor has been slowly destroyed since the turn of the previous century, beginning with the aftermath of World War I – the war in which Western culture lost its innocence in the face of objective reality, much like a teenager discovers that his parents don’t really know everything and therefore must know nothing. It’s an excellent book, and I strongly recommend it, but by way of illustration I will again quote English Literature Professor Jean Duchesne of Condorcet College in Paris:

“What is a little disconcerting for the French is an American president who seems to be principled. The idea that politics should be based on principles is unimaginable because principles lead to ideology, and ideology is dangerous.”

If this is not an example of a society with no confidence, I don’t know what is.

Many people have commented on the loss of Western confidence. Peggy Noonan in her recent column, A Separate Peace:

I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it’s a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with “right track” and “wrong track” but missing the number of people who think the answer to “How are things going in America?” is “Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination.”

Mark Steyn in his piece, It’s the Demography, Stupid:

That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence. As a famous Arnold Toynbee quote puts it: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder”–as can be seen throughout much of “the Western world” right now. The progressive agenda–lavish social welfare, abortion, secularism, multiculturalism–is collectively the real suicide bomb.

James Lileks:

Mind you, it’s not the actual news that bothers me as much as the reaction to it; the reactions speak to something amiss in the heart of the West, a failure of nerve, a fatal lack of faith in the civilization we’re entrusted to defend.

These are just a few samples. When the normally Pollyannish Noonan and Lileks see a “fatal lack of faith,” you know there’s something severely amiss.

It is my contention that the loss of faith in Western civilization is the direct result of two things: the secularization of Western civilization, and a corresponding realization that there are no absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights. Or, more specifically, the cognitive dissonance resulting from the refusal to accept this as objective fact.

Western civilization is based on the concept of God-given individual rights, but reality refutes their existence. War cannot exist if such a philosophy is true, yet war exists. People die. Their liberty is stripped from them. Their property is stolen or destroyed. No one is punished for the violation of these rights. If a society abandons religion (as much of Western civilization has done) then we cannot count on God to punish the violators, and they get away with their crimes against us, (See: Josef Mengele, Slobodan Milosevic, and most probably Saddam Hussein) yet we’ve been breastfed on the idea that our rights are absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, and ultimate – not to mention, self-evident.

World War I soured the West on the concept of “honor.” World War II soured the West on the idea of a “war to end all wars” – and it proved conclusively that man’s inhumanity to man was still alive, well, and unchanged except in sheer capacity since the time of Genghis Khan. The Korean War suggested strongly that war was nothing but a waste of life, and Vietnam hammered that suggestion home.

Critical Mastiff starkly illustrated the philosophical dichotomy in his post, The Enervated Man of the West:

The difference with the West is that we value life so much that we are willing to kill people to protect it. This requires a sterner mind than does simple nonviolence; it is not trivial to develop a philosophy in which you can willingly kill others at the same time as you hold life sacred, indeed, in service to that sanctity.

A word on sanctity. It necessarily implies that human life is sacred everywhere, at all times, regardless of prevailing social mores or laws. This carries with it the obligation to protect human life everywhere, to the best of our practical ability, and regardless of opposing social mores.

—

(I)t is difficult to reconcile the sanctity of life with the need to kill people in its defense. It is even more difficult for a decent person to kill another, himself (as opposed to supporting a champion who kills in his stead). And, most of all, it is most difficult to do so when it places yourself and your loved ones at risk. In short, we are dealing with an intertwining of philosohpical dissonance, misplaced mercy, and above all else a deep, pervasive fear.

The political Left has embraced that fear. If you examine it closely, it has wrapped itself in a philosophy that attempts to extend all of the West’s “rights of man” to the entire world – up to and including those who are actively seeking our destruction, and the Left holds itself as morally superior for doing so. Attempting to intercept terrorist communications is “illegal domestic wiretapping” – a violation of the right to privacy. Media outlets showing acknowledged Islamist propaganda is exercise of the right of free speech, but suppression of images from the 9/11 attacks – specifically, the aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center, or its victims jumping to their deaths – is not censorship. The humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib is described as a “human rights violation,” as is the detainment of prisoners at Guantanimo without trial. For the Left, the war between the West and radical Islamists should not be handled as a war – it should be handled as a police matter – as a society would handle internal violators. Our enemies shouldn’t be killed, they should be, at worst, captured and counseled. Our enemies are not at fault, WE are, because we are hypocrites that don’t live up to our professed belief in absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights. If we just lived up to our professed beliefs, the rest of the world would not hate us. Yet to believe this, the Left must ignore objective reality. It acts, as the Moriori acted, to negotiate and appease, because that’s what its philosophy demands – and the results would be identical.

Rusticus at Solarvoid illustrates that the Left is exercising a philosophy other than Locke’s:

The prevailing philosophy of the left has many names and ideas: collectivism, identity politics, minority rights, the Nanny State, but what it all boils down to is that group rights always trump individual rights. The individual is always subsumed into the group.

This is at complete odds with Lockean philosophy. And the United States is Lockean at the core. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are written contracts implementing John Locke’s philosophies on government and self-rule.

Our rights are not as important as their rights, in short.

To some extent the political Right suffers from a similar cognitive dissonance. Critical Mastiff suggests that we have a philosophy that reconciles “the sanctity of life with the need to kill people in its defense,” but in point of fact we do not, at least not one that goes beyond Rand’s one fundamental right – the right to ones own life. We have the right to kill others because our own lives are of value. We extend that value to others, and justify the killing of those who do not respect that value as defensive, as protective, and not as aggression. We kill some so that others can be free. It’s a rationalisation that pacifists disagree with:

But in short, we believe that our good triumphs over their evil. The prevailing philosophy is expressed well by Robert Heinlein:

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate–and quickly.

This piece is written from an atheist perspective in which the concept of God-given rights is plainly rejected. Reverend Donald Sensing wrote a recent piece entitled Can Atheism be Justified? in which he asserts:

Let me say that again so you know I am intentional: If atheists are to take their own beliefs to their logical end, they mist(sic) agree that they have no right to promulgate their belief. They have no right to challenge me about my religion. They have no right to speak up in my community, no right to live in my community, indeed, no right even to life itself. They have no rights at all, in fact.

If atheists are true to their own creed, they must admit that the entire concept of human rights crumbles to dust according to that same creed.

I think that I just spent 5,000+ words saying pretty much that rights aren’t objectively real – with the one glaring exception of Rand’s “one fundamental right” – the right to ones own life. He continues:

If persons are not “endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” (in the words of a famous Enlightenment rationalist), then “rights” is nothing but a flatus vocis. The concept of rights then really means nothing but “who wins.” So by their lights, atheists are able to speak out (in America, anyway, not in Saudi Arabia) and attempt to persuade others only because the rest of us let them. But why should we let them? Why don’t we religious people simply persecute atheists out of existence?

Because most current Christian and Judaic philosophy prohibits it, just as some current Christian and Judaic philosophy rejects warfare. It was not always so. It does not logically follow that it will forever remain so. (See: Phelps, Fred.)

So, regarding rationality for any system of beliefs, how does atheism have a superior claim, except in the minds of its adherents? Any “rational”system of law or morals that atheists may devise may be rebutted by an equally rational system that countermands it.

Well, I as an atheist, don’t claim that atheism is “superior,” merely different. But I would also point out that there is no single Christian, Judaic, or Islamic philosophy, either. Every faith-based system of law or morals that has been devised has been rebutted by equally faithful adherents to a different sect. Atheism is just another one, albeit with one less God. Thus, his argument seems moot. I am curious however. If everyone is indeed endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, how does Rev. Sensing reconcile the universal sanctity of life with the need to kill in its defense? Some Christian sects other than his reject the idea and embrace pacifism. (I assume he does not.) Why are they wrong?

I titled this (extremely long) essay The United Federation of Planets. Why? Because until all of humanity (as one of Rev. Sensing’s commenters put it) comes “together at the table as a family,” we will have conflict between societies. Those conflicts will illuminate the flaws in our particular philosophies, and cause those societies to change. Joe Huffman recently quoted Samuel P. Huntington from his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order:

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.

The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the US Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them that obligation to extend that culture throughout the world.

I don’t think that the West is all that evangelical, it’s just that freedom and prosperity are damned attractive to those without it. However, freedom and prosperity are destructive to organized religion in general, and fundamentalist religion in particular – Islam perhaps more than most. But the ideas of Western civilization in general, and the American philosophy in specific have proven themselves superior. Dinesh D’Souza expounded on the superiority of the American philosophy in his essay What’s So Great About America?:

In America your destiny is not prescribed; it is constructed. Your life is like a blank sheet of paper and you are the artist. This notion of being the architect of your own destiny is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America. Young people especially find the prospect of authoring their own lives irresistible. The immigrant discovers that America permits him to break free of the constraints that have held him captive, so that the future becomes a landscape of his own choosing.

If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is “the pursuit of happiness.” As writer V. S. Naipaul notes, “much is contained” in that simple phrase: “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation, perfectibility, and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known [around the world] to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

In an old post over at Knowledge is Power contributor Claire wrote something appropriate to this post:

We need to reacquaint ourselves with what is good and right and pure and unique about The Great Experiment that is America. We need to return to the roots of belief in the basic goodness of Man from which our approach to governance sprang. We need to give ourselves permission to be proud of all that we have accomplished in our mere 228 years and believe that we, indeed, still have the Right Stuff to continue to do credit to our forefathers, and to ourselves. We need to give ourselves permission to protect ourselves because what we have created and what we have done is worth protecting. And what we will do will be principled, and decent and right.

If we do that, then perhaps the rest of Western civilization might reacquaint itself with it, too:

When soldiers from any other army, even our allies, entered a town, the people hid in the cellars. When Americans came in, even into German towns, it meant smiles, chocolate bars and C-rations. — Stephen Ambrose

Bill Whittle discusses in the first chapter to his next book the need for philosophers to be able to tell the difference between the map (theory) and shoreline (reality). And he’s right. Philosophers have had that particular problem since they asked the first question “Who am I?”, and the second, “Why am I here?”

However, human beings do not function on reality alone. It’s crucial that the maps be accurate; running aground where the map says “deep channels” can be fatal to any society. It’s also crucial that the people aboard any particular philosophy also be able to look at a dusty little fishing village and see the potential for a shining city upon a hill – because if they can’t see it, not even its foundations will ever get built.

Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good; that honor, courage, and virtue mean everything; that power and money, money and power mean nothing; that good always triumphs over evil; and I want you to remember this, that love, true love never dies. You remember that, boy. You remember that. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. You see, a man should believe in those things, because those are the things worth believing in.

UPDATE: There have been some blogposts associated with this essay. Publicola still disagrees with me, but I think we’re much closer in worldview than he imagines. Perhaps even after 6719 words I still wasn’t clear enough. Otter of Scaggsville may have been convinced by my argument, but he’s struggling with the idea. I struggled with it, too. That’s why it took me the better part of five months to hammer it out. And, of course, someone had to comment on the length of the essay. (Still no word from Alger, though. 😉

UPDATE II: Joe Huffman comments. I respond.

UPDATE III: Critical Mastiff comments from the perspective of Judaic Law.

UPDATE IV: Added the video clip.

A couple of days ago, fellow gun- and rights-blogger Publicola posted The Minority Retort, a long-delayed piece on the topic of the Rights of Man. Pertinent excerpt:

In most things Kevin & I are in agreement. However there are a few differences.
I refer you to the following posts:

What is a “Right”?
It’s Not All Faith
Rights, Revisited
History and Moral Philosophy

In these you’ll find the main difference between Kevin & myself: He’s a Contractualist whereas I’m an Absolutist. I think we both agree as to some of the problems society currently faces about Rights: namely that we are pretty damn apethetic in general about the most important ones.

Where we differ is in the origin of those Rights.

Publicola goes on to make his argument:

A Contractualist believes that Rights are strictly a construct of the social contract. In other words Rights are dependent on society agreeing that they are in fact Rights.

An Absolutist believes that Rights are inherent & exist independently of the social contract. Rights are an inherent thing not given to men by men, but bestowed upon us by Nature or Nature’s God (depending upon your belief system).

Please, read the whole post if you haven’t already.

Let me see if I can illustrate where I see logical flaws in Publicola’s arguments.

I’ll accept – to a point – Publicola’s definition of me as a “Contractualist.” I have, however, made the point that I do believe in at least one right that exists outside the social contract. In my six-part exchange with Dr. Danny Cline on this very same topic, I said this:

Yes, I did state that “A ‘right’ is what the majority of a society believes it is,” and I’ll come back to that, but I am in agreement with Ayn Rand in her statement:

A ‘right’ is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.

That right is, in my opinion, REAL, but it can be and has been trampled, folded, torn, spindled, mutilated, and – worst of all – unrealized, for the overwhelming majority of Man’s existence upon the Earth.

The source of this right?

Reason.

Or Nature. Yaweh. Christ. Vishnu, Mother Gaia, Barney the Dinosaur. I don’t know, nor do I care overly much, but reason works for me.

I believe that right is “real” because I believe that – given the chance – average specimens of humanity will conclude through reason that they are of value (to themselves if no one else), and that their physical selves and the product of their labor belongs to them and not another. However, it is difficult to build a society based on this belief alone. (The AnarchoCaptialists think it can – and should – be done, but admit that they don’t know how.)

I went on to argue that this right, the right to one’s own life, is understood only if there is sufficient freedom both of time and thought to allow reflection on the topic. It’s “self-evident” only if you have the time and the freedom to consider the question.

For millennia, that was not the case. People lived ferally at the whim of nature, then in strict hierarchies and at the whim of their social superiors. The fruit of their production was not theirs. It belonged to clan and tribe and then king. Their lives were not their own.

Publicola argues that history does not negate the fact that the right existed even when it was unrecognized. I argue that, if a thing isn’t recognized, isn’t praticed, isn’t defended, it is for all intents and purposes non-existant. Publicola argues that rights are inherent and independent from society, but then states:

If a stone falls out of the sky & kills you that’s just part of the game. It sucks, & in a bad way but those are the breaks. The rock was not acting with malice when it landed on you. It was behaving as rocks behave in gravity.

If a person walks up to you & for no justifiable reason drops a rock on you & kills you, then we have action with intent. We also have a good use of why Rights were communicated.

People. Be it a person acting singly or a group acting as a government, people are the reason it was necessary to define & articulate & communicate what exactly a “Right” is. They are, in essence, boundaries to prevent action from or by other people that would halt or slow you down in seeking or trying to achieve something that is necessary & proper for you to do.

Rights, according to Merriam Webster, and agreed to by Publicola are:

something to which one has a just claim: as a: the power or privilege to which one is justly entitled b (1) : the interest that one has in a piece of property — often used in plural (2) plural : the property interest possessed under law or custom and agreement in an intangible thing especially of a literary and artistic nature; something that one may properly claim as due

I’ve used that argument myself. But note the one commonality. Rights are, by Publicola’s definition and mine only claimable against other people – that is, your society. You cannot claim the ocean violated your right to life if you drown in it because of an accident. Your family can, however, file claim in court if someone else was responsible for your being in the ocean in deadly peril.

That is, if you live in a society that recognizes your right to life.

If you don’t, then you’re SOL. Your “just claim” would just fall flat.

I quoted MaxedOutMama yesterday:

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It’s worth it.

It’s a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else’s rights, because if you don’t there is no one to defend yours.

Rights exist when people are willing to defend them. Otherwise, they’re just some damned fool’s crackpot ideas.

I’ve discussed this before, too. I believe in “a man’s right to his own life,” and that “all other rights are its consequences or corollaries.” However, “all other rights” gets damned fuzzy damned fast. Certain Founders – among whom included James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights – believed that enumerating some of the fundamental rights in the Constitution would lead to the denegration of other, equally important rights. I quoted James Irdell from the North Carolina ratifying convention:

[I]t would not only be useless, but dangerous, to enumerate a number of rights which are not intended to be given up; because it would be implying, in the strongest manner, that every right not included in the exception might be impaired by the government without usurpation; and it would be impossible to enumerate every one. Let any one make what collection or enumeration of rights he pleases, I will immediately mention twenty or thirty more rights not contained in it.

(From Professor Randy Barnett’s Restoring the Lost Constitution.) Irdell argues that the rights of humanity are, essentially, innumerable. Every single human being out there can come up with a “right” that they firmly believe in. Madison even tried to forstall this danger by writing the Ninth Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

But the Ninth Amendment has become a meaningless inkblot, according to Robert Bork.

So who decides?

The society you live in, by general agreement.

That’s what defines a society.

And what defines the success of a society is whether the rights, privileges, and responsibilities they agree to result in the survival of that society.

I think you can see that the current French belief in the right to, as Nina Burleigh described it, “cheap medicine, generous welfare, (a) short workweek and plentiful child care” just isn’t going to pay off for them in the long run. Nor is England’s belief in the right to universal health care.

A society is defined by the rights, privileges, and responsibilities agreed to by the politically active majority (which may, in fact, be a tiny minority of the overall population.) When that politically active majority changes, so does the society. We no longer practice slavery. We no longer practice codified, legally sanctioned discrimination against blacks. A very vocal minority is currently attempting to change our society and manipulate what the current majority sees as our rights. Things change.

But the Absolutists say “NO!” They believe there are absolute, positive, unquestionable, fundamental, ultimate rights.

I know only one. An individual’s right to his own life. There are consequences and corollaries of that one right, but people will disagree on what those are, and some will even disagree with that one. Religious fundamentalists may argue, for example, that an individual’s life belongs to his diety. I believe that’s the position the Jihadists take. Their lives are not their own.

And this is why societies clash – fundamentally incompatible belief systems. A disagreement on what are and what aren’t rights. From David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed:

We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our Republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles . . . but the principles conserved are liberal, and some, indeed, are radical.”

We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable.

I think we’re witnessing a destabilization of our dynamic society. Of societies all over the world, in fact. What the Absolutists here proclaim to be Absolute Rights are, in fact, pretty radical compared to what history has shown us, and this is illustrated by MaxedOutMama’s quote:

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked.

What other society has ever been founded on a principle that embraces the radical idea that cherished principles and beliefs should be subject to question and even mockery? Yet the right of freedom of speech is one of those absolutes, is it not?

And if not, why not?

Dr. Cline replied to Part II early last week. I’ve been putting this off, quite honestly, because I’m on vacation and I’m still recovering from the sprained frontal lobe that Part II cost me last time. Once again, I’m posting Dr. Cline’s reply in its entirety, to be followed later, but predated, by my response which will appear below this one. Give me a day or so to complete it.

Without further ado, I give you Dr. Cline:

First, let me say, regarding your suspicion that we are nearing agreement that I am not quite so optimistic. I think we have already reached agreement on some points, or nearly so, but I suspect that what we are really doing in the greater part of our discussion is uncovering a fundamental point of disagreement. Maybe you’re right, though.

I’m glad you brought up the difference between physics and mathematics. I don’t have the same disdain for physicists that you attribute to mathematicians in your post, but it is useful to examine the differences. Mathematics operates by proof, by moving logically from premises to whatever conclusions can be derived from the premises. A statement such as the “twin prime conjecture” (which states that there are infinitely many distinct pairs of primes whose difference is two) is therefore suspected to be true in mathematics, but it has not yet been proven. Until recently, Fermat’s famous “Last Theorem” suffered through its existence in the same limbo realm. (Although, at the time, it should have more properly been called Fermat’s last conjecture.) The greatest problems of mathematics have traditionally spent long years in this state.

Physics on the other hand, operates by disproof (or, as Karl Popper called it, by falsification), as does all of science. Nothing is ever proven (in the positive sense) in science. Science operates by making claims that can then be tested against empirical observations. No number of observations can grant us a satisfactory verification of any scientific claim. What we must settle for in science, then, is to be able to test our claims and eliminate those that do not agree with our observations. Once I discovered Popper’s works on the philosophy of science, I was amazed that people had not discovered this sooner. (They didn’t, and many still deny it – there are still yet those people, even some scientists, who claim that somehow a finite number of observations can conclusively verify a scientific theory.)

This distinction gives us a nice way to look at the internal workings of thought itself. Both math and science operate according to the rules of logic. Further, both math and science implicitly accept certain additional premises or axioms as true. In mathematics these additional premises are, stated simply, “logic is true” and “arithmetic is true” among others. Until Popper’s work, in science there were several, (again among them that “logic is true”) but notable among them was the claim that scientific induction worked – i.e. that we are eventually supported in a universal claim by examining a finite number of particular cases. After Popper, even if this premise is no longer necessary to us, we still have other premises that we accept as true without any attempt at proof in science. Notable among these is the supposition that our observations reflect some independent, actually existing reality. Now we can avoid this question by claiming that our observations do not actually represent anything else at all. Indeed, no less a luminary of physics than Stephen Hawking has stated more or less this very position, that science has no independent meaning – we are just playing a game (one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “language games”) when we are doing science. If this is all science is for us, I’d argue it is not of much value. Fortunately, this view is incorrect.

Primary among the questions we ask regarding physics, mathematics, and even metaphysical questions such as questions of morality are questions about our justification. How and when (and why) do we say we are justified in a determination of fact in one of these areas? The answer that skeptics (at least certain skeptics, those we might call “hard skeptics”) reach to this question is that no answer is justified in any area. Indeed, this is a difficult position to argue against in one sense, as knowledge in virtually any subject matter is open to doubt. However, this sort of skepticism is very unproductive. Further, as stated above, it is self-contradictory, as it announces in absolute certainty that nothing can be known for certain. Other skeptics might only express doubts of this level of severity for certain knowledge, and hold other knowledge as absolute truth (or at least very resistant to doubt). This was the method of the logical positivists (whom I mentioned last time) who said only answers to questions of science are justified (or even meaningful). Unfortunately, this statement is itself an answer to a non-scientific question and the belief of these more limited skeptics also is self-contradictory. A skeptical view that might not contradict itself could be “all or nearly all knowledge is open to some doubt.” However, this view says almost nothing and still leaves us with the open question – where is doubt valid, and in these cases, how much doubt is reasonable?

The question of how much doubt is reasonable applies in questions of morality as well as in science or knowledge in general. I have suggested in my previous letters that we can know certain rules of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) such as “murder is wrong” or whatever. However, my main point is rather not that we know specific rules of morality with absolute certainty – at least not without a great deal of work (as even rules as seemingly obvious as “murder is wrong” may contain subtleties as, indeed, “murder is wrong” seems to in regard to the difference between murder and other forms of killing). Rather my main point was that we know, with whatever level of certainty possible in knowledge, that there are such rules. We must accept that such rules exist before we can find them.

Your note that rights are not completely interchangeable with morals is at least possibly true. Rights are a way of stating certain “negative moral rules,” i.e. what things are not morally acceptable for one person to do to another. There may well be (and many would no doubt say that there are) other “positive moral rules,” rules of obligation rather than rules of freedom – things we must do for others if we wish to live morally. Others would disagree with the claim that there are positive obligations that others place upon us if we wish to live a moral life. Ayn Rand I think would be foremost among the claimants that all we really owe each other is our absence and thus might claim that all there is to morality are questions of individual rights. However, even she might grant that there are certain rules of obligation in morality, though if so, she would no doubt say our obligations are to ourselves.

Your claim of the tale of the Maori and the Moriori as evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality seems false to me. Again, morals are not inviolable. Saying that the fact that not everyone obeys whatever moral rules there might be is evidence for their absence seems to be expecting a little too much of morality. I might wish morality was self-enforcing, but that will not make it so. Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices. Your claim that condemnation of them is inappropriate as their behavior was moral according to their society is simply wrong. Any such claim negates entirely the validity of the rights of the individual, subjecting them to a test by opinion poll or ballot. My claim is that the primary position is that of the individual (a thing with both physical form and, more importantly, a mind) and the individual ONLY. Your earlier claim (following Ayn Rand) was that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, ‘moral.'” I’m not quite so sure that the source of morality is survival only, but whether or not I agree with that, the survival that Rand was alluding to was NOT survival of society, but rather the survival of the individual. The necessary condition upon an entity to have rights seems to me to be either the presence of a mind or, at the very least (and probably not nearly enough), some sort of physical existence. A society, the thing to which you claim that at least some rights (and apparently from your argument, those that trump all others) are given, has neither of these qualities. In the end, if the primary position as holder of rights is granted to the society (or the nation or the collective or the volk) the end of all individual rights is the result.

Your examination of things regarding how well they “work,” whether science or morals, again misses the fundamental point of difference between the two. Morality is not science. Moral questions are not posed in a way as to be falsifiable; there are no scientific tests we can perform to determine whether a moral claim fails to hold or not. This points us to the flaw in your Heinlein quote:

“A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual’s instinct to survive — and nowhere else! — and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.

“We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race — we are even developing an exact ethic for extra-human relations. But all moral problems can be illustrated by one misquotation: ‘Greater love hath no man than a mother cat dying to defend her kittens.’ Once you understand the problem facing that cat and how she solved it, you will then be ready to examine yourself and learn how high up the moral ladder you are capable of climbing.”

You rightly recognize that a “scientifically verifiable theory of morals” is nonsense. However, your supposition that Heinlein’s talk about such a “science of morality” was the kind of thing I was referring to is wrong. The realm of morality is different from the realm of science. Moral rules are a priori, in the sense that they are unprovable, and indeed untestable.

The claim Heinlein makes for his future society is unsupportable for two reasons. First, science does not work through verification, but through falsification. Second, moral claims are not falsifiable. This does not make them false, merely not science. Karl Popper understood this. His critiques of certain ideas (notably the later form of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis) were based on their proponents’ claims that these ideas were science. They were not falsifiable, and thus, they were not science. Popper recognized, however, that all knowledge is not necessarily scientific. Some knowledge must exist before science in order to make science a method of divining truth. If we claim that science is all there is of knowledge, we are making the logical positivist fallacy. If only statements of science are true, or meaningful, or valuable, then the claim itself that science is all there is fails the same test for truth, or meaning, or value. Examining everything with regards to whether it “works” or not puts us in the same quandary. If, as I suspect, you mean that something “works” when it has so far passed every scientific test devised by us, then the statement that only things that “work” are true (or meaningful, or valuable) is just as untestable and so just as untrue (or meaningless or worthless). Even Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his logical positivist days, recognized this. He said:

6.53 The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other — he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy — but it would be the only strictly correct method.

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way; he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

In 6.54, he recognizes the self-contradictory nature of his own claims, which presumably led to him eventually (somehow not immediately!) abandoning them and taking up (amazingly) other self-contradictory claims. Of course, if we throw away our ladder after we have climbed up it, and knock out the legs of the platform we are standing on, we must wonder what is left holding us up? If the only things we recognize as valid are questions of science and answers found through scientific means, we must in the end accept that there is no justification for science itself. Note that I am not saying we must accept that there is no justification for science, but that science’s justification must be found outside of science. If science’s justification lies outside of science, we might well expect other justifications (such as moral ones) to lie outside of science.

In the end, the existence of a society must be of (distant) secondary importance to the existence of the individual. The individual does not exist to serve society; the individual exists for his or her own purposes. Society, inasmuch as it exists at all, exists only to further the purposes of the individual. If we grant, as you clearly do in your statement:

There are MANY moralities, one for each society extant, of which the objective question is “do they work?” Do they support the continued existence of their societies?

that the existence of society is the primary purpose of morality and even existence, we should not be surprised when individual rights are denied, even by those agreeing with us. In any case, whether we regard the individual and its existence as primary (as I do) or the society and its existence as primary (as you seem to), we may (and probably will) have to fight for the continued practice of our rights, but their protection and their existence are not the same things. If we grant society the top spot in existence, we lose the justification we have in our fight.

You finally say:

It is not enough to believe that there is a single objective standard of morality, based on the corollaries of the fundamental right to one’s own life. It is necessary to convince others of the “rightness” of that standard and those corollaries, and to inspire them to support and defend that standard against attack by others who hold different moralities as “right.”

which I agree with. It is not enough to simply hold that there is a single true standard of morality. However, though it is not sufficient, it IS necessary. If we accept that there are several moralities, each true in its own right and perfectly good for a certain society, be it the New Guinean cannibals, the Maori, the Moriori, or the American Revolutionaries, we have removed our justification for choosing one over another, other than claiming “it’s good because it’s ours,” perfectly unsatisfying reasoning to me. If we insist that how well they “work” (assuming that we have a clear definition of what we mean for a morality to work, which I don’t think we do) is the only means allowing us a preference between them, we again find that we can only say that moral questions are answered “it’s good because it happened” or perhaps “it’s good because the society was successful” or other such after the fact answers. As far as convincing others of the rightness of our standard (and before that, convincing others that there are standards in the first place), I agree that it is an important goal. In fact, convincing you that there is such a true standard (which we must accept before we can say what the standard is that is “good” or “right” or “something that works” or whatever) is my main purpose in writing all this.

Expect the response to be long and involved. I certainly do.

UPDATE, 4/16, 3:35PM: Part IV is up.

(Continued from Part III)

In regards to reaching an agreement, I think we’re going to shortly reach a point where, unless Dr. Cline changes his mind, we’re going to have to agree to disagree.

If I grasp Dr. Cline’s position correctly, he believes that rights – human rights, individual rights, fundamental rights, however you want to describe them – are like mathematical axioms, where an axiom is defined as:

A fundamental element; a basic principle; something assumed without proof as being self-evident or generally accepted, especially when used as a basis for an argument

He believes further that the corollaries to these axiomatic rights can be discovered a priori from the application of logic to a knowledge of these rights, and an an objective system of morality that is valid for all people, everywhere, at all times can be constructed from these rights.

To that I say, and not as flippantly as it sounds, “Welcome to the United Federation of Planets.” I mean no insult. Please bear with me as I explain the problems I see in Dr. Cline’s philosophy.

Dr. Cline and I have agreed, I think, to at least one fundamental right. That right was described by philosopher Ayn Rand as “A man’s right to his own life.” Rand also stated that all other rights “are its consequences and corollaries.” He and I both agree that this fundamental right is the basic postulate, the self-evident truth, upon which a system of morality should be built. But it’s necessary here to reiterate what I stated in Part II: we have to understand the difference between rights and morality, because the two are NOT equivalent.

Dr. Cline wrote:

Your note that rights are not completely interchangeable with morals is at least possibly true.

No, it is absolutely true, as I tried to explain before. Morals are the rules of behavior of a society, what is and what is not acceptable from its population. This is a critical thing to understand: morality can exist independent of any concept of individual rights, and has for the overwhelming majority of the history of man. Rights may exist as logical postulates, but they have had little to no effect upon human history until very, very recently.

A society is defined by its morality. A society is described as:

A group of humans broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

They usually live in the same general geographic area, and they share a common belief system that defines the limits of acceptable behavior – their morality.

Rights may exist independent of society, but morality cannot. Morality is the set of rules by which people interact, whether those people belong to a band of hunter-gatherers, a tribe of farmers, a chiefdom, or a State. Their morality tells them how to deal with each other, and (hopefully) how to deal with “outsiders” – people with different moralities. The purpose behind having a set of rules of behavior is, at its base, survival. An individual, alone in the wild, has no need for morality. His right to his own life is absolute – and dependent entirely on his ability to survive in the wild. Only when confronted by other people does a question of morality arise – how to best survive as part of a group. Groups of people have a survival advantage over individuals, but membership in a group requires acceptance of the rules of that group – and those rules are learned. They’re first learned through direct experience, and as the society matures, they are learned through instruction.

This brings me back again to Heinlein, and the “History and Moral Philosophy” speech where Col. Dubois states that “man has no moral instinct.” This is the first major problem I have with Dr. Cline’s philosophy. In What is a “Right” Revisited, Part II I stated “I think Dr. Cline believes that man has an innate moral instinct,” to which he replied in his next piece:

Well, I’m not going to argue much against this statement. I do indeed believe that man has innate moral knowledge (I wouldn’t say an instinct, but that’s a pretty minor problem). I should say rather that I believe that I have innate moral knowledge. I’ve never been very convinced of the applicability of knowledge about one’s self to knowledge about others. So instead let’s say that I believe that I have moral knowledge and I suspect that some others do as well.

Yet, in that same piece I stated:

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

He and the other Founders may have held those “truths to be self-evident,” but for centuries if not millenia before they were neither self-evident nor true. In fact, even today those “self-evident” rights are not acknowledged in much if not most of the world.

In Dr. Cline’s reply to that he says:

This statement is only half-correct, and in that half you don’t go far enough. In the millennia before, the statements were true – but they were not then, nor were they in Jefferson’s day, nor are they now self-evident. These truths, like all a priori knowledge are not things that we can prove, but are things that we must discover. It is not easy to uncover reality or truth – not in mathematics, not in morality, and not in science.

I see a problem here. Dr. Cline’s philosophy is based on a concept of rights that exist and are self-evident, as axioms requiring no proof, yet he concurs with me that Jefferson’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” rights weren’t self-evident, then or now, though he holds them as true (and in retrospect, I agree with him – largely – on both accounts.) As I said before:

Dr. Cline believes that he has a personal “innate moral knowledge” and he “suspect(s) that others do as well,” but by stating that I think he admits that such knowledge may not be and probably is not universal. That “innate moral knowledge” is akin to Newton’s ability to develop the Calculus by his pure logic, or Einstein’s conception of the Theory of Relativity through his. These are talents that are rare in humans, and when such people apply themselves to the questions of morality, we call them “philosophers” – people like Rand, Kant, Popper, and Aristotle, and also Marx, Neitzche, and Kierkegaard. It is important to understand that when humanity is the topic, “irrational” implies much more than “the square-root of 2.”

Dr. Cline objected to the tale of the Maori and Moriori, saying:

Your claim of the tale of the Maori and the Moriori as evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality seems false to me. Again, morals are not inviolable. Saying that the fact that not everyone obeys whatever moral rules there might be is evidence for their absence seems to be expecting a little too much of morality. I might wish morality was self-enforcing, but that will not make it so. Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices. Your claim that condemnation of them is inappropriate as their behavior was moral according to their society is simply wrong. Any such claim negates entirely the validity of the rights of the individual, subjecting them to a test by opinion poll or ballot. My claim is that the primary position is that of the individual (a thing with both physical form and, more importantly, a mind) and the individual ONLY. Your earlier claim (following Ayn Rand) was that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival, and whatever works to ensure survival is, for that society, ‘moral.'” I’m not quite so sure that the source of morality is survival only, but whether or not I agree with that, the survival that Rand was alluding to was NOT survival of society, but rather the survival of the individual.

First, the story of the Maori and Moriori wasn’t presented primarily as “evidence of a lack of an objective standard of morality.” It was presented as an illustration that there are many moralities, one for each society extant, each based on the experiences learned by the members of that society, and passed on to other members. Dr. Cline states that “Anyone can choose to live how he wants; the Maori (at least those involved) made their choices.” If I’m reading this correctly, he’s stating that the Maori “made their choices” to not accept his “objective standard of morality.”

But how could they choose it? What opportunity did they have? Is this objective moral standard self-evident, or isn’t it?

The point I was trying to illustrate was that they had no concept of his objective moral standard, no concept even of individual rights, at least outside their own culture. The Moriori were “others,” and as such the Maori attack was moral in accordance with Maori custom. Any attempt to convince the Maori that their behavior was immoral would have been met with a blank stare if not outright hostility. They had no concept of any moral standard other than the one they lived under. They didn’t “make their choices” – they had no choices, because man has no moral instinct. They believed and acted on what their culture told them was moral. An agrarian tribal warrior society doesn’t support much in the way of a philosopher class, and their morality worked until they met Europeans who could overpower them.

As an aside, I don’t attribute my assertion that “the whole purpose of morals is to ensure survival” to Rand. For one, I ammended that statement, and second it’s not her idea, to my knowledge, it’s Heinlein’s if not some other, earlier philosopher. What I said was this:

There are at least two bases for morality: survival, and individual rights. For the overwhelming majority of the existence of Man, the morality of any society has been based strictly on survival – anything that worked to ensure survival was, by definition, “moral.”

—

Man has existed for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, and our social structures have struggled slowly and painfully up from the band, to the tribe, to the chiefdom, to the state over that long time period. Throughout all of it we have done so without an ideal system of morality, just as we did without mathematics, agriculture, metallurgy, chemistry, or physics. We’ve been too busy just surviving. A theory of individual rights is much like mathematics – something of great value that requires time and resources to explore and develop.

It’s not a matter of the Maori (or any other culture) choosing to reject Dr. Cline’s objective moral standard. Such a standard is still largely undefined today. And one reason it is still undefined is because, aside from Rand’s “one fundamental right,” very few rights of the individual are axiomatic. For example, the right to arms isn’t an axiom, it’s a corollary to “a man’s right to his own life.” It’s the means by which he can defend his life and property. (“IF we know that P implies Q AND we know that P is true THEN we know that Q is true.”) It is the work of philosophers to do the logic necessary to “prove” the corollaries, and I don’t believe that there were too many Maori Jeffersons, or Poppers, but probably a couple of Neitzches.

Morality is, then, by Dr. Cline’s definition, a “science.” It’s based on hypotheses formed from observation, and it’s tested constantly in the laboratory of life. If a particular morality is ever disproved, as the Moriori’s was, the society generally fails and is replaced by a new society, often but not always made up of members of the previous society who have learned that their morality was inadequate the hard way, no matter how well it worked previously. The failure may be catastrophic, as it was for the Moriori and uncounted thousands before and after them, or it may be almost unnoticeable culturally, as it has been for America over its history, as our morality has slowly and incrementally morphed from seventeenth-century agrarian state to twenty-first century information-age state.

But all this takes opportunity and effort, and we’ve only had that opportunity and effort available to us for a short while historically. We’re still working on it, and Dr. Cline alludes to this when he states:

I have suggested in my previous letters that we can know certain rules of morality (of what is right and what is wrong) such as “murder is wrong” or whatever. However, my main point is rather not that we know specific rules of morality with absolute certainty – at least not without a great deal of work (as even rules as seemingly obvious as “murder is wrong” may contain subtleties as, indeed, “murder is wrong” seems to in regard to the difference between murder and other forms of killing). Rather my main point was that we know, with whatever level of certainty possible in knowledge, that there are such rules. We must accept that such rules exist before we can find them.

But accepting that such rules exist is not the same as knowing what they are. Figuring out what they are is the job of philosophers, and they have yet to reach anything resembling a consensus after at least 5,000 years of considering the questions.

Dr. Cline argues that rights, at least the fundamental ones, are axioms. Acted on with logic, we can determine their corollaries. From these we can build an objective morality.

I agree, mostly, with the primary argument – fundamental rights are axiomatic; unverifiable and (hopefully) self-evident, given the opportunity to consider them. Once you’ve overcome the problems of day-to-day survival, you might actually have the time to consider them, if you are of a philosophical (and socially benign) bent. Most people are not though, and through most of human history, the problems of day-to-day survival denied the opportunity anyway.

I agree that some corollaries can be discovered a priori through the application of logic, but as with the greatest problems in mathematics, the greatest problems of those corollaries will take long years to wrestle with, and we may never get a “right” answer. But when it comes to morality, we’re going to remain stuck in the realm of science: Apply the theorem, test in the laboratory of life, and keep testing until it fails. Learn from the failure, work up a new theorem, and try again. Heinlein’s “scientifically verifiable theory of morals” (as he meant it) is nonsense, as science doesn’t prove a scientific theorem the way that a mathematician “proves” a mathematical theorem.

Science just tests to destruction.

Dr. Cline states:

In the end, the existence of a society must be of (distant) secondary importance to the existence of the individual. The individual does not exist to serve society; the individual exists for his or her own purposes. Society, inasmuch as it exists at all, exists only to further the purposes of the individual. If we grant… that the existence of society is the primary purpose of morality and even existence, we should not be surprised when individual rights are denied, even by those agreeing with us. In any case, whether we regard the individual and its existence as primary (as I do) or the society and its existence as primary (as you seem to), we may (and probably will) have to fight for the continued practice of our rights, but their protection and their existence are not the same things. If we grant society the top spot in existence, we lose the justification we have in our fight.

I believe Dr. Cline has misinterpreted what I’ve said on this point, and I have to correct him here. What I have illustrated is that, throughout history, the individual has existed to serve society, but – and historically very recently – that has started to change. Rand said it, and I quoted it before:

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day.

The idea that society exists to to further the purposes of the individual,

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

is very, very new. Our own government, in the case of Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez as recently as 1963 stated:

…for while the Constitution protects against invasions of individual rights, it is not a suicide pact.

Survival, it seems, is still the primary basis of our morality, not individual rights.

I was not endorsing the idea that “man serves society,” but recognizing the fact that it has been that way for millennia. Dr. Cline judges these previous societies against his “objective moral standard” based on the rights of individuals and finds them wanting. I judge them against the question “did they work, and for how long?” because I understand that Dr. Cline’s “objective moral standard” has yet to be even mostly defined. It may exist, I think it does, but we haven’t discovered it all yet.

I repeat: No society currently exists based on that ideal single objective standard, and I honestly think it will be centuries – if ever- before one might. If we do, perhaps then we can build an anarcho-capitalist paradise where coercive governments no longer exist, and we can all live in harmony.

But I severely doubt it.

Even the United Federation of Planets had conflicts with other societies who didn’t share their morality. 😉

Until we do, rights will remain what the majority of a society believes and is willing to defend.

Edited to add: I hardly ever do this in these philosophy pieces, but I ran across a Mark Steyn column that said something I think is related to this discussion and illustrative of the point I’m trying to make about how the role of the individual in society is shifting:

The most vital economic resource is people, and that’s the one thing much of the Western world is running out of. The anti-globalists can demonise sovereign states and sovereign companies — the Dells and other multinationals — but we’re entering the age of the sovereign individual, and that will be a lot harder for the anti-glob mob to attack. By 2010, a smart energetic Chinaman or Indian will be able to write his own ticket anywhere he wants.

Read the whole piece, but that quote directly relates to my point that, more and more, society is beginning to serve the individual, and not the other way ’round.