Chapter 7 THE ETHICS UNDERLYING SOCIAL STRUCTURE * Some Ethical Concepts Defined * Philosophy Underlies Society * Foundation of Law * Voting * Majority Rule * Stateolatry * Miscellaneous Ethical Topics * Abortion * Honesty vs Dishonesty * Link Between the Individual and the Group * What is a slave? * Profound Ethical Concerns * Coerced Compassion * Effect of Social Complexity on Statism * Dual Ideologies * Hallmark of a Conservative * Compromise * Libertarian Foreign Policy Thoreau might have written only yesterday about our government today. What makes his commentary so timeless in its application is that he saw beneath the superficial manifestations of government to its underlying principles of operation. What is important is to define the state toward which the human community should be advancing. To set the parameters and the goals toward which the men and women of good will should strive; the general relationships that should exist betwen human beings. To produce a schematic for civilized life, a set of instructions. This is the intent of my writings on Ethics. * Some Ethical Concepts Defined term: genus: differentia: ethics human behavior interpersonal libertarianism political principle voluntary statism political principle coercive anarchy political structure voluntary government political structure coercive Ethics is the study of interpersonal human behavior. There are several such forms of behavior: sexual, economic, and political, to name a few. In each of these behaviors an interaction occurs between two or more people. In sexual behavior, for example, the interaction involves erotic stimulation. In economic behavior the interaction involves material wealth. And in political behavior the interaction involves human liberty. In each case there are two fundamental manners in which the interaction can transpire: coercively or voluntarily. In sex I would define these as rape vs consensual sex. In economics I would define them as theft vs trade. And in politics I would define them as statism vs libertarianism. Libertarianism is the statement of a political principle. As John Hospers described it: "a philosophy of personal liberty - the liberty of each person to live according to his own choices, provided that he does not attempt to coerce others and thus prevent them from living according to their choices. Libertarians hold this to be an inalienable right of man; thus, libertarianism represents a total commitment to the concept of individual rights." Libertarianism is a political philosophy, concerned with the appropriate use of force. It asks one question: Under what conditions is the use of force justified? And it gives one answer: only in response to the prior use of force. The opposite of libertarianism is statism, the principle that it is proper for the community (or a selected subgroup thereof) to compel the behavior of its individual members. Anarchy is a narrower term, contained within the context of libertarianism, and referring to the social institution by means of which the principle of libertarianism shall be implemented. Government is the social institution by means of which the principle of statism is implemented. In practice throughout history, the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of government has been that it is an institution comprised of the strongest gang of aggressors in a particular area at a particular time. Consider that when people live together in a society, that is, a group in which interactions can take place among all the members, there must be institutionalized a set of ethical standards of behavior designed to inhibit actions which would result in the violation of freedom. This is the ostensible (but NOT actual) purpose of a legal system. A society can have either libertarianism or statism as its standard of behavior. In accordance with the first alternative, the social institution (legal system) for implementing that standard of behavior will be an anarchy. On the other hand, if statism is the standard of behavior then a government will be the implementing institution. An anarchic society is not a Utopia in which the inititation of violence is impossible. Rather, it is a society which does not institutionalize the initiation of force and in which there are means for dealing with aggression justly when it does occur. The absence of government does not mean the absence of violence. It simply means the absence of an official, legal, institutionalized tool for its imposition. A statist society is one in which aggression is institutionalized. * Philosophy Underlies Society Philosophical principles are food for the mind in just the same sense as there is food for the body. It is not necessary that you eat poison to be sick - is suffices merely that you fail to eat the proper food. For example, you will suffer if you fail to eat vitamin C. In just the same way, an individual person - or a social organization - will suffer not only if it implements wicked philosophical principles, but also if it simply fails to implement proper philosophical principles. In the case of an individual, that failure can occur when a person takes actions based on his principles. To the extent that the principles do not correspond to reality, the actions he takes will fail to achieve beneficial values. Thus it is that a philosophical failure will have destructive consequences in reality. In the case of a society, the danger arises from the fact that there will always be individuals whose personal beliefs lead them to perform actions which violate rights. Many individuals would use their positions wickedly if they could. However, the institutional arrangments within which people perform their tasks determine whether or not such abuses can be carried out. If social institutions fail to accomodate this fact, the actions of those individuals will be detrimental to the society. Further, the deliberate institutionalization of rights-violating behavior (e.g., government) is akin to the dietary failure of actually eating poison. Thus it is that a philosophical failure will have destructive consequences in social reality. Society doesn't function because government intervenes occasionally to resolve disputes. Rather, the vast majority of people depend on continuing relationships wherein it's customary to keep your word, treat others with respect, and comply with mutually beneficial norms. These privately-developed norms are the glue which holds society together, by and large in spite of the interference of government. Here are examples of two different norms, each of which produces a completely different type of ethical behavior, depending on the acceptance or rejection of government interference in an interpersonal relationship: Consider a man and a woman who have lived together in a state of intimacy for 20 years. At the end of that time, they decide that the best thing for them to do would be to go their separate ways and each live independently of the other. So what happens? Each hires a lawyer, goes to court, and attempts to induce the government to use its coercive power against the other. This sort of divorce occurs so frequently that it is considered a natural process, always to be expected, even inevitable. But in fact there is nothing natural, expectable, or inevitable about this arrangement. It is simply the result of a mistaken cultural norm which is easily corrected by a fundamental alteration in the individuals' perspective on government. Consider a man and a woman who have lived together in a state of intimacy for 20 years. At the end of that time, they decide that the best thing for them to do would be to go their separate ways and each live independently of the other. In this case, it would be unthinkable for them to go through the above described legal process. Why unthinkable? Well, don't you see, they are not husband and wife, but father and daughter (or mother and son). You see, people CAN live peaceful, productive, and cooperative lives - once they cease to regard government as an acceptable arbiter of their interpersonal relationships. The Hutterite sect of Christianity, which has existed for over 400 years, has never experienced an act of murder by one of its members. Many people consider philosophy to be very largely an affair of acquiring and then displaying certain clever techniques of logico-linguistic proficiency. Or they seem to want a philosophy resembling the multiplication table or the periodic table of the elements. They want it to be such that all philosophy is mechanistically determinate. So that whenever faced with an alternative they can simply consult this "look-up" table and thereby be relieved of the necessity of intellectual effort. They want an answer to every question - even before it has been asked. Maybe what they really don't want is the recognition of personal responsibility. They want a philosophy that takes this burden off their shoulders. The perspective of personal moral responsibility for one's actions is being abandoned - it has nearly been culturally lost - and the result is what you see in everyday's newspaper headlines: mayhem and brutality. * Foundation of Law A natural law is a necessity imposed on an entity by the entity's nature. It is a cause which mandates an effect: appropriate behavior. This cause is inherent in the entity's specific nature. The law arises from the interaction of the facts of the entity's nature with the other facts of reality. A natural law is practical - it must always "work" - because it relates to things as they really are. While it is generally recognized that man's physical and even his mental nature are subject to the rule of natural law, it is just as generally assumed that the area of ethics is completely outside the scope of natural law. This assumption is held tacitly, rather than being identifed and defended, simply because it CAN'T be rationally defended. It is quite foolish to assert that man is a being with a specific nature and therefore subject to the rule of principles derived from that nature in all areas except his dealings with other men. Do men cease to have a specific nature when they come into relationship with other men? Of course not! Natural law does indeed apply to human relationships, and it is just as objective, universal, and inescapable in this area as in any other. The proof of this is that actions have consequences - in the area of human relations as surely as in the area of human medicine. No matter how cleverly a man schemes, he will suffer if he insists on acting in a manner which contradicts the nature of human existence. The consequences may not be immediate, and they may not be readily apparent, but they are inescapable. The law of supply and demand, and all other market laws, are really natural laws, derived from the nature and needs of man. The fact that market laws are natural laws explains why a free market works and a controlled-market doesn't: natural law is always practical - it always "works." Thus man-made law should be identified rather than invented or decreed, as is the case with government legislation. Law is necessary for the survival and development of individual liberty, but decreed legislation is its nemesis. Arbitrary legislation destroys the very certainty that we seek from natural law: People can never be certain that the legislation in force today will be in force tomorrow. As a result, they are prevented not only from freely deciding how to behave but from foreseeing the legal effects of their daily behavior. Legislation also disrupts established conventions that have hitherto been voluntarily accepted and kept. Even the possibility of nullifying these conventions tends to induce people to fail to rely on any existing conventions or to keep any accepted agreements, no matter how they may have come into existence. Man's only duty is to respect others' rights and man's only right over others is to enforce that duty. A free society exists when people recognize, as a social, collective rule, that individuals have the right to own property and to use their bodies and minds as each sees fit. Their recognition of this right consists in their accepting a duty not to interfere with these free actions of individuals. This social rule has the enormous advantage of being the only collective rule compatible with individual freedom and autonomy. This is the only rational way in which society can cope with the problem posed by nonagreement about "The Good." Every bit of human progress has happened for a single, simple reason: the elevation of the status of the individual. Each time civilization has stumbled into another age that is a little better, a bit more enlightened, than the ones before it, it's because people respected other people as individuals. When they haven't, those have been the times of slipping backward. One of America's greatest shortcomings is that almost everything nowadays is geared against the individual and in favor of the big institutions - big corporations, big unions, big banking, big government. So not only does an individual have trouble getting ahead and staying there, he often has difficulty merely in surviving. And whenever bad things happen - inflation, devaluation, depression, shortages, higher taxes, even wars - it isn't so much the big institutions which get hurt, it's the individual, all the time. More and more, individuals are being deprived of the power of decision, and being allowed only the power of choice among the things government permits. The more you depend on government, the more limited those choices become. What must be reinstated is the opportunity for the individual to make decisions that count. Small wonder that many people in big cities seem so despairing: nothing in view indicates any care for what the individual thinks or desires. Hitler: "The individual must finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole... that above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual." * Voting Here are the best arguments I could find - both for and against voting: Thoreau (Civil Disobedience): "All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked, I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting FOR THE RIGHT is DOING nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but litttle virtue in the actions of masses of men." "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Voting: You advocated an undertaking you didn't fully understand. You were a participant in an activity you failed to supervise. You did not check the activities of a man whom you knew from experience to be a liar, and you permitted that man to screw around with the most dangerous technology in human history. I'd say you shirked your responsibility. In America, voting is an all-or-nothing proposition: you either win or you lose. If you can get 51% of the vote, you get 100% of the power. No matter whether an office is filled by an 80% voter turnout or by a 15% voter turnout, the new office holder has the full power of his office. If you are on the losing side - the minority - you get nothing. The alternative presented to the voter is absolutely exclusive: the selection of one TOTALLY precludes the other. There is a conflict in voting which is not found in the market. Market choices conflict only in the sense that buying a given good leaves you LESS money (not NO money) to purchase other goods. While you can buy some pretzels and some pizza, you can't vote for some Bush and some Clinton. In a market, the individual is never placed in the position of being a dissenting (and powerless) minority. Voting is just a method of choosing oppressors. Every time you step into a voting booth you license a potential killer or thief. From the perspective of either political party, there is no area of human activity that is outside the sphere of government encroachment. Some advocates of voting, when faced with the accusation that they are perpetrating this evil, will counter with the assertion that your means of control over the situation is to exercise your right to vote, and that if you don't do so, you have no right to complain about the situation ("If you don't vote, don't complain!" is what they say). Consider the nature of the demand they are laying on you: your alternative is either to participate in the wickedness (by voting) or refuse to participate and thus be condemned to submit in silent acquiescence to being victimized by the wickedness. In fact, only those who do NOT vote have a legitimate moral right to complain! They are the only ones who give no sanction or support to their persecutors. Imagine a neighborhood in which two bullies dominate and intimidate everyone. But they're democratic-minded bullies: they allow all (well, almost all) the neighbors to vote every four years in an election to determine which of the bullies will be empowered to possess a big stick and for the next four years to rule the neighborhood, beating and robbing all the residents. Now imagine that one poor persecuted resident complains about being beaten and robbed, and in response is told: "Well, if you don't like bully D then next time express your preference for bully R - but unless you choose one of these bullies, you have no right to complain about being beaten and robbed." Such a demand for willing self-immolation is an act of inexcuseable viciousness - worse even than the beating and robbing! The very act of voting is an attempt on the part of voters to delegate to another person a power that they could not justly possess themselves. Your participation is your concession that there should indeed BE elected officials with the power of government coercion. Government is based on coercion, but individuals should not have the authority to coerce others, and therefore they should not put themselves in a position to delegate such authority to third parties, which is the essence of voting. There is plenty of mass-media crowing about the "high voter turnout" (about 55% - that's high?), as an "affirmation of the system," and a "strong endorsement of democracy." Nobody mentions the message of the 45% abstention. It is often said that refusal to vote means that one is left with no voice at all, but that implies that having a voice in the proceedings is proper and desirable. Authoritarian activity is one which forces, directly or indirectly, someone else to do something. But voting in itself does not do this. Only voting for authoritarian candidates (including the lesser of evils, which is still an evil) or for authoritarian policies is authoritarianism. Voting AGAINST tax increases, measures to increase government controls, and voting FOR libertarians truly committed to total liberty cannot be authoritarian. Voting for freedom or against coercion does not delegate power to another; just the opposite. Participation in electoral politics serves to legitimize the whole political process and the existence of government. If people did not vote, the democratic theory of government would lose its legitimacy and politicians would have to justify their rule on the basis of something other than the alleged consent of the governed. This, hopefully, would make the true nature of the State more obvious to the governed. And such a revelation might have the potential to motivate people to challenge, evade, or ignore government interference and coercion. If you consider voting to be acceptable, then you must consider it to be acceptable for the winning candidates to hold power in a coercive government. The ultimate political issue is that of the Individual vs. the State. But the voter, by virtue of his behavior, has already cast his lot with the state. Each candidate would use the State in a different way - but each would use the State. Obviously, this is a game which only the State can win. By playing the game, you demonstrate your conviction that the game is playable. Suppose you are in airplane which gets hijacked and the hijacker says, "I will kill you all unless you vote that you want to be set free." Unfortunately, over 50% of the passengers are anarchists who are opposed to voting, so they refuse to vote, and all the passengers are killed. In this case, by refusing to vote, they indirectly contribute to the death of the minority that would have survived if they had been the majority. Not voting in this case is authoritarian. Not voting constitutes an implicit declaration to the winner that "I don't care what the outcome is." We are all living in a society hijacked by the rulers. If we can vote for less coercion but refuse, we implicitly endorse coercion. The fact is, when we are hijacked, as we are, or under terrorist rule or subject to any authoritarians, we are involved, and a refusal to voice a yea or nay can itself further authoritarian rule. [This is a fundamentally collectivist argument - it assumes that the victim is in some way responsible for the behavior of the criminal.] John Galt (Part3, Chapter8): "It's the attempt of your betters to beat you on YOUR terms that has allowed your kind to get away with it for centuries. Which one of us would succeed, if I were to compete with you for control over your musclemen? .... I'd perish and what you'd win would be what you've always won in the past: a postponement, one more stay of execution, for another year - or month - bought at the price of whatever hope and effort might still be squeezed out of the best of the human remnants left around you, including me." From Ayn Rand's notes for ATLAS SHRUGGED: By accepting his decisions, which she knows to be wrong, then by helping him to carry out bad ideas well, she only helps him to run the railroad badly and thus contradicts and defeats her own purpose, which was to run it well. She postpones the natural consequences of his bad decisions and thus leaves him free and gives him the means to do more damage to the railroad by more bad decisions, and worse ones. A bad thing well done is more dangerous and disastrous than a bad thing badly done. For example: an efficient robbery is worse for the victim than an inefficient one. "Silence implies consent." Consent to what? Just what is it I consent to when I do not vote? To the policies of Bush? To the policies of Clinton? To the policies of Marrou? To the policies of all those whose principled disagreement with the electoral system precludes their participation in it? The process of implication contains a consequential relationship. For one thing to imply another thing, there must be a causal sequence between the two things. People who make the assertion "silence implies consent" never propose any chain of logical connection between the silence and the consent. Precisely how does consent arise from silence? How can dead men be said to consent to anything? If my silence does imply consent, then how far does that implication reach? If I am silent about one side of an argument, and also silent about the other and contradictory side of the argument, then what implication can be drawn concerning my consent to either side? Am I considered to consent to all things about which I am silent? Even those about which I am completely ignorant? To the fact that someone in Calcutta beats his wife? If I must express disapproval of all things to which I do not consent, for fear of reproach resulting from my silence about any of them, there would not be sufficient hours in the day for such a plethora of expressions as would be required to preserve my moral purity. Voting would make ME feel like a swim in the sewer. * Majority Rule In America, it is claimed, we have "majority rule." Just what do we have in fact? To find out, let us analyze a recent presidential election. I chose the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 because the winner of that election received the greatest plurality of votes of any recent (during the past half- century) election: Johnson received 61% of the votes cast. But was this landslide victory an expression of "majority rule"? I think not. Certainly Johnson can be said to represent a majority of the voters - 61% is, after all, almost two-thirds. But when you consider the total number of eligible voters you discover that Johnson represents only 37% of them (they didn't all choose to vote, you see). So Johnson represents only a bit over one-third of the voting-age population of the country. That can hardly be said to be a majority! But even this is not a fair assessment of the situation. Johnson was, after all, not merely president over those who chose to vote for him. And he was not merely president over those who were qualified to vote. He was president over EVERYBODY! And out of that "everybody" how many actually expressed a choice to have Johnson as their president? 22%. Yeah, only about one person in five chose Johnson. As I said, I deliberately picked this election as an example. Any other recent election shows even more strikingly that this so-called "majority" is a quite small fraction of the population. The notion of "majority rule" is hogwash! Shortly after the 1964 election I realized that the American electoral process contains a fundamental flaw. When you vote, the only choice you have is to vote FOR one candidate or FOR another candidate. There is no way you can vote AGAINST any candidate. There is no "NO" choice on the ballot, only "YES" choices. This realization was one of the things that turned me off to the idea of politics. You have no doubt heard (many times) of a disgruntled voter going to the polls to choose "the lesser of two evils." I realized that the lesser of two evils is still an evil, and to express a preference for that evil is to don the cloak of moral culpability for his subsequent behavior. I observed with interest a peculiar electoral quirk during the 1976 elections. The LP, after the expenditure of an enormous amount of time, energy and money, was able to get "None of the above" placed on the ballot in Nevada. Thus there were three options available to the Nevada electorate when they went into the polling booth to elect their congressman: the Democrat, the Republican, and None of the Above. The outcome of this election was very interesting: the Democrat received 23% of the votes, the Republican received 29%, and NOTA received a whopping 47%. Can you guess what happened? Very simple: the Republican went to Washington as the congressman from Nevada. As of 1990, NOTA is still on the ballot in Nevada, and the winner of every election is that PERSON who gains the greatest number of votes. Votes cast for NOTA are simply wasted. It is intrinsic to the American Constitution that there MUST be a government. The people CANNOT choose "No Government" - that is not provided for in the Constitution. Sure, the Declaration of Independence observes the right of the people to "alter or abolish" their government, but the Declaration of Independence is not a legal document. I found it fascinating to watch the first post-Soviet general elections in Russia. They had an explicit choice on their ballots: Yes or No for any (and all) particular candidates. Such a large number of the Communist candidates (who ran unopposed) received a preponderance of "No" votes that run-off elections were held a couple weeks later. Those "NO" votes were indeed counted - unlike the NOTA votes in Nevada. I found it fascinating also to watch the subsequent Hungarian elections, which were held with the stipulation that unless at least 51% of the voting population did participate, the elections would be invalid. The Hungarian government has at least a more acute sense of "majority" than does the American government. In a recent election for the Fremont County, Wyoming government, only 13% of the population voted, and yet the government selected by that tiny fraction does indeed rule Fremont County. Some "majority rule" that is!! American voter turnout as percent of voting age population, during national off-year elections: 1966 47.9 1970 47.9 1974 38.9 1978 45.9 1982 48.5 1986 46.0 1990 45.0 Since 1972, when 18-year-olds first went to the polls, their election participation has steadily declined. In 1990 less than 19% of the 18 to 20 age group voted. The majority is invariably wrong. Consider the fact that every major breakthrough in man's understanding of the world has always been greeted with indifference or opposition by the majority. When private individuals in 18th century England introduced the "barbaric" practice of innoculating against smallpox, the majority, including virtually the entire medical profession, was appalled. Advances are made by individuals or by small groups of cooperating people who OVERCOME majority opinion or indifference. The fact that the majority is invariably wrong has interesting implications for the concept of democracy - a system which means, in fact, State control of the individual and his property in accordance with the supposed wishes of the majority. In a word, where majority rules, progress stops. The goal of free men should not be majority rule at all but self-rule, a society in which not political action but individual action prevails. Political freedom for the individual has become a charming legend from the early years of the Republic when individual liberty - rather than the will of the majority - was actually considered the core of democracy. Nowadays, acceptance of the legitimacy of individual autonomy is a contradiction wholly intolerable to the democratic ideology. Under a democracy, when a man looks into a mirror he sees one ten-millionth of a tyrant, and one whole slave. Some of the devastating consequences of the Ambiguous Collective fallacy can be observed in the phrase "we are the government," where the useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the naked exploitative reality of political life. For if WE truly ARE the government, then ANYTHING a government does to an individual is not only just and not tyrannical; it is also voluntary on the part of the individual concerned. If the government has incurred a huge debt which must be paid by taxing one group on behalf of another, this reality of burden is conveniently obscured by blithely saying that "we owe it to ourselves." But WHO are the "we" and WHO the "ourselves"? These are two distinctly different groups of people. If the government throws a man into jail for dissident opinions, then he is only "doing it to himself" and therefore nothing improper has occurred. And so we must conclude that "we" are NOT the government; the government is NOT "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people. But even if it did, crime is still crime, no matter how many citizens agree to the oppression. There is nothing sacrosanct about the majority; the lynch mob, too, is the majority in its own domain. A black African guerilla, commenting on democracy: "Vote, what is a vote? I don't have a vote in Mozambique. They don't have the vote in Zambia or Zimbabwe or Angola or Tanzania. Nobody has the vote in Africa, except perhaps once in a man's life to elect a president-for-life and a one-party government. Vote? You can't eat a vote. You can't dress in a vote, or ride to work on it. For two thousand rand a month and a full belly you can have my vote." * Stateolatry The most firmly held myth is the one that no society can exist without government - and its corollary that every society must have a ruler. The myth of the necessity of the State is as decisive as belief in God was for the people of Medieval Society. This myth is held so firmly and fundamentally by many people that they are entirely unaware even that they hold it. For a good illustration of this syndrome see Heinlein's CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY, pg 180. Here you can see someone to whom government is so invisible that he describes human culture without reference to it. Everyone is so immersed in the context of statism that no one really knows the other alternative. Even though the Polish (or Hungarian, or Romanian... etc., etc.) governments might WANT to establish a free market, they simply do not know what it is. Most people do not realize they could even HAVE any control over their own economic situation. Because everything is so wrapped up in bureaucracy and law no one has any idea that government could be circumvented. So long as people cannot perceive alternatives for comparison they will never even become aware that they are oppressed. They will not only lack any impulse to rebel, they will lack even the power of grasping that the world could be other than what it is. It is as Orwell said it would be: "You will lose the ability to think certain ideas, and then you will be totally incapable of ever trying to act on those ideas." The only way out of this statist situation is for people someday to realize that governments are NOT necessary for civilization - that in fact governments are an impediment to civilization. When the day comes that enough people are disillusioned with government, government will simply cease to exist. It will go the way of Alchemy, Phrenology, the Flat Earth, and other similar errors that were eventually discarded as being useless. This is why I do not think anarchism to be utopian. Today it is only a dream, a dream that will not soon come true, but if the idea is preserved it will be used in the future. Consider this: all government is founded upon Lies. But a lie will not fit a fact. It will only fit another lie made for the purpose. Therefore the life of a lie, and of government, is simply a question of time. Nothing but truth is immortal. * Miscellaneous Ethical Topics * Abortion One of the major issues of the day is the argument about Abortion. By and large, this is merely a diatribe of emotional invective, containing very little in the way of factual analysis (see the remarks below, by George Bush). I want to engage not in a moral or ethical evaluation but merely in a factual presentation upon which can be based whatever evaluation you choose to draw from your own set of moral principles. Many arguments are based on the contention that a fetus is a human being, and is therefore possessed of the right to life. This is the "Human Rights" argument. There are six points of development at which a fetus can be claimed to acquire the status of "human being." Any argument from this premise must choose and justify one of these points: 1. Fertilization 2. Implantation in the uterine wall 3. Brain-wave activity 4. Quickening (when the woman becomes aware of the fetus' movement) 5. Viability (when the fetus can be withdrawn and survive) 6. Birth Some argue that whether or not the fetus is a human being, it is not a "person" i.e., is not possessed of the complex of psychological characteristics that distinguishes any one human being from all others - in short, that the fetus, although a human being, does not have a soul. Aquinas, rejecting the notion of a fertilized-egg = person equivalence observed that "the body alone is begotten by sexual procreation, and that after the formation of the body the soul is created and infused." Others argue that even if the fetus is a human being, it is a parasite and therefore does not possess human rights. This is the "Parasite" argument: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being's body? The fetus does not have any right to be fed and nourished, because such a right would make the woman its slave. The only means of refusing is to expel the fetus. What the woman is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted parasite within her body to be ejected from it. This argument is countered with the assertion that parasitism is a perfectly natural phenomenon (Mankind is itself a parasite upon the earth) and therefore parasites do indeed have rights - the fetus has as much right inside its mother as does man on mother earth. Both are in their natural habitat. There is also the "Supersession" argument - that the rights of the woman supersede any rights possessed by the fetus: Does not a woman have a primary right to her own life? The right to determine the circumstances of her own body? The "Contractual Obligation" argument: Conception and pregnancy are foreseeable consequences of even careful sex. By willfully causing a fetus to exist, parents implicitly recognize its need for support; it's a package deal. When parents mutually enable their sperm and ova to join, the parents are not enslaved - they have volunteered. And its rebuff, the "Choiceless" argument: If the woman is claimed to have volunteered for a contractual obligation, how is it that the fetus, which is an entity incapable of making choices, can be said to be a participant in that - or any - contract? And there is the "Infanticide" argument - the contention that a live, born child cannot in principle be distinguished from a viable late-term fetus: they both have an unconditional need for material support. Therefore, if abortion is acceptable, so also must be infanticide. (This can be extended to include euthanasia for seriously ill adults and dependent elderly people, as well as all those whose continued existence requires material support provided by other people.) When couples who both carry the mutation for Tay-Sachs disease decide to have children, they typically elect to have prenatal testing. If a fetus has the disease, they usually abort it rather than give birth to a child who would succumb within five years to a horribly slow, painful death. Because it is always so uniformly hideous in its progression, extremely few people believe a child afflicted with Tay-Sachs should be brought into the world. The view of the Religious Right, as expressed by George Bush (LA TIMES, 12/12/88): "Well, it (may) appear to be a double standard to some, but I, that's my position, and it's, we don't have the time to philosophically discuss it here, but... we're going to opt on the side of life, and that is, that is the, that really is the underlying part of this for me. You know, I mentioned, and with, really from the heart, this concept of going across the river to this little church and watching one of our children, adopted kid, be baptized. And that made for me, and it was very emotional for me. It helped me in reaching a very personal view of this question. And I don't know." Also to be considered are the inevitable practical results of anti-abortion laws as under such laws many abortionists become dangerous and disreputable practitioners resorted to by desperate people. As many as 60 million abortions are performed annually, at least 50% of them clandestinely in the 100 or so countries where the procedure is illegal. Unsafe abortions account for between 105 and 168 maternal deaths for every 100K births in the Thirld World countries. This constitutes between 25% and 40% of all maternal mortality. Every year, in six of the Latin American countries where the practice is illegal, about 2.8 million women have abortions and half a million are hospitalized for related complications. A study in Boston and Long Island showed that 66% of women having their first abortions are young, single Catholics opting for abortions rather than sinning repeatedly by using birth control. 70% of those who had a second abortion were Catholic. * Honesty vs Dishonesty There are times when a lie is not only ethically justifiable but is actually morally obligatory. "What?! What?!" I hear you croak. "Is this guy out of his mind?" Well, let me explain. Imagine that you set out to go downtown having in your left pocket $10 and in your right pocket $100. As you are trudging along the street a hoodlum snatches you into an alley, claps his revolver (a Quickfire Arms Corp. Saturday Night Special) up gainst the side of your pretty little head and wheezes softly into your ear: "Allright, Cutie, your money or your life!" So you, trembling in fear and terror, reach into the left pocket and produce the ten-spot. "Arrgh!! He gasps, wafting into your nostril the stench of cheap Sicilian wine, "Izzis alla dough ya got, kid?" I maintain that at this point your answer not only COULD morally be "yes," but that it actually SHOULD be "yes" and that if you answer "no" you are behaving in an immoral, self-destructive fashion. Under ordinary circumstances a lie is an attempt to initiate force against someone - that is, an attempt to separate him (without his consent) from some rightfully achieved value. In the context of my little story, the lie is not an initiation of force. Your money is not the hoodlum's rightfully achieved value, and you have NO ethical obligation toward him. Your only moral obligation is to extricate yourself from the situation in the least self- destructive manner possible. Thus we see that a lie can be a perfectly proper act to protect a value against an injustice; not a desire to gain a value by faking reality, but a fully contextual recognition of the relevant facts of reality. * Link Between the Individual and the Group Richard Adams, in his book WATERSHIP DOWN, made a profoundly important identification of a connection between the individual and the group - the connection that explains why people will do things in a group context that they would never do when acting as individuals: "The current that flows (among creatures who think of themselves primarily as part of a group and only secondarily, if at all, as individuals) to fuse them together and impel them into action without conscious thought or will." This is the psychological phenomenon that accounts for the clearly distinct difference between the behavior of "individual man" and that of "group man." Branden maintains that the fundamental moral "sin" is the failure to choose to think (see THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-ESTEEM, chapter 4). I would draw a parallel to this contention in the field of ethics and maintain that the fundamental ethical "sin" is the failure to choose to judge. I mean specifically failing to make judgments about the ethical propriety of your own behavior, and instead allowing yourself to become merely an instrument of someone else's will. Rand observed that the most contemptible man is the man without a purpose. But the most evil man is the man who allows his purpose to be determined by others. The most widespread (and most devastating in its effects) manifestation of this failure is the claim that "I was only doing my job." This I call the "Nuremberg Defense" as it was the most common defense offered by the Nazi war criminals during the Nuremberg trials. Whenever you hear this claim what you are hearing is an attempt to justify ethical viciousness on the grounds that the perpetrator has abandoned his own judgment and accepted the propriety of acting according to the judgment of someone else. The Nuremberg Defense tries to divorce choice from action and thus avoid the assignment of guilt. The man who makes the choice tries to absolve himself from guilt by claiming "but I didn't DO anything," and the man who performs the action tries to absolve himself from guilt by claiming "but I didn't make any choice." When each has thus eliminated guilt from his considerations, both together are capable of a completely unlimited scope of wicked behavior. This "default of judgment" phenomenon lies at the base of all government police agencies and all military organizations. This phenomenon made possible the Holocaust, and without it the Holocaust would not have been possible. Without it, the Hitlers of the world would each have to do his own murders personally, and would not be able to act through a social institution comprised of people trained to accept any judgment - any choice - governing their behavior. Any judgment, that is, except their own. The vast majority of the human race are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from infliciting pain, but in a society where viciousness is institutionalized they don't dare to assert themselves. One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally participates in iniquities which revolt both of them. "In fear of what others might report about you, you stoned the woman although your heart revolted at the act." Hitler: "I understood the infamous spiritual terror which this movement exerts, particularly on the bourgeoisie, which is neither morally nor mentally equal to such attacks; at a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down. This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty." But this process works only with "group man." It does not work at all with the individualist. The individualist is the person who has a higher allegiance to his own conscience than to the rules others set down for him. The individualist thinks and judges independently, valuing nothing higher than the sovereignty of his own intellect. He is not the sort of chaff that makes good fodder for the state. * What is a slave? I can see two fundamental distinguishing characteristics of a slave: 1. He must do whatever his master commands him to do. 2. He cannot do anything without having permission from his master. Keynes described aggregate demand management as "the one kind of compulsion of which the effect is to enlarge liberty." Edmund Burke wrote, "Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed." Rousseau, in The Social Contract: "Men must be forced to be free." If libertarianism were politically possible, there would be no need for the LP. The fact that society is constructed in such a manner that an ethics can be implemented through governmental coercion, precludes the implementation of a rational ethics. Contrary to the "gentlemen" quoted above, you cannot coerce people into freedom. Freedom is the absence of coercion. * Profound Ethical Concerns I have frequently heard people claim that certain issues are fraught with "profound ethical concerns." Issues such as research using fetal tissue, DNA manipulation, organ transplants, etc. Here is one of the rare instances wherein a proponent of such "profound ethical concerns" actually makes a sensible statement of the concerns he imagines: Gene therapy raises profound ethical concerns. For instance: 1. Should therapy be applied simply to improve one's offspring, not only to prevent an inherited disease? [He implies that the elimination of an evil, "an inherited disease," is perhaps acceptable, but the implementation of a positive good, "to improve one's offspring," is of questionable propriety. Why does he object to a good?] 2. Who would be empowered to decide? [Here he clearly implies that someone is to have the authority of "empowerment." Why must such an authority exist? Who, after all, is "empowered" to decide which people shall be permitted to wear shoes?] 3. Is society willing to risk introducing changes into the gene pool that may ultimately prove detrimental to the species? [In fact, Yes. Not only does the willingness exist, but the perpetuation of such detrimental genes is actually legally compelled by implementation of medical techniques that preserve the existence of severely retarded people.] 4. Do we have the right to tamper with human evolution? [Everyone who ever selects his/her spouse on the basis of "He would make a good father" or "She would make a good mother" is "tampering" with human evolution. Why does he object to this selectivity?] Veterinarians are particularly sensitive to the ethical problems of dealing with animals - love of animals, after all, was what brought most of them into the field. Vets point out that their job is not to prolong life but to reduce the suffering of as many animals as possible. Human medicine, they aver, is in many ways more heartless: "We're allowed to give suffering animals euthanasia, but physicians are required by law to keep their patients alive no matter what the cost." Sooner or later man will be going outside the solar system. Sooner or later we will meet types of intelligent life much higher than our own, yet in forms completely alien. And when that time comes, the treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved toward the other creatures of his own world - including himself! * Coerced Compassion Reflect on the vast majority of those who turn to police power to remedy distress. Every one of them will say they act purely because of their concern, their compassion, for those on the lower rung of life's ladder. Can they not trust their own compassion to express itself? Apparently not, for it seems, when they turn to government, they are insisting that they must be forced to do that which they claim they already want to do. An absurdity! People who want to control other people's lives never want to pay for the privilege. What they usually expect is to be paid for the "service" they impose upon their victims. What they never recognize is that the individuals who are forced by government regulation to act against their own interests are the very "public" which is supposed to benefit from the government controls. In any case, if you are going to do good for someone, it really should be THEIR idea of good, not yours. In all cases, it should be the other person who initiates the interaction - by asserting THEIR perception of their own good. Why was it necessary to have laws to FORCE racists to practice racism? After all, the employers, landowners, businessmen, etc., were overwhelmingly from the dominant group and were free to segregate and discriminate on their own. The answer is that the voluntary structure of economic incentives works against this behavior. As long as producers and consumers are free to act spontaneously in the context of a free market, there are economic costs for discriminating against minorities. There are likewise economic incentives to avoid discriminatory practices. * Effect of Social Complexity on Statism Socialism must always fail because any society large enough to be economically and technologically civilized is too large and complex to be contained within the minds of any subgroup. The competence of government began to decline precipitously after the First World War as society's technological complexity began to increase exponentially. It will be the final irony of the statist system that, once headless after a catastrophic collapse, it will be unable to save itself. The centralized control of all aspects of the country will prevent people from asking the questions that must be answered before any organized recovery can begin. * Dual Ideologies The claim that countries that call themselves capitalist are guilty of misdescription reflects the fact that both those in and out of power use dual ideologies - those that actually guide their actions and those that are used as instruments of deception in waging social conflict. The theory of a political system is almost always its surface ideology, and it may be a deeply, if not necessarily intentionally, deceptive facade. People almost automatically assume that the goal of a political system is to advance the welfare of at least a majority of the population. But this is because some such goal is almost universally propounded in surface ideologies, and, being credulous, they allow themselves to be taken in by the surface ideology and never perceive the real motives that actually guide the behavior of the state. Much of the government's "crime-prevention" behavior can be explained by the idea that the State has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong doing, not because it desires to abolish wrongdoing, but because the State desires to monopolize it. * Hallmark of a Conservative The hallmark of a conservative is the phrase "too much." If you press him until you can get him to identify the core of his social philosophy, you will find that it is founded on a statement containing some variation of the phrase "too much." He is not fundamentally opposed to slavery, just "too much" slavery. He is not fundamentally opposed to government interference in private lives, just "an excessive amount" of interference. He is not fundamentally opposed to tyranny, just a level of tyranny that is "far beyond" what he judges acceptable. An excellent example of this is the following quote from FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton and Rose Friedman (page 61): "Some restrictions on our freedom are necessary to avoid other, still worse, restrictions. However, we have gone far beyond that point." But the distinction between an acceptable level of restriction and an unacceptable level is an arbitrary one, because such a distinction is based on a similarity in quantity rather than a difference in quality. The "point" the Friedmans refer to is an undefinable position. A second characteristic by which a conservative can be recognized is his reliance on religion. Almost all conservatives have religious belief as a major foundation stone of all aspects of their philosophy. A third characteristic by which a conservative can be recognized is that politically, he is an "anti-". If you ask him what his political philosophy is based on, he will usually reply that he is an anti-communist. This is what makes conservatives attractive to philosophically superficial capitalists. Such capitalists (who are themselves opposed to communism) see no deeper than the "anti-communist" label presented by the conservative and conclude that the conservative is their philosophical ally. To be allies, it is not necessary to have a noble aim in commmon. It is necessary only to have a common enemy. If your ally defines himself only as an "anti-" you can use him without fear that he will corrupt your purpose. You have a big advantage: he knows only what he DOESN'T want. You know what you DO want. But the flaw in applying this idea lies in the philosophical superficiality of the capitalists. They do not probe beneath the surface label of the conservative and observe that fundamentally what he is FOR is the imposition of some form of coercive social institution. The conservative thinks he can make some compromise between freedom and slavery, but his belief that there is a happy middle somewhere in between is wrong. That is not how compromise works. * Compromise A compromise is an adjustment of conflicting claims by mutual concessions. But this means that both parties agree upon some fundamental principle which serves as a basis for the adjustment. It is only in regard to concretes or particulars implementing a mutually accepted basic principle that compromise can occur. A compromise is a negotiated adjustment of the quantity of some phenomenon, thus the process cannot be applied between two disparate phenomena. There cannot be a compromise between a phenomenon and its negation. For example, between theft and non-theft. If I want to steal $10 from you and I respond to your protest by suggesting that we "compromise" and I will steal only $5 - this is no compromise! It is relinquishment, by you, of your principle of non-theft - and acceptance, again by you, of my principle of theft. Once you have accepted the principle of theft, then we can indeed compromise - on how much theft you will be subjected to. Ben Franklin wrote in 1766 that "if Parliament has the right to take from us one penny in the pound, where is the line drawn that bounds that right, and what shall hinder their calling whenever they please for the other 19 shillings and eleven pence?" * Libertarian Foreign Policy Robert Ringer: "I am in favor of complete freedom of trade between companies and people throughout the world, but not under the umbrella of political partnerships between governments." Thus a proper libertarian policy toward trade relations (a foreign policy, as expressed by a free society) should be: We will trade with individual people or with private companies, but we will not engage in any exchange which is subject to the control of a government.