Libertarianism does not, it seems, have a common moral theory. Some have harped on and on about the Non-Aggression Principle as the be-all and end-all of libertarian morality. Still others invoke religion, or Ayn Rand, to produce some sort of moral system. These locally flavored libertarian moral codes are never presented – within Ron Paul/Mises orbit Libertarianism – as universal, but rather are upheld as good and grand systems which Libertarianism can enable. Catholic libertarians favor Libertarianism because they feel it allows for Catholics to be Catholic, and so forth. I would contend, however, that Libertarianism must develop a common moral theory, and promote it as consistently as we do our political and economic preferences. Western civilization is dying, and liberty, which has always been the life blood of the West, needs the anchor of moral judgment in order to thrive.
I often point to Thomas Reid and the “Common Sense” school of the Scottish Enlightenment as the intellectual and moral foundation of Libertarianism. I would argue that Scottish Enlightenment principles were highly influence in early continental Liberalism. I would also argue that this same philosophy was central to the moral ideals of the American revolution. How often do we discuss Jeffersonian America in contrast with Hamiltonian America? When we refer to “America” as a civilization in possession of a common commitment to liberty, I argue we are referring to a now-extinct culture grounded in moral theories coming out of the Scottish Enlightenment.
I would like to present a review of Thomas Reid’s moral philosophy. I will expound on it a little, and also raise the salient criticism levied against it. Finally, I will explain how we can reinterpret this moral theory through a more modern lens which, I believe, will temper it as a suitable universal moral theory for modern Libertarianism.
Thomas Reid was a contemporary of David Hume in the late 18th century, and a resident of Edinburgh. If you know of Hume, you’d know that he critiqued Locke’s rationalism, and was a champion of philosophical skepticism. Hume didn’t think that we could say that we really know what we think we know, and moreover Hume argued that our moral theories were bunk. Hume believed that reason did not apply to morality, and that morality was more an expression of preference. Enlightenment reason had nothing to say about right or wrong, in his view.
Reid’s philosophy was targeted directly at Hume’s skepticism. He countered Hume by first accepting that Hume’s critique of Locke was completely correct. However, Reid himself also critiqued Locke, coming at new philosophical conclusions through a new way of thinking. The best summary of Reid’s approach is to say that Reid rejected Locke’s theory of ideas. Reid did not think that ideas as we understand them existed as discrete objects. Rather, Reid argued that what we know, we know by comparing and contrasting our experiences. This led him to propose a set of first principles which were held to be true not because they can be demonstrated by reason, but rather precisely because reason cannot be applied to them. “Common sense” says that existence exists, and reason cannot disprove this intuitively perceived truth. The popularity of the term “self-evident truth” goes back to Reid as well.
You might, at this juncture, be skeptical. Isn’t blind acceptance of what we assume to be true a horrible way of going about things? What about empiricism? Reid’s system champions empiricism, and saves it from the philosophers. Reid’s common sense allows us the meaningfulness of natural evidence, even when our own preconceptions wish to reject the evidence of nature. Only certain first principles are held as “self-evident” truths. What about essentialism, don’t many people accept the idea of fixed gender roles as a “self-evident common sense”? First of all, given the high probability of some sort of biological basis for some notions of gender traits, it’s not inappropriate for people to “sense” as if there is some natural basis for some of our notions of gender. However, in Reid’s system, we reject essentialism on this level. Gender is nothing but a category which we have constructed to sort out patterns from the data of our experiences. It cannot be essentially true. Reid rejects pure ideas. However, the possibility of some objective phenomenon that might lead to notions of gender distinction cannot be rejected. Keep in mind that social factors can be included as part of this causal set of phenomena. Something “real” has led to gender categories, but that doesn’t make these categories essential.
I will go further and advance a little of my own, contemporary interpretation of Reid. Reid’s disciples of yore might not at all agree with what I’m saying, but I believe deeply – simply from reading him directly – that Reid himself would have been sympathetic to what I’m saying.
Reid leaves a lot of the critical questions of philosophy unanswered, as a deliberate part of his answer to them. He asks us to accept reality as real merely because it appears so. Later, more problematically, he asks us to accept the reality of moral truth, “self-evident”, simply because it seems commonly true to man. Reid’s disciples liked to invoke God as the source of these non-rational truths, surmising that we possess the moral ideas we do merely because God created us with them pre-programmed in. They saw harmony between an ordered natural universe, and our own intuition, including our moral intuition. There’s just the one creator, after all.
I think this sort of thinking was a disservice to common sense philosophy. For one, by the late 19th century – with the popularity of German philosophical ideas, pre-modernism, and the decline of religious faith (Biblical higher criticism ended the notion of a purely evidence-based defense of Christian beliefs – popular in the 18th century) – the traditional champion’s of Reid’s theory of intuitive moral truth began to move away from the idea. Common sense philosophy proposed that God’s hand in giving man a clear conscience might be an explanation for this intuitive moral sense that Reid invokes. However, I don’t find in Reid’s arguments the necessity for this particular explanation for what Reid calls the “Conscience”.
Thaddeus Russell – the post-modernist historian – has famously trolled libertarians who insist on the existence of objective truth. In a podcast he referenced a room on the other side of a wall, and asked how we can know that it is still really there. It’s a good question! Reason itself does not give us any kind of proof that it would be.
The answer to Russell’s post-modernist observation is that we have to consider consistency. If you study language, neuroscience, or artificial intelligence you know that the structure of knowledge in the brain is actually a set of overlapping sets of associations of sensory data. The brain is not a pre-framed logical architecture with an innate grammar and mode of thinking. After receiving inputs, the brain takes contrasting experiences an interprets them as differing categories. For example, sound is perceived via vibrating hairs within the cochlea. When these hairs physically move, by vibrating air, they release chemicals into a nerve cluster. The amount of chemicals then create different electrical signals sent into the brain. Different sounds enter the brain as different amounts of electrical signals. The brain then finds the map which has to do with that specific pattern of signals (say, 10 electrical blips versus only 1 blip), and activates it. At this same moment, you might see, feel, smell, or think something. And those inputs will be mapped to the 10 blip pattern rather than the 1 blip pattern. The sight of an open mouth (a singer) will be associated with certain sound patterns, and the closed mouth with others.
What’s interesting is that the brain has an enormous processing capacity. There are unfathomable numbers of such maps, all overlapping, for varying levels of resolution. This leads to an idea of strong and weak associations. The sound of blues might be related to feeling drunk, or the tangy taste of barbecue sauce. Emotions might also be connected to the sound of blues.
Our sense of the world is built upon these associations, and any given thought or sensation is just a contrast between which other thoughts and associations are strongly associated with it, versus which are not.
When we try to guess what’s on the other side of a wall, we have to rely on these maps in our mind. We have nothing else we can possibly rely on. All we know – all we can know – is which associations are stronger, or which are weaker. That is, what principles, rules, or occurrences are more consistent within a context, and which are not. Consistency doesn’t imply inevitability, but there is no justifiable reason for assuming to be true that which is less associated with a context than that which is strongly associated with it.
If we extend this principle of consistency to its limit, we observe – I should say, I observe – that certain features are consistent with the sum total of all of my experiences. The idea that there is a substance – call it reality – which exists beyond this thing I call myself (my knowledge, my body, my consciousness), is centrally consistent with all my experience. There is no single instance of this not being the case, so long as I employ reason consistently in interpreting my experiences. As a consequence, I have every reason to believe in an external, objective reality and simultaneously I possess no justification for thinking this external reality does not exist.
As I converse with other people, I observe from their account of experience, that they must share the same set of impressions, with the same features and qualities, that I do. By reason I can say that we have a common sense of reality, and so we can guess that we have every reason to believe in an external reality and no reason not to.
It could be the case that reality as I know it doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, it would be internally inconsistent with the sum total of my knowledge, experience, and reason to conclude that this would be true. It could be true, but I lack any reason to say that it is true. I also know that the precise nature of this objective reality is something beyond my ability to know. I could be dead wrong about how it works. This doesn’t mean I can’t make correct judgments. It would be very correct of me to assume that the pavement upon which I walk to work everyday is not covertly a disguised pool of hot magma. It could be, but I have many reasons drawn from a rational sorting of my life experiences to conclude that it’s not. Thus, I would argue that while objective reality is to us unknowable, it is certainly possible for us to make many consistent and good judgments about reality. The very first, most important and consistent judgment we would make is to assume that this external thing actually exists, and has consistent rules most of the time. And that’s why, in answer to Thad Russell, I do think that room exists on the other side of the wall. It’s simply inappropriate for me to conclude that it doesn’t.
Keeping in mind the epistemological premise I’ve just introduced, consider Thomas Reid. Do we need a creator to explain the non-rational truths of the universe (like the reality of our sensations)? It doesn’t really matter how we explain them. We have reason to feel confident in this substance we call reality, even though we cannot prove by reason that it concretely exists, and so it’s “okay” to say that these experience come because of the external reality. That confidence is our “intuition”, and our basis for “self-evident” truth. To say reality doesn’t exist is to say that our entire process of knowledge, judgment, and action is worthless. This skeptical position might be true! Yet, the decision to make choices and take action is itself a firm declaration that one believes in the reality of existence as self-evident.
I turn now to Reid’s moral paradigm, which should appear much more useful now that we’ve introduce a more contemporary interpretation of his epistemology.
Reid is unhappy with David Hume’s moral conclusions, saying, “But some philosophers, particularly Mr. Hume, think that it is no part of the office of reason to determine the ends we ought to pursue, or the preference due to one end above another. This, he thinks, is not the office of reason, but of taste or feeling.
“If this be so, reason cannot, with any propriety, be called a principle of action. Its office can only be to minister to the principles of action, by discovering the means of their gratification. Accordingly, Mr. Hume maintains, that reason is no principle of action; but that it is, and ought to be, the servant of passions.
“I shall endeavor to shew that, among the various ends of human actions, there are some, of which, without reason, we could not even form a conception; and that, as soon as they are conceived, a regard to them is, by our constitution, not only a principle of action, but a leading and governing principle, to which all our animal principles are subordinate, and to which they ought to be subject…
“The ends of human actions I have in view, are two – to wit, What is good for us upon the whole, and What appears to be our duty.”
Reid presents two layers to his moral theory. The first considers the gratification of the passions. He calls this the “Good on the Whole”. He argues that despite our passions being non-rational, that any sufficiently mature human mind will begin to consider passions in context, over the long run. We, ultimately, employ reason to contrast our passions, and to contrast our desires of the now with our desires to come. Even those with “high time preference” use rational calculations to get through life (that is, they do not go around raping people and stealing all the time, there is some amount of self-limitation which distinguishes them as human beings). As a consequence, Reid argues that reason not only serves passion, but in a sense directs it. We delay our gratifications, and in so doing, find more satisfaction.
He wrote, “It appears, therefore, that the very conception of what is good or ill for us upon the whole, is the offspring of reason, and can be only in beings endowed with reason. And if this conception give rise to any principle of action in man, which he had not before, that principle may very properly be called a rational principle of action.
“I observe, in the next place – That as soon as we have the conception of what is good or ill for us upon the whole, we are led, by our constitution, to seek the good and avoid the ill; and this becomes not only a principle of action, but a leading or governing principle, to which all our animal principles ought to be subordinate…
“It appears also, that the fundamental maxim of prudence, and of all good morals – That the passions ought, in all cases, to be under the dominion of reason – is not only self-evident, when rightly understood, but is expressed according to the common use and propriety of language.”
What Reid has thus far developed is common sense (in the colloquial meaning of the term). This is also the basis of a lot of moral theory. Yes, it takes our passions, desires, even animal needs for granted. So is it really morality, or just intelligent gratification of wants? Have we transcended Hume’s idea of reason being only a servant of passion? Or have we conceded to it?
Reid’s second area of morality he calls duty. Otherwise known then as rectitude or moral obligation. This notion of morality has been very problematic to philosophy since at least the late 19th century. Post-modern and post-post-modern thinking spends most of its time attacking and deconstructing any idea of moral obligation. So what the heck, man? Am I seriously talking about moral obligation?
Reid’s first area of morality – Good on the Whole – is important insofar as it explains how we get to the second area of moral obligation. It is also how we understand what morality is, precisely. Good on the Whole is a concept which applies Common Sense epistemology to the pursuit of wants.
We take a set of wants which we perceive non-rationally. We perceive hunger, thirst, and so forth. We don’t know why we want food, sex, and so forth, we simply feel that we want them. Reason and judgment, however, place these wants into maps of association, into context. We don’t merely remember that eating food alleviates hunger, we associate the alleviation of hunger with the hours of work we have to do to earn a paycheck, and the ritual of going to the store to buy food. The whole of our life, including our feelings about other people, and the particulars of our sense of self, is the context for these wants.
We are not simply employing reason to gratify wants. Reason helps us shift how we prioritize want. The feeling of hunger can be felt equally strong and imposing, as a sensory experience, but we might choose to react to it differently depending on the greater, whole, context. This is Reid’s argument about the Good of the Whole.
As I mentioned, we don’t stop at a Good of the Whole argument. Complete morality requires consideration of the “grander” implications of the basic conclusion.
Reid speaks of a higher category of morality he calls duty. His approach to it is rather curt.
He says, “With regard to the notion or conception of Duty, I take it to be too simple to admit of a logical definition.”
Reid explains that Duty is understood through its associated concepts, such as justice, honesty, and so forth. In linguistics, this would be called an arbitrary token. Duty itself has no inherent meaning, but rather anchors a “map” of related notions. Reid insists, properly, that duty cannot be resolved into self-interest.
With my exposure to post-modern thinking, I too get stuck at this point, while considering Reid. What is this Duty? Could he just be trying to defend a social convention, rationalizing as universal something which is just an arbitrary product of sociological factors? It does seem like that’s what he’s doing, because he spends a great deal of time asserting that Duty, or the “Moral Sense”, intuitively exists, and that all people everywhere have a notion of it, so it must meaningfully correlate to something substantive.
I think, to a degree, Reid falls into a trap. It seems that, if pressed, he might admit that he is trying to rationalize a social convention. He, problematically, insists that our “Moral Sense” is built into us, just as the laws of physics are built into the universe – by the hand of the creator. I will shortly explain why Reid’s insights were more powerful than he might have realized, and how to reconcile them without having to invoke God. However, I’ll prepare for this by detailing the nature of this social convention Reid is talking about.
Reid talks about the notion of good and bad. He insists that people possess and internal sense that some things are simply bad – in a moral sense – while others are inherently good. Before presuming to fill these categories, he presents them as first principles of moral philosophy. He is arguing that morality is meaningfully real because we have an inborn conception of moral good and bad, and therefore by reason we are able to construct a moral framework consistent with “reality”.
Okay – there’s nothing which says that this is not just colloquial thinking. Good and bad, moral dualism, might indeed be mere social conventions. More precisely, some cultures might really emphasize dualism more than others, even if something about dualism is universal (life vs. death, for instance). Thus, Reid doesn’t quite justify his invocation of these categories as a basis for his moral theory. Nevertheless, Reid catches himself.
He writes, “All reasoning must be grounded on first principles. This holds in moral reasoning, as in all other kinds. There must, therefore, be in morals, as in all other sciences, first or self-evident principles, on which all moral reasoning is grounded, and on which it ultimately rests. From such self-evident principles, conclusions may be drawn synthetically with regard to the moral conduct of life; and particular duties or virtues may be traced back to such principles, analytically.”
If moral reasoning exists at all, it exists in terms of what is preferable and what isn’t. These basic categories can represent moral good and moral bad. And from this we have first principles upon which we can construct a moral system. However, can we say that moral reasoning is even a thing? Like, a real thing as opposed to some social convention.
We have to think carefully about what morality is. Post-modern thinking would demolish the colloquial sense of morality. What is morality? The set of common standards of behavior or judgment between people – okay, that’s arbitrary, maybe oppressive. Maybe morality is your sense of what is proper to do or not proper to do? Okay, well, just do what you want. Whatever’s proper to you is as proper as anything else.
We have a clear rationale for this framework of moral good and bad, first principles of proper action and judgment, and yet the very foundation for this otherwise fine structure is nothing but sand.
Reid’s followers championed what they held to be the keystone of Reid’s moral theory – the conscience.
If we carefully develop this concept of conscience we can arrive at a clear interpretation of Reid’s moral theory, and I believe, justify its use today. First, let me define conscience.
The etymology of the word “conscience” is interesting. Commonly, we understand it to mean, “the faculty of knowing what’s right.” However, it comes from the Old French, where it meant, “innermost thoughts”. The Latin root of the word is conscientia which means something like, “joint knowledge”. If me and my buddy both know the batting average of our favorite baseball players, then this is our “conscientia”. The concept can be turned inward, in a weird conceit, and means the knowledge that you share with your inner self. Naturally, this presents a complex understanding of self, but applies to something as simple as an inner dialogue. When we take this concept forward, we have a very ancient sense (in the Western world at least), that the “inner self” possesses a certain innate knowledge. And, we are led to believe by common understanding, that this inner knowledge can make accurate pronouncements about right and wrong. So, “conscience” not only refers to our sense of right and wrong, but also proposes that we possess such knowledge intrinsically so long as we honestly search our feelings.
Reid invokes the “Moral Sense” as God’s gift to man, and we might think that – again – we are leaping to the conclusion that our inner sense of right and wrong should be held up as universal. We can’t get away with this! So we ask, what is going on here? Is there some reason why people have this strong association between the concept of self, inner knowledge, and a sense of right and wrong?
Surely, there are countless ways to correlate these things in a deconstruction of universal morality. For example, I can argue that parental shame created a sense of right and wrong, and that their shaming occurred because they were first shamed by society. I can thus argue that conscience itself is bunk, a mere pathology. To a degree, this is why Reid’s moral theory was abandoned in the 19th century.
However, I will argue that this notion of “Conscience” is universal, and an appropriate basis for a common moral system. It’s important for me to highlight that I don’t hold conscience to be a fixed moral sense given by God. Conscience itself is fluid, but nevertheless meaningful and the core of our own real moral sense.
Consider Reid’s “Good on the Whole”. By Common Sense epistemology, we are handling what’s “Good on the Whole” differently than other philosophers. First, we reject rationalist morality. What is either “good” or “bad” on the whole must evolve out of non-rational premises – such as our instinctual wants and desires, and the unchosen circumstances of our life. “Good” in this case is decidedly not a Platonic form, nor is it a pure idea. It is intrinsically tied to the whole statement. There is no pure “good” without “Good on the Whole”. The real existence of the sum of our wants and desires, in the context of the real circumstances of our life, define and create the association which is our “Good on the Whole”. Our personal good is defined only through association, in context.
Secondly, in considering “Good on the Whole” we reject Hume’s skepticism. We see an emergent whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. As I explained, an equally strong sensation of hunger can be prioritized more or less depending on circumstances. A person can choose to live with hunger in some cases – say, during a diet – and give into it in other cases. The substance of the hunger sensation is equal in both cases, and so we cannot say that reason is merely serving passions. The relative importance of a passion or desire actually adjusts due to the application of reason and judgment. Again, this is because our “Good” is an emergent whole, which considers countless overlapping maps of association, and gives no discrete life to any particular bits (for the Austrian economists, consider the critique of the labor theory of value).
The concept of the “Good on the Whole” applies to our concept of tangible self. It is us, our body, our proximate experiences. Nevertheless, in our mind we possess a sense of life which extends beyond the self. We perceive a universe, which we sense as having an existence beyond the thing we call self. We perceive other people. We abstract notions such as “life” or “happiness”. Let’s apply Common Sense thinking to these concepts.
“Happiness” might, in Plato’s system, be some mystic realm which some gate in our mind is connected to and variously opens and closes, letting in the pure substance of joy, in varying quantities, to fill us with pleasant feelings. Not so in Reid’s system. With Common Sense we have happiness as an emergent phenomenon. The sensation of euphoria is non-rational. We can’t explain where it comes from, but know that it exists. Happiness, then, is a trans-temporal harmony of euphoria. It’s a balancing of euphoric experience, by measured gratification of reward systems, keeping these actions as consistent as possible with the whole sense of what is good.
Many things cause joy. Being with a loved one. Receiving confirmation that order does exist in the universe. Gratifying appetites. Connecting to a pure sense of being. Good on the Whole demands harmony within the self, but also harmony of self with the universe.
Joy obtained at the expense of others is a poisoned joy. Joy, in the Whole, is not merely the sensation of euphoria, but also the experience in context of the map of associations all having to do with it.
Empathy is not a meaningless concept. Causing pain means associating your own pursuit of ends with the feeling of pain in another. People can be sociopathic. Your mental associations might be broken, maybe you have some kind of addiction, maybe you can’t conceive of another’s pain, or haven’t been in much pain yourself. However, assuming you have a normative, balanced psyche, then there is no way to cause pain to another – for your own pursuit of happiness – and not understand that your happiness is associated with pain. This is a tainted happiness. Happiness is not a pure form, and cannot be experienced in a contextual vacuum. It’s soured milk. Here is the essence of Reid’s theory of Conscience and morality.
Conscience is the center, and core. It is the inflection point of the Whole, as we contextualize our wants and desire, and ourselves, within the greater universe as we understand it. There is simply too much going on for us to accept hedonistic pursuits alone as life’s sole purpose. And so, we have to accept that there is, in essence, a moral rhythm to our lives.
If we understand that our pursuits are not primitive gratifications of wants, but rather rational actions which consider the whole, then we understand that action and desire incorporate the whole context. When we consider the whole context, we realize that certain principles emerge – consistencies – and these serve as the foundation of our moral system.
What are this first principles, and what is the right system of morality. Well, I won’t go so far as to define one myself here and now. Often, these systems are well understood colloquially. The Golden Rule is an almost universal maxim. Reid would happily point this out, as his use of the term “common sense” was not meant as a neologism or re-appropriation. He meant for the term as it is commonly understood to be used in his philosophy. We “know” what morality entails. It’s not that difficult, in the basics.
We should trust that moral judgment can exist, and that our intuition about it can tell us a lot. We should examine evidence, and lean heavily on reason in making judgments. We need to understand our limits, knowing that we’re not omniscient and understanding that our moral judgments are not moral conclusions. We are capable of making sound judgments as equally as we are capable of being wrong. Morality, at its core, is the development of a personal balance. We seek harmony with society, within ourselves, with the Whole. Morality is not a state of being, we can’t impose it, and we gain nothing merely because it exists in the world. Morality guides our personal actions. It exists when it is internalized: comprehended and accepted. It can’t really be imposed, because only individuals can open the door to their own souls.
We do need moral judgment, however. Complex situations, and complex, dynamic societies, require careful and precise moral thinking. Society, even if decentralized and ungoverned, is an emergent whole. Even if all the nations of the Earth possess radically different moral and social systems, there is still a level at which some common code must be employed.
I argue that universal morality does exist. It exists in basic first principles that define, at least, the structure of morality. It exists at the top level, in the axioms of human action, defining what minimally is common between all of us, and so what common modes of understanding or interaction ought we to have.
When a culture develops, where people who possess common language and commerce are in frequent interaction, I propose that some deliberate effort to discuss common moral beliefs must never cease. It is too much to impose one’s preferred morality on others, but by God, cannot we still make judgments? Certainly, we can our opinions with each other. Let me give an example mired in controversy.
I, for one – as a libertarian – understand that drug criminalization is horrible. However, I think Marijuana is also horrible. I don’t care if it’s mostly “not so bad for you”, in your estimation, and makes you feel good. That stuff directly affects the areas of the brain which deal with all of this “Good on the Whole” balance I’ve been talking about.
I’m convinced – even more so by the enormous George Soros “it’s all good, get out of the stone age and try pot grandma” media campaign – that weed is the essential substance of liberal thought: a foggy view of morality, a completely unjustified sense of openness in companionship with a underlying anxious hostility to the “other”, and middle aged professors who used to have a very high IQ and now have a kind of high IQ and therefore are totally overconfident about their beliefs. But whatever, dude. Yes, I’m being judgmental! This is my point! We should be judgmental.
From a strict Common Sense point of view, in the manner in which I’ve been discussing it, I can’t categorize a drug as “good” or “bad”. I can judge things about a drug to be “good” or “bad”. I also need to consider the whole context. Will a college kid fail life if they try a drug? No, but some will. Maybe, if the overall use, socially, is common enough, a lot of people will suffer later simply because enough people who don’t later suffer decided that morality wasn’t their problem because it didn’t apply to them. Maybe even if weed is not a problem for you, maybe it might still be bad for “all of us”, and might be worth abstaining from.
Forget about cannabis for a moment. Maybe there are things which don’t cause personal harm, but which are still immoral for us to personally do because if enough people do them there will be explicit social harm. “And what about alcohol?” Well, maybe those of us who drink a little too much have a moral obligation to shape up even if “personally there’s no harm.”
This leads me to a somewhat radical concept for Libertarianism. We like to think that we’re “live and let live” people. What if that’s wrong? What if being in society means both contributing to a common moral discourse – being a little judgmental – but also requires a sense of moral obligation to sort of kind of self-sacrifice a little in the name of social harmony? I’m not saying government should do any of this, and I’m not saying this needs to work the way it did in the 1950s (and most of the X0s before that). However, to invoke some old thinking on this, maybe liberty means responsibility?
We’re advocating that society must not place external restraints on people. We all get that this means less government. However, as Thaddeus Russell has brilliantly tried to insist to our community, even social shame is a form of external restraint.
This is all good, perhaps, but then how does society work without any restraint? This is a form of argument similar to those as crude as “who would build the roads if there was no government?” We can’t neglect it. We understand, first of all, that there would be organized groups which would have an interest in building roads if the government didn’t do it. We also understand that the architecture of our transportation system might be radically different in a libertarian political order. We also accept that, yeah, there would be a lot of farmers in our vision of society who would be living without paved roads.
Can we extend this metaphor to morality? Even in our utopia, we still would need and expect groups with clear moral systems to exist and live according to, maybe even somehow enforce these systems. Not universally, of course. That’s, in fact, what we have to avoid so that we can still call our society “free”.
How can you allow groups to have moral systems, but then also maintain limits which prevent moral imperialism? I think Thaddeus Russell’s answer might lean towards a vicious denouncement of moral systems which are imperialistic (which possess a sense of universality). On the other hand, I’m not sure that’s the case. Thad Russell’s strategy against moral imperialism seems to be one which relies on the colonized to disobey and resist the imposers. I’m going to step into the dark a little on this one, and say that perhaps we might correlate Thad Russell’s strategy to a system of moral proprietorship.
In libertarian theory, we know that people conflict over resources. Property is our response. Many criticize us for being absolutists, particular in that they don’t accept the idea that there’s a universal definition of property. However, at least from the economist’s point of view, libertarian theory presents a number of very effective solutions to resource distribution problems, that seem to benefit even the most poor in society, by use of systems of property. Perhaps property is a system of rules which balances competing actions and interests, on the whole?
I want my friends to know that I hate weed. I want them to know I’m a judgmental ass who doesn’t trust them as much as otherwise because they smoke. That I don’t want to be around when they do. Frankly, they return the favor whether I say anything or not – not smoking is a great way for an under-40 guy living in a college town or large city in America to stunt his social life.
See, because I have this gut feeling that not everyone actually is into weed. I feel like a lot of kids would choose not to smoke if you just asked them their preference, but that simply because a lot of people are, and given that marijuana is its own best brainwashing salesman, the culture of weed is hard to slow down in the sort of environment that college is.
I get how smokers are sensitive about the anti-cannabis mentality, given how people are in jail over the stuff, but now that it’s going mainstream I’m over that. I hate how smokers get huffy and emotional when people say bad things about weed. It’s called over-activation of the mood and relationship centers of the brain, dude. My concern is, I want people who don’t like weed to also be able to have their opinion. I want to be able to tell a kid, “you shouldn’t try it,” one time for each time a user pushes and says, “man you gotta try it.” Yet, it’s a one-sided thing.
See, a smoker can push weed on a kid because, “It feels good man”. Which is a clear and discrete moral opinion. But if I assert my moral opinion, the reaction is, “Don’t be so judgmental dude.” Anti-judgmentalism is, in my opinion, just another form of moral imperialism. Let’s all be judging each other frequently, please.
Ok, sorry dudes, I didn’t mean to launch such a massive buzzkill. I have a point, and it’s not really about marijuana.
My point is that Libertarianism should champion the idea of us and everyone else attempting to make moral judgments. Within a framework of private property rights, and with a common commitment to liberal principles of society (free speech, debate, non-violence, tolerance when property is respected, even a willingness to forgive, open up to the new, and so forth), we should embrace moralism and judgmentalism. Holy cow, how can we not!
We need to have rational moral opinions, we have to be making them, evolving them, and so forth. “Stop being judgmental” is a form of thought policing. It’s no good. I think even Thaddeus Russell could agree.
In conclusion, if we define morality carefully, we can begin to use it again. There is reason to be confident in the existence of reality, and the possibility of sound moral judgment. Moral absolutes are not there for us. Moral judgment is a product of reason, because reason considers the whole context and judges situational circumstance against it. We should never stop trying to make better and clearer moral judgments; as libertarians, we need to try. We know that other people will have different judgments than us, so first we seek our common understanding in good faith, and then debate the hell out of it.
However, if we stop trying to build and live within any moral system, there can be no society. We’re libertarians, not human islands.
Since the 60’s (thanks weed), we’re not supposed to talk about morality. By the 80s we had to say that drugs are bad because, uh, they hurt your body. We used to make moral arguments about how happiness needed to be balanced with pain, how both up and down moods were essential to life. Also, when we argue against war, we are forced to talk about how the country can’t afford it, or how troops should be on our borders but not in Iraq. They are all good arguments, but in the end we’re going to have to – as an American society I mean, not just as libertarians – start thinking morally again. Americans really don’t care about moral arguments (thanks 1960s). The fact that either the liberals or the conservatives are taken seriously when they make moral arguments just goes to show what a joke moral education is in America. Our problem is that we abandoned morality when we discovered that contemporary morality had hypocritical features. Plus, weed is like so good man (by the way, the Vietnam War, not grass, was the problem – and CIA opium). Come on! We should have adjusted our morality, not given up on it.
The last followers of the Common Sense moral tradition were the New England Unitarians. Most of their movement was swept away by Emerson and Thoreau’s hippie BS. It seems that the real nail in the coffin, however, was the Civil War. Unitarians were against war and slavery. But supporting war against slavery was a chance at relevance I suppose. Even before the 1960s we had the 1860s. Unitarianism was already struggling to reconcile their moral positions with modern thinking, and rather than adjust and persevere in the face of the difficult moral question of war, they let go. There’s a reason we have sayings about picking your hill to die on, and bearing your cross. We don’t personally gain from moral commitment, but the world requires it nonetheless. Yet, there’s immense satisfaction which comes from being a civilized man. Call it smug self-satisfaction, hypocrisy. Most moral people are quite nice, and maybe you don’t know them that well. Even so, traditionally moral people can have their own moral obligation to evolve and develop their moral beliefs rationally. Something else that America has forgotten.
We have to talk about morality again as such. We have to do it without talking about God or Ayn Rand. We’ll have no hope if we don’t.
