Begging the regulation

One readily recognized example of question begging goes thus:

“God must exist.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, the Bible says so.”
“But why should I believe the Bible?”
“Because the Bible was written by God.”

And we all laugh at the dumb theist, who may have other good reasons for his faith, as he clearly doesn’t realize how silly that argument sounds. Now, claiming that God exists is a bold claim; therefore, the evidence needs to be good if we are going to accept it from an intellectual standpoint. In Monday’s Guardian, one author makes another bold claim: “Liberty is not what it once was.” Forgetting for the moment that he holds John Stuart Mill as the philosopher of liberty, I found the argument a little wanting in general, and I couldn’t help but think of the ‘God’ conversation above when I ran into this section of text:

Mill’s libertarian philosophy is based on two precepts … The first principle asserts that “all errors which (a man) is likely to commit against advice and warning, are far outweighed by the evil of allowing others to constrain him to what they deem his good”. Only cranks believe that now. If it were a generally held view, we would not prohibit the use of recreational drugs or require passengers in the back seats of motor cars to wear safety belts.

Were the paragraph above simply a description of common public opinion there would be nothing fallacious at play — aside from his unwarranted use of the word crank, that is, which appears to signify “someone not agreeing with the majority” for this author. (You know, like all those “cranks” who voted against Bush in ‘04.) But, alas, description is replaced with prescription when the text above is implicitly used as evidence later:

The philosophy for our time ought to concern a consensus about civilised conduct, not extol irresponsible individualism. And it ought to be based on a definition of liberty that is far more meaningful to the majority of mankind than Mill’s notion that freedom is no more than the absence of restraint.

::

The following conversation then took place in my mind:

Daniel: “This doesn’t seem philosophically sound to me.”
G: “You mean you’d prefer a Mill-style freedom?”
Daniel: “Yes; I think I would.”
G: “But that’s preposterous, for the first thing to go would be seat-belt safety laws and anti-drug laws.”
Daniel: “Great! . . .Oh, there’s a problem?”
G: “Well, it’s obvious that only cranks think that, so you’ll need to get with the times, if you want to propose a serious version of liberty. . .”

Democracy, the god that failed

I am, of course, borrowing for my blog-post title the name of a book by the venerable Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

A recent interview with Barrack Obama concerning his new book highlights a contemporary puzzle:

“Q: If readers are to come away from The Audacity of Hope with one action item (a New Year’s Resolution for 2007, perhaps?), what should it be?

A: Get involved in an issue that you’re passionate about. It almost doesn’t matter what it is–improving the school system, developing strategies to wean ourselves off foreign oil, expanding health care for kids. We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.” (emphasis mine)

I see a couple of options for interpreting Mr. Obama here. Perhaps it is the case that we should have full trust in democracy as a system that works — that is, when we put things to the populace to work out within a state apparatus, and if everything goes well, justice will tend to prevail and citizens’ needs will largely be taken care of.

My problem with Mr. Obama’s approach is twofold. First, his audacity of hope is for a system where everyone may try their darndest to control the lives of everyone else. The key is for everyone to at least have their say, so that they can at least have the honor of participating (even if nothing that they say changes policy). Therefore, it makes sense to give a general exhortation toward doing something, even if this entails everyone doing all kinds of contrary things, including vying for laws to control one another’s lives. The big idea is to let the marketplace of democratic power sort out the good from the bad.

Secondly, there happens to be one position that Obama can’t encourage, and that is the activist that does their work by doing nothing. The one intolerable disposition is that of the man or woman who cares not what their neighbor does, either in their personal life or in their business. If all that you ask is that you be left alone to your devices in the same way that you will tolerate the existence and rights of others, it is impossible to get involved in precisely the way that Obama thinks is necessary for the healthy survival and flourishing of political economy.

On a side note, some libertarian thinkers such as Professor Roderick Long have argued that democracy implies self-rule, and self-rule implies a libertarian / anarcho-capitalist society, if it is taken seriously. Therefore, working towards democracy is, in principle, not opposed to the goal of liberty.  At first glance, Mr. Obama almost seems as if he is in this camp — seeking a transfer of power from lobbyists and professional politicians to ‘the people.’  Nevertheless, beneath the notion that it should be up to the people to decide things lurks the dreadful corollary that ‘the people’ should have the power to decide what they plus everyone else should do.

This is why other philosophers of liberty, such as Dr. Hoppe, are through with the idea of democracy altogether.

I’m not doing your dirty work for you

Well, we had speakeasies, and I suppose that this only makes sense:

I’m smoking in a bar in Philadelphia and nobody says, “Boo!”

There are 20 other people, smokers and nonsmokers, hanging out, enjoying themselves, not doing any harm to anyone (except maybe themselves). The bar is spacious, the NCAA is on the TV screens, beer pennants hang from the ceiling, and through the large windows I see rain falling.

The owner is sitting at the bar chewing nicotine gum. He’s a former smoker.

Also a former cop.

“I’m an irresponsible bar-owner,” he says with a smile.

Despite the smoking ban – because of it, actually – Philadelphia now has “smoke-easies,” a play on “speakeasies” that came to us with the Prohibition of alcohol. Prohibition was enacted in 1920, repealed in 1933 and largely ignored in between. I’m surprised at how many Americans meekly obey smoking bans.

“It’s my bar, it’s my four walls, cigarettes are legal,” he says. “Why can’t I allow my customers to smoke?”

Six months before he opened, “a beautiful-looking restaurant, [he names it, I won't], opened a few blocks from here. They never allowed smoking. That is their right,” he says, leaving unspoken his belief that it’s his right to permit it.

A Health Department inspector dropped in not long ago. No one was smoking, but he asked why Friday had ashtrays on the bar. Friday told him they were heirlooms, something like that.

The law requires bar managers to enforce the ban by telling patrons they can’t smoke, but they are cautioned not to take any action other than to call the Health Department to report smokers.

The Health Department has a hotline to report smoking in bars. (If you want the number, look it up yourself, snitch.)

Friday says no patron ever complained to him, “but we did have a complaint to a barmaid.”

He tells his employees to say, “We don’t condone it,” but tells me: “We can’t enforce [the ban]. It’s not our job.”

It’s that kind of a place.

Unlike Friday, he’s been written up by Health.

Who ratted him out?

Health inspectors won’t ever say, but Seamus says, “It’s either a neighbor, a competitor or sometimes a customer, but it’s usually your competitors.”

Seamus tries “to adhere to the letter of the law” and tells customers, “You cannot smoke in here.” If they do, “there’s nothing within my legal authority to tell you not to smoke,” he says.

Seamus’ father was a cop for 35 years, but “I’m not in that business. I’m in the entertainment business,” he says.

“I have military men come in here, they’re just back from Iraq. If anyone, they have the right to smoke, you know,” Seamus says.

He wouldn’t stop them, even if he could.

Joe bar-owner walks the fine line between obeying the law but rebelling against its purpose. Be tyranical if you must, but don’t expect me to do your dirty work for you. I’m still thinking over all of the ethical implications at play.

Where does security come from?

Are liberty and security the daughters of order, or are order and security the daughters of liberty?

An excellent blog on liberty, security, and property rights here. Guess what you didn’t know about many of the recent shooting sprees (and who knew but wasn’t telling you)?

The troubling thing is that both mainstream parties look to restrict liberty in some way for the sake of security. Some want our privacy stripped so that they can see who are the potential terrorists; others want us to depend on socialized defense. Both parties think that liberty, in some way, opposes security and peace.

Edit / Followup: There is another good, if a little gruesome at times, article on the issue at Lew Rockwell.

O’Rourke and Aquinas (of course!)

  I happened upon some P.J. O’Rourke quotations on a blog, and wanted to get a couple down, for potential future use.

 ”Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.”

“And whom do you draft in a war against drugs? Certainly not eighteen-year-old boys. They’re the enemy.”

“You say we’re distracting Clinton from the business of government. Well I hope so. Distracting a politician from governing is like distracting a bear from eating your baby.”

“Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.”

“You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money.”

(on socialism) “Everyone knows that life ought to be fair and that God’s a lousy guy for not making it happen. Everyone should get what everyone else gets. And, if everyone else gets broke, hungry, and dead, well fair’s fair.”

and, of course: “Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”

Which reminds me; I’ve got some reading to do in Aquinas. . .

Oh!  Which reminds me again . . . in two ways.  Thing one: my birthday present from my mom and dad, namely these two books, will be arriving at my doorstep any afternoon now.  (Said my mom when telling me about my present, “I had a really hard time buying this, even though it was on your list.  I just kept thinking, ‘this doesn’t look like fun.’”)  Do I need to add that I am tremendously excited?

Thing two: I am putting together material for a book of philosophy, to be used by the discussion group in which I participate.  The book will contain writings from Dionysus, Boethius, Maimonides, and more — including Tommy ‘Nas.  I’m going through the Summa Theologiae to gather selections for the book, and I’m working with Google Documents to compile everything.  One of the nice things about Google Documents — among many, many things — is that you can ‘publish’ your work.

My progress on the Summa can be found here, and as I continue to add / edit the document, these changes will be reflected on that webpage.  In other words, that web link will always display the most recent ‘version’ of my work.