Neither Left nor Right: Selected Columns (Hoover Institution Press Publication) - Softcover

Machan, Tibor R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817939822 ISBN 13: 9780817939823

Verlag: Hoover Institution Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

In Neither Left nor Right, a collection of his columns, Machan, a relentless advocate of the political philosophy of libertarianism, offers his always well-reasoned, often controversial opinions on the variety of threats to individual liberty in the United States and around the world.

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Tibor R. Machan is a Hoover research fellow, Professor Emeritus, Department of Philosophy, Auburn University, Alabama, and holds the R. C. Hoiles Endowed Chair in Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business and Economics, Chapman University.

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Neither Left nor Right

Selected Columns

By Tibor R. Machan

Hoover Institution Press

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8179-3982-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Preface, 
1. FOUNDATIONS, 
2. HOW TO THINK, 
3. THE INDEPENDENT SELF, 
4. SEX AND POLITICS IN AMERICA, 
5. CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS, 
6. THE INDIVIDUAL VERSUS THE STATE, 
7. PEOPLE AND ENCOUNTERS, 
8. AMERICA UNDER ATTACK, 
9. ENDINGS, 
10. LIFE IS GOOD, 
AFTERWORD: LAST REFLECTIONS, 
What I Have Done and Why, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Foundations

Why Liberty Is Necessary for Morality

Yuma (Arizona) Sun, March 22, 2003

It is often taken to be a feature of a free society that it rests on the belief that no one can tell what is morally right or wrong. That is supposed to be why government doesn't impose a lot of strictures that people are forced to follow. If, however, we could determine what is right and wrong, then, the idea follows, government could just proceed to force everyone to behave right.

A sad result of so explaining the merits of a free society is that it begins to look as if liberty is the enemy of morality. And it is in just this way that a good many people have understood the Western tradition of liberalism. They have come to believe that if you accept the Western idea of a free society, you must not care about morality at all. Arguably, a great many enemies of the West hold such a view. Love the West, reject morality; love morality, reject the West.

Yet this is completely wrong. In fact precisely the opposite is true. The reason the Western idea of a free society makes a great deal of sense is that unless people make their own moral choices and act on them freely, there cannot be anything morally praiseworthy in what they do.

A person who does the right thing because it is commanded, forced upon him, isn't acting morally. Such a person is acting from fear, not from the conviction that what he is doing is right. It is only in substantially free societies that men and women can be morally good. If one is forced to praise Allah or God, give to the poor, or defend one's country, there is nothing praiseworthy about that. One is then a mere puppet, not a morally responsible agent.

Of course, there have been some who have defended the individual's right to liberty on the ground that no one can tell what is right or wrong. Some very famous people have done this. Yet their defense of human liberty is a weak, ineffectual one. That's because if one cannot tell what is right or wrong, one cannot tell whether violating someone's right to liberty is right or wrong. So a moral skeptic simply has no consistent reason to complain if the right to liberty is violated.

Those, however, who insist that they do know right from wrong have no justification for opposing a free society. For men and women to be morally praiseworthy — or alternatively, blameworthy — for something they do, they have to do it freely, of their own initiative, not because they are coerced to do it.

No one is morally improved by being forced to be generous, just, kind, courageous, prudent, honest, charitable, moderate, humble, or the like. The paternalistic motivation behind many government measures that ostensibly aim to make people good is hopelessly misguided.

I would even question the motivation of those who promote coercive government measures aimed at reducing vice and increasing virtue — since coercion kills personal responsibility and does this very obviously, it is more likely that advocates of forcing people to be good are power seekers, not promoters of morality at all. They use morality merely as an excuse to rule other people. In the name of an allegedly good intention, they perpetrate the most dehumanizing act; they rob people of their liberty to choose.

Of course, the laws of a free society cannot guarantee that citizens will choose the right way to act. That choice is in the hands of the citizens themselves and their fellow citizens, friends, community leaders, teachers, writers, and others who urge us all to do what's right, not law officers whose task is keeping the peace, not making people good! But in a free society, where no one is authorized to dump the results of his or her misdeeds on others' lives, people are encouraged to do the right thing more than in societies where personal responsibility is missing because of a lack of individual liberty. So the critics of a free society who want more emphasis on morality than on liberty would do better if they first stood up to defend liberty. In a free society the prospects for a genuine, freely chosen morality are far greater than they are wherever men and women aren't free.

Is Human Nature Good or Evil?

As a little Catholic boy, I was taught that we are all born in sin — we inherited it from Adam and Eve who defied God in the Garden of Eden. That is the story of original sin, and in most Christian religions one gets over it by being baptized. The theologians of Christianity, as well as the philosophers on whose thought some Christian ideas were built — Plato, Plotinus, and others — cooked up this idea.

Is it right? Are we really all basically rotten?

The secular version of this story is a bit different, but not that different: we all have some rather low instincts or drives that make us vicious, nasty, greedy, and only when we are properly socialized do we manage to get straightened out. This nonreligious version of the idea gained prominence through the writings of such figures as Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and Sigmund Freud in the nineteenth and twentieth.

Again, the real question is, are these folks right? Are we all tainted from the start — is human nature basically corrupt?

An alternative view has also emerged, both from religious and from secular sources. For the religious, it holds that the doctrine of original sin doesn't mean we are all base or lowly, only that we are capable of going bad, of getting corrupted. Young ones aren't evil, but they can become so, as well as good — it is a matter of our God-given free will. Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas taught roughly this idea, as did Aristotle in ancient Greece.

For the secularists, it is a similar story: we are born innocent enough, by no means inclined toward good or evil, but as we grow up, our choices guide us toward one or the other, more or less. It is up to us; we aren't hardwired either way.

Of course, there is yet another idea, pushed by many natural and social scientists, that all this stuff about good and evil is nonsense — we just are what we are, as wolves, birds, whales, or ants are, and all the talk about good and evil is superstition or myth. But this view has its problems since those who hold it pretty much denounce those who don't, thus implying that the moralists are not doing right in holding their crazy ideas.

It looks, therefore, as if we cannot just toss out the notion that human beings can go right or wrong and do so on their own initiative. The only real question is whether they are predisposed to do one or the other or are free to do either.

But wait, isn't this just a question of opinion? Can these matters be settled? Haven't we tried fruitlessly to resolve them, all through human history?

One promising way to look at it is that yes, we have tried and have maybe even succeeded in finding some pretty good...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hoover Institution Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817939822
• ISBN 13: 9780817939823
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar