I don’t know if Clint Eastwood coined that phrase or not, but if he did he deserves a medal. He uttered it in response to criticism from the hypersensitive religious right, many of whom are complaining about his hit movie “Million Dollar Baby” because it portrays a euthanasia scene. I don’t have time to comment in detail, but this article in the Kansas City Star says it well enough. I think the phrase works just as well in reverse too.

Cathy Young, a contributing editor of Reason Magazine, and self-described libertarian has argued in favor of restricting civil liberties to promote security: “It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks. Even in the Declaration of Independence, the right to liberty is preceded by the right to life.”

The right to life is the most fundamental right, yes. No argument there. However, Cathy Young forgets, or never understood, that the right to liberty is a necessary requirement for maintaining and furthering one’s life. Without it the right to life means nothing. She leaves out the right to property (not explicitly mentioned in the Declaration, although implied), which is a necessary requirement for the rights to life and liberty. In short, if the right to liberty can be violated to allegedly protect the right to life, then the right to liberty means nothing and neither does the right to life. If we are not free to make the choices and perform the actions we think necessary for the maintenance and furtherance of our lives, then our lives are not our own. The rights to liberty and property are necessary corrolaries of the right to life.

Cathy Young: Libertarian or not?

Not.

On a related note: the libertarian imposter has ignorantly and viciously attacked the work of a genuine libertarian, Thomas Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. Here’s Woods himself (here and here), and Jeffrey Tucker, on the issue.

I’ve just uploaded a new working paper…my first working paper actually. I am hoping to improve on it and eventually prepare it for potential publication, so comments are welcome. The title is “Moral Legislation and Democracy: The Devlin-Dworkin-Hart Debate Revisited.” You can view the full pdf version here. As a teaser, here is the opening paragraph:

The issue of moral legislation is a perennial one in modern politics, particularly in the United States. Can we make a distinction between the criminal and the merely immoral? Should there be a realm of private morality that is none of the law’s business, and, if so, how large (or small) should it be and what should it encompass? Those who favor moral legislation, i.e., legislation that criminalizes to varying degrees actions considered by others to be a matter of private morality, fall on both sides of the mainstream political spectrum. Conservatives tend to favor using the state to preserve traditional values by, for example, restriction or prohibition of drug and alcohol use, anti-pornography laws and other crimes of indecency, anti-prostitution laws, anti-sodomy laws, strict criteria for divorce, and laws against same-sex marriage. Indeed, the issue of homosexuality features prominently in the Devlin-Dworkin-Hart debate. On the other side of the spectrum, left-liberals tend to favor using the state to prevent and punish acts of discrimination, hate speech, and insensitivity to certain classes of minorities considered to be official victim groups. I will even submit that left-liberal social welfare policies in general qualify as moral legislation.

I hope to address these important metaphysical questions, along with their ethical and political implications, in a paper that I am writing for a philosophy seminar I am taking this semester on the metaphysics and morals of death. Below is the research proposal I am sending in application to the Institute for Humane Studies for their summer research program. With luck, I will get the fellowship and not have to work this summer, except to prepare this paper for potential publication. See here for the pdf version that includes an annotated bibliography.

Death and Harm: A Neo-Aristotelian Account

Is death a harm? Can the dead be harmed? We are tempted intuitively to answer yes. Death robs us of life and puts to a final end our striving after our goals. When someone, after he has died, has his reputation sullied by false information we tend to think he has been harmed. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, observes that we cannot with perfect confidence call a man fortunate until some decades after his death: “For it seems to some extent good and evil really exist for a dead man, just as they may exist for a man who lives without being conscious of them, for example, honors and disgraces, and generally the successes and failures of his children and descendents” (23-24).

Yet if we look deeper at these questions, we run into problems. If a person is dead, who is it that can be the subject of harm? As George Pitcher remarks, “post-mortem persons…are…just so much dust; and dust cannot be wronged [or harmed]” (161). Any defender of posthumous harm must meet Epicurus’ formidable argument:

Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of all sentience,…Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. (Cited in Fischer, 121)

It is helpful to clarify the concepts: dying, death, and being dead. “Dying is a process. Being dead is a condition or state. Death intervenes between dying and being dead; it takes place at the end of dying and the beginning of being dead” (Fischer, 3-4). At the moment of death, then, we cease to exist and there is no subject to be harmed.

Contemporary philosophers have lined up on both sides of this debate. Those defending the position that the dead can be harmed tend to follow Aristotle in accepting our intuitions as essentially correct; they seek to philosophically justify our intuitions, but must avoid the problem of the subject. The Feinberg-Pitcher account defines harm as set-back interests and holds that the person harmed is the ante-mortem person, i.e., the person at some stage of his life. This solution presents Feinberg and Pitcher with another problem, that of backward causation, for it looks like posthumous events are working causally backwards in time to harm the living person. In avoiding this problem they make the counterintuitive and paradoxical claim that the harm done to an ante-mortem person harms him not retroactively when the event occurs after his death but before his death because it was going to happen. The person is in a harmed condition the moment he invests in an interest that will be set back in the future. The deterministically impending future harm casts a shadow over his life even if he does not know it. Levenbook, not satisfied with the Feinberg-Pitcher account, redefines harm as a loss that is bad for the loser. If we can say that someone loses his life at the moment of death (and she thinks we can) and this is a harm, even though he ceases to exist at that moment, then there is no problem ascribing losses to him at times shortly or long after his death. But it seems that Levenbook has not really avoided the problem of the subject, for at the moment of death there seems to be no subject who can lose his life.

While deeply metaphysical in nature, these questions about death and harm have practical real-world implications. If death is not a harm, is it wrong to kill someone painlessly and without their knowing it? Is killing really as bad as we tend to think it is? If the dead cannot be harmed, then why should we care about their reputations, wishes, claims, obligations, wills, and contracts?

Which side one takes, and how one defends it, will have important consequences for ethical, political, and legal theory and practice. To be sure, those who take the Epicurean view still condemn killing as well as other things popularly thought of as wronging or harming the dead, but have to find other reasons for doing so. For example, Ernest Partridge defends our intuitions on this account, while rejecting posthumous harm, with a consequentialist social contract theory. Feldman, too, though he defends posthumous harm, employs a consequentialist theory. While consequentialist theories (such as utilitarianism) are both useful and oft-times persuasive, they suffer from logical flaws and only tell part of the story.

To my knowledge, no libertarian has directly tackled these issues. A eudaimonic virtue-ethics focuses on the moral agent, encompassing the best features of both deontology and consequentialism, and thus, I think, can provide the strongest reason to refrain from killing and to respect the dead whether or not one thinks death itself is a harm and/or the dead can be harmed. I further wish to propose that a neo-Aristotelian/libertarian/natural rights defense of posthumous harm and death as a harm is not only possible but superior to other attempts. I will begin by arguing, like Feldman, that in order to define death we must first define life. Death can only be understood in the context of life. Life is logically prior to death. The life of man qua rational being must be the standard of value by which we judge whether or not death is a harm.

It’s funny… I was told by a professor in my department a while back that my beliefs on economics and political economy amounted to nothing more than ideology. Indeed, my “ideology” (libertarianism) made him, in his own words, uneasy. Well, it was his fault for asking ideologically-laden questions in class in the first place. One time, he asked my fellow grad students and I, in our comparative political economy class, whether we favored a flat income tax or a progressive income tax. Most preferred progressive, of course, but when he got around to me I quite naturally had to say: no income tax. But that answer was out of bounds. It is perfectly acceptable to debate the merits of different varieties of statism, but to question the merit of statism itself is out of the question. It wasn’t long after this episode that he called me into his office and told me that the theories of the Austrian School of Economics, because they didn’t involve empirical (quantitative) testing, amounted to an ideology and that my Austro-libertarianism made him uneasy. He then recommended that I seek another major for my Ph.D. (Miraculously, I still got an A in the class.)

What is funny is that these so-called social scientists reject logical arguments and value judgments as unscientific while holding up empirical quantitative testing of arbitrary hypotheses with crude measures as scientific. They seem to think that truth cannot be arrived at by logical reasoning and that value judgments are arbitrary and subjective. Yet they do not see that if my position amounts to nothing more than ideology, then all the more so does theirs. They have simply shifted the realm of what is considered acceptable debate from metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics to a certain methodology. A case in point is hegemonic stability theory in the field of international relations. Scholars debating the merits of this theory cannot agree on how to define, measure, and operationalize hegemony; consequently, they cannot agree whether the theory is correct or not (assuming dubiously that empirical quantitative analysis could answer that definitively anyway). So, one can’t question the ideology of empirical qualitative/quantitative (especially quantitative) hypothesis testing. One can only question how to go about doing this so-called science from within the accepted ideological framework. The dismal state of affairs prevailing in the hegemonic stability theory debate pervades all of mainstream political science; indeed, I dare say, all of mainstream social science.

Well… It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been rather busy what with the three graduate-level classes that I am taking, another class that I am teaching, and the fact that my clunker of a car went belly up so I’m looking for a new, cheap replacement.

In any case, my three classes are going well…aside from the fact that I have to do an empirical quantitative analysis research paper in my international conflict class. Not sure what I’ll do the paper on yet.

My seminar on the metaphysics and morals of death (from an analytic philosophy perspective) is proving interesting. We are primarily looking at the fundamental questions of whether death (as opposed to the process of dying) is a harm, and whether the dead can be harmed. The answers to both questions, particularly the latter though, have important implications for ethical and political theories. If the dead cannot be harmed, then why should we respect their interests, wills, contracts, etc.? I plan to write a paper on these issues from a neo-Aristotelian virtue-ethics approach. I’m also going to apply for an IHS Summer Graduate Research Fellowship to develop it for publication.

And my seminar on Austrian philosophy, formal ontology, and realist phenomenology goes well. I’m finding I still agree with Barry Smith that the Austrian economists can benefit from studying the Austrian philosophers (the Brentano School, Husserl, Reinach, Wittgenstein). The last vestiges of Kantianism need to be shed from praxeology. Rothbard began this process, but did not complete it. Namely, it needs to be recognized that rather than the whole corpus of economic theory being implied in, and deduced directly from, the action axiom in some analytical and tautological sense, there exist a vast web of synthetic a priori propositions from which praxeological theory is woven around the central action axiom. (If my meaning here isn’t clear, I can elaborate in future posts.) However, I think both the Austrian philosophers and economists can benefit from studying Ayn Rand. And all three can benefit from returning to the great Aristotle himself. Accordingly, I am thinking of writing my paper for this class on “Ayn Rand, the Austrians, and Aristotelian Apriorism,” which I could then expand into a thesis for my second M.A. (in philosophy).

My class, introduction to political theory, is going well (I think). I’m almost done discussing Plato’s Republic. I can’t wait to move on to Aristotle’s Ethics (in its entirety) and Politics (selections).

Not very surprisingly, I am…

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

An accomplished diplomat who can virtually do no wrong, you sometimes know it is best to rely on the council of others while holding the reins.

There are some words which I have known since I was a schoolboy. “With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.” These words were uttered by Judge Aaron Satie — as a wisdom, and warning. The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.

Jean-Luc is a character in the Star Trek universe. This The Next Generation fan site has an outline of his career.